Ask, and the general consensus would be that no one had time for any nonsense or daydream while the insidious sun still scorched the last frontier of the great west. Time birthed boom towns only to wilt them at the stalks, the prospect of amber-eyed fortunes and shambling cards a thing of the past, as harsh a lesson as oil in the ground drying up. The death of a dream, wasn’t it? Everyone knew it, from the surliest town citizen to the loneliest rancher.

Freedom fleeting.

Leigh Masters thought about that plenty.

A long dance over the outright wilderness was what led him from Fort Griffin to Arizona. Tombstone, quaint and dangerous, a white-veiled stranger with honeyed promises of riches all while the shadows jeered and cursed out the last of Lady Fortune’s favour wrought. A flash of red sash, fluttering in the arid breeze, sent the message as well as any bullet. But the winds were changing, and rapidly at that. Last he heard, Clanton and Brocius were getting hell rained down on ‘em by that former lawman Earp, turned larger than legend, the hounds of his posse at his heels, mastiffs biting and snarling for blood. 

The lawlessness. The ache of vengeance.

All birds of a peculiar feather, damning in familiarity.

The locomotive puffed into view, the steam grey as it rose into star-speckled skies, gone just as quickly into the folds of the velvet night. It drew to a halt, nestled within the bosoms of the station. The passengers disembarked and he, amongst many more, stepped into the nearest carriage. The winds died down by the time the exiting horn tapered off, leaving the corridor in a rare vale of quiet in the cold December air. The squalor’d chug of the engine from the potbellied piping was quick to reassert itself as the miles began to straighten out, the wheels rattling unflinchingly bruised and black against the welded flatbed of stones.

The distance stretched as snap-fast as a neck. Leigh moved as if on the prowl at first, taking advantage of the shadows that flickered like flame to conceal the predatory coil of his muscles. His feet pattered like slow drops of rain, monotonous and careful, as he hefted the baggage over his shoulder and lay the other hand to rest against his side. Less than a hair’s breadth away from a quick draw. Eventually, he sat with his back pressed against the tinfoil crush of the carriage walls and snuffed out the kerosene lamp closest. 

Then he went to restless sleep with the brim of his hat pulled down low, hair scratching the rough angles of his face.


He dreamt in remembrance.

It was not imagination that plagued him, but rather the spectral haunting of memories. Patchwork quilts of voices and lights, drowned beneath the gurgling river water, flashes of touch ever transient but as blistering as the heat from the midday sun. The moon fat and gorged, turning the sands pearly, a vast shifting bed reaching beyond the horizon. 

On this particular night, it is five years ago, at a saloon in Texas. A misstep in tact that brings about just the strangest conversation he’d ever had. 

His steps scratch the planks, spurs silent as death as the entrance swings into the saloon where drunkards and cheaters inhabit the dale of men. Gun oil lies heavy and thick in the air, drowned out by the raucous laughter and murmur of conversation, each sound indistinguishable from the other. There’s a group huddled around the faro table; green baize striking to the flush of cards and the golden murk of bourbon. 

The piano player on the bench, skin plastered and sweating pale all the colour– sandy hair slicked back sternly and a gun in a holster on either hip– his fingers sharp and graceful upon the instrument. His lady woman pressed up against him, bodies in tandem and lax, their backs arching to every miniscule shift of a key, a mournful nocturne that sombers him quick.

“He’s good, ain’t he?” Says the gambler that Leigh shares his whisky with.

He agrees, a sound humming in the back of his throat.

Theodore’s eyes are hawk-sharp in contrast to his dulled senses, black and beady like a crow’s as he leans in conversationally. “Well, rumour has it he’s a lunger. Any day now.” There’s anticipation somewhere that churns his gut, a sickening crawl. 

Sure enough, he’s not blind to the bad fit of coughin’, the handkerchief speckled with blood, nor the flash of wet red teeth before it is sucked clean. Dark eyes track him across the room, as straightforward as one creature feeling out the weight of the other, the prickle of being watched right back. A glance curious enough, but never harmless. 

And he remembers thinking, mouth dry as sand, music’s gonna stop soon enough.

Theodore’s breath is caramel-sweet with whiskey, heavy with the taint of cigarillos, washing over him in a placid thrall, “How like a winter hath my presence been, from thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!”

He knows the work of sonnets and such. They do not interest him. There is a campfire in his mind, chords plucking the strings of a guitar, and the guttural reminiscence of another rhythm. Laredo and her streets. He murmurs instead, inaudible beneath the swig of his glass, a nearly songbird lilt, “All wrapped in white linen, as cold as clay.”


The promise echoed, as if caught within the chamber of a gun.

He stood at a crossroads, kneeling in the soil with his nails dirty with grit, choking down on moist earth. The box in his hands, a damned weight, like he hasn’t yet decided to dig or go home empty, tail tucked between his legs. This too is a lie. He’d made his bed plenty, he supposed. Staked more than his soul to be where he was, and by God was he going to settle old ghosts to rest.

The end is what he saw clearly– soft light spilling through glass. 

He pulled himself out from the wallowing.

Sunlight crawled in through the open cracks between the carriage seams, a deft touch stirring him from the depths of slumber. He kept his eyes shut for a breath of a second longer, conscious of the manner of which the ground seemed to sway like a boat out on the morning sea, a lull in the ember of determination that had carried him thus far. When he arises at last, there is not an ounce of hesitation in his tread, confident in his ability to radiate the sense that he is but another faceless traveller.

“Fresh air.” He offered apologetically to the frowns sent his way after much jostling. “I do beg your pardon.” The flap of his overcoat concealed his holster down to every inch of callused leather.

He counted the number of carriage cars ‘till the last, hair thoroughly windswept by the end of it, rustled by the unsheltered snatches of buffeting winds outside. Less faces glanced back the further he went, nearly empty by the end of it. The slip of his reflection in the window properly saw him for once, a stretch of eternity narrowed down to the realization of a stranger in the other. Charcoal-grey eyes, a flinty curl of the lip, bare down to a coat in undertaker hues and the weight of a service weapon against his hip.

The hunt not commenced, but drawn to an end. 

The last carriage was denoted as private. He entered without a care, as silent as a wraith lingering upon cobblestone, as his vision funneled to the back of a dark brim tilted low. He squeezed the breath in his lungs to a minimal rhythm, his pulse feathery and set apace. He closed the remaining distance rapidly and pressed the cold kiss of the barrel against the crown of the marshal’s skull. Leigh said lightly, a courtly Southern tone, “Hullo, Milton.”

He savoured the sharp tremoring between those shoulder blades. The rabbiting pulse of a neck vein.

He was not inclined for the mercy of a quick death. The muzzle trailed against the curvature of skin, past the ark of the cheeks and then between the eyes. Brown pupils seein’ double as they became blown wide, the icy cracks of fear yawning open an invisible chasm. The swallowed bulge of saliva trapped within the throat. But that face… so very recognizable it inspired the acid hiss of hatred, a caged animal in the cradle of his ribs.

“This scares you, doesn’t it?” He settled on the seat opposite, leather crunching, arm stretched unwaveringly on target. 

The verbal dig landed. A leashed anger flashed back even if there was not a twitch in that body, a tad more similar to the cold-eyed bastard he knew. There you are. This was the man who had shot his enemies down without a second thought, leaving a ravaged trail of corruption from Dodge City down to Wyoming. The purveyor of Leigh’s bitterest anguish. That pink sunset was still seared against his eyelids, as he recalled the way his boy had been scraped raw and mutilated against the sands, tied to the horse and dragged dead over several miles.

“I don’t know you.” Milton said, coarser than usual. A laugh, high and reedy, soured at the tips. The former lawman splayed his fingers wide open in mockery, tilting back, a dismissive nature to the air about him. His voice dropped to something calmer, more amenable, but a deception down to its bare bones. “Walk away now, buck. If you wish to see another dawn.”

The quiver of a smile strung Leigh’s face into a nasty grin. “Frank Milton. Born and raised in cattle county, made deputy to marshall in Tucson. Turned in the bounty for Micah Walters in ‘73. Strange thing, the Rattlers set up shop in town soon after, got mighty powerful with friends in high places. Nothing a little bribery and tip-offs couldn’t solve.”

There it was, the shift in mannerism. He spat, eyes narrowed, “Yer a damn Pinkerton?”

“Why, not at all.” He outright laughed, and answered slyly. “I could tell you your man was highly talkative right before the end. I could say you were sloppy with the records, or perhaps quite a few whispers slipped through the gaps. Tchh.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “It’s all burned to the ground anyway. Your legacy.”

Milton looked at him, cast with a new light. “You!” He raged, comprehension dawning upon his features.

The years spent were not in vain. Leigh had emptied the caches and set ablaze the husks till they dried out beneath the desert sun. Hunted and shot down every accountable man down to the last dregs, and then turned the marshall’s own paranoia against him, pitting the law to finally catch and corral every exposed sin. Squeezed in the tightening walls until he sat alone and afraid in a carriage headed west, running on the fumes of exhaustion.

“My da taught me to skin a rabbit when I was ten.” He said thoughtfully. “First time the knife touched the carcass fur, I damn near pitched a crying fit. Never could look at any sort of meat after that without seeing that pair of dead eyes.” His finger twitched against the fine trigger, but right before he pulled, “‘Course, I saw them next when I pulled my son from the horse you tied him to. I recognized him alright, beaten and bloodied to a pulp. Did you think I wouldn’t remember you?”

Colour drained from sallow flesh. A wet gasp, “Wait–”

He fired. A red hole bloomed between pieces of skull, white fragments shaking loose as the body slumped back over, finally wordless. He hoped the howling winds goin’ past were adequate to muffle the sound, but it didn’t matter. He breathed in the sweetest coppery perfume, and even though the ache in his chest would never subside until death, there was a satisfaction to be found. Like revealing a hidden winning hand of cards. Violence was an old dance partner; hand in hand, the closing salvo slowed their tandem steps and he bid it farewell with a parting gift.

The music, slowing to a stop.

The death of this way of life approached, as swift as its rider upon a pale horse. Carried by the tracks through and past the wilderness– the beckoning siren song of uncharted lands and arid, untamed towns– he glanced back and did mourn what was lost. Outside, he leant upon the railing at the tail-end of that carriage, and allowed the revolver to slip free from his lax fingers onto the spurred sandy ground, tangling it to rest upon the undergrowth of thistle and cattails. The blue horizon sprawled ever on, and as he watched the swelling crescent of yarrow upon countless fields, pale and pretty, white petals hunched over yellow, he was content to slip away into the day.

The peace ahead beckoned more strongly now.

The city ahead.

Written By: Trishta

Edited By: Ryan

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