Cowboys tell stories - there’s not much else to do, on most ranches - and sometimes they even tell the truth, even if they don’t always know it. And they love sad songs, ballads: they’re the best ones to sing to the cattle at night, to soothe them. Cattle don’t know shit about music, or maybe they just have better manners than some audiences I could tell you about, so cowboys don’t have to sing well - but sometimes you hear one who does, and this one had a voice sweet enough that I listened for a minute or more before I heard what he was singing.

I was working as a trail cook because there were some people on the Natchez who thought me too lucky at cards for their liking, so I’d left the boat, changed my fancy duds for Levis, an old patched red shirt and a coat that might have been blue or grey once, and headed towards California. I had some money, my pistols, and a wicked deck of cards, but none of them were much good in land where there’s nothing left to buy or steal. I signed on for the drive team because we were heading the same way and I knew they’d do twenty miles or more a day for the first few days, just so the cattle would be tired. Besides, no-one would think to look for the Professor on a chuck wagon in Kansas...not that I was still using that name. I don’t know what the cowboys called me when I wasn’t listening, but to my face, I was Mr. Morgan, sir.

Anyway, this cowboy looked younger and prettier than me, and much younger than I owned to, and he was singing in Spanish too soft for me to catch all the words, though I made out most of them. He had a good voice, and it was a pretty song, all about how beautiful this woman looked as she bathed in the river, at least until he reached the end where they found the young man gutted like a fish…no, that couldn’t be right. I must have misheard, or misunderstood.

He came to the wagon for coffee a couple of hours later and I asked him what he’d been singing. “Pretty song - something about a woman crying?”

“La llorona,” he said, softly.

“That’s it. How does it end?”

He looked at me for a moment, uncertainly. Like I said, he was young and pretty, prettier than most mattress girls I’d seen or many on the hog ranches, and he’d probably had men try to seduce him before. Then he sang the last few verses quietly, as though they were a threat. As I’d thought, the story ends with the young cowboy going down to the river to see the beautiful crying woman - alone, despite everyone’s advice - and being found again a few days later, a few miles downstream, torn almost in half.

I shook my head. “You make that one up?”

“No. Heard some women singing it once, but it was another cowboy who taught it to me. I guess it’s an old song; Aaron, the tall nigger, he sing it in English.” I had to smile at that. Aaron had a fine bass voice, a good few octaves deeper than this boy’s. “And what’s - Dulcea? A woman’s name?”

“Dulce agua. It means ‘sweet water’…it’s the name of a river where this happened.”

“That’s a true story?”

He shrugged. “The women, they say so. On the Rio Dulce Agua, near the Puerta Del Diablo.”

I stared at him. “Devil’s…Gate? On the Sweetwater River?”

“I do’ no. I just hear the song, and the cattle, they like it.” He shrugged, then poured the dregs of the coffee into the dust. “Gracias, senor.”