He looked at me quizzically for a moment—the mention of a dirty deed at least seemed to give him pause.

“Billy, please don’t do the dirty deed,” I said.

But Billy Bone just grinned.

“Save one or two of those tasty lambs, in case I pass back through,” he said before riding away to the west.

8.

“I’ve still got my mule,” I told Esteván. “Maybe I could beat him to the Rio Animas and warn your brother and the boys.”

Esteván looked skeptical—he was slipping rapidly into a mood of fatalism.

“You don’t even have a gun, Señor Ben,” he said. “I don’t think you should go. Somebody else will shoot Señor Billy pretty soon. You don’t need to take the trouble.”

“But taking the trouble might save the other two boys,” I pointed out.

Esteván, though, had been carried away by his own vision of the poor mute boys babbling to one another in heaven.

“They all could speak together at last,” he said. “It’s good to think about.”

I saddled up Rosy and left him to think about it, though it saddened me to leave the old man, smaller than his giant dogs and with no “little ones” to care for. He offered to kill another lamb if I’d stay—he himself lived mostly on jerky—but I had some gallant notion of outflanking Billy at that point, and set out in a high lope for the west.

Much of my gallantry had rubbed off by the time I reached the town of Trinidad that evening. The discovery that there was actually a hotel there that provided hot baths took care of the rest of it. I stayed in the hotel more than a week, wrestling with my conscience between frequent soaks. I also recaptured a certain measure of literary inspiration and ripped off a double-dimer called Mutes of the Mesa; or, The Sheepherder’s Remorse—easily the best thing I had written since The Butler’s Sorrow.

In my strolls about the town I did make a few inquiries about the best route to the Rio Animas. Billy was an erratic traveler; I might waste a week and still beat him there, or so I told myself. But the mule skinners and tradesmen I inquired of merely looked at me askance and drew a finger slowly across their foreheads—a gesture meant to indicate that I could expect to be scalped if I insisted on traveling in that direction.

“You might run into Bloody Feathers,” one mule skinner said.

“I have run into him,” I said. “He didn’t seem so hostile.”

“Well, his friends are rough,” the man said, making it clear he considered my judgment to be amateurish.