Bloody Feathers jiggled Viv a time or two, producing some prodigious shrieks and causing him to drop the fancy pistol, at which point Bloody Feathers dropped him. Viv rolled around in the dirt, as if he had been set on fire, as Bloody Feathers leaned far off his horse and picked up the gun.

“What a pretty little gun,” he said. He looked at Billy when he said it, and grinned in rather a challenging way before sticking the pistol in his pants.

Billy looked quite subdued—at times he seemed to shrink an inch or two in size—and ignored the challenge, if that is what it had been.

The plump beauty who was the cause of it all kept her eyes modestly lowered as Bloody Feathers trotted past us and took his place beside the cattle. The man who had so recently aspired to her favors was still moaning in the dust.

“I wisht I hadn’t seen that,” Billy said, when the Indians were out of earshot. “It’s the kind of thing that makes me have them shaking dreams,” he said. “I’d almost rather see the Death Dog than a thing like that.”

For the moment, he seemed anything but a dangerous boy.

13.

Vivian Maldonado spent the rest of the day holding a sockful of hot corn mush against his sore ear and grumbling and complaining.

“If you are a big killer, why didn’t you shoot?” he asked Billy several times.

“I don’t have to shoot a man just because he’s holding you up by the ear,” Billy replied.

But his tone was subdued—I believe he felt he had come off badly in his brief meeting with Bloody Feathers.

Now and then Vivian pitched the sock over to the old Mexican woman who worked in the general store, so she could reheat the mush. While it was being warmed he spent his time looking in the mirror. He looked just as he had before the incident except that his ear was as red as a beet.

“Grow your hair,” I suggested. “Then nobody will notice that you have a red ear.”

“Now I’m deformed,” Vivian said gloomily, though he wasn’t. “If I go back to the circus they’ll put me in with the freaks.”

“You shouldn’t have stood so close to the horse,” Billy remarked—he was already ready to criticize technique.

“Besides that, you made them speeches,” he added seriously. “If you need to shoot, shoot—don’t make speeches.”

“Now I’ll never see my Rosanna again,” Vivian said, remembering that he was heartbroken as well as deformed.

“I’ve never met an Indian named Rosanna,” Billy said unsentimentally.

“That’s what I called her,” Vivian said, with a sad shrug.

That afternoon he rode off toward Puerta de Luna, still holding the sock of mush against his ear.