“How’s that?”

“Jest sleeping a spell.”

“Well say, now, you mean you ain’t come into any cash money since I divested that there chapeau? You mean things has got so bad you have to take the loan of a bed in a house of ill repute that ain’t in use?”

“Things is pretty bad, all right—”

They continued to squat. Still thinking hard, Hoke said, “jobs is difficult to come by hereabouts, Dingus. You’d know that if’n you’d been around. But you ain’t been around lately, have you?”

“Been over east.”

“Well, jobs is mighty scarce. Matter of fact, things is so bad — well, it jest come to me I’d like to throw in with you, if’n you ever take partners now and then?”

“I donno, Hoke. Sort of delicate, deciding to trust a feller bears you a grudge.”

“I could forget the grudge right soon, once we achieved us some cash money, I reckon.”

Dingus exhaled pensively, considering things. Hoke was still thinking for all he was worth. “My hand’s off’n my gun on the bed there, Dingus—”

Dingus raised himself cautiously. “Back off slow, Hoke—”

“I’m abackin’, Dingus—”

He saw the other weapon drop finally to the bed. They stood eyeing each other.

“Shucks,” Hoke said reassuringly, “I reckon you had to take my poke that time, once you was started robbing my hat.”

“Weren’t no way out’n it, jest by the ethics of the thing.”

“Sure. But meantimes, well, what’s the sense to keep up a grudge against a feller’s been my chum, even if I only knowed you here and yon? But say, I got to get this here bed tidied up before I go, or Belle is apt to skin me. You want to give me some assistance?”

“Thisaway? Durned if’n I ever tidied up a bed in my life.”

“Thataway’s pretty near. Wait’ll I come round and direct you. What you got to do, you lean over more, sort of not touching it at the same time, so’s you can leave the pillers all fluffed.”

“Feller never knows when he’s gonter learn something new, I reckon. This correct?”

“That’s right dandy there, Dingus,” Hoke told him. “And now jest sort of stay bent over a spell while I collect me your guns peaceable like, seeing as how I got my own aimed right into your miserable skull. What you jest learned, you polecat, it ain’t how to tidy up a bed, but jest what bed you should of rode clear of to start with. And you can consider yourself lucky we ain’t outside nowheres neither, or you can bet a cash dollar I’d make you pee down your woolens there too, jest to get us all the more evened up—”

But Hoke had been in the wrong bed also, or at least at the wrong time, because Belle Nops fired him the next morning. “But he’s jest that desperado,” Hoke pleaded, “he ought to be in jail anyways.”

“I don’t care if he’s Jesse James’s pet hound,” Belle told him. “What kind of sheriff do you think you are, galavanting around the countryside arresting outlaws when you were supposed to be keeping an eye on my whores!”

“Well, I weren’t even actually galavanting,” Hoke insisted, ‘we was jest—”

“Look, I don’t care if you tell me you found him in that bed of mine you spend so much time in, which as a matter of fact you likely did, since the horny little twerp has come sneaking in there and tried to assault my bloomers at least three times since he stole a key one night. Which is—”

“What?” Hoke said, “you mean he ain’t your—?”

“You’ll never knowjest what you lost, brother,” she said. “You can keep that badge if you want to; I don’t give a belch in a hot wind about that. But any juicy hocks you grab around here now, you’ll pay the going rate among the girls or else go dig yourself up a squaw somewheres.”

“But Belle,” Hoke said.

Yet it was considerably less calamitous than he thought, since there remained that reward money to compensate for the lost sinecure. First, however, a circuit judge had to be gotten hold of, to try Dingus. (The legalities themselves were remarkably informal. The judge arrived on mule-back, wearing a Remington revolver on each hip and with a Blackstone under one arm and a Bible beneath the other, and he confronted Dingus through the bars of his cell. “You Dingus Bobby Magee?” he asked. “I reckon that’s close,” Dingus allowed. “You assassinate all them critters we got warrants swore out to?” the judge asked. “How many assassinations you got?” Dingus said. “Guilty as charged,” the judge declaimed, “and I hereby sentence you to be strung up by die neck and left strung until you are dead, dead, dead.”

“And you kin go plumb to hell, hell, hell,” Dingus said.) But then the judge signed the execution order, and a deposition indicating that the said Magee was indeed in the custody of Sheriff C. L. Hoke Birdbill, Yerkey’s Hole, New Mex., and once the latter had been posted to Santa Fe Hoke received his three thousand dollars. He secured it in a locked strongbox beneath a cot in the smallest unused cell, the cell locked in turn.

And he began to find his conventional sheriffdom more gratifying then also, what with the abrupt fame that had accrued to it. A San Antonio newspaper, from which he would clip the most commendatory of the several accounts of the sentencing, reposed upon his desk throughout the weeks he awaited the hangman.

“You’re gonter get it memorized,” the condemned man remarked of Hoke’s attention to the paper, though with his new affluence Hoke had taken to browsing through a St. Louis mail-order catalog with almost equal frequency. Amused, or anyway unperturbed, Dingus lay with his boots off and a sombrero shading his eyes, on the cot within his cell. This was a Thursday night, with the execution finally but two days off.

“They do word it right pretty,” Hoke acknowledged.

“But all the reference to that there deadly gun battle,” Dingus speculated from beneath the hat; “you reckon that got wrote up too, I mean previous to this recenter story about the hanging?”

“I reckon,” Hoke said, not pursuing it.

“I sure wish we could get holt of that story.”

“Excepting it wouldn’t do you much good anyways,” Hoke said, “seeing as how you wouldn’t be in a condition to read it except betwixt now and Saturday, unfortunately, being deceased thereafter.”

“I reckon that’s true enough. But I’d still like to hear tell of that deadly gun battle.”

“Well, you ain’t gonter, alas.”

Hoke sat contentedly, less interested for the moment in the subject at hand than in his boots, which he believed he might replace with something in a soft, tooled calf. Meanwhile Dingus remained silent for a time. Then he interrupted Hoke’s reverie to ask, “What you gonter do with all that reward money anyways, Hoke?”

Hoke had his old boots on the desk. “Ain’t rightly thought,” he said.

“Leastways you don’t have to bear me that grudge no more, seeing as how you got your eight hundred dollars back. Way it turns out, you’re about twenty-two hundred dollars to the good.”

“I don’t hold you no more grudge, Dingus. None a-tall. I reckon now it’s your turn to hold one on me.”

“You was jest doing your job, was all. Sheriffs a sheriff, even in bed. Sort of a unglorious way to get took though, in a feller’s underdrawers.”

“I ain’t told nobody that aspect of it, Dingus.”

“I appreciate that, Hoke.”

Again Hoke was happy to see the subject drop. What he had failed to mention was that there must indeed have been a story about the capture, since several of the newspapers had long since written in request of his participant’s version of the episode. Hoke had replied with laudable modesty in each case, if with a certain cloudiness of detail.

Meanwhile Dingus had arisen, stretching. He stood rubbing his neck with his left hand.

That reminded Hoke of something. “Say now, how come you ain’t got no scar on your wrist there, from where you was all bandaged that time you robbed me?”