I supposed the Tulip was just having her little joke. Perhaps she was tired of the cowboys and wanted to scare them off. From every point of view it seemed unlikely that Billy would return to Greasy Corners—it was hardly the resort that would do for a honeymoon with a great English lady. The heiress to the Cavendishes and the Montstuarts would not be likely to flourish in the China Pond. Even Dot seemed a shade too fine for the China Pond.

In a way, I regretted it, too, for the fact was, I missed Billy. It seemed likely that my travels with him were ended, the book of our adventures closed. That night in my poor hut I did a little wistful dreaming: I imagined a better Billy, shed of all his violence, his habit of casual murder, his headaches, and his fear of the Death Dog.

Despite all that he had done, I guess I just liked Billy, and now that he was gone and it was unlikely I would ever have to watch him kill another man, my mind got busy and created a happy little life for him. I couldn’t quite get Cecily Snow into the picture, but I did give Billy my old skill, telegraphy. Before I went to sleep, I imagined him running a busy little telegraph office somewhere—in Illinois perhaps.

But the next morning the double blast of a 10-gauge shotgun woke me, and when I rushed outside I saw that the real Billy Bone had come back, as La Tulipe predicted; and not only that, he had promptly shot the liver out of her husband, Des Montaignes.

5.

Des Montaignes’s error was simple. Unimpressed with lineage or much of anything else, the old mountain man had simply walked up to Cecily Snow and made a rude suggestion almost the minute he saw her.

He did have at least the discretion to make the suggestion in French—Cecily told me this later—but for all his traveling he had had too few opportunities to observe aristocratic behavior. Dewey Sharp, who saw it all, said Des Montaignes was quite taken aback when Cecily turned to her young killer and said, “Billy, this filthy old beast wants to couple with me.”

Whereupon—according to Dewey—Billy turned red in the face, shoved his shotgun into Des Montaignes’s stomach, and emptied the gun—emptied the stomach too, I suspect.

Billy was still shaking with anger when I got there—he was attempting to reload so he could blast Des Montaignes again, though the man was as dead as a rag. Both empties had stuck in the barrel, and Billy was too enraged to pop them out.

“Billy, he’s as dead as he can possibly get,” I pointed out.

Billy reluctantly gave up the effort to remove the swollen shells from the bloody shotgun.

“Well, I wish the stinking fool were still alive so I could kill him again,” he said.