“Dingus whoozy what?”

“Well now, you fellers jest must be behind the times up here, I reckon,” he informed them blandly. “Why, ifn there’s a more disreputable, underhanded, back-shoorin’, poorhouse-robbin’ skunk in the whole New Mex territory, it’d be news to most folks. Yep. What I hear, this Dingus Billy Magee, he cuts the gizzard out’n law officers on sight sometimes jest from plain cantankerousness. That’s Dingus, d-i-n-g-u-s—”

So it took scarcely any time at all after that, and when he started back to Santa Fe again, perhaps three months later, there was already well over two thousand dollars in rewards on his head, and his name was being spelled reasonably also. “Which even Juicy Drucy is gonter have to admit ain’t bad a-tall, for a shaver not even yet nineteen,” he speculated satisfactorily. He had taken to offering physical descriptions of himself on recent occasions also, inventing the red-and-yellow fringed Mexican vest by way of embellishment, and that too had been mentioned in several accounts of his exploits. Shortly before he reached home it occurred to him that he might actually purchase one.

So Drucilla had never heard of it, of the famous garment or of any of the rest, apparently. “Because I never read the newspapers any longer,” she said contemptuously. “Why, no respectable girl would have any interest in violence and bloodshed, which is all they ever print these days, of course.”

Dingus gaped at her. “But all them cuttings you—”

“When one ceases to be a child, one puts aside childish things. I should like to marry a pillar of the community now, a banker perhaps. Yes, indeed, nothing but a banker will do.”

“A what? Well, I’ll be mule-sniffing son of a—”

“Cousin William, please. Your language!”

So he endured that for a week or two and then he asked her how much it would cost to buy a bank, or open one. “Oh, I imagine it might be managed for sixty or eighty thousand dollars,” she informed him, “since I would only be interested in a respectable sort of bank, naturally.”

“Sixty or eighty thousands Dingus screamed. “Lissen, I got four hundred, in a sock I buried one time, and that’s the—”

And then suddenly it came to him. She was in the kitchen, sweeping, and he literally dragged her into the yard. “All right,” he said. “Yes. But wait now. Jest wait, a month or so maybe, because it ain’t gonter be that easy. But there’s got to be the sixty, maybe even more. Because it’s been ten years, at least, that she’s been salting it away, and—”

“Who?” Drucilla said. “What are you—?”

It was Belle Nops. Dingus did not know her except casually, since he had stopped at the bordello only rarely in his wanderings as a trailhand. But he had heard the speculation among her more regular clients often enough, and now his mind began to glow with the possibilities. “Because at a dollar a hump for all them years it’s got to be a unadulterated fortune,” he said. “And on top of that there’s the profits from the drinking and the gambling likewise. And it’s all jest sitting there, in that safe which fellers says is in her office, and which—”

“But I still don’t know what you’re—”

“You jest start cogitating on exactly where you want that bank to be,” Dingus said, “and I’ll be back here in less’n a month.” He did not explain further, already leading his horse from the barn. “Oh, yes, indeedy,” he told himself, saddling up. “And it’s been getting on time I went and done me some honest stealing, anyways.”

But it wasn’t a month. Nor was it two or even three. He tried flattery first, but this did not even get him into the bedroom, the office. “Because you lissen here now, Sonny,” Belle Nops told him, “I nominate my own jockeys, and I ain’t so saddle-wore that they’re about to be snotty twerps wet behind the ears yet, neither. Anyways you’d rattle around like a small dipper in a big bucket.”

“But I knowed me a right smart of older ladies,” Dingus protested, “and they’d speak admiringly of me, too. Why, you jest write a brief letter of inquiry to Miss Felicia Grimshaw, over to Galveston, say, or Miss Youngblood in the same—”

“I just this morning hired on a unplucked little thirteen-year-old from Nogales,” Belle told him, “down the hall in the end room. Three dollars cash money, you can do the first-night honors.”

So then he stole a key and tried rape. What he had in mind, of course, was an eventual intimacy that would lead to his presence on an occasion when the safe was opened. But he had never been exceptionally strong, nor did he weigh as much as a hundred and forty pounds, and she outwresded him easily each time. He had been jumping her from behind the door. When he changed his tactics and did not materialize from within her closet until she stood stripped to her garters, she finally got mad enough to heave him bodily down the rear staircase.

Dingus sprained a wrist. But if he had to give up on it for a time after that, he finally did commit one actual crime while nursing the injury in a sling. He was not sure how much educational value the experience offered, the victim being an acquaintance. Too, he had intended appropriating the man’s derby hat only; the slightly moist eight hundred dollars from within it was sheer happenstance.

When a new strategy at last did occur to him, it was based on the theory that recumbency would be half the battle. So this time he waited outside the bordello entirely until he believed she would be asleep. Then he made use of his key, undressed soundlessly, and slipped into her elusive embrace.

Some weeks after that, when he was two days away from being hanged, he complained moderately to Hoke Bird-sill. “Least you might have done,” he said, ^t6y^ou could of wore that there new sheriff’s star on your woolens, I reckon, so a feller’d know jest who it were he was about ready to violate.”

But even after he had talked Hoke into letting him escape, simultaneously appropriating the latter’s reward money as an afterthought, the sense of his unfulfilled mission continued to plague him. It had become a matter of more than Drucilla and their bank; there was a man’s pride. Yet in his next two attempts he did not even reach the bordello itself, what with Hoke lying in wait for him behind it.

Dingus supposed he could not blame Hoke for a certain annoyance, though as a matter of truth the man’s intrepidity puzzled him. “Maybe I oughter of added it where Johnny Ringo and the Dalton brothers involved with Mister Earp in the valiant story of how I got my wrist wounded that time,” he speculated. When Hoke put a bullet through the loaned-out vest for the second consecutive time, Dingus concluded the project could wait again after all. He decided he might as well add Hoke’s three thousand eight hundred dollars to the four hundred in his sock at Santa Fe.

But he was still some distance away, curled foetally into his blankets on a chilly night west of the Pecos, when he had a new educational experience altogether. He had no opportunity to flee as the two men appeared, since they materialized so unexpectedly in the flickering glow of his campfire, and so soundlessly, that for an instant he almost believed it a dream. In fact the first thing he saw was the naked bore of the sawed-off shotgun itself, as it was thrust beneath his chin. “One move and you’re deceased,” he was told.

But then he was less afraid of being murdered intentionally than of having it occur by accident, since the man covering him was so nervous that the shotgun commenced to tremble unconscionably in his hands, pointing into Dingus’ left eye one instant, his navel the next. Nor was the second thief any more composed. Snatching up Dingus’ weapons, he dropped each of them at least once before managing to scatter them beyond reach in the mesquite.

Then, abruptly, constellations exploded inside Dingus’ skull. So the conversation which followed seemed dreamlike also: