It was in that stinking barroom, to the music of castanets, that the great love story of the West began. For Katie Garza was Billy’s true love, and Billy was hers. Katie had come up as scrappy as he had; kill or be killed was her way, just as it was his.
I won’t say Lady Snow shouldn’t have had a role in the play—you can’t keep a sad boy such as Billy from wanting such a dream of beauty as she was that day he came upon us in the little prairie creek.
But Cecily Snow was more of a fascination: she offered, in the short time they shared, a brief escape from the ways of the rude country where Billy lived his life.
“He liked her because she was white and clean,” Katie Garza said in her bitterness. It was Tully Roebuck who reported the remark.
Heartbreaking words, though Tully didn’t notice—he just passed the remark along as he might any other. Katie Garza lived hard in a dirty place—it must have nearly killed her to think she lost Billy to a woman who had servants to press her dresses and change her fine sheets.
I didn’t figure in the play, really—I call it a play, but as the dead piled up on the plain, it began to seem like one of those great old poems of war, Homer or Roland or Horatio at the bridge.
I just followed along with Billy as he rode the bloody trail—a wandering boy one step ahead of his doom.