“It feels like a big hand is trying to squeeze my brains out through my ears,” he said when I handed him the pills. “Do you think the Devil does it?”

“I don’t believe in the Devil, Billy,” I said.

“The Tulip does, though,” he said.

“Oh, is the Tulip alive?” I asked.

“Sure she’s alive,” he said. “So’s Dezzy. They’re still in Greasy Corners.”

“How’s Katie Garza?” I asked.

“Fine as ever,” he said quickly, in a tone meant to close comment on that subject.

“She’s going to be a little jealous when you elope, I expect,” I remarked, ignoring his tone. “If I were you I’d ride fast and I’d ride far.”

Billy did not answer for several minutes. Then he said a curious thing—to this day I remember the sad look in his young eyes when he said it.

“I’m getting too big a reputation, Sippy,” he said. “Sometimes I wish they’d just let me fall.”

2.

A little later, when the pills worked and his headache subsided, his mood improved substantially and he revealed the true motive for our expedition.

“Snow says I’ve got to kill those little bug-eyed whelps now,” he said.

“But why, Billy?” I asked. “They’re her own half-brothers.”

“She says they hate her because she’s beautiful,” he said. “She says when Old Whiskey dies they’ll catch her and kill her.”

“Oh, I doubt they’ll catch Cecily,” I said. “My opinion is she’ll not likely be caught except when it pleases her to be.”

“She said you’d be jealous,” Billy remarked, with no rancor. “But there’s a plot. That’s why she killed the tall nigger. He was supposed to do it for them.”

“Cecily’s been reading too many penny dreadfuls,” I remarked. “Anyway, Mesty-Woolah’s dead and Cecily’s quite safe. Who would dare try to kill her?”

“Tully or somebody,” he said. “Some gunman.”

“Billy, that’s nonsense,” I said. “Nobody’s plotting to kill Lady Snow.”

“If Snow said it, it’s true, and you better not call her a liar just because you’re jealous,” he said. He looked at me coldly.

“Billy, would you kill me?” I asked. “Do you think it’s just your right to kill anybody, even a friend? I am your friend, you know.”

He looked at me again and finally managed a sheepish grin.

“I guess you are a friend,” he said. “It’s just that sometimes I wish you didn’t talk so dern much.”

3.

The next morning we crossed the North Canadian, at that season just a dry crack in the plains, with some muddy ground in the center of the crack.

“Isn’t this another of those rivers you’re not supposed to cross?” I asked, hoping to dissuade him from his mission.

Billy had risen in a sparkling mood. He spat defiantly into the mud.