Then the guns stopped shooting, which felt better. Still, I decided to stay hidden in my hat for a few minutes, undignified as that might be. I wasn’t sure the guns were through with their shooting.

My mind, a spinning top, spun me back to Philadelphia. I lay there in the dust and cigar butts, regretting the fact that I had never kissed Kate Molloy, a very appealing Irish parlormaid, who had shown signs that she might allow it.

No doubt it’s always the unkissed girls you remember when you’re about to be killed. Kate was so pert, so lively—what had stopped me?

Before I could reflect and grow sorrowful about this lapse, somebody grabbed my pants leg and began to drag me across the dusty floor. It was a short, furious little man in buckskins, with greasy black hair and rotting teeth—the very image of Black Nick.

He was strong and brisk, though. I was fairly whistling across that floor.

Then Billy spotted me.

“Hey, slow down, Dez,” he said. “That’s my friend Mr. Sippy who ain’t from Mississippi. Don’t be dragging him out—I don’t think he’s even shot.”

“I’m not,” I said meekly, though it was really too early to be sure.

Des Montaignes immediately got huffy. He dropped my legs and frowned.

“Stand up if you’re alive!” he said with some exasperation.

I guess I had inadvertently wasted the man’s time. He marched over to the corner, where he soon found a man who was dead. As I was getting to my feet, he dragged him out.

“Dez is all business,” Billy said. He seemed in unusually high spirits. His young eyes were dancing.

Soon the people who had knocked me down on their way out came trooping back in—an eclectic mixture of retired buffalo hunters and leisured gunmen. Billy made a fine joke about Des Montaignes mistaking me for a corpse, so I got introduced to the sweethearts of Greasy Corners while they were having a good laugh at my expense.

4.

Hill Coe, Pleasant Burnell, Wild Horse Jerry, Simp Dixon, Happy Jack Marco, Moss Kuykendall, Ike Pumpelly, and Vivian Maldonado were the principal gunslingers operating out of Greasy Corners in the time Billy and Joe and I were there.

Among the buffalo hunters present were Nute Rachal, Jim Saul, Hank Leedy, J. C. Smurr, and Zack Stuckey.