She didn’t answer. Her eyes were swollen. She cut one of the silver nuggets off her vest and laid it on Billy’s breast.

“Heaven be your bed, chapito,” she said. “Soy el tuyo.”

Then she got up and started back for Mexico, a woman with a sadly torn heart. Bloody Feathers rode with her out of town; when they left, La Tulipe left too, hobbling off with Bonaparte across the plain toward Colorado.

11.

Tully Roebuck rode back to Lincoln that afternoon, to his sheriffing and his blind daughter. I thought of going up to Winds’ Hill and attempting to rid the earth of Cecily Snow, but of course I did no such thing. Instead, benumbed by life and death, I plodded over to the good hotel in Las Cruces and immediately penned the dime novel that I assumed would assure my glory and my income as well.

I called it Billy the Kid; or, The Wandering Boy’s Doom. I expected high fame, but I suppose I was too quick off the mark, for the book sold poorly. The only thing that caught on was the nickname: now that Billy’s risen in legend, the white star of the West, talk of Billy the Kid is all you hear—it’s the one phrase I contributed to the language, of all the millions I wrote, though the book it introduced is forgotten, and was never believed.

The irony is that Tully Roebuck’s silly memoir, written two years after my novel, caught the public fancy. It had been a terrible winter, Tully lost all his cattle and no doubt needed money, so he sat down with one of the Buntline secretaries and wrote The True Authentic Adventures of the Notorious Billy the Kid. It had the kind of lurid cover they used to put on my Orson Oxx tales, and it sold a million. Tully got so rich he began to buy racehorses, but he had only a year in which to enjoy his riches before Brushy Bob Wade ambushed him near the Bitter Lake and sent him where Billy is, and Hill Coe and all the rest.

Tully borrowed the nickname I had invented, but I bore him no grudge for that. What’s puzzling to me still is how an earnest fellow such as Tully Roebuck could fool himself so easily and in the process confuse the story so completely.

It’s true that Billy, as he was dying, asked Katie to let on that Tully had killed him—I suspect now that Billy didn’t want it thought that he was killed by a woman, even one who loved him. But the puzzling thing is that Tully somehow convinced himself that he did kill Billy Bone. He claims in his booklet that he fired a second before Katie, which is nonsense—he was still inside the China Pond when Katie fired.