From the moment we rode into Greasy Corners—it consisted of no more than a dozen crumbling adobe hovels scattered beside the alkaline Pecos—I knew I had come to one of the strangest and most forlorn places I would ever visit in my life.

A pig or two slunk around the hovels and a few dusty curs scratched in the street, now and then adding their whines to the whine of the wind. The pigs were as thin as the dogs, unnerving to a man used to the fine plump pigs of Pennsylvania.

It looked odd—mighty odd, as the little Yankee captain might say.

“Not much to behold, is it, Sippy?” Billy said, as we trotted in.

But then he was grinning—he looked excited, whereas Joe Lovelady only looked depressed.

Of course Billy was the young prince of the town, the adored boy. He whipped up his horse and loped in, ahead of Joe and me. Joe looked as melancholy as the dusk which had by then embraced the long plain.

“You don’t look too cheerful,” I remarked.

“No, I don’t enjoy Greasy Corners,” he said quietly. “I just come here to humor Billy.”

“I can see that it’s not exactly a garden spot,” I said. In itself that was Yankee understatement. The soil was so alkaline that the tufts of buffalo grass looked as if they’d been salted; the stems of sagebrush were white.

I felt a little apprehensive. “What’s the main thing to watch out for?” I asked.

“The people are the main thing to watch out for,” Joe said. “Folks that stay in this town are only interested in two things.”

“What two?”

“Killing and dying,” Joe said.

2.

“I may die eventually, but I’ll be damned if I’ll allow myself to be disappointed,” Will Isinglass said to me in one of the curious conversations we had while I was his prisoner north of San Jon.

He was eating a beefsteak, and he paused to look at me down the length of the long table his dead partner, Lord Snow, had brought from England. Drippings from the meat stained his beard. He looked like an old gray buffalo—a shaggy mane, a great head.

“I’ve lived eighty-five years and got every damn thing I wanted,” he added.

“Except a son with a chin, I suppose,” Cecily Snow said, contempt dripping from her voice as the juice dripped from the meat. The English do know how to manage contempt.

Isinglass studied her a moment—her enmity affected him as little as the bite of a flea, though she was a beautiful woman, daughter of a family that had held sway in England for six hundred years.

“Well, a whelp is usually a burden,” Isinglass said. “I’ve found it cheaper to hire my help.”