The sun fell in a sky succumbing to an orange blaze that threatened impending dark. Across the flat expanse of sand and brush, purple mountains stood rigid and silent, setting the unyielding border between Earth and Providence. In the desolation fled a man on horseback, and chasing close behind was another rider.

The pops from the pursuant's pistol, which had once struck fear in the fleeing man, now became a secondary danger to the condition of his horse—both because the second rider seemed incapable of shooting accurately from horseback, and because he could feel his old appaloosa crumbling under the strain of their sprint. Each breath became more exhausted. Every step was more unsure. Then the faltering creature ceased altogether. The appaloosa's speckled hide deteriorated into the dust and brush, tossing its rider into the air in a pitiful evocation of Icarus, complete with precipitous meeting between man and earth.

Seeing his foe struck down by Fate herself, the second rider slowed to a prance and then a halt before slipping down from his horse. He approached a few steps, intentionally stomping his boots with each stride to produce a menacing rattle from his spurs. His white Gentleman's Stetson was lowered on his brow as he had seen it worn by more adept lawmen before him. The first man, emerging from the carnage and brushing dirt and briar from the wide black brim of his hat, stared down his pursuer. Though it had been many a year since encountering a challenger, he had experience enough from his days of outlawry to distinguish the confident from the proud, and this man was neither confident nor proud yet seemed mighty set on being both.

The man in the white hat hurled trifle words across the paces separating them that proclaimed the man in the black hat's particularly poor position and warned of the consequences of flight on foot. While his voice feigned bravery and the coolness that only experience or psychopathy delivers, the man in black discerned the slight trembling of the voice and the shivering of the young hairless jaw. In response he offered nothing but a slow nod of his wide-brimmed head and a slight twitch of his mustached lip. The man in white then presented two options: to lay down his weapons and come quietly or face the cold touch of Death. With effort, the man in black refrained from chortling at the rehearsed words. Finally, the man in black spoke. He had been retired for years; his days as a notorious highwayman merely an old song on the wind. A duel with the man in black would bring neither coin nor fame.

His statement was met by the artless assertion from the man in white that the law was the law and bad men must be brought to justice, lifted straight from some dusty law enforcement manual. The man in the black hat stepped forward, treading carefully over the strewn body of the appaloosa. It was as if winds and Earth moved with him for the man in the white hat began to tentatively retreat despite only moments before proclaiming victory for himself. The black-clad man spotted the fear dripping from his adversary's face and felt enraged. He saw the many winding paths of his life all converging here at this moment as clear as day before him, and the prospect that this meridian would involve such a man of weak courage and standing seemed a final lark from God or Fate or Apistotoke or whoever he believed in on that particular day. That old familiar snake began to coil in his stomach and start its unhurried ascent through his ribs and into his chest.

Upon the recognition of determination and hostility boiling within his rival, the man in white was gripped with that old fear. Like a chortling fire, it burned in his gut. Then flames crept up over his eyes and he was suddenly back on the battlefield. Bullets shrieked through the air and cannons ripped up the soil as if Hell was making its long-awaited siege upon the world of men in rhythmic volcanic discharges. He was struggling forward on his stomach while men rushed onward around him. A hand reached out for him, but in a moment the hand was gone. In those days, the man in white had been a man in gray. Amidst figures of night and smoke, his rebel uniform was mottled with the shades of war. Howls that he thought were only borne of the primal beasts of the frontier assaulted his eardrums. He tasted blood and tears, and the tears were his, but the blood was foreign. He was sick, unable to stand, unable to shoot the loaded rifle in his grasp, unable to flee. Only when a bullet finally lodged itself in his shoulder did he find relief. He didn't feel the gunshot that had shattered his collarbone, but he did feel his stomach, alight with a ravenous fire that rendered his limbs inept. Shaking as he held the rifle to his chest, he thought longingly for the cot that would be his world for the many weeks ahead.

Though far from the fields of the war of aggression, he stood again upon battleground, this time of his own creation. The flames still blazed before him, blurring his vision and shaking his limbs. Already, his knees trembled beneath the weight of his body and the impending violence. Paces across the desert, the man in the black trench coat glared from under his wide brim.

Drunkenly zipping under the shade of the hat, a fly had taken interest in the man in black, neglecting the body of the appaloosa only feet away. The man in black didn't dare swat it, knowing all too well the implications of any sudden movements in a standoff such as this, opting instead to fire puffs of air from his protruded bottom lip to shield his face. As the bug dove in close he blinked, then blinked hard again.

He saw a flash of white light—a long-lost memory resurfacing from the smoldering swamp of his mind. A camera on a wooden tripod flashed. The man in the black hat stood proud back then, with a young woman sitting at his right and an infant between them. He looked down at them both—the woman and the child—and felt the warm nuzzle of some furry creature deep within which he had once known and could have named but had been consumed long ago by a far bolder beast. The man remembered smiling down at his wife's glowing face and the wondrous stars that were his baby's eyes. They were the jewel blue of his mother's, not the charred brown of his own.

The man in black had looked up into another pair of eyes; round and set deep within a face swollen from plenty. They belonged to a man with a fattened smile and emaciated mustache. The man in black had smiled at the gentleman with an innocent belief that the character was his own personal Virgil in the world of entertainment and pleasure. The first time he had been dealt a hand of cards and put the bottle to his lips, he had felt a power and purpose beyond anything his sedentary life had offered, which included that delicate emotion which had once fluttered within him.

With another blink, the ghosts had vanished and the man in black was once again just a man with a hat and a trench coat and a loaded six-shooter hanging inches under his hovering fingertips. As the sky darkened, the nocturnal fauna of the desert stirred slowly from their slumbers and announced their return to the world of the living with shrieks and chitters. The cicadas and crickets commenced their ebbing droll, and cool air joined in to conduct the chorus. In the inner ear of the man in black, there was a distant rattle that echoed through the deep caverns of his body.

The man in white's stomach frothed like a pool of thick petroleum, and when he took a feverish gulp, it dropped a lit match down his throat and into his belly. Forth came an inferno that weakened the already tenuous pillars that were his legs and corroded the definite lines and angles of his vision. The world faded into the same pastels and grays that had painted another scene of such mortal fear.

Another flashback of warfare; another sprawling plain. It was the day before his badge had been torn from the front of his shirt. In fact, it was mere seconds before he had lost the honor of wearing that pin of the protectors of the frontier and the free peoples that populated it. With childlike inanity, he had yearned for the glory that the badge embodied. Never had he envisioned the lethal arrows screeching soundlessly through the air. Nor had he expected the loss of the bearded fellow with whom he had been debating the quality of whiskey between Quartzburg and Custer.

There was a spray of blood from the wooden shaft in the bearded man's windpipe. When the horses pulling his wagon reared, he wondered for a moment how their whinnies were capable of echoing so widely across the tallgrass plain. Then his thoughts were captivated by the feathered Indian who had summitted the hill beside him. As the man in white watched an armada of the war-painted men breach the earthen embankment, whooping in harmony with their mounts, the first gunshots cracked the dusty air from his comrades on the wagons before and behind him. A few of the horse-backed assailants fell callously into the thigh-high grass, splattered with crimson liquid identical to that now staining the cloth of the man in white's shirt.

The first cohort of natives pulled back from their direct attack and prowled the hilltop, relying on their winged blades to lay ruin to the remaining five rangers. For the first time, it occurred to the man in white to reach for his six-shooter which he fumbled to remove from its holster, his limbs adopting the structure of running water and the accuracy of a breeze. In the war, he had held, lugged, and fired much less governable weapons, yet faced by the frenzy of the painted riders, he was imbued with the same trepidation he had felt in the mud of the east. The gun bucked in his hand, spitting each bullet into the sand and brittle flora. An arrow whizzed through the corridor left between the roof of the wagon and the side of his head. The second arrow was fired by a stronger arm and steadier bow, but it was only capable of clawing the white Gentleman's Stetson off the man's scalp and casting it down from its lofty perch to the dirt below.

The man in white struggled to slip fresh bullets into the spinning chamber as another arrow thunked into a spoke of the wheel just inches from his booted ankle. His hands were shaking and there was the clatter of the metal falling to the wooden boards beneath his feet. In his mind, he saw the battlefield and felt the rush of fear in his veins as if it'd been injected into the bullet scar on his shoulder. Then the man in white was sprawling backwards, an arrow protruding from his chest like a branch from a trunk. He didn't even feel the impact of his back finding dirt or the arrow tip resting between his ribs. His eyes looked to the Heavens until he became conscious of his dire situation. There was a quick scramble as the man in white nestled his body against the side of the wagon with the misplaced notion that it would offer sanctuary from the attackers. His hand crawled across his chest, feeling the sticky red and the wooden projectile. Into his shirt pocket his fingers dove and heaved out a small square photograph, now stained in the bottom left corner. The man in white scanned the image as he had many a time before in the darker or duller moments of his life, then he clutched it to his chest, his eyes staring off at nothing in particular but consciously avoiding the sight of his grisly wound.

A bestial scream shook him to his feet. Another ranger had fallen just yards away, and a painted figure was standing over the man, clutching him by a tuft of hair with one hand while the other hand pulled a stone blade across the scalp. The man in white clambered back up into the wagon. His mind had gyrated away from any concept of honor or duty and fixated on survival. With a pop of the reins, he and the wagon were rushing away from the portrait of violence. A voice, if not many voices, called out for salvation, but it could not be distinguished whether they were from the dead or the living. A sudden arrow into his tricep was the final strike from the painted men, and then there was nothing but the open grass in all directions.

The man in white would never discover the origins of the fire that consumed the wagon behind him, but soon the wooden structure was engulfed in heat and devilish light. In petrified panic, he too was ignited like a box of tinder. Flames crept up from his belly, coiling around the arrows that bulged from his flesh, and licked across his eyes. Before him, the skyline melted into the horizon, and Heaven and Earth rolled and melded into some fire-governed land.

Now, he was far from tall grass and Indians yet still encumbered by the cowardice and yearning for synthetic respect that had shared joint custody of his soul since he had been given the burden of freedom. He tried to calm the fire that slowly melted his senses, but on it raged. Informed by experience, the man in black detected it all and would have pulled his lips into a devilish smile if only his cracked leather skin were still capable of such a feat. The man in black relished the fear that pervaded the faces of the unsure and the untested, and this man's blazed across the short expanse of sand and shrubs like a lighthouse eye on a distant horizon. But there was something in the man in white's young face that prod him like an itch. This itch diluted the usual seething passion he so often brandished in the moments before bloodshed. There was a softness to the young man buried under artificial ruggedness that he identified as innocence.

Suddenly, he recalled the jewel blue eyes of the woman he had once held in his arms; but in this memory, he held her by the shoulders and away from his own body as he had done with increasing occasion during the waning years of their affiliation. In those days, the round man had immersed the man in black in a lotus jungle of gambling and drinking. Here, he had thrived—not as the family man of his former days but as a nocturnal animal, engaging life in a way some may have considered gratifying but to others was simply reckless hedonism. His wife was of the latter opinion, for she saw clearly what the man in black was still too blind to acknowledge. As the months and years went by, every hand and every sip rendered less and less glory, starving the animal that had grown within him. But when his wife exposed this physical and emotional deviation of his character, the parasite seethed. The only apparent remedy was bigger gulps and bolder wagers, which further stoked and emboldened the beast. There was a time when the woman would throw her body between his and the door and plead for him to remain. Yet with a venomous word and often a strike, he would cast aside the woman he had loved and plunge into the night. When the woman tried to hide away the devilish draughts that had eroded the soul of her husband, she was met with a fury only sobs could quench.

One fateful night, the booze-bolstered man had pushed a tower of coins forward on a hope and two kings and was confronted by a terrible assemblage of five black spades presented by the man beside him. In an instance, the fragile substance of his life was blown asunder, revealing hollowness. For the first time, he saw the desolation of his being, and he was horrified. Yet, the horde of men jeered and laughed in revelry at the demise of man, and his executioner in his revelry gave him a jovial pat on the back. The man in black's sinewy hand towed in the bottle before him and his tongue swept down a final swig. Then, the serpent came alive somewhere deep within and shot up through his chest, its twining body circulating down each leg and pulsing into each arm. When the man with the black hat violently pushed away from the table and shot to his feet, the men cackled all the more loudly. But now the beast commanded authority over his mortal frame, and through his eyes it saw only opportunity for the slain to become executioner.

The man in black turned his back to the table and the lantern-light and gazed into his long shadow bent against the wall. He pulled his floral-printed bandana over his nose. When next he breathed in deeply, it was not his own lungs that ingested the foul wafts of liquor and mud and excrement, but the lungs of the snake. With speed and grace, he spun and bit out at each man with the roaring fire-cracks of his revolver until all six held a bullet of their own deep within their flesh. In another sweeping movement, he filled his pockets with the blood-spotted coins from the table. These same coins he dropped irreverently upon the floor of his house only moments later to the utter revulsion of his wife. He snapped at her to load up what little they had on the wagon out back, but the woman, seeing the snake in all of its splendor for the first time, did not back down. When the man in black coiled and signaled his impending fury with the menacing rhythm of his rattle, she stood all the firmer. The man struck, and the woman searched for an instrument to combat the great beast. With swifter enterprise than Heracles, she lunged first for the chortling lantern on the table, but her counterattack lacked the speed of her venomous husband. The flaming lantern toppled through the air and burst upon the wooden floorboards, casting a dancing light throughout the house. Shadows silently reenacted the terrible scene in epic fashion on the walls, perfectly capturing each moment of attack and resistance, then of domination and tragedy. Finally, even the shadows were consumed by the growing fire that found footing in every corner of the house that had once been a home.

The man in black pulled his hat down low over his charcoal eyes and slithered out of the burning shack and up onto his horse. In the distance, he heard riders approaching, but he had neither the decency nor resolution to confront them.

Now, after nourishing the snake countless more times for the achievement of infamy unattainable to an honest man, he found himself upon a stretch of baked soil staring down some shivering figure. He lacked the liquid cajoling that normally unleashed the serpent's fury, but it had been years since it had fed. It needed little goading now. As he felt the wriggling of the serpent expanding from his torso into his limbs, he shouted a final warning across the sand. The man in white responded by adamantly, yet unsurely, grinding his feet into the dirt.

Thus, the stage was set, and the two actors locked themselves in the climatic dance of combat. The white-hatted man quivered as the lapping sounds of fiery tendrils beat against his very soul, while the black-hatted man bristled and bared his venom-dripping fangs from under his mustache. The song of the desert swelled. The horizon held the faded light of a dying coal. The wind held its breath.

The man in white tore his gun from its holster and aimed, but he was betrayed by the inner fire. His quivering finger pulled the trigger and launched an anemic bullet into the distant frontier beyond the man in black. His opponent—with something like interbred glee and pity—snatched his own pistol and lithely cocked, aimed, and fired in a thunderclap just barely preceded by the sizzling bolt that struck the front of the white vest just northeast of the heart. The man in white was sent into a spiral of cloth and flesh and blood but appeared graciously saved from pain, for once his body landed in the dust, it did not move.

The serpent hissed joyfully and receded into its den as the man in black surveyed the scene cast red by the setting sun. His lip twitched, and he coughed once as he finally crossed the threshold that had separated the denizens of light and dark. Only a sideward glance was paid to the contorted corpse as the man in black passed.

He met the dead man's horse where it had been left and had remained despite the pistol fire. The man in black readied himself to climb aboard when a curiosity pricked at the back of his mind and drew him once more to the man who had pursued him to the far reaches of this river plain. The man in black circled the body on the glossed wings of a vulture. He looked upon the face and the legs bent in mimicry of reclination and the one arm outstretched on the dirt as if reaching for something that was and would always be unattainable. With a pat down the front of the man's jacket, he discovered no money or trinkets of any worth. Then, concealed within the bloody folds of his left breast pocket, he found a small square photograph with his own bullet hole punched cleanly through. Using one thumb, he wiped away the sticky blood that corrupted the image to see a faded picture of a family, complete with a small giggling child, a seated woman with a lovely glowing face, and a suited man whose head had been cleanly obliterated by the bullet's fury. Even in the sepia blur of the image, he could see the jewel blue of the woman's eyes, for he had explored their vast depths many a year ago.

The man in black stumbled backwards, the serpent in his stomach writhing in protest as he gazed down at the fallen man before him. Suddenly, he remembered a long-repressed image. He saw his wife lying before him in a burning house, her eyes wide in final observance of the home they had once shared. Then he remembered a second pair of eyes, just as blue and fearful peeking out from behind their tin washtub as the man in black had turned and disappeared into the night. They were the eyes of a child he had long assumed—and maybe hoped—to have been consumed by the inferno. But the eyes had found their way back to him, only to be closed by his own hand.

A yearning for those blue eyes to reopen overcame him. As he looked down again at the faded image of his wife and child, and the round vacuum where his face had once been, an idea surfaced within him that sent the serpent into a frenzy. He held the photograph firmly between the fingers of his left hand while reaching for his pistol with his right. When he raised the cold steel barrel to the rough skin under his jaw, the snake lashed out, turning its poisonous bite upon its own vessel. Yet the man in black did not yield to the pain and rush of venom that sought to turn his muscles to stone. He looked down at the child—his child—and constricted his fingers on the thin metal lever. And in that fraction of a second between the click of the trigger and the bite of the bullet, he thought he felt the softest flutter of some long-forgotten creature within the vicious coils of the serpent.

A flash of orange and plume of red, and then two men lay in the hushed sands of the Snake River Plain; one in white still reaching for that which was now surely beyond his grasp, the other in black with an arm outstretched as if in return. An image of a family that may have been, enshrined in this sliver of time.

Moments later, there was movement in the scene of death. A slight twitching of the younger man's finger unsettled the stillness. Then came a sudden cough from what had once been the man in white and the spitting of blood onto the dry earth. He did not check the hole torn through his chest by the bullet, but simply rose and holstered his gun and strode over to the body of the man in black. For a moment, he peered down at the workings of the bullet upon the face.

The revenant's hands were steady as he grabbed the black-garbed cadaver and threw it over his shoulder. He cared not about the streaks of crimson that ordained his white jacket and pants. The body he chucked on the croup of his pallid steed, and the man in white felt only cool serenity as he pulled himself onto its back, never searching for the blood-stained photograph that had blown across the dirt and now found itself tangled in dry briars.

The sun had fallen in a simmering sky the red of a dying ember, ushering in the dark droves of the night. Across the flat expanse of sand and brush, shuddering at the whistle of the wind, purple mountains whispered in their primordial semantic between Earth and Providence. In the turmoil, there was a rider, and lying close behind him was what may have once been a man.