Meanwhile Miss Eugenia Moore was having dinner with City Marshal Ben Canty back in Silver City. He wadded a slice of bread and wiped up the gravy on his plate. He used a small comb on his mustache as he chewed, and she told him the boys were gone to look for work in that unclaimed area of Texas, Kansas, and Colorado referred to as No Man’s Land. She herself was heading north at the end of the week for Denver.

He stared at her. Finally he said, “I’m sorry to hear you and Bob are splitting up like that.”

He walked her home and sat on her bed and bent over the drawings spread out on the quilt. “You’ve got quite a hand,” he said.

She brought him coffee in a tin cup and they drank it facing each other.

“What kind of work would it be they’re looking for?” he asked.

“Ranch work, I suppose.”

“I thought they were free spirits these days. I thought they were doing without regular jobs.”

Eugenia sat next to him and leaned back on a pillow, wrinkling a picture of flowers in a vase. “You’re talking about rustling. I’m fairly certain they’ve given that up. But I can understand why life on the scout is so appealing. You take a job like yours. You are hampered and impeded every day by the very laws and regulations it is your duty to enforce.”

He leaned back on his hand, destroying a drawing of tree-tops and a church steeple. “There’s something you want me to delay, is that it? What do I get for the trouble?”

She said, “This is my last evening in Silver City. I’d like it to be really special.”

Canty thought about that and swirled the coffee in the bottom of his cup before he lifted it and drank. He glanced at her face, then back at his boots. “Sometimes nothing important gets done. Sometimes the day just seems to drag by.”

By ten o’clock the Dalton gang were leaning their elbows on the mahogany bar and muttering to strangers about how the professionals were misdealing the cards, so that it would seem we had an excuse for what we were about to do. Newcomb was the last to lose his stake, being swindled on what they call a cat hop at the last turn. He kicked the chair getting up and stood apart from the rest of us for his drink. He pulled his coat behind his gun butt. The bartender was rounded over, washing glasses in a tub. A señorita was talking to him. Newcomb shouted, “Who ya have to punch to get a drink around this place?”

The bartender said, “Are you talking to me, runt?”

Newcomb said, “Well, I don’t guess I’m talking to the spittoon.”