Scarcely a month after our conversation Tully himself was ambushed by Brushy Bob Wade, leaving the little blind daughter, for whom he grieved so deeply, to be raised by a sister in Oklahoma.

11.

It’s true that when I watched Joe leave for Texas with Elmer Fay’s body, I was passing through the feeblest phase of my career as a dime novelist. The half-finished Black Beans was a clear failure. My old hero Sandycraw, who had foolishly joined up with the brash Texans, seemed to have lost all force of personality; he had allowed himself to be trapped by some scoundrelly Kiowas and was awaiting a terrible fate with unaccustomed passivity.

Indeed, I had no more to show for two weeks of scribbling than a hodgepodge of travel notes, none of them likely to arouse cheers from the benumbed editors at the house of Beadle and Adam.

Was Tully right? Did I ride north with the boy killer in order to become the Buntline of the Whiskey Glass? Am I such an opportunist as that?

I dispute it. I went north because I couldn’t stand to leave Billy Bone, as he sat there looking so low—just a little Western waif, with such a lonely look stuck on his ugly young face that you’d want to do anything for him.

I stuck with him out of sympathy—not admiration. None of us admired his killing; but none of us could stand to desert him either.

Joe Lovelady veered off in shock at the killing of Elmer Fay, but he was back in time to play the decoy, else Billy would never have escaped from that jam in Skunkwater Flats.

Katie Garza turned away in misery in San Isidro, but it was Katie who managed to slip Billy the gun that kept him from being hanged in Lincoln County.

He had the sad boy’s appeal—and yet the minute you succumbed to it he’d make you wish you hadn’t.

Joe Lovelady was scarcely out of sight with Elmer Fay’s corpse before Billy wore through his bleak mood and became cocky as a rooster.

“Joe, he’s just finicky,” he said, and he rode along all day singing ditties in rough Spanish that I suppose Katerina had taught him. He was in perfect spirits.

That night we were so far out on the llano that I could not find a single stick of wood, and we were forced to make a smoky campfire from a pile of cow chips I assembled. All we had to eat was a piece of jerky that had been in my saddlebag since our visit to Tularosa, washed down with a little canteen water from the Rio Grande.

My mood, not high to begin with, had sunk during the course of the day, but Billy’s was soaring.