EPILOGUE

The Franklin Mountains lay behind them, almost lost in the ribboning dust kicked up by the stage wheels. Before they reached Fort Bliss, Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon had four hundred miles of prairie to cross, a vast wilderness of grass under the arching blue bowl of the Texas sky.

“How are you holding up, Red?” Buttons said, slowing the team to a distance-eating trot.

“I feel like hell,” Red said.

“Where?”

“All over.”

“I don’t like this, Red. I don’t like this one bit, you being cut up and shot through and through an’ all,” Buttons said.

“You already told me that back in El Paso.”

“Doc Malone was real angry when you left, mad enough to chew a chunk out of the head of a double-bit axe, I’d say.”

“Buttons, one of the times when I was snowed up I read Doctor Darby’s Maladies and Ailments of Women from cover to cover. Now I know enough about doctoring to take care of myself.”

“Red, I don’t know if you’ve looked in a mirror recently, but you’re a man,” Buttons said.

“Man, woman, it doesn’t make any difference,” Red said. “A misery is a misery.”

“Well, I hope you know what you’re doing,” Buttons said.

“If I’m still alive by the time we reach Fort Concho, I reckon you’ll know I knew what I was doing,” Red said.

Buttons drove in silence for a while, the team fresh and going well, and then he said, “Red, you ever met a real live coward afore?”

“Can’t say as I have,” Red said.

“What makes a man that way?” Buttons said. “Why does he become a yellowbelly?”

Red said, “Well, now I study on it, a coward gets scared and quits and a brave man gets scared and still does what has to be done. At least, that’s how I see it.”

“What are we?”

“I don’t think we’re cowards, Buttons.”

“Me neither,” Buttons said.