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that's Billy Bonney," he said, strictly to himself. His eyes were on the second rider, who sat his horse as if he were joined to it, his whole body fluid. "That it is."
    He remembered Billy a bit differently. A brush of yellow mustache had been under the boy's nose when he was a ranch hand with Willis Monroe a few years back, out on the Tuckamore. This boy was clean-shaven and certainly dressed fancier than Billy had ever dressed. He'd known Billy to wear homemade boots, not the spit 'n' shine jobs this bandit sported. But it was Billy all right. Lapham was convinced. He'd seen enough of the face. More than that, it was the way he sat his horse. And what a shot he was, the best in all of Arizona.
    He watched as the riders weaved in and out of the tree trunks, racing almost soundlessly on the deep beds of brown needles, away from the puffing engine and lowering fire. Then they disappeared.
    Shaken thoroughly at having recognized Billy, Lapham eased himself back to his seat, suddenly feeling each of his seventy-two years.
Incredible,
he thought. Billy had always been a little wild, he remembered; he hadn't had any particular respect for law and order, got himself into scraps, and was thought to have put the Double W brand on several more calves than Willis Monroe actually owned. Willis had always had to hold him down. But the boy had never done anything really bad.
Train robbery, my lord,
Lapham thought.
    Thinking about Willis, Lapham pulled a linen handkerchief from his hip pocket and mopped at his wizened face. He barely heard the jumble of voices and angry shouts along the tracks as passengers poured out. He sat shaking his head in dismay, wondering if anyone in car 2 had recognized Willie's cousin. The only passengers from Polkton that he'd noticed were a mother and her young daughter, who were new to town and not likely to know Billy.
    He peered again down the sun-mottled slope, making up his mind not to mention Billy Bonney until they reached Polkton. It wasn't the immediate business of forty ranting passengers. Sometimes he thought his long years in the practice had taught him more about people than about law. People who got robbed were generally unreasonable. His own wallet had held fourteen dollars, but he was no longer concerned about it.
    Feeling the need for a drink, he stuck a thin, splotched hand into his coat to extract a slim silver flask. He took a quivering mouthful of whiskey, rinsed, then swallowed. In a moment the pounding of his heart began to slow. He sat thinking of Billy Bonney as Mapes, aided by a few passengers, kicked and raked the cordwood embers off the tracks.
    Waiting for the ruckus to subside, his mind went back in time, reviewing the holdup while frowning fits and starts darted across his face, and wordless murmurs filtered from his lips. Age had not dulled his mind, only slowed it.
    He'd first met Willis Monroe in his own office, when Willis came in to change the title of the Tuckamore land after his dad died. Later he'd introduced pretty teacher Kate Mills to Willie, worried that young Billy, always the ladies' man, would try to snap her up instead. She'd become Monroe's wife.
Good for her,
he'd thought.
    Then cousin Billy had gone to Mexico, Lapham remembered, two or three years ago. Time ran together. Even Willis said he'd finally lost track of him.
    Lawyer Lapham blew out a disheartened breath. Willis was in a thorny bush, he concluded, and opted for another drink from the flask. As a friend of both the sheriff and Billy, Lapham was most dismayed. As a lawyer and a student of men under stress, he was also intrigued. Willie was duly elected sheriff and would have to catch Billy—or at least try; then he might have to hang his cousin until the boy was pronounced dead. Regretfully, the law had no provision, so far as Lapham knew, for family ties and friendship.
    Downing his second drink, he got up and projected the yellow-white mane out the window. "Anybody know who those bastards were?"