Tully Roebuck, more experienced than I, seemed to be reckoning too, perhaps along the same line.

“I don’t know when I’ll see you boys again,” he said.

“Oh, the breeze will blow us up your way someday, Tully,” Billy Bone said lightly.

“That old man’s a troublesome neighbor,” Tully said. “He don’t let up. If I were you boys I’d scat for a while. Maybe a horse will fall on him and slow him down.”

“If not, I’ll put five or six bullets in him—that’ll slow him down,” Billy said. He was impatient to be off.

“Say hello to Bess. I hope to come by and sample her pudding once she’s had the baby,” Joe Lovelady said.

“Come if you can, we’ve a shanty you can bunk in,” Tully said, and rode off in the sunshine.

“I like old Tully, but I suspect he’s lazy,” Billy said as we started on toward the mountains.

It seemed an odd remark, since the man had just made a long ride to warn us; neither Joe nor I replied.

I would have said happy, not lazy; Tully Roebuck seemed serene—and perhaps he was, as he loped off toward the Rio Hondo, dragging Bonaparte behind him.

But Bess, his wife—Joe Lovelady said she made excellent puddings—caught a fever and died in childbirth; the little girl lived, but soon went blind. Tully Roebuck would never be serene again, or happy; the next time I saw him he was sheriff of Lincoln County, and his gun was at the service of Will Isinglass.

29.

Two days later, as we were filling up on chiles and frijoles in a somewhat inhospitable bar in Tularosa—Billy was right about the town—Katie Garza blazed into legend by robbing Governor Lew Wallace at gunpoint as he sat in a buggy with his wife outside the Mission San Miguel.

The whole territory had a laugh at the expense of old Lew, in my opinion no more than an inferior dime novelist himself—for what was Ben Hur but a fat double-dimer set in Roman times?

Katie turned her white mare, the Dove, and raced down through the terrible wasteland known as the Jornada del Muerto—she knew of a secret water hole that enabled her to go where a posse wouldn’t dare follow. Of course, Governor Lew had to get up a posse—I’m told he rather liked Katie’s spunk, himself, but his wife took being a governor’s lady seriously, and was not amused. He convened the posse mainly to save face: some old chiefs from the Bosque del Apache, with whom he had been parleying at the time, thought it hilarious that a girl could rob a governor, so he had to do something.

By the time we heard the story in Tularosa, Katie was already back in Mesilla, buying drinks for all comers in her favorite cantina.