I rode north up the river for two days and saw nothing but a few brown deer, and one skinny antelope who seemed to be lost. No white mountain lion appeared. I knew I was getting closer and closer to the Jicarilla country; I knew too that I wasn’t going to see any white mountain lion; but I couldn’t make myself turn back. I wanted to will the fabulous white cat into existence even if I willed it into existence and it ate me.

At night, by the huge campfires I built, I saw the white lion in my dreams. But by day, as I wandered into increasingly barren, wind-eroded country, the thin buttes splotchy with black ore, I saw few beasts at all—though some of the wind-sculpted hills themselves were most exotic formations, follies cut by the unending wind, castellated and Gothic. Seeing their shapes in the long dusk was as spooky as anything in Beckford or Mrs. Radcliffe.

I woke on the third morning feeling sobered, even rational. The quest for the fabulous white lion suddenly seemed quixotic. Did I think I was the Ahab of dime novelists?

I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t, though I still liked the notion of putting Sitting Bull in the same book with Orson Oxx. While waiting for the coffee to boil, I scratched a few notes to that effect, and, while scratching, heard someone playing the harmonica and playing it very badly.

Billy Bone trotted over a ridge. He had the grace to look abashed when he realized I had heard his awkward music. He stuffed the harmonica in his shirt pocket and loped right up to the campfire, evidently in a perfectly fine humor.

“Billy, you haven’t seen any white mountain lions, have you?” I asked.

“Nary a one. I hope you’ll share the coffee,” Billy said.

Then, two hours later, only a few miles down the Rio de las Vacas, he shot and killed the young Apache boy.

10.

Cecily Snow knew horses. The gray she had selected for Billy was a fine animal. His gait was quite a bit longer and swifter than Rosy’s, which is why I was fifty yards or so behind when Billy shot the Apache boy.

I heard a shot but saw nothing when I looked up. I assumed Billy had just shot at a snake or something, though it was unusual that he had used his pistol—for he would have been all day hitting a snake with his pistol.

Still, one makes lucky shots. I saw him looking down at something and still assumed it was a dead snake. A large sprig of sage obscured whatever it was he had shot at until I was almost on it: there lay the boy, who looked to be ten at most. He was already dead.

“Oh, Billy!” I said, jumping down. In a moment I saw quite well that there was nothing to be done.