I met them all and came to like most of them, but I admit I was nervous at first. Billy and Joe had impressed upon me the absolute necessity of keeping people straight as regards profession and reputation. It could be fatal, they assured me, to confuse a buffalo hunter with a gunslinger. A buffalo hunter might slap me on the back and buy me a drink if I promoted him to gunslinger, but it wouldn’t work the other way around. Were I to casually ask a prominent gunslinger how many buffalo he’d killed, rude treatment would be the best I could expect.

“Most of them would just pull out a gun and plug you,” Billy said matter-of-factly. “Hill Coe and them others, they got reputations to keep up.”

Hill Coe, the famous marshal of Abilene and Dodge, had the coldest eyes in town, and a big standing among the locals. Only the Italian dandy, Vivian Maldonado, who had quit a life as a trapeze artist in a circus to seek glory with the gun, ever seemed disposed to challenge him.

The rest were frankly just the journeymen of the owlhoot trail—a jolly lot when jolly and a sullen lot when sullen.

All of them—even Hill Coe—were careful of Billy Bone, a boy with little experience, but with a reckless eye.

“They don’t know what Billy might do,” was Joe Lovelady’s analysis. “They don’t, and he don’t neither.”

5.

It seems that Greasy Corners owed its existence to the reactionary nature of buffalo hunters. Like most humans, they were reluctant to strain themselves learning a new trade.

I gathered that Jim Saul and Nute Rachal and their crowd had stuck it out to the end at Fort Griffin, Texas, the last big shipping point for buffalo hides.

“Then one day we skint the last buffalo and there was nothing to do,” Jim Saul said, with a sad, weary look in his eyes. He had hunted the southern herd in the days when it strung out over the plains for hundreds of miles.

“None of us is smart enough to make no living gambling,” Hank Leedy said. “You got to have them quick hands to play cards.”

“I just don’t know where all them big critters went to,” Nute Rachal said—the buffalo hunter’s melancholy song.

They were all large men—ripping the hides off dead bison takes muscle. They would sit around all day in the shade of an old hide shed in Greasy Corners, whittling and spitting, looking sadly again and again across the empty plain, like old tired bears whose coats had worn shabby.