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worse than Kansas, but I was wrong.”
    â€œThe odds of your execution in Guthrie are rather long,” Houston said. “This isn’t the old days of Hanging Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith, where capital punishment was a form of mass entertainment. These are modern times, Mister Gamble, and there is much populist feeling. There has never been an execution at this prison. I doubt that you will be the first. Life in prison is a more likely sentence.”
    â€œI would rather be hanged.”
    Temple brushed his hair back from his forehead and looked at Gamble quizzically.
    â€œThere’s every chance that you’ll be extradited to Kansas to stand trial for the murder of Lester Burns. Kansas has the death penalty, but nobody’s been hanged for twenty-eight years. Under law, the governor must sign off on the execution, and since 1870 no governor has. But the man you killed was the governor’s brother-in-law. He might make an exception. If not, then you’ll be returned to Oklahoma Territory for the murders of the German cousins.”
    â€œSounds tiring.”
    â€œWhy did you kill Lester Burns?”
    â€œBecause the bastard deserved it.”
    â€œTell me about the events that led up to the killing. Did you know this man Burns?”
    â€œNot until a month ago. After hocking the fiddle, I found myself on the prairie near Caldwell, at a tent city of dope peddlers, whores, and gamblers. Anywhere cards are dealt, whiskey flows, and love is for sale, there’s money to be had. I aimed to have a little.”

S IX
    The tent city where Jacob Gamble had met Lester Burns was on the side of a red limestone bluff called Lookout Mount. In the halcyon days of the Chisholm Trail it was where the girls from the brothels in the wide-open cow town Caldwell would sit and watch for the next group of Texans coming north. Now that the proliferation of railroads had shut down the cattle drives and ended the era of the cowboy, Lookout Mount had become a crossroads, a watering hole for the lowest elements of two worlds, a shadowy place where a man, white or red, could get a drop of whiskey or buck the tiger or know something strange before crossing into the Nations or heading back to the States.
    The townsfolk called it Hell’s Front Porch.
    Gamble arrived on foot late one afternoon on the next to last day of 1897, a carpet of snow on the ground, his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his black coat, a north wind stinging the backs of his ears. The fingers of his left hand were touching the few silver dollars he had gotten from the fiddle.
    From a distance, the Porch looked like every other gamblers’ hell that Gamble had known during his thirty-five years in the West, a cluster of tents and shacks thrown up from whatever had been scavenged from abandoned cabins and barns nearby. But as he neared, he could see what appeared to be an old-fashioned round circus tent in yellow and black, with a rainbow of silk ribbons whipping from the apex. As he got closer, however, he could see that the cone-shaped structure wasn’t a circus tent at all, but a large old Plains Indian lodge.
    The lodge was a tilted cone that must have been forty feet in circumference at the base, and narrowed to a point at the smoke-darkened top some fifty feet above the ground, from which lodge poles bristled. Bits of bright colored cloth and rags were tied to the poles. A long slit down one side of the top was the smoke hole, with the smoke flaps opened like wings on either side. Smoke flowed from the top, and the upper two-thirds of the lodge glowed like a Chinese lantern from the firelight within.
    The black-and-yellow bands covered half of the lodge, the half facing town, while the other half—facing the Indian Nations—was covered in paintings depicting dozens of historical events in the history of whoever had owned the lodge. Gamble walked around the lodge in wonder, looking at primitive depictions of