Fenimore lay in bed until three hours past sunup, then put on his clothes, which had dried overnight on the back of a chair, rolled up his poncho and stuck it under his arm, and walked down the stairs to the lobby of the The Olympus, where the hotel-keeper was standing at his desk, flipping through the pages of the same book as yesterday and wearing the same apathetic expression. “Found my money yet?” he asked.

“Tub water’s gone cold.”

Outside, the sun was bright. There was no trace of fog. The Starman’s horse’s blood had mostly faded from the surface of the dirty street. One more day and it would as if the horse had never lived and never died.

Higher, Rafael Rodgriguez’ marble head and wounded shoulders contrasted with the clear blue sky.

In the square around his broken-off, revolver-wielding arms, regular people were milling. They were the same people who’d milled yesterday, but being among them was different than looking down on them had been. This morning, their bodies pressed against Fenimore’s and he felt their heat, their fear and their confusion.

The raised platform was empty, but a few of the more commercially minded millers had put up makeshift booths or overturned crates on which they’d laid out salable goods: apples, trinkets, old silverware, salt, ragdolls.

Fenimore browsed to kill time.

The ragdolls were ugly, the silverware unpolished. The apples were bruised and browning. Only the salt looked unspoiled, but Fenimore didn’t have money anyway, except for the seven coins in his pocket, with which he wasn’t about to buy something that came out of the ground.

One of the seller women yawned. “You ain’t from around here by the looks of you. Can I interest you in a fork?”

“Maybe you have a knife instead.”

“Nah,” she said, “ain’t allowed to sell those. They weapons, says the Ironlaw.”

“A spreading knife.”

She looked at him queer. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the laws. I just follow ‘em on threat of punishment. If the Ironlaw says a knife’s a knife, spreading, cutting or otherwise, I don’t ask questions and I don’t sell it. You sure you don’t want a utensil?”

Fenimore had never seen a man spread another to death with a knife, but he had seen an angry wife stab a whore in the eye with a fork. Nevertheless, he declined the offer.

“Suit yourself. There’ll be plenty of takers later. A good fork always tugs at the purse strings.”

“At the redemption.”

“That’s right,” she said, smiling, and whispered, “speaking of which, I hear they got a real young one today. Got caught trying to run for it cross the desert. Didn’t make it, of course. And word is he’s an orphan, which is why I got my good wares out. Redeemin’ is all right, and everyone likes a good punishment, but there ain’t nothing like a bullet to the head to get people’s money flowing.”

“Is there a redemption every day?”

“Lately it’s so. Lots of crime in the world these days. Maybe a spoon?” She held one up.

“Ever heard of a man named Ezekiel Picasso?”

She let the spoon drop and crossed her arms under her breasts. “I ain’t got nothing to say about him or his family. Not a one good word.”

She looked around to make sure there weren’t any men in colourful clothing around, then leaned in closer and like any good gossip said something anyway: “Bandits, the lot of ‘em. Killers with cold blood. Not like the Rhodeses. Now, I know some of the folk, they get nostalgic for how it was in the days of the Rodriguezes, and I remember them days, too, but for me the Ironlaw is at least some form of culture and civilisation, which we never had under the Mexicans, if you know what I mean. And as a trader woman, I care about that. If you ask me, everyone keeps calling it a feud but there’s only side to back, at least if you got a good head on your shoulders and no bad ideas of your own inside. Know what I mean? The quicker those Picassos are all dead, the better for the rest of us.”

Fenimore was about to ask her about working for the Rhodes, when a Picasso goon strolled by and the woman shut up. Her thin lips wouldn’t budge. The goon slowed his stroll, eyed her with about as much affection as a fisherman eyes a barnacle, and continued on, eying Fenimore with the same plus a lip curling dose of savage distrust. Fenimore reflected it right back at him, curl for curl. He’d known plenty of men like these: stupid men. Sometimes bravely so—like Pedro—and sometimes suicidally so, the most dangerous kind, but mostly just wandering foot soldiers who got by on intimidation and raw numbers and who’d call a snakepit home just as long as they could be on the side of the snakes.

“Careful, gringo,” the goon said. “I see any more of your teeth I might be tempted to knock them down your throat.”

Fenimore smiled and bowed. “My apologies, senor. I’m a simple trader here for the business and show.”

The goon puffed out his chest.

“You don’t look like you’re selling nothing.”

Fenimore unwrapped his poncho and held it out for the goon to see.

The square was getting lively. Around them, people were hocking goods, banging pots and haggling over prices.

The goon said, “That’s ugly.”

“We can’t all be good looking.”

The goon scratched his head and contemplated, unsure whether that had been an insult or not.

“I wove it myself,” Fenimore said. “I’m a travelling weaver.”

“It’s still ugly.”

“I’m still learning the trade.”

The trader woman, who’d been watching them in silence, packed up her forks and spoons into her crate, lifted the crate, keeping it up with her knees, and ambled away bowlegged to find a new place to set up her shop. “Forks,” she called out, “Silverware, forks and spoons. I got them all…”

“I suggest you do the same, gringo. Else we might end up engaging in a confrontation.”

Fenimore noted the double holster the goon was wearing, each filled with a shiny revolver whose grip the goon had begun stroking with the tips of his fingers. The holster seemed to be standard Picasso issue. “You think I should stop weaving ponchos and start making forks?” Fenimore asked.

The goon widened his stance. “I said I suggest you do the same, as in take paces backward, gringo.”

Fenimore bowed again.

But when he straightened, the goon’s attention was already elsewhere: on the sound of incoming hooves. The grey-coated riders, whom Fenimore now identified as the lawmaking Rhodes, were arriving.