Through the window I saw a city police cruiser pull to the curb.

“Your cab is here,” Temple said.

Wyatt glanced over his shoulder, then scratched his cheek. “I will not pretend I can contend with the smarts and humor of Miss Temple. Instead, I salute both y’all as fellow Texans and patriots defending the U.S. of A. against the ragheads that is attacking our great country,” he said. “I’ll be out to your ranch directly with a haunch of sirloin to slap on the barbecue. Y’all live up that gulch right outside Lolo?”

He grinned idiotically, his teeth shiny with his saliva.

Later, after he and his friends had eaten and gone, Temple and I sat in the quietness of the now almost deserted restaurant, the glass in the window vibrating with wind. I felt both inept and angry at myself for reasons I couldn’t define. I kept reviewing in my mind what I should have done to Wyatt Dixon, like a schoolboy who has been shoved down in the playground and done nothing about it.

“Forget it,” Temple said.

“He spit on us.”

“Don’t get the ego mixed up in this, Billy Bob.”

“I’ll see you at home,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

I paid the check and went out the door without answering.

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY was a Northern California transplant by the name of Fay Harback. She was a petite woman with a small, attractive face and white skin, and hair that was mahogany-colored and thick on the back of her neck. She’d graduated at the top of Stanford Law and, like many of her fellow Californians in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, had moved into the northern Rockies.