Why? Because it’s the one that makes him look the most cold-blooded, of course. You could argue that he killed the four Isinglass mutes because Cecily Snow bewitched him—it’s probably true. You could argue that some of his other victims were shot because he expected that sooner or later they would try to kill him: self-defense in advance is what that claim amounts to. Billy probably looked at it that way himself on the rare occasions when he gave his killings any thought at all.

But the Indian boy poses a hard problem for those who want to claim Billy as a misunderstood hero. None of the great heroes of old went around shooting unarmed ten-year-olds.

Some go as far as to deny that there ever was an Indian boy at all, which means attacking me, the only living eyewitness. So they do attack me, fiddling with maps and time schedules in order to prove that I couldn’t possibly have seen what I claimed I saw. The radical fellow from Roswell won’t even allow that I was with Billy on that part of the trip—he claims there are people who saw me in Taos that day; his theory is that I made up the story of the Indian boy because I was jealous of the fact that Tully Roebuck’s little book about Billy sold more copies than mine, and this despite the fact that Bloody Feathers himself confirmed the killing in more than one interview.

Of course, Billy didn’t help matters. He told three or four different stories about the Indian boy himself. Katie Garza said he told her that the Indian boy threw a knife at him, and that he ducked the knife and shot on the reflex; but while he was in jail in Lincoln he told Tully that he just shot to scare the boy, who happened to jump the wrong way at the wrong time and was unlucky enough to get killed. Then, just before he escaped, he told a newspaperman from Las Cruces that the Indian boy was an eighteen-year-old brave, fully armed—so that nonsense was soon in print.

I suppose they’ll argue it forever—or until all the black dirt of life finally washes off Billy and leaves him a pure, clean legend.

As for me, I withdrew from the controversy long ago. I know the truth all too well, but I try not to think about it now because it makes me too sad. I’ll never forget riding up to that sprig of sage and seeing a dead child lying beside it, shot down by someone hardly less a child, who would himself soon be dead. It floods my heart with sorrow to think of that day at all—of the dead child and the living, the silent girls, the poor hogan, the old woman wailing as the Trojan women wailed for the dead boys of Troy.