Menard was sitting there looking at me, one knee sort of drawn up, his gun lying across his leg. He had been hit twice in the lungs and every time he drew breath there was a frothy burst of blood from the front of his vest.
“I told him he should leave you alone,” he said, “but he wouldn’t listen. I told him nobody could beat a man’s luck, and you had it.”
“So this is all for you,” I said quietly.
“Looks like it. Pull my boots off, Sackett, and bury me deep. I don’t want the varmints after me.”
Not being a trusting man, I still held my gun on him while I tugged his boots free.
“You take the gun,” he said. “It brought me nothing but trouble.”
Galloway had come up to me. “Fetchen’s dying,” he said. “You tore him apart”
Taking Menard’s gun, I backed off from him.
James Black Fetchen was not dying; he was dead, and there were two others besides him, one of them the man I’d seen at the stable.
The stage driver rolled his tobacco in his cheeks. “If you boys are through, we might as well bury ’em and get on. I got a schedule to keep.”
At the placer-mining camp of Russell the stage pulled up and we got down. We took Reed Griffin and Fred Vaughn out on the street. “We agreed to see you safe to Durango. You had us set up for killing. Now, do you figure we’ve earned our money, or do we take you all the way?”
“You going to let us go?”
“Forty dollars each,” I said, and he paid it.
“Ride out with the stage,” I said, “and keep going.”
So we let them go, the Texan riding along to see them on their way.
“Galloway,” I said, “we’d better find some horses and ride back to that cabin on Pass Creek.”
“You figure we should stay there?”
“Well, there’s Judith. And that’s pretty country.”
“Hey, did you see that niece of Rodriguez’ do the fandango? Every time I looked at her my knees got slacker’n dishwater.”
We had come a far piece into a strange land, a trail lit by lonely campfires and by gunfire, and the wishing we did by day and by night. Now we rode back to plant roots in the land, and with luck, to leave sons to carry on a more peaceful life, in what we hoped would be a more peaceful world.
But whatever was to come, our sons would be Sacketts, and they would do what had to be done whenever the call would come.