I looked, but except for Billy, himself just a speck on the grasslands, I saw no one. My eyes, trained on vistas no more spacious than a fine Philadelphia lawn, had yet to adjust to western distances. We rode on for some three miles before I was able to discern the Fay brothers, two specks even more minute than Billy Bone.

“How can you be sure it’s them?” I asked. “They’re just dots. They could be anybody.”

Joe grinned, amused by my amateur ways.

“I’d recognize that pacing mare of Elmer’s anywhere,” he said. “I once owned that mare myself.”

We swung into a lope. I gathered from his smile that the Fay brothers were friends. I discovered that I was feeling a bit more cheerful at last. It was a fine morning; company might even lift Billy’s mood.

I had scarcely a minute to enjoy my improved morale when there was a crack; the sound of a gunshot rolled across the empty plain. We were no more than a quarter of a mile from the riders then. There was another rolling crack, and I saw the flash of sun on Billy’s gun barrel.

Billy and the two riders were stopped only yards apart. Then one rider slid off his horse; the other fired a wild shot before he turned and raced away.

Billy shot four more times at the fleeing man, to no effect.

“Good Lord, Billy’s shot Elmer,” Joe said, kicking his horse into a run.

The fallen man had managed to cling to his bridle rein. The mare spooked and dragged him thirty or forty feet before Joe could stop her.

That didn’t matter, for the man was dead.

Billy Bone had not dismounted. He had an empty gun in his hand and a look of cold satisfaction on his face.

9.

Joe Lovelady was too shocked to speak, at first. He knelt by the body of Elmer Fay, looking as if he expected to see the man open his eyes and talk, though he knew as well as I did that the man was dead.

“I believe he’s gone, Joe,” I said, dismounting.

“I hope he is, the Texas son of a bitch,” Billy Bone said. He knocked the empty shells out of his pistol and began to reload.

“If this was a better gun I might have kilt the other one, too,” he added.

“It’s Elmer Fay,” Joe said in a shaken voice. “I knew him well. Why did you have to kill Elmer?”

I think Billy had expected nothing but praise—he was startled by Joe’s tone, and perhaps by the looks on our faces.

“Why, he said he was from Texas—I supposed he was one of those killers,” Billy said. “There was two of them. I wanted to be quick and get off the first shot.”