ADAM STEELE RODE out of Rosarita and onto the east trail as the first of the vigilantes began to gather out front of Matt Hope’s livery stable. Leroy Bate was in the group, eager to make tracks. His taller but much less powerfully built father was also on the street with a saddled horse, but looked like he would much rather be back preparing to open up his grocery store. Frank Sorrel did a lot of nervous tugging at his bushy mustache while he waited. Just three other men the Virginian recognized from yesterday’s saloon deputation and this morning’s gathering outside the sheriff’s office were also in a position to say something to him when he led the black stallion out of the livery, swung up into the saddle and heeled his mount forward. But nobody spoke and only the Bate boy gave the Virginian anything more than a passing glance that ranged from apologetic to something close to envious. The youngster glared with his eyes and sneered with his mouth and continued to watch the departing rider for long seconds while the older men peered in the opposite direction: perhaps hoping that the saloonkeeper had changed his mind and would come to the livery only to announce that he had decided to wait for the return of the sheriff.
Out beyond the sign that was the eastern town limits marker—it welcomed strangers to Rosarita with neat and quite recently freshly painted lettering—Steele sensed that there were suddenly more than one pair of eyes fixed upon him, and he turned in the saddle while he continued to have his mount walk easily along the heavily used trail. It was a long way back now to the livery, beyond the cemetery, the stage and telegraph office and the Webbs’ bank and so it was not possible to discern the expressions on the faces of the men grouped there. Nor was the Virginian able to recognize any of the men, walking or slowly riding horses, who were heading along the street toward the livery. He could guess that Duncan Nelson was on the street, equipped for what might turn out to be a dangerous ride: but if Leroy Bate was still glaring at him with unconcealed hostility, Steele could no longer sense it. The men with the youngster were all peering at a point on the trail beyond the lone rider—where it swung to the south and curved out of sight behind a stand of pines. And as he turned his impassive attention to the same direction he knew that most of the men were seeking—with faint hope of seeing it—a first glimpse of Orville Kyle as the lawman returned toward town.
The Virginian did not look behind him again until he had ridden around the curve of the trail: and then he only did so as a part of his habitual survey of the terrain, his dark eyes searching for anything that might signal danger. He saw nothing that caused him to do a fast double take as he tensed himself to abandon the reins for the stock and frame of the Colt Hartford jutting from the forward hung boot. And neither did his not always trustworthy sense for lurking menace give him reason to itch between the shoulder blades or sweat more heavily than the rising heat of the morning required.
He did not sweat very much at all after he had taken off his suit jacket and stowed it under the same tie that lashed his sheepskin coat to his bedroll. For the trail over most of its constantly curving and rising and falling route was shaded by the towering pines that flanked it. And he elected to ride at an easy walk that did not exert himself or his mount. There was no reason for this pace other than that it suited his purpose and his mood. This purpose was to get the feel of the timber-rich country through which he was moving: in much the same way as he tested how he felt about Rosarita even after his first run-in with the sheriff. His mood as he rode easily along the shaded trail, breathing cool air fragrant with the scent of the pines, was of quiet satisfaction with his present circumstances.
He was out of the lockup; the discomforts of the beating were diminishing by the minute and the uncustomary trouble that was causing so much unrest in Rosarita had only involved him because of the way he had infuriated Orville Kyle with his self-opinionated stubbornness. Steele felt so contented with his lot this morning he was prepared to admit this to himself, and even crack one of his one-time boyish grins as he did so. Contributing to his pleasantly complacent frame of mind was the fact that he and his horse were well fed and completely rested due to Kyle’s own intransigence and Matt Hope’s conscientious competence as a liveryman. And for no charge—for neither Ellie Webb nor Hope had asked for payment and Steele had certainly not offered to cover the cost of his supper and for the stabling, feed and curry combing the stallion had received. He had been aware ever since he was put in the lockup that the traveling money he carried in his pockets had not been touched. And his first act when the preacher returned his gear to him in the sheriff’s office was to check the contents of his saddlebags to ensure the sack of gold nuggets worth around five thousand dollars, and another eight thousand in bills remained intact.
‘Whatever was in there when your possessions were brought here will be in there now,’ Masterson had said solemnly as he watched Steele go through the bags, a look of injured dignity in his sunken eyes. ‘Whatever else he may be, the sheriff is not a thief.’
‘Same as the whole town, young man,’ Ellie Webb had added, her homely features set in a frown of earnestness. ‘Whoever brought your stuff in the office wouldn’t have touched it for any other reason than to tote it.’
But the Virginian had double-checked anyway: and ensured that the preacher and the woman did not see the gold nuggets and the bundle of cash money that was his current stake to get him started in the horse ranching business. He had done the counting in such a manner that it could not be seen by the reproachful eyes of the sincere couple because it was in his nature to trust nobody. Was so ingrained that he would remain suspicious of his fellow man for the rest of his life—even if he were to find the perfect piece of land to ranch and thereafter come into contact only with people as ardently honest as was claimed for the citizens of Rosarita. For although such an eagerly desired change in the style of his life would surely result in some shifts of his personality, certain facets of his character he knew would never alter.
But this was not a newly discovered strain of self-awareness, and so the line of thought did not mar his peace of mind as he rode out of the band of timber some two miles as the crow flies from town. Reined his horse to a halt and swept his gaze over a broad vista of grass-covered rolling hills featured by nature with outcroppings of rock and stands of timber, and by man with farmsteads. Close to where Steele sat his horse, on the rim of the first of many shallow and broad valleys that corrugated the terrain for as far as he could see, there were four places that were still being worked. There were two on one side of the trail and two on the other side. Each place was fenced and had a house and a barn and corral with fields of healthy-looking crops on all sides. There was at least one horse in each corral, along with a milk cow. On one place there were some hogs in a pen and on another there were chickens. Each had a well in the front yard and all had a column of smoke rising straight from the house chimney. At least one man worked in the fields of each farmstead and without exception they raised a hand in greeting as Steele rode down into the valley and among the places without pausing. He responded in a like manner to these men, and to an old-timer who waved as he sat in a rocker on a porch. Once he tipped his hat toward a woman who came out of her house to go to the well just as he was passing. The houses, which all showed signs of having been extended from crude beginnings over the years, and the men working the fields, were too far back from the trail to make it easy for an exchange of the time of day. But Steele was conscious of the tacit friendliness of the farming families and detected no sense of being watched with surreptitious curiosity when his back was toward those people he had or had not seen. So either news of the stranger to town had not reached out into this part of the country yet, or these farming people were uninterested in the troubles of Rosarita.
On the far side of this first valley he rode under an arch of sun-bleached rough timber with a plank fixed to the cross-member. On the plank was a just discernible painted legend:
PUBLIC ROAD ACROSS PRIVATE LAND—OWNED BY A BEGLEY
Beyond the arch the trail looped up and over the rise into another valley where there had once been a half dozen farmsteads that were larger, and therefore more widely scattered, than those which were still being worked. But, as Steele had been told in town, these had been bought up by Avery Begley many years earlier: and since then they had fallen into a state of dereliction in the same way as the place beside the cottonwoods on the river bank out on the far side of Rosarita. Just a crumbling wall here and a chimney there, a leaning line of fencing, a wagon with only one wheel and a child’s swing suspended on rusted iron chains from a tree branch gave clues to how men and women had once worked this piece of terrain and been successful enough at their labors to establish homes and begin to raise families. For the rest, nature had resumed control and grass and brush and young saplings had taken hold on the once cultivated fields.
In the third valley there was still visible the sign of just one abandoned farmstead. But perhaps there had been more and maybe relics of them were still to be found, if anyone were interested, among the many stands of timber that were the dominant natural feature of this piece of country. And it was in this valley, where the trail turned sharply to the right and began to drop gently down into a brush and timber crowded ravine that Steele found Pierce Nelson.
The sixteen-year-old boy lay face down in the brush at the side of the trail, legs together and arms at his sides. The Virginian recognized him because of the Stetson that was still held between his shoulder blades by the thong around his neck. The kid had put on a duster for his night ride into the country. There was no blood staining the back of the cream-colored coat. Because the night had been chill, and so far this morning the spot where the body lay had remained in the shade of the trees, decomposition had been arrested. So Pierce Nelson had not started to stink yet. But that the boy was dead Steele had no doubt from the moment he saw the total inertia of the form. And the stallion was just a moment later in sensing death was in the air: snorted and tossed his head nervously as his rider reined him in. But the horse calmed to the gentle touch of a gloved hand on his neck and then the softly spoken words as the Virginian swung out of the saddle. The animal needed no urging to be led to the far side of the trail where Steele hitched the reins to a clump of four-foot-high sagebrush.
The Virginian felt confident enough that he was alone with the dead boy to leave his rifle in the boot as he moved back toward the body, taking the time to note the most obvious sign on the trail. Then he stooped over the corpse and used both hands and the steadying lever of a lower leg and foot to ease Pierce Nelson from belly down to face up: with much the same delicacy as he would have applied had the boy been alive and badly hurt.
He looked a lot older than sixteen, and the aging process of dying the hard way had caused his acne scarred face to become ugly. He had been skinny when he was alive and now that he was dead he seemed almost emaciated. His thin lips were tightly compressed and his eyes were open to their fullest extent: and they looked greener than when life had animated them. The expression in the eyes, frozen there at the instant of dying, showed the agony of suffering rather than anguish that the end had come so soon in his life.
The cause of his death was a bullet in his belly. It had gone through his duster just above the lowest button that had been fastened and had made a neat little hole in the fabric. The stain of a massive blood loss was not so neat in the way it had blossomed irregularly out around three sides of the hole: to the fourth side the blood had spurted and then seeped down over his saddle and horse.
As Steele straightened up from the corpse without peering more closely at the wound, his bristled face was expressionless. And when he turned and then hunkered down to examine from close quarters the sign on the trail, his eyes narrowed just a fraction in concentration and he drew back his lips to expose teeth through which he allowed a tuneless whistle to escape softly. A few moments later he came upright and moved along the trail for twenty or so paces, bent forward from the waist, and with his neck craned so that he was better able to see the tiny areas of shadow that the early morning sun cast among the sign. Then he returned to the point on the trail between the corpse of Pierce Nelson and his uneasy horse, double-checked his initial conclusion and was fairly sure he had read the scarce sign correctly.
The youngster had been shot someplace to the east of where he died. Then, by choice or because his horse was spooked by the gunfire, he headed back for town at a gallop. He made it as far as the end of the ravine before he was unseated and was thrown to the trail. He had dragged himself off the trail and into the brush. How long the boy had remained there before he died Steele could not guess. But the degree of agony expressed in his eyes could not have been torturing him for very long—for he had not thrashed around or spilled much blood after he crawled to the spot where he died. Perhaps he had lost consciousness for a time? But conjecture was pointless, Steele told himself as he unfastened the ties of his bedroll. Apart from the fact that Pierce Nelson had died here as a result of a stomach wound, the only other certainty about what had happened in the night was that the kid had had company for a while.
This was a man who also rode here from the east, dismounted and sat in the brush at the boy’s side. Chewed some tobacco and did some spitting of juice-colored saliva. And did a little bleeding of his own. Before, the sign seemed to indicate, he spooked the dead youngster’s horse into a bolt for Rosarita then climbed back into the saddle of his own mount to ride off to the east, dripping spots of blood into the dust of the trail.
While the Virginian unfurled his bedroll and used a blanket to drape the corpse, he found it impossible to bar from his mind the facts that Sheriff Orville Kyle had left Rosarita ahead of Pierce Nelson yesterday and that the lawman was a tobacco chewer. But, as he refixed his depleted bedroll behind his saddle and then unhitched the stallion from the sagebrush, he found it easy to resist the temptation to speculate on the basis of what could be a false premise formed by coincidence.
And it was none of his business, either. Let the dead boy’s father and the bunch of vigilantes he was leading out from town get to the bottom of the mysterious killing. If the most fervent members of the posse were able to sustain their initial enthusiasm and keep riding this far out of town. Steele had not made any kind of haste, and yet as he swung into the saddle and pressed on along the trail through the ravines there was still no sign of Duncan Nelson and the rest of the men closing on him. But, beyond the ravine and riding up another gentle incline out of a shallow valley, he was again able to easily suppress an initial impulse to wonder what was keeping the posse. And soon he was feeling as contentedly satisfied with life as he had before he found the corpse of the boy.
The open range across which he rode, where the only signs of man’s encroachment was now the trail and its accompanying telegraph wire, looked to be just the kind of country for which he was seeking. Well-watered bunch grass grazing land upon which stock of a man’s choosing could not do anything else but thrive. Unspectacular country scenically, but pretty enough to look at for a man as materialistically minded as Adam Steele. The nearest neighbors as far away as a man elected them to be by the siting of his house. Likewise the town where he would have to go for essential supplies every now and then.
Yes, the Begley place certainly seemed to be well suited for his purpose. But, the present trouble apart, it probably was not ideal in all respects. After all, perfection was reputed not to exist this side of the gates to heaven—and he had no desire to feel that brand of utter contentment while he was alive anyway. So if it turned out that Avery Begley’s heirs were unwilling to sell off a part of this fine piece of rangeland to him, the Virginian would not be overly concerned by their decision. For there was a big country spread out beyond the crest of every hill, and what was yet to be seen over the next rise could well be even better than what seemed to be so good right now. So if Charlotte and Dale Begley turned down the offer he intended to make them … well, at least he had seen that the kind of place he was looking for did exist outside of his imagination.
Despite having adamantly acknowledged to himself that local troubles were none of his concern, Steele could not fail to register that he was still following the sign left by the man who had sat beside the dead or dying Pierce Nelson for a period last night. He saw, too, where the eastward ride of the boy had been halted by the gunshot that blasted a hole in his belly and his horse wheeled and commenced the gallop back the way he had come. Here, also, beside a dark outcrop of red rock, the tobacco chewer had started to bleed. Steele noticed such signs as he maintained his customary survey of his surroundings: and as before he found it easy not to speculate. But then, some thirty minutes of easy riding away from the corpse, he reached a spur trail and could no longer ignore what the sign on the hard-packed dirt told him.
The spur cut off the trail to the north, curving out of sight into an extensive stand of mixed timber. A board was nailed to a tree trunk at a side of the spur. It hung askew on rusted nails and the crudely painted lettering was just discernible after many years of weather had done their worst to wash and bleach away the warning:
KEEP OUT—By Order
Avery Begley
There was no easy-to-spot sign that the cut-under buggy and the flatbed wagon rented from Matt Hope in Rosarita had turned in off the main trail. But Steele could not fail to see that the tobacco chewer had swung off onto the spur here. He had not dripped any spots of blood for a considerable way, but he had continued to spit juice-colored saliva at irregular intervals.
So, as he tugged gently on the reins to steer the stallion out of the full glare of the mid-morning sun and into the dappled shade of the timber, Steele was forced by the dictates of commonsense to acknowledge it was unlikely he could remain apart from the past and present troubles that were none of his concern. They had started here on the Begley property and the tobacco-chewing man who knew something about the way Pierce Nelson died had apparently brought them back. Somewhere back on the trail—and surely the posse could not be too far distant by now?—the saloonkeeper and his fellow citizens could not fail to see the sign that marked an easy-to-follow trail between the corpse and the spur along which the Virginian now rode.
Hell, he was a fool to even contemplate the prospect of talking buying and selling business in such circumstances. But, like it had been said of him, he was infuriatingly stubborn and self-opinionated. And, also like it had been said, nothing that is worthwhile comes easy. He spat at a tobacco juice stain at the side of the trail. He missed it, but this would only have mattered if he had believed in omens and such like. So he simply scowled, without being entirely sure why: then his face became impassive as he rode out of the timber and toward two stout posts between which a gate had once hung. Now, and for a long time beforehand, the rotting remains of the gate lay off to the side, at the corner of a weed-choked field—one of several that stretched back from the gateless entrance in a line of mostly fallen down fencing toward a huddle of buildings in the bottom of a hollow some quarter of a mile away.
Because the farmstead where Avery Begley had chosen to live was in a hollow, the Virginian was able to gain an excellent first impression of the place from his elevated vantage point after he had reined in his stallion at the gateway. There was a stone-walled, timber-roofed house that looked only big enough to contain two rooms. It was in need of maintenance, but was not in such a bad state of disrepair as the larger barn with a hayloft in the steeply pitched roof. Out back of the house, in the area between it and the barn there were some small animal houses with fenced enclosures.
The fields to either side of the house and outbuildings—ditches, hedges and lines of timber showed how the ground had once been sub-divided—were as overgrown as those that flanked the wagon-wide strip of hard-packed ground between the gateway and the front yard of the place. Out back was the land that Avery Begley had cultivated. This was fenced on all four sides, and except where the fencing had been flattened at two places—both some three hundred feet wide—the enclosure looked to be well maintained: the posts treated with creosote not so long ago and the strands of wire gleaming in the sunlight so obviously not rusted. Between the two gaps in the fence, from the north back to the west side a great swathe of destruction had been laid by a large herd of stampeding cattle. Maize, wheat, root vegetables and beans had suffered under the trampling hooves of the animals as they thundered across the land of one man that was coveted by another.
Nowhere on Begley land had Steele seen signs of the grass fires that Hart might have ordered lit. But beyond the north west corner of the fenced area he saw sunlight glinting on a body of water. There was a fence encircling this and he thought this could be the fishing pond that Ellie Webb said was poisoned by Lucas Hart’s men.
To the north and east of the farmstead the terrain rose in a shallow incline cloaked by lush looking grass. Then, close to the crest of the rise, small outcrops of rock jutted drunkenly out of the rich soil. There was just one area, about fifty feet across, where there were no rocky obstacles featuring the top of the slope. And it was here that the cows had started their downward rush toward the Begley place, their pumping hooves churning up the grassland without the animals being in any danger of crashing into and over the dangerous rocks—which the frontrunners would not have been able to see until they came over the ridge at full tilt.
Again, the Virginian could not fail to take note of the obvious as he heeled his mount away from the gateposts and down into the hollow on the long-time unworked side of the farmstead. But he made no attempt to extend what he saw into a theory about the stampede that led to the death of the man who was the newest occupant in the Rosarita cemetery—would remain so for just a short while before Pierce Nelson assumed the unenviable distinction.
He saw there was smoke curling lazily from the chimney that rose up the outside of one end of the house. He also saw that the buggy and the wagon had been negligently parked on the front yard, apparently left where they came to rest. The horses were apparently in the ramshackle barn. The flatbed had been unloaded of luggage. All that moved down in the bottom of the hollow was the smoke from the chimney and there were no sounds loud enough to be heard above the regular clop of the stallion’s hooves against the hard-packed dirt.
If the final quarter mile of trail from town to the front yard of the Begley place showed sign that the tobacco chewer had ridden over the same route a few hours earlier, Steele had no inclination to look for it. Because his sense for impending trouble was sounding an indistinct warning somewhere in a dark recess of his consciousness. Indistinct because the farmstead was a troubled place anyway, by all accounts, and the sign he had followed since he discovered the corpse of the kid emphasized that trouble had not ended when the fatally sick Avery Begley was carried away from here.
It looked fine. Not ideal: but like the country he had ridden through to get here, this place could be made to suit his purpose. It would need a lot of work to fix it up, but it certainly had the potential.
He was within a hundred and fifty feet of the firmly closed front door of the crude house. Still attempting to quell what he considered to be unfounded uneasiness by looking at the place from the point of view of possibly owning it. But he was so tensed to respond to sudden danger that he started to hurt in places that had not suffered in the beating he took yesterday. And then a scowl displaced impassivity on his unshaven face. This as he reined the stallion to an abrupt halt. Had no time to thrust his right hand forward to fist it around the stock of the Colt Hartford as the door of the house was wrenched open. And the elder of Charlotte Begley’s escorts stood on the threshold: a Winchester rifle aimed from the shoulder.
‘You surprise me, sir,’ he greeted in an even tone.
‘You gave me something of a start,’ Steele countered.
‘I may smile at your humor when the situation is less fraught with anxiety on all sides, Mr. …?’
‘Adam Steele, feller.’
‘Fletcher Arness, Mr. Steele. Your presence here surprises me because you struck me as a man of some intelligence when we first met in town yesterday. I assumed you were not the kind of man who needed to be told anything more than once?’
With the cocked rifle held in a rock-steady aim at the Virginian’s chest, Arness’s attitude remained as effortlessly well-mannered as it had been at the Webbs’ bank. And the expression on his leanly handsome, evenly bronzed, clean shaven, blue-eyed face was the same as it had been then—just a hairsbreadth removed from lighting with a friendly smile. But, Steele was certain, he was the kind of man who was able to kill with such a look of amiability toward his victim. Today he was not wearing a derby, cravat or suit jacket. But he nonetheless exuded elegance with boots that were highly sheened, pants that were perfectly pressed, a vest with polished buttons and a shirt that was stiffly starched. The metallic buttons of the vest and the matching fasteners at his shirt cuffs provided the only note of contrast with the otherwise solid blackness of his garb.
‘No offense, but the lady doesn’t interest me, except as the owner of this place now that Avery Begley’s dead.’
‘Ms. Begley might be offended to hear you say that. I accept what you say in the manner you have said it. In return, I would ask you to take no for an answer this second time of asking. Ms. Charlotte Begley has no intention of selling this property she inherited from the previous owner. So I think it best you be on your way to look for what you want elsewhere, Mr. Steele. With my apologies for the lack of hospitality. Unfortunately, we are not yet in a position to entertain guests. Having just moved here from the city, as you know.’
Steele nodded, then said: ‘One thing, feller?’
‘If it will not take long.’
‘You always see off unwanted visitors with a rifle?’
‘Just those who I feel will not be persuaded by a simple word of caution, Mr. Steele.’ Now the near smile suddenly became closer to the scowl he had worn as he drove the buggy out of Rosarita yesterday. And an icy tone entered his voice when he added: ‘I spoke to you in town, and so …’ He raised the shoulder that did not support the rifle stock.
Steele felt irritably dissatisfied that he had to let this be the end of it. It was the Begley woman he had come to see, but it was obvious he would have to start trouble with Fletcher Arness to get to her. Was it worth the risk? She had sounded adamant in Rosarita before she saw the place she had inherited. Before he had seen it, either. Was she still as determined as the dandy with the rifle maintained now she had seen what there was to hold on or to sell? Also, how strong was his hankering to settle on this piece of country so well suited to raising horses—now that he was looking down the barrel of yet another gun on account of his interest? What aggravated him so much was that he found both questions equally impossible to resolve right then. And, because he could feel his anger expanding and knew there was a danger of it altering from cold to hot, he decided to back off and gain time to think.
‘A thought to ride with you, Mr. Steele,’ Fletcher Arness said, his tone even and his expression almost a smile again as he watched the faintly frowning Virginian start to wheel the black stallion.
‘I’ve got plenty of my own, feller,’ the Virginian answered.
‘You can carry one more. Just want you to keep in mind that I’ve never shot a man in the back. So provided you keep heading away from me, you have nothing to worry about: as far as I’m concerned.’
Steele needed to take a moment to bring under control the impulse to a flare of anger that in the present circumstances would be either reckless or futile. And managed to achieve this behind a mask of impassivity as he further sought to conceal the depth of his feelings toward Arness by raising a gloved hand and flicking a forefinger against the underside of the brim. Then thought his voice sounded just a little strained when he tried for an even tone as he replied:
‘I hope the lady’s as impressed as I am, feller.’
Charlotte Begley let a trill of laughter escape her smiling mouth as she moved into the doorway at Arness’s side and then called: ‘Fletcher never fails to amaze me, Mr. Steele! Perhaps when he does there may be a place for you here!’
It was not far away from noon and the woman was still in a nightgown of some fine white fabric that was diaphanous, but decently draped her body because it was so full from neck to ankles. Her red hair hung freely to below her shoulders and was tousled from sleep but she had done something to take most of the signs of the night off her face. This morning she no longer looked regal: instead merely an attractive woman of early middle age indulging an inclination for a brand of coquettishness that did not become her.
‘Ms. Begley sometimes makes jokes at the wrong time, too,’ Arness said sardonically as Steele extended the flick of his hat brim to become a more genteel tipping of his Stetson now that the woman had shown herself.
Then Dale Begley snarled from inside the dilapidated house: ‘Goddammit, Fletch! The bastard’s got a friggin’ army with him!’
A gunshot and the shattering of a window as the bullet exploded through the glass momentarily transfixed the attention of Steele astride his wheeling horse and the couple in the doorway. In that part of a second, Arness and the woman snapped their heads to the side to look at the fear-filled youngster who had fired the shot. And the Virginian gazed at the shower of glass shards sprayed out of the frame to splash across the yard.
‘You jerk, I gave him my word—’ Fletcher Arness started to snarl as he snapped his head around again. And was in time to see Steele thud his heels against the flanks of the stallion to lunge the animal into an instant gallop.
‘No, he’s right!’ the woman shrieked, thrusting an arm with a pointing finger out through the doorway. ‘Look at them! Get him, Dale! That’s my boy!’
The Virginian, the hair at the nape of his neck still standing up after the bullet brushed through it, rasped through clenched teeth as a barrage of gunfire masked all other sounds: ‘That sure makes him a son of a bitch!’