“We’re eloping, Mr. Sippy, ain’t that grand news?” she said, in high good humor—she might have been a parlormaid announcing that she was running off with the scion of the Sackvilles or the Cecils.

To say that Billy was smitten is not to put the matter strongly enough: he looked at Cecily with wonder, as awed as a child might be on seeing the full moon for the first time.

“Leaving today?” I inquired. It would have been sensible. News travels fast on the prairies; it would not be long before Isinglass, in Texas, heard that Mesty-Woolah was dead.

“Goodness, not today—we needn’t flee like servants,” Cecily said. “Billy has a few chores to do, and I would just like to finish my work on the thistles and cockleburs—this is the perfect season to do them. I expect we’ll set out on our travels in about a month.”

“I hope it ain’t longer,” Billy said. “I’ll barely be able to wait as it is.”

Beside a blooming beauty such as Cecily Snow, any man is apt to seem a pallid organism, but few faded as completely as Billy seemed to as he sat with her that afternoon. He reminded me of one of the nearly transparent fish Cecily had shown me in her father’s aquarium. An outline was visible, but the fish—as you ordinarily think of it, with guts and fins and scales—didn’t seem to be there.

Neither did Billy, that day. He was the boy Cecily Snow had chosen to cast her womanly light on, and in this case the light was so strong that the boy all but disappeared. He said little and never took his eyes off Cecily unless she happened to throw him a direct glance—in which case he quickly found a stem of grass to look at.

Cecily’s appetite was such that Billy and I were lucky to get a few bites of mutton and a biscuit apiece, and a few swallows of tea.

“I’ll take that hamper back, you go with Billy—and if you don’t look after him perfectly I shall be very vexed with you, Ben!” she said to me firmly after we’d packed up the scraps.

I had ridden out on an old plug one of the wranglers assigned me, but I noticed, when I arrived, that one of Isinglass’s better cow horses was saddled and ready for Billy—his shotgun was in the saddle scabbard. They must have chosen the horse while the wranglers were in the tower inspecting Mesty-Woolah’s body.

When it was time to go, Cecily stood not five feet from me and gave Billy a kiss as passionate as if he were a very Byron—it embarrassed him deeply and discomfited me—before mounting her thoroughbred. I, of course, was to be reunited with Rosy, whose behavior was as equivocal as ever.