The rest of them were watching Wyatt. They were all afraid to speak, all except Holliday, who evidently didn’t have anything he felt like saying at the moment. Holliday wasn’t scared of anybody; he didn’t care about, anything, even his own life, enough to be scared. Holliday was a shrunken little man with a lopsided face, sick-looking eyes, tiny broken blood vessels in his nose that made it look purple. Back East, Warren had read a dime novel about him, and now meeting him he had been shocked. This Doc Holliday was a dour little man with the mannerisms of a rag-picking tramp, a twisted, humorless being whose thick Georgia drawl was pitched on an incongruously thin, high voice.

Right now Holliday sat on the floor with his back to the car side, drinking from a bottle, playing cards with the three ruffians whom Wyatt in his expansiveness had invited to accompany the funeral party as far as the New Mexico line, where Texas Jack and his two unsavory friends would leave the train and go about their dubious business. The three ruffians had helped Wyatt catch the man named Cruz, the one Wyatt had killed last week.

The railroad had given them the entire express car as a favor to Wyatt and Virgil, who-according to the dime novels Warren had read-had caught several bands of train robbers. The other night Holliday, drunker than usual, had confided in Warren: “Don’t believe the lies you read in that yellow trash, sonny. Wyatt and Virg have got plenty of powerful friends in politics and that’s, how they arranged for the private car. None of us ever stopped any train robberies.” Then, laughing sourly: “Quite the reverse.” But Holliday was a habitual liar. It was impossible to know what to believe. The only sure and certain thing in all the confusion was Wyatt’s rock-hard assurance.

They were all Westerners except Warren; it was as if they all knew some secret he hadn’t yet learned.