Blood and Gold

“You’ll never make it back across the Red, Dusty,” Kennedy said. “Luke Butler was a named man and he had friends.”

I nodded. “Maybe so, but I reckon I’ll take my chances.”

Later, after he’d caught up his horses, I stood in the rain and watched Kennedy ride away, Luke Butler’s body draped facedown across the saddle of his buckskin.

Kennedy glanced over his shoulder once, with eyes that burned hot with hate, like he wanted to remember me for all time. Then he turned back and I watched him go until he was swallowed up by the hills and the shifting steel curtain of the rain.

It was still not yet one, but the afternoon had turned cheerless and dark. The clouds and hills had merged into a gloomy, uniform gray, so there was no telling where the land ended and the sky began. Off to my left, a jay fluttered among the branches of a cedar growing at the base of a low mesa, sending down a shower of water. The branches shook again for a few moments as the bird sought a new perch and then the tree returned to stillness.

The bullet that had burned across my thigh had not broken the skin, but my leg felt numb and sore as I scouted the area for a few minutes, saw no one and returned to the shelter of the cave. I teased the fire into flame and put the coffee back on to heat.

When I sat and rolled a smoke I was surprised that my hands were steady. I lit the cigarette with a brand from the fire and set to studying on what had happened.

Clem Kennedy had called me a gunfighter and that was a label I did not want to wear. Back in Dodge, I’d seen the named shootist Buck Fletcher kill a man in the Long Branch. After the smoke cleared, I’d looked into Fletcher’s eyes and seen only despair and something else . . . hopelessness maybe, like he knew he was a man caught in a trap of his own making and there was no way out.

I didn’t want to end up like that. I wanted a place of my own with a wife and kids, smoke from our cabin tying bows in the air, the white laundry fluttering on the wash line and an ugly spotted dog sleeping on the stoop.

Gunfighter.

I’d killed Luke Butler, a gunman of reputation, and where Western men gathered, that was a fact that would be noted and talked about.

Clem had been right. Others would come. Most would be motivated by the lure of easy money, but there would be a few with a completely different agenda. Those would be wild ones and they’d test me with their own lives to see how I stacked up, how I ranked in the gunfighter hierarchy.

I poured coffee into my cup and drank it strong and scalding hot.

My heart was heavy as lead, my spirits troubled, and beyond the shelter of the cave roof the raking rain rattled relentlessly as it continued to fall.

Then I heard the flat boom of a rifle shot. And another.

Chapter 2

I’d no way of knowing what those shots meant, but I didn’t want to just sit there and let trouble come to me a second time.

Rising, I tightened the girth on the paint, then swung into the saddle. I’d forgotten the saddlebags!

I stepped down, threw them onto the back of the saddle and mounted again.

An eighteen year old makes his share of mistakes, and as things turned out, I’d sure roped the wrong steer by taking along those saddlebags. But that was something I wouldn’t discover until later, when it was way too late.

The shots had come from the north, and I swung around the base of the hill and rode up a wide gully, splashing across a deep, swift-running creek with tall cottonwoods the color of smoke growing on both its banks.

After I cleared the creek, the gully widened out, hemmed in by a series of low red sandstone mesas, their bases thick with cedar and juniper.

I followed the gully for a couple miles, riding tense and alert, my 44.40 Winchester across the saddle horn. There was no sound but the rustle of the wind through the grass and the steady, hissing counterpoint of the driving rain.

The day had gotten grayer still, and I saw no sign of life anywhere.

But when a man rides wild country, it’s wise for him to pay attention to his horse. As I rode into a grassy valley dotted here and there with cedar and clumps of sagebrush and bunch grass, the paint’s ears pricked forward and his head came up real fast. He snorted, and the bit in his mouth jangled.

I leaned over and patted the paint’s neck, whispering to him to take it easy. This seemed to calm him down some, but he was still up on his toes, dancing nervously to his left, his head tossing, not liking what he smelled in the wind.

I fought the horse for a few moments and finally got him turned and urged him deeper into the valley. About half a mile ahead, a steep-sided bluff jutted like a redbrick wall into the valley floor and from where I was I couldn’t see what lay beyond.

My hat did little to shield my face from the rain, and water kept running into my eyes. I wiped the oilskin sleeve of my slicker across my face and peered ahead.

Nothing moved.

The land was empty and bleak and it seemed whoever had fired those two shots was long gone.