By midafternoon I had begun to feel a little desperate. Greasy Corners, our destination, I knew of only by hearsay. It was said to be a den of whores and cutthroats, but that part didn’t worry me. Most of the local settlements were dens of whores and cutthroats.

My own hope was to find one a little closer. Greasy Corners was somewhere on the Rio Pecos—at least one hundred and fifty miles from where we hit the plain. I knew Rosy well enough to know she wasn’t going to tolerate Joe Lovelady’s pace for any one hundred and fifty miles. She was a mule with a lot of balk in her. I was not looking forward to being left on that vast empty plain with a stalled mule.

Besides, I was starving. By midafternoon I had begun to scrape little curls of leather off my saddle with my fingernails, just to have something in my mouth.

Billy Bone seemed a little gaunt too.

“You wouldn’t have a biscuit, would you, Mr. Sippy?” he asked at one point.

I shook my head. “Do you think your friend will consider stopping for supper?” I asked.

“No, and if we did stop I don’t see what there’d be to eat,” he said.

“I’ve got a headache,” he added in a sad tone. “If you don’t have a biscuit you probably don’t have a pill, either.”

But I did have a pill—a bottle of them, in fact. I had bought them in Galveston a few months before and forgotten about them. They were just general pills, about the size of marbles and guaranteed to cure a wide range of diseases. I dug them out of my saddlebag and poured Billy Bone a handful.

“Let’s just eat them,” I said. “They’re just general pills. It’s better than starving.”

Billy didn’t say anything, but he gave me a kind of quizzical, grateful look. It may be that my sharing those Galveston pills sealed our friendship.

We rode out on the plain, munching the big pills. After he’d eaten about thirty, Billy got tickled.

“I may get so healthy I’ll fall off this horse,” he said, but before he could get any healthier we saw Joe Lovelady racing this way and that, whipping at something with his rope.

“Prairie chickens,” Billy said. “He’s good at catching prairie chickens. Joe just whacks them down with his rope.”