Every day for the next several days, "Hotchkiss" visited the jail to confer with his client. And with every visit, another piece of the Kid's precious Colt was smuggled to him via the false lawyer's false belly. Some of the pieces were woefully tiny, in Curry's opinion. He waited until everyone else was asleep before reassembling the gun piece by piece under cover of darkness – he didn't need light to do it, in fact, could've done it blindfolded – but he was getting impatient. He was beginning to suspect his partner was deliberately dragging out this whole process. In his opinion, if Heyes hadn't been so stingy with the pieces, he could have had the complete gun by now and they'd both be long gone! Curry scowled, mulling over the possibilities. Could Heyes be developing feelings for Grace…? Or did he actually think he was gonna stand up in a court of law in that lawyer get-up and argue her case…? It was frustrating not to be able to talk to him about it, but they could only risk short, whispered conversations or an occasional terse note scrawled on a scrap of paper and slipped through the bars surreptitiously.

The Kid was reminded of a book Heyes had read aloud to him on the trail not long ago, chapter by chapter as they relaxed near the campfire. It was the latest book by that Mark Twain fellow, the same one that wrote about fingerprints and whom Kid had suspected of using an alias. Mark Twain, right…Curry shook his head and rolled his eyes just thinking about that ridiculous name. This new book was all about two boys named Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer – boys who were in another book, too, that Curry remembered reading a long time ago. The first book had mostly been about Tom Sawyer, but this one was about the other fella, Huck Finn, and how he'd sailed down the Mississippi River on a raft with a run-away slave and all their adventures together. It was a real good book, but there were some nasty fellows in it. When they got to the part about the Duke and the King, Curry had told Heyes he'd sure like to "flatten" those two crafty grifters, who were nothing like his own notion of an honorable conman – decent men like Soapy and Silky. But the part that he was remembering now came toward the end. Jim, the runaway slave, had been captured and was being held in a makeshift jail cell and Tom Sawyer showed up to help Huck bust him out. But Tom made the whole escape so unnecessarily complicated and convoluted that Kid lost his patience entirely. Heyes had thought the episode was funny, but Kid was incensed. He declared he wanted to flatten Tom Sawyer, even if he was just a kid. Heyes thought Kid wanting to flatten Tom Sawyer was even more hilarious. He insisted that his partner did not understand the finer points of satire and asked pointedly how could he flatten a fictional character anyway, boy or man? That's when Curry had suggested even more pointedly that he might flatten Heyes instead and they ended up putting the book away for a time. Right now, Heyes was reminding the Kid a little of that exasperating Tom Sawyer. And instead of relating to Huck Finn, as he'd done before, Curry was feeling a lot like poor old Jim.

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One day, Heyes managed to whisper to Kid that everyone thought Joshua Smith was on his way to deliver the damning photograph of the Kid to the Wyoming authorities. Kid wouldn't learn the details until much later, but "Smith" had told just about everyone in town about his delivery job, bid his new friends farewell, and checked out of the first room he'd rented in the hotel. (Hotchkiss had rented a room that happened to be adjacent, with a convenient connecting door. Locked, of course, or so everyone who worked in the hotel thought.) Then he picked up his horse from Stu at the livery stable and rode out of town. A few hours later, no one at the other livery stable across town recognized the horse that Wendell Hotchkiss, a hard-working man returning from a rare but well-deserved recreational ride, brought in to be boarded. Meanwhile, the damning photograph had been burned to ashes, much like the one Clementine Hale had once used against the former outlaw leaders in the past.

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Another day, with brown eyes dancing impishly, he shared the news with Kid that "somehow" the telegram sent to Wyoming conveyed the misinformation that the captured outlaw Kid Curry was being held in Abilene, Kansas, not Abilene, Texas. (Just in case they decided not to wait for the photograph to show…)

Meanwhile, Heyes seemed to be having a gay old time not only playing lawyer, but acting as a detective, figuring out what had really happened the night Navarro had met his untimely demise. But the Kid wouldn't hear about the extensive investigations and interrogations his partner had been conducting until after everything was all over.