The Gun Man Jackson Swagger: A Western
Author: Stephen Hunter
Date: 2025-10-14 00:00:00+00:00
Description: Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Hunter, "a true master at the pinnacle of his craft" (Jack Carr), returns with a classic Western—gunfights, horses, saloons, and looming above, the ominous presence of the railroad—about a Civil War veteran investigating the dark reality of a prosperous ranch. In the frying pan of a drought-scorched 1890s Southwest, an old man shows up at the region's only prosperous spread, the Callahan ranch, seeking work. Jack is flinty, shrewd, tough, and a natural with a gun. As an incentive to be taken on at his age, he shows the foreman an uncanny skill with one of Mr. Winc
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

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FOR THE OLD GODS:

John Wayne

John Ford

Jimmy Stewart

Gary Cooper

Sam Peckinpah

William Holden

John Wayne

Lyle and Tector Gorch

Sergio Leone

Clint Eastwood

Richard Boone

James Arness

Jock Mahoney
and John Wayne

NOTE: “Gunfighter” is a word of recent coinage. A survey of Western newspapers in the late 1800s shows that a man notorious for his skill with handguns and his willingness to use them was called, variously, a “shootist,” a “man-killer,” an “assassin,” or a “gun man.”

—ADAPTED FROM THE SHOOTIST BY GLENDON SWARTHOUT

Yeehaw!

—ANONYMOUS

CHAPTER ONE

The sun was a blowtorch, scorching the Arizona Territory crisp. Sagebrush, some living, some dead, bounced indifferently about the raw landscape. While most of America prospered in the wonderful year of 1897, here vegetation had turned brittle while the once abundant and variegated cacti had retreated within themselves, their spindly arms forming structures more appropriate to crucifixion than blossom. Every hillock was its own Golgotha. The wind was contaminated by the vast amounts of grit and other matter it hurled about, so that a man’s face went raw in the pelting. Hardly any water lay free, and access to what little remained was strictly controlled by men with shotguns. The mountains seemed like scar tissue on an immense scale, the rivers trickles, the watering holes puddles of mud and shit. Animals died in the thousands, mostly of the big dry. Bones, bleached white by the blaze, littered the land. Wolves, coyotes, and big cats, who fed on the smaller creatures in normal times, were out of business, having moved on or simply perished along with their prey.

As for folks, most of them just hung on, hoping for rain, not believing that it would ever arrive again. They dreamed of water and cursed their god for withholding it. They breathed dust, grew sluggish with despair, and turned on one another.

In this miasma of despond, only two areas of prosperity remained. The first was the railway town, called Railhead No. 4, the fourth on the way west to California. It was sustained by Eastern money, not cattle, bearing the name Arizona Southern and being a subsidiary of the great Union Pacific. It was laid out straight to run from Nogales to Yuma, hence cutting a day off the detour up through Tucson. It was largely populated by single men of singular immaturity, and was rich in vice. A whorehouse was a good business, while a hardware store was not.

Second was the Callahan Ranch, the Crazy R, which alone among the big spreads had not dissolved under the pressures of the drought. Though its surviving cattle were as bony as anybody’s and its water holes as dismal, Colonel Callahan was able to keep a full complement of gun men on salary. Having more money than anybody, these boys tended to dominate all encounters that came their way. All wore Mr. Sam’s Peacemaker in Mexican holsters. All were said to be proficient.

Naturally rumor arose, suggesting that the colonel’s sources of income might not be all legitimate. Some said that his secret business was railroad security and labor discipline, some said he owned interests in the string of brothels in Railhead No. 4. Some even said—though not to him—that the Dark Riders, a legion of enforcers and revengers unseen by day, were headquartered at the Crazy R.

There was another feature, of course. As the big spreads closed or hunkered in, they had to release their cowboys. Saddle tramps became normal, as singly or in clumps, formerly affiliated cowhands roamed the roads, looking for a place to land. Some turned to crime. Others abandoned the cowboy life and retreated toward the growing cities of the West Coast, and left their horses, guns, and memories bitterly behind. Others tried a variety of ploys to get themselves hired, but for the rare opening a hundred men were available. It got to be a problem, so that the wanderers were not welcome at the few places that might sooner or later have jobs.

It so happened that one day in May, hotter than the axles on hell’s chariot, a solitary pilgrim on a nag more dead than alive and skinnier than a museum dinosaur, picked his way toward the Callahan spread. He paused to see a hacienda of ample proportion flanked by outbuildings of two bunkhouses, a barn, a cookhouse, a warehouse, and other signs of freshly painted viability. It stood on a plateau of a gentle hill.

You would notice the central fact of this fellow’s existence immediately: he was old. The face, baked by a thousand years on the prairie, was nut-brown, though the shade did nothing to disguise the net of fissures and gullies that ensnared it—that which could be seen or inferred under a density of dappled white-gray beard—into an imitation of a hide drying into a shield a young Apache might admire. The mouth was a dash among the swirls, and hair hung down from his hat, which was not your ten-gallon Westerner’s headpiece, but more citified, of a kind called fedora that had lately been showing up on the plains and desert. Since the geezer could not have afforded such a thing, it was logical to assume it had been won in poker or taken at gunpoint. Or perhaps scavenged at the site of a mysterious massacre.

His fingers were long, but as for his body, though it appeared to be long as well, that information was hidden under a rawhide duster that was so much a part of the cowboy outfit it did not come off even in scalding weather. The eyes were hard, and crafty, the boots well beaten, on their fifth or sixth pair of heels and soles. He didn’t look like he’d say much or explain much. Perhaps he wore guns under the duster, but the garment didn’t reveal them by shape; he had a scabbard under his saddle, but no Winchester in it. Rather it held the tarnished brass hilt of a cavalry saber, presumably atop a blade that had drawn blood. The rope on his horn looked loose and well used, perhaps older even than the man himself.

He rode to the hacienda and waited, still on horseback. Though other cowboys lounged about the place, none paid attention to him. Why would they? He was an old man in a dry time, without a future or a past. He was negligible. He was a nuisance.

In time a fellow—no cowboy, more of a former cowboy type, given now to office work for the cattle operation and logistics—came onto the porch of the hacienda, and gave him a once-over.

“Who might you be?”

“Name’s Jack. Looking for work. Heard you might be taking on.”

“Ain’t you a bit elderly, Jack? The work here is killing hard, sometimes hard killing. Apache off the reservation, rustlers, folks come with guns to take water that ain’t theirs. The lead flies. You’d be more comfortable in a rocker, on a porch, sipping lemonade, waiting to pass quietly without pain.”

“Probably so. But who would pay for such ease?”

“I see. Rootless, then?”

“Had a good life working for various outfits. Last place, up in Colorado, the bank took over. About thirty of us were released. We scattered. I had saved up a little, lived on that for a time. Yep, lots of lemonade, usually with whiskey. But the money ran out and the lemonade and whiskey followed. So here I am.”

“It’s true we’re looking. But these jobs are good, and the colonel only takes the best man, Jack. Hard to see how you qualify as a best man.”

“Sir, I learned the horse with the Arkansas cavalry in the big war thirty years back. I had four years of battle and sleeping on bare ground. I’ve got the bullet holes and the pieces of tin to prove it. I stayed with the horse as my two war mounts were the noblest creatures I ever knew. Never saw a man to match them. Cowboyed here, there, everywhere, sometimes going all the way to guns. All these years later, I can still stay in the saddle sixteen hours a day, live on beans and coffee, sleep in the brush, and do it again the next day and the next. I can rope and shoot and brand, I can ride fence, I can track. I’ve been around the Apache and the Northern Cheyenne, don’t lose my head if I see a batch of either on the approach. When bullets fly, I am calm, as I am when the bear charges. I have all the cowboy skills, at the highest. I’ll prove it if you let me.”

“Yet I see no guns.”

“Pawned. Maybe pick them up later when I get a job, though the pawn usury is so high it might be better to start anew.”

“Pawnbrokers and whore-runners are the only ones making money today. You sure you’re not just here for a handout? We get a lot of that. Unattached cowhands roll in, beg for work, claiming they’re the best. But they’re really cadging for a free meal and a quarter or so for a whiskey the next town they go. That wouldn’t be you, would it, Jack?”

“No, sir.”

“The colonel doesn’t like that. He likes honesty and loyalty. His army ways. He was in the big war too, though not your side. I wouldn’t go bragging on how many Unions the Arkansas Cavalry in general and you in specific sent to glory.”

“I got no brag in me.”

“Then I guess everything you say is true. But still, I’m not seeing anything special. You must be special good at something, and some things—”

“I have a gift for the rifle.”

“Every man I ever met claims to be a good shot.”

“I can show off a little.”

The man considered him, looked him over three times and then a fourth.

“Don’t know why I’m favoring an ancient string bean so, but as it turns out we could use a good rifleman.”

“As I say, I don’t brag. Just let the Winchester do my yapping.”

It took a while. A long while. As he waited on the porch, he watched the life of the spread play out. At a certain moment near twilight, a herd of cowboys rode in. They were rangy, young, and looked like knights of a sort, and carried themselves as such. They had confidence, being good at their jobs, and that was expressed in bravado form, whoops and yelps. “Buckaroo” seemed to be the word for such youngsters. They were too in love with themselves, the fun they had each day, the whooping and hollering, to notice the heaviness of the work, or its occasional danger. They wore tall, giant hats and their legs were encased in the flappity-flap of leather chaps to prevent the horseflesh from chafing the boy flesh.

Nothing’s dangerous if you’re that young, even a war. Jack remembered himself thirty years or so earlier and thought that he could fit in easily enough with this tribe. They hadn’t been in battle, true battle, and did not know what artillery and massed musket fire or a few Gatlings could do to men such as them. Perhaps they’d remain so innocent.

But there was another group, not so merry, not so wild. These were men of a smaller bunkhouse off to the left, who kept to themselves. In fact, that building was encircled in range wire, to dissuade visitation. A narrow gate led in and out. These fellows enjoyed their privacy and, like most of a private nature, valued it highly enough to defend it by any means possible. You wouldn’t want to annoy them, and they’d have a code of behavior more stringent than most and would probably ride any new arrival hard, no matter the age, to make certain he was up to their standards. It went with that kind of man, and Jack had spent enough time as one in his life to know their byways and predispositions. You got off on the right foot with them or you never made it up. First impressions were the only impression among that sort, he knew as a fact.

It didn’t surprise him to feel that eyes from that building were on him hard, even if no evidence of it was available. But it seemed in accord with what he’d heard of Callahan, that some of the place’s agents were known to move by dark and behave in ways nobody cared much to talk about or acknowledge. Most powerful men had a corps of serious men about, and that went from the president of the United States on down the whole ladder to the president of the school board. Some worked off strength, some worked off firearms, some worked off persuasion by fist or club. But no matter, they took themselves seriously and their place in the world was hard-earned.

Then a man detached himself from the place and headed toward Jack. He was tall and thin, his pants tight, his boots bright, his hat low over his eyes, and a mustache like a bat’s wings occluding his mouth. He looked like he didn’t laugh or talk much, but if he spoke folks would always listen, whether it was instructions or corrections. As for the laughter, it never would come, unless drunkenness was involved.

He wore no chaps. Instead he was gunned up too, the Colt 4¾-inch Peacemaker model in basket-weave leather cut and bent by a skilled Mexican, otherwise lacking in ornamentation. The gun, Jack knew, was of a sort meant for fast, close shooting. You’d use it in a fight, maneuvering quickly, and the caliber would be big enough to put most fellows down on the first shot.

Jack saw how useful to the bearer the pistol was, as expressed in its shiny beauty, meaning probably that it was cleaned hard by him, as if to bid fair warning to the world of who and what he was. The stocks were still the New Haven black rubber, the mottled purple and smeared yellow of the case hardening on the frame still vivid. The hammer had been snicked back a notch, which made it easier to cock and thus faster, so that he was always ready to go to work with it. In the same fashion, his hand never strayed far from it.

He approached. Eyes dark, narrow. No smile under the mustache, no softness or welcome or sense of etiquette. It may have been Victorian times all about, rich in ceremony, fashion, and decoration, but where this fellow was, it would always be all business, straight to point or holster, whichever was called for. He was the timeless warrior.

“You claim to be some sort of special shooter. Why ain’t you with Annie Oakley in her Wild West show?”

“Way past women. Wouldn’t know what to say to Miss Annie. Just looking for a spot where I can be of value in the years I have left.”

“How old?”

“Middle fifties. Born in 1842.”

“No rifle?”

“Had to pawn it. Needed to eat. But I can shoot most as well as my own, with fair ammo and sights lined up straight.”

“Well, lookie here,” said the man. “Here’s Mr. Boseman with a rifle.”

Mr. Boseman—so the first fellow seemed to be called—stood there, a well-cared-for Winchester of the 1892 model in hand.

“My own,” he said. “I don’t shoot it so much anymore, so it’s clean. Here’s three cartridges.”

Jack took them, .38-40s. He felt the density to the stubby lead projectile outweighing the bottleneck case and the powder that gave it its fuel, feeling the familiarity of something long a part of his life.

“Crank ’em out yourself or buy fresh from the New Haven boys?”

“New Haven. Bought ’em with the rifle. We do have a fellow who comes out and reloads shells for us once a week, but I haven’t used my store-bought up yet. Anyway, make a difference to you?”

“If you or this town fellow put ’em together, no telling how they might fly, what speed, what drop over distance. If they’re from New Haven, I’d guess they fall four feet the first fifty yards, six the next, and eight the third. I got a better chance of hitting knowing that.”

He manipulated the shells adroitly, proving only that he could manipulate them adroitly. Turning the firearm to its side, he inserted them, one after the other, into the receiver loading gate, feeling them fight the magazine spring as they were driven into the tube under the barrel. He tested the rifle against his shoulder a bit, dropped it, raised it. Then he said, “Tell me what needs a hole.”

The dark man said, “See the smaller bunkhouse? For some damned reason it’s got a useless weathervane atop—”

Jack threw and clamped the lever, feeling the mechanics of the gun pick up the first cartridge and lift it to the chamber, even as they tilted and locked the hammer with a satisfyingly metal-on-metal click, then drove the package into place as the lever was closed. In the same motion he put rifle to shoulder, cheek to stock, eye to front sight, held six inches high, and pressed the trigger, which obediently released the hammer against the cartridge’s primer, detonating it and sending the whole thing into a well-regulated sequence of events.

The noise was sharp, the burn of the black powder was instant and copious, and even against the brightness of the day a flash registered, and a hundred yards away, the tin rooster bent spastically under the impact of the 180-grain bullet, while clanging loudly.

“That one?” asked Jack.

“You only wounded him,” said the dark man. “Maybe luck had a part to play and—”

But before he finished, Jack repeated the ceremony of the rifle and fired a second time, and this time the rooster vibrated with the same clang and gave up the ghost, skittering down the roof over rough shingles to the ground.

Four or five gun men, in various states of undress but all armed, poured from the building.

“Sorry to disturb you fellas,” Jack called. “Just a little rooster pecking.”

Silence clotted the air for a bit. Then the dark man said, “Mr. Boseman, can you get us a few pieces of fruit or a gourd from the kitchen? This fellow shoots well at something standing still, let’s see how he does when the target is moving.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Boseman. He left and seemed gone but seconds before returning. He had two melons with him, of the sort called cantaloupe. And two more of his treasured New Haven cartridges.

Jack reloaded smartly.

“All set, old-timer?” asked the dark man, the melons in hand. Jack levered the rifle again.

“Why not?” he said.

The boss lofted one cantaloupe, then the other, into the air. Jack didn’t bother to shoulder the arm. Locking it under his elbow, he calculated on intuition both speed and deflection, fired, levered, and fired. In both cases, the fruit exploded, flinging gobbets of melon about the universe.

Silence again.

“I have a cartridge left,” said Jack. “Anything else need a bullet?”

“Maybe Joe Pye?” said Mr. Boseman. “Make a lot of folks happy.”

The dark fellow said, “My name’s Voth, first name is Tom but you’ll never call me that unless you marry my sister and she died seven years ago.”

“As you insist, Mr. Voth. I go by Jack.”

“Forget the mister. Voth is enough. Only Jack?”

“For now.”

“Paper on you by full name? Bounty men on your tail?”

“Truth is, I don’t know. Sometimes if you get in a fracas, it depends on who wins whether they put out a poster or write a dime novel.”

“Seen that too. Are you fixing to join the gun men?”

“If that’s your colonel’s decision. I didn’t specify your group as opposed to the younger, louder boys in the big bunkhouse. It wouldn’t be polite. I just need a job.”

“Southern? Your voice seems to indicate it.”

“My people are from Arkansas. Served in the cavalry. But I left after the war. Couldn’t settle down, it seemed. Needed stars above and clear territory ahead.”

“The colonel will like that, being himself military.”

“He will find me well versed in army ways, even if it was a different army.”

“That was very fine shooting.”

“It seems to run in the family. Nobody knows why.”

“You impress. I like the calm. I like the lean, so no need for much beyond trail food. I like the softness of voice, the direct stare; I like the big hands, good with pistols, I’d bet. But do I like you? Hard to say yet.”

“I understand.”

“Let me tell you something. This frontier is ragged everywhere except in my bunkhouse. It’s tight-run, obedient, and capable. No time for learning, no time for amateurs or clowns. You do what’s required and do it well. You back up the men on each side of you and I mean to the death, if need be. We do get in scrapes and men die, that’s the fact.”

“I have thought that part through,” said Jack, “and am easy with it.”

“Well, if he sends you our way, let me tell you what to expect. He needs a lot of gun talent because once a month he sends ten wagons south fifty miles to Mexico. It’s rough country the whole way, but getting there’s nothing compared to getting back. He keeps this place running off a deal he’s got with the commandant of a Federale outfit in charge of the state of Sonora.

“This fellow sells the colonel his grain, his foodstuffs, his flour, everything you need to run a spread this size, at a nickel on the dollar, as stolen from the Mexican government. You see it around here, that’s where it comes from. But getting it back, that’s the hard part. Braves who’ve jumped the res and want to be Geronimo, Mexican revolutionaries, Mexican military units on the roam, bandits both Mex and ours, it’s all gold to them because it can keep them operating too. On the way back, it’s rare we don’t get jumped at least once, sometimes two or three times. Men die on both sides. Sometimes we lose a wagon. Tough work. You sign with us, you will get shot at a lot, you will shoot back a lot. If you’ve got the sand to stand up to that, we’ll welcome you. If you run or hide, we’ll kill you. Telling you before just so you know.”

“Been shot at a bit.”

“Your life is equal parts duty, loyalty, and courage. And violence.”

“I can pay that coinage.”

“You understand, when you step through that door, you are mine to use as I see fit, in accordance with the colonel’s larger wishes.”

“I do.”

Voth turned to the administrator, Boseman, and said, “Tell the colonel I want him.”

The colonel: Jack’s own age, but with a whisper of fancy to him. Clearly well raised in a landed family, schooled not only in Latin and Greek but in which spoon, when to stand or sit, how to control body demands to fart or gurgle, which were ladies and which were whores and how to treat each one.

No handshake, no warmth. No sit-down. No drink offered. No hospitality. His hard army eyes bored into Jack, who met the stare easily without back-off, yet did not offer defiance, only connection.

“Jack, is that it? Only Jack?”

“Yes, sir. For now, as much for you as me.”

“So be it. Our outfit has many men of a single name. Now, you claim, sir, the war as heritage and education.”

“I was in it, start to finish, not counting hospital time.”

“How many times hit?”

“Six. One bad one. A .54 ball just over the heart. That boy could shoot a lick. It kept me in hospital for six months. Finally, I pronounced myself fit and rejoined the fellows.”

“The fellows being?”

“Third Arkansas Cavalry, under Earle and then Hobson, part of Joe Wheeler’s Army of Mississippi. Company D, called Danley’s Rangers after the major, and named for him to the end even though he didn’t make it.”

“Too many good men didn’t make it. Think of what we lost and how it will set us back.”

“I do, sir.”

“How many big fights?”

“Seventeen named battles, I believe. Then skirmishes that busted out any time, any place, and nobody bothered to remember or write down and put in the books.”

“Rank?”

“Sergeant major by the end.”

“So you’ve led men under fire.”

“Many a time.”

“After?”

“Was wild for a while. No accounting for why. Care not to remember it much. Killed too many buffalo, too many Indians, mostly Comanche. And Northern Cheyenne, very brave men. Then cattle fights, water fights, land fights, even whiskey fights. It was not a good time.”

The colonel considered.

“Sit down,” he finally said. “I am told you are of high gift as a rifleman. We need that. If we can drop our attackers from afar, we save the up-close pistol work that gets far too many of ours killed. That would be your job. In our army, we called them sharpshooters.”

“In mine too.”

“Then I hated them. You Southerners could shoot a bit too. Now I need them.”

“I hated them too. Now I’ll be one.”

“Strange world, no? Anyhow, I must tell you I run this place different than most places. You may have sensed that. I have cowboys for the cattle, but cowboys aren’t gun men. They work too hard to practice the pistol and I hate to lose a good roper to a fight over a water hole. I have a small group that now seem to be called Dark Riders. Voth runs them. There are men of a certain caliber who take pleasure in seeing their talents for chaos orchestrated and put to practical use. The sort that seemed to end up as sappers in my army. Yours too, I suspect.”

“That is so.”

“I suppose Voth told you most of it. When we move supplies up from Mexico, we are jumped more than once. Fights the whole way back. If you’re who you say you are, it’s nothing new or strange. If not, it’ll eat you up and the boys will see your weakness. They won’t abide it.”

“I understand.”

“All right. Need a drink? I have whiskey of several kinds, British gin, sour mash, what have you. It’s a full bar.”

“Whiskey straight would be my choice.”

The colonel ushered him over near the fireplace, under the dead-eyed watch of a gigantic elk and its crown of thorns, and after pouring led him to a plush chair. He himself sat opposite.

“I must tell you a story,” he said. “Otherwise, you could say you were tricked into my employ. It begins with hope, it ends, alas, with death.”

CHAPTER TWO

It was spring then, but the drought had already staked its claim. The land had not this season acquired the purple of sage, the cacti failed to hide their savagery behind flowers, the hills looked bleak, like an untended cemetery.

Still, most boys that came by were of a sort: rambunctious, cocky, thinking highly of themselves. Some had earned that cockiness, others were just pretending to it, and when Callahan needed cowboys, he trusted the judgment of his head wrangler and foreman, Jacob Brine, who’d been cowboying for fifty years and knew just about everything there was to know about the herd animals and what it took to raise them, protect them, keep the meat on their bones, then drive them four hundred miles to the Dodge City yards for shipment east.

But this boy was different. He had a graveness to him. His eyes were hollow, as were his cheeks, and his disposition was serious. He seemed twenty going on sixty.

“I need the work,” he said, “because I cannot steal to live. I will not hunt. If I do not have work, I die. That’s the problem I face.”

“I wish I could hire you because of your circumstance,” said the colonel. “But this is a business enterprise with a moral imperative to survive collectively. I cannot afford charity. If I hire you, it’s because you’re of a caliber able to do the work at a high level.”

“I believe I am, sir.”

“See, right there, I have doubts. Most boys would say ‘Dad blame right, I can,’ showing me how sure they were of themselves, believing such confidence would weigh on their behalf. You say only you believe you can but leave the possibility that you can’t.”

“I know I’ll work hard as any,” said the boy. “I know I ride as well as any. But there is a part of it about which I am unsure. You see, I’m a schoolteacher, except all the schools are closed as most of the folks have left the territory for more hospitable climes. I’ve never been in a fight, I don’t hunt because I hate to see those beautiful creatures bleed out on the prairie, be devoured and much left for ’yotes and flies. I have no beef against the red man. Rustlers should be turned over to the law, not strung up from a tree. I’d rather read than drink, I’d rather recite poetry than cowboy tunes.”

“What of the cowboy profession, then, is your strength?”

“I talk to animals.”

This was a new one for the colonel. He paused. “Meaning?”

“They’re like the children I taught. You can whip them hot red, and they won’t do what you say. I learned that if you stay calm, show gentleness, don’t yell or carry on, you’ll get more out of them. I can do all those things. In fact, I insist on doing those things. Also: I can be alone. Maybe I prefer to be alone. The bunkhouse seems like it might be too rowdy for me. I can ride the fence, I can go on the search for the runaway, find it, and get it home. If a beast be sunk in mud, I will go in and get it out. I won’t leave it to die mewling as it sinks under. It’s not in me.”

“We lose over a hundred head of cattle to mud and sand on every drive. We lose too many horses every month on supply runs to the south. Sometimes I lose a wagonful of hardtack and bacon because one animal decides to lie down and quit. But you say you don’t get frustrated? They are stupid, stubborn as stones and without a sense of consequence. I’ve seen a cowboy spend an hour to get a calf out of a ditch, only to have it jump back in on release. You have the patience to deal with that kind of situation?”

“I know I do.”

“Can you shoot?”

“No gun man. I can kill for mercy. I don’t live for the gun. I have never killed a man, including Indians, and I hope I never have to.”

“Sure you don’t want to be a preacher, boy?”

“The god I believe in isn’t in a church. He’s everywhere life is.”

In the end, with reservations, the colonel hired him. Into the big bunkhouse he went, where his grave ways, quiet, and reluctance to hurt marked him different until one night he broke Digger McClanahan’s jaw with a single punch, because Digger accused him of loving animals more than men.

As Digger lay on the bunk floor, spitting blood and trying to fit his jaw back into place, the boy said, “Know what, Digger? I do love animals more than men.”

On the range he quickly proved invaluable. Called “Teacher,” he had no quit in him, he did what was required, what was expected, and what was beyond. He was first out, last in. On his watch, no beeves wandered, no predators fed, and in the morning the herd was tight for counting. It seemed the animals loved him too, for he got several calves out of mudholes, he made a running horseback shot on an alpha wolf as it led its crew onto a lagging creature, and he rounded up strays every single night, well after all the other boys had sacked out. He did all this on a few beans, a little coffee, and a couple of pieces of bacon. And one biscuit with jam.

Finally, foreman Brine came to him and said, “Want you to go in early this afternoon. Some of them other boys are going south tomorrow in ten wagons. Their boss Voth wants you along to handle the animals, as it’s rough territory and loss of team is always of concern.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Now, you listen to me, boy. Those men ain’t like us. They’re man killers, shootists, trash with fancy guns. The guns are shiny, the men ain’t. You don’t want to get too close to them. They’ll poison your ways and if you disappoint them or stand against them, they’ll kill you. I think highly of you and the idea of you dead in the dust seems to me a terrible waste of a good man.”

“I’ll watch myself,” said the boy.

And he did too. He understood the dynamic of the situation, found small ways to prove himself early, didn’t bully or brag, yet exactly at the same time, made it clear he was not and could not be of them. In time, as had the younger cowboys, they came to respect him.

They made it to the headquarters town a few dozen miles into Northern Mexico with no real difficulty other than the land’s treacherous and dusty eccentricities, as the teams had no trouble with the empty wagons and from afar all of evil intent could tell from the way the wagons rode that they bore no cargo, and what would be the point of robbing an empty wagon?

Teacher did not like Agua Caliente, finding it a Mexican whore town, rowdy and licentious. It seemed to float on a sea of warm tequila, and the women had unfettered breasts, pendulous and clearly obedient to gravity, under pale blouses through which their uniformly large nipples were visible, as a form of advertising. Everybody was armed, usually with a pistol and a dagger, and the many vaqueros wore quirts—that is, rawhide whips looped to their wrists—for running cattle or scarring one another. Of course, the men, including the commanding Voth, saw the place as a time for some recreation. A couple of nights were thus spent in inebriation and fornication, with fights as common as hangovers in the morning. Teacher could not approve, but he could not place blame either, knowing from the Iliad the nature of rough men in dangerous circumstances. Instead, he tended to the animals then read a poet named Shelley down by a creek, and one afternoon bought some candy that he distributed to the mob of ragamuffins that sensed his decency and followed him everywhere.

On the third day, the business was completed, wagons loaded, the teams hitched, and the journey back across the border commenced. Teacher rode up and down the length of the ten wagons—and discovered, to his surprise, that now there were eleven, the eleventh being sealed tight and having three guards aboard, not the usual one. He checked the animals by gait, noting the two or three that seemed to favor a leg, guessing abscesses had formed and could be relieved by saltwater and linen wrap to keep the dirt out. But still—

“Mr. Voth?”

“What is it, boy?”

“I note a new wagon. Those animals I’m not familiar with, and tonight I’d like to take a closer look at them.”

“You never mind that, boy. If I don’t tell you to do it, you don’t do it. Got that? By the way, it’s just Voth, not ‘Mr. Voth.’ Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I am not a kind of bloomer-bitch Nancy Ann in a flossy shirt and ribbon tie that needs to be called ‘Mister.’ Seen too much of that. I am just Voth, boss and man killer. Understood? You do not want my ire.” Voth’s eyes, never friendly, had gone stoney as if of obsidian.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now, do your job as I have instructed. And no more.”

But Teacher was not capable of “no more” where an animal’s welfare was concerned. That night, he snuck low to the strange wagon, and crept among the team that was tethered to it, to keep them from roaming. Indeed, he found an abscess on the left foreleg hoof of the second right-hand horse. He soaked it in saltwater but skipped the linen as a giveaway of his attention. Best to let the creature rest a week until the abscess healed, but that was not possible given their vulnerability in the dangerous foothills. The horse would have to go forward in its duties, abscess or no abscess, until the train reached the Callahan spread, at which point it could be released to heal properly.

It was on his trip back—he didn’t crawl, but he traveled low to ground, and froze at any sign of observation—that Teacher heard a noise from inside the eleventh wagon. It sounded like muttering, as if the cargo were human. But how could humans be locked away without food or relief on a rough venture such as this? It would be monstrous. You wouldn’t do such a thing to a slave or a war captive. What would the point be? What low game were the Dark Riders playing?

He puzzled over it and resolved to keep his eye open as far as number eleven went and the next day make it his business to pay special attention to the conveyance for an answer to its mystery. But nothing revealed itself, except that its teamsters and guards were fellows he had not seen before, and he noted that they kept to themselves. And then all such concern vanished when they were attacked.

That was not quite the story that the Colonel related to Jack. His was without mystery and deceit, merely a straightforward tale of young Teacher’s virtue. Jack suspected much had been left out as all human events have two layers, one of fancy and one of reality. He suspected that in the redactions lay the answers to some of the questions that brought him here. But he let it be, sensing his employment rested on acceptance of fancy. It was not his business—yet.

“You must understand,” the colonel said to Jack, “that the raiders who assail us are of different declensions. Some are trash, scoundrels, simple killers and bandits who want only to take goods for resale. They are straightforward as tacticians and simply ambush by rifle to drive guards under cover, and then send ten to steal a wagon, knowing that six will die, but the wagon will be purloined. Then there are the Indian braves, of no tribe, or possibly of many, who have found one another in the wilderness. They live primarily to kill the white-eyes and theirs are simple murder raids, not meant to steal but to exterminate and scalp. However, they are so ardent, they fall prey easily enough to good men with rifles who stay cool under their fire and are efficient in returning fire. You will earn your pay that day, Jack. After a few losses, the braves scuttle off, embittered.

“But some predators are more sophisticated. I suspect they are clans of deserters from whichever army, and they are not without tactical skill. Who leads them is not known, even though I have put money behind inquiries. Anybody who finds and eliminates that leader will be amply rewarded. In this case, the mystery man understood, from measuring the amount of dust raised by each wagon we believe, which one carried the heaviest load. That would be the one with ammunition, weighted down with so many lead projectiles. It was that wagon that was the focus of the attack, a lightning strike by two able horsemen, for their leader had urgent need. There would be raw powder in the wagon, for we reload cartridges to save money. He knew our Dark Riders would immediately abandon that wagon and fall away, fearing a vagrant round could hit the keg and set off the blast. That would sunder the train, and these ex-soldiers would then attack the smaller unit, driving our protectors away, so that they could plunder the abandoned carriers. It was a solid plan, well crafted, demanding much nerve as at any time the powder wagon could explode. Nobody ever accused them of lacking courage.

“But what nobody counted on was Teacher’s refusal to let horses die. The powder wagon team was still tethered, and before fleeing the dangerous gunshots, the teamsters had braked it, so it served as anchor. The beasts, being animal, fell to panic over the noise and commotion. They reared and pulled, and one, maybe two, busted loose and got out of range. But four were left and it was not in Teacher to let them perish. We yelled, we screamed, we covered, but the boy was both fool and hero and ran exposed to gunfire to the wagon, and though the blast was imminent, and the danger of lunging, rearing, insane animals extreme, he jumped among them and cut them free. Then he was on the return to us when a bullet finally struck the keg and the wagon exploded. He was hit by seven pieces of shrapnel and felled instantly, his back sodden with his own blood. It was an act of sacrifice such that I had not seen in my own four years of war—”

“Nor me in mine,” said Jack.

“And were medals given, surely he had qualified for the highest of them, all for beasts of no intelligence, but innocent of sin and therefore entitled to every right to life. Thus, they lived, and he died.”

“I noted in the war that the good die young.”

“Don’t they, though? But I tell you this story for a reason. Not merely to point out the danger involved but as well to make the deeper point about altruism. Few things in the world are worth dying for. Choose carefully. For if you come aboard, your life belongs to me, and I will use it as I need to. I tell you this straightforwardly, out of respect for your service, as I would not tell others and as I wished I had told Teacher. He was too noble for such an end, but that’s what he received. You have been shot at too many times to fall to some piece of trash’s bullet. But I cannot let you join if you don’t swear to fight as hard for me as for the Confederacy in your cavalry years. Your bunkmates deserve as much.”

“I can relieve you, sir, of any worry. I’ve seen enough of death to fear it no more.”

“Commendable,” said the colonel. “Or possibly merely foolish. In any case, I welcome you to the Crazy.”

CHAPTER THREE

His name is Jack. He’s a great addition to our Wild West show. He may be old, but he shoots a rifle as well as any man here, maybe any man anywhere. Go out and look at what remains of our tin rooster. Jack smacked it offhand from the porch of the hacienda, in twilight and wind. That’s a hundred yards by my pace. Or mourn the melons you will not have for dessert because he shot both out of the air on my toss. His job will be to keep you jackasses alive under attack, so you better treat him well.”

So Voth introduced Jack to the Dark Riders. That was all, that was enough. He carried his saddle, his blanket with its cache of other items for comfort and hygiene, his saber and Mr. Boseman’s rifle, plus what was left of Mr. Boseman’s ammunition in a blue-green box of .38-40s—“Central Fire, .38 Cal.” it was labeled—to one of the open bunks in the center of the room. He dumped it, stripped off his rawhide duster, and lay down, rolling a tailor-made.

Nobody said a thing, nor did he. He knew nothing he said at this stage mattered. These fellows would never be impressed by palaver, only deeds under fire. He enjoyed the cigarette, then rolled over and closed his eyes.

They were older than you might expect, with many miles and much dust showing on grave faces. It wasn’t a merry crew, more a crowd of sullen individualists. Even at rest, all wore their pistols, as if their sense of the fragility of life demanded perpetual protection. It had the feel of death row in a federal penitentiary, and lacking booze to liberate their weighted spirits, they simply contemplated reality, mildly celebrated life, and thought about the violence they’d seen and the violence they’d unleash. It was the way of a certain kind of man, not the soldier, as Jack had seen and been, but the professional adventurer who roams from war to war and country to country, selling his skill for gold but really for the thrill of battle and the satisfaction of the kill.

Morning came swiftly, and he was up with the others at six, performed his ablutions, then changed into a newer pair of jeans and a cleaner shirt. Then finally someone spoke.

“No handgun.”

“I pawned it along with my rifle to pull together enough money to live on.”

“But suppose we are jumped—it happens often—by large numbers and they overcome your ability to drop them like tin roosters and it turns into a close-in fight.”

“In that case,” said Jack, “I’d go among them and smash the leader to pulped tomato with the butt of the long gun. I’ll take his pistol as it’s likely to be the best. I’ll then kill the rest. Then have another cigarette and see what Cookie makes for breakfast.”

Some saw it as a joke, some saw it as a promise. But one as a threat.

This fellow showed trouble. Large in frame, he’d be the boy who always got his way. He had dull blue eyes showing less animation than a cow’s, muscles that pushed against his shirt, and hands like hams. A punch of his would bust up anything. He had a mass of blond, tangled hair, hanging down to his back, just like Wild Bill’s. It looked like the tail of a yellow raccoon. That was a hint, right there. But most significantly, he fancied himself a pistolero, and had a Smith & Wesson No. 3 in his Mexican holster. This was a break-open, heavy-framed revolver, much faster on the reload than any Colt iteration, which required a slow cylinder rotation and chamber-by-chamber insertion of single cartridges.

“Mister, if you’re as good as you say you are, all our troubles are over,” he said to Jack. “I may as well throw this big iron away right now.” With that his hand flashed to the pistol, rode it toward the sky hooked on the trigger finger, and began to spin. The pistol was a blur, blazing around the axis of the finger, sometimes upward in orientation, sometimes downward, and as a final coup, pushed behind his back and there launched. His hand was fast enough to catch it coming down on the front side of the shoulder, spin it twice more, then deposit it in the holster.

“I ain’t going to bother to tell you what good gun handling that is,” said Jack, “because you already know. And told everyone else. But I have to say, where I come from, we spend our time practicing shooting, not spinning. It’s more useful.”

“I handle that part as well,” said the man. “These boys can testify. I’m only meaning to say, I am the best here after Voth, so don’t cross me, as many that have are now sucking dirt.”

“I cross no man,” said Jack. “But it goes two ways: I won’t be crossed either.”

“Joe Pye, you back off,” came the call from Voth, moving in from his quarters. “He’s passed his test, and I won’t have him pressed by you. Jack, Joe thinks he’s the secret boss of this place and it’s on him to make all personnel decisions. He ain’t and it ain’t.”

Joe Pye gave Jack a nasty little bit of smile that expressed more hostility than affection and slid back into the crowd. Jack knew he was only marking territory. He wouldn’t be teased or mocked, he would be respected, and by nature aggressive, he’d always be pushing the lines. That was his game, and it was a familiar one to Jack, but he marked this Joe Pye as someone not quite to be trusted, as he was far too interested in where he stood than what he had to do.

“You come see me after you eat, Jack,” said Voth.

When Jack arrived, Voth said, “Brine has two cowboys riding fence today. It’s eighteen hours in the saddle. I want you along, not working fence but working the horizon. Several other teams on fence have told me they know they’re being looked at from afar, maybe through glass. Could be nothing. Could also be a sort of human varmint wants to strike for purse and mount and gun and run. Your job is to make sure the young cowboys come back.”

“I will see to it,” said Jack.

He saddled up on one of Callahan’s stronger cow ponies as his old boy wasn’t up for such a grueling job. Putting leather to horseflesh was something Jack loved, for he loved horses, especially the two who’d saved his life. This tough one had no name as he was new to fold and had no master then. He was a chestnut roan of gray and tan, maybe sixteen hands tall, and who’d ever broke him had done a good job. He took to saddle well and didn’t fight the halter. He seemed to want to do his job. Jack treated him with a hard hand early, planning to go softer later on when the mount had warmed to him and understood who was horse and who was man.

He met his two wards in front of their bunkhouse. String beans, they looked about twelve, scrawny as rails, all cowboyed up in fluttery leather chaps against the rub of their horses and vast hats against the sun.

“I’m Jack,” he said. “I follow you.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said either Billy or Matt. “We hear you’re the best man on the spread with a rifle and can see like an eagle.”

“We feel well protected. You can also tell us stories of the war and your life roaming the West. Rumors say you knew the great gunfighters now passed.”

“Rumors are rumors because they ain’t true. And I won’t be telling you a thing. Let me explain how it works. I’m invisible. You don’t see me, you don’t talk to me, you don’t look to me to join in your conversation. If I speak, you listen because I feel it’s important. But don’t look at me or nod, and I promise to never say anything funny, so you’re spared the need to laugh. I may be with you, I may be ahead of you, I may have gone on the scout, climbing a hill for a better view, looking for sign. That’s my only job and I have to do it at full pitch. It’s when you relax that the ruckus will start, that I can guarantee. So I don’t relax, and if a ruckus starts, being ready before is all that counts. You boys hear me good?”

“Yes, sir. What about meals, when—?”

“I’m invisible, remember. Invisible men don’t eat. Meal or not, resting, stringing wire, laying post, it don’t matter, I don’t exist. When you get back after dark, and your pals ask you about Mr. Jack, you better be able to tell them nothing or I haven’t done my job.”

He stuck to that iron principle. It was two horse hours to the spot they left off, and another hour before they came upon a stretch of wire that needed patching. The boys dismounted and set to work, while Jack rode up the wire and back a mile each way, his eyes on the rolling grass and the crusty but low stone clusters that kept this part of the West from being beautiful. Above the sun blazed without mercy, stealing the blue from the sky, turning it dead white. The air was hot though no rain threatened. The drought, day 77. Nothing alive showed itself, as if most things had given up on motion until the heat broke, while for its part the heat seemed set on unleashing misery. He was looking for dust, tracks, flashes of motion, flocks of birds on the rise as if startled, maybe smoke from cook fires, maybe the sound of a shot from someone downing the rare antelope, buzzards circling over a body of some poor creature, human or not. In all those respects he was disappointed. It was as if the three of them on their three mounts plus a burro carrying posts and shovels and a couple of spools of the nasty wire were alone on the surface of the planet.

He pulled in, dismounted about twenty-five yards off the boys. No point in getting close enough to tempt conversation. They loafed for a bit, eating hardtack and sipping canteen water, then relaxing with a hand-rolled, and then with a sigh that youngsters always utter when there’s yet more work to be done, they remounted and moseyed to the next worksite.

It was a terrible job, but then most jobs on a ranch are terrible, which may be why you have to be young to do them. They cut the bad wire, trimmed and looped the new, dug postholes a good three feet straight down, then inserted the posts and packed the dirt, shoring it with rocks if they were available. Then they strung the wire, one pulling hard, the other hammering it taut to the posts, so that it could do its job of keeping ours in and theirs out.

The wire was the worst part. Well, maybe digging the holes was the worst part. On the other hand, packing the rock and dirt down around the post was awful too. You couldn’t do any of it without drawing blood, bugs, cramps and other strains, sweat in rivers that formed lakes. It was never over. The fences always needed tending, so the stock didn’t wander, and some other group of fellows make a claim, and that’s when you got gun trouble of a sort nobody liked but nobody could figure out how to avoid.

So that was the process and the next day’s and the day after’s as well. It was thankless but not pointless. The Callahan Crazy R’s upside-down brand stood out on the haunches of the colonel’s stock, but mixed and shrouded in dust under the screaming sun, mistakes were easy to make, which led to misunderstanding and sooner or later the whole shebang would go up. Thus the soundest policy was separation and it was worth a continuing patrol by cowboys to keep it so.

Nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened. It was the West, ageless, timeless, forever and ever burnt by sun and beaten by wind.

On the fourth day, a Friday when the boys were eager to get back in and head out for a weekend at the Railhead No. 4 whore town, Jack said at about 2.30 p.m., “This will be the day they attack.”

Of course Billy and Matt violated their oath not to look at him as both turned and stared.

“Heads down, blanketheads. No reaction. Just listen to what I say and get ready to do what I tell you.”

“Sir, if—”

“Shut up. Listen. Obey. Your lips will turn dry, your lungs will work too hard, and you’ll want to piss hard. It’s normal. Don’t fight it. If you have to piss, piss. No shame.”

They rode on another mile. They were higher in the hills now and by crow flight as far from the ranch headquarters as they were going to get. Help was a long way off. They were on their own. That too was the West. Jack wouldn’t have it any other way, but he knew these boys to be highly skittish and unsure now that mortal issues had been broached.

“Should we pull our rifles?”

“No. That’ll just cause them to open fire at long range. They’ll score some hits, and then take off, pissed. The next folks they run into they’ll take it out on.”

“Who are they, Mr. Jack?”

“There’s three of them,” Jack said. “Two braves and a half-breed. I’d guess Northern Cheyenne from the riding style, which is quite advanced. They’re the best horsemen of the plains, although finding them this far south is a surprise. I’m sure they jumped the res, headed to Mexico, where the rumors say an Indian army is forming to push the white-eyes back to the Mississippi—that is, those left with hair on their head.”

One of the boys—Matt? Billy?—began to whimper. The other said, “How do you know?”

“I picked up unshod hooves yesterday, wide of here but traveling in the same direction, at the same speed. I’m guessing they’re out of corn and dough and what’s driving them is a quest for meat. Where you go back at night, they hunker down. I found a campsite. They don’t want to spook the herd or steal it, they just want to cut a steer out, run it off Callahan property and beyond a day’s ride by pursuers, butcher it, eat hearty, and take the rest along packed in salt and herbs so it’ll keep them going to Mexico. That’s much easier if you boys are dead. They’ll also take scalps, not because they believe in it, but because they know it’s instant respect if they run into Mexicans or other Indians, even if it’s the hanging tree if they run into white folks with more guns.”

“What do we do?”

“Not a damn thing so far. But atop this rise, we’ll come to a long slope, a shallow valley, then another slope. The fence is broken twice, you’ll have to stop at each. It’s the second one where they’ll jump, being close to the brush line so they don’t have to break cover except at the very end. We’ll let ’em. But at the first stop, I’ll pitch in on the work and we’ll mingle, pulling the horses to us. Not sure which boy is which but you in the white hat—Bobby?”

“Matt, sir.”

“I’m Billy,” said the other. “There is no Bobby.”

“Good enough. Matt, you and I going to switch hats and horses. Then you ride off as if going for a scout. I want you tall in the saddle, legs stiff, like I ride, not all hunched over the way you ride.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When Bobby and I are alone, that’s when they’ll make their move. Only it ain’t you on the rifle, it’s me, and I won’t wait to see who they are as I know and I can drop the two coming on fast at the first sign of attack.”

“Are you sure that—?”

“Yes, I am. If I don’t shoot, we die. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. But what about the third?”

“He’s covering from a long way out. He’ll try and pick me off. I got a nickel says I pick him off.”

One of the boys gulped hard.

“It’ll be over in a few seconds, and you’ll be able to tell the whores you were in a gunfight. They’ll like that.”

The boys, whatever their names were, went still. They rode the rise, they crested, they came to the slope and saw the first broken fence at the low point. Down they went, and though it was not steep, good horsemanship was called for to control the beasts, who sensed the gravity and as well felt the intensity in their riders’ tightened thighs.

Down they went, arriving in time at the break, where a strand had rusted through and busted. That had released the tension in the other two strands, so they languished on the ground.

“Okay, ten-year-olds, cluster up now, all tight with horses between us and the brush line. They’ll watch hard, but unlike you, they ain’t frightened, they’re excited. Kills and scalps in their immediate futures, that’s got them all fizzy and bubbled up.”

Everyone dismounted and mingled at the fence. Boy Whatever-his-name-was leaned down and snipped the rusted wire, tossing it away. The other boy looped fresh wire to good wire, and pulled tight. First boy pulled the other strand tight and took a new end from the second boy and had enough in play to do a skilled wrap job linking the two. Magically, the fence was restored, and the two relaxed strands popped to under the restored tightness.

“That ought to hold her,” said Jack, and the three came together in the cluster of horses, the hats were exchanged in the cloud of dust and horseflesh, and the reins traded.

Matt climbed aboard Jack’s nameless mount, soothed its neck to reassure the animal that although he was different, he could be trusted, and then both Bobby—oops, Billy, Billy!—and Jack hauled themselves up as well.

“You got a big head, son,” said Jack, as Matt’s hat drooped to the top of his ears and would have fallen farther but for them.

“I hope it don’t flop off,” he said.

“It better not,” said the other. “It cost me—”

“Cut the palaver,” said Jack. “You don’t want to but bear down. You, Matt, get on out of here, ride like you know how.”

“Yes, sir.”

Matt gave his animal just the right flick of his spurs, and with a little lurch, the roan took off at a trot, and soon Billy and Jack were alone. They drifted along, bodies casually arrayed on horseback as if they hadn’t a care in the world, except against his right leg Jack carried Winchester’s model of 1892.

“Don’t these things always go wrong?” said Billy through a raspy throat.

“Yes, normally. But it’s better to have them go off plan so that you got something to get back to than to have no plan and just let them tumble along crazy. Then it goes way wrong and that’s when the wrong people get killed. Okay, we’re here. Again, let the horses get between us and them. Don’t let love of horse cloud your brain. Seen it happen. The boy loves the horse so much he gets himself killed over it. I love horses too, but no man should ever die for them. If the Lord wanted it that way, He would have figured out how to get the horse to ride you.”

It went silent as they bent to the wire and pretended to attend to the repair.

“Don’t be looking around. They are coming, for sure. If you look up, it could go haywire.”

This problem was at the post, which slanted over, its moorings gone soft and mushy. It needed to be straightened, its underpinning shored up tight with gravel or stone so that it set straight, which would tighten up the wire.

They worked it, Jack tugging, the boy rounding up rock and stone to jam the hole. Not hard, not easy, at least it didn’t involve pruning and pulling wire which led to cuts and blood. The job then done, Jack allowed himself a look up. Yes, here they were. Two men on horseback under big hats, loping along as if nothing was planned but a chat, a laugh, and a smoke. They could be out for a Sunday stroll, giving off no signal of imminent attack. But of course, they were where they shouldn’t be, coming from a direction they shouldn’t be coming from. The sun was still a blowtorch, the world bleached of color, the grass yellowish, the dust loose and floating, the breeze but a memory, and Jack turned when the two riders were but fifty yards away, and at that time it happened.

They ripped off their hats and flung them, bent forward over their horses’ necks, and kicked the flanks. The hats gone, their hair roared loose, and they lifted a tomahawk in each right hand, kicking the flanks again so that the beasts went from canter to full charge, tearing up the earth with the sharp edges of their hooves. Both wore war paint, jagged red across the cheekbones, both yelped a war cry announcing to the world that they had come to rule and kill and woe betide he who stood before them.

It was an image from twenty years earlier when the great war to the death between the red and white was fought in every gully and hollow across a million square miles of contested ground by warriors beyond mercy for the other race. They seemed to explode from the past. Jack saw immediately that the plan was to drive the white boys into panic, so they would separate and could be ridden down, dispatched by blow of the killing ax to the neck, and then claimed as victims of the red man’s vanity by the ceremony of scalping, left bloody bald and dead to feed the buzzards.

It was not to be so. Jack stood behind the saddle of his mount, the beast breathing wetly, quivering ever so much. His rifle protocol was to keep a shell chambered, the hammer back one of the three notches it had to be pulled through to reach full cock. He pulled it through to the last notch holding the stock hard to shoulder but not letting it rest on the saddle slope before him, for a horse’s twitch could push the shot off.

The front sight seemed to find the first brave under its own volition, and his finger came straight back on the trigger, also of its own, the hammer fell, and a tenth of a second later, the orchestration of falling hammer and pin striking primer launched the business part of a Remington .38-40. It was neither the most powerful round available nor the least, but somewhere in the middle, enough to kill but not enough to destroy. It struck dead-center chest, immediately sending the recipient on to his spiritual destiny, and he fell doll-like to the dust, and the grit abraded and destroyed his handsome features.

Jack threw the lever with a speed beyond time, the spent shell began its lazy flop to the planet surface, and before it landed, he’d come left and pulled down on the second brave with almost the identical results, the only difference being that this one took a second or two longer to die, and had time to pull up on his animal, so it had halted by the time his brain got around to instructing the rest of his body that it was time to enter the spirit world. He fell to the earth without drama or grace but intact save for his blood-spurting heart.

“Wow!” said Billy. “That’s some shooting!”

He made to check the bodies, but Jack grabbed him by the shoulder and yanked him back behind the horse, and at that time the far-off percussion of a black powder rifle sounded, a whizzing in air described flight, and a spray of dust kicked up to locate impact.

Jack dropped, aiming under the horse’s belly, to the root of white smoke rising cannon-like in the brush line, and sent five more rounds out, striking and dust tossing at or near the base of the smoke. He cocked and fired so fast it sounded like one of Mr. Gatling’s spinning-barrel guns.

“You stay here,” he commanded as he snaked a few more cartridges into the rifle through the loading port, then swung aboard the horse and set off at a fast gait to the area that he’d just shot up and, as it turned out, the boy he’d just shot up.

This one lay in the dust, an old Springfield trapdoor carbine not far away. But the boy had no use for it. He breathed raggedly.

“You killed my friends,” he said. “You killed me.”

“None of this happens if you three runaways don’t play Crazy Horse on us. You think it’s 1876 or something?”

“Jesus, I’m dying,” screamed the boy.

“Looking at that wound, I don’t think you are. It’s just below the clavicle. Most folks come back fine from it, though they might walk a bit crooked from then on.”

The boy tried to squirm, but Jack pressed the muzzle of the ’92 into his throat, which quieted him fast, then went over and picked up the Springfield.

“You get this off the Custer battlefield? It’s so old it’s got worms on its rust.”

“It’s the only gun we had. It don’t shoot too straight.”

Jack looked carefully at the ladder sight just ahead of the trapdoor hinge.

“It shoots fine,” he said. “You just don’t know crap about it. Sights are set at three hundred yards but you were shooting at a hundred or so. You couldn’t hit the barn, much less that door. So I’m guessing on your adventures in the wilds you didn’t learn enough to fill a teacup, right?”

“Them’s the warrior boys. It was their idea to attack.”

“It makes sense from the Indian point of view.”

“What be happening to me?”

“Interesting question. You don’t tell me what I want, maybe I just leave you here to bleed out or attract a few of the coyotes still around.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said the boy.

“Or I could patch you up and take you to Callahan’s spread. Not sure what he’d do, but I know whatever it was, you’d end up on the long end of the rope. Stealing cattle is more a hanging crime than shooting a cowboy. Easier to replace cowboys than cows.”

“I be dead, then?”

“Sure seems as much. Or—”

“Or else what, sir?”

“Or you tell me what I need to know and I fetch your pony and send you on your way. I keep the trapdoor, though.”

“I don’t know nothing,” said the boy. “We just saw bad shit ahead on the res, and we hated the white people who treated us as dogs. So we took off one night.”

“That much I figured on. But there’s more.”

“No, sir, ain’t no more.”

“You had a destination. You knew where you were going. Elsewise you wouldn’t have stayed on campaign here on Callahan’s, stalking us, waiting for your chance. You’d have jumped us the first day if you wanted only meat. You’d have watched us go on if you only wanted passage. No, you wanted the meat, but you also wanted to circle the spread until we got farthest south.”

The boy said nothing.

“Your whole little trip was better planned than you’re letting on. You had a destination. You had a plan. You had a future planned. Now, you come clean on me, or you won’t like what happens to you.”

The boy—he was a mix of red and white tribal features, with a white boy’s pug nose and a red one’s deep brown eyes, making him oddly handsome under his mop of floppy black hair—sighed hard as the young who know nothing of tragedy are wont to do.

“And,” continued Jack, “you look enough white, so you could negotiate with white folks. If the two friends were planning on joining up with some red-skinned raider band, they wouldn’t have needed you along for the trip. You don’t belong with them, as you’re a good five years younger than either of them.”

“They was like brothers.”

“But they were not brothers. Cousins at the best, maybe. I take it you’re the half-breed riding the shoed horse.”

“My mother was Cheyenne. My pa was a cowboy, but he died young. Raised on the res, with Charlie Two-Dogs and John White Feather you killed.”

“Do stupid, get stupid. Now, back to the question here. I got the idea you’d heard of an outfit. Word like that gets around among angry young men, and because it fits so well with your anger, you believe it. Spill or die, those are your choices.”

The boy shook his head sadly, because he knew he was about to betray a confidence.

Finally, he said, “There’s a rumor an ex-officer is putting or has put together a certain kind of raider bunch. It ain’t along normal lines, you know, about rape and money. No, it’s point is to destroy something called capital.”

“The capitol? Of a state or territory, you mean?”

“No, sir. Not as I understand it. It’s wealth, but it’s not. It’s not just money, it’s the idea that money buys power and property, and with that power and property they get more power and property. That means they can hang on forever and crush anybody who comes against them. But it also means, they sell lies that they are God’s best and to fight them is to fight God and wreck everything. But nothing will ever change unless some people have the guts to fight this capital.”

“Poison blabber,” said Jack. “I heard they got it back east, and people are blowing factories up and setting post offices on fire. I think they murdered some coppers in Chicago. Sounds crazy to me, but I can see how young men could fall for it and march off to its tune.”

“That’s what we was hoping. But we ran out of food and had no idea how bad the drought was. We needed to cut a cow loose. But if we did that, we knew the fence riders would be on us real fast. The plan was to jump the fence riders, and nobody’d notice they was gone for hours, and we’d use that time to drive south with our cow.”

Jack nodded. “Sounds like something a twelve-year-old would come up with. All right, you’ve earned your getaway trip, soon as you put a name and a location to this radical fellow.”

“They call him The Frenchman. That’s all we had. He’s in Northern Mexico, we were told. He’s putting an army together, of a different sort. That’s the war we were heading off to join.”

“Heading where?”

“Charlie Two-Dogs said he heard of this on the Cherokee res, and the fellow The Frenchman was said—”

The bullet hit him square in the head. It wasn’t pretty. It never is. But Jack knew instantly that it was such a good shot it was aimed by someone who knew what he was doing, and who he was doing it to, on the reasoning that if the shooter was a stranger, he would have killed Jack first, for the two rifles he held.

“All right, Pye,” Jack yelled, “get your sorry ass out of the weeds.”

Seventy-five yards away, Joe Pye emerged from the brush, rifle in hand. He ambled over, a smirk on that bully-boy face.

“You son of a bitch, Pye. What the hell you doing?”

“Your job, old man. Killing rustlers.”

“He was twelve, on an adventure to fix the world.”

“Twelve or twenty-four or forty-eight, he was trespassing on Callahan land. Your job—my job, everybody’s job—is what I just done. He was dead already. And it’s better coming on all of a sudden like that than to ride a rope for the four minutes it takes to strangle, squirming and shitting the whole time while everybody laughs. I’ve seen both, and believe me, he’d thank me if he knew. Anyhow, fuck all this shit. Voth sent me. Plans have changed. We’re taking a train south tomorrow, and with your fancy rifle skills, Mister Annie Oakley, you’re the star of the show.”

CHAPTER FOUR

As anticipated, the trip down was easy. As anticipated, the stay in Agua Caliente was an ordeal: flies, Mexicans, whores, drink and drunkenness, in that order. Jack let the boys have their way and didn’t partake, nurturing a jar of tequila in a dark corner of a bar. He liked the stuff, maybe too much: it lit a fire on the tongue that burned all the way down and hit with a hammer when it landed, turning the squalor of what was into something softer.

But mainly he listened. The Frenchman. Bandit and revolutionary/ex-officer. Hell-bent on changing the order of things. Organizing a secret army to destroy something called capital, which Jack realized was in some sense the whole world. This Frenchman held some answers to the questions Jack needed answering.

But among the border trash who frequented the den of his choice, that name was never uttered, not that he heard, anyway. They were the usual gun-heavy scum, unshaven and filthy, whose true vocation was sloth, which was funded by occasional crimes against the weak and helpless. One of Mr. Gatling’s whirling-barrel guns would have done the world a gallon of good with one sweep, north to south, of Agua Caliente and its citizens.

That would include the Federales, who did nothing to enforce the law but usually found the occasional lethal mischief—Jack witnessed a knife fight, two gunfights, and a brawl that produced a dead man—highly amusing, especially when the victims were gringos or Americanized vaqueros.

But at the end of his wait, having established his bona fides according to the place’s morality, he chose the whore with the smartest eyes and took her upstairs.

She wasn’t young. She wasn’t old. She was a whore, that was all, out of time, with the wisdom that lying with a thousand men often produces.

“I don’t want no squeezing and licking,” Jack said, throwing double the whoregeld on the bed. “I want information. And I want secrecy. You tell me what you know now, and I’ll give you some ideas of what I’m looking for and then you nose around and the next time I’m here, you give me a report.”

“You get me killed that way, mister. This ain’t no town for snooping. Too many dark plots, too many guns and knives, no law.”

“But the money speaks. Don’t go crazy with it, just hide it well. When you get out of here, that’s when it’ll come in handy.”

She considered, looked him over. Then she said, “What you want, then, Señor Gringo?”

“Ever hear of a man named ‘The Frenchman’? Gringo, like me. Some kind of leader, military or political. Said to be raising an army of some sort to change things all around.”

“Never. Nothing.”

“All right, try this. Seen a bunch of young fellows around? Not the gun trash as here, but these boys would be cleaner and have no investment in showing tough. They might not even be carrying guns or knives.”

She looked at him hard, up and down. It had rung some sort of bell.

“Not here. My sister, she lives in a town called Ibanez, half day by wagon to the east. She said it has been overrun lately by what she calls a children’s army. Young people, men, gringos, Indians, Mexicans, all kinds come in and rest up and then disappear into the mountains. It is said they run raids north of the border for supply, but they are forming an army to do God knows what. But in Mexico, sir, everybody is always forming an army. That is what Mexico has become—a hotbed of revolution and destruction. These armies will fight each other, and all in between will be crushed. It is not a good thing.”

“Write her and ask for more details. Next time I come through I’ll see what you’ve got. Maybe you could visit her.”

“I cannot leave. I owe money, and I pay the debt with my body. Worse, the more I fuck, the deeper in the debt I get. And worse still, I fear that one day my daughters will be stolen from me and also turned into whores.”

“We fought a war to stop slavery,” said Jack. “Ask me, I got the scars from fighting on the wrong side. But maybe you need a war down here too. This time I’d fight on the right side.”

He was rewarded on the last day by a close-up meet with Major Arau, the commanding officer of Second Squadron, 14th Hussars Army, of Sonora, Northern Mexico, who coolly directed the loading operations of the enterprise.

“Hussars”? In the Mexican army? Who knew?

Arau was of a sort usually attracted to cavalry, not because it was the most effective way to fight a war but because the uniforms were so bright and pretty. His most certainly was. It fit so well, it had to have been privately tailored, as Jack had seen with many officers in his army of long ago in such finery. The jacket was cream, pressed sharp, with a chest of tin and ribbon to give it multicolored spectacle. He wore his pistol in a shiny belt with a leather support strap over the shoulder. By the shape of the grip under the holster flap, Jack could see that the weapon was from Colt, but silver-plated and pearl-handled, a pimp’s gun, maybe engraved on closer examination. On the other side of his belt, he wore a saber, three feet of curved Toledo steel in a curved Toledo steel scabbard, its hilt a basket of tangled silver tendrils. He also carried a riding crop, had those tight-fitting pants puffed at the thighs, and of course shined boots, brown, with polished spurs. He stood for the old kind of officer, when there were no Gatling guns and soldiers carried muskets mainly to make smoke when they did their real killing with bayonet. Men like Arau somehow never lacked courage—you could not say that of them, ever—but usually lacked sense. Their answer to every battle issue was the same, which was the charge. Jack had seen many such men, of both Union and Confederate allegiance, lying in the mud of obscure towns and hollows, their beauty now blasphemed by lead and blade.

Major Arau and Tom Voth sat on horseback as the Federale troops—not in Hungarian-inspired dress tunics but sweat-soaked khaki—loaded the bags of grain and flour, the chunks of bacon and pork, the barrels of lead .38-caliber bullets and powder into the various wagons, while the boys, now acting as teamsters, worried over the horses, backing them into the rigs they would pull back up north, sometimes roughly. It was some spectacle, the horses bucking and kicking up the dust like gun smoke, the drivers adjusting, tightening buckles, pulling the tangles out of straps, making certain the reins ran without impingement from halter to wagon, the wheels kept well greased, the springs bolted solidly, all the necessities taken care of for long haulage. Noise too, lots of it—the screams of the horses, the curses of the men, the sound of hammers pounding wood to tighten nailed connections, the general hubbub of shapeless racket created by large numbers of men working hard at tasks they don’t enjoy.

“Jack,” Voth called, “come on over here.” Jack rode over.

“This here’s our Mexican partner, Major Arau.”

The Mexican stiffened into military formality, touched his visor with his riding crop at the end of the slightest of bows.

“I am at your service, sir,” he said. He was an unusually handsome man—it seemed to go with the uniform—with bright eyes and white teeth.

“Sir,” said Jack with a nod, as under him his more realistic horse issued a snort that could have been sarcasm.

“I am told you were a great cavalry soldier in your civil war,” said Arau.

“I had two good horses shot out from under me, if that’s what you mean, sir. I rode in a few charges and saw battle lost and won from horseback. My memories would be of surviving, not prevailing.”

“Ah, the modesty of the professional. Sir, I am impressed. Perhaps sometime you and I could share a meal, some wine, and talk of the end of the cavalry.”

“Very pleased to do so. And I agree with you, the horseman’s era is almost to a close. These modern guns, they shoot too fast, too much. They would turn the charge into a butcher’s back room.”

“I only hope to ride in the last one before the machine gun becomes universal,” said Arau. “My father rode in a dozen charges in our various obscure Mexican wars. I can never catch up, but one would improve my standing with him.”

“I understand, sir. I come from a family of gun men, so I do know how reputation can weigh on a fellow.”

At that point a lieutenant approached and spoke Spanish quickly. Jack knew enough to realize the man had said the loading was all done. Time to go.

Twenty miles out, the landscape turned to treachery. The small hills got higher, the rocks turned crusty, in clumps and clusters here and there, and soon enough they traveled through alleyways of sandstone and dead vegetation, in a pall of dust, under the battering of the sun.

Jack sat on the bench in the cab of the second wagon, his rifle between his legs, out of sight to all except the most careful binocular reconnaissance. Usually there were two teamsters on the bench, but in this case number two crouched low behind the bench, his head barely peeping out. His job was to throw the canvas off the wagon and reload Jack’s rifle if trouble came. Jack had the boy’s Springfield trapdoor carbine along as well, fully loaded with a pocketful of .45-70s, to keep up fire while his ’92 was being serviced.

“This is where we got it last time,” said the driver, Luke.

“Don’t talk,” said Jack. “I don’t need your help. I can read the land and tell off that where it’s likely we’ll take fire. Your yap just gets in the way.”

“Jack, he was just—”

“Shut up,” said Jack. “They won’t jump us here. The reason is, it’s too late. The shadows are long. Shooting into shadow from outside of it is wasting ammunition. We’re in the shadow here, not them. Did you two gun tramps know that?”

Silence.

In time, they emerged from the maze of alleyway ambuscades and came into grassier country. Then a river presented itself, problematic and time-eating, because the barrels of powder had to be removed from the wagon and carried on horseback across the water.

The driver said to the other, crouching teamster, “One of them barrels gets hit and the poor boy underneath gets turned to hash.”

Jack said nothing but knew it to be unlikely. A bullet wouldn’t light up black powder. It needs something incendiary to set it off.

“When I said don’t talk, I meant to each other too. Got it?”

“He sure is an ornery bastard,” said the driver.

“Trying to keep you alive, Chugwater,” said Jack, and that was the last utterance until they cleared the river, on the other side of which they found the land more hospitable for a while and settled down for the night. It was the best time. The wagons circled, the horses untethered and secured in the middle, a campfire, some well-prepared vittles, perhaps a secret bottle of whiskey or two, but by rule forbidden, as it was forbidden in the bunkhouse as well. Voth knew what armies knew: young men, whiskey, guns, boredom—not a good mix.

Up at five, camp broken and horses in harness by six-thirty, after biscuits and coffee. They all felt secure because Jack had risen at four, mounted up on Voth’s horse, and done a quick circle of the camp, looking to cross tracks of infiltrators, and finding none.

“If we get hit, it’ll be this morning,” said Voth.

“I know,” said Jack. “By afternoon is too close to a town that could mount a posse, and if they succeed in getting a wagon or two from us, that’ll slow them down.”

“You ain’t so dumb. That’s how I figure it too.”

Two more hours eating dust put them in rolling grass country, scorched hard, gray-brown instead of green-yellow, so pounded by the sun in a cloudless sky most details vanished to the eye.

“Dust,” he said to his driver.

“What?”

“See that third ridge ahead on the left? Behind it I see dust rising. Not much, but some. Horses shuffling. You know that hill?”

“It’s lower to the north than it is to the south. We normally don’t expect action up here, we’re so close to home.”

“They ain’t stupid. They’re trying something new, whoever they are. What about the other side as we pass through?”

“Dried-out trees. Water went away, then the trees. Only trunks.”

“Good cover?”

“For men flat on their bellies.”

“Shooting downhill?”

“Not steep-like, but sloped.”

“So our tired horses would be slow getting up either side, if it came to that.”

“Yes, sir, that makes sense.”

“You back there, you get ready to pull the cord and drop the canvas off this wagon.” Then he yelled to a rider alongside, bade him closer.

“Gonna be jumped in a few minutes. First shots come from the right, rifle fire. They hope to bring a few down, cause panic. Instead, pass this along—you and all the riders bolt to the other side of the wagons on the first shot so you’re behind cover. But don’t relax. Riders will come hard at you from behind that ridge up there on the left. Be ready to engage by rifle. That should shake ’em up.

“Then mount up and go to handgun, and chase ’em, maybe get close enough to send a few more to glory. Don’t bother going up slope after them. Your horses are too tired. Just kill a bunch and let the others go. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No rush now. Nothing fast yet. If they know we know, they’ll scatter and head back to the mountains. We want to cut their numbers and scare the shit out of them.”

“Yes, sir,” the man said, then nodded and headed off to spread the message, not at the gallop but at a bit of a canter, as if he had just remembered his sister’s birthday and had to get a present.

“When I say now, you halt, driver. I can’t hit near as much off a moving wagon as off a still one. I hope to knock a few down before they can do the same to us.”

“Yes, sir. Man, you know what you’re—”

“Been to a few dances,” said Jack. He thumbed back the hammer on the ’92. No pre-fight jitters. Not him. Never happened. Still, you could know so much, plan so hard, shoot so well, and some goddamned ricochet off a nail fired by a titmouse could still take it all from you. So far it hadn’t happened, though it had come close so many times and he had the scars to prove it.

They rolled along. The world seemed to have slowed down. The sun blazed more fiercely yet, the flies buzzed more intensely, the smell of horse thickened, the clack-clack of the wagon tongue slopping around between the horses grew more irritating. He felt his senses sharpen.

The shot, sounding raspy and dry, proclaimed the presence of the sharpshooters.

“Now!” Jack yelled, rolling backward into the wagon bed to set up against its wall.

He looked for the giveaway black powder puff of smoke, saw nothing, and then a bullet struck the wagon blowing through the wood. What the—?

Another one bounced off the metal strut that supported the canvas cover and another zinged overhead. His mind clouded, a lick of fear rubbed against his brain; he could think of no explanation. What the—?

And then clarity: whoever was shooting was using the new smokeless powder, which accounted for the lack of rising white puff to signify position. He applied focus, concentration, and willed calm. In a second he was able to pick up the minute disturbance in the atmosphere left by the smaller smear of gray smoke, and tracking it down to source, he placed his front sight against the spot, came up a bit, fired, threw the lever, then fired again. Hit? Maybe. Tell by the blood later.

The spatter of incoming shots rose. Like angry bees, the bullets whipped toward them, though the inexperienced shooters didn’t quite understand the theory and practice of elevation, and so the first fusillade hit only dirt, ripping a screen of it to float and obscure and turn all to blur. That gave Voth’s riders time to retreat behind the wagons, and the men in the wagons time to dive into the beds, where an inch of wagon hardwood might not protect them, but it could deflect the rounds, which, being smokeless, had to be .30-30 and no bear-killing powerhouse.

From his own side, a few rifles sounded, but he put no faith in it. Shooting for blood at over one hundred yards through dense clouds of dust was dicey; it took skill, calculation, and cunning, to say nothing of experience and a nose for the math of marksmanship calculation.

He emptied the last round from his ’92, handed it over to the man next to him to reload, took up the Springfield, and drew the hammer back with his thumb as he settled behind it. He’d already dicked with the ladder sight, raising the peep sight up the legs of the contrivance to the 150-yard mark, which now seemed about right. Again, he located a kind of odd disturbance in the air far out, not a haze quite, but a mild sense of distortion, like oil smeared on glass, which he took to be the smoke of smokeless powder, and his trigger finger agreed that he was as close as he was going to get, and it came back. The .45-70 kicked like a mule, blowing a 406-grain chunk of lead on its way. It was far more powerful than the .38-40 but not necessarily more accurate. All in all, it made a poor military rifle cartridge, as Custer’s boys and thousands of other blue bellies had found out, their bones now bleaching on the endless prairie.

He popped the trapdoor, where the rifle had been converted from percussion fire to cartridge fire, and in so doing mechanically plucked out the empty .45-70 casing. He shoved another .45-70 in, locked the trapdoor shut, cranked back the hammer, settled in, and looked for targets. He thought he saw a man scuttling through the broken trunks of the dried-out trees, squirming for safety, performed the necessary math in his head, found the hold that the math indicated, and squeezed his second .45-70 off. The same blast accompanied the event, the same recoil, the same fulsome puff of white smoke from the burn of the black powder.

“Riders,” someone yelled, “other side.”

Jack dumped the Springfield—he’d be bruised from the recoil tonight—and received Mr. Boseman’s ’92 reloaded. He confronted the left-side slope from his new position as he raised the rifle and threw the lever forward and back, seeing mostly horses swirling and dashing amid a front of dust, almost impenetrable to the vision. The boys on his side were scrunched behind well-trained, supine horses who offered their bodies as cover. The men kept up their own steady fire, aggressive, high-volume, but not particularly accurate.

And just that fast it was over.

The horsemen retreated down that same draw that had led them to the attack and were gone even before any of the boys could mount up and pursue. Nevertheless, three or four pulled their animals up to all fours and made to mount.

“Hold off, hold off,” came Voth’s call. “Okay, anybody hurt?”

Nobody was hurt except someone named Shorty who’d fallen off his horse on the dash to the other side of the wagons. Evidently, Shorty was famous for clumsiness, and his new limp and sloth were greeted with hoots from the unhurt. Someone helped him into a wagon.

“Let’s go,” cried Voth, signaling from the head of the column. “They’re running, they’re messed up bad. I want us out of here before they get back together and set up another try.”

“Wasn’t much of a fight,” said Joe Pye. “Think I got me a few, but hard to say in all that dust. Them boys didn’t have much in the way of finish-it today.”

They were back, all of them, alive and untouched except for Shorty’s limp, now decamped to the small bunkhouse where secret bottles of whiskey had come out and most just lay there, drinking, smoking, and ragging on one another. It was like a man party two thousand or so years before, under the Colosseum, for survivors only.

Tomorrow, by tradition, they would rest, then head out at evening for the town of Railhead No. 4, less than twelve miles north from which, yard by yard and mile by mile, a great Eastern company was constructing a railroad to the Pacific, the idea being to go straight to the booming town of Los Angeles. And for all the hope and glory attached to the enterprise, the important men who backed it, the national politicians who endorsed it, at the squalid end of the great crusade, Railhead No. 4 was known, as had been Railhead Nos. 1−3, as Whoretown. You could not have two thousand male workers in a town without whores and whiskey of the cheapest variety to drain their excess energy.

Someone else said, “Now they know we have a sharpshooter and, more to the point, a fellow who can figure them out. They’ll do it different next time.” He paused. “Going to get worse, not better.”

“Nobody died today, but that only means ten more will die next time unless the genius here can outthink them again,” another pundit announced.

“Doubtful,” said Jack. The bunkhouse went quiet as its new hero was about to speak. “They had a good plan, but the other fellow is right, they’ll be slyer next time. Thought they had us, coming in on two fronts, called a pincer movement at West Point. Maybe next time they go up to three, or even four. Or use dynamite to blow a rockslide down in our route just as we arrive, so we’re all bottled up. Maybe attack and feint; our horsemen give chase, and another group hits the boys we left behind with the wagons. I can’t figure ’em all. I was lucky today because I saw dust. They’ll think on that, and I guarantee you, next time, no dust. Next time, you earn your money with your rifles, not behind horses either.”

That took the talk out of the outfit, but Jack couldn’t leave certain things alone, being his nature was such that he never forgot or forgave.

“And you didn’t kill nobody today, Pye. Nobody did. I didn’t. Too far, too hard to see, too much wind, too much movement. We just got them all riled up and hungry for another go. You boys live on that now.”

“All right,” came Voth’s voice cracking through the dark of the bunkhouse. “Jack, you quit scaring these boys to death. Liable to wake up with an empty room tomorrow. You come with me. The colonel would like to see you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack.

He went with the silent boss from the small bunkhouse to the hacienda and was led into the same room as before. Lots of glass eyeballs, particularly the two belonging to the bull elk, stared down from the walls. The colonel, as before as well, wore his suit and looked as if he’d just stepped in from a campaign stop or a board meeting. Mr. Boseman lurked in the background, ready as always to serve.

“Sit down, gentlemen. John, get the boys a drink. Whiskey? Gin and lime? Lemonade with Russian hellfire?”

“Whiskey here,” said Voth, sitting.

“Two, then,” said Jack.

The colonel was across from them as Boseman served the drinks in crystal glasses of a sort rarely seen west of the Mississippi.

“Jack, I heard from Mr. Voth you performed outstandingly today, as well as a few days back on the fence line.”

Jack nodded, taking a hit of the liquor. Mallet to temples. Buzz hard. Focus diminished. Sense of calm well-being. Most abrasions and contusions gone silent. In other words, the good stuff.

“Some luck involved. And we didn’t damage them as I’d hoped. Not the boys’ fault, but those people are well disciplined, and finding themselves at a disadvantage, abandoned the field quickly. No sense hanging around to get shot to pieces for nothing.”

“He don’t think it’ll get any easier next time neither,” said Voth. “And I do believe he’s right.”

“Tom, who do you think these fellows were? Seems as if they were too organized to be just border riffraff.”

“Maybe Federales out of uniform,” said Voth. “It’s the only read I get on it. I wouldn’t put it past Arau to sell to us, then attack us to get the goods back.”

“Possibly his storehouses are soon to be audited by someone from Mexico City and he will have to explain where half his supplies went,” said the colonel.

Jack took another hammer of whiskey. So fine! He did like the stuff. “Jack, any thoughts?”

“I think Mr. Voth’s got it nailed. It’s not riffraff.”

He said nothing about an ex-officer called The Frenchman organizing some kind of army to invade America and hang all the rich people. That had to be hoarded, until he saw how it would play.

“But as to who, not sure. Too organized, too smart, to be a bunch of deserters and off-res braves come together. See, one motivation such fellows would have that seems absent here is simple fun. For that sort of boy, raiding, shooting, killing, that’s better than a night in the best whorehouse in Dallas with five hundred dollars in your pocket.”

“True of our boys too,” said Voth.

“Yep. But these fellas only wanted goods, not fun. So they quit up front, seeing they was suddenly outgunned and out-surprised. Going ass crazy on the fun of it wasn’t in their minds.”

“That seems like a good observation.”

“I do have an idea, if Mr. Voth is okay on it,” Jack said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“I want to go back there tonight. I’ll sneak out, ride all night, and sleep tomorrow. Tomorrow at twilight I want to go over the place. There has to be signs. From tracks I can judge how many. From footprints I can figure out what kind of boots, hence what kind of men. Then I want to look at empty shells. They may tell a story. If it’s Mexican government .43s, there’s your Federales. If it’s every damn round Winchester ever made, then it’s a gang without military affiliation. If there’s used caps spilled everywhere, it’s old-fashioned black powder, from way back in the war. Probably not ever professionals, maybe just peasants with a single solid leader running them. If there’s nothing, that would mean they figured it out and went back, found the brass, and swept over the tracks and prints, just to leave us with no clue about nothing. That would be the smartest move and I don’t know what it could portend.”

“But whatever, you do think this is somehow ‘organized.’ Who would do such a thing?”

“That would be politics. Sir, you must have lawyers in Phoenix. It would be on them to figure out. Ain’t my patch of the woods.”

“Fair enough. But excepting politics, can either one of you think of someone who would want to close me down?”

Voth said, “Maybe another big railway company. Close us nightriders down, then we ain’t ready to mount up and track and kill anyone who attacks the tracklaying operation, like we done last year. That threat goes away. The straight route to L.A. don’t get built and the business stays with the others and there you are.”

“Good, Tom. Very acute, wouldn’t you say so, Jack?”

“Real good,” said Jack. “I’d have never come up with that.”

“Boseman,” the colonel yelled to the figure in the shadows. “You’ve been listening. I pay you to be smart. You must have something to say.”

“Sure I do,” said the man, obeying the colonel’s gesture to sit among them. “Don’t laugh, but the long-term loser in all this would be the steamship companies. They say they’re going to build a canal through Panama, but until then, heavy or mass quantity of shipping to the Angel City must go around the cape or the long, expensive way via San Francisco railroad. That’s all going to end when you get a direct rail route to southern California, which is going to grow like a prairie fire once it gets that connection in.”

“I doubt they’re smart enough or bold enough,” said the colonel, “but I can’t take it off the table. Here’s my idea. Mexican revolutionaries. I’m no expert on the politics down there as they’re as complicated as a Chinese jigsaw, with parties and even armies coming and going. But taken as a whole, they don’t want southern California developed by Americans because that squeezes the Mexicans out. And if some revolutionary takes over, the farming and the citrus trees of the southland would be of enormous help in stabilizing a shaky new government.”

That seemed to do it.

“Well, enough for one night. You sure you want to go on this mission, Jack? No Whoretown rest stop for you?”

“I don’t need that no more, sir.”

“Okay. You have my blessings. Now, let’s all try and get some sleep. Tom, can you see that Jack gets the best fresh horse, and more .38-40 for his saddlebags.”

“I’ll stick with the chestnut roan, sir. He’s a fine animal.”

With that, whiskey finished, and Boseman staying behind to clean up, the colonel returned to his book, and Voth led Jack out to the stable.

“Got something to say?” said Voth.

“No, sir,” said Jack.

“Told you. Just Voth. Don’t hold with fancy or proper. Gets in the way.”

“Got it.”

“You do your job well, which I like, and you don’t expect the spotlight, which I like. But one thing remains before you’re truly trusted.”

Jack nodded.

“You know, it ain’t talked about much, but we do more than what you see. We also enforce railroad policy. Usually, it’s just making a show of force or bullying some loudmouthed reformer to change his ways. Sometimes it gets ugly. That’s why we’re called the Dark Riders.”

“I have it.”

“When you get back, maybe go out with a few of the boys one night. Rough up some agitators, smash a printing press, threaten an Eastern know-nothing.”

Jack didn’t like this a bit. But he said nothing.

“You do that, I’ll know you’re for real, and so will the boys.”

“Then I’ll do it,” said Jack.

CHAPTER FIVE

The night was a mercy. Cool and dark, semi-illuminated by a shred of moon, it offered escape from the brutal sun of the day, and now calm, an escape from the whistling grit that filled the air by light. He made good time on the roan, and off memory and dead reckoning, found the valley of the ambush well before dawn. Instead of unsaddling and sleeping immediately, he climbed the ridge from behind which the riders had come, and watched the sun rise and wash over the land below.

Whoever had picked had picked well. From up here it would have been easy for him to observe the coming of the wagons and the moment when they would be too far in to go back and too far out to go forward. That’s when he’d given the signal, the sharpshooters had opened up, and a few minutes afterward, on a second signal, he’d sent his men on horseback. He could not have anticipated the adroitness with which the Rocking R fellows had taken cover from the sharpshooters and then anticipated the horsed men.

Jack made a close examination of all that lay before him, looking for indication of lurkers. A truly smart fellow on the other side would have anticipated a scout returning to the scene to learn what could be learned. But he saw nothing and believed himself secure. At that decision, he eased his way back down the slope to the draw where the riders had waited for the wagons to pull into the vulnerable position. He found it scuffed and ripped by hoofprints, but nothing off a boot and no empty shells. Also, no sign of a formation that might have connected it with the military, theirs or ours. The horses, however, had been well shod, that he could tell, and all shoes matched. They were from a single ranch with a blacksmith, or a town with a single smithy.

That done, he rode the draw, to see the thing from the vantage point of its most aggressive riders, who’d come on the attack after the sharpshooters had presumably pressed the Crazy R’s into panic. Again, tracks were deep—speed—and sharp—commitment—and without deviation—sureness. They meant to come hard at the stalled train, and get in close for killing, presumably with handguns at instinct-shooting range. They hadn’t made it, being greeted by the fusillade of rifle, and so they yanked hard to the right, ran parallel to the train, shooting those handguns from horseback at speed without much effect. Hard to hit anything from horseback, especially with a handgun, a lesson Jack had learned in the cavalry. Also, no ejected shells, because nobody tried to reload on horseback under fire, an advanced cavalry skill few had mastered even in three years of cavalry war. By the presence of tracks going forward and backward, it was clear they’d quickly abandoned the plan, made one last pass as they returned to the draw, then disappeared out of reach from rifle fire.

That wasn’t much. He’d seen that and knew it already, and now focused on it to determine any meaning. One thing was they boasted tight discipline throughout the whole fray, and no hero had broken from the pack to bring close-in pistol fire on the riflemen. Again, nobody wanted to die for wagons full of bacon and flour. Were they battle-shy or was their leader notably parsimonious with the lives of his men? Two possibilities, one suggesting they were young, the other suggesting he was smart. No conclusion.

He rode next to the glen of shattered trees, where the sharpshooters had hidden. He hoped to find treasure. Nothing at first, which was something. They had returned, swept out their tracks, policed up their brass. Not stupid. The trees and stumps, all bent and gnarled, all dead, revealed many punctures and fractures where bullets had struck, not worth examining because they were from himself and the boys in the wagons.

He looked more closely at the dirt, trying to recollect the spot where the first shot had been launched. And found it. Clearly that fellow was more active, more energetic, more aggressive than the others. That would mean he probably fired more, and that would in turn mean there were more shells to gather, and that would mean there was a larger chance the cleanup crew had missed one. Shells being round and the land being sloped suggested a downward roll. Jack picked his way around a natural barricade of deadwood and went to knee to peek and probe the underneath for a shell. No luck. Cursing, he turned, applied the same technique to another, farther downslope and was rewarded.

Pulling the shell out, he looked closely. Then, needing more vision, he pulled a pair of magnifiers from his pocket, and hung them off his nose and ears. The shell’s headstamp read “REMINGTON,” curving along half the rim, and underneath, riding the other half, “.30 WCF,” meaning Winchester Central Fire, which was indeed the formal name of the .30-30, and its smokeless powder capability.

It was freighted with meaning. The Winchester Model 94 was the only rifle in the world made for the .30-30. It hadn’t been available but a year or so, as it had taken breakthroughs in both metallurgy and chemistry to produce such a creation. The chemistry combined who knew what at what ratio to liberate three times as much power and two-thirds less smoke per cartridge than black powder of the same measure, which therefore demanded a radical new steel to encompass it. The frame had to be stronger, yet remain light enough for a rifle’s ease of carry, yet at the same time, it had to have flex to it, or too much brute strength and the sharpness of the blast would just shatter it. Somehow the Winchester fellows had brought this one off before all the geniuses of Europe and America. The result: it could propel any 100-grain bullet flatter and faster than any other bullet made in that range, making it ideal for mid-sized game. No deer and few bear—and no men—could stand against it.

But since it was new, it was still remarkable. In a West crowded with lever-action rifles of all shapes and sorts in a dozen or more black-powder variations and calibers, folks would notice the 94 and the particular ammunition that made it so effective. What they noticed they’d remember.

What they remembered could be tracked.

Someone had received shipments from both New Haven, Connecticut, and Ilion, New York—locations of Winchester and Remington manufacturing—within the last year, almost certainly by rail. Someone would know about that. It was now a question of finding them.

CHAPTER SIX

He did not ride to Railhead No. 4. It would be too crowded, and the chance of someone seeing him would be too high, and somehow it would get back to Callahan and Voth that he was investigating something he shouldn’t be investigating. Instead, he guided the chestnut a little more to the east and set out at an angle to reach the No. 3 railhead town, now dying as the tracklayers and their vices and hungers had moved on.

Arriving late afternoon, he stabled the animal, making certain it had a cooling wash, a good portion of oats and barley, and a stall in which to sleep. He then set out, first off to recon the town, as getting to know a place is a thing a certain kind of man has always got to do. He saw that the old whore strip, where a half dozen or so bawdy houses, with their accoutrements of young women, alcohol in copious amounts, and trouble in more copious amounts, had fallen into shabbiness. Two or three of the places remained open, but there was no energy. Progress had moved on. No music came, and their masters had taken the poor young whores up the tracks to a destination where their loins would produce more profit.

His first stop was in a general store where rifles were a prime product. But no Model 94s. “Not till next year,” said the owner. “Can’t even get ’em in Denver or San Francisco. The guns are so popular, not only in the West but everywhere, Winchester can’t keep up with the demand. I’m told not to expect our shipment in for at least six months. But I do have two beautiful ’92s here.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jack replied, “but want to see if that smokeless does what they say it does.”

He had already formulated his next stop. With the guns so hard to come by, it was impossible someone had acquired them at retail, even in the big city. Thus some mischief was implied—a robbery or such, whereby someone of bad intent stole the guns all packed and ready to ship. Maybe this crime took place here or maybe in New Haven or more likely someplace in between. But how was he to know?

It didn’t take long to solve that one. He walked now to the train station, a new brick building with tan wainscoting and the bold sign “Arizona Southern Railroad NO. 3” over its double doors. He entered, happily discovering that no train was due within several hours, which meant the place was empty of waiting travelers or recently arrived pilgrims. He was looking for Western Union. And indeed, there it was, part and parcel to the railroad, administered by the same clerk. He approached the window.

“Ticket, sir?” asked the young agent.

“Not today. Need to send a telegram east.”

“Want me to take it down?”

“You may find this hard to believe, given my unkempt appearance, but reading and writing are among my few skills. I need a pencil and a paper.”

“Of course. It’s a penny a word to a place this side of the Mississippi and one and a half beyond.”

“I believe I have the coinage.”

He took a pencil and a large yellow Western Union pad to a bench, sat himself upon it, thought a bit, and began to write.

Chalmers Breckinridge Reporter

The New York Herald

12 Broadway New York, N.Y.

Cashing in favor you owe. Check Winchester, New Haven, Connecticut. See if a shipment of new Model 94 rifles has been stolen—maybe from the plant itself, maybe from a rail or freight depot between here and there. Check too with Remington, Ilion, N.Y., for missing crates of .30 WCF ammunition for that rifle only. Rifles would number dozens, ammunition low thousands.

Faster better.

Wire result c/o me, Railhead No. 4, the Arizona.

He handed it over, the boy read it, totaled it—99 cents—took the silver dollar.

“None of my business, sir, but are you a detective?”

“You might say as much. That being so, you do understand, don’t you, that this communication is private?”

“That is the Western Union guarantee.”

“Then you won’t mind if I set over there while you send it, then come and take the original back.”

“If that is your ken.”

“It is.”

He went back to the bench, rolled and enjoyed a cigarette, and the boy went straight to work. It took about twenty minutes, as the boy was a steady but not spectacular operator. Jack then went when beckoned, took the paper back.

“What’s the word now?”

“Mum,” said the boy.

“Here’s another silver dollar to ensure mum.”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy.

That accomplished, he felt done for the day. All that lay before him now was the forty-two-mile hoof back to the Callahan place, easily accomplished before dawn tomorrow. In fact, so easily accomplished, it now occurred to him that a shot of lubrication might make the darkness ride more pleasant, as shots of lubrication made many trips bearable.

He looked for the nearest place with alcohol aboard, and saw the Palace across and down the street, much faded and dilapidated from its glory days of whores and rail workers, yet still apparently open, though both the whores and the tracklayers were long gone.

Entering, he saw nothing he had not seen in a thousand other such places and would see in a thousand places to come. Mostly empty, the place reeked of dust, faded damask, a stage where a chanteuse may once have warbled for the amusement of the rough clientele. In one corner, a quartet of lounging younger boys killed a bottle. He went to the bar, lounged himself, and when the fellow polishing glasses that would never be used turned, he said simply, “Whiskey straight. Two fingers.”

“You got it, Pop,” said the barkeep.

In exchange for a half-dollar piece, Jack took the drink, sipped it slowly, savoring what burn it offered—nothing memorable to be sure—and enjoyed the brief blur. Three more blurs, out came another coin, and another two fingers of the brown were sloshed into the vessel, possibly two and a half as he was now an old customer.

He savored, rolled a cigarette, and then moseyed to a table to enjoy the approaching twilight, the calm of day, the feeling of heat diminishing.

“You ain’t got no gun,” somebody said. Evidently to him.

He turned and saw one of the fellows at the corner table was addressing him.

“No, sir,” he said. “No need. I aim to get along with everybody.”

“Or maybe you’re a coward,” said the man, clearly the number one of the four, the other three of whom just looked him over.

“Maybe I am,” Jack said.

“Maybe I don’t like cowards,” said the man. His pals thought this remark quite stupid, as they exchanged glances. Jack got the play. Red was showing off for the fellows who were not quite paying him the respect he needed.

“Red, you settle down now. Nobody here’s asking for trouble,” said the bartender.

But Red would not be settled down. He was a junior-sized Joe Pye, Jack realized, angry that the world had yet to acknowledge his power and glory. A frontier of whores and whiskey and few laws tended to attract such men. It was their natural pond, where they could snap and snip at other fishes without any fear, so they believed, of consequences. This freedom turned some of them right nasty.

“I just don’t like drinking with cowards,” said Red.

Jack took a deep breath, more of a sigh.

“I called you a coward, old man. You just sit there and take it?”

“Sir, whatever has you riled I’m sure it ain’t me. I’ll just finish up and be on my way, and you’ll have the Palace to yourself and your three brave friends.”

The mistake was in the tone. A little mockery was implied, meaningless to most but of great offense to Red.

“You think being called a coward is funny, and now you think you’re going to scamper away.”

“I’ve got a long ride ahead of me, friend. I haven’t time to discuss the world and its complications and disappointments with you, Red. Red, is it? Should I know the name and be shaking? Am I tied up with Red, the famous gunfighter?”

“Red,” said a companion, “he’s funning you, I think.”

“He probably killed a drunken Indian in 1867 so he now thinks he’s a hero,” said Red.

“That drunken Indian was probably asleep too,” said another, and all laughed, perhaps too hard.

Red stood. He had Colonel Colt’s smoke wagon dangling low off his hip, and the Mexican holster was tied down, while the hammer wasn’t, as if ready for speedy action. Even in the dim Palace light, Jack saw the problem: Red had notches—five, maybe six of them—on the grip of the pistol. He thought he’d get another notch today. He was notch-happy.

Jack couldn’t contain himself. It was a character weakness, he knew.

“If I was you, sonny, I wouldn’t have paid full on that Colt. Somebody already cut notches into the grip.”

“I’m drawing down on you, you son of a bitch. Old or not, nobody talks to me that way.”

“But if I’m unarmed, you don’t get a notch, is the way I heard it. Plus, it’s pure murder then, and even in a town like this one, I see you ending up on the gallows tree.”

“Jimmy,” barked Red, “slide him over your Colt.”

“Red, you sure?”

“You heard him, Jimmy, dog-talking me. Nobody gets to do it. You, barkeep, you’re the witness. He’s armed, same as me. It was a fair fight, you tell ’em.”

“Red, this is not a good idea,” said the barkeep.

“You just sit there and watch, barkeep. Or I’ll turn my attentions toward you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jimmy unholstered his own Colt and pushed it across the table to Jack.

“You mind if I pick it up, Red?” Jack asked. “See that it’s loaded, see how it balances, see how the grips feel in my hand.”

“Be my guest. Anything funny and down you go.”

Jack picked the pistol up, saw Mr. Colt’s elegant orchestration of curves, each echoing the others, three in number, the curve of the cylinder guard, the curve of the hammer slot, and the curve of the grip. That fellow had to be a genius. This one went seven and a half inches through the barrel, giving it extra weight up front for stability at the expense of efficiency on the draw. The case coloring of the frame had yet to fade and yielded a motley of purple and yellow meant to harden the surface of the steel but by accident giving it the patina of a Rembrandt. He turned it pointed left sideways to his eye and popped the loading gate. Clicking the hammer to the second stop, he eased the cylinder around on its axle to make certain that in each chamber the rear of an unfired cartridge presented itself, in this instance the biggest boy, a .45 Colt. All were pristine, their primers silver circles against the duller brass of the case itself.

“Nice pistol, Jimmy. I felt the lubrication in the turn, and nothing has wobbled loose,” Jack said, a smile showing through his mess of a beard. “Like a good whore, nice and tight. Let’s see how it hangs in the balance.”

He spun the gun once, and it rotated smoothly on the axis of his trigger finger. “Nice,” he said.

Then he spun it again.

And again. And—

The gun ceased to exist as a Colt Model of 1873 as it twirled and instead became pure whiz. It was spinning so fast it seemed to have turned to magic. He spun it horizontally up, then horizontally down, the speed of whirl defeating gravity. It was quicksilver, a smear devoid of detail but communicating demented acceleration. He dipped, bringing it low, moved it around his back, and a twitch in his shoulder signified yet more magic as he tossed it, still rotating, over his shoulder, and caught it by the grip without bobble or tremor—you’d guess he’d done this before—and when at last it ceased to spin, it was solid in his hand, its muzzle keen on blowing a hole the size of a fist into Red’s belly.

His finger pinned the trigger and his left hand, so fast again it was a blaze of speed, passed over the weapon, cranking the hammer back, and the pinned trigger arranged the inside pieces, so that nothing hooked the hammer, and let it slam forward and fire.

The bullet struck the backstrap of Red’s own still-holstered Colt, mutilating it into twists and shreds, laying the impact so hard on it that it punched the weapon clean out of the holster, its grips flying in different directions, and it fell to the floor, where, because God thought this one was so amazing it deserved a dramatic finale, He arranged for it to land on the hammer point, and the hammer resting against the primer of the shell in the chamber transferred the energy and set it off, the bullet fortunately hitting nothing but wall, where it energized a large puff of dust, debris, wood frags, and plaster shreds.

Silence fell upon the theater of the pistol.

“Still want to have that gunfight, Sonny?” asked Jack. “Since yours is all beat to hell, one of your other pals can loan you his iron. I’d say twenty feet, we’ll let barkeep say ‘GO,’ and then what happens is what happens. Just because you annoy me, I think I’ll shoot you in the gonads. And, oh, sister, the mess.”

When Red again spoke, the declaration was shorn of bravado.

“I’s just funning you, mister. Had too much to drink. Didn’t mean nothing.”

“The rest of you boys, pistols out, tipped up, second click on the hammer, and dump the cartridges in the cylinder to the floor. Now. NOW!”

They did as ordered.

“Now, you clear out. I’ll even pay for your bottle of whiskey. You, Jimmy, you come back tomorrow for your hogleg when this business has calmed down. No more fun for you all tonight.”

Mumbles.

“WHAT?”

It came in unison. “Yes, sir.”

The four youths slunk out, heads down, bodies shed of aggression. Jack turned to the barkeep.

“Here’s a double eagle, should cover everything. Give Jimmy his iron tomorrow if he shows proper commiseration.”

He slid the revolver across the bar.

“Sir,” said the barkeep, “I’ve tended bar in all the bad Western towns for thirty-odd years. I’ve seen more gunfights than any man alive. I’ve seen Wyatt and Doc, I’ve seen Bat, I saw Wild Bill even, and John Hardin. But I’ve never seen gun handling like that. Are you with Buffalo Bill’s big production?”

“I don’t hold with showing off. The exhibition was to turn it around, so I didn’t have to kill nobody. It’ll scare most of your weaker gun people clean out of their pants.”

“Who are you? As I said, I knew ’em all, or heard of ’em, and I know I’d know of you.”

“Just an old man in a dry season, waiting for rain.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Before Jack returned to the spread, the colonel called Voth into his office.

Voth was not used to such attention. He was pretty much encouraged to run his boys as he saw fit, and as a fellow with much experience in both leadership of hard men doing hard jobs and as a pistolero of astonishing capability to back up his demands, he anticipated such freedom. But he understood at some level that there was something about the new star of the outfit, Jack, that was not right.

With a crystal glass of sipping whiskey, he sat across from the colonel under the blank gaze of the elk on the wall and other rich-man gewgaws. But the room was designed to impress other sorts of men than he was, and so he noticed none of it. His mind was locked on What do I have to do? and How do I do it?

“Tom,” said the colonel also with a drink in hand, but a cigar aglow to double his indulgence, “please make yourself a cigarette if you want, take a few sips of that wonderful libation I’ve imported from St. Louis, and tell me what you think of Jack.”

Voth diddled on the tailor-made for a bit—he was good at rolling—and lit up. “Good man,” he said. “The last trip back could have been rough if we’d walked into it blind. But he was on it early, got it figured out, organized us in a solid way, and it ended up costing us nothing but time.”

“Is he ambitious?”

“Here’s a thing I noticed along those lines: After the shooting of those brigands on the fence line, the cowboys all loved him. A certain kind of man would have taken that to heart, and sought allies there, among them, useful in any attempt to rise in the organization. But I watched. He ignored them. He made no play for them. Nor, in our bunkhouse, has he made a play to recruit allies, as a fellow hard-set to rise might.”

“He keeps to himself, does he?”

“Completely, sir. Short, polite, always respectful even to those who ain’t worth no respect, he treats all the same. He don’t go off to town with this bunch or that bunch, though every bunch except Joe Pye’s would be eager to have him along. He don’t butter nobody up. Not even me.”

The colonel nodded, considered.

“I have, however, spoken with him about a certain issue,” Voth continued. “Meant to tell you, now I will. I think it would be good if he’d go with Pye and the few boys the next time they have some persuading to do. It’s the only thing a bully like Pye enjoys, which is why he’s so good at it. But it would ease tensions if all knew Jack got his hands dirty like the rest of us.”

The colonel nodded.

“Tom, very good. I approve. The timing is perfect too. There’s a new preacher at the little chapel in No. 4. Eager young fellow. But you know the young: frequently unwise. He needs to be informed of the path the railroad expects and to know the consequences of not following along. Jack could go with Pye and Shorty on that ugly little job. I’ll have Boseman get you the details.”

“Yes, sir,” said Voth.

“I’m sure he’ll do it well. That is what troubles me. You see, what’s wrong with him in a larger sense is that nothing is wrong with him. No doubt he is of the highest caliber, but it’s difficult for me, now that I’ve seen him, watched him work, to imagine that such a man would be so reduced in circumstance that he’d pawn his guns and saddle and show up here three days after his last meal and bereft of kit, begging for work and happy to get it. He’s too good to find as a saddle tramp, even in times tough as these.”

“Do you think he’s an agent, a Pinkerton, some kind of state officer?”

“I hear rumors from my lawyers in Phoenix that there’s a lot of talk about starting up a ranger battalion, much like the one in Texas, to quell the vice and violence in the provinces. Maybe he’s a party to that organization.”

“But wouldn’t you know if they’d started up?”

“I should, depending on the acuity of the men I pay extravagantly for such information. But maybe they’re cleverer than that, and since it’s to be secret, they have made no announcement and only the territorial governor and a few of his associates know. But I have enough enemies without that eventuality.”

“It could be any of the same folks we mentioned as plotting against us the last time. Other ranchers, the railroad people, somebody with big Eastern money behind them, maybe even steamship folks, as Mr. Boseman suggested.”

The colonel nodded.

“Well, Tom,” he finally said, “as you know, we are vulnerable to secret probes. Thus, I want you to keep this Jack under a close eyeball. Who does he talk to, what questions does he ask, does he go anywhere secretly, does he have some method of passing communications? Our business can’t be disclosed to the world. You understand that?”

“I do. Which brings me to a question. On the next trip south, we’re due some special cargo from Major Arau. How do we handle that? Jack’s sure to notice the eleventh wagon. He wouldn’t be as easy to take care of as Teacher.”

“I’ll contrive a ‘mission’ for him. You should be all right without him, as our organized robbers will still be trying to figure out what is going on. The lesser breeds, be they off-res braves or trash looking for easy pickings, should be mostly fun for your boys. They do so much like to kill people.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Jack was slowly attuning himself to the secret workings of Callahan’s place. He now understood that the young cowboys mostly loathed the gunfighters because when they weren’t riding train to and from Mexico, they mostly lay about bickering with anybody who came by, while the cowboys themselves spent a good twelve and sometimes sixteen hours a day on horseback. For their part the Riders equally despised the cowboys because they weren’t man killers and therefore a part of the secret man killer club. They felt you weren’t worth taking seriously if you hadn’t shot for blood and been shot at for blood. The cowboys also naturally seemed eager to obey their foreman, Brine, as well as the law, and had dreams of settling down on a small ranch with a wife and children when their own cowboy days were over. The gun men had no dreams, no sense of the future, except gunfight and whiskey. They worshiped speed, the larger ability to hammer-slap with both speed and accuracy, and perhaps a little showy gun handling as well. If they weren’t lounging or holding shooting contests, they seemed mostly obsessed with the revolver spin, at which Joe Pye was adjudged the best.

Jack, having nothing to do until it was time to head south again, appointed himself a horse wrangler. He was good at it, since he loved the animals. They were more trustworthy than men. Each morning, he went to the corral, where new stallions had been brought in, and set about pacifying one of the animals for human companionship. He was not above the spur and whip and chain-tight shanked halter, but neither did he over-rely on them. He felt the animal responded more gracefully to a little easefulness over the long day. He never worked them too hard, and when eventually it came time to assign the horse to a cowboy in need of a new mount, the results were always gratifying. The boy and the horse got along well, without blood or yells being spent.

“We had a boy here once,” said Matt, as the two came upon each other in the corral one hot afternoon, “who had the same fondness for the horses. For all the animals.”

“I heard. He got blown up, right?” said Jack.

“They say he was cutting loose a team in the middle of a battle and a Mexican bullet hit the powder and up she went. He caught a back full of fragments, lots of holes like a Gatling gun.”

“I heard that story the same way. A shame. Sometimes it don’t make no sense at all.”

“I say you can tell a lot about a man the way he treats his horse.”

“I say the same,” said Jack.

“If you look at the others in that wired-off bunkhouse where you bunk, you’ll see their horses all fear them, and you can look close and see spur scars and whiplashes. I don’t like that a bit.”

“I don’t neither,” said Jack. “But that’s a good reason to stay clear of them.”

That night, after chow, Voth came up to him.

“Remember that thing we talked about? The ugly part of the business?”

“I do.”

“There’s a party going out tonight. Bully work, on a new reverend to town, has to learn what the railroad prefers as to policy. Pye will handle it. I want you along so you know how it works.”

“It ain’t a thing I’m eager on.”

“Nobody is. That’s why it’s your turn.”

CHAPTER NINE

The believers sang a good hymn, and if there was a God up there, He surely heard them. On the other hand, if He was up there and heard them, why would he let Pye, Shorty, two other Riders, and Jack into the church after the last folks cleared out? Hooded in dusters and low-tilted hats, they looked like Becket’s murderers.

“Uh, yes, may I help you?” asked the young man. He had a circular face, circular glasses, and a circular head. Even his hair ran to circles. He wore black except for a starched white collar showing above the cut of a collar meant to exhibit it.

“Well,” said Pye, “actually, Mr. Holy Man, we’re here to help you.”

The reverend was taken aback by this, knew instantly that his well-armed visitors were not friendly.

“All are welcome here,” he said. “I greet you with Christ’s joy and bid you peace.” He opened his arms to welcome them to the warm wooden space, lit by candles, with its shimmering Christian images about the walls.

“All of us done been blessed by our Lord Colonel Samuel Colt,” said Pye, grinning. “It’s him who gets our worship. We ain’t of the pew-sitting type.”

“Do I understand that to be a threat? There is no money here, nothing worth your time or effort. I would urge you to leave in peace.”

Joe smiled, then hit him hard in the face, knocking him back and down, opening a spurting laceration. Up on the wall, an alabaster Jesus watched but said nothing. Joe kicked the reverend in the ribs, and then Shorty joined the rib party, and in seconds the young preacher was doubled up in pain. At that point a young woman appeared in the rear end of the church.

“What’re you doing?” she said. The kickers turned to look.

“Well, ain’t she a pretty one. Prettier’n any Mexican whore in No. 4, for sure,” said Joe. Jack thought: Touch her and I will blow your brains all over Jesus.

“Don’t hurt my wife,” said the reverend, from the floor. “Please, I’m begging you—”

Joe kicked him in the ribs again.

“Lady,” he said, “you advise him to stay on the floor or I’ll really get rough. Then I might have sport with you, pretty thing. Then to put a ribbon on it, I might burn down the church.”

The young woman froze—fear does that—and began to sob.

Joe and Shorty found this quite funny. Jack and the other two boys just watched numbly.

“You boys get over here,” ordered Pye. “Let’s see how good you kick too.”

The other two raced over.

“Jack, you got no call to sit it out.”

“I think four to one’s enough manpower,” Jack said.

“Suit yourself,” said Joe, and turned to the job at hand. Twenty or so kicks later, he declared the job finished. He leaned close to the reverend.

“We’ll consider this just a friendly howdy-partner chat. I hope we don’t have to come back. But what would get us here in a flash is any more of your Sunday preaching about the evil of the Arizona Southern and the way it supports vice. Yeah, we heard you said the railroad owns the whorehouses and the whorehouses should be shut down. That’s contrary to railroad business. Them bohunks need to blow off steam and they need a Mexican whore to blow it off into, if you get my meaning and I’m pretty sure you do.”

The reverend said nothing. He was gasping, wrenching in pain. Jack guessed broken ribs, six or seven, plus a belt of bruises that wouldn’t let up hurting for weeks, plus memories that would never go away.

“Because I like you so much, I let you off easy,” said Joe. “But if I have to come to this joint again, well”—Joe pulled out his big silver Smith & Wesson revolver—“I’m afraid I might have to bring my pretty thing here into play.”

He placed the muzzle of the revolver against the man’s temple. He cocked the hammer, then pulled the trigger.

It seemed to take an eternity for the hammer to fall, but when it did, it landed on an empty chamber with a click.

The young man’s crotch turned black with piss. Joe and Shorty and the other two laughed. It was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

They stood.

“You done been educated, Reverend,” said Joe. He led his little crew out.

“See how it’s done?” he said as they mounted. “Easy as pie. Or, ha-ha, ‘Joe Pye’!”

Another few days passed and then Voth came to Jack. “You okay? Seem glum.”

“Pye enjoyed his little party too much.”

“That’s Joe. He ain’t nice, no, but we need his kind. Sorry, it’s how it is.”

Jack said nothing.

“The colonel wants to see you.”

“You’re coming too?”

“No, this one’s private between you and him.”

Jack went to the hacienda, where Mr. Boseman awaited, and the fellow escorted him into the colonel’s big office, more lit than usual since it was nearing twilight gloom. In a minute or so, the colonel entered, tall and elegant as always, impeccably dressed, the string tie evenly arranged in front of his ruffled shirt, the black riding coat spotless, the high black boots that snared the jodhpur trousers all shined. He looked as though he was heading to the ball.

“Sit down, Jack. Again, a drink?”

“Since the boys aren’t allowed to, then I won’t partake. They’ll smell it on me and it could set them off.”

“I’m sure you could handle anything that bunch could throw your way. But do have a cigarette then, or one of my cigars if you wish.”

“The cigar would be appreciated. I have a weakness for fine tobacco expertly rolled.”

The cigar offered, taken, lit, enjoyed, the smoke released to roll thickly through the air, the slight buzz it loosed enjoyed, Jack set up to listen.

“I gather you were not too pleased with our bully-boy tactics.”

“It ain’t my decision. There’s forces here I know nothing about. Since they’re involved in paying me so much, it behooves me to keep the yap shut or suffer their displeasure. That’s the way of the world.”

“Sensibly spoken. Your candor is appreciated. Let’s move on to more enjoyable topics. You haven’t been to No. 4, am I right? You are not known there?”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so. All right, this is what I require. I’m sending a new train to Mexico in a few days. But you will not be on it. My feeling is that you so outfoxed the raiders last time out, they will not be in a hurry to re-engage, not until they know more and have some information at hand. I don’t think the other antagonists offer a serious enough threat for you to spend your talents on. I have confidence that Voth and his men can handle that situation.”

“I’m sure he can, sir. He’s very capable.”

“Good to hear you say that. What I want is that you leave with the group, but on the first night, you slip away. You double back to No. 4. I’ll have a man in that town secure you a room in the Lincoln Hotel, the town’s finest. You’ll have one hundred dollars in greenbacks to finance both the hotel and the meals and drinks. But this is no vacation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s a job of spying. You do not identify yourself as an agent of mine, but more of a higher-caliber chap looking to pick up suitable work. Not gun work. I don’t need the Jack who could shoot the iris out of the eye of a gnat at fifty paces. No, I need sly Jack, who notices and figures. Maybe it’ll come to nothing, but I am still haunted by thoughts of unseen enemies plotting against me. It’s that conundrum you’re to investigate. Maybe there’s something in the air you could pick up on, or certain signs you could notice, which could initiate the gathering of storm winds meant to destroy Callahan’s Crazy R. I’m thinking such signs could include gun men in town, perhaps, or a group of Eastern businessmen not of the railroad but still, by cut of clothes and shine of boots, backed by money.

“They’d be asking impertinent questions. Or it’s said the territory is going to start up a ranger troop, as they have in Texas, of extremely hard men. Such groups are always said to be in the public interest, but usually they cater to the whims of the richest. They could bring various actions against me. You might hear of that.”

“I’ll endeavor to do my best. It’s not my profession but I have some skill at it.”

“I’m sure you do. Then, to keep the deceit at its most impenetrable level, I’d have you rendezvous with the train the night before it arrives here. If it’s being watched, I’m hoping nobody in the hills with glasses will have seen clearly enough before then to note your absence, and in that way, they will not know that we are actively attempting to counter their measures.”

“I’ll do as you ask, sir. Do you want a written report as the army would require?”

“No, a verbal summation of findings will be sufficient. Jack, we need information. Be my eyes, be my ears.”

Harold Thoreau

Pinkerton Detective Agency Office/Arizona

Territorial Capital

August 15, 1897

Dear Agent Thoreau:

As per our discussion, I have set my plan in motion. My employee “Jack,” as he calls himself, should arrive in No. 4 August 22, late night, and take the room you have secured for him.

The mission before you is to keep him under constant surveillance. It is possible he is an agent representing parties unknown with the final goal ahead of engineering the downfall of my enterprise. As you know, I have powerful connections with certain sponsors of my own, and while I believe them able to deal with any threat that bodes ill for the relationship we have, at the same time I do not want them aware that I find myself under duress. It could alter their perception of me. Hence your labors should be conducted under the greatest discretion.

Among the possibilities you should be aware of would be the following: prearranged contact with other agents, and an exchange of information between them; messages left and passed clandestinely; telegrams he might dispatch or receive; interest in activities beyond his scope of duty; reading materials that are well above the limits of an uneducated ex-cavalryman out of benighted Arkansas; overheard conversations of similar rhetorical sophistication, the sophistication itself being as indicative of misrepresentation as the content of such conversations; sexual dispositions of unusual expression.

I would not at this point attempt to disrupt any of such behavior; its observation and documentation alone are enough. If you can obtain papers that have interested him, or copies thereof, that would be most useful. Further, any information regarding his background, history, record with or against the law, peers, military experience (I have sent you his claimed unit affiliations for whatever use they may be, though I do understand C.S.A. records no longer exist), family, social status, and such forth, would be greatly valued.

I should further caution you he is an extremely observant man, so your wit must be at its sharpest to avoid detection. As a professional of the nation’s most reputable office of private inquiry, I have no doubt you are yourself a man of high-tuned capability and such a mission is within your wherewithal. I shall not, therefore, present you with any advice on how to proceed as you might be insulted by such or, if not, amused by my naivete.

I await your report.

Colin Callahan

The Crazy R Ranch, Railhead No. 4, The Arizona

CHAPTER TEN

Railhead No. 4 had two businesses that gave it identity and sustenance. The first was, as financed by certain men in the Union Pacific building in far-off New York City, to extend the direct southern route of the Arizona Southern to the burgeoning city of Los Angeles, California. This demanded the management of large numbers of extremely rough men performing endless hours of physical labor under the unsentimental stewardship of gang bosses. The work was brutal, the bosses more brutal. Corporal punishment, though strictly illegal by territorial statute, was applied vigorously, not by whip as in the Old South of slave days but by fist or club. The men were kept in line by beating, aggressive remonstrance, and threat of fine or release into an uncertain economy already flooded with unneeded workers. Plenty others awaited any employment opening.

Higher-caste employees—engineers, dynamiters, security executives, payroll and logistics staff, and the like—had better lives but not by much. Unlike the stifling tents that shielded the workers at night, these folks crowded into a little village, some of them with wives and children. A school existed, to teach the three Rs to such children, as did a general store, a stable, a restaurant, a laundry, a pharmacy, and a firehouse, where a horse-drawn engine awaited the many accidental conflagrations common to an area where many people lived who hated every bit of their lives.

The situation, therefore, was explosive, especially among the lower five-sixths of the populace, and fights to the death between men, driven by the constant threat and the remorselessness of the schedule, were not uncommon. Meaningless grudges produced homicides regularly, and each murder produced counter-murders as the cycle of violence and retribution played itself out over and over. It was hardly civilization as practiced in America at that time.

A realistic appraisal of the situation meant that some kind of release was necessary for the brutalized workers, else they might of a day emulate Spartacus, singing praise to Emma Goldman and causing existential damage and casualties and annoying the hell out of the New York people.

Thus, the second main business of No. 4 was sin. Whatever form one wanted had to be available cheap and plentifully so that, on their rotating one half day off per week, the laborers could depressurize. No Protestant moral didacticism could stand in the way of this massive communal need, and the Southern’s upper management were by nature men of hard practicality and no prissy sentimentality. To open lower California would not only take men of muscle and labor but an endless supply of whores, liquor, gaming, and other rough comforts. It was the price of progress and profit.

Jack sipped whiskey at the center of this desert Sodom, watching, waiting, listening. He was in the Golden Apple, the most ample of the saloon/whorehouses that serviced No. 4. But who would notice him, for the place, as normal, was a belowdecks bacchanalia on a ship bound for hell. Huge, sweaty men were packed in, each of them eager to get as much human pleasure into his brief respite as possible. They wanted the swirl that bad liquor brought faster than good, and it arrived in large amounts, swiftly. They wanted the rush of sex happiness, and women were available for such relief, no questions asked, no names kept. The whores, Mexican to a gal, were sadly overworked, but the truth was, nobody much noticed or cared. They were not treated any better than animals, to be beaten if reluctant, and many bore the bruises and swellings of over-earnest administration. Their job was to be a sex-hole, nothing else. A good way to get beaten witless fast was to preach reform, as the reverend had so recently found out.

Then there was another feature of the place: somehow men together also produce a noise, not really coherent, a kind of swelter of vibration that echoed and rattled about the walls, bounced off the ceiling, passed through the mountains of fume generated by cigars and tailor-made cigarettes, whirled about the hundreds of glasses and bottles, and was its own form of pressure. It was inescapable, crushing, ultimately dispiriting. The only way to end it was a good hosing by Gatling gun.

In such a lawless ruckusville, fights were common, mostly fisticuffs of shocking brutality. Sometimes blades came out, increasing the lethal potential quite a bit, as well as the slop factor, for bodies were just sacks of blood, and penetrated, they yielded fluid in lakes and lagoons with great speed. Gunfights, however, were rare as rail workers—a motley of Poles, Slovaks, Irish, Italians, Germans, all big huskies who’d wandered west in search of El Dorado, only to find the Southern—did not own or were not proficient with handguns, and moreover, the railroad’s own police were well armed with Colts but more usually deployed billy clubs to knock down any would-be Wyatt or Bat or John Wesley before shots were actually exchanged, lives taken, and business halted a good half an hour for cleanup of blood and broken glass, and hauling away of bodies, the wounded taken to a dispensary where a lone railroad doc tried to preserve life, though often without success.

Jack had a bottle of Pikesville rye, or so the label said, from the East. Under his rawhide duster he wore a white shirt with a neatly tied ribbon tie, and sat relaxed. Something in his demeanor suggested you would not be wise to jigger with him, and so he was unbothered.

He listened hard and watched harder, occasionally moving from place to place to overhear a particularly interesting group of sin-eaters. At the end of the bar, his new friend Caboosehead pretended not to watch him, while nonetheless keeping intermittent contact via the large mirror behind the bar. He was beefy, muttonchopped, wearing the bowler hat that had all but taken over the broad-brimmed cowboy hats in the towns of the West. Jack thought he looked like a mushroom. Anyhow, it had taken Jack ten, possibly as many as twelve, seconds to understand that he was under professional observation. It would be amusing to double back on Caboosehead, give him a thumping, and see who he was working for. Had to be Pinkerton under employ of the colonel, hard evidence that the colonel, despite his bonhomie, cigars, and whiskey, didn’t yet trust Jack. Jack was fine with this. It would be shrewd of the colonel to check and double-check, and that way avoid cruel surprise. Jack elected to let Caboosehead do his job without interruption, let him remain under the belief that he was getting away with something. No need at present to upset that apple cart.

He went back to eavesdropping.

“The one with the birthmark. Get her wet and she goes nuts. I give her an extra—”

“Ben, don’t give ’em no extra. They come to expect it and you got problems. It’s like giving a stray cat a dish of milk. Suddenly the cat ain’t stray no more.”

“Yeah, well, I figure if she’ll—”

“It ain’t you, Ben. You’re doing hurt to your buddies, making it harder to get the Mex gals to shake tail when we done paid up a dollar.”

That one seemed to be going nowhere. Well, what about:

“Aye, them fookin’ Polacks need a smashing, if ye be askin’ me. Just ’cause more o’ them than us Irishers these days, they be acting all full of swagger and moving to the front of the equipment line—”

“Aye, and to the ends in the rail hauling.”

Jack guessed that the ends were lighter than the center.

“And them fookin’ gang bosses, they favor the Polacks over us, ’cause not speakin’ the language they ain’t givin’ no talk back.”

“One of these nights we ought to go on a quick head-banging rip through the tents, give ’em a bruising so bad they think twice but don’t know who done ’em.”

“Oh, they’d know all right.”

“Well, maybe. But that’d cut ’em back a bit, would it not? Then maybe we’d get back to the way it was.”

The fellows didn’t know it would never get back to the way it was. Progress was the railroad’s most important product.

On and on it went, mostly labor grievance, anger at some mythological Other, physical complaints about pain to spine and knees, wondering if they’d get a bonus when the rails finally reached into the city called The Angels, that sort of thing. Agh! Dispiriting as hell, the black bitterness of those who both hated and needed the railroad.

Then finally, something.

“The meeting’s at midnight. Behind the general store, there’s a barn. It’s empty but we can get men in there if they’re careful and the railroad dicks are unsuspecting.”

He had changed from the white shirt to his black bib one—his best!—and got there early, at 11 p.m. He found a place in the scrub trees not far off, from where he could watch, and made certain to play stupid so that Caboosehead would think him stupid as he himself nestled into trees a hundred yards behind Jack.

They began to arrive in ones and twos at 1l:30, moving stealthily through the dark, in hopes of evading the uniformed railroad police. By midnight the place was crowded, though quiet. Conspiracy only occurred on the sly and in the dark. Jack waited and watched, then slid low to the barn, slithered along till he found a loose slat, pried it a bit, and put his ear to it.

“… no right whatsoever to work you so hard without care of any sort, fire you summarily without cause, sell you your living needs at exorbitant prices. It is exploitation of the workers, pure and simple. We must stop it.”

“You’re talking strike. Easy for you to say. I’m sending money to my wife and kids in Denver every month, and without that, they die.”

“You cannot think of it that way. What you do must not be done for your wife and kids but for all wives and kids, now and particularly of the future.”

“But if we throw a bomb like they did in Chicago, the dicks will open fire and kill a mess of us. Then they’ll beat the rest till they get the names of the leaders, like you, Liam, and they’ll have you arrested, and since the railroad owns the courts, you’ll be hung. And for what? Twenty-two cents an hour instead of twenty, and two doctors in the dispensary instead of one?”

“Jimmy’s right. We ain’t got much but it’s all we got. We lose it for something called the Socialist Labor Party and what have we got? Nothing is what we got, even if we win.”

“Nobody says it’ll be easy or fast,” said this Liam. “But what is clear is that the only way is through organization and solidarity. If we cost the railroad money, they will come around lickety-split.”

“We have nothing to lose but our chains,” someone said. “I say strikes don’t get you food on the table. You’ll never raise fat kids off a strike. In truth, this ain’t a thing except a war. We got to be prepared to kill and maybe die.”

“Says you, Jake. You got no wife and kids, and if you lose this job, you just wander somewhere else. I lose all.”

On and on it went. In the end, Liam, the SLP rep, signed up a few secret members, but most just couldn’t commit. A secret meeting was to them as much as a fuck with a Mex whore when it came to letting off the steam buildup.

But Jack fixed on this Jake, the firebrand. He seemed like the type who’d be moved by outrage to more extreme measures. He was ripe for recruitment into a radical outfit if he hadn’t been recruited already. Squinting through the hole in the wall, Jack made him out to be tallish, thinnish, reddish, Irishish. That marked him well.

The meeting broke up, and in the same twos and threes by which they’d come, they wandered back to their tents, seemingly without incident or observation. But Jack managed to find and stay on Jake, as presumably Caboosehead brought up the rear. Jake was the only one who went alone, without a pal, back to the tents. Maybe he was too hot a potato for the others.

Jack tailed him, counting on his unusually strong night vision to keep in contact from a distance. His mystery was quickly solved. Jake had a drink, then ambled off, to be intercepted at an alleyway by three men in bowlers and frock coats, with lumps under their shoulders signifying pistols. They pulled him back, scrunched down with him, and talked earnestly, one of the suited men taking notes. Handshakes were exchanged, then goodbyes said, and Jake headed off one way, the three another. So Jake was an undercover. But for whom?

Jake didn’t make it quite to the tent city. Jack stepped out from behind the latrines and thumped him hard in the back of the neck, knocking him down and out.

He dragged the Irisher deeper into a gully, dumped him hard, then sat on his chest, until he finally came out of it. Blinking, groaning, thrashing weakly to discover himself pinned hard, he finally said, “Who are you?”

“Hey, bub, since I’m on top I’ll ask the questions. Who are you?”

“Jake Costello, tracklayer.”

“Tracklayer, your ass. You just chummed up to three frock coats with pistols aboard. I make it you are connected up with one of the following: railroad detectives, Pinkerton, a private inquiry agency, territorial undercover, or even Grover Cleveland himself. Which is it, bud?”

“You got it wrong, mister. Them’s debtors I owe to. A syndicate, you might say. I used the dough to buy a place, but it went doggy-up in the drought. I slipped out on them. They caught up with me, and made it clear to me—”

“That’s cock-and-bull, bub. They’d beat you hard you owed criminals money. That’s how they work. I seen you chatting, as if at a tea party. I saw one fellow taking notes. I saw handshakes.”

“I don’t—”

“I could smack you dizzy if I wanted, and you’d open up for sure. But there’s an easier way. I do know men in the tents, having cowboyed with them before all this heat and sun. If I let spill what I saw, they’d believe me. And your time will be over soon enough.”

Jake said nothing.

“You want to end up facedown in a ditch, throat cut?”

“No, sir.”

“Then spill it out. All of it.”

“All right, then. No tell?”

“No tell.”

“I am with the railroad, after six years on the Denver police. There was an incident and they let me go. Unfair, but there you have it. Believe me, I do not like this undercover, but it was all I could get. I have kids too, just like them rail-layers.”

“What’s the job? Straight spy work?”

“I’m to get the boys fired up, on the thought that my craziness will draw out the more extreme fellows, you know, them that find the SLP too soft. The type that would throw a bomb or set a fire.”

“You give up the names, then. They get the heave-ho?”

“No, sir. The boys is hauled in, given a choice. They go spy or go hang for sedition. No choice at all. The end is that the tracklayers are so compromised they’ll never strike, much less revolt.”

“Proud of yourself, are you?”

“I’m just as jammed up as they are. The set-up don’t allow nobody nothing, but them at the top. I’d take off, but my wife and kids—”

“Okay, let me go straight to my interest. You part of or hear anything about some way in which a big ranch south of here called Callahan’s Crazy R is on a target list? It’s got some gun men on hire, and they handle certain security jobs for the railroad, such as posse work after a robbery. Ring any bells?”

“I heard of the Dark Riders and that scary assassin Voth. They ran down some rail thieves last year and hung ’em all. No robberies since.”

“What about info from the other security boys in town? That is, Pinkertons, territory officers, maybe federal or military detectives?”

“Not a thing. I don’t know who they are, they don’t know who we are.” Jack let him up.

“Okay, now, git. You got twelve hours of laying steel tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir, I— Well, one thing.”

“More?”

“I don’t know what this is. Probably nothing. Still—”

“Spill. I’ll decide if it’s anything.”

“The railroads may hate each other’s guts, but they ain’t stupid. They share information on possible trouble. You know, strikes, robbery gangs, anarchists, saboteurs, Indians, all them that could do harm.”

“And?”

“This report come through from Mexico, not sure the source, not sure of anything. Just said to be what some folks are talking about. They call it la gran muerte del número cuatro. It had some kind of mystical meaning to it, I don’t know, religious or something.”

Jack said, “I speak a bit, not much, what you pick up. Spanish, I mean. They’re talking about the Great Death of No. 4.”

Her name was Yolanda. She looked to be about fourteen, and under certain circumstances she would have grown to be a pretty, possibly even beautiful girl. These were not such circumstances. She had the zest and bounce of a seventy-seven-year-old. Her face collapsed quickly from artificial glee to a mask of despair. Her eyes held no light, her face no spontaneity. She had been hard used, then put away wet. The makeup, crudely applied, could not mask that pain. Worse, she seemed to favor her left side, so Jack peeled back the shoulder of her dress on the right, to reveal a bruise in brown and yellow with the shape of a billy club to it.

“Who did this to you?” he asked.

“Mrs. Hansen.”

“Why?”

“I am slow to awaken this morning.”

He laid fifty cents down on the bed.

“What do you want, sir? I can do anything. I am not permitted to say no.”

“Talk. Nothing of the flesh. I look at that bruise and I got no frisky in me.”

“You will not tell them I have spoken? They would not like it. I would be beaten. I mean nothing to them.”

“I will say nothing. Do they beat you every day?”

“No, but often. The girls do not defy Mrs. Hansen. They are too frightened. But now and then, to make an example, she will drive one to defiance and then hurt her with the club. A girl died two weeks ago. That is enough to keep us in line.”

“Where is this?”

“I cannot say. A house, half an hour or so out of town. Locked and guarded, a prison. We all sleep there. They take us to and from in a big wagon every night and every morning, but it is sealed and locked and where it takes us, I cannot say.”

“How did you end up there?”

“They take me in the night. They tell me my mother sold me and that I now belong to them. They told me that my mother could not feed me anymore and that I should forget her and think of my new life. But my mother did not sell me. She would never sell me.”

“I am sorry for your hardship.”

“It is of no point to be sorry. Nothing can change it. It is what my destiny has become. If I could escape, they would hunt me and kill me. Nobody has ever escaped. Nobody ever will. We will do this till we die, and then they will bury us in the desert unmarked. We will never see a priest or a doctor again. We are nothing to anybody except the man with a quarter in his pocket who needs a fuck or he will hang himself from the labor of the day. Certain men have decided that this will be our life, and nothing can prevent that. They have power and guns. To stand against them is to die.”

“Do you overhear talk among the men, the guards, I mean? You have picked up enough English to understand. Is there anything you can tell me?”

“They talk only of how they hate the job but it is all they can get. They talk of the cruelties that are inflicted upon them. They accept it, as we do. We are all slaves, though of different responsibility. Ours is to lie with strangers day and night and pretend to enjoy; theirs is to discipline with brutality. They do not like it no more than we do. Nobody has a hope. There is no hope.”

“Let me ask one last thing. It’s a phrase in Spanish. I recently heard it. La gran muerte del número cuatro. Does that have any meaning?”

“I have never heard it,” she said. “I know this place is No. 4. If the Great Death arrives, I believe it will be a good thing, as in the Bible He destroyed evil cities. I would even welcome it and die happily in flame and sulfur. We are the damned.”

“Don’t give up hope,” Jack said. “You will surely die.”

“Are you hope, sir?”

Jack had no answer.

He pretended to be well satisfied, gave an extra half-dollar piece to the gal that ran the whorehouse floor of the Golden Apple. Then he went downstairs, had a glass of fake Pikesville at the bar, smiled happily, and sat there as relaxed as any man who’d just had his fires quelled by cool water.

Where was Caboosehead? Around somewhere, maybe waiting across the street?

Jack ambled out, moseyed down the wood sidewalk, passed by a few alleyways and then a cross street, and came at last to the Lincoln Hotel. At a certain point in the journey he felt himself watched, but he in no meaningful way reacted. When he got to the hotel, he halted the doors, yawned as though wrung out, snuck a glance, and caught movement in the shadows across and down the street. Caboosehead, of course. Had to be him.

That established, he got his key from the desk and went upstairs to number 9 and entered. Turning up the gas lantern, he found nothing disturbed. He made a show of stripping to his underdrawers and using the washbasin, then turned down the gas lamp. And went to bed.

An hour later, after no sleep, he pulled on his clothes, opened the window, and crawled out. He eased his way down the roof of the porch, and slipped off, hanging, then dropping the last six feet. He scurried behind the hotel and waited another twenty minutes, searching for any sign of movement in the dark. None.

Believing himself unnoticed, he made it to the stable, saddled up the roan, and skipped out the rear doors. He rode into the night, not far, but far enough. He secured the horse, then took up a low position that let him gaze down the dark alley that ran behind the bordellos. He gathered it to be around 4 a.m., and in time, a wagon approached. It was of the larger variety, called a Conestoga, built for families or increased haulage. It lumbered down the alley. Behind each of the joints, the wagoner stopped, and a fellow dropped off, hammered the door, and escorted anywhere from three to five girls back to the wagon. After clearing all four houses, he’d loaded a total of fourteen into the wagon, at which point he climbed back into the cab and the wagon began to roll.

Jack followed, but at a distance. No need to keep them in view, because the contrivance could not but stir up a drift of dust as it plowed along the raw road, and with his good eyes Jack was able to keep that atmospheric disturbance in sight.

Above, night in the American West. A vault of stars, maybe millions of them, against the black satin of space. A cool breeze, the day’s only mercy. A curl of bone-white moon settling on the horizon, offering next to nothing of illumination. The occasional appearance of a particularly twisted cactus or a patch of dried-out desert scrub and brambles, nameless bent trees. Rises, falls in the earth as he rode its ripples. The occasional sound of a night creature, a call, a scream, a song of love, a whine of complaint, a screech of death. The wagon took a course near and paralleling the tracks, then turned right and headed out into the Sonoran Desert. Jack tailed, no Caboosehead on this train.

In time, the wagon turned left into a draw, and Jack hitched the chestnut roan to a scrub tree, scampered up a low hill or rise, and at the crest went prone. Unloading was occurring with the same lack of ceremony as the loading, supervised by a blocky figure in black, a woman. Mrs. Hansen. Had to be. With no rush of wind, her voice carried.

“Come on, you damned Mex whores, get it moving. You, Carlotta, I see you dragging, get in there or I’ll give you a knock-around. Same with you, little Rosalita, don’t give me them doe eyes and don’t try no I-am-hurt monkeyshine on me.”

It had at one time been a hacienda, but was felled by ruin, and now, without herds or crops to sustain it, it was a mass of abandoned adobe. Behind was a derelict barn, half in ruins, and to one side a corral, though imperfectly fenced and not capable of restraining any beasts. Only the house had a sense of security to it, looking in the dark like a fortress of some sort, but designed to keep people in, not keep them out.

Jack waited a bit, then watched as the teamster left the dwelling, climbed into the wagon, and headed off. Jack followed at the same distance as before and left him as he turned into the rail camp. He himself returned to No. 4 and managed to slip in the back of the hotel. The night clerk dozed, and up he went, back to room number 9 and a few hours’ sleep.

The next morning, after ten, he checked out, went to the stable, and again paid fees. Then he saddled the roan and headed out. The question now was: How far would Caboosehead follow? All the way back to his interception of the wagon train? That would be bad. But he was lucky, or the detective was tired. Four miles out, Jack ducked into a grove of trees and waited. Caboosehead had seen enough. The man continued and then without enthusiasm—he was just as sick of Jack by now as Jack was of him—he turned and headed back to No. 4. Jack gave him half an hour, then headed back to No. 4 himself, though he didn’t enter by Main Street. Instead, he circled around back, came in from another angle, and searched carefully before making a move. Time-consuming to be sure, but accomplished without incident. This brought him to the backside of the train station. He slipped in, finding it empty, and went to the window of the ticket office. Another young man greeted him, eager to rise in the railway business.

“Western Union?”

“Yes, sir.”

Jack gave him the name.

“Oh yes,” the boy said. “It’s a long one. Usually, they aren’t that long. You may have—”

“Just hand it over.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was heavy, at least three pages stuffed into the flimsy envelope.

He took the back route out of town, checking again to see that nobody followed, and then finally opened it up:

He talked to Winchester sales manager in New Haven. No missing guns in continental U.S., not even in the territories, at least between the plant here and wholesale there. However, the Mexican government requested sample Model 94s as possible contract replacement for the rifles of their presidential guard.

Winchester shipped one crate—16 rifles, along with 5,000 rounds of the .30-30 Remington—via Nogales to Mexico City. It was reported that on May 15 this year, somewhere south of Nogales, well into Mexico’s northern district, the state of Sonora, the train was held up and not only were the rifles and ammunition stolen, but much in the way of food and supplies, enough, it is said, to feed a battalion for a month. I have read the report from a Major Arau who is commanding officer of the Federal Army of Mexico for that district. His conclusions are as interesting for what they don’t say as for what they do say.

To sum up: well-organized, efficient attack, no pointless casualties, not like usual Mexican underworld operation, which is mostly bang followed by more bang and lots of yelling. Wagons were ready to offload the various materials and the whole thing took place without gunfire. Suspicious?

Winchester certainly thinks so, but since the guns and ammunition were already paid for, they’re letting it slide, perhaps on the advice of our government which doesn’t want a big ruckus over 16 rifles. That’s why there was nothing in the newspapers.

Oh, and one more piece of news along these lines. There was another item aboard the freight train, and it too was purloined. Don’t know the weapon, but they say it was something new from England, called a Maxim automatic machine gun. Ten thousand rounds of belted caliber .303 British also stolen.

Hope this clarifies and satisfies.

Best,

Chalmers NY Tribune

PS. I’m still getting royalties from “Gun Man.” Enough for bacon once a week!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The big news in camp when Jack intercepted the wagon train out of Mexico and away from Major Arau’s warehouses was that ace gun man Joe Pye had killed a Mexican whore in a bordello. But it was merited: she had been yelling at him.

The story that Jack heard was that Joe had wandered down from the bad part of town into the worse part of town and set up shop in one of the sleaziest of the joints. He then proceeded to drink enough tequila to keep a navy afloat. He was taking his time picking a señorita for the night, when one of the older nightingales assaulted him, that is began to berate him aggressively for a variety of sins. No one knew the source of the tiff, as the only witness was Joe himself and he only spoke two words of Spanish, tequila and gracias. Joe feared for his life, though all admitted his consumption of tequila had probably impaired his decision-making, and out came the Smith & Wesson, and one .38-40 later, in a haze of gray smoke, the woman hit the ground like a sack of cement falling off a wagon.

Joe saw no reason to run. There was effectively no law in Agua Caliente, and no one represented the whore caste, so it was merely a matter of waiting for the yelling to subside and the music to start again. He did, however, give a $20 double eagle to the bartender, meant for the woman’s children, if the bartender could be trusted, but he couldn’t.

“Joe’s pretty good with a gun when it comes to a face-off with an unarmed whore or beating the crap out of a holy roller,” said Jack. “I wonder how he’d do against somebody who knew a thing or two.”

“Get that thought out of your mind, Jack,” said Voth. “You ain’t here as the cause of justice. You work for the colonel same as me, same as Joe. If the colonel demands some kind of punishment, he will express himself, though it seems unlikely, as the Mexicans expressed no grievance. Federales brought Joe back that night and they didn’t say nothing. Major Arau didn’t say nothing.”

“That Mexican major was too busy waxing his mustache,” said Jack, to some laughter.

But Jack had put two plus two together and realized that the situation had just clouded over even more. The dead whore had to be the live whore who’d agreed to look into matters for Jack. In his way, Jack had killed her. This did not please him and was one more piece on the table favoring a consequential confrontation with the blond killer. But it meant more.

Had she gone about her business too loudly? Had she acquired information not meant to be distributed? Had someone put an order out to kill her and slipped Joe a fee to do the job? It could not be just coincidence, could it?

On the other hand: Maybe it wasn’t the same woman. Maybe it was just the random drift of a bad man through the universe, causing fatal damage wherever he scraped hard. That was explanation enough, the simplest, the cleanest, the easiest. No need to get all detectived-up over an incident of meaningless violence in a territory jam-packed with meaningless violence.

Only one person would know, and that was Joe. Jack decided to watch Joe very carefully: Had he come into new wealth? Had he made some purchases indicative of extra spending money? Was he gambling foolishly, flashing a wad in a quest for respect? Had Joe said anything to Shorty or others in his little group of acolytes? Could Jack buddy-up one of them and get him to talk? What about Voth? Was he party to this kind of shenanigan?

The only track through this thicket of doubts would be Joe himself. Maybe the blond idiot could be goaded into saying something.

“Where is Joe?” he asked.

“Ain’t here. Took a wagonload of stuff into No. 4, for the new general store that’s just opened. The colonel sells to it too. He never misses a chance at an extra nickel or two. That’s why he can stay afloat.”

“I see,” said Jack, whose first move on joining the train had been to count the wagons. He now realized that if Joe had left with a wagon, there had been an eleventh.

Colonel Colin Callahan Crazy R Ranch

Railhead No. 4

Arizona Territory of United States

Dear Mr. Callahan:

As per your request, we assigned an agent to keep your employee “Jack” (last name unknown) under surveillance in his three days in Railhead No. 4.

To summarize:

Our operative reports that “Jack” performed his mission with persistence, skill, determination, and cleverness. He would in fact make an excellent Pinkerton detective. Our op observed him on all three days trying to obtain intelligence with regard to any plans anyone may hold for future actions against the Crazy R. In that regard, he insinuated into groups of cowboys and railroad men in No. 4’s four houses of ill repute in hopes of persuading men to confide in him. He moved in close to a group of more refined men, all in frock coats and bowlers, who appeared to be in town in some executive capacity, either in the employ of the railroad or owing allegiance elsewhere. Without attracting attention to himself, he seems to have gotten close enough to overhear their business. Then, in one instance, he managed to locate the site of a secret meeting thought to be held by the anarchist labor group, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Overhearing the discussion, he identified the fieriest of the participants and followed the man until he was alone, then overwhelmed and interrogated him at length. Whatever information he obtained will almost surely be shared with you as his part; our op could not get close enough to overhear.

At no time did he yield to the temptations of whiskey, strictly rationing himself to two drinks per night. At no time did he use expense funds forwarded him to buy personal items. At no time did he engage in games of chance. At no time did he surrender to temptations of the flesh, abundant as they were. He did accompany one of the Golden Apple’s working women upstairs, but, according to our operative, appears not to have engaged in sexual activity with her, as she was as neatly dressed after their private time as before. We conclude he almost certainly used that time to acquire intelligence. At all times, he kept a low profile, only emerging from his room at night to pursue his assigned activities. He made no effort to communicate either openly or surreptitiously with a contact. He received no messages via a drop, a common behavior for an undercover. Nothing in his demeanor or his behavior suggested cleverness, ruse, divided loyalties, or any attributes of the so-called “secret agent.”

All in all, he must be regarded as a superior employee. I trust this concludes our business satisfactorily.

Yours cordially,

Harold Thoreau

Pinkerton Detective Agency Territorial Capital Office

Invoice for Services Included

That was a wasted $200, concluded the colonel, alone in his office with Voth. He handed the letter over to the gun man, who read it quickly.

“He seems all right,” Voth said when finished.

“The trouble with this spy nonsense is you come to take nothing at face value,” the colonel said. “Thus, this proves one of two things, alas directly in opposition to each other. Either indeed Jack is what he says and we are lucky to have acquired his services, or he is far more skilled than the Pinkerton operative, utterly confounded the idiot, and led him to believe exactly the opposite of what the truth was, now embellished by the reputation of the great Pinkerton agency.”

“You know I ain’t as smart as you, Colonel. I’d never have gone to that possibility. Given the agency’s standing, I’d have taken the report as gospel.”

“In the war, we had endless trouble trying to outthink ourselves. There’s always a clever-boots attached to staff who claims to see secret motives in everything. Sometimes he’s right, usually he’s wrong. On general principle based on experience, I would therefore choose to accept the operative’s report, but I cannot quite forgo more effort. You must, then, Mr. Voth, keep observation on him at high pitch. Look for tiny anomalies in account, observe carefully, and perhaps even encourage the blond monster Pye to continue his program against the man. Possibly under pressure of the animosity, Jack will blurt something, though generally speaking he seems quite cool.”

“That one could come to guns,” said Voth. “Pye has a lunatic streak. He likes to shoot people, necessary or not. In the East, I believe he’d be in an asylum for the insane. Out here, his insanity is useful and yields respect for what normally would be grounds for lockup. The problem I see is that Jack is carrying no weapon, so he would easily fall to an armed attack by Pye.”

“I believe no matter the circumstances, Jack would prevail over the maniac with the pretty hair and the pretty revolver. At any event”—the colonel looked at his stopwatch—“Jack is soon to be here, to make his report and give his counsel. Possibly we’ll know more after that. Parse his words carefully, Mr. Voth. I’m guessing your sensitivity to human perversity is acute.”

“It was something I learned in my prison work, sir, before I took up the pistol.”

“One day, I hope, you’ll tell me why you made that choice. I am certain it’s an interesting tale.”

“Damned interesting, Colonel.”

At that point, Mr. Boseman brought Jack in.

“Jack,” said the colonel, rising, “do sit. Have a cigar and a whiskey. Boseman, attend to the man’s appetites.”

No change could be detected in Jack. Same tall, silent man, facial subtleties obscured by the mass of black-gray tangles around his mouth and jaw, only his coal-black eyes, gun-man narrow, gave indication of a lively brain. He was caparisoned, as usual, in rawhide, though he carried his battered fedora in hand, revealing much hair, unkempt, unslicked, unsmoothed, all of it the same black shot with gray.

“Sorry to be bearing road dust,” he said. “But I do believe you want the report before I settle into my cleanup.”

“Entirely correct,” said the colonel. “So did you come across anyone seeking the destruction of the Crazy R?”

“First off, it was hard to move in No. 4, there being so many detectives among the crowd. You couldn’t turn without bumping into a Pinkerton. No one, however, showed me any attention. I believe, as a secret agent, I was able to maneuver freely.”

“I thought you’d be good at that. Cavalry sergeants are usually men of the highest capability.”

Jack nodded in thanks.

“Now, as to form of report, let’s do this as efficiently as possible. I would have you narrate, start to finish, your time and encounters, as Boseman takes notes. I will not interrupt, letting you stress naturally what piqued your interest. In the end, I will have questions, as possibly will Mr. Voth or Boseman. Do proceed.”

Jack told most of it, eliding only what might reveal that he too had a secret agenda. He left out the identification of Caboosehead, and the intelligence gathered and sent his way by Chalmers Breckinridge, concerning stolen rifles and the frightening Maxim automatic machine gun. Best for him alone to know of these things for now.

But of course, he told them of the Arizona Southern undercover’s bulletin from the underground and the girl Yolanda’s dispirited explication of it and her dire prophesy about la gran muerte del número cuatro. And of course the colonel responded.

“So that alone is a forecast of the sort of Armageddon I fear. And it is directed to Railhead No. 4, not the ranch here.”

“That is true. However, whoever they are, they will know that in some regard we have an arrangement with the railroad to act as pursuit and retribution to rail crimes. This is widely known off the hanging of the bandits last year.”

“Perhaps we messed up in lynching them,” said Voth. “But they had shot two of our boys and the Dark Riders wanted vengeance.”

“No, no, you did the right thing,” said the colonel. “That action brought rail raids to nil ever since. So not only was it vengeance, as well as justice, but also practical application.”

“Yes, sir,” said Voth.

“My point,” Jack continued, “is that any attack on the railhead would almost certainly be preceded by an attack on the Crazy R, with the strategy of destroying the pursuers before the crime for which they would be put in pursuit.” He did not mention it, but it occurred to him that the Maxim gun would be the perfect instrument for such a strike. A wagon could approach by night, and from close range the Maxim gun could deliver a thousand husky rounds of .303 into the smaller bunkhouse in seconds, shredding it and all who snoozed inside. Then the wagon and the mystery army could get to No. 4 within two hours, before news reached the town, and similar judgment would be unleashed. Then off would go the raiders into the night, having delivered their blow against— What was it again? Oh yes, “capital.” The story would become huge, and the massacre would perhaps inspire similar actions across America. If someone were desirous of destroying the nation, that might be a very good start.

“That’s a plausible expectation,” said the colonel. “Tom, it seems our lads have acquired a new responsibility, which would be night patrols at the perimeter. Further, our boys should be drilled in rapid response to attack. It might behoove us to prepare a chestful of bombs of some sort, in order to disrupt the assault. Perhaps embedded with shrapnel. That would do for artillery.”

“Yes, sir,” said Voth. “I will set those actions to motion immediately.”

“Sir,” said Jack, “those are excellent preparations for a raid, but perhaps another approach would be to strike before we are struck ourselves. As I see it, you have another four weeks before my services as sharpshooter on a wagon train are called for. I would take that time to wander into Mexico and see what information I could scare up. If I am successful and can locate the source of this aggression, it’s our boys who could do the raiding. We could kill many, scatter the rest, free the horses, and burn the wagons, thus sparing both the ranch and the town.”

“That ain’t a bad idea,” said Voth.

“If Mr. Voth thinks it’s good, then it must be good. Rest tomorrow and head out the next day.”

“Sir, I’ll head out tonight if it’s all the same to you. I believe if you’ve got a job of work, best to start now, not then. ‘Then’ may never arrive.”

“So be it,” said the colonel. “I’ll get you some cash. And as before, we shall await your report.”

“I’d carry a handgun if Mexico was my destination,” said Voth.

“I might have one—maybe even two—around somewhere,” said Jack.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It stayed bright late, so when Jack left at four, there was no sign of oncoming night. He rode the long access road from the Crazy R to the bigger road that led, taken to the north, to No. 4 and, to the right, to the desert and hill chaparral that ultimately became Mexico.

Waiting at the crossroads for a bit, he made sure no one followed to mark his direction. Once he so believed, he started out again, turning, however, north, away from his stated destination. He rode about four miles through the rolling desert scrub, under the blinding sun, through the windless afternoon. He came then to an adobe ruin of what had once been a chapel for those of the Catholic faith, though long abandoned. He secured the roan, then slipped inside, pausing again to scan for intruders, followers, pilgrims, settlers, whoever might be pressing along on a day full of blaze and temperature. No one appeared.

He went into what was once inside—now there was no roof, the two walls to east and south had either been battered down or fallen into brick and rubble of their own accord. He walked the aisle, on each side flanked by benches that had been for the worshipful, but were now testament to the destruction that heat and drought can do, and came at last to the altar, or what was left of it, more ruined wood turned almost white by the sun, much of it in splinters.

He pulled open the doors of the cabinet that was beneath the ruined altar, bent to scrape a pile of timbers aside and dust the strongbox that lay underneath. He got it out without much effort, pleased to see it unmarked as he’d expected, then lifted it, stepped to an unbroken bench, sat down, and commenced his business.

Opening the strongbox, he encountered first off a wad of bills and a small pouch heavy with double eagle gold pieces. He slid a few greenbacks out of the batch and left them loose, in case he needed them fast, in a getaway. Next came two oily rag bundles, and he lifted them free, then unwrapped one on his knee. Peeled, the bundle revealed a Colt revolver of the category Special Target, whose barrel wore stamps proclaiming it not only of the Hartford firm, but also in the caliber .38-40, his preferred vintage. To any of the thousands of Westerners familiar with Colt’s most famous product, the Peacemaker, this one would have seemed odd. Perhaps an ancient thunder lizard had taken a Peacemaker in the jaws and crushed it or possibly the beast stepped on it. It boasted the famous Peacemaker lines, legendary since 1873 for grace, as well as near-on-perfect comfort to hand, but those lines had been squished—squashed? crushed? mulched? squeezed?—from top to bottom, and it appeared to have collapsed upon itself. It was less tall, more squat. It was not particularly beautiful the way its progenitor was. For one thing the barrel, forced downward, was much closer to the trigger guard, and being compacted, it facilitated recoil directly into the hand and forearm and did not compel the revolver to leap upward on the shot, as had the original.

Too, the grip, so fluid in the original, had a harsher bend to it, curling more relentlessly groundward. For another thing, instead of the traditional three humps of hammer channel, hammer pivot, and grip, which precisely reflected one another and gave the original a lyric melody in steel, it appeared that one of the three had been squeezed out, permitting only two in the reduced real estate available, with the pivot now directly a part of the grip. Then again, the hammer, a proud and stately statement of curvature and pride that seemed to reach for the sky, was in this iteration much stubbier, much softer in effect, and much lower. It held no sharp angles to cut skin. Thus uncut, it could be reached easily by a thumb, without the hand quitting the grip. And finally, the trigger guard, another masterpiece of grace and rhythm in the antecedent, had been lengthened into something almost ungainly.

Of course, the Colt people had committed these desecrations not out of madness but out of measure, carefully considered. The stated reason was to improve Colt’s success in the world of target shooting, particularly at the big pistol match held at Bisley, England, every year. The lower barrel and straight-back jump of the recoil impulse made recovery quicker and more sure. The sharper angle of the grip enabled the one-handed shooter to secure it more firmly in a position accessible to the unblinkered eye. The lowered hammer spur meant, as stated, less stretch in the cocking, hence less disturbance to the iron grip in which the pistol was secured, and the more spacious trigger oval gave the target shooter room to stretch his trigger finger against the onset of cramps.

In this regard it was certainly a success, as Bisley records showed, but in so doing the Colt engineers had also fashioned the best fighting pistol of the age. Everything that made it a better target gun also made it a better fighting weapon in general, easier and faster to handle. Particularly in its shortest barrel length, 4 inches, as was Jack’s, it was superb out of the holster and into an instant shooting position, and the softer hammer made it a surer instrument for slap-firing. The bigger trigger guard opened it up to the leather gloves so common to the frontier. A skilled man could really rip with it, and Jack was skilled. He always had been, whatever the piece.

He now removed his rig. This was a thick, strong, Mexican-leather gun belt, which sustained two Mexican holsters. One of them held a pistol straight to the right hip, while the other was constructed to exhibit extreme cant and secured to the left of the buckle, offering the grip across the body to the same hand as the other. Snatching number two was faster than reloading number one.

The rig was in fact old. For many years it had toted the two 1873 Peacemakers he then carried, and it had served him well on many occasions. He had thrown those wonderful big irons into a river when, ten years before, he’d given up on the killing life. When the current situation demanded a return to the guns, a trip to the best shop in Denver got him the Special Targets, and fearing need of them, he’d spent a month in the desert with them and a crate of .38-40s, reacquainting himself with the skills of pistol work.

He belted up, then broke open a box of Remington cartridges and threaded five, not six, into each gun. That is, a round in the first cylinder chamber, rotate on and past the next chamber, then four more into the succeeding chambers. Anyone knowledgeable of the revolver did this because a design flaw that Colt hadn’t been able to overcome meant that when the gun was loaded with six cartridges, the firing pin rested on the explosive primer of a live round, which set up an accidental gunshot off a bump or a fall or a drop that banged the hammer, which would bang the pin, which would bang the leg or whatever else lined up with the barrel. The loading protocol allowed the firing pin to rest on the air of an empty chamber. Cocking put the gun in action for five quick shots. If a fellow expected gun trouble, he might then add a sixth round to the instrument, preferring the extra firepower to the measure of safety. It was always, however, a dicey decision.

A last item remained, not in the strongbox but lodged behind it in the cabinet. It was ungainly. He unwrapped and discarded the newsprint that had protected it. His hat. Full-brimmed, full beaver, by Stetson, and not cheap at $4 in Denver, it wore a crease down the crown, was tall, medium gray, with the brim on each side softly rolled, to express, as did all such hats, the magnificence of the American West. His fedora was left in the box, the box was restored to the altar and again buried under broken spars of lumber, and he turned to exit.

Now a gun man again, he mounted the roan and headed on to his night’s destination: Railhead No. 4 and its street of bordellos. The sun set amid a hemorrhage of mashed-up purple-gold, and the temperature began its nightly fall. It would be full dark by the time he arrived.

Yep. If you knew his character, you’d know where the man would be. Joe Pye was not merely a braggart and a bully but a lazy son of a bitch. That meant, whatever business he’d had with the eleventh wagon being concluded, he’d award himself an extra day off, knowing that nobody back at the spread would say a word.

He was easy to find, sitting at a table in the Golden Apple, surrounded in smoke, leaning back in the chair with a third of a bottle of something brown there to sing him sweet songs of importance, heroics, and wealth, his long tail of blond hair hanging out of the hat cocked back on his head. His Smith & Wesson lay beside him on the table, because otherwise, holstered, it would have been a harder grab if things went south. Well, that was the excuse, anyhow, and it might have done for Wild Bill himself in Deadwood or other hard gun towns. For Joe, it was charade. He just wanted to show it off and proclaim his membership in the tribe of shootists, not cowpunchers. Another man sat with him, but Jack could not make him out, as his back was toward the bar where Jack sat.

It was Jack’s turn to be Caboosehead. None of his observation was direct, but instead was a reflection in the giant mirror behind the Apple’s bar. Caboosehead had taken this exact stool some days ago, but where Jack had quickly pegged his presence, Joe Pye was having too much fun being Joe Pye to pay any attention. If he looked into a mirror, it was only to reflect on his own dash.

Folks came and went, the place filled with smoke, the piano man played on. A fight broke out over cards, but no guns came into play, just fists. It was over so fast—big guy pounding little guy—many missed it, and the others laughed. Whores cruised, mostly connecting with foolish young cowhands, off to get their cherry busted. It was another night in the Old West, except nobody in the joint thought of it as old: it was new, it was fascinating, it was the present. Whatever tales would be told, whatever lies inflated like balloons, whatever form of narrative would offer chronicle of this time and place, it mattered nothing to anyone there, and their imaginations, in any event, were incapable of stretching so far. They had no idea they were the urtext of a myth.

At last Joe Pye, the final swig swigged, realized it was time to make some kind of move back to his real life. He leaned over and made a last joke with his pal, then rose, and sauntered out.

Jack did nothing. The fact was, he meant to leave Joe Pye alone tonight. That would come later.

Instead, his object of interest was Jack’s pal. That fellow worked hard to finish his own glass of whiskey, though Jack could tell that he wasn’t a seasoned drinker who could throw down the firewater for hours without showing distress. But at last, he nailed it, but then took another few minutes to wait for the room to quit whizzing about. Finally, sure of his footing and his mission, he rose.

Of course. Jack had sensed something familiar to him. It was the neophyte gun man Red, who’d peed up his pants at Jack’s gun-handling skills in another place a few days back. Red was of a sort who’d be attracted to a show-off like Joe Pye and hope that some of Joe’s glamour would rub off, not realizing that Joe’s glamour was thin gruel in the real world of men and guns.

When Red turned, Jack saw that he’d gotten a new pistol, knowing that when Jack hammered the backstrap of the first one, that pistol was busted forever. The new pistol was another old acquaintance; it seemed to be the gun that Jack had done his little theater with, including the backstrap slap-fire that had been carried by the other boy, name of? Ah, yes, Jimmy. Red must have bought it off him. Maybe Jimmy had sense enough to abandon Red and head back to his father’s ranch.

Red stood, shakily, and walked out, on a somewhat unsure line. Jack let him go, went to the window, and watched as the fool climbed awkwardly aboard a gray stallion, turned it, and began to trot off, southbound, out of town. Jack then went to his own animal, unhitched it, and took up the chase.

So unsure was Red’s horsemanship that Jack feared he’d fall off and crack his head. But even if the gray wandered this way or that, Red kept him drifting southward along the road. He could pay no attention to the dark figure three hundred yards behind him, not having noticed the figure in the first place.

He passed the cutoff to the Crazy R and continued straight. If there was road, he’d be all right but once the road abated, he’d lay up for the night, being too drunk to negotiate the wild patch that led to Mexico. Finally, hours enough to have racked a good twenty miles, he pulled off into a snarl of dried trees and settled in. Mount secured, saddle placed for a pillow, wood gathered for a coffee fire in the morning or whenever he woke up, he wrapped himself in a blanket and was soon asleep. Jack moved into the brush a hundred yards away, and did the same, though quietly and without ceremony.

Red slept through dawn—not Jack—and about ten, gauging by the sky, Red stirred, rolled, and finally sat up. Clearly, he was up against no deadline. Clearly, he was bad hungover. He took his time doing his ablutions, lighting the fire, filling the pot with coffee, chicory, and canteen water, and saddling up while the coffee bubbled and prepared itself for consumption. Then he sat down, poured himself a nice steamy cup, pulled a biscuit from somewhere, and made to enjoy a rich fellow’s slow breakfast. And then of course he noted the tall man coming out of the brush in a steady gun man’s gait, hat low over his eyes.

“You,” he said.

“That’s right,” Jack said, “me. Go on, finish your coffee. No rush to our business.”

“You got a new hat,” Red said.

“I do. Also, some new friends.”

He pushed back his rawhide to reveal the two Colts basketed in the rig, straight in and crooked to the right, ready for sport or drama.

Red whimpered.

“I don’t want no trouble with you.”

“Depends on you, Red. Let’s get straight to it, because I want to brew my coffee on that fire, too.”

“Y-yes, sir. What is it you need from me?”

“Here’s your choice. You finish that coffee, then tell me what I want to know, you give me that new Colt, then you saddle up and head north. Maybe Colorado, maybe Wyoming. Fine places. Fellow could do well up there. You don’t come back here unless it’s been so long, I’m bound to be either dead or in a wheelchair.”

“And the other?”

“You don’t finish your coffee and we get down to business. Won’t take but a minute or so to blow them gonads off. Then I get my coffee and you make new friends among the coyotes and buzzards.”

“I don’t know nothing,” said Red. “I don’t know—”

“I figure it this way. You come here on a job. The job was to pay Joe Pye for killing a certain whore in a certain Mexican whorehouse. They thought she was a spy. That’s because she was a spy, but not a very good one. She was working for me. That puts her death at my doorstep, and I’ll answer for it when I face St. Peter. It’s one of many I ain’t proud of. But the question for you would be, who’s ‘they’?”

“Are you some kind of government agent?” said Red.

“You ain’t that lucky and the government ain’t that smart. Get to it.”

“I don’t know,” said Red.

“Bet you do,” said Jack.

“They’d kill me if—”

“That’s why your next stop is Wyoming. They don’t reach up there yet.”

Red whimpered again.

“Sonny, my need for coffee is building fast. I might just get tired of waiting here for you to stop making little girl noises and move on to the next step.”

“All right, all right,” said Red. He breathed in.

“It’s some kind of thing. I don’t know what you’d call it. Politics, maybe religion, maybe foreign, like German or Russian or something. Anyway, they’re building an army in the mountains, that’s what they told me.”

“They’re going to make a war on capital, is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it. I never figured out what that meant. Anyway, the man give me five double eagles to come up here and pay off Joe Pye for whatever job it was, because I knew Joe Pye and none of his boys did. I don’t get it. Why didn’t they just kill her themselves?”

“Because then it’s a mystery who killed her. It would be known something is going on, and maybe somebody notices. If it’s Joe, it’s just a mangy gringo dog scratching an itch. Nobody cares.”

“This all is making me dizzy.”

“Take another sip of coffee. Now, who was ‘he’? Mex or gringo? Name? Appearance? Did he have men? Was he scary?”

“He was like a minister. Very solemn, very serious, black suit, white shirt, tie. Wore a cap, not a hat. Had a little chin beard. But you didn’t tell him it looked foolish, he was too serious about everything. I never saw such a serious man. No name given. I’m thinking of Old John Brown, in the song. That’s who he reminded me of. He had three followers, all young, all gringos. High-class fellows, educated. Those gringos came with me in No. 4, they were my escorts. They made sure I paid Joe. You saw ’em. We didn’t talk much. I don’t know nothing about them. They let me know that in all things except gun work they were the superior.”

“What happened to them?”

“Once the money was paid, they lost interest in me. Off they went, that night, like they couldn’t be late. I bought Jimmy’s Colt for two of the three they’d just paid me.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know what’s coming, but whatever, I don’t want to be here when it arrives. That’s why I’m headed deeper into Mexico.”

“No, you’re headed to Wyoming, Red. Without a gun. Get on that gray and put some tracks down. Now I need my coffee.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He saw no need to enter Ibanez. It would be a town of spies for this Frenchman and his holy army. Jack figured his presence would cause a stir. Signals would be sent, preparations made. Instead, he laid up on a ridge outside the place and cold-camped; that meant he went without a coffee fire for a bit and lived off cold biscuits and hardtack. Not enjoyable but it was what had to be done.

Much smaller than Agua Caliente twenty miles to the west, Ibanez was mostly adobe, as if wood hadn’t yet been discovered. Through his old war binoculars, Jack noted a single cantina, mostly for Mexican trade. Didn’t seem to be a whorehouse as no gals left late. Didn’t seem also the sort of place where much of anything happened, and even the cantina seemed mostly shy of clientele. No gringos that he could make out, just Mexicans, farmers mostly, living in town but heading out to their fields by morning and back by dark. Without actual information, Jack assumed a bank, or a grandee, owned the land, leased it to the farmers in exchange for most of the harvest of whatever crop or fruit it happened to be. It was that way everywhere except Ohio, and it was probably the case in some parts of Ohio. It was how the world worked.

The only reason the town was there and not somewhere else was that enough water ran through it to keep people alive in the heat, though baths would be a problem. No stage serviced it, much less a railroad, but occasionally Federales from Major Arau’s depot outside Agua Caliente arrived, cooled their thirst on tequila and hunger on beans, maybe some pork, and then snoozed into the late afternoon, leaving finally in the dusk when the ride back on station wouldn’t be so oppressive.

Finally on the third day, some fellows showed up. Gringo to the bone, and maybe not even of the West. They wore suits and bowlers and rode awkwardly. Four to be exact, on a great adventure. But if they expected flowers and kisses and the trumpets of triumph, they were disappointed. No one paid any attention. After a bit of awkwardness, they found a respite in the cantina and were still there when night fell.

Jack shed guns, spurs, and hat, considered, then abandoned, the notion of taking his old saber, then gave up his position on the ridge, and eased down on foot into the town. He approached the cantina on the oblique, keeping to the shadows. He was pleased to note that now that it had cooled, the young men had moved onto the porch. They smoked cigarettes and had already had more tequila to drink than they had known existed in the world. But it was all noise: he could not see them, as he lurked behind the corner of the building. But he could hear: first came a lot of chatter about football, would Harvard beat Princeton the upcoming fall now that Linkletter had graduated and was selling bonds on Wall Street. Clearly no victory against Yale was possible, absent Linkletter, and was not even discussed. And, yes, the game had been ruined when the wedge was outlawed. It might never recover. Then the subject moved on to women. It seemed a “Lucy” haunted them all, but she had banished them. She was probably cavorting with Linkletter in the Waldorf-Astoria, even as these brave crusaders languished under assault by mosquito, fly, hot spell, thirst, dust, and far too many Mexicans. It was enough to make a fellow take his bowler off, or even loosen his tie. But then the talk turned interesting.

“Say, Chandler, this great upheaval of yours has certainly turned into a great disappointment.”

“They will know we are here.”

“How could this be known? I’ve seen nothing but these peasants since we left Texas three days ago.”

“He will have set up security and intelligence. The man is no fool. That is why he will succeed where the others will be compromised by secret police and sent to Devil’s Island.”

“Wrong continent, old man.”

“I was speaking metaphorically. I need to point out, for the last time, he is a former officer in the French Army. Hence, he is well versed in military necessities, including, as I say, security and intelligence. He will proceed at his own rate and not be rushed into a hasty decision. This is far too important on the world historical stage to rush.”

“So said the chaps at Haymarket and look what happened to them. Hung by the neck until dead.”

“Jimmy, nobody is going to hang a Worthington.”

“Not so. True of Worthington the first, my grandfather, who made all that filthy money, and even my father, the second, who quite decently only spent half of it. But poor Jimmy is but the third, and has already frittered away the remaining half, at the age of twenty-one, so perhaps the magic has worn off.”

“Fididdlesticks. Certain verities will never perish. At most you will get a severe reprimand from your father and be back in Cambridge on time for the Princeton game.”

“All right, everybody,” said the beleaguered Chandler, “let’s all calm down and find a place to sleep. I am sure the contact will come tomorrow and we will need our rest. He is making sure we are not Pinkerton, that is all.”

“Hear, hear, old man,” said one of them, and they rose and shuffled off.

It didn’t come the next day, as Chandler had promised, and Jack wondered if the whole parade had been called off, as he guessed Chandler did also. Jack imagined that Chandler received a great deal in the way of collegiate sarcasm as the day dragged on. His fellow soldiers for the future could stand everything except being ignored. This would drive them insane. Oh, the woe, the calumny, the aggravation. It was so wrong.

But on the day after, it all changed. Another young man arrived, and through his binoculars, Jack saw that it was that other Jimmy, who had backed up Red in No. 4. It was Jimmy’s gun that Jack had used to shoot the backstrap off Red’s pistol, and it was Jimmy’s gun that was currently nested in the small of Jack’s back, still a-chock with .45 Colt cartridges, each the size of a robin’s egg, dipped nose first in molten lead. The five evidently talked at length in the cantina, proving that whatever outfit the second Jimmy represented, they felt confident enough in their security to meet with folks in the wide open.

In time, all five came out. The collegiates moseyed down to the stable, paid up fees, saddled animals, and came riding back to Jimmy. Jack wondered how the group would handle the two-Jimmy mix-up. He didn’t see Jimmy Worthington III giving up his name, nor did he think the lanky Jimmy, whose horsemanship was superb and spoke of much experience on the plains, would do so. Maybe Jimmy III would go to James or even Jim. Sometimes sacrifice is necessary.

Then, in the cool of the late afternoon, they formed a single-file line and headed out. Jack would be number six in that line, but always five hundred yards behind. He didn’t think either Jimmy would notice. It was not an easy path, and given the somewhat amateur horse management by the collegiates, it took even longer. Up they went into the Sonora Mountains, the low, rocky maze of fissures, stone peaks, arroyos, switchbacks, and boulders that lay across this part of the world, paying no attention to the boundary between Mexico and the United States. You’d have been hard-pressed to know which of the two nations you occupied and, in another mile or so, that might change. Meanwhile, above, on day 113 of the drought, the sun burned as usual like some industrial mechanism for melting battleship hulls, and it fiercely drove all moisture from the air and all breeze back to its place of origin. The vegetation showed the ravages of its power, most having gone crunchy-brown, brittle as chopsticks, begging in its way for a sip of water, cool water.

Jack was careful. When he came to an open track, he halted and gave it another few minutes, as when in the open, he’d be vulnerable to binoculars himself, or telescopes more likely. Once he was sure the young men were lost in the maze ahead, he caught up swiftly as the roan was superb, as was his own mastery of it. One of these days, he was going to have to give it a name.

At a certain point, something occurred to him, and he pulled off the track into an arroyo that offered both shade and concealment. It had just struck him that there had to be another, easier way up. How else would they get the stolen supplies they needed to sustain themselves through such a rocky incline? Therefore, this approach had to be the secure route, and it would be the way to bring new recruits up. Sooner, rather than later, they would be subject to scrutiny by a guard force, perhaps armed with Winchester 94s pumped full of the speedy smokeless-powder cartridges. Their job was to make sure that the new recruits weren’t agents, secretly leading an army of enemies along, to finish off The Frenchman’s crusade against capital by cruel midnight massacre, with a portable gallows along just for him. But who would such an enemy army be? The Mexicans—that would be, essentially, Major Arau and his Hungarian-Mexican hussars in creamy tunics—had already made a financial connection with The Frenchman, as the phony train robbery indicated, and the Americans, as usual, were too focused on getting and protecting their own capital to pay any attention. And there was no American army installation within 150 miles. But then he realized that though the idea of enemy agents was silly, it still represented the way someone like this Frenchman would think. Crusaders had need to believe that all were their enemies, and betrayal lurked in every barroom and bunkhouse. Jack had seen it all over the West, and even been party to range wars in which such suspicions were the only justifications for the carnage.

He proceeded sideways around the mountain, looking for a highway in the stone. When he found it, he had to acknowledge that it was artfully hidden. Somebody had high battlecraft and knew the secrets of camouflage and subterfuge. Rather than cover the road with felled vegetation, which would brown and turn to kindling rapidly in the heat, the author of this masterpiece of deceit had already stripped the leaves and hung the snarly branches with hundreds of pieces of greenish-brownish silk, which undulated in the wind and from afar gave much the idea of a living thing, a wall of scrub forest. Yet it was instead a gate, light but well constructed, which could be pivoted open without difficulty, yielding a broad sweep of packed dirt that switchbacked upward discreetly, easy passage for wagons laden with supplies and machine guns. No road led directly to the hidden gate, as that would be too obvious; instead, however, the land was open, and since it was only rarely used, the wagoneers could vary their approach, wearing no tracks or ruts into the earth. Again, well conceived, well executed. A superb military mind, of exactly the sort who had planned the attack on the wagon train a month ago. Was The Frenchman of the West Point engineering department?

Jack slipped in but did not take the road up. Surely that would be under observation. Better that he observe them than that they observe him. He roughly paralleled the road, over rougher ground, his mount astutely finding the sure footing underneath. Ahead a summit rose, and in time he heard the clatter of rifle shots, though by the peculiarities of the sound he identified the arms involved as black-powder, single-shot rifles, surely the ancient Remington .43-caliber rolling blocks that had served the Mexican army for decades, during which, if he was not mistaken, the army had not won a single battle against a foreign enemy since the Alamo in 1836.

Within creeping distance, he abandoned the horse, knowing it would seek him out if he called, answering to the term “Boy,” and realized then that the beast had named itself. Smart animal. Up he went, through dry, brittle grass, dust, around humps of rock, clusters of wiry greenery still hanging on despite the plague-heat. The sound of the firing was steady, regulated. At last, he reached the crest, and slithered to it, binoculars out.

Interesting. It was clearly some kind of military-inspired improvisation, but to his eyes there was something off, though he could not quite identify the discordance. It lay in what had been a meadow but was now dry acres of dust, under the bulk of the rest of the mountain, a field of perhaps a quarter mile by a quarter mile. At the distant end, a rifle range had been set up, and perhaps sixty men were in the prone position, shooting at large bull’s-eyes a hundred yards farther out, against the wall of the mountain. White smoke rose and drifted from the black powder of the .43s, as did dust from the bullet strikes behind the targets, against the stone. Someone busily supervised, rushing from man to man, kicking them into better positions, merciless in his upbraiding and insistence. Pure NCO, as Jack recognized the style, having exemplified it for three years back in the war.

The housing was primitive, being three larger staff tents and a field of pup tents for two men; that arrangement obviously separated the population into an officer class and a soldier class. A corral enclosed a small number of mounts, twelve to the count. Then there was a mess tent, from which smoke rose, as dinner approached, and beyond that an ammunition and supply dump. This aggregation backed to a precipice, beyond which lay only sheer cliff. Clearly no general drunkenness was allowed in camp, for the army would lose more to gravity than battle and soon cease to be an army.

There too was an assembly area, presumably where The Frenchman inspired his followers-at-arms, and behind it, a flagpole. Again, interesting. Two flags, one red, one black. No national flags at all, as if whoever was in charge didn’t believe in nations.

Jack made no move, only watched. The men, when done firing, were herded back to the assembly area on the run, driven forward by the excoriations of the NCO and his assistants. Then came the meal, which Jack could tell consisted of exactly his own: beans and bacon and biscuits like cannonballs, the difference being that this fare had been prepared in vats and heated, while Jack’s had been eaten stone-cold for a week now. Afterward, the men spent a half hour at their pup tents, cleaning the rifles. Then they were allowed to lounge and smoke and gossip for a bit, before it was back to the assembly area, where at last The Frenchman made his appearance.

He was tall, rail-thin, decisive in movement, precise in posture, dressed in khaki jodhpurs and boots. He wore round spectacles, his top button was buttoned, the shirt itself creased sharply, the boots shiny. Around his waist, he wore a revolver in a Mexican holster. He had a livid scar, as if someone had thought his face was a piece of cheese and decided to take a slice. It ran between the corner of his eye across a sharp cheekbone. He also talked too much. Such men often did.

Tonight, he gave a lecture and Jack was out of hearing range, but it seemed somewhat overlong and technical, and the fellow delivered it without flourish or excitation. He clearly had determined that the text of his oration was powerful in its own right and had no need of theatrics or wit for its impact. As he spoke, the NCOs, or whatever rank he had assigned them, walked among the men with riding crops, snapping sleepers sharply across the back to awaken them. Names were taken, perhaps for tomorrow’s staff of kitchen police. On and on it went. Jack could see the soldiers melting into the ground as The Frenchman continued, as if their fatigue were pulling them toward the earth itself. At the end, hours later it seemed, The Frenchman’s voice rose for the first time as he required them to stand, at attention no less. The two flags were lowered by NCOs and the men stood stock-still in iron respect for this ceremony of the military life, but, again oddly, no salute was required.

When they were released, The Frenchman and his staff retreated, and the soldiers got another half hour of knock-around time, which they clearly needed. Lights-out was called, although technically the camp had no lights to put out as electricity had not reached this part of the world yet, and torches, though presumably on site, had not been lit. Whatever, other than the patrolling guards at the perimeter, the men settled down.

Jack was also tired. He slithered off the crest and eased down the slope. The horse awaited him patiently. He stripped his saddlebags and saw that he was running low on beans and biscuits. That meant he had to make a move soon or fall back for replenishment, which he did not want to do, since the long trek off the mountain would be arduous, as would the climb back up after resupply. In the next second it occurred to him that the same issue must have faced The Frenchman and his men or boys. They could only stay until resupply, and since the only resupply was by raid and the last raid had been foiled by himself, they would have to raid again soon. But raids were troublesome to organize and dangerous to execute, and in their chaos was the perfect chance for the less committed of the young men to slip away and return to their own less adventurous, if less idealistic, lives. The loss of men could not be a pleasing development, and since only four had joined in the last week, it appeared that perhaps the novelty as well as the nobility of the enterprise had worn off somewhat. All these signs pointed in one direction: whatever campaign The Frenchman was planning, he had to launch it soon.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

As do all army mornings, no matter the army, this one began before dawn. Aroused by NCOs and hounded by them, the soldiers performed hygiene then ran to the mess hall for what appeared to be boiled oats and coffee, mainly coffee. Then to drill.

Drill? Who would have thought such a thing. Obviously, The Frenchman, who watched with satisfaction as the troop was divided into three platoons, and the platoons taken through rigorous maneuvers. Forward, harch! To the left, harch! To the right, harch! Right oblique, harch! And through all the harches in the book. Ridiculous, yes, but in the long run, it made sense, as armies had known since the Summerians against the Assyrians four thousand years ago.

Drill, in any army, was not about marching but synchronous obedience. It was where teamwork was injected into the blank boy-mind, and the boy learned to obey without thought but in rhythm with the others. It was, in the end, and not guaranteed, how most wars were won and how smaller units could defeat larger ones: reflexive teamwork, respect for comrades, pride in self—that was the meaning in all the harches. The Frenchman clearly understood this, and while his charges cannot have delighted in the stomp-stomp-stomping under sun and through dust of drill, he insisted upon it. He counted on their discipline and, at least by what Jack had seen, received it in return. They seemed to believe hard in what Jack saw was an army of idealists, not reluctant conscripts. What could make Harvard boys, smart as they were, prance about like Pickett’s infantry before the slaughter? Surely, they would see through it, and once ridicule began, it would soon evolve into sarcasm, then satire, then sullenness, and finally desertion. That was another process Jack had seen much of in the war.

The next exercise, however, was more practical in the immediate sense. From the depot tent, a squad of ne’er-do-wells lugged out a series of barely portable stage props, or so they appeared. Rocks of papier-mâché, tree trunks of similar composition, piles of mock rubble, brick-like walls. It was a pretend battlefield, Jack realized, just as he realized no officer in the Confederate Army had come up with such a good idea.

The obstacles were distributed randomly across the field, and first individually, then in squads, and finally in platoon strength, the boys were loosed to get through them, taking cover, shooting their empty rifles over and around the impediments, then racing forward to a new position. It was exhausting, but as it engaged the imagination, most of the soldiers gave it their best. But not all.

“Quite ridiculous, as is this whole episode,” said Jimmy III, now called Jim, to Chandler as they hunched, soaked in sweat, attended by clouds of flies and mosquitos, all Mexican and thus far more carnivorous than their American counterparts. They were behind a faux wall that could have easily served in the annual Hasty Pudding Show. “I mean, it’s all pretend. Everything. But the sweat and boredom and flies are quite real.”

“This is the hard part,” said Chandler. “After this, the actual battle, if it comes, will seem easy.”

“Except for the other lads picking us off like flies by the swatter.”

“Jimmy, I mean Jim, it is all for something. You wanted something other than clipping coupons and having congress with debutantes in your Newport summer cottage.”

“I could use a debutante right now.”

“Of congress we will get our fair share once the campaign is underway, and it is recognized what we stand for. It is a style young women adore.”

“Right now I would adore something quite alcoholic and some actual meat, and after that I would settle for congress with one of those jiggly Mexican thunder-waifs of the demimonde.”

“You may be a revolutionary, but you must remain a gentleman. Your parents and ancestors would forgive the insurrection but never the whore.”

Suddenly a blast shattered the air, destroying their spirit but hurting their ears more. No one had ever told the collegiates that guns were so loud and would leave their ears ringing forever. When their bodies had returned to their skin, they looked to see the uncouth Senior Corporal Lutec, the archenemy of all their comforts, looming angrily over them. He looked like an especially depraved Boston harbor thug, and had the same face, all tic-tac-toed with scar tissue that spoke of a life neither Chandler nor Jimmy—Jim!—could comprehend. He had just discharged his revolver into the ground between them, raising a squall of powdered dust and stinging stone fragments.

“Up, up, you vucking bastards! Your comrades are dying ahead and you sit vucking tweeting like little veevees!”

He spoke through an otherwise unidentifiable Europeanesque accent that mutilated syllables and consonants equally as it filtered them through a coagulation of phlegm, tobacco shreds, and teeth of pewter coated in algae.

Chandler shot Jim a look that indicated that even he, the most devout of the four Harvard revolutionaries, was not pleased at the senior corporal’s remonstrations. Really, so unnecessary. Yet neither could he resist, much less disobey them. He rose, pulling the more lethargic Jim with him, and both heaved their ancient rifles to port arms and set off at the run toward a fallen tree fifty yards ahead.

“Shout, goddamn you vancy peepees!” shouted Lutec, running effortlessly with them. “Let the voe know you bring death by bayonet!”

“Aieeee!” shouted Jim III.

“Louder, puffy girlchik!!”

“AIIEeeeee!” shouted Chandler.

“LOUDER, bourgeois scum!”

“AIIIIEEE!!” shouted both boys, as they reached the fraudulent tree and went to knees, sucking in the oxygen. At that moment they did not care what blasphemy the senior corporal unleashed on them.

But strangely, he released none. They crouched, sobbing more than breathing, yanking the air into scorched lungs.

“Stand up,” Lutec said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out two rather tarnished .43 cartridges and handed them over.

“Load.”

Ach, Jim hated the rifle. He’d had much shotgun experience at his grandfather’s South Carolina pheasant plantation, but unlike the smooth and elegant break-open shotguns, the rolling block was a challenge to operate. He cocked the hammer, then moved to the lever to drop the block and give access to the chamber. Though drenched in gun oil, the lever had always proved stubborn. But eventually it dropped open. He slid the cartridge in, then shoved the lever to raise the block and seal the thing into the little tube where it would go bang.

Fully loaded, of course, the Remington scared him, so he threw it to his shoulder.

“Port arms, idiot,” said the senior corporal.

Both boys complied.

“Vall in behind me! NOW!”

They did so and followed him, as he abruptly turned and led them back across the assembly area and toward the gate.

There, on horseback, was a tall, bearded man in a gray hat, black bib shirt, red bandanna, scuffed boots, and tight jeans much beaten by the elements. He rode magnificently, almost a part of his animal, itself magnificent, as if he’d been born not to it but upon it. He held the reins delicately, but his right hand was never far from the two Colt guns belted at his waist, one of them slanted across his pelvis. His eyes were slits that dispensed no warmth, only penetrating powers of observation. He had a sword in a scabbard under his leg. His face, though somewhat occluded by the snarl of gray-black beard, and moreover in shadow, was calm as a portrait’s. The impression was aristocratic, but not of class, as in Boston, but of larger meanings in a more savage world. It occurred to them simultaneously: they were gazing upon a true gun man.

Jack had needed an angle. You just don’t go barging into a secret army training for war in the mountains of Mexico and begin to ask questions. That was a sure way to end up tossed off that precipice behind the tents.

But what? How? He had to ease his way in, make them acknowledge his gifts and use that for leverage in his hunt for the information that brought him here. He watched and thought from his prone position on the ridge. Could this angle be—nah. What about—no, not a chance. Then there was—no, there wasn’t. He tried to separate the phenomenon before him into sectors, thinking that one might yield a possibility.

Horses? Did they need a wrangler? Didn’t appear as such. They were a marching army, not a cavalry. Tactics? Nobody knew more than he did. On the other hand, clearly the fellow with the scar knew a lot as well and might see an advisor from nowhere as a potential competitor, which would be a sure two-step to the cliff. Not promising. What about politics? Could he claim to believe in the cause of the red and the black flags, with no national emblem on them, proclaiming the army that marched beneath them to also be without a national identity? But he had no idea what the black and red meant, and besides, he had paid no mind to politics over his years, and could not speak the language.

That left only one thing, maybe his best. The guns. What did he know about guns that would make him valuable to the people down below? With the .43s, the guy in charge wasn’t invested heavily in marksmanship. This was not to be an army of long-range sharpshooters. Jack could see no handguns, and besides, while they might have been impressed with his slap-fire genius, that too was of no use to an army. They weren’t shootists. They were simple shock infantry, the fodder that fed the maw of any hungry war. They were the doomed, as such men always fell in numbers that far outmatched more glamourous specialties, like cavalry or artillery. Their job was to run at the enemy and hope that in unity and precision they would drive him into panic. If they ever came up against cool hands—the Confederacy was indeed an army of cool hands as the Union deaths that far outnumbered their own made clear—the cool hands would mow them down, then go to supper.

He pondered, again spending the day locked in place, taking mental notes. First, they were clearly quite secure here. No patrols were sent to search for raiders. Second, the NCOs or whatever they were had gotten quite proficient in their deployment of the Winchester 94s and the smokeless ammunition. They practiced alone, in a variety of positions, and were indeed skilled shooters. Jack crept closer to them and brought his binoculars to bear on a row of black bull’s-eyes with centers punched precisely and damned few fliers.

Then what—?

It happened when it happened. It was bound to happen. Yesterday, today, why not tomorrow or next week? It was the second day of observing, and he’d eased off a little on the labor—the troop was pounding away with its .43s, Jack wasn’t even watching, but lay lounging in the high grass under the ever-beating sun, perhaps smoking a hand-rolled (he was running low on fixings, another reason to get going). Three separate soldiers happened to fire their .43s in close succession. No planning could have brought off such a thing, for the boys were too ragtag in their application, so the author of the event was only the random drift of the universe. But there they were, three fast ones in under half a second.

Bap-bap-bap!

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Anhalten! Anhalten!” yelled Senior Corporal Lutec, in a frenzy of panic, fear, and German. He drew his pistol, jumped up and down, made hand gestures.

Jack lounged atop his horse and watched the fellow prance. Next to him, on either side, two pasty-faced soldiers stood mortified. You could blow in one’s ear, and he would tumble, hitting the other one on the way down and knocking that fellow to the ground as well. Meanwhile, well behind them, the secret army of the Sonora Mountains tried to organize itself to deal with the emergency of a visitor.

Certain NCOs led the troops back and away, aware that sixty inexperienced men with loaded .43 Remingtons could in no way be trusted. At the same time, other members of the cadre had snatched up their 94s and rushed toward Lutec and his interrupter, to back up the NCO in case… well, in case of whatever one man could do against close to seventy.

Jack waited for it to settle down. You’d have thought he carried lit sticks of dynamite the way they carried on. He’d never seen so many clenched faces, urgent postures, heaving chests. These boys clearly had some more work to do to get ready for the real thing.

Corporal Lutec meanwhile regained his composure, at least enough to revert to his nearly English. “Drop your veapons. Zir, drop your veapons IMMEDIATELY or I shall have to shoot! Zir, I DEMAND that you drop your veapons.”

But then another voice spoke, this one flat as the plains of Iowa, where it had been formed. It was the original Jimmy.

“I’ve seen this fellow,” he said. “Lutec, he could kill you and eleven more of us before you could fire. He’s that good. Just stand down, hear him out.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” Jack said. “By the way, just to show there ain’t no hard feelings, I brought you that nice new Colt back. It’s tucked behind me. I’ll reach back and toss it to you if you tell your pals not to open fire.”

“Do it left-handed,” Jimmy commanded.

“Sure, but that only leaves my right hand free to do whatever damage it might care to do.” He smiled.

Awkward pause. Jimmy calculated.

“Your call, young man. Hurry now, I’d like some coffee soon.”

“Right hand, then. Nothing fast.”

Jack reached back and emerged with the nice Colt by the barrel.

“OK?”

“Yes.”

“Here it comes.”

He tossed it lazily, perfectly through the air, where it rotated cleanly and arrived at Jimmy presenting its grip. Jimmy snatched it from the air, immediately checked the hammer to see that it was safely resting in its second notch, opened the loading gate, and rotated the cylinder to make sure that it still contained six .45 Colt cartridges.

“Your friend Red won’t be needing it no more,” said Jack. True, but misleading as he had not killed Red, merely sent him scampering north, unarmed, unharmed. But he wanted Jimmy to tell them he’d dispatched poor Red. It was good advertising.

Suddenly a shot fired.

To the symphonic chord of clicking, snapping, and gliding levers being thrown and then slammed home, all 94s came to bear on Jack.

Another moment on the tippy tippy edge of catastrophe.

“It wasn’t me,” said Jack. “It was one of them young fellows with the .43.”

The other Jimmy—now Jim—in his nervousness had clenched his hand, not realizing that in so doing he also clenched his fingers and in that way pulled the trigger.

“Corporal Lutec, you better train up that one better. He’s a little shaky on his manual of arms.”

Lutec turned, and ripped the smoking rifle from Jim’s grip.

“Dummkopf!” he yelled seven times, and Jim melted at the verbal assault.

“Don’t go too hard on him,” said Jack. “I bet they didn’t teach no courses in the Remington at Harvard.”

Lutec spoke, but in an English so clotted with mispronunciations it made no sense. Jimmy, who’d grown used to it, translated it from the English to the English.

“What are you doing here? How did you find us? How did you get past our security? What is the meaning in all this?”

“Well, I could answer, but I think I’d prefer to save that for the fellow over there with the little beard and the scar on his cheek. From what I could see through my binoculars, he’s the boss man.”

They sat in the larger tent, with its side flaps tied upward so that it had the aspect, but not the beauty, of a verandah. Outside, drill had recommenced. The unit had moved on to the random obstacle course, and Jack could see the young soldiers charging, ducking, shooting, arising, charging again.

“My name is Auclair,” the man across from him said. He sat in perfect posture and stillness, his face grave, solemn, composed. He was not young, appearing to be Jack’s rough contemporary. His eyes seemed like spear points. His lips were thin and pale as icicles. Up close, his scar looked like a volcano. “As you can tell by my accent, I am of the French.”

“My name is Jack,” said Jack. “As you can tell by my accent, I am of the Arkansas.”

“A state of the former rebellion, is this not so?”

“Very much so, even to this day.”

“I admire rebellion. How is the coffee?”

“Quite good. Heavier, thicker than normal.”

“European. I could never get used to the American pisswater you call coffee. The machine was imported from France. It is the one luxury I allow myself.”

“Well chosen, then. I salute the decision.”

“Tell me now, sir, why I should have this chat with you, taking time from my responsibilities? Not to discuss coffee, I presume.”

“No.”

“I am told you are a superb practitioner of the pistol. A dangerous man, indeed. Yet if it’s employment of some sort you seek, as you can see we have no interest in dueling, either of European heritage, or the draw-and-shoot style favored over here.”

“I have no pistol expertise for sale. I thought, first off, we might connect on the basis of our membership in a club hard to get into.”

“And that would be?”

“No official name. Maybe called the ‘club of those who survived the saber.’ Not many do. I can tell from the depth and shape of the scar that it was a saber, not a knife, not a bayonet, not a skinny little dueling weapon—”

“Rapier.”

“Rapier. But a cavalry saber, wielded at killing speed.”

Jack rolled up his left sleeve. He turned his forearm backside and displayed a near-perfect copy of the distinguishing lividity on The Frenchman’s face.

“Pine Bluff,” he said, “1863. A Yankee captain. He rode hard into my blind side, blade at full ready. I didn’t see him. But my horse sensed him—that was a great animal—and sidestepped. I turned, seen the blade coming. If the horse hadn’t moved, he’d have cut me wide open, chin to gut. But I caught the blade on the arm, and with the other hand put a .36 Colt ball into him. He didn’t like that a bit.”

“Melee,” said The Frenchman. “The most primitive form of battle, the most difficult, the fastest, the most intimate, the most demanding of bravery and talent and perhaps the most important for the day, since battles turn on the skill of those who flourish in the melee. Please continue.”

“I rode back to the aid station. No thread left, for all the sewing they’d done that day. They just wrapped it in linen, which is why the scar is so pink to this day. Then I rode back to the company. Third Arkansas Cavalry, Danley’s Rangers, by the way.”

“I am convinced. You are an impressive man. You must be listened to.”

“Since we’re trading war stories, you perhaps could tell me yours.”

“I have been at war—actually for thirty years, but in an army, only once. The French Army. I fought in and barely survived the Battle of Sedan in 1870, then moved on to the Siege of Paris. The war was over in January, but the intelligence staff, keen on my intellect and aggression, asked me to go in mufti and keep an eye on our defeated, embittered men, whom they did not trust. I saw what happened in the early spring of 1871. But that is of no interest now.”

“The scar? It was at Sedan?”

“Not actually. In the French army, dueling is a serious occupation, as young men seek out tests to demonstrate their courage. With the heavy cavalry saber, it is the most destructive form of the duel. I received this in 1869 at the Special Military School at Saint-Cyr. It was administered by a lieutenant named Jacques St. Etienne. He died at Sedan, poor bastard. But he had two dueling scars, as administered by yours truly, while I entertained his edge only once. I suppose that means he won in the end. I only remember immense amounts of blood and somehow finding the ability to continue the fight. Of course, I would not let them stitch. No one did.”

“Impressive too, I would then say.”

“We are both warriors. We can talk. You tell me what you have on offer, and what you wish to trade for it. Tell me please as well how you got into our camp of a sudden. Neatly done. Ranger work, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir. I had much experience in stealth during the war. And believe it or not, in some smaller wars here in the West. We called them range wars, over water rights, possible passage to railhead, stolen cows. Many men died and were buried without grave markers on the prairie.”

“You were an assassin?”

“Never. A gun man. I sold my skill in all kinds of fights. Melee, long-range sharpshooting, and the draw-and-shoot you mentioned. I never shot a man in the back or an unarmed man. I never shot one not trying to kill me. I was above that.”

“Again, a serious man, a man of much experience. But what is that to do with us?”

“Being then of a violent world, I hear things from the violent world. I heard that in Mexico, south of Nogales, maybe a hundred miles due east of here, a train was robbed. Besides much in the way of food and supplies, a crate of the new Winchester 94s was stolen.”

“They were headed for President Diaz’s palace guard. We will put them to better use.”

“I am sure you will. As for how I knew you were here, from a mile out I heard your shooting exercises. To my ear, it was easy to tell the old .43 black-powder rounds of the soldier from the sharper, harsher smokeless-powder report of the 1894 your cadre carries. Thus I knew where the guns had gone.”

“Sound analysis.”

“But I also knew that a Maxim automatic machine gun was in the loot, along with the English army cartridge, .303 British it’s called. Lots of ammunition. Yet I did not hear the sound of that particular gun.”

The Frenchman looked steadily at him. His eyes were blinkless, intense. Jack had at last impressed him.

“More coffee, then?”

“Indeed.”

The Frenchman signaled to a Mexican standing ramrod straight at a tent pole. That fellow disappeared, returned with two more cups of the steamy black.

Jack savored it. These people knew their coffee.

“Please continue.”

“In my war, the automatic gun was the Gatling. You are familiar with it, I expect. Six barrels, each single shot, on an axle, rotated by a crank, and reloaded mechanically in the rotation. I had seen, both in my army and among federal troops, that young soldiers are fascinated by the concept of the automatic gun. They love to shoot it. They can’t get their hands off it. They’ll stand in line just for a chance to crank out a line of bullets, just to see the dirt fly.”

“This is true,” said The Frenchman.

“I concluded: if this gun is not being shot, it is because they do not know how to do so.”

The Frenchman said nothing.

“It works by a different principle than the Gatling. For the Maxim, when the trigger is pressed, the first shot is fired mechanically. The energy of the fired cartridge is harvested to operate the mechanism and advance, then fire the next cartridge, and on and on and on as the belt of cartridges is pulled through the breech. If the trigger is engaged, the gun fires. It can probably fire six hundred rounds a minute, off the pressure of a finger on a lever. That being the case, it would be an instrument of some complexity.”

“You, then, are familiar with these guns? I had heard they were only used in Africa by colonial armies against the dark people.”

“Never seen one in my life. But I am a man of the gun, as I said. Family disposition, from God knows where. We understand them. Not just the shooting, but all the mechanics, operation and maintenance. I can say, give me a day alone with the Maxim and on the next I can teach your collegiate idiots how to defeat an army or destroy a city.”

“How many thousands in payment?”

“Not a penny. What I want from you is information that I can only get from you. You hold the answer, believe it or not, to the question that has brought me here today, and the journey has been more fraught than you can imagine. I am at the end of a long trail.”

“Then you shall make me happy, and I shall make you the same. We of the brotherhood of the saber survivor deserve such entitlements.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was late, dark, he was tired and facing many problems, so it did not matter that Mr. Boseman pointed it out to him.

“Sir,” said Boseman, “there is a piece of mail there I expect you to find especially interesting. I know I did.”

“You did, eh, Boseman? I take that as quite a recommendation as you are so normally restrained in your observations, a trait I appreciate.”

“Only trying to do my job to your standards, sir.”

“Excellent. You are dismissed, then. But do first refill my whiskey glass, if you don’t mind,” as if it were at all conceivable that Mr. Boseman could mind.

The assistant took the empty glass and went quickly to the cluster of bottles on the shelf. He fulfilled his mission, adding an extra third, as he expected the colonel to need it. Outside, the sun had melted into a pool of liquid gold as it drained away for the night, leaving the otherwise empty sky purple in the twilight.

Colonel Callahan went through the mail, learning that the lien on the south thousand acres was to be renewed at favorable rates, seeing the monthly generous check from the Southern for deposit, an invoice from one of his several lawyers, and finally the envelope of 8½-inch by 11-inch dimensions that bore the return address of one of the Denver boys, Louis Fitzgerald of Wiggins, Fitzgerald, and Mason. It had some heft to it, as if it contained several contracts, or even more, a book of some kind.

Boseman had sliced it open, and Colonel Callahan merely turned it upside down, tapped it, and watched as a bound paper-covered volume slipped out. It bore a note. “Colin,” Louis had written, “perhaps this answers some questions.”

It appeared to be what was called a dime novel, that is, a highly romanticized narrative of some Westerner of note, usually a legendary bandit or killer, but it also could be a lawman of high respect and heroic deportment. Callahan had never actually read such a thing, preferring Gibbon for light entertainment and was as of now but three and a half volumes shy of finishing the Empire.

He flipped the volume.

On the cover, a thin man in black from hat to boots hunched forward into the silver-spangled saddle on the back of a rearing black stallion, a Colt brandished in the right hand, a black glove on the left, possibly to protect the palm while slap-firing. He looked intent of purpose, but the facial rendering was so generic it gave no real information. For that, in a split second, he turned to and comprehended the title and the subtitle.

The Gun Man Jackson Swagger, it proclaimed. And underneath, “The West’s most mysterious shootist, who won a recorded 27 pistol fights before tiring of being the best and simply disappearing.”

And in still smaller type, “Although never formally a lawman, Swagger’s exploits seemed always to fall to the moral side of the line, as he killed many of dubious or dangerous reputation and drove still others out of town and on to wilder regions. Who was he? Why did he come, where did he go?”

The author appeared to be a Chalmers Breckinridge, of the New York Tribune. The colonel opened the book and began to read.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jack said, “Since you all go to a fancy Eastern university you are comfortable in the presence of genius. You are now in such presence.”

He had asked for four, college men of course, for superior intelligence. On top of that, he required that they all knew one another, for the task before them required teamwork, and teamwork required trust based on long acquaintance and shared ordeal. He knew who he would get.

Chandler, who seemed to be the boss. Jim, wildly handsome with tousled black hair and otherwise unkempt after the style of the actor Booth. Then Charles, apparently the most studious, with a pale broad forehead, thin blond hair with a definite part in the middle, and gold-rimmed specs. And finally Osgood—Ozzie—of plumpish dimensions, who looked the most ludicrous in the khaki shirt and pants.

“Listen good. Pay attention. You will memorize fast, I know, but it has to be faster than fast. It must be flash fast, meaning it happens without thought, especially when people are shooting at you, and they will be.”

“It looks like it should squirt flame,” said Ozzie. “It doesn’t look like a gun at all.”

“It looks like something in some kind of factory, you know, with pumps and steam and small fires,” said Charles.

“That is so vague,” said Jim, “it is quite useless.”

“It is not useless,” said Charles. “What, you’re going to say it looks like a green dragon swooping down on a castle. That would be useless.”

“It looks like something to help you start an automobile.”

“How would you know? You’ve never even seen an automobile.”

“Yes I have. My uncle actually—”

“Knock it off NOW,” said Jack, sternly. They quieted down in a split second. No Harvard professor had spoken to them in such seriousness, but then no Harvard professor carried two Colt revolvers and had the eyes of a hawk hunting breakfast.

“In here, I talk, you listen. In here family, money, how many books you’ve read, or how much you love Lucy don’t matter a damn. If you have questions, you ask, I answer. Then we practice. We practice, we practice, we practice. I want to see blisters on fingers before I let you do it for real.”

“Sir, I think you misunderstand,” said Charles. “Miss Lucy is actually Lucy Parsons, a radical compatriot of Emma Goldman, whom we—”

Jack didn’t give a rabbit’s crap.

“This thing is a Maxim machine gun,” he said, obliterating Charles. “I drop the word ‘automatic’ because it just gets in the way. It may also be called a Maxim gun, without penalty. Understood?”

Four “yessirs” of varying sincerity came to him.

They were at least out of the blowtorch sun and the sirocco of dust that jointly hammered the parade ground where the others toiled to learn something of the business of war. It was merely ninety-eight here. The air hadn’t moved in a month. It smelled like canvas, gun lubricant, and sweat.

What sat before them really did have no antecedent in the imagination. Fundamentally, it was a rectangular construct of steel, sporting a crank along its side. At one end were two spade grips, on the other an elongated cylinder of smooth steel with plugs in it to suggest its purpose was to carry water. At the end, low off the face of the cylinder, a nozzle had been attached, new to the firearms design tradition. The complete apparatus was mounted on a three-legged contrivance with dials and cranks governing the aim of the gun. It was gunmetal gray because it was gunmetal, period. It was about four feet in length and three feet off the ground. At the lower part of the leg, behind the handle on the gun a ludicrous little seat had been welded for the bottom of the gunner. Such a domestic touch, they thought.

“This thing doesn’t just boast a single invention,” Jack preached to his acolytes. “Mr. Maxim had to come up with at least four inventions. And all those had to be combined in such a way to work together. Otherwise, it was just a pile of junk. It shoots a cartridge called the .303 British, which is the standard English military cartridge, with the newest smokeless propellant. The cartridges are pulled smoothly into the gun by a canvas belt. It fires at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute. The Brits have used it to mow down Africans in the hundreds. No one has yet noticed that it’ll work just as well against white people. You may be the boys who put that information before the world.”

The concept of death somewhat alarmed them. Yes, the stupid army marching. Yes, the imbecilic crawling, hiding, jumping, running, and yelling. Yes, the ludicrous old Remington single-shot .43s with their vast sheets of white smoke. But each of those was a discrete ordeal, connected to nothing. They all had vague ideas of marching triumphantly through Boston as the focus of intense adoration—much of it female—for they had brought justice and freedom to America. But that sort of skipped over the part where you shoot a man in the guts or head, and it goes splashy all over everything, like a dropped vat of beef stew. Now, however, before them was the killing machine that brought modern efficiency to the battlefield and destroyed human life and property on a scale yet unimagined—and they would be its agents. It had never quite occurred to them in this specific way, but here they stood before the gun man himself, learning the intricacies of the murder trade.

“Come up here now. Look into the guts of the thing.”

Mysterious Jack then tilted up two lids from the rectangular container, hinged in the middle so that they touched backs when fully lifted. One by one the four drew close, bent, and peered. It was like looking into the cockpit of the Industrial Revolution.

“You have to have some idea of how it works if you’re the one who has to use it. Most important invention is the overall concept: this machine uses the principle of recoil. That is, the energy released by the firing of the bullet sends that bullet on its way forward, but in so doing it launches a great deal of motion backwards, and that energy moves the belt, advances another cartridge, and fires it. As long as the trigger is down, that keeps happening—ten times a second.” He let them contemplate the awe of it—and the horror.

“Ten times a second. Your fifty-man army couldn’t fire half that many rounds in a minute.”

He felt their awe and fear.

He touched a box wedged into the rectangular unit, up near the belt end.

“I call this the magic box. All the mechanics happen here. It’s the heart or brain of the machine. Pull it out and you’ve got a pile of junk.”

“Sir,” asked Charles, “the rumor was, nobody could figure out how to work it.”

“It ain’t the simplest thing in the world. I can see how it baffled them. This crank on the side which runs the whole operation? You think you pull it and release it, and it’ll fire. No. You have to pull it and release it twice in order to get that first cartridge into the feed block, then down into the chamber. And then the killing starts. Now let’s get on with your education.”

Jack hated speeches and the men who gave them. They seemed to release so many forms of evil into the world, from the banality of political chicanery to the slaughter of the thousands in the human squall called war. If every man who had or would give speeches were hung from an oak tree, wouldn’t the world be a better place? He didn’t know. That sort of thinking was not the way his mind worked, despite the odd bolts of anger that sometimes lit his mental horizon.

But here he was, about to be victimized by another speech. The Frenchman stood before his men, on a platform. On the same platform sat Jack, the Harvard machine gun crew, and the Maxim gun, threaded with a belt of .303 British, pointed safely downrange.

“Soon, very soon,” proclaimed The Frenchman in his soupy French voice (“Zoon, very zoon”), “we will strike a blow for the freedom of all mankind. It will be violent, yes, but all change must begin in violence, or it fails to get the attention of the world, and it fails to inspire the imaginations of those who must heed and apply its inspiration.

“You have performed magnificently, young men of the Army of the Red Youth, and in the years that come, your memories will be hallowed. You have worked and sweated and yielded to the discipline of a revolutionary army. You have trusted and given loyalty and soon you will both shed and give blood.

“You understand that death may be a price that you pay, and you are willing to die to make the world a better place and will no longer be owned by the wealthy who steal from all and are administered by the governments that protect them from justice in exchange for a share of the plunder.

“Yet your lives must not simply be squandered. I do not believe in martyrdom. No, you must be given any military unit’s fair chance at survival. That is how I differ from my intellectual compatriots. They understand in principle, but they lack the military will to organize, train, and execute efficiently. It is the soldier in me, learned at the great école militaire at Saint-Cyr while they were all fools who learned their lessons from Marx’s great book, which unfortunately did not include instruction in the assembly and operation of the Maxim automatic machine gun. I have introduced Comrade Marx to Mr. Maxim, and the world will be shocked at the results. For the first time in history, to quote a British poet, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not.

“Without the gun and the discipline, we are rabble. I know. I have been rabble. As some know, I was in Chicago in 1888, at Haymarket Square, among the rabble who brought their anger to bear against the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. Our anger was just, our cause was righteous, our intention was noble. Yet it turned to chaos and slaughter and the ultimate execution of the innocent.

“Of the four men hung I knew them all—three were not even present and the fourth was well back in the crowd, far from a leadership position. Besides their love of freedom and their commitment to the future liberation of the world, all shared this common feature: They knew nothing. They were fools when it came to the application of force. Hence, as I say, rabble: a mass of surging workers with no plan, no set of protocols, no weapons save their own flesh, which they were willing to sacrifice. Sacrifice is not enough! As a former officer in the most disciplined military in the world, I fully understood the fecklessness of the effort. If we were to inspire the Great Disturbance of socialist theory, we were sadly underequipped, both physically and mentally. We had nothing but our bodies and a single bomb.

“Of that bomb I know all. I built it, I lit it, I threw it. I killed seven policemen that night. It was but a bottle of wine loaded with the black powder obtained from emptying two hundred army rifle cartridges and packing the powder with nails and pieces of gravel for the shrapnel effect, an improvised fuse of powder in a glove tied to its neck. I lit it, I threw it. I saw it explode. I saw the flash of the blast, I even received a tiny fragment of its shattered glass. I saw the eruption of white smoke immediately upon the flash, I saw the policemen fall, I saw the crowd withdraw at the fury of the explosion. I heard the answering guns of the policemen, I smelled the acrid fumes of hellfire and brimstone suddenly dominating the atmosphere. I fled the police bullets and I managed to escape.

“I was not betrayed. Eventually my name came up, and yes, I am wanted today, but I was never arrested. I escaped and followed what happened with heavy heart. Most important, I learned the lessons.

“I learned that professional discipline must inform revolutionary armies. Mobs accomplish nothing. I learned that strategy is far more important than passion. I learned that training is more important than screaming or singing red anthems or distributing pamphlets. I learned, despite the length of this address, and yes, accuse me of hypocrisy, that action is far more important than speeches, and I have now fully applied those lessons.

“In a few days we march north. In a few days we engage and destroy capital at its most wanton. In a few days we shall unleash the miracle of steel and chemistry and genius-level capitalist engineering.

“They gave us the rope we will use to hang them.” He turned to the gun crew. “Gentlemen!”

Chandler, the most passionate, was the gunner. Ozzie, still quite strong though plump, the assistant gunner. Jim, the spotter, locating targets, guiding Chandler. Charles, the water expert, making sure the gun stayed cool with buckets each time the nozzle at the base of the muzzle ceased to yield steam.

In an orchestration of focused precision, each did his job, as Ozzie inserted the belt into the port on the right side of the receiver and checked the level of pressure in the recoil spring on the left side, Charles stood by with both pail and funnel, and Jim leaned over the hunched Chandler’s shoulder, pointing out imaginary Cossacks on the charge or whatever fancy danced through Chandler’s mind.

Chandler cranked the operating handle on the right side, and the sound of clanking and grating announced the gun’s administration. Then he cranked it the second time, to similar acoustic result. He grasped the double spade grips at the rear, which provided the leverage to guide the weapon to its target on the fulcrum of the tripod. He looked to Jack, who nodded. His thumbs then pressed the butterfly trigger between them.

Alarums and excursions. Thunder and lightning. Bang, bang, and bang. There arose such a clatter. From the thing itself, the sound of the rapid fire of the .303 British cartridges was a lion roar from the war god Ares, a cascade of percussion so industrially fast no individual shot could be discerned. At the muzzle, the snout emerging from the circle of the water case, dragon’s breath spit into the atmosphere, a leap of pure incandescent flame again sustained by the rapidity of the discharge so that the behavior of no individual cartridge could be isolated. All this transpired in absolute clarity for all to see, as the smoke was sparse, obscuring nothing, merely drifting wanly above, never quite accumulating before it quickly dissipated. In perfect focus, all could see a spew of ejected shell casings whizzing out of the gun, and the cocking handle rotating back and forth on the whiz, like a half propeller on a high-speed gasoline boat. Vibration filled the air, moved the earth, assailed the ear. Everybody’s eyes moved from the thing itself to the berm a hundred yards away, where a staccato of detonations prestidigitated themselves from nothingness into existence in but fractions of a second, mutilating the ground that they ripped, lifting a neat line of dust geysers that disorganized in seconds into floating debris. It took no imagination at all to understand that he who was caught in such a hurricane became tatters.

Then silence—from the gun itself, from the men. Then noise—much of it—arising from the men. Instantly, they had become believers. Now they believed they were invulnerable, that no force on earth could stand against Mr. Maxim’s invention. They roared in delight.

“Very good,” said The Frenchman.

“Hold on. More to come,” said Jack. “Okay,” he commanded the men of the crimson H, “now the illuminators.”

They attended the gun. The belt was removed, another one inserted across the wooden roller, tugged tight, the lead cartridge placed at exactly the groove in the entrails of the beast where it should be, the hook that advanced the canvas attached. Charles opened the lid of the gun tube, applied the funnel, and slopped in half a bucket of water, which hissed and steamed as it contacted its superheated gallon of predecessor. All assistants then drew back, Jim whispered something to Chandler, who accommodated him by cranking the elevation wingnut on the tripod, and then cranked the gun twice, priming it.

Jack turned to The Frenchman.

“You’ll see the military advantage in this last wrinkle. Think of its battlefield usage and the lives it could save—and take.”

The next was miracle and Fourth of July in combination. The same huge noise, the same paltry whisper of smoke, the same issue of airborne vibration, but distinct from before, now yellow blurs roared in a parabola into the twilight air, pure radiance, pure heat, pure destruction. They described an arc that rose, then flattened, then bent as the energy behind the bullets ran out, and down they rained, again to target berm, this time not merely stirring the earth but as well igniting the brush. Where the curve of light descended, flame followed. Soon the horizon was awash in fire. And all this from a mere fifty rounds of the .303 British Illuminators.

Then again the silence.

“Break it down, clean it, and get it ready to transport,” Jack ordered.

The Harvard men set about those tasks with much industry. They were the designated elite, at least in theory, and on their enterprise would a new world be born.

Meanwhile, The Frenchman stood again to face his now buzzing men.

“You see now that we cannot be stopped.” Scant response except for buzz. Fearing that nobody had heard him, he tried again, with more success.

“You see now that we cannot be stopped. No American army component has such a weapon, such power, particularly that last burst of advanced experimental ammunition that turns the world to fire. In two days, then we march. The bell we clang will in itself be mighty, but mightier still will be the reverberation of that bell, as it will inspire uprisings of workingmen everywhere. It will signal of the end of oppression. We shall burn the cities, the factories, we shall destroy the railroads, we shall flatten the slums. In the aftermath of this great upheaval, we shall rise anew. Our leadership will not be of capitalists in their spats and tuxedos, but of the working class, men with dirt under their nails but compassion and justice in their hearts. We shall create, you and I, a new, just, clean world. We shall prevail!”

“Does he believe that insane manure?” Chandler whispered to Jack.

“Who knows what this frog nutcake believes?” Jack whispered back. “Now, you and the boys get ready to do what I told you.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mr. Boseman fetched Voth and disappeared into the shadows.

Voth sat where he had sat before and accepted, as he had before, both a cigar and a whiskey. “You had said, Mr. Voth,” said the colonel, “that you might someday tell me how you got in this business. I think I would like to hear of it. You mentioned prison guard as part of your background. Interesting.”

“Yes, sir,” said Voth. “Ain’t much I care to recollect. But since you’re paying the bills, what you want, I deliver. I worked at Yuma ten years. I was an orphan, they was hiring, and so I signed on at the age of eighteen, actually being sixteen. No other place to go. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a prison, sir.”

“In the war, ages ago, I passed several stockades for enemy prisoners. Godawful places, in the memory.”

“Bad as that was, Yuma was worse by a long ways, I’d bet. No queerness goes unpracticed in a place where you got three hundred men locked up. That goes for prisoner and guard alike, as in truth both is prisoners, and the guards are just barely able to keep the lid on the place, it’s a battle every day.”

“Until?”

“Until it blew. We had a riot, off of nothing, bugs in the beans, something like that. It went south fast to the most sickening kind of violence you’d ever care to see. Most of the boys had shivs stuck up their assholes, and when time come, out they’s pulled and every grudge is settled in blood and torture and speedy too, so speedy it’s on you before you notice it.”

“It sounds quite primal, then.”

“Not sure what ‘primal’ means, sir.”

“Primitive.”

“Yes, sir. Primitive. Anyhow, I found myself and two other screws alone in the west tower and a pack of berserkers all het up on the blood they done already spilled howling for our meat. I do believe they would have eaten us. It might have been the best meat they had since they got there. Anyhow we only had one weapon, a ’73 Winchester, and the other screws was so scared they couldn’t stop shaking enough to handle it. Not me. I picked it up and opened fire. In less than a minute, I killed fifteen men, the last with a butt stroke so hard it smashed his eye all to goop.”

“Good heavens.”

“I thought I’d be behind the walls instead of top of them before the week was done. No, sir. Turned out, I’s a hero. Everybody looked up to me. Can’t say I didn’t like it, just as I can’t say I didn’t like the thrill of dropping them guys. Best thing I’d ever had. I got more out of that rifle than I’d gotten out of anything in my life, in less than a minute. They wanted to make me an assistant warden or something in the system. But I now had a deep craving to get away from walls and convicts. I wanted the wide-open. I left Yuma and on my fancy new man-killer reputation got a job as a deputy in a town called Surprise, Wyoming. Bill Tennifer was the sheriff. He said, ‘Okay, Tom, know you can kill. But the question is, can you kill when the other fellow has a gun too?’ ”

“Could you?”

“After he taught me. He was a great man, and as good with a gun as anybody I ever seen. And after five years under him, I had picked up a lot. I killed nine men in that time, from his skills. But he said to me, ‘Tom, you’re too good to be a deputy in Jerkwater, Wyoming. With your gift, you ought to be making a lot more money and sleeping in a house, not a room behind a general store.’ He was right, so off I went, looking for gun work, highest bid takes the boy. The next ten years I spent rented out to various ranchers and ranch groups and was used against farmers and sheep men, and I was used by the railroads against them that wouldn’t sell out to the railroads, and my reputation became hard and widely known. You heard of the Red Squirrel Massacre?”

“Wasn’t it ’84?”

“ ’85.”

“It wasn’t a big one, as I recall. There were far bigger ones.”

“Well, it was big enough,” said Voth.

“Sioux, as I believe. But not the group that attacked the Nestor family ranch. They were Brulé, the ones that were massacred were Hunkpapa. But Sioux kinship groups are amazingly complex, and I don’t think even Sitting Bull himself understands them. If you got it wrong, you really shouldn’t blame yourself. Things happen. It’s the West.”

“That thing didn’t have to happen if Charlie Wainscott, who ran the outfit, weren’t drunk and scared, and when we come across Indians, any Indians, he gave the word to go in, kill ’em all. We did, only a few old braves, mostly squaws and kids. I know I’m supposed to feel bad about the murdering. Sometimes I do. But… the truth is, I did in fact like it. You’re a god. You say who lives and dies. Down deep, I ain’t big ashamed. It’s more of little ashamed. We needed men who could do the killing work, not many could, but I could, and nobody’ll ever say it, the truth is, we couldn’t have done nothing without it. It had to be done. Nice folks wouldn’t do it, but nice folks would come on the land we cleared. They may hate us, and believe themselves better than us, but they damn sure needed us at the time.”

“You are straight on that, Tom. You don’t get greatness or strength or wealth or a future unless someone’s willing to take up the killing trade. In the end, you have done more for our country than an old foghorn like me. The Tom Voths are the true necessary men.”

Voth took this compliment to heart, as it was so, he believed. Heros get glory and women and star in Wild West shows, but there’s no West to show if the Tom Voths haven’t cleared it out yet.

“Here’s why I had Boseman get you. I wanted you to see this.”

The colonel handed across The Gun Man Jackson Swagger.

Tom looked it over. He didn’t read well, but he recognized the form and the name “Jack” and figured it out.

“Jack is Jackson Swagger, you’re saying.”

“I believe him to be so. This volume, cheap and vulgar though it may be and far off the great Gibbon’s style in English prose, nevertheless comports with everything he told me about himself, the war, Arkansas, the wife dead young, the wandering years, the Wild West Show skill with the pistol and rifle.”

Tom nodded. If that were so, then indeed Jack was the gun man in mufti.

“You have heard of him?”

“In those years, the late seventies and the eighties, yes. I also worked with men who’d worked with him. They were the sort who didn’t impress easily, and he impressed. He was as good with any sort of firearm as a man can be, while at the same time of high bravery. Yet he wasn’t no blackguard nor bully, didn’t go out of his way to impose or impress. He had no need to be the boss. He wasn’t greedy neither, and took what was owed, no more. An impressive man, to be sure. I knew there was something about our Jack right from the start.”

“So the first question must be, why would such a man go to such an effort to infiltrate us? Not normal behavior. He’d have no need to go under false papers as some sort of drifting old saddle bum.”

“He said nothing to give indication. Then again, he grew close to nobody and sent admirers away, preferring solitude above all.”

“Clearly, he is here on the hunt. But for what? Of whom? To what consequence?”

Tom just shook his head. He tried to angle out some reason for a gun man of Swagger’s repute to come to call on this operation. Perhaps he had heard of something and felt it needed setting right, but in fact there were so many such episodes of secret nefariousness in the history of the Crazy R under Callahan that it would be difficult to know which, and in the end, perhaps it didn’t matter. He was here, guns aboard, mind set on something he’d see as justice and who would stop him?

“I have to ask you, Tom Voth, man on man, could you if called upon face him and walk away from his corpse alive?”

Voth considered. He was the best man he knew with a pistol and adding in his abundant bravery and commitment to duty, he knew himself to be a formidable gun man of his own right. Yet reputation was not easily come by, and if Jackson Swagger had one of the best, it had only been purchased by deed, not talk.

This was a fellow of special purpose and talent, maybe more of each than Voth.

“I see it now as something meant to happen. He never bucked me and showed no hate. But his skill affronted me. Destiny, mine and his, set this up. No matter the consequences, it must occur.”

“Your courage as always is admirable. However, I do believe that from now on our fellows should always travel in twos or threes. One to one, he is sure death, if that is his plan. If not, then perhaps his goal is something not concerning Crazy R and he only uses it to draw near to his real target. When he has dispatched it, he will move on and who’s to be the wiser?”

“I’ll wish on it too, sir. And I’ll set the boys up for caution. But I believe that Jackson Swagger will have his day, and nothing can stop him. That is the way of such men.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

You will have dinner in my quarters,” said The Frenchman. “You have a question to ask and I shall endeavor an answer as to the best of my knowledge.”

“I will do that.”

“Now, sir, see to your men, make certain of proper stowage, and we will strike camp tomorrow and move toward our objective the 29th of August, for arrival the 1st of September. You may choose to join us and would be welcome. You may head to the many brothels of Mexico, as you prefer.”

Jack nodded and went to check as his Harvard crew more or less expertly deconstructed the Maxim, then emplaced the major parts into an interesting canvas saddle contrivance, meant to distribute its 136 pounds evenly over horse or mule.

The boys worked well and hard. It befit their high valuation of themselves to be special, as Jack had known it would.

“Do you think—?”

“You clamp it down now, Chandler,” said Jack. “Leave it be where it now is. No chatter, no palaver, no debate exercise. That time is past. You’ll only confuse matters and yourself as well. Doubts? Every soldier has ’em. But you have chosen a course and that’s what will happen.”

“If you’re not—”

“Clamp it down as well, Charles. Things will happen as they happen. Don’t think otherwise, you’ll just be stirring up your mind.”

That said, he left them in silence, his and their own. He went to his own tent, and there fetched the small kit with his belongings. Inside it, he found his white silk scarf, usually wrapped three times around his neck. This time he wrapped it three times around his chest. Then he buttoned up his black bib shirt. Then, finally, he put on his black silk vest, a gun man’s ceremonial vanity, and buttoned it tight. He then plumped the red bandanna around his neck, not quite into the array of a tie but at least giving what he wore something more of the ceremonial. Then he unstrapped his guns.

The orderly—one of the several uplifted Mexicans promoted to trusted positions—leaned in, announced to The Frenchman the arrival of his guest, and ushered Jack in.

The Frenchman entered shortly, having changed shirt and into formal, shined boots, but still clearly a high officer of an army in tropical khaki, his shirt immaculately starched and buttoned to the top. He now wore a pair of wire-frame glasses, and his goatee, freshly bathed and waxed, yielded a precise point.

“Do sit down.”

They ate in affable silence. No dried-out army food in the commander’s tent. Beef in red wine sauce, grilled Mexican corn, tortillas in herbal butter. The wine, red as well, was perfect.

The plates cleared, the man gestured, and the Mexican put a well-made leather-tooled box on the table before him, a pistol case of some sort, it seemed.

“Before we begin, I thought this might interest you, as a man conversant with weaponry. You have mastered the machine gun, but the whole world of firearms design is exploding, not just on Maxim and his machine gun and the other machine guns now in manufacture, but on the naval cannon, the field artillery, and finally—the automatic pistol.”

He slid the case over, Jack opened it. Yes, it interested him. Large for a handgun yet small for a carbine, it appeared to Jack as some kind of hybrid of locomotive and broom.

“May I?” he asked and got an affirmative nod.

He removed it from the security of its red velvet lining and brought it close to eye. Its barrel was rapier-thin, yielding to an ejection port and a skyline of impressive machine work along the top of the frame, comprising a folding sight and various elevations, all fitted into detailed steel fretwork of mysterious purpose. Seen casually, it resembled the vista of an industrial northern city. For a grip, however, it did not look into the future but into the past, as it took the configuration of pure wood handle, an elongated teardrop of proportion exactly to the hand. The trigger guard was round as a coin, encompassing a trigger in exact parallel to the circularity. Then it altered significantly in design influence, embracing the modern again in the precision of a steel rectangular box, clearly the storage unit for the cartridges of apposite caliber. Obviously it would contain ten or even fifteen.

“I assume it works by the same principle as the Maxim,” Jack said. “The energy generated by the first shot cycles the inner machinery into action, so that a shell is ejected, a new one inserted into the chamber for firing upon only the pull of the trigger. The shooter just works the trigger to achieve his end, no cocking, no cranking, no resetting.”

“That is correct,” said The Frenchman. “The C96 Mauser, 7.63-caliber, high-velocity, ejecting a shell at each shot, locking open when depleted, the bolt held in place off the chamber. At that point, one inserts another clip of cartridges and forces them downward by thumb and into position. The bolt is automatically released to fly forward and in one second the pistol is loaded and primed. Ten more pulls and ten more shots, and on and on. Quite neat and efficient.”

“It looks well engineered and machined.”

“In these matters the Germans lead the world.”

“A gift for raiders.”

“Indeed.”

“Wish we’d had these at Chickamauga,” said Jack, enjoying the fluency of the piece, its natural hunger for targets. It would be the crown prince of melee. “In the war, I’d carry five, sometimes six or seven revolvers if heavy engagement was on the menu. Easier to grab a new pistol than reload an old one. This would seem to have anticipated that issue. You have connections in order to receive this from the Prussian military?” Jack asked.

“I do. We have followers everywhere. We are an international brotherhood, agents of no nation, beholden to no one. That is why I see a red dawn ahead and enjoy the reality that our cause is ordained. But enough of this. We must address my obligation to you. Now, having earned the information you desire, it is on me to pay in full. Please proceed. Oh, wait. Manuel, chartreuse!”

The Mexican orderly snapped to, disappeared a second, and returned with two liqueur glasses topped with green fluid.

“After-dinner liqueur. At the end of every duty day. As you please.”

Jack threw his down. Too sweet for his tastes, yet not without its slap.

“The occasional civilized pleasure makes the rigor of war bearable, does it not?”

“It does.”

“Now, sir. Onward.”

“Though I don’t know your campaign or its objective, I realize that given the number of men it requires, you must provide logistics. You have to feed and house and train a company, in scorching weather without much water. You must feed your soldiers, most of all. You have horses as well. I know that one source of supply is a large ranch in Estados, which has a deal for steady stolen supply off the Mexican war effort, foodstuffs and materiel, particularly with the connivance of a Major Arau, a cavalry fanatic who has named his supply-depot soldiers the ‘14th Hussars Squadron.’ ”

“A man of great usefulness, though of course despicable. He has fingers in all pies and can obtain most of what anybody needs on demand. Such corruption as you have never seen.”

“He sells to a Colonel Callahan of the Crazy R, which provides heavy security for the Arizona Southern’s westward adventure. Yet I believe one of his men works for you, a gun man named Joe Pye. I’m betting Pye reports to you on shipment and route. You attack, making sure to avoid massacre but taking just enough to operate for another month. Both you and Colonel Callahan pay this Pye. That explains many oddities to these events.”

“Very clever on your part. Then it follows that you were the chap who out-figured me on our last attempt.”

“Yes, sir. Nothing personal, you understand.”

“Of course. C’est le guerre. But do go on.”

“Yes. Then let’s focus on one such. I have traveled far and endured much for this intelligence. Three months ago, you attacked a wagon train, and made off with three contrivances of goods. You also exploded a wagon with bullets and powder for the colonel’s operation. A man was killed. I need the story of that day.”

“There was no explosion.”

Jack nodded. “I had suspicions. The story is that a bullet hit a keg of black powder, exploding it. The man was trying to clear panicked horses from the area and was cut down by shrapnel.”

“That is the story. Why do you suspect it?”

“Because no bullet is hot enough to detonate powder. It needs open flame. Shoot it all you want, it will not explode, just leak.”

“Excellent,” said The Frenchman. “I was told later that the man had a sentimental interest in horses. But he was also suspicious of what the wagons bore. He was then both heroic and nosy, and these two combined to get him killed.”

“You are certain about the explosion?”

“I leave people behind on our raids, in case a posse is formed and a pursuit begun. They would have seen an explosion. They would have reported it. This did not happen.”

Jack nodded.

“What you have is not war but murder,” said The Frenchman, with the air of a judge pronouncing a finding. “Why, I cannot say. What did that man find out? I do not know. I leave the bourgeoisie to its own perversities, except to note that it does not surprise me and it is just another reason for its elimination.”

Jack seemed to consider.

“Perhaps Major Arau can tell you more.”

“I will travel to see him.”

“And are you satisfied with my explanation?”

“Yes.”

“And on the topic of joining us, I presume your interest in this murder precludes that possibility.”

“It does.”

“Thus, whatever private crusade you pursue, I wish you luck on it.”

“Appreciated.”

“Then I will see you off. You have much travel tomorrow.”

“Yes, sir. I will return to my tent and get to sleep early for an early departure.”

“Do you need an escort? I fear the precipice when it’s dark and one has had a drink or two. I have lost three men that way.”

“I am fine,” said Jack.

The two men stood. And shook hands.

Jack exited, got his bearings, and turned in the proper direction. At the precipice, he noted the vast darkness below. It was all chaparral, leading nowhere for miles and miles. He turned, walked along it toward his tent.

A man suddenly stepped before him. It was Joe Pye.

He shot Jack point-blank in the chest.

Jack felt the blow, spun backward into the pull of gravity, and fell into the dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Joe was happy. He had money in his pocket, memories of murder in his mind, a new notch on his pistol, and a half-gone bottle of whiskey in his hand. Alls he needed now was a gal to fuck.

“You sure on this, Joe?” asked Shorty, who was beside him as the two ranged through No. 4’s nicer district in the early evening.

Joe took a swig. Damn good hooch. It amplified all his memories of the look on Jack’s face as he tumbled off the precipice, and diminished all those of his father screaming “You ain’t nothing, boy! You ain’t never finished a job of work in your life! I’m tard of feeding a no-’count!” and whipping him with a razor strop.

“Surely am,” he said. “Had my eye on this one for a long time. No Jack around to scare me off. He’s a pile of bones at the bottom of a canyon.”

The house was behind the church, which had been unvisited since their last time there. It was dark, the house still lit.

“Let’s go,” said Joe. “It’ll be fun.”

They dismounted, tied up, and went to the front door and kicked it open.

The pretty gal was spoon-feeding her husband. His face was still wrapped, because his jaw was bad broken. The meal then was oatmeal. He sat erect in a chair, his multiply broken ribs demanding a wrap around his torso chest to hip. One leg was straight out on account of the cast, and his dead-white toes showed. The other leg had wrappings tight about the knee.

“Well, damn, ain’t this a sight,” said Joe.

Everything happened fast. The injured man began to make sounds of distress, not quite a scream. The scream was handled by the missus. Joe handled the rush to her and the throw-down-hard part and the rip-the-dress-off-her part. Shorty watched. He seemed to enjoy it.

“Why?” she screamed. “Lord God, why?”

“Ain’t no ‘why,’ lady. It just is, ’cause I’s me and you’s you and here’s here.”

He went about his business, and it was clear he was something of an expert. Still, Shorty complained.

“Hurry up, Joe. I want some too.”

Joe completed with a spasm of something wild beyond joy, pulled out, and rolled off her. “She’s all yours,” he said.

“Too late,” said Shorty. “Watching you got me jacked up and I already damn finished. Maybe I’ll get me a damn whore later.”

“Hope so,” said Joe, “ ’cause I got me a feeling ain’t gonna be no whores left after tonight.”

The injured man tried to launch himself at Joe. Even if he had made it, what could he have done?

“Damn,” said Joe, laughing. “That ain’t polite.”

He shot the wounded man in the head. Then he walked to the fallen woman and shot her too.

“I’ve had better,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

On this day Major Arau chose his gray, his most powerful animal and his most obedient. He rode, as do most drawn to cavalry, with both grace and fury, becoming one with the animal. He loved the feel of its muscularity beneath him, the sense of its need to satisfy him, the wonder of its grace. The animals had been central to his family for four hundred years, and to this day, his serious engagement with them was one of his most essential rituals.

It was yet early and the night cool lingered, and no wind had yet arisen to sweep the desert’s sand and grit into the air, as well as blur everything in that thickness. Therefore: clarity. More wind would produce more dust, and clarity would be diminished. He rode at a strict cavalry canter, not a gallop. His head was high, his gray’s head was high. The animal’s ceremonial step, refined and exquisite, yielded an image of man on horseback, master and hero, noble and wise, an image that would frighten the enemy, dissuade the peasantry, and inspire his own men. It also had a noticeable effect on the female of the breed.

He looked forward so to these excursions. He was, as usual, immaculately dressed, the boots shiny, the spurs a-jingle, the crop held precisely under his arm, the saber adangle from his hip, glinting in the sun, the cap square on his head. Indeed, he looked the complete hussar, ready to lead his light brigade against the Russian guns at the end of the valley.

He took the horse through its exercises, from prance to leap to diametrical advance, to the final thunder of the gallop. He hoped that someday the opportunity would arrive and he would lead the men against others of the cavalry inclination, perhaps the French, still said to possess the finest light horse in the world, or, yes, even the English, renowned for their courage and the pure effort they applied even though subject to withering fire. Half a league, half a league onward rode the six hundred. Was there a man dismayed? Not though the soldier knew someone had blundered.

It was the blunder that conferred the glory of sacrifice on the six hundred. Pounded by the Russian cannonade from the heights on both sides of the valley of Balaclava, onward, onward they rode, noble six hundred. Major Arau tried to imagine the percussion of the exploding shells, the whistle of the screaming shrapnel, the superheated gas at play across the battlefield. He tried to imagine himself in the center of it. He tried to imagine the grip of his saber, its hunger for flesh, the impact of collision with the other side, the bite of edge through flesh, the screams of the cut, the graceless topple of the slain enemy to the raw earth below, his own energy at full expression, as he slashed his way through the living ranks.

It was magnificent.

It wasn’t war, but still it was magnificent.

He yearned for the charge. Soon the charge would have vanished from the battlefield, as new weapons that fired faster and more devastatingly took it over. The result would not be the glory of the charge, the nobility of duty done to the death, the memory of survivors, the respect of the historians. All that was vanishing. The next phase would be purely the destruction of human meat, on a vast scale and to no purpose. No Nolan, no Cardigan, no Blenheim, no charge of the French Hussars at Friedland, no Mongolian horsemen with their Buryat bow. Cavalry had slain the mighty Crassus, whom not even Spartacus could bring down. The Sassinid Persians destroyed all the Romans, in their time and fashion.

After the reign of Christ, mounted warfare came to Europe, where for nineteen hundred years the battle between dismounted, densely packed masses of rankers and scampering elite formations on horseback, which charged in hopes of breaking them, raged across nations, tribes, empires, any political unit at all.

Depending on the war and the century and the length of the pike, it varied who ended up dead. But in the end, it seemed the infantry had the upper hand, as the horsemen were too often brought down out of range by the ever-increasing accuracy of the infantry rifle and artillery shell. The last act, which was merely waiting for enough machine guns and a big enough war, was gathering in the wings. It would eventually play out, leaving millions slaughtered by machine gun, and the world would go on without the cavalry and without the Araus. It must be. It would be.

He reached the end of the field, and halted, dismounting.

Again bright, not yet hot, the sky a cavalry-blue for his squadron of one. He imagined pennants and flags and lines of horsemen, he heard the shuffle of the breathing, he smelled the ordure of the digestion, he felt the impatience of the horse.

“Almost finished,” he thought. Then he saw the man.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

For an outfit calling itself the Army of the Red Youth, it was rather small: five men on horses, two wagons and two platoons of thirty infantrymen, and a small squad of hangers-on, that is, Mexican servants, cooks, latrine diggers, and others in service to the idea of military operations. It raised little dust even in the drought, and little in the way of tracks that the wind didn’t quickly diminish and then blow away completely. So little footprint for an entity that meant to change the world.

The Frenchman was in front on his horse, and behind him, also mounted, were his four NCOs. They would occasionally peel around to the rear, and patrol among the infantrymen, exhorting them to keep up the pace and their spirits.

“Onward, boys, onward. Not far now! Then we’ll leave the world a better place!”

The pace was not strenuous, the distance not vast, and the chaparral, though inhospitable by appearance, with its rills of rock and hill, its arroyos and clumps of brush, its cacti and other desert vegetation, proved not to be arduous. If the path were picked carefully—The Frenchman, with his military background, was an expert—it went smoothly enough. Frequent water breaks, a surprisingly soft wind, an absence of grit whipping through it and a hint of moisture to the air, and the unit moved with purpose and good order toward its goal.

“You see, Lutec, how well it goes? We have trained the men well.” He spoke in French.

“Yes, sir,” said Lutec. In a French much better than his English. He had been with his officer since the war of 1870. He was at Sedan and saw the ring of fire and the mounds of French dead, he had seen Paris in its brief period of liberation and equality, he had mourned its passing and the return of the old order, as Europe and its kings and chancellors and prime ministers clamped down hard on the stirrings of a new way. He had followed his officer into the radical underground, not saying much, given only to service. In fact, The Frenchman—that is, Etienne d’Auclair, duc de Boulange—took him quite for granted, which is how he wanted it.

“Yet you look troubled, Pierre,” Auclair said in French. “May I ask why, Senior Corporal?”

“I want to re-emphasize my findings of this morning, sir. I feel I didn’t make my point clearly enough.”

“Oh, the business of the missing horse?”

“And guns, sir.”

“Yes, I believe them to be meaningless. I was following at twenty paces and I saw Pye shoot him directly in the chest. I saw him spin, stricken, and fall over the precipice. Already dead. Gravity took him, gravity smashed him, gravity killed him—a second time. The horse has no meaning. The guns have no meaning.”

“But both were gone when I checked. Why would that be?”

“I know he meant for an early departure. He dressed for dinner, then packed his kit and saddled his horse. He would then not have to do such a thing in the dark at five a.m. The intention was to give himself five hours in the cool air before the heat grew difficult around ten. Then he could stop and rest in the shade until two and get in another few hours after that. It’s simply how a man travels in filthy hot weather.”

“Yes, sir. But then why was the horse not in the corral overnight? Why was it missing, as were his two revolvers?”

“Horses have perceptions we lack. The horse must have sensed his death, saw little future in the Army of the Red Youth and its war on capitalism, and taken off.”

Lutec said nothing, but simply looked grumpy. Two Prussian hussars had sabered up his face in 1870 until he killed them both with a needle gun bayonet. He had been grumpy ever since.

“You will see, Senior Corporal. Tonight we shall have chartreuse while Railhead No. 4—and America—burn.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It was another horseman, in black fully aglow in the brushwork of the sun, and as had Arau, this chap showed exuberance. He was of the horse. He intended to die on horseback, and when didn’t matter much. He approached, the chestnut roan eating up the distance, then pulled aside twenty yards off.

“Rodrigo,” the major signaled.

Rodrigo, his aide-de-camp and bodyguard, had already noted the intruder and was hard on the approach.

“See what this fellow wants,” said the major. Rodrigo cantered to the man.

“Señor,” he said, “this is a private area. You are not permitted.”

The two horsemen now faced each other at arm’s length, since Rodrigo, to show his seriousness of purpose, had advanced beyond normal rules of horseback etiquette.

“I have business with the major.”

“You may enter the depot in town and request an appointment.”

“Have a feeling I’d wait a long time,” said the man. “Just thought he and I could finish it up here.”

“You are not understanding,” said Rodrigo. “It is forbidden.”

“Sir,” said the man, “it is you who are not understanding.” Drawing a saber from under his left leg with a speed and precision born of experience, he cut off Rodrigo’s head in one fluid motion.

The body remained on the horse for several seconds. A few arteries pulsed a spray of droplets into the air. Then the body twisted, fell from balance, and toppled into the dust.

The major, a few steps back, understood instantly the skill of the man. Not only acuity of aim and strength and speed of cut, but the way the man’s body remained still despite the physical demands of the transaction, so that all strength was focused on the blow. It betrayed hands and wrists, as well as forearms, of great strength, as well as much experience.

The man turned to face him.

“Out for a ride, Major?” the man called, and Arau recognized him as the very capable fellow allied with Voth, in the employ of Colonel Callahan. He recalled that Voth had said of this one that he’d been Confederate cavalry in the war.

“That was a nice cut. You are the former cavalry man who rode with Voth, is that not correct?”

“It is. Today Voth is not here. I am on my own. I hope you don’t take offense, but that seemed the fastest way to get your attention. I hesitate to kill without formal declaration of contest, but I presumed as your aide-de-camp this fellow had a hand in many of your crimes, so his punishment was just in the eyes of everybody.”

“We are all sinners, are we not? What do you want?”

“You have information. I need you to share it with me.”

“You threaten me, then?”

“Perhaps we could just chat and I’ll go upon my way. My judgment on your behavior could await another day, or even forever. But no matter, I shall obtain that information.”

“You have pistols. I have not.”

“I will then make no use of my pistols. I have experience, as do you, with the blade from atop a fine and valiant steed. I am not practiced and moreover bear a bruise on my chest that would flatten another man.”

“Pain does not bother you?”

“It bothers me as any man. But duty undone bothers me more.”

“This will be an interesting contest. To sabers, then.”

The major drew his blade. It flashed in the sun. It was a superb Toledo steel with brass-basket hilt and only slightly curved, after the modern fashion, thick through spine yet a razor at edge. Its beauty did not mean it was unfit for battle: the sword makers at Toledo had never made a sword unfit for battle, and they’d been at the trade since the days of the Cid.

By contrast, Jack’s was a war-beaten relic, heavier in all respects. It was actually of Yankee manufacture, of Ames Sword, Ames, Massachusetts, having been picked up after a skirmish in 1862 when its original owner no longer had need of it. Jack carried it for the next three years. Used it often, shed much blood across its blade, and came to know it like a brother. If he had need of a weapon for this test, the Ames Heavy Cavalry Saber of 1858 was the weapon he would choose, if somewhat archaic in the degree of curve and the heaviness of quillon and pommel. And of course, strictly built for battle, it lacked ceremonial niceties.

The two rode to the center of the field, then separated until twenty yards lay between them, faced their horses, and saluted each other with blade and momentarily dipped head.

“En garde!” shouted the major.

“Yeehaw!” replied Jack.

With that, the major reared the gray on two legs so that it built momentum in the descent, then spurred it with a violence that communicated to it that this was battle, not practice. It leaped hard and fast on Jack, whose own mount, challenged, responded with a head-down charge, instinctively finding an angle of approach at zero, so that the gray had no room to launch a cut.

Was this a fight between swordsmen or horses? Both, actually. The animals understood that survival lay in angles, and the horse who closed on the small portion of his enemy’s perimeter that could not be guarded by saber would prevail. They banged and thudded against each other, whipping up the Mexican dust, each angling to break into the geometrical space from which the death strike could be launched, each failing. In fact, what they produced was as much of sound as fury, or rather the sound of fury: as they maneuvered, they closed and struck or guarded, and the two edges banged hard against each other, absorbed the blow, and skidded down the edge to each other’s brass quillon, there catching for an extra spurt of strength. At this point it became a new game, as the blades rolled about each other, each aspiring to slide off the other at a point close enough to become an instantly applied thrust meant to find home in deepest torso. But again, despite the energy invested by both horses and men, and the urgency of the struggle, no fatal penetration could be engineered.

In time, the animals backed off from each other. The two swordsmen looked hard at each other, each seeing the other’s formidability. They were soaked in sweat, as were their mounts, and both men and animals breathed heavily through parched lungs.

“I see you have done this before,” panted the Mexican.

Jack was wiping sweat flecked with blood—a cut somewhere he hadn’t noticed in all the exertion—but he answered, “Yes, but in melee, where one slides off one enemy to engage another. Never straight blade on blade. This is unexpectedly intense. And there is no recourse.”

“You have chosen it, sir, not I. It is mine only but to survive. A shame we cannot have a drink afterwards.”

“That’s the problem with battle,” said Jack. “You must kill the people who most impress you.”

Jack lowered, charged, attempting to dip so far that he opened an upward thrust, but the Mexican was instantly aware, and feinted an outward drive, then ducked back in, unfortunately jammed too close to his foe to reset his blade angle for the kill. Instead, at speed, the two crashed together, muscles driving on muscles, and under certain circumstances one might have unhorsed the other, turned, and ridden him down, then dismounted for the coup de grâce, as regretfully as it might be applied. But each clung to his animal off the strength of muscles much versed in horseflesh, and stayed aboard. The impact would leave a horizon of bruise where each had beaten against the other.

They separated again.

“It would be a shame to kill a man so talented and brave,” said Jack. “Why not just tell me what I want to know and we’ll go our ways with fond memories.”

“No García-Borges Arau has ever surrendered,” said the major. “We carry the field or we are carried from it. I have no choice.”

“So be it, my friend. Save a chair for me in hell!”

“Or you for me!”

Again, they lowered, again they charged, again the blades banged, then skidded, then tangled, and Jack used a trick that he’d conceived of thirty years ago, but never tried because it could only work mano a mano. He dived from his horse. Having bulldogged many a young steer in his time, he knew the terror of slipping the saddle’s security and launching into space, and knew also that in giving up his horse, he was betting all on the surprise maneuver. As both speed and gravity took him down, he reversed grip on his weapon, thrust full-strength at a target he could not see for the blur of speed and dust and the rush of the fall, and felt it bite hard into flesh. It was the sensation of the butcher’s profession, as one could sense the feel of the gelid meat as it yielded to the cut. Then he hit the ground, lost everything in a sequence of flashes and crashes as his head went against the dirt as an egg to a wall.

He rolled through dust, meant to scramble to his feet to reacquire the saber in time for the Mexican’s next attack, but didn’t make it and was hit hard by the animal’s front quarters, which drove him backward in an arc, and again his head was driven into the dirt. He blinked, falling into confusion, breathed in a gallon of sheer dust, tried to blink clarity back into his eyes but knew he was doomed unless…

The Mexican did not ride him down again, this time grinding him under hooves, making the final thrust largely irrelevant. Instead, he simply relaxed on his horse, if wobbling a bit. He raised his arm and exposed the long slice from above the navel to around the back, which now released blood in copious quantities.

“You have killed me,” he said.

“If that is what you want. I see blood but not spurting, which means no arteries are cut. You will not bleed out fast. If I wrap linen tight about the wound, and your horse can get you back, you may live many more years.”

This was a lie. Indeed, no arteries had been cut, but Jack made out four, maybe five, incisions in the coils of the small intestine as the rent uniform peeled backward to reveal such secrets. Already poison leaked out. Infection would follow, and Major Arau would join his forefathers in cavalry heaven within the week.

“Yet I will not be able to ride. What use is life, then?”

“Find a woman. Then find six more. Have many children. Show them your scars to scare them away from an army life. Drink much wine.”

The man said nothing, but slid off his horse. Jack got the linen wrap from his saddlebag and commenced to seal the draining blood in. Major Arau’s horse, knowing it was needed, immediately approached. Jack helped the wounded man aboard.

“You take but then restore life. What a queer chap. I am in your debt. What information do you need?”

“I know you have a supply deal with Colonel Callahan. I also know that occasionally an eleventh wagon is inserted into the wagon train. I know that The Frenchman’s Red Army will not bother it, by some sort of other arrangement, I suspect brokered by you.”

“You know much.”

“I pay attention. The question, then: What is in the eleventh wagon?”

The Mexican grimaced in pain, made as if to pull away, but lowered his head one more time.

“Young girls,” he said, “for the whorehouses of Railhead No. 4.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

There have been many—perhaps millions—of speeches without revolutions. But has there ever been a revolution without a speech? Don’t count on it.

On the second day’s march, The Frenchman, formerly of the 13th Regiment des Fusiliers, General Staff Department G (intelligence), the Socialist Reform Party Leadership Council, the French Workers’ Party, the Black Flag Guerilla sabotage section, the SLP Action Committee (chairman), and presently the commander in chief of the Army of the Red Youth, ordered his Red Youth to cease their march. Tonight the true work began, and that moment required consecration as well as clarification. This meant, quite naturally, another speech.

“Young men,” he began, when they had drawn close, gone to rest, laid down their Remington .43s, taken off their hats, and in some cases loosened or removed their boots, “I bid you rest one last time before action. I want you to use this time to contemplate the enormity of what you begin tonight. You should have pride, enthusiasm, but above all, a moral clarity as to what lies ahead. I do not pretend the crusade will be without blood. I never have. I only proclaim, that in the Maxim machine gun under the cover of the wagon, for once the force is on the side of the people, not the Cossacks, the gendarmerie, the bobbies, the Pinkertons, the government agencies, the capitalist goons, the misinformed patriots, the ignorant and the savage. We can and will, for once, vanquish them.

“Our plan is simple. After dark, we come out of these hills to the town of Railhead No. 4, headquarters for the expansion by the Arizona Southern Railroad into California, and we bring a message of devastation to capitalism. We teach them that they no longer control the means of production; they are ours, by right of sacrifice and conquest. I have an agent there already. He is a large blond man of cowboy disposition. But he is totally of our cause. Even now he waits in the Golden Apple bordello for our arrival.

“I know that all before me are willing to die for this cause.”

“Not hardly,” whispered Jim to Chandler, who muttered in reply, “Shut up, you’ll get us hung.”

“But I have a melancholy truth for you which I need you to affirm. Our plan calls the machine gun to open fire with illuminator rounds on all administrative and logistical buildings of the rail construction team. Sheds, offices, warehouses, piles, the raw material of aggressive capitalism. These rounds will set them aflame. They will be gone in minutes. We will then dynamite the stockpiles of ties and rails, making splinters of them or steel pretzels. We shall turn then to the city of workers’ tents. Most, we pray, will have fled. Some, however, in confusion, will stay and fight.

“This is where dying is not enough. Only killing is. You must understand the implication of your actions. You must destroy capital. No matter that its defenders fail to grasp the implications of their actions, they must be shot down. It is the price we pay and they pay for a new world. No one ever said it would be easy.

“Then we move into the city proper. The executives and managers live in an area west of Main Street, in houses that in most countries would be called mansions. They must be set aflame, and those that flee must be shot down. Men, women, children, it makes no difference. They live off the blood of working people and deserve to die therefore in the initial conflagration of their system. I urge upon you, be ruthless, be relentless, show no mercy. Teach the world, for soon the world will be your audience, that to defend capital is to die. It can be no other way.

“Then, finally, we move into Whoretown. This is the fulcrum of capitalist evil, where they turn our own appetites against ourselves and render us worthless against our hungers. Especially here our message must be relentlessness. The guns will be loaded with the bullets of fire and must set aflame or otherwise individually shoot down all who remain. The whores especially must die, for they are the lubrication of exploitation. If captured they will be hung or burned, depending. You may first take any pleasure with them you see fit—it has been a long night, after all—and then they will be consigned to their fate.

“Tomorrow, we rest, and certain parties will comb the ruins for replenishment. Meanwhile, I will send out a communiqué proclaiming our victory, seizing the moment to inspire other insurrections nationwide, even worldwide, spontaneously, and our actions will be imitated. In very short time, no national state will be able to stand against us. Our way is righteous, the only way into the next century. We shall prevail. Apollo must vanquish Dionysus forever.”

He held them captive. He felt their obedience. He felt a new world stirring. He felt his own elevation unto moral greatness.

“Sir,” said Jimmy, “uh, there’s a man a few hundred yards ahead, standing in the prairie.”

“A man?”

“Yes, sir. Worse than that, I think it’s a dead man.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I feel his approach,” said the colonel. “Do you, Voth? In the war, before the big battle, we could feel emanations in the air. I feel them now. The next days will be bloody.”

“Yes, sir,” said Voth. “But again we have no clear indication of why the gun man Swagger took disguise among us and has done service on our behalf.”

“No, but I cannot believe it is otherwise innocent. Why hide? Why snoop? What mystery did he need to unravel before action? What will that action be?”

They stood on the verandah of the great house, contemplating the sheer beauty of the sunset, the calm of the day as it slid to night, the 30th as it slid to the 1st. In the west, a great hemorrhage of cloud had formed, like a massive bruise bringing pain to a leg. It did not bode well, but the colonel kept that suspicion to himself.

“Sir,” said Voth, “perhaps I should head into town. He might go there directly. I could confront him with those questions. If he is hostile, as we suspect, violence will occur. Perhaps I’ll prevail, perhaps he will. Whatever, you’ll have your answer.”

“Tom Voth, I do not deserve you. Not only brave, skilled, a natural leader, but a willing sacrifice on my behalf. You are Lancelot, to be sure. But I much prefer you here, commanding your Dark Riders so that our most skillful defense will be offered. After all, we are twenty to his one. You dispatched the cowboys?”

“Yes, sir. I doubted their loyalty. Many saw Jack as a hero. Worse, in a battle they would likely panic and run about, confusing the issue. Part of his plan may have been to use that confusion to advantage.”

“Excellent. Always two steps ahead, eh, Tom?”

“Three would be better. But I do what I can with what I’ve got. I would like to face the man alone when he first arrives. I feel that has been in the cards since we first laid eyes upon each other.”

“I would wish it not, preferring you with twenty guns in backup. But I know on this matter you must have your way. It is in your makeup.”

“Yes, sir.”

“No matter, Tom, you cannot let him destroy the ranch. Do you see, the ranch is America. It is what we fought the war for. It is large, splendid, and provides for the many. Indeed, some sins have been committed to keep it on keel. That is always so of large entities. Look carefully enough at any of them, from the British empire to Mr. Carnegie’s steel colossus to the United States Army to any top company on the New York stock exchange. Indeed, flaws, sins, mistakes, injustices will ultimately be revealed. It is the nature of the gigantic to be ruthless and sloppy at once, and people are crushed all the time. Yet all reformers, all revolutionaries, all do-gooders, seek to destroy the thing itself, focused on its sins, blind to the work of sustenance, of best for most, of likewise stability, the mantle of protection, of hope for the future that justifies all the ugly little stains and random deaths it leaves in its wake and which cannot be eliminated in any event.

“Those of us chosen by fate to defend the future see and understand that, are not unmindful of the tragedies, but know more sincerely that we must protect it all, for over the long run it is best. Many fail to see this, or will not let themselves see this, feeling that their inadequacy is the fault of the system, not themselves. Why would a man like Swagger not see that?”

Voth had no idea what to say in response to this rant. He had never heard the colonel in such high agitation.

“Perhaps he is just a natural outlaw, sir. I saw many at Yuma, some men of surprising ability. Yet their personality drove them toward crime and even more, destruction. Where it comes from, I have no idea. Perhaps they are born that way, perhaps some event turns them so. It is a great mystery.”

“So it is, Mr. Voth. You are wise in your observation. Well, then, we shall just have to wait to see what this outlaw has in wait for us.”

“We will stop him, sir.”

“We must stop him, Mr. Voth.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I plotted cleverly to kill you, my friend Jack. How, then, is it that you face us now?” asked The Frenchman quite convivially. “Are you ghost, sir, or creature of Nietzschean fantasy? Did Shaw invent you, or Dostoyevski?”

“None of those, even if I knew who they were. Actually, I stand before you on account of silk.”

“The material?”

“It can stop bullets—not their impact but their penetration. My chest, where Pye’s shot landed, is the color of a purple fruit and sore as hell to boot. However, I was wrapped in several layers of silk, including a thick vest and a white scarf, in the belief that your private assassin would do the trick. He would use his .38-40 Smith & Wesson as loaded with the reloads from Colonel Callahan’s armory. To scrimp on money, the armorer scrimps on black powder. The bullet then travels much slower. A blankethead like Pye would know nothing of this. To him, a shot is a kill. It is not always so.”

“But the fall—”

“That cliff was thick with vegetation. Since I wasn’t dead, I’s able to slow my fall into more of a roll. Damned dizzy at the bottom. But by the time my horse found me, my head had cleared.”

“Clever. Lucky too, but then the clever are always lucky. What demand do you bring to my table?”

“The order to stand down, disperse, destroy the machine gun, and go on about your business in ways not involving murders of the innocent.”

“There are no innocent.”

“That’s the kind of talk that sets lead to flying.”

“It is, is it not? Surely you see why? I have four stalwart men on horses with Winchester 94s. I have a Maxim gun. I have sixty men-at-arms pledged to my cause, ready to go forth. Against all this, you bring only yourself. I admire your courage, as I always have, but as you stand against me, alone here in the twilight, you must be destroyed. I suppose it has something of the Greek mythic to it, the one helpless against the many, of no hope. Still, he rages on.”

“You have four men on horseback with rifles. I can draw and kill the first so fast it defies belief. That shot’s report will stir the other three horses. They will skitter and prance. Their riders will not find the stability for a secure response. Before a second has run its course they will be dead, the horses fled. Fellows, drop those rifles and back off.”

A moment or two passed.

Lutec tossed his first, then Jimmy. Then the others.

“Then I will command my machine gunners,” said The Frenchman.

“Sir,” yelled Chandler, “sorry but the Harvard Crimson chooses to go the way of Jack. Our gun is indeed ready to fire, but not at him; rather it will destroy our colleagues. I would hate to do so, so I now recommend to them that they toss those ludicrous .43s aside.”

First one, then another, and then more, and finally all decided to disarm themselves. They backed away, some already on the run.

“It seems they weren’t keen on machine-gunning babies in their cribs in the night,” said Jack.

“They are fools, then. They leave the world unchanged.”

“Perhaps they can change it without massacring babies.”

“Maybe you’re the fool for believing such a thing is possible.”

“So be it. I’d always prefer foolishness to baby-killing. Then it’s you and I?”

“It is. You are a renowned pistolero. I am but a retired French officer. What sport can there be for you? Why not just execute me?”

“I do not execute or assassinate. I kill by fair contest. Well, most of the time.”

“We shall see. I am experienced, as you know, in European dueling practices. The scar on my face so proclaims. I have indeed also dueled with pistols, after our fashion. My presence speaks of some skill at arms. Are you prepared for la duella?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“At ten paces, then. On command we turn, set, and aim. There can be no evasion; we are standing like men. On further command we fire. No premium on speed, only on coolness and its result, accuracy.”

“Your Mauser being longer of barrel and more precisely sighted than my short-barreled smoke-pole, the advantage goes to you.”

“I believe you to be any man’s equal in accuracy. But take away the advantage of speed, and we shall see, shall we not, what is to happen?”

“Any more rules?”

“One round per weapon. No holster. Pistol in hand, hand at hip, back to back. On command each walks ten paces. On further command, turn, on command raise and aim, on command fire. He who is standing then is the victor. If both are dead, so be it. If neither, then a reload, and the ritual done again, until one has fallen.”

“As you say.”

Jack unstrapped his pistols, choosing the one in the left-side holster, it being in his judgment a trice more accurate. He tilted it up, notched the hammer at the second stop to free the cylinder, opened the loading gate, and rotated. One by one four cartridges dropped out into his palm. He pocketed them. He set his cylinder so that the one remaining cartridge came up on cocking the hammer. Then he glanced, saw The Frenchman attending to his pistol by different protocols but to similar results. Nine times he pulled hard on the bolt that carried the cartridge to the chamber, and each time a cartridge, nabbed by an ejector hook, popped out. When one remained, he let the bolt slam forward, priming the pistol. Keeping his finger off the trigger, he turned to Jack and bowed slightly.

“I am ready.”

“As am I. Let’s dance,” said Jack.

They stood back to back, moving pistols to the half salute.

“As by its nature, my pistol is cocked,” said The Frenchman. “I encourage you to cock the Colt. That way I accrue no advantage.”

“Cocking is part of my firing procedure,” said Jack. “To separate cocking and firing into different elements would feel strange. I will hold as is.”

“By the way,” said The Frenchman, “it does not matter that you have stripped me of army and machine gun. The momentum of progress is on my side. You will not prevent the revolution, but regardless of our outcome, merely postpone it. I am history.”

“I am just an old man with a gun,” said Jack.

“Lutec?” called The Frenchman.

“Yes, sir,” said the noncom, taking over the ceremony as duel master. “On my command, ten paces.”

He paused a second.

“Monsieurs,” he cried and began to count. “Une, deux, trois,” and on till the tenth step. “Halto.” Another second.

“You may turn.”

Jack pivoted. Twenty yards away stood The Frenchman, ramrod-straight and calm as death, the pistol at his hand.

It was long-barreled and slim, even in the dying light and the fall of dark, displaying its intricate engineering, its lines of the next century, not, as Jack’s displayed, the last.

A small audience observed. The army, such as it was, had melted and fled. Lutec stood between the opponents, and in front of the four men on horseback and, next to them, the four Harvards, Chandler behind the brutal snout of the Maxim, the other three in service positions, though no target lay before them.

“Take aim,” proclaimed Lutec.

The Mauser rose slowly and calmly and behind its bore Jack could make out the largely indifferent eyes of The Frenchman. He expressed neither passion nor fear. He was not asweat or atremble. The bore of the pistol did not shake.

The second lasted an eternity. Generations came and went, empires rose and fell, masterpieces were painted, statues sculpted, revolutions started, some finished.

“Feu!” said Lutec.

Both pistols barked, though in the emptiness of the prairie the sounds dissipated.

Jack slap-fired his Colt from the hip, a good twentieth of a second before The Frenchman’s finger lit off the automatic pistol and sent its cargo to the horizon.

The Frenchman fell back, his hand flying to his face. He went to his knees. He examined the raised palm and saw it rich in blood. He stood, shakily, bereft of words. The blood formed a delta on his khaki shirt, issuing from a rent at the edge of his cheekbone, glistening in the last glow of the low light.

“Now you have another dueling scar,” said Jack.

The Frenchman looked at him as if under some influence. Then collapsed and went still. Lutec went to him, kneeled, and felt for pulse.

“Il est fini,” he said.

“I guess so,” said Jack to Lutec. “That wasn’t no old man’s hand-load. It was a full-bore Remington factory round. Same effect as an eight-pound sledge to the brain. Now, Lutec, you grab your boss’s horse and ride hard to Guadalajara.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Mrs. Hansen was in a foul mood because she was always in a foul mood and tonight was a part of “always.” You would be too if Indians had killed your husband when you were twenty-two, burned your ranch, and kidnapped your children, thus forcing you into a career in the whore trade. At least she had risen to the executive ranks of that profession, even if such success did little for her mood. The annoyance at present was the lateness of Mort, the driver of the whore express. The knock came a little late, 8:15 p.m. Mrs. Hansen peeked through the hole in the door, and saw Mort Dodge, scruffy and foul as he always was, a glowering frown on his ugly features.

“About time,” she said, opening.

But it was not Mort. Mort was there, now on his knees, hands tied behind back. Instead she faced a person she knew immediately to be the gun man Swagger, though she’d never seen him. But rumors were rife in No. 4, proclaiming the arrival of a specter from the past, tall and thin and hawkish, in rawhide duster, wide gray hat with soft rolls to the brim, two Colts in Mexican holsters, and a Mexican belt.

She had no time to speak, for the man hit her with a gloved left hand, turning her nose to a smear and knocking out three teeth.

“You turned out these girls,” said the gun man, “for any scum with a dollar in his pocket. You must have thought there’d never be no paying for it. Bad decision. I’m the bill collector.”

He picked her up by the scruff of the neck, threw her into the wall. Perhaps some bones broke. Her breath was driven from her body, and in general pain seized her, doubling her up. He seized her again.

“Now unlock all the doors upstairs. Come on. Time’s a-wasting.”

They climbed the stairs, and one by one, the woman opened the doors. Two by two the girls came out, bewildered. But all were dressed for another night of fucking, and painted up like the whores they were forced to be. Jack watched them go downstairs, and they gathered, confused, in the front room.

“Anybody speak English?” A girl nodded. It was Yolanda, whom he’d spoken with before.

“You tell ’em what I say.”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl.

“Outside is your wagon,” he said loudly. “But tonight it does not take you to Whoretown. In the company of some young cowboys from the Crazy R, it will take you back to Mexico, to the town of Ibanez. You will be released and given fifty dollars to return to your homes. You need tell nobody how you were used. Your story is your property, and if you choose to keep it secret, that is your right.”

“Why do you do this?” Yolanda asked him. “The men who run things will be very mad at you.”

“They’ll be too busy tonight to notice. It is the night of the Great Death, come as prophesied, though with different results. I do it because nobody should be stolen into a whore’s slavery. There are certain things I cannot abide. That happens to be one of them.”

He watched them go, and Matt and Billy helped them into the big Conestoga. After some arranging, Matt climbed into the cab.

“All set, Mr. Swagger.”

“You and Bobby and the boys run these girls back to their town. You’re sure on the route, even in the dark?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good, then. Get going.”

“Sir, I—”

“Get going, boy. Nobody here needs to say nothing.”

He watched the wagon pull out and saw four more horsemen, probably unnecessary, fall into a protective formation behind.

When they were gone, he leaned over, and picked up the one called Mort, the whore teamster. “I’d ask you who you work for,” he said, “except I already know.”

“I didn’t do nothing to them gals,” said Mort. “It was just a haulage job.”

“This is going to be just a burning job,” Jack said.

He hauled Mort in, threw him against the steps. Upstairs they found Mrs. Hansen groggily moaning in a puddle of blood. Picking each up by the neck, he threw each into a room, which locked when the door was pulled shut.

Then he went downstairs, looked about. No lights had been lit because there was still half a sun up, smearing scarlet across the sky. He picked up an oil lamp, took out a match, and lit the lamp’s wick. Then he threw the lamp hard against the wall, where it shattered, sloshing the oil everywhere in the fraction of a second before its wick ignited it, turning it into a splatter of flame. Three more lamps, three more splatters, one big fire.

He left, finding his horse waiting for him outside.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Where the goddam whores?” yelled Shorty. “God dammit, I want to get laid. Money’s burning a hole in my pocket.”

“Thought you was spent,” said Joe Pye, sitting next to him.

“I got plenty left, don’t you worry none,” said Shorty.

Joe and Shorty sat in the half-empty Golden Apple. It probably wouldn’t get busy for another hour yet, but the whores were usually on station by eight-thirty and it was almost nine.

“Ain’t that the way,” said Shorty. “Whores but no money. Or you got the money, but there ain’t no whores.”

“And whores and money but no spunk, ’cause you wasted it,” said Joe. “Anyway, I wanted to get me some more action in before the fun starts.”

Suddenly Luke was standing over them.

“Okay, boys,” he said. “Apologies on me. Don’t know what’s keeping Mort. Drink’s on the house.” He poured a half a shot of what was advertised as Pikesville rye into each glass.

“That shit ain’t been a thousand miles of Pikesville,” Shorty snorted, “which is way east in Baltimore. That shit’s from some squaw’s bathtub fresh from last night.”

“You don’t gotta drink on the free,” said Luke.

“He’s only joking,” said Pye. “We’ll take what we are offered. And we thank you for it, brother.”

“Amen,” said Shorty.

The rye, or whatever it was, hammered and lit up each man as it went down. It turned the large room momentarily to blur, but then everything snapped back to semi-clarity. The place was semi-filled with smoke, semi-loud, semi-busy. The “semi”s would be removed from the calculation in an hour or so. The girls would work the room, the dealers would work the cowboys, it would be another grand night for Western civilization at the Golden Apple, leading bordello of Railhead No. 4 on the Southern’s westward surge toward Los Angeles. Life was good for all involved, except the whores, the workers, the Indians moved for the railroad, the small ranchers kicked out by the big ranchers, and so forth.

“Don’t know where this French fella gets his dough,” Joe said, “but he’s sure got enough to spread around.”

“Bet he’s got some big plans,” said Shorty.

“Bet he does too,” said Joe, “and we’d be smart to hitch on.”

And then what did they say? Nothing. Without whores as a distraction, what were these two morons going to discuss over the next three hours until the fireworks started? Politics? History? Popular culture? The game of baseball, currently the rage in the East? Which whore was better?

That one actually worked.

“I ain’t had that new young one,” Shorty said. “Nice little diddies on her. She just cries so damned much.”

“Me,” said Joe Pye, “I like ’em big. That’s why I always go with Lupita. Her balcony is crowded, and she don’t never cry. Now, I ain’t saying she enjoys it, but at least she’s used to it, sort of. More each time.”

And that was it for conversation. Only another two hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.

They stared into space, nursing the rye. Shorty took out his makings, and started putting a cigarette together. Joe yawned, caressed his beautiful pistol, and—six things happened at once.

The windows of the Golden Apple all blew in, spraying glass bits as they disintegrated.

The chandelier above them shredded into a glass hurricane, showering crazily upon them.

Flaming smears of hellfire streaked through the atmosphere, and wherever they landed and whatever they landed upon, they destroyed, including wood, glass, bottles of alcohol, mirrored surfaces, and the occasional man.

Everybody became an instant Christian, beseeching God to let him survive. A sustained roar grew so loud it ripped eardrums and drowned out the praying.

And finally everything started to burn.

“God dammit,” said Joe to Shorty, having found a new subject of conversation, “them dumb bastards are three hours early. This wasn’t supposed to happen till after midnight when Whoretown was all jammed up.” Both had made it to the floor but were dejected that their rye had not. Maybe in the confusion, they could creep over to the bar and—

“What the fuck have they got?” yelled Shorty on the verge of panic. “Some kind of Gatling gun?”

“Nah, it’s a British thing for mowing down darkies in Africa. This French guy got ahold of one and he’s going to use it to conquer the world.”

Shorty said, “He ain’t going to have no problem with that thing.”

It was clear the machine gunners had moved on to other targets: same shattering roar, same scream of bullets tearing through wood and glass, same odor of actual cordite, same sense that the world had just turned on its axis.

Most of the others took the opportunity to flee. They hit the double doors and scattered into a night illuminated by the flickering and flaring of burning buildings. No sense being among the first white people killed by a Maxim gun.

In seconds the place was empty but for various sorts of smoke that drifted, mingling chemically, through the atmosphere. Again, it occurred to Joe that with Luke gone from behind the bar—they’d seen him dash out—they could crawl back there and help themselves to an evening’s bounty of fine bad whiskey.

“What’re we going to do?” asked Shorty, trembling.

“Best thing is,” said Joe, thinking more clearly, “we just stay here, inside. Fire’s not roaring yet, it’s mostly back in the bar and going up the stairs. We got some time before it forces us out.”

“Then?”

“Then we amble out like we own the place. And we do. They’re looking for a big fellow with blond hair to guide them. We’ll take them into the mansions and set them ablaze and then we’ll do a job on the railroad yard. And then, my friend, we ride clear, our pockets full of hard cash. Fire and brimstone done come to the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Southwest territory and—”

But a voice interrupted his musing.

“Joe Pye. I am the gun man Jackson Swagger come to settle up. Get out here and face me like a man or burn in there black as the devil’s piss!”

They got there around 8 p.m. No Jack. “We wait, I guess,” said Chandler.

“He said he’d be here,” said Charles.

“He’ll get here,” said Jim.

The horses shuffled and shifted quietly in the still twilight, Chandler tried again to master the art of building a cigarette from fixings but again failed, Ozzie and Jim squabbled about deeper meanings, and Charles simply watched the pool of light slowly drain out of the west, though he felt it a weaker show of color this time, and only now and then and only briefly did a ray of sun show itself.

“What’s going on with the weather?” he wondered aloud. Nobody answered, nobody cared.

Then Chandler took out his new toy.

“You be careful with that thing,” Ozzie warned.

“Oh, Christ,” Jim said, “now he thinks he’s a gun man.”

It was the late Frenchman’s Mauser. Chandler had copped it from the grass when they were moving out. It fascinated him.

“Think of the engineering,” he said, fondling the intricacies of the weapon. “Think of the imagination. I mean, who on earth could have conceived a pistol in this shape, and yet it fits so smoothly into the hand.”

“Just watch where you point it. You don’t know anything about it.”

“I think I figured it out. I got the belt. In the pouches are these little clips, they hold ten bullets—”

“Cartridges,” said Charles. “At least get the nomenclature right.”

“Yes, well, you pull back on the rod or bar or whatever here, and that moves back and opens the breach. Then you hook the tips of the clip into these notches here and force the cartridges down into the thing with your thumb.”

He did just that. The cartridges made a clickity-clicking sound as they rode the pressure into the magazine. Suddenly the magazine, emptied by its late owner before his duel, was full. Chandler released the rod to fly forward, move a cartridge into the chamber, and seal itself with a satisfying shudder.

“I think I just loaded it.”

“Great. Don’t touch the trigger.”

“I won’t, I won’t.”

“Chandler, throw it away. You have no use for it. You could hurt somebody.”

“I’ll put it in the holster and I won’t touch it unless we’re attacked by Apaches.”

“You’d have to go to the reservation to be attacked by Apaches.”

At that point, a figure materialized out of the dark, its first recognizable feature the gray hat with soft rolls.

“You boys okay? No problems?” the gun man asked.

“Nothing,” said Chandler. “It went just like you said. Say, you shaved your beard. Fellas, take a look—”

“Cork it, Chandler,” snapped Jack.

“Is that why you’re late?”

“Nah. Big commotion in town. Somebody killed the minister and his wife.”

“Good god! Who would—?”

“I know who. He’ll pay up soon enough.”

That quieted them.

“Okay, you gather round, I’ll tell you what happens now.” They came close, all hunching in the lee of the wagon.

“Real slow-like,” said Swagger, “with as little noise as possible, we’re going to ease the wagon into Whoretown. Best place is in the street, between the Golden Apple and the Orient. Then you unhitch the team and fade back into town, maybe find an alley to come to rest in. Once you’re gone, I’m going to climb into the wagon, unlimber the gun, and open fire. The theory I’m banking on is: no whorehouses, no whores. So—”

“But what about the whores already in the houses?” asked Ozzie. “I mean, sure, my mother would consider them immoral, but to get machine-gunned in the night doesn’t seem quite right.”

“Ain’t no whores in there tonight. That’s already been taken care of. I’m going to fire those illuminator rounds, aiming high on the first floor and low on the second. I’m hoping not to kill anybody. The point is to burn the buildings down. Dry wood in this drought, rooms full of silk and cotton and flammable alcohol, they ought to go up fast and burn clean. As I say, no whorehouses, no place for whores, or at least not the kind of whores that work in No. 4.”

“You don’t want us there in case—”

“No, I don’t want you there. You’d just get yourself killed. You let me do the killing or the getting killed. Anyhow, after a while, when I got all the buildings going hot, and all the cowboys and railroad workers have long gone, I will have some business in the street. You’ll hear some shots. Don’t come running till that shooting’s done. Then we have one more stop.”

“Who is—?”

“You don’t ask no questions. Just do what I say under the assumption I am trying to get you out of here alive and frisky. And that maybe in some way you have helped out a lot.”

“Helped who?” asked Chandler.

“You’d never get it, Chandler. Now let’s go.”

They moved slowly through the night, coming onto Main Street, then edging down it, past shops and restaurant and finally to the alley that marked the divide between halves of the town, the working half and the sinning half. The horses nickered and wheezed and occasionally sneezed or coughed but generally obeyed.

“Okay, unhitch the horses,” Jack said.

Jim, who had become an acceptable teamster, did so, and led them around and back.

“Okay,” said Jack, “now you boys get outta here. When the shooting stops, you come on back, but even then, be careful.”

They nodded and faded back.

Swagger took a deep breath. At any second, someone could come poking around. He did a quick once-over on the gun, found it set, checked that it indeed was primed with a belt of illuminator rounds, which were painted black and came out of a separate crate marked “Experimental Lot No. 144, Illuminator .303, British Small Arms Company, Birmingham, Eng.” He leaned forward, threw the crank twice, then pulled and yanked the canvas of the wagon cover free. He squared up, rotated the gun to bear on the Golden Apple, and pressed the trigger.

It was like a hose of fire. The gun gobbled through ten rounds that, leaking incendiary intent, pulled strands of sheer incandescence through the night, and where they smacked, they destroyed and ignited. They ate into the barroom of the Golden Apple, shattering the windows, shattering the mirror and a slew of whiskey bottles behind the bar, atomizing all of it. He saw the men below as they squirmed in crazy time to evade what was the hand of God as far as they could understand it. That first spray done, he moved upstairs and painted a similar if longer burn path through the rooms fronting the street. As before, instant ignition, the sudden unfurling of flame from each window as the cheap chintz curtains went first and fast, and soon all the contents of the room were aflame. Downstairs a crowd of men broke from the doors and ran off into the night.

He moved methodically through each of the four houses. It was the same. The line of fire traced by the burning bullets chewed into the wood construction, spewing fire both in arrival and in wake. In what seemed seconds, the buildings went, the roofs especially, churning billowy clouds of smoke lit orange by the fire below. And in the same amount of time, the inhabitants scrambled for survival, spilled out and dispersed insanely into the dark.

Soon enough he was left with a hellscape. The burning buildings formed a corridor of conflagration, and in the street, the dance of the flames traced itself in shadow and glare. It radiated waves of heat and the stink of consumption by flame. It looked like a road toward apocalypse.

He climbed out of the wagon, faced down the boulevard of burning wood.

“Joe Pye,” he yelled, “I am the gun man Jackson Swagger come to settle. Get out of there and face me like a man or burn black as the devil’s piss.”

“I thought I killed that fucker,” said Joe.

“You musta forgot to tell him,” said Shorty.

“Shorty, git behind the bar and look for a rifle or a shotgun.”

“The bar’s a wall of fire, Joe. I ain’t going near it. We get out of here in thirty seconds or we burn black, like he said.”

“Fuck,” said Joe. Then he yelled, “Okay, Jack. I’ll kill you again. Ain’t no nevermind on me.” He turned to Shorty. “Two of us. Both fast, both straight shooters. Let’s do the job.”

They rose and headed out through the shattered saloon doors as behind them, the ceiling half-collapsed and obliterated the table under which they had hidden.

They saw the gun man at the end of the street. He’d shaved his beard. He’d shed his duster. Two guns on his belt, both right-handed in their holsters. He had a new hat. Looked in the flickering orange and drifting smoke as calm as the ice cube before the whiskey. They drifted into the street, feeling heat on each side, finding the air hard to come by for the smoke. But in time they were forty feet away.

“Last time I saw you, I was killing you, Jack,” said Joe.

“I don’t hold that against you, Joe. Try and kill me anytime you want. But you killed more than a few folks for your various clients or just on sheer mean, like that minister and his wife. You answer tonight, you and little Nancygal there.”

“Aw, Jack, no need for that,” complained Shorty.

“So… anytime, boys. It’s getting hot in this street, I’d like to get a drink of water soon as this is done.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Colonel Callahan,” called Voth. “You ought to see this.”

The colonel came out of the hacienda and found Voth and several of the other Dark Riders in the staging yard. All were turned to the northwest; all were staring hard.

The colonel saw an orange glow to the sky, not a solid color but a flickery, wavering phenomenon, hovering over what had to be No. 4.

“Something big is burning, that’s for sure,” he said.

“Is it Jack? Is he bringing retribution to the town?” wondered Voth.

“He must be burning Whoretown. Those buildings would go fast and fill the sky with their consumption,” said the colonel. “From the railroad standpoint, doesn’t matter. No. 4 is just about shot and they’re already planning a No. 5 fifty-odd miles toward California.”

“Will he be coming to us next?” asked Voth.

“Who knows if it’s him or some holy rollers bent on burning out the sin? Jack doesn’t strike me as the type who’d be enraged by sin, not having killed as many as he has. Still, the beard hid his true face, so maybe we never knew what he was feeling.”

“Sir,” a Rider asked, “could it be the Indians? Maybe some Apache kids got fed up living on the reservation and struck out for no other reason than to murder white folks and go to the Hunting Ground in a blaze of glory. Wouldn’t take many of them to light that place up.”

“Apache ain’t fire people,” said Voth. “Other tribes, maybe. But your Apache puts too much stock in scalping to burn up the dead,” said Voth. “It’s the waste of a good head.”

“It’s him,” said the colonel. “I have a feeling. He’s on some mission. He will explain it when he gets here. I do know this: There will be blood.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Chandler’s mother once said to him, “Chandler, only one word describes you: despicable. You are low, manipulative, dishonest, and greedy. Do not think I have failed to notice. I shall have words with your father concerning you.”

His father said, “Chandler? Which one is he, dear?”

Thus, naturally, Chandler disobeyed Jack’s dictates. He viewed himself as far too heroic to cower in an alley. He told the others to stay put, and crept down the street by way of the wooden sidewalk under the porches of the shops. He felt the weight of the Mauser pistol on his hip. It was not arrayed for fast draw, the holster being deep and covered by a flap, but he knew with a second or two’s notice he could get it out. He felt dangerous as well as heroic.

He came at last to the drama. It unfolded before his very eyes, and he understood he was seeing something quite rare in the world: an epic confrontation between mythologies of different gun gods, as fought to the death. It was like watching Hector and Achilles on the hot plain outside Troy. It so stirred his fancily educated imagination that he almost began to weep. But then a stroke of genius hit him. He wished he had some kind of instrument of photography by which to record the oncoming event, not as still life but in motion. Such devices existed out of the Edison laboratory, but he himself had until now considered them too vulgar to be worth the penny entrance fee on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Not this one. Any amount would be too little. He imagined it as if being photographed by a moving picture camera, and indeed, from his vantage point, he was appropriately set up for the proper angles. He was behind Jack about fifty feet, but so situated that the two opponents were just to the left of Jack, though being at a greater distance, somewhat smaller. But that orientation meant he would be able to see the fluidity of the whole action—the draw, the muzzle flash of the pistols, the hits—and watch the loser tumble lifelessly to earth. Had anyone in history seen such drama so perfectly? He made a vow to watch carefully and commit the details to paper as soon as possible, so that they wouldn’t disappear. He tried to list them in the seconds the men bantered with each other, the roar of the burning building too loud to allow their words to be understood. (Idea: some method of recording the words in syncopation with the action would bring a sense not only of realism but more—especially if the words were clever—emotional intimacy to the event.)

In any case, those details:

The setting: They were situated in a tunnel of flame. On either side, the fires lashed out and back, almost dancing, mesmerizing in their rhythm. (Idea: music to accompany the image and heighten the mood would most certainly be welcome.)

Other artistic touches: The color of the flames, the slow drift of smoke, not enough to obscure but just perfect to lend the scene a kind of theatrical aspect, carrying a double meaning: this was both real and heroic but also had an otherworld quality to it, giving it the satisfaction of a story. The costumes: by accident (or not?) they were perfect, freighted with meaning themselves. Jack’s slim figure, unperturbably calm and representing the gun man at apex: boots, tight jeans, the loop of a gun belt laden with pistols and spare cartridges which glittered in the fire’s pulsations, black bib shirt, red bandanna around throat, and best of all, that gently rolled gray hat, surely the best hat Chandler had seen in his adventure in the West. Thank God he had picked up that hat! It wouldn’t be the same without that hat! And the final touch, so brilliant, so ready for the moving pictures: a black glove on his left hand.

As for the two others, they were far shabbier in well-lived-in clothes: dark jeans, each with a light shirt and suspenders, their hats less elegant but no less Western, and of course the guns that each wore, especially the blond one, whose holster dipped low off his hip and held a gleaming silver pistol. Their faces gleamed as well in the light, and Chandler was close enough to read not fear but ambition on them. They seemed happy to be here. This was the climax of their lives and immortality would arrive in the next few seconds.

The big one’s hand drifted close to the grip of his revolver, he flexed his hands open and shut, he seemed to take a breath—

Chandler joined him in the sudden need for lots of oxygen.

—and then his hand went to blur as it shot toward the grip. No hand could move so fast—

—except Jack’s.

Chandler saw it all unreel before his amazed eyes.

Jack’s hand seemingly vaporized into invisibility as if leaving the universe, then reappeared in instant time just a tiny bit in front of his hip as the black glove streaked across the top of his revolver. Chandler heard a single shot.

His opponents staggered. One dropped his gun, stepped sideways, then toppled. Black liquid spewed from his chest. The other, the blond, went to his knees, big silver pistol still in hand, still unfired, looked about in bewilderment, and seemed to then notice his own extreme leakage problems as, from inside, his cream-colored shirt darkened in vivid if utterly random shape as the blood feeding it spread unstoppably in all directions. He fell like a tree dropped expertly on Main Street. Blood squirted everywhere. They looked like clowns dying in mud, each with his own feckless technique in battling the inevitable. One punched the red mush of dust and plasma, splattering it on his face. The other smoothed his corn-silk hair, gilding it magenta in the weird firelight. In seconds, however, they were stiller than dried shit.

Chandler memorized the composition, determined that it would never leave his mind. The gun man, unvanquished, standing in the shimmying light, pistol in hand, the two others facedown in the wetland.

He had killed two men standing fifteen feet apart in one shot! Jack turned, walked to Chandler.

“Enjoy the show?”

“You—you—you—gluck-(swallow)-urp-uck.” He had no oxygen, and his throat felt like a gila monster’s after death by thirst.

“I what?” said Jack.

“You killed two men with one bullet.”

“No, two bullets. I can slap-fire with my first finger and follow on with my last finger so fast it sounds like one shot. Faster than the ear can hear, faster than the eye can see.”

“Bully for you! Most superior! Will you teach me how?”

“Not a chance.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The moon—half-full—behind racing clouds. Some breeze, still the stench of sulfur in the air. Everything occasionally vivid in the intermittent celestial light. A landscape of saguaro, crusts of rock, knots of brush. The road ahead aglow with lunar illumination—or not, as the clouds continued to flee.

Another night in the desert.

He rode easily. He was almost finished. Then it would be all right, and he could die in some kind of peace. The chestnut roan beneath him—what a great animal!—seemed to sense the cosmic calm that now attended him, and eased its canter, rendering it smooth and purposeful. It was pleasant enough so that one hardly felt on horseback. He breathed in, cool air, breathed out, cool air, felt the horse’s firm back and tight muscle beneath him.

In time—how much?—he came to the Crazy R gate. The gate was open. By chance? By carelessness? By invitation? Who knew and what did it matter? He turned, eased up the road to the ranch. Suddenly a patch of clarity arrived in the sky, and the land was basted in wan shine. He drifted along the silver road, trending gently upward, for the ranch hacienda, bunkhouses, and barn were at the highest elevation of the colonel’s holdings. He passed through useless land, as the grazing pasture was to the west. The sound of cattle nevertheless rolled across the scrub, and now and then, mournful as always, a coyote’s cry rent the stillness. Were the ’yotes returning? Did they sense the end of the drought? Would the heat break, the wind stir, autumnal colors appear against the gray sameness of the sage? Had a curse been lifted? Again, he didn’t know. Who could know the future?

Then he saw the man. By posture it was Voth, smoking a tailor-made as he waited ever so coolly for what was to come. He had squatted, and at each inhalation, the tip of the cigarette glowed, bringing color to his hard face. Was he alone? Jack believed that if it was Voth he would be alone. Whatever evil Voth had done, it was professional, not personal, emotional, out of crazy. He’d be here tonight, here on the road to the ranch, and whoever was faster would win. That couldn’t be said for the Dark Riders or the colonel, for they were far nastier than Voth, who knew the code and defined himself by it.

Jack eased to a halt, unloaded from the animal. He whispered into the giant ear, “Stay, boy. Stay.” The chestnut of course would do exactly that, until the world ended if need be.

Jack took a breath. Then he began his slow walk toward his enemy, who in turn rose, flipped away the butt, and began a drift toward Jack.

They faced each other, hands loose, languorous in their posture, athletic in their poise, as ready as possible for what came next. The gray moon beamed down. Sulfur rode the breeze. A coyote mourned. A steer groaned.

“Nice hat,” called Voth.

“Ain’t it, though. It was two dollars in Denver.”

“You shaved your beard. Makes you look younger.”

“Only in the dark. In the light, you can see how hardscrabble my life has been.”

“You know what? I ain’t even going to ask you what this is about. It don’t matter. It’s what we do, and we will do it.”

“I appreciate it. And yes, it is what we do. A talent, a curse, a blasphemy, a blessing. I don’t got no idea.”

“Me neither. But you do know there’s twenty guns up on the hill, waiting for you. I suppose getting me is some sort of satisfaction, but if that’s where you find yourself, I’d turn and disappear. Ain’t no mercy on that hill. I trained ’em too well.”

“Ain’t here for mercy. Ain’t here for revenge. Ain’t here for justice.”

“Why, then?”

“It has to do with blood, and the way I’s brought up. Certain things you have to do. This is one, and life without it would turn me rancid and wasted. Not worth living. So let’s get to it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Far off a roll of thunder, then another one. A fork of lightning broke across the sky, bringing a quick spurt of bright that lit each tense face, each set jaw.

“Next lightning.”

“Yes, sir.”

Seconds passed, maybe four, maybe four thousand. Who was counting? Lightning cracked crookedly toward the earth, filling the world with its bone-cold glow.

Both shooting hands flashed toward pistols on the way to becoming blurs on the upward stroke. Two muzzle flashes, two ear-busting reports, one hard on the other, two streamlined chunks of lead, passing each other in the moonlight, two meaty thumps as lead struck flesh, two men down.

Only one stirred, shook pain out of his body, moved in a certain way to protect a wound, breathed heavy, understood that he had survived, and climbed—hard, slow, hurting—to his feet.

Left arm, maybe four inches from the heart, outside the bone.

That meant the other had been faster by a hair, but fired too soon, before the muzzle had quite come to bear on the center of the other. That hair later, Jack’s slug had busted his heart.

Jack holstered the Colt. Slowly then he walked to Voth. No last words. Nothing but still.

Above, the moon glowed bright, then seemed to gasp as an edge of cloud, leading a front, came between it and the living and the dead on earth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

An hour before what would be a sunless dawn, Jack reached the plateau on the hill. Before him he could see the colonel’s hacienda, the two bunkhouses, and farther off the barn and the corral. No details were available as the dark obscured reality. Still, lightning split the sky, thunder rolled, a breeze pushed its way across the landscape, carrying a cargo of light dust.

His wound hurt bad. It would need to be looked at soon. But not now. Peering into the thick gray of the air and light, Jack did see the glow of a cigar. It had to be the colonel. He walked slowly toward it, and the man came into focus, elegant as usual in his dark frock coat, white ruffled shirt, black tie. He sat, cross-legged, on a dining room chair someone had brought out. He appeared calm, rested, as ready for a liqueur as for a gunfight.

“I thought it would be you,” said the colonel.

“He was the fastest I ever faced. He put one into me. But at the edge. Mine went into him solid.”

“I can at least say he died as he preferred. On duty as a professional. That was his character.”

“His character was solid. I am sad that it came to what it came to, as I am over the Unions my duty forced me to kill all them years ago.”

“Be that as it may, Jack, here we are at last where you always wanted to be and where you worked so hard to bring yourself. Why don’t you tell me what this is about? I am now aware that you were a sort of secret agent, on a kind of mission. You were hunting something, and not until you found it would you move. If you’re to kill me, I do believe I am owed an explanation.”

“Yes, sir. I agree.”

“Please proceed.”

“I suppose it begins with the eleventh wagon. Not on every trip, but at least three or four times a year, it brought girls up for the whorehouses. Arau kidnapped them—he was paid—the Dark Riders transported them, and probably raped more than a few on the way up. My guess is that you had a deal with the railroad. Them boys knew they had to have whores for the workers in a railhead town, so they paid you to find and deliver the girls. You were paid a nice fee for sure, and that, more than the cattle, kept the Crazy R alive.”

“The Crazy R is necessary to America. The railroad is necessary to America. A direct route between the East and Los Angeles is necessary to America.”

“Some might say, not if it costs America its soul.”

Silence.

“Anyhow, I never would have figured you as a reformer, riding and raiding after justice for a few poor girls you never knew nor even thought of until this came. What was special about these girls in a frontier full of such girls?”

“You told me yourself of the boy you called Teacher. That is an apt description of him, as he was a stubborn fellow, set in his beliefs, no matter how unpopular they would be and whatever they cost him. He was always in trouble on their account.”

“So you knew him?”

“He was my son.”

The colonel merely stared at him.

“Of course we didn’t know,” he finally said.

“And if you did, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Your only boy?”

“I have another. He remains, raised by my sister, doing fine. When my first wife died, he was so young, a baby, I knew it was beyond me. I turned him over to her and come out here out of grief and pain. I married a strong Quaker woman, and like my first wife, she died young. To support the boy, I turned to the gun. He was raised Quaker in a town in Colorado, but I supported him, visited him twice or three times a year, and loved him hard. He was all I had. I was proud of what he became.”

“And I took that?”

“You did, sir. I figure he found out about the girls. He had to be shot. That was the policy. There never was any explosion. I traveled long and hard to find the fellow who ran the bandits. He told me himself. I knew from the start it was a lie, because a bullet won’t set off a keg of black powder. It ain’t hot enough. It has to be a flame. But there was no fire near the powder, because Pye, who also worked for the bandit, told them which wagon carried it.”

“But you had to know for sure.”

“In searching, I ended up in the mountain camp of that fellow, a French revolutionary who was all set to make war on America. He told me because he knew he’d have me killed—by Pye. Instead it’s him whose plans got changed.”

“You are a capable man.”

“I do the necessary.”

“And now you mean to face twenty of the fastest guns alive?”

“Seventeen.”

“Shorty, Pye, and even Tom. Still, seventeen.” The colonel raised his hand. “A pity,” he said. “When I drop my hand, seventeen, not twenty, rifles will—”

“The pity,” said Jack, “is that we have got the Maxim gun and you have not.” He went hard prone.

The machine gun’s crazed reports ripped across the ranch, so loud, so fast, so harsh it would drive any unprepared man to insanity. The torrent of .303 British tore into and through the Dark Rider bunkhouse, 250 of them, a full belt, splintering, shredding, penetrating, piercing, and atomizing all that came before them. Wood, glass, and other relics of civilization, including men, fell to the rush. The smell of cordite filled the air.

Jack rolled, picked himself up, and ran low to the muzzle blast, arriving in seconds at the wagon in which the Harvard boys manned Mr. Maxim’s massacre masterpiece.

“Good shooting,” he yelled at Chandler.

“I couldn’t see his hand raise. But I saw you hit the ground.”

“It was perfect. Here, let me fire. Your war is finished.”

He jumped behind the gun, as Chandler vacated, and fell back to the other three.

Jack quickly reloaded, yanking the bolt handle twice, feeling the mechanics of the gun align into place. This time it was a belt of the experimental illuminators he gave to the weapon’s maw. He rotated the gun on its tripod to bear on the cowboy bunkhouse and fired half a belt. The long whip of sheer light lashed the structure, and it too seemed to shudder under penalty of damage. It began to burn. He might have seen a man or two dash out, but it was not worth tracking them for additional kills.

He came back to the Dark Rider building. It needed the purification of fire. Another hundred rounds into it, the muzzle aflare, the empty shells spitting from the ejection port, the vibrations as the cordite alchemized into energy and sent the bullets whizzing lethally toward their target, and the place started to burn. Soon it was a conflagration. Finally, he turned to the hacienda. He threaded in another belt, threw the cocking handle twice, and bore down. It was adobe and therefore would not shatter or burn as had the wooden structures.

But there were doors and windows. He fired, working it over methodically, until no window stood unbroken, no door unpenetrated.

Then, silence. Not a shot from the Dark Riders had been fired.

“Anybody left alive, you come out now, guns gone, hands empty and up,” he yelled.

A man rose from the trough in front of the burning building, then two more came from the hacienda. “You are lucky bastards. You get on your horses and you ride hard into the sunrise. Thank your god he let you survive. I have no interest in further retribution if your name is not Callahan.”

They ran to the barn. In minutes they emerged, bent low to the animal, horses in full charge, and disappeared fast, churning gallons of dust.

“Did you see the colonel?”

“He dashed into the hacienda when the Maxim opened up,” said Charles. “I saw him go.”

“You all wait here.”

He slipped his black glove onto his left hand, holding the Colt in his right. He eased in, got out of doorway silhouette, and waited for his eyes to adjust. When they did, they observed destruction. Bullets had torn walls, upholstery, art, gaslights, even trophies on the wall. It smelled of ruin and gunpowder. Yet all was quiet.

Room by room he moved, finding each destroyed except those to the center and rear, and in each he saw or heard nothing. At last only the office—many a time he’d sat and smoked and drank in that room—remained. Yet stillness still obtained.

He slid in quick and came across the colonel sitting at his desk. The man was upright and locked in the stillness of death, which is absolute. Not a breath stirred, not a muscle twitched. Jack turned to a gas lamp on the wall, took the glass off, turned on the spigot, and lit the flame.

The colonel had placed one of his big-bore hunting rifles under his chin and pushed the trigger. What the shot had done to the top of his head was unseen, as the head had been tilted back by the impact.

However, the wall behind and the great trophy elk that hung there had been painted in red gore.

“He couldn’t stand to see his place destroyed,” said Chandler.

Jack turned to face him.

“Where’d you come from? Don’t you obey no orders whatsoever?”

“I guess not. A rich-boy character flaw.”

“Let’s get out of here and—”

A man stepped from the shadows with a rifle and shot Jack under the left shoulder blade. Chandler fired three times with the Mauser. The man dropped hard, semi-rolled, and went still.

“Boseman,” said Jack. “I always knew it would be a titmouse.”

Chandler ran to him, found him infirm, about to fall. “Get me outside. I cannot abide the stink in here.”

Holding Jack up with an arm around the waist, he got the wounded man outside and to a chair on the verandah.

“Get the wagon, fast,” he yelled. “He’s been hit bad. We need to get him—”

“No,” said Jack. “The nearest doctor’s at No. 4, twelve miles of rough road away. I’d bleed out halfway.”

“Jack, you have to—”

“Quiet, dammit,” said Jack. “Now, you college boys, you ain’t done yet.” They were silent.

“I don’t have much time, so listen hard. No daydreaming, Chandler.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First thing is, you open up that Maxim gun. You take out the magic box and take it with you until you find deep black water, and you throw it in. That way no revolutionaries, Indian raiders, bank robbers, railroad men, or other desperados will use it. Pick up one shell from it. Just one.”

“What’s—?”

“You send it anonymously to the president of the Union Pacific railroad, in a fancy envelope with a typed letter. The letter—you fix it up college style—will say something like, ‘Dear Sir. You are aware of what happened at the Crazy R Ranch to your Arizona Southern employees Colonel Callahan and the Dark Riders. We are the boys that did that. We have a Maxim machine gun as this spent shell proves. You go ahead and build your railroad and your railhead towns. But from now on, the whores come and go as they please, and you make sure they are well paid, as it is upon their backs that you lay your tracks and the nation grows. We will be watching. Any more kidnapping of Mexican children and we will show up at your building and with that gun clean house from president on down to third assistant secretary in charge of purchasing paper for the toilets blah blah and whatever.’ Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you bring my chestnut roan to me. Let him see so he knows I’m gone and there’s no point of waiting around. Take off the saddle and his halter and let him go. He’s retired now. Let him spend the rest of his life on the free range. He earned it the hard way.”

Again, assent in chorus.

“Next, you bury me on the lone prairie. My pistols with me, so they don’t become souvenirs for ghouls.”

“You deserve a Viking funeral, Jack. With a chorus singing Wagner and a thousand warriors with torches and all the royalty—”

Jim. He seemed to be crying.

“Nah,” said Jack. “Plain dirt’s fine. I’ll sleep well there. No marker. Let ’em wonder what ever happened to the Gun Man Jackson Swagger and worry that he could come back still. I have to hurry now. My legs are numb and so are my arms. It’s getting darker.”

Someone else started to cry.

“No tears. We ain’t women. Next, you pull out of here. Head toward No. 4. About four miles down the road on the right, you’ll see the ruins of an adobe chapel.”

He coughed up blood. Then he coughed up more blood.

“Well damn, look at that,” he said. “Anyway, go into the chapel. Go to the altar. It’s got a cabinet door. Open it. Pull out the debris and you’ll find a strongbox. Open it. Inside, about six hundred dollars in cash and maybe two hundred dollars in gold double eagles. That’ll get you home.”

“Jack.”

“I feel so tired now. You got one more thing to do. You write a letter to Mabel Louise Swagger, Blue Eye, Arkansas. You tell her her brother Jackson has passed but not to mourn as he had a good life. Tell her the land I own there in Arkansas is now hers. Tell her I loved her to the end, and my boy too and if he has one, his boy too. Tell her to sell the land if she wants and use it on a Harvard education or a trip to Paris or whatever. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Dizzy. So damned to hell dizzy.”

“Jack—”

“Only this: Yeehaw.”

His eyes closed and the forever sleep took him.

They followed—and would follow—his instructions to the letter. Now all that remained was the dreary wagon trip to No. 4 and the beginning of the long trek home.

Nobody spoke for the longest time as the wheels bounced over the rough Western ground and up the steep Western hills. It was only when the wagon crested a ridge, and No. 4, with its railroad station, silvery tracks, and dead zone of burnt timber lay before them, that Jim remarked, rather grumpily, “Why is it so wet all of a sudden?”

Harvard boys! They always miss the obvious! Duh!

It was raining.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

A note on genealogy and other topics.

The origin of the Swagger gene is described in Targeted. It arrived via a historical Scottish officer in the British Army during the Revolution, known for his qualities of shooting genius, courage, and imagination. As I decreed, it passed from that chap to his only child, the first born of his wife. Alas, he was already dead by the time of the birth—but the gene was carried on. She moved with a second husband under the nom de guerre Swagger to Arkansas in 1780. They are the mysterious couple arriving from over the mountains referred to in many of the books.

The gene seemed to pass only to her firstborn and direct descendants, that is, the direct relatives of the original Scots husband, though sometimes it skipped generations. Jackson, her great-grandchild, was born in 1842. He inherited it from the Scot, as the current book dramatizes. But his first child, born in Arkansas in 1865, who may or may not have had it, remained in Arkansas while Jackson went west, married again, and had a second son called in this book Teacher, who did not carry it.

Meanwhile, back in Arkansas, that firstborn child grew up, married, and had a child, perhaps in 1898 or so. That son was named Charles, and he has been featured in two stories set in the 1930s. He had a son named Earl who has been featured in four stories set in the 1940s. Earl had a son in 1946 named Bob Lee who has been featured in twelve stories, set in various years following 1946. Bob Lee had a son named Ray Cruz, born in Vietnam in 1968, featured in two books set today. I should say also, I do not have the Swagger gene.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Think the shooting is exaggerated? Go to YouTube and look up the great fast gun and exhibition shooter Bob Munden. Among other ballistic miracles you’ll see him perform the same trick on balloons that Jack performs on Shorty and Joe Pye. I didn’t believe it either, but ever since I stumbled on it a few years ago, I’ve been thinking, Gotta use that!

Then, the bullet-stopping propensity of silk is well documented. It, however, kills its wearers on the strength of pure energy.

So don’t try this at home, kids.

And finally some aficionados of samurai might recognize elements of Kobayashi’s great film Harakiri lurking about in my plot. As I have always said, when you steal, steal from the very best.

And thanks to all who rode with Jack: Barrett Tillman and John Bainbridge provided great deep edits, my seven-months-pregnant daughter, Amy, a much beribboned equestrienne, guided me on the horse stuff.

And then the regular crew.

First, my brother Andy, who, when I told him what the next one would be, emailed: “A western! Cool!”

Then of course Gary Goldberg, Dave Dunn, Lenne Miller, Jeff Weber, Mark Keefe IV, Mike Hill, and Brooke Hart (for fixing troublesome formatting issues). And thanks to Facebook friend Les Voth, shooter, writer and photographer, for the use of his name. Finally, my wife, Jean Marbella, for the coffee and the many times she pretended to listen to me yap about all this!

More from the Author

Front Sight

The Bullet Garden

Targeted

I, Ripper

Sniper's Honor

Hot Springs

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN HUNTER is the creator of the Bob Lee Swagger novels as well as many others. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post,where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism,he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Stephen-Hunter

EMILYBESTLERBOOKS.COM

@AtriaBooks

ALSO BY STEPHEN HUNTER

BOB LEE SWAGGER SERIES

Point of Impact

Black Light

Time to Hunt

The 47th Samurai

Night of Thunder

I, Sniper

Dead Zero

The Third Bullet

Sniper’s Honor

G-Man

Game of Snipers

Targeted

EARL SWAGGER SERIES

Hot Springs

Pale Horse Coming

Havana

The Bullet Garden

RAY CRUZ

Soft Target

OTHER NOVELS

The Master Sniper

The Second Saladin

Tapestry of Spies

The Day Before Midnight

Dirty White Boys

I, Ripper

Basil’s War

Front Sight

NONFICTION

Violent Screen: A Critic’s 13 Years on the Front Lines of Movie Mayhem

Now Playing at the Valencia: Pulitzer Prize–Winning Essays on Movies

American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman— and the Shootout That Stopped It (with John Bainbridge, Jr.)

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Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Chapter Eight
- Chapter Nine
- Chapter Ten
- Chapter Eleven
- Chapter Twelve
- Chapter Thirteen
- Chapter Fourteen
- Chapter Fifteen
- Chapter Sixteen
- Chapter Seventeen
- Chapter Eighteen
- Chapter Nineteen
- Chapter Twenty
- Chapter Twenty-One
- Chapter Twenty-Two
- Chapter Twenty-Three
- Chapter Twenty-Four
- Chapter Twenty-Five
- Chapter Twenty-Six
- Chapter Twenty-Seven
- Chapter Twenty-Eight
- Chapter Twenty-Nine
- Chapter Thirty
- Chapter Thirty-One
- Chapter Thirty-Two
- A Note from the Author
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright