Three days later, though his leg was far from healed, Billy Bone saddled up the cow horse that had fallen on him and prepared to ride away to keep his rendezvous with Cecily Snow, whose name had not been mentioned during our stay in San Isidro. Billy, I suppose, had only been counting days, waiting for the month to be up.

Few men have ever mastered the skill of leaving a woman. Billy Bone, who lacked all polish, did it very poorly. When I walked up, he and Katie were standing by the horse, and Billy looked every bit as nervous as he had the first time he left San Isidro.

I suppose, at bottom, he was as much afraid of women as the rest of us; certainly he didn’t enjoy upsetting one, and that’s an almost invariable consequence of the moment of leave-taking, if the woman’s in love with you at all.

Katie Garza wasn’t weeping and sobbing this time, though.

“This is the third time you’ve left me for no reason,” she pointed out in a low, cold tone. They stood in front of the poor cantina. Billy, still quite crippled, struggled with the saddle, and then struggled to mount. Katie, three feet away, made no move to help him. Her eyes were dark black, and there was no smile of love on her face.

“You know you won’t last a month across that river,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Billy was pallid—his color had never really come back. I had learned to identify a certain pallor as his headache look. He didn’t look either happy or well, but he was stubbornly-going.

“Aw, Katie, I’ll be fine,” he said, avoiding her cold, steady eye.

“I’ll look you up in a month,” he added. “I’ll be hunting someplace warm when the northers start.”

Katie said nothing at all. She looked at him, silent as a stone.

Billy started to turn his horse but stopped. I suppose he felt too remiss.

“Thanks for saving me from that necktie party,” he said. Then he looked at me.

“I wish you’d come with me, Sippy,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. I was taken quite by surprise.

“Hell, I don’t know why,” he said with a trace of his old crooked grin. “I guess I’ve just got used to having an old Yankee writer along.”

I think now he must just have been seized by a moment of fear.

“Go with him, Ben—he’ll need someone along who can think,” Katie said in a low tone.

Then, as Billy started again to turn his horse, she walked over and caught his bridle rein.