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Description
5. The Gravedigger

The pre-dawn starlight found the corpse covered in flowers. They covered his lap, sat in his hair, and filled his hands so that the entire man was brimming with color. Sarah Jo sniffed and placed the last of the flowers over his hands. It had taken her the entire night to gather them, but she had succeeded in her duty.

“¡Oye, chica!” Don Santo called as he came into the pre-dawn light. “What are you doing?”

Sarah Jo stiffened. She squared her shoulders and stood straight, and she turned sharply toward him and looked him dead in the eye.

“What you’ve done is evil, Don Santo,” she called back, as loud and clear as a bell’s peal. “You’re gonna pay for it, and I’m gonna be there to make sure that everybody knows just how many crimes you’re paying for.”

Don Santo grinned. He took a pistol out of his belt and aimed. The girl’s heart jumped, but she stood her ground.

“I’m not afraid to shoot loud-mouthed little brats like you,” he growled through his grin. He cocked the pistol.

“You are afraid,” said Sarah Jo. The door to the house opened as Miss Maudie looked out, drawn by the noise. She gasped when she saw the gun, but stopped as she saw Franco’s rifle leveled at her.

“What?” snarled Don Santo.

“You’re a coward!” Sarah Jo said. She jerked her head up bravely and looked him square in the eye. “All you do is beat up people who aren’t strong enough to fight back, Don Santo! You’re a coward and someday a real man’s gonna shoot you down like the dirty rotten coward you are!”

Don Santo snarled and aimed. The gun went off and Miss Maudie screamed as Sarah Jo’s head jerked to one side.

The girl looked up slowly, a red line beginning to weep fingers of blood down her cheek where the bullet had grazed. “And you’re a bad shot, too!” she shot back. Don Santo cocked his gun again furiously.

Sarah Jo smiled defiantly and extended her arm to him in one smooth, languid motion, just as the dead gunfighter behind her had done before. She pointed her index finger at Don Santo and brought the hammer of her thumb down.

“Bang,” she said.

Don Santo fired his pistol, thunder echoing in the air. It jerked to one side and the bullet whizzed off into the desert, harmless. Don Santo slowly let the gun drop from his hand, looking at the bloody fingers now lying on the ground with it.

The drifter’s corpse had looked up, gun in hand. Flower petals torn to bits by his bullet hung in the air for a moment. There was silence after the gunshots for one golden moment before Don Santo screamed.

He knelt and clutched at his hand. Franco whipped his rifle over and then jerked and fell to the report of another bullet, a red hole in his forehead and a spray of gore on the barn door above him.

The drifter stood up, sore and stiff and still caked in his own blood. Flowers clung to him dustily and he took a few slow, unsteady steps forward. Miss Maudie covered her mouth with her hands and let out a soft, keening wail of a gasp.

“It’s over, Santo,” said the drifter, moving to stand in front of the girl as a living shield.

“I’ll kill you yet, you son of a bitch!” Don Santo snarled, whipping the pistol up in his off hand. He aimed for Sarah Jo and pulled the trigger. Split seconds apart, three gunshots went off.

Don Santo’s eyes crossed as he fell backward, a bloody hole in his forehead. His gun fell from his hand, as well as a few fingers.

The drifter’s pistol was at his hip, left hand poised over the hammer as the last shreds of smoke drifted from the muzzle into the yellow morning light.

Silence.

No—the thunder of a heart.

The drifter went to one knee and uncurled the severed fingers from the grip of Don Santo’s pistol. He looked at it for a moment, all black metal and gold inlay, and traced bloody fingers over the intricate designs engraved upon it. “The gun of the great Don Santo,” he said. “I’ve heard of this. It’s said he stole it from a Mexican general.”

He half-turned his torso and held it out to the child behind him, looking over his shoulder at her. “Deserves to go to a hero, don’t you think?”

Sarah Jo hesitated. Then, looking at her mother with a small, proud smile, she came forward and took the gun from the drifter.

The drifter stood up and holstered his Colt, then patted her head with his unbloodied hand and turned to Miss Maudie.

“I’ll get a shovel,” he said, and headed for the cowshed.

“I thought you didn’t dig graves,” said Miss Maudie, weak in the knees but standing resolutely now, shoulders squared and hands at her sides.

The drifter paused and glanced over his shoulder at her briefly, face gaunt and bruised and not unlike a face the woman had seen once, not so long ago. Then he stepped over Franco’s body and into the barn.

The corpses were all buried before noon, all four of them in a row with piles of rocks to mark their presence. Sarah Jo painted up a sign and the drifter put it into the rocky earth for her and piled it with stones, right above Don Santo’s head. It read:

Here Lies Don Santo
and his gang
Luís, Franco, and Julio
Terrors of Broken Trail, New Mexico
Brought to Justice by A Good Man
June 13-14, 1872

The drifter read it in silence, or at least looked at the letters. Sarah Jo might have asked if he was illiterate but her mother fetched them both inside from the sun. She sat the drifter down on their sofa without ceremony and began treating his wounds.

He was slender, Miss Maudie realized upon inspection of his torso. He was too slender for him to be eating enough food for a man of his size. And there were scars, faint but shining in the light. Bullet wounds, long scratches, knife gouges. Some were still fresh, not yet fully healed and shining a dull, pearlescent pink like fresh meat. The rope burns around his throat were varied, some old and some new, a mix of marks that spelled a single word: Outlaw.

“You’ll die if you keep pushing yourself,” Miss Maudie told him, dabbing the freshest wound—Don Santo’s bullet, the one that had ripped through his abdomen and allowed him to fake his death—with alcohol. The drifter said nothing. “Men’s bodies aren’t meant to take the kind of punishment you give yours.”

“I’ve been through worse,” said the drifter, taking a hearty swig of tequila as Miss Maudie threaded a needle. As soon as she had sewed up the wound she fetched him a pillow. He’d shrugged his shirt back on and he reclined on the sofa and, promptly, he lost consciousness. Miss Maudie sighed and put a blanket over him. He remained there for the better part of a week.

He looked better when he finally woke up, though he’d been troubled in his sleep and had taken a fever as soon as Miss Maudie had patched him up. Mother and daughter had wondered briefly whether they would have to dig a fifth grave for the drifter, a hero to be buried with the villains he’d killed, but he fought through the fever and it broke a few hours before he came to.

The drifter awoke and sat up slowly. The first thing he requested was a bath.

“The world would be a better place if it had more men like that in it,” Miss Maudie said quietly to herself. She’d helped him to the tub and had heated water for him before he’d assured her he was a grown man and was therefore fully capable of bathing himself.

“Then again,” she added to herself, “it just might be full of dead heroes.”

The drifter emerged eventually, after enough time had elapsed that Miss Maudie was sure he’d slipped down into the water and drowned. He was dressed in new clothes, a shirt of her husband’s that she’d given him, and his bruises had mostly healed already except for the last faint traces of green here and there. He could open his eye again and his nose was straight on his face.

“Sorry,” he said to her expression of concern. “I fell asleep.”

She looked at him for a moment. He moved to the door in his usual tired, practiced slouch of a walk and took his hat and coat from the pegs on the wall.

“Suppose we should go pick up the bounties of Don Santo’s gang,” he added, and headed out the door.

Miss Maudie wondered for a moment whether this man was even human.

The drifter found the child petting his horse. He’d searched the bodies of Don Santo’s gang before burying them and had taken anything useful, and now Don Santo’s tooled black leather gun-belt hung across Sarah Jo’s chest like a bandolier, the gun snugly at her hip. The rest of the weapons, the ones of less renown and importance, had gone to Miss Maudie for her own personal armory. The drifter had pocketed any money and tobacco, as well as a bottle of tequila.

“He likes you,” he said as he came up behind the girl. Sarah Jo turned quickly. The drifter was standing with his saddle and bags over one shoulder, coat in hand and hat on head. There was a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.

“You were out for a long time,” Sarah Jo said. “We made friends.”

“I bet you did,” said the drifter. He moved over to his horse and began saddling it. Sarah Jo watched in silence.

“Are you leaving?”

“Eventually,” said the drifter. “I’ve got to go into town first and pick up the bounty on Don Santo’s gang first. I figured you and your ma would like to come along.”

Sarah Jo nodded. The drifter finished outfitting his horse and paused, considering the girl.

“You shot that gun yet?”

“No, sir,” Sarah Jo said, half in awe that he would ask.

“Want to learn?”

The child nodded quickly, and soon gunshots rang out as a wooden target served to play Don Santo. She took to shooting like a fish takes to water, or like a fledgling bird takes to flying.

They went into town late that morning, the drifter on his grullo stallion and Miss Maudie and her daughter on the buckboard. The drifter dismounted outside the sheriff’s office and headed inside, closely followed by the other two.

“Don Santo and his gang are dead,” said the drifter, rousing the sheriff from his newspaper. “I’m here to collect the bounties.”

The sheriff looked stupefied for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “What proof do you have?”

“The girl has his gun,” said the drifter, and Sarah Jo proudly displayed her prize. “He and his men are buried on the trail to the Bartlett homestead. There’s a sign.”

The sheriff examined the gun before he handed it back to the child. He nodded and turned.

“That’s nine hundred dollars in total,” said the sheriff, writing out an order for the local bank. He signed it and handed it over, then paused.

“You’re him,” he said.

The drifter was silent. The sheriff’s eyes flicked back and forth between the drifter’s face and the poster on the wall. The man on the wall looked meaner, colder, more angular, but there was no mistaking them for different men.

“Thanks,” said the drifter, and he tipped his hat to the sheriff and went out the door.

He’d nearly reached his horse before a gunshot rang out. The drifter stopped.

“You’re Gravedigger Wallace,” the sheriff declared. The business of the town had stopped, and all eyes were now on the drifter. He reached up slowly with his right hand and tipped his hat down further over his eyes as if that would protect him from the townspeople’s frightened stares.

“I’m going to have to bring you in, Gravedigger,” the sheriff said, leveling his pistol. “You’re wanted in more states and territories than any man alive, and I’ll be damned if I let you take over this town or ride away with some other criminal’s bounty.”

Gravedigger Wallace tut-tutted quietly under his breath. “Now why would I want to settle down out here?” he murmured to himself. “Not enough rain to grow corn.”

“What’d you say?” asked the sheriff, cocking his pistol slowly.

“I said I’m sorry,” said the Gravedigger, a bit more loudly, as he turned his head slightly to give the impression of glancing back at the sheriff, “and I’ll try not to shoot your fingers off.”

The sheriff tried to fire. The Gravedigger was faster. By the time the sheriff had begun to squeeze the trigger the Gravedigger had already cleared leather and whirled. He fired from the hip, his left hip, a bullet that knocked the pistol from the sheriff’s hand just as he finished squeezing the trigger.

The sheriff’s bullet whizzed off into a building harmlessly. People gasped and ducked.
The pistol landed on the ground with a metallic thud. The sheriff stared in horror at his own hand which, to his surprise, was still intact.

The Gravedigger holstered his pistol and took a step toward Miss Maudie. The crowd watched with bated breath. Miss Maudie drew herself up as he raised his hand. The Gravedigger offered the receipt to her and she took it.

“Use that however you like,” he told her. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“You aren’t the type of man I expected to be a hero, Gravedigger,” Miss Maudie said. “I never would’ve taken you for the type to bring justice to a little town like this.”

“There’ no such thing as justice, ma’am,” said the drifter, turning to mount his horse. “Just us.”

Sarah Jo stared at him for a long moment as he turned his horse and surveyed the townsfolk. All of them looked frightened or angry. And, mostly, the Gravedigger looked weary and just a little bit sad.

Sarah Jo stepped forward and raised her hand to him. “Goodbye, Justin,” she said, and he hesitated a moment before he leaned down and clasped her hand in his, gently. He shook it.

“Goodbye, Miss Sarah Jo,” he answered.

“You ever coming back here to visit us?”

The Gravedigger, scourge of the West, blight on civilized peoples everywhere, friend of no one and Satan’s right-hand man, paused.

Then, gradually, his steely eyes softened to the tone of the sky and his cruel mouth widened into a smile that looked entirely natural on his face.

“I’ll try my best, ma’am,” he answered, and he straightened back up in the saddle and nudged his horse forward.

He stopped the beast a few yards away, horse champing at the bit and shifting from hoof to hoof. The time to run was now, but the man was hesitating, perhaps loathe of leaving this town where two people had taken him in. He wore a curious expression, half hopeful and half pleased, and in that moment he seemed to be no more than a soft-spoken drifter with a penchant for defending the defenseless.

“Miss Maudie,” he called, and the woman raised her head. “Keep your daughter practicing with that pistol. She’ll make a fine sheriff one day, you mark my words. That girl’s fearless.”

The first gunshot rang out and whizzed into the compact earth near the horse’s feet, spraying a fine layer of dust onto its hooves as it startled. The Gravedigger held it expertly in check. The sheriff growled something and advanced the cylinder with a click. He aimed again and squinted in the noon light.

Gravedigger Wallace tipped his hat to Miss Maudie and Sarah Jo as his horse half-reared. Then it gathered itself like a coiled spring onto its hind legs and lunged forward toward the open desert as the town of Broken Trail opened fire. The drifter crouched low on its back and never once looked over his shoulder, and his horse tossed its head and surged onward, chased by bullets and racing the wind, its rider a drifter with a heart of tarnished gold.

THE END

Description
5. The Gravedigger

The pre-dawn starlight found the corpse covered in flowers. They covered his lap, sat in his hair, and filled his hands so that the entire man was brimming with color. Sarah Jo sniffed and placed the last of the flowers over his hands. It had taken her the entire night to gather them, but she had succeeded in her duty.

“¡Oye, chica!” Don Santo called as he came into the pre-dawn light. “What are you doing?”

Sarah Jo stiffened. She squared her shoulders and stood straight, and she turned sharply toward him and looked him dead in the eye.

“What you’ve done is evil, Don Santo,” she called back, as loud and clear as a bell’s peal. “You’re gonna pay for it, and I’m gonna be there to make sure that everybody knows just how many crimes you’re paying for.”

Don Santo grinned. He took a pistol out of his belt and aimed. The girl’s heart jumped, but she stood her ground.

“I’m not afraid to shoot loud-mouthed little brats like you,” he growled through his grin. He cocked the pistol.

“You are afraid,” said Sarah Jo. The door to the house opened as Miss Maudie looked out, drawn by the noise. She gasped when she saw the gun, but stopped as she saw Franco’s rifle leveled at her.

“What?” snarled Don Santo.

“You’re a coward!” Sarah Jo said. She jerked her head up bravely and looked him square in the eye. “All you do is beat up people who aren’t strong enough to fight back, Don Santo! You’re a coward and someday a real man’s gonna shoot you down like the dirty rotten coward you are!”

Don Santo snarled and aimed. The gun went off and Miss Maudie screamed as Sarah Jo’s head jerked to one side.

The girl looked up slowly, a red line beginning to weep fingers of blood down her cheek where the bullet had grazed. “And you’re a bad shot, too!” she shot back. Don Santo cocked his gun again furiously.

Sarah Jo smiled defiantly and extended her arm to him in one smooth, languid motion, just as the dead gunfighter behind her had done before. She pointed her index finger at Don Santo and brought the hammer of her thumb down.

“Bang,” she said.

Don Santo fired his pistol, thunder echoing in the air. It jerked to one side and the bullet whizzed off into the desert, harmless. Don Santo slowly let the gun drop from his hand, looking at the bloody fingers now lying on the ground with it.

The drifter’s corpse had looked up, gun in hand. Flower petals torn to bits by his bullet hung in the air for a moment. There was silence after the gunshots for one golden moment before Don Santo screamed.

He knelt and clutched at his hand. Franco whipped his rifle over and then jerked and fell to the report of another bullet, a red hole in his forehead and a spray of gore on the barn door above him.

The drifter stood up, sore and stiff and still caked in his own blood. Flowers clung to him dustily and he took a few slow, unsteady steps forward. Miss Maudie covered her mouth with her hands and let out a soft, keening wail of a gasp.

“It’s over, Santo,” said the drifter, moving to stand in front of the girl as a living shield.

“I’ll kill you yet, you son of a bitch!” Don Santo snarled, whipping the pistol up in his off hand. He aimed for Sarah Jo and pulled the trigger. Split seconds apart, three gunshots went off.

Don Santo’s eyes crossed as he fell backward, a bloody hole in his forehead. His gun fell from his hand, as well as a few fingers.

The drifter’s pistol was at his hip, left hand poised over the hammer as the last shreds of smoke drifted from the muzzle into the yellow morning light.

Silence.

No—the thunder of a heart.

The drifter went to one knee and uncurled the severed fingers from the grip of Don Santo’s pistol. He looked at it for a moment, all black metal and gold inlay, and traced bloody fingers over the intricate designs engraved upon it. “The gun of the great Don Santo,” he said. “I’ve heard of this. It’s said he stole it from a Mexican general.”

He half-turned his torso and held it out to the child behind him, looking over his shoulder at her. “Deserves to go to a hero, don’t you think?”

Sarah Jo hesitated. Then, looking at her mother with a small, proud smile, she came forward and took the gun from the drifter.

The drifter stood up and holstered his Colt, then patted her head with his unbloodied hand and turned to Miss Maudie.

“I’ll get a shovel,” he said, and headed for the cowshed.

“I thought you didn’t dig graves,” said Miss Maudie, weak in the knees but standing resolutely now, shoulders squared and hands at her sides.

The drifter paused and glanced over his shoulder at her briefly, face gaunt and bruised and not unlike a face the woman had seen once, not so long ago. Then he stepped over Franco’s body and into the barn.

The corpses were all buried before noon, all four of them in a row with piles of rocks to mark their presence. Sarah Jo painted up a sign and the drifter put it into the rocky earth for her and piled it with stones, right above Don Santo’s head. It read:

Here Lies Don Santo
and his gang
Luís, Franco, and Julio
Terrors of Broken Trail, New Mexico
Brought to Justice by A Good Man
June 13-14, 1872

The drifter read it in silence, or at least looked at the letters. Sarah Jo might have asked if he was illiterate but her mother fetched them both inside from the sun. She sat the drifter down on their sofa without ceremony and began treating his wounds.

He was slender, Miss Maudie realized upon inspection of his torso. He was too slender for him to be eating enough food for a man of his size. And there were scars, faint but shining in the light. Bullet wounds, long scratches, knife gouges. Some were still fresh, not yet fully healed and shining a dull, pearlescent pink like fresh meat. The rope burns around his throat were varied, some old and some new, a mix of marks that spelled a single word: Outlaw.

“You’ll die if you keep pushing yourself,” Miss Maudie told him, dabbing the freshest wound—Don Santo’s bullet, the one that had ripped through his abdomen and allowed him to fake his death—with alcohol. The drifter said nothing. “Men’s bodies aren’t meant to take the kind of punishment you give yours.”

“I’ve been through worse,” said the drifter, taking a hearty swig of tequila as Miss Maudie threaded a needle. As soon as she had sewed up the wound she fetched him a pillow. He’d shrugged his shirt back on and he reclined on the sofa and, promptly, he lost consciousness. Miss Maudie sighed and put a blanket over him. He remained there for the better part of a week.

He looked better when he finally woke up, though he’d been troubled in his sleep and had taken a fever as soon as Miss Maudie had patched him up. Mother and daughter had wondered briefly whether they would have to dig a fifth grave for the drifter, a hero to be buried with the villains he’d killed, but he fought through the fever and it broke a few hours before he came to.

The drifter awoke and sat up slowly. The first thing he requested was a bath.

“The world would be a better place if it had more men like that in it,” Miss Maudie said quietly to herself. She’d helped him to the tub and had heated water for him before he’d assured her he was a grown man and was therefore fully capable of bathing himself.

“Then again,” she added to herself, “it just might be full of dead heroes.”

The drifter emerged eventually, after enough time had elapsed that Miss Maudie was sure he’d slipped down into the water and drowned. He was dressed in new clothes, a shirt of her husband’s that she’d given him, and his bruises had mostly healed already except for the last faint traces of green here and there. He could open his eye again and his nose was straight on his face.

“Sorry,” he said to her expression of concern. “I fell asleep.”

She looked at him for a moment. He moved to the door in his usual tired, practiced slouch of a walk and took his hat and coat from the pegs on the wall.

“Suppose we should go pick up the bounties of Don Santo’s gang,” he added, and headed out the door.

Miss Maudie wondered for a moment whether this man was even human.

The drifter found the child petting his horse. He’d searched the bodies of Don Santo’s gang before burying them and had taken anything useful, and now Don Santo’s tooled black leather gun-belt hung across Sarah Jo’s chest like a bandolier, the gun snugly at her hip. The rest of the weapons, the ones of less renown and importance, had gone to Miss Maudie for her own personal armory. The drifter had pocketed any money and tobacco, as well as a bottle of tequila.

“He likes you,” he said as he came up behind the girl. Sarah Jo turned quickly. The drifter was standing with his saddle and bags over one shoulder, coat in hand and hat on head. There was a cigarette in one corner of his mouth.

“You were out for a long time,” Sarah Jo said. “We made friends.”

“I bet you did,” said the drifter. He moved over to his horse and began saddling it. Sarah Jo watched in silence.

“Are you leaving?”

“Eventually,” said the drifter. “I’ve got to go into town first and pick up the bounty on Don Santo’s gang first. I figured you and your ma would like to come along.”

Sarah Jo nodded. The drifter finished outfitting his horse and paused, considering the girl.

“You shot that gun yet?”

“No, sir,” Sarah Jo said, half in awe that he would ask.

“Want to learn?”

The child nodded quickly, and soon gunshots rang out as a wooden target served to play Don Santo. She took to shooting like a fish takes to water, or like a fledgling bird takes to flying.

They went into town late that morning, the drifter on his grullo stallion and Miss Maudie and her daughter on the buckboard. The drifter dismounted outside the sheriff’s office and headed inside, closely followed by the other two.

“Don Santo and his gang are dead,” said the drifter, rousing the sheriff from his newspaper. “I’m here to collect the bounties.”

The sheriff looked stupefied for a moment. Then, slowly, he said, “What proof do you have?”

“The girl has his gun,” said the drifter, and Sarah Jo proudly displayed her prize. “He and his men are buried on the trail to the Bartlett homestead. There’s a sign.”

The sheriff examined the gun before he handed it back to the child. He nodded and turned.

“That’s nine hundred dollars in total,” said the sheriff, writing out an order for the local bank. He signed it and handed it over, then paused.

“You’re him,” he said.

The drifter was silent. The sheriff’s eyes flicked back and forth between the drifter’s face and the poster on the wall. The man on the wall looked meaner, colder, more angular, but there was no mistaking them for different men.

“Thanks,” said the drifter, and he tipped his hat to the sheriff and went out the door.

He’d nearly reached his horse before a gunshot rang out. The drifter stopped.

“You’re Gravedigger Wallace,” the sheriff declared. The business of the town had stopped, and all eyes were now on the drifter. He reached up slowly with his right hand and tipped his hat down further over his eyes as if that would protect him from the townspeople’s frightened stares.

“I’m going to have to bring you in, Gravedigger,” the sheriff said, leveling his pistol. “You’re wanted in more states and territories than any man alive, and I’ll be damned if I let you take over this town or ride away with some other criminal’s bounty.”

Gravedigger Wallace tut-tutted quietly under his breath. “Now why would I want to settle down out here?” he murmured to himself. “Not enough rain to grow corn.”

“What’d you say?” asked the sheriff, cocking his pistol slowly.

“I said I’m sorry,” said the Gravedigger, a bit more loudly, as he turned his head slightly to give the impression of glancing back at the sheriff, “and I’ll try not to shoot your fingers off.”

The sheriff tried to fire. The Gravedigger was faster. By the time the sheriff had begun to squeeze the trigger the Gravedigger had already cleared leather and whirled. He fired from the hip, his left hip, a bullet that knocked the pistol from the sheriff’s hand just as he finished squeezing the trigger.

The sheriff’s bullet whizzed off into a building harmlessly. People gasped and ducked.
The pistol landed on the ground with a metallic thud. The sheriff stared in horror at his own hand which, to his surprise, was still intact.

The Gravedigger holstered his pistol and took a step toward Miss Maudie. The crowd watched with bated breath. Miss Maudie drew herself up as he raised his hand. The Gravedigger offered the receipt to her and she took it.

“Use that however you like,” he told her. “You don’t owe me anything.”

“You aren’t the type of man I expected to be a hero, Gravedigger,” Miss Maudie said. “I never would’ve taken you for the type to bring justice to a little town like this.”

“There’ no such thing as justice, ma’am,” said the drifter, turning to mount his horse. “Just us.”

Sarah Jo stared at him for a long moment as he turned his horse and surveyed the townsfolk. All of them looked frightened or angry. And, mostly, the Gravedigger looked weary and just a little bit sad.

Sarah Jo stepped forward and raised her hand to him. “Goodbye, Justin,” she said, and he hesitated a moment before he leaned down and clasped her hand in his, gently. He shook it.

“Goodbye, Miss Sarah Jo,” he answered.

“You ever coming back here to visit us?”

The Gravedigger, scourge of the West, blight on civilized peoples everywhere, friend of no one and Satan’s right-hand man, paused.

Then, gradually, his steely eyes softened to the tone of the sky and his cruel mouth widened into a smile that looked entirely natural on his face.

“I’ll try my best, ma’am,” he answered, and he straightened back up in the saddle and nudged his horse forward.

He stopped the beast a few yards away, horse champing at the bit and shifting from hoof to hoof. The time to run was now, but the man was hesitating, perhaps loathe of leaving this town where two people had taken him in. He wore a curious expression, half hopeful and half pleased, and in that moment he seemed to be no more than a soft-spoken drifter with a penchant for defending the defenseless.

“Miss Maudie,” he called, and the woman raised her head. “Keep your daughter practicing with that pistol. She’ll make a fine sheriff one day, you mark my words. That girl’s fearless.”

The first gunshot rang out and whizzed into the compact earth near the horse’s feet, spraying a fine layer of dust onto its hooves as it startled. The Gravedigger held it expertly in check. The sheriff growled something and advanced the cylinder with a click. He aimed again and squinted in the noon light.

Gravedigger Wallace tipped his hat to Miss Maudie and Sarah Jo as his horse half-reared. Then it gathered itself like a coiled spring onto its hind legs and lunged forward toward the open desert as the town of Broken Trail opened fire. The drifter crouched low on its back and never once looked over his shoulder, and his horse tossed its head and surged onward, chased by bullets and racing the wind, its rider a drifter with a heart of tarnished gold.

THE END