Billy lay flat on his back, his mouth open, snoring lightly. Asleep, he looked about twelve. And he was supposed to be the great killer of the West!

I saw that the horses were ready. Joe had even saddled Rosy—a remarkable thing. Often I had to spend an hour paying her insincere compliments before I could get her to accept the saddle.

“How’d you come to know Billy?” I asked. From the manner of their intercourse I assumed they must have been friends for years.

“Why, we just met up,” he said, as if surprised that anyone would care to inquire. “He doesn’t have no folks, and I don’t either, now—we thought we’d see if we could get on with a cow outfit.”

He sipped his coffee for a bit. “But I don’t know that Billy’s going to make a cowboy,” he said, with a sigh. “I guess it just ain’t his line.”

It was Joe Lovelady’s line, though. I soon came to see that if there were such a thing as the perfect cowboy, Joe was it. He had the skills to perfection—and more than that, he had the temperament. Joe asked for no more than horses and cattle, ropes and saddles, grass and sky. It was his misfortune—well, better say his tragedy—to fall in with the gunmen.

If I had realized that still morning how fast the old wheel of fate was spinning I would have wired for some money and bought Joe a ranch in Nebraska or Montana or somewhere as far from New Mexico as I could get him. I liked him the minute I set eyes on him, and I had the money, too. But I suppose there’s no likelihood Joe would have ridden away and let Billy fall. Call them sidekicks, compañeros, or what you like, I doubt they could have been separated, except by the one thing that did separate them, finally.

“He snores even worse when he sleeps on his stomach,” Joe remarked in a tolerant way. You could tell from the way he said it that the man was a true friend to Billy Bone.

11.

We rode all day at a fast Joe Lovelady clip but got nowhere—or nowhere that one could rightly call anywhere, at least. We must have traveled seventy-five miles, but seventy-five miles is no more than a breath on those plains. When we made camp that night we could still see the mountains where we had been the day before—the air was that clear.

I had been around the edges of the great plain for the past month, but I would never have dared just strike off across it—not unless I had a competent fellow such as Joe Lovelady to follow.