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"¿Quién es?"

Well, where do you come from?
And where do you go?
Well, where do you come from,
My Cotton Eye Joe?

"¿Quién es?" he said again. And in that moment the first shot was fired and then the second. The first bullet entered his body at an upward angle, passing beneath the bone and into the heart, and he was already a dead man. The second shot was wild; it struck the adobe wall, then rebounded against the headboard of a wooden bedstead, so that there seemed to have been three shots in all. But in fact there were only two, both fired from the same gun. He fell upon the floor of the dark room. John Poe, standing just outside, heard everything--the words, the shots, and, as he stated afterward, "a groan and one or two gasps from where I stood in the doorway, as of someone dying in the room." Pete Maxwell, whose house it was, brought a candle and set it burning on a windowsill. In the bare light the dead man lay yellow on his back, stretched out, a butcher knife near his left hand. His body was almost obscenely pale, the color of clotted cream, nearly hairless, blue veins at the wrists and temples. His mouth was slightly open, his teeth protruding. His eyes were closed. He was dressed only in pants and stockings. And he was positively identified. Very soon after the shooting people began to gather there, some of them crying. The women pleaded to take charge of the body, and they were granted permission at once. They carried the body to a carpenter's shop on the grounds and laid it out on a workbench and placed candlesall around it. And the next day they laid it in a grave in the old military burial ground nearby, and there was composed a report of the coroner's jury in the hand of one Alejandro Segura. It began:

Salud:

Este día 15 de Julio, A.D. 1881, reciví yó, el abajo firmado, Jues de Paz del Precinto arriba escrito, información que habia una muerte en Fuerte Sumner.

In the distance there were the voices of children. The air was very still. Paulita Maxwell, Pete's eighteen-year-old sister, did not weep, could not, though her heart was breaking. She kept to the darkness, her eyes open wide, as if to see something there take shape, the invisible become visible. She felt her skin tighten and become as hard and brittle as pottery. She believed that if someone should touch her she would shatter. She did not dare to open her mouth. Any sound that came from her now would be horrible--gagging, or a strange rodentlike whimper. She gnashed her teeth, and her mouth and throat were so dry that her breaths were like burns. Neither could she pray, even silently. She could express nothing but that her grief was inexpressible. Her hands were folded, her fingers laced and locked. A fly had lighted on the nail of her right thumb; she was oblivious to it.

Well, I come for to see you,
And I come for to sing.
Well, I come for to show you
My diamond ring.

"¿Quién es?"