“No, you didn’t see him,” Billy said. “I seen him. The Death Dog only lets you see him if he wants you.”

Neither of us slept the rest of the night, though the storm soon passed so far to the east that the lightning was no worse than the flickering of a lamp. Billy kept his guns in his hands all night.

“It’s true you don’t know much about staying alive out here, Sippy,” he said. “But I know dumber people than you, and they’re still alive.”

“Luck,” I said.

“Must be,” he agreed. “You rode on that boat and it didn’t sink.”

16.

The boat didn’t sink, but my spirits did, when I finally arrived in Galveston. The island was just a low, muggy strip of sand whose citizens seemed to spend all their time either sweating or scratching or both.

From researches in my favorite literature—the dime novels, of course—I had formed the impression that the first thing a traveler ought to attend to upon arrival in Texas was the acquisition of a certain amount of ordnance: guns and knives, that is, and the more the better.

Consequently I had not been on the island an hour before I acquired a Winchester rifle, a Colt revolver, two derringers—one for each boot—and several bowie knives. I expected assailants, and soon had my guns loaded and my knives sharpened.

The assailants didn’t keep me waiting, either; they arrived in my hotel room at once and in force, unfortunately too small to shoot and too quick to cut.

I meant it, too. It was not too much to say that in the ten pounding days it took us to pass across Texas I completed a passage of a different sort.

When I got on that stage in Galveston I was still young, at least in my attitudes. By the time I got off it in El Paso I was old.

17.

I’ve often wondered if that terrible trip would have aged me as it did if I could have kept my rightful rear seat in the stagecoach.

It was not my first experience of stagecoaches, though it was to be by far my longest. Wells Fargo had brought a couple to the big ’76 celebration in Philadelphia; rides around the park cost only five cents, and I took fifty or sixty cents’ worth before the celebration ended.

Even that brief experience was enough to convince me that a stagecoach was a miserable conveyance, useful in dime novels but a pounding torment in real life.