There was just the briefest movement, a swish of sound: Joe Lovelady was still smiling at me, but there was something wrong with his head. The smile seemed suddenly to be coming from above his right shoulder. Then his body tilted slightly, swayed a little, and toppled toward the chicken house. A great fan of blood spread across the chicken-house wall; my clearest memory is of that perfect fan of blood, and then Joe’s head was rolling past Isinglass, who put out a foot and stopped it.

The old man looked at me, perplexed.

“The head jumps to the right,” he said. “You’d think as clean as Mesty cuts, it would just stay on the neck until the body falls down dead. But it don’t—it jumps to the right.”

The sound of his words became faint, as if he had receded to the heavens. It seemed I was being swallowed by a pool of warm black ink. I sank into it calmly, hearing sounds like the voices of giant frogs, before the black sleep came.

10.

“It’s foolish to try and tolerate a feller with that kind of ability if he’s on the wrong side,” Isinglass commented that evening at dinner.

I was still feeling rather peaked; the cowboys had revived me from my faint with a hatful of water from the horse trough, and I came to in time to hear Cecily Snow, mounted on her thoroughbred, castigate Isinglass for having allowed the African to besplotch her father’s chicken house with Joe Lovelady’s blood. “It will have to be repainted, and the sooner the better,” she said before riding off.

The day had passed somehow; I hadn’t fainted again, but I was still so weak I could scarcely lift my soupspoon. Cecily, seeing the condition I was in, had nobly sacrificed another terrapin, but my mind was not on the soup.

“Joe Lovelady wasn’t your enemy,” I told the old man. “He always spoke of you with respect.”

“Well, his mistake was to save that brash little Bill,” Isinglass said. “If he’d let me have that boy he’d have been welcome to his head.”

I believe he was saddened by the day’s events, though—his bowl of chili remained as untouched as my soup.

“I’d have made that man my foreman,” Old Whiskey said. “I offered him the job once. It ain’t my fault he chose to save a killer. In fact, it’s my regret. A cowhand like him don’t come along but once in a lifetime.”

“Couldn’t we change the subject?” Cecily asked. “I found the man aloof to the point of rudeness, myself.”