Theodore Turnbull and Mary Whistler had been running for two days. First across desert, then through chaparral hills that lead into thickets of pine nestled at the foot of a mountain range with its various peaks armored in snow.

Their horse had collapsed, a beautiful brown mare with a cream-yellow mane that Turnbull affectionately called Blondie. They couldn't slow their pace in order to camp for the night as there was always that thin wisp of dust on the far horizon coming ever closer—the horses of Alvin, Slim, Windham, and Russ—the men who wanted to carry away Mary and Teddy's scalps.

Turnbull slung his rifle across his back after packing everything he could into his saddle bag, and, after ignoring Mary's protests, left a bullet in Blondie's skull. He did not have the time to bury the beloved horse or butcher her for provisions so he left her for the vultures and coyotes.

They knew the men chasing them—two weeks ago they had all shared a campfire, with Mary cooking and cleaning; they had traded stories, ate, and hunted together under the collective name pinned onto them by the Arizona Daily Star after an especially successful train hold-up, Alvin's Outlaws.

At first the men found the alliterative name hilarious and juvenile in its simplicity. They began using it as a joke to annoy Alvin, who hated it, before it was later adopted as their official name once the sheen of humor had worn off.

Led by the infamous Minnesota outlaw Alvin Petroski, the group had recently found a way to get money legally, without robbing stagecoaches or stealing cattle and without having to keep looking over their shoulders for the law. The frontier police down in Mexico—the rurales, would accept Apache scalps no questions asked at 10 dollars a piece.

But soon they found out that Apaches are hard to catch.

So Alvin and his crew had started killing those who weren't Apache, travelers and rural farmers. The rurales either didn't notice or didn't care. The scalped bodies the gang left in their wake would then be mistaken for Indian attacks on innocent civilians. Thus leading to continued requests from the Mexican authorities for Apache scalps and closing the circle of supply and demand.

Profits rose steadily and everyone except Turnbull and Mary were happy.

At the age of twenty-three MaryWhistler had come to join the outlaws by way of Texas. She had followed her husband west to Arizona and later down to the Mexican border where he met Alvin Petroski.

After her husband was killed while robbing a warehouse in Yuma, Mary—distraught and with nowhere else to go—decided to stay with the outfit. She cooked, she cleaned and she helped dye the illegitimate scalps black to better pass them off as Apache. She hated this part of her job and was comforted by telling herself that one day it would be the last time.

The first time she met Theodore Turnbull she was scared of him. Everybody in the gang had done their share of violence, but nobody did it more calmly than Turnbull. She had once seen him slice open the throat of a man with a straight-razor, while no hate, no fear, nor excitement showed on his face. It was as if he was cutting through a loaf of bread.

She slowly found herself feeling safe near Turnbull. After her husband had died none of the other men had touched her out of respect for the deceased. But after a few months had passed she started feeling as if she were their captive and not their friend. Their tones were short when speaking to her and they began to order her to do things instead of asking. Sometimes she caught the men looking at her lustfully, not like the young boys she had grown up with had, but like she was prey and they were predators—all of them except Teddy Turnbull.

One night when they were the only two still awake, Turnbull opened up to Mary: he had been a cattle rustler his whole life, he was never married, but he once had a daughter, he was getting tired of killing and thinking of leaving the gang. Then Mary confessed everything to him. That she did not feel safe here, that he made her feel safe, that she wanted to leave, wanted to go to San Francisco where she had an aunt, and that she wanted him to come with her.

One week later they had stolen what was left of the scalp money and fled. Turnbull had killed the night-lookout named Fogle, thrusting a knife point into the hollow of his throat as he slept on the job, thrashing the blade back and forth within the neck to make sure he had not missed the jugular veins. Vocal cords torn and wet with blood made Fogle's muffled screams bubble as his hands grabbed about frantically and then his eyes aflame with terror, fizzled out into an unseeing stare. It was messy and probably unnecessary but Turnbull figured that a man like Fogle had it coming.

Mary had asked Turnbull to make a detour. They stopped at a mail outpost and she told the station master where the infamous Alvin's Outlaws were hiding. Their pursuers were intercepted at the border by Arizona marshals. Kapp and Two-Dogs were captured and hanged.

This left only Petroski, Russ, Slim and Windham to even the score with the turncoat Turnbull and the maid Mary.

After a day of walking parallel to the foot of the mountain range, weaving through pine and searching for a spot to pass through the looming rock face beside them, Turnbull saw it: a trail following a little creek which cleaved the mountains in two.

Turnbull pushed up the brim of his Stetson hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"What do you think?" He asked Mary.

She folded her arms across her chest and exhaled. "Well . . .  the trail doesn't look too overgrown . . . but we don't know where it goes. It might go nowhere. You think it's smart to risk it?"

"We ain't got much choice Mary, we keep walking on foot and they'll catch up to us."

"Well if you think it wise then I'm with you" She searched the sky and then pointed a finger past the mountain tops.

"Teddy, look at that. Weather's turning quick."

"Well then we better hurry"

They entered the V-shaped passageway beneath a sky filled with ragged gray and black clouds.

The winding mountain path frequently diverged from the creek before returning, and was here-and-there cut by a ravine small enough to leap over with a running start.

Between these jumps (which burst the blisters on Turnbull's feet) and scrambling over boulders blocking the tortuous path, (which ground his open blisters into the sweat-salt and pus collecting in his boots) Mary was grateful that she had thought to put on a pair of trousers before they had fled.

A few drops of tentative rain touched the earth as the path began to narrow and the walls became vertical, then curved up and inward, until only a narrow strip of gray sky hung above them. Turnbull could now reach out and place one hand on each side of the canyon—which he did—giving relief to his aching feet. They began to see crude paintings representing bulls, birds, deer and horses smeared in pigments of red, yellow and black along the close canyon walls.

As they passed a final bend, the trail ended in sheer rock, but the creek continued to trickle out from a low cavern, two feet tall by three, whose mossy mouth was strewn with remnants of lumbered wood and rusted nails.

"What now?" Mary asked.

"We take our chances inside." Then Turnbull smiled. "Or, we can wait for Alvin to show up and say 'gee we're real sorry about Fogle and the missing cash'"

In the pines at the mouth of the defile Alvin Petroski dismounted his horse and looked at the creek, a heavy rain was striking the ground around him and dimpling the creek water.

"The damned fools have either got themselves cornered or killed" He said.

The scout named Slim knew that they were lucky the storm hadn't come until now, when they had already cornered Turnbull and Mary, soon the tracks would be washed away by rain.

He stepped up alongside Alvin.

"How you know this crack in the mountain don't go clean through Al?"

"I don't"

"So they could already be on the other side of that mountain, headed to god-knows-where while the rain erases their tracks?"

"This mountains pretty big, they didn't have enough of a lead to pass through that quick," Alvin said as he shook his head and then pointed a finger at the creek that came out of the defile to make a point.

"You see how that crick has overrun its banks? The path alongside isn't much bigger—He's wet, miserable and wading up to his knees in water right about now and she's probably drowned."

Slim raised his eyebrows and looked over at the other two men who were listening while mounted on their horses. Russ, in agreement with Slim, shook his head while grimacing and Windham gave a flippant shrug, not wanting to take any sides.

Alvin placed his fists confidently on his hips and turned towards the men "we camp here 'til the rain stops, then we see what-is-what when that crick slows down."

Turnbull and Mary were in the cave crawling on their bellies with Turnbull leading the way when the creek began to swell and quicken with the downpour. He panicked and tried to reverse, not thinking, and accidentally kicked Mary in the face. He tried to yell over the rushing water but she could not hear. Panic had set in but he had no choice but to continue or get them both drowned. He crawled forward, raising his head when he could to gasp for air, bumping the top of his head on the rock ceiling, and every time he stopped he would wait to feel Mary's hand on his heel before continuing. After a few meters he raised his head again and found that it touched nothing. He pushed himself up onto his knees and still did not feel rough rock digging into his back. He was now able to stand up straight. He turned and grabbed Mary by the wrists, helping her up and out of the low cavern.

The damp smell of the cave and the deafening rush of water confused his senses. The tunnel which they had just come in from was almost completely submerged. He felt the terror of death closing in.

We will drown here, he thought, this damn fool of an idea ends with us entombed in a wet cave.

Then in a moment of calm, a strange thought occurred to him: in a pitch black cave he shouldn't have been able to see or grab Mary's arms, much less notice that the low tunnel they had come from was almost underwater.

He felt Mary's breath on his ear.

"Teddy look, an exit!"

He looked up and saw a storm-gray light shaft cutting into the darkness of the cave.

The next day, the smallest of the gang, Slim the scout, crawled out from the low cavern mouth and threw his lit torch into the creek, extinguishing it. His knees and elbows were muddied. Alvin watched him expectantly under a vertical ray of noon sun penetrating into the defile.

"Anything?"

"No," said Slim, "only this." He reached into his waistband behind his back and pulled out a brown hat, crushed and damp. Alvin took it from him and turned it over, pressing his fist into the inside of the hat to reform its shape and inspect it. "A man's hat. It's a Stetson Boss-of-the-Plains. No doubt It's Turnbulls," turning it over and searching along the hatband with his fingers.

"This all you found? No sign of the whore?"

"No, not a lot to see in there . . .  dark as hell. I double checked every corner searching for a body or a clue—Nothing. Neither wind nor light, which would signal any exits. It's a dead-end."

"You think she ditched him?"

"I dunno. Maybe."

Alvin made no reply as the two of them looked up and down the high canyon walls searching for a clue. Here the canyon walls were smooth and curved inward at the lip. Climbing them would be impossible.

The man named Windham kicked at a rusted nail and watched it skitter across the rocks of the canyon floor.

"Looks like someone was prospecting here," he said. "Don't make sense that there would be only one entrance and nothin' else."

Russ replied "and those Indian finger paintings we just passed. Maybe they got captured by Apaches."

Slim answered. "Fool-headed miners sometimes dress the path to their mining claims up in voodoo nonsense to scare away superstitious strangers, Indians didn't do that."

"So what now?" asked Russ.

"I don't know," said Windham facetiously, "maybe if we set up camp here they'll be nice enough to come to us."

Russ laughed at Windham's open insolence.

Alvin interrupted them. "Knock that horseshit off—they was here but they're gone now. we double back til we find something we may have missed."

Turnbull lay prone with his repeater rifle at the ready on an outcropping of rock above the last bend in the ravine before it opened out into the pine forest they had fled from yesterday.

Last night he had boosted Mary up through the hole in the cave ceiling before climbing the many hand holds of the inner cavern wall to the exit, losing his hat along the way.

After climbing out of the cave, Mary had turned to him. "We gotta do something to stop them or they'll just follow us through."

Mary had helped Turnbull throw as many volcanic rocks as they could carry into the hole to jam up the exit before they sat away from the edge of the opening and used the heels of their boots to kick at the dirt rim until it became loose and the soil slid down onto the rocks, sealing the exit.

They had spent the night out in the rain and Turnbull had been able to take off his red-leather boots, soothing his tattered feet in the chill air.

Now he felt a cold coming on, fogging his brain.

As he waited in his prone position he suddenly saw the red of Russ' flannel shirt coming around the bend with Windham just behind him. His rifle was already zeroed-in. All he had to do was press the trigger.

The outlaws had found nothing and were headed back to their waiting horses. Alvin was annoyed with Slim. He had questioned his authority and wound up being correct—They should've pushed up the canyon yesterday. Now Turnbull and Mary had escaped and Russ was openly mocking him. Alvin knew that if he lost the confidence of his men or was killed, Slim was next in line to take over the gang's leadership role. But Slim's Outlaws didn't have the same ring to it.

"Why're you all the way in the back?" Alvin said to Slim who was behind him. "You're the damn scout, so go scout out ahead."

"I already told you there ain't nothin' here to be worried about, and Russ's just as capable a scout as I am." replied Slim.

Damn it, thought Alvin, that's how it is: When I'm gone Slim leads and Russ is the scout and second in command. They ain't even trying to hide it anymore.

Alvin stopped and quickly swung around to face Slim, stabbing a finger into his chest to tap his anger out in morse code.

"Listen here you little bastard, I know what you're doin and I'll be god-damned if—"

A shot rang out and interrupted his tirade. Windham came limping around the corner, wide-eyed, with blood blossoming around a hole in his trousers at the thigh.

"The son-of-bitch killed Russ and winged me"

Down the sights of his gun barrel Turnbull saw the pop of bone, blood and brain debris exit from the back of Russ' head as he crumpled to the floor and Windham grabbed at his thigh before quickly leaping back behind the bend.

Turnbull waited a few moments waiting for someone to appear but nobody did, so he crawled backwards away from the ledge to where Mary was.

"I got two with one shot," he whispered.

Mary smiled and grabbed his shoulders silently shaking him with excitement, but he knew that hitting two men with one shot had been pure luck.

Slim dragged Windham back up the path by his armpits. Windham's femoral artery had been cut by Turnbull's bullet and he left a dark trail of blood in his wake. Slim had to keep the man's arms back from covering his grave wound in order to properly drag him to safety.

"Leave it alone," Said Slim, trying to wrestle Windham's arms and calm him. "I'll tie it up with your kerchief in a minute."

"Leave him, he's done." Said Alvin.

Slim and Windham shouted. "What?"

Alvin lowered his revolver. Windham's eyes followed the gun barrel, as Al took aim at his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Alvin pushed past Slim.

"We go back to the cave," he said.

Slim hesitated, shaken by the cold-blooded deed he had just witnessed. The canyon was now so silent that he could hear the sound of blood trickling from Windham's nose. But he knew Alvin was right. Windham was good as dead as soon as the main artery in his leg got damaged and he would have only slowed them down. He turned to catch up with Alvin.

From above the rim, Turnbull looked down on the body of Windham: his head laid in a patch of dirt soaked dark-brown and his face was mapped with threads of blood that weaved across his face from the gunshot hole, his eyes, his nose and his mouth.

"Son of a bitch," Turnbull muttered to himself.

Mary and him walked in a crouch, far back from the rim of the canyon, intermittently stopping and waiting, listening for the sound of boots scraping across rocks.

"Wait." Mary said, stopping Turnbull by grabbing his shirtsleeve. "Why don't we just cut out now, leave with two of their horses—we can scare off the other two in different directions—by the time they find out we're not after them anymore and catch their horses, we would be far away."

"No," said Turnbull.

"We have a chance to get away. It's now or never."

"I said no." He pulled away from her grasp.

She wanted to hit him, but her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of three muffled gunshots. Turnbull quickened his pace and Mary followed.

Damn Him, she muttered.

They had reached the section where the canyon walls curved upward and tightened to only a few feet across.

"Turnbull!" He heard the voice of Slim shout.

He did not answer. No good could come from Slim knowing he and Mary were just above the canyon walls. Slim was testing him, to see if he was still following, or at the very least he was trying to get Turnbull to lower his guard.

Turnbull pulled his revolver from its holster and handed it to Mary along with a handful of rounds.

"You know how to use this?" he asked.

"Yes, of course," she said.

He nodded. "Right. Go around on the other side, leap across. We might not be done shooting yet—if you get a line of sight on either of them take the shot."

Mary nodded and jogged off.

"Turnbull!" Slim shouted again. "If you're out there, it's over. I've killed Petroski."

"Don't bullshit me Slim," Turnbull called down.

"I ain't."

"Then prove it."

"How?"

"Show yourself."

" . . . Alright."

Turnbull heard cloth scraping against rock and saw Slim crawl out of the cave mouth. He stayed on his knees but put his hands up.

"I'm Alone, Alvin's body's back there in the cave," Slim said.

"Take off your gun belt."

Slim slowly lowered his hands and undid his belt buckle, letting it fall in the mud and shuffling forward on his knees, away from the belt.

"You trust me now?"

Turnbull looked up at Mary, who was only a few feet away from him on the other side of the narrow gap at the top of the canyon. She shrugged in response. Not knowing what to do. She had never seen Teddy undecided before and it scared her.

Earlier, Slim had entered the cavern behind Alvin. When they got into the large room where they could stand, the butt of Alvin's revolver had grazed Slim's hand. He acted quickly, placing his palm over its wooden handle so that it could not be pulled up and then pressed his revolver barrel against the soft mass of Alvin's body and shot three times. Alvin's body thumped to the ground but his gun was still in Slim's hand.

Slim tucked the weapon into the length of waistband behind his back. He crawled back to the opening and waited.

Mary heard the gunshot and saw Turnbull's face explode. He fell forward and smacked his chin against the far side of the gap, making a horrendous hollow thud like a dropped watermelon as his body fell down into the hole.

Two more shots followed.

Slim ran up and put two more rounds in Turnbull's head—just to make sure. His gun was empty now, but it didn't matter. Five people had entered the canyon and only he was alive.

No more Alvin's Outlaws. Good riddance. But what now? Maybe he would go east to Texas and start over again, but this time leading his own gang. Or maybe he would go straight. His life was now nothing but new beginnings.

He turned to walk back to his ammunition belt when he heard a revolver's hammer being cocked back and a woman's voice shout:

"Hold it!"

Mary was in a wide stance at the top of the canyon, while holding the revolver Turnbull had given her in both hands, pointing it down at Slim.

When Slim had turned around and saw that it was Mary, he seemed relieved.

"Well I'll be damned. you should be thanking me, not pointing a gun at me."

She didn't answer and kept the gun pointed at his chest. Aiming center-mass just like her late husband had taught her.

"Put it down. It's over, they're all dead," he said.

"And why shouldn't I add you to the tally?" She replied.

"Because I saved you."

"How do you figure that?"

"There's no more gang, you're free. You don't gotta be Turnbulls whore anymore."

She tightened her grip on the pistol and said "I never was."

"Oh come on Mary, you all bent outta shape over Turnbull? You really think after everything he'd done and everything he'd seen, that he would be able to turn over a new leaf?"

"You're right. You did me a favor," she said.

Slim smiled. "Good I'm glad you've come to your senses."

"Thanks Slim," Mary said before she emptied her revolver into his chest.

She pushed back the brim of Turnbulls crushed stetson and wiped the sweat from her brow. She had buried him in a peaceful little sun exposed rise nearby. She had everything she needed already packed on Alvin's sorrel, along with forty dollars worth of scalps in a burlap sack. It would be enough to get to California . . . 

 . . . and as she mixed together charcoal and ash with water in a leftover canteen to create black dye, she smiled, because this would be the last time.