Guns of the Canyonlands

During those years he bought his first Colt revolver and learned how to use his fists. By the time he was eighteen he was counted a man and respected as a top hand.

He’d just turned twenty, still lacking a man’s meat to his wide shoulders, when he’d first sold his gun. Tyree had ridden with John Wesley Hardin, the Clements brothers and the rest of the wild DeWitt County crowd in the murderous Sutton-Taylor feud. He’d learned his trade well, patiently tutored by Hardin, a fast, deadly and pitiless gunfighter who had shown him the way of the Samuel Colt’s revolver and taught him much of the men who lived by it.

Since then Tyree had hired out his gun in five bitter range wars, worn a town-tamer’s tin star twice and for six months had ridden the box as a scattergun guard for the Lee-Reynolds Stage Company out of Dodge.

Tyree had been shot once, by a gunman named Cord Bodie, who did not live long enough to boast of it. Three years later he’d taken a strap-iron arrow in the thigh during a running fight with Comanche on the Staked Plains.

He stood three inches over six feet in his socks and weighed a lean two hundred pounds that year, all of it muscle crowded into his shoulders, chest and arms, the tallow long since burned out of him by sun, wind and a thousand trails through the wild country. When circumstances dictated, he’d suffered from the bitter cold of the high mountains like any other man, cursed the sweltering, gasping heat of the desert and gulped at the thick, fetid air of the Louisiana bayous and fervently wished himself somewhere else. But Tyree had the capacity to endure, to reach down deep and draw on a seemingly bottomless reserve of strength and will, and that was what set him apart from lesser men and made him what he was.

If asked, the only reason he would give for riding into the Utah canyonlands was that he wanted to see a place he’d never seen before, to stand and wonder at its beauty and lift his nose to the talking wind.

Like most of his restless breed, he knew that the iron road, the telegraph and the sodbuster’s plow were changing the vast Western landscape forever. Soon it would all be gone and there would never be its like again. Not in his lifetime, nor in any other.

He could not dam the tides of progress, so he would see the magnificent land, live it . . . and in later times remember and tell others how it had been.

And maybe, just maybe, he’d find a place out here where he could flee his reputation as a gunfighter, and hang up his Colt forever. He could drink his coffee of an evening from his own front porch, his face crimsoned by the fire in the sky. And maybe there would be a pretty woman rocking at his side and a passel of tall sons to take care of them both when they grew old.

Tyree rode through blue hills fragrant with the smell of juniper and sage, the sun hot on his back. He was still a mile from the flats when he topped a rock-strewn ridge, then headed down into a narrow valley where a stream chuckled to itself as it ran over a pebbled bottom and crickets made their small sound in the grass. The gulch was a pleasant spot, shaded from the sun by the leaves of tall cottonwoods, the air smelling of wildflowers. Tyree reined up and swung out of the saddle.

The day was hot and the brassy ball of sun burned in a sky the color of faded denim. He decided to let his tired dun drink and then graze for an hour before taking to the flats. Crooked Creek could wait. There was no one there to welcome him, no woman with perfumed hair smiling from her doorway, her voice husky with desire—just strangers wary of other strangers.

Tyree eased the girth on the horse and led the animal to the creek. As the dun drank, so did he, stretched flat out on his belly on the bank. After drinking his fill he splashed water on his face and combed wet fingers through his unruly black hair. He smoothed his sweeping dragoon mustache with the back of his hand then settled his hat back on his head, the lacy tree shadows falling dappled around him.

The dun had wandered off to graze. Tyree took off his coat, fetched up against a cottonwood trunk and rolled a smoke. When he’d finished the cigarette, he closed his eyes, enjoying the quiet, lulled by the laughter of the creek and the soft, restless rustle of the cottonwoods.

He eased his position against the tree as the dun wandered close to him, cropping grass, and he tilted his hat further over his face.

Gradually, he drifted . . . his breathing slowed . . . and he let sleep take him.

A hard kick on the sole of his boot woke Chance Tyree from slumber.

“Get on your feet, you.”

Tyree opened his eyes and saw a bearded man towering above him, the rock-steady gun in his hand pointed right at his head. He turned and saw another man a few feet away to his left. That one held a Winchester.

Each wore a lawman’s star on his vest. They looked like grim and determined men.