That night a dry storm rumbled across the plains a few miles to the north of us. Thunder cracked and lightning slit the darkness. Joe Lovelady slept right through the worst of it.

I was somewhat nervous, but Billy Bone was terrified. “Now lightning’s something I really hate,” he informed me. “They say it cooks you into black bacon if it hits you. I’d give a million dollars if we was inside so we could hide under the bed.”

Since we definitely weren’t inside, he hid under his saddle.

“Throw the saddle blanket over me, quick, Sippy!” he said. I draped it over the saddle, so as to make a kind of curtain, but Billy was shaking so much it soon slipped off.

“I’d rather be dead than go through this,” he said.

“Oh, that’s extreme,” I said. “It’s not that bad.”

“You’ll think so when you’re black bacon!” he said bitterly.

Then he saw something that made him even more frantic. He gave a cry, threw off the saddle, and yanked both pistols out of his coat.

“Did you see him?” he asked, which gave me a bad scare. I assumed he had seen an Apache in the lightning flash. But it hadn’t been an Apache, it had been something that frightened him even worse. Before Joe and I could even figure out what we were being attacked by, Billy had emptied both pistols into the darkness, and when I say emptied, I mean emptied—twelve shots.

Even Joe Lovelady couldn’t sleep through twelve shots. He rolled over, pistol in hand, just as the lightning flashed again; but so far as either of us could see, the plain was empty.

“What was it, Billy?” Joe asked, puzzled but not really alarmed.

“It was the Death Dog,” Billy said. He was so scared his teeth were chattering, and he was dropping bullets, trying to reload.

“There ain’t no Death Dog, Billy,” Joe said. I believe he was a little exasperated at having been so rudely awakened from a sound sleep.

“It was the Death Dog!” Billy insisted. “He was standing not thirty feet away, grinning at me. It means I’m a goner for sure.”

“It was just an old lobo, coming to eat those rabbit guts,” Joe said firmly. He lowered the hammer on his pistol, rolled over, and soon went back to sleep.

But Billy Bone was a long way from sleep.

“There’s no worse luck than to see the Death Dog in a lightning flash,” he assured me.

I knew Joe Lovelady was right—if a wolf had been there he was probably only after the rabbit entrails. But I wanted to do what I could to reassure Billy; he still flinched every time the lightning tongued toward us.

“He was probably looking at me, Billy,” I said. “I’m the only one old enough to be eligible in this crowd.”