Fire of a Thousand Guns

FIRE OF A THOUSAND GUNS

(Spurs of Steel II)

by Philip Mason

To read the prequel: Spurs of Steel

Synopsis: Our nameless hero from Spurs of Steel returns, now working a number of odd jobs to pay off a debt from his past. One such job brings him to Hardcoat Pass, where he comes upon a mysterious scene of carnage, averts his own assassination, and is offered a hefty sum to act as bodyguard for a man with a very high opinion of himself. Taking the offer, our hero heads west across the dangerous frontiers of New Mexico Territory to Utah Territory. Great peril awaits the pair, and the nature of the mysterious carnage becomes clear, while our hero valiantly fights his way toward the resolution of his assassin problem. Consequences from events in Spurs of Steel contribute a central element to the interweaving plots of Fire of a Thousand Guns. 

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Part I: The Assassins

            July’s fiery breath made travel along the dirty roads of northern New Mexico Territory a sweltering Hell. But Hell was fine for my horse and me. We looked for Hell, and found it wherever we went. Or it found us. If Hell followed us, or simply had the same taste in seedy and dangerous locales, I never knew.  One way or another, we always stumbled upon each other.

            A day and a half of travel was behind us. Miles of mountains, sand, and shrubs all the way to the horizon. We’d encounter not a soul besides scorpions, snakes, and hawks on our journey. The way I liked it.

            Trampling over tumbleweeds and desert rocks—what passed for roads in the region—my horse and I came upon a wagon train, or what was left of it. The noontime sun hung directly overhead, and would have burned my neck were it not for my elbow-length hair blowing in the wind. At times like that the sun tells you not to care about anything but rest and shade. I don’t need a sun to tell me not to care. Still though, finding twelve destroyed covered wagons—some still on fire—messily executed bodies strewn about the place, horses dead on their sides, and valuables scattered across the ground is something hard to be unmoved by. I didn’t know these deceased strangers, or the harmless horses, but sorrow pervaded the grim spectacle.

            My black horse seemed to mourn the dead of his kind, while I inspected the men and women whose heads and limbs had received torment and destruction. And the bottles of whiskey and vodka, the tools, the gold coins, the ammunition boxes that were scattered about in plain view hinted at something more heinous than robbery. I searched the caravan’s remains for something useful. There were bodies in the burning wagons. The chaos of the scene suggested quickness, striking fast and moving on, without the time for clean up or covering tracks. Something would be left behind. To my surprise, a wagon full of weapons seemed untouched besides the bullet holes and blood stains in the canvas.

            Opening a box of Winchester lever action rifles is like Christmas morning, but without your old man choking on broken glass from a beer bottle he shattered so he could cut your younger brother’s ear off for losing his job as a gunrunner. Opening that box as Hell breathes down on you, while on your way to Hardcoat Pass to deliver a single package, is like Christmas morning with the town’s finest whore between your sheets. But this whore does all the shooting.

            I took two repeaters, a Model 1886 and a Model 1873, slung them over my back, and gathered boxes of ammo. Supply was plentiful, so I took only what I could fit in the satchels on my horse. I filled my belt with a little extra .357 ammo, for quick loading into my always-present sidearm, Ol’ Persuader–a  revolver with history, savagery, and class. A box clearly marked for explosives caught my eye, and I took a few sticks of dynamite and a box of gunpowder, which I stored right away.

            “Not my intention to steal, muchacho,” I said, standing above the dead driver of what I figured to be the leading wagon. His head had been blown through by a shotgun at close range. Tragedy sure does paint with many shades of red. “I’m not a thief. Not anymore. But I don’t suppose you folks will be needing these.” I of course was referring to the guns on my back, but I felt no urge to clarify, as I was speaking to a dead man. The dead man, like the others in the caravan, was well dressed. I searched his leather vest’s pockets until I pulled out a folded map. The destination marked was Hardcoat Pass.

            A few more minutes of searching revealed the names of the wagon train party, and some other choice bits I pocketed for later. I mounted my heroic black steed and headed toward Hardcoat Pass, five miles up the road. I loaded my new rifles while riding at a slow trot.

            We were climbing the rocky hill to the town when five bullet holes exploded in the ground in front of us. Gunfire came from behind. I turned to see four men with identical mustaches and black hats emerging from a ravine.  It was the perfect opportunity to test my new weapons, as though these scoundrels were Heaven-sent, or Hell-sent.  They didn’t yell for my attention, they didn’t  tell me to hand over my goods, they started shooting and closing in from the larger rocks on the hill. I dropped from the horse and pulled the Model 1886 from my back. My horse scrambled out of sight while bullets flew past my head, ricocheted from the rocks, and patches of earth exploded in front of me. These attempted killers seemed assured of victory, with confident and dangerously cocky openness as they fired. They didn’t bother to take cover because in their minds success was a sure thing. My rifle kicked with sweet, exploding fury, and the odor of gunsmoke took over. My first assailant fell dead to the ground, a fresh hole in his chest.

            I knelt behind a boulder and pulled off two shots into the torso of a second assailant who dropped in a pained gasp. He flailed on the ground for a moment before becoming still. A series of ricochets drilled the boulder, and I hid. When I looked over, the two remaining assailants had split up to come at me from two sides. I shot one in the leg, and when he fell to the ground I shot him in the arm. I spun to face the other man, but found him lying bludgeoned on the ground, my faithful horse standing on top of his badly beaten body. The horse and I exchanged the glance we always exchanged in scenarios through which triumph was achieved through teamwork; it is a common scenario.

            The man I shot in the leg and arm was still alive. He was reaching for his gun when I stood over him and my shadow cast itself across his face. His Mexican eyes looked into my gringo  eyes, or the barrel of the rifle, I couldn’t tell which,  and he rested his hands at his sides. I imagine the view from his vantage point wasn’t favorable, but still had a sort of spectacular aspect about it. Like a romantic vision of heroic victory signaling his defeat.

            “Mind telling me what that was about?” I asked.

            “Assassination.” He didn’t show any pain in the way he talked. His English was adequate, if such a thing can be judged from a single word.

            “Assassination attempt. You’ve failed.”

            He said nothing, and his eyes squinted.

            “Who sent you?”

            A tumbleweed rolled by and I heard a rattlesnake in the distance. There was no other sound. He refused to answer.

            I grabbed the hat off his head and set it on my own. I hadn’t worn a hat in years, but this one was nice. Rugged, finely shaped, black like my leather pants and duster, just dirty enough, and unlike any other hat I’d seen in all my days. Except for the other three that sat on the dead men’s heads.

            “You boys have fine taste in hats. Tell me who sent you to kill me. Someone thought it best to send four assassins instead of one. You can tell me or you can get a spur in your gut.”

            I twisted my foot to let him see the glistening steel spurs that graced my boots. The spurs that killed a town. The spurs I killed an old friend to obtain.

            The assassin grinned when he saw them. Clumsily, he pulled a dagger from his belt and threw it at my head, missing by a great distance. I shot him in the hand and dug my spur into his thigh. My horse and I had to listen to him scream and complain as we dragged him up the hill into Hardcoat Pass, to deliver into the hands of the authorities.

Part II: Hardcoat Pass

            Hardcoat Pass was a trader’s town. Not much else went on around it except gambling and hunting. Its position on the edge of Navajo country, or what was left of it, made it important for white men trading with the Indians. The town wouldn’t exist for long. It started as a settlement by a couple trading caravans along the San Juan River, desolate and hidden, right around the time Grover Cleveland won the presidency. It grew to a population of a few hundred, which nearly tripled in the warm months, and had trader traffic by boat and road alike. Some years later, shortly after the Great Snowstorm of 1889, while harboring the murderous sons of a Confederate soldier—two men with the blood of ten Navajo families on their hands—the town would be raided by Navajo avengers, burned to the ground, and all its goods stolen or eradicated. It’d become a town of quiet ghosts. But that’s not crucial to this story.

            On this day it was a good-looking town. A pleasant balance of trees, grass, and desert dirt, and enough water for the thirstiest mouths. Dry plains covered in red and brown dust surrounded it if you went far enough from the river, with distant mountains to the north and south. There were plenty of rich men who dressed like poor men, three fine bars, a gambling hall, and women that made your leather stick to your skin even indoors. Most of them weren’t even paid for it. In the line of work that had me going to Hardcoat Pass on this particular day, I found myself traveling there frequently. It was the kind of town that was quiet when you wanted it to be, and exciting when you wanted that.

            Since it was most of the time a quiet place, all eyes were on me as I dragged my attempted assassin through the street, to the front porch of the Sheriff’s station. Muted gasps and whispered words of interest floated about, while a cloud of dust and a thin stream of red-stained sand trailed us. I nodded at passing women, whose curious gazes quickly became breathless swooning.

            “Sometimes I think you come to town just as an excuse,” said Sheriff Shepherd, between puffs of his lunchtime cigar, “to bring gifts to my jail. Christmas in July? Hell!” He stood from his bench and greeted me as I dismounted my horse. “What’s his story?”

            “Tried to kill me. Says he’s an assassin. There are three more down the hill, north of the ravine. He’s the only one who made it.”

            Shepherd scratched his gray beard, looked over the man’s bullet wounds, blew smoke in his eyes, then said: “I might rather be dead than look like you. Someone get Doctor Sullivan out here. And someone go find this boy’s friends. See if we can’t learn something.”

            One of the deputies ran off toward the doctor’s office, and two others carried my moaning attempted murderer inside the jailhouse.

           Shepherd petted my horse’s main, and blew his smoke downwind. “Razorback, you Goliath. Ever thought of tradin’ him to Marty?”

            “Razorback and I don’t part. You know that. Doesn’t matter what latest breed Marty’s got.”

         “What brings you out to these parts? Another delivery?”

        “The usual.” I took a bag off Razorback’s saddle and let Shepherd peek at the box inside. “It’s for Marty, matter of fact. A courier showed up in Santa Fe with a sick horse, couldn’t finish the delivery, so it went to me.”

            “You’re living in Santa Fe?”

          “Not exactly. Still don’t have a home. But Santa Fe provides good work, so I spend time there.”

         “Honest work? Or you gone back to your lawless ways? If you’re no longer a drifter, you might be likely to settle down. Maybe live honestly.”

          “It’s honest work. But settling down ain’t for me. Come on.”

            “Hard to imagine you as a courier, though I can see its appeal.” He took a drag on his cigar, and scratched Razorback behind the ears. “Long trips into dangerous territory, life on the back of a horse, or dang, even on foot. It makes sense for you.”

            “I do a wide range of work around there. Couriering is one part of it. I like the time out on the land. Also work on a ranch, work as a guard at a bank, and apprentice as a gunsmith when time permits.”

            “My Lord, son. Look at you. Still look like an outlaw, but you straightened up alright.”

            “Maybe a little.”

I didn’t bother to mention all this work was to pay off a gambling debt I’d accumulated during a night in Tombstone, down in Arizona Territory. After news of the Red Peak incident, cleverly referred to by the papers as the Red Peak Incident—in which my readers will recall I was a central figure—spread across the west, I thought it best to escape the controversy by drifting far away. Over four hundred miles away.

I’d started smuggling alcohol and tobacco across the Mexico border with a Chinaman named Yin-Yang. The money was better than good, and the Tombstone whores were my favorite, so we often found ourselves staying in the town for long periods. When Yin-Yang got caught up in a game of faro one evening at the Split Six Saloon, a game he didn't know the rules to, but a stomach full of Scotch told him he should play anyway, I had to step in. Quickly I won back everything he’d lost, but found myself chained to the cards by my lust for victory. Gambling’s high is something no drink can match, and greed is a source of energy no resource can imitate. By the end of the night, and the end of the second bottle of whiskey, I found I’d gambled away two thousand dollars—more than twice what Yin-Yang and I were worth, combined. A wealthy man who, by my good or bad fortune—I wasn’t sure which—was in lively spirits at the bar that night. His name was Jim Firebanks, half English, half Comanche. He was in Tombstone to oversee the opening of a new mine he owned. Overhearing the ruckus that came from Yin-Yang’s and my situation at the table in the back, he came to see what was the matter.

Yin-Yang, drunk not only on Scotch, but on a fair dose of Oriental rage, assured our fellow faro players we would not be giving them their money, in so many words, because we just didn’t have that kind of loot. I don’t know if it was because he said this to the meanest bastard in the place, or because he was Chinese, or because of the large sum of our debt, but Yin-Yang was shot through the eyes by a Remington New Model, one of my favorite guns at the time. A fight broke out between me and seven others, including the grim bastard who killed Yin-Yang, until I found myself restrained and immobilized by the crowd. Jim Firebanks stepped in right before the big bastard put a hole through my head.

He paid off my debt to the seven gamblers to convince them to spare me. Generous though his gesture was, he told me he didn’t do anything for anybody for free.  To repay him he said I would work for him, earning a sum of two thousand dollars plus any interest he deemed appropriate. Though I was an outlaw, a gunslinger, a bootlegger, an occasional thief, and a sex-mad wild man, I had honor, and a good heart that recognized a good deed. We agreed I would work on his ranch in Santa Fe, and he’d allow me to house Razorback there.

The bastard who killed Yin-Yang was arrested later that night, but the penalty for killing a Chinaman in Tombstone was sixty pieces of silver and a night in jail. Jim Firebanks, wealthy as they come, of course had prestige and connections in all towns in which he did business. For an extra thousand dollars worth of work promised to Mr. Firebanks, I struck a deal to get me into the jail and alone with the prisoner for five minutes. It was there I buried a knife into the bastard’s skull. Making good on my word, I showed up at Firebanks’ ranch in Santa Fe in two weeks time, and went to work.

The work was good, I enjoyed it. After Firebanks judged me to be a person of high character, his words, not my own, he trusted me enough to leave the ranch to pursue other work, even if it meant long absences. He knew I’d always return. This is how I came about the part time courier position, as well as the apprenticeship in gunsmithing. But the money from these jobs, including ranching, was slow. As if his name wasn’t an indicator, Jim was part owner of a bank in Santa Fe, and he hired me on as security, after witnessing my skill with a gun. I hoped that work would help pay off the interest I’d be accumulating toward Mr. Firebanks. By the point I’d arrived in Hardcoat Pass, on this particular visit, I’d been working for Firebanks for close to two years. I’d paid off two thousand of my original debt, and accumulated an additional one thousand in the meantime. Two thousand dollars still to pay, but I never once considered running. That’d only put a price on my head the size of the District of Alaska. And I was an honest man who stuck to his deals. High character and such.

But I didn’t want to lay all this down on Sheriff Shepherd. No need to go on about my problems. Besides, he was about to have problems of his own.

“Shepherd, almost forgot. Out some miles, along the road, there’s a ravaged  wagon train. No survivors. Twelve wagons in all, maybe thirty bodies. Strange thing, though. All kinds of valuables still there, all over the ground, some still in the wagons. It wasn’t a robbery. Looked like a mass execution.”

         He took off his hat and scratched his forehead like he always did when he heard troubling news. “Goddammit. Third one in a month.” His mood went from cheerful to fearful in a flash, and I got the impression this was something that caused him ongoing stress. “I’ll have my boys check it out after they deal with those assassins. Wonder if that’s the guilty party.”

         That four men hired to kill me would have been waiting around outside Hardcoat Pass to kill trade caravans seemed unlikely. And none of the assassins had a shotgun, a weapon that was evidently present during the caravan attack. But I had no interest in discussing the matter further. I dug a crumpled paper out of my duster pocket and handed it to Shepherd.

            “Found their inventory list and the traders they were delivering to.”

            Shepherd looked over the list, though it didn’t appear to strike him as important. “Thanks. We’ll put this with the others.”

          “I’ve got to get this to Marty. Guess I’ll be on my way.”

            “Sure thing. I ought to get to back to work. Looks like my day just got longer.”

Part III: A Favor

       Marty’s stables housed Mustangs of the highest pedigree, which rich folk from as far north as Salt Lake City and as far east as Oklahoma Territory came to buy. Though Hardcoat Pass was a small town, Marty’s horses gave the town a tiny hint of fame, making it a veritable goldmine for wealthy horse lovers.

        Razorback frolicked in an open field of dandelions while I looked for Marty in the stables. Horse smell put me at ease.

       “Butler, you bitch of a horse!” That was Marty’s voice. “Stop eating Pilsbury’s oatmeal. God in Hell!”

       “Marty,” I grunted, finding him in the back of a barn with three horses around him, which made his small stature seem even smaller. “Got a package for you.”

         “Ahh, hello!” He set down a plate of oats and milk and rushed toward me with a smile all over his face. “I don’t normally talk to the horses like that! And Butler, she’s a girl. A bitch, but what a sweet bitch she is. Just sometimes she eats oats that ain't for her!”

         “None of my business. But you ought to be kind to your horses, Marty.”

        “Oh, I am, I assure you I am! Tame and domestic though they are, some of these beasts still got feral instincts. None of the etiquette customers want. But hey, that’s not your problem. What have you got for me?”

       “A box.” I handed him his package and presented the receipt, indicating the need for his signature.

           “I’ll get a pen. Come inside! You want a drink?”

         I followed Marty into his lavish log home and took a seat on a chair covered in animal fur. He set the package on a table in front of me and rushed off to find a pen. Admiring his animal pelts and his keen taste for Mexican-weaved rugs, I thought about the dead caravan just a few miles away. Their bodies roasting in the sun, vultures would soon find them and pluck the flesh off their bones. The deputies would be lucky to find bodies intact. The flask on my belt caught my eye as I examined the chair I sat in, so I had whiskey while I waited.

       “And here’s something for the delivery!” Marty returned. “I know it’s a long trip.” He stuffed a handful of silver certificates into my palm, worth almost a hundred dollars, he assured me. I didn’t bother to count it because I wasn’t expecting it.

       I suppose he could see from my face or by my silence that the money was a surprise. And a happy one.

          “There’s more where that came from, friend!”

      Though we weren’t friends by any stretch, and him calling me one was almost an insult, I let my eyes do the talking, to tell him he had my attention.

          He opened the package. Inside was a long wooden box, and inside that box was a gun I recognized immediately. A Colt revolver, Army model, from 1860. The kind my father used. .44 caliber bullets were tightly packaged with it, nestled into a velvet covered hatch below the gun.

         “That’s a handsome weapon,” I said. “But what you just paid me is five times what the gun is worth. Sure more than you paid for it.”

         “I know what I paid you. But see, this gun’s gonna more than pay for itself. To me it’s worth more’n my stage coach! Been a streak of horse thieves around these parts the last few weeks. ‘Bout once or twice a week a couple horses go missing. I seen ‘em myself, early morning or late night, when it’s dark. Saw a couple fellas takin’ my horses from the barns, but they were armed. Didn’t have weapons to stand up to ‘em. Now I do.”

            I pointed to an animal pelt draped over a table. “What about that?”

        “Oh, Lord no! I don’t kill these. I buy these off fur traders. Where you think you are? This is a trade city, son. What money doesn’t buy, regular goods can!”

             I stood up and tipped my hat to Marty, and told him I had to get going. But as I headed toward the door, already tired of his hospitality, even with his generous tip, he stepped in front of me.

            “I told you there’s more where that money came from. Remember?”

            I remembered, because he had told me this not two minutes earlier.

            “What would you say to doing me a favor? Might be a big favor, but a big favor drives a big price.”

            “What kind of price, and what kind of favor?”

        “The favor first. My son-in-law needs to be reunited with his family. Took a train as far as Madrid, then hitched a ride on a convoy up to these parts, but can’t seem to get anyone to agree to take him where he needs to go.”

         “And where’s that?”

         “Zion Canyon. Utah Territory.”

         “That’s three or four days travel. And a dangerous way. 

       “You think I don’t know that? That’s why no one else is offering to take him! That, and they just don’t like the boy. Don’t want to put up with him for four days. Also seems to have been some trouble with the transport we arranged. More than once, I ought to say. Boy’s been here for weeks. That’s a long time to be separated from family, you know. But now you come along…”

            “You’re not enticing me, Marty. I’ve got to head back to Santa Fe in the morning. This trip will triple my travel time, my time away from other responsibilities.”

            “You’re a gunfighter, right? You’re good with a gun.”

            “Used to be. I live a quiet life, now.”

           “So those guns on your back, and that piece at your hip are only for show? Come on, you're not foolin’ me. You might try to live a clean, quiet life, but you still get your share of shit and demons, don’t you? You wouldn’t be couriering if you didn’t think there’d be a great chance for trouble, a likelihood for risk and peril, and unpredictable vistas of adventure. You need that rush. You’re a gambler, not just with money, but with your own fate, the very frontiers of your sense of perception and pleasure. You know the quiet life ain’t for you. Don’t even say anything. I can tell.”

            “Make your point, or I’m gone.”

          “You won’t merely be an escort to my son in law, but protection. Sheriff’s told me a story or two about you. He’s fond of you, and says you handle yourself better than anyone he knows. Just my luck you came around right about now.”

            “I’m not a bodyguard. Goodbye.” I tried to move past Marty, but he was quick to block the door.

         “Eight hundred, plus food, water, all necessary supplies! Half now, half when you return with evidence my son in law has arrived alive and well!”

         “Eight hundred sure is tempting, but it just isn’t enough. That’s a week of travel, round trip. And over some of the roughest terrain in the region. I’ve got work to tend to back in Santa Fe. Longer I’m away, more money I lose.” Although eight hundred dollars was more money than I’d earn in half a year back in Santa Fe, I had to make a long foray into possible danger worth my while.

            “Nine hundred, then. Just about all I can do.”

            “Five thousand.”

           Marty laughed a bellowing, booming, obviously forced laugh. “You think I’m made of gold, do you? Hah! I ain’t got that kind of money to spare!”

         “I know how much your horses go for, Marty. I know how many you sell in a month. I can estimate your cost of living by your modest home. And I know how loose you are with your money after what you just paid me for delivering a package. Five thousand, Marty.”

          He looked offended, then thoughtful. “One thousand five hundred,” he offered.

            “Four thousand.”

            “Two.”

            “Four thousand.”

            “Twenty five hundred.”

            “Anything under four and I walk.”

            “Four thousand it is, then.”

Four thousand dollars would pay off the rest of my debt, leaving me a couple thousand in change. I’d be free to leave Santa Fe on good terms, and find new lands for Razorback and myself. New towns, new trouble, new whores, new risks. Again, I let my eyes do the talking. If Marty had seen eyes before, he’d know a look of absolute enthrallment that transcended simple forms of happiness. But I held a firm, disciplined control over my eyes and the unspoken messages they relayed. At the most, my eyes might have indicated an agreeable air that showed little more than acknowledgment of his offer.

        “You’ve got your man,” I said. I shook Marty’s hand, and he threw his hands in the air in the least dignified show of joy I’ve ever seen.

          “Oh thank you. He’s right upstairs! I’ll go tell him right now! You won’t regret this. He’s a scientist! A real scientist! A man of numbers and extensive knowledge of our world! You won’t regret this, no! Surely you understand what a favor you’re doing me! No, you won’t regret this! Thank you!”

          “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t care who he is, where he comes from, what he believes in, what he does for a living, or anything. He’ll keep his mouth shut all four days, or however long it takes us to get to Zion Canyon. I don’t want to hear anything from him. I want a fast, quiet trip.”

         Marty didn’t give me any sign to show me he heard a word I said, just kept nodding and smiling, and when I finished, he ran to find his son-in-law.

          He must have been early to mid twenties, so it wouldn’t be inaccurate to call him a man. But a man isn’t defined by age, and the person who came down the stairs with Marty embodied nothing that I had ever associated with a man. He was a tall and scrawny fellow with a beard like feces smeared on the cheeks. His voice was a squeaking wagon wheel to my ears, a horse’s neigh, a pig’s mating call. He introduced himself as Ricky Fluddermutt, said he came from Pennsylvania. I didn’t ask how or why he came out west, because I didn’t care. But Ricky didn’t care that I didn’t care, or he just didn’t notice my lack of questions, so he filled me in on every useless detail of his journey and other pieces of information I didn’t ask for. This was immediate, unprovoked.  The things he told me were of such unmatched uselessness, tedium, and commonplace stupidity that I won’t repeat most of them either because I’ve forgotten them after much effort to do so, or they were so empty that putting them to print would offer nothing of worth in the world of letters. The weight of his depressing and tiresome reports of the mundane and meaningless was so heavy that I felt it would crush Razorback and I like a Utah boulder.

His charisma, if one were to mistake what he had for charisma, was like a man on fire running through the center of town. He makes a lot of noise, but the only sensible thing anyone can do is throw water on him or steer clear. He was of such low character and unpleasant disposition that a full account of his bottomless pit of bad traits would take days to impart. He started with his own story, of his fondness for mathematics and the natural sciences, and how his career in such a field propelled him above regular folk like myself.

          “We’re not like everyone else,” he said more than once. “We’re thinking men. Educated, and wired to solve problems.”

            Something told me he never had to solve the problems I did. Guess we were wired different.

         Briefly, but not briefly enough, he dictated to me his verbal resume’, his qualifications as a petroleum scientist and businessman, as though they meant something to me. He recited the names of laboratories he’d worked in, the forms of technology he had extensive knowledge of, complete with acronyms he seemed to invent on the spot. The dizzying, nauseating information dump of no context and no value seemed only to pick up in speed. He followed the bland story of himself with an in depth history and analysis of the restaurants of Pennsylvania, fancying himself something of an aspiring hobbyist food critic. Having never been further east than Kansas, I couldn’t think of things I cared about less than Pennsylvanian restaurants. When Ricky mentioned his wife and kids, I quickly envisioned a miserable woman in perpetual regret for ever having married such a person, and children who would grow to be just as unlikeable as their father. I was surprised any woman would touch this creature with a hint of affection.

            This whole information overload occurred over about the time it took us to shake hands and walk outside to the rolling pasture where Razorback frolicked with kindred-spirit horses. This gives you a sense of the focus this man had on the frivolous, the incredible feats of excessive talking he was capable of, his own obliviousness to the level of interest others have in what he says, and how many useless syllables he could fit into a sentence.

         His goal was to establish immediate credibility, to assert some kind of intellectual dominance over others, and to present himself as a person much more in tune with the world and its important goings on than anyone around him, as a man of exquisite perception. He wished to appear as a jack of all trades, a master of all, an indomitable mind and presence. His ability for self reflection seemed in short supply, and I could tell he forced himself upon others in a similar manner every chance he got. He revealed all things about himself as if they were encyclopedic facts, with no sense of structure, priority, or relevance, putting as much of it as he could on the table at once, leaving nothing below the surface. He eradicated any possible human mystery about himself, a necessity of existence, and rendered himself wholly uninteresting in the process. Few people, if any, could be happy this person existed.

         “Marty” I said, hoping to cut Ricky’s storm of words short, “I’ll return in the morning to collect the first four thousand, the supplies, and your son-in-law. Have everything ready when I arrive, or this won’t happen.”

            “But, where will you stay?” asked Marty. “You can see I have plenty of room in my house to put you up for the night. It’s no trouble. It’s just a small token of my appreciation.”

            I looked at Ricky. The arrogant smirk on his face, the air of unwarranted superiority he held himself with, the cocky, soaring ego of a man whose mind harbored disorders yet to be catalogued by medicine, made me grind my teeth in apprehension. I accepted the invitation, not for myself, but on behalf of Razorback, who didn’t often get to spend time with other horses in pretty fields.

            “I’ll sleep here.”

            Ricky nodded, and Marty, I could tell, was overjoyed. The way he eyed Ricky I knew he wouldn’t miss him.

Part IV: Red Vengeance

            Before sunrise Marty and I loaded Razorback with sleeping rolls, canteens, rope, coffee, whiskey, flint, matches, beef jerky, and other supplies for travel. It seemed over the course of the night Razorback had grown fond of one of the girl horses. That’s the one Marty would have Ricky take, on account of us thinking Razorback deserved a companion on our trip.

            “Get Ricky out here,” I said, tightening the satchels to Razorback’s saddle. “Daylight’s on the horizon and we gotta get moving.”

           I poured whiskey into my coffee and threw it back. Filled it once more, and repeated. When Ricky came down, he loaded his stuff onto the female horse, and Marty came to thank me again.

          “You don’t know what it means to me that you’re doing this.”

            “Stop thanking me. You make me want to go to Santa Fe and forget I ever took your offer.”

            “Seems your horse is real fond of Dianne! Look at his tongue!”

            “Who’s Dianne?”

Razorback was licking Ricky’s horse on the ears, regular horse-to-horse grooming.

            “That gorgeous brunette right there! People who love their horses give ‘em names like a person. Not some kind of mixed up animal name! Dianne! A woman’s name!”

        “What makes you think an animal wants a human name?” I eyed Marty. It was early, and he’d already worn away most of my nerves. “Human names are too civil and obedient. An animal shouldn’t be obedient. That’s for men. Men who don’t value themselves.”

            “Say what you will, but I know horses! Horses is my business, and a human name makes a man feel more comfortable with a horse. You call a horse ‘Oliver’,  and whole messes of people are gonna show interest in buying him. You call a horse ‘Cannon Hoof’, and people are gonna stay inside when he trots by.”

        “Why ‘Dianne’?” I asked. The name brought memories that became less grievous and burdensome with time, but that I still liked to bury under mounds of stone and clay. “Why not Ruth or Jenny?”

      “Nothin’ wrong with ‘Dianne’!” Marty shouted, following it with a crackling laugh and a hoot like an owl. His mood was too much at 6 in the morning.

       Ricky finished packing then came to join what was barely a conversation, turning it into even less of one. The most intentional sigh I’d ever heard came out of him, which I came to learn was the prologue to his monologue. It was how he hoped to grab the attention of his target, to let them know he had something on his mind, something to say that was of utmost importance not only to himself, but, undoubtedly, to the target as well. And a monologue it was, for at no point during a typical exchange would he grant the listener, the target, the opportunity to speak, to bounce back, to interject an idea, or a valid opinion. He was not inquisitive, or genuinely interested in what others had to say, but loved the sound of his voice, and would make sure it was heard with clarity by all around him. His sigh, his drawn out, exaggerated, obvious sigh was designed to cue the target to say: “Hello, Ricky. How are you?” or “Ricky, what’s on your mind?” to which he would reply with his uninteresting monologue, as arid as the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada. His monologue was, in fact, so dull and devoid of useful information about anything of substance that it often became a soliloquy, an offering of undeveloped idea fragments to people unable or unwilling to hear it.

          When neither Marty or I took Ricky’s bait to start down a path no man seeks, Ricky forced eye contact with me and held a ceramic coffee mug at eye level, to be sure I saw it.

            “So glad I brought my mug,” he said. It was a regular looking mug. Black and boring, like the coffee inside it. “Some people forget to bring coffee mugs on long trips, and then find they can’t drink coffee. At least, not of their own volition. Only when others decide to provide them a cup. With your own mug, though, you can drink coffee whenever you want.”

            Ricky went on like this for a while. Marty looked at me, but avoided my eyes, for he knew in them I held great hatred and venom, the kind of venom one reserves for a man who’s set him up for certain death, or days of unpleasant company. But in a moment of kindness he pulled money from his pants pocket and cut off Ricky mid-sentence, a sentence that was by now a soliloquy about his knowledge of kilns used to heat ceramics for use in creating such fine sculptures, like the coffee mug in his hand.

            “Here’s two thousand,” said Marty, counting the bills as he laid them in my hand.

            “Get on your horse,” I said to Ricky. “From sunrise to sunset we’ll ride. Should be able to cover a hundred miles a day, give or take, so we can make the trip in less than three days. Gonna be a long ride. By my guess, it’ll be the longest you’ve ever spent on a horseback.”

            Ricky tried to speak up, probably to inform me he was an expert cowboy who’d spent a great deal of time in the wild heart of the frontier, surviving by river water and gunpowder, but I nailed his words into a coffin of my own commands, telling him he’d be responsible for navigation. I handed him a map of the region and told him to stay on his horse.

            “Not much in terms of civilization from here to there, so we’ll be sleeping under the moon. Coyotes and rattlesnakes better not scare you, son, because they’re fixin’ to be your bedmates.”

          The smile on his face said he took it as a joke.

         “There,” Marty said, placing the one hundredth Stephen Decatur in my hand. “Two thousand dollars. You all set?”

            “We’re set.”

       “If we travel through Navajo country,” said Ricky, putting a brand new derby on his head, “which it looks like we will, we may find some easy rest with the Natives.”

         “Don’t be so sure about that.” The first rays of sun came over the eastern horizon, and I stored the money in a pack on Razorback. “Saddle up. We’re moving out. No roads out that way, so we’ll stick along the San Juan ‘til we hit the Colorado. After that the map comes in handy.”

       Marty waved us off as we departed, laughing and smiling and throwing his hat in the air. His relief had become my hardship. I hoped eight thousand would make it worth my effort.

         Before we left town, we stopped by the Sheriff’s station. Shepherd seemed pleased to see me, and let me in on the latest news concerning my attempted assassin.

          “His name’s Nicandros something or other, your killer. Attempted killer, I mean.” Shepherd’s beard was a mess, so I knew he’d been scratching it and toying with it all night, probably long into the morning. Circles were under his eyes, and I could tell coffee was the only thing keeping him upright. “Nicandros and his amigos are, or I should say ‘were’, as I’m talking past tense now, part of a gang of desperados calling themselves Lanzas del Infierno, or the Spears of Hell. We’ve heard of these fellas before, and they’ve been around for some time. A Mexican gang, you might well have guessed. Started up in Altar, Sonora, in Mexico, back in ’77. The Salazar cousins, three dirty stinking shits, began robbing locals, moved on to murder real fast, made a name for themselves in the region. No one tried to stop them,  everyone just got out their way when they came around. By ’81 they’d started gunrunning and recruiting other miscreants, including a bunch of talented gunfighters out the military. Violent bunch of animals they were, and they started offering their services to wealthy mine owners and minor oil barons from Texas to Arizona, to kill off competition, or anyone who got in the way of operations. The gang grew, and started operating heavily along the Mexican border.

            “The Salazar cousins died in a shootout a while back, and the gang’s lost a bit of its muscle. But they got about fifteen core members, and it looks as though you knocked them down a few. Nicandros tried to kill himself with a knife last night, either to end the pain of having three bullet holes in him, or so he wouldn’t have to talk. We took his knife away like you do with a child. My deputies and I, using his wounds as leverage, got him to spill his proverbial guts. He and the other muchachos were hired by two men he called ‘outraged banditos’ all the way from California. Had a bone to pick with a ‘longhaired, leather-clad scoundrel.’ Sound like anyone you know?”

           “No.”

       Shepherd nodded and went on. “Our compadre was losing a lot of blood, and Doc couldn’t seem to get his holes stitched up, maybe ‘cause of us prodding them for answers. Last thing he said last night was in Mexican. None of us know too much of it, but Doc was able to make out something about a place called Red Peak, and lots of fire and death. None of us ever heard of that place. I suppose it’s a mountain. A volcano, perhaps.”

Revenge. Of course it was revenge. A stale cliche’ by that time, as commonplace as yucca. But that doesn’t make it any less dangerous, or tiresome. There were four survivors of Red Peak. Razorback and I were two of them. The other two ran away like cowards before the blood storm.

            “I’d like to talk to him. I’ve got to make a surprise trip this morning.” A trip to Zion Canyon, which, in my dismal sort of luck, was only forty miles east of Red Peak. “But on my return in a few days, could I speak with him?”

            “Oh, I’m afraid Nicandros is dead. Died of blood loss, I’m sure. He and the others are already buried.”

             Shepherd informed me they still knew nothing about the wagon train killings, and I left so he could hope to get some rest.         

           The shadows outside were getting shorter, so we were losing travel time. Razorback had his tongue in Dianne’s ear when I walked outside, and for a moment I imagined the brown horse, with Ricky on her back, and Razorback in her ear, as the reborn form of the human Dianne who died in Red Peak three years earlier. What a thought. If Razorback fucked this horse I wouldn’t know how to take it.

          We departed from Hardcoat Pass and made decent time following the San Juan west. The weather was nice for July, and Ricky’s incessant, one-way banter became easy to ignore after the first five hours. I don’t know how many times he talked about his coffee mug, or his obsession with rapidly advancing telephone technology. It didn’t matter, because I occupied my head with ideas of what I’d do with my newfound freedom and a thousand dollars. Travel north, maybe. Razorback preferred cooler weather, and I couldn’t blame him. Black hair, much like black leather, is not kind in the desert heat. We traveled twelve hours the first day, stopping twice so the horses could rest, a third time so Ricky could shit, a fourth time so he could piss, and stopped a little past the Colorado-Utah Territory border for the night.

       I was worried Ricky’s vacant-minded stories would carry on under the stars, while I gazed into the constellations and recalled Greek myths in silence. But he commented on the view above us, and we soon found ourselves in a real conversation. A common interest had been found, but within minutes he was spouting trivia, and ignoring my sense of wonder in the celestial in favor of his cold, disinterested recitation of things authors had said about space long before him, but in more eloquent ways. While he rattled on about cataloging stars and the average temperature of their surfaces, I was lost in the sky’s immense vastness. Countless cosmic wonders existed beyond my realm of understanding, incredible infinities were staring down at us, and I felt worthless, like a tiny faceless cactus already forgotten. My sense of importance was vanquished when thinking of the universe’s boundless expanse. But Ricky’s sense of importance seemed more inflated than ever as he listed the names of telescopes he knew of around the world, and told me how highly he was respected back in Pennsylvania. I was halfway through our first bottle of whiskey by this point, so I closed my eyes to let inebriation take me under, paying no heed to Ricky’s nocturnal monologue.

            He was asleep when I woke up a little later to piss. But an unusual noise from the horses drew my attention their way. There it was. Razorback was fucking Dianne. If ever horse love was as vibrant as a desert rose, as breathtaking as a California sunset, as ambrosial as a prostitute’s corset, this was it. I watched only for a minute, then stumbled through the dark, back to my bed roll, and passed out.

Part V: Descendents of the Gun

          “If we cut away from the river, just go straight west, we’ll cut half a day off our trip.” It was about noontime. Ricky was holding the map in front of him, while Dianne carried him with what seemed like a happier trot. Hard to tell if a horse you don’t know that well is happy, but sometimes they make it obvious. Razorback was in high spirits, too.

            “Mountains don’t make for easy riding,” I said. “And that’s all we’ll hit the whole way. That’ll do nothing but add difficulty to our ride. Double or triple our time if we’re lucky.”

            I found that when you shot down Ricky’s bad ideas, challenged his uninformed opinions, or dismissed his naive insights, he got quiet for a moment, laughed, then changed the subject. This happened often on our second day, and it felt good. Everything he said was empty exposition. Though we had momentarily found ourselves in a back and forth about the stars, it was nearly impossible to have a true conversation with the boy. His inquiry was limited to the specifics of a piece of technology, or obscure artifacts of science. His questions never entered the personal realm. I sympathized with having no interest in other people. But if a man has no interest in others, he can’t expect others to take an interest in him. Ricky was a boy. A twenty five year old boy.

            “I suppose it’s unlikely we’ll run into another soul on this whole trip,” Ricky said. I hoped he was right. If we ran into anyone in these parts, it’d be Navajo or outlaws, neither of which worried me much, they’d just slow us down. Day one ended up being slower than I expected. I wanted day two to move faster. If we didn’t make it past the Colorado River, I’d have us traveling through the night.

            “Let’s hope.”

            “What if we do? Friend or foe? What do you think are the odds?”

         “Not concerned with odds, friends, or foes. Just moving. I’d like to get well past the Colorado, today. Hit Zion Canyon midday tomorrow, leave you, and get out of there.”

         “My family’s actually in Cedar City. That’s my final destination.”

         “No one said anything about Cedar City. I’m taking you to Zion, then I’m done. Just a long trek back in silence.” I stretched out my words, drawled with explicitness. This would indicate the fervor with which I wanted to be rid of him.

            “Oh, understood. There’ll be someone to take me to Cedar City from there. It’s all taken care of.”

            I didn’t care. Once he was at Zion he wasn’t my problem. Once he was at Zion, and I had him give me some sort of proof he was alive and well to take back to Marty, he could drop dead. Wouldn’t matter to me.

          “My father-in-law says you’re a gunfighter.”

          “Used to be. Now I’m a courier, a rancher… and I work in a bank.”

       “Well, no. Now you’re a bodyguard and an escort.” Ricky laughed because to him, he’d just made a good joke. Those were the kinds of jokes he made. All he’d really done is put me one notch closer to cutting his throat.

          “I am not what I do for money, nor is it who I am.”

          “But what more is there? I hear people say that, but that isn’t true. The people who say that are people who have failed and can’t be proud of what they do for work. Pastimes don’t make you anything. It’s your means of income that define you and give you meaning. Maybe that sounds feebleminded, but it’s the truth. That’s what you contribute to the world, and that’s how you measure your value. Objectively against others, not subjectively.”

        “You’re wrong. Most things you say are rooted in wrongness, but this is the most severe shape of wrongness your words have taken, so far. Money can’t define me, boy, and it can’t define you. A construct of men cannot give worth or meaning to one’s life. What one does for the mere benefit, be it to himself or to another, without  the anticipation of reward, or the fear of lost profit, is a greater measure of worth than money. And meaning has nothing to do with it.”

          “Money is only a symbol, though. It symbolizes you’ve done something that someone values, and they’ve taken part of their worth and given it to you in exchange for that thing of value you’ve done. That’s how it works. That’s what gives your life purpose and meaning. Don’t you understand that?”

         “What I understand is life is inherently meaningless and should be left that way. Why should there be meaning for it to be valuable?”

          “I really don’t think you understand what it means to value something.”

           “You’re not a person I suspect understands the value of much anything. You’re defined by your name, your social status, your own perceived sense of importance. But none of that means anything to me.”

           “Perhaps not. Speaking of which, if you don’t mind me asking, what’s your name? Marty never did tell me, and you didn’t seem to be in the mood to share it when we met.”

           “What’s it matter?”

          “It matters a great deal. What am I to call you? How do I address you?

“Call me nothing. No name.”

“ ‘A man is nothing without his name.’ My father told me that, long ago.”

            “A man is everything without his name. More without it, even. A name is nothing but a ball and chain to slow him down, to keep him under watch, to make sure he’s obeying the right laws, frivolous though they might be. Maybe to you it’s an identity to cling to, to build up and boast of, to put alongside others of some imagined importance. Your name means nothing. Mine means nothing. Without a name, who can find you? Without a name, who can speak of you? If a man wants to speak of you and you have no name, he’s forced to speak of your actions, your character, and what you’ve done, or your legacy. He can speak about you rather than your name. Everyone has a name, but none of them mean anything.”

           “The Natives have names that seem to be meaningful. Their names describe them, they identify a characteristic or a trait they’re known for. ‘Runs Like Bear’, or ‘Bringer of Fire’, names like that.”

           “That is so, but those names tell one small part of that person’s story, hardly at all relevant to an identity.”

         “I guess I’ll call you Bodyguard. That’s all I know about you. Or would you prefer Gunfighter?”

          “No name.” I took a long swig of whiskey from my flask. “I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss living by the gun, though. Worked as a railroad sniper for a few years, shooting eyes out of would-be thieves. The job got to be too easy, too much of a routine of comfort. I learned all the ways—of which there are very few—a man can rob a train successfully. Tried it once, succeeded, then spent my money recklessly. Shared my knowledge in seedy bars and with seedy people, and soon made friends with all kinds of pleasant scum. It wasn’t long before I was running around with wet mouth lowlifes, doing anything to get in trouble or make money. When the caliber of my friends fell low enough, I found myself in frequent fights, first of the fist, then of the gun. Took a lot of punches, a few bullets, but usually came out on top. When I left these people behind is when I took up work as a bounty hunter. Ideal kind of life. Did that for a number of years.”

          “I could never enjoy work like that, see. There’s too much uncertainty, and when you think about it, no parameters to work within.”

        “Think about what? That’s the allure of it, no parameters and no rules. Get your man, get your money. By whatever means necessary.”

     “But certainly it wasn’t your ideal career if you’re a courier, now.”

            “Got carried away after some years…”

            “You never went to university?”

            “Not a chance in hell. Why would I?”

        “To learn things of value, though that is not to say there isn’t value in what you must have learned in that type of life.”

      “I come from a long line of fighters. Gunfighters and warriors. It’s in my blood, see. Hell, it is my blood. It’s not about learning things, it’s about doing things. My father was a first lieutenant in the Civil War. He was born in the Republic of Texas, lived there all his life. Not long after I was born, Texas seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy, and the old man was on the battlefield. He lost both his legs by the end of the war, something that kept him angry all his life, but he didn’t start beating my brother or me until we were old enough to fight back. That’s the kind of father he was. A good one.

        “And his father before him was a soldier in the Mexican-American War. Even though he took a bullet to the ribs, went deaf  from cannon fire, and lost a hand to a Mexican sword, all in the same month, during the Battle of Veracruz, he lived long enough to see my father return from the Civil War, and to compare war stories.

          “And his father—my great-grandfather—fought in the War of 1812. A Marine in the Atlantic theater, that bastard fought on the USS Constitution, tore the British four gaping holes in their major arteries. After some years he left his lifelong home in Virginia for Texas, right after the state’s independence. Story is he did so just to spite the Mexicans, and Bustamante. He died the year I was born, but I think he held me once or twice.

            “His father, my great-great-grandfather, fought. Guess which war. The Revolutionary War. The greatest of all wars. This man shook hands with General Washington. President General George Washington. Even served under him at the siege of Boston. His journal still exists, and in it he wrote two dialogues between General Washington and himself. I’ve never read them, but I know they’re worthy of legends. The man wasn’t only a warrior, but also a bard.

       “And finally, we get to my great-great-great-grandfather. A man we know little about, but that he fought in the French and Indian War, and his bloodstained long-rifle he kept in top condition, even after the war. It has been passed down to each generation. Last I knew, my old man had it. It’s the first gun I ever fired, at six years of age.  Used it once to kill a man who broke into our home to rape my mother, the tender soul. As far as rapes go, it was an awful one. Left my mother scarred for the rest of her years, unable to look at a fiddle ever again. But I was only eleven, loaded the rifle, and shot the son of a bitch in the spine. He was crippled and unable to flee. I took my time loading the second shot, and shot him through the jaw. 

         “So you can see fighting’s in my blood. Guns are my arms. Bullets, my fingers. Gunpowder is my heart. Six generations of warriors. But there are no wars for me to fight. None that have names. Nothing on a grand scale, or that will be remembered by anyone. But the fighting’s just the same.”

            Ricky didn’t bother with anymore questions. He could only have realized, then, that nothing he would tell me would be important, or in any way matter to me. He had nothing, and finally he knew it.

            The remainder of day two was quiet, until we crossed the Colorado River and found ourselves encroaching on a Navajo encampment shortly before sundown. Four hogans had been built not far from the river, and their doors, facing east as is tradition, granted us provocative views of naked Navajo women, cleaning themselves with pots of water. Ricky, not being used to the natives of the land, but wanting to appear enlightened, feigned anthropological interest in the beautiful bodies before us.

     “Remarkable that such a primitive people, not aesthetically inclined in the least, still concern themselves with hygiene.”

           My spurs were begging to fly through his flesh like an eagle through the sky, but my heart’s rage halted for the uncovered women who bared it all, their long black hair wet against their soaked skin. It seemed as though all at once they noticed us, but took no efforts to cover themselves or to avoid our stares. As we trotted slowly past their hogans, two of the women approached us.

            They placed their hands on Razorback’s fur, clearly impressed by his size and his obvious strength. I dismounted, and one of the women, thin and young, smiled. I showed them my half finished bottle of whiskey and their faces lit up. We had found our rest stop for the night.

            Hours passed like tumbleweeds in a sandstorm, and two more bottles of whiskey were emptied, shared among the four women and myself. Ricky refused to touch any—girls or booze. He made many remarks about his wife waiting for him in Cedar City, and how, although she had become disagreeable and irreversibly larger after giving him two and a half children (I say half only because one of his children was not his own, but the offspring of a Norwegian from Minnesota), he couldn’t wait to be with her again. I agreed that he should refrain from enjoying the night with us, and suggested he try his hand at fishing in the river, which he happily did. As he waded through the water, I took my clothes off to show the Navajo girls I had the same inhibitions they had—none. By the time the third bottle was opened, the five of us were tangled into an orgy, cramped into a single hogan, wet with desire and fermented grain mash. This episode constituted my first, my second, my third, and my fourth Navajo women to experience sexually, and as a man with a pioneer heart, I stopped at nothing to ensure they each enjoyed the experience with the fullness of their spirits and the wholeness of their beings. As the scene approached its end, I heard Razorback and Dianne neigh into the starry night, with the same sounds of horse love I’d heard the night before.

*     *     *

            The morning sun poured through the doors, telling us it was time to be on our way. I kissed the girls and they asked if we would stay for a breakfast of rabbits. I loved rabbits, but as companions and not as food, so I slapped the girl who asked, and insisted we had to hurry to make it to Zion by sundown. We packed our things and readied the horses for departure. But as I emptied a canteen into my mouth, Ricky nudged me and pointed to the river. A canoe had rowed to shore, and two Navajo men climbed out. They waved with friendly gestures.

            “This is why I don’t like running into Navajos,” I said. “They take up all your time, and you have to sit there while they practice their English on you, but there’s nothing you can do.”

            The men, much older than us, far older than the girls, both wearing full Navajo dress of buckskin shirts and weaved blankets, approached us. They touched our horses just as the women had, and smiled, nodded at us, and said some words I didn’t know. When the women all poured out of one hogan at the same time, still nude, the men’s dispositions seemed to take a turn. The realization that these girls were probably their wives hit me square in the brain. Ricky and I probably looked like a couple of perverts. In an instant, the men yelled in their Navajo tongue, not a word of which I understood, and I pushed Ricky toward Dianne and I climbed onto Razorback.

            “Goodbye!” I shouted to the girls, as I escaped at Razorback’s full speed. Dianne and Ricky were close behind, and soon we were over a hill, beyond the cliffs, with the Navajos out of sight. “Ricky,” I said, for the first time in a fine mood, “today we’ll make it to Zion.”

Part VI: In the Canyon’s Shadow

            The beautiful red and white rocks of Zion Canyon appeared in the distance. Its hoodoos and cliffs reached toward the sky, as if to touch mother sun, and the green of trees below the Navajo sandstone made me wish I was a god who ate land formations for sustenance. It was late in the evening, after a long day of rapid travel, and the sun’s orange and red glow illuminated the rock in ways far beyond the bounds bare words can describe. We rode through the slowly dimming canyon, past nightfall, following the winding Virgin River north as Ricky led the way to the traveling party.

            “It’s around this bend,” he said, following  the map in the glow of the moon. We were rounding a colossal rock formation known as the Temple of Aeolus, where the river wrapped around in one of its many deep turns. “The wagon train leaves tomorrow morning, so if you need to hang around until then, it would be fine.”

            As we rounded the bend, sounds echoed off the steep canyon walls—the sounds of screams and gunshots and terror and death. Ricky looked at me before our view was clear, but as we came into the open, away from the rock, the wagon train he was to take north appeared before us, encircled by horse-riding bandits in full outlaw dress, with bullet belts over their chests, rifles and pistols in their arms, and faces covered by red bandanas. Gunshots brought men and women to the ground, wagons burst into flames, and the few who tried to run were trampled, impaled upon swords, or shot in the back. It was happening right before our eyes, a scene of hopeless massacre, irrevocable tragedy. A shotgun blast from horseback tore a woman’s head off her shoulders, a man was engulfed in flames, burning and screaming, and a young girl, no older than ten, was dropped by a gunshot to the shoulder, and finished off with three bullets to the stomach. Her mother cried only feet away, before a sword cut her across the neck, and she bled to death in a creek bed.

            Ricky vomited on his horse, lurched over, and seemed about to fall off. I grabbed him on the arm, shook him, and commanded him to follow me close.

            Like rabbits fleeing from the wolves, we turned and sped off down the shore of the river, south through the canyon. The splashes from our horses’ hooves alerted the men behind us, and a chase was underway. A single escape route was all we had, and Razorback, with his unmatched agility, reached speeds greater than other horses could. But to my relief, Dianne was an exceptionally fast horse, and showed no difficulty keeping pace with us. Our pursuers were unable to keep up, a stroke of good fortune, considering they seemed to have no shortage of ammunition to fire at us as we rode away. But asylum we had not reached, and soaring bits of metal screamed past our heads, our horses’ legs, and sent explosive echoes through the canyon. Rounding the Temple of Aeolus granted us a moment’s advantage, as our hunters lost sight of us.

         “Stay close to the wall!” I shouted. The river turned sharply, and we turned with it, remaining covered by the canyon’s shadows. Soon the moon would be high enough for us to bask in its glow, as the shadows indicated, but there looked to be enough time to use the darkness to our benefit. I couldn’t be sure how many trailed us, or if all had decided to give chase. We ran until the gunshots briefly returned, before we were able to round another bend in the river, behind another rock formation—another moment of reprieve.

            A stretch of open canyon floor lay before us, and we sped through with hopes the dark would abet us long enough to escape. The sounds of our hunters remained at our back, with the occasional gunshot echoing from the rocks. When we came to the mouth of the canyon, where the Virgin River forked into other veins, a band of men on horseback, illuminated by the moon, moved toward us. Ricky and I were still under canyon shadows, but as they drew closer, I saw each of the six men wore the hat I wore.

        “Thank God!” cried Ricky, his voice shaking with horror, sick with shock. “Just when all seemed lost…”

            “These aren’t friends, Ricky. Be silent.”

         “Why? But, certainly these men… They look armed. All dressed alike, they could be deputies. They can help us…” And with no time for me to intervene, Ricky blurted loudly to the six Lanzas del Infierno, with his hands waving in the air, his voice quivering in nauseous fear. Though he thought he was beckoning desperately to be saved, he was begging to be slaughtered.

            I spun Razorback around and rushed in the direction of our other pursuers, in hopes I’d come upon a nook in the canyon to hide inside before meeting them. I pulled the Winchester Model 1873 from my back to hold at my side, and with my free hand, felt through a bag hanging from the saddle. Gunshots rang out from the mouth of the canyon, and I looked back to see Ricky and Dianne hurrying toward us. Off to our left was a large pocket in the canyon’s cliffs, away from the river, which I scrambled to, still out of the moon’s glow. The edge of the cliffs’ shadow crept down the canyon wall, warning that soon the cover of dark would end. A bullet ricocheted off the rocks around us. And another. They were firing blindly, though they knew our direction. Gunfire came again from the other direction, from the masked bandits—the wagon-burners. Flanked by two separate enemies, we were cornered. The pocket we hid in didn’t go back more than a few hundred feet. Unless we learned to climb vertical canyon walls, we were trapped.

            Dianne noisily clamored behind Razorback, and we settled behind a patch of trees that cut us off from view of the river.

            “Get off your horse,” I said, quietly. “Don’t make a sound.”

            Ricky fell from Dianne and crouched on the ground, noiselessly. I joined him, and handed him a box of matches.

            “Hold these.”

           Two sticks of dynamite rested in my left hand, the rifle rested in my right. The Lanzas del Infierno had entered the canyon shadows, and I watched see their dark figures riding toward us from the south. From the north, the wagon-burners advanced. One of the Lanzas fired in our direction, then a masked bandit did the same. These shots seemed to alert each group to the other’s presence.

            The Lanzas del Infierno shouted at the wagon-burners in tangled Spanish, and the wagon-burners yelled back in a crooked Texas drawl. What at first appeared to be our ineludible doom quickly turned into a theater of war, with the wagon-burners and the Lanzas del Infierno opening fire on one another. The Lanzas scattered, shouting venomous Spanish at their newfound enemies, and the masked men, close enough for me to see their entire horde had joined in the chase, charged forward, into immediate battle. It was twelve against eleven, but even as a remorseless gambler I couldn't have bet who would walk away.

            Gunpowder explosions from the muzzles of both parties lit up the battlefield, and soon the moon peered over the cliffs, shining its white light over the warriors. A midnight scene of violence played out a hundred feet in front of us, trees acting as our only cover.

            “See?” said Ricky, barely audible over the cracking of gunfire, “I told you they’d help us!” From a regular kind of person, this could have readily been taken as a joke. From Ricky, it was a chance to say he was right, despite how misguided he was. Even in the clutches of death, he had something to prove.

            “Those Mexicans are paid assassins. They’re out to kill me. Looks as though they’ve been hard on our trail, probably since we left Hardcoat Pass. Though it’s not clear how they found us. Or caught up to us.”

             “Then it seems a fine time for me to tell you that I believe those men they’ve engaged in war against are pursuing me.”

        I hit Ricky on the arm. “They’re after both of us. I believe those men are responsible for a number of decimated wagon trains back by Hardcoat Pass.”

           “No, I mean to say, I think they’ve been after me for some time. Assassins, like your Mexicans.”

            I stared into Ricky’s puzzling expression with my own puzzled thoughts and questions. But this was no time for questions. This was a time to escape.

           “Our enemies are occupied. We can slip past and leave the canyon, get you to Springdale.” Springdale was only a few miles south of Zion, and although it was a town of useless farmers, I could leave Ricky there and be on my way home in the morning.

           We saddled up and snuck out of our hiding spot, riding south and staying clear of the battle that raged loudly behind us. As we approached the mouth of the canyon, a third party greeted us with cold, hard aggression. A group of Navajo men on horses moved slowly in a line, facing us. Leading the line were the two Navajo men we’d met that morning by the Colorado River. They all wore animal skins and colorfully painted furs.

         Again, Ricky voiced relief at the presence of new armed men, but again I had to tell him his sense of danger was defective. These were not friends. The sounds of gunfire raged on behind us, not far back, and the painted faces of Indians eager to kill slowly closed in from the front. We were flanked again.

        “Face to face one more time,” said one of the old Navajos leading the tribe. His English was perfect. They seemed unconcerned about the deafening violence happening upriver. The Navajo spoke with an only barely raised voice. “You defiled our women, a crime that is payable by blood or silver. Our wives have already paid for their sins, with their blood for the sky.”

          “Oh my goodness,” said Ricky. The insightfulness of his commentary never exceeded this. He looked at me as though he expected me to do something heroic. I still held the rifle and the dynamite, but wasn’t in a position to arm either before a few bullets could blow through me.

            A bullet that at first seemed Heaven-sent, then quickly a product of Hell’s burning pits, flew past my left ear and planted itself firmly in the ribs of the old Navajo. He folded over and fell from his horse. In one and a half blinks of an eye, his eight fellow Indians raised their rifles for combat, and emitted a blood-curdling battle cry from the deepest reaches of their primordial lungs. They dispersed around us, and charged toward the Lanzas del Infierno and the wagon-burners, by now a muddled mob of firing guns, swinging swords, and violent yells, all coming our way. The battle spread out around us, and before we could run, we found ourselves dead center in the War of Zion.

Part VII: Blood and Sand

           

            A bullet grazed my leg and another tore through my hat, missing my head, I later discovered, by less than an inch. “Keep moving!” I shouted at Ricky, but the storm of gunfire was too loud. I could only hope he’d take my lead. I rushed through an oncoming trio of wagon-burners with shotguns in their arms, readying my rifle as I turned around behind them. Fired at one, his head shattered, he fell from his horse. Pumped the lever, and fired another one into the burner beside him, through the heart from the back. He held onto his horse for a little while longer before falling to the desert floor. 

            Ricky was sticking close to me, which was a bad idea. I signaled for him to scatter, so we’d be less of a singular target, but his stupidity and lack of individuality made it impossible. I flew past a Navajo and a Lanzas del Infierno fighting at such close range they’d dropped their rifles and taken to revolvers, each landing a few shots before a second Lanza felled the Navajo with a bullet to the neck, and another through his mouth to ensure his demise. A wagon-burner decapitated this very Lanza seconds later with his sword, but was shot through the arm by the first Lanza.           

          This was all out war, and every man was a target. I held no loyalties. Every person on this battlefield was my enemy, Ricky barely less so than the rest.

            “Ricky, the matches!” If he had to stick so close, he’d better be useful. He tossed me the box of matches, and by dumb luck they landed in my lap, not in my arms already encumbered by weaponry.

           “You know how to use this?” I asked, indicating the rifle.

         He nodded, so I threw it to him. I lit a match and ignited a dynamite’s fuse. At full speed, I tore through a cluster of grounded warriors, each having fallen from their horses and engaged the enemy on foot. I dropped the dynamite into the confluence of lowlifes, speeding away as I pulled the1886 off my back. I picked off a Navajo warrior decked out in a wolf’s fur, and bullseyed a wagon-burner through his bandana-covered face before the dynamite exploded. My hearing was temporarily replaced by a ringing, and destroyed bodies collapsed in a growing cloud of white smoke.

         The number of still-standing warriors had by now fallen to half of what had started. But bullets still flew in all directions. Two Lanzas del Infierno’s horses were shot through the head by a wagon-burner, and the assassins were killed by shotgun blasts at close range. The mysterious masked lowlifes were not above murdering horses to achieve their goals. From less than ten feet I put a hole into the horse-killer’s abdomen, bringing him to his knees. Razorback gladly trampled him under hoof, in proud and avenging calls of fury. When the wagon-burner’s mangled body, gasping its final breaths, pleaded for mercy, his own horse silenced him with its hooves in a skull-crushing final blow. It was good to know that even in war, all horses stood together. If only men could be half as honorable.

            Ricky was hit in the back by a distant shotgun blast, leaving a few bloody marks, but nothing serious.

“Use the gun!” I yelled. “Stop holdin’ it like a glass doll.”

 He brought a wagon-burner to the ground with a shot to the knee, but a Navajo’s arrow flew through the man’s chest before Ricky could take a second shot. He fired off plenty of misses, so my attention went elsewhere.

            Most combatants had run out of ammo by this time, or didn’t have time to reload, so blades were brandished to get close and dirty in the final leg of battle. A group of men fought at close range with swords, knives, and machetes, and I jumped from Razorback as he ran through their combat, trampling two in his wake. As he galloped away from the scene I fired a series of un-aimed shots into the group in quick succession, wounding a wagon-burner, dropping a Lanza, and sending the others scattering.

      A furious Navajo, resplendent in war paint and brandishing a long blade in the air, pounced at me from just outside my field of view. By sheer luck I managed to knock him away with the barrel of my rifle. An arrow from one of his compatriots flew past me, a foot from my face, though I never saw where it landed. As he climbed to his feet to face me in battle, a Lanza del Infierno pierced my shoulder with a bullet, whom I retaliated against with two shots into the stomach. I watched him bleed to death while the Navajo swept the blade across my legs, bringing me to the ground. I was in favor of a fair fight, but lying on the ground with freshly cut legs, I had no patience to deal with the Navajo holding his blade above my head. One blast to his neck sent him dying into the earth.

           I stood, pain striking into my legs, and caught my breath while guns fired around me. A bullet hit my right arm from behind, causing me to drop the rifle. I spun around, throwing the unlit dynamite as I did, and let my hand land on Ol’ Persuader at my hip, as soon as the explosive left my fingers. I pulled the revolver from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and watched the dynamite fly through the sky toward a masked wagon-burner whose rifle was still smoking. At just the right moment, I fired, sending a .357 caliber bullet marked high-priority into the dynamite, blowing it up directly in front of my assailant. The gruesome remains of his body crumbled from his horse, who, I am glad to report, was unharmed.

            When the smoke cleared, a silent canyon floor was revealed. Bodies were scattered across the scene, severed limbs and heads lied in sand stained with blood. Vegetation was splattered red, and the canyon shadows danced in the moon’s glow. No gunshots could be heard, only the wind as it carried death’s stench. Horses roamed quietly, calmly, save for a murdered few, as two Navajo warriors limped away from the carnage’s aftermath. Ricky and Dianne approached me. Razorback chewed on grass a few feet away.

            Ricky’s face said what his words couldn’t. His adrenaline was pumping, and his fear and excitement and relief were all bottled into one devastating sensation that left him exhausted and ready to sleep in the dirt. The feeling was mutual. He didn’t speak, though I wouldn’t have heard him anyway. The ringing in my ears seemed like it was going to hang around for a while.

             I holstered Ol’ Persuader and picked up the rifle. As Dianne walked closer to Razorback and Ricky sat motionless on top of her, I scavenged the battlefield for survivors. A wagon-burner and a Lanza crawled toward one another, each with knives in their hands, determined to finish what was started. Blood was in their eyes. With the butt of my rifle I knocked the wagon-burner out cold, and with the toe of my boot, I put the Lanza to bed early.

            Another Navajo lived through the carnage, and he said things to me that could have been apologies, could have been threats, or might have been any number of things, but my hearing hadn’t returned to its full capacity, so his words fell on dead, ringing ears. Might have been Navajo words I wouldn't have understood anyway. He nursed his wounds: a deep cut in his arm, and a bullet hole in his thigh. While he walked with faltering steps toward the other two survivors of his people, I gathered rope from a pack on Razorback. I bound the hands of the surviving Lanza del Infierno and the wagon-burner, behind their backs, with tight, precise scorpion knots.

The knowledge of knot-tying was a skill passed down through my ancestors, each man adding his own custom knot to the knowledge of his offspring. I’d developed the scorpion knot as a youth, and as I bound the hands of these unconscious aggressors, I reflected that I had no offspring with whom to share my creation. Didn’t want them. Children burden a man more heavily than gangrene in his hands. I would rather lose my hands than lose the freedom children would no doubt steal from my very soul. And that tells you a lot, seeing as my hands meant a great deal to me. Without hands I could shoot no guns or tie no knots. And in those days, tying knots was the closest I got to the arts.

            After binding the men’s hands, I used the rope to bind them to one another at the ankles. I tied this rope to Razorback’s saddle, and climbed upon him.

            I fingered my ear as the ringing lessened, and caught Ricky’s attention with the snap of my fingers. His face was an empty bar top after closing time, facing the field of battle strewn with corpses. He slowly turned his head to acknowledge me.

            “We’re going to Springdale,” I said. “These pieces of shit are coming with us.”

Part VIII: Springdale

            Nothing worth seeing existed in Springdale. The high rock around it was a marvel to behold, but that didn’t belong to Springdale. Shacks, barns, and a few houses sparsely covered the area. A population of 61 resided here according to a wood signpost I spotted as our horses walked into the settlement. The wagon-burner and the Lanza assassin were dragged behind Razorback. Both conscious, and both wounded, they had moaned and hissed during the beginning of the trek toward Springdale, but repeated meetings of my boot with their sides kept them in check.

Ricky hadn’t spoken much for the last hour except to complain about his back, and to say he had an incredible tolerance for pain. He said he was surprised with how well he handled a rifle, since he devoted so much of his time and energy to intellectual pursuits, and simply found no value in simple-minded barbarism like weaponry. When he said there was likely to be a whole plethora of things he was naturally good at without having ever been properly trained, but that he would probably excel at beyond those who devoted their lives to such things simply because he had what he called an amazing knack for getting the feel for things right away and mastering them with little effort, I punched him in his scattergun wounds and told him his shooting was subpar, even for a woman. I took the gun away from him and found it jammed. The Renaissance Man had been running around without a usable weapon.

            “Get out your pocket watch and tell me what time it is,” I said, when we reached Springdale.

            Ricky had never mentioned a pocket watch, but he was the sort of fellow who would have one. He pulled it from his tattered vest.

            “Five after two.”

          “No one’s going to be up for some time. We’ll sleep over here.”

      We set up camp behind a wood shed for farming equipment. I poured whiskey on my tied up arm and leg wounds, then drenched Ricky’s back in the stuff before taking a long pull for internal use. I pulled more rope from a satchel and made sure the Lanza and the wagon-burner would be incapacitated for the night. I was too tired to deal with them then, and planned to do so in the morning.

        Clouds had moved in to block out the stars, but the moon remained exposed to light up Springdale until sleep could take us.

            *     *     *

           

            A farmer woke us up with offerings of cornmeal and wheatgrass. Ricky turned it down for not being elegant enough to meet his tastes, but I accepted. I threw sand in Ricky’s face because he was being an arrogant egoist, which is a convoluted way of saying he was being himself.

      The farmer’s name was Ten Bucks Ted. Ricky emphatically introduced himself, then made a great deal out of me not wishing to share my name with anyone. I threw more sand in his face and slapped him on his scabbed-over wounds. He grimaced and cried out, as though it was the first time in his life he’d felt pain.

            “Couple men of the sand, eh?” said Ten Bucks Ted, with a smile. His gray beard was untamed and long. My horrible companion had a lot to learn from him as far as facial hair went. “You guys alright?” He seemed entranced by the blood on my sleeve and my pants, with a fixation on the rifles slung over my back.

            “We’ll be fine,” I said. I poured more whiskey on my arm.

“My friend and I took refuge in your settlement for the night,” Ricky explained, in a tone that drew as much attention to his pain as he could muster. “It’s necessary for me to get to Cedar City as soon as I can, because—eh, ow!—my  wife and kids are there. I’m a family man.”

           Despite his apparent pain, he started into a longwinded report about his childhood in Pennsylvania, and his exceptional capacity for retaining large amounts of information, but I soon cut him off.

            “We’re not friends, he and I,” I said. I looked at the Lanza and the wagon-burner. They were still fastened to one another, and to the wooden equipment shed. “We had some trouble last night, and these two are the leftovers. With your permission, I’d like to tie them up somewhere else and learn a few things before we hang them.”

          “Hang them?” Ricky cried. “Are you—you really think we should?”

            I already had a handful of sand ready, and threw it in his face.

            “Yes, Ricky. And on the topic, why don’t you explain to me your reasons for believing those masked men wanted you. Nothing I’ve seen points to that, and I’m curious. These men have a lot of answers to give.”

            Both pieces of human garbage stared at me with faces that spoke murderous intentions, that did a poor job hiding thoughts about what they would do to me if they were free. The angry silent types.

          Ricky adjusted his posture and cleared his throat. “I don’t know for certain, of course. But you will recall something I told you when first we met, about my trip from Pennsylvania to come west.”

            I wouldn’t recall anything, because I hadn’t listened to a single detail he’d shared with me that first afternoon. I caught the general scope of his stories, but never the point or the tiresome details.

          “Tell me again,” I said. “For Ted, here.” Ten Bucks Ted seemed to be all ears and no words.

         “My family had already moved to Utah Territory,” Ricky said, taking a tone that suggested his words were of incredible importance. “But I was kept behind for my job. Remember, I said as I had traveled through Appalachia with the Watlow Wilson wagon train that we came to a coal mining settlement in West Virginia. We stopped for the night, met the miners, and everyone had a lively time. I spoke with a miner about the Pennsylvania oil rush of the 60’s, and told him about my present involvement with the industry, in Titusville. He was curious about such endeavors, but more so about the uses for petroleum.”

            Hearing it now, I was glad I hadn’t listened to him as he related his dreadful story in Hardcoat Pass.

            “When he asked me to speak with his boss about my work, I was very eager to talk to a fellow expert in energy resources. He, too, was fond of experts. We talked about the sort of things experts talk about, and debated energy resource management. He said he just didn’t see oil catching on, and I said it absolutely would. When I told him of my intentions out west, he seemed flustered. I mean angry flustered.”

            “What are your intentions out here?” I asked.

            “Exploratory drilling. I’ve told you this. With all the developments in extraction, it’d be stupid not to obtain reserves in these parts. My employers, Fester & Brooks Petroleum had promoted me to lead the development.”

            “OK. Please move to the point.”

           “After we left the settlement, it seems the coal boss put out a telegram to his boss, the man who owned the mine. When we reached Denver our wagon train was met with some hostility by the locals. To be short, the owners of various coal mines and regional oil wells had caught wind of our plan to expand an eastern oil company into the west. Ten others in the wagon train were employed by Fester & Brooks, to help begin operations when we arrived in Utah. But the harassment of the wagon train by those associated with established coal and oil in the area led to me seeking alternate passage. Men in bandanas much like the one worn by that man and his friends, they…” Ricky pointed to the wagon-burner, “in fact, the very same bandanas. Identical to his. They threatened us, told us to turn back. We tried to bargain with them, to offer them supplies to leave us alone, but they wouldn’t stop. The threats became more and more serious, and they became violent, to intimidate us.

         “It became too much for me. I separated from the group, and took the railroad south to Madrid, leaving the wagon train behind. That’s as far as I could go via steam engine. The wagon train had planned to stop at Hardcoat Pass a few days after Denver, before heading to Utah, because it was partially composed of a group of traders. By my good fortune, my father-in-law lives in Hardcoat Pass, so I planned to meet back with them there, to ride to Utah."

           “The point, Ricky. You seem to be getting close, so cut to it now.”

           “Yes, yes. I managed to find a caravan to take me from Madrid to Hardcoat Pass, and stayed with my wife’s father. But the Watlow Wilson wagon train never arrived in Hardcoat Pass. For weeks I was stranded.”

           “OK, right. Got it. You were stranded, I picked you up, the rest I know.”

         Ten Bucks Ted was a good listener, a man of few words, my favorite kind of person. He took us to his home after Ricky quit talking. I pulled our captives along at gunpoint, and explained to Ted the gist of our situation as we walked.

          The walls of Ted’s cabin were covered in mounted deer busts, trophies of his slaughter of unarmed beasts of the wild, symbols of what he perceived to be the epitome of man’s dominance over nature. There were ten in all, granting insight into the man’s name. In his tiny one room home, death’s glory was king.

            “Guess you can set your prisoners up right over here,” said soft spoken Ted, pushing a wheelbarrow against the wall to clear the floor. He laid down a Navajo rug. “Any uh you fellas want somethin’ to drink? Still got some chuparosa tea.”      

            “Have you got any cigars?” I asked. I removed my hat to show respect for the inner sanctum of his death temple.

           “Boxes of ‘em!” he excitedly yelled. He went to a desk and pulled a green leather box from its drawer. “I make my own!”

           He handed me a thick one, and lit it for me. It wasn’t good, but it would do. “Much obliged, Ted.”

I kicked our captives in the back of their legs to bring them to their knees on the rug.

            “You first,” I said, putting Ol’ Persuader to the head of the Lanza. “The men who hired you. There are two of them. Where are they and what are their names?”

            He spit on my gun, so I spit on my fist and punched him in the eye.

            “Tell me where they are.” I said.

            “Who?”

         “The Lanzas del Infierno, your assassins club, were hired by two men from California, two men who have a vendetta against me. I know why, and I think I know who. I know their faces. But I need to know their names and where I can find them.”

             “Not in California for a lot of years,” said the Lanza, his English not as smooth as the first one I’d met. “Since Red Peak, they have not gone far. Just north to start over.”

            “North, where?”

         The Lanza glanced at Ricky, nodded toward him. “Cedar City.”

“What are their names?”

“We never knew their names.”

           I pulled the cigar from my mouth and burned it against his palm. He cried out but insisted he still didn’t know names, assuring me he had no reason to hold anything back since he knew his hours were coming to an end.

            “What do they do in Cedar City? Are they important men?”

            “Leather workers. They make boots and shoes.”

            Interrogation continued until my cigar burned out, but I learned nothing more of value. The Lanza had become useless.

            “Your turn,” I said, looking at the wagon-burner, and lighting a new cigar. “I know nothing about you. Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

            He’d been silent all morning with a look of menace in his face. My patience was already low, from bullet hole pain. To my luck, he didn’t give me much trouble.

         “That guy told you everything already,” said the wagon-burner, looking at Ricky. His voice was gruff, crude, stale like the salt flats, with the drawl of the south.

            “Fill in the gaps.”

         A cough left his mouth, accompanied by blood and mucus landing on the rug.   

        “We worked for the oil men. Colorado to Nevada, spread out wherever they wanted us.”

            “Spread out to do what?”

He coughed again. “To kill or kidnap or blackmail. Whatever had to happen. We did it with pleasure.”

          “Yes, I see that. I saw you shoot a little girl and stabbed a horse, with pleasure.”

            Smiling, he said, “We all gotta go sometime.”

            “So you’re hitmen?”

            “Paid killers?” Ricky echoed.

            “Not paid to do any one thing. Got paid by the week, a steady rate. Sometimes doubled or tripled, depending on the amount of work. We made our own decisions, deciding who to attack, when, and where. Rarely took any orders from anyone unless there was a special need at the time.”

            “Who employed you? One company?”

            “One company. To keep the region theirs.”

            “To wipe out the competition.”

            “Most the time, yeah. With buddy here, not the case.” He eyed Ricky, and Ricky’s eyes fell to the rug. “We harassed them at first, as was common for those looking to come out west. But soon we took to thinkin’ it best to use them. We kidnapped his friends, although he’d left by that time.”

            I glanced at Ricky, though he expressed little concern.

       “Our employers found these guys’ knowledge real useful. But without this compadre, the picture wasn’t complete. Seems the rest knew enough together to get the oil drills designed, partly constructed, but Fester and Brooks Petroleum were smart, made sure each their men knew only a little, to put their heads together to complete a project. But individually, they’re worthless. Mr. Fluttermutt here had bare minimum amounts of knowledge, but the last bit our bosses needed. He was the last part of the pie, so we put a priority on him.

            “His companions informed us of his travel plans, so we hung around Hardcoat Pass for some time, attacking any wagon train on its way into town. All to get one man. But you can’t leave witnesses, see. We never did find him. Seems he’d already arrived in town by the time we got there. And by the time we learned he was hidin’ out, you’d already taken him out this way.”

            “Yet, somehow, here you are,” I said.  

            Again the malcontent smiled. “Learned real quick where you was headed, and made good time to beat you here, since the odds of findin’ you on the way was slim. Perfect timing, huh?” He laughed, and coughed, and wheezed with death.

            “Mojave Suns,” said Ted, sipping on his tea. “Think I know of you. Knew of you.”

            The wagon-burner eyed Ten Bucks Ted up and down, spit blood on his rug, then he started up again. “We ain’t been called that in years.” He talked slow and put emphasis on the last word.

            “But you were once known as the Mojave Suns, ain’t that right?” asked Ted. “That bandana ‘round your neck, and the bullet sashes. I seen you boys in Barstow when my sons and I was prospectin’ for silver in Owens Valley. Heard about your escapades in the area, about your aggression toward the folks comin’ out of the hills with gold. Met more than a few people who said they’d been robbed by folks in bandanas lookin’ an awful lot like yours. Said all the bandits wore the same kind. It was about in ’76 when they started findin’ dead pan miners in the mountains, and all their minerals gone. My sons and I saw it with our own eyes. A handful of you, maybe four or five, invaded a prospector camp. We watched from a distance and couldn’t do nothin’. But I never forgot it. Soon enough, folks started reportin’ ‘Mojave Suns’ attacks all over. Thought it was an Indian tribe ‘til we learned who everyone was talkin’about.”

            “Interesting story,” I said. I looked at the wagon-burner and kneeled before him to get face-to-face. “How’d you know where we were going?”

           “Just a hunch.” He grinned. It being the ugliest grin I’d ever seen, I hit him in the lip.

 “Every time you smile I’m going to wipe it off your face.”

            He smiled again, I hit him again. His smile persisted.

          “As you like,” I said. I stood up, walked behind him, and pulled his bandana tight around his neck. I pulled his hair with the other hand and let him know my time was valuable, and his was running out.

            He gasped, gurgled, and struggled to speak. I loosened the bandana to give just enough air for words.

          “The horse man. One with all them horses. He told us.”

            I released my grip, and sat down on the only chair in the house.

            “The horse man?” Ricky said. “You mean Marty?”

            “Marty’s dead,” I said.

            The Mojave Sun, the wagon-burner, my least favorite person in the room, looked at Ricky. “No, the man’s alive. We left him breathing. That’s about all we left him.”

            “Oh Lord,” Ricky said. He bowed his head and, for the first time since I’d known him, he started to pray. Any other day, any other place, I’d tell him to knock it off. 

            “He was adamant about gettin’ us to leave, though,” said the wagon-burner. “Hell, he shot a couple of my compadres. Sheriff and the deputies got involved, and we knew our efforts were best spent elsewhere. Plan was to head back there once we got our man, and finish off the whole town.”

            The wagon-burner refused to tell us the name of the oil company he worked under. No amount of burning, choking, or hitting was adequate to get anything else out of him.

            Ten Bucks Ted helped me tie two nooses, and at noon, we set the Lanza del Infierno and the Mojave Sun on a high construction scaffold we rigged for hanging. I used an extra six feet of rope for the wagon-burner’s noose, to make his demise more memorable. Twenty residents of Springdale came out to Ted’s place to witness the executions. Many said it had been far too long since they’d seen a good hanging.

            “You are both sentenced to death for madness, chaos, murder, conspiracy, and rampage,” I announced, loudly, but with as low a show of emotion possible. “May you both rot through the ages to come.”

            Ten Bucks Ted pulled the wood out from beneath them, and our enemies fell to their deaths. The wagon-burner’s rope being a great deal longer caused him to drop further, and his head ripped clean off his body, much to the surprise of Springdale’s eager residents, whose screams of shock and disgust made for a good show. His body landed on the ground below the scaffold, leaking a red fountain from the neck. I was the only one who applauded. A memorable demise made a town pleased. For one brief moment, something worth seeing existed in Springdale.

 

Part IX: Prize or Perdition

            The people of Springdale were of a kindly disposition, shared their food freely with Ricky and me after the surprise hanging, and the only doctor among them—a Confederate surgeon from the Civil War—took care of our wounds. As most of the folks in the settlement were Mormon, there was no bar—something I found impossible to understand—so I drank from my flask while a piano player and fiddler entertained us in what passed for a saloon. Ten Bucks Ted told the locals how vile and corrupt the decapitated wagon-burner, or Mojave Sun, must have been. The more he shared, the more gleeful they became at the lowlife’s gruesome demise. Bloodshed was a common source of pleasure in those days, but to see it as a cause for celebration was rare. Ricky took every chance he got to talk about Pennsylvania and oil drills. Since there were no women in the settlement except for farmer’s wives long past their prime, I drowned away in whiskey’s sailboat across waves of rye and barley. Though it thinned my blood and brought angry orders from the doctor stitching my wounds, I kept at it. I never imagined a settlement so close to the void would drive on my nerves.

            Ricky asked around for an escort to Cedar City, but not surprisingly, no one was up to it. After much drunken deliberation, and imagining a possible sequence of events burning like wildfire from my choices, I decided Cedar City, not Hardcoat Pass, was my next destination. At first I chose not to tell Ricky, to leave town without him, as he pleaded desperately for someone to stomach his dead-end tales for 40 miles. But going too deep into the whiskey makes one share secrets they’d prefer to keep hidden. My plot of secret travel soon became known to Ricky, and he informed me he’d be tagging along.

            We stayed in Springdale until the next day, giving Razorback and Dianne time to rest and frolic merrily, and giving our stitched wounds a little time to be soothed. When we departed in the morning, Ten Bucks Ted handed me ten dollars, ‘to be spent at your leisure, but preferably on goods and necessities for your return trip.’ Perhaps this was another insight into the man’s name. We shook hands, I thanked him for his hospitality, and we said goodbye to the fine folks of Springdale before heading north.

            We stopped in the canyon to search the bodies of the fallen Lanzas del Infierno, Navajos, and Mojave Suns. Twenty seven human corpses in all, and a few horses. We searched for ammo, but found nothing left. We went further into the canyon, to the slaughtered wagon train, and scavenged the scene for supplies. Ricky wouldn’t come close, insisting that the death of innocent women and children was something his coward’s eyes couldn’t see up close. I stocked up on ammo for my rifles and revolver, and took a supply of water and food rations. I tried to ignore the ghastly aftermath of the Mojave Suns’ attack, but vultures and flies feasting on the corpses made it hard to overlook. After rotting for a whole day in the desert sun, the smell didn’t help, either.

            We made it to Cedar City by the early afternoon. It was a town of close to nine hundred people, all Mormon. A cool wind blew through the streets, and men dirty from mining for iron drank water instead of beer.

         “Ah!” exclaimed Ricky, excited, restless, in high spirits. “Home! This is my home, now. Isn’t it a beautiful place? It’s not like Pennsylvania, of course. The first letters from my wife reported a lack of fine dining, lower culture, but a marvelous climate. Though she says the boots sold here are the finest she’s ever seen.”

            “I don’t care.”

            He didn’t hear me. By this point, whatever came out of his mouth was the only thing he could hear. His excitement at being reunited with his wife must have put him in a good mood. I found myself in a better mood, too, knowing I’d soon be rid of him, and I’d soon be rid of the two men who wanted me dead.

        “My knowledge of oil rigging and engineering is extremely valuable to the region, though I doubt anyone right now recognizes how important I will be. I’ll write to Fester & Brooks to report the kidnapping of the others. They’ll send others out, this time well guarded. This  will be the beginning of something wonderful.”

            “I don’t care.”

            He still didn’t hear me.

           “I suppose now we part ways,” he said, turning to face me. “It was an interesting trip, to be sure. My wife will be enamored with my telling of it.”

            I said nothing, but looked at Razorback, then Dianne, and anticipated a momentary sadness in my horse as his companion left his side.

            “Let my horse lick your horse,” I said to Ricky.

            “What?” He laughed his snide, disinterested laugh.

      “Razorback is fond of Dianne, as you might have noticed.”

       He of course hadn’t noticed. To notice a horse’s fondness for another horse requires a connection with the nature of the beast, a heart of the wild, the ability to reflect and develop basic empathy with creatures not identical to oneself. Ricky didn’t possess this ability. There are qualities that set a hero’s heart apart from the hearts of regular men, and Ricky possessed none of them. In battle I had seen that he had graduated from a boy to a man, but he was nothing more than a regular man, absorbed with himself and his narrow scope of interests. To expect him to empathize with something not human was expecting too much.

            I jumped off Razorback and took him close to Dianne. They licked the ears of one another and Ricky looked at me with furrowed brow.

            “As you know, Ricky, I have business to attend to in town. Before I leave, I need some form of proof from you that you’ve arrived in Cedar City. So I may claim my reward from your father-in-law.”

         “Of course. How about you come to our house tonight? You’ll meet my wife and my children, and I’ll give you a token from my wife to give to her father.”

            “I’ll just take the token, thank you.”

            Ricky told me where to find his home, nodded at me, and rode off, down the dusty street. Razorback didn’t seem too gravely upset, which kept my spirit strong.

            I tied Razorback to a post in front of the post office. After sharing water with a thirsty looking miner on the street, I inquired as to where in town I might buy a pair of boots. He directed me to Tiger Lily Leatherworks, just down the road. He said they made the best boots in the west. As I walked to the leatherworks, and the sun hung high in the sky, a cool gust of wind seemed to push me from behind, guiding me toward either prize or perdition.

Part X: Wanderer of the Sands, Drifter of the Dry Lands

            A lovely woman in a dress, purple like blooming scorpion weed, said hello to me on the front steps of Tiger Lily Leatherworks. Her eyes were Arizona poppies, her hair red, like Indian paintbrush.

            “How can I help you, stranger?” she asked, her voice like a cabaret encore.

            “Looking to get some boots,” I said, playing it steady and cool.

            She looked at the boots I had on, and the shining spurs of steel that held tight to them.

            “Looks to me like you got yourself some mighty fine boots, already.” She eyed me up and down, and smiled like a hooker in an opium den. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

            I didn’t have time for small talk, despite her good looks, and her breasts bulging from her too-tight dress. I had business to do, and she was standing in the way.

            “I’ll just have a look around,” I said. But she blocked the door.

            “Can’t let you bring those guns inside, mister. This is a house of God.”

            I looked up and down the front of the building. “This doesn’t look like a church.”

            “It’s not a church. All buildings are houses of God, because God is within the heart. So any building housing men and women is a house of God.”

            “Not all hearts have God in them.” I took the rifles off my back, set them on the porch.

            Her eyes fell to my waist, and her hand beckoned for Ol’ Persuader.

            After I handed her all my guns she allowed me to enter her shop.

            “No one else works here but you?” I asked. Boots lined the walls, filled rows of shelves. But the men I came to see were nowhere to be found. Not a soul in sight. A thick smell of leather permeated the establishment.

            “Oh, the leather workers are in the back,” said the woman, setting my guns down behind the cash register. “That’s where they make the boots. I just run the place. I’m Tiger Lily. Got the nickname from my hair.” She ran her fingers through her long locks.

            “Looks like Indian paintbrush to me.”

            “You’re a drifter, ain’t you? You know, we like to treat out-of-towners with a little Cedar City hospitality when they come by lookin’ for boots!”

            “No thanks, I’m just here to see a couple friends of mine.”

            “No boots?”

            “No boots.”

            “Well, certainly you wouldn’t be opposed to some of our hospitality! A warm meal for a traveler!”

      “No. My friends must be in back. They’re your leatherworkers. How many have you got working for you?”

            “Only two, sir.” She seemed agitated, twirled her hair in her fingers like she  really wanted me to accept her hospitality. “They never said they was expectin’ visitors.”

            “I’m unexpected. Sounds as though they’re in back. I’ll be fast.” I headed toward a set of double doors in the back of the shop, but again Tiger Lily cut me off.

          “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. No one’s allowed in the back. That’s where they do all their work. It’s awful messy!” She giggled a nervous giggle. Her cuteness was becoming agitating.

            “I’m used to messes.”

           Tiger Lily looked at the bloodstains on the sleeve of my duster, and on my tattered pants.

            “So it seems. You look like you could use a hot meal! Ain’t you hungry? I live upstairs, above the shop. I’ve got pig snout and rump roast, from lunch. Finest roast I’ve ever made!”

            “I’m not hungry.”

            “Now, come on!” She was pleading by this point. A desperation came over her and she seemed strangely persistent. “I know you don’t know the boys in back. They’re quiet types, don’t have much in the way of friends. Let me take you upstairs and feed you!”

            “Madam,” I said, taking off my hat, “do not keep me from my business any longer. I assure you, they will recognize me. Take this to them, and tell them an old friend has stopped by.” I handed her the black hat I’d taken from the Lanza del Infierno I’d shot at Hardcoat Pass. The bullet hole it received at Zion Canyon would make my message clear.

        She took the hat and looked it over for a moment, before glancing at me. “As you wish. But stay out here. It’s an awful mess.” She went through the doors to the back.

         The boots around me did seem expertly crafted, perhaps the finest in the west, as the miner had told me. I had to admit I'd never seen boots this good anywhere. But I wouldn’t let the bootmakers know. Inflating one’s ego right before you kill them is too cruel a punishment, even for men who have to die.

            The double doors swung open again, and Tiger Lily appeared, carrying my hat. Her face was pale, her lip quivered, and her eyes stayed on me.

            “So, sir,” she cleared her throat. “They would be happy to see you…” Her voice trembled with apprehension. “You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Her forced smile didn’t hide anything.

            “Maybe I’ll try that rump roast, after all.” I took my hat from her hands, set it on my head.

            “Marvelous! I’ll be fast!” She hurried to the far end of the shop where a spiral staircase led upstairs. She ran up, quickly out of sight, just before a gunshot rang out from the double doors.

            Splinters flew through the air as the doors flew open, and I dove behind a shelf of boots. Another gunshot rang out, through the doors. Judging by the damage done, and the sound of the gun, these were shotgun blasts.

            “Come on, you son of a bitch!” shouted a man from the back. My guns were at the front of the store—too far to get them, now. I threw a nice looking boot through the double doors, and it met with shotgun fire.

            The doors flew open and a man of unimpressive stature, weak frame, and expensive clothing stood brandishing a single-fire shotgun. He pulled back the firing hammer. I threw another boot at him, and he blasted the shelf I hid behind, tearing it to pieces.

            Knowing the time it took to reload a single-shot, I jumped from behind the wrecked shelf, rushed the man, and jumped into the air, sending my boot into his face. He flew back, through the double doors, landed with a crunch on a hallway floor, and his gun fell far out of his reach.

            “Still got that same cowardly look on your face,” I said, walking toward him.  “No running, this time. All your hitmen are dead. Hung the last one myself.”

            “Then we’ll all greet you in Hell,” he said, bleeding from the nose.

            “I believe you were looking for these.” I showed him my spurs, let his eyes dance on their shining metal surface. I let him see the treasure he’d never have, the deceptive tool of death that would be his end. “I thought I’d deliver them myself.”

            I stood over him, lifted my foot above his chest, and brought down my heel, piercing his heart and ribs with the stainless spur. His body shook in a quick convulsion, then he died. I followed the hallway to a dark curtain that covered a passage. When I stepped through, I was hit by a pungent mix of smells, like rotting flesh and hazardous chemicals.

           Before my eyes was a room filled with corpses. Naked men and women, even a few children, lied in rows, drained of their blood, and severed limbs in piles on the floor. The bodies seemed well preserved, despite the smell, and some appeared to be in the midst of having their flesh cut from their bones. I’d never vomited at the sight of death, but the exhibit of wretchedness around me sickened me.

            “Ahoy, traveler,” came a voice from beyond another curtain. “Wanderer of the sands, drifter of the dry lands.” The curtains at the other end of the room parted, and a man stepped forward. A familiar looking coward, known briefly from my time at Red Peak.

            He appeared fragile like his cohort, as I remembered him. His voice was the sound of a man at his end.

            “Don’t know how you found us,” he said. “And now that you have, it seems almost embarrassing.”

            We both walked slowly toward the center of the room, stepping over body parts as we did.

            “Here you’ve stumbled upon something you must find revolting. Perhaps you thought as those cowards ran from your wrath three years ago, they’d straighten up their lives, find honest work, become law abiding citizens, men of high character. But do you know how easy it is to make a living, and a killing, with—how shall I call it?—unsavory activity?”

            “Not really any of my business,” I said.

            He pulled a knife from a table and rushed at me. He caught my duster, cut me in the rib, but I knocked it from his hands, threw him into a pile of bodies, and tossed his knife aside.

        “Oh, what a mountain of a man you are!” he proclaimed, standing, unfazed, from his pile of death. “And how have you changed in three years?”

        I could tell this was a man who thought highly of himself, much like Ricky, and who would go long into unlistenable speeches if given the chance. I kicked him in the face, and he fell to his knees.

         “I’ve heard enough dry monologues these last few days to last me a lifetime,” I said. “No need for one more.”

          Before he could protest, I swept my leg up, bringing my boot past his face. His neck was sliced open, my spur was stained red, and soundlessly he crumpled to the floor with his hands below his jaw, his own blood running through his fingers.

            I let him die on the floor, surrounded by corpses of the innocent.

            As I walked through the hallway, to the front of the store, I heard Tiger Lily’s voice from beyond the double doors.

            “Bardeen! Conway! You take care of him?”

            She came carefully through the double doors, running into me and gasping, her face pale as before.

            “No ma’am, they weren’t able to take care of me. Maybe you can.” I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her through the double doors, into the front room of the store.

            “My God! Please! My God! Let me go! I had no part in this! I swear!”

            I dragged her to the spiral staircase and took her up, fighting her small, struggling, and surprisingly strong body the whole way. The stairs led to a dainty kitchen, living room, and bedroom, with three beds. I threw Lily against a table in the living room. She was in tears by this point, swearing up and down she had no involvement in the operations that took place in the back.

            “Where’s my food?” I asked.

            She said nothing, but looked to the kitchen, where a rump roast sat on a plate. Beside it was a glass bottle filled with a gray substance, and a syringe.

            “You poison drifters? Out-of-towners? You kill them, cut them up, make boots of them? Is that right?”

            She shuttered, exploded with denial and claims of ignorance, and begged me to understand she was unaware of the disgusting things her business partners were up to.

            “Would you rather eat that arsenic-filled rump roast in the privacy of your home,” I asked, “or be hanged in front of the whole town for your crimes?”

            Her crying was cut short, and she stood up with grace and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She reached between her breasts and pulled a tiny knife from a compartment in her corset. Nothing I hadn’t seen before. She tried to dig the blade into her heart, another trick I’d seen once or twice, but I caught her hand, took the knife, and pulled her downstairs, kicking and screaming. I took my guns from behind the cash register, and walked outside with Tiger Lily in my arms.

            Only a few doors down the street I told the Sheriff of Tiger Lily’s crimes, and told him what to expect to find at her leatherworks shop. She sat quietly while the Sheriff and his deputies listened with a look of disbelief. As I left, the Sheriff asked me to hang around town for questioning, but I had to refuse, and left to gather Razorback.

            Ricky’s home was a not-modest log house with two chimneys. Despite my insistence that I was in a hurry, he introduced me to his children and his wife, and again made a great deal of my not sharing my name. He handed me a necklace from his wife, a wooden pendant with her initials in it, and told me it would be more than enough to prove to Marty his safe arrival. As I walked back to Razorback, Ricky insisted on showing me the new boots his wife had bought for him. They looked like the ones in Tiger Lily’s shop.

            “Your boots are made from human beings,” I said. I climbed on Razorback and rode off as fast as we could go, without listening to what Ricky had to say. It was a long way back to Hardcoat Pass. Without Ricky at my side, it’d be a pleasant trip.

*     *     *

            Marty paid me the other two thousand upon my return to his home. He sat in a wheelchair now, and told me of his run-in with the Mojave Suns, who he called ‘masked horse-murderin’ sons of bitches,’ and explained the brief firefight that erupted in front of his house between them and the Sheriff and his deputies. Said he fired off a few shots, himself. He took me out front to show me the bullet holes that riddled his house and his yard.

            “Caught a bullet in the back,” he said, not seeming at all bothered by being crippled. “One of the deputies died, but we killed a couple of those sacks of shit before they went running! That gun you brought me! Ho ho! It tears a man right apart!” On his front lawn were two rotting corpses that appeared to have been fed on by numerous animals over the previous days. Marty said the bodies would stay there as trophies until the animals took their bones, or the Sheriff requested they be buried.

            I told Marty of the demise of the Mojave Suns, the brief war we found ourselves in the midst of in Zion Canyon, and of the hanging we performed in Springdale, much to the enjoyment of its people. He was enthralled with the details of our adventure, and said I was an even better story teller than Ricky. I couldn’t tell if this was a compliment or a lightly veiled insult, so I didn’t bother to figure it out.

            On leaving town, I told Sheriff Shepherd to no longer concern himself with the Lanzas del Infierno or the band of caravan-slaughtering deviants. I pulled out a tightly sealed sack, from a bag carried on Razorback.

            “Smells vile,” said Shepherd. “I’m afraid to open it.”

            “It ought to smell vile. It’s a gift. It’s the head of the last of the Mojave Suns.”

            Shepherd said he appreciated the gift, but he threw it in the trash, saying a man of the law couldn’t accept such tasteless tokens of justice. I told him he was one of the good ones, and made my way out of Hardcoat Pass. Santa Fe was waiting, and beyond that… freedom.

THE END

* the artwork I  used for this is stolen from Thomas Moran. It's not my own, not my property.