On a bright, clear West Texas morning in the late summer of 1888, when across the prairie blue mistflowers were in bloom and lark buntings sang, lawman and vigilante Dan Caine shot beautiful Susan Stanton right between the eyes.

The killing haunted historians for generations and even London’s Strand Magazine, of Sherlock Holmes fame, was intrigued enough to publish an article about the incident under the headline, The Medusa Mystery, so-called since to look into the woman’s face meant death.

But there was no mystery about Susan Stanton’s demise. She was said to be a temptress, a witch, the most beautiful and dangerous woman on the frontier, fast with a gun and a demon with a knife, and the tale of her downfall begins, as it inevitably must, with a bloody massacre . . .

* * *

In all his born days, old tinpan Fish Lee had never seen the like . . . the entire Calthrop family massacred . . . and it was white men that had done it.

Fish looked around him, wide-eyed, everything sharply delineated by the glaring sun.

Big, laughing Tom Calthrop had been shot several times. Nancy, his plump, pretty wife, died of knife wounds and unspeakable abuse. Their ten-year-old twins Grace and Rose and sons Jacob, fifteen, and Esau, thirteen, had been shot and Grace, possessed of long, flowing yellow hair, had been scalped. There was no sign of sixteen-year-old Jenny Calthrop, and Fish reckoned she’d been taken.

The family dog, a friendly mutt named Ranger, lay dead in the front yard and only Sadie, the cat, had escaped the slaughter, but now mewing in piteous distress, the little animal twined and untwined itself around Fish’s boots like a calico snake.

All the bodies, sprawled in grotesque death poses, lay in the main room of the cabin.

The dusty, white-bearded prospector picked up the cat and held her close in one arm as he looked around him again. Part of the cabin had been scorched by a fire that had burned for a while and then gone out, and the smell of smoke still hung in the air. There was blood everywhere and amidst it all the six Calthrops lay like marble statues. It was a wonder to Fish how still were the dead . . . perfectly unmoving, their open eyes staring into infinity. The china clock on the mantel tick . . . tick . . . ticked . . . dropping small sounds into the cabin with clockwork dedication as though nothing untoward had happened.

The walls closing in on him, Fish Lee pulled down Mrs. Calthrop’s skirt so that others would not see her nakedness as he had and then stepped out of the cabin. He lingered on the shady porch for a few moments and then walked into the hot, West Texas sun. The calico cat wanted down and ran back inside, tail up, where the people she loved would no longer make a fuss over her.

Fish lit his pipe and then took a pint bottle of whiskey from his burro’s backpack. The little animal turned her head and stared an accusation at him.

“I know, Sophie,” he said. “But this is strictly medicinal. I seen things this day that no Christian man should ever see.” Around him were the tracks of horses and high-heeled boots, most of them clustered near the well, and Fish figured six or seven horses and riders, though he didn’t have enough Injun in him to make an accurate count. Tom Calthrop’s bay riding mare still stood in the corral in back of the ranch house, so horse theft was not the raiders’ motive. But the cabin had been ransacked, so they’d been after something. But what? Cash money probably . . . what little the family had. Fish took a swig of rye and then another and pondered that answer. He shook his head. Yeah, it was most likely money, but damned if he knew. Going back two decades, Fish Lee visited the Calthrops once or twice a year and was always given a friendly welcome and dinner and a bed for the night. He knew that in recent years with cattle prices low, Tom barely scraped by as a rancher, and money was always tight. He bred good Herefords, but they were few in number because he could no longer buy additional stock and hire punchers to work them. The boys helped and did what they could, but neither of them were really interested in ranching. Fish remembered Nancy telling him, “Jacob and Esau are readers, and readers aren’t much help come roundup.” At the time, she’d smiled, but he’d seen bittersweet concern in her eyes.

Damn, that had been only a six-month ago. And now the Calthrops were all dead and the young boys being readers and not riders no longer amounted to a hill of beans.

Fish Lee was short and wiry, dressed in worn-out colorless clothes that he’d had for a long time. His battered top hat looked as though someone had stepped on it, a pair of goggles on the brim for protection against blowing sand. He had a shovel in his pack but didn’t have the strength to bury six people. He had a Bible but couldn’t read the verses, and he had a Henry rifle but no enemy in sight. In other words, as he stood in afternoon sunlight beside his uncaring burro he felt as useless as tits on a boar hog.

“Sophie, we’ll head for Thunder Creek and let the law into what’s happened here,” he said. “Sheriff Chance Hurd will know what to do.” He read doubt in the burro’s dark eyes and said, “He will. You’ll see.”

After one last, lingering look at the cabin where shadows angled across the porch where the ollas hung, Fish shook his head and said, “Oh dear Lord in Heaven, what a terrible business.”

He then led Sophie west toward town, walking through the bright light of day under the flawless blue arch of the Texas sky.