CHAPTER ONE
The Widowmaker bent over the dead horse's skeleton and snapped the jawbone from its skull. Straightening, he swayed and tottered on his feet while the heat waves in the canyon shimmered around him. He kept hold of the jawbone, but clutched the wound in his side with the other hand. The scars on his face, old scars and newer scars, stood out plainly on the burnt brown of his skin as he squinted up at the molten sky and cursed the desert and everything to do with it under his breath.
It was a burning land he stood upon, where shade was as scarce as water; where the rocks were scorched like cinders and left so lava-hot that they would sear bare flesh at a touch. It was no place for a man, especially for a man on foot without water, and with a ragged hole in his side.
He shifted his gaze back the way he had come, through the chain of rugged mountains and canyons leading up from the desert valley, and to the far side of that valley and the blow sand there. Those dunes were miles and miles behind him, but his memory of them was as clear as if he could see them now. Those shifting, blowing mounds continually reshaped themselves under the hot wind, one grain of sand at a time. The boot prints he had left in those dunes two days before were likely already gone, as if he had never existed in that place at all, a story told and untold. The distance between there and where he now stood was as good a place to die as any he had ever traveled, only he wasn't dead, not yet.
Sixty miles or more he had come, a great deal of that on foot, one staggering step at a time, bleeding until the blood, too, dried up like the rest of him, and then up through the rocky, barren canyons, working himself westward. The hot ground blistered the soles of his feet through his thin boot soles and rocks cut him when he fell. And fall he did, more than once, and each time it took him longer to get back up. Nothing but rage and sheer stubbornness carried him on.
Water—he had thought about it for every one of those miles out of the dune sand and across the valley and suffered for want of it. The pain of the bullet wound in his side was child's play compared to that thirst.
And yet, he kept going, the line of his travel straight and true, even though he knew not the hellish country through which he passed. It wasn't any landmark or some distinctive feature of the treeless, rock-pile mountains to the west that guided him, but rather the occasional hoof print pressed into the earth ahead of him, or here and there where one of those same iron-shod hooves had scored a rock or crushed some brittle desert plant beneath its weight. He wasn't an exceptional tracker, even less so in his current condition, but his bloodshot eyes locked on to the horse tracks, homing in on them like a man reaching for a rope to pull him out of a dark pit. He had become a manhunter, and not for the first time in his life.
He gave one last glance at the desiccated, mummified skeleton of the dead horse lying in the rocks at his feet, the same skeleton that he had jerked the jawbone from. It was hard to tell how long the horse had been dead, a single year or a hundred years. The desert was like that, burning the juices out of you until you were nothing but bits of leather and bone, and then preserving your pitiful remnants to the point that the ancient was new and the new was ancient, everything equally withered and dry.
There was an old, dry-rotted saddle and saddle blanket with the horse's skeleton, and the Widowmaker put a boot against the saddle and gave a shove. The bones scattered and fell apart, and he could feel his own pieces falling away, creaking and popping and crumbling, no matter how hard he tried to keep himself together.
A rattlesnake under the saddle, its shade disturbed, slithered through the horse skeleton's rib bones and then coiled and posed to strike. Its unblinking eyes stared at the man thing that had torn down its kingdom and its tail rattles buzzed as dry and brittle as death.
He ignored the rattlesnake and walked on, the jawbone in his fist swinging at his side. The hoof prints he had been following led up a canyon, so that was the way he went. The only sound in his head was the sound of his worn boot soles scraping and scuffing over the rough ground and the slow, dull throb of his heartbeat pounding in his head.
His stride was uneven and short, especially for a man of his height, but the only way to go left to him was slow. He was so tired that he couldn't tell if the heat waves had grown worse ahead of him or if it was simply that his eyes refused to focus.
As it was, it was nearing sundown when the canyon made a sharp bend to the west around the foot of a rocky mountain point. He rounded that turn and saw a clump of palm trees against a bluff not a hundred yards higher up the canyon. Such trees in the desert likely marked an oasis of some kind, a spring, tank, or some source of water belowground. He blinked once, and then twice, to make sure he was seeing what he was seeing.
There was a trickle of smoke floating up from the campfire someone had built in that grove of palm trees. At the sight of the smoke he forgot about the water and he forgot about his wounds, and he gripped the jawbone in his right fist until the line of ivory teeth in it cut into his fingers.
They would be up there in those palms—seven guns or maybe more, the same men who had left him for dead out on the dunes. The jawbone scraped against the empty pistol holster on his right hip when he shifted his grip on it, and a drop of blood fell onto one of his boot toes from his bleeding hand.
He started toward the palm trees in the evening dusk, making no attempt at stealth, and something hotter than the desert furnace burning in his eyes. "Leave me for dead, will you? Well, I ain't dead yet, but you're going to wish to hell I was."
CHAPTER TWO
Six days earlier, San Bernardino, California
Newt Jones woke with an aching back and a bad attitude. The aching back was a symptom of the sagging mattress on the jailhouse cot he had slept on, and the bad attitude was a result of the month he had spent locked up in a ten-by-ten cell. The morning sunlight shined through the single, barred window at the foot of his cot and struck him full in the face, worsening his mood and causing him to squint and scowl. He was always grouchy when he first got up.
He threw a forearm across his eyes to shield against the sunlight and groaned as he swung his legs off the cot and sat upright. It took him several minutes to decide whether it was worth all the trouble to get up and to come fully awake, but he finally managed to rake back his hair from his brow and settle a crumpled black hat on his head before he stood and went to the window.
Four men were crossing the street going dead away from him, their voices receding as they went. No matter how their voices faded, they were loud enough for Newt to surmise that it had been their conversation that had woken him. Undoubtedly, they had begun their talk under his window and were now moving elsewhere. He scowled again, rubbed a pointer finger absentmindedly along the crooked bridge of his nose, and watched them stop on the other side of the street. The one doing most of the talking had taken a stance on the raised boardwalk in front of Kerr's Emporium, the town's biggest general store, and the other men remained in front of the speaker on the edge of the street.
The man on the boardwalk was tall and thin and dressed in a white shirt, blue denim pants, and high-topped boots. Other than that, Newt couldn't make out much more about him, for the tipped-down brim of the man's hat hid most of his facial features. The distance was too great and the man was talking too quietly for Newt to make out the words, but from the his hand gestures and the way he had the group's attention he was either quite the orator or had something really interesting to say.
The sound of a door opening behind Newt caused him to turn around to watch the city marshal come into the walkway between the row of cells down either side of it. Buck Tillerman was a tidy, stocky fellow with a short-brimmed gray hat as pale as the walrus mustache that draped over his upper lip. The marshal took hold of the Saint Christopher medallion watch fob dangling from the chain across the front of his vest and pulled out a pocket watch which he frowned over, moving the watch farther from his face and to arm's length to properly focus on the time.
"Morning, Marshal," Newt said as he came over to grip the bars of the door to his cell. "When I heard you I figured you were the jailer coming with my breakfast."
"No sense in costing the taxpayers the price of another meal to feed you," the marshal said.
"Well, let me out of here," Newt said when the marshal made no move to open the cell.
Marshal Tillerman continued to monitor the watch face and never bothered to look up at Newt, much less reply to him.
"You're actually counting off my time?" Newt asked.
"Thirty days Judge Kerr gave you, and thirty days is what you'll serve. Not a minute less. Although I'm good and ready to get rid of you, I'll tell you that," the marshal said after he gave a short grunt. "I prefer my prisoners less on the surly side and more repentant."
"This jail cell isn't exactly good for morale and pleasant demeanor."
"You remember that the next time you come to my town." The marshal pocketed the watch and sorted through a ring of keys. "I told you to call off the fight, but still you and that gambling crowd had to try it anyway on the sneak."
"No harm in a little friendly pugilism to pass the time." Newt shrugged.
It was a reoccurring argument between them, almost daily, and one too late to win. Bringing it up again was nothing but sheer stubbornness, but Newt did it anyway. And rankling the marshal had become something of a sport for him to fight the melancholy and boredom, and a sort of minor revenge when he could have no other kind.
"I don't make the laws. Tell that to the reformers in the governor's office or the legislature if you're of a mind to," the marshal said.
"From what I hear, nobody's enforced that prizefighting law out here since they passed it better'n thirty years ago."
"It's still the law, and the Judge is a real stickler for what's right and proper."
"Judge Kerr, I'd as soon never see him again. Once in front of his bench is enough. That old highbinder wouldn't happen to be the owner of that store out yonder?" Newt jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the window looking out on the mercantile across the street.