Joe Lovelady watched the little scene calmly, just as he watched the rest of life. But the gunslingers were upset. They were testy men at best and resented any threat to their routine.

“I think she’ll skin you, Hill,” Billy said, knowing full well that he had just hung the old gunman on a hook he could not get off of.

“The Tulip can hold the money,” he said. “Me, I’m putting mine on the lady.”

Hill Coe looked dismayed; but after a moment he nodded politely to Katie and finished adjusting his glove.

13.

The rules for the match were soon agreed upon: each contestant to shoot twenty bottles; in the event of a tie they would then shoot bottle by bottle until someone missed.

“Why, Hill can shoot all day and not miss,” Happy Jack said. “Unless Katie slips up we’ll have to race over to Roswell and get some more bottles after a while.”

La Tulipe gave a hearty laugh. In the daylight she looked mulatto, or high yellow, as it’s called in the South; it was clear she had been a beauty in her day.

“What are you laughing about, you old slut?” Pleasant Burnell said. There was no friendship between him and La Tulipe.

“I’m laughing at the thought of how quiet you’ll be when you’re dead,” La Tulipe retorted.

Katie Garza shot first. She sat down, crossed her legs, rested her pistol across her forearm, and proceeded to shatter twenty bottles. It was as cool a performance as you’ll ever see—for of course all the gunfighters were expecting her to miss.

When she stopped to reload, after cracking the eighteenth bottle, there was a fair amount of tension among the men—not including Billy.

“She don’t mean to miss, does she?” he whispered. He was no shot himself, and I think it astonished him that a woman could shoot so well.

Katerina calmly cracked the last two bottles, shook out the two empties, reloaded, and stood up.

“I’m satisfied with the first round,” she said.

“Pretty shooting, Miss Garza,” Hill Coe said, perfectly amiable.

He stepped up to the line and waited confidently while Happy Jack lined his twenty bottles along the top of the wall. He even had a bit of a shine—perhaps he supposed that Katie had taken a fancy to him and had offered the challenge as a way of attracting his interest.

Then he raised his pistol, as he had some eighteen thousand times a year for many years—and missed clean with his first and only shot.

14.

A hasty move, the twitch of a finger, the smallest of miscalculations—I suppose we all stand no farther than that from ruin.

Did Chittim know he was going to lie down and die on the sidewalk, while going, as he so often had, to fetch my morning dime novel?