Ralph Compton Vengeance Rider

A LIVING LEGEND

All eyes turned to the old man who was walking toward them, supporting himself on a silver-headed cane in his left hand. “I think I’ll deal myself a hand of this little fracas if y’all don’t mind.”

“Step away, old-timer,” Fletcher said. “This isn’t your fight.”

The old man smiled. “Damn it all, Buck. I’m but thirty-seven years old. Younger than you, a lot better looking, and I must say, when you get right down to it, a whole heap better mannered.”

Jesse, his eyes ugly, snarled: “The man is right. This ain’t your fight, Doc.”

Doc! Fletcher knew why the old man had seemed so familiar. The last time he’d seen Doc Holliday had been in Deadwood, ten years before. But the little gambler’s tuberculosis was now far gone and the disease had aged him terribly.

Grief and fear spiked in Fletcher as he heard Doc say: “Jesse Taylor, Buck Fletcher is my friend. You know I can’t walk away from this.”

“Then so be it, Doc,” Jesse said. His shotgun came up fast.

Fletcher drew, but his gun still had to clear the leather when Doc fired, skinning his Colt from a shoulder holster with lightning speed.

THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

It has become a symbol of freedom, where there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

—Ralph Compton

One

The horse was gone . . . and with its loss came the death of hope.

Tiny McCue lay dead in a pool of his own blood, his small, thin body shot to doll rags, the tracks of the six riders who had murdered him pointing due south.

Buck Fletcher took off his hat and wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his wrist, still desperately grappling to believe what he was seeing. His face bleak, he kneeled and looked more closely at Tiny’s body.

Judging by the hole it had made, the little puncher had been shot in the back by a rifle at long range; then another six bullets had been pumped into his chest while he lay helpless on the ground.

The thong was still over the hammer of Tiny’s Colt. The man never even had a chance to draw.

Fletcher rose, a sigh escaping, unbidden, from his lips. Tiny had not returned to the ranch after he’d left to exercise the bay thoroughbred, a chore he performed regularly. That had been two days ago.

At first Fletcher had not been too concerned, thinking that Tiny had stopped over at one of the surrounding ranches, something he did now and then to swap lies with other punchers.

But when another day went by, he’d grown worried. The Black Hills country was beautiful, but hidden within its rugged splendor it harbored a hundred different ways to kill a man and sometimes all it took was a momentary lapse in concentration, a thoughtless choice or just some mighty bad luck.

It looked like Tiny had run into all three.

Fletcher had set out earlier that morning to search for the man, and after three hours of following tracks this is what he’d found.

Around him the magnificent, uncaring land was bathed in morning sunlight, and the blue shadows were slowly washing from the arroyos and canyons of the surrounding hills. Jays quarreled noisily among the branches of the yellow aspen and higher up the slopes, green arrowheads of spruce stirred in a warm, southern breeze and, towering above the trees, rose soaring, fantastic spires of gray rock. The sky was a clear, brilliant blue, streaked here and there with hazy smears of white cloud, and the air smelled of pine and wildflowers.

All this Buck Fletcher experienced without joy. A dull rage burned in him, changing the color of his eyes from the same blue as the sky to a hard, gunmetal gray, and his mouth under his sweeping dragoon mustache tightened into a thin line.

Six men had come here, to his range on Two-Bit Creek in the Dakota Territory, and killed his hired hand. And they had taken the horse that meant the difference between life and death for Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter.

Slowly, with deliberate motions, Fletcher rolled a smoke, a scalding anger building in him.

He had not taken up his guns for almost ten years now, and had thought to never do so again.

But he vowed to himself that he would take them up once again and exact a terrible vengeance.

He had been wronged and he would bring about the reckoning.

Fletcher lifted Tiny’s body onto the back of his horse. He was stepping into the stirrup, preparing to swing into the saddle, when the puncher’s hat fell to the ground. Fletcher picked up the hat and made to jam it back on the man’s head. But something caught his eye; the corner of a twenty-dollar bill sticking out of the band.

There was a total of eighty dollars neatly folded into the hatband, and a picture of a buxom woman in corsets torn with loving care from a drummer’s catalog.

Fletcher shook his head. It was little enough to show for fifteen years as a puncher and a dozen drives up the dusty, dangerous trails from Texas. Little enough to compensate a man for the rheumatisms that plagued him every winter and the pain from the Kiowa arrowhead of strap iron buried deep in his lower back, too dangerously close to the spine to be removed.

Sometimes, especially when the red wheat whiskey was on him, Tiny was a talking man, and Fletcher recalled him once saying that he had an older sister back to Laredo, married to a man who traveled in hardware. He would get his wife to send the woman the eighty dollars, plus whatever Savannah considered a fair amount for the puncher’s guns, saddle and horse.

It was not much of a legacy as legacies go, but it was all there was, that and the month’s wages still owing to him.

After a careful study of the woman in the corsets, Fletcher folded up the scrap of paper and shoved it into Tiny’s shirt pocket. It might bring the little rider some comfort to be buried with it.

Fletcher swung into the saddle and headed north toward his ranch on the Two-Bit. His buckskin gelding, made uneasy by the smell of blood and the nearness of death, tossed his head, jangling the bit, and once the horse shied as a jackrabbit burst from under his feet and zigzagged its way across the buffalo grass.

Ahead of Fletcher rose the looming bulk of Dome Mountain, a great bulge in the earth’s crust cut through by deep gorges and ravines, and further east he could just make out the smoke-colored cottonwoods lining the banks of Lost Gulch.

The sun had climbed higher in the sky and the morning was already hot, heralding another stifling day.

Fletcher rode through a tree-lined valley between a pair of saddleback hills, where he briefly let the buckskin drink at a clear, shallow stream bubbling up from some tumbled granite rocks, then swung west, toward his ranch.

As he left the hills and crossed the flat, he came across more and more of his own cows, young stuff mostly, Texas longhorns crossed with his Hereford bull, each bearing his FS Connected brand on the left shoulder.

He’d sold twenty steers earlier in the spring, fresh beef for the miners in Deadwood, and the five hundred dollars the cattle had brought him now resided in a money belt at his cabin.

This was seed money, and Fletcher had hoped he would soon see it grow to the ten thousand dollars he so desperately needed. But with the death of Tiny McCue and the theft of the fast, game Star Dancer, that hope seemed all but gone.

Grimly, Fletcher set his jaw. No, it was not gone. He would take time to bury Tiny decent, then get the horse back—or die in the trying.

His daughter Virginia, with her blond hair and her mother’s laughing green eyes, had no one to depend on but him. And if she asked it, Fletcher would move Dome Mountain itself for Ginny, even if he had to take the peak apart rock by rock with his bare hands and reassemble it somewhere else at a place of her choosing.

In the past, during his wild, violent and ofttimes lawless years, Fletcher had never imagined that one day he would wrap his Colts in a blanket and settle down to the life of a rancher with a woman and child he adored. But now that it had happened, he could envision no other life. He would grow old with Savannah and see Ginny . . .

But what of Ginny?

That question hit Fletcher like a blow to the stomach. Yes, what of Ginny now that Star Dancer was gone?

He had already made up his mind on that score. It was six against one, but he would bring back the horse. He had to.

A thin column of smoke, straight as a string, rose from the chimney of the cabin as Fletcher rode up, and the smell of newly baked soda bread hung fragrant in the air. Savannah’s paint stomped at flies in the corral beyond the house and, nearby, the stream Fletcher’s father had diverted from the creek twenty years before tumbled over a bed of sand and mossy pebbles, chuckling in amusement with a humor all its own.

But as Fletcher reined up outside the cabin he noted that the stream level was much lower, as was that of the creek. No rain had fallen since the end of March and out on the range the buffalo grass was already showing patches of brown, frizzled by the long winds blowing hot and dry from the south.

Normally, for Fletcher, this would have been a worrisome thing, but right now he chose not to dwell on it. There were other, more pressing matters at hand.

The cabin door swung open and Savannah stepped outside; the sight of her, as it always did, taking Fletcher’s breath away.

His wife’s auburn hair was loosely pulled away from her face, tied with a pink ribbon at the back of her neck, and her emerald eyes were bright with welcome. Savannah’s teeth flashed white as she smiled, her mouth a little too wide for true beauty, tiny, arched lines showing at the corners of her lips. She wore a dress of pink gingham that matched the color of the bow in her hair and showed off the generous curves of her body. She was, Fletcher decided, not for the first or the last time, a right pretty woman, a woman a man would never tire of coming home to, a woman like no other he’d ever known.

And he wondered, as he many times did, what she had ever seen in him.

He knew himself to be a big, homely man who was not at all skilled in the social graces and whose pleasures were few and simple. He was now, at forty, showing traces of gray in the dark hair at his temples, and the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth were etched deep from exposure to all kinds of weather and from life and the living of it, a life recently good but before that almighty hard. What he did not know, and could not see, were the things Savannah admired in him. She loved his fumbling, always half-embarrassed kindness and the genuine good humor that crept into his eyes when she, sometimes thinking him a little too demanding, harkened back to his service in the War Between the States and addressed him as “Major Fletcher,” snapping to attention as she gave him the palm-forward salute of the Union horse artillery.

But most of all, she admired Buck Fletcher’s genuine quality of empathy. He had the instinctive awareness and deep regard for another’s feelings that was, and remains, the mark of a true gentleman.

Courage, determination, the will to endure, Savannah saw these and other attributes in her husband—most of which he could not guess at, and if she had ever uttered them aloud it would surely have embarrassed him horribly.

Despite the morning heat, Savannah looked as cool as the sprig of mint in an iced julep glass, but now her cheeks drained of color as she saw the double burden Fletcher’s horse was carrying.

“Tiny is dead,” Fletcher said, replying to his wife’s unspoken question. “They killed him and took Star Dancer.”

Savannah’s face was stricken, understanding the consequences of the stolen horse as keenly as did her husband.

Fletcher swung out of the saddle and, spurs chiming, stepped toward his wife. “I plan to bury Tiny decent and go after them.”

“How many?” Savannah asked.

“Six. Maybe more.”

The woman nodded. “I’ll sack you up some supplies.”

Fletcher had expected nothing less. He knew Savannah would not plead, would not beg him to let it go and have the law handle it. She accepted what had to be done. Like all frontier women, his wife knew that in this harsh, unforgiving land a man was expected to make his own way, right his own wrongs. With the spring roundup so close, there could be no asking the surrounding ranchers for help, nor, she understood well, would her husband ask for it.

They needed the horse back and now Buck had it to do. That was the beginning and the end of the story. There would be no discussion. No argument.

“How is Ginny?” Fletcher asked.

Savannah’s face changed, lit up by a smile. “She was up today for a couple of hours. She even helped mix the bread dough.” The woman’s eyes sought those of her husband, seeking an answer to a question she’d not yet asked.

Now she asked it. “Ginny’s getting stronger, Buck. Isn’t she getting stronger all the time?”

Fletcher saw the pleading in his wife’s eyes, knowing the answer she wanted. Savannah had asked him the question but he chose to step carefully around it.

“The doctors at the Swiss clinic . . .” he hesitated, trying to frame his words, “. . . they’ll make Ginny better.” He forced a smile. “You’ll see.”

Savannah bit her lip. For a few moments she stood in silence, looking at her husband. She had hoped to hear comforting words that never came, hoped for a reassurance he could not bring himself to give. Fletcher realized she was disappointed, but he had never lied to her and now was not the time to start.

Finally Savannah turned and glanced back toward the window of the cabin. “Buck, find Tiny a place further along the creek. I don’t want Ginny to know.”

Tiny McCue, with the cowboy’s almost superstitious dread of tuberculosis, had seldom come near the cabin where Ginny lay. But the child had often watched him from the window as he worked, something of interest to see in a still, unchanging land.

But Savannah was right. Better Ginny did not know. They would tell her Tiny had moved on, as several hands had done in the past.

Fletcher had wanted to first go inside and see his daughter, but now he led his horse into the barn behind the cabin. He lit the fire in the forge and began to heat an iron rod, the rusty handle of an old branding iron. That done, he made a headboard of rough pine slats, and took the red-hot iron and wrote on the board. He had to reheat the iron several times before the marker was finished, precious time he knew he could ill afford.

But Fletcher had seen too many dead men tumble into unmarked graves over the years, and he would not make Tiny another.

All in all, Tiny McCue had been only a fair hand, and a sometimes sour and unwilling one at that, but every man should leave something behind to mark his passing.

Fletcher grabbed a shovel, then led the buckskin to the base of a hill about half a mile from the cabin. The ground was dry, hard and dusty, but he buried the little puncher deep enough to discourage marauding coyotes and covered the grave with as many loose rocks as he could find.

When Savannah joined him, they said the prayers they knew, then Fletcher hammered the marker into the grave with the back of the shovel. It said simply:

Tiny McCue A good rider 1886

It was not much to say about a man, but it was enough. Some Fletcher had known, better men than Tiny, had gone to their Maker with much less.

When Fletcher and Savannah returned to the cabin Ginny was asleep. The child lay on a cot in the main room of the cabin, the arcs of her long eyelashes dark on her pale cheekbones, her corn yellow hair spread like a halo across the pillow.

The consumption had come on her a year before, and already the disease had exacted its toll. Ginny was very thin and her face had taken on the strange luminosity often seen in victims of advanced tuberculosis, an inner glow like the light artists paint into storybook angels.

But this light was not light, it was darkness. It was, Fletcher knew, the pallid shadow of death. The sand was fast running through the hourglass and Ginny’s time was growing short.

“She’ll die, as we all must die,” Dr. Jacob Anderson had told Savannah and Fletcher a few months before. “All I can tell you is that you should prepare.”

Savannah, desperate, willing to clutch at any straw, begged Anderson to tell her if he knew of any other doctor wise in the ways of the disease who might save her child.

The physician tugged at his beard and shook his head. “Not in this country. But there is a mountain clinic in Switzerland, very exclusive, very expensive, and I’m told the doctors there are doing wonderful things.” The old man looked around their spare cabin, his eyes bleak. “Ginny would have to stay there for a year, maybe longer, and the cost . . .” he shook his head, “. . . ah . . . the cost.”

“How much?” Savannah asked, hope flaring in her eyes.

“At least five thousand dollars.”

“I’d want to go with her,” Savannah said.

“Then double that amount.” Anderson glanced around the cabin again. “Do you have that kind of money? Ten thousand dollars is a great deal.”

It was Fletcher who spoke. “We’ll get it, Doc. Somehow we’ll get it.”

Anderson shrugged. “I can write the letters, make the necessary arrangements. But it will have to be soon.”

“How soon?” Fletcher asked, fearing the physician’s reply.

The doctor’s eyes were level, his voice calm, matter-of-fact, professional. “Mr. Fletcher, without the Swiss clinic, your daughter will be dead in six months.”

Now Fletcher leaned over and gently kissed the sleeping child on the cheek. The girl stirred and muttered something he did not understand, then slept again.

Fletcher turned to his wife, his eyes red. “Take care of her, Savannah.”

“I will, Buck. Until you come home.”

Fletcher quickly brushed the back of his big, work-roughened hand across his eyes and Savannah, knowing well her husband’s touchy masculine pride, said: “You must have gotten dirt in your eyes, Buck.”

Fletcher nodded, accepting what she was giving him. “Probably when I was digging Tiny’s grave.”

Savannah nodded. “It’s so dry and dusty out there.”

“Yeah, it’s dusty.”

Fletcher was wearing his guns, a blue, short-barreled Colt in a crossdraw holster at his waist, another with a seven-and-a-half-inch barrel on his hip, both in .45 caliber.

He and Savannah stood, wordlessly looking at each other for a few moments, then the woman seemed to make her mind up about something. She stepped to the pine chest that Fletcher had made for her, opened a drawer and brought out the money belt.

“You better take this,” she said. “You may not have time to come back home before the race.”

Fletcher hefted the belt in his hand, the twenty-five gold double eagles heavy. “I’ll have to find a jockey now Tiny is gone.”

“You’ll find one.” Savannah managed a smile. “I imagine there are plenty of skinny boys in Arizona who know how to ride a racehorse.”

“I reckon.”

They stood close, each unwilling to say the words of good-bye. Finally Fletcher said: “Well, I guess I got to be getting along.”

Savannah nodded. “Wait,” she said.

She stepped to the chest again and from another drawer brought back a small pile of bills and coins that she thrust into his hand. “There’s forty-seven dollars and thirty-five cents there, Buck. You may need it.”

Fletcher shook his head. “Savannah, that’s all the money we have. I can’t take it.”

“I’ll make out.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed Fletcher on the mouth. “Now,” she said, her voice breaking, “leave before I become a silly woman and make a complete fool of myself.”

“Savannah,” Fletcher whispered, holding her close, “I’ll be back and I’ll have the ten thousand dollars. I promise you.”

“I know you will.”

Savannah stepped out of her husband’s arms and took a bulging canvas sack from the table. She handed it to him. “There’s a loaf of sourdough bread, some bacon and a couple of cans of peaches.” She smiled. “And an extra sack of tobacco.”

Fletcher smiled. “I guess you know how I get without my tobacco.”

“Only too well.”

When they stepped out of the cabin, Fletcher swung into the saddle and Savannah stood at his stirrup. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “Come back to us, Buck.”

“Depend on it.”

He swung his horse south and, behind him, Savannah raised her arm and called out: “Vaya con Dios, Buck Fletcher.”

Fletcher turned in the saddle and touched the brim of his hat, words failing him.

Ahead lay the long miles and six murderous outlaws he would hunt down and kill or see dangle from the end of a rope.

And behind, he was leaving the woman and child he loved, maybe forever.

Fletcher rode on, away from his home on the Two-Bit, a hurting in him that clutched at his belly and would not let him go.

Years before, a wild-eyed preacher had told him about hell and at the time Fletcher had paid him no mind. But now it all came back to him.

“A place of blazing fire, of terror, of vengeance, and of screams and torment,” the man had said.

“So be it,” Fletcher whispered, as he rode into the white heat of the burning morning.

He was bringing hell with him. That too was part of the reckoning.

Two

When Fletcher splashed across a foot of water in Bear Butte Gulch, the sun had risen high above Bear Den Mountain and the day was still and hot, the dry south wind no longer blowing.

Sweat trickled down Fletcher’s cheeks and under his shirt. Around him brooded silent, pine-covered hills, and his eyes reached out across the far, hazy distance only to see land and sky melt together, forged into a single shimmering, molten mass by the relentless hammer of the sun.

A mile to his east squatted a small log cabin, the home of a widow woman and her two children. She had come here with her husband three years before to farm this land, hoping to coax crops from the thin, rocky soil, and had failed.

After two years, drought, insects and grinding, endless toil had done for the man. He’d been plowing when a terrible weight, heavy as an anvil, had crushed his chest, numbing his left arm, twisting half his face into a grotesque mask. He clung to life for a few days and then died.

The woman, trying to succeed where her husband had failed, remained.

Fletcher glanced over to the cabin and shook his head. He did not give much for her chances. This was a harsh, relentless land that had no mercy on the weak. A woman alone, without a man’s strong back to help her, had little hope of surviving.

Once, Fletcher had ridden over there and asked if there was anything he could do to help. But the woman was proud, a stiff-necked, Yankee kind of pride, and she had refused. She had been polite enough, but firm and unyielding, and Fletcher, admiring her spirit, had not pressed the matter.

The smoke that rose from the cabin’s chimney told him she was still there. Good luck to her, he thought. And he wished her well.

Without rain, the tracks of the six raiders still scarred the buffalo grass, heading due south, seemingly in no great hurry, confident of their guns and numbers.

Fletcher reined up under the shade of a cottonwood on the bank of Elk Creek at the southern limit of grassy Windy Flats and built himself a smoke, trying to think the thing through.

He had no idea why the men had stolen the horse. If they intended to sell him, they would have to do it soon, though there were few around these parts who could afford to buy a thousand-dollar thoroughbred. With six of them sharing the loot, to sell Star Dancer for anything less would hardly bring them riding wages and such little profit was a small enough reason to kill a man.

Did they intend to keep him? That was a possibility, though the big three-year-old was high-strung and most times nigh impossible to handle. He was no cow pony and no day-to-day riding horse either.

Fletcher shook his head, his thoughts getting him nowhere.

Careful of fire, he stubbed out his cigarette on the side of his boot and pitched the dead butt into the water of the creek.

He swung his horse around and followed the tracks again, pointing straight as an arrow toward the lower reaches of the Cheyenne and the Nebraska border.

Mindful that the outlaws were two full days ahead of him, Fletcher rode through all of the searing day and considered making camp only when the night birds were pecking at the first stars and a waxing moon rose to cool a land scorched by the sun.

Around Fletcher the hills lay still, each surrounded by silence, broken now and then by the calling of the coyotes out in the darkness.

Once, he had been a man who loved solitude, finding no quieter and more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. But now, as he sought a place to make his fire, there was an aching loneliness in him, memories of Savannah and Ginny echoing in his mind like the failing notes of a faraway bugle.

He knew the separation was none of his doing, but that did little to make the hurting less.

Fletcher made camp near the ruin of a stone cabin he figured had been destroyed in some long-forgotten Indian raid years before. The cabin stood at the base of a flat-topped hill, close to the aspen line, and a narrow, sluggish stream ran nearby, lined by a few struggling and dejected willows.

Only one wall of the cabin still stood, and Fletcher built a small fire at its base, then stripped his horse and rubbed down the buckskin’s back with a piece of coarse sacking he carried in his saddlebags. He led the horse to the stream to drink, then staked him out on a good patch of buffalo grass.

Only then did Fletcher himself drink. He splashed water on his face and chest and ran a wet comb through his thick hair. Then he filled his coffeepot and settled it on the glowing coals of the fire.

While he waited for the coffee to boil, he leaned his back against the wall of the cabin and began to build a smoke.

Beyond the glow of the fire, the darkness was gathering around him, the movement from day to night now complete, yet done so gradually and easily, Fletcher could scarce recall when the light had passed.

He lit his cigarette and dragged deep, liking the harsh taste of the tobacco.

“Hellooo the camp!”

A man’s voice came from out of the shadows and Fletcher rose to his feet, stepping from the arc of the firelight, his hand close to his Colt in the crossdraw holster.

“Come on ahead,” he yelled, “but I’d take it as a real courtesy if you keep your hands well away from your belt buckle.”

The man chuckled. “Don’t wear no belt, sonny. But I’ll keep my mitts away from my suspenders if’n that sets right with you.”

Fletcher’s fist closed on the walnut handle of his Colt. “Step slow and easy, mister. I’m not what you’d call a trusting man and tonight I’m a might tetchy to boot.”

The man chuckled again and then emerged slowly from the darkness. He was maybe seventy years old, dressed in the plaid shirt, canvas pants and mule-eared boots of the gold prospector, and he led a small burro burdened with pick and shovel and the other tools of his trade.

“Smelled your coffee,” the old man said. “Don’t have none myself. Fresh out this morning.”

“There’s plenty,” Fletcher said, relaxing some, his hand dropping from his gun.

“Name’s Salty Higgins,” the old man said. “Prospected in these parts, man and boy, nigh on fifty years.” Higgins smiled behind his long, gray beard. “I been to Denver, blew my poke, now I’m back to the diggings again and as broke as ever was.”

“Easy come, easy go, I guess,” Fletcher said, a statement he was to make again but in a different time and place.

Higgins nodded. “You could say that. At least the go part is easy. When it’s about money, it’s the come part that’s tough.”

Fletcher inclined his head. “There’s a stream over there where you can water your animal.” He jutted his chin toward the burro. “But when you strip the pack off him, I’d take it as a kindness if you’d steer well clear of your Henry.”

The old man laughed. “Dang it all, sonny, you said you wasn’t a trusting man an’ I’m beginning to see clear that you wasn’t just makin’ that up.”

Fletcher nodded. “I’ve lived this long by stepping easy and being real careful.”

Salty Higgins saw to his burro and returned to the fire carrying a tin plate and cup. Fletcher filled his cup and Higgins set it on the ground beside him. He reached into his shirt pocket and found a battered, yellowed meerschaum pipe. He lit the pipe, then lifted the cup to his mouth, smacking his lips in appreciation. “You make good coffee, sonny.”

“I get by,” Fletcher said.

The old man nodded, giving Fletcher a sidelong glance. He opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind and sealed his lips with the rim of his cup.

“You got something on your mind, old-timer, say it,” Fletcher said, smiling, so there was no implied threat behind the words.

Higgins laid down his cup, slow and careful. “Well, I mean no offense mind, but I’ve been studying on you some. You could say that’s a habit with me, studying on folks I mean.”

“Strange things, habits.” Fletcher shrugged, building another cigarette. “Seems to me, most folks don’t even know they have them.”

“Maybe so. But I guess I know all the ones I got, both good and bad.” The old man tasted his coffee, blew on it, then tried it again. “Hot,” he said. He laid the cup beside him. “Anyhoo, what I was going to say is that it could be you’re an old-timey gunfighter by the name of Buck Fletcher. And it could be, a spell back, ye rode with John Wesley Hardin and the Taylor boys and them wild ones down to Texas a ways.” The old prospector made a show of carefully studying the glowing coal of tobacco in his pipe. “I ain’t saying it as a natural fact, but it could be you did.”

Without looking up, Fletcher sliced bacon into his small frying pan and set it on the fire to cook. “How do you know these things, Salty?” he asked finally.

The prospector shrugged. “Could be that back in the spring of ‘74, I was passing through Comanche, Texas, when John Wesley shot a deputy by the name of Charlie Webb. But it could be that Webb got a bullet into Wes afore he died. And it could be that it came about by and by that Wes’s brothers Joe and Bud, along with a mean one named Tom Dixon, was took and hung.

“And could be I saw with my own eyes how John Wesley escaped—on the back of a sorrel hoss rode by a big, homely man who was hell on wheels with a gun and shot his way out of town. Could be that man was Buck Fletcher.” Higgins nodded to himself. “An’ it could be that man was you.”

Fletcher turned the bacon with the blade of his pocket-knife, a beautiful ivory-handled folder made in Sheffield, England, the gift of a Confederate colonel he’d captured at Antietam.

Once the bacon was crisp he placed it to the side of the pan and fried two slices of sourdough bread in the smoking fat. He made a sandwich of the bread and bacon and passed it to Higgins, Western etiquette dictating that the guest must always be served first.

Fletcher sliced more bacon into the pan and only then did he speak.

“Maybe you’re right, Salty. Maybe I am Buck Fletcher and maybe all that riding I did with Wes and them wild ones happened so long ago I can scarce remember.” He shook the bacon to fry it evenly. “But I recollect that Wes was all right. Maybe a mite too quick on the trigger was all.”

Higgins chewed his sandwich thoughtfully. “Y’know, one time I had me a big poke an’ I bought me a steak sandwich in Delmonico’s over to New York.” The old man smiled, his milky blue eyes glinting in the firelight. “It weren’t a patch on this.”

Fletcher nodded, acknowledging the compliment, and built his own sandwich.

“See,” Higgins said, “a sandwich like this, it slicks up a man’s skin an’ protects him from the cold, and the bacon fat greases his joints and saves him from the rheumatisms. That,” he added, talking around another huge mouthful, “is something to remember.”

After the two men had eaten, Higgins lit his pipe and Fletcher rolled a cigarette. Once they were both smoking, Higgins said: “Could be I got something else to say.”

“Then say it,” Fletcher said. He felt drowsy and relaxed. The moon was splashing silver paint over the surrounding hills and the fire crackled, a burning stick now and then shifting, sending up a small, bright shower of sparks. The coyotes were calling out to each other again and, fairly close, a sleepless owl questioned the deepening night.

“Could be I heard—”

“Say it straight out, Salty,” Fletcher interrupted. “I’ll take no offense.”

The old prospector nodded. “So be it. I heard tell the last time I was in Deadwood that Buck Fletcher had himself a wife and a young ‘un and a spread up on the bend of the Two-Bit.”

“You heard right,” Fletcher said, only mildly interested in what the old man was saying.

“All the talk in the saloons was how you’d hung up your guns and had bred a racehoss so fast he could run from sunup to sundown in less than half an hour.”

The drowsiness left Fletcher instantly and he leaned forward with a start. “What do you know about the horse?”

Higgins shrugged. “Only this—I think I saw him two days ago.”

“Where?”

“South of here. A big, lanky bay with a white star on his forehead. Steps real high an’ lively, ain’t that right?”

“That sounds like Star Dancer,” Fletcher said, excitement building in him. “Where did you see him?”

“Right near Harney Peak, north of the Cheyenne. There were six men with him, mean ones.”

“Salty, how did you come across them? It seems to me they wouldn’t be keen to welcome strangers.”

“I’m a coffee-drinking man,” Salty said. “But I never seem to have any, maybe because I drink it up so fast. I smelled their coffee, just like I smelled yours, and walked into their camp.” The old prospector smiled. “I wasn’t exactly told to make myself to home, but they didn’t shoot me either.”

“Recognize any of them?” Fletcher asked.

“Sure thing. I knew Bosco Tracy right off, him and his no-account brothers Luke and Earl. Two others I’d never seen afore, but the other one I recognized.” The old man leaned over and spat. “He was Port Austin.”

Fletcher eased back against the wall, his fingers going to his shirt pocket for the makings, remembering things he’d been told.

The Tracy brothers were mean all the way through, cold-blooded killers who would cut any man, woman or child in half with a shotgun for fifty dollars. But for sheer badness they didn’t hold a patch to Port Austin.

A few years back Austin had come up the Chisholm Trail with a herd from Texas to Abilene; then, after brushing off the dust of the long miles, decided honest work was about as welcome as a wart on a whore’s butt. To make his point, he robbed a general store in Hays and made his getaway by outdrawing and killing a deputy sheriff. A month later he killed Quirt Lawson, the lightning-fast Newton gunfighter who was said to have six dead men to his credit.

On Christmas Eve ‘79, angry at the inflated Festive Season price a young soiled dove tried to charge him in a brothel in Wichita, Austin stabbed the woman to death and later decorated the bridle of his horse with her long, red hair.

In the months that followed, he robbed banks all over Kansas and beyond, but he really didn’t come into his own until he hooked up with the Tracy boys.

The last Fletcher heard, Port Austin had carved eight notches on his gun butt, and the number had probably grown since. He was poison mean and fast as a rattlesnake with his Colt. Fear didn’t enter into this thinking, but neither did mercy or compassion or any other human emotion.

Austin was a born killer with ice in his veins and he thought no more of shooting another human being than he would a rat. If evil truly existed, shackling the mind and perverting the conscience, then its personification was Port Austin.

Higgins raised an eyebrow. “Now you’re doing some thinking your ownself, Buck.”

Fletcher nodded, his face revealing an uncertainty not unmixed with a measure of apprehension. “I was studying some on Port Austin.”

The old man nodded. “He’s a handful all right. They said he’s the best with a Colt’s gun as ever was.”

Letting that remark slide, Fletcher asked: “Salty, did they tell you where they were taking the horse?”

The old man shook his head. “Not directly. But, like I said, I’m a studying man and I keep my ears open. If a feller just sets quiet and listens, he can learn a thing or two.”

“What did you learn?”

The prospector extended his cup and Fletcher filled it. “I heard them cussin’ and discussin’ about how they’d staked out your ranch for three, four days afore they killed your hired hand. Bosco said it was just as well, because he was getting a tad impatient and favored just riding in there and taking the horse. Ol’ Port, he said he’d gun all he found in the cabin so there was no witnesses.”

Fletcher swallowed hard. During the past days he’d been spending a lot of time on the range, and if Bosco Tracy and Austin had found Savannah and Ginny alone, he would have murdered them both without giving it a second thought.

A coldness in his belly, a stunned note of disbelief in his voice, he asked: “They knew it was my horse, Buck Fletcher’s horse?”

Higgins nodded. “Sure they knew, but they didn’t give a damn. Buck, you’ve been out of the limelight for nigh on ten years. Folks forget what you were an’ what you done in the olden days. Bosco and Port Austin and the others are a different generation. Hell, them boys have read the dime novels and filled their heads with all kinds of rattlebrained fancies. They hang their guns low on their thighs and strut around and think themselves . . .” The old man stopped and motioned to the south with the stem of his pipe. “Here, what was the name of that youngster who caused all the trouble down there to Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory a few years back?”

Fletcher thought for a few moments then replied: “William Bonney, as I recollect. The newspapers called him Billy the Kid. Or he did.”

Higgins nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Well, Bosco and Port Austin and them, they think themselves to be just like Billy the Kid. They want to get their names in the newspapers and become known as famous bad men.”

His mouth tightening into a grim line, Fletcher said: “All that newspaper ink didn’t do Bonney much good. He’s dead.”

Higgins shrugged. “I guess Bosco and Port figure that won’t happen to them. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn. Boys like that want to live fast and wild. That’s why they stole your hoss, to get money for women and whiskey, two things that’s a big part of living.” The old prospector smiled in his beard. “For any man.”

Fletcher’s ego was badly bruised, even as he told himself that his gunfighter days were long gone and that a man’s sense of self-importance just laid out the perimeters of his own limitations.

But, looking at Salty Higgins with unhappy eyes, a bitterness rising in him, he asked: “I guess my being over-the-hill and all, they figured I wouldn’t come after them?”

The old prospector grinned. “Hell, Buck, they knew from the git-go you’d come after them. But like I tole you, they don’t give a damn. There ain’t a single one of those boys who don’t figure he could take you in a gunfight.”

“Are they that good?”

Higgins shrugged. “I don’t know, except for Port an’ maybe ol’ Bosco his ownself. But the rest sure reckon they are.”

Fletcher rolled a smoke. The south wind was stirring again, making the flames dance. The glow painted red the hard planes of his face, giving him the expressionless, wooden look of a cigar store Indian.

Picking up a burning brand from the fire, Fletcher lit his cigarette, his great, beaked nose and high cheekbones flaring orange for an instant.

“Where will they try to sell the horse, Salty?” he asked finally, tossing the twig back into the flames.

“Not around here, that much I know.”

“Where then?”

“Arizony. They said they were selling the hoss to a gambling gent down there.”

“Long ways to take a horse.”

Higgins nodded. “Maybe so, but I heard tell that Texas John Slaughter is organizing a big hoss race on the Fourth of July down at his ranch in Cochise County in the Territory. They say the purse is ten thousand dollars, winner take all. Maybe the sporting gent plans to enter your hoss in the race and bet heavy on him on the side.”

The old man smiled. “If that’s the case, he’s taking a chance. I don’t know if your Star Dancer is as fast as they say, but ol’ Texas John has an American stud he calls Big Boy an’ folks tell me that sorrel can’t be beat by anything on four legs.”

All this Fletcher already knew. Slaughter was charging five hundred dollars to enter a horse in the race—the twenty-five double eagles that now weighed heavy in his money belt.