He grinned with pleasure. "Just as I thought, an escaped mine slave. But the brand is not readable. What mine did you escape from?"

I did not answer. He let me go and stood up. He gave me a kick. "It doesn't matter. He's strong and healthy. Any of the mines will pay us a hundred pesos for him."

I knew he was right. They would pay a hundred pesos and consider it cheap. A black slave would cost them four times that much.

Ay de mi! I had forgotten an important lesson in life, one the fray always preached. When things are too good to be true... they are not true. Only a fool would have been duped by the little india with the donkey. I should have seen from the length of her stride and the swing of her arms that the old crone was a man.

I had blown up a mine, shattered a mountain, survived a river at full flood, escaped certain death only by the personal intervention of G.o.d, bedded down a beautiful india saint... only to stumble-no!-race into the hands of slave hunters.

The donkey "woman" caught up with us.

"I get credit for the capture!" he shouted to the others. "I get the bonus dinero." He ran up to the man who had examined my face and whom I took to be the leader of the band. "Yanga, I get the bonus dinero for making the capture. Isn't that true!"

The name jolted me.

"I caught him with my rope," the man called Yanga said. "You let him get away."

"But I was the bait that lured him out of hiding!"

I paid attention to the man as the donkey man argued with him. Could it be the same Yanga whom I had aided years ago? What about the maroon bandit leader named Yanga?

After the two men resolved their differences, Yanga announced that it was too late to head for a mine; that they would make camp on the spot. Supplies were unpacked and a fire started for dinner. I eyed Yanga until my staring caught his attention.

He gave me a kick. "Why do you stare at me? You try to poison my soul with the evil eye, and I will cut you into little pieces."

"I know you."

He grinned. "Many people know me. My name is sung all over New Spain."

"Your name was ridiculed when I last saw you, the night I saved your life." I had actually saved the man's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, but for most men it was the same thing. He was older and his beard was streaked with white, but I was convinced it was the same man.

He stared down at me narrowly. "Explain yourself."

"You were tied to a tree along the Jalapa road. A plantation owner was going to relieve you of your t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es. I cut you loose, and you removed his instead."

He muttered something in his native tongue that I did not understand. He knelt beside me again and stared at me. I could see that he was trying to subtract the years and the beard from the face.

"Ridiculing you as a prince," I went on, "he boasted of castrating you in front of his other slaves, so they would understand the consequences of disobedience, what would happen to them if they disobeyed. You were beaten, then tied to the tree. The man threw a rock at you and told you to eat that for dinner."

His face revealed that my guess was right; he was the Yanga of the Jalapa road. "Life is a circle," the fray used to say. "If one has enough patience, everything that goes by him once will return. The chinos in China on the other side of the world believe that if you wait by a river long enough, the body of your enemy will float by. Like the body of your enemy, the good deed you do today, the evil you sow, everything comes full circle."

I started to say something else, and he hushed me. "Quiet. Don't let the others hear such talk."

He left and did not return for another hour. When he came back, he had food for each of us. He loosened my left hand so I could eat.

The others were gathered around the campfire, exchanging boasts and dreams about what they would do with the prize money they would collect for capturing me. From their talk I understood that they had bagged a few indios and an africano mine slave in the past, but none had been as big and healthy as I was. Ay, I wish they had seen me before the india farm woman had fattened up my body and soul.

"How did escaped slaves come to be slave hunters?" I asked.

"I have fought the gachupins for seven years," he said. "Over those years my band grew to more than a hundred. We could not live by thievery alone but needed food and families. That meant that we could not flee as fast from danger. We made our village high in the mountains, and when the soldados came, we drove them back into the jungle. But we always paid a price. And each time we fled, our village was burned, and we had to find another home.

"Finally the viceroy offered us peace. We would be forgiven our past crimes and would be declared freedmen. In return we had to return all escaped slaves that came our way. The plantation owners pay little for this service, but the mines continually run out of workers and pay well."

Eh, it's a brutal world, is it not, amigo? Avaricious slave owners flog and rape their human "property." The espanols mistake a pig stampede for an africano rebellion and hang innocent blacks out of ignorance and fear. Ex-slaves, who once fought to be freed, now hunt other slaves for a bounty. A short time ago I was going to rob an old india of her donkey and goods.

"Returning me to the mines is a death sentence," I said, testing the waters.

"What did you do to get sent to the mines?"

"I was born."

Yanga shrugged. "Death cures all ills. Perhaps dying quickly in the mines is more merciful than dying on the outside."

"And perhaps I should not have risked my life for your manhood. I did not save a man anyway but a woman."

He hit me across the head so hard I blacked out for a moment. He retied my hands. Before he left, he gave me another kick.

"You get to eat only because we want to kept you fat until we are paid for you. But don't speak your bad words to me again. The mine owners will not miss your tongue when we sell you back to them."

The men around the campfire laughed at my punishment.

I lay very still, bringing the world back into focus. The man had fists the size of cannonb.a.l.l.s. And maybe harder.

However, when I rolled to my side, I felt a knife tucked between my ribs and my right arm. The rope Yanga had retied around my left hand had enough slack in it for me to grasp the knife.

The maroons drank and sang and argued late into the night. Eventually they pa.s.sed out. If they had selected a sentry, he was pa.s.sed out too-and snoring. They were all snoring. I cut myself free, picked up my manta and retied it around over my shoulder. I crept over to the mules, who knew me by now and did not spook.

There were four mules, still saddled and bridled in case the maroons needed to mount up in a hurry. I cut the reins and cinches on three of them. As soon as I was in the saddle of the fourth, I let out a yell that would have awakened people in the Place of the Dead, and booted the mule's ribs with my heels. I left the shouts of men behind me. Hopefully, by the time they rounded up their mules, I would be long gone.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWO.

Thus began an era of my life in which my name became famous once again in New Spain. Famous for charity? you ask. For works of scholarship? Amigos, you joke with me, of course, when you ask such questions. You know that the first time I became famous in the land it was for two murders I did not commit. Do you expect anything less from me? This time it was as a bandit leader that lips spoke my name and tongues wagged my fame.

Not long after I escaped Yanga's slave hunters, I began my new life. And why not? I was a man of property, possessing a mule and a steel knife. But I could not eat the mule I needed to carry me, and a knife is not a sword. Furthermore, I lacked money.

Finding an ax along the road gave me an idea. I would become a woodcutter, and on the Zacatecas road I had my first chance.

I spotted a very fat priest traveling by mule litter. He must have been an important fray, perhaps the prior of a church or convent in the mining capital. His litter was transported by two mules, front and back, with an indio walking beside each animal with rein in hand. Ten more indios, armed with knives and spears, marched with the litter.

Not too far in front of the priest's procession was a large mule train. The priest no doubt camped with the muleteers at night for added protection and traveled near them by day. But at the moment his litter and indios had dropped behind the mounted mule train, because they were climbing a steep hill, and his indios on foot could not keep up.

I was one man armed with a knife against a dozen indios. If I attacked them, they would impale me like thorns in a maguey branch. But I possessed a secret weapon: my axe.

The sun had set below the rimrock, casting the road below in shadowy twilit gloom, when the comedia began. As the priest's procession approached the top of the hill, his indios were forced to stop. At which point they heard the chopping sounds. No houses were evident, so the chopping was a little strange. To the fray, of course, the chopping sounds were nonetheless insignificant, but to an indio steeped in superst.i.tion, Night Ax, the headless apparition, evoked nothing less than h.e.l.l on earth. During childhood their parents told them continually that if they weren't good children, Night Ax would come for them. They, in turn, pa.s.sed the same threat on to their children: Night Ax stalking the evening forests, pounding his chest with his ax as he looked for victims.

As the chopping continued, I studied the indios from my hiding place uphill. The indios looked at one another, clearly distraught. Each of them had chopped wood on almost a daily basis. They understood that the ax wasn't splitting wood but... spilling blood.

The procession came to a halt. The priest, oblivious to the drama, continued to sleep, his head slumped forward. I mounted my mule and came out of hiding at a swinging gallop, the ax in hand, my blanket covering my head-with holes punched out for my eyes-making me appear in the deepening dusk as a headless, ax-swinging fiend.