“I didn’t know Joe had a mistress,” Billy whispered to me later in the evening. Somehow he had picked up the term. We were standing at the bar in the China Pond, watching Katie dance with Viv Maldonado.

Oh, but Katie was a looker, with raven hair and eyes to match. Her vest was buttoned with little silver nuggets, given her by an admirer, and she had splashed her shirt with sequins, which glittered as she danced. La Tulipe, the old yellow Creole woman, played the castanets for the dancers as they danced. Vivian Maldonado, perhaps remembering the applause of the crowds from his days on the trapeze, was mighty acrobatic, but his step was never too quick for Katie Garza.

“I don’t know that just because he hugged her it means she’s his mistress,” I said, as we watched the dance.

“It does so!” Billy said, firmly convinced on the subject. “That Joe, he’s all secrets—you never know what he’s really thinking,” he added. It was clear he was having to revise his opinion of his friend, who was outside, still squatting by the wall. Joe Lovelady didn’t enjoy barrooms, even with Katie Garza there to rouse up the crowd.

She roused it up, too—she had such animation! In Philadelphia they would have soon had her running the biggest balls. Hill Coe and Pleasant Burnell and some of the other gunfighters sat up a little straighter and tried to shine; but of course for plain American gunmen to try and outsparkle an Italian circus hand is hopeless in itself; and anyway, Katie was merely making use of the fact that Vivian knew how to dance.

Her eyes were only for Billy, the awkward boy who didn’t really know what a mistress was, although the whores of the Colorado mining saloons had been the only aunts and nannies he had ever had.

“That Joe, he’s tight with his talk,” he muttered, as irritated by his friend’s reserve as he had been by his competence the day I met them.

“I guess the next thing, he’ll be getting married,” he said gloomily. “Then I won’t have nobody to pal around with except you, Sippy, and you and I will starve to death without Joe to rustle the grub.”

He was right on that point, but wrong about Joe and Katie—when it came to love, he had no experience to draw on, just his boyish fancies. He thought love all happened in capital letters, but I knew better. I had Dora to teach me that it was mostly fine print.

“I don’t think they’ll be getting married, Billy,” I said. I had already seen the glances Katie was casting his way. Women will tend toward the man with the reputation, a fact I’ve often noted in Philadelphia.