Guns of the Canyonlands

With this thought uppermost in his mind, Tyree shoved the Colt into his waistband. A man armed and belted attracts attention. Eyes go to the iron on his hip and other men wonder: Is this just a drifting cowhand who carries a gun only to use the butt to pound nails, the barrel to stretch fence wire? Or is this man of a different stamp, a skilled and sudden fighter who has made his mark and killed his man?

All too often the answers to those questions were written in hot lead. Not wishful of inviting such speculation, Tyree took a hip-length, elk-skin coat from under his blanket roll and quickly shrugged into the garment, pulling it almost closed to cover the walnut handle of the Colt.

The coat was fringed, decorated on the shoulders and front with Kiowa beadwork. A few years back it had cost Tyree a good paint pony and a jug of whiskey. He figured he’d gotten the best of that trade.

Tyree led his horse to the saloon, looped the reins around the hitching post and stepped inside.

The saloon was a single room, built tight and close, but Tyree was grateful for its relative coolness, willing to ignore the pervading stink of tobacco juice, man sweat and stale beer. Dust-specked light from a pair of unglazed windows angled onto the bar—a timber plank laid across a pair of sawhorses. From the ceiling hung an oil lamp, casting a dim orange halo in the gloom. An assortment of bottles stood on a shelf behind the bartender, a big-bellied man wearing a brocaded vest and dirty, collarless shirt. Above the shelf hung a printed sign that asked: HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER?

To Tyree’s right a small, thin man with the quick, sly eyes of a bunkhouse rat sat at the only table in the place, a bottle and glass in front of him. A couple of men stood at the bar, one middle-aged and nondescript, a puncher by the look of him, the other a tall, wide-shouldered towhead, Colts holstered low on his thighs, wearing his gunman’s swashbuckling arrogance like a cloak.

All this Tyree took in at a glance, aware that he had in turn become the object of scrutiny.

The two at the bar and the man at the table were studying him closely, taking in his wide-brimmed Stetson, the Kiowa work on his coat and the jinglebob spurs chiming on the heels of his boots, the rowels cut from Mexican silver pesos. The boots themselves were custom-made, the expensive leather sewn sixty stitches to the inch, using an awl so fine that if it had accidentally pierced the boot maker’s hand the wound would have neither hurt nor bled.

Tyree knew that his outfit spoke loudly of Texas, and this was confirmed when the bartender smiled and asked, “Fair piece off your home range, ain’t you, Tex?”

“Some,” Tyree admitted, prepared to be sociable if that was what it took. He was aware that the towhead’s intent gaze was slowly measuring him from the top of his hat to the tip of his boots. The man was on the prod. A combination of belligerence and meanness bunched up hot and eager in his pale eyes.

Tyree had run into his kind before, a would-be hard case, probably with a local reputation as a fast gunman. Such men were not rare in the West. Boot Hills from Texas to Kansas and beyond were full of them.

Tyree, mindful of his decision to leave gun violence behind him, made up his mind right there and then to have no part of him.

“What will it be?” the bartender asked.

“Anything to eat around here?”

The bartender scratched under a thick sideburn, then nodded to a glass-covered dish at the end of the bar. “What you see is what I got. You like cheese? I got cheese and soda crackers.” He glanced behind him. “Maybe I got soda crackers.”

“It’ll do,” Tyree answered. “And a cold beer.”

“All I got is warm beer.”

“Just so long as it’s wet.”

The bartender found a plate, dusted it off on his apron and moved to the end of the bar. He fingered some chunks of yellow cheese onto the plate, added a handful of soda crackers, then set the plate in front of Tyree. From somewhere at his feet he came up with an amber bottle of beer, thumbed it open and laid it alongside the plate.

Tyree took a sip. It was warm and flat, but it cut the dust of the trail in his throat. The cheese smelled strong and the soda crackers were stale.

The man watched Tyree eat for a few moments, then asked, “Where you headed, Tex?”

Tyree shrugged as he picked a cracker crumb off his bottom lip. “No place in particular. Just passing through.”

“That’s a damn lie.”

The voice had come from behind him, that quick. That raw.

“What did you say, mister?” Tyree asked, his hazel eyes, more green than brown, moving to the towhead who was now standing square to him, straddle-legged, thumbs tucked into his gun belts.

“You heard me plain enough. I called you a damned liar.”

There was a vindictive challenge in the towhead’s words, the voice of one who had killed his man and was anxious to kill again.