The Hawk
by Tom Sheehan

The freighter stumbled into the De La Grasso Station in mid-July of 1876, more than 50 miles from Tucson, blood on his arm from a flesh wound, but yelling out so everybody in the station could hear him, "I saw him! I saw him! I saw The Hawk! They was holdin' me up, three ornery cusses, and he come out of the trees like he was a fire-eater, shootin' off his guns and scarin' them critters off quicker'n any fool can imagine. Yes sir, it was The Hawk! He swooped in like he was on wings and he's wearin' a mask makes his nose hook over like he's gonna kill some critter for eatin', just like he was gonna rip it apart."

A hundred miles away, less than a full day later, a bank robbery at Wilton Ford was halted by the appearance of a man in a mask, which hooked his nose out of kilter, and who said to the lone teller a few spare words, "Keep your gun on these fellows until the sheriff gets here. Tell him The Hawk paid a visit."

Near Winslow, only a few miles out of town and only two days after the attempted bank robbery at Wilton Ford, the Overhaul Stage was stopped and three bandits were about to take the strong box off the stage, and had already wounded the shotgun rider, when they were surprised by a man in a weird mask. He seemed to appear from nowhere to stop the theft with a few well-placed shots, then tied up the thieves and slapped them over the saddles of their horses, saying to the stagecoach driver as he left the scene, "Deliver them to the sheriff in town. They're strapped on their horses and tied to the back of the coach. Tell the sheriff they're his prisoners, and you can do the charging, but make sure he knows they're a gift from The Hawk." With that said, he spurred his horse, a big and handsome paint that looked like a colored horse in a schoolmarm's coloring book.

In the first year or two of appearances of The Hawk, wearing the weird mask that hooked his nose and riding an impressive looking paint that could be seen in paintings behind the bar in many saloons, it was Tucson Sheriff Virgil Nawblock who began wondering about those appearances. At first it amounted to only mild wonder, then a sincere sense of curiosity began to work his attention to pieces, and he finally settled on a firm decision: he'd keep a little informational notebook on The Hawk.

To that end, he began collecting, via telegraph, letters, stories from travelers and coachmen and freighters, and as much saloon gossip he could attend, all the adventures of The Hawk. The notebook listing showed what and where and when those sudden appearances of The Hawk's had come about with the times and distances in between as part of the listing . . . and his long and arduous calculations on the possibilities that evolved.

In addition to the notebook, Sheriff Nawblock got a map of the Arizona and New Mexico Territories from the editor of the Tucson Clarion and Herald. It was like a puzzle to work out as he plotted each event on the spot where it happened and how long it would take him by horse to get to the site of the next appearance of The Hawk. The map, with as little traceability as possible to The Hawk, was kept in a locked drawer in his office. It became his major off-duty diversion.

Doubts of varying magnitude began to foment on their own . . . and a keen sense of admiration for the actions of The Hawk.

More than a few times he argued with himself about the possibility of one man making all those rescues even if half of his information was right and half the times of such happenings were even incorrectly reported by a day or two. It was after less than a year of such noting and plotting that he surmised it had to be more than one man in the strange mask and riding the paint horse.

The Hawk was not one person.

Nawblock, long retired and "on the porch" as he termed it, never made much headway in learning true identities until, with all time sitting in his lap as he sat the porch, began to plot locations of individuals he knew who could and would fit the character of The Hawk. Those who left any question in his mind were cut off from any further concern, and abruptly forgotten.

He was overjoyed at arriving at a list of 10 men he had known for years who could wear The Hawk's mantel.

He saw the list as men of virtue, hard work, some with great personal property, some with little property but fit for a good, clean living, all law-abiding and all with other admirable values.

Secretly, he wished he was on such a list that might be kept by one of those on his list. Those 10 men, unknown to him, kept him in high esteem.

But for more than 30 years the man known as The Hawk had fought against any and all kinds of evil doers in the territory. His targets were not only thieves and murderers and rustlers and horse thieves and road agents of various kinds, but the big thieves, the land manipulators and money investors that dealt with underlings in any manner they chose to get their way, to steal properties of all kinds and dimensions, to gather the riches off someone else's work and sweat and, too many times, the loss of life in such circumstances.

Now, hastening onto 50 years of age, rancher Grover Dumont remembered where and how it all began. Each detail of that solid memory. He saw the map of the Arizona-New Mexico territory as if it was marked at the back of his mind. Saw the first appearance of the masked man the people began to call The Hawk, a new hero for the people

The land was being savaged, not by the American Natives, but by greed, force and wild corruption that come with exploration, expansion and plain all-out adventure; and the boys of wealth in The School of the Mission San Agustin del Tucsón unknowingly gathered their forces for a cause. They were up front with each other, an even dozen of them, in the course of many late night discussions from the start. Each of them came from decently well-to-do families that sent them to this special school, and they had measured each other from the git-go. They realized they would be harnessed to the same dollar signs that allowed them here in the first place, without a solemn promise for anyone in their lot.

It was disheartening.

At one meeting of the group, closed off from all the other students, they discussed problems, politics, law and occasional gender stuff. Much of it was illuminating; much of it saw true blame for the shape and condition of the land and the status of its people.

But it was Grover Dumont, son of a highly successful mine owner, sole heir, who made the revolutionary remarks that they'd often look back on. It was time for change.

He said, at a moment of revelation, "I believe I am not alone in this image of mine, one that has come upon me in the middle of the night, in day-dreams, in moments of extreme enlightenment. The lot of us gathered here, each one of us, can do something to help the people, the territory, and the nation as a whole. We've been a century on our own and we still have a long way to go. You all know it. You've all seen it. We're not dumb. As a group, we bring strength to a cause. This is the ultimate one. It will take a serious dedication, perhaps the loss of fortune or loss of family ties, loss of anything that you might call important to you. But when you come right down to it, when you vaguely remember who has gone before us and left little but a name or a small fortune for someone to waste, you might find the message that has come to me. And it is this group, the bunch of us that brought this idea to me. I know I didn't conceive it by myself, for I have felt what all of you I hope have felt in our meetings, some kind of belief that goes beyond us."

He paused, looked them all in the eye and said, "It's bigger than we are."

Eric Lindsey said, "Spill it, Grover. Let it go. We can handle it. Face it, if it's not for us, we won't get another chance as a group."

Dumont put strength in his voice, a noticeable demand, and a bit of illumination: "We're going to become one."

"Hell, Grover," Lindsey said, "we're one already."

"I mean one man, one rider, one figure, one hero for the people."

He let it sink in, saw some of them dumbfounded, some with a slim beginning of an understanding smile. "We will become one man who is everyplace at once, doing everything to help the people. Each one of us, when our turn comes to be the hero in this, the savior, we wear the same clothes, our own issue of course, and each one of us wears the same mask. We go as the masked rider, but never at the same time. If we plan our appearances, know the times and schedules perfectly, we can throw Hell right in the face of those who steal from the people, hurt the people, hurt the expansion of the country."

He sat back, let all of it sink in, or try to sink in. The beginning smiles began to widen, spread, began to show appreciation for the idea of one man being everywhere almost at once, a hero in a mask, on a memorable horse.

Dumont already knew it had to be a paint, a horse easy to see and hard to identify from a quick sight.

"You wait here. I'll be right back." He left the room.

In a few minutes he came back, wearing a gray hat, a pearly gray shirt, black vest, and black pants. A pair of Colts was holstered on his belt—and he wore a mask across his eyes, a mask as black as a dead sky. To those who knew him better than his family might have known him, he set a striking figure, youthful but ominous, agile but proud, singular but belonging to a cause.

"What do we call him?" Lindsey asked, shouting, standing in the middle of the room, his eyes bright blue, a smile locked on his face, and his mouth ajar.

Dumont knew that his pal had an idea of his own and noticed how Lindsey set his stance, ready for what he was about to say, ready for any and all replies, questions, denouncements at the highest level. Robert Sherwood Lindsey, III, was the dearest friend he'd ever had, and he had only known him for two years.

Finally, Lindsey said, "I have a choice of two names we can give to this masked man right at this minute. We can call him The Guardsman," and Dumont saw him shrug his shoulder in a declarative but minute disdain, letting The Guardsman sit on the minds of all in the room, and then he qualified his whole approach, "or we can call him The Hawk."

The very name hung in the air, and all the romance of it sat with it.

Jumping up, exclaiming his approval, agreeing with his friend's ploy, his manner of presentation, Dumont glowed with his response. "My God, Bob, that's it! That's it! I never had the slightest idea about a name. That's it, The Hawk." Those in the room saw him mouthing the name over and over again, as if he was tasting the drama of it, the swooping beauty of it, swooping in from wherever in every place, all of them one, one from them all no matter how many times or places The Hawk would appear; the legend in the making.

He looked around the room and realized it also sat well with those who would wear this uniform of a sort, carry the name, The Hawk. He was elated. It was the best thing that ever happened at The School of the Mission San Agustin del Tucsón, which had been in place since 1775 when it was established by Father Garcés as a daughter church of San Xavier del Bac. Once the place was known as San Cosme y Damián de Tucsón. Around them sat the O'odham village of Chuk-son, some of it in remnants, some having braced the new century, moving well into it as Tucson.

Lindsey was still working the curiosity angle. "How did this happen, Grov?"

Dumont did not stop to gather his facts in a coherent order, but let his emotions carry it off. This, he fully realized, was the moment for his idea. Nothing in his life would ever be bigger, or more ready to be said.

"I was riding, just riding, looking at things, and feeling the land and what was upon it, from all angles. The lime hue of mesquite wrapped into my eyes and lingered like offering a drink of lemonade. I rode around with all the Earth calling out to be noticed, the pines, the flowers, the ridges so clearly defined in cliff faces that they came at me like pages in a book, and I knew I was being taught something. Something was right in front of me waiting to be learned, that learning never stops even if you stop looking because you hear it or smell it and you're back where you started, looking at it from an ant hill to a mountain top and the sun kissing it like a girl does her lover in morning's realization. The prairie dogs called out to me and the hawks shifted their wings overhead into a new thermal updraft and I could read their signs like a language spoken to me long ago, perhaps something my father had said. And right then, like I was looking into the face of a hawk on his prowl, it all came to me. That hawk came to me. It took me in like I was in its talons, but wrapped me in one single and noble idea, wrapped me up forever in this idea, this being what I am, what we are, how time and history and the new century will look back on us. We are here at the root of history; let's make it happen."

He raised his empty hand and said, "To The Hawk. May they live forever."

The Hawk made his way across much of the territories of Arizona and New Mexico, alighting in places an ordinary man could not have reached from a previous rescue, and the rumors and the legend and the stories grew manifold until The Hawk had become a beacon of heroism, clean play, tidy and neat rescues of maidens in distress, of old men on the downside of their lives, on the feeble among the citizens of every settlement, town, moving wagon train, stagecoach or horseman alone on the grass. He came to be expected, and in truth, there were some folks who began to pray for his appearance when they were at great disadvantage, like a gun in the back or stuck in their face.

It was retired Sheriff Virgil Nawblock who was the vital witness at the end, when The Hawk was killed by road agents trying to hold up a stagecoach in which Nawblock was a passenger.

The killers, two young men in masks, stood confused, unsure of what they had done, looking down at the prone figure of the masked man whose nose seemed bent and hooked on his face.

An elderly woman passenger, unafraid of the bandits, yelled at them from the stage, "You scum of the Earth have killed the only hero we had around here. You two have killed The Hawk, who has saved more lives than you can count, and whose death, you may be sure, will be avenged." She showed them her raised fist, and yelled again, "Scum of the Earth has killed The Hawk, and the fiery God will come down on them from high above."

The confused killers, forgetting what they had come after, spurred their horses and fled, and it was the retired sheriff who unmasked the dead man and saw that he was a man who was on his list of possible Hawk suspects:

Grover Dumont.

He began to wonder if it really was the end of The Hawk . . . as he had known them, perhaps the lot of them

Riding the Vermillion Hills
by Dick Derham

"Do you remember your first, Mr. Bailey?" the youngster asked. "They say a man always remembers his first, no matter how many times he does it. That's the way a fellow knows he's become a man, ain't that right, Mr. Bailey?"

Bailey's companion was excited, jittery and needed to talk. Beginners sometimes do. Talking quiets their nervousness, helps them stay focused. Bailey understood that. "A man ought to make sure his first ain't just some no-account quickie if he's going to look back on it in pride, right, Mr. Bailey? He ought to take his time, letting it build up like he will want to remember it. Ain't that right?"

The two riders had left Bailey's camp with several hours of daylight left and were angling north across the range, neither was in a hurry.

The promise of the morning had developed into a pleasant spring afternoon in Kansas, the hint of a breeze playing with the long grass, a sprinkling of cattle grazing contentedly in the distance. Far ahead of them rose their destination, the Vermillion Hills, rough folds in the land which stretched for 50 miles along the northern edge of Kearney County. Few pleasures in this hard land were greater than an easy ride across open range.

The youngster's cheeks showed the fuzz of a male of the species still in the transition from boy to man. He hadn't bulked out to range heft so his flannel shirt hung loosely from his shoulders. His well-worn corduroy trousers showed that he was not new to the cattle country nor to the demands of a saddle-pounder. But "kid" still summed up the essence of the young rider.

His well-traveled companion, perhaps late 30s, sported a thick bushy beard which concealed most of the face where a man reveals his soul, but two alert brown eyes told that life had taught this man to accept the world as he found it and to employ its essence as the foundation of his own success in life's journey.

As they rode, the younger rider breathed deeply of the spring-grass-perfumed air, seeing the familiar range with all its details, storing up memories that he would revisit for a lifetime, eagerly letting his anticipation build. Beside him, Bailey was remembering.

It was a good day to be alive.

Yes, Bailey remembered his first time, not too far from here it had been and on a spring afternoon much like this one. Though he had not suspected it at the time, that afternoon had started him on a career that took him to Wyoming, to New Mexico, from Texas to Montana, a productive career, something in which he had long taken pride.

Just on the cusp of manhood, Billy O'Toole, as his mama had named him, had been eighteen years old, not yet at full growth, lanky, with a muscled body grown hard with the weekend cowhand chores on his father's ranch. He'd been performing routine Saturday rounds that day checking for cattle in trouble, when a typical Plains squall had blown in. Seeking shelter from the pelting rain, he headed for the abandoned barn on the old Franklin place. As he eased the barn door closed behind him, the nicker of a horse told him he was not alone.

Amanda Foster, she of the long blonde tresses, had been sixteen and the only girl in the schoolhouse who made him red-faced and tongue-tied. A year behind him, she was, her lushness growing at the same time as his desire. Harmless it had seemed, that afternoon in the privacy of the old barn. Without other boys around to tease him, his bashful smile had come unbidden as she nervously made room for him beside her. Few words had been spoken or needed as, it seemed, Amanda had shared his longing and shared as well the same inhibitions where others could see. Her kisses had been sweet, her hands gentle as they rubbed his shirt front, as she unbuttoned his shirt, her caresses welcoming him into her embrace. She'd offered no resistance when he breathlessly unbuckled his gun belt and slipped his trousers down over his knees.

As she welcomed him eagerly, he had discovered that their union was different from anything he had ever imagined, that giving her pleasure was more important than what he was receiving. When they finished, he had felt gloriously fulfilled as never before or since. He had known at that moment what path he wanted his life to take.

"Tomorrow, I'll go see your Pa," he had told her. "Ask him for permission to come calling on you."

If that had been the end of it, likely he never would have left Kansas.

"My name is Randy Tucker." The kid's voice came as an unwelcome interruption to Bailey's remembering and forced him to give some attention to his saddle mate.

"But you can call me Red, like everyone does," the kid continued. "Folks call me that because my hair's got an Irish color in it, just like yours. They say my Pa was Irish but I never knew him. They say he got killed in a stampede before I was born. Are you Irish too, Mr. Bailey?"

Bailey grunted to give the sense that he was listening, but his mind was still back in the glories of the afternoon in Franklin's barn, the gentle passion of Amanda, and the sudden discovery that a flash flood can strike a man without warning, its torrent sweeping him from the pleasant trail his life had been traveling and crashing him off by nightfall in a direction he never expected to go.

The gully-washer struck when he and Amanda emerged from the barn. Bobby Gillespie, the scrawny offspring of a neighboring dirt farmer who Bailey hard-fisted in the schoolyard most weeks smirked down from high on horseback and far out of reach of the bigger boy's fists.

"Billy's got a girlfriend," Gillespie intoned in his mocking singsong way. "Billy's got a girlfriend." Asking Bobby to shush would have been fruitless. It would only assure he'd scamper off to town and spread his news to everyone he could find. For Billy O'Toole there would be no disgrace. Truth to tell, Gillespie was envious; all the boys would be envious that he'd spent time in the barn with Amanda.

But a girl's reputation was different. Amanda's was different. And a man had a responsibility to protect his woman. So. he'd done what he had to, shushed Gillespie's gaping mouth for good, got on his horse, and never looked back.

"You're famous all over, Mr. Bailey," the kid was saying. "I'll bet even them big-bellied nabobs back in Washington City know all about you. I must have read that book they wrote about you, "Avenger of the Prairie" it was called, must be a dozen times."

Bailey had tried to read the book himself, thrown it against the wall of hotel rooms in disgust at its lies, its exaggeration, its simplification of the complexity of lived experience, its telling the story Easterners wanted to read instead of life as it happened. He'd been only halfway through the book when he finally tossed it into a campfire.

"I'll be telling my grandkids about this someday," the kid was saying. "I used to dream about meeting you, Mr. Bailey. Never thought we'd be riding side-by-side, sure not out to the Vermillion Hills."

The Vermillion Hills had defined the boundary of Bailey's world in those early days, but today, with his thoughts about Amanda and Bobby Gillespie and what happened next, those words called to mind his sojourn in the shadow of the Laramie Hills.

By then Union Pacific had laid its rails west from Omaha to Cheyenne and on across the plains to the Rockies and beyond, transforming unowned grasslands used only by the declining herds of buffalo into forage for cattle brought up the trail from Texas to be fattened on the nourishing Wyoming grass and shipped to Eastern butchers. The growing cattle industry assured that a husky redheaded 18-year-old would have no problem signing on as a cowhand with one of the outfits new to Wyoming. Riding for the Double H had been a good first job for a teenager: demanding physical cowhanding during the day, bunkhouse shenanigans building solid friendships in the evening, and all that transforming a Kansas boy into a man.

The trouble in Wyoming hadn't started until Bailey's third year. The head count at spring Roundup tallied short by more than could be explained by wolf kills. Human predators had invaded the territory and riding the range took on a somber tone. Saturdays were for rifle practice.

After a month of fruitless range riding, the day came when Bailey, Milt Anderson and Lucius Fillmore, the two hands he was riding with that day, encountered a trail left by someone driving perhaps twenty head of cattle, not a lot, the thief probably thought, not enough to be noticed by a brand that counted 7000 head wearing the Double H scar on their flank. His mistake.

Cattle move slower than horses. It was only a matter of time before the three cowhands closed the distance on the rustler. So, as they crested a rise, they already had their rifles in their hands. The rustler heard the horses behind him. dug in his spurs and galloped for the safety of the next ridge. But even a good horse couldn't outrun Bailey's rifle.

"He was running away," Milt Anderson protested. "You shot him in the back."

"Think seeing your ugly puss would scare him off for good?" Bailey had scoffed. "He'd be back when we weren't around."

Mr. Holloway counted out three months pay and told him to go to Texas and change his name. "I know you were riding for the brand," Holloway told him. "But a killing changes a person, there's no going back."

"A killing changes a person." Bailey had been unaware that he had spoken his thoughts aloud until the kid said, "Lets everyone know he is a full-blooded man, right, Mr. Bailey? A real 'Avenger.'"

No that wasn't what Bailey meant, though he hadn't understood how he had been changed not until after he got to Lincoln County and rode out one afternoon to see Frank McNabb.

There had been plenty of jobs for young cowhands in West Texas in those days. Pat Bailey, the name he had used ever since, spent two uneventful years in the Texas Panhandle. Then early one spring his rancher assigned him to ride on a trail drive with 250 cattle being sold to a New Mexican rancher named Chisum. That's where his life opened up and he became the man people looked up to.

Chisum's South Spring Ranch was the largest outfit in the thinly-settled Lincoln County, just a sleepy corner of New Mexico Territory not yet as famous as it would be within months.

Ruffians were trying to take over, to "regulate" as they called it, Lincoln County, so Mr. Jimmy Dolan had explained. They'd shot down Sheriff Brady, ambushing him right in the street of Lincoln Plaza, killed another man when he stopped at Blazer's Mill to pick up his mail, and no honest citizen was safe. Dolan's offer of double pay meant less to Bailey than the promise of important manly work.

For the first week or two, he spent his time idling in Lincoln Plaza, waiting for something to happen, drinking at Montoya's with new friends, including an amiable Virginian, 22-year-old Buck Morton, a hard-working young man whose qualities of leadership and honesty had made him foreman of the Murphy-Dolan cow camp.

The "Regulators" claimed to be a lawful posse with a warrant issued by some pretend "Justice of the Peace" and with their animus for the established ranchers, one of the men they had their eyes on was Morton. When their "posse" ran him to the ground, Morton had surrendered with their solemn promise that they would take him to Lincoln for trial. The indirect way to town led through the isolation of Blackwater Canyon where eleven bullets, one for each member of the posse, found its way into defenseless flesh. The execution changed everything. No longer a boss's fight, the War became personal to the friends of Buck Morton and the Murphy-Dolan cowhands took the battle into their own hands. Blood flowed on both sides.

Some of the smaller ranchers thought that by staying neutral between the powerful Murphy-Dolan House and the upstart McSween-Tunstall ring they could make the competition between the two rivals work for them, but after Buck Morton was murdered, his friends thought neutral was an obscene word. One of the so-called "neutrals" was two-bit rancher Frank McNabb who Bailey had shared a bottle with a time or two and Dolan had sent Bailey out to talk some sense into him. Bailey hadn't seen how anyone could be neutral about the murderers of Buck Morton, so when he rode up and McNabb stepped to the door of his cabin and said "stand down, friend," Bailey had assured that Frank McNabb would remain neutral forever.

And that's when Bailey learned how that Wyoming killing had changed him, grown him he would say. Maybe he had tossed in his blankets a night or two after shutting Bobby Gillespie's filthy mouth, but planting two in Frank McNabb's brisket troubled him no more than slicing a bawling calf's ear at the branding fire. And so, Bailey learned that he had the inner strength to pull a trigger and not think twice.

For three months, he joined in the gunpowder games, tallying a couple of the men who had done for Buck and fighting side-by-side with his newfound friends in the culminating Five Days Battle for the control of Lincoln Plaza. He'd been one of those with his gun unlimbered for the turkey shoot when MacSween's killers made their desperate attempt to escape from McSween's burning house. When he'd seen two of them, Vicente Romero and Francisco Zamora, try to survive by hunkering down in the chicken coop, he'd blasted a full load from his pistol into the flimsy structure, reloaded and blasted again. Maybe he'd been the one who had done for Harvey Morris, but his shot went wide when the Bonney kid dashed out.

After what they called the Battle of Lincoln, all the starch went out of the "regulators." There was still cleanup work to do, of course. But it didn't take long before those they hadn't got to yet could see their future. The Coe cousins skedaddled with their puny little herds, Hendry Brown went off and got himself a sheriff's badge in Kansas, Doc Scurlock hightailed it to Texas, and pretty soon there was nothing left for a man drawing double wages to do.

"How many you done, Mr. Bailey?" the kid asked. "Reading The Avenger I counted only fourteen, but I could tell he was leaving lots out."

How many troublemakers had he put down? Bailey had never kept count. Some years only three or four. More in a good year. But profitable work was becoming hard to come by. What difference did it make? The only number that mattered was his bonus.

"Only amateurs notch their guns, Red," Bailey replied. "It tells everyone that the fellow is a greenhorn and he always goes out fast." Maybe the kid was listening. Maybe he was even learning something. Did Bailey care? He wasn't sure, but it helped pass the time as the Vermillion Hills drew closer.

But the kid was right. That book writer had scattered his shots after the Lincoln County fracas. A routine jobbing of a squatter here and there didn't titillate readers like being double-gunned in the face-off with the rustlers up on Crazy Woman Creek—at least that's what his customer told him they were. Maybe they'd stolen an unbranded calf or two, maybe not, but the book writer said rustlers sounded better to Easterners than squatters or homesteaders. And what did it matter? Dead was dead and he got paid.

"Troublemakers are everywhere, Red. It don't much matter where you look. I never sit around loafing for long. A man likes to keep busy."

"That's what Pa says, always finding chores for me, always telling me there's more work to do."

It was the bane of growing up on a ranch. "My Pa would have kept me out doing chores till midnight, if Ma hadn't insisted on me coming in for supper," Bailey remembered.

"Sounds like you and me are a lot alike, Mr. Bailey."

They had been riding an hour or so when Bailey absently reached for the makings in his vest pocket, something cowhands do half a dozen times a day without thinking. As his horse plodded forward, Bailey "Veed" the cigarette paper in his hand and tapped tobacco from the pouch to fill it. When he was done, he pulled out a wooden match, scratched it along his saddle horn, and lit up. Only then did he notice that his companion was watching him.

"Need the makings, Red?" Bailey asked.

"Sure would be nice, Mr. Bailey." Bailey tossed the pouch over like he would with any saddle pard. Throughout cow country, sharing the makings with another man did a lot to build friendship. Just a little thing, but it established a reciprocal obligation.

The hot acrid smoke filled Bailey's lungs and relaxed him as it always did. Sometimes it helped him work through problems, but not this time. Finally, the cigarette was down to his fingers, he squished out the stub on his saddle horn and tossed the charred remains aside. About the same time, the kid finished his smoke.

"Mr. Tyler, he's a new hand my Pa hired when the trouble started this spring, he's been giving all me a lot of tips about how things are done, like how he always uses a man's own weakness against him. He taught me how to breathe deep and let half the air out and hold it to steady my rifle. Lots of dead tin cans where he's been practicing me," the kid told Bailey.

"He's drilled me on ways to cut a quarter of a second off my draw. That's what he calls 'a killing difference.'" Bailey could see that kid was proud of what he was learning. "I've been practicing my fast draw," the kid continued. "I can beat all the kids at school. Of course, I'm not ready to match myself against a top man like you."

"Josh always cared more about holster speed than impact effect." Bailey chuckled to make it sound like a joke and knew he had succeeded when the kid laughed in reply. Getting a man to laugh with you was a way of strengthening a relationship.

And what he said about Tyler was true.

Riding with Josh Tyler had been good productive years, Bailey remembered. In the Lincoln County fracas which started then both on their careers they got to know each other, gain confidence in each other's skills and learned to build themselves into a good team. In the process, Josh had become his best friend. After they "deregulated" the regulators, and Mr. Dolan paid everyone off, Bailey had offers to ride with Jesse Evans, or to spread his bedroll with the boys on Seven Rivers, but they were outlaws. So, him and Josh rode north, killed a few men in Colfax County and looked for more good paying work for men of their talents.

As it turned out there were troublemakers everywhere. All they had to do was let folks know they were available—water thieves trying to control public streams, rustlers operating out of Brown's Park or Hole-in-the-Wall, barbed wire fanatics closing off the open range and all of them needing the talent Bailey had discovered when he stopped by the McNabb cabin that night.

So, Bailey and Josh Tyler went into the "security business" working in New Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, even as far as Montana until good paying two-man jobs became scarce and they needed to split up.

Every time he bucked his wrist on a man, he'd added to his rep and to the price he could demand the next time someone needed him to solve a problem. He'd never been a kill-hungry murderer like the Bonney kid had been. Like he told that book writer, he took pride in the way folks turned to him to solve their problem. For ten years Bailey rode across the West, wherever greedy men were trying to take what someone else was willing to pay to keep.

It was an important job, Bailey told himself. A job a man could do with pride.

But time passes. A day, a week, a month, it flows on and even a good job becomes routine—a squatting sodbuster here, a water thief there, a sheep rancher smelling up the cattle range somewhere else. Doing the same thing, pulling iron, spitting lead, turning a shirt red, the routine of the work takes away the challenge and without challenge a man wonders what there is to life.

Soon an eager young twenty-year-old is thirty-five. He thinks about the satisfaction of his job, but then he thinks about what he has missed, the soft, reassuring presence of Amanda in his arms, the ranchers he had seen and worked for who had been building their future while he was still the workman he had been in his mid-twenties. The pleasure he knew he could never fully understand but that he had witnessed—most of all the pride Lucas Foreman exuded watching his two teenage sons grow to manhood—a man knowing he was building a posterity. Far too late, Bailey had begun to see how a man truly measures his life.

And even some ranchers in the cattle business began yielding to barbed wire. Take the job that had brought him back to Kearny County. For years, he worked for ranchers angry because some interloper wanted to build fences, keeping another brand's cattle off "his" grass, even though it was on government land. But after months of waiting for a good job offer, Bailey found himself listening to a rancher who showed him some leases that said it was his own land he was fencing. Putting down fence cutters was a new experience, but Bailey told himself a professional takes the work on offer.

Bailey had been back in Kearny County only a week, and already he had sent one cowhand scampering back to the bunkhouse with a hole in his shirt. Just a shoulder hit, a fair professional warning. Next time they would come in teams, two or three at a time, which would be good for Bailey's money belt.

Saturday wasn't a good day to hunt fence-cutters, so Bailey headed to town to stock up on supplies and shells, no risk that anyone would recognize the hard-faced heavy-bearded late 30s rider as the youngster who had silenced Bobby Gillespie's dirty mouth all those years back. When he stopped into The Brewers Saloon, it was cluttered with cowhands from several of the nearby ranches, each cowhand indistinguishable from one another except for the lanky fellow with his arm in a sling. The four hands sitting with him, laughing with him, youngsters who maybe thought a golden handlebar mustache or a neatly trimmed beard made them different, but all Bailey saw was fence-cutting troublemakers worth five double Eagles a piece, bounties on the hoof waiting to be collected.

What Bailey hadn't expected was the solitary man in a rear table wearing his customary white Stetson hat over a freshly purchased green plaid flannel shirt, a man whose hard face softened to what might be called a smile of recognition when he spotted Bailey, Josh Tyler.

They shared a bottle, reminiscing about the good days in Lincoln County, the time they cut Chavez y Chavez off from the herd and perforated his shirt eleven times, one for every bullet in Buck Morton's body, and about their work in Wyoming and the one time they went to Montana. That night Bailey turned into his blankets with the aura of friendship lulling him to sleep. Sunday was a day of rest, not because Bailey put any of those Thou Shalt Nots above business but because cow hands were protective of their off time.

Monday was a regular workday, so Bailey was up at first light and had his horse well-watered and fed, and himself Arbuckled and baconed with plenty of time to be where he could watch movement at the Rafter T corral when the hands caught and saddled and rode out on their morning assignments. Only the last rider out of the ranch yard, a chunky man in a green plaid shirt and white Stetson rode toward the fence line. Bailey followed along for an hour until he found a good spot and settled down to wait.

The sun was high overhead when a spot of white appeared in the distance. From his prone position, Bailey eased the rifle stock into his shoulder and tracked his target patiently as the white dot resolved itself into a Stetson, as the green plaid shirt filled up his sight picture, but still he waited, 400 yards, 300 yards, when the rider paused and pulled the makings out of his shirt pocket, rolled a smoke and then kneed his horse back on its journey. 200 yards, 150 yards and Bailey squinted down the barrel of his Winchester until at 100 yards the yellow Bull Durham tag hanging from the target's breast pocket filled the gunsight. Bailey squeezed one off and scrambled to his feet.

While the target slumped to one side and hit the ground hard, Bailey stirruped up, dropped down to the flat, and finished the task with two quick head shots from his .45. A professional is always thorough.

With the day's work completed, Bailey rode easy in the saddle musing on whether he could claim a double bonus for the day's work. But that thought passed quickly. It was a gentle spring day in Kansas, with the fresh smell of the grass and the hint of a breeze.

It was a good day to be alive.

Back at his camp, Bailey found a surprise waiting for him, some red-headed kid squatting on the ground. The kid jumped to his feet respectfully when Bailey walked his horse toward the camp.

"I'm drifting across Kansas riding the grub line and looking for a job, mister," the kid said. "When I saw your camp, I would have halloed the fire, but you wasn't here. So, I come in to wait."

Bailey could see a pleasant evening over the campfire, sharing tales, and relaxing. "Make yourself to home," he invited, as he swung down. He was loosening the cinches on his bay horse when he felt the iron dig into his ribs.

"It's a real honor, Mr. Bailey, for you to be my first kill."

Riding across the range without the comforting weight of his revolver pressing against his thigh for the first time in nearly twenty years was unsettling. More unsettling was his carelessness in taking the young kid for granted. Turning his back, even momentarily, on the youngster had given the kid all the time he needed to draw, cock, and order "shuck your gun, Mr. Bailey."

From then, the order to mount and move out followed. No conversation, no yakking, no chance for him to distract the kid. Would the kid fire if he refused his orders? Beginners were unpredictable. Bailey had not dared to risk it. But the kid had already made two greenhorn mistakes that would kill him.

"Kill first, then talk," the basic rule of professionals of the gun everywhere.

And second, if you have to take your target captive, give him a thorough search. The single shot Remington derringer Bailey always carried in his boot top was within reach. Just a toy nuisance most saw in the little gun, but in the practiced hands of a professional like Bailey, a single .41 caliber shot settled any dispute.

Following either rule could have saved the kid's life, but now the kid was dead man riding.

"Mr. Tyler, he said when you hired on with a fence-builder, you turned yourself into an honest kill," the kid told Bailey. "Of course, you being friends and all, it wouldn't have been honorable for him do it," the kid continued. Tyler's typical failing, Bailey remembered, losing focus on business. "He knew I had the itch and drilled me on how to use your weakness for kids to make my first kill. He said it ain't near as hard as folks make out to turn a fellow sitting strong in the saddle into a stinking pile of range rubbish."

The brutal dehumanizing words came from Tyler, Bailey knew, but the kid's revolver would speak the same ruthless language unless he could parlay the kid's mistakes into a one-shot derringer take-down. "Talk first, kill later," was the kid's choice. Get to know your object as a man instead of just money in your jeans, find out he's like you in some way, laugh at his jokes, swap the makings, maybe get to like him. That's when a man starts making mistakes. All the kid had needed to do was draw, cock, and kill, no thought required. But trying to put down someone he had got to know, an amateur loses focus, becomes vulnerable.

The Vermillion Hills would be the kind of kill-site Josh would choose if he wanted to lose the body. They were perhaps ten miles ahead, so Bailey had an hour to develop his kill-plan. Plenty of time, Bailey told himself even if the best he had come up with so far depended upon the kid making more mistakes. Long odds. If Tyler had trained him right, within an hour Bailey would be nothing more than nourishment for buzzards. He gave a short chuckle. The Avenger of the Plains had come back to where he started, only to get taken out because of some gun-idolizing youngster.

"Talking about Josh take me back to the time him and me was hunting rustlers in Idaho," Bailey began. "Thought we found an inside man in the C W bunkhouse." Bailey took his time telling the story, no need to rush through it, about waiting until one day the cowhand slipped off by himself. When they tracked him, they saw he was heading toward a small copse of trees where another horse waited. "We prided ourselves that we was earning a double bonus that day."

"What happened?"

"The other rider got up from the ground and stepped to meet our cowhand. Josh and me was waiting until the targets made a tight shot group and we was just about to do our work when the new cowhand took off the big Stetson and let long blonde tresses flow." Bailey laughed. "She was the schoolmarm and we was close to making ourselves murderers."

"You ever make a mistake, Mr. Bailey?"

"Never." The answer was firm and unyielding. "It don't matter what someone else may tell him, whenever a man crooks his finger, he takes on a pile of responsibility. It's up to him to make sure he's doing a needful killing. Putting a man down don't allow for no do-overs, Red."

Whether the kid realized Bailey was working to addle his brain or just passing on a professional ethic Bailey couldn't tell, but the kid was thoughtfully silent for some minutes.

They were entering the Vermillion Hills now. The hills were not well-traveled. Outlaws sometimes made their camps there. Lawmen had entered, and never been seen again. Few trails penetrated the wilderness, and the narrow path Red had guided them to was little more than a narrow game trail between two hills.

"Not many folks come to the Vermillion Hills, Mr. Bailey," Bailey was used to the kid jabbering by now, in fact he made it work. The more the kid jabbered, the more he relaxed, the more vagrant thoughts could divert him the less focused he would be. Bailey could feel the derringer—his lifeline—digging against his calf. In a few minutes the kid's shirt would have a .41 caliber hole right where it counted.

"Do you think they'll ever write a book about me, Mr. Bailey?" the kid asked. Bailey didn't answer, but the kid was in the mood to talk anyway. "If they do, 1'll tell them you was a man four-square, just like the Avenger book said. There wasn't no quivering or begging and you and me just rode off together all relaxed and friendly like two old pards riding fence. I'll always tell folks you rode tall in the saddle right to the end, never caterwauling or nothing like that Sanderson fellow out in Arizona did when you tumbled him from his saddle."

No, Bailey knew, they'd never write about 150 pounds of rotting flesh being nibbled on by the Vermillion Hills coyotes. Maybe Bailey hadn't worked out the details of his kill-plan yet, but for a master gun professional like him to be put down by a pissant like Red Tucker was too humiliating to contemplate.

"Depends on how good that fast-gun training Josh gave you is and how many rounds of the wheel you last," Bailey replied. When Red didn't seem to understand, Bailey continued. "It's an old game. When some fellow builds his rep by taking down someone famous, he becomes the new prize. After Bob Ford killed Jesse James, men lined up to be the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James. Ford gave it a good ride, but finally the wheel double-zeroed him and someone else got to play. In a few more spins of the wheel, the winner was 'the man who killed the man who killed the man who killed . . . ' Before long, folks lost track of who was up next and not many could remember those who went down along the way." Bailey let the fake history lesson sink in for a minute and gave the Kid some advice: "keep practicing your holster speed like Josh told you, but remember in the kill game, first to fire don't score near as high as first to hit."

Let the Kid puzzle that out, Bailey told himself. Keep him thinking about anything other than why they were taking this ride and watch for his next mistake.

"I like you, Red," Bailey said. "Hope you last at least till Christmas."

They were deep into the Vermillion Hills now; Bailey knew they could reach the killing ground any minute. And he had yet to work out the defect in his kill-plan. His derringer was inaccessible from the saddle. Meanwhile, the hourglass of his life was draining fast with only a few minutes of sand left. As long he could keep the kid talking, he would not die, but when they stopped talking, if Tyler had trained him right, the kid would draw, cock and kill.

"There was this fellow up in Montana, young fellow he was, Lonnie Fairchild he went by," Bailey remembered. "Josh and me had us a job working for Granville Stuart and his Montana Stranglers at the time and knew in our bones that Fairchild was a rustler, but just knowing something ain't enough to bonus a man out."

"What did you do?" Red asked. Draw the story out as much as you can, Bailey told himself. Keep the kid listening.

"After two weeks of losing trails, finally we tracked him to his campsite in the hills where he had two heifers tied up and waiting for his running iron. One afternoon, just at suppertime, we made our move, "halloed the fire" and rode in. He didn't know us from old Jeff Davis, told us to stand down, and we tossed our share into the cook pot. Pleasant evening it was, sitting around the dying embers, passing his flask back and forth, him being a friendly fellow. Finally, we all rolled into our blankets."

"You kill him in his sleep?" The kid asked astonished.

Bailey rejected the notion with an abrupt shake of his head. "Not professional. When me and Josh worked a man, we never stole his dignity," Bailey told the kid. "Come morning, we woke Fairchild up with the rope already tight around his neck, and I explained to him how we made our money."

The kid's eyes were saucer-wide as he listened to a story more exciting than anything in that "Avengers" book. "You swing him? How long did he kick?"

Bailey tried to sound patient. "Like I said, over supper we'd come to know him as a friendly fellow, a man you could trust to keep his word. As long as he skedaddled, Josh and me didn't see no reason to stretch his neck. We gave him 48 hours to leave Montana, or we'd see that he went out hard." When Red seemed confused, Bailey drove the point home.

"Lots of times we kept our six shooters in their holsters, Red," and maybe the kid was learning something. "Killing's not the only way to solve a problem."

The story was a lie of course, there was no bonus for a rustler riding to Wyoming. They had strung him up before supper. "Kill first, then eat," then rolled out their sleeping bags and let the rope twisting gently in the night breeze lullaby them to sleep.

After the Montana story ended, they followed the trail for several minutes as Bailey tried to find some other topic of conversation that might keep him alive for another half hour. He was about to make up a story about the Colfax County War when the kid broke the silence.

"It was really good riding with you like two old saddle pards, Mr. Bailey," Red said, "and all this time you knowing I'm fixing on . . . " The kid trailed off. "I mean . . . " The kid was having a hard time saying it. Bailey had spent two hours attempting to addle the kid's brain enough to get the kid distracted from his purpose. Had it worked?

"It makes me think about what you did with Lonnie Fairchild," the kid continued hesitantly. "I wonder, maybe if you agreed to skedaddle and never ever come back to Kearney County, maybe we wouldn't have to . . . " The kid trailed off again.

Bailey found it was easy to agree. "You earned the right to tell me what to do, Red." The trail was descending through the brush now. Bailey could see a clearing up ahead. A good kill zone. Had he cut it that close? In five more minutes, he'd have been face down fertilizing the grass.

But now everything was different. The kid would move up alongside, reach out his hand, they'd clasp right hands in a strong man-to-man shake to seal the agreement, he'd yank the kid forward, snake out the kid's revolver from its holster, and kill.

"But then I remembered," the kid continued reluctantly, "I promised Mr. Tyler I'd . . . " His voice trailed off uncertainly. He swallowed hard before continuing. "My Pa always said a man's got to keep his word or he ain't much of a man. That's what my Pa says."

As the trail leveled off Bailey found himself in a small glen, centered around a clearing not more than fifty feet across. The perfect kill zone. He'd run out of time.

"I always like coming here," the kid said. "Quiet and peaceful." Their horses ambled forward slowly. If Tyler had drilled the kid on a professional takedown, Bailey knew he'd be getting two hot ones in the back any second.

"Me and my Pa took an elk here last fall," Red was talking, maybe still trying to put it off. "And Andy," Red added. "She came with us for the first time. Of course, Andy ain't her real name. She carries our Ma's name, so we call her Andy for short."

The grass was green and deep, it was a peaceful scene. "I always liked this spot, Mr. Bailey. Mr. Tyler said it was a respectful place to do it." A good place to lose the body, he meant. Bailey no longer put his hopes in the kid's hesitation. He had heard the resolve coming back to his voice. "I guess, that is,  . . . I mean, if this place is okay with you, Mr. Bailey?"

Bailey wasn't listening. The name Andy ricocheted around his skull. A name that was short for Amanda. He looked over his shoulder at the redheaded kid, perhaps truly seeing him for the first time. He had to ask. "How old are you, Red?"

"Going on eighteen."

Seventeen years then and a few months more. Add nine months and count back and where did it take you? Where it took Bailey was to a glorious rainy afternoon in the old Franklin barn and to a question he'd never thought to ask: what duty does a father owe to a son he's never met? The derringer pressed hard against his calf reminding him of the other urgent question. What duty does a man owe to himself?

"I've been learning a lot of things from you, Mr. Bailey," Red said. "Wish we could squat and pass the makings back-and-forth for another hour. But Ma'll skin me if I ain't back for supper." Suddenly the kid was nervous as he faced up to what he had come to do. "So, I guess we need to . . . You know, do it now." He looked at Bailey almost as if he were asking permission "if that's okay with you . . . ."

"As good time as any," but the kid had finally given him a way to get his derringer into action. "My mare is a good horse, Red. Let me swing down and leave her out of it."

Swinging his leg over his horse's rump it was easy to slip his hand inside his boot. As he landed, he spun quickly, swinging the derringer up, squeezing it's one shot off as he had so many times—but unaccountably not a center shot, but just a sleeve hit, not even the kid's gun arm. All Bailey's practiced professional accuracy had done was galvanize Red into action.

Unsurprisingly, the kid reacted with an amateur's haste and triggered off his first shot while his revolver was still in the upswing, punching into the flesh of Bailey's thigh, staggering him around as he regained his balance. Four panicky shots punched holes on the air as they whizzed by. Only the last trigger pull before Red's gun clicked empty did any damage as it carved into Bailey's shoulder, thrusting him forward, sprawling him motionless on the grass.

The burning pain disabled Bailey momentarily. After a moment, he found he could control the pain and breathe shallowly. Behind him he heard Red dry-heaving from the saddle. Red could always tell himself he had shot in self-defense, but now he would never be a cold killer. Bailey had done what he could for his son. He had fulfilled his duty to Amanda, as well, though she would never know it.

Finally, Bailey heard the kid's horse riding off and he could fulfill his duty to himself. That last wild shot had carved through flesh and gristle only. The bullet had come out high on his shoulder making his shirt soggy, but no real damage had been done. He'd be riding away and giving Josh Tyler the horselaugh.

All he had to do with stuff his kerchief into the wound to staunch the bleeding  . . .  all he had to do was stuff  . . .  all he had to  . . .  But suddenly he was tired  . . .  very  . . .  very . . .  his eyelids sagged  . . .  closed  . . .  and the darkness claimed him.

Gold Thuggery
by Ralph S. Souders

Autumn had come early to Colorado. The leaves on the mountain trees were already turning from green to shades of orange, yellow and red. The pines needles, of course, would remain green. The air temperatures, especially in the higher elevations, were already unseasonably cold and forecasted to remain as such in the near term. This was going to be a cold winter, and Avery Baxter was diligently preparing for it as were most miners in the region. He had already finished weatherizing his cabin by installing a chinking mixture of clay, dirt, lime and ashes to seal the air gaps between the logs and boards that had developed during the warmer weather. He had patched any areas of the roof that might potentially develop leaks when the coming snows began to melt. Finally, he had reinforced the fireplace and chimney to eliminate any threats of fire or carbon monoxide. He was satisfied with the overall condition of his home.

Avery was a loner who had resided on this homesite for the past eleven years. He was a middle-aged man in generally good health, save for the usual aches and pains that men his age all seemed to develop. He had chronically sore knees and shoulders as well as a tired back, all resulting from many long shifts working in the corporate mines. Finally, as his fortieth birthday approached, he had terminated his employment with the company and set out on his own. After wandering and searching for many months, he had finally come upon his present location. Finding the site satisfactory, he had staked his claim to the property, filing the legal documents at the county land office. He built his small cabin on a ridge overlooking the Black River. He enjoyed the beautiful view that this vantage point offered, from where he could easily monitor all forty acres of his property. The local area had generally been peaceful, but over time as more people arrived in the territory, stories of crimes and violence increased proportionally. Avery intended to remain vigilant, determined to protect all that was his as best he could.

Once Avery had settled on the property, he began spending his days working in the river, inspecting the placer deposits there and recovering sporadic pieces of loose gold. This gold dust was typically pea gravel in size and initially, somewhat difficult to find. However, as he patiently worked the stream, he developed a technique that would serve him well in the pursuing years. To date, he had recovered more than one hundred-fifty pieces of gold. In addition, while exploring the more remote areas of his property, he had discovered a small vein of gold in a rocky area. Still in possession of his mining tools, he proceeded to work this vein. To date, he had accumulated almost a pound of gold ore from it and was confident that more was still waiting to be extracted. He wondered if there might be other deposits of gold on his property. He surmised that this was possible, but he had no compelling reason to search. He already had as much work as he could handle.

Avery divided his workdays between the vein on his property and the placer deposits up and down the river. Every morning, he would work the gold vein until his back and shoulders became tired. After lunch, he would go to the river where he would sit on a small, wooden stool in the shallower water and pan for gold. In late afternoon as his back and knees began to hurt, he would quit for the day, leaving his stool in the weeds beside the river. He would then retire to the cabin for the evening. The only deviations from this routine were in the spring when he would plant his vegetable garden and in the late summer and early autumn when he would harvest. He would do maintenance on the garden in the evenings as needed. He also took time off to hunt for meat. He obviously could do little work during the winter months. Avery owned a horse and a mule that he kept in a shack of a barn beside a small, fenced corral located adjacent to the cabin. He was always cognizant to keep the animals properly fed and sufficiently exercised.

Avery stored his gold in four separate locations within the cabin, primarily beneath the floorboards. He believed that anyone entering the cabin intent on stealing his gold would probably terminate their search upon finding an initial stash. They would have no reason to consider the possibility of additional hiding places being located throughout the building. It would be an intruder's misfortune, however, to enter the cabin while Avery was inside. Within his easy reach, Avery kept a loaded 12-gauge shotgun as well as two loaded 38-caliber handguns. He was proficient with all three weapons and any uninvited visitor would certainly suffer a very serious consequence. To date, Avery had not experienced any situations with strangers trespassing on his property.

Several years earlier, Avery had found an injured Indian brave lying on the riverbank not too far from the cabin. The young man, probably in his early twenties, had badly sprained an ankle in a fall from a nearby stone bluff. He was unable to walk, experiencing great pain. Avery assisted the brave to the cabin where he provided medical care as best he could and kept him fed and comfortable for two days. Eventually, several other braves arrived in the area in search of their missing tribesman. Avery led them to the cabin where they were surprised to find the man under good care, recovering nicely from his injury. The Indians were pleased at how well Avery had cared for one of their own. As they collected the man and took him away, Avery could sense their appreciation. In the subsequent years, Avery would interact with these Indians whenever he encountered them in the area. Avery considered them to be friends, and he believed that he could reply upon them for help if such a need should ever arise.

One morning several weeks back, Avery had ridden into town to purchase supplies from the general store. He had the pack mule with him to carry the supplies back to the property. Before entering the general store, Avery had visited the bank across the street to convert a couple gold pieces into currency. The banker was experienced with this procedure. He weighed the gold on a jewelry balance and determined that its total weight was 2.4 ounces. He was impressed with the quality of the ore. The official exchange value of gold in the U.S. was $18.94 per ounce. The banker did his calculation and completed the transaction by handing $43.00 to Avery, retaining a small commission for the bank.

"Thank you, sir," said Avery friendlily as he put the money into his pants pocket.

"You're welcome," replied the banker as he smiled at his customer. He then asked, "do you keep your other gold in a safe place? We can hold it for you in our safe if you'd like."

"No, that's not necessary," explained Avery. "I really don't have that much."

"That's your choice," responded the banker skeptically. "If you should change your mind, let me know. My offer will still stand."

Avery nodded his head and smiled in understanding. "I'm much obliged. You have a good day," he said as he backed away from the counter, turned and began walking toward the door.'

"You, too," replied the banker. "Take care."

As Avery exited the building, he paid scant attention to the stranger who had been standing in line behind him. The man was tall and muscular, wearing worn, dark clothes and a grey Stetson. He had witnessed Avery's transaction with the banker, and it had piqued his curiosity.

"Interesting fella," the stranger remarked to the banker as he approached the counter. He handed the banker a fifty-dollar bill and requested change in gold and silver coins. "How well do you know him?"

"Not that well," admitted the banker. "He comes in here now and again to trade some gold for currency. He's a miner. I believe he lives east of here on the Black River somewhere. Other than that, I don't know too much about him."

"That gold dust he gave you appears to be pretty good quality," suggested the stranger.

"It is," agreed the banker. "I suspect he found it in the water somewhere. They say there's still some out there, but it's difficult to locate and hard on your back to retrieve. If he's found some, good for him. I doubt if he's found much. He's not a wealthy man, that's for sure."

The stranger nodded his head in understanding although he did not share the banker's opinion. He suspected that the miner owned more gold than the banker surmised. As the banker placed fifty dollars in coins onto the counter, the man counted his money carefully before placing it into his pants pocket.

"Thanks," said the stranger as he nodded his head while turning toward the door.

"You're welcome," replied the banker. "Have a good day,"

The stranger stepped outside the bank and looked up and down the street for any sign of the miner. He noticed a horse and a pack mule standing side by side at the hitching rail outside the general store. Those must be his, the stranger thought to himself. The miner had to be inside the store, spending the money that he had just obtained from the bank. The stranger was already in the early throes of concocting a plan. The first step would be to follow the man from town to determine exactly where he lived. Once that was known, a firm plan of action could be developed.

Avery arrived home that afternoon where he put away the supplies from town after locking the horse and the mule inside their corral. He did not anticipate having to return to town for at least the next six weeks or so. He did not like going to town. He was pleased to have that chore behind him again for the time being. He was eager to get back into his routine.

The next couple of days were long and uneventful as Avery worked on the gold vein in the mornings and panned for gold in the afternoon. On the third afternoon, he was surprised to hear a horse neigh several times in the general vicinity as he sat on the stool in the shallow riverbed. He was working approximately three-quarters of a mile to the west of his property. The sound of the horse was emanating from further west, the opposite direction from the corral where his own horse was secured. Feeling uneasy and suspecting that he was being watched, Avery vacated the water earlier than usually and headed home. He took an alternate route through the woods, avoiding the riverbank where he could be more easily followed. He intended to be cautious in the days ahead. He would guard his property as might be necessary. He would stay away from the gold vein and out of the river until his concerns had passed and he felt more comfortable. He had always felt safe living in this location. He hoped that this feeling would continue in the future.

As he arrived home, Avery was distressed to find the door to the cabin wide open. It appeared that someone had been there during his absence. Carefully, Avery entered the building and finding no one, he quickly scanned the interior. He was surprised to find nothing amiss. His loaded weapons were still in their designated places. He checked the four hiding spots and found that his gold was still stashed and undisturbed. He now wondered if he had perhaps neglected to close the door when he had left for the river earlier in the afternoon. That would have been out of character for him. He doubted that he had, especially not in this cold weather. Unfortunately, he really could not be certain. This event concerned him and affirmed his belief that he needed to remain vigilant. He was determined to do so.

Two days later with no incidents having occurred and still not seeing any strangers near the property, Avery decided to venture back to the river to pan handle. He was anxious to concentrate on his work and to relax his troubled mind. However, upon returning to the cabin that evening, he unexpectedly encountered two of his Indian friends in the woods. Avery was pleased to see them, and he gestured hello with his right hand. The Indians gestured in return. Their demeanor was friendly as usual, but their bodies appeared tense, and their faces contained expressions of apprehension. Something appeared to be wrong.

"Yesterday. We see man at house. He open door. He see us. He run to woods," said one of the Indians. This was the same brave who had suffered the ankle injury years ago.

Avery nodding his head in understanding, immediately feeling the same apprehension as his visitors. He was relieved to know that it was not he who had left the cabin door open, but he was distressed to learn that somebody else had attempted to enter his home. Avery surmised that this stranger would quite likely attempt to break into the cabin again.

"He come back," said the Indian. "Four men. We see by river. Two hold long guns. All have small guns." The brave motioned toward his hips as he spoke. "Bad men," he said in a foreboding tone. "Bad men. Much trouble."

"Thanks for the warning," said Avery stoically, acknowledging the information. "I guess I'd better head home and get ready for company." He tried to hide his concern as he spoke, but it was difficult for him to do this. He was already feeling very anxious.

"Go home," agreed the Indian. "Stay in house. We hide outside. We help you."

"I'd be much obliged," replied Avery gratefully. "I can really use your help. Thanks."

The other brave loudly whistled a signal. Apparently, there were other Indians in the area. Avery and the two braves walked together until they reached the cabin. Immediately upon arriving there, Avery climbed into the corral and led the horse and the mule into the small barn for safety. Once the animals were inside, he closed the door and fastened it securely. Hopefully, if gunfire was to erupt, no stray bullets would penetrate the walls of the barn. Avery dreaded the probable consequences should that happen.

As Avery left the barn and its adjacent corral, he noticed that three additional Indians had joined their tribesmen in the yard. Avery was familiar with these men, too. After a short meeting, a strategy was decided whereby Avery would defend the cabin from inside the building. He would take position with his handguns behind the cabin window. He would also have his shotgun with him, and he would be prepared to blast anyone attempting to enter through the front door. The five Indians dispersed throughout the yard and assumed positions in the adjacent trees and underbrush. Avery had noticed that none of them was equipped with a rifle. Nevertheless, they were all armed with a stringed bow and carried a supply of arrows in a quiver. Although the antagonists were said to be well armed, Avery believed that this group of six defenders would be more than a match for them. He was not anxious for a fight, but he was confident that they were as prepared as could be under these unexpected circumstances.

It was early evening when the four outlaws arrived at the cabin, quietly stepping out of the trees behind the building and moving into the yard. Since there were no doors or windows on the back of the building, they moved to the front of the structure. They surveyed the area quickly and believing that they were alone, they prepared to begin their assault. They moved their guns into ready position.

"Hey, you inside," shouted the leader, the man who had previously seen Avery in the bank. "Come out with your hands up, old man. Bring your gold. Do what we tell ya and ya won't get hurt. Don't make no trouble for yourself."

Avery carefully peeked through the open window. It contained no glass. It was covered by closed wooden shutters. There was a small seam between the shutters which enabled him to see his adversaries without being seen by them. Avery vaguely remembered seeing the speaker in town a few days earlier. He recognized the grey Stetson and the dark clothes. Had the man been in the bank? The general store? Avery could not recall for certain.

"Looks like I've already got me some trouble," shouted Avery in response. "I ain't goin' nowhere. Y'all need to leave. Just go! We can forget this ever happened."

The speaker did not reply. Instead, the four outlaws aimed their weapons at the cabin window and commenced to fire. Eight or ten bullets pummeled the wooden shutters, damaging them considerably. Avery ducked his head to protect himself. He was unnerved by the barrage.

As soon as the gunfire stopped, Avery pointed his handgun through the shutter seam and fired a single shot in return. The bullet whistled past the speaker's head, missing by mere inches.

"That was my warning shot," hollered Avery. "The next one goes between your eyes. Go away! Now! This is your last warning."

Avery watched as the speaker motioned angrily to one of his colleagues. This man had a bundle of rags wound tightly around a wooden stick. These rags had been soaked in kerosene or some other flammable substance. The man, wearing a leather glove on one hand, proceeded to light the rags with his cigarette. He was obviously intending to start the cabin on fire. If the cabin began to burn, Avery would have no option except to vacate the structure quickly. The only exit was the front door. He was certain that he would be shot and killed as soon as he left the building. The outlaws apparently intended to retrieve the gold from the ruins once the fire had burned itself out.

The outlaw lifted the stick containing the burning rags with his gloved hand, intent on throwing it onto the wooden roof of the cabin. As his arm reached behind his shoulder to begin this throwing motion, the sound of an arrow could be heard whizzing through the air. The man screamed in pain as the arrow entered the back of his right leg above the knee, directly behind the thigh muscle. The wound was deep. The man screamed in pain and inadvertently dropped the rags, setting his pants on fire. The man yelled in terror as he rolled on the ground in a vain attempt to smother the flame. Soon all his clothes were burning. Simultaneously, additional arrows began to fly through the yard from all directions, hitting the other three outlaws and dropping them to the ground. No further shots from Avery's gun were necessary. The ambush was over within seconds as two outlaws lay dead on the ground with the two others significantly wounded. One of the deceased was the stranger with the grey Stetson. As Avery exited the cabin, he was amazed at how quickly the outlaws had been defeated as well as by the carnage now on the ground. His Indian friends had saved his life, his home and his possessions. His gold remained safely hidden inside the cabin. He already felt tremendously indebted to them.

While Avery guarded the two wounded men, the Indian braves retrieved the outlaws' horses from the riverbank where they had been strategically positioned. The two deceased outlaws were tied onto the backs of their horses. The charred, naked body of the burned man was covered with a blanket. The two wounded men were helped onto their horses where their hands were tied to their saddles and their feet were tied to their stirrups. Avery gratefully thanked the Indians for their help. The braves were pleased to have been able to assist their friend. As the Indians left the property on foot headed for home, Avery mounted his horse and accompanied the outlaws back to town. Upon arriving at the sheriff's office just before dusk, Avery met with the sheriff and reported in detail what had transpired earlier that evening. The bodies of the two dead outlaws were taken to the town cemetery where they would be buried early the next day. The two surviving outlaws were treated by the town doctor for their wounds before being transferred to the town jail. They would be tried for their crime when the circuit court judge next came to town. Avery would be required to testify in court. There was little doubt that the two men would be found guilty and subsequently sentenced to the territorial prison in Canon City. Avery looked forward to getting this entire matter behind him. He was anxious to return to his simple, normal life.

In speaking with the sheriff, Avery convinced the lawman that he was a relatively poor man who had accumulated a few gold pebbles while panhandling in the river. He stated that the amount of gold in his possession was not nearly enough to warrant anybody stealing it. The idea was ridiculous. There definitely was not enough gold for anybody to risk his life trying to take it. Weeks later, Avery gave this same testimony to the circuit court judge. The two surviving outlaws were found guilty and sentenced to ten years in prison. Avery expected no further trouble. By this time, the local opinion was that Avery was an eccentric hermit who was best left alone. Although it was believed that he had little of value on his property, the consensus was that he was willing and capable of protecting what little he had. He also had a powerful ally in the local Indian tribe. Except for acquiring two dogs to assist him in guarding his property, Avery soon returned to his simple life as a self-reliant, hardworking and honest man. Meanwhile, his private stash of gold continued to slowly grow. He honestly did not know if he would ever need it. He did know that it was rightfully his and he did not expect to be spending much of it anytime soon.

The Kingdom Ranch
by Tom Hale

In the beginning there was Duncan Campbell, a hard Scotsman with nothing but his energy and brains to get him by. He used both to form The Kingdom Ranch, which he built up from a livery that rented horses out into the biggest cattle ranch in all of Southwest Texas. This story isn't about how Duncan built his Kingdom, though. It's about how he lost it.

Now, Duncan had three top hands, in addition to his son: Woodrow McAlister, John MacDuff, and Ben Abernathy. McAlister and Abernathy were thick as thieves, life long friends, while MacDuff and Matthew were close with each other.

Duncan had a big house for himself and Matthew. Abernathy was a bachelor, and bunked with the other bachelors in a long bunkhouse, there were maybe six or seven men in that house. McAlister and MacDuff were both married men, though McAlister and his wife Lisa had never been able to have kids. MacDuff, though, had two sons, one just a baby when this tale picks up, and the other around ten or so.

There was a stampede one night, happens every so often. Duncan was at his house, by now the old man did not spend his evenings in the field with the cows but let the younger hands do that, he had hired them for a reason, after all. McAlister and Abernathy were out that night, giving a watchful eye on the herd and making sure the younger men stayed out of trouble.

It was just one of these young cowboys that McAlister sent back to the house to report that all was well, that McAlister and Abernathy had been able to turn the herd and get them back under control. McAlister had sent the young man ahead so he and Abernathy could try to determine what had spooked the herd, though they both knew it could have been just about anything and there really was no telling with cows. Duncan and Matthew were waiting on the porch when the cowboy rode up, they were light sleepers and the stampede had woken them up.

"What's the word, son?" Duncan asked as the young man reached the porch.

"Stampede, sir," he said. "McAlister and Abernathy got 'em turned and down, but they're lookin' now to see what spooked 'em. They're comin' in to let you know what they find, but wanted me to come on and let you know everything's fine."

"Well, the cows do get restless during branding season," Duncan said. He turned to Matthew. "McAlister's a good man, Matthew. You'll be wise to keep him on, once the Kingdom is yours."

"I know that," Matthew said. "Him and Abernathy, both. And MacDuff. I'm no fool to let good men leave if I can keep 'em."

McAlister and Abernathy were riding to the ranch house at that very moment to fill Duncan and Matthew in on the stampede. Near as they could tell, a rattlesnake had gotten in among the herd and got everything riled up, getting trampled for his troubles. Still, no worry about rustlers starting the stampede, so that was good.

"A lousy way to spend a night," McAlister said to Abernathy. "Although I don't know that spending it in the saddle is any worse than sleeping on the ground, for my back, that is." He sat up straight and stretched.

"You're just sore you had to sleep with the herd at all, you're getting soft in your old age," Abernathy said. The two men smiled, McAlister shaking his head at his friend's words.

"You have got some sass, don't you," McAlister said.

"Ay, and I let you have it when you deserve it. Oh, what's this?" He pulled up on his reins and McAlister did the same. They had turned a corner on the path right into a trio of old women, standing around a fire just off the path, they looked like they were roasting a rabbit or some other small animal. Lightning had begun to spark in the sky over them, though there had been no hint of a storm just a moment before. A chill ran down the spines of both men, hardened as they were by a life of action and violence. Something about seeing three old women out here where they had no business was more unnerving than running into a party of Comanche on the war path. They were talking to each other, with no interest in McAlister or Abernathy.

"Where have you been, Sister?" asked the first old woman.

"Killing swine," said the second woman.

"And what of you, where have you been?" a third sister asked of the first.

"A sailor's wife was in Galveston had a basket of pecans in her lap and was munching and munching. 'Let me have some,' I said to her. 'Be gone, old crone,' she said to me! Her husband, aye, has sailed off for a land of sugar cane, and shall be gone long."

"I'll supply a strong wind to blow his ship around," the second witch said.

"I thank thee," said the first witch.

"And I as well," said the third witch. "That will show that nasty woman to be selfish with her pecans."

"Ah, McAlister approaches," said the first witch, having at last noticed the two men riding towards them.

"Ho, who's this?" Abernathy asked the crones. "It's been years since any Comanche medicine women were around here, and here you're all out on a night like this?"

"If you can speak English, tell us, who you are," added McAlister.

"Ah, McAlister, old Duncan's chief," cried the first witch.

"McAlister, the boss of Kingdom Ranch," cried the second witch. Their companion spun their meat on a spit over the fire, now and then looking up at McAlister and smiling. Her silence was more unnerving than her companions.

"Y'hear that, McAlister? Duncan's Chief! Now, that's good news if ever I heard it," Abernathy said, laughing at the prophecy.

"And Abernathy," said the first witch, turning her attention away from McAlister. "Lesser than McAlister, but, then, greater."

"Not so happy, but much happier," said the second witch.

"Aye, your sons will be Boss of the Kingdom Ranch, although you will not," said the third witch.

"McAlister and Abernathy!" said all three witches in unison. Lighting cracked across the sky, though no rain fell.

McAlister looked at his friend. "See how you like it? Now you know why I didn't smile when they made my prediction." He turned to the witches. "But you're wrong. I'm not the head foreman here, just another hand, though I'm older than the young rascals we got riding for us. And as for owning the ranch someday, that'll go to Duncan's son Matthew, and that's as it should be."

Just then a lightning bolt split the night, striking the spot where the old Comanche witches were standing. McAlister and Abernathy were both blinded, and when they could see again the three old women were gone. Their fire remained, and the meat roasting over it. McAlister looked at it and decided he did not want to know if it was rabbit or not.

The two men looked at each other. "Let's just keep this to ourselves," McAlister said.

"No problem from me, partner," said Abernathy.

They continued their ride back to the ranch house in silence, both feeling a cold hand on their chest but neither wanting to admit it. Duncan and Matthew were on the front porch waiting for them, the young cowboy messenger having been sent to wash up before breakfast. The sun was still hours away but the day started early at the Kingdom Ranch. Duncan rose from his rocking chair to greet McAlister and Abernathy. He had a smile on his face, which McAlister thought odd, considering the stampede they had just seen.

"Hail, McAlister! My new head foreman," said Duncan, waving his blue bandanna like a Roman victory laurel. Being called 'head foreman' put McAlister and Abernathy both in mind of the three witches and their prophecy. They exchanged glances but did not mention their frightful experience. McAlister dismounted his horse and tied it to the hitching post, Abernathy did the same.

"What's all this about head foreman?" McAlister asked. He shook Duncan's hand then Matthew's. "I never heard the Kingdom having a head foreman, just you telling us old salts what to do."

"Well, that may have been how we done it in the past," Duncan said, "but we can always change. And I think giving my best man a promotion, of sorts, is smart business. You're important to us, McAlister, me and Matthew both."

Now McAlister, even before he was given the title of head foreman, had enjoyed the benefits of his status among the men of the Kingdom and had a little cottage of his own, set back behind the main house the Campbells lived in. Nothing fancy, just a kitchen and a bedroom, but it was plenty for McAlister and his wife Lisa. They had loved each other fierce when they were younger, but had never had children of their own and now their marriage was more of a partnership than a love affair. Still, if they were partners in life then they were the closest of partners there could be, and McAlister never let a decision or problem go by without seeking Lisa's advice.

"Three witches? What are you and Ben drinking out there branding all those cows?" Lisa asked. "You need to get some sleep."

"No, listen," McAlister said. "Me and Ben wasn't drinking, you know Duncan won't abide alcohol out there on work. It was three old women, Comanche witches I guess, though I know there haven't been wild Comanches around here in ages. But they said I'd be head foreman, even though Duncan's never had a head foreman, he's always been sort of the head foreman himself. Well, now look, and I'm head foreman."

Lisa stared out the window at the Campbell house. The cottage may have been good enough for McAlister, but she had stared out that window and seen the back of the Campbells's big house for too many years to be content with just a kitchen and bedroom. And not even their own house, Duncan could kick them out any day he took a mind, though she knew the kindly old man would never do that.

Still, Duncan would not be around forever, and there was no telling what that son of his had planned for when he took over the Kingdom. Lisa had come West with a drunk for a father and a mouse for a mother. The mouse died first, the drunk not much later, and she was alone until Woodrow McAlister rode into town with Duncan's cowboys. The town was Laredo, McAlister had taken her from it, and she had no intention of ever going back.

Her mind moved sharp, and it moved fast. She whirled to catch McAlister before he collapsed into their bed.

"You can own the Kingdom, Wood," she said. "You're a better man than Matthew, the men like you, not him. Duncan won't be around forever, at his age."

McAlister sat down onto their bed and stared at her. He had just managed to get his boots off and was not in the mood for any kind of foolishness.

"Matthew'll get the Kingdom, you bet," he said. "What am I gonna do, get the old man to adopt me? Work my way into his will?"

"You don't have to work your way into the will," she said. She was moving now, beyond anyplace McAlister could go alone. She loved her man but he was simple. "We're way out here, the closest town is El Paso, and that's three days' ride. If the old man dies, you can just tell everyone he left you the Kingdom. By the time the law gets wind, it'll be too late, everyone will have just accepted you, and Matthew would be left out."

"Ok, so, let me get this straight," McAlister said. "Duncan dies. Somehow, I find out before anyone else, and just tell everyone he left me the Kingdom? How would I know before his own son?"

"Because," she said, "you're going to kill him. Tonight, before anyone wakes up. You'll kill him in his bed, in his sleep. A knife, a quick slice across the throat, easy as slaughtering a lamb. Quicky and he won't feel a thing, he'll just go. But you have to do it tonight.

"Put your boots back on, go over there. The lights are out, I can see from the window here. Matthew's in bed. Kill Duncan, come back, then tomorrow morning he'll be found. Matthew's the only other one in that house, everyone will think he killed his pa just to get a jump-start on the inheritance. You make your claim, and I just know the men will side with you."

McAlister did not want to admit that the plan made a certain amount of sense. "I suppose the men do respect me more than they do Matthew," he said. "Ben, for sure, would be on my side." He shoved his foot back into its boot and stood back up. "I can't have you living in this shack forever. Time I did something about it." He sounded like he was telling himself these things, and not talking to his wife. He adjusted his suspenders, put on his hat, and headed out their door towards the big house.

McAlister woke up in bed, screams from the big house dragging him from his sleep. He had hoped that what he had done the night before, only hours ago, had all been a nightmare, but the screams told him otherwise. Lisa was already in the kitchen making their breakfast but came back to the bedroom. He sat on the edge of the bed in his long underwear with his bare feet on the floor. She sat next to him and took his hands into hers.

"He's been found," she said. "Now we have to react as we would normally, with surprise, sadness. But also anger, because that no good son of his killed our good Duncan. That's the way this will work, Woodrow."

McAlister composed himself, shoved down the vomit that threatened to spew his fear and revulsion, and ran to the big house like he did not know that Duncan was lying in his bed, his throat cut from ear to ear with Matthew's own knife. McAlister had found it lying on the dining table when he snuck over just hours before.

The Campbells' maid, Maria, had found Duncan when she checked his bedroom, he had not come for breakfast and she was worried about him. She loved the old man as a father and was worried lately that the ranch was too hard on him. McAlister found her collapsed on the floor outside Duncan's chambers.

"Maria, Maria, what's wrong?" he asked, sick that he knew the answer.

"Señor Duncan, he is dead!" she wailed. "Someone has cut his throat, Señor McAlister, I found him just now!"

McAlister went into the bedroom, knowing what he would find. There lay Duncan Campbell, the greatest man in this part of Texas, his throat cut in his own bed. Blood stained his sheets a dark rust color. McAlister could not control himself and shoved his fist into his own mouth to stifle his cries. Luckily Maria interpreted this as a natural reaction to finding their beloved benefactor dead.

"Where's Matthew?"

"I don't know, Señor McAlister," Maria said. "He came in when I screamed and saw his father like this," she said, fighting to keep her composure, "then he ran outside, I don't know where he ran to."

This was music to McAlister's ears. Their plan had been to frame Matthew for his father's murder, and by running like he did he only helped make their case.

"Maria, this is Matthew's knife," McAlister said.

"Are you sure?"

"I'd recognize it anywhere, as big as it is. A Bowie knife, that is, Maria. It's not for shaving calluses off your big toe, that's for sure." He ran to the big bay window at the front of the house, looking for signs of Matthew. Before he had fought to control his revulsion at his deed, now he fought to control his elation that Matthew had been so foolish as to run when doing so would make him look as guilty as if Maria had seen him slicing Duncan's throat herself.

"I'll have to tell the boys," he said, turning back towards the maid. "They probably heard you scream, same as I did, and will have questions."

He walked out onto the front porch and saw that indeed the men had heard Maria's scream.

"Now, boys," he said, "I've got some bad news. You heard Miss Maria, I reckon, same as I did. I went inside just now to see what the ruckus was, and, boys, I've got bad news." He looked at their faces. A mix of young to old, a few older than he himself. "Mr. Campbell, well, he's dead. Killed, looks like." A general murmur started, shock and disbelief.

"What happened?" asked a voice in the crowd.

"Looks like he got his throat cut," McAlister said. "With this!" He produced the knife that did the deed, that he had used to kill Duncan. He had tossed it onto the bed after but took it this morning to show everyone. "This was on the bed next to him."

"That's Matthew's knife," said another nameless voice.

"Where is Matthew?" Another voice.

"I don't know," McAlister said. "I don't know. John, Ben, can you come inside and we'll talk about what to do?" MacDuff and Abernathy stepped forward and followed him into the house.

Maria was still inside, she had begun cleaning Duncan's body.

"You gotta admire her devotion to her duties," Abernathy said. McAlister and MacDuff exchanged a glance but did not comment on Maria's devotion, to her work or otherwise.

"Boys, this is bad," McAlister began. "Matthew's knife, Matthew's gone, run off somewhere."

"You don't think he killed his own pa do you," said Abernathy. "I can't believe that."

"Sure looks that way, though," said McAlister. "Why run?"

"Maybe he's scared," said MacDuff. "What reason's he got to kill Duncan? He loved his old man, they didn't quarrel, that I could tell."

"Maybe he wanted the Kingdom before Duncan was ready to give it to him," said McAlister.

MacDuff waved his hand, dismissing the thought. "I don't see it," he said.

"Well," said McAlister, "Matthew running away, even if he weren't the one killed his pa, means no one's here to take charge, at least until the law gets here and sorts it out."

"Could be that's where Matthew ran off to," said MacDuff. "Like as not he thought he was the next man up, so to speak, with his pa dead and all."

"Maybe, maybe not, but he ain't here no how," said McAlister, "and we got a crowd of young boys out there with no one in charge, and that ain't a smart situation, in my mind. Until the law, or Matthew, or whoever, gets back, I think we need someone in charge. And I think that someone oughta be me."

"Why you?" asked MacDuff.

"Well, Duncan already'd made me head foreman, didn't he? Seems like he'd had some measure of trust in my abilities."

Abernathy had not been following the conversation too close, as far as he was concerned either McAlister or MacDuff could be in charge, he had no ambition to that sort of responsibility. But his ear cocked when he heard Mcalister claim that being head foreman made him next in line to be in charge. He looked up at McAlister, who looked back at him. McAlister did not like that Abernathy perked up just then. Was he remembering the witches? Their prophecy? He wanted his friend to lay low, be quiet, and not get in the way.

"I don't know as we need a formal proclamation," said MacDuff.

"Well, I guess we don't need anything formal right now, you're right," agreed McAlister. He decided then that he would have to kill MacDuff, too. He had killed his old and loving benefactor Duncan, he could not let that heinous deed pass in vain, he now knew he had to have the Kingdom Ranch or his murder would have been wasted. Abernathy, too. What's started must be ended, he thought.

"Well, all this talk of who's in charge has got me sore hungry," said Abernathy. "Reckon Cookie is in the mood to get breakfast going?"

"Yeah, and the boys will be needing something to do to keep them from dwelling on Duncan too much," said MacDuff. "Best rouse Cook and see what we can get. Make something special, maybe."

"For Duncan's memory, I like that," said McAlister. "Go on, Ben, and get Cookie started on that." McAlister suddenly had an urge to have the last word, to be issuing the commands. Abernathy and MacDuff both left and McAlister watched them before heading back to see Lisa.

McAlister walked into the kitchen from the yard between their house and the Campbells. Lisa had left her breakfast plate on the counter next to the wash tub. It was unlike her but he decided most of what they had done the last twelve hours had also been our of the ordinary. He set his hat down on the dining table and walked into their bedroom.

There Lisa lay, on the bed they had shared for their entire marriage, as dead as that old man in the big house. Her skin was pale as chalk but that only made her black coal hair even darker. Blood had pooled on their bed by her wrists, he could see where she had cut herself. He stood and stared, rushing to her side would do no good. He looked for a note but he had an idea why she had done what she done. His own guilt was eating him alive, too, but he would not give into it like she had.

There was a knock at the door and he heard it open. He closed the bedroom door quickly so Lisa would not be discovered. He did not know what he planned to do about her but he knew he could not let anyone else find her.

Ben Abernathy stood in their kitchen, leaning against the counter with his hat tipped back.

"Ben," was all McAlister said.

"Wood, what's happening?" Abernathy sighed, blowing out breath that he may as well been holding since Maria's scream pierced their morning quiet.

"Well, Matthew Campbell's killed his pa, Ben," said McAlister. He tried to keep his voice steady and was worried to find that he had no trouble doing so.

"You sure it was Matthew? Why would he do that, Duncan'd already told everybody he was to take over the ranch someday."

"What better reason, then, Ben, don't you see? He wanted it now, not someday, but right now."

"Then why ride off? That don't make no sense."

"He probably realized what he'd done and hightailed it out of here, he's probably somewhere across the Rio Grande right now with a patch of burned earth behind him where he was riding."

Abernathy sighed. "Wood, you're sure you didn't have anything to do with this?"

"I don't know what you mean by that, Ben, but you rest assured our years of friendship ain't earned you enough credit to go accusing me of murdering Duncan Campbell."

"Wood, those Comanche witches, they were right weren't they? They said you'd be the head foreman, then Duncan made you head foreman when he'd never even had such a position before."

"And now I'm owner of the Kingdom, is that what you mean to get to? And you're thinkin' about them sayin' you'd end up even greater than me." McAlister shifted his stance, standing away from the bedroom door frame that he had been leaning on.

"No I ain't. Just, it's a little odd is all I mean to say," were the last words Ben Abernathy ever spoke. No soon had he said them then McAlister whipped his pistol out of its holster and fired a round into Abernathy's heart. Abernathy stumbled back, looked down at the blood spreading across the front of his shirt, and fell down into a dining room chair. Now sitting, he looked up at McAlister and opened his mouth, but no words came. He slid down and fell onto the floor, the second friend McAlister had killed in the last twelve hours.

A commotion was building outside, he could hear horses galloping and men shouting in the court yard. He holstered his pistol and went out to see what was going on.

The commotion consisted of MacDuff, Matthew Campbell, Sheriff Reynolds and a passle of his deputies, and the rest of the Kingdom Ranch cowboys. Campbell was talking to the younger men while MacDuff conferred with the Sheriff. When McAlister stepped into the courtyard MacDuff stopped talking to Reynolds and stared hard at McAlister.

"What's all this?" McAlister asked the crowd. "Sheriff Reynolds, I assume you're here to arrest Matthew Campbell for the murder of Duncan Cambpell!"

MacDuff stepped close to McAlister so the two could talk without the crowd interfering. "Campbell got the Sheriff, Wood. It's over." McAlister did not fail to notice MacDuff caressing his pistol, his fingers lightly brushing its grip. He was thankful his own sidearm was already loose.

"How'd he get him so quick? County seat is a day's ride at least. Seems the Sheriff may be in on this, you think of that?"

"He cabled him from the house telegraph, had him start this way and met him halfway."

McAlister did not know the Campbells had their own telegraph machine, he had never been interested in any news that was further than the borders of the Kingdom Ranch.

"Where's Ben?" MacDuff asked.

"Ben? Why, how should I know? Maybe he run off when he saw the Sheriff, maybe he did Duncan."

"We all heard a gunshot, Wood, from your house. Where's Lisa, is she alright?"

"Lisa's fine, don't worry about Lisa," McAlister said sharply. He did not like MacDuff sticking his nose into his own marital business.

"Ben didn't run to the Sheriff, Woodrow, and I think you know it," said MacDuff.

"Why would I know what Ben Abernathy does? The man's always been a fool."

"I think you know because you killed him. You shot Ben and you cut Duncan's neck and for all I know you killed Lisa, and it's got to end, Wood," said MacDuff. The Sheriff dismounted and began walking towards them. "Let's just get this all straightened out, Woodrow. Do the right thing."

"You don't tell me what's right," said McAlister as he reached for his pistol. MacDuff was faster, though, and his own shot rang out before McAlister could clear his holster. He stumbled backwards then fell down, his eyes staring up at heaven.

MacDuff and the Sheriff stood over him to make sure he was dead. "He was your friend, weren't he?" the Sheriff asked.

"He was, him and Abernathy, the three of us. I don't know what got into him, but it's over now I guess." He looked back at the ranch hands. Matthew Campbell was with them, reassuring them that the violence was over. "I best we better get these folks in the ground. It's branding season, you know. Them cows don't care what's been going on here today."

The Map
by Dana L. Green

"Give it to me," he said.

"I don't have it," I said.

"I'm not going to ask a second time," he said. He pressed his cocked pistol against my belly.

"Did you wash your bullets?" I asked.

"What?"

"I don't want to get an infection."

"You're loco? Mount up, we got a day's ride ahead of us."

After a six-hour dusty ride, we hitched our horses to the well at an empty depot. We found no horses in the stable, no food in the depot pantry only some dead spiders. It appeared as if no one had been near the depot for a couple of weeks. The dust and sand covered the depot main building, outhouses and corral making it spooky and uncomfortable. The depot has been a major transfer stop for feeding passengers and supplying fresh horses for the stagecoaches for nearly a decade. Tom and Betty Harris along with their twin boys, Clint and Benjamin, have been full time operators of the depot for the past six years. They had weathered sandstorms and Indian raids and bandits with the help of the Calvary. They had grit. Nothing could have run them off. Where had they gone?

I was forced to make the trail ride without boots. The stirrups were like pitch forks to the soles of my feet. My feet and hands were battered and bruised. I thanked God that my bloodied wrists were finally free of the spiked shackles. I did not want to make him aware of my pain. Standing up during the ride did relieve my saddle sores. The brim of my stetson was stained with the day's sweat and my shirt's backside felt the same. All I wanted was to get my boots back on and wash the trail dust off my face and water my parched tongue and blistered lips. I was getting itchy and wanted to get the hell out of here as soon as I could. I had developed a belly full of hate for my hateful bounty hunter. This bastard was born to be hanged. No hanging was too good for him.

Jack apparently weathered the day's ride and was drinking spring water from a bucket under the shade tree of Sagebrush Depot. Jack still mounted with dad's saddle. Within the saddle's secret pouch was my secret. If the bounty hunter got his hands on its contents, I was a dead man. The "Map" was safe and would remain so, just as long as dad's saddle was not removed from Jack's blanket and mount. I watched closely. He left my double saddle bags and boots untouched. I had a loaded six shooter in my right bag pouch. I needed to find a way to get Jack close enough to mount and ride. Believe me I would ride Jack with no looking back. Trust me I would get away.

"I need to go to the privy," I said. It was located just off the stagecoach depot kitchen doorway and in plain sight of the bounty hunter.

"Sure, just keep the door ajar."

"No privacy in the privy?"

"I got to keep my eyes on you."

The difference between feeling you're in a clean privy and a dirty one is the depth. This one was a good four-foot drop from the wooden seat to the bottom of its 'catch'. The catch was empty. No use for quite awhile.

What 'the killer' wanted was dad's map of the Sunset Ridge gold mine. I was not giving him what was mine and my mother's inheritance. Dad had worked "The Ridge" for nearly eight years before he found the vein. The strike would cover our ranch purchase once we got to the coast of California. There is nothing worse than a killer bounty hunter. Maybe a greed driven bounty hunter concealing his motives. They're criminals with a dead or alive permit to kill and steal.

Once I got inside the privy, I took a look around. On last month's stage trip, I got Willy to allow me to hide a pocket two shooter in the dirt under a false board. It was there and wrapped in a sock. Clean, loaded and ready.

"We will sleep in the depot tonight."

"What is your plan for tomorrow?" I asked.

"Prisoner, we will ride to Sunset Ridge and pay your mother a visit."

The morning sun was coming up when we mounted up for the two-hour ride to our Sunset Ridge homestead. We encountered no other riders on the trail. I decided to wait to make my play once we reached my home. I would have the help of mom and our hide out. When we got to the homestead, we rode straight into the barn and put the horses in stalls. He told me to "make tracks to the house and keep quiet". I noticed the buckboard and horses were gone. I figured Ma must've gone to town or was at a church function. I hoped she would approach the barn and see my marker in place. I placed the horse pitchfork against the stall door. It would trouble in the house. Get help. Load the barn shotgun and hunker down.

I opened the front door to the kitchen and found the warm coffee and a pan of grits on the stove. A plate of fresh biscuits was on the dinner table. Ma was out of sight. The bounty hunter sat down and started eating. He didn't stop until he finished a belly full of biscuits and grits.

"Ok, where is your Ma?"

"Not sure. I have not been home for nearly two weeks."

"When she shows up, I plan on getting her to give up the map. I want my map."

"Your map?"

"Yes, my damn map."

In less than hour Ma's riderless buckboard came to a stop in front of the barn. The bounty hunter looked outside and said, "Your Ma is a cagey one. You go stand in the doorway. I will have my gun in your backside. Don't try anything foolish."

I knew Ma was outback and she would have the loaded 'Henry' rifle with her. She knew how to use it. What I did not know was that Sheriff Penny was backing her play. Ma had gotten word of the happenings at the Sagebrush Depot from Tom's son, Clint

Clint had come to the depot late last night. He was looking for his folks and his brother, Benjamin. Clint was not aware that the depot had been raided by the Indians and the Calvary had rescued his mom, dad and brother. His family had been staying at Fort Carver for nearly three weeks.

Clint got an earful listening to the greedy bounty hunter as he ran his mouth ranting at me in the main lodge. Clint knew he couldn't help me at the depot. He rode all night so he could get word to Ma and Sheriff Penny and help arrange for my rescue the next day at our homestead in Sunset Ridge.

Sheriff Penny came in view at the right-hand side of the porch. He pointed in the direction of the barn indicating Ma's position. I slipped my hand into my shirt and gripped my palm gun; I saw the bounty hunter turn to shoot the approaching Sheriff at the end of our porch. I curled my hand around my left side and fired a shot into the bounty hunter's chest. He slumped to the floor.

After washing up and getting some of Ma's home cooking down, Sheriff Penny, Clint and I tied the bounty hunter on his horse for a final ride. I asked Sheriff Penny to see to it that the undertaker buried him three feet down. He asked why three feet instead of six. I told him I wanted the snakes to eat his retched dead body. I wanted him in hell by sundown.

Before the Sheriff rode off, he assured Ma and me that dad's gold strike was safely recorded at the Assay Office. The Map was in dad's saddle pouch. Our inheritance was secure. Three months later we arrived in Sacramento and purchased our ranch.

The Letter
by W.Wm. Mee

Late Spring: 1774 'The High Country',
west of Fort George on Lake Superior.

Dobson Tanner looked up from stirring the kettle at the strangers that had just arrived at the Hudson Bay Company's base camp. The form standing before him in the early morning light looked more wolf than man, especially since he was wearing the head of one for a hat. Ranging close behind him were three likewise creatures; all fierce eyed, grim faced, dressed in furs and bristling with weapons. Dobson glanced at his musket leaning against a tree on the other side of the fire and thought: 'Hell, it might as well be on the far side of the moon!'

"Hey, Cookie, where's boss-man Thompson at?!" the large wolfman demanded. His English was good, but the French accent was still there.

Dobson looked over at young Billy Simms, one of several guards Captain Thompson had posted to protect the camp from 'uninvited guests'. He sighed and turned back to the big man looming over him. "He's around somewhere. Who wants to know?"

The big wolfman bared his teeth and glanced at his pack just behind him. "Hear that, mes amis? Cookie here wants to know who I am?! Shall I tell the ignorant fool?!"

Without waiting for an answer, the large man thumped his massive chest. "I am Gaston Etienne LaBlanc! The biggest, meanest, toughest 'voyageur' in all Canada! I can drink more, fight longer and paddle further than any three men combined! I can also outdance, outsing and outshoot any other sonovabitch alive or dead!"

"Mighty interesting, friend," Dobson said with a grin. "But it seems to me that you forgot a couple of 'out-do's'.

"Qui? And what would they be, mon ami?!" the wolfman demanded.

Dobson's grin widened. "Out-talk and out-brag."

The charged silence stretched out between them as the snow continued to swirl about the camp. Young Billy Simms and several other trappers slowly moved up behind Dobson and suddenly it seemed that there were two packs of wolves glaring at each other across the wind blown fire.

"What's this then?!" a loud voice called out. "Dobson, what the Christ's going on here? Who the hell are these men?!

Dobson kept his eyes on the wolfman. "Not quite sure, Capt'n. Billy here brought them in—sort of. This big fella and me were just getting acquainted."

Captain Malachi Thompson stepped forward. Slightly less than average size, what Thompson lacked in stature he more than made up for with personality, temper and panache! Living in the High Country for over twenty years, he had taken a native wife and partially adopted her people's dress and manner. Until he opened his mouth, most mistook him for a Native.

"So, mister, suppose you tell me who the hell you are and what you bloody well want here in my camp?!"

The big man swathed in wolfskins dug inside a greasy shooting bag and produced an equally greasy letter. "That there is from one o' yer bossmen back in Montreal. It says that me n' my boys are now on the payroll!"

Thompson took the letter and stuffed it down the front of his once-white blanket-coat, to be read later in his tent when he had his glasses and better light. "On the payroll for what? Wolf hunters? 'Cause you sure as shit aint trappers!"

"No, mon ami, we are not! This country is cold enough without standing in an icy stream freezing my balls off setting traps! My friends and I are 'voyageurs'! We bring the supplies poor fools like you need to live through the cold winter! We then rest up, drink a little and then we take your furs back to Montreal, where we find a woman and stay warm and drunk till the spring thaw. Then , mon ami, we start all over again!"

Captain Thompson glanced over at Dobson and young Billy, saw they were both armed, then turned to face the big man dressed in wolfskins. "So, what the hell are you doing here?! Shouldn't you still be warm and drunk back in Montreal?

The big man's face stretched into something that might have been a grin. "Ahhhh, as your Shakespeare once said, 'There's the bloody rub'!"

Thompson's hand went to the large bore pistol thrust into the sash of his blanket coat. "Now just what the hell does that mean?!"

The big man's 'sort of smile' stretched even wider. Dobson, being a man who enjoys books more than brothels, answered the captain's question. "It's a quote from 'Hamlet'. It means 'there's the problem'."

"Then why the hell didn't he say that?!" Thompson growled. "And who the hell is this 'Hamlet' bastard?!"

"He's a character in a play," Dobson said.

"A 'character in a play'?" the captain repeated, his hand now firmly on the butt of his pistol. "Seems to me we got ourselves a real, live 'character' right here! All gussied out in wolfskins with a pack of rabid looking mongrels at his heel! Says he's a 'famous voyageur' but I don't see no goddamned big freight canoe out here in the woods!" The pistol came out of the sash and, though not yet cocked, was still a very tangible menace. The half dozen men behind the wolfman growled under their breath and reached for their own weapons.

"Hold on there just a damned minute!" Dodson said, stepping between the two men with his hands up and empty. "There's no need for hostilities here. Let's look at the damned letter and take things from there!"

Wolfman and the captain continued to glare at each other, but after several tense moments, Thompson saw the wisdom in Dobson's words and handed him the letter.

"Alright Dobson, we'll see what Frenchie here's letter has to say. But your eyes are better n' mine, so read the damn thing out loud! I'll just hold on to my pistol till you're done."

Dobson broke the plain blob of red wax that sealed the letter, opened it and held it up to catch the weak sunlight filtering through the swirling snow.

'To Captain Malachi Thompson:

March 5th, 1774, Montreal

This here letter is to introduce Etienne LaBlanc & his group.

They are experienced voyageurs hired by the HBC to escort this year's shipment of furs back to Montreal. Kindly hand all furs over to them immediately & they will bring them safely back here to Montreal. You can trust LaBlanc for he is a man of his word.

Director General.

Alexander MacTavish

Dobson shrugged and handed the letter back to Thompson, "Seems kind o' strange to me, cap'n, but there it is. Looks like LaBlanc here is tellin' the truth."

"Mais oui, mon ami!" the grinning wolfman beamed."As the letter says, you can trust Etienne LaBlanc! So, captain, if you will tell your men to prepare the furs, my men and I will take them back to our canoe."

"Not so goddamned fast, LaBlanc!", Thompson said, cocking his pistol and pointing it directly at the big man. "I've known the Director General for years and this is not his signature. Also there is no HBC seal on the letter to make it official, so I'm not giving you a bloody thing!"

He then told Dobson and the others to draw their weapons, disarm LaBlanc and his three men and send them on their way. LaBlanc, with Thompson's large bore pistol pointed at his belly, could do little but stand and glare as Dobson and the others did as they were told.

"You are making a big mistake, captain," LaBlanc growled.

"It's you, LaBlanc, that made the mistake," Thompson replied as the weapons were piled up on the ground. "Alex MacTavish and I have been writing each other for years. I know his handwriting when I see it, and that aint it."

LaBlanc shrugged and showed something close to a smile. "Well, captain, it was worth a try, no? It has worked before with others, but you were just too smart for us."

"Sounds like a confession to me, LaBlank," Thompson grinned back. "What do you say, Dobson? Should we hang these bastards and be done with it?!"

"I think you should shoot him, cap'n," Dobson replied. "Then send the others on their way. Let them spread the word not to trifle with the HBC."

Thompson barked out a laugh. "You hear that, LaBlanc? And Dobson here is a real 'educated man'— just like you claim to be. He reads books; knows who the hell Hamlet is. If he says that I should shoot you, I'm inclined to go along with him!"

LaBlanc's fake 'smile' twisted into something less pleasant. "Now that would be a serious mistake, captain."

"Oh?" Thompson inquired. "And why is that?"

"Because, 'mon ami', the dozen men I have hidden in the woods would open fire on you."

Thompson frowned and he raised his pistol and pointed it at LaBlanc's head. "I say you're bluffing— but even if you aren't, you'll still be dead."

The big man suddenly stepped forward and to the right, knocking Thompson's pistol aside with his left hand. The weapon discharged and the ball flew well wide of its intended mark. LaBlanc then pivoted left and slammed his massive right fist into Thompson's left ear, dropping the smaller man like a sack of potatoes.

"Down!" the wolfman then bellowed, dropping to the ground. Two of his three men did the same. The slower third one was caught in the tremendous fusillade that exploded from the trees not fifty feet away.

The noise of the dozen muskets going off in a concentrated volley was deafening. Flames from the muzzles lit up the shadows as smoke and lead balls the size of a thumbnail filled the early morning air.

Along with the slower, third member of LaBlanc's group, Captain Thompson, young Billy Simms and six other HBC men in camp were killed outright. The only survivor was Dobson Hobbs who had been hit high in his left shoulder. Luckily the bullet hadn't broken any bone, but Dobson still could die from loss of blood, infection, exposure—or from the wrath of Etienne LaBlanc, who now rose up before him.

After nudging Thompson's dead body with his boot, LaBlanc turned to the only survivor. "Ah, the man who reads Hamlet! The man that suggested that the captain shoot me as an example to others not to—how did you put it? Ah yes—not to 'trifle' with the HBC. How very poetic." LaBlanc then bent down, drew Dobson's own belt knife and brandished it in front of his face. "Well, you see how quickly the worm turns, eh, Monsieur Shakespeare? Now it is your captain and friends that are dead and you are the only one still alive—for now."

He then moved the knife to Dobson's throat. "Perhaps I will kill you with your own blade ? Or perhaps I will just take an ear? Or an eye? Something to remind you of this in the years to come—if, that is, you don't die here of your wounds."

LaBlanc then stood up and tossed the knife on the ground. "I hope, mon ami, that you do not—for I want you to live. I want you to tell everyone you meet that it does not pay to 'trifle' with Etienne LaBlanc!"

The big man then laughed and turned to greet his fellow voyageurs who were moving through the camp taking whatever caught their eye. "Go on, my brothers! Help yourself to whatever you like! But save the drink for later! We have to load the furs and be off downriver for home. I want to be back in Montreal before the rivers start to freeze!"

Before losing consciousness Dobson Hobbs swore to himself that if he somehow managed to live through this, he would one day meet up again with Etienne LaBlanc—and on that day one of them would most certainly die."