Valdez Is Coming by Elmore Leonard

said.
    Inez looked over the pages facing her. “I don’t see anything more about it.”
    Valdez raised his eyes from the open robe to the nice-looking face of the dark-haired girl. “It’s too bad he doesn’t come here,” he said.
    Inez closed the book. “He never has and I would guess he knows where it is.”
    “If he did,” Valdez said, his gaze still on Polly. “I could wait for him.”
     
     
    Diego Luz had a dream in which he saw himself sitting on a corral fence watching his men working green horses in the enclosure. In the dream, which he would look at during the day as well as at night, Diego Luz was manager of the Maricopa Cattle Company. He lived with his family in the whitewashed adobe off beyond the corral, where the cedars stood against the sky: a house with trees and a stone well in the yard and a porch to sit on in the evening. Sometimes he would picture himself on the porch with his family about him, his three sons and two daughters, his wife and his wife’s mother and whatever relatives might be visiting them. But his favorite dream was to see himself on the corral fence with his eldest son, who was almost a man, sitting next to him.
    The hands were very nervous when he watched them with the horses because they knew he was the greatest mustanger and horsebreaker who ever lived. They knew he could subdue the meanest animals and they were afraid to make mistakes in his presence. He had told them how to do it, what they must do and not do, and he liked to watch them at work.
    In the dream Diego and his son would watch R. L. Davis hanging on to the crow-hopping bronc until finally they saw him thrown and land hard on his shoulder. His son would shake his head and say, “Should I do it, Papa?” But he would say no, it was good for the man. He made R. L. Davis ride only the rough string, the outlaws and spoiled horses, when they were on roundup or a drive, and made R. L. Davis call him Señor Luz.
    R. L. Davis mounted the bronc and was thrown again and this time he went after the horse with a loaded quirt and began beating the animal over the head. At this point in the dream Diego Luz walked over to R. L. Davis and said to him, “Hey,” and when R. L. Davis looked around Diego Luz hit him in the face with one of his big fists. R. L. Davis went down and the eldest son poured a bucket of water on him and when the man shook his head and opened his eyes, he said, “What did I do?” Diego Luz said, “You hit the horse.” R. L. Davis frowned, holding his jaw. “But you hit them when you broke horses,” he said. And Diego Luz smiled and said, “Maybe, but now I hit whoever I want to.”
    R. L. Davis was a good one to hit. Once in a while though, he would leave R. L. Davis alone and hit Mr. Malson, not hitting him too hard, but letting him know he was hit. And sometimes he would fire Mr. Malson, call him over and say, “It’s too bad, but you’re too goddam weak and stupid to do this work anymore so we got to get rid of you. And don’t come back.”
    Diego Luz would think of these things as he worked his land and broke the mustangs he and his eldest son drove down out of the high country. His place was southeast of Lanoria, well off the road to St. David and only a few miles from the village of Mimbreño, though there was no wagon road in that direction, only a few trails if a man knew where to find them.
    His place was adobe with straw blinds that rolled down to cover the doorway and windows and an open lean-to built against the house for cooking. There were a few chickens and two goats in the yard with the three youngest children and a brown mongrel dog that slept in the shade of the house most of the day. There was a vegetable garden for growing beans and peppers, and the peppers that were drying hung from the roof of the ramada that shaded the front of the house, which faced north, on high ground. Down the slope from the house was the well, and beyond it, on flat, cleared ground, the