When breakfast was over, Booth and Jesse remained in the saloon while Trip and Josie went back upstairs. In no hurry to go anywhere, the two brothers took time to have a couple of shots of whiskey. “To settle that tough bacon down,” was Booth’s explanation for it. They were still sitting there when Trip came back down and sat down to have a drink with them. “Well, did you get your wild hairs smoothed down?” Booth asked, and winked at Jesse.

“I reckon,” Trip replied smugly, “for the time bein’, I reckon.” He sat there for a few minutes after his drink, then got up out of his chair. “I’m feelin’ a little cooped up in this place, like I’m in jail. I’m gonna take a little walk outside and get some air. I’ll go over to the corral and make sure that feller is takin’ care of the horses.”

“It ain’t bad for a jail, though, is it? You’d better watch yourself walkin’ around out there,” Jesse warned, with a wink for Booth. “That Hawk feller might be hidin’ out in those cottonwoods, waitin’ for a chance to catch one of us outside.”

“I ain’t worried about him,” Trip declared. “Matter of fact, I hope to hell he is hangin’ around out there someplace. I’d like to invite him to come on out and we’ll settle this thing for good. Then we can get on down to Helena, where there’s more goin’ on.”

When he walked out, Jesse looked at Booth and said, “Maybe that problem we talked about might get took care of.”

A few minutes later, Josie came downstairs, on her way to the kitchen to help Dinah Belle. “You and Trip weren’t upstairs very long,” Booth said to her as she passed by the table.

She shrugged indifferently. “He was havin’ some problems, said it was because he was in a killin’ mood and that messed up his thinkin’ about anything else. Said he was gonna go huntin’ for Hawk. He paid me double, though.”

“That was probably to keep her from tellin’ anybody,” Jesse said after she left. He and Booth both had a good chuckle over it.