Convincing Billy that he should be worried did not prove easy, though. The next day he was in perfect spirits—it was a day of fine clear sunlight, and we spent most of it lounging on the banks of the Pecos, watching Cecily work at her easel, a little distance away. She worked with severe concentration, only now and then pausing long enough to flash Billy one of her winning smiles.

“I never thought I’d be lucky enough to know no one like Snow—much less run off with her,” Billy said. He responded to Cecily’s smiles with a shy, boyish look.

“Billy, the trouble is you haven’t really run off with her,” I said. “You’re only a day’s ride from Winds’ Hill. Do you think Isinglass will just sit down and let her go?”

“No, the old cud will be coming, I know that,” Billy said. “I’ll just have to kill him. Snow says he wants to marry her and make her have a baby.”

“You might kill Isinglass, but what about the others?” I asked.

Billy didn’t answer—I don’t think he really heard me. He was lying flat on his back, looking up at the deep, clear sky—not a worry in his head that one could detect. He might have been a farm boy or a cowboy, resting from some pastoral labor; and yet the flecks of Des Montaignes’s blood still stuck to the barrel of his shotgun.

Twice more that day I tried to warn Billy, to make him realize that killers as able as himself were on the move. I didn’t attempt to describe to him what I assumed was Cecily’s plan: to convince him that his grand elopement had something to do with property. He wouldn’t have grasped it, and if he had, he wouldn’t have believed me. Every time I tried to suggest that he and Cecily ought to be moving on, he just looked bored.

“Sippy, ain’t you ever going home?” he asked in the late afternoon as Cecily was folding her easel.

“I may, Billy—I don’t know,” I said.

I felt a drooping sadness at that moment, hard to explain. He merely wanted me to shut up; he could not be made to consider the future at all.

Later I concluded that was one reason Billy killed so easily, in such a conscienceless way: he apprehended no future, neither his own nor his victims’. The present swallowed Billy as the whale swallowed Jonah.

We dined outside Lord Snow’s fine tent, this time on some jugged hare Cecily’s cook had packed. I doubt Billy had ever tasted jugged hare before.

He seemed to find it exceptionally tasty. “Why, this is a lot better than them jackrabbits Joe used to cook,” he said.

Cecily smiled at him indulgently before favoring me with a cool, regal look.