Of course, Famous Shoes might find his tracks and track him. Joey decided he had better kill Famous Shoes, at some point; the old man was the last tracker in Mexico capable of tracking him to his cave. It would be best to kill him soon, before some gringo hired him to find the cave. Joey knew that the cave was becoming a legend among the gringos. Soon men would begin to hunt for it. But the cave was deep in the mountains, up a canyon where horses couldn't go.

With Famous Shoes dead, the treasure in his cave would be safe for years.

When Captain Call and the men had been gone a few hours, Joey got out his rifle and looked through the telescope at Judge Roy Bean. The old man had gone inside and got himself a bottle of whiskey. He sat with his back to the building, holding his pistol in his lap. The whiskey bottle, he set on a little rock beside his chair. There was a shotgun propped against the wall and a rifle under the buffalo robe. The old man had brought some kind of newspaper out of the saloon and was reading it in the fading sunlight. It was a large newspaper; when the judge held it up to read, all Joey could see was his legs.

Joey leveled the rifle and shot Judge Roy Bean right through the newspaper, low down, a belly shot. Roy Bean leapt up and began to fire his rifle wildly, as much at the sky as at anything in particular. Joey shot him in the shoulder, so he would not be able to shoot the rifle well, and then he shot him in the leg, causing him to crumple. The old man tried to crawl over to the shotgun propped against the wall, but as he reached for it, Joey shot him in the arm. Joey was surprised that the old man struggled so, after being shot in the belly. He was plainly a tough old man, but that would only make matters worse for him. Joey got on his mother's spotted pony and rode up to the saloon. He could see the rifle and the shotgun, but he couldn't see the pistol. Joey thought the pistol was probably under the newspaper the judge had been reading when he shot him in the belly. The wind was blowing the newspaper away. Several pages were stuck on prickly pear piles, between the saloon and the river.

Roy Bean managed to prop up against the wall of the saloon. He had his pistol, but when he pointed it at Joey and tried to shoot, the pistol didn't fire. The old man was breathing heavily --he tried again to shoot the pistol, but again, the pistol didn't fire. The trigger wouldn't pull. Joey had his own pistol out and was ready to shoot, but he didn't want to kill Roy Bean with a gun if he could avoid it. He had other plans.

Roy Bean grew so irritated with his pistol that he started hitting it against the wall. The joke was on him, he knew. He had kept the pistol on cock for so long that it had rusted tight. It seemed to him that it had been on cock for ten years or more--foolish behavior. Now, the young Mexican had him. He was belly-shot, had a broken shoulder, a ruined leg, and a smashed arm.

He couldn't move well enough to get inside his saloon, where he had a good stabbing knife. The young Mexican rode right up to him, and made a loop in a rawhide rope.

"You arrogant pup, do you plan to hang me?

Go away," Roy Bean said. "I'm the one that hangs people around here. I'm the law west of the Pecos, or ain't you heard, you damn cub?" The next moment, he was choking so badly he couldn't talk. Before he even realized the boy was moving, Joey Garza had slipped off his horse, flipped the rawhide noose around his neck, and jerked it so tight it almost crushed his Adam's apple. Roy Bean felt a burning anger at Woodrow Call, who could have stayed put with his men for a day or two, and given Joey Garza time to pass on by. The boy had outsmarted Captain Call, and now look!

But the pain in his throat grew so severe that it cut off his anger along with his breath. Joey got back on his spotted pony, and Roy Bean found himself being pulled up toward the roof of his own saloon. The boy had flipped the rawhide rope over the chimney and was backing his horse away, pulling the judge slowly upward. When his feet left the ground, he twisted slightly, trying to get a hand under the rawhide rope. But the rawhide was unforgiving; he felt scalding bile flood his throat.

Roy Bean struggled and twisted. He felt that if he could just get one breath, he might yet struggle out of the noose and live. But Joey Garza slowly backed his horse, pulling Roy Bean higher, pulling the noose tighter. The rawhide was like steel. Roy Bean twisted again.

He thought he might crawl up on the roof and get free, but he only had one hand. His lungs burned badly; the air seemed like black water.

Call's man had been right about the pistol--he shouldn't have kept it on cock all those years. The Mexican boy backed the horse another step, pulling him so high that his head mashed against a roof beam that protruded from his wall. Black water flooded the world, where the air should have been.

When the old man's kicking and twisting began to slow, Joey got down and carefully gathered up the pages of his newspaper. The wind had scattered them badly, but Joey took his time and got them all. There was a bullet hole through the paper, and the prickly pear had torn it a little, but it was all there. Joey folded it carefully and put it in his saddlebags. There was a picture in it of a lady who wore many jewels. Maybe someday he would stop a train with a lady on it who had jewels he could take to his cave.

Then he went inside the saloon and looked around, hoping old Bean owned something worth stealing.

The old man was still kicking and twisting--once or twice, Joey heard him thump against the wall.

There was not much in the saloon, though. The only thing he found that he considered worth taking was a silver picture frame.

The frame sat on a whiskey box by the old man's bed. The woman whose photograph was in the picture frame seemed to Joey to be the same woman whose photograph was in the newspaper, the one whose jewels he wanted to study. But the light in the little room was dim; he wasn't sure. He took the picture with him.

There was nothing in the saloon except cases of whiskey. A knife hung on a peg inside the door, but it was an old knife. Its blade had been sharpened so many times that it was as thin as the moon, when the moon was only a sliver.

Joey took the knife and used it to cut open Roy Bean's clothes. The old man was dead.

He hung just beside his own doorway. Joey wanted to see where his first bullet had gone in.

It had struck just below the navel. The old man had been tough as a javelina, Joey decided.

Not many men would struggle that hard, after being shot below the navel.

Before leaving to take up the trail of Captain Call, Joey stood up in the saddle and crawled onto the low roof, in order to snub the rawhide rope more securely to the chimney. He wanted to make sure that Judge Roy Bean would be hanging by his own door when the next traveler showed up at the Jersey Lily Saloon, hoping for a drink.