“I reckon I can find my way down a hill, fog or no fog,” Joe Lovelady said.

Billy choked off his fit, sighed, and struggled onto his horse, a rangy black at least seventeen hands high.

“Gentlemen, could I ride along with you until we get out of these mountains?” I asked, seeing that they were about to ride off and leave me without further ado.

They both looked down at me. Joe Lovelady was a good-looking young man with a fine mustache. He could have been twenty-one or two, but no older, and he had more self-assurance than Billy Bone would ever have.

“I’m out of bullets and I’m lost and I’m not good at heights,” I said, realizing it was a lame speech.

It had a good effect though—it put Billy Bone in a better humor.

“This old man’s a total loss, but let’s take him along anyway,” he said. “Let’s show him some fun.”

Joe Lovelady seemed surprised at the suggestion.

“What’s his name?” he asked, looking me over.

“His name’s Mister Sippy but he ain’t from Mississippi,” Billy said, and laughed even harder at the joke than he had the first time.

He was still laughing when we started down the hill.

3.

Joe Lovelady set a smart pace, cloud or no cloud. Rosy didn’t appreciate it, but she was tired of living the lonely life with me and did her best to keep up for company’s sake. Billy’s horse was so tall it was like following a giraffe.

I don’t think Billy much cared for horseback travel. His reputation was made in the Territory, but to me he had the look of a city boy—and in fact he had been born on the Bowery in New York and brought West as a baby. Something of the Bowery had stuck to him, even so.

Before we had been traveling an hour, he got bored enough to drop back and make a little conversation.

“We could all break our necks trying to follow Joe Lovelady in a fog like this,” he remarked rather petulantly.

Finally we got down below the cloud and saw the great plain stretching away. By noon we had got pretty well out of the Sierra Oscura, but Joe Lovelady evidently had no intention of stopping for lunch. I began to realize that he behaved with a certain relentlessness when it came to getting where he was going.

I suggested to Billy that we might stop and try to scare up a bite in Tularosa, but Billy immediately vetoed that.

“There are plenty of unkind sons of bitches in Tularosa,” he informed me.