The man on the train was very dead. The metal band of the fountain pen embedded in his throat reflected the evening light like a sunset shining off a distant lake. There was less blood than I would have guessed; just a bright bloom fanned beneath his bowtie and a thin trickle, beginning to crust, ran from the corner of his mouth. Sheafs of paper lay pasted to the car's muddy floorboards.
His killer sat next to him, six inches away, eyes closed, chin and bushy beard resting on his chest. A giant of a man, his face was mostly hidden behind his greasy black hair, hanging down like crow's wings. The killer wore the clean, plain clothes of a ranch hand: a blue chambray work shirt and jeans, faded colorless over slick bottomed riding boots. The giant seemed oblivious to the four of us crammed into the narrow aisle diagonal to him. The smell of burning coal drifted back to us as we sat unmoving in the Laramie Station.
The conductor broke the silence. He whispered, gesturing at the giant, "He been sittin' just like that since he done it. Twenty damn people in the car watched him snatch the quill from that poor boy's hand. Never said a word to him, just buried it in him right as we was pullin' into station. Didn't say a peep. Craziest damn thing I ever saw."
After, the killer had simply closed his eyes and gone to sleep, waiting, it seemed, for us to come and take him away.
'Us' was me and my two deputies, Bullington and Carter. Bullington was craven and would be worthless as tits on a bull if this went sideways, but Carter seemed okay. He was new and I'd never seen him in action, but he'd cut his teeth at Antietam and although that was a dozen years ago, I guessed he'd be just fine if it came to it.
I cleared my throat. The killer raised his head slowly and looked at me. His eyes were a queer amber color, almost golden. I saw pure evil there, like the devil had caught a ride from Cheyenne to Laramie and found himself a soul to steal. My forty-five was still in its holster. I'd learned through experience to save the iron until it was the only option. Instead, I held a coil of rope. The man the conductor had sent sprinting to the office had breathlessly told us that this man was the biggest goddamn cocksucker he'd ever seen, so I'd brought the rope. Good thing, too. The man wasn't exaggerating. No way this giant would fit in the iron cuffs.
Carter moved away and slid along the front of the empty seats until he was facing the killer directly. If the man had a gun and drew quick, he might get one of us, but he'd die where he sat. But the killer's eyes never left mine. Bullington and the conductor had inched their way back toward the exit and seemed ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.
"Did you kill this man?" I finally asked. The question seemed absurd, given the circumstances, like asking a puppy sitting next to a turd if he'd shit on the carpet, but it didn't seem like he was going to volunteer the information on his own.
The killer glanced at his dead seatmate. If he felt any emotion, he didn't show it. Instead, he smiled at me. His teeth were tombstones, big and white and straight in the black bush of his beard, and his smile was genuine: the smile of a child getting a kitten or a man seeing his bride on his wedding day. I had a flash, sudden as a lightning strike, that I'd seen that smile before. The man was thirty, maybe younger, at least a decade younger than me, but I would've remembered his sheer size if I'd seen him before. 
"You caught me," he finally said. "Brilliant detective work. Just stunning. Don't know how you solved it."
He held his hands out to me, still smiling.
"You armed?" I asked.
"Had a pen somewhere," he said, patting his breast pockets. "Oh yeah, there it is." He looked at the dead man then fixed his golden eyes back on me. 
"Carter," I said without turning away from the smiling giant. "I want you to shoot this man in the face if he so much as twitches. Got it?"
"Got it."
Carter pulled his Colt as I cinched the rope tightly around the giant's wrists. My hands trembled with the realization that he was big and strong enough to kill me with his bare hands if he took a mind to it, but he didn't move; he just kept the same satisfied smile on his face. When I stood him up his head nearly brushed the seven-foot-tall ceiling, but he followed docilely enough as I led him out of the car and along the wide boardwalk that flanked Main Street. Carter followed, pistol trained on the giant's back, and Bullington brought up the rear. The four of us naturally fell into step as we walked, as is often the case with former military men, our heels beating a steady rhythm on the pine boards that might have been a death knell. For whom, I couldn't have said. 
The Sherriff's office was most expensive building in Wyoming territory. Completed in the summer, it was a squat brick building, plain and square and handsome in an austere sort of way. The office area in front, overlooking Main Street, had three plain desks. My own small office was tucked into the corner. The back of the building, accessed through a thick oak door, housed six small—and currently empty—holding cells, three on each side of a wide walkway. The black iron bars still gleamed, the paint not yet worn away by the desperate hands of desperate men.
My prisoner refused to tell me his name, but was otherwise the model of good behavior, as far as that goes. His name didn't truly matter for his punishment; justice wasn't delayed for something so trivial, else we'd never get a name again, but leaving that end untied was shoddy detective work, and I vowed to do my best to pry it out of him. He was almost certainly wanted somewhere for something, and it would be the decent thing to do to give that community, wherever it was, closure.
He readily admitted to killing the man on the train—a newly hired newspaperman, it turned out—and signed the matter-of-fact confession I wrote out for him with no fuss. He told me the scratching of the newspaperman's nib got to be too much to bear, so he silenced the pen. It was full dark by the time I got done with all the paperwork, never my strong suit.
Laramie, like most frontier towns, moved quickly where justice was concerned. Develop a reputation as soft on crime, the thinking went, and you'd soon find yourself a haven for all manner of thieves, cutthroats and bandits. Better to hang first and tease out the details later. With the signed confession and eyewitness accounts, it was not deemed necessary to have a jury trial. The killer still refused to give his name but, the judge ruled, he was to be hanged at noon on Saturday anyway, three days away.
Saturday dawned clear and cold. The October wind carried the cruel bite of winter down through vast fields of useless brown grass, around the great boulders the Indians worshipped and through the needles of towering Ponderosa Pines, then down past the scrubby little mesquites to the valley floor, through chinks in log cabins and cracks in pine siding and through poorly sealed windows and doorframes, and finally into the bones and hearts of men, where no fire could keep the chill at bay. Winter came early here, and it was a hard time, and men became beasts in hard times.
Bullington, the craven, stayed with me in the jailhouse while Carter oversaw the erection of the gallows in the town square and kept an eye out for anything out of place. I couldn't shake the feeling that something about this didn't add up. I always tried to treat condemned men with compassion, but I also understood that a man with nothing left to lose can turn desperate in a hurry. And this particular condemned man looked strong enough to pull me right through the six-inch gaps in the bars if I let him get a grip on me, a thought that crossed my mind as I handed his bowl of stew through the waist-high horizontal slot in his cell. I returned with a chair and my own bowl of the same stew and sat, safely out of arm's reach. A death sentence often gets a man to talking, and I thought I'd redouble my efforts to squeeze a name and maybe a motive from this stranger, who had barely uttered a word since the train. Bullington stayed cloistered in the front area.
We ate in silence, our spoons scraping against the wooden bowls. Finally, the stranger spoke.
"What time you got, Sheriff?"
I pulled my pocket watch from my vest. "Almost ten. Two hours to go."
"You still want my name?"
"Only if you want to give it. Hardly matters now."
"You want to know why I done it?"
"Sure I do. Whole town wants to know."
I sat still. I didn't want to say or do anything that might break the spell and turn the man away from telling me what he wanted to tell me. What would possess a man— who, in his brief confinement and appearance before the judge, didn't seem any crazier than me—to kill a stranger in cold blood on a crowded train? And who was he? Was he running away from something, or toward something, or was he just one of those poor men, condemned by some twist of fate, some defect of the brain, to eventually break with reality? I'd certainly seen my share of those types, both during the war and after: men who had seen too much killing and experienced too much horror until something just snapped inside them, but this man wasn't old enough to have fought in the war.
"Tell you what, Sheriff. I'll give you both answers. Who I am and why I really killed that fella. But first, I'd like to tell you a story."
I nodded.
"I come from down Arkansas way," he said. My pulse quickened. I'd spent the worst months of my life in Arkansas. Every man who has experienced combat loses a little bit of himself. To be able to kill a man—or many men—and not get torn up about it, you must first convince yourself that the enemy is less human than you are. By convincing yourself of that, you become less human yourself. Some of us could snap back out of it, once the fighting was over, while some never could get over it. But everyone that's experienced it, I suspected, came out the other end changed in some way. Life takes on a bit of a different meaning when you've seen the other side, and I'd done things in Arkansas that I tried not to think about now.
"Little town," he continued, a southern accent that I hadn't noticed before creeping into his cadence."'Bout a hour's ride south a Little Rock. Grew up on a plantation. Nothin' grand, raised some livestock, a little rice, a little cotton. Couple a slaves to work the land. I can't say we always treated 'em right, but then, I don't know nobody who did, no matter what they say now. We treated 'em like property, 'cause that's what they was. My Daddy was a believer in settin' examples.