Puerta de Luna was much like other little Pecos settlements we visited during lulls in the Whiskey Glass war. There were eight or ten adobe huts, all but two of them inhabited by half-starved Mexicanos. One of the huts was a combination cantina and bordello, and another was a tiny store which dealt mostly in bullets.

The town could hardly have housed a flock of chickens comfortably, yet it was there that we found what was left of the gunmen last seen in the Arroyo del Macho. Moss Juykendall and Ike Pumpelly, both fallen to the Texans’ bullets, had been replaced by two colorful specimens who had just drifted south from the Dakotas.

One of the newcomers, a boy no older than Billy, was named Henry Knogle—the gunfighters cheerfully referred to him as the Tadpole.

The other arriviste was definitely no tadpole; he was a giant of a fellow with a red beard whose name was Barbecue Campbell.

Des Montaignes and La Tulipe were not in evidence; they had refused to leave Greasy Corners, and no one could say absolutely whether they were alive or dead.

“Oh, I reckon the Tulip’s alive,” Billy said optimistically. “She told me that the day she died there’d be an earthquake, and the earth ain’t quaked that I’ve noticed.”

“It’s apt to quake later in the day,” Happy Jack Marco observed somberly. “It may just open up and swallow a certain person.”

It seemed we had arrived at a moment of tension—the friendship of Happy Jack and Pleasant Burnell had evidently suffered a rupture. The two men sat across a table from one another, each with a gun in one hand and a fork in the other. They were attempting to eat lunch without once taking their eyes off one another, the result being that their vests were liberally splattered with frijoles that had failed to complete the journey to their mouths.

The sight was so comical that I wanted to laugh, but something told me that would be a wrong, perhaps even a fatal, response.

I didn’t laugh, and Billy didn’t either.

At the table beside them, Hill Coe, once the glory of Dodge City, was lying face down, dead drunk. Across from him, wearing a dark frock coat and sporting a mustache as thin as the lead in a pencil, was none other than Doc Holliday, the famous shooting dentist.

“Here’s Billy,” Viv Maldonado said when we walked in. His ear, though still showing a splotch or two, was no longer a fiery red.

“Why, is this the young terror? I’ve been anxious to meet him,” Doc Holliday said, in a drawl that owed something to Alabama.

Billy nodded coolly to the older man; the remark had been slightly derisive and Billy knew it, but he pretended to be more concerned with the touchy situation that prevailed between Happy Jack and Pleasant Burnell.