Katie and Billy spent the evenings in her room—occasionally, from my seat under the tree, I would hear him trying to toot on his harmonica. Sometimes I would hear Katie laugh—a sound with even a note of girlish joy in it, a sound such as one of my own happy daughters might make.

I hope it was joy: Katie Garza had a true heart, and I hope she and Billy sang a few more bars of the sweet melody of love in that time of waiting.

But it was a short time, and a sad time, a chill cast into its warmth by the fact of Billy’s murders. Some days it would make me sad to see how hard Katie tried, for she threw all her young energy and great spirit into the effort to make Billy Bone want to live again, to get the spunk back into his grin and that old lively glint back into his eyes.

The truth is, Katie failed. Billy hobbled around, he shot his gun, he spluttered into his harmonica, and he lolled with Katie in their little bed in the room behind the cantina. Perhaps, in private moments that I didn’t see, he was the old Billy for an hour, but even that I doubt.

Something had left him—call it hope or energy or confidence or what you will: one didn’t need to name it in order to feel its absence. His laugh had no ring, his fun no strength and no surprise. Katie kept smiling, but it was clear her heart was heavy: she must have felt as if she were trying to stuff a ghost back into its body—she might get a leg in, or an arm in, but then the ghost of Billy would float away, secure in its absence.

The caballeros got tired of guarding the river. They went back to horse racing, gambling, fistfights, and tequila. A few left San Isidro to pursue light banditry on the stagecoach routes to the north; they came back not much richer, but with splendid new Yankee hats.

Often, at night, Katie would leave their room and come and sit with me under my tree. Sometimes I scribbled by lantern light—the long afternoon siestas I had begun to take left me wakeful until midnight or after.

“I can’t do nothing with him, Ben,” she said one night, clearly miserable. She drank a whole bottle of tequila, but said no more the whole evening.

I was glad she had stopped calling me Mr. Sippy. I had fallen a little in love with Katie myself, though I don’t believe she ever noticed.