Happy Jack had a pistol in his lap—it seemed he had actually shot the stranger. Vivian Maldonado had lunged across the table in a fit of temper and slit the man’s throat, but instead of just dying quietly the stranger managed to get a gun out and pump off several wild shots.

“Happy Jack cut him down neat,” Billy said with admiration.

“Yeah, Dez, don’t I get a free drink for restoring public order?” Happy Jack asked.

Des Montaignes had returned and was kicking dirt from the floor over a puddle of blood.

“Go poke a pig,” Des Montaignes replied. Such rough talk was commonplace in Greasy Corners.

“Why, the dern shoats won’t have me,” Happy Jack said. It got a general laugh. Even Hill Coe managed a smile.

Then I heard a crooning from a dim corner near the bar. The noisy crowd heard it too, and at once grew silent. The crooning came from an old yellow woman, rocking on a little stool near the end of the bar. She was a heavy woman, and heavy-voiced too; and she wasn’t merely crooning, she was singing in the French tongue:

O fleuve profond,
    O sombre rivière . . .

“That’s La Tulipe,” Billy said. “She knows the past and the future.”

The old woman’s singing got louder—it seemed to surge from her throat. Jim Saul and the other buffalo hunters stood listening with tears in their eyes—maybe La Tulipe’s hoarse voice reminded them of the lowing of the animals they all missed. Then the song died back into wordless crooning as the old woman rocked back and forth on her stool.

Before anyone could stop him, Des Montaignes rushed over and kicked La Tulipe off the stool. She was his wife—he felt he had the right, I guess. He started to kick her again, but before he could, Billy Bone stepped over and stuck a pistol against his scraggly jaw.

“Don’t be mistreating the Tulip,” Billy said. “If you do I might decide to blow your brains out that back door.”

Des Montaignes was a violent, filthy old man. But he had trapped beaver in the country of the Blackfeet and the northern Cheyenne; he had lived with the Shoshone and the Yankton Sioux, sold slaves to the Comanche and the Kiowa, eaten dog with the Mandans. They say he made a fortune on the Red River of the north and lost it on the Red River of the south. He was said to know every stream and campsite from the headwaters of the Missouri to the mouth of the Rio Grande.

In short, the man had had time to acquire a little common sense. He did not kick his wife again.

“These sad tunes are bad for business,” he said, by way of excuse.

“Not as bad for it as me shooting you in the head,” Billy remarked dryly.