"Is the drunk with the black hair and whiskers around town?" he asked.
"They ate dinner here yesterday."
"They—oh, he and his friend?"
"Yep, him and his friend."
Billy got up and went to the door of the kitchen. "Excuse me, ma'am, do you remember a tall, black-haired feller and a friend with him who ate in here yesterday noon?"
Oh, yes, the good-looking girl remembered perfectly both men. Billy thought that it would be as well to have a description of the friend. Would she describe him. She would and did. The description was that of Slike, Slike with a short beard. The man's eyes, she said, seemed to bore right through her. They gave her the creeps.
Billy believed he had heard enough for the time being.
After dinner Billy went up and down Main Street, scraping acquaintance with storekeepers, saloon keepers, the hotel proprietor and the town marshall. By five o'clock he had established the fact that two ranches of the neighborhood, the TU and the Horseshoe were at loggerheads, and that the Horseshoe was hiring gunfighters; that the black-haired man called Jack and his friend, whose name no one knew, had been engaged in conversation with the Horseshoe foreman; that the following day they had told a bartender that they had offers of good jobs at one hundred a month apiece; and that finally, a wolfer had met them on the range riding in the direction of the Horseshoe ranch.
That night Billy and Dawson disappeared from Dorothy.