“He worked here once,” she said. “I don’t suppose I would want to know him, but I would have liked to couple with him a little. He refused me on the grounds that he was married, as if that had any bearing on the matter.”

“Well, it would to some people,” I said.

“Only to you dull Americans,” Cecily said. “Is the man a friend of yours?”

“Why, yes, Joe’s a friend,” I said.

“I suppose the old brute plans to execute you together,” Cecily said. She might have been saying he planned to buy us both a first-class ticket on a train.

Then, serene as a queen, she crossed the hall to her bath, leaving me to assess the situation as best I could. I looked again. The old man and Joe seemed to be having an amiable conversation from what I could see—very likely Cecily was exaggerating the menace to suit her own ends.

I dressed and hurried out.

The three men were moseying along together toward the cookshack where the cowhands took their meals. When I came out they stopped in front of what was called the chicken house—it was where Lord Snow had once kept his gamecocks. Cecily claimed he had once had some distinguished fighting fowl, but skunks and other predators had gradually reduced them until only one violent old rooster remained, an ill-tempered bird who flung himself at the netting of chicken wire if a person approached too closely to suit him.

Mesty-Woolah stopped when he saw me approaching. Isinglass and Joe Lovelady took another step or two, still chatting. From their manner you would have supposed they were just discussing the weather, or the price of beef on the hoof, or brands or calving or the roundup or some other easy staple of rangeland conversation—and for all I know, they were.

Joe Lovelady smiled when he looked up and saw me. I thought he looked weary and supposed he had ridden hard, though at that point I had no inkling how hard, much less how far.

I was about to offer him a warm greeting—I liked Joe immensely, and was eager to know where he had been for three weeks—when something happened that to this day I can neither forget nor clearly remember. It happened in a second, so fast that I wonder if even the retina of genius—of Mr. Dickens or Mr. Darwin—could have caught it; when I try to recover a memory of it now I only get confusing particles.

Mesty-Woolah moved; perhaps he whirled: I remember the briefest flash, though I saw no sword; in none of my memories of the three men walking that morning do I remember Mesty-Woolah having a sword—not, that is, until he had used it.