I’m sure a few Roman candles would have contented most of the caballeros who rode with Katerina Garza; perhaps that would have satisfied many of the gun-fighters too. Their lives were bleak and boresome; the livelier among them liked to hear noise once in a while, and see sparkles in the night. And the only noisemakers or sparklers they had were guns.

Before I could inquire of Joe Lovelady why a lady bandit would call her gang the Turkeys, the gang itself came racing right up to the China Pond, shooting at the heavens. The horse in the lead was a white mare—I guess the race into town had excited her because she fought the rein and pranced when her mistress stopped her.

A cur yelped, causing one of the bandits’ horses to pitch. The horse threw the bandit, who pulled a gun and shot repeatedly at the dog.

The young woman astride the white steed—I still think of them as steeds; it’s the dime novels again—seemed annoyed that the caballero had tried to shoot the dog that caused him to get thrown.

“If you hit that dog you’re going to cook it and eat it,” she said. “It ain’t the dog’s fault you can’t ride.”

I’m not sure the caballero heard her—he was stomping around in a pet, shooting at nothing.

“Let’s shoot him and take his horse, he can’t ride anyway,” another caballero suggested. There was a general laugh, which didn’t improve the furious bandit’s humor.

“No, save your bullets, we might need to shoot some of these white people,” Katerina said. She swung off the white mare with a confident motion—it reminded me of the way some ladies rise from the bed of love.

Then she noticed us.

“Joe, could it be you?” she asked in a softer tone.

“Hello, Katie,” Joe said, standing up.

Then, to my surprise, he gave the bandit queen a good long hug.

10.

While Joe and Katie were hugging, Billy Bone walked out—probably he was curious about the shooting. He was that way: he would go to violence wherever he found it, and that was his doom, as I tried to show in my novelette Billy the Kid; or, the Wandering Boy’s Doom, written after it was all just history.

It was my tale that produced his nickname, Billy the Kid—certainly nobody in the New Mexico Territory would have been fool enough to call him a kid while he was alive and well armed.

But when he walked out of the China Pond that evening, he didn’t find violence. He found his friend Joe Lovelady hugging a woman, and I think it shocked him more than if the seven or eight caballeros had been lying dead on the ground. It shocked the caballeros too. The one who had been thrown stopped shooting at the long-gone dog, and they all just stood around.