A few hundred buffalo from the southern herd had grazed down the Rio Pecos. Jim Saul and the others had come over from Texas and killed them. The hides were so poor that in the end they decided it wasn’t even worth it to ship them—a huge pile of hides still lay just south of town. When the wind shifted the smell was strong enough to gag you.

Rumor had it that there were still some buffalo in Montana, but the Greasy Corner professionals didn’t go north.

“I’d rather just think about them being there,” Jim Saul said. “If we go kill them then it’ll just be the same story.”

They had lost their hope, and everybody knew it.

“Somebody ought to just shoot them,” Billy Bone said. “I don’t know if they’ll fight.”

But when Mesty-Woolah swept down with the hard riders, they did fight. And Isinglass did kill them, to the last sad man.

6.

What had occurred when I had first stepped into the China Pond was a sharp disagreement between Vivian Maldonado and a stranger who had been slow to adapt to local ways.

It was the stranger Des Montaignes dragged out the back door, once he became disgusted with me.

Billy walked me over to the card table where the fracas had occurred and gave me a brief lecture. Napoleon was no keener student of battle tactics than Billy—and yet Billy’s fighting was all impulse; it was only after the bodies were removed that he liked to pretend he had had a plan.

“The stranger’s mistake was to sit too close to the table,” he explained. “Everybody knows you don’t sit too close to the table with Viv—if he loses two hands in a row he’s apt to go for you with a pigsticker. Now look at Hill Coe, he’s positioned perfect. He can reach his cards, but he ain’t in range of no knife.”

Hill Coe, of the cold eyes and fine reputation, dressed like an old saddle bum. He was dealing cards to Simp Dixon, Happy Jack Marco, and Vivian Maldonado. The latter sported an elegant white buckskin vest and had pomaded his hair.

“Beely, take a hand,” Maldonado said. I had seen his type in Naples, when Dora and I did the tour.

“No, I ain’t in a mood to be stuck with a knife today, Viv,” Billy said in a joking way.

Happy Jack Marco, a jolly-looking fellow with bright blue eyes, also sat well back from the table. “I’m thinking of hiring a nigger to handle my cards when Viv’s hot,” he said in a drawl as slow as molasses.