“Katie probably remembers I couldn’t hit those bottles,” he said as we sat around the campfire the first night. We had piled so much wood on the fire we had to sit fifty feet back from it or else be scorched.

“I doubt she’ll hold poor marksmanship against you,” I said.

“I wish I’d hit at least five or six bottles,” he said. “I can’t do nothing right, Sippy. I never could do nothing right.”

In a trice, a sadness took him.

“Nobody ever has liked me, except Joe, I guess,” he said.

“Why, I like you, Billy,” I said. “Tully likes you, and Katie must, or why would she have asked you to go to Mexico with her?”

“I don’t know if she meant it,” he said. “She might have just been joshing.”

“Billy, she asked you three times,” I reminded him. “She wasn’t joshing.”

“She don’t know me much, though,” he said. “When she gets to know me I doubt she’ll like me.”

His spirits seemed to sink lower and ever lower, a surprise to me, for he had been jolly all day.

“I’m just alone,” he said. “I’m just alone. I guess that’s how it will be.”

“Billy, what about me?” I asked. “I thought we were friends.”

He looked at me like a boy whose pup had just been run over by the milk wagon—sad enough to die.

“We are, but you’ll go off one of these days,” he said. “It don’t mean I ain’t alone.

“Besides, you’re crazy,” he added.

“I may be, but Joe isn’t,” I said. “A man who has Joe Lovelady for a friend can’t claim to be completely alone.”

“Oh, Joe would help if he could,” Billy said. “But he’s a cowboy. He’s got his place in this world.”

It seemed a curious remark, since when I met them they had been riding the western trail together. But there was no doubt that Billy had sunk into a bog of sadness.

“There’s no place in this world for me,” he said, in a tone that would break your heart.

“Billy, I just can’t understand why you feel that way,” I said.

He didn’t answer. We sat and watched the ridiculous fire we had built throw sparks into the dark heavens.

“Well, Hank Leedy didn’t mind dying much,” Billy said, in a tone of resignation. “Maybe I won’t either.”

“Billy, you’re young—you’re just starting to live,” I said, though the look on his tight little face made the words seem hollow.

He was fiddling with one of his old pistols, clicking the chamber and testing the hammer. To my surprise he suddenly blazed away—six rapid shots—at the campfire itself.