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It was a right lively little town in its day and a powerful easy place to get killed in. None of the graves are marked and mighty few people now know where any of them are."

Old Man Foor looks at the gate to get his bearings, walks a little distance, as by a compass, and halts. With a knotted forefinger he points down to a strip of flat, yellow, sun-cracked earth that is strangely bare.

"This is the spot," says the old man. "Under this strip of baked clay lies Billy the Kid."

The bare space is perhaps the length of a man's body. Salt grass grows in a mat all around it, but queerly enough stops short at the edges and not a blade sprouts upon it. A Spanish gourd vine with ghostly gray pointed leaves stretches its trailing length toward the blighted spot but, within a few inches of its margin, veers sharply off to one side as if with conscious purpose to avoid contagion. Perfectly bare the space is except for a shoot of prickly pear that crawls across it like a green snake; a gnarled, bristly, heat-cursed desert cactus crawling like a snake across the heart of Billy the Kid.

"It's always bare like this," says Old Man Foor, standing back from the spot as if half-afraid of some inexplicable contamination. "I don't know why. Grass or nothin' else won't grow on it—that's all. You might almost think there's poison in the ground."

Narrow cracks made by the blistering sun have outlined on the hard yellow surface the crude suggestion of a picture.

"If you stand at a certain angle," says Foor, "them cracks look a little like a skeleton hand. Stand over here. See? Can you make it out? Them four lines there look like a dead man's long, crooked fingers reachin' out for