“No, señor,” Esteván said. “They lived in silence, but they were good with the sheep. I don’t know why Señor Billy shot them, but then I have lived all my life with these sheep. Many things puzzle me that people do.”

I didn’t ask for details, but later Esteván lit a candle and urged me to enter the cabin.

“Come, see my little ones,” he said. “Maybe they are talking to the angels right now. Maybe they were only meant to speak in the great heaven.”

The cabin contained three small bunks, two of which had bodies in them. The corpses wore the same rough cloaks that Esteván wore. He had put a kind of cheesecloth over their faces, but pulled it back to show me the “little ones.” Neither boy was as old as Billy; their chins were not distinguished and their eyes did bulge a bit, but they were not the horrors Cecily had described.

I put the cheesecloth back over their faces.

“How did he kill them?” I asked, wondering at the irony, for two sons of the West’s greatest cattleman had died dressed as sheepherders in a lonely cabin on the Purgatory.

“Señor Bill?” Esteván said. “He just shot them at the campfire, when the dogs stopped barking. Nobody was asking him any questions. I thought he would shoot me, too, but he just killed my little ones.”

“I think it was a mighty bad thing to do, Esteván,” I said.

The old man looked sadly at the shrouded corpses of the boys for whom he had cared, for so long.

“I think so, too, señor,” he said. “It seemed like a bad thing. I cried all day. But I guess someone will kill Señor Billy pretty soon too—he is not going to last long. And if my little ones are speaking their first words to the beautiful angels in heaven, it is not too sad. They never got to speak down here on earth.”

7.

The next morning the sun shone bright and hot again. The only clouds in the whole sky hung over the tops of the mountains, far to the west.

Esteván was up before me, digging the graves.

“I didn’t want to do the burying yesterday,” he said. “I like a good warm day if I have to bury someone. This sunshine is good, and it’s going to be warm in the earth after a while. The little ones will have a good dry grave.”