2. Sun Prairie (Next Town Over the Novel chapter 3)

Hunter was of the opinion all these Midwestern towns looked alike and for the most part Sun Prairie didn’t do much to turn him from this line of thinking. Indeed, it was very like Lookback: another little huddled main street afloat in a yellow ocean of grass, though this one perched on a short bluff overlooking a valley full of its eponymous sun flowers. It had a bigger hotel than Lookback had, though, probably owing to gawpers coming to see the aforementioned blooms, and while it was only afternoon, the hotel became Hunter’s singular focus. He hadn’t slept for close to three days and the prospect of doing it in an approximation of a bed was a temptation that could not be denied, even if lingering in town for any longer than it took to cross into the valley of sun flowers was beyond the scope of his plans.

Ignoring the gnawing sense that it was a terrible idea he steered Diamonds for that corner hotel. He hadn’t even drawn up at a hitching post and the place’s whores-in-residence were after him with all the thirsty, unwanted purpose of mosquitoes. They’d caught the scent of his trailworn loneliness, the sight of his expensive horse and clothing, dusty as they all were. There were three of them: two dark women of Eurybais and a white girl with hair that was – Hunter didn’t want to look at her, directly, but he could see it at the edges of his vision – almost red.

“Afternoon, Mister!” she sang from the hotel’s generous porch, and then politeness forced John to look at her finally, and smile, for the half second it took him to yank his hat brim down back over his eyes in acknowledgement. He swung down from Diamonds and busied himself tying the grey stallion up where he could easily reach the water trough. He’d inquire about getting the horse something decent to eat within, but first…

The almost-red-haired girl was sauntering down the hotel’s front stairs to intercept him. The other two hadn’t moved; either they could read his disinterest better than their young coworker or they’d decided to let her have him. “Fine day, ain’t it,” she said. “Lookin’ to start it off with a bang?”

Finally, he looked at her properly. Looked down at her, really, because she wasn’t even shoulder-high to him. Her almost-red hair was long and pulled up into a fetchingly untidy pile of Arteridean coils. For the briefest second he considered it, considered her. He hadn’t really touched another person since … well, thatdidn’t bear consideration. He was lonely, anyway, and the distraction couldn’t hurt. But the fact was he doubted the average whore had it in them to entertain him in the manner to which he was accustomed, and they made him uncomfortable, besides. Hunter decided, impulsively, to return the favor.

He stepped toward her, into intimate proximity such that that they were almost touching and he was looking directly down at her, his broad white hat shadowing her admittedly pretty face. “And what if I said yes?” he posed in a private purr, and he watched her eyes for any ghost of fear or glint of recognition. And he saw it: she was afraid of him. He couldn’t know, obviously, if it was because she’d seen a wanted poster or because she recognized him on a more visceral level as something she ought, wisely, to be afraid of, or because her line of work just bred caution in the wise, but she was.

He managed a somewhat brittle smile in appreciation of her mercenary self-mastery. “Second thought, darlin’, I’m here on a spiritual pilgrimage. It wouldn’t do to have my devotions muddied with … ” He took her naked white fingers in his gloved hand and brushed them with his lips in the briefest allusion to a kiss. “Impure thoughts.”

Something in her smile warmed; unfurled with genuine interest at the clear consideration she was being afforded. And then, goddamnit all, he found he almost regretted his decision as he turned, quickly, and jogged up the stairs.

* * *

The red-haired woman trudged determinedly though the sea of yellow prairie, and eventually found what wasn’t exactly a road but was certainly a well-traveled way between scattered towns: a couple of bare, hard wagon ruts slicing through the otherwise thigh-high grass. It was a warm, early autumn day, vibrating with the codas of summer insects, and the sky was an eternity of blue you could just about feel yourself falling into, but she had eyes only for the revolver in her hand, which she was vainly twiddling with, a driver in her teeth. Hunter had ruined the action, hopelessly, until she had access to somewhere she could fabricate or at least scavenge and bodger in some new components.

Escaping the noose had been trivial. Among other things secreted in her arsenal was a gleaming stainless steel scalpel, and she’d dug it out as soon as Hunter had left with Diamonds. Her only hurry was to somehow outpace them, but even that seemed easily achieved since Hunter had to sleep sometime. He was yet a man, after all.

She’d been walking for a full day, mechanically, unhalting, lost in thoughts of slipping the scalpel between Hunter’s cervical vertebrae and how he’d fold, helpless and boneless, beneath her, when she heard the jangle of horses under harness. She turned and saw dust rising faintly over the rise she’d just come from, back up along the not-a-quite-road. She stopped, quickly screwed together what was left of the pistol receiver in her hand, and holstered it.

The long ears of a pair of mules crested the hilltop first. A dark bay and a parti-colored paint pulled a rickety wagon with a covered load in its bed and a mess of mining hardware lashed to its sides. As it trundled down the slope toward her, she could make out the pair in the driver’s seat: two men with the look of brothers. They shared a shaggy blond hair and a general aspect, though the man driving the team for the moment looked a bit bigger and a lot more careworn than his slimmer sibling. The elder, undoubtedly, he wore an old sheepskin coat and a lot of very practical looking homespun. The younger brother wore a leather jacket with fringe so long it gave him the look of bird wings, over plaid, and his hatband was crusted with conchos, glaring in the noonday sun. The red haired woman also noticed the glint of the big metal buckle on his gun rig. He wore a pearl-gripped service pistol, a long-barreled six iron: the kind the Republican Army had handed out to soldiers of distinction after the war.

The brother driving the team pulled them up alongside the red-haired woman, but before he could reshuffle the reins in his fingers to tip his hat the younger brother was leaning exuberantly out of the wagon, manners if indeed he possessed any forgotten. “Afternoon, stranger!” he called unselfconsciously, “Whatchu doin’ way out this way?”

Up until this point the red-haired woman’s face had been largely obscured by the wide brim of her hat; she angled her head now to look up at them, sidelong, a birdlike motion, and only then did they see the pale of her, her burning eyes, and it caused them to notice, in turn, how singed her clothing was, the marks at her throat almost like rope burns, but no—they weren’t red enough. Nothing about her was red enough; she had an eerily bloodless cast in general. Both brothers shrunk away, the elder almost imperceptibly, his mastery over himself better, the younger in a broad and wide-eyed recoil. The older brother then elbowed the younger, and the younger appended a flustered “…Ma’am!”.

The elder brother was gathering himself to attempt a revision of this entire meeting when the red-haired woman spoke, in a voice like rain on a campfire: “How far is the nearest town?”

Thankful for the direction, the elder answered: “Nearest? Prob’ly be Lookback, but seems you’re headin’ away from there, same as us. Good on you, too: just been some trouble there. Strange stuff.”

“Where are you bound, then?” she asked, approaching the bay mule’s near side. The mule shied, subtly and slowly, away from her, shoulder twitching as if fly-bit.

“Wandering Gulch,” the older brother answered, eyes narrowing as he noted the mule. “’Bout a day due northwest.”

“What’s in Wandering Gulch,” the woman pressed.

“It’s a biggish mining camp—” the older brother began to answer, but he was interrupted by the younger man, who cut in, verbally and bodily, throwing his arms wide:

“They got everythin’! Saloon, gambling hall, cathouses till breakfast—“

“Saintssakes, Markus!”

The younger brother, whose name was apparently Markus, shrunk, gloves parting his hat from his blonde hair to nervously scratch his head and look away sidelong. “S’pose you wouldn’t be interested none in any of that, ma’am, no.”

The red hair woman just stared at him, flatly and incuriously.

The elder brother cleared his throat. “I’m Lawrence Westcott and this here’s my kid brother Markus.”

The woman hesitated in her response. What, after all, to say? But eventually, she said “Vane Black.”

“Can we offer you a lift, Miss Black,” Lawrence said, and while he dreaded her response he had to admit her appearance concerned him. “Respectfully, truth be told, you don’t look so good.”

* * *

Two coins danced over the backs of Hunter’s gloved fingers before he slapped them down. “Best room you got, I suppose, whatever that is. Possible to get a bath?”

The woman behind the counter traded the coins for a key. She was almost hilariously prim-looking considering the number of whores openly working her hotel, in her starched beige coat with her white shirt collar buttoned up to her chin. “We can draw you a bath, sure. Need to stable a horse? It’s in the back. You can take him round while we send up the water.” She slid a registry with a pen and inkpot perched on it across the countertop.

Hunter didn’t look at the book: he put down a third coin, grabbed the key, and turned for the hotel’s broad central stairs.

“Would you like to register please?” the clerk called after him, helplessly, but Hunter bounded up the steps without a glance over his shoulder.

“I’m gonna get out of this filthy overcoat and then see to my horse,” Hunter called back. “I ain’t fit to be seen.”

* * *

They’d driven for hours, in long tracts of silence where hoofbeats on dry packed earth, jingling harness and shrilling late summer cicadas all seemed oppressively loud for the lack of conversation: tracts broken periodically and startlingly by Markus’ guileless observations and anecdotes.

He was by then explaining the history and context of their present circumstance: “So this big mining outfit moves in, puttin’ all the regular folks out of business, right, so I say to Lawrence, ‘Hell Lawrence, we got nothing here but our soldierin’ money; let’s load a cart and run a bunch of stuff they need up there!’ You know, hardware, mining stuff. Better still, let’s level the playing field some, you know?” Here he flung his arms wide, jostling Black into Lawrence, who shuddered away reflexively much as his mule had earlier. “So we’re runnin’ dynamite!”

Lawrence tutted, wearily, his shoulders relaxing back into their previous slump. “You tryin’ to scare the lady, Markus? Sam hell, take it easy.”

But Vane Black had put an arm over the seat’s backrest to swivel around and regard the wagon’s tarp-covered cargo with redoubled interest. Lawrence couldn’t see her face, though, and likely taking the motion for nervousness, forced his hard features into what he hoped would pass for a reassuring smile, and kept talking. “Sort of a volatile plan, ain’t it. Kind of … whatchucallit … metaphorical. Sums us up good.”

She was still looking thoughtfully backward at all that dynamite, though, unresponsive, so he continued: “What about you, ma’am. What were you doin’ way out here with no provisions to speak of? Seems like there must be some kinda story there.”

She turned forward again, finally, but she didn’t look at him: she was looking ahead down the dirt track, a flinty and faraway expression on what he could see of her white face beneath the broad black brim. “Looking for someone,” she said eventually.

“Well, good thing we come upon you!” Markus remarked. He was utterly oblivious, as far as Lawrence could tell, to the strangeness of their passenger. “Like Lawrence said, you don’t look so good. You look kinda faint. White. Like maybe you got more than a touch of the consump—”

“Markus!” Lawrence hollered, and his little brother recoiled, leaning dangerously off the driver’s seat in doing so, but still Vane Black seemed wholly unfazed. She was staring at a rough-hewn signpost up ahead: just a timber, really, with two shingles on which someone had scratched names for the upcoming forks in the path. One led slightly northward, toward hills that were doubtless formidable but at this distance were just a blue band on the horizon: that was the way to the brothers’ Wandering Gulch and its cathouses and regular folks in need of hardware. The other path ran southwest, into nearer yellow hills and holloways that largely obscured anything beyond. This way was marked “Sun Prairie.”

“What’s in Sun Prairie?” Black said, flatly, as oblivious to Markus’s consumption comment as he’d been.

“Sunflowers,” Lawrence replied, with a hint of disdain which Markus evidently took great umbrage at. The younger brother leaned over across Vane’s lap to snarl a correction:

“They ain’t just ‘sunflowers’, goddamnit Lawrence, they’re Sun Flowers.”

Black wasn’t sure she appreciated the distinction he was trying to make and apparently Lawrence didn’t either, because he rolled his eyes and said with a patronizing smile: “Folks exaggerate, Markus. I’m sure they’re just tryin’ to get people down there.”

Markus slammed a fist into the open gloved palm of his other hand, angry. They’d evidently debated this before. “Damnit, Lawrence. Godammnit. You’re no fun and you got no imagination, I swear. Didn’t you learn nothin’ fightin’ alongside all those folks in the war. They ain’t yeller weeds like you’re thinkin’! I heard all about it. They burn in the dark, light up the night like it’s daylight ‘n’ everythin’. Like magic. Or maybe, I dunno, not like magic but just plain magic. So help me, when we’ve sold off this minin’ junk—“

This shattered Lawrence’s patient, placid smile and now he, too, turned to yell rather rudely across Black at his brother. “This was your idea, Markus!”

“Well irregardless….” Markus said, staring huffily away toward Sun Prairie. “When we’re done with it we’ll head down there and see it ourselves. I’ll show you.”

Lawrence sighed, eyes on the mules and the oncoming crossroads. “Regardless, Ma’am,” he said, “Sun prairie’s got tourists, and some kinda flowers.”

There was a click, and both brothers looked inward at Vane Black, and found themselves staring down the barrels of both her pistols. She was banking on their unfamiliar construction confusing the point of their present usability as she said: “Time we parted ways.”

* * *

Hunter had taken Diamonds around the corner from the hotel’s dooryard, through a little alleyway separating it from its good-sized stable building and into a sunny paddock area of dirt packed rock-hard by countless shod hooves.  He’d shed his overcoat and indeed the body coat beneath was white enough to approach respectability but his shirt was so impossibly dusty and slack with sweat by this point he’d given up; he reached up to loosen his tie and the topmost button of his collar. The hell with it. Who was going to see? Whores? The hostler?

His hand was still at his throat, untangling his red velvet tie the rest of way when a woman walked out of the stable and stopped, staring.

“Well now,” she said. “There’s a handsome fellow.”

John knew, of course, that she was talking about Diamonds: she was already crossing the yard to take him by the reins and wasn’t looking at him and his damp collar and slack tie at all. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with the presumptuousness of her touching his horse without his leave but wanted, as always, to phrase an objection amiably, but she’d disarmed him in a way that took him back to Ellen Cauley, and he knew, looking at her and making this unconscious connection to his awkward youth, that he was done for.

She was tall, not so tall as he was but unlike the girl on the front steps he couldn’t have effortlessly rested his chin on her head, that’s for sure. She had dark, Ellen Cauleyish hair in an untidy, purely functional bun, with sweaty strands loose in her freckled face. She was well-muscled, a career wrangler for a certainty, wearing trousers that fit powerful thighs a little too tightly, a formerly white shirt cut for a slenderer woman strained taut across shoulders and biceps such that every line of her was almost indecently displayed. When she finally looked from Diamonds to John he became aware a second too late that his lips were stupidly parted.

He rallied himself, and said, too late: “Thank you kindly for noticin’ but I’m here about my horse.”

She looked at him now, a quick scan up and down his conformation, unabashed, just as she had appraised Diamonds, and John liked to think she perked up slightly as she did so. “I got room for both of you,” she said, and there was nothing at all shy or retiring about her voice, only wry amusement as now, finally, she noticed the state of his clothes, the soot and the traildust and his unshaven neck, naked in the V of his open shirt collar.

John grinned and looked down at his leather shoes, once black, blurring into the perimeter of his spats, once white; they were a near-uniform dust color now. “He could use some oats and a good currying down, but I can see to it myself.”

She raised an eyebrow and began to lead Diamonds off, toward the stable’s open sliding door, daring him, seemingly, to just try. “See to yourself. I’ve got this fella.”

Hunter watched them disappear inside, Diamonds without even a backward glance as the horse smelled fresh hay and feed and cool water; the tall stablewoman did look back though, similarly eager. John’s hand nervously crept to the back of his neck, absently explored the scar there, slicing up from his damp shirt collar. He turned finally and stalked back toward the hotel. His stomach knotted itself with uncertainty as to whether he wanted her to come to him or not, his thoughts turning, as always, back to Vane Black.  He didn’t doubt she’d catch up to him, with or without Diamonds. He just wasn’t sure when.

John went up to his room and found a bath was in fact already waiting for him: a small wooden sit tub he couldn’t exactly luxuriate in, especially at his height, but he made an effort. The water was good and steaming hot to start with, and for a few seconds he was distracted from the gnawing pain of his back; the warmth replacing the beestung feel of his fingertips and extremities. It cooled even as it filled with his traildirt, though. He gestured, an opening of his hands beckoning the warmth back to the water and reheating it to a steam, unwilling to give the sensation up so soon. Before long though it was cold again, the pain sinking its teeth back in, and his mind wandered to the possibility of getting a couple fingers of whiskey.

There’d been a time Hunter hadn’t been much for drink. It used to put him in mind of Randall Cauley, drunk and mean as a rabid skunk within an hour of getting the cattle to a railhead, but John had come around on it, especially now—maybe to a degree that might have been worrisome if not for the … extraordinary circumstances. A few bourbons were at least a veneer of armor against the bees, reduced them to a buzzing hardly worse than the tingle of sleeping flesh.

He rose from the bath, dirt-dull water sliding from his hard, scarred body. Ruefully he looked at his clothes, laid on the bed to avoid the tarnish green of the footboard, the likelier clothes rack.  Nevermind his predilection for appearing well-dressed; he hated to think of crawling back into the filthy things now that he’d gotten the worst off himself.

John had learned, or at least seen, a spell for this; he’d seen Madame Boudreaux do it, knew it was an old piece of witchcraft used by women since time immemorial, simple, harmless — and responsible for many an old washerwoman being dragged away in irons in Arteridean territories. It was also enchantment, and he was, somewhat ironically, not terribly natural at enchantment.

Nevertheless, he extended his hand, fingers outstretched as if to grasp, toward his limp, grime-gray shirt. He hooked his consciousness into the ether like claws snagging fabric, felt it resist his pull as his closed his fingers, and saw the dirt ever so slowly begin to shift, boiling away in a little cloud of dust to leave the smallest patch of white.

John grinned, wondering if anyone had adapted this working into a ward, assuming so but wondering how, thinking how it was best accomplished without having to maintain concentration to keep it alive—

He caught his focus unraveling down the branches of speculation, reminded of Vane Black. They were so alike, really.

His lips twisted in a brief, sad smile, and he slid into his slightly less filthy clothes.

Downstairs, the long shadows of sunset sliced the saloon into strips of gold. Lanterns were being lit and folks were settling down to more serious drinking. Two of the sporting women from outside were at the bar talking to the barkeep, an old man in dirty sleeve garters: one of the black women and the almost-redhead. The latter caught Hunter’s eye when he came in and gave him a small smile, at which point the former looked over appraisingly, then turned to whisper something in her associate’s ear. The almost-redhead looked at the other woman seriously, and nodded, and the black whore shrugged in a sort of resigned way and went back to conversing with the barkeep. John didn’t like the look of this interaction, and while he touched his hatbrim in acknowledgement of the almost-redhead, who was looking at him again, he went to the other end of the bar.

The barkeep abandoned the pair of women to take Hunter’s money.

“Whiskey,” Hunter said, slapping down a coin and then adding “Double” with a polite smile. He turned while the fellow fetched his drink to lean his elbows on the bar and stretch his shoulders. A violin and its bow leaned on a chair beside the place’s upright piano. The fiddle was simple, varnish dark with age, and looked somewhat comical next to such a big expensive rocaille piano, a piano that was surely the pride of the hotel if not the town, right after its namesake flowers. Neither were in use currently.

The bartender sat down his drink and Hunter swiveled to take it with an appreciative nod, turning back to the lonesome violin in its chair. He must have lost himself momentarily in thought and in so doing his expression must have widened into something thoroughly unguarded, because the tall groom seemed to materialize next to him, and he was only made aware because she observed “Piano player got himself shot and the fiddler ran off with one of the whores. Haven’t had music since. You play?”

John angled himself to face her. She’d let her hair down; a long, wild, thick mane with a curl, presently, from having been confined to a bun throughout a long day’s work. She was staring at him, a little expectantly, with absolutely nothing demure or retiring in her manner, eyes falling on him like a riding crop.

“I do,” Hunter said, a little guardedly, sipping his whiskey. “Fiddle leastways; can’t say I ever learned my way around a piano.”

“Let’s hear,” she said, at once, and her voice was teasing, bordering on cruel. “I can see plain you’re some kinda performer and the itch is like to kill you, sitting there with no one looking at you.”

John decided that despite a passing resemblance it wasn’t Ellen Cauley she reminded him of after all.

He stood, and crossed to the instrument, trying out another mostly-futile stretch on his burning shoulders, but glanced at the barkeep for further permission before picking the violin up. The old man, who indeed was paying attention, nodded, almost hopefully: how long had they been without their dead pianist and philandering fiddler John wondered. He picked up the violin with something like relief: the pull had already been nearly irresistible and the stablewoman’s order – or was it a dare? — made it feel nigh compulsory.

It had been awhile since he’d played but not so long as to turn him sheepish, though he did slide somewhat gently into a mournful northern islander ballad until he felt he was being paid due attention before laying into a reel a person could dance to.

The first one up, of course, was the almost-redhaired sporting girl, circling him with a fairly respectable toe dance. She was grinning, prettily flushed, but eventually it broke into a scowl Hunter tracked to the stablewoman, who’d risen from her seat at the bar. She was pacing over like a panther and like a panther she was about to take her prey and drag it off, out of reach — or so John suspected was the idea — but when she leaned into him, smelling like leather and timothy hay, what she murmured, untimidly, was: “Bring Louisa if you like; I don’t care one way or another and I suspect she’d work you for free or close to it.”

John blinked at the stablewoman and then at the almost-redhead, whose name was apparently Louisa. Her grin had returned, now with a wry little quirk to it. She’d heard and her little squall of jealousy was assuaged by the proposal.

Hunter was bone tired, frankly. He’d been living on nothing but whiskey and magic for days, after all, and only because he was in a terrible hurry, the weight of which had been kept off him briefly by the cleaning up and the fiddling but which, now, landed on him square and he just wanted to go to sleep. After getting what he’d come here for, anyway, and he hadn’t actually come for a bath. He was reasonably sure one or both of these women did in fact know exactly who he was. Well, his name, anyway. Were things like to get more complicated if he went along with this or jilted the pair of them?

John looked out the window at the sun, slanting near horizontally. He wondered how much time he had.

* * *

It was sunset when Black drove the Westcott brothers’ nervous mules into Sun Prairie; the blonde wood of its new construction beamed rose in the setting sun, unrolling endless blue shadows across the yellow prairie. Shopkeeps swept the day’s dust off porches, and a few threads of cookstove smoke had begun to unfurl into brilliantly pink and gold sky. A gaggle of children playing in the thoroughfare hurried to get out of the mule cart’s way. They looked up at its peculiar driver as she passed. Black returned their stares with eyes glowing like the sunset, and they ran.

Ever attuned to the sounds of tinkering, she noted the industrious tolling of a nearby blacksmith as she passed, guessing the tools in use, but her speculation was halted as her eyes passed over the hotel cater-corner to the smithy: it wasn’t yet twilight, but the hotel’s façade was deep in blue shadow such that its already-gaily-lit interior was easily visible. There, vignetted in a front-facing window, was John Henry Hunter, fiddling of all things, orbited by a whore of uncomfortably familiar stature. Like the goddamned Devil.

Black froze, powerless to suppress the memory:

“Not even a show tonight and you’ve drawn a crowd,” she shouted down from the second story window, where below, couples danced around him, balanced on an upended crate and fiddling unashamedly in the streets like a busker. “Never knew anyone so desperate for attention.”

He’d put the bow away, then, lowering the violin and bowing, showmanlike, on his precarious little stage. “Only yours, Doc.”

Only yours, Doc but here he was, yet another tall, fit individual sliding into the frame to pull him out of it.

Black’s lips curled back from grit teeth, and she began to scan around for where Diamonds might be stabled. She turned the wagon left at the corner, stopping the mules at the mouth of the little alleyway behind the hotel, and raised her fingers to her lips. She whistled, a shrill fweeeet that could’ve traveled a mile if she’d but blown harder but this was a softened version, tailored for discretion in the quiet of oncoming evening. Within the courtyard, Diamonds responded with a low, familiar whicker.

Vane crawled from the wagon, stalked into the stableyard via the blue gray shadows, keenly vigilant for a groom or an hostler until a notion slid past the tumblers of her brain and unlocked the realization that this person was very likely headed upstairs inside the hotel. She found Diamonds, looking over the half door of a comfortable box stall. Her tack – or rather, Hunter’s tack, for in the end Diamonds was his — was stowed on a saddle rack nearby. She grabbed Diamonds’ bridle off a peg. It was instantly identifiable at a glance: Hunter had never parted with his predilection for the rangeman’s gear of his youth and Diamonds generally wore a plain cowboy’s headstall but it was fitted with the broadest, kindest sweetwater bit in the collection.  She slid it over the horse’s face and the stallion opened his mouth to accept it, willingly, ready to work. For now she didn’t dare take the time to saddle him fully; she threw the rest of the tack over one arm before unlatching the stall door and leading Diamonds out by the reins.

She lashed Diamonds to the tailboard of the Westcott brothers’ wagon, dumped the saddle into the bed with the dynamite, and crawled back up to the drivers’ seat. She circled the block with the mules and the hardware, then headed onward through town, into the obliterating gold of a sunset dead in front of them.

Sun Prairie sat on a bluff but a ramp had been cut down to the prairie below by rain and travel, and it led directly to a meadow a distinctly darker green than the surrounding yellow prairie. A little handpainted sign posted at its edge marked it “Legendary Sun Prairie”; Black drove the mules past it, trampling a path into the otherwise trackless green.

She climbed back out of the wagon to examine the foliage underfoot as there were no extant flowers, legendary or otherwise. Parting a floor of large trefoil leaves she beheld an understory of delicate white flutes. Vane Black had had a head for biology, and so the red haired woman concluded, reflexively, they were some kind of inverse nyctinast, saving themselves for a particular nighttime pollinator. Satisfied that these presently rather unassuming blooms were the vaunted sun flowers, she went to the back of the wagon. From the arsenal secreted in her cloak she pulled a tiny glass phial, fitted with a brass cap and collar, and a little flint cylinder. She uncapped it, gave the cylinder a flick, and a flame blazed to life in her fingers, feet from a wagonload of dynamite. From the hardware the Westcott’s had covered the sides of the wagon with she took a lantern. She lit it, carried it back to the drivers’ seat, and placed it there with the flame turned precariously high considering the circumstances. She unhitched the Westcott’s mules, untied Diamonds, and leading all three, walked away.

* * *

John Henry Hunter had mentally budgeted half an hour to eager women, another hour to the task at hand, and planned, then, to spend at least four on sleep likely to be full of holes, and allowed himself to be led off like a reluctant bull, the groom dragging and Louisa pushing him gamely with her fingertips sunk rather too enthusiastically into his latissimus dorsi¸which he only knew the name of because of Vane Black.

Halfway up the hotel stairs he heard, somehow, via providentially open doors and windows, an echo of the whistle he’d taught his horses for three decades. He stopped where he was, frozen on a stair, previously pliant body gone immovably rigid. Louisa actually tripped forward into him, the transfiguration was so abrupt.

“Terribly sorry,” Hunter said. “ ’Fraid I lost track of the time.”

He swiveled on the stairs, breaking free of the stablewoman’s admittedly strong grip like it was nothing and pushing down past Louisa. She caught up to him at the door and caught his coat sleeve. He permitted her to stop him, waiting for her to say her piece.

“It’s the flowers, ain’t it?” she said.

“After a fashion,” John admitted.

“You goin’ out there to wish, or … or … pray?” Louisa said. She spat it, really: from her tone she seemed to harbor a certain, historic jealousy toward the flowers.

John angled his head to smile down at her somewhat contritely. “I did tell you I was here on spiritual matters.”

“If you’re lookin’ to get to heaven, Mister Hunter—” Louisa positively leaned on his name. Was it a threat? She glanced behind her, up at the groom, who hadn’t moved from her place halfway up the stairs and now had her arms folded coolly across her chest. The taller woman’s manner clearly communicated this was all very much take-it-or-leave-it, to her. “—we could get you there a whole lot faster.”

Louisa knew people fairly well, and she could see the reality of John Henry Hunter boil over the simple, blithe affect of him right in front of her, in his scorching cloudless eyes. Where he’d drawn her in with a cheery warmth like a bonfire, he now towered a consuming, elemental flame, and she thought to herself she should have trusted her very first impulse outside on the porch.

“I very much doubt anything is like to get me to heaven,” Hunter said, his voice suddenly molten cruelty, “least of all some two-bit whore in this one-horse town.”  It poured from him unbidden all of a sudden but she was lucky, honestly, that’s all it was.  Something about her knowing assertion that anything to do with her could possibly trump why he was here for import just couldn’t be borne. His eyes jerked up to the stablewoman, whose name he’d never even learned. “My horse just got stole right out of your goddamn stable. G’night, ma’am.”

John swept outside, the less-dirty tails of his white coat trailing him dramatically. He tried to strike a balance between running and walking that was quiet and casual but the fact was his heart was juddering in mixed anxiety and bald anticipation. He was in a hurry to catch her, by all the saints; he hadn’t expected her this quickly, wasn’t prepared in the slightest, but here she was, and his shameful excitement at the prospect muddied the dread. It flooded his senses.

He made it to the stableyard without attracting any additional attention, not that he’d even have noticed. He’d already forgotten Louisa and the tall stablegirl, singularly fixed, now, on his realpursuer. Diamonds was already gone, as was his tack and any sign of Vane Black. Hunter touched the gold watch tucked into his vest pocket as he cast about the ether trying to find her by magical means. His awareness eventually caught on her, like linen on a nail, and she was so near his stomach caught in his throat.

The sun sunk, finally, beneath the horizon as Hunter followed the red haired woman’s path through Sun Prairie. The sky cooled into a blue twilight hung with coal red clouds. He glanced at his watch, caught himself adjusting his tie and almost laughed aloud at the absurdity.

He descended the easy grade down into the meadow of slumbering flowers, and his eyes followed the carelessly trampled track out into their midst to an abandoned wagon. On the otherwise empty driver’s seat burned a solitary lantern. He didn’t even slow down as he considered what her angle here could possibly be, just strode out into the flowers. If he wasn’t mistaken there was a rosy shimmer faintly beginning beneath the calf-high carpet of green, like a great fish of the deep swimming just beneath the surface. He ignored it though, for the moment, fixed on the lantern with a perplexity that reminded him very much of trying to work out how a new illusion was accomplished. Hungry as he was for the reveal, though, he reached out sidelong with his fingers and smothered the little lantern flame even as he scanned the bluff tops for any sign of her. He took a breath.

“Now why would you want to go ruinin’ the sundown we both came all the way out here for leavin’ a lantern lit? Right unromantic of you, Mizz Black.” Hunter drawled it conversationally but empowered his voice as he once had to reach the cheap seats.

And then she appeared, stone-faced in the waning purple dusk, atop a ridge overlooking the field of flowers. John’s rifle, or whatever she’d made of it, trailed from her hand. Diamonds shoved forward from concealing aspens and dogwood brush behind her with a low nicker of nervous greeting.

That was when the Sun Flowers awakened.

Every demurely coiled bud unfurled, near-simultaneously, reaching stems and parting petals to the darkening sky. Each and every one shone like a star as they opened. Seen from the red haired woman’s vantage point above, the meadow floor seemed to crack and yawn open into another plane, of rosy-white light.

John stood stunned momentarily. He’d known about this in advance but it was just hearsay: he was taken aback by the awesome reality of it.

Below Vane, Hunter looked so suddenly familiar she froze, remembering, an echo of such intense feeling she nearly staggered. With his white coat glowing in the reflected light, the contours of him semi-lost in the blooming, blinding light and his features starkly underlit Vane Black recalled, unambiguously, John Henry Hunter lit this way by footlights, sunning himself in the appreciation of a packed house. And then, usually, tearing himself away, to grin toward the wings, toward….

As powerful as Vane Black’s feelings had been it was an echo nonethess. Shaking it off she raised the rifle, experimentally arranging Hunter above its iron sights before sweeping it gently sidelong, toward the tarp-covered contents of the Westcott brothers’ hardware wagon.

John observed this small movement, squinting, a smile of irrepressible appreciation twisting one side of his mouth as he understood what was in the wagon he stood not two feet from. He couldn’t help but wonder what she was capable of, like this. Everything she had been, presumably, but more: was all that cunning now unmoored from any kind of conscience? To be sure she’d been headed that way, anyhow, but now….

Hunter stuck his thumb and forefinger in the corners of his mouth and blew.

At the sound of the whistle, Diamonds tossed his head, half-rearing. The horse almost bowled Black over as he ran straight to the bluff’s edge and leapt the good ten feet down to the gleaming meadow below. The horse crossed to Hunter in just a few cantered strides, and John wasted no time vaulting aboard, bareback. While Vane regained her interrupted aim above, John reached into the bed of the wagon and threw back a tarp, revealing the dynamite and confirming his suspicions.

“Well,” he said, drawling the word like a low whistle of appreciation. “If this ain’t just inelegance incarnate. Hardly up the standards of your usual schemin’, is it? And, darlin’: you wouldn’t want to catch poor old Diamonds in the blast, would you?”

Would she? He wasn’t even sure. He’d believed she’d need Diamonds to keep up with him; after the ridiculous speed with which she’d followed him here to Sun Prairie he was less confident. He did his best to meet her flinty, unblinking stare with an uncowed grin. There’d been a time she’d stared up at him like this, smiling with cruel self-satisfaction from below as he stood on display, humiliated. She looked similarly smug now, but humorlessly, face betraying nothing but the wrath smoldering in her ember eyes.

Hunter perceived then the flash from the rifle’s muzzle, sorcerous senses allowing him to experience it before the crack of the report, and his fingers stretched open as if to catch the bullet.

Lead was easy to liquefy, even sublimate, especially so small a quantity as a bullet, and John effortlessly burned away the projectile midair before it reached he and Diamonds and the dynamite, but it was then, committed to the gesture that dealt with this first shot, that he realized she’d fired a second time, wide of him, but not wide of the wagon. His hand sliced wildly across him to catch this next bullet but he missed it, goddamnit.

The ethereal blaze of the Sun Flowers was briefly outshone by the blast from the wagon as the Westcott brothers’ dynamite went up beside Hunter. Even Vane Black’s now-hellfire eyes burned; she blinked with aggravation at the sensation. When she reopened them she could see, at first, very little but smoke. She waited patiently for the evening breeze to clear enough to see, still holding the rifle. The blush-hued glow of the sunflowers within thirty feet of the blast had given way to literal smoldering, smoke trailing from ember and ash.

Below, Hunter’s lungs prickled as he breathed smoke and air hot enough to bake bread. He was unhurt, of course, by the incendiary element of the explosion, but Diamonds was lying on one of his legs, and Diamonds was not so lucky as he was. John set to detangling himself from the horse with all the delicacy he could manage, especially unable to see as he was. Everything was dull ember-red, light diffuse through the smoke.  So motionless was the big grey stud Hunter entertained the thought he was dead, but the horse shuddered beneath him with a feeble whicker, and John’s stomach twisted sickly.

Out from under Diamonds, Hunter hunkered beside him for an assessment. As the smoke thinned, he could see the hair was scorched off, the skin blistered over much of the horse’s far side, the side that had been nearest the blast. Moreover, that foreleg was flinders, the mass of hoof dangling and dragging on the ground as Diamonds weakly struggled by blackened sinew for the most part. He laid a hand on an unburnt patch of neck, a thin attempt to comfort. It was difficult to reconcile his feelings.

John became aware that behind him, the small dark shape of Vane Black was drifting near like a ghost.

“Always someone falls victim to your machinations don’t they,” he said. It was the tone of earlier, the spitting fire.

Hunter located his hat nearby, stuffed it on his head and rose. He turned his back on Diamonds with considerable force of will, to address the red haired woman. His look was solemn but not terribly hot; he’d tamped the anger down and was left only sorrowful. “Don’t beat the devil ‘round the stump this time, darlin’. You know I don’t wear a gun.”

He turned to go, the flames of the fireswept Sun Flower meadow parting for him. He paused and bent to pick a single intact bloom, and remembered flowers, burning in a vase, but it was cut short by another crack of her rifle. For a heartbeat he assumed she had ended dauntless Diamonds, but a wet heat and a sharp pain caused him to look down and find he’d been shot clean through the right shoulder. Blood bloomed from the breast of his coat.

Behind him, the red haired woman stood over the mound of burnt flesh that was Diamonds, rifle still leveled in front of her. She watched Hunter vanish as flames closed behind him like a final curtain. He’d vanished from view but she knew he’d fled into the night, seemingly unaffected by the wound.

She looked down at Diamonds, whickering, stricken on the ground, a low, slow, juddering sound now. Vane Black knew medicine, knew that leg was irreparable and the burns, widespread as they were, not much better. Clearly it’d be a mercy to end the horse, but on the other hand she wasn’t predisposed to do John Henry Hunter a good turn and without the extraordinary horse her pursuit would be greatly delayed.

She lowered the gun, squinting as she contemplated another option.

Louisa was out front of the hotel, hugging a shawl around her shoulders and scanning hawkishly up and down the darkening street. It promised to be a quiet night, with only a few horses hitched out front and a handful more stabled in back. The current crop of hotel guests were a quiet bunch, and Louisa had very little to do besides wonder after John Henry Hunter. She supposed she’d dodged a bullet but couldn’t help her pride smarting a little at the sudden rejection. Probably she shouldn’t have made it apparent she knew he was an outlaw; she wasn’t the sort to go to the law but how was he to know that.

It was true she had a certain dislike of the Sun Flowers; they were her rivals here in Sun Prairie for nighttime entertainment, but still she was in the habit of watching the rosy glow of them erupt when the sun went down, calling out droves of luminous moths. And so she was sat on the porch, waiting for the dawn that followed the sundown, when she saw the explosion. The dome of orange fire seemed to consume half the meadow, and for a second the whole porch was lit not with subtle pink but hellish red.

A few straggling folks in the street ran, panicked, in varying directions, unsure how to respond. Some got behind cover, some ran for the sheriff.

Louisa ran inside and got the tall stablewoman, whose name was actually, in fact, Adeline.

By the time the two women reemerged onto the porch the Sun Flower meadow was a column of smoke, its belly orange with still-burning fire.

“Goddamn,” Adeline said.

Then up the hill from the Sun Flower meadow, initially shrouded in the orange haze but resolving as it neared, came a clattertrap sledge, pulled by two mules caught between exhaustion and fear, driven by a small figure lumped beneath a soot colored serape. Adeline couldn’t, at first, make heads nor tails of what the mules were dragging but eventually that resolved itself too, until unmistakable: the tall grey stallion she’d stabled for John Henry Hunter, but blackened and inert on the uneven bed of the makeshift travois.

“Goddamn,” Adeline repeated. She had the notion to go intercept the driver of this grim implement, but it was followed almost immediately with an awareness it was a poor impulse and she’d almost definitely be killed if she did. Instead, she hooked an arm around Louisa’s shoulders and herded her, protesting, back into the hotel.

Not long after Vane Black drove the mules past, but by that time there was no one on the porch and almost no one in the streets. Seemingly even tourist destination Sun Prairie knew in its frontier bones to withdraw like a turtle at the first whiff of danger.

Vane drove the Westcott brothers’ mules back through town, toward the blacksmith she’d passed on the way in.

In truth it was a full service livery, in a big if plain building that was, if not new then just unfinished: no battens kept the orange glow from inside from seeping through the generous cracks of its primary, unpainted boards. In fact the only paint on it was large, handpainted lettering on its façade reading

BLACKSMITH

Carriage Smithing

Horse Shoeing
For Rent: Horses and Rigs
Jasper Jackson, Proprietor

Jasper Jackson, Proprietor, was actually just starting to draw out the rein of the left half of a new pair of flatbill tongs, after breaking them earlier in the afternoon, and was already completely disgusted with the whole day when a small white woman flung open the smithy door with a saddle over her shoulder.

Jasper looked around, helplessly, as if for an explanation or maybe just a clock to confirm it was well past suppertime and an odd hour to be barging in here.

“Need a horse ‘fore you go worryin’ ’bout shoes,” he said, standing up straight.

Jasper Jackson was a tall black man, broad in the shoulders and back from a life of hammering iron, and presently he was soot- and oil-smudged head to toe and wielding not only his hammer but a glowing length of iron. He knew he cut an imposing figure – he knew it! – so he was surprised when this small stranger just ignored him, outright, and slung her saddle and kit on the dirt floor of the smithy without even looking him in the face.

“Damnation, woman,” he said to her, “what’s the hour?”

She looked up at him, finally, with eyes very like the working-hot bar in his hand, and seemed to perform some silent calculus for a moment. Then she fished in one of the saddlebags she’d thrown on his floor and retrieved a fistful of cash she didn’t even count, and offered it to him.

“Leave,” she said. Her voice reminded Jasper of dropping hot steel in a quenching tank, and he felt the skin of his neck prickle at the sound. Still, he was too angry at the intrusion to be cowed, and he took a step toward her, clutching his hammer and the hot iron differently, a bit less like a tools and more like weapons.

The red-haired woman noticed this shift in his grip, his posture, and it drew her attention in a new way to the hot bar. Jackson had begun to draw it out and it was a bit thinner, bent, and somewhat recalled a running iron, held like an artist’s implement in the hands of another towering man lit by firelight and before she had even properly sifted the memory she’d drawn one of her sidearms and shot the bar out of Jasper’s hand and with it two of his fingers and part of his thumb.

Jasper gave a yell – he couldn’t suppress it. He dropped his hammer to grasp his other wrist as he beheld the bloody shreds of his fingers and immediately considered the difficulty, if not impossibility, of shoeing horses without these fingers and the end of his thumb. Bone and blood were all mixed up with exploded rawhide glove but the pain hadn’t properly set in yet – he knew it was coming – and all he could think, initially, was first the tongs and now my hand.

“Damn!” he said. “Goddamn!” And then, stuffing his bleeding left hand into his right armpit: “Gun-crazy little bitch, who do you think you are?”

The red-haired woman still had the pistol extended toward Jasper. She finally stood from where she’d been bent on the floor dumping all her tack, gun barrel fixed levelly on the blacksmith. She stepped toward him, and when he didn’t retreat she pressed the muzzle into his sternum, into the leather of his smithing apron. “I’ll take the apron.”

Jasper considered his options, but he could feel blood soaking his armpit and his hand was starting to throb and he was certainly outmatched. He stumbled back a step, reaching behind him to untie the apron. She’d backed him out the open smithy door by the time he unhooked it from over his neck. He strained against the rigid prod of the pistol barrel briefly, to hand it over. He turned then, and after a glance at the mules and the sledge they were hitched to, he ran away, wondering what he’d even seen, lying there on that sledge, but afraid to look over his shoulder.

The red-haired woman shoved open the big carriage doors. She grabbed the nearest mule’s headstall and led them in, dragging Diamonds behind them. Once inside she shut and barred the doors, threw her hat on the floor and donned the apron. Looking around at the tools and facilities on offer by the light of the dimming forge, Vane Black went to work.

By Lawrence Westcott’s estimation it was around ten o’clock in the morning when they sighted Sun Prairie; if he didn’t know the place was so named for its famous flowers he would have believed it was so called for the blazing yellow of the grass in the late morning sun. His eyes were practically vibrating with it, and the little town with its half unpainted buildings was a welcome respite for them.

When finally they shuffled into town, Mark was eyeing some grazing sheep with extant hunger, like he meant to eat one whole and alive like a coyote, and indeed he then whined: “I know you’re in a hurry, Lawrence, but I’m starved. Think maybe we could find a strip of bacon before—”

He was cut off by walking into Lawrence’s suddenly outthrust arm. He followed his big brother’s gaze to the front of a smithy, where a little hook-nosed man with a weak chin and a bowler hat was plainly arguing with a comparatively huge person with no hat on his bald head and a bandaged left hand. He was gesticulating furiously with his wrapped up appendage as if urging the the littler man to action.

“Well go on!” said the bigger man, who the Westcott brothers rightfully pegged for the smith.

The smaller man, who was fidgeting with the sheriff’s star on his lapel, an affectation he was clearly unused to, had a gun in his hand, and he waved it around now irresponsibly, so great was his irritation. “If you’re so goddamned eager, Jasper, why don’t you take this goddamn gun and just handle this yourself!” But he did, then, turn and pound on the smithy door with admirable conviction before standing well to the side of it in case it opened on a gunman. From that position he added: “I’m the new sheriff. The newest. Virgil Ennis. Open the goddamned door!”

The Westcott brothers had approached by then, and Mark, in his typically forward manner, said excitedly to the Newest Sheriff, Virgil Ennis: “What’s goin’ on?”

Lawrence physically cringed, a familiar crumpling of his big frame he was overly used to. Quietly, he mumbled “Sam Hill, lower your damned voice, Markus,” in a tone of an admonishing parent in church.

In response, Mark cupped his gloved hands around his mouth, and repeated, in a loud, theatrical whisper that was scarcely quieter than his speaking voice “What’s goin’ on?”

Lawrence legitimately couldn’t tell if Mark was truly this stupid or just did these things to needle him but it hardly mattered because the effect was the same.

Newest Sheriff Virgil Ennis squinted at the Westcott brothers, his eyes passing over their general condition, with special attention paid to Mark’s pearl-gripped sidearm. He was apparently in a gossiping mood for he explained, in a more successfully low voice than Mark’s: “Some heeled biddy showed up here at the smithy night ‘fore last haulin’ some crowbait animal on a sled. Jasper shinned outta there when she pulled a gun on him—“

“She shot my hand off!” Jasper corrected him, indignantly, waving his maimed appendage. Blood spotted the bandages. It was not healing well, clearly.

“She’s been holed up in here since,” Ennis continued. “Lord knows what she’s up to in there. The racket’s been nonstop! Talk is she’s some kinda bail hunter or somethin’ tailin’ that ten thousand plunk fella. I guess they tore up Lookback a few days ago.”

Mark stared at the door wonderingly. “No one made to get her out of there sooner?”

“Well sure they did!” Ennis said. “Two sheriffs ‘fore me tried to bust in there and she gunned them both down. If you ask me we ought to just set this whole place on fire.”

As Jasper Jackson glowered at Virgil Ennis at the very suggestion, Lawrence looked at Mark. As much to intimate to his brother who they were dealing with as he wasn’t altogether sure Mark had caught on as to actually confirm, he asked “This uh … lady … didn’t happen to have a couple mules with her, did she?”

“She did!” Jasper exclaimed, pointing at the door. “Got them in there with her now in fact. A bay and an – “

“Oddball paint,” Lawrence finished, rubbing his face miserably with his hand.

“Emmet and Jake!” Mark yipped excitedly.

“How’d you happen to know about that?” Virgil Ennis inquired, a touch suspiciously.

Mark forced himself between his brother and the sheriff, grateful for a reason to talk. “Well see my brother and me were givin’ her a lift to Wand’rin’ Gulch when she—“

“She held us up and took our wagon,” Lawrence finished, again, before Mark could embellish the story. “Took everythin’ we had.”

“Even our dynamite!” continued Mark, slamming his fist into his opposite glove. “Damnedest thing, too—she looked so peaked and frail!”

Japser Jackson lit up, invigorated some by this strange camaraderie. He pointed at Mark with his remaining index finger. “Damnation, yes! White as a sheet she was; had her pegged for sickly when she come in. Looked to me like she was dyin’ o’ consumption.”

Mark elbowed Lawrence, grinning. “That’s what Isaid.”

Like Lawrence, Virgil Ennis was not particularly enjoying this reunion of parties wronged by the redhaired vigilante and cut back to more salient points: “Dynamite, you said? That’d explain the blast. Night she showed up there was an explosion outside town. Damn near wiped out our flowers.”

Lawrence glumly scratched his scalp, filthy under his hat. “Can’t help but feel half responsible, sheriff, and those mules’re about all we got left to our name. If you don’t mind lendin’ me your iron, maybe we could handle this for you?”

Vane Black’s goggles were just getting properly snugged over forge ember eyes when the respectably sturdy livery door was kicked to spillikins by Mark and Lawrence Westcott. She looked over casually toward the brothers, their shapes cut out of a near opaque block of sunlight through dust in the otherwise dim smithy. She slid her arm garters over her leather gloves and began fastening them at the wrists.

Lawrence Westcott had expected to be shot at, as he was a former soldier and was used to being shot at, frankly, and he found the complete lack of resistance almost more unnerving than if she’d drawn on them immediately. The barrel of his borrowed pistol dipped slightly with uncertainty, but he noticed that, beside him, Mark’s hadn’t. You could have used the barrel of the pearl-handled revolver for a level.

“Hello again, Ma’am,” Mark said, almost chipperly. His gun remained fixed to her but he looked sidelong at where their mules were stabled in two adjoining little rope stalls, seemingly safe.

Lawrence felt a little embarrassed he’d faltered and his excitable little brother, once again, had remained such a cool head. He somewhat testily joined the negotiations: “Time you returned our miles and, uh, vacated this here place of business.”

The redhaired woman actually had the temerity to turn her back on them, to retrieve her black hat from a workbench. As she did, the tall horse standing saddled beside her swung its head out of the murk and into the sunlight pressing in from the door and then Mark’s pistol most assuredly wavered; he almost dropped it.

The horse was a big grey stud, probably around seventeen hands, and about a quarter of him, including half his face, appeared to be riveted iron.

The horse seemed otherwise a horse: it pawed the smithy floor with impatience, largely oblivious to the nature of its left foreleg (articulated iron, cable and chain standing in for tendon and bone), the plate bolted over its face and pieced into its jaw, the ribbons of seeping burn and sutured incision slicing up from the segmented metal pauldron covering what was presumably a deeply damaged left shoulder.

The Westcott brothers had been to war with the Arteridean Empire, fighting, at times, alongside witches and blood magicians and Suntouched spirit talkers, but they’d never seen anything like it. It put them off their footing, figuratively and literally, and when the redhaired woman went on ignoring them to swing aboard the quarter-metal stallion and out the door, both Mark and Lawrence were knocked on their asses in the dirt.

Outside, Jasper Jackson and Virgil Ennis were similarly sat down as Diamonds blew past them, hovering as they were curiously near the door.

The horse receded into the yellow of the prairie, fading into its own dust, seemingly unslowed by its unfamiliar new prosthetics. Like a dust devil, the redhaired woman was gone.

Lawrence exited the smithy, somewhat sheepishly, and offered New Sheriff Virgil Ennis his hand to help him up. Behind Lawrence, Mark shoved open the carriage doors. He disappeared back inside, and Jasper Jackson hurried in after him to assess the state of his establishment.

“And you say the fella she’s after is worth ten thousand bucks?” Lawrence said as Ennis stood up. He handed the sheriff’s gun back to him.

“Sure is,” said Ennis, holstering the pistol and reseating his bowler.

“Well what’s she worth, then?” Lawrence mused.

“Heckuva lot real soon I reckon!” replied Mark, emerging from the murk of the livery leading the mules Emmet and Jake, in headstalls. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’, Lawrence?”

Lawrence let out a little groan, and took Emmet’s long, coiled harness reins from Mark. “I’m afraid I probably am.”

Mark assessed Jake, bare of any tack but his harness bridle, then turned toward the open smithy doors. “Your sign says rigs for rent, mister. You got any saddles?”