That’s what occurred, but it’s not good enough for History. The Battle of Skunkwater Flats has been studied as if it were Waterloo, or at least the Custer fight. They’ve measured it all with their calipers and are not happy to have an actual participant around to question the measurements.

For instance, there’s the theory that Happy Jack Marco wasn’t killed by the Texans at all—some believe Pleasant Burnell saw a chance to settle a score, and shot him in the back.

Now I dispute that. I know Pleasant Burnell wasn’t really pleasant, and I doubt that he would scruple at back-shooting under normal circumstances, but when he dashed out of that cabin he knew he was outgunned twenty to one—it’s unlikely he’d have chosen that unlucky moment to gun down one of his allies. If by some miracle he had managed to escape and still carried his grudge he could have shot down Happy Jack a little later on.

They quote me to that effect, but call me “unreliable.” They don’t believe me about Simp Dixon, either. The majority of the histories now claim he was shot within ten feet of the cabin. But there was still some light when Vivian and I came out, and neither of us saw the body. What probably happened was that he got wounded farther up the arroyo, tried to crawl back to the cabin, and died before he made it.

The one thing the authorities agree upon is that Hill Coe put up a splendid fight. When his corpse was displayed, alongside the others, in San Jon, New Mexico, two days later, a coroner counted eighteen bullet holes in it. I’ve seen the pictures, and it’s plain to me that they tidied Hill up a bit. I observed, as I was driving the wagonful of corpses to San Jon, that Hill’s right ear had been almost shot off, but somebody did a fine job of sewing it back on, because it looks normal in the pictures.

No agreement will ever be reached as to how many Texans Hill killed before he fell. Some argue two, some argue six, and one radical fellow from Roswell argues none: he claims Billy Bone circled around and killed all seven of the Texans who fell, before he raced for the border: that theory is one reason you often see such a high count when people are reckoning up Billy’s murders.

I tried to keep up with the literature and the theories for a while, but first it made me weary and then it made me sad: survival can be a rather deflating kind of thing.