On that point, Billy never changed his opinion. Of course I had a few ragged Mustang Merles in my saddlebags, and when the action was slow in Greasy Corners, or when we weren’t chasing anybody, or being chased ourselves, I read them to Billy and Joe. They came to like dime novels fairly well, giving the stories close attention and making astute criticisms of the impulsive Merle’s many errors in judgment.

But Billy remained firm in his conviction that the yarns, as he called them, could not have been the cause of my derangement.

“I’d say you were crowded up in the house with too many females,” he concluded.

Be that as it may, what finally brought me to my senses was the sudden death of our butler, whose name, I learned, was Chittim. I had never been quite solid on the man’s name, and had had to ask Dora to please inquire of Cook. J. M. Chittim, we were informed.

Poor Chittim dropped dead one morning on his way back from the cigar stand. While we were waiting for the van to come from the mortuary I had a good look at his corpse and saw to my astonishment that he was thin as a rail. I was simply amazed! I felt sure Chittim had been fat—or at least solidly plump—when Dora and I had hired him some twenty years before.

Dora and I were newlyweds then; perhaps we were happy. One doesn’t pay a world of attention to a butler in the morning of one’s marriage, though I do remember that Dora’s dreadful mother, a violent hand with servants, advised against him because of his inexperience. Young Chittim could not have been more than a year or two out of his teens at the time, and I’m quite certain he was plump.

But he died thin as a rail. The death shocked me, and for a few days I gave more thought to J. M. Chittim than I had, I’m afraid, in the twenty and more years he had served me faithfully.

“That shows you were crazy already,” Billy said. “There’s no reason to think of dead people. They’re gone. If you let your mind drift like that, somebody that ain’t dead will sneak up behind you and steal your wallet.”

Billy liked to suppose he was the practical man, all business. He didn’t like to be reminded of how superstitious he himself really was.

“You don’t have no fresh dead, Billy,” Joe Lovelady observed with a note of sadness in his voice. He was whittling a stick; now and then he would brush the little curls of wood into the fire.

“It’s when they’re fresh gone that your mind gets stuck on them,” Joe said, the thought of his baby and his young wife, Nellie, no doubt too fresh for comfort.