Hombre by Elmore Leonard Page A

Delgado’s if we were lucky, some time during the next afternoon or evening. Then home. It didn’t seemfar when you looked ahead. The trouble was you had to keep looking back.
    After the little sleep we had had it was good to lie down again. Everybody picked out a spot. We couldn’t make a fire so we ate some more of the biscuits, which were pretty hard by now, and the dried strip meat which never was very good.
    We did not drink any water though. John Russell had said we would have to wait until night. It was midafternoon now. Imagine not having had a drink since that morning. The salty beef didn’t help your thirst any either. But what could we do?
    I kept picturing myself sitting on a shady porch with a big pitcher of ice water, sitting there in a clean shirt having just shaved and taken a bath. Boy!
    Mendez looked ten years older, his eyes sunken in and his face covered with beard stubble. Dr. Favor’s big, broad face, framed by that half-moon-shaped beard, was sweaty looking. The McLaren girl and John Russell were the only ones who didn’t look so bad, I mean not as dirty or sweaty as the rest of us. With her hair too short to muss and her dark skin, she looked like she was taking it all right. John Russell was dusty, of course, but had no beard to make his face look dirty. You could tell he had pulled out the stubbles Indian-fashion when he first started to get a beard, years ago, and now he’d never have one.
    Russell stayed mostly by the open side, lying down but propped on his elbows and looking down the way we had come up. I guess he was resting and doing his thinking now, taking time to see things clearly. Whatever he saw in his mind, it got him up on his feet after a while.
    He brought the saddlebags over to me and dropped them. He didn’t say guard them, but that’s what his look meant. All he said was he would go have a look at things and he left, taking only the Spencer carbine; no water or anything else. He didn’t go straight down the slope but headed off through the pinyon, I guess to keep high up as he scouted the ground we had covered from the draw.
    A little while after he was gone, Dr. Favor went over to where the waterskin and canteen and provisions were. He picked up the canteen and was drinking from it before anyone had time to yell stop. It was the McLaren girl who yelled it.
    She jumped up, and Dr. Favor held the canteen out to her. “Your turn,” he said.
    “We’re not to drink till tonight. You know that.”
    “I forget,” Dr. Favor said. She could believe him or not; he didn’t care.
    Mendez, still sitting down, said, “Maybe we should all take one, to keep it even.”
    “To keep it even!” the McLaren girl said. “Whatabout later when we don’t have any. What good does keeping it even do?”
    “I’m thinking of now,” Mendez said, rising. “You can think of any time you want.”
    “All right,” the girl said. “And what about Russell?”
    “Look”—Mendez had this surprised sound to his voice—“if he wants to wait till dark, all right. That’s up to him. We drink when we want.”
    “He doesn’t even have to know,” Dr. Favor said. He saw Mendez liked this idea so he put it out there again. “If you’re worried about Russell, why would he even have to know?”
    “And you think that would be fair,” the McLaren girl said.
    “It’s his rule,” Dr. Favor said. “If it’s unfair, he brought it on himself.”
    “Look,” Mendez said, making it sound simple, “if you want to wait, you wait. If you want a drink now, then you take it.”
    That was when he grabbed the canteen from Dr. Favor and took a good drink, more even than Favor had, so that Dr. Favor reached for it and pulled it out of Mendez’s mouth.
    “You said keep it even.”
    Then he handed the canteen to the McLaren girl.
    She took it, her eyes right on Dr. Favor and hesitating just a little before she put it to her mouth. Ifthis surprises you, look at it this way: they could drink it all