“Yes sir,” Bob Valdez said. “But her husband won’t earn anything anymore. Not this year or any year. So maybe five hundred is not so much.”

Mr. Beaudry said, “Giving that much is different than giving her a few dollars. I don’t mean the difference in the amount. I mean you give her a sum like five hundred dollars it’s like admitting we owe it to her. Like we’re to blame.”

“Well?” Bob Valdez said. “Who else is to blame?”

Mr. Beaudry said, “Now wait a minute. If you’re anxious to fix blame then I’ll have to go along with what this man said.” He nodded toward R. L. Davis. “You killed him. We didn’t. We were there to help flush him out, a suspected murderer. We weren’t there to kill anybody unless we had to. But you took it on yourself to go down and talk to him and it was you that killed him. Am I right or wrong?”

Bob Valdez said, “Everybody was shooting-”

Mr. Beaudry held up his hand. “Wait just a minute. Shooting isn’t killing. Nobody’s shot killed him but yours and there are ninety, a hundred witnesses will testify to it.”

“I said it before,” R. L. Davis said. “He killed the coon. Nobody else. The wrong coon at that.”

A few of them laughed and Bob Valdez looked over at R. L. Davis standing with his funneled hat over his eyes and his thumbs hooked in his belt trying to stand straight but swaying a little. He was good and drunk, his eyes watery looking and the corners of his mouth sticky. But it would be good to hit him anyway, Bob Valdez was thinking. Come in from the side and get his cheek and rip into his nose without hitting those ugly teeth and maybe cut your hand. With gloves on hit the mouth, but not without gloves. He could see R. L. Davis sitting on the floor of De Spain’s saloon with his nose bleeding and blood down the front of him. That would be all right.

And who else? No, he should be able to talk to Mr. Malson and Mr. Beaudry, the manager of a cattle company and a government land agent, but he was having one son of a bitch of a hard time because they didn’t see it, what he meant, or they didn’t want to see it.