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right glove, on his middle finger. The girl caressed the bearded cheek of the man in the stovepipe hat, then leaned forward to pick up her cards and cast a glance toward the bar.
    â€œHey, barkeep!” she called. “Bring us another bottle of that panther piss, will ya? It’s so bad it makes me wanna blow both your eyes out the back of your head, but if it’s all you got, I reckon . . .”
    Her eyes found Fletcher standing and aiming the shotgun from the bottom of the stairs. She smiled brightly, weird green eyes—eyes like a cat’s—flashing under the green war paint, two locks of copper-red, green-streaked hair falling down her shoulders to frame her breasts. “Hey, look who’s here! It’s the lawdog!”
    She lowered her cards and continued to regard Fletcher as though he were the parson and she were a sweet little bride preparing for her wedding ceremony. “Come on over here and have a drink, lawdog. It’s the worst hooch I’ve ever tasted in my nineteen-goin’-on-twenty years, and I’ll prob’ly be blind by sundown, but I reckon if you live around here, you’re used to it.”
    The others had shifted their gazes to Fletcher now, too. They looked at him with sneering amusement, like schoolboys who’d turned a turtle onto its back to see what it would do or how long it would take to die.
    The look-alike in the brown-checked suit said, “Yeah, he was in here before, his panties all in a twist on account what you and Captain Sykes and Heinz were doin’ upstairs.”
    â€œOh, really ?” the girl said, her tone and her stare hardening as she leaned back against the shoulder of the gent in the stovepipe hat. “And why shouldn’t I kill my brother’s killer, pray tell?”
    Fletcher raised the shotgun’s butt to his shoulder and aimed at the middle of the table, keeping all six faces within his field of vision. The black man had frozen in the act of dealing, looking up at Fletcher from beneath his thick brows, the whites around his dark eyes glowing in the shadows.
    â€œKeep your hands above the table,” Fletcher ordered. “You’re all under arrest.”
    They all looked at Fletcher with indifferent expressions, as though he were only a momentary interruption in their card game—like a swamper wanting to scrub the floor beneath their table or a house girl clearing their empty glasses.
    The redhead leaned back against the shoulder of the stovepipe-hatted gent once more and sneered, her smooth cheeks dimpling. “You’re being silly, lawdog. Downright foolhardy. You know who we are?”
    Out the corner of his left eye, Fletcher saw the bartender, Carstairs, standing tensely behind the mahogany, staring toward Fletcher and the table.
    â€œNorman, you still have the sawed-off under the bar?”
    â€œReckon.”
    â€œPull it out, make sure it’s loaded.”
    Carstairs stepped to one side, bent down, and came up holding the short-barreled ten-gauge with a braided rawhide cord. He breeched it, peered down the tubes, then snapped it back together.
    â€œWhat do you want me to do with it?”
    â€œAim it. Any of these folks so much as twitches a gun toward me, cut loose with one of your wads. Consider yourself deputized.”
    Fletcher kept his gaze on the table, opening and closing his right hand around his own shotgun’s fore stock. The outlaws continued to stare back at him with that infuriating condescension.
    â€œVery slowly, one at a time,” Fletcher said, “I want each of you to reach down beneath the table and, one at a time, bring your weapons up and set them on top of the table. Pistols, knives, swords—whatever you’re carryin’.” He glanced at the man nearest him, the triplet in the checked suit and sombrero. “Sir, we’ll start with you. Nice and slow or I’ll blow a hole through your back wide enough to drive a wagon