The Gun Fight

With much gratitude

I dedicate this book to

Gary Goldstein

for giving me a new literary world to explore.

Prologue

He found them on the morning of the fifth day.

It had been difficult to track them down. The range was oven-hot from sunup to sundown, the earth so bone dry and hard, it made hoof prints hard to spot. The heat had worn him down. His canteen was almost empty by the time he reached them, his body feeling seared and weak.

The three men were asleep beside a narrow creek, sprawled exhaustedly on their blankets in the shade of a cottonwood tree. He could make out the form of Aaran Graham, the biggest of the three, a tall, bulky man lying on his right side. The other two were younger, slight of build, lying on their backs, Stetsons shading their eyes.

Benton’s gaze shifted to their grounded saddles. All six saddlebags bulged with their contents; what the three men had robbed from the Millersview Bank last Thursday afternoon, leaving behind one dead and one badly wounded teller.

Benton drew in a long, tired breath and dismounted slowly. He really was getting too old for this kind of thing. Julia had been on his back for months now. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was time to leave the Rangers and settle down. Still, what else did he know how to do?

He slipped the carbine from its scabbard and started down a dusty slope toward the three motionless figures. He tried to be as quiet as he could but his boots scuffed unavoidably on the hard soil.

He was glancing at the three staked horses when Aaran Graham jerked awake, twisting around, his half- asleep expression one of startled anger.

“Wake up!” he shouted, grabbing for the holstered pistol lying on the ground beside him.

“Don’t do it!” Benton ordered, snapping up the carbine barrel. He saw the two younger men sitting up groggily.

Graham paid no attention, clutching at the handle of his Colt and starting to raise it.

Benton’s shot hit him in the center of the chest, knocking him backward; he was dead before his body hit the ground.

“Pa!” The cry of anguish made Benton’s gaze jump to the stricken face of one of the younger men.

Before he could react further, the other young man had snatched up his pistol and fired. Benton grunted in surprise as the bullet struck the barrel of his carbine, knocking it from his grip and numbing his fingers.

Training made him dive to his left, avoiding the young man’s second shot by less than an inch. As he fell, his right hand dropped to his pistol. It was free of his holster and being fired before the young man could get off another shot.

The bullet slammed into the young man’s chest just above the heart and, with a cry of dazed pain, he stumbled back, eyes already glazed over by the death which took him seconds later.

Benton scrambled to his feet, eyes fixed on the remaining young man who, he saw now, was more a boy than a man. He’d had no idea until moments ago that one of Graham’s men was his son.

The boy was staring at his dead father, then at the other young man who Benton later learned was his older brother.

Benton was never to forget the expression on the boy’s face. Stunned and horrified, his eyes wide with total disbelief. The look in the boy’s eyes was what Benson would remember most; the look of someone whose entire world had just been shattered.

When the boy’s hand clawed down for his pistol, Benton stiffened with amazement. “Don’t! ” he cried, unable to believe what he was seeing.

Only habitual reflex kept him alive; an ingrained mechanism that made him fire without thought, hitting the boy in the stomach. He felt a bolt of shock that his aim had been so poor. It had been, he later realized, the measure of his utter dismay that the boy had attempted such a hopeless move.

The boy had stumbled back and sat down heavily on the ground, a blank expression on his face now. He looked down curiously at his stomach, regarding the pump of blood from the bullet hole as though it were coming from someone else.

Then—Benton felt sick to his stomach when he heard it—the boy began to cry.

“Pa,” he murmured. “Henry.” He repeated the names over and over, sobbing like a frightened child, tears flowing down his cheeks.

Then, finally, before he fainted, he cried out, once, “It hurts!”

Benton sank down on the ground, legs suddenly devoid of strength. He looked at Aaran Graham’s body. At the body of Henry Graham. Finally, at the thinly breathing form of Graham’s younger son; his name was Albert, Benton later discovered. He knew that even if he tried to get the boy back to Millersview, he’d be dead before they were halfway there.

One week later, Benton brought the three bodies back to Millersview after remaining with Albert Graham for the two days it took him to die.

The first thing he did when he got home was go up to the bedroom, open a chest at the foot of the bed, and dump in his pistol, holster, and belt.

When his wife asked him why he’d done that, he told her that he was finished, that he would never wear a pistol as a weapon again.

3:29 P.M., Millersview, Texas, August 13, 1871.

The First Day

Chapter One

The chaparral bird was running a fierce race with the black roan as it pounded across the hard earth. The long legs of the bird flashed wildly in a swirl of alkali dust, ten yards ahead of the roan’s battering hooves.

Off the wide trail, a jackrabbit bounded into the brush with great, erratic leaps. Awakened by the muffled thunder in the earth, a coiled rattlesnake writhed sluggishly and lifted its flat head, dead eyes searching.

The tall roan galloped along the trail, its broad legs drawing high, then driving down quickly at the dust- clouded earth. The spur rowels of its young rider raked once across its heaving flanks and the thick weave of