"Set 'em up for the house."

Jed Fowler swaggered into Jarvie's Saloon and General Store trailed by three of his men, the ones who made it back from the Greeley debacle. Jed Fowler, bane of lawmen, bankers and stage lines in three states.

An uninformed horseman on the trail from Craig, Colorado to Fort Du Chesne on the banks of the Uintah who paused for a beer and the sound of human voices would know before the door banged shut behind him that he had entered a different world, a world of men more familiar with the aroma of burning cordite than the fragrance of dripping sweat. Perhaps he would guzzle his beer in three gulps and be back in the saddle before drawing unwelcome attention. But for a man like Dave Mitchell, the denizens of Jarvie's exuded the strength of will, if not of character, he had sought to emulate when he spurned the life of a sweat-and-dirt cowhand at the end of the long trail drive from Texas to Arizona, the hardest work the fifteen-year-old boy pretending to manhood had ever done, the travail he had condemned himself to when he had naively traded his father's never-ending list of farm chores for the false lure of Devil-may-care freedom cowhands exuded, only to find that sweat had followed him, the discovery that had propelled him into a life where a man knew no boss.

Since then, his only sustained physical labor had been the muscle-building rhythm of swinging the pick-axe on the Yuma rock pile, five years that took him out of the stage business, five years that had totally failed if its purpose was to make him "penitent," but it did make him hard; it built a nineteen-year-old youth far short of his manly bulk into a hard-muscled, self-assured twenty-four-year-old man ready to make his way in the world, a man determined to yield to the claims of no one. It had led him to Jarvie's Store.

Since 1880, John Jarvie had served the basic needs of Brown's Park settlers with wares ranging from dry goods to work clothes to hardware of all kind, the kind a farmer might need, the kind a man taking respite from his working life with banks and stagecoaches might need. The store building was crowded, a small round table where five men could huddle over poker, a small side table, and shelves and counter space crammed with anything Jarvie could sell to a profit. What Jarvie's store didn't stock required a trip to Vernal, forty miles there and forty miles back. So John Jarvie's store became the social center of the community of the settlers, the ranch hands and the "visitors," men like Jed Fowler who paid premium rates to drink their whiskey where lawmen seldom visited.

Located just south of the Wyoming-Colorado state line and stretching into Utah, with the Cold Spring Mountains to the north and the Diamond Mountains to the South, the long six-mile-wide valley had a mixture of canyons and caves that provided ideal secluded campsites for men on the dodge as well as pockets with natural boundaries for small ranchers seeking advantage from the good grass and reliable water and who welcomed its remoteness from brand-checking range detectives. Men could rest secure from pursuit, enjoy the fruits of their industry, and scout for like-minded men to partner with in upcoming venture, a place where enterprising men of a certain line of work could spend their money and drink their whiskey without unwanted attention from predators stinking themselves up with a hunk of metal on their chest. Should the need arise, from Brown's Park, a fast horse could outdistance the jurisdiction of any interfering posse that ventured the seventy-five miles from the county seat at Craig, reaching the remoteness of Northern Utah or Western Wyoming where the writ of a Colorado posse held no sway. Jarvie's customers were Mitchell's kind of men; Brown's Park was his kind of place. So he had told himself the day the iron gates clanged shut behind him and he'd smelled free air for the first time in five years.

Three weeks had passed since Mitchell left the heat of Arizona, following back trails where he could, traveling through Raton Pass at night, avoiding Denver, where the lawmen kept track of out-of-state dodgers, especially those from Wells Fargo, crossing the Rockies, descending into Leadville, and finally finding his way to a place where a man could relax, not relax his guard, no man in a certain line of work ever did that, but at least drink his whiskey without worrying that the man at the next table was a lawman. Most important, Brown's Park was a place where he hoped to find someone he could do business with. He'd hoped to find Jed Fowler.

Now Fowler had returned. The question remained whether Mitchell could maneuver his way into Fowler's next operation.

Mitchell accepted the whiskey and raised the glass toward Fowler across the room. "Obliged," he said.

Mitchell's first days at John Jarvie's Saloon had been solitary, drinking beer at the side table, his back to the wall, watching the comings and goings with suspicion, but that did not set him apart in an establishment that caters to a certain type of man. He was clad in typical long-rider range garb, flannel shirt softened to shapelessness by endless washing, the faint outlines of the bloodstains from Wilcox discernible only on close scrutiny, the shirt tucked into saddle-worn whipcord pants, the yellow duster rolled up behind his saddle. The dressing, still tightly wrapped around chest and shoulder from the Willcox fracas, stayed hidden as long as he kept his shirt buttoned. Mitchell tried not to let the stiffness show. A man on the dodge needed to hide his weakness, though any sharp-eyed watcher who looked for such things would notice the slight bulge over the shoulder, the tendency to favor his left arm. To the men who needed to know, the wound it bespoke, and Mitchell's efforts to conceal it, could serve as a job reference.

Mitchell made himself predictable, arriving every afternoon, bending his elbow a few hours, then riding back to his campsite three miles away, located two miles off the road in a stand of scrub pine up an untraveled side canyon. For those whose job in Brown's Park included eyeballing strangers, he showed himself a wary man, a man concerned about his safety, a man on the dodge.

By the third day, he started putting names to some of the regulars. Occasionally he would lift a finger from the table in acknowledgment if one looked his direction. In the second week, the day Mitchell had waited for came, a day when the poker crowd dropped to three. He took his beer over. "Private game? Or open to travelers?"

"Fresh money's always welcome."

Mitchell played a cautious game, careful to leave some of his money behind, not a lot, but enough to assure his continuing welcome. "Dave," he told them to call him, a careful man who saw no reason to spread around a last name that might be true and might not, and no one cared to ask. By the time Fowler returned, Dave was accepted by the regulars; not trusted, no one in Brown's Park trusted another man, but accepted to sit with and to bend an elbow with.

None of them talked much about his life. "Done most of my work in Arizona," Mitchell confided once when he had been drinking more whiskey than was wise. "I can deal with the heat if I have to, but I figured maybe I'd try Colorado."

"Going back in winter?" The comment only seemed like idle conversation.

"Not that kind of heat," Mitchell replied.

Fowler's gang had been back two weeks. Fowler accepted him as one of the Brown's Park hard cases, a second-rater, a kid of course, but someone who could fill a saddle when a stage needed stopping. They'd slapped cards at each other over poker once or twice, and Mitchell knew they were playing at more than cards. "Badge stink" smells up a man and earns him a hot bean behind the ear. Mitchell also knew better than to show much interest in Fowler, that was not the way to play a big, savvy barracuda you wanted on your line. "Never let your fish suspect how eager you for his nibble," his Pa had taught him. Play too forward and the fish would get suspicious and snap the line. No one would notice if a no-account twenty-five-year old ex-con on the dodge went missing and for a man like Fowler the question "should we take the chance?" had only one answer.

One afternoon, the weather being tolerable, Mitchell took his beer outside and planted himself on a bench on the shady side, a pleasant enough place to wet his tonsils and listen to the Green River flowingat summer speed. And a place for friendly conversation of a private sort if anyone had an interest.

In five minutes, a fish swum by, young Jimmy Tanner, one of Fowler's men not yet ground to reticence by experience, just a small minnow, but sent out to do a job, Mitchell suspected. "He clean you out at poker?"

"Thought I'd take me my ease in the fresh air. You mind if I share the bench?"

With a gesture, Mitchell invited Tanner to set. Not much was said, not at first. Mitchell knew he was being sniffed, gently, hardly noticeably, but it was there. To show he knew the game, he sniffed a bit back. He told a little about himself, little enough so Tanner knew he was holding back. The word "Yuma" escaped his lips once, but Mitchell moved on quickly, as though hoping the slip was not noticed. No such luck. The next day Fowler's Segundo, Grady Hughes, slid into the chair across the table. "Done my time in Yuma," he said. "That spindle-chested bastard Williams still honchoing the cesspit in your day?"

It was a test, of course. Anyone who ever had been braced before the Warden's desk knew Saxton had bossed the hellhole for years. "Man who gave me my days in the Hole could have planked any of the guards with one fist," Mitchell said. "Maybe you was somewhere else."

Hughes grinned at Mitchell's turning the test back on him. "Yeah, you were there all right. Your beefy arms show your time swinging the pick."

"Always been a Wells Fargo man," Mitchell told him. "When I started working my trade again after I got out, they took it personal and put out paper. I don't need ever to go back."

Hughes said little, but Mitchell continued to be welcome at the Fowler gang's poker table and the sniffing went on.

Then one day Mitchell confided in Tanner. "I got to get back to work," he said, "my money belt's getting hungry. I only know Arizona. I need someone in the business who knows his way around Colorado."

"Or Wyoming."

"Wyoming?" Mitchell gave that some thought. "They got more up there than Custer's angry Sioux wanting a man's hair?" He hadn't made an offer, not anything to put a man on the spot, but he'd made his cast and his fly was floating in the water, waiting for a prime barracuda to give it a nibble.

As twilight fell, Mitchell turned aside from the main trail, into the narrow pine-covered draw in the Cold Springs Mountains and up the trace to his campsite, secluded from unwanted visitors, as befits a man on the dodge. No random traveler would stumble across his campsite, only someone on business, friendly or unfriendly.

His mare gave one flick of the ears as they followed the narrow animal trace, sniffing animal; no nervousness, though, not a cougar then, just another horse. And a horse meant a man who had ridden the horse.

The clearing was as empty as he had left it, but eyes could be—were—watching from the trees. He was most vulnerable when he swung his leg back over his horse's rump, but he expected no trouble, even if the visitor was not who he expected. Mitchell down-saddled normally, letting the hidden eyes see only the actions of a man with nothing to hide. Horse care always comes before man care. Only after he had removed all tack, picketed the horse and curried it gently did he let himself think again about the watching man.

Mitchell dumped his saddle, his nightly pillow, in his tent. Then he let himself stretch out his back muscles, twisting side to side, relaxed and giving no sign he knew he had company. It had been fifteen minutes. His back trail remained empty; no one had tracked him. They were alone. He started working the buttons of his fly as he casually stepped toward the woods, a man about normal business.

He had been expecting a visitor, but the stakes were too high to risk a mistake. He waited until he was inside the protective cover of the tree line.

"Show yourself."

In a moment, he and the visitor faced each other, As his hand closed firmly around Collins', that one handshake with the man who saw life as bigger than a predatory competition surged a glow of masculine assurance through Mitchell, the days among the slime of Brown's Park almost wiped out by the knowledge he had somehow gained Chet Collins' respect.

"Fowler's back," Mitchell reported once they had the campfire going, the water boiling and the Arbuckle's measured out. "Three men with him. Thought he had more."

"He lost two at Greeley. One of them had half the take in his saddlebags. It could work out well."

"He'll need to ride out again soon," Mitchell concluded.

"And he'll want another man or two in his crew."

Mitchell said nothing. Riding with slime, that was his job, the tribute he paid to Wells Fargo for ignoring the Tombstone robbery and the sentence back to Yuma it had earned him. A man pays his debts.

Tombstone, three months back and a lifetime away, the event that changed his life—no, what changed his life had been the day before the robbery, the encounter with a man who stood tall, facing death without a whimper, the man who exposed Mitchell's fellow robbers as weak, venal men, however willing they were to take and to kill, men like himself, like he had been learning to become.

He'd been given a second chance at life, a second start down the trail. Had he earned it? Or was it an inexplicable gift? Crandall, the Wells Fargo "suit" from San Francisco, thought he had been working with them all along, setting up to bring down Runnels. The man who would have died—Chet Collins—would say he proved what he carried inside himself, but Mitchell knew better. He had acted impulsively, without thought, stupidly perhaps, had gone ahead with the robbery and planned to take his full share. But here he was, drinking coffee in a camp with a man who carried a badge and feeling cleaner than he could remember in all his life.

The afternoon carried the smell of expected rain in the air as Mitchell downsaddled and turned his grulla into Jarvie's corral. "How 'bout a dash of oats, 'Pache?" he inquired as he measured a scoop into the feed bag for Apache, the best animal for miles around. Sure better than the two-legged ones inside.

As he started down the path to Jarvis's, Hughes waited for him.

"Word is your money belt's getting thin."

"I been thinking about finding a bank I could visit," Mitchell acknowledged. "I know Arizona. But I don't know Colorado."

"Jed's scout just reported in. Looks like we got some good work lined up. Jed says you can come with us if you want."

"I'm in. Where to? There was talk of Wyoming."

Hughes flashed him a sharp look. "Jed don't tell us what we don't need to know. You still in?"

"All I need to know is Jed's leading and you're along." The two men shook on it and Mitchell followed Hughes into Jarvie's.

"Got a friend of yours, Mitchell," Fowler called from his table.

The bearded face barely concealed the scowl of a man who had never been a friend of Mitchell, an ugly face he had last seen at Parson's Den, the Chiracagua outlaw hole where he had hidden out for a spell and made the link-up with the Runnels gang before the Tombstone robbery, a den much like Jarvie's where he had tried to belong, back before he met Chet Collins. "McCullough," he acknowledged. "Long way from Arizona."

"Me and Mac have worked before," Fowler said. "Good man to scout a job."

McCullough was studying Mitchell, making no attempt to conceal his hostility. "Always thought there was something that smelled about the Tombstone job. Someone busted you out and left Forsyth and Loney to sweat their time in Yuma.

"Prove yourself true, and you get some friends, McCullough. Try it sometime."

"It stinks. I'm telling Jed there's one way to be sure of you."

"You want to sell my hide to Wells Fargo?" Mitchell shifted so his weight was evenly balanced, his gun arm hanging free. All his work building himself up before Fowler was on the line. In his arrogance, Fowler respected guts more than anything else. Back down before McCullough and he might as well swallow his own gun barrel and make it easy for the outlaw leader. "Let's see how much hair you got on that scrawny chest of yours."

But McCullough was still the same sneak he had been in Arizona. He spread his hands on the table and opened his mouth, probably to wheedle.

Fowler saved McCullough from speaking. Mitchell could see him pocket the two men's barely-concealed animosity for some future use. Fowler liked it when each man was loyal to him, not to each other.

"Can your personal stuff until we get back. Mac's finished his scout for me. You want in, Mitchell, be saddled and out front at first light."

The chatter of the Army guns behind them, they pounded leather deep into the night, Fowler and the three other men who had made it out. They rode past Jarvie's without a pause, crossed the state line into Colorado but finally Fowler signaled a halt. "State lines don't matter to the Cavalry, but the horses need a breather," he said. "Jimmy, start us a fire for some Arbuckle's."

The horses were picketed, the cinches loosened, and each man tossed an airtight into the small fire Tanner soon had smoldering.

The Army payroll had been as lightly guarded as McCullough had reported. The flankers had unavoidably closed in on the wagon as it entered the canyon, bunching up to make a good target, the dynamite had brought down an avalanche of boulders to block the road and the first volley stretched one trooper out on the ground and left another grasping his saddle for balance. The remaining eight hands grabbed for sky before echoes had stopped.

While the gold was being transferred, Mitchell took it on himself to check the downed man "You there, Private," he summoned one of the prisoners, "pressure bandage this wound." He saw Fowler watching. "He makes it and we don't have Army ropes waiting for us," Mitchell explained.

"They'd have to catch us first." Fowler turned back to watch Hughes supervise dividing the gold among the saddlebags.

The transferring was nearly finished, Mitchell and Fowler mounted and ready to leave when a distant bugle blared "Charge" and the back-up detachment thundered over the rise two hundred yards down the road. Mitchell did his job and spurred in behind Fowler, heard Tanner and McCullough galloping behind him. The others? No one needed to ask what army men thought of folks who tried for their payroll. They rode hard, while the gunshots behind them dwindled and finally came to an end.

Across the cook fire, McCullough's arm hung slack as he tied his kerchief around the wound. Fowler looked at him. "Supposed to be an escort of six men," Fowler said with a mildness of voice unexpected from an outlaw leader who had just seen three of his men shot down. "No one told me nothing about a back-up squad."

"Last three times that's what it had, Jed, I swear. The Sergeant I paid off told me everything was the same. I done my best."

"You're not paid to do your best. You're paid to get it right." Fowler looked to Mitchell. "You got unfinished business with him. Go ahead."

Mitchell stepped around the fire across from Fowler and Tanner and faced McCullough, his gun arm hanging loose and ready. "My wrists broke, Mitchell," McCullough cried. "I can't draw against you."

"You don't have to draw to die," Fowler reminded him.

"Please, Mitchell," McCullough appealed. "I'll tell everyone I was wrong. I got a trashy mouth, but I ain't got nothing against you. Tell me what I need to do to make it right. Anything."

The sniveling disgraced any man who rode with a tough kill-prone crowd. Disgraced the leader as well. But that wasn't Mitchell's concern. "You're not worth my time, Mac." He looked at Fowler. "You got the big beef with him. I'm not getting paid to stomp your snakes."

"Jed, please—"

Fowler's smooth draw delivered three shots from ten feet away. Fowler reholstered.

"Now is a good time to unhitch Jed. You too, Jimmy." This time, Mitchell's hand was filled with businesslike iron.

"What's the idea, Mitchell?"

"I signed on because my money belt needed fattening. It still does. You screwed up so I can't get my money the clean way. Now I'll do it the dirty way."

"Mac was right about you."

"Not all the way, but he wasn't all wrong either. I'm not much into killing, but your bounty's the same either way. Defang yourself or fall down."

Tanner was already fumbling with his buckle. "I'm not worth nothing dead Mitchell," he said as his gun belt fell away.

"Jed, you're out of time." Mitchell thumb-cocked. Fowler unbuckled.

Three hours later, Mitchell trailed his two prisoners as they rode west. In the early light, he saw several dark-skinned riders coming toward them. "Hold up," he ordered his prisoners.

"Them's Buffalo Soldiers, Mitchell," Fowler said. "Looks like you go down with us."

The detail approached abreast, professionally alert, carbines at the ready. The corporal in charge halted twenty feet in front of the three men. "Make a run for it," he invited. "We'd like that."

Mitchell eased his gun into its holster. At least there'd be no shooting by mistake. "I'm claiming the bounties on these two, Corporal."

A man moved out from behind the soldiers. "Wells Fargo has rewards offered on each of them," Collins said. "You take in your prisoners, Corporal Washington; I'll take charge of getting this man his pay."

As the Army detail started leading their prisoners away, Fowler twisted in his saddle. "I'll kill you, Mitchell. No matter how long I'm in Leavenworth, I'll find you and I'll kill you slow."

"Forgetting McCullough are you, Jed? You threw down on a disabled man. You're going to hang."

Mitchell and Collins watched the soldiers ride out.

"When you didn't give me the "all normal" signal with your campfire, I got into my overlook over Jarvie's and watched Fowler and the rest of you ride west. It's the time of the month for Army pay, so I suggested they increase the guard."

So the job was over, it had gone smooth. The Fowler gang would trouble Wells Fargo no more. Mitchell knew he should feel the satisfaction of a job well done, of Collins' approval. But his gut churned.

"Working undercover's a dirty job," he muttered. "Fowler's getting what he needs. But I shared drinks with Jimmy and the others. They're no different than me."

"They are, Dave. You think about it, you'll know." Collins flicked his reins. "There's a friendly little saloon down in Vernal where we can talk it over while I write our report."