February, 2012

Issue #29

Bud Clayton
by Myles Culbertson

Tough . . . that is always the first term that comes to mind whenever I think of Bud Clayton. Even in his later days the man's stature and demeanor testified of a life lived in a world intolerant of fear or weakness. Bud's countenance revealed a seasoning gained in the transition from territorial frontier to modern industrial society. His inscrutable expression was at once fierce and pleasant, impermeable as a canyon's rock face. His piercing stare could end a fight before it started.

He was my great uncle, whose wife Bess was W.O. Culbertson's sister. Strikingly beautiful, she was Bud's softening complement. I knew the two of them when I was a child. In those days Bud was a police chief and later a judge in Tucumcari, New Mexico, but he had been a cowboy much of his life, working for some of the major cattle ranches around the turn of the century, including the 3 million acre XIT. A notorious bronc rider, it is said he offered a standing bet that he could put silver dollars in both stirrups under his boots, ride any bucking horse till it quit, and the dollars would still be there. Bud rode in some of the biggest rodeos of the day, like Cheyenne and Pendleton, but he was always more at home on the big outfits, not in the rodeo arenas.

In the days entering the 20th century, New Mexico was, like much of the West, riding the wave of a changing agricultural economy. Demand for more and better beef to nourish the nation's explosive industrial growth caused capital to roll into the West, establishing vast ranching empires with large herds of improved quality "one iron" cattle. The area below the northeastern New Mexico caprock was choice cow country, sought after by cattlemen and entrepreneurs. Some of the outfits, like the Bell Ranch, were here to stay, creating their own chapters in the history of the state and the business. Others were temporary, filling immediate demand and moving on to other enterprise or to oblivion. All were big, and all needed crews of expert men to care for their investments and get the cattle to market.

Part of that cow country is where the Pecos and Gallinas rivers join. Born in the same range of mountains, the two waterways are cousins of sorts, finding their own separate ways out of the Sangre de Cristos, pursuing tortuous pathways to the low country. The two find each other below the great escarpment in a hilly plain of abundant grass and scattered prickly pear, chollas, and junipers. Occasional palmillas, slender-spined cousin of the yucca, stand guard over the slopes and river breaks where the rivers join forces.

Before the speculators and land traders opened the way for cattlemen and their financiers, Spanish settlers had made an uneasy life here in the confluence of Apache and Comanche domains. They called the area "La Junta". It was destined to become a world of cowboys, tough and adventurous, making their mark over the next century in this region of mesas, creeks, springs, grass and cattle. For a while it was Bud Clayton's world.

A few miles north and west of the Junta, the thousand foot high Apache Mesa rises, the western anchor of the caprock escarpment reaching across northeastern New Mexico. Near the mouth of a canyon that cuts through the convergence of that high escarpment and the lesser Chupainas Mesa to its south, a little rock ranch house and barn called Chupainas Camp had been built back in the 1870s. Bud Clayton spent the summer of 1912 there alone, breaking horses for the HOW outfit, a Texas-based cattle company running on the surrounding ranchland. The way he described it, there was a large round corral where he would rope an untouched bronc, wrestle a saddle onto him, and step aboard. The corral gate was rigged so that when the latch was pulled it would slowly swing out, opening under its own weight. The horse would throw his fit, and when bucking turned to running, and Bud thought he had him kind of handled, he would pull the gate latch as they ran past, making one more circle inside the pen. The gate would creak open and out the hole they would go, breaking into the wide open. By the time horse and rider made it back home, the pony was on his way to becoming an esteemed tool for a cowboy. Bud broke 20 horses that one summer at Chupainas.

Some time previous, the Red River Cattle Company — owner of the famed Bell Ranch — held the lease on a large parcel of the same country. Bud was a Bell cowboy in those days, and the outfit sent him with a number of other Bell hands there to look after the cattle and fend off any rustlers. The cowboys called it the Philippines, because the ranch was so far west from the Bell headquarters. The Gorras Blancas (White Caps), a violent frontier vigilante group, were raising hell in the area, running off cattle and cutting fences in the name of disputed property claims and hatred for these new stewards of the land. Bud spoke only a couple of times of an incident when a Bell cowboy came upon a whitecap cutting the Bell drift fence, and of an ensuing battle that ended with smoke rising from the barrel of a six-gun and a whitecap dead on the ground. He never admitted who the cowboy was.

For a time during that first decade of the century, Bud Clayton was breaking horses upstream from the Junta for the Conchas Ranch, a sizeable operation that lay under the caprock, eastward from the Gallinas River. It was a broken grama grass and cactus country, spotted with areas of dense juniper and pinon-covered canyons. One of the Conchas neighbors was Chaperito, a small community land grant anchored on the banks of the Gallinas River, its village perched on a rock bluff at the edge of the passing waters, its farmland and pastures sprawling out around the village.

Bud had a helper, a Spanish youth, helping ride the horses he was starting. Bud would typically start a horse and get a few days on him, and then turn the horse over to the boy and start another. In the doing, he took a liking to the kid and had become something of a mentor, making a pretty good horseman and cowboy out of him. The boy called his taciturn companion "Señor Bud", even though there weren't that many years between them. So it was one summer day as Bud and his young sidekick were prowling the river breaks near the Chaperito grant. He and the boy were riding their broncs along a rocky ridge in sight of the village. Bud hadn't been away from the cow camp for a long time and had a bulge of letters, written over the past few weeks, in his chaps pocket. There was a post office in Chaperito, so Bud handed a dollar to the kid and sent him to the village with the letters. "I'll ride this rough country out. You lope down to the post office and mail these for me, and then you can ride out the river bottom. We'll meet back up where the Indio draw comes in."

The boy reined his horse off the little rock bluff and headed toward Chaperito, a couple of miles away. Approaching the little rock and adobe village from the southeast, he could see the emerald strips of farmland touching the river beyond the one-story houses and steepled church that surrounded a broad dirt street. The only commercial establishment fronted on the street, a stone and plaster building that housed the store, post office and saloon, all in one room. As he entered the village, a few of the citizens gave notice to the kid who was riding a pretty good saddle on a better than usual horse and whose clothes and hat betrayed some influence of the gringo cowboys of the big ranch. Though native to the culture, he felt like a stranger in this village, known for decades as being close-knit and hostile toward outsiders. Forty years earlier the citizens were more likely to choose friendship with the dangerous Comanche than with the gringo ranchers in the area or the soldiers of the fort at nearby Hatch's Ranch.

He pulled up his horse in front of the post office and dismounted, tentatively stepping onto the porch and entering the store. Across the room from the entry was a cage-fronted counter that served as the post office. On the boy's left was a counter behind which shelves were stacked with a number of canned foods, bolts of cloth, household items, lamps, and the like. Also there was an open-fronted cabinet with a few bottles of whiskey on display; below that, several bins containing flour, beans, rice, and other foodstuffs. A small square table was near the window on the other side of the room, where three men were quietly slurring some sort of argument. They glared from under their battered hats at this trespasser.

No one was behind the postal teller cage, so the kid asked the room's only occupants who he could see about buying stamps and depositing the bundle of letters. With sudden curiosity one of the men inquired how he was to buy the stamps. The boy pulled the dollar from his pocket and once again solicited their help. The man took interest. A thin smile cutting his face, the man rose from his chair, grabbing the dollar from the boy's hand and sitting back down. The boy gestured after him, protesting the seizure. The man stood back up, gripping the boy's shirt and, with his other fist, knocked him to the floor and started kicking him in the side. As he tried to stand, the man grabbed his belt and shirt, kicked the door open, and pitched the boy out on to the ground at his shying horse's front feet. He could hear laughter inside as he struggled to his feet, untied his horse, and slowly swung his leg over in the saddle. Jaw pounding and ears ringing, he turned the pony for the edge of the village. He stood up in his stirrups with a painful wince and hit a long trot for the river, one silver dollar lighter and full of dread about what Bud was going to say.

The sun was high as the kid prowled the river, hastily looking through the cattle that had come down to water and shaded up to wait out the afternoon. The movement of the horse helped loosen the stunned muscles in his side. He was in a hurry, hating the burden of undelivered bad news. Whatever trouble he was going to be in with Señor Bud, he wanted to get it over-with and done.

He picked his way past a rugged cut where the creek came through to an open grassy flat. Far ahead, he spotted Bud peering upstream from where the little draw known as the Indio Arroyo joined the Gallinas. He was sitting relaxed in the saddle, his crossed forearms resting on the saddlehorn and his hackamore bronc standing half asleep in the warm noon sun. The colt threw his head up and pricked his ears toward the approaching horse and rider, but Bud had already been watching them a good while. As the boy kicked into a lope across the grassy flat, Bud observed how the agile blood-bay moved and changed leads, dodging the cholla and prickly pear along the way. "That's gonna make a good pony," he thought, as the young rider and his mount crouched to a stop next to Bud.

"How's the river look?" Bud asked.

"Pretty good. The cattle are already watered out — en repecho. Señor Bud, I have to tell you something." The boy's nervous angst was obvious. So was the bruise on the side of his face. Bud squinted slightly, more curious than alarmed. "I took your letters, but some men were there. One of them knocked me down — cabrones! He took your dollar."

"Where's the letters?" Bud asked.

"Here." The boy pulled the paper bundle from inside his shirt.

Eyes squinting, now with resolve, "Well", said Bud reflectively, "I'll take care of it."

"I'm sorry, Señor Bud, I should have fought."

"Its OK. I'll take care of it. My pony's spent. Let's trade and you can go on back to the camp with him. Take it easy with him and let him blow. Do the chores when you get there. I'll see you by dark."

The two cowboys pulled their saddles off and exchanged ponies. Mounted again, the kid turned toward the cow camp several miles east. Bud hit a long trot back upstream toward the little village.

The hardness on Bud Clayton's face would have inspired repentance from anyone who laid eyes on him as he entered the village. His little cowhorse hit a slow trotting cadence up the wide dirt street toward the post office. Several yards behind horse and rider, a rocky bluff, some 20 feet high, overlooked the river. The loose dust of the street in front of the post office boiled up around the horse's black pasterns as he shuffled to a stop. Bud threw the bridle reins over the hitching rail and stepped up on the porch.

He entered the doorway and noticed three men huddled around a table with a half-empty whiskey bottle perched between them. They glared drunkenly at this gringo stranger. He paid no attention to them until he was in the middle of the room, in front of the postal counter. The men had gone back to their whiskey-laden debate when Bud turned around with a cold look in his eye, pulling his .45 Colt from its holster. Pointing it above his head, he pulled the trigger. As the bullet passed through the stamped tin ceiling, the explosion rocked the local drunks back in wide-eyed shock, one falling out of his chair, knocking the whiskey bottle to the floor. Fine dirt fell through gaps between the ceiling and wall onto the store's proprietor who had jumped behind his counter.

"I want the son-of-a-bitch that took that dollar!" Bud declared, bringing his six-shooter around toward the table with slow deliberation.

One of the men scrambled for the door, not even touching the porch as he left the building and ran headlong into the dirt street, the tied horse spooking and jumping aside. Bud stepped out the door and watched the man scamper away, looking over his shoulder like he knew he was about to be shot. His eyes were locked on Bud all the way down the street, the fear on his face almost cartoonish. The last thing Bud saw was the man's bulging eyes, pumping elbows, and flying knees as he suddenly dropped out of sight.

Curious at the outcome, Bud stepped on his bronc and cantered over to the Gallinas bank below the rocky bluff where the fleeing drunk disappeared. There he was, on the ground, half in and half out of the shallow river water. He wasn't moving, but he didn't look dead. Bud dismounted and leaned over the prostrate form at his feet. The former bully groaned and tried to sit up. It looked like he might have a broken arm. Bud figured the care side of this event would need to rest with the locals, so he simply fished around in the man's pockets until he found the dollar, or at least a dollar to replace the purloined one. He mounted back up and, before turning away, calmly advised the vanquished one, "Don't take what isn't yours — and don't do that to my friends."

The little horse wheeled on his cue and started back up the trail around the bluff and onto the street. The thief's compadres were standing wide-eyed out front of the store poised for an escape from this gringo horseman from hell. As he rode toward the store, they scurried far around him in the direction of the rocky bluff to find their friend. The little horse balked as he approached the building, not sure what next might charge out that door. Bud stepped off and once again entered the post office. He set his wad of letters and the dollar on the counter in front of the terrified postmaster, and politely waited for change. When the transaction was completed he sauntered out the door into the afternoon sunlight. Drawing up the reins to mount his pony, he looked across the village and down the dusty thoroughfare. Nobody was in sight, other than the two local toughs slinking away toward the river. Bud swung his leg over the bronc and pointed him eastward, leaving the village behind, all business for the day completed.

As he rode away Bud's mind turned to the important things. The incident was put away, unimportant history, as he considered work to be done over the next few days. He still had some horses to get started. If it wasn't plumb dark when he got back to camp, he would run 'em in. He and the boy would get an early start in the morning. The warm late afternoon was turning pleasant as their shadow reached out ahead of them onto the trail. He smiled as he noticed the bay bronc hitting a nice little running walk, a gait not many horses can pick up. "Some day," Bud Clayton mused, "I'll do other things, maybe . . . some other day."

Making Their Stand
by Jeanie horn

Hawk scrubbed his gnarled hand over the bristle of whiskers on his upper lip and chin, and studied the button lying in his bedroll. Moonbeams leaked from behind thin clouds, spreading a warm glow across nubby grass, illuminating the still form. Sleep and the slant of light falling on the kid softened his expression, made him look younger than the fourteen years he claimed.

The wind picked up, and branches of a nearby tree scattered webs of gray shadow. Hawk tossed a couple of dead limbs onto the coal-bed of the campfire he'd built earlier. Shoulders hunched beneath his wool blanket draped around his neck and across his lap, he shivered in the October chill and poured more twice-heated coffee into his tin cup. Sipping the bitter brew he watched the moon ease toward the horizon.

"Time to get up, Toby."

The boy stretched, threw back the cover of his bedroll, raked his fingers through his thick mat of blond hair and crammed his battered felt hat on his head. He'd slept clothed and reached for his boots, gave them a good whack together then tipped them upside down and shook them. Satisfied nothing slept there, he shoved first one foot then the other into his boots, stood up and stomped a few times.

"I'll get water to make breakfast." The kid shrugged into his wool jacket, grabbed up a bucket and headed off towards the thin stream that wiggled through the grass, where water ran clean and clear.

"Good," Hawk grunted. "This stuff from last night is thick enough to eat." He loaded his pipe for a smoke.

The first light of morning, like the color of unpolished silver, crawled silently over the grasslands. Two weeks earlier he'd returned with the boy from helping deliver a thousand longhorn cattle north to Kansas, and wasn't sure where him and Toby would wind up from this campsite. When he was fourteen, same age as the button claimed to be, Hawk came from Boston to this country, liked it well enough to stay.

And the wild territory had ruined him on anything back East. This part of Texas could be a mean, empty land with a loneliness he understood. But free land, too, with enough room for a man to stretch himself without bumping elbows with his neighbors. Where he didn't have to answer to anyone's calling but his own, most of the time. He didn't much give a damn what people thought or said or did as long as they didn't interfere with whatever he was doing. Long as he was left alone, he didn't bother a living soul, mostly fired his gun only when he needed camp meat. He preferred his own company and that of some animals to some people he met, most of the time stayed clear of towns.

Every few weeks he'd head out and find a place to get those supplies he couldn't kill to feed himself. He had two horses, two pack mules, enough gear to make camp for as long as he wanted, when he chose. With the kid to look out for, though, likely he'd have to get used again to seeing lights and hearing noises he didn't make himself. Unlike most cow wranglers, he didn't blow his wages right off, soon as the drive ended, but made the money get him through the winter until the chance to make another drive

He heard the distinct thud of a horse's hooves approaching. From the sound a shod horse, not an Indian pony. He knocked the cooling dottle out of his pipe and stuck the briar in his pocket. The rider finally came into view.

"Hello, the camp!" he called out. "Friend." He rode in slow, unthreatening, tall in the saddle, hands well away from the colt pistols strapped at his waist.

As he came closer, Hawk studied the man, felt a strange chill passing through his blood.

The rider pushed back his black flat-crowned hat with his finger and revealed clean-shaven features. His handsome face belied the ugly, mean look in his eyes. A pack mule came to a stop behind his roan gelding. Movement to the left also caught the stranger's attention.

"Well, Toby, what a surprise. I've been looking a long while for you."

"I ain't going back with you, Pa."

"Don't be so hasty. Let's talk it over."

"Won't do you any good to talk. No matter what you got to say, I'm not changing my mind."

Hawk had grown to care for the boy with sad, gray eyes, who spoke when he had something to say. Otherwise he listened. Hawk puckered up; spat a wad in the fire.

"Don't bother getting down, mister," Hawk said. "The button don't want to go with you, so ride on out."

"Toby is my son. Who do you think you are, trying to keep my boy away from me?"

"He's been doing a man's work for the past six months, don't seem like a boy to me anymore. He's earned the right to make his own life."

"A man!" The rider snorted and pulled his gun then pointed the weapon at Hawk. "Toby's nothing but a snot-nosed kid, thirteen his last birthday."

"Like I said, he does a man's work." Underneath the blanket, Hawk eased his right hand onto his pistol butt, pulled the Colt from its holster, laid the gun across his lap out of sight. "Don't point a gun unless you mean to use it." He spoke in a voice so low and husky it was hardly more than a whisper.

An image of the boy came to his mind, how he'd looked six months earlier when he trailed into Hawk's cow camp looking for work, the old bruises and scars of abusive treatment, eyes sobered with the reality of a hard life. Just a kid, a long way from having his full growth, but Hawk could tell he'd be a big man someday when he filled out. Muscles tensed along his powerful arms and he forced them to relax with a great effort of will. A cold weight lay heavy in his heart, a realization that he'd have to kill Toby's father.

"Get your belongings, Toby. You're going with me."

"No!"

"Don't ever think you're going to get by with smart-mouthing me, boy. I'll teach you some manners when we get back home." His expression filled with a consuming hatred, cruel and deadly.

Watching the kid, Hawk could see fear in his eyes, but also determination not to be bullied anymore.

"You ain't never gonna lay a strap on me again, Pa. Just ride on out like Mr. Hawk said."

Hawk saw the gun waver in the man's hand, then slowly he eased the aim to point at the kid, his finger tensed on the trigger and his thumb began to cock the hammer.

"I told you one day you'd open your mouth and be in big trouble."

"I don't hold with the idea of letting a grown man pick on somebody smaller." Hawk's hand came from under the blanket, aimed at the man, whose Adam's apple bobbed with a hard swallow.

"Mind your own business." The man's finger tightened on the trigger, his look fastened on Toby, then shot a quick glance at Hawk.

Hawk squeezed off one shot. The rider flushed a little white in the face. A look of surprise flickered in his eyes before his gun hand went slack and the weapon hit the ground. The roan snorted and tossed its head at the sound and the recognition of fresh blood. A second later, the man tilted sideways and fell from the roan. Dust rose with the thump of his body.

"I had to do it, Toby. He was about to kill you."

"I know."

"Get the shovel, we'll bury him."

Toby went to the stack of gear, picked up the short-handled shovel and walked back over. "I'll dig the hole."

Hawk started to protest, but realized seeing his father die would not be an easy weight for shoulders so young to carry. Toby was a good young'un, maybe a final decent act towards his father would make the load easier to bear. He watched Toby begin digging a few feet from where his father had fallen. The soil was sandy and digging went pretty fast. When the hole reached a good depth, Hawk got to his feet.

"You go on, break camp, gather his horse and mule with ours. I'll finish up here."

"Yes, sir. I don't think I could eat now anyway."

"Me, neither." Hawk waited until Toby was on the far side of camp, then squatted down and riffled through the man's pockets.

Coming up with a good-sized roll of money, he counted eighty dollars, then folded the bills and stretched to ease them into his pocket. The button probably wouldn't hear of spending the money right away. However, it would eventually come in handy for him to get a better start in life. Hawk then pulled off the Mexican-tooled boots the man wore and tossed them aside. Looked about Toby's size, and he would need good footwear before winter really set in.

For a moment, he studied the bullet hole between the man's eyes, then swept his palm down to close the vacant stare. Seemed like, dead, the man did a lot better job at caring for his son than he did alive. Hawk rolled the body in the hole then rose and adjusted his Stetson and set in with the shovel to fill the grave. As he tamped down the dirt hump, Toby walked back over and waited.

"You got any more family? Someone you need to get ahold of?"

"No, sir. After Ma died, when I was ten, it was just me and Pa. He got real mean once she was gone. I'd heard her crying often enough, I knowed he had that mean streak all along. But she kept him off me. Ma was the only one ever loved me, Mr. Hawk. Then without her, I was just Pa's slave."

"You get everything in order?"

"Yes, sir. Saddled our horses, too."

"Might as well move on. There's jerky in the saddlebags, that'll keep us a few hours. We can stop for an early dinner." Hawk packed the extra pair of boots in the pannier on one of the mules, saw the kid watching him, didn't say anything.

Mounted on his Appaloosa, he watched Toby cast a last look at the hump of fresh dirt. "You want to put up some sort of marker?"

"No need. I don't plan to ever come back this way."

Riding away, from the corner of his eye, Hawk studied the kid for a long while, saw his features take on a different look than the sad expression he'd worn for so long. The boy's face was a mirror of his mind, a young man eager to ride over the hill and see the other side.

Under the Outhouse
by Josh Wittenberg

Rachel wasn't so much a town as a clutter of saggy buildings separated by a rocky dirt road. In its center was a small park; essentially a dollop of thirsty grass with a small gazebo perched atop it. The gazebo had a peaked roof with a cupola, the roof being plated with old splintery shingles that made it look almost shaggy on top.

When Lawton Parrish rode in on his red mare, Marie, a number of what he presumed to be townsfolk were bunched up in front of the gazebo, watching the portly man standing inside of it, in the shade of the shaggy roof. Whatever the man was saying, he conducted his words with excited movements of his short arms, waving them about like his sleeves were on fire. Once he pointed over towards a building on the right side of the main street. Lawton winced his eyes over that way as he dismounted his horse, and saw 'First Bank of Rachel' on the sign below the string of windows on the building's second floor. The man then wildly gesticulated behind his back at the road out of town, almost as if he were pointing Lawton out to the townsfolk. The townsfolk seemed to turn their heads and shift their gaze to Law in unison. None of 'em had what Lawton considered particularly welcoming expressions on their faces.

Lawton wound Marie's reins around a hitch post in front of the town's livery and filled the water trough with some water from the nearby pump and a bucket. Then he patted her and left her to go see what all the hubbub was about.

By the time he got to the gazebo, however, the meeting had broken up and the congregation had filtered out. Lawton had noticed that a lot of the men had had guns in their hands.

"'Scuse me," Lawton said to the portly man who'd been the center of attention.

"Uh, yes young man?" The little guy had a bowler hat on his roundish head. His nose was big and pink with lots of dark, wide pores, and was ribboned below with a thick and curly handlebar mustache. The mustache was waxed and shiny.

Lawton said, "I'm looking for a bean pot and a bed. Any chance I might find a meal and a room in this town? I been on the road for days now, and I need somethin' 'sides squirrel and scummy water."

The roly-poly man grinned and twiddled one of the spiral curls of his waxy mustache. "Why of course!" he exclaimed. "We could use the money, to be frank with you. Even if we don't cotton much to strangers in Rachel. No offense, son, just that we ain't been having much luck with outsiders."

"That what your little town meeting was about?"

"Er . . . yes. Well, not strangers specifically. Just one in particular, at the moment. And I guess he ain't much of a stranger, neither. You ever hear of Gus McCree?"

Lawton rubbed his stubbly jaw and felt around his teeth with his tongue. He'd only been in the hot, dusty town for a few minutes, and already it was starting to leave a bad taste in his mouth.

"No," he finally said, "can't say as I have. I imagine, way you ask about him, he's a crook though. Am I right?"

The man nodded. "Worst kind of crook. He just blew into town this morning. He walked right in to the First Bank of Rachel and cleaned it out — took everything. Not just the money, either. That McCree is a petty but thorough bastard. He took the bonds, the painting off the wall in the lobby, the deeds to most of the local businesses and homes, hell, he even took the pens on the little chains that are at the teller windows for folks to use when they come to make withdrawals or deposits."

Lawton snorted a little laugh and cocked his hat. "Sounds like a real jackass. But why didn't someone just air 'im out? I saw all the guns those men were holding. Most of 'em were stroking shotguns the way an old woman strokes a cat. You tell me not one person was able to shoot him down?"

"Oh, we tried!" the man exclaimed, his eyes widening to the size of eggs. "But McCree was bulletproof."

"Bulletproof! That's a new one on me," Lawton supposed. "How'd he pull that off?"

"It was the damnedest thing," the man said, leaning in close to Lawton as if it were gossip meant for his ears only, his voice tuning down to a raspy half-whisper. "This morning I was sitting in my office — oh, I'm Mayor Luther Tate by the way, how do you do? — anyhow, I was sitting in my office, and at about nine o'clock, one of the tellers from the bank, Ms. Viola Green, she bursts into my room and says the bank is being held up.

"Naturally I tell her to grab the sheriff and that there's not much I can do about it, and she says she already saw the sheriff and that McCree had already laughed off a few bullets and left the sheriff gut-shot on the floor of the bank. So I got a few men and headed over just in time to see McCree loading up two horses with satchels of stuff from the bank. He was wearing some sort of shiny steel suit of armor.

"I declared he stop in the name of the law and my men drew pistols on him, but damn if he didn't just turn around, double over, and squeak out an offensive mallard call at us from of his shiny hinder, and chuckled. The men fired and the bullets seemed to knock him around a little, but the sonofabitch got right back up on one of the horses, grabbed the other one's reins, and rode right out of town with all our money. Laughing all the way, I might add."

"I see," Lawton said quietly. He didn't, really, but under the circumstances it was the only thing he really had to say about the story he'd just been told. "But you're sure it was this McCree fella?"

"Yes," the Mayor gibbered. "He had a helmet on, but his voice was unmistakable. It was Gus McCree all right, the bastard. I'd know that worm-peckered, stone-livered, rattlesnake raper anywhere."

"And how's that?"

"Because," Mayor Luther Tate complained, "he's my brother-in-law!"

Lawton was hit hard with the notion to spin on his heels and leave town. He was tired, bedraggled, and hungry as a beakless buzzard. Last thing he needed was to wander into the middle of some cockamamie family feud — especially one involving an entire town and a smarter-than-average criminal. Still, there was the small matter of paying for that meal and that bed he'd inquired about. He had less to his name than a dead man, and his pockets were empty. Still, the urge for hot food and a soft mattress itched deep.

"Well, Mr. Tate, my name's Lawton Parrish. How about a trade," Lawton said, fighting the urges of his better sense.

The Mayor cocked an eyebrow and breathed deeply. "What kind of trade?"

"A room and a meal for me and for Marie," he pointed to his horse, "for this McCree character?"

Mayor Luther Tate fiddled some more with the curlicue ends of his mustache, smoothing and primping them. "What makes you think you can do it? Bring him in, I mean?"

"I done my share of bounty hunting," said Lawton. "I've hunted and captured — sometimes killed — things meaner 'n a crook with a kettle around his belly."

Mayor Tate thought about it for a moment. He turned sharply to scan the quiet town behind him, as if there might be somebody there he meant to confer with, but found none, and turned back.

"Alright," he agreed. "Come with me to the Skeleton Key. We'll get you some lunch and let you rest your haunches a bit."

"Sure you don't want me to set out right away?" Lawton asked. "That crook, brother-in-law or not, is gaining ground on us. Might be best if I saddle up Marie and try and find him before dark."

Tate rolled his bowling ball head from side to side. "No need. I know exactly where the fink is. He's got a cabin 'bout three miles out of town."

"Didn't notice it on my ride in," Lawton exclaimed. "And why would he just go back home, knowing you knew where he'd be?"

"His place is west of here, up on Miner's Flat. Near some old silver mines that've been abandoned for a decade or so. One of the mines is still technically under McCree ownership, though no one goes up there anymore. That cabin he lives in is the one my wife grew up in. And as for the second part, Gus is dumb as a stump, but he's got balls the size of train wheels. He even said to me as he rode out of town: 'You want your green back, you know where to come get it.'"

Mayor Tate saw that Marie was taken into the livery and fed and brushed, while Lawton accompanied him to the town's sole tavern. It was a low-ceilinged slop house that wanted desperately to be a saloon. A wrinkled old bartender stood with his starched white apron behind the smooth wood counter of the bar, and there were old, rusty spurs and derelict pistols and rifles mounted on the walls, as well as printed posters for past town celebrations sponsored by the bar.

"Howdy, Mayor," the old man said in a voice like a dry fart.

Mayor Tate nodded in response and pulled a chair out at a table under a massive bear's head snarling down from the wall. Lawton joined the Mayor.

Mayor Tate ordered, "Two whiskeys, Mort," and the wrinkled old man with a face like curdled buttermilk grabbed the bottle and poured out two shots and carried them over.

The Mayor then ordered two 'Skeleton Key Specials' as the drinks were set down on the table, and told Mort to bill his office. Mort nodded, stuffed the unused order pad into his back pocket and the pencil behind a pickled ear, and trudged off to the kitchen.

Lawton heard the sizzle of raw meat hitting a heated grill. His mouth salivated heavily and his gut ached with emptiness.

"So, why they call this place the Skeleton Key anyway?" Lawton asked.

Mayor Tate pointed past Lawton, who turned to see the piano against the wall behind him.

Mayor Tate said, "Look at the keys on the piano."

Lawton obliged, sliding his chair towards the instrument. And sure enough, what looked like a standard saloon hall piano from a distance became a more sinister novelty up close. All the white keys on the piano's keyboard were replaced with human toe and finger bones. The black keys were old, time-darkened skeleton keys.

"Sure is a creepy setup you got there. Mind if I ask how you came about something like that?"

"Not at all!" the Mayor gloated. It was clearly a story that had been injected into the local folklore; probably purposely purchased for just that reason, Lawton guessed. "A strange fellow came through town some years back. He took up residency here for some time. A queer old guy who later moved on to Plot Hill down there in Louisiana, I think. Got a job as an undertaker.

"Anyways, he was a real ghoulish type, but he had money up the wahzoo. While he was here for about three years, he accumulated all kinds 'o stuff in the house he occupied, and when he left, well, he just kind 'o left everything behind for the town to cannibalize.

"Mort grabbed this puppy. Thought it might drum up business. Ain't that right, Mort?"

The old bartender grumbled and nodded as he set two plates down on the table. It turned out that the Skeleton Key Special consisted of a burnt and blackened steak, a side of runny mashed potatoes and some boiled carrots. Lawton wanted to suggest that maybe it wasn't the lack of a novelty piano that was keeping the customers at bay, but considered the fact that it was a free meal nonetheless and decided to drown his thoughts, and dinner, with a liberal application of ketchup.

During their meal, Mayor Tate continued to relate the town gossip to Lawton, especially where it concerned his brother-in-law, Gus McCree. Gus was a miner who grew up working the silver mines, but spent maybe a little too much time underground, (in the Mayor's words), and got to disassociate with people. He grew introverted and surly. And when the mines on Miner's Flat were considered unsafe, and more or less all mined up, they were abandoned. It took five deaths in three different mines to do it, but folks eventually either took up another profession, leaving the mines behind altogether, or took off for greener mining pastures.

Not Gus, though.

Tate said that was about the time his sister moved out and hitched up with him, and that infuriated Gus further. Mayor Tate's wife, Eloise, was a teacher in the only school in a seven-mile radius. She was the only other source of income the McCree household had had after their parents died. They had been farmers by trade, but Gus wasn't much for farming, so he continued to mine in the shaky underground caves until they started to collapse so bad from over-excavation, that he couldn't get down inside them anymore.

When Eloise married Luther and moved out, that left Gus to his own devices. She gave him a small stipend to cover groceries and such, but he had to take on a plethora of odd jobs to cover the rest of his living expenses. Work was hard to come by in a town so small, at least finding small jobs that people wouldn't do for themselves, so he spent most of his time sitting up in that lonely old shack, living under the constant scrutiny of the black, hollow, ever-watchful eyes of those abandoned mine entrances.

"Some say those mines are haunted now," Tate said, chewing with loud, wet chews that sounded like snapping rubber bands. "Never been in one to tell ya the truth. Won't even go to the cabin. Eloise won't go near it anymore, either. Something wrong with Gus's mind now."

Lawton asked Luther to draw a map to the place. Luther flipped a little printed paper placemat that read, 'The Skeleton Key Saloon — Deadly Delicious Dinner & Drinks', in red ink, decorated with a drawing of a skeleton playing the odd finger bone and key piano, and did just that.

"I'd like to have a man or two with me, if possible," Lawton said while the Mayor doodled his directions on the placemat. "If I can surround the cabin, I'll have a better chance of bringing him back alive. It's just me and him, I have a feeling I might have to shoot him to bring him in."

Mayor Tate said, "I'll see what I can do. I'll have to be careful, though. As you saw earlier, most folks are ready to just silence Gus for good — and using a shotgun for a muzzle no less. My wife would get mighty icy if I let that happen."

Their meal finished, and at least in Lawton's case, not sitting too well in his stomach, like a feral monster fetus trying to kick its way out, Mayor Tate walked Lawton back to the livery to get his horse.

"So, in all this time that Gus has been alone up there," Lawton asked as they approached the stable, "he ever come to town and do anything like he did this morning?"

The Mayor chuckled. "Some. Nothing like today, mind you. Lotta drunk 'n' disorderly type nonsense. One night I guess he got mad up there, thinking about how he presumed Eloise had abandoned him, and he was drinkin', got stewed up real good, and he came into town and smashed out all the windows of the school with rocks. Tried to set fire to the schoolhouse, too. Fortunately this was in October and the ground was wet with frost and condensation then, the wood too moist; so it didn't take.

"Other incidents, too," Mayor Tate added, " but nothing like robbing the bank in an outfit made of steel."

"Is Gus a blacksmith? He make that suit himself, you reckon?"

The Mayor chuckled again.

"Gus? Well, I don't know. I doubt it. Gus has never been real capable with his hands. Any time he tries to do something constructive — like building or mending — it usually ends up crooked or lopsided or something. Proof of that in the outhouse he put up behind his place. Saw it myself the last time I was out there. First off, he built it a bit too big, too wide; and second, it ain't got any ventilation on it. And it's lopsided!

"Must be a mighty ripe turd closet on hot summer days like today!" the Mayor added.

Marie came around, led by the stable owner, a man named Pierce, and she looked well groomed and rested. Mayor Tate asked Pierce if he would be interested in accompanying Lawton in apprehending Gus, to which he responded with a wide-eyed, slow-twisting head shake. He said that that snake was straight crazy and didn't want anything to do with him. He did offer up his two sons, though.

They were eighteen and twenty. Both seemed up for the challenge, and agreed. Mayor Tate deputized all three men and waved them off.

"Remember," the Mayor shouted through a makeshift bullhorn made from his cupped hands, "bringing Gus back to town ain't important. It's the money that'll make or break us."

Lawton and the Pierce boys traded a sideways glance and rode on.

After riding out a ways from Rachel, and twisting to the right, baking and basting in their own sweat in the flaming golden eye of the sun, the eldest Pierce boy pointed out the flat hilltop called Miner's Hill.

"That chimney you see poking up above the wheat grass fringing the hill up there, that's old Gus's place. Only one lives up there these days." His name was Rodney. He had a head of shaggy rust-colored hair shaped like a helmet that trailed down his jaw on either side and forked into a beard and mustache of greasy, bristly hairs.

"Mayor tells me he thinks the mines up there are haunted," Lawton sniggered, "so maybe he ain't so alone after all."

Even under the chafing pink sunburn on their faces, Lawton saw the Pierce boys go pale as chalk. They looked to one another without speaking a syllable, and trotted on. Clearly they thought something wicked was happening up there. Something worse than just Gus McCree.

The boys showed Lawton the way up to the top of Miner's Hill, crossing the wide Silver River by means of a shaky handmade bridge that ran across, just above the surface. Based on the Mayor's description of Gus and his technical skills regarding carpentry, it had all the earmarks of his sloppy craftsmanship.

Lawton asked the boys if Gus made the bridge and they reckoned he did, reiterating the fact that he was the only one who lived up this way anymore and would've been the only one to use it.

"How deep is that thing?" Lawton inquired, nodding towards the running gray snake of river beneath them.

"'Bout five feet or so at the deepest," Dean, the younger Pierce said.

When all three men were safely on the opposite side, just a hundred yards or so from the cabin, he brought the boys in to a huddle formation and told them his plan.

"We leave our horses here, at the bottom of this short incline. That way they're accessible if he tries to run, but they won't hinder us none, allowing us to sneak about the cabin with our heads down."

"And what about when we find him?" Rodney asked, checking his pistol's cylinder and slipping bullets into the empty slots.

"We worry about that when we find him," Lawton answered. "The main thing is, don't let him get to far out of our net. We're going to break up and move towards the cabin from three angles. You see him run, you holler out. We let him get too far out of our perim'ter, he might get away. Like treeing a squirrel or something."

"And if he has that steel suit on?" Dean wondered.

"I've got some thoughts about that," Lawton said. "Of course, I ain't seen it yet, so I can't say until I'm sure. But I got a few ideas cooking in the old bean pot upstairs," he said, tapping his noggin with an index finger.

"And be careful," Lawton added. "According to the Mayor, this ground is full o' sink holes and such from the mines. I'm sure old Gus knows each rock and crater like the backs of his thievin' hands, but we don't, so keep those eyes peeled. Could mean the difference between walking away and a broken foot or leg."

The boys assured Lawton that they understood and he sent them off. They scampered up the hill, hobbling around the cabin with heads low and backs hunched.

Their guns were drawn.

Lawton waited until the boys were in position and then he walked up the hill and across the flat shelf of rocky land, straight towards the cabin's front door. His gun remained in its holster in the niche of his left armpit, hidden by his jacket.

He stepped up to the front door and knocked.

There was no response.

The door wasn't locked, so Lawton opened it slowly, pushing gingerly with his fingertips while keeping his body against the wall around the edge of the doorframe. It opened wide with no response.

His heart beating in his throat, Lawton slid his revolver from his holster, and spun around the doorframe, stepping into the cabin's large one room. It was empty. There was a cot with sweat- and filth-tanned sheets and a pillow in one corner of the room. There was a small stove with a couple pots and pans nailed to the wall above it. Opposite the bed, on the other side of the room, was a small bureau with some random knick-knacks on it. Closer to Lawton, directly to his right in fact, pushed up against the wall under the sill of a front-facing window, was a table. On it were some moth-eaten gunny sacks, a bad oil painting of a row boat in a fake gold-gilt frame, and a couple of pens with short lengths of tiny beaded chain limply dangling from their ends.

"Gus? You home?"

It was clear he wasn't.

Then there came a shot. Dean screeched, "Hold it, Gus."

Lawton dashed outside and rounded the cabin to see Dean standing with his gun drawn, the barrel pointed at the door to the large, lopsided outhouse. Rodney was standing a few feet away with his gun aimed too. In the frame of the door stood a paunchy middle-aged man in a pair of full-body red long johns. His hands were in the air. A black beard of curls ringed the wide, yellow smile on his otherwise hairless head.

"We need that money you took, Gus," Lawton said, stepping towards the outhouse.

Gus just grinned, hands up in surrender. "Never seen you before, mister," he said through his grin, his words almost accentuating it. "That fat pig Luther send you up here to slap me on the wrist and take the green back?"

"I don't want nothin' to do with your wrists," Lawton said over his gun barrel. "In fact, less I have to touch you, talk to you or deal with you, the better this is for me. So, now that you've lost your little tin tuxedo, why don't you tell me where the money is so I can go back to Rachel and get me some sleep, huh?"

Gus let out a raucous laugh and snorted. He spit on the ground. "Not so easy, boy." In a maneuver surprisingly spry for the chubby old guy, Gus ducked back inside, slamming the door closed behind him.

Lawton looked to Dean who looked to Rodney.

"That man is plain crazy!" Dean said. "Nowhere to go in a shitter."

Despite the knowledge of that fact, the three approached said shitter in a slow and cautious manner.

"Okay, Gus," Lawton huffed, exhausted from the heat, "we got you cornered. It's hot and I'm not in the mood for games. Just give me the money and I don't even need to take you to town. Mayor said he didn't care if you came back or not anyway. The boys here heard it."

"That's right, Gus," Rodney said.

No response. It was quiet enough to hear the heat breathing on their necks.

"Goddamnit, Gus," Lawton hollered, losing his cool, "I'm done negotiating." He grabbed the handle on the outhouse door and jerked it open, thrusting his gun forward to shoot if needed.

It was empty.

"How the hell'd he do that?" Dean gasped.

Rodney jogged around the back, kicking the boards of the structure's rear wall, and scanning the area behind it. "Doesn't appear to be an escape door or anything."

"No," Lawton affirmed. "We would've heard it if he slipped out some back hatch. We'd have seen him take off running, too." Lawton stepped into the outhouse. "Hey, it doesn't stink in here," he said. "Shouldn't an outhouse, particularly in this type of weather, smell to high hell?"

His companions agreed that it should.

Lawton knelt down near the circular hole in the ground and pushed his face near the aperture. It was dark, but it was also obvious that no one had shat in that hole, recently or ever. Lawton fished a hand into one of the pockets on his jacket to fetch a match, still ogling the hole with his face near it, when a brilliant flash temporarily caused him to wince his eyes closed. A firm, hot, hard grasp clenched his throat.

A metal hand had come through the hole. It must've been one of the gloves of the bizarre metal suit Gus had used to rob the bank. Lawton's hands instantly went to the fingers of the metal glove, prying them away from his windpipe. It was just as he figured, the fingers were a series of separate steel pieces with tiny gaps in between, allowing the knuckles and joints to bend. If the suit was that way on the fingers, Lawton realized, it must be the same for the rest of the joints of the body.

The metal fingers pried away from Lawton's trachea, Gus's gloved hand disappeared back down into the dark hole in the floor. Lawton quickly stood up to get some visual distance, and began to scan the floor of the outhouse. Finding the wire-thin crack he was looking for, he bent down and grabbed at the edge of the hole, pulling the floor upwards. A narrow door opened in the floor, revealing wooden stairs leading down into the darkness.

Bingo, Lawton said to himself.

The two stunned Pierce boys followed Lawton down into the earth beneath the false outhouse. An oil lantern burned on a hook in the rock wall of the stairwell, the flame dancing on the wide wick like a drunken pixie doing a striptease. Lawton grabbed the lamp and held it at chest-height to light the way.

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, they found a wide but low cavern. The cavern was old and seemed to be a natural formation, not chiseled and chipped like a mine would be. The lantern caught something shiny. There was a pile of old mining equipment, cluttering the space around some small stalagmites jutting up from the rocky floor like giant muskie teeth.

"Damn," Dean whispered. "This place is spooky."

Lawton brought the lantern to head-height and extended his arm out as far as it would go. His other hand was numbly wrapped around the handle of his revolver.

"Gus?" Lawton called. His voice echoed and wavered, bouncing back and forth amongst the nooks and crags in the subterranean rock, swelling and dipping in pitch and volume the way a wave crests and melts in the sea.

A shot pinged out from the darkness somewhere in front of them. The unseen bullet hit the rock wall behind Rodney and caromed off, ricocheting two or three times in different trajectories before coming to rest somewhere. Lawton heard the spent slug drop to the floor of the cavern somewhere unseen.

"You want that money back, stranger?" Gus howled, his voice seemingly deeper Lawton thought, but then he realized it wasn't deeper, just muffled. That meant he had his steel helmet on. "Well, you're going to have to fight me for it!

"That swindler Luther owes me. That whole dried-up town owes me. First they took my livelihood, closing down the mines. Then Luther took Eloise. Only person in that tinder-pile called a town ever gave me the time o' day was that old feller who took off for the south. He gave me this suit. Had it made for me. So you want that money back, mister, you gonna have to earn it."

Lawton saw the form step out from behind a natural outcropping of rock in the distance, just far enough away to be barely lit by the lantern. The lantern caught the reflective metal surface of the suit. Gus looked huge with it on. Shiny steel boots extended up to bulbous steel kneepads and thigh guards. There was a steel diaper around Gus's groin and backside. Lawton could see the red of the long johns through the thin spaces between the pieces. Around Gus's torso was a large armor bubble that looked like a giant shiny marshmallow. His arms were plated in several small steel marshmallows, ending in the steel gloves. On his head was a helmet that looked akin to an upside-down feed bucket without the handle, with a deep slit across the eyes for him to see out of.

"So," Gus balked, stomping forward with a metallic clank from each footstep, "go ahead, tough guy. Take your best shot."

Lawton had to think quick. He swung the lantern around and found what he was looking for — the money. It was lying in a sack on the floor. "Dean, do me a favor," he said, backing up and lowering his voice.

"What's that?"

"Go back topside and get yours and Rodney's horses. Bring 'em back here."

Dean holstered his piece and raced back up the stairs.

"Ha!" Gus spat. "Running away? You cowards aren't even goin' to try and take me?"

Lawton raised his gun and squeezed a shot out. It smacked the mouth of the helmet loudly, creating a small confetti of sparks.

"Ha ha! Nice shot, gunslinger. But bullets can't harm me. Not in this thing."

Lawton shot again, quickly, aiming for the dark slit Gus used to see out of. Gus was too busy chuckling to notice, but when the bullet hit, it was as if a bee had flown into his helmet. Both steel-plated hands went up to the opening, frantically massaging the metal helmet.

"You son of a bitch!" Gus wailed. "You're too smart fer your own good. That slot was a tit-hair wider, you'd have spilt my brains out."

Lawton shook his head. "I didn't think there'd be much to spill."

Enraged, Gus stumbled forward. Clearly he wasn't adept at running in the armor yet. He looked like a big metal toddler taking his first clumsy steps. Only this big metal toddler had a gun in his hand.

In less time than it took to blink, Lawton fired off another shot, expertly hitting the dark slit in the helmet. Gus roared with rage, again, temporarily blinded. Lawton signaled to Rodney to rush up the stairs, and the two men dashed through the floor of the outhouse and back into the baking sun of the afternoon. Dean was just arriving with the horses.

"Rodney," Lawton turned to his companion, "I want you to hide behind the outhouse. I'm going to try and draw Gus out after me. When he's focused on me and out of the outhouse, I want you to sneak back down and grab the bag of money. Then you and your brother take off back for town. Got it?"

Rodney nodded and curved around to the back of the outhouse and waited.

A loud, dry snapping sound came from inside the lopsided 'turd closet', accompanied by a string of helmet-muffled curses. Gus had found the narrow hatch in the floor too small to squeeze through. In his anger, he'd started punching up the boards of the floor, demolishing the outhouse around him. Finally his large, metal form hulked through the doorway and stepped out into the yard.

"Hey Gus," Lawton chided, "why don't you wiggle those steel-plated ham hocks you call ass cheeks over here, and show me what a big strong man you are?" Lawton quickly tugged out another two shots, this time hitting the open cranny between the big metal diaper and the steel thigh-plate on his right leg.

Then he took off running.

First he ran to Gus's cabin. He stopped outside the window facing Gus's bed.

"I imagine all that steel weighing ya down, it must be mighty difficult to move too fast, huh?" Lawton joked. "I wonder, maybe you'd move faster if you had some motivation." Lawton had still been holding the lantern he'd grabbed in the cavern below. One swift hurl and he sent it crashing right through the window. Glass scattered everywhere, and the dancing pixie flame sashayed out from the confines of the lamp and caught the blankets on Gus's bed. The bed burst into flame instantly; smoke bellowing out from the busted window's frame.

"You done it now," Gus growled. "I ain't playin' games no more. Now I'm going to plain tear your limbs off!"

The metal juggernaut sped like a runaway train aimed directly for Lawton. He noticed that Gus no longer had his gun in his hand. He assumed he'd had to lose it when working his way out of the narrow floor hatch in the shitter. As Gus got close to his burning cabin, muffled promises of vengeance coming from beneath his bucket head, Lawton dashed off towards the Silver River. Gus carried forward into the front of the cabin, the inertia and momentum carrying him further than he planned. He smacked into the front door, knocking it inwards off its hinges. It fell flat into the main room of the cabin, surrounded on all sides with bobbing tongues of yellow flame and thick drapes of smoke.

Gus lay there for a second, the wind knocked out of him. The heat around him swelled in the metal armor he wore, making his body feel like a piece of meat cooking in an oven. Clumsily he tried to steady himself. Finding it difficult to see or breathe, he finally relented and tore the helmet off his head, throwing it across the burning room in frustration.

Gus took a second, panting, to survey his last few possessions as they were licked into nonexistence and ash by the many tongues of flame. Any worn thread, any small semblance of self-control that existed in his mind burned away with the cabin.

The river. He'd seen that smug stranger run off down the hill towards the riverbank. Gus made up his mind, the blood in his temples percolating like coffee. That boy would never reach town alive. Money or no, it didn't matter anymore. Clumsily he pulled himself off the burning sheet of wood that once served as his front door, and he marched down towards the water's edge to find his prey.

Lawton was there waiting. He saw Gus coming down, smoke wafting off his shiny form as if he were dissipating up into the air little by little. Lawton noticed the bucket helmet had come off. That only meant one thing — that old nut cake was seeing things through a thick red filter right about now.

Just as Lawton planned.

"Glad to see you could catch up, Gus," Lawton said, the man still marching towards him. Gus's face was a twisted mask of hate: unflinching, unwavering. He looked like he could've chewed through an iron bar, if properly seasoned. "I decided to wait for you here in the water," he added. "Thought you might like a little cool-off after I got you so burned up back there." Lawton threw a mocking little laugh at the end of his quip. It was calculated. He knew it meant stoking the fire.

Gus broke his stride and snapped into a lumbering but deadly run. Lawton backed into the river, trying to keep his footing on the slick, erosion-smoothed rocks lining the bottom. Gus waded in after him.

Lawton coaxed him forward. "That's right ole Gus, you wade in here deep as you like." Lawton kept backing up. He kept his gun holstered.

"You keep runnin' at the mouth, boy," Gus spat, seething. "It's the last bit 'o runnin' you ever gon' be able to do. You hear me!"

Lawton skipped back to just past the halfway point across the river. The water leveled just below his nose. He hoped his plan worked.

Gus kept forward, driven by rage and the fact that his intended victim was just a dozen feet away. Each step came harder, though. His legs began to knot and strain. Finally, just a few feet shy of arms length from Lawton, his body froze as if his feet were cemented to the riverbed.

"Sorry 'bout your cabin, Gus. Was a bit extreme, I admit. But like I said, I'm mighty tired and my tolerance for games is less than zero. My eyes are sore from no sleep, my ass is sore from travelin', and my guts are sore from that sorry meal your brother-in-law served me in town."

The Pierce brothers appeared over the edge of the cliff. Rodney had the moneybag tied to his saddle. They galloped across the makeshift bridge, slowing to wave an indication of success to Lawton, then continued on.

Lawton waved back. Gus watched stupefied as the brothers disappeared in the distance, his mouth gaping open.

"What the hell you do to me? I can't move a muscle!"

"Water, genius. Those big heavy steel boots you're wearing are full of water. I imagine you have trouble operating them the way it is, them being so heavy and you being — no offense here, but let's call a spade a spade — not exactly the muscular type. Soon as I realized I couldn't shoot you I had to come up with a way to contain you. I ain't got a rope, and even if I had, I doubted you'd let me get close enough to use it.

"All that stuff I did back up there, the shooting in your eye slit, the torching your cabin, the making fun of you, that was all to rile you up to a point where you didn't know what you were doing beyond lusting for my blood. I figured I could get you to that point, you'd follow me anywhere just to get your hands on me."

Lawton finished crossing the river. He called his horse, Marie, and she made her way across the shaky bridge to join him.

"Right now the water is just up to your shoulders. That means every piece of that big bulletproof suit of yours is full and heavy as a cauldron. I wouldn't plan on moving anytime soon." Lawton hopped up on Marie. "I'm riding back to town to make sure the money's safe and accounted for. I'll let the Mayor know where you are. He'll send deputies out for you I imagine. For the time being, just keep your head above water and there'll be less of a likelihood of you drowning."

Lawton gave Marie a slap on the rump and she took off towards town. He didn't look back to watch Gus shrink as he made distance. The man was more or less frozen there until someone came and yanked him out with a rope or something. All the water pressure in his suit holding him in place, it would take some doing too.

Thinking things through on the ride back to town, Lawton felt that despite what he did, he found himself empathizing with Gus a little bit. It had been a rough deal, the mines caving in and drying up like they did. Wasn't the Mayor's fault, of course, and there were other jobs out there, but still, it was a hard thing when loss of work threatened one's connection to the town and home one grew up in. Eloise moving out must've been difficult as well, Lawton imagined, but that was natural too. Gus couldn't rightly expect his sister to stay a spinster the rest of her life just to cook and clean for him and pay for the groceries; a man has to make his own way at some point.

Still, there was a sadness in Gus that Lawton recognized. It was a frustration bred of somber futility. Something like that starts eating at the brain and the soul, especially when its basted often with rotgut liquor, it's bound to drive someone insane. Now, adding insult to injury, even if that injury was mostly a crooked point of view on Gus's part, he was shamed, homeless and humiliated, stuck in the middle of Silver Lake, smelling the sweet wood smoke of his torched cabin.

Lawton almost pitied the poor slob.

Mayor Tate was beaming when Lawton galloped back down Main Street, past the livery where the Pierce boys were standing, brushing out their horses. He held his arms open wide in a jubilant greeting.

"Mr. Parrish, welcome back! I just want you to know the entire city of Rachel appreciates deeply what you've done for us."

Lawton took a quick look around. Aside from the Mayor and the two Pierce boys, there didn't seem to be many people doing much of anything, let alone appreciating, in the streets of town. A drunk was singing a bawdy old ballad while sitting in the dirt in front of the Skeleton Key; his voice as sour and off key as his appearance; and there was an old dog sleeping loudly on the walk in front of the Rachel General Store.

"Now that room you wanted," Tate swooned, "I promise, sir, you'll get the very best room at the Rachel Hotel. No charge, of course."

"Mayor," Lawton interrupted, "Gus McCree is still alive. He has no home. I had to burn his cabin down. I guess the word 'had' might be a little strong, but either way, there it is. He's still alive and standing in the middle of Silver River. I suggest you get some deputies out there to drag him out. Might need an ox to do it. He's still wearing that bulletproof suit of his.

"By the way," Lawton added, "he claims that eccentric old feller who left you folks your prized piano had it made for him. Seems like the old corpse-stuffer was maybe adding to Gus's paranoia, feeding it a little bit. Or maybe a lot. Maybe got him so worked up as to reaching the point where he'd come into town and rob a bank and kill a sheriff. Not sayin' Gus doesn't have inexcusable things to answer for, but maybe he had help getting pushed to it. After all, that character that made the suit for him, he knew something was going to happen. Maybe Gus had drunkenly discussed his intentions with him. Gus claims the guy was his 'only friend,' as he says.

"Guy wants to stir trouble up, presented with the luxury of leavin' town before things get too excited, maybe he gets to working on Gus about his sister taking off and the mines being useless and Gus being useless."

Mayor Tate dropped his grin and rubbed his jaw with a chubby palm. "That's an awful lot of conjecturing, Mr. Parrish."

"I guess so. But Gus — I've met others like him before. He's driven. And he was driven. Maybe most of it is psychological, some bad wiring or just depression takin' its toll or something. But he don't seem like a man who's mean for mean's sake. There were steps that led him there. Not sayin' he didn't forge that path, or that he didn't take it knowing there were other paths out there. Just something to think about."

"I can assure you, Lawton," Mayor Tate said, inflating his chest with an exaggerated swell of pride "that Gus McCree will get a fair and honest trial. Rachel and its citizens pride themselves on their due diligence."

Lawton nodded a silent response. Seemed to him, that folks in Rachel were mighty busy, what with all the appreciating and due diligence going on.

"Now," the Mayor said, returning to the topic of the bargain, "like I said, your room will be —"

"Actually," Lawton interrupted again, "I think I'm just going to head on out. I appreciate your holding your end of the bargain and I'm glad I could help out with your situation, sir, but, to be honest, I think maybe it's best I keep moving."

The Mayor's ruddy face was overcast with a glum pallor by Lawton's words.

"Oh, well . . . ." He raised a hand with obvious disappointment and Lawton took it. Having said their goodbyes, Lawton turned Marie and headed her out of town. As he passed the Pierce livery, he raised a hand in a wave to the boys who were still standing in front, grooming their horses.

That night found Lawton lying on his back on his tattered bedroll under the stars. He was only about five or six miles away from Rachel, and only a meager two or three from the next town over, but he decided he wanted to be alone after all, to think. And after the meal at the Skeleton Key, the jerky and fire-heated beans tasted pretty good. As he traced the spectral flecks of light in the sky with his eyes, joining them to make shapes only he could see, he found his mind wandering back to Gus McCree. He wasn't entirely sure why. The man was a killer, a bank robber, an attempted arsonist, and a bum. But still….

Sleep started to massage Lawton's brain and eyelids. A powerful yawn put the choke on his energy and the world around him started to melt into sleepy darkness. He rolled over to check on Marie. She was asleep near a pine tree some feet away, painted a dancing orange by the flickering campfire.

Then a notion hit Lawton Parrish as he stretched and pulled the thick horse blanket over his supine form on the rocky ground. The reason his mind kept going back to Gus McCree, was that he saw a bit of himself in the old crackpot. The man was a loner, uncomfortable around people. Lawton realized, not without a slight chuckle at the irony of the situation that he'd left Gus McCree in before heading back to town, that like the Mayor's troubled brother-in-law, when it came to people, he was just a fish out of water.

The Wagoner's Present
by Willy Whiskers, Constable of Calliope NV

Dorothy La Blanc stepped onto the train in Mansfield Massachusetts as she had done every June for the last five years. Teaching school in the little nearby town of Easton was a respectable profession for an unmarried young woman, but it paid so poorly that it was difficult to keep body and soul together during the long New England winters. So, each year she made the trek west when school ended and returned in September for the next year.

"Going to see your sisters again?" asked the conductor as he punched her ticket.

She smiled, "Yes, I miss them so much."

Now in her mid-twenties, she ran the risk of being an old maid but the school policy was no married woman could teach. So, if she gave up her life to a husband it would mean the end of her beloved profession. Trapped in this strict Puritanical predicament, she still had her own life to live.

That evening the train arrived at Grand Central Station where she arranged to have her nearly empty trunk sent to a hotel on 42nd street. Checking in, she spent a couple days shopping and haunting her favorite book stores.

With her trunk soon filled with new clothes and books, Dorothy, or Dot as she was called out west, bought a ticket to St. Louis. There she had girl friends and needed no hotel. After a week, with her purse refilled, she tripped on to Denver to visit other sisters — as she called them — and finally arrived in Calliope, Nevada where Madame Betsy Lovey and some of her girls greeted Dot at the station. Kisses and hugs went all around as the women reacquainted. All still abuzz, they piled into one great carriage for the trip to Betsy's establishment.

Dedicated to his family's freight business, Harvey McCallian seldom left work until late and then went straight home. A bit dour and having the sense of responsibility of the first born, he knew his younger brothers, John and Pete, had wives to attend and gave them the space he felt they needed. However, this was his birthday and his brothers had a celebration in mind. They dragged him from the wagon barn to Madame Betsy's for a few drinks and perhaps a special birthday present.

The brothers kept Harvey's glass full and it was not long before the older brother started forgetting about wagons and turned his attention to the frilly dresses flitting about the room. He was not averse to the activities of Madame Betsy's establishment and had spent many a payday there at another point in his life. At odd moments, when his sisters-in-law were around he pondered his solitary life and each time he was with his invalid father, the old man never missed a chance to poke him about needing a woman. Still, no woman he met seemed to suit him.

Making her rounds in the spacious parlor, Betsy greeted the boys. "We're lookin' to give Harvey a present tonight," said John. "She's got to be special."

Knowing Harvey personally, Betsy already had someone in mind that might make a good fit. Her eye fell on Dot who was standing by the piano flipping through a stack of sheet music with one of the patrons. "She's a good one — just arrived from the east. Perfect for a old stick-in-the-mud like you." She smiled at Harvey and tousled his hair.

"You fellas don't need to do this," the wagoner protested

"Nonsense!" rejected Pete. "Betsy says this is the girl for you and we're gonna get her for ya."

Betsy called Dot over. "These are the McCallian brothers and it's Harvey's birthday. Do you think you can make this a night to remember?"

The schoolmarm rocked back on one leg and regarded the wagoner with a cock of her head. "Sweetie, you and I are going to have a great time." With that she took his hand and led him up the wide spiral staircase leading to the private rooms. John and Pete hooted encouragement to their brother who still felt a little sheepish about his present.

At Betsy's, each girl had her own room where she lived and there were other rooms for the business. Dot passed by the common rooms and brought Harvey to her own room. As the door closed behind them, Harvey thought to himself that it showed a distinct woman's sensibilities. Dominated by a big brass bed with intricate scrollwork, a wide wingbacked chair sat in the corner between two windows. There was a large dresser with mirror along one wall next to a carved wardrobe with Mexican iconography. "Make yourself comfortable," instructed the lady as she poured a drink from a cut glass decanter sitting on a side table.

Standing in the middle of the large carpet, Harvey continued marveling at her room. This was the first time he had seen how the girls lived. A book on the bed table caught his attention — Pride and Prejudice.

"My mother use to love that book," he said.

"I bought it in New York on my way out. With all the reading I do, you'd have thought that I'd have read it long ago, but no. I'm just reading it for the first time." Dot handed him his drink.

Awkwardly, they looked at each other without making eye contact for a long few moments, then the man asked, "Could you read some of it to me?"

"The book?"

"Ya."

"Aren't you sure you want something else?"

"Just a few pages, if you don't mind."

"Very well." Dot took her book and sat on the bed as Harvey settled into the wing back chair. Turning to her bookmark she began reading "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife . . . ."

As she read, calmness washed over him. His head cleared and time disappeared. If he bothered to think if it, he would have realized that the best times of his childhood were sitting at his mother's knee listening to her read to him. He was only four or five when Pete was born. With three boys to raise while his father was off driving wagons their reading sessions became fewer and fewer. By the time he was nine she was gone and life became hard after that.

They both drifted through the English countryside following the Bennet girls until a strong rap on the door brought them around. "Dot, how is it going dear?" asked Betsy.

"Oh, fine" she replied. "Be out soon."

"Guess we lost track," said Harvey. "But it was wonderful."

"I feel like I owe you one."

"Don't tell my brothers, but this is the best birthday present I've ever had."

"It was fun for me too. Perhaps we could do this again sometime."

"You know," he paused. "I happen to own a buggy and there's a nice place on the other side of the lake under some oaks."

Dot smiled coyly as she began wondering what her students would do without her next September.

The Willow Garden
by Tony Burnett

Down in the willow garden
Where me and my love did meet . . .
That's where I murdered that dear little girl
Whose name was Rose Conlee.
            ~traditional bluegrass ballad~

My name is Byron Elliot Conlee, christened for my father, for his father, to five generations. Many men have perished by my hand, more than can be claimed by the most heinous outlaw or the most valiant soldier. You will not, however, find my name among the dime novels or academic testaments of our time. I am but a tool of justice. I am the hangman.

I have looked into the eyes of men preparing to cross the river Styx and I have seen many things. The righteous walk the final steps with dignity and grace. It is the men with dark, evil souls who protest. I have dragged these men, crying like a wounded child, clutching at anything, up the gallows stair.

I once chanced to meet a well known gunfighter. He had delivered the body of a notorious cattle thief to the magistrate and was paid five hundred dollars, tenfold the payment I receive for a single death. We were in the local saloon one evening. When he discovered my occupation, we had occasion to discuss men of honor. He claimed they never cry for mercy when faced with death. "These ghosts ride with you throughout your days." The notches on the ivory handle of his revolver numbered seventeen. I countered that I had no such ghosts. I am only an agent in a legal system bringing civilized society to the frontier, an agent of man's law and of God's law. My own mother gave her life to this frontier. She believed a civilized society was God's will. I plan to prove her right. I am not the judge. I am but a means.

The gunfighter professed to know the souls of men. "As I rode into this town," he stated, "mothers pulled their children indoors, men turned their faces away and I was told I was not welcome at the inn. Even the women of the bordello had no bed for me. I was forced to sleep in the livery with my mount. Let me demonstrate the fickleness of the human character." He called the bartender over, purchased a bottle of top shelf Kentucky bourbon and loudly proclaimed, "Drinks all around until this bottle is dry." Not one patron refused his drink. "I have ghosts," he said. "You have them as well. It is only honor that is in short supply."

It was some years before I met that man again. Were it not for our previous encounter I must wonder if he would have climbed the stairs in such a regal manner, asking for no hood, only that he end his life looking into the setting sun. His last wish was that I be given his revolver. At the time of his passing the stock had twenty-three notches and I received my initial ghost.

The sunlight was illuminating the low crests of the surrounding hills. In this lush valley, however, a thick mist sat heavily on the laconic river. We had searched most of the night, my father and I, accompanied by the sheriff and several town folk. She had not returned by the fall of night. Her place at the supper table had not been visited. By the ten o'clock hour we were searching. The night had passed slowly with no results. The dawning of the day allowed a visual benefit but deepened our concern. I was the unfortunate soul to spot the whiteness tangled on the riverbank. I scrambled through the brush with my heart thumping my throat. As I approached, my body slowed as the brambles tore at my legs. My hands were bloodied by branches. I found myself knee-deep in the black water. She floated in the mire, her long black hair tangled in the gnarled roots of a bald cypress. Her wide eyes stared blankly into the unknown. Her white cotton dress hung on her shoulders, ripped wide from the neckline to the knees. A pearl handled dagger was buried deep in her breast. The agony over came me and I fell to my knees in the river clutching her cold, stiff body. My precious Rose, my baby sister, my friend and confidant lie cold and gray in the chilling river. Anger welled in me beyond my physical capacity to contain it for I knew well the owner of the lethal knife. So often I had pleaded with her not to consort with this miscreant. The gaudily tooled dagger was the property of Earl Knox, the poorly chosen beau of my dear sister.

"The man is dangerous," I tried to explain not a fortnight ago. "He possesses an illness of mind and partakes of the fermented grape with great frequency."

"He loves me truly. He told me as much," She pleaded.

"I suppose those are the marks of love settled on your wrists like violet shackles. And why is it you wear your veil though it is not the Sabbath? Do you think me blind, sweet sister? I fear for your safety!"

"It is merely his lust that drives him. Once we wed he will settle into a temperate life. He has great wealth. He promises a balcony overlooking the ocean and servants to prepare my meals."

"Oh my poor dazzled sister, he has no money. The wealth of which he speaks is that of his father. Once he leaves the fold his fortune will dry up like spit on a summer street. What will be your fate then?"

"You are a vicious brother! I do not believe you! You would prefer that I shrivel and perish on this dusty prairie like my namesake, like our dear mother."

"There are many strong, honorable men in this town. You are a beautiful young flower. Is there no real man here for you?"

"They are dusty and course like this town!"

"So you prefer this effeminate, lace encrusted fool who wishes to own you? I must warn you, the wine he thirsts for is evil!"

"And you, dear brother, I know you imbibe in the pleasures of rye whiskey."

"That is so, but the clear liquor does not alter the sensibilities."

"So you say, but wine is the blood of Christ."

"When sanctified by the Church! Many things of God, when used in a sacrilegious manner, are but tools of the Devil. I have seen men drunk on the nectar of the grape lust for the loins of other men. That, my sweet sister, is against God and man. Your prissy beau, with his lace trimmed blouse and snug breeches, frankly, I do not understand your fascination."

"No, my brother, I suppose not, for you are as course as this outpost of civilization we inhabit."

"Please, sweet Rose, let us not quarrel. You are all I know of love and beauty and I will be beside you forever. I only ask that you not rush blindly toward this Earl Knox. I am afraid he may have a perverse plan for you. I do not want to see you disgraced."

The conversation played through my mind as I wrapped her cold, wet body in my waistcoat. My father and I transported her to the waiting buckboard, the lines in his face deepening with each step. I had but one goal at that time and it was vengeance.

The scoundrel awaited us at his father's estate. He was contrite as the sheriff bound him for transport. He sneered and taunted us with the statement of his father. "Worry not, my fair-haired son, for the power of wealth shall set you free."

I waited as he fretted in his iron cage. I visited him regularly. "You were the chosen of my dear sister," I told him. "Fear not, I will stand beside you throughout this ordeal." I fixed my eyes upon him as I watched the color drain from his features.

The forthcoming arrival of the circuit judge was postponed as fall degenerated into a grizzly winter. I had ample occasion to visit young Earl Knox. Through my friendship with the sheriff, bail was denied. Though the Knox family wealth was great, our township was one of few administered by men of integrity. Useless attempts were made to bribe the sheriff and the magistrate. The Knox family hired mercenaries to orchestrate a jail break. Three men fell to the weapons of the constabulary. Two of them perished and the unfortunate survivor is but a shell of a man. Earl Knox remained a prisoner.

On the eve of the winter Solstice I received a communiqué from a gentleman in St. Louis. It had come to his attention, through means not revealed to me, that I was in possession of a revolver formerly owned by a famous gunfighter. He was prepared to pay me six thousand dollars for the weapon. Though tempted by his offer, I could not leave my objective unfinished. I responded that I would consider his offer but travel through the territory at this time would be ill advised.

Through the course of the winter I called on Earl Knox regularly, pleasing his palette with rare steak, fine mutton and wines of his choosing. It was my intention to gain a rapport with him for I had an enigma gnawing at my soul. I wanted, no, required an explanation. Why? I was aware that his testimony in court would be slanted. Before I took his life it was imperative that I discern his motivation.

The day came, as I knew it would, when he called me into his confidence. "Come to speak with me after the sheriff retires. We have many things to discuss." Time attained the consistency of blackstrap molasses as I anticipated the setting of the sun. From the inn, I acquired a medium rare rib eye steak complete with a bowl of fresh snow peas. I resisted the temptation to spit on the dinner plate. Offering the meal to Earl Knox, I requested of him the reason for my visit. He gushed over my offering and asked me to sit with him as he masticated the rib eye. Upon completion of the meal he turned to me. "You are aware, of course, that my father has great wealth. He is a powerful man and yet he has approached the magistrate, the sheriff and the circuit judge. He has had no success in gaining my freedom. You have been unusually and unnecessarily kind to me. I have a discreet proposal for you."

"You know why I have lingered by your side. I want the true reason for you ending the life of my precious sister. I claim no friendship or affection for you. My goal is only that knowledge. Any consideration that you receive from me will, of necessity, require that knowledge."

Earl Knox considered my request briefly. "I have had a long time to ponder that while I endured my incarceration here. Though my mind was confused at the time, I feel I can explain the justification as I saw it. First, however, I would like to propose monetary compensation in return for you arranging my escape. You are my final contingency. If you would consider assisting with my freedom, what would be my cost?"

"I would think the amount would be obvious. The method of payment would need to be arranged."

"You say the amount should be obvious and yet nothing you have said answers the query. What would be your compensation?"

"Thirty pieces of silver, thirty silver dollars would ensure my cooperation. I will need your confession as to your motivation for the bloody murder of my sister as well. Consider these demands and I will arrange for a method of payment." As I parted his company he reclined on his bunk, fingers entwined behind his head, and bid me adieu.

The evening brought no rest as I pondered the greed and dishonor eating my soul away. Was I, as my dear sister stated, a course and ruthless man? Could I experience a reformation? Did it matter? As the sun lightened the eastern horizon these questions remained unanswered and sleep had not come. I allowed a week to pass before revisiting Earl Knox. It was a week of torment and introspection but a solution was forming in my mind.

I arrived at the jail just before sunset as plans such as mine should never see the light of day. I fought back the disgust upon confronting Earl Knox. I presented him with a silk kerchief belonging to my sister Rose. It had been doused with her chosen perfume. I cringed as the lout held it to his face. Tears welled in his eyes.

"Wrap the thirty pieces of silver in the kerchief and have your agent leave it under the willow tree where you assassinated my sister. Now I will hear your confession, then I will explain my plan for your earthly salvation. I cannot, nor would I, do anything about the fires of Hell that await you in the afterlife."

Earl Knox sat on his bunk and pondered a moment as if he were sitting around a campfire preparing to spin a yarn. " Byron, it was never my intention to kill Rose. She was a lovely maiden and I planned to make her my wife. Sitting in the willow garden by the river, her beauty and precociousness overcame me and lust boiled in my loins. I asked her if she would share a bottle of burgundy wine with me, hoping it would loosen the laces of her corset. She refused me as she had many times before. She said that our union should be sanctified by God. She then teased me with stories of how she was rubbing cream on her skin and studying the art of lovemaking by talking to older women with successful marriages. My passions were inflamed. I had to get her to drink of the grape so that she would not resist me. I drew her to me and we began kissing. As she began to push away, I clutched her throat and squeezed until she fainted. As she slept, I tried to pour the wine down her throat. She awoke with a start accusing me of trying to poison her. She began screaming like a banshee that her brother was right, I was a pervert. She insisted that I take her home. When I refused she became a shrew such as I have never known, lunging at me with teeth bared and nails at the ready. I feared for my safety. I had no choice but to defend myself with the dagger hanging from my belt. Do you see? It was my life or hers."

"You took her life for your foibles?" I asked. "And I suppose you violated her as she lay dying?"

"She was quite deceased when I enjoyed her pleasures," he bragged.

The room was spinning. I forced my hands to grip the iron bars to keep them from ripping him apart. I stepped out of the cell onto the street to regain my composure. It was difficult to breathe. I stood as a wooden Indian would on the porch of the jailhouse for what seemed like an eternity. It was hard to remember my promise to myself but new ideas were forming in my mind. After I finally relaxed I reentered the jail.

"I have no reason to spare you from the gallows save my honor," I stated. "However, a promise is a promise. You will need to follow my instructions to the letter and you will survive your hanging. When I measure you for the rope I will give you enough to allow your feet to touch the ground. It is imperative that you stand erect as the trap is opened. As you know we enclose the area below the gallows in canvas so as not to shock the women and children attending the event. I will have a buckboard with a coffin on it placed underneath. The coffin will be loaded with rocks approximating your weight. After I pull the trap, I will go below and cut you free placing you among the rocks. I will put two small nails in the coffin lid. I have agreed to transport the body to the undertaker as he has family coming into town to participate in the festivities and he wishes to take them out for a meal afterwards. Once I give you the signal you can force your way out of the coffin and go free. Remember to securely nail down the lid. You will need to leave the territory and assume a new identity. If fortune smiles on us no one will know. Otherwise, you should at least have several hours head start. This all depends on my stipend being delivered as per my demand."

"Have no doubt you will be rewarded," Earl Knox assured me.

"Remember, I can make the gallows quick and efficient or I can assure a slow and painful death." I fixed him in my gaze and spun on my boot heel, exiting without further conversation. I made no further contact with Earl Knox prior to his scheduled day of execution.

As the day of execution approached, I watched my father sink deeper and deeper into the void. He no longer spoke nor attended to his hardware and mercantile operation. I did what I could to keep his business open as it helped to alleviate the dread and shame my future held. The sunset of my father's life was at hand. I had watched him fade since the untimely death of his wife. With his daughter buried it was as if his soul had vacated his body, leaving only a shell. For him, for God, it was my duty to deliver Earl Knox to the fires of Hell.

On the day of reckoning I arose before the sun, holstered the gunfighter's prized weapon, packed a saddlebag and headed for the river where my sister had met her fate. As I approached the blood stained boulder I saw the lily white kerchief bundled on the rock. I untied it and counted out the thirty pieces of silver. After sitting on the boulder contemplating the trading of justice for personal gain, I took the coins to the river and skipped them one by one across the calm water as would an innocent child with smooth, flat stones. I tucked the kerchief into my breast pocket and mounted my horse, turning back toward town.

Upon reaching the jail I encountered the padre in contact with the accused. I asked for a moment with Earl Knox. The priest seemed relieved to relinquish the attentions of the prisoner. The father met my eyes with a look of thanks. Upon the departure of the priest I informed Earl Knox that the agreed payment had not been found.

"That is impossible!" He screamed. "My own father was to have placed it there!"

"How is it to finally realize your monetary worth?" I mocked.

"Bring my father to me. There must be some mistake."

"The time is nigh. We have but minutes."

"Please, I beg of you. I have my own money hidden. I will pay you double if you will spare me!"

"And how do you propose to make this happen?"

"Spare me and I will bring you a generous bag of gold. I will meet you at the rock one hour after the scheduled hanging, on my honor."

"Your honor? I have seen no evidence of honor! I should slice you open and let you watch your entrails spill before you! I will, however, give you this last opportunity. If you fail I will spend my life tracking you down. Your death will be slow and painful and all time before it will be filled with fear and apprehension. As God is my witness, I will prevail!"

"Yes, certainly, thank you my friend."

"You will survive your hanging. I am not your friend." I tied his hands behind his waist. "Would you care for a blindfold?" I asked.

"I see no need for one."

I led him to the gallows. The boisterous crowd grew quiet as we climbed the gallows stair. I placed the noose around his neck. He stood solemn without speaking. The padre spoke a brief prayer over him and descended from the platform. As I pulled the lever the silent crowd gasped in unison followed by a raucous cheer. I left the platform taking the receding steps slowly. Under the gallows I found Earl Knox suspended from the noose, his toes touching the ground, the rope snug around his throat. His face was inflamed as he gasped for air. I pulled his pearl handled dagger from my belt and flashed it before his eyes. I grabbed the strap cinching his hands and pulled down, tightening the noose. I stood behind him pressing my body firmly against his. I wrapped my free arm around his shoulder holding the shiny knife against his throat just below the noose.

"My blood and my being are screaming for vengeance. Even my loins want you to feel the degradation experienced by my sister. My love! Not yours!" I hissed, acknowledging the swelling pressing against his buttocks. "It is only my honor that frees you." I took the dagger from his throat and sliced through the rope above the knot. I picked him up and threw him forcefully into the rock filled coffin. I finally cut the strap from his wrist. As tears streamed from his eyes, I tacked the coffin lid closed. Taking my seat on the buckboard I drove to the undertaker's barn and pulled into the shadows where my mount waited. I pounded on the coffin, mounted my steed and rode toward the river.

I am sitting on the rock speaking face to face with the ghosts residing in the barrel of the gunfighter's revolver. They are explaining to me about blood and honor. I have sold my honor for knowledge. I am told by these ghosts that my only hope to reconnect with my sister is to mix our blood on this rock where she died. Just as these apparitions are about to assist me with this magical union, I hear a rustling in the brush. I look up to see my nemesis, Earl Knox, holding a leather pouch. I holster the haunted weapon and take the bag.

"You should have pulled the trigger," Earl Knox taunts. "You can never return to your home. You are now as much of an outlaw as I am."

"I should have let you hang. We would both be free."

"I am as free as a bird. Only your honor binds you in shame."

I pull the pistol from my holster. The first shot finds his groin, doubling him over.

"Your promise!" he screams.

"My promise was fulfilled when you survived the noose!" I exclaim. I pull the white kerchief from my shirt to place under my nose, inhaling the last faint hint of my sister, Rose. Upon realization, Earl Knox attempts to lunge at me. The second shot finds his chest, knocking him off his feet and into the river. Although the third shot misses, the fourth removes his flawless face from the front of his head. As Earl Knox joins the silver coins, I use the pearl handled dagger to carve another notch into the revolver. The ghosts are silenced. I holster the weapon, mount my horse and begin the journey to St. Louis.

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