Four Live Rounds

on the good, red road

October 1893

San Juan Mountains

Southwest Colorado

If Durango was on the road to hell, Silverton had already gotten there and staked a claim—enough whorehouses, dancehalls, and gambling halls to service a city ten times the size.

Oatha settled on one of the less rowdy saloons for his nightcap, pushing through the throng of revelers to get in line behind a man at a barstool nursing three brimming shots, the surface of the whiskies trembling from the vibration of bootstomps on floorboards. Hands grazed his shoulders and he turned to see a toothless, blond whore in nothing but stockings and a corset grinning at him.

“Bet you could use a trim,” she said.

“Not tonight.”

She went on through the crowd, availing her services, and through the smoky lowlight, Oatha caught shards of his grimy reflection in the constellation of liquor bottles behind the bar.

He’d been waiting ten minutes for the barkeep to notice him, when a voice lifted above the din, “You gotta yell out you wanna drink in this shithole!”

Oatha glanced back, saw a pale, smoothshaven man of thirty or so waving him over, his face half-obscured by dirty, chin-length yellow hair. At the table sat three men, and the one who’d called out to him motioned to an uncorked bottle of whiskey upon which the trio had already inflicted substantial damage.

“Happy to share.”

Oatha relinquished his place in line and threaded his way through the crowd to the table, where they’d already pushed out the last remaining chair. Oatha sat, extended his hand across a filthy set of playing cards and a pot of tiny pokes, a few crumpled dollars, a double eagle, and a voucher for fifteen minutes with a whore called Grizzly Sow.

“Oatha Wallace.”

“Nathan Curtice. This is Marion McClurg and Daniel Smith.”

“Boys.”

McClurg, a larded beast of a man, reached forward and pulled the pot toward his corner of the table while Dan eyed Oatha.

“Play cards?” Nathan asked.

“Not often.”

Nathan poured a whiskey, pushed the glass to Oatha, who took it up and tossed it back with a fleeting grimace.

“Two dollars gets you in on the next hand.”

“Well, I’m trying to save my money—”

“For what?”

“A horse.”

“A horse.”

“I’m traveling on to Abandon. Got a job with the Godsend Mine.”

“No shit,” Nathan said. “I’m headed that very direction myself to visit my brother. He’s sheriff up there. Maybe you heard of him…Ezekiel Curtice.”

“I haven’t.”

“Yeah, I can’t quite believe what that outlaw’s become myself.”

McClurg shuffled the cards while Dan refilled the tumblers.

“You been to Abandon?” Nathan asked.

“First time.”

“What I heard, even across lots, it’s a twenty mile ride through hard country.”

Oatha felt the cards sliding under his fingers, McClurg already dealing.

“Don’t wanna play.”

“Few hands won’t kill ye,” Nathan said.

Dan muttered, “Man bought you two drinks already. ‘Less you some boiled shirt, least you can do is play a hand.” Oatha looked over at Dan, the man thin as a totem, gant up and blanched like he carried some parasite. Oatha reached into his leather pouch, selected several pieces of hard chink, and tossed the coins into the middle of the table.

Two hours later, Oatha stumbled out of the saloon, and he barely made it into an alley before spewing his supper against the clapboard.

Nathan stood chuckling behind him. “You can’t play cards for shit.”

“Yeah,” Oatha groaned as he leaned against the wall, bracing for the next round of nausea. “And I got barely the money for a horse now.”

“Wouldn’t fret.”

Oatha spit. “Why’s that?”

“Like I said, me and the boys headin to Abandon in two days. Travel with us, you want. Dan’s got a mule you can ride.”

“A mule.”

“Mean son of a bitch name a Rusty.”

Oatha straightened, tried to center himself over his feet, the world tilting. On the second floor of a false-fronted building across the street, a headboard smacked repeatedly into a wall and bedsprings squealed like ravenous pigs. Against the dark, Nathan was just a silhouette.

“You sure?” Oatha asked.

“Yeah, you don’t wanna be takin that trail to Abandon on your own anyhow. Wild country out there, bad people in it.”

“I’m obliged,” Oatha said, though he wasn’t. Last thing he wanted was these men for extended company.

“You get yourself home?” Nathan asked.

“Believe so.”

“I’m gonna go scare up a little snatch.”

Nathan wandered off toward Blair Street, an assured elegance to his drunken gait, and Oatha sat down against the back of the saloon to let his head clear, get his bearings straight for the long stagger back to the hotel.

He woke stiff and cold some hours later, still sitting up against the back of the saloon, his

gray frockcoat glazed with a heavy frost. The throbbing at the base of his skull was his

pulse, and it quickened as he struggled to his feet in the thin air.

The predawn sky held a deep lavender tint, the surrounding peaks stark black against it, like patches of starless space, and aside from the candleflames in the windows of the cribs, this boom town stood as still and dark as a man might hope to see it.

Oatha bought a lineback canelo from a greaser at the livery, an old saddle, and provisions for two days, including tobacco and a quart of whiskey. Struck out of Silverton in the late afternoon, even as the sun perched on a jagged ridge of peaks in the west.

At dusk, he was three miles out of town, camped along a drowsy stream downsized to a trickle in these dry weeks of autumn. Oatha lay smoking on his bedroll, staring up through the spruce at pieces of the night sky, moonless and starblown. If he rode hard, he’d make Abandon by nightfall. It all seemed like the start of something for him, a new direction. He was fifty-one, and maybe it was time he got his life right, started walking that road his friend, Sik’is, had always talked about.

The restlessness of the horse tore him out of the dream, and Oatha sat up before his eyes opened. It was light out, though still early, maybe an hour past dawn. He got up, walked over to the mare and rubbed her neck.

In the near distance, a twig snapped, followed by the clink of bits and leather saddles creaking in the cold. Oatha spotted movement through the trees. Though he’d star-pitched fifty feet off the trail, he now realized he was still in easy eyeshot of any passersby who happened to glance in his general direction.

He counted three riders moving up the trail and was debating whether to hail them or just let them pass, none the wiser of his presence, when a voice called out, “Got breakfast ready, Oatha?”

Now Nathan was coming toward him through the trees astride an apron-faced gelding.

“Hello there, boys.” Oatha mustering more enthusiasm than he felt, something unnerving about being in proximity to Nathan Curtice in the middle of nowhere that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

Nathan, Dan, and McClurg rode up, and Nathan dismounted, walked over to Oatha, glancing at his bedroll, his horse, as if he’d caught him stepping out.

“Got yourself that new horse,” Nathan said.

Oatha nodded.

“You know you’ve hurt Rusty’s feelings.”

“Who?”

McClurg snorted.

“Oh, the mule. Came looking for you boys yesterday,” Oatha lied, “see if you wanted to start out a day early.” The way Nathan stared into his eyes bothered Oatha, like the man was looking through his head, reading the scrawl on the back of his skull.

“You not think we’d make fit traveling companions?” Nathan asked.

“Course not.”

“What then?”

“Just started out early is all.”

Nathan gave a nod, though it didn’t appear to be one of understanding. He glanced back at Dan, as if to say something, but stopped himself.

“You care to ride on with us?” Nathan asked.

“I’ll probably just catch a few more winks and then—”

“How about you saddle your horse right now, come along with us like you said you was goin to.”

Oatha rode between McClurg and Dan in the early morning cold, the trail winding up a long drainage through a dense stand of spruce. By midday, a thick cloud deck had darkened the sky, and when the men stopped to lunch at timberline, tiny flakes of snow stood out on the wool of Oatha’s coat. They were making a leisurely go of it, no chance of reaching Abandon by nightfall at this pace, but Oatha held his tongue, even as they lounged for two hours, smoking and nipping from Nathan’s jar of whiskey, the men fair drunk by the time they finally decamped.

It was cold riding, and Oatha’s glow soon faded.

They climbed out of the trees, the snow blowing sideways over this exposed, open terrain. The Teats, those twin promontories Oatha had been using as a guide since yesterday, had vanished in the storm.

They camped miserable, cold, and wet just below timberline in a grove of dead spruce, got a sheet of canvas strung up between the trees, a fire going underneath, but even the whiskey jar making the rounds couldn’t lift Oatha’s spirits. He sat leaning against a spruce, watching the snow pour down and the light recede, thinking he should be in Abandon by now.

“How much you figure they keep on hand?” McClurg asked.

“Few thousand. Ten if we’re lucky,” Nathan said.

“Enough to make it worth our trouble,” Dan said.

Oatha cut his eyes at the three men, and McClurg noticed, said, “What?”

“Nothing.”

Nathan smiled. “Nobody told him he felled in with road agents.”

The men laughed.

“What do you do for a livin?” Nathan asked.

Oatha’s mouth had run dry. “Been prospecting, bar mining, picking up work in the mines where I can—”

“Like honest work, do you?” Dan said.

“I guess.”

“But the question,” McClurg said, “is how you feel about dishonest work?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well think on it, get back to us.”

The men laughed again and Nathan swiped the jar from Dan, tilted it back. McClurg hoisted a log onto the fire, a spray of ashes engulfing Oatha. He rummaged through his satchel, located the loaf of sourdough he’d bought before leaving Silverton.

“Break me off a hunk a that,” Nathan said, and Oatha tore off a piece.

“Got a round a cheese in here, too.”

“Don’t be stingy.”

They cut cheese onto the bread, set the slices on hot stones in the fire’s vicinity to let it melt.

The storm brought a premature night, and in the firelight, Oatha watched the snow fall without respite. They played cards until the fire ran out of wood, won the last of Oatha’s money, drank up his quart of whiskey, smoked all of his tobacco.

As the other men snored, Oatha lay awake. If it hadn’t been snowing so hard, he’d have attempted to sneak out of camp, resaddle his horse, and get the hell away from Nathan and the boys. He didn’t want to look it in the eye, but the truth of the matter was that he’d backed himself into a bind, and if he didn’t slip away from them tomorrow, he’d probably never reach Abandon.

Oatha’s eyes opened. As he sat up, his vision sharpened into focus and he saw the gray-white madness of the blizzard, the canvas sheet sagging to the ground at one end, the snow piled up three feet around the boundary of their little shelter.

He held his hands toward the low fire, his head throbbing again, a whiskey hangover that wouldn’t die until noon at the earliest.

Nathan looked at him, shook his head.

“My horse and yours are dead. We’ve caught a bad piece a luck here.”

They stayed under the canvas all day, taking turns venturing out to gather wood from the abundance of rotted spruce and melting snow in the emptied whiskey jars, a tenuous proposition, the fire and ice resulting in shattered glass in two out of three attempts.

By evening, the snow had quit but the wind raged on through the night, and the sound of limbs cracking kept Oatha from the depths of restful sleep.

The second morning dawned cloudless and bright. They saddled the two remaining horses and broke camp as the first rays of sunlight struck the Teats, Oatha clinging to

Dan, Nathan to the substantial girth of McClurg.

A quarter mile out from the shelter, Dan’s horse stopped in its tracks and refused to take another step, snow to its belly, nostrils flaring in the thin air.

“I’ll make you go!”

He dismounted, grabbed the bridle strap and fought to drag the horse forward, but it wouldn’t budge, even when Dan drew his Colt and smacked the animal across the bridge of its nose.

“Enough,” Nathan said. “These animals ain’t built for this.”

“Maybe just one of us should take a horse, try to make Abandon,” Oatha said.

“Who, you?”

“To what end?”

“To get help. Bring back a sled or a—”

“Snow’s too deep,” Nathan said. “Hell, it’s just early October. We’ll get us a warm spell in a couple days. Good sod-soaker.”

“We’re almost out a provisions,” McClurg said. “We’re just supposed to wait around?”

“I ain’t in control of the weather, Marion.”

Oatha climbed down from the horse, and Dan screamed at the animal, “Go on! Get!”

“No, you dumb shit,” Nathan said. “We need ‘em.”

“For what?”

“Hard to tell just how long we may be stuck out—”

“I ain’t eatin my horse.”

“Circumstances like this ain’t the time to make declarations a what you will and won’t

do.”

It was snowing again by nightfall, and it didn’t stop for three days, the snow accumulating higher than the canvas tarp so that the shelter more resembled a snow cave.

Oatha could tell by the brightness of the tarp that the sun was out.

McClurg snored.

Nathan stared grimly in his direction, said, “He left.”

“Who?”

“Who ain’t here?”

Oatha saw where the wall of snow had been broken through behind him, cobalt sky and fir trees powder-blown and sagging.

“Where are the horses?” Oatha asked.

“Dan took one. The other’n keeled.”

Oatha’s head was hurting again—dehydration instead of whiskey and the beginnings of real hunger. He’d eaten the last of his cheese and bread two nights ago.

“We botched it,” Nathan said. “Should’ve walked out after the first storm. Wouldn’t of been fun, might’ve froze, but we’d of had a chance.”

“You don’t think we got one now?”

They butchered the calico that had just died, cut warm, blood-colored steaks out of its haunches and grilled them over a low fire. The smell of the meat cooking and the sounds of what little fat there was burning off gave Oatha a charge of energy, made him realize just how hungry he was.

The meat was stringy and tough, commiserate with the lean muscularity of the horse, but he ate his fill of it and slept for the rest of the day.

“Tell you what,” Nathan said two nights later as they roasted the last of McClurg’s horse. “God’s been waitin for this, and I know he’s enjoyin ever minute of it. You just had the misfortune a being with me when he finally caught up to my ass.”

“Wonder if Dan’s made it to Abandon or Silverton,” McClurg said.

“I hope he’s froze. Don’t mention his name again.”

“He might come back and save us.”

“That happens, I’ll reevaluate my feelings toward the man.”

“So tell me,” Oatha said, “you boys weren’t going to Abandon for the mining opportunities, were you?”

Nathan glanced at McClurg, let slip a little smirk. “Let me put it this way. This horrible weather saved your life.”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“Sure you do. You was gonna try and take your leave of us your first chance. If I’m wrong, you can have my portion a Barney the horse.”

“You was gonna kill me?”

“Dan would of done the honors, him bein our resident cutthroat.”

Nathan grabbed hold of the hoof, turned over the horse’s leg.

“Why?” Oatha asked.

“For whatever money you had. For your horse. Because the first night I saw you diddling around in that Silverton saloon, you struck me, of all the people in it, even the beat-eatin pelados, as a jackleg, and I thought how much fun it’d be to take you apart.”

Oatha’s heart pounded under his coat, his windpipe constricting, the reality sinking in that he was trapped in this barely adequate shelter with two men who’d intended to kill him and perhaps still did, out of food, and colder than he’d ever been in his life.

“But you had a change a heart?” he asked.

“Way I see it, we caught this rough piece a luck, we’re in it together now.” Nathan unsheathed his bowie knife. “Ya’ll think this leg’s fit to carve?”

Two days hence, their eleventh in the shelter, the hunger returned, Nathan’s bowie insufficient to the task of cutting cookable portions out of the horses that had frozen straight through. He took his hammer shotgun, spent half a day wandering through snow deeper than he was tall, McClurg and Oatha waiting in the shelter, listening for a gunshot, talking of their last warm meals in Silverton, what they intended to eat upon their reentry into civilization.

Nathan returned at dusk, doused in snow and shivering uncontrollably.

Growled, “Not even a fire to come home to?”

“I’ll make one,” Oatha said.

“You can hunt tomorrow, too.”

The weakness and hunger made negotiating the snow nearly impossible, but Oatha ventured out anyway, lightheaded and cold.

He spent two hours fighting his way downhill under the bluest sky he’d ever seen, verging on purple, following Nathan’s tracks from the previous day, the snow melting off the trees.

At lunchtime, he stopped at the edge of a glade, tried to scale a blue spruce for a better vantage but his strength was sapped, settled for beating down a spot in the snow instead.

The afternoon was almost warm, especially sitting in direct sunlight, but he couldn’t shake the chill. Exhausted from the hike down, he leaned back and shut his eyes, and when he woke again, it was getting dark, the nearest peaks already flushed with alpenglow.

In the dusky silence, he thought about what Nathan had said, how he’d spotted his weakness out of everyone in that Silverton saloon, how he was in this predicament because of some deep virus in the fabric of his character.

Sometimes, lying in bed late in the night with the room spinning—those moments of drunken introspection when he feared and believed in God—he’d admitted to himself that he was headed for something like this, that the shell of a man he’d become since the war was going to get him killed one of these days.

Damn if he hadn’t been right about something.

Next morning, Nathan left again, and Oatha lay in the shelter’s dirt floor all day, in a fog, too weak to build a fire, the world graying, his thoughts running back to childhood in Virginia and those long summer days in the field behind his home, filling baskets with blackberries, hands stained purple from the fruit, swollen with thornpricks, and the hum of bumblebees and the scent of honeysuckle and cobblers baking in the humid evenings and his mother’s face and his three brothers, long dead on a Virginia hillside.

After a night of fever dreams, Oatha found himself stumbling down the well-worn hunting trail, the morning bright, the snow soft. Sat hours in the glade, the shotgun across his lap, pulling out clumps of hair, eating snow to quench his thirst, though the ice only chilled him down and intensified the agony behind his eyes.

There passed periods of sleep, stretches of consciousness, bouts of bloody diarrhea, and he kept hearing birds fly overhead, wings beating at the air, but every time he looked up, the sky stood empty.

The next day, no one left the shelter, the men sitting around the cold fire-ring, faces grim and squandered of color.

“We’re dyin, boys,” Nathan said.

Oatha sat leaning against the spruce, staring at McClurg, whose brow had furrowed up in wonderment.

“Ya’ll hear that?”

“What?” Nathan said.

“Dan’s come back.”

Oatha cocked his head. “I don’t hear nothing.”

“He’s callin out for me.”

“You’re hallucinatin, Marion,” Nathan said. “Ain’t a soul out here but us. Wasn’t gonna say nothin, but Dan’s a ways down this mountainside, settin against a tree, froze. Saw him two days ago, figured it wouldn’t do much for morale to mention it, but there you go.”

“That’s sad,” Marion said.

“No, I’ll tell you sad, the fuckin tragedy of the situation. Snow’s meltin so fast now, we could us probably walk into Abandon in a day or two if we wasn’t so weak.”

“Reckon it’s settled that much?” Oatha asked.

“Wouldn’t be the worst post-holin I ever done.”

Oatha lay there considering it, decided Nathan was right at least about the one thing—he barely had the strength to stand, much less walk the remaining ten or however many miles it was into Abandon. And for the first time, lying there with the sun beating down on the dirty canvas that had served as the roof over his head for fifteen days, the prospect of dying didn’t seem so bad.

Twelve hours later, dying had advanced from a pleasant thought to an all-consuming desire, Oatha wondering how much pain a human body could stand, if he could hope to drift away the next time he went to sleep, or if he had days of this torture ahead of him—the slow wasting of his body, the slow fracturing of his mind.

When his eyes opened, Nathan was standing over him, and the day had dawned, feeble light filtering through the opaque membrane of the canvas.

“I’m goin out there,” Nathan said, his voice straining to produce a whisper, “and by God if I don’t come back with food I’m gonna enlist one a you to put my ass out a this unending misery.”

McClurg lay facing him, his obese jowls swollen to the brink of splitting, fluid pooling under the skin. His eyes were open and glazed, and Oatha thought the man had died until he saw them manage a lethargic blink.

“You awake, Marion?” he whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Ask you something…you believe in God?”

“Don’t reckon. You?”

“Sometimes.”

“How you figure you’ll come out if in fact he’s runnin this show?”

“Don’t know. Ain’t been particularly good or bad. Just sort a plodded my way along. I was friends with a Navajo when I worked the Copper Queen in Bisbee. Man named Sik’is. He was always talking about walking on the good, red road.”

“Ain’t heard of it. Where’s it at?”

“Ain’t a place so much as a state a mind, you know? Way a living. Balance and harmony—”

“This some spiritual bullshit?”

“It’s like walking the path where you’re the best version of yourself. I don’t know. Always sounded nice to me. Thought one a these days, I’d seek this road out. Start living right, you know?”

“Wouldn’t put much stock in the philosophy of a injun. You never kilt a man, have you, Oatha?”

“Me and my brothers fought against the Federals at Malvern Hill, so yeah, I done my share.”

“I kilt five, two in fair fights. Three was plain murder in cold blood, and you know, I been settin here thinkin on ‘em, especially one I met on a two-track outside a Miles City. Young man. We rode together for a spell, shared a bottle, and I knowed he was headed home to his wife and three younguns ‘cause he told me, and still when we stopped at a crik to let our horses blow and he bent down for a drink a water, I cracked open the back of his skull with a rock and held him under ‘till he quit kickin.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause he told me he had a pouch full a seventy dollars he’d made workin in a Idaho mine.”

“You ashamed of it?”

Marion seemed to reflect on the question, then he licked his dry, cracking lips and said, “I reckon. But it’s a rough old world out there, filled with meaner hombres than the one you’re starin at. Figure it was that young man’s time, and if it hadn’t been me, it’d a been—”

A shotgun blast exploded in the forest, trailed by a shout of unabashed joy.

Marion struggled up off the ground. “Son of a bitch hit somethin.”

Oatha felt the excitement bloom in his gut, Marion already on his feet, lumbering out of the shelter.

Nathan hollering, “Boys, come look at this! Shot us a elk!”

It required immense effort for Oatha to sit up, and he had to employ a spruce branch to leverage himself out of the dirt onto his feet.

Marion yelling, “I could kiss you, Nathan, tongue and all!”

Oatha limped out of the shelter as fast as he could manage into sunlight that passed blindingly sharp through the dead trees, Marion twenty yards away, moving with considerable speed though the spruce, Oatha following as fast as he could, shoots of pain riding up his legs, the muscle atrophied, already wearing away.

There was Nathan in the distance, standing with the shotgun beside a scrawny aspen, its bark chewed up, near cut in two by buckshot, Oatha scanning the woods for the fallen elk as Nathan raised his shotgun.

Marion’s head disappeared in a red mist and the rest of his body collided into a tree and pitched back as Oatha ducked behind a spruce, the trunk too small to shield him from a spray of buckshot, figuring if it came, he’d catch a pellet or two at the least.

“The hell you doin, Nathan?”

“Livin, brother. Livin.”

“You mean to kill me, too?”

“I mean for us to eat this fat son of a bitch, get back to civilization.”

Oatha peered through the branches, saw that Nathan was still standing above Marion’s headless frame, the breech of the shotgun broken over his forearm.

“Why you reloadin then?” Oatha shouted. He didn’t own a gun anymore, hadn’t in three decades, but Marion’s was sitting next to the snowbank inside the shelter—a Navy—and he had to bet it was loaded.

“‘Cause I don’t know if you the type a man to go along with somethin like this.”

Nathan was fishing in the pocket of his oilskin slicker, pulled out a pair of shells, Oatha thinking if there was ever a time to make a break for it, this was it.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” Nathan said. “I kilt him out a pure necessity. Was you the fat fuck, I’d a cut your throat long ago.”

“There ain’t no level a hunger make me eat the flesh of another man.”

“I understand,” Nathan said, sliding shells into the chambers, snapping closed the breech.

Oatha started back for the shelter, his boots sinking two feet in the slushy snow with every step.

He heard the report before he registered the blood running down his back, colder than iron as it flowed under his waistband, a rush of pure animal panic flooding through him.

By the time he reached the shelter, Oatha’s shoulder was aflame and he could barely move his arm to break through the wall of snow, though with the adrenalized bolster of sudden strength, the accompanying pain was a slight distraction.

He fell through under the canvas as the crunch of Nathan’s footfalls approached, scrabbling through the dirt and snow for Marion’s revolver.

The Colt lay under a threadbare Navajo blanket, and as Oatha got his hands around the steel, he realized the vulnerability of his position, urging himself to settle down even as his hands trembled.

Nathan’s footsteps had gone silent.

Oatha sat in the dirt floor, straining to listen, no sound but the trees creaking in the wind, his pulse vibrating his ear drums.

“They’s still time,” Nathan said. He was close, his voice passing muffled through the snowbank, Oatha unable to pinpoint his exact location.

“For what?” Oatha asked.

“You to come to your senses, see there ain’t no way out a this pinch except you help yourself to a little Marion. You wanna live, don’t you?”

“Not to the detriment a my conscience.”

“Tell you what…the one time in your pathetic life you decide not to be a coward, and it’s gonna get you dead.”

“I ain’t always been like this, Nathan. War does things to a man. Makes some heroes, turns others killers, some the other way entire.”

“Guess we know which way you went, tramping through country like this without so much as a revolver.”

Whether loosed by the stress of these harsh conditions or some other agitation, Oatha felt a pool of rage that had been fermenting most of his adult life, welling up inside him, a force so potent and for so long contained, he realized in that moment, it could not be put back ever, his voice shaking as he said, “Well, you ain’t but thirty or so, and I know you kilt and think you seen killin, but you ain’t seen nothin like what the Federals did to us at Malvern Hill, the ground saturated with blood like it had rained from the sky, so what the fuck would you know about any of it?”

“I know I like the edge I ain’t heard ‘till now in your voice.”

Oatha thumbed back the Colt’s hammer.

“What now?” Nathan asked. “Wanna call ourselves a truce, get to the business a livin?”

“Moment you throw down that shotgun, I’ll know you ain’t full a shit on that proposition.”

Through the wall of snow Oatha had broken through, he saw the shotgun sail through the air and disappear into a snowbank.

Nathan called out, “Anytime you wanna do the same with Marion’s Colt, feel free.”

“Wish we had some spice,” Nathan said.

The steaks they’d carved out of Marion’s rump sizzled, marbled with fat, Oatha thinking the odor couldn’t even be called unpleasant. His right shoulder seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, and he wondered how many pellets of buckshot some sawbones was going to have to dig out of his back when he reached Abandon.

“I’ve smelt this before,” he said. “Or somethin like it.”

“You’ve et man?”

“No, in a San Francisco nosebag.” He thought on it for a moment, said finally, “Veal. Smells like veal.”

“Don’t it feel peculiar settin here about to—”

“If I weren’t starvin to death, maybe. But I think we’d be advised to steer away from any sort a philosophical conversation about what we’re about to do.”

They stood on the cusp of night, cloudless and moonless, the brightest planets and stars fading in against the black velvet sky like grains of incandescent salt.

Nathan flipped the ribcage. “I believe this is ready.”

The saloon was Abandon’s last—thin walls of knotty aspen, weak kerosene lamps suspended from the ceiling, three tables, presently unoccupied, and a broken-down piano.

Jocelyn Maddox stood wiping down the bar when the door opened.

“You’ve made it by the skin a your teeth,” she called out. “Thirty seconds later, it’d a been locked.”

The man paused in the doorway, as if to appraise the vacant saloon.

“Not for nothin, but it’s twenty degrees out there, and the fire’s low.” The barkeep motioned to the potbellied stove sitting in the corner, putting out just a modicum of heat at this closing hour.

The late customer made his way in, Jocelyn noticing that he walked like a man who’d crossed a desert on foot, limping toward her, and even though his hat was slanted at an angle to shield his face, she knew right away he was a newcomer.

As he reached the bar, half-tumbling into it, she saw that his face was deeply sunburnt, the tips of his ears and nose blackened with frostbite.

“You could use a cowboy cocktail,” she said.

The man leaned his hammer shotgun against the bar and reached into his frockcoat, pulled out two leather pouches, then another, and another, lining them up along the pine bar.

“One a these has money in it,” he said at barely a whisper, the pretty barkeep already uncorking a whiskey bottle, setting up his first shot.

“The hell happened to you?” she asked.

The man removed his slouch hat and set it on the barstool next to him. He lifted the whiskey, drank, said, “How much for the bottle?”

The barkeep leaned forward, her big black eyes shining in the firelight.

“Yours, free a charge, you tell me what you been through.”

He hesitated, then said, “Rode out from Silverton three weeks ago. Got waylaid by an early snowstorm. I been walkin three days to get here.”

“Was you alone?”

He shook his head, poured another shot of whiskey.

“Where’s the rest a your party? Where’s the men these wallets belong to?”

“They didn’t make it.”

“But you did.”

“Maybe I should just pay you for the bottle, ‘cause this line a questioning is gettin pretty old.”

“You ain’t gotta worry. I’m on the scout myself, and this ain’t the worst town for layin low.”

“That right.”

“For a fact. So, how’d you make it when your friends didn’t.”

“I et ‘em.”

Jocelyn threw back her head and laughed as hard as she could remember since arriving in this dying town, a fugitive in her own right, the man wondering if she was laughing because she thought he’d made a joke, or because she was crazy, and on the fence as to which reason he might prefer.

He drank the whiskey, poured himself another shot, said, “Care to hoist a glass with me?”

Jocelyn set up a tumbler for herself, and they raised their glasses, the man feeling better already. Maybe it was the hunger and the thirst, exhaustion bordering on madness, but he felt a surge of something, and though he couldn’t name it outright, having never known it, he suspected it was peace, the embracing of a thing he’d had his back to going on thirty years.

He said, “To you—what’s your name?”

“Joss.”

“To you, Joss.”

And he made a quiet toast to himself also, to finding his good, red road, to Dan and to Marion, and to Nathan of a now crushed skull, having brained the man in his sleep with a still-warm stone from the fire-ring upon which they’d roasted Marion.

He wondered what Sik’is would’ve thought of this new thoroughfare he’d found for himself, then realized he no longer cared.

As he swallowed his whiskey, the glow spreading through his stomach, to the tips of his filthy fingers, dulling the pain in his shoulder, he was overcome by a joy that sheeted his cloudy irises with tears. He felt thankful for every painful second of those twenty-one days in the wilderness, for the starvation and the thirst. He regretted nothing. If he’d never met Nathan and the boys, he’d have rolled into Abandon right on schedule, that weak, miserable fuck of a man he’d been for thirty long years since he’d watched his brothers die on Malvern Hill.

“You all right?” Jocelyn asked.

Oatha reached for the whiskey bottle.

“Strange to say, but I believe I just woke up.”