tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come. He rattled deep in his throat and blood bubbled scarlet and sudden over his lips. His glazed stare fixed on the glow of the lamp above his head . . . but by then he was seeing only darkness.
Hammer back, Tyree’s gun swung on Charlie. But the little man threw up his hands and screamed, “No! Mother of God, no! Don’t shoot! I’m out of this!”
“Shuck that gun belt and step away from it, or I’ll drop you right where you stand,” Tyree said.
Charlie’s trembling fingers quickly unbuckled the gun belt like it had suddenly become red-hot and let it fall. He backed toward the door, looking down at Rinker, a tangle of shocked emotion in his eyes.
“But Dave was fast,” the man whispered, shaking his head in disbelief. “He was the fastest around.”
“Had he ever been to Texas?” Tyree asked.
“No . . . I mean, I don’t think so.”
Tyree nodded. “Figures.”
From force of long habit, he punched the empty shells out of his Colt, reloaded, then stuck the big revolver back in his waistband. He turned to the bartender.
“You saw what happened. I didn’t want this fight and Rinker was notified.”
The man opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing, his Adam’s apple bobbing like he was trying to swallow a dry chicken bone.
“What’s your name, bartender?” Tyree asked.
“Zachary,” the man answered finally, his stunned, haunted eyes a mirror image of Charlie’s. “They call me Zack Ryan, when they call me anything.”
Tyree motioned toward the dead man. “Well, Zack Ryan, will you take care of this?”
The bartender gulped, then nodded. “Sure, sure, Tex, sure. Anything you say.”
Tyree dug into the pocket of his pants and chimed three silver dollars onto the bar. “A man should be buried decent,” he said. “Lay him out fitting and proper in his best suit, and get a preacher to say the words.”
“I’ll do it,” Ryan said, nodding again, his face gray. “I’ll do right by him.”
Tyree lifted a hand. “Thanks for the beer and the food.”
He turned and stepped toward the door, his spurs ringing like silver bells in the sullen, smoke-streaked silence.
“Wait,” Ryan said, his curiosity overcoming his fear. “Did Owen Fowler really send for you?”
Tyree stopped in his tracks. “Who the hell,” he asked, a vague anger tugging at him, “is Owen Fowler?”
Chance Tyree ground out his cigarette butt on the heel of his boot, then swung his long leg back into the stirrup. “Well,” he said, to no one but himself, as is the habit of men who ride lonely trails, “maybe I’ll meet this Owen Fowler one day. Then him and me will have words.”
Tyree shook his head and kneed the dun forward in the direction of the flats.
He harbored no illusions about Crooked Creek.
The town would be the same as the last he’d visited, and the ones before that. The warm beer and raw whiskey would taste the same. The same choking yellow dust would cloud the street and the people would be as he’d found them in all the other towns he’d passed through, uncompromising men and women bred hard for a harsh land where nothing came easy.
Tyree was thirty years old that summer of 1883, and behind him lay a decade of gun violence, rake-hell years of blood, fury and sudden death. Many times he’d walked the line between what was lawful and what was not. In those days to be young and brave and full of fight were qualities other men admired, that fleeting moment of blazing, reckless youth when the old sat quietly in the shadows and watched and wondered and said nothing.
His ma had died giving birth to him. His pa had grieved for a while, then taken a new wife. Tyree had been raised hard and tough, knowing little of parental warmth or affection. His pa was too occupied with trying to wrest a living out of a two-by-twice ranch on a dusty creek south of the Balcones Escarpment.
When he was thirteen, his pa had given him a swaybacked grulla horse and four dollars and told him it was time for him to leave and seek his fortune. “Things are tough around here, Chance,” he’d said, “what with cattle prices the way they are an’ all. I got your new ma and the three younkers to care of an’ I just don’t have the money to feed you and put clothes on your back no more. So you see how things are with me here.”
Tyree turned his back on the ranch without regret and spent the next seven years drifting, working in the hard school of the cow camps and the long, dangerous drives up the trails to Kansas.
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.
