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to leave known witnesses breathing. At least that was what he’d heard about himself in small towns and large, wherever he’d visited quietly, where people thought they knew him but didn’t realize they were talking to the man of flesh himself, and not just the man of rumor.
    â€œThat’s not the sort of help I was looking for,” said Haskell as he glanced down at the oozing head of McGinley. He knew that soon a crowd would close in, attracted by the god-awful noise revolvers made. But there was nothing for it. He had to have the innards of that cashbox, and the fastest way was a bullet.
    Grady liked the way sudden, sharp actions had of blazing right through all the expected yammering and chitter-chatter. All he wanted was the money, maybe a free drink, and then . . . gone. He’d get that this morning too, but in the form of the still-locked cashbox and a nearly full bottle of Crow Dog rye.
    Yes, voices drew closer, clumping along the narrow sprung-plank boardwalk out front. But Haskell was already out the same door he’d entered. Through the narrow storage room, then the alley to his waiting horse, the fidgety roan. If he had known what the beast would be like, he would have opted for a different one. But he had to admit the horse had bottom. He’d tested it three times since leaving Oregon and heading southward.
    Each barroom raid had resulted in less money than he had expected, but enough to get him to the next town. The one thing he always tried to avoid was hard work for someone else. Heck, he didn’t even like to spend much effort on his own behalf. Nothing more galling than sweating when he didn’t have to.
    By the time shouts from the alley reached him, he was already more than half a mile out of town toward a cluster of rocky gray spires visible to the southwest, jutting from the lodgepole pines like low storm clouds.
    Haskell snorted down a laugh. “Rubes, every one of them,” he said to the horse. “They’ll be coming and we’ll be gone. They always wait a little too long. They see the blood and they know they’re next. They let themselves think of their wives, the little ones, their good town lives, how hard their trips out here were.
    â€œThey let those comforting thoughts settle in and then, of course, it’s too late to give chase, to do much of anything but quiver and cry and mourn. Those few seconds plant the doubt, the fear.” Haskell smiled. That’s really what I do, he thought. I am a farmer of these fools, and their fears are my crops. He let out a snort. “I am a poet, horse. And don’t let nobody tell you different!”
    The metal cashbox, stuffed in one saddlebag, but too long to let him work the buckle properly, bounced in rhythm with the harried horse’s efforts. Its coiny contents clanked, alternately pleasing and annoying Haskell. He’d hoped for a heftier box, but hadn’t had the time to wait another day for the money from Saturday night’s affairs. Besides, he reasoned, there was no guarantee that the lummox of a bartender—different from the man he’d laid low, wouldn’t have taken the cash home or to the town bank.
    What he wouldn’t give for all the money in a rich town’s bank. . . . With that fulsome, comforting thought settling over his brain like a thick, drizzle-filled gray cloud, Grady Haskell booted the wide-eyed roan to a greater lunging pace and popped the cork from the mouth of the bottle of rye. He smiled as he guzzled what he regarded as a well-earned drink. But nowhere near as tasty as that first sip of champagne was going to be from that first bottle of many he was going to buy once he pilfered clean his first big, bursting bank.
    Only thing he needed was a handful of rubes willing to do all the things he didn’t have enough hands for. Elsewise he’d do the entire thing himself. But there was nothing saying he had to end up splitting