Then he put away his gun and helped La Tulipe get back on her stool.

“A wolf will eat you and shit you out as a green puddle,” she said to her husband, in clear if husky English.

Adjusting for the difference in circumstances, it was not unlike the kind of things Dora used to say to me.

7.

After Des Montaignes gave up kicking his wife he went back and kicked some more dirt over the blood the dead stranger had bled. He had fairly drenched the floor along one wall. None of the cardplayers got up to help.

It may be that the easy life produces a little too much sensibility. I don’t consider myself to be unusually squeamish, but the sight of all that fresh blood made me feel so sensible, all of a sudden, that I hurried out to seek a breath of fresh air.

Joe Lovelady had already gone out. He was squatting by a wall, having a smoke.

“I wish Tully would show up so we could get out of here,” he said.

Tully meant Tully Roebuck, a man Joe and Billy sometimes cowboyed with. They had even once cowboyed for Isinglass, but Billy was a dud as a cowboy, and when he got fired Joe and Tully left out of loyalty.

Isinglass, of course, recognized that Joe Lovelady was the genuine diamond, when it came to cowboys; he offered to make him range boss of the Whiskey Glass ranch, and that was when the ranch covered some three million acres—most of eastern New Mexico and a lot of western Texas.

To be selected as foreman of the largest ranch in the world was quite an honor, but Joe Lovelady politely declined it and rode off with his reckless young friend, Billy Bone.

“Besides, I don’t like to be bossing men who are older than me,” Joe later explained.

Perhaps I seemed a little wobbly in the legs when I stepped out of the saloon. “You act like you’re sick,” he said.

“Well, it was a little close in that barroom,” I admitted.

The prairie dusk was fading but it was not yet completely dark. I squatted down by the wall in an effort to imitate Joe—he had become my model in matters of Western etiquette and deportment.

“That old woman sings songs that make you feel like you have to die soon,” Joe said. It was a fair description of La Tulipe’s music.

“I don’t suppose I’d settle in this place if I was planning a long life,” I remarked.

“No, but it’s ideal for gunfighters,” Joe said. “They ain’t got no plans.”

8.

When I got to know the gunslingers better, I saw that Joe had a point. The majority of them never looked farther ahead than the next hand of cards. On the whole, their prospects were as dim as those of the buffalo hunters.