Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 7 & 8, July/August 1998

Sidewinder by David Edgerley Gates

He shook the snake out of his boot and stepped back in case the rattler was aggrieved, but it slithered away, still a little sluggish with sleep. Placido Geist bore the snake no ill will. The nights were cold, and he was probably lucky it hadn’t crawled into his bedroll. He pulled his boots on and squatted down, breathing some life into the fire, or what was left of it, snapping dry mesquite twigs and feeding them to the embers a few at a time until they caught. He rubbed his hands together and blew on them, getting stiffly to his feet again. His bones were old. Nights on the trail, sleeping on the ground, drinking stale cowboy coffee in the mornings.

He grained and watered the claybank mare, listening to the silence. The sun was just clearing the rimrock, casting long shadows across the scrub. The day seemed to be coming up windless and dry. He poured himself some coffee, breaking pieces of hardtack into it to soften.

After he finished his breakfast, he scattered the cookfire with his feet and poured the old grounds over the ashes. He scoured the pot out with sand, packed his gear, and saddled the claybank. He took off the hobbles and mounted, turning her head southwest.

He’d been tracking his man the best part of a week. The old bounty hunter figured to take him by nightfall.

“Concho Jimmy,” Placido Geist said, studying the photograph. It was recent, or more recent than the likeness Placido Geist had been carrying in his head almost half a lifetime.

“That was taken when he started a dime stretch at Huntsville,” said the marshal, a man called Hardesty.

Placido Geist nodded. Ten years in the state penitentiary. “And now he’s done his time,” he said. He calculated the release date. “A week ago Sunday.”

“First thing I heard about it, I sent you the wire,” the marshal told him apologetically.

The telegram had caught up with him in Odessa, four days too late. “No help for it,” Placido Geist remarked.

Hardesty cleared his throat. “It’s my understanding the two of you have a score to settle,” he said.

That was true enough. It was in fact no secret, and the marshal was simply being circumspect.

“I might know which way he’s headed,” Hardesty said.

“That’s a start,” Placido Geist said.

It was awkward, Hardesty thought, trying to frame his information in a delicate way. Perhaps he meant to spare the older man’s feelings, but Placido Geist would have preferred he just get to the point. He had an idea where this might be going. How not?

“South of the Chisos, into the Big Bend,” Hardesty said. “The money from that robbery was never recovered.”

“I hadn’t forgotten,” Placido Geist said.

“It’s been my experience that most outlaws are creatures of habit, and none too eager to change,” the marshal said.

“No more than the rest of us,” Placido Geist said.

For years, he’d been known in the border country as el Espectro, for his stealth and his skill as a manhunter. He was still respected, but in some quarters they’d begun calling him Tio Taco, although not to his face. A tame Mexican in other words, a paid regulator in the hire of Anglos, railroad robber barons and oilmen. He was a buscadero out of a forgotten school, the tail end of the Comanche wars, a scout for the army and the Texas Rangers, a hired gun. He’d been born a halfbreed, his father a farrier, an immigrant from the Rhineland Palatinate who’d settled in West Texas and married a woman of mixed blood, part Spanish, part Indian. His place of birth, his parentage, his entire circumstance, had made its mark on him, and he’d learned early the lessons of a pitiless environment. But the earth turned, the past slipped away into historical anecdote. The railroads came, and the telegraph. Electricity and the automobile. A world war was now beginning in Europe, a war being fought with machine guns and mustard gas, even aircraft. The killing would be mechanized and impersonal, and solitary adventurers like Placido Geist were becoming an anachronism. On occasion, however, it served him. He was a rough old cob, and necessarily so, but he had the equipment, physically and temperamentally, to make the best of a dirty job, with few rewards and less thanks.

The man he was after was named James Taft Pringle. Jimmy the Juke, alias Concho Jimmy. Originally from the Lower East Side in New York, Jimmy Pringle had been sent west as a boy, one of thousands of urban orphans placed with families along the frontier, some of the children welcomed and made to feel wanted but many of them no better than indentured servants. Jimmy Pringle had been one of the unlucky ones, bound over to a Bible-beating dirt farmer who preached Temperance and regularly exercised the strap. Jimmy lay in wait for his foster father in the barn one hot Nebraska afternoon, clouted him with a singletree, and put his eyes out with a pitchfork before he strung him up by the heels from the hayloft, doused him with coal oil, and set him on fire. On the run, he made his way south to Ogallala and across the Platte, down to Dodge City, where he picked up the route of the old Chisholm Trail and followed it into Texas. He was barely sixteen. He was dealing faro in Fort Worth when he fell in with worse company, a hardened owlhoot by the name of Bob Ketchum, known as Wind River Bob, a murderer and horse thief from Wyoming. Wind River Bob came to an appropriately villainous end at the hands of an angry mob in Las Cruces, New Mexico, but by then he and Jimmy had long since come to a parting of the ways. In the meantime, Concho Jimmy had earned his spurs and drunk his fill from the cup of wickedness.

“I don’t recall the specifics,” the judge said. “Then again, it’s been close to thirty years, and back then I was riding circuit up near Amarillo. Deaf Smith, Castro, as far as Ochiltree, little Panhandle courthouses with outdoor privies. I’ve heard bits and pieces, of course.”

Lockjaw Lamar was retired from the bench, but he was still a serving justice of the peace, a lifetime appointment. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Placido Geist’s affidavit was on the partner desk in front of him. Placido Geist sat on the other side of the desk.

The judge sighed and replaced his spectacles, tucking the thinning hair back over his ears. “You’re putting me in a compromising position,” he said. “If you had grounds for a criminal complaint, any court could issue a warrant.”

“I’m aware what I’m asking,” Placido Geist told him.

Lamar nodded. “You want legal authority to effect a reprisal,” he said. “Letters of marque, I might say.”

“I’m not trying to hide behind the law,” Placido Geist said. “If my intention were simply to hunt the man down and kill him outright, I’d do it and suffer the consequences. I want the authority to apprehend.”

Lamar’s eyes narrowed behind the lenses of his glasses. “You’re, presuming on our previous acquaintance,” he said. “I don’t know as I cotton to it.”

“You know what they say,” Placido Geist remarked, smiling for the first time. “It’s good to know the law, but it’s better to know the judge.”

Lamar snorted. “You’re a bold rascal, but I see no reason to doubt your word,” he said.

“I hope to secure a conviction,” Placido Geist said.

“I’ll draft a writ,” Lamar said. He sucked on his teeth unhappily. “It’s no better than a legal fiction and almost certainly abuse of process,” he added. “A piece of paper won’t afford much protection to either one of us if you bring your man in head down over a saddle.”

“I’d rather see him swing for it,” Placido Geist said.

“I expect he needs it,” the judge said.

Placido Geist rose to his feet. “I’ll be by first thing in the morning,” he said. “I appreciate your help.”

“This affidavit makes no mention of an injury done you,” Lamar said.

“The injury done me was incidental,” Placido Geist said. “I wasn’t there when it happened.”

Ketchum’s gang had held up a freight office in Alpine and escaped south toward Boquillas, on the Rio Grande. They were pursued by a posse of citizens, determined but ill-equipped for tracking fugitives in such desolate country, and the bandits eluded them. Back in those days the Big Bend was wild and broken, with little cultivation or settlement even by the Apache. It still belonged to mule deer and javelina, and horses left little sign on the stony ground a white man could follow. The posse turned back, defeated, and Wind River Bob and Concho Jimmy Pringle got away into Mexico without sweating their mounts. By the time Placido Geist had learned of the outrage, the trail was cold.

This much was on the record. The judge was asking for a fuller account.

“They shot their way out of Alpine with no regard for casualties, civilian or otherwise,” Placido Geist said. “One of the victims was a pregnant woman. She lingered for three days, while the doctor tried to save the baby, but in the end she died and the infant along with her.”

“You knew the girl?” Lamar asked him.

“Her name was Amarita Espenor,” Placido Geist said. His voice sounded rusty. “I was the father of her child.”

“You blame yourself for her death,” the judge said.

“I blame myself for her disgrace,” Placido Geist said. He shrugged. “The ancient Greeks tell us a man can’t step in the same river twice.”

“Heraclitus,” Lamar said.

“I have to make an accounting.”

“As do we all, sooner or later,” Lamar commented.

“Some of us sooner than others,” Placido Geist said.

He’d run them to ground one by one, over time. The task was complicated by the fact that the gang had split up, and it was difficult to establish which of them had actually taken part. The evidence was circumstantial, since the money from the holdup wasn’t found and the notes never went back into circulation, but he pieced it together from outlaw gossip and saloon talk, jailhouse interviews, trial transcripts, deathbed confessions, and foolish luck. He used bribes and, on one occasion, torture. By process of elimination, he made up a list of the six men who’d been in Alpine that afternoon and confirmed it by speaking with witnesses. It took him ten years to find them, and in the course of things two of them died before he caught up with them, killed in an attempted robbery, or trying to evade pursuit, and two more went to the noose for crimes committed later. He was able to talk with Gimp Fogerty the day before his hanging, and it was Gimp who gave him the name of the kid, Concho Jimmy Pringle.

Concho Jimmy had recently been convicted in a bank theft and was doing seven years. Placido Geist thought to visit him, but his attention was distracted by reports of Wind River Bob Ketchum in New Mexico. Wind River Bob didn’t cheat the rope, but he cheated Placido Geist of justice when he fell victim to lynch law. That left Concho Jimmy, but he’d broken jail when Placido Geist got back to Texas. He was variously sighted, but it took another ten years before he was captured near Del Rio and sent back to prison to finish his first term, with five added for the break.

In the year of our Lord 1918, Placido Geist was himself well past sixty, and Jimmy Pringle was no spring chicken when he was released from jail. The boy who’d been sent west on the orphan trains was now closing fifty. Prison and the outlaw life had made him old before his time, embittered and mistrustful and with scant remorse, but Concho Jimmy wouldn’t have lasted this long if he hadn’t already been mean as a snake.

“He may well have done,” the young constable said in answer to Placido Geist’s question. He studied the handbill. “I’ll admit I couldn’t rightly say.”

The town was a whistle-stop called Longfellow, and the constable’s name was Nightingale. He’d offered Placido Geist a chair and a cup of jailhouse coffee, trying to put him at ease with these courtesies, but in fact it was Constable Nightingale himself who felt awkward in the presence of this near-legendary figure out of the rough-and-tumble past. He’d heard many of the stories.

“If he got off the train with the intention of packing into the Chisos, he’d need a horse and tack, grub, some other possibles,” Nightingale said. “We can ask at the Every.”

“I’m glad of your assistance,” Placido Geist said.

“I’d like to do what I can to help,” Nightingale said.

“I’ll have some more of that fine coffee,” the manhunter said pleasantly, leaning back in his chair.

Nightingale thought the old man was probably ribbing him, or just being polite. The coffee in question was more than six hours old. The worn enameled pot had been simmering on the kerosene stove since first fight.

“This robbery your man’s wanted for,” the constable said to him, pouring them both another cup of coffee. “I don’t seem to recollect it, not since I’ve had the badge. When did you say it took place?”

Placido Geist told him the date.

Nightingale’s surprise was plain on his face. The crime had been committed before he was born.

“There’s no statute of limitations on homicide,” Placido Geist reminded him.

“No,” Nightingale admitted, and paused, unsure of himself. He examined the writ from Judge Lamar again. “I don’t mean to offend you,” he said, “but I’m inclined to find this summons of dubious provenance. I doubt if a magistrate in Pecos or Presidio County would feel bound by it. I certainly couldn’t hold a man on an unproved charge that old.”

“I wouldn’t want to cause you embarrassment then,” Placido Geist said, his expression mild.

Constable Nightingale wasn’t sure he cared to read between the lines. “Let’s go pay a call down at the stables,” he suggested, standing. He put on his hat.

Placido Geist was unexpectedly short, Nightingale saw, when measured against the younger man. His reported image would not have had him quite so stout, either.

They walked down to the other end of town on a wooden sidewalk. Nightingale apologized, explaining that they didn’t have the money for brick as yet. Longfellow was no more than a wide spot in the road, it should be observed, but even so, the main street was a metalled roadway made of rolled peastone to accommodate automobile traffic, and there was a local telephone exchange as well. Placido Geist found nothing to object to in a wooden sidewalk, and he could just as well have done without the telephone, but he didn’t remark on this to Nightingale. He figured the young peace officer would think him a stick-in-the-mud. He had to admit he liked automobiles, preferring them to horses at his age.

“What prompted you to get off here?” Nightingale asked.

“Longfellow and Marathon are the closest stops along the rail line to the Big Bend,” Placido Geist said simply.

Which made sense, Nightingale realized, if he’d thought it through before he asked the question. He felt foolish not to have worked it out already.

“Of course there’s no guarantee,” Placido Geist said. “He could be halfway to El Paso or Matamoros and I’m carrying my water in a sprung bucket.”

Nightingale felt better, but he recognized that might have been the older man’s purpose, and he began turning quite a different question over in his mind.

They made inquiries of the ostler, who remembered a sale to a man answering Concho Jimmy’s particulars.

“Sold, not hired?” Nightingale asked.

The gelding was no hack, the stableman told them. He had a soft mouth and good wind. Not some snake-eyed canner, either, but a four hundred dollar horse. The animal he described to them was what the Mexicans called a grullo, the slate blue of a sandhill crane with a dark mane, tail, and socks, and faint zebra striping across the withers. In local parlance a mouse dun but a distinctive horse all the same.

Placido Geist had climbed the fence and was looking over the cavvy of saddle horses in the corral.

“How much for the claybank?” he asked the stableman.

The dealer quoted a price.

Nightingale knew it was absurd, but he waited to see how Placido Geist did his business.

The chunky old man heaved himself over the fence and let himself down, picking his way gently through the horses, not spooking them. He offered a caramel candy to the hammerhead mare. Jesus, she was ugly, Nightingale thought.

The horse took the sweet and whickered, her breath whistling as if her vocal cords were stiff.

Salado, Nightingale thought. Windbroke.

Placido Geist led the horse back toward the fence, holding her familiarly just under the chin.

“A hundred dollars,” he said.

“I can’t let her go for that,” the stableman said. He’d have let her go to the knackers for fifty.

Placido Geist shrugged and started to climb the fence. The mare nipped at the seat of his pants. The old man hooked his leg over the top rail. “One twenty-five,” he said.

The stableman shifted his eyes. “One fifty,” he said.

Placido Geist got down and spat in his palm. They shook hands. “She’ll be needing fresh shoes,” Placido Geist said.

The livery owner tried to jerk his hand free, but it was caught fast.

“I’m offering you a fair price,” Placido Geist said. “You’d as soon be rid of her.” He glanced over his shoulder at the horse. “She’s got pretty feet, but I can’t say as the rest other’s much.”

The livery owner nodded sulkily-

“I take you to be a fair judge of horses,” the constable said as they walked back up the street. “Why the mare?”

“Looks aren’t everything,” Placido Geist said, smiling.

“And men?” Nightingale asked.

Placido Geist stopped and looked at him.

The question had come out unrehearsed. Nightingale felt suddenly abashed and dropped his gaze.

“There’s no trick to telling a good man from a bad one,” the bounty hunter said.

“Do you mean to bring Pringle in alive?”

“If he’ll come peaceable.”

It was an unsatisfactory answer. “I don’t feature being made an accomplice to a killing,” Nightingale said.

“You mean your mouth’s not quite made up for it,” Placido Geist said, but not unkindly.

“I want your undertaking that what you intend is lawful, or that a man of good conscience could put his name to it.”

“There’s no harm in asking,” Placido Geist said.

None of us is entirely evil, and none of us, of course, entirely good. We are often what we least want to become, and perhaps Concho Jimmy would have turned out differently in what might be regarded as a more perfect world but the facts proved otherwise. He early on displayed a talent, a genuine enthusiasm it must be admitted, for depredation and a taste for easy money. The boy was father to the man.

The missing loot from the freight office robbery in Alpine had lain hidden in the Chisos all this time, and none of the surviving members of the gang had tried to go back for it until now, when Jimmy Pringle was the last of them still alive. There’d been a small amount of gold and silver coin, which they’d divvied up between them, but the bulk of the paper currency was issued by local banks and would attract notice as stolen when anybody tried to redeem it. They decided to bury it. Later, when there might be less suspicion attached to its ownership, they’d retrieve it. Thirty years after the fact, of course, it was red-dog money, worthless because the issuing banks had failed or called in their old notes long before in exchange for U.S. silver certificates backed by the Federal Reserve. At this point the banknotes were nothing more than a historical curiosity. Concho Jimmy wasn’t hazarding the rigors of the trail on a fool’s errand. He had more animal cunning than that.

“Railroad bonds,” Placido Geist explained to the constable.

“Stolen property,” Nightingale said.

“They disappeared a long time ago,” Placido Geist said. “There’s no way to determine their provenance. They might have been unearthed in an attic or found in the lining of a couch. Anybody could happen across them. They are payable to the bearer on demand.”

“Would these be Santa Fe bonds or Southern Pacific?”

“Some smaller road probably, one that’s since been absorbed by Harriman and Hill,” Placido Geist said. “That’s of no great moment.”

“It is if the railroad no longer exists.”

“They’re worth a like interest in the present road,” the older man told him. “Whatever the ownership of the company, such bonds are still hens for as much as twenty years after they mature. It’s not too late to cash them in.”

“He can’t profit from them if he committed the robbery.”

“We’d have to prove it,” Placido Geist said. “And to do that we have to catch him first.”

They’d camped in a draw just south of Maravillas Creek. The dusk was long and flat, but they were already in the shadow of the Santiago, the crooked mountains to the west. Nightingale wasn’t sure whether he’d convinced the old bounty hunter to take him along or whether Placido Geist had let the young constable talk himself into it. Either way, Nightingale was grateful for the opportunity.

“What persuaded you Pringle would come back into the Big Bend?” Nightingale asked.

“I’ve researched the man,” Placido Geist said. “I had a few strong leads as well.”

There was more, and Nightingale suggested as much.

Placido Geist sat back against his up-ended saddle, stretching his boots out toward the small campfire. “I figure it’s appropriate,” he said. “We’ve both come full circle.”

“In other words, you think it likely Concho Jimmy’s out here because you want it to be so,” Nightingale said. “You’d admire the symmetry.”

“I’d say that was true,” Placido Geist admitted, shifting his weight to pick a stone out from under his poncho, and got more comfortable.

“And the others?”

“Gone to a greater reward,” Placido Geist said, “but one not without its own perils.” He stared into the coals.

The coffeepot began to bubble, and Nightingale took it off the fire and set it in the warm ashes. He poured in some cold water to settle the grounds.

“I’m not mistaken to suppose you’ve an axe to grind,” he said. “Your dogged pursuit of this man is hard to fathom.”

“I was disappointed in love,” Placido Geist said.

Nightingale was wise enough to hold his tongue.

“It wasn’t of my own choosing,” Placido Geist told him, not looking up from the fire. “The girl’s family didn’t much approve of me. Can’t hardly blame them, an Indio halfbreed with no prospects. I wasn’t an educated man or a promising one, and I had little to recommend me.”

Nightingale poured them both a cup of coffee and handed one to Placido Geist.

Geist let the steam rise into his face. “I got her pregnant,” he said. “It’s common enough, but I didn’t know. I was chasing Iron Claw for the army. They’d trailed north into Colorado.” He seemed for a moment to have lost his train of thought, but he was only ordering things in his mind, cataloguing his sins. “Amarita was killed by the bunch that robbed the freight office. My child died with her.”

Nightingale felt compelled to comment but was silent.

Placido Geist glanced up from across the fire. “It’s an atonement,” he said.

“I can see how you’d feel that way,” Nightingale said.

Placido Geist smiled. “No,” he said. “I’m not blaming Concho Jimmy Pringle for what happened, any more than I could blame a scorpion or a snake, and no more than I blame myself for it in spite of what my friend Judge Lamar thinks. There are no innocents. We are all guilty of something. Amarita was guilty of too much affection, too simple a desire. Jimmy Pringle is guilty for the hate in his heart, not for what he did to her or me. My atonement is that I have to cleanse my own heart of hatred.”

Nightingale didn’t quite understand.

“I have to forgive him,” Placido Geist said.

“And then you’ll feel free to kill him?”

Placido Geist thought about it for a moment. “No, but I won’t lose any sleep over it,” he said.

It took three days before Concho Jimmy was sure he was being tracked. He hadn’t taken any thought to covering his back trail. Not to put too fine a point on it, but nobody should have known where he was headed or what he was up to. Unlike many cons, Jimmy had kept his own counsel inside and didn’t brag about his scores. Certainly there was talk, but he had never encouraged it. Enough mystery attached to him that he was spoken of, not to, and he was one of the few to have ever broken out of Huntsville, although it was twenty years ago. In stir, Jimmy was left alone, as befitted someone that high in the pecking order. He minded his own business, and only once did he kill a man, a pesky son-of-a-bitch who kept badgering him about the jobs he’d done with Wind River Bob. He made him for an informer and knifed him in the shower stalls one afternoon, but it wasn’t laid at his door. The dead man had no friends, and even the screws were glad to be shut of him. They looked the other way, and Concho Jimmy Pringle was off the hook. He had no reason to believe he was anything but golden when he got out of jail. Nobody else had lived to tell the tale, and he’d never told it. It was disturbing. Concho Jimmy circled behind himself, walking back the cat.

“He knows we’re here,” Placido Geist said, studying the track of the horse. He got to his feet and dusted off his pants.

“Why would he think anybody was after him?”

“Native caution,” Placido Geist said. “Concho Jimmy’s spent most of his life looking over his shoulder, and usually there was somebody there.”

“Does it matter what kind of somebody it is?”

“Not to Concho Jimmy.”

“What’s his next move?” Nightingale asked.

“He could double back and give us a sniff,” Placido Geist said, mounting up again. “Or he might be looking to dry-gulch us in one of those arroyos up ahead.” He gazed off toward the horizon. A heavy cloudbank was rolling up along the edge of the sky like rising dough. You could make out the occlusion of the weather front. It came on with ominous speed. “I don’t care for the way this is making up,” he said to Nightingale. “We’d best move to higher ground.”

Getting caught in the open was better than being swept off their horses in a gully-washer. They pushed their mounts up the side of the wash, clambering up onto the ridge. They could see across the country, which was an advantage even if they weren’t following Concho Jimmy directly.

The day had gone suddenly dark, but against the slate color of both mountains and sky Nightingale thought he saw a scurry of movement. He looked again and it was gone, maybe a trick of the light. It was anyway a couple of miles off and could have been only the quick shape-shifting of shadows as the storm bore down on them.

It came in a rush, the wind fretting the manes and tails of the horses and a drumming noise across the barren ground like running feet or the beating of wings. The mare was getting skittish. Placido Geist quickly dismounted and covered her head with his jacket, tying the sleeves underneath her jaw, to calm her down and protect her eyes.

Nightingale followed suit. They pulled the horses around, backs to the wind, and hunkered under their bellies. Hailstones the size of kidney beans rattled down, stinging their shoulders like birdshot, and the horses chivvied and tugged at the reins, spooked and uncertain.

Placido Geist spoke carefully to the mare, holding her head close to his, and Nightingale imagined the old bounty hunter spoke in Spanish. The mare steadied.

It was just as abruptly over, the cloud curtain passing in a veil, and the light leaking back. It was only late afternoon. The boiling cumulus trailed off in streaks of violet cirrus, pushing north.

Nightingale raised his head. The sun came through the canopy in bars, like bolts of cloth unrolled across the hard ground. The light masked the distance, the play of cloud shadow tricking the retina. He uncovered the buckskin’s eyes and climbed back into the saddle, standing in the stirrups to search the landscape in front of him.

Placido Geist was slower to mount, the claybank still shifting her feet nervously, tossing her head and sniffing at the wind as it changed direction.

Nightingale’s horse staggered as if he’d stepped in a prairie dog hole and slowly collapsed beneath him before he even registered the report of the gunshot. He tried to keep his seat as the buckskin went down so he could kick his legs clear of the falling horse and not be caught underneath it, but he realized too late he should have thrown himself to the ground. Upright he was still a target, and the second shot slammed him low in the back of the ribs, pitching him forward over the withers.

Placido Geist dragged him off the wounded horse even as the animal lurched off balance and fell over, shuddering, its limbs splayed out bonelessly. The claybank was rolling her eyes in panic, sawing at the bit and trying to jerk free. A third shot was low, whining off a rock in fragments. Placido Geist managed to haul the mare’s head around and pulled her unwillingly after him off the crest of the ridge, dragging Nightingale along behind him down the stony slope to cover. He knew he was handling the man roughly, but there was no help for it. Nightingale seemed to have lost the use of his legs if not his wits.

Once they were out of sight behind the shallow cutbank of the dry wash, there was no more gunfire. Placido Geist tried to make Nightingale comfortable, but he could see the constable was badly hurt, probably beyond repair. They were too far into the back country, with only one horse between them. Placido Geist made an effort to stem the bleeding but without much success. Nightingale coughed weakly, flinching with the pain. His breathing was labored, and rust-colored saliva bubbled up to his lips. The splintered ribs had punctured a lung.

Geist lifted his head and gave him some water and sat back on his heels.

“God-a-mighty, but I’m sorry, son,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring you all this way just to get you killed.”

“You needed a witness,” Nightingale whispered hoarsely.

“I fear I’ve lived to regret that.”

“My only regret is that I won’t live to see that varmint hang for this,” Nightingale said.

“I’ll see that he does,” Placido Geist said.

Nightingale shivered slightly as if with a chill.

Placido Geist rose to get a blanket from behind the saddle, but when he knelt down again, Nightingale was dead.

Given to self-examination but not vanity, Placido Geist reflected that he probably wasn’t at fault. On the other hand, the young constable would have lived longer had he stayed behind, and Placido Geist hadn’t discouraged his company. The old bounty hunter felt a rising anger in spite of himself. He’d led the boy into a trap.

The light was beginning to soften as the afternoon wore on. He dug a shallow grave a little way up the slope and buried Nightingale, hunting up enough stones of decent size to cover the body and keep it from being disturbed by scavengers, at least for the next few days. He put the personal effects in his saddlebags and led the mare back up the wash the way they’d come earlier.

He swung in a wide circle to the west before turning south again and stayed below the skyline until dusk, when the shadows grew long and purple. He meant to make up some lost time by traveling after dark and figured to cut sign at daybreak. He wasn’t going to let the sun set on Concho Jimmy Pringle again, not in this lifetime.

Concho Jimmy had slipped away well before the light faded. He counted himself lucky to have hit the horse, let alone the rider, at that range. It was too bad he hadn’t gotten both men, but if the other man kept coming, he’d have a chance to bushwhack him farther along.

After sundown he made a cold camp. A fire would only give him away. In this waste it might be seen for miles. He had no idea who was after him, but it made no difference. He knew he had enemies, and of course any one of Ketchum’s gang might have split on him in the shadow of the rope. The point was that somebody was dogging his trail, waiting for him to lead them to the promise of money. Concho Jimmy hadn’t spent twenty years of his life in prison to let that same promise slip through his fingers. He was too close now.

He studied on the problem. The way he saw it, there was a hard way and an easy one. The harder way was to go wide and backtrack, coming up behind the man on the ugly claybank horse and kill him if he could take him by surprise again. The reward was absolute, the outcome uncertain. The easy way was to let the pursuer come to him in the place of his own choosing. Jimmy thought that was better. And he knew such a place. With an early start he’d be there ahead of time.

He’d bedded down after moonrise, and when he woke at first light and shook the snake out of his boot, he’d only gotten a few hours’ sleep. Mounted again, he worked the kinks out of his back as he rode, quartering back and forth across country until he made out recent tracks. He pulled the horse up and got down. The hoofprints were widely spaced as if the rider were in a hurry. They led off south by southwest. Placido Geist climbed back on his horse and followed them, but taking it at a slower pace, wary of ambush.

Later that morning he came in sight of the cottonwoods. A sure sign of water in that arid country, the lonely stand of trees marked the edge of a creek coming down out of the mountains. The mare could already smell the water and shook her head impatiently. He dismounted and let the reins trail on the ground, patting the horse on the shoulder as he pulled his saddle gun and squatted down. The mare took a few steps and then stopped, unsure of herself. She wasn’t hobbled, she knew, but she expected at least to be led, if not ridden. She bobbed her head, the reins swinging. The only creature dumber than a cow was a horse in Placido Geist’s opinion, and a cow was some dumber than most. He felt around on the ground for a stone to chip at her, but the claybank seemed to realize his intention. She was willing enough to venture to water alone and she trotted forward tamely, if still puzzled by his behavior.

He bellied down in the sawgrass and worked his way into a gully, moving diagonally. He was headed for the trees but upstream. In the spring the gully would flood with runoff from melting snow. In this dry season it was just cracked clay. He hoped he wasn’t raising any dust that could be seen from the cottonwood grove. He squirmed along on his elbows, not lifting his head, the big Sharps cradled across his chest as he crawled. He made an awkward progress, the gun clumsy and dirt itching inside his clothes, sticking to his skin as he began to sweat. His eyes stung. The sun moved toward the meridian overhead, and the sky was white with heat.

The mare trailed her reins to the stream and drank. She raised her head, sniffing another horse.

Placido Geist crawled into the shade and pressed himself against the cold rocks, letting the water trickle over him.

The mare whickered, and then stepped into the stream.

Nothing happened.

Placido Geist held his position. His legs were numb in the cold water. Steam clouded off his damp shoulders.

A kingfisher darted from branch to branch with a call halfway between a rattle and a whistle. Taffeta, taffeta. The bird watched the stream where the mare churned the water, scaring frogs loose from the bank.

Stones rattled in the talus.

Placido Geist carefully adjusted his posture, hoping his legs would hold him up if he had to stand.

Concho Jimmy slid down the rocks, his rifle at the ready and his eyes alert.

Placido Geist cocked the Sharps.

Concho Jimmy approached the mare carefully, looking to either side, and caught her bridle. She seemed relieved and didn’t bolt.

Placido Geist straightened up slowly to ease the cramps in his legs.

Concho Jimmy tied the mare’s reins to a cottonwood stump and started back across the stream.

“Jimmy,” Placido Geist said quietly. His voice carried the hundred yards across the chuckling water.

Jimmy stopped, his footing uneasy on the slippery stones of the streambed. He looked back over his shoulder.

The barrel of the Sharps rested on a rock, steady as the planets in their orbit.

“You here for the money?” Jimmy asked him.

“I’m here for you,” Placido Geist said.

“Ugly horse you ride,” Jimmy said, grinning.

“She came cheap enough.”

“I don’t come that cheap,” Concho Jimmy said.

Placido Geist saw it happening. Jimmy threw down on him with the Winchester, and Placido Geist shot him with the big gun. The .45–70 caught Jimmy Pringle square in the chest and knocked him into the water. Unaccustomed to gunfire, the mare jerked at the reins tied to the stump, showing the whites other eyes.

Placido Geist levered out the spent shell and reloaded, picking his way over the wet stones as he walked downstream. Jimmy struggled to pull himself upright. He had a belly gun, a .44 pistol. He tried to tug it out.

“Better to be judged by twelve than carried by six,” the bounty hunter said. “Leave it alone.”

“You never meant to take me alive,” Jimmy gasped.

“I mean to see you hang,” Placido Geist said.

“I reckon you won’t have the pleasure,” Jimmy said, getting the pistol free.

Placido Geist stood astride him and knocked the gun out of his hand with the butt of the Sharps. “Take your pleasure where you find it,” he said.

He dragged Jimmy up out of the water and threw him onto the bank like a stunned fish. Jimmy was short of breath. Blood rattled in his chest.

“I’ll cost you the satisfaction,” he said, panting.

“At least I’ll have that,” Placido Geist said. He went across the stream and took the lariat off his saddlehorn.

Jimmy, the life leaking out of him, was slow to understand, but when he saw what Placido Geist really intended for him, he thrashed weakly, kicking at the streambed with his heels. “You owe me better,” Jimmy pleaded. “You’ve already killed me once. A decent grave and some Scripture is all I’m asking for.”

“You don’t deserve it,” Placido Geist told him. He made a loop in the rope and threw it over a branch.

“It ain’t Christian,” Jimmy protested. “You can’t do me this way.”

But he could, and did, and there was an end to it.

He left him swinging, and as he rode away, he heard the kingfisher flirting in the cottonwoods. His call echoed back eagerly. Taffeta, taffeta.