"I thought I told you not to die in here, you ugly sonofabitch!" Wesley Hardin said. His temper was rising. The blacksmith had done nothing but vex and disobey him.

"If you weren't already nearly kilt, I'd take a bed slat to you--it might teach you some manners," he added.

Lordy Bailey realized he had made a serious error, bringing the black man to a town Wesley Hardin frequented. He was well known to dislike black men.

"Ought not to have ..." he said, but then his tongue stopped working, and he felt a great loosening inside himself. He rolled on his back and stared upward until the light became dark.

Patrick O'Brien, the bartender, walked over and looked at Lordy.

"He's dead, and we're without a blacksmith," Patrick said.

"Good, I disliked the bastard," Wesley Hardin said. "He thought I ought to pay for his nigger, the damned idiot!

"Drag him out, boy," he said, addressing the order to Joey. "He'll soon stink up the place if we leave him long." Joey met the scabby man's look, but didn't speak.

"Goddammit, is everybody stubborn in this town?" Wesley Hardin asked, his face splotchy with anger.

Patrick O'Brien felt a little worried.

Many of his customers had killed a man or two, but not since he'd opened the bar had he had two men in it who were as dangerous as Wesley Hardin and Joey Garza. Between them, they had killed a fair number of men. It was early in the day, but already a man lay dead on the barroom floor.

It occurred to the saloonkeeper that Wesley Hardin, a selfish fellow who didn't take much interest in other people, might not realize how dangerous Joey Garza was.

"This is Joey Garza," he said. "He's the one they sent Call after." Joey looked Hardin straight in the eye.

He wanted to study the man, and would rather not have to kill him. But that was up to Hardin. He would kill him, if it became necessary, with his bowie knife. He had watched Hardin shoot the blacksmith. Hardin had managed it, but he was quite slow, Joey thought. An Apache would have killed the man with a knife, in half the time or less, and Joey modeled himself on the Apache when it came to killing. Joey knew he could slip behind Hardin and cut his throat with one move and one stroke.

But he didn't want to kill the man, and he also knew it would not be wise to underrate him, just because he was a scabby old gringo. Wesley Hardin had killed many, many men; the fact that he had been a little slow with the blacksmith didn't mean he would be slow if his own life was really at stake. The blacksmith had posed no threat. But Hardin was a killer, like himself. He should not be underestimated.

Wesley Hardin got up, picked up the blacksmith's legs, and slowly dragged him outside. The crows set up a cawing the minute the door opened. The blacksmith was a heavy man. Hardin had to stick his revolver back in his belt and use both hands, in order to drag him out.

"O'Brien, get your donkey and drag that heavy bastard off," he said, when he came back. He was winded from his effort, and his face had gone pale.

"Wes, you need to hold your temper," Patrick O'Brien said. "That was the only blacksmith within a hundred miles." Wesley Hardin didn't take kindly to censure. He frowned at the Irishman.

"I might shoot every man, woman, and child in this stinkin', nigger-bird town, and then you wouldn't need a goddamn blacksmith. How's that?" he asked.

Wesley Hardin turned to Joey with an angry look.

"You could help me wipe this nigger-bird shithole off the face of the earth, if you're such a killer," he said to Joey. "You kill the men, and I'll take care of the women and the brats." "Wes, there's only two children in town, and they're mine," Patrick O'Brien said. He had meanwhile taken the precaution of arming himself with a shotgun. When Wes Hardin was in one of his irritable moods, it was wisest to be armed.

"I wasn't speaking to you, you damn pig!" Wesley Hardin said, giving the man a violent stare. "I was speaking to the notorious young killer, here." For all Hardin's jumpy manner, his eyes, when he looked at Joey, were clear. He might twitch, but he wasn't really agitated, not in the part of himself that sized up men and situations.

The boy, the g@uero, gave back an empty gaze. Joey let his eyes meet Hardin's, but in Joey's eyes there was nothing.

Only distance, a distance deep as the sky.

"Why would they send Woodrow Call after a pup like you?" Hardin asked. But he let no insult into his voice.

"Because I steal money from Americans," Joey said.

"You're right--it's the money, not the killing," Wesley Hardin said. "They don't care who gets killed, out here in the baldies. It don't cost the damn pigs a cent for us to kill one another out here. Why would they care? Out here west of the Pecos, it's fine to kill, but you better not steal from no trains coming from the east, where the damn Yankees keep their money.

"How much did you get?" he inquired, in a calmer tone. "I heard it was a million, and I heard it was the army's money." Joey looked at the man coolly, with his distant eyes. Did the old killer really expect him to tell how much money he had stolen?

In fact, he had buried the payrolls only a few miles from where he stole them. He didn't know how much he had taken, he just knew that the money was too bulky to carry very far. He was not such a fool as to bury it all in one place, either. He hid it in snake dens; the Apaches had taught him how to find them. They often ate snakes, when they could get nothing better.

He didn't have the time to carry so much money to his cave, nor did he want to. The money was not very interesting to him. His cave was for beautiful things. Everything he stole, he wrapped well.

He had taken two hundred gunnysacks from a hardware store in Piedras Negras, to the puzzlement of the man who owned the store. The man could not understand why anyone would take gunnysacks, when there were guns and axes to steal.

Joey took the sacks because he needed them to wrap his treasures. That was also why he had taken the fancy sheets from the rich man who had the fur coat. He didn't want to sleep on the sheets; he wanted them for wrapping, so that his many silver objects would not grow dingy in the cave.

At another hardware store in San Angelo, he found some excellent wooden barrels, and he hired an old man named Jose Ramos to help him take the barrels on donkeys into the mountains. He left them in one cave, an empty one, to fool old Ramos, and later came back and carried them, one by one, to his own cave, which was three days away.