The next two days were pretty much like the first one. Ashcraft and I were together twenty-four hours each of the days, and usually the girl was with us, and the only time we weren’t drinking was when we were sleeping off what we had been drinking. We spent most of those three days in either the adobe house or the Golden Horseshoe, but we found time to take in most of the other joints in town now and then. I had only a hazy idea of some of the things that went on around me, though I don’t think I missed anything entirely. On the second day someone added a first name to the alias I had given the girl—and thereafter I was “Painless” Parker to Tijuana, and still am to some of them. I don’t know who christened me, or why.
Ashcraft and I were as thick as thieves, on the surface, but neither of us ever lost his distrust of the other, no matter how drunk we got—and we got plenty drunk. He went up against his mud-pipe regularly. I don’t think the girl used the stuff, but she had a pretty capacity for hard liquor. I would go to sleep not knowing whether I was going to wake up or not; but I had nothing on me to give me away, so I figured that I was safe unless I talked myself into a jam. I didn’t worry much—bedtime usually caught me in a state that made worry impossible.
Three days of this, and then, sobering up, I was riding back to San Francisco, making a list of what I knew and guessed about Norman Ashcraft, alias Ed Bohannon.
The list went something like this:
(1) He suspected, if he didn’t know, that I had come down to see him on his wife’s account: he had been too smooth and had entertained me too well for me to doubt that; (2) he apparently had decided to return to his