No one paid particular attention to Billy, and they never had.

He was useless on a horse and ridiculous with a gun, and the only place where he seemed formidable was behind a typewriter.
Now he sat looking, down into the dead face of Pete Glass, trying to grasp the meaning of it all.

From the first he had been with Pete, from the first the invincibility of the little dusty man had been the chief article of Billy's creed, and now his dull eyes, bleared with thirty years of clerical labor, wandered around on the galaxy of dead men who looked down at him from the wall.

He leaned over and took the hand of the sheriff as one would lean to help up a fallen man, but the fingers were already growing cold, and then Billy realized for the first time that this was death.

Pete Glass had been; Pete Glass was not.
Next he knew that something had to be done, but what it was he could not tell, for he sat in the sheriff's office and in that room he was accustomed to stop thinking and receive orders.