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little bag open and shake one of the small, gelatin tablets into the palm of his hand. With his thumb and index finger, he plucked the pill out of his palm and, as Spurr opened his mouth and lifted his tongue, Trumbo set it inside the old lawman’s mouth.
    Spurr let the nitroglycerin tablet, prescribed by his doctor as the latest “heart-starting medicine,” dissolve under his tongue. As the nitro gently exploded in his chest, nudging his tucker and making it begin to beat more regularly, the mule eased itself up off Spurr’s sternum. The policeman was speaking to him, but Spurr wasn’t listening.
    His thoughts were with the girl, who’d taken a bullet meant for him.
    He heaved himself up onto all fours, crawled over to Jane, who lay staring through wide-open eyes at the sky while her tussled hair blew in the breeze around her pretty head.
    Her lips were spread, revealing her teeth, so that she almost appeared to be smiling.
    Blood puddled the simple, light brown dress she’d donned that morning to have breakfast at the Chinaman’s with the ragged old lawman.
    â€œOh, darlin’,” Spurr said, sorrow racking him, as he gently took the girl’s young face in his hands, brushing his thumbs across her eyes, closing them. “Oh, my dear sweet, beautiful darlin’!”

SIX

    Two weeks later, Spurr splashed whiskey into a tin cup and threw it back.
    He sighed, smacked his lips, and set the cup on the crude table he’d fashioned from a pine stump beside the bed in his two-room cabin on the slopes of Mount Rosalie. He lay his head back against his pillow and stared toward the front of the shack filled with brown shadows.
    It had been a warm day, and he’d propped his plank door open with a rock. Now the air was stitched with an autumnal chill. The light angling through it and through the low, sashed windows on each side of it, was touched with late-afternoon gold and speckled with dust motes.
    Night would be here soon. Spurr had gotten out of bed once to scrounge up a sandwich to go with the whiskey he’d been sipping since dawn, and once more to prop the door open with the rock.
    Outside, the dog who hung around the place started barking angrily. The sounds were harsh after an entire day filled with the peace and quiet of the bluffs and foothills rising toward the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, and the vaulting, cobalt-blue, high-altitude sky. A long, quiet day now interrupted near its end by the barking of that damn dog whom Spurr called simply Dawg and who’d come out of nowhere and stayed around the place even when Spurr wasn’t here, which was damn near all the time, though that would likely change now.
    If they were going to cohabitate indefinitely, Spurr and Dawg needed to come to terms.
    â€œGoddamnit, Dawg, shut your consarned mouth and go rustle up a porky-pine!”
    The dog’s barks did not dwindle in the least. In fact, they grew even more frantic. And then Spurr realized why as his sharp ears picked up the ominous ratcheting hiss of a rattlesnake.
    â€œAh, shit.”
    Spurr flung his single sheet back and dropped his stocking-clad feet to the floor. He rose with a heavy groan, feeling his ticker lurch in his chest, and then, clad in only the socks and his threadbare longhandles, shuffled over to his cluttered eating table. His Starr .44 sat on the table, beside a tin plate from which Dawg had earlier removed Spurr’s steak bone from last night and chewed it, growling and whining his satisfaction, on the front stoop.
    Spurr grabbed the .44, spun the cylinder, and shuffled out onto the stoop and stood over the grease spot that was all that remained of the bone.
    The dog was running in circles about thirty feet out from the stoop, in the yard that was large patches of clay-colored dirt between yucca and mountain sage plants. In the middle of the dog’s rotation, and the focus of its attention, was a coiled diamondback that