Billy and I spoke of the Apache boy only once, that same afternoon: we had stopped to water our horses in the Rio Salado. I was heavyhearted, and I suppose I looked it. He looked at me with a certain sympathy, though I know it seems odd to say it: shoot a mere boy in the morning and yet show sympathy for a tired old writer in the afternoon.

But life’s that way.

“Don’t look so blue, Sippy,” he said. “They’ll gun me down pretty soon, and then you’ll be spared days like this.”

“Billy, I don’t want them to gun you down,” I said. “I’d like to be spared that, if I’m spared anything.”

“Know what I dreamed the other night?” he asked rather cheerfully.

“I couldn’t guess.”

“I dreamed I was dead and the Death Dog was licking my skull,” he said. “I didn’t have a body but I still had my eyes, and that old dog was licking my skull. I can’t wait to tell that one to the Tulip. She’ll enjoy that one.”

“I bet she will,” I said.

12.

We pressed on south as hard as we could, looking over our shoulders for Bloody Feathers every minute or so—both of us got cricks in our necks from looking back so often. I heard later that Bloody Feathers was far to the north, on an elk hunt, the day Billy killed the boy; but in our imagination he was right behind us.

Billy was firmly convinced that Tully Roebuck was the man most likely to save him from the Jicarilla chief. Apart from napping a little at night and resting the mounts when we had to, we raced on to Lincoln.

I know Billy was really scared, and I suppose I let that lull me into thinking he would take a conservative line with the public, at least for a week or two—in which way of thinking I could not have been more wrong. Before we had been in Lincoln for an hour he had shot down two perfect strangers, a banker and a cattleman, had been arrested by Tully and both his deputies, and was being held for the time being in a hardware store—the howling mob in the street being so violent that there was no immediate way to get him safely to jail.

I didn’t see the killings. I was in a saloon, refreshing myself with a glass of whiskey and a very tasty beefsteak; but when I heard the report of a 10-gauge shotgun I knew that my hopes for an armistice had been shattered.