La Grande Sauterelle pointed out that the inscription had been painted on and that, in all likelihood, it couldn’t be a hundred years old, but he would admit nothing.

“It could have been any Théodore or Théophile in 1875,” he said.

“Why not Théophile Gautier?” she asked ironically. “I wonder if he was still alive in 1875. Just a minute . . .”

She looked up the poet among the proper names in the Petit Robert.

“He died in 1872,” she said. “I was off by three years.”

She took the wheel and, after starting the Volks, drove out of the parking lot and back onto route 220. Jack peered at the maps to see how far they were from Fort Hall: it was on the western slope of the Rockies and they still had a fair way to go.

The girl drove very well on hills. She didn’t have to look at the speedometer to know when to change gears; she simply listened to the sound of the motor and she never made a mistake.

“Why not Theodore Roosevelt?” she asked.

“Huh?”

“Look in the Petit Robert . . .”

He muttered that the joke had gone on long enough, but nonetheless he looked in the dictionary: Teddy Roosevelt had lived from 1858 to 1919.

“You see?” said the girl. “And he made a number of trips out west. He had a ranch in Dakota or someplace like that. Before he was president of the United States he was a cowboy.”

The girl’s expression was impenetrable and, as usual, the man couldn’t tell if she was being serious. They began to talk about cowboys. Jack told her that when he and Théo were little, a real cowboy was a man who pushed open the doors of a saloon and, by this simple act, caused a deathly silence to fall inside: the piano player would stop playing, the girls would climb upstairs, the poker players would become as motionless as statues, and the barman would dive behind the counter; but one man stood leaning against the counter, very tall and thin and dressed in black, drinking a beer as if nothing had happened, with his back to the man who had just walked in.

In the saloon, gripped by fear, everyone knew the story: some years earlier, the tall thin man in black had killed a man, and that man was the brother of the cowboy who had just entered the saloon.

In all those years, the cowboy had had but a single thought: to find his brother’s murderer.

He had followed the trail from town to town, and now the hour of revenge had struck.

The two men would go out together into the dusty street flooded by sunlight; they would take fifty paces, then turn and stand motionless for a moment, facing each other, hands at their sides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .