"That's a pile of money. You'll need a big man to earn it."

"That's why I'm here."

"Here," was the Warden's office at Yuma Penitentiary, closed away from the ears of talkative prison guards. Mitchell had been yanked off the rock pile and marched across the yard with the usual unnecessary roughness, ostensibly for another round of Yuma-style discipline after an infraction of one of the petty rules so numerous that guards could always find a reason to inflict pain. Now he stood at disrespectful attention staring down at the man behind the desk. Across the room where he would be out of earshot, the Warden sat shuffling papers at a work table.

The visitor began his scheme to get the fish to nibble at his line. "Yuma breaks a man down into pebbles no bigger than those you've been making on the rock pile for five years."

"I don't break," Mitchell growled.

"Or it makes a hard man harder, refining soft iron into brittle steel, then turns the product out onto the people of Arizona, an angry man thinking he's entitled to collect back pay for his five years of pain."

"So you're scared I'll go back to taking your money. You think one thousand dollars is enough to bribe me to stay clear of your stages?" The Wells, Fargo & Company man ignored the scoffing in Mitchell's voice; he had bigger things in mind than the possible depredations of one ex-con.

"Would it work?"

"Hell no," Mitchell said. "Taking folks' money is what I do."

"A real bad boy —"

"That's right," Mitchell interrupted.

"But not an evil man," the Wells Fargo man continued. "You never killed anyone, not even when you could have shot your way out of the trap we arranged outside Bisbee and made your escape."

Mitchell shifted suspiciously. "You trying to tell me I got me a pair of angel wings hid somewhere under this prison shirt? If you just scrub off the prison stink, I'd be a real good man?"

"A good man would be useless for what I need." For the first time the Wells Fargo man thought he had Mitchell's attention. "I need a bad man. Maybe you, unless your soul has shriveled into a lump of uncontrollable hate."

Mitchell didn't respond, but he was alert, curious, suspiciously hostile, but he was listening. The Wells Fargo man began talking, telling Mitchell how the money could be earned, not talking about doing good, not making it sound like Mitchell would be working with the law, just laying out a business proposition that could work to mutual advantage. Once the talking, mainly the listening, was done, Mitchell was manhandled to the dark, dank hole earlier prisoners had pick-axed into rock. There he would sweat two days of isolation, his punishment for whatever infraction they had used to justify the interview.

As the Wells Fargo man swung to saddle outside the iron gates, he wondered whether he had wasted his time on a long ride.

"Throw down the box."

Six weeks out of the hellhole that had completely failed if its task had been to make him "penitent," Mitchell's life had quickly resumed its normal rhythm. This was the third Wells Fargo stage he had stopped, the third strongbox he had blasted open, the third set of travelers who had meekly surrendered their money belts to him.

Stopping a stage, waiting at the top of a hill while the horses lumbered upgrade and became too winded to make a run, or lurking in a boulder-strewn canyon where the twisting road was its own obstacle, all that routine work used the skills Mitchell had developed—the only skills he had—after the trail herd from South Texas that the fifteen-year-old had used as an escape from his pa's unending list of chores had reached the Gila River Valley and the trail hands found themselves with pay in their pockets, but no work.

Mitchell found he had liked having pay in his pockets almost as much as he liked having no work. So when the money ran out, he and an older hand, a man of the world with nearly twenty winters behind him, found that stages had money free for the taking.

After a year, after he'd learned the tricks of the trade, after his partner became a little too free with his cartridges to suit Mitchell, he'd done his work solo, building his skills, seeing the West, traveling north to the Colorado mining district during the heat of the summer, then back to Arizona and New Mexico when winter came to the Rockies. Not taking orders from any man in a big hat, Mitchell bragged that he'd lit on the ideal life for a man bold enough to take it.

Now he was back working for his living like before, the only difference being he knew about the roadhouse in Parson's Den, the isolated nest in a secluded canyon in the Chiricahuas habituated by men like him, the place the squishy-minded Wells Fargo man had let him in on, a good hunkering down spot for an enterprising man between work, a place the lawmen knew about, as the oblong mounds of dirt behind the saloon showed, but seldom visited, and then not for long.

His work finished. Mitchell had the driver unharness and scatter the horses to delay him from spreading the alarm. Ready for a vacation, Mitchell hit the trail to Parson's.

The Chiricahua Mountains had been uplifted by massive compressive forces that folded the sandstone sediment into ripples, producing a mountain ridge rising six thousand feet above Sulfur Springs Valley to the west and San Simon Valley to the east. Not high, not as Westerners measure mountains, they were rough, disorderly, broken, where water and ice had quickly transformed fissures into deep, but narrow slits, while above the canyon walls spires, columns and balanced rocks still remained of the volcanic overlay from millions of years past. Its harsh beauty was foreboding to strangers but reassuring to men who welcomed isolation from unwanted pursuers. No horseman found his way through the narrow defiles and into their recesses by accident. A rider in a hurry would find the twists and false turns in the narrow rock passages a time-draining obstacle. Posse men forced to ride single-file into its remoteness would end their day providing amusement to guards posted in secure firing positions high in the canyon walls.

Seth Parsons had chosen well when he went into business to serve the needs of a class of men willing to pay his high prices for their security.

The center of life in Parson's Den, the dimly-lit Parson's Saloon served as the social club for men willing to risk anonymity in sociability. The cribs were out back beyond the outhouse; what called itself the hotel was across the street with two-bed and four-bed rooms, moldy mattresses, and ravenous bed bugs. Most of the year, men staked out their space and spread their blankets in the open air, sleeping on the softness of needles from the Mexican pinon pine. "Living free," men in the trade, called it.

There were maybe a dozen idlers in Parson's when Mitchell rode in, men who watched him suspiciously, trying, maybe hoping, to get a whiff of badge stink that would lead to another narrow mound of dirt. After three days drinking solo, he watched an incoming deliveryman slip the barkeep the freshly-printed dodger Wells Fargo had put out after his last stage job. Only two-fifty and not worth anything dead, but enough to give him "cred" in this burg.

Not that men cozied up to him, but they stopped looking at him like they'd just as soon walk him out back and guzzle whiskey while they watched him dig.

Every saloon he'd ever entered stank of stale beer and man-sweat. Mitchell couldn't say why Parson's Saloon affronted the nostrils more than most. Long-forgotten phrases fought their way into his head: "The fragrance of honest sweat," "the joyous burn of hard-used muscles," a jumble of phrases his father had used which always seemed to mean "get about your chores, boy."

Mitchell had never succeeded in explaining the unfamiliar sense of satisfaction he felt in Yuma as he returned, muscle-sore, to his six-man cell after an unresisting boulder surrendered to his pick and crumbled before him to pebbles good for nothing more than pelting squirrels. How could battering a defenseless boulder into helpless submission cause a man to stand taller than when he stopped a stage and made the shotgunner crawfish before him? Did it show an unsuspected lust to destroy? Or was he learning to glory in muscles used for violence? Was it evidence of his growth as a man? Certainly not a pleasure of accomplishment of a meaningless task! His mind rejected the notion of "honest sweat" or "burning muscles," words which made him sound too much like his Pa. Hadn't he outgrown all that?

Maybe that Methodist minister whose yakking Pa and Ma had made him sit through would try to explain the mystery. And would fail. That sky-pilot stuff never fit with the real world Mitchell saw around him. Not with all the unanswered prayers he had heard screaming to heaven in multiple languages from pain-wracked prisoners in Yuma.

Mitchell scanned the saloon. Fifteen men now—bearded, scruffy men; strong, self-reliant men—who saw no need to doll themselves up like weak citified poodle dogs. Everyone here saddled his own horse proudly, made his own way in the world, standing on his own two feet. That old preacher-man couldn't hold their coats.

Still the stench of the saloon rankled his nose.

The two men approaching his table had caught his attention from the first, each man in his early thirties, carrying himself with arrogant confidence that caused other men to step aside. "We brought our own bottle," the older man said. "Like to set a spell."

Mitchell waved them to the chairs and waited. "Name's Blake Runnels," the talker said. "This here's Joe Ortega."

"Mex stink." He'd heard that sneer since he was old enough to hear man-talk. He'd seen men shift tables when Ortega and Runnels sat down near them. He'd suffered through the thick, rancid stench that emanated from one of his cell mates in Yuma after a hot day on the rock pile. As far as he could tell, its putrid odor polluted the air and offended the nostrils, suffocated a man's lungs, near as bad as Anglo stink. Ortega's glowering eyes waited for his reaction.

Mitchell reached across the table and grasped Ortega's hand. "Howdy."

He let Runnels freshen his drink, and they sparred a bit, talking about not much of anything, sniffing each other from one side, then the other, like two hounds getting acquainted. Finally Runnels got to the point. "Putting together some men for a little party down to Tombstone. Hear you got a rep for liking some action. Maybe you'll want in."

Mitchell stared at the two men intently. Blake Runnels was the name the Wells Fargo man had mentioned, the prize stallion he'd pay a hefty sum to corral, the man he'd wanted Mitchell to traipse up to Parson's Den to locate. A man worth that much to Wells Fargo interested Mitchell. Any operation he planned should have money in it, likely more than the Wells Fargo man promised.

"I'm listening."

It was a simple proposition. Banks pile up a lot of loose cash before the mines pull money out to make payrolls. "A quick visit and we got enough to head to St. Louis for a celebration," Runnels explained.

Mitchell's visit to Tombstone went uneventfully. He rode in, hitched up before the Consolidated Miner's Bank where he changed a double eagle like any cowhand in from the range and ready for a spree in town. He'd timed it right: with a line before the teller's cage, he didn't look conspicuous as he stared restlessly around the room, noting the back door, the location of the vault, and where the lead man should stand before moving in on the Head Cashier. He wet his whistle at two or three different saloons, like any visiting cowhand might, then trailed back north, figuring he found the quickest escape route from town. Did he take time to send a coded message to Wells Fargo? Hell, no! Comparing notes with Ortega, each had something to contribute, and the plan Runnels laid out looked to be good. Banks weren't his line of work, but a man advanced by learning new skills and Runnels promised he'd have a saddlebag full of gold when they rode out.

Next came the waiting: four days caged with these men in a deserted shack in the hills near Tombstone until they judged the gold on hand would fill the most saddlebags. Mitchell looked around the small cabin at Runnels and Ortega, at Loney and Forsyth. Working solo, he hadn't spent this much time with other men since trailing from Texas. He didn't count Yuma where a wise man avoided showing who he was. He tried to compare these four men to Josh and Frank, and the other trail hands whose names he no longer remembered.

Around a dwindling campfire at day's end, the drovers had been tired men, ready to turn in for a few hours of shut-eye before rolling out to ride night herd. Talk had been minimal and he couldn't say he really knew any of them. Spirits always soared when Josh brought out his banjo for half an hour of unmusical growling through old songs before the trail boss gruffly ordered them to their bedrolls. Those days had been muscle-grueling work, the men dirty and sweaty, their shirts tattered by the end of trail. He'd have said those simple cowhands couldn't match Runnels and his crew in toughness; he realized what he meant was hardness. Josh and Frank and the others had a toughness the men in this hideout wouldn't understand.

But these were the kind he had chosen for his life's companions.

The afternoon before the scheduled operation, Ortega stomped in from his guard-mount gun-fisted and prodding a man before him. "Found him sneaking around, not riding in openly, just skulking through the brush. We can have us some fun before we plant him."

Forsythe and Loney quickly stripped the prisoner to his union suit. A search disgorged little money, not enough to make him worthwhile by itself; his saddle bags contained a change of clothes and an assortment of air tights but not much more. Then his boots were examined. A dumb hiding-place, Mitchell thought. These men he had teamed up with knew their business. They wouldn't overlook the recessed compartment in the heel.

"Wells Fargo," Ortega proclaimed as he tossed the tin on the table. "I could smell his badge stink five hundred yards away."

Even in his underwear, the prisoner stood erect and proud, as though proclaiming his superiority over the men about to kill him. The only man in the cabin who had troubled to scrape off chin whiskers in the morning; body trim without the fat or sag of a saloon-hound; the whipcord muscles of a man sure of his power. Can you admire a man just from looking at him? No more than average height, he seemed larger than Runnels, bigger then Loney, more muscle power than Forsyth, no slyness about his eyes like Ortega. Only one man had ever made that impression on Mitchell, the trail boss whose authority had kept all the hands in check with no more than a soft word. Just standing before them in his underwear, the Wells Fargo agent showed up the smirking outlaws of Runnels' gang up as pale imitations of manhood.

"Got something to tell us, Mister?" Runnels demanded. "Something that will make it worth our time to let you be?"

Mitchell watched the confrontation with foreboding. In a moment, the man would understand what he faced, his postured pride would crumble, of that Mitchell's knowledge of men assured him. And then what? Did this Wells Fargo man know about the conversation in Yuma? Would he turn to Mitchell, speak to him, demand his help? The man had no other hope of living. But the man remained close-lipped. So far at least.

"There's a shovel in the shed," Runnels said. "Let him work his muscles about three feet worth."

The Wells Fargo agent squared his shoulders and clamped his jaw tight. Mitchell finally breathed. Another man's life was on the line, but he was safe. He relaxed as Ortega lumbered across the room and clamped his hand roughly around the doomed agent's bicep.

"Got some sweating to do and then some bleeding."

"Not going to happen." It was an unconsidered impulse. Even as he got to his feet, surprising himself more than Runnels, Mitchell knew he was being foolish.

"You got a different idea of where to salt the carcass?" Runnels asked.

"The man was just doing his job." Mitchell stepped over beside the prisoner. Perhaps no one noticed, but now there was no one behind him. "I don't hold with killing."

"Maybe you're outvoted."

"Man's life don't turn on a show of hands." Mitchell's eyes locked with Runnels' and held them. "We tie him up while we do our business."

"Then?"

"Then we turn him loose. You're heading for the bright lights, so what can he tell?"

"Spoke like someone with his face already decorating a dodger," Ortega sneered.

"Hell, Blake," Loney spoke up, "before a job ain't the time to argue. I say we tie this stinking lawman up like Mitchell says. His blood will still leak when we come back to divvy up."

Mitchell knew, likely the Wells Fargo agent knew as well, the thread of the lawman's life was frayed with a slim likelihood he would survive their return. But his fate was days away.

Ortega and Forsyth trussed the agent hand and foot, and tossed him in a corner of the barn where he could spend the night and the days ahead keeping company with barn owls, vermin and rats. "Good company for a blood-sucker like you," Ortega jibed as he pulled the barn door closed.

In the morning, as the men saddled and readied to ride out, Ortega eased open the barn door and disappeared inside. Stepping quickly, Mitchell was no more than half a minute behind. "Knots got to be good and tight," Mitchell said as Ortega bent over the prisoner. "Make sure they got no play in them." There was a pause. Mitchell thought he heard Ortega's knife slide back into its sheath.

"He ain't going nowhere," Ortega said as he straightened and backed off.

Mitchell stepped forward to make his own check. He booted the bound man, not too gently, hard enough to bring a short snort of laughter from Ortega, hard enough to get the agent's attention. "Made a big mistake coming here," Mitchell told the Wells Fargo agent as he let his blade slide from his hand. He kicked again, and only the prisoner saw the swing of his leg spill hay over the knife.

Out in the yard, the men mounted, Runnels leading the way. "You coming?" Ortega challenged.

"I'm the last man on the trail," Mitchell declared. "Making sure no one straggles back to pay our prisoner a goodbye visit."

The operation went smoothly, like Runnels had laid it out, right up to the moment Loney swung the vault door closed on the bankers. That's when Ortega's gun dug harshly into Mitchell's ribs. "We figure a Wells Fargo lover like you don't need a share, Mitchell. We could do it right here, but it'll be more fun when we got whiskey glasses in our hands."

Mitchell had no chance to make a break for it as they marched out to the horses. He toted the saddlebags, heavy with cash and gold. His holster was empty, but he doubted he looked like a prisoner to the bystanders watching from a block away, and what difference did it make?

One hundred yards ahead, the hideout cabin looked much as it had when they left it, the Wells Fargo agent's mare still in the corral. That puzzled Mitchell, but he had more important things on his mind; like the man riding behind him, Ortega, happy to let Mitchell know he got a kick out of doing business with a moving target.

As his trail drew to a close, Mitchell wondered about the mistakes he had made. What was the Wells Fargo agent to him? What difference did one more dead lawman make? Why had he shoved his nose into the business? As he analyzed his loathing of his four captors, it came to him that he hated them not because of what they were doing to him. He hated them for what they were. What he was. He'd come to understand that wiping out a human life was nothing personal to them; it was just a routine part of the business they were all in, something he hadn't learned riding solo. Ortega's gun was about to remedy that defective part of this outlaw's education.

Then Forsyth was bending sideways in the saddle to swing open the corral gate. Time slowed down for Mitchell as every minute became precious to him. Loney's leg was out of the stirrup, swinging back over his roan's rump. Runnels was at the corral entrance. Ortega was chuckling lowly. "Have our fun soon, Mitchell."

Mitchell recalled the Wells Fargo agent's stoic fortitude in the face of his condemnation. This was the trail Mitchell had chosen. He would voice no complaint when it ended.

"Hands up."

The voice came from the barn, the sound of rifles cocking from the trees east of the yard. Runnels cursed and dug in the spurs. His horse jumped forward and a rifle spoke, pitching him to the ground. Others went for their guns. Mitchell dove from the saddle.

In two minutes the fighting was over. In ten minutes, the posse had them on the trail to Tombstone, two sagging in their saddles, their wounds attended to enough so they wouldn't bleed their lives out on the trail, the other two packed face down, and Mitchell himself riding with wrists bound to his saddlehorn.

The trial took twenty minutes. The jury found them all guilty without leaving the jury box, and his ticket back to Yuma was quickly punched. No word from Wells Fargo. He hadn't expected any.

The horsemen drew to a halt in front of the small cabin. "Inside."

That was the first word the hooded men—his captors? his liberators?—had directed toward him since they broke him out of the Cochise County jail shortly before midnight. Six hours on the trail had brought them up a narrow canyon in the Dragoon Mountains northeast of Tombstone and to this small clearing.

Mitchell swung down and walked stiffly to the cabin. His still-manacled hands fumbled with the knob and he stepped inside.

"Sit down," the Wells Fargo man told him. Mitchell sat. The Wells Fargo man reached across the small table and grasped Mitchell's wrists. In a moment, the handcuffs were off.

"We couldn't tell whether stopping a couple of our stages was Mitchell doing business as usual, or setting himself up to earn his pay." He placed a stack of greenbacks on the table and pushed them over.

"Maybe I wasn't sure myself," Mitchell admitted. "What made you decide?"

"Him." Mitchell followed the Wells Fargo man's gesture. The sentinel standing just inside the door removed the hood over his head.

Mitchell got to his feet and crossed the room. "You stand tall." He stretched his hand out to Ortega's one-time prisoner. "Been years since I shook with a real man."

Back at the table, Mitchell started to reach for the money. He guessed he had earned it, setting the Wells Fargo agent free, even if maybe he hadn't always been working the way the Wells Fargo man thought. Anyway, turning down money from Wells Fargo was against his religion. He flinched when he saw the second item on the table. A hostile burning rose in his chest. "What's that for?"

"That's the road you can travel. These last weeks, you learned you're not like the trash you just helped bring in. You'll never go back to being one of them."

Mitchell tried to speak, to throw the Wells Fargo man's words back in his face. His denial stuck in his throat. But neither could he admit what the Wells Fargo man said, admit that that he had ridden into a blind canyon from which there was no outlet.

"When you leave here, you can stumble down the owlhoot trail until it leads you back to Yuma."

Manhood meant riding free, Mitchell believed, making his own rules. But his time with the Runnels Gang made clear the price: working with two-legged animals, knowing he had to learn to become more like them. He'd saddled his horse long ago. Working solo, lonely, but his own man, what else was there for someone like him?

"Or you can pick up that badge, use what you know working for Wells Fargo."

"Smell myself up with badge stink?" Mitchell blurted, the one thing he knew would degrade him more than riding with the likes of Runnels. "Work for the man!"

"For yourself. Choose a life of satisfying labor an eighteen-year-old kid couldn't understand. But I think you can now, Mitchell. 'Living free' doesn't mean being chained to outlaw holes and men you hate. 'Living free' means taking charge of your life and doing work you're good at."

Mitchell's stiffly erect posture showed his rejection of what the Wells Fargo man was saying. What did some suit-wearing city banker know about manhood? He'd heard all he wanted to hear.

"You've been riding a dark trail, Mitchell. Pick up that badge and you'll be riding through sunny meadows, you and your partner."

"Partner?"

"Agent Conners."

For a while no one moved.

Finally, Mitchell reached past the shiny badge that represented everything he had scorned and grasped the stack of greenbacks. Wordlessly, he got to his feet, turned his back on the Wells Fargo man and strode toward the door. Pausing in front of Conners, he stared at the agent a long time. As he probed deep into the man's soul, Mitchell felt his life change.

"If we're partners, half of this money is yours."