“Where’s Roy? With Her Nibs?” They had been in Hambry a little over a month now, and in that time Depape had conceived a passion for a fifteen-year-old whore named Deborah. Her bowlegged clumping walk and her way of squinting off into the distance led Jonas to suspect she was just another cowgirl from a long line of them, but she had high-hat ways. It was Clay who had started calling the girl Her Nibs, or Her Majesty, or sometimes (when drunk) “Roy’s Coronation Cunt.”

Reynolds now nodded. “It’s like he’s drunk on her.”

“He’ll be all right. He ain’t throwing us over for some little snuggle-bunny with pimples on her tits. Why, she’s so ignorant she can’t spell cat. Not so much as cat, no. I asked her.”

Jonas made a second cigarette, drew a sulfur match from the sack, and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He lit Reynolds’s first, then his own.

A small yellow cur came in under the batwing doors. The men watched it in silence, smoking. It crossed the room, first sniffed at the curdled vomit in the corner, then began to eat it. Its stub of a tail wagged back and forth as it dined.

Reynolds nodded toward the admonition not to argue about the cards you were dealt. “That mutt’d understand that, I’d say.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Jonas demurred. “Just a dog is all he is, a spew-eating dog. I heard a horse twenty minutes ago. First on the come, then on the go. Would it have been one of our hired watchmen?”

“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”

“Don’t pay to, no, don’t pay a bit. Was it?”

“Yep. Fellow who works for one of the small freeholders out along the east end of the Drop. He seen ’em come in. Three. Young. Babies.” Reynolds pronounced this last as they did in the North’rd Baronies: babbies. “Nothing to worry of.”

“Now, now, we don’t know that,” Jonas said, his quavering voice making him sound like a temporizing old man. “Young eyes see far, they say.”

“Young eyes see what they’re pointed at,” Reynolds replied. The dog trotted past him, licking its chops. Reynolds helped it on its way with a kick the cur was not quite quick enough to avoid. It scuttled back out under the batwings, uttering little yike-yike sounds that made Barkie snort thickly from his place of rest beneath the piano bench. His hand opened and the playing card dropped out of it.