better’n to be robbers and thieves.”
“Then what is it you’re planning?” Zack, the mid-
dle boy, said, “if’n not farmers and not highwaymen?”
“I reckon there’s by gud rewards to be collected on
lawbreakers is what I’m thinking. Bounty hunters is
what I’m thinking.”
“You mean manhunters?” Zack asked.
“By gud, that’s what I mean. It’d beat shit out of
working a farm or selling dry goods, or begging in the
streets. Shit fire, ain’t nothing here for us’ns now that
the Yanks have come through. Why I wouldn’t even
screw these wimmen round here for knowing the
Yanks has been at them. You see anything here worth
staying for?”
They looked upon the homestead, the leaning old
buildings, the weeds grown high as a man’s belly, the
distant blue hills, the empty sky, an old rusted pail,
and shook their collective heads.
“How we find these lawbreakers with rewards on
’em?” Zane wondered aloud as they headed west af-
ter scratching the initials gtt (gone to texas)—on
their front door, the three of them riding in a buck-
board pulled by the one war mule between them.
“Shit fire, all we have to do is stop at any United
States Federal Marshal’s office and ask, I reckon.”
And so that’s what they did soon as they reached
Fort Smith and were told there’d be plenty of law-
breakers the other side of the Arkansas River, but
duly warned not to interfere with the legal law.
“The Nations is full of bad actors,” the marshal
said. “But by God don’t you ever get in the way of one
of my men or I’ll have you standing before Judge
Parker. He is known about these parts as the Hanging
Judge. I ’spect you’ve heard about him, ain’t you?”
“Fucken Yankee, from what I know,” Zeb said.
“But don’t worry about us none, we’re just looking to
make a go of it doing what we do best.”
Zeb took a handful of dodgers and stuffed them
inside his shirt.
They caught their first man—a rapist named Fair-
pond—shot and killed him in a tavern in Poteau when
he tried to put up a fuss, and delivered him to the
Western District Marshal’s office back in Fort Smith,
his corpse so stinking ripe by the time they arrived,
they were given the one hundred dollar reward money
without an argument and an extra ten if they agreed
to bury the fellow quick and not bring any more
stinking corpses into town.
“Shit fire, dead stink don’t bother us none,” Zeb
said, taking the reward money in hand. “We spent
three years smelling that particular stink—from
Ezra’s Church to Fort Pulaski. We was oft on burial
details, my brothers and me. July and August, was the
worst. Heat will turn a human ripe in no time.”
They’d slowly and inexorably worked their way
farther and farther west over the next several years,
crossing Indian Territory and into the pistol barrel be-
fore crossing the border into Texas. Texas proved to
be fruitful for quite some time: plenty of badmen with
rewards on their heads, many of them ex-Confederates
like themselves, busted and down on their luck and
knowing only one thing: how to use a gun.
“One,” a man named Albert Bush said, “you all
sound Southern, like myself,” and asked if they had
served in the war and they said they had, and he said,
“Then you understand how it is,” and they said they
did but it didn’t make a shit of a bit of difference to
them and for him to throw his hands up or make his
play.
Several years came and went as they scoured the
state, sometimes running into what Zeb called “the
nigger police” and once they nearly shot it out with
that bunch, but tempers got cooled in time. And after
they got most of the big fish—Emmitt Brown, the
Pecos Kid, and Sam Savage—and collected the money
on them, there wasn’t much but little fish left and they
grew weary of chasing all over the endless Texas for
as sometimes as little as fifty dollars and decided that
the north country might suit them better. One thing
they heard that attracted them was that a fellow could
buy good land cheap; land with grass and good water
if a fellow wanted to say go in the cow business.
“Cow business?” Zane said incredulously when
Zeb came up with the idea. “Hell, that’s like being a
farmer, ain’t it?”
“No, you don’t do nothing with cows but get you a
bull to screw ’em and sit back and watch ’em have
more cows. It’s a easy living,” opined Zeb, who had
assumed the natural role of leader. Land was cheap in
Texas, too, but it was mostly scrub and prickly pear
and too many snakes. Zeb hated snakes worse than
he hated Yankees. So they decided to ride north.
It was in Montana when they first heard the name
William Sunday. He and a fellow named Fancher had
shot and killed a man and his boy—a local pair from
Miles City who had been well thought of in the com-
munity. Were told this by a rancher, that the man and
his boy had been just out hunting antelope when
someone shot them.
