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something; and this short line here mightily resembles a bony thumb. Funny, ain't it?"

You look closely, curiously, at the sun-drawn skiagraph. The resemblance is unmistakable. The weird shape startles you. Can it be the thing has some cryptic, fathomless meaning? What are those long, bony fingers reaching for? Who knows? But there it is clearly sketched in the hard yellow clay-a skeleton hand, reaching … reaching .…

"I reckon if you dug down under there, you wouldn't find much of the Kid left," says Old Man Foor. "It's more than forty years since they put him away. You might, maybe, find his skull. They say the skull goes last. The Kid used to have buck teeth that made him look like he was laughin' when he wasn't. And like as not, his buck teeth make his skull look like it's laughin' yet. It kind o' gives you the creeps to think of him down there under the earth still laughin'."

Foor takes a few steps toward the north.

"Bowdre's grave is here," he says, "and O'Folliard's here at the other end of the row. Them three fellers was pals in life and they're pals in death. There wouldn't be no finding the graves they sleep in unless you knew where to look. There's mighty few people left alive who know exactly where Billy the Kid's grave is. There's Mrs. Paulita Jaramillo, who was Paulita Maxwell when she was a girl—she knows; and Francisco Medina, who dug the grave; and Deluvina Maxwell, the old Navajo woman who lives with the family of Don Manuel Abreu; and myself. I reckon that's about all. There was once a path running through the centre of the cemetery from north to south, and the Kid's grave was three feet west of this path and thirty-one steps from the gate. I knew