The boy returned home at dawn the next morning.  The reluctant, uncertain sun slid left to right on the horizon very slowly. There were two suns in the boy’s blurry eyes, and they came together and separated over and over, until he blinked them back into one.

            He went inside and went over to Lucy and knelt down next to her.  She wasn’t moving and he could not hear breathing and for one startling moment he thought she was dead.  He knelt and checked her and realized that she was only sleeping.  Her breath was raspy, but not loud.  Weak and very shallow.  The boy stood and looked at her.  She was almost as thin as nothingness.  She should be dead, the boy thought.  The heart cannot pump blood through bones.

            “Did you get your hand fixed, boy?”

            The boy looked up, startled, at the sound of the satisfied voice.  The man mother had brought home the day before was there, at the edge of the hallway which led down to the bedroom.  The boy had not seen or heard the man when he walked in.  The man was very quiet.  All men like him were quiet men most of the time.

The man was rolling his white sleeves down and putting on his cuff links.  His black coat and black hat were on the chair near the window.

The boy was very surprised to see the man outside of the room.

They usually did not come outside of the room.  Except to leave.  And they never stopped to talk.  This man talked a lot for a man from Dakota Inc., the boy thought.  He was not as quiet as the others.  And it was strange to the boy.  All the talking.  He did not like all the talking that the man was doing.  The boy did not know how to respond to the man’s words; the words that fell dead on the floor at the boy’s feet before they even reached his ears.  The boy tried to find answers for the man’s dead words, but all he could think about was the gun that was tucked tightly in his belt.  He could feel the handle pressing into his stomach.

The man looked at the boy and smiled at him with something like acceptance.  Acceptance and fearlessness.  The boy felt like a melting candle.  The flame was there, and sinking down and down to the metal base. Why is the man talking, the boy thought.  They do not talk.  They only leave and come back again.

“Yes, my hand is clean.  There is no stinging,” the boy said.  Lucy did not stir.

“Where is the bullet?” the man said.

“I don’t know.  It went through my hand.  Maybe through the wall.”

“You don’t have it?” the man said.  “Oh, yes.  I remember now.  Yesterday.  Yesterday you told me it was not in your hand. We spoke briefly about the bullet.”

The boy stood.  “All bullets are brief,” he said.

The man nodded and looked down to adjust his cuff links. “Yes, they are impatient.  It is the afterwards that drags on and on.”  He sighed and put his hands down at his sides.

The boy tilted his head and looked strangely at the man.  “Is this why so many bullets are needed?”

“Needed?  No. It is why so many are possessed.  Men are fickle.  They do not know what they need.  The only solution is to have an abundance of everything, just in case.  Nothing lasts.  Everything is brief.  The first bullet could be the last bullet, but there’s no way to know.  So we have many.”

The man stopped and the content look on his face vanished.  For a very brief moment he looked at the boy and looked uneasy.

The boy nodded and turned his eyes away from the man.  He looked around the room.

“This bullet is outside my hand,” he said, pointing to his bandage.  “It is somewhere around.  If I find it I will let you know.”

“No. Do not tell me.  Do not look for it.  Wait.  Where is the bandage your mother said to bring home?”

“I left it with the doctor.  I remembered eventually, but it was too far to go back.”

The man nodded, and his uncomfortable look softened.

“So you left it in Shadow, and you ignored your mother?”

“I left it, and forgot what she said.”

The man nodded again.  He understood something of bloody bandages and leaving them behind and forgetting promises and the words of his mother, and his friends, and some other people he had known along the way.

“I must got to Shadow,” the man said. He walked over to the chair, his boots making a heavy, hollow sound on the wooden floor, and his spurs chiming like a triangle at dinner time.  He put on his coat and hat.  “You may stay and look for your bullet.  Whatever.  We will be back when your mother comes for us tonight.  You can do whatever you like.  Come into Shadow, and get some things if you like. You will not need any coins.  Dakota Inc. has plenty of them if you need them.  But soon you will see that coin or no coin, it will not make any difference.”

The boy said nothing.  He was appalled at all the talking.

“I will be outside in the wagon, smoking,” the man said as he stood at the open front door with his back to the boy.  “Your mother can come to take me back to town when she is ready.  I’m in no hurry.  I might take out my gun and shoot around to pass the time, so don’t worry if you hear it.”

The boy said nothing.  Worry.  No, he would not worry about all the shooting.  He could fall asleep to the sound of bullets.  But the talking.  This man talked too much, and the boy did not know where it came from.  He did not think the man did, either.

“Mother will be out,” the boy said.  “But she is tired and moves slow these days.  If you run out of bullets, maybe there will be another way to pass the time.”

The man gazed out at the South Dakota dawn. He grunted and nodded, then walked out.

The boy’s face went white and he stared without blinking for a long time.  He couldn’t move.  He was part of the floor of the drafty ranch house and stuck in South Dakota.  Then, he closed his eyes and remembered the blue soldier. He was sitting there on the log in the night, leaning on his musket with its barrel to the ground.  Comfortable, and watching the fires in the distance with weary eyes, and the boy came up behind him with the knife. It was all so quiet.  A quiet memory for both of them. For the boy, it stung his mind like lightning without the thunder.

The boy went to the window and watched the man from Dakota Inc. through the wavy glass.  The man pulled out his pistols and began firing them all around.  Into the air, into the ground, into nothing.  After a minute, the boy ran over to Lucy.  He shook her by her shoulder, which was as thin as the end of a broom handle.  He shook her roughly to wake her.  Perhaps too roughly for her health, but he was frantic.

“Lucy, wake up!”  he hissed, turning his head to the window where the shooting continued.  “We must leave. We must go now.  I don’t know where.  Maybe to the mountains.  Not back to Richmond because the only way back there is through town.”

He stood up and ran to the window.  The man was sitting on the wagon.  He was checking the bullets in his pistol, spinning the chamber deftly in his palm. The boy turned to Lucy.

“I will go and get mother.  We’ll leave now before more men from Dakota Inc. come.” He paused and his voice got quiet. He pressed his hand to the cold glass of the window.  “And they will come.  They will come by nightfall, if not sooner.  Several of them.”

He ran back to Lucy and knelt down beside her.

“We will go now, and leave the great trunks.  There is no time, and they are too heavy.”  He sighed and caressed his sister’s shoulder gently.  “It will be okay.  We don’t need them.  We’ll bring your quilt, and I can give you a coat.”

Lucy did not move.  Her head was buried under the colored quilt.  She opened her eyes, but she did not speak.  She looked out the little fuzzy holes in the quilt and saw that the front door of the ranch house was hanging open slightly.

She could see part of the wagon and she saw the man sitting on it.  He had two pistols in his hands and he was firing them across the plains of South Dakota.  Neither Lucy or the boy were startled by the shooting.  The boy continued to speak urgently to Lucy, and she continued to lay and stare out at the wagon and the man from Dakota Inc..  After a moment, she smiled.

A few minutes later the shooting ceased.  The man was out of bullets.  He put his pistols back in their holsters and pulled out a cigarette.

***

Mother would not leave the bed.  No matter what the boy said, she would not leave. Not for the boy, not for the man outside or for any other men from Dakota Inc..  Not for Lucy.  Not for Richmond.  Not for herself.

Mother was lying naked and still on the bed.  Her blood had become the temperature of the air in the room, and she could feel nothing. The boy averted his eyes and pulled the thin sheet over her.

“No, I will not leave with you, Jason.  They will have to come and take me away like they took father.  I will no longer go out to them.”

The boy pleaded with her, but she just shook her head.

“Cover my face with the sheet, Jason.  Everything is cold.”

But the boy did not.  He took her by the arm instead and began to gently pull her from the bed.

“No!” mother screamed, and jerked her arm back.  “Do not pull me!  No more of this, Jason!  Do you understand?  No more!”

The boy let go quickly and stepped back.

“Take Lucy and go far away,” mother said, her voice quiet again.  “Go cover yourself in the ocean if you must, but don’t go back to Richmond.  Don’t go back through the town.  Go the other way.”

The boy nodded sadly, but he did not bother speaking.  He took his hat from his head and put it to his chest and walked towards the bedroom door.

“Jason.”

The boy stopped.

“You cannot go back to Shadow ever again.  There is no good reason to go there.  There are other places, understand?” mother said.

“Yes, mother.”

“I know Dakota Inc. will try to give you a reason.  But the only reason they can give is themselves.  In Shadow there are no slaves to free.  There is no new country to build.”

“Yes, mother.”

Mother nodded and closed her eyes.  She turned her head towards the ceiling.

“No. No good reason at all.  In fact…” she paused and a little smile came to her face.  “All I have learned from this place, Jason, is that it is both the beginning and end of reason.  But who can live like that?”

She laughed a little.

The boy began to cry.

Mother did not seem to notice.  She continued speaking with her closed eyes to the ceiling.

“So go over the mountains.  But you cannot give that man the wagon and the horse. Oh yes, he will try to keep them.  He will try to take what he wants, but he must only take what you give him this time.”

Then she turned her head and opened her eyes, and her dark, red eyes were like bullets, and hot.  The boy’s tears began to dry as he looked back at them.

“And you can give him anything, Jason,” she hissed.  “Anything else you want.  Just not the wagon and the horse.  Do you understand?”

There was silence in the room for a few moments.  Not even the cold wind of South Dakota was blowing.

“Goodbye mother,” the boy said.  Then he left the room.

***

The boy walked past Lucy and the fire, and went to the open door of the ranch house. He stood at the doorway, off to the side, and watched the man some more.  The man was looking slightly impatient by this time.  He flicked his cigarette to the ground and pulled out a gold watch from behind his vest.  The man was in a hurry, the boy thought.  A hurry to get to Shadow, so that he could be in as equal a hurry to return to the ranch house.

The boy continued to watch him curiously.  After another moment, the man spat out a profanity and then threw his gold watch angrily to the ground.

Without turning to look at her, the boy told Lucy to keep her head under the quilt and to never mind what was about to happen outside.

“Pretend you are back in Richmond, Lucy,” he said.  “Or make believe it is the popping of the embers in the fire.”

Lucy whispered something back but the boy could not understand it.  And then there was something like small laughing and then only the sound of her breathing under the quilt.

The boy turned to look at her and he noticed that one of her bone-thin hands was sticking out from under the quilt.  He went to her and knelt down and took her hand.

“I must go out for a moment, Lucy,” he said.  “I am the smiling soldier that you dream of.  And I must go outside for a moment, but I will return soon.  And after I return all will be well.  All the fighting will have stopped, and my uniform will be clean, okay?”

There was a small laugh from under the quilt.

“And then we will leave this place.  I will be you soldier and I will come and ask for your hand in marriage and we will leave.  We will…we will go away to our honeymoon.  Yes, our honeymoon, Lucy.  Where everything will be quiet and sweet, like the smell of your fresh muffins.  And mother will stay here, of course, because she cannot come on our honeymoon with us.  Do you understand?”

There was another laugh. Then Lucy’s hand slipped back under the quilt.  The boy stood and pulled the pistol from his belt.  There was a little stinging under the bandage in his hand from where the gun was pressing on it, but mostly it felt okay.  He turned and went to the door of the ranch house, but this time he didn’t stop at the doorway.  He walked determinedly out into the fresh South Dakota morning, directly towards the man from Dakota Inc., who was still sitting in the wagon.  As he walked the boy stretched out his hand and pointed his pistol at the man, and held it very steady at the man’s heart.  He continued walking until he was right next to the wagon and pointing the gun up at the man.

The gun was high.  It led the boy as if it were his own head.  His body simply followed it around and did what it was directed.  There was no face.  Just a gun.  A floating, faceless gun.

The gun was very steady.  The boy learned that much from the War of the States.  The boy once heard one of the older boys say that if you raised your hand and your gun was not steady, then you should simply turn the gun around and shoot yourself so that you could at least be sure of hitting something.  Better that than make a waste of it.  The boy had no intention of making a waste of it now.

The man turned to the boy.  He quickly went for the guns in his holster, but then he remembered he was out of bullets.  So he did not bother taking hold of the guns.  He just held his hands over his holsters.  His eyes looked lost for a moment, and they wandered around frantically along the ground and then out to the horizon as if the man was looking for something but not finding it.

“You must leave right now and you must leave on foot,” the boy said.  “Mother says you cannot have the wagon.”

The man could not see the boy’s face too well from behind the gun so it was hard to read his eyes.  This was too bad, he thought.  Hard to know for sure when you can’t see the eyes.  But he thought he knew the boy pretty well from their earlier conversations.  He was not yet convinced he needed to be too worried.

“Your mother will take me into Shadow.  Then I will leave,” the man said.

“She is not going to Shadow.”

The man thought about this.  After a minute, he nodded.

“I see,” he said.  “I see that you have found your bullet after all.  Truly, you must be a rare kind of fool.”

“I’ve heard it before.”

“You have no idea what you’re doing.  Shooting a man.  You think that’s all?  Then you get to keep your wagon and a couple of women, and I am dead right here in your front yard?  Then that’s the end of it?  You could have stayed in the east, for that kind of foolish thinking.  You outsiders are all the same.  You never understand what it means to fit in.”

The boy was taken aback by this a little, and the gun wavered.  Then the boy closed his eyes and shook his head.  The gun steadied.

“I know what I’m doing,” he said, and opened his eyes.

“Boy, you would not be here if you knew what you were doing.”

The man sighed and sat up straight and looked around.

“No one would be here,” he muttered.  And then, “Richmond,” he scoffed and threw his cigarette to the ground.

The boy shook his head.  He turned a little to look at the ranch house, then quickly turned back to the man.  “I am sure there are a lot of words for you, but I don’t have time.  I’ve got…I’ve got questions.  But there is just no time for you, man.  Just leave.  Leave, and leave the wagon.”

“Your mother told you to shoot me, did she?” the man said.  “Is that it?  Son, your mother is a stranger.  A stranger’s words don’t mean anything.”

“But the wagon means everything,” the boy said.

“A stranger’s words and a stranger’s face,” the man continued.

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care?” the man asked.

“No.”

“Well, what do you care about, then?”

“My wagon.”

The boy’s pistol went off five times.  The man fell backwards with a burst of escaping breath that sounded like all of Lucy’s breaths put together from the day she first got the sickness.

The tired horse that was hitched to the wagon suddenly came alive.  Her eyes went wide and her head reeled up and she pranced nervously for a minute.  It was the sound of the bullets, which cracked upon the South Dakota air like a hammer on a railroad spike.

The man slumped forward, his white shirt beneath his black coat soaked with blood.  His body then fell forward and landed on the horse’s back, which startled the poor animal even more.  She jumped and shook and the man’s body slid off of her and landed with a thud on the ground.

There was blood on the wagon and on the poor, tired horse, but the man was gone.  There was no one to force the boy, or his mother, or the horse, to go back to Shadow.

The boy looked down at the dead man and was relieved.  South Dakota was rid of him, and the boy was thankful.  Ten thousand blue soldiers had burned Richmond to the ground and none of them had the feel of an enemy like this man.  The boy’s heart raced with fright, then slowed in relief, then raced in fright again.  He put his gun in his belt and took a few steps back.

A moment later he realized his bandaged hand was throbbing.  Then he remembered Lucy.  He must take his sister and the bloody wagon and go.  There was no time to clean the wagon.  No time to clean the horse.

He turned and ran back to the house.  He got to the doorway and stopped.  He thought he saw something.  He went to the window, then let out a frightened cry.  There was a face in the window, with an open, moaning mouth, and it startled him.  But then he realized that it was just his face.  The glass in the window was wavy, and the reflection was strange.  The boy calmed himself and closed his mouth and looked at the window.  Just his reflection.  But when he closed his mouth, the mouth of the reflection seemed to stay open.  Open and gaping and gray like the sky.

The boy remembered his sister again and ran back inside the ranch house.  She was still under the colored quilt, and staring out the door.  She was still smiling a little, and her blinking and breathing told the boy that she was alive.  The boy ran to the bedroom to speak with mother one more time, but she was gone.  She had left the bed, and the boy did not see her anywhere.

There was no time.

He ran back to Lucy and knelt down and pulled her gently but quickly from under the quilt.  She was not asleep, but she also wasn’t quite awake. Embers popped from the fire and landed in her hair and even some on her face, but she didn’t notice.  The boy brushed them furiously from her hair, and they smeared black on her forehead.  And he remembered his sister’s imagination and how mother always said it was like lightning.  But now it was only smeared embers on her head, and this made the boy angry.

He smashed his fists in the fire and this sent even more burning embers over his sister, onto her hair and face and quilt.  The boy screamed in fright and frantically brushed them from her, but the quilt was burning.  He flung it off of her and stomped on it until the flames were out.

He looked around for something to cover her with, now that the quilt was finished.  There was nothing in the room.  An empty tin cup.  The broom.  An open door.  The dying fire.  He ran to the back bedroom and pulled the blanket from the bed off of the floor where mother had put it.  He ran to the window of the bedroom quickly and peered out.  There was the mountain in the distance.  A clump of trees.  Gray sky.  Mother was nowhere.

He went to the room with the hole and took a pillow, moist with the morning dew, and also the blanket off the bed.  In the corner of the room was a coat stand and he grabbed one of his old, gray woolen coats off of it. Then he went back to Lucy and lifted her up gently.  She was shivering and coughing at this point, and her thin white nightgown was wet with a cold sweat so that it stuck to her skin like a paste.  The boy put the wool coat on her and also one of the blankets.

The boy noticed with fear that Lucy seemed to weigh no more than the gun in his holster. And she seemed every bit thin enough to fit into the holster as well.  Light and thin enough to carry on his hip.  What had become of her?  Her full lips were now like the flap of an envelope over her teeth.  Her teeth were stained red with the blood of her coughing.  Her hair was thin and sticky and stringy, and it was plastered in formless, unsolvable tangles against her pale neck and forehead.  She coughed and shivered.  Then she smiled, and she said “Yes, yes, why thank you, sir,” over and over again.

The boy carried sister to the front door.  In the corner of the room in the shadows he saw a corner of one of the great trunks.  But there was no time.  None.  No time to go pick through it to find anything useful.  Too heavy for him to drag to the wagon.  He left it where it was, untouched.

He took his sister and the pillow and extra blanket to the wagon.  He put his sister on the bench where he could drive the wagon and she could lean on him.  The other things he put in the back.  There was a sharpness on the breeze.  Winter was blowing down the mountain.  But they were going up, the boy thought…up the mountain to meet whatever they would meet there, winter or otherwise.  There was nowhere else to go.  It was the only place around that looked any different to him.  Everything else was the same.  Except for Shadow, which was a grave.

A blast of wind came upon them as the boy climbed in the wagon next to his sister.  The razor sharp cold cut at the threads of his coat and he shivered.  The horse lowered her head and shuddered and waited for her directions.

“Good girl, good girl,” the boy said quietly.

He turned to his sister.

“Lucy,” he said.  “What should we name her?  We have never given her a name.”

Lucy smiled and shook her head.

“I’ve no idea,” she whispered.

The boy turned away from his sister and stared straight ahead.  It was a long way.  He lowered his head and put up his collar.

“Good girl, good girl,” he said, then pulled on the reigns and they started.

The boy ignored the road that led toward Shadow and took the wagon around the house, out the back.  The horse still had the streak of the man’s blood across her back.  But it was browning now.  Drying quickly, and growing lighter and lighter in color, like the color of the South Dakota dirt, with each passing moment.

The man from Dakota Inc. still lay on the ground.  And face down with eyes open he examined, with the deep, deep interest of the dead, the ground beneath him.  When the horse started moving, one of her hooves struck the man from Dakota Inc.’s head, and pushed it down, crushed, into the dirt.  The boy just shook his head and held onto his sister.  No wonder the horse did not have a name, he thought.  She couldn’t tell a dead man from the road in South Dakota.  What do you call a horse like that?

Soon they were moving quickly away from the ranch house, bumping and lurching along, toward the mountain.  The boy hoped to reach it soon.  Perhaps they would stay there for a while in a shelter that he would build.  Maybe they could even stay there forever if they needed to.  Maybe no one would bother looking for them there.  Maybe no one ever went to the mountain.  Maybe it was just something South Dakota looked at to pass the time.  Or perhaps he and Lucy would see what was on the other side and keep going.

Lucy drifted in and out of consciousness and lucidity as they went.  She opened and closed her eyes slowly, like a drunk man on the verge of sleep.  At one point she looked down at his hand with the bandage as it held the reigns.

“You have come for me, but where is your flower?  The red flower in your hand is gone.  Am I too late?” she said.

“No, Lucy.  We have just left.  We have a ways to go still.”

“Oh.  Good,” she said with a sigh, her unfocused eyes closing again.  “Then it is you, my soldier.  And we are leaving Richmond, then.  And the war is over and we are off to be married, and I will bake you muffins and they will be sweet.  But then where is the flower you brought for me?  I could have sworn I had seen it.”

The boy felt very sad.  He tried hard not to cry.

“Lucy, you are not too late.  We are still in Richmond, and are not quite away yet.  And the war is not over.  So there is plenty of time to bring you more flowers.  As many as you want.”

Lucy sighed and smiled.

“Then I am not too late,” she said.  “Thank you Jason.  The soldiers are still to come in their very clean uniforms.  And when I awake I will be married, and I will cook for my soldier and he will bring me flowers.”

“Yes.”

“I love you, Jason.”

“I love you, too.”

More flowers, the boy thought.  Flowers everywhere.  In the hands and on the ground and in the eyes and on the wagon and everywhere.

Bullet Three

Mother sat on the edge of the bed in the main bedroom of the ranch house and looked over the pages of the play that father had been writing.  It wasn’t the one that he intended to write, the one about his coming to South Dakota.  That one he never got to.  He was taken away by Dakota Inc. before he had a chance to start it.  The one that mother was looking at was one that he had written during the War.  He had written it to keep his mind on the things of Richmond, and to take it off of the killing that was going on north and south of the great city, in fields and over hills which, at the time, were far enough away to not be real, but close enough not to be a just dream.

Mother remembered how he used to sit in his chair near the window and sip his warm water, the half-finished pages of his play turning uselessly in his hand, his face turned to the window.  He would just stare for hours at the street beyond the glass where all the people walking—people he knew even from his youth—turned to strangers before his eyes.  He looked so sad, mother thought, as tears formed in her eyes.  How do you get over sadness like that?  Do you move to South Dakota?  Does that help?

Perhaps, she thought.

Perhaps it is the only way, in the end.

She looked down at the foot of the bed.  There were father’s boots, still neatly placed together.  Empty.

She turned again to the pages in her hand.  The last few were blank.  There was no ending to the play.  There was no ending because there was simply no ending.  The War  took care of that. The new play was to have started in South Dakota, but South Dakota was endless as well, mother thought.  Endless, all the way even to the ocean.  For it is all South Dakota, she thought, and then you fall into the water and are buried, and so even the oceans might as well be South Dakota.  Yes, there was truly no end in sight.

Without an ending, all of the pages might as well have been blank.  They might as well not have been written at all.  Mother remembered the pages of the newspapers, and the pages from the books that blew down the streets when the blue soldiers came, popping with sparks and ash, burning all of their pages blank.  She took father’s play and went over to the fireplace where Lucy was resting beneath the colored quilt and threw it in.

Then she went to the chair near the window and stared out at the plains beyond.  Lucy began to cough and shudder, but mother just stared and stared.  Soon, her eyes became blank.

Father was gone, and Jason could no longer work.  Dakota Inc. had forbidden it, and so he no longer went to the casino to work for Van Carlo. He spent his time hanging out near the ranch house, usually out back, brushing their one horse that pulled their small wagon, and speaking to her in quiet, gentle tones.

Mother was afraid that soon they would also come for Jason.  The boy was still strong, and useful, and if there was any chance of them getting paid, it would be through him.  And so the boy would be worth quite a lot to Dakota Inc.

‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘surely they will come for the boy soon.’

They would come with their remorseless faces and all their guns, and there would be bullets, bullets, everywhere.  Bullets in the bread and bullets in the soup and in the feed for the horse and bullets everywhere that would go down the throat the hard way.  So the best thing for the boy would be to stay out of sight; to never go out, and never, ever go into Shadow, and hope that enough time might pass that Dakota Inc. would forget about him.

‘But I can still work,’ mother thought.  There was a room in the ranch house with a hole in the ceiling where the boy never slept anymore. The boy only slept outside, on his back each night, his hands behind his head and staring up at the moon; and Lucy stayed under the colored quilt and could not move anymore because of the coughing which clung to her like a thin, damp nightgown.

Mother remembered a watch she had in a drawer in the bedroom.  It was broken and no longer told time, but it was made of gold and still worth something.  She stood up from the window and went to get the watch.  She’d use the watch to buy something so that she could work in the only way a woman like her could in Shadow.  The fair-skinned women in town said that the smoke made it easier, but the smoke cost money, and that was the reason she needed the watch.

Whiskey was available, too, and easier to get, and she wondered for a brief moment if she should try whiskey instead of the smoke.  But the problem was that she never really had a taste for whiskey.  Well, she actually did a little, before the war.  But during the war, they would give it to the soldiers when they had been shot through the arm or leg, just before they began to saw at the torn and ragged limbs, so now whiskey tasted like amputation to mother. No, she couldn’t even bring herself to smell whiskey anymore, let alone drink any, so it would have to be the smoke for her.

The fair skinned women told mother that the smoke would go into her mind and make her think about some strange things, but she doubted that they could be any stranger than the thoughts that were already in there.  She would join the fair skinned women in their work, otherwise mother knew there would be no surviving South Dakota, especially its winter.  And even with the work, it would be hard season for them to bear.

Mother went into town to see the fair-skinned women, and bought some smoke with her gold watch.  Then, each evening, just after the sun began to set, she left her children at home and climbed into the wagon with its one tired horse and rode to Shadow.  In the wagon on the way to town, mother would use the smoke, and then go and find a man to pleasure.  It didn’t matter who the man was as long as he was with Dakota Inc. Dakota Inc. organized the fair-skinned women, and Dakota Inc. men were the only men the women took into their rooms and their wagons and their tents.

So, for a few long and painful weeks–hazy, and void of form or reason–mother did this, but at the end of it there was still no money for the family to live on.  Because of her husband’s debt, Dakota Inc. took a percentage of what mother earned.  It was a very large percentage; practically all of it.  What was left over went for the smoke, and mother found herself beginning to use it more and more, until the boy noticed that the smell of it became like the smell of mother herself.  It was all around her, and announced her presence before she was even seen.  It came before her like an emissary, and it followed after her like the long train of a filthy wedding dress.

Every morning mother would sleep in late.  The boy would bring her some hot water and some bread for breakfast, but she would never take it.  It would sit on the bedside table as mother just lay there. Eventually, the man in the bed with her—there was always a man—would nod and smile at the boy and then reach over and take the bread and eat it himself.

“Much obliged,” he’d say.

They were different men from Dakota Inc. most of the time.  Mother did not really have any regulars, and though the boy knew that the men were always different, to him they all looked the same.  The same man, just dozens of them, all with different names.

After bringing bread and water to mother, the boy would bring some to Lucy, who was always laying by the fire under the colored quilt.  But she would never eat, either.

“Give it to the birds, Jason,” she’d say.

            “What birds, Lucy?”  It’s winter now, and I haven’t seen many.”

            “Ah,” Lucy said softly, her eyes closed, as they were most of the time.  “So they have not followed us from Richmond.  I see…they have kept going to the ocean, while we stopped here.”

            The boy told her that he didn’t understand.  Then Lucy told him it was angels; that she meant the angels.  Then she smiled and said that she was sleeping a lot these days and to never mind her.

            “It seems that I am the fool now, Jason,” she said, smiling. “Not you so much.”

***

            The next day the boy went to bring the bread and hot water to mother, but she was not in her room, and neither was the man from Dakota Inc.  He walked out of the bedroom and laid the bread and water near Lucy’s head, near the fire.

            “Lucy, I can’t find mother.  She’s not here, and the bed is made.  I don’t think she ever returned from last night,” he said.

            His sister responded, but he couldn’t tell what she said.  She was speaking in whispers a lot these days because her throat hurt from coughing so much, and she was so tired.  Also, her breathing was very raspy, like waves upon rocks.

            There was a small cup of water with a little sugar in it next to her head that the boy brought to her each night to soothe her cough.  The boy looked into the cup and noticed that the water was gone, but there was a small amount of blood at the bottom of the cup instead.

            His sister barely made a wrinkle underneath the colored quilt.  She was so thin; thinner than a ghost.  Maybe she was already a ghost, the boy thought.  She was the transparent pale of a ghost, and she certainly spoke like he imagined a ghost would speak.

            From the fire place some embers popped out and landed on the quilt.  They were not dangerous.  Just cold embers, and they quickly extinguished upon the thick quilt covering Lucy. One of them landed on a strand of Lucy’s hair, and it began to burn along it slowly until the boy reached down and squeezed it out with his fingers.

            He picked Lucy up and moved her back a little from the fire. She turned her head up to him slowly, but did not open her eyes.

            “Do not move me, brother,” she said in a whisper.  “I like the flickering light of the fire in front of my closed eyes.  It makes me think of Richmond during the war, and the popping of embers reminds me of the sounds of the muskets in the distance.  I remember when I would stand at the window with closed eyes, for I could not bear to look at all the burning.  And I thought that if I closed my eyes, I could see something beautiful instead.”

            The boy started to say something, but stopped.  He sighed sadly and moved her back nearer the fire.  Then he sat down next to her, and stroked her hair gently.

            “Lucy, I’m worried.  I am worried about mother.”

            After a long pause, Lucy responded.

            “I am in the kitchen with the muffins, Jason.  Mother is here.  The muffins have red frosting, and they are glorious. All the soldiers have returned and are smiling, and even their horses are smiling.”

            The boy looked confused.

            “Lucy, the kitchen is empty” he said.  “There is only a little bread and water next to you here.  There are no soldiers.  There haven’t been any soldiers for a long time. Except…” he paused.  “From what I hear, the blue soldiers are coming closer this way in South Dakota.  I do not want them here, to be honest.  But they will be here soon enough anyway, and it will be like Richmond again, and you won’t need the fire before your closed eyes to imagine it.”

            After a moment, the boy said, “Wherever we go, it seems the guns always follow,” He sighed again.

“We need to get out of here, Lucy.  Perhaps West, to the mountains.  I don’t know.  But mother has not returned from last night.  I hope she comes soon.”

            “No, Jason,” Lucy said.  “The soldiers have come home, for they came in the night, one by one.  All are tall and grand, and their uniforms are as clean as the day they marched from Richmond.  There is no speck of blood on them, and the only red is the frosting of the muffins, which mother has baked.”

            At that moment, the boy became angry.  His sister’s imagination had become greater since her voice became weaker.  She was spending too much time in front of the fire, just as she spent too much time in front of the window during the War of the States. He was angry at her and angry at himself for being such a fool.  He could not understand his sister, or her imagination, and he hated himself for it.

            He stood up in a flash and ran to the chair near the window.  There was a holster with a long barreled pistol hanging from it.  The pistol was from the blue soldier that he’d killed with his knife during the war.  He grabbed the gun with its six-chambered heart and turned it on his sister.  Perhaps this would open her eyes.  Perhaps this would turn her away from the flashing before her eyes, he thought.

            “Open your eyes, Lucy!” he screamed.  “And help look for mother!”  Then he raised the barrel up so that it pointed just above Lucy’s head and fired it into the wall. Each time he fired, he punctuated it with these words:

            “There is a soldier!  There is Richmond!  There is a soldier!”  And he fired until the gun was empty.

            “There is a soldier!  There is mother!  There is father!  And the muffins are hard and will smash your teeth to pieces when you eat them!  Now where is mother?!  She has not returned from last night!”

            Lucy shrieked in fright and covered her head with the quilt. Her body shook with violent tremors, and the quilt writhed over her as though wild horses were trampling upon it.

            “No, Jason!” she screamed.  “I have not seen her because my eyes are not open!  Ask the man! Ask father!  There is always a man in the house, and he must still be here!  There is always a man in the house!” And she sobbed heavily and continued to shake uncontrollably.

            The boy threw the smoking gun to the floor roughly.

            “No!” he said, grabbing Lucy. “The men mother brings are not father!  And this is not Richmond!  But I can make it feel like Richmond, by heavens, if you do not open your eyes!”  He wheeled and picked up the gun.  Then he pressed the warm barrel against Lucy’s forehead where it left a circular mark.  “Do you feel this?  This is the clean soldier!  This is mother and father!  Now help me!”

            Lucy put her hands over her ears and shook her head wildly.  And with all the strength she had left, she replied as plainly as she could.

            “I don’t know, Jason!” she cried.  “She is off with a stranger!  How can I know her place when all the men are strangers?!”

            The boy let go of her, and she collapsed, sobbing, to the floor, her limbs tangled awkwardly around and through the colored quilt.

            “She is gone, Jason.  Just gone.  She is not herself, and the man is a stranger and no one, and so we must make them something…something we can recognize. And it is up to us to do this because father is no longer here to help us.  And so I don’t care what you think or what you say, Jason!  I will see the very clean soldiers, and I will see the muffins and they will be sweet, because what else can they be?  What else?  There is nothing else!”

            The boy recoiled at his sister’s harsh reply.  He sat back, almost as if pushed, onto the hard, wooden floor of the ranch house.  The heavy gun in his hand made a dull thud as it plopped to the floor, his limp hand still holding the grip.

            “And you, Jason, are a hypocrite,” his sister continued, her voice muffled as she buried her sunken face deep into the colored quilt.  “You…with a mind like a mirror pointed to the gray skies of South Dakota.  A knife?  You used a knife, and you think that makes you better than that blue soldier you killed.  And now you have his gun and you point it at your sister. You would just as well have left him alive and not taken it.”

            After that she said nothing, and neither did the boy.  There was no sound in the house except for the wind blowing through the holes in the wall, and the sound of his sister’s breathing, which was now like shallow creek water over very small stones.

            After a minute had passed, Lucy spoke again. “Jason?  Jason?” Her voice was a whisper.

            “I’m here, Lucy.”  And when the words came out, the boy was surprised to hear that his own voice sounded almost as weak as hers did.  He felt numb all over.

            “I forgive you, brother.  You are just an empty sack.  Just a fool, and a dullard, with an imagination like a crack in the desert.  But I will fill you, Jason.  With pure, white flower of high quality, and I will make the muffins, and they will be sweet, with red frosting.  And I also notice the flower you bring to me.  The gun, let’s say, is the green stem and the bullet hole through your hand is a red flower, a corsage, and you have come as a soldier for his bride.”

            The boy looked down at his hand and that was when the pain started. It was agonizing, like a storm in his hand, with piercing lightning.  If he was numb before, he wasn’t now, and he began to cry.

            He leaned into Lucy, and cried with many kinds of pain into the quilt.  Then he stood and ran to the kitchen and tore hastily a piece of kitchen cloth as a makeshift bandage.  Shuddering in pain and fright, he ran from the house, the pistol in his good hand and the storm and the blood in the other.

            He ran a few paces from the door, then stopped.  He looked out across the empty, quiet landscape and realized that he had nowhere to go.  Even in such great pain, there was no one who would take him.  He turned back to the ranch house and saw the new holes he’d created with his gun.  Then he gnashed his teeth in pain, and tore from the house in a sprint.  He needed to find a some place for his hand.  He needed to find mother, also.

            He got to the end of the road, then stopped and knelt over.  He was breathing hard, and the air that came out of him was as cold as the air that went in.  It was frigid in South Dakota, and the wind was moving.  There was no smell or sound upon it.  The cold wind carried everything away in the winter, like a silent train heading for the coast.

            Then there came a sound, and the boy looked up to see his mother coming in the wagon. There was a man with her that the boy did not recognize.  The boy stood as mother approached at a slow pace.  She stopped the wagon next to him and the boy looked at her but he didn’t know what to say or how to look or what to do.  He put the pistol in his trousers and clutched his hand and breathed hard. Then he looked at the man and hated him.

            The man looked straight ahead at the house for a long moment, and there was satisfaction in his eyes, as if he’d already gotten what he came for somehow.  Then he turned toward the boy and smiled.

            “Did you shoot yourself in the hand, boy?” he asked.

            The boy hated him. He wore a black suit with a white shirt.  Dakota Inc. kind.

            “I did, and it is very painful.”

            “It happens,” the man said.  Then he pulled a coin from his pocket and threw it to the boy.  The boy instinctively reached out with both hands and caught it, and there was a searing pain as the coin touched the wound.

            “It is a good day for me,” the man said.  “I knew this woman had a son your age that was working for Van Carlo.  I’d heard about this son, how he killed a blue soldier in Richmond.  We all thought there was a very good chance that one of us would see a bullet eventually.”

            The man smiled again and shook his head and chuckled.

            “Well, I’ve sure seen the bullet.  It’s right there in your hand.  So we’ll just head up to the house and do what we came to do, eh?”

            “The bullet is not in my hand,” the boy said.  “It went through it.”

            “Then it is lost.  And that’s just as good, I suppose.”

            The boy did not reply.  He looked with uncertainty and disappointment at the hole in his hand. The pain had subsided by this point. The hand had mostly gone numb.

            “Yep, it is a good day for me,” the man chuckled. “A boy who shoots his own hand will have trouble finding the bullet, I think.  If I were a gambling man, I’d say it’s not in him to find it.”

            “You are not a gambler,” the boy said.  “I’ve never seen you in the casino.  You are from Dakota Inc..”

            “I am from Dakota Inc..  We are all from Dakota Inc..”

            “But there was one man who did not have a black suit.  He came first, just a few weeks before you.”

            The man nodded.  “That was Jimmy.  I knew him.  He is dead now because he was not supposed to come.  He broke the rules.  So, you see, we are all from Dakota Inc., or we are not at all, understand?”

            “What rules?”

            “The new rules. Your mother is very comely, so it was important that we make new rules. We make them every day, it seems.”

            The man sighed and looked anticipatory and bored at the same time.

            “Take the coin,” he said.  “Go to town and see the doctor.  Tell him you are from me.  He’ll know better than to think you are lying.”

            Mother said, “When the doctor fixes your hand, bring back the bandage.  Do not leave it there.”

            “Who is this man, mother?” he said.

             Mother did not respond.  She just stared straight ahead at the ranch house and started the wagon moving slowly again.  After the horse, the tired horse, who moved with her head lower than her tail, had gone a few paces, mother turned back to the boy.

            “Do not speak to me again, Jason,” she said.

            “Trust me, boy,” said the smiling man from Dakota Inc.. “And go and fix your hand.”

            So the boy went to Shadow.  None of the men from Dakota Inc. bothered him as he walked down the street because of the coin in his hand.  He found the doctor and gave him the coin, and the doctor fixed his hand.  He worked without many words.  He just muttered softly under his breath and said “There, there, lad” in an Irish accent a few of times. “There, there, lad.”

            After his hand was fixed and had a new bandage he went back to the ranch house, but he left the old bandage at the doctor’s.  When he finally remembered that mother had told him not to leave it, he had gone too far and it was too late to turn back to get it.  Surely the doctor had disposed of the bandage by now, the boy thought.  Then he marveled at what a fool he was, and at how quickly he could forget mother’s words.

            The boy arrived home a few hours later and stood at the door of the ranch house.  But he did not go in.  He heard Lucy coughing weakly, and there was the now-familiar smell from inside.  The boy could smell it from under the door, and from around the top and through the weak spots in the wood of the door. Rotten. Meaty. Organic, but somehow unnatural. He turned away from the door and felt the odorless wind of South Dakota across his face.  The wind took everything away.  Everything.  The cold numbed his face to where he could not feel it and it to where seemed as flat and featureless as the very land around him.  He could not bring himself to go back inside the house.

            He went back to Shadow and wandered the streets.  No one from Dakota Inc. bothered him because they saw that, even though he no longer had the coin, he did have a new bandage on his hand.

The Strangers gang rode out from camp, making their way slowly towards Shadow.  There they would stay for a while, just on the outskirts near the great rocks, then they would head for the mountain.

The hat Rifle wore was still acting like a bandage for his bruised and bloodied head, thanks to the pistol whip from Fire.  But his mouth hurt too, and unfortunately there was no bandage for his mouth.  Not even any bandanas like Leonard had to cover up the pain.  The only thing on his face was the large fish hook that bound his lips together.  But the fish hook was getting harder and harder to see as the blood began to build up and cake around it.

Behind his fastened lips was half a tongue.  The other half was back at camp, lying in the dirt near the opening of his tent which was still flapping.  The other Strangers had taken their tents with them, but not Rifle.  He left it, set up and empty.

 With half a tongue and lips bound together with a hook it was hard for Rifle to speak, or to cry, or even to breath.  So he said nothing.  He kept his eyes forward…so far forward that they seemed to drift far out in front of his head, just above the nose of his horse.  He looked this way and that, and thought about the fact that he would track this boy down, just as he had promised Leonard.  He would track him all the way to the top of the mountain if he had to.

The Strangers rode on and on in silence until the morning turned to dusk.  They were just silhouettes against the horizon.  The coat of Leonard, who was the last in the line of Strangers, billowed forward with the South Dakota prairie wind and threw an abnormally long and inconsistent shadow across his gang.

Rifle noticed that it was getting on nighttime, and once again he thought about resting in his tent on his bedroll.  He was tired, and could not help but to think of dreaming.

He thought about the fact that he had been dreaming more and more about the strange woman.  Not the woman from the Ranch house—not the wife of the fat man.  No, the woman he saw the other day.  He wondered what she was like, for he did not get to talk to her.  He wondered if her fingers were cold just like his own mother’s fingers were always cold because of the wind that came through the thin walls of their home in South Dakota, a long time ago.

But on that day, Leonard also knew that Rifle had seen the woman.  He told Rifle to forget the woman, she was helpless.  But Rifle could not forget her because she reminded him of his mother.  And that night he laid on his bedroll in his tent and he dreamed of his mother.  The next day he got up early and went out and looked around the camp and tried to find the woman again.  But she was gone, Leonard said.  Leonard was up early too, and had sent the woman away.

Rifle was very sad, and was angry with Leonard for sending the woman away, and not telling him and not letting him speak with her.  When Rifle saw the woman, things made sense to him.  Even Leonard and the Strangers and everything they did made some sense to him.  But this…this sending the woman away, it made no sense at all, and Rifle was very disappointed and angry.

It was that morning, after he had told Rifle that he sent the woman away, when Leonard told him that he and Fire would ride to the ranch house and collect the man called Holland for Dakota Inc.  Rifle was not looking forward to the ride because he would have a lot of time to be tempted to think about the woman he saw in camp.

He was tempted and gave into it.

The day went by and he rode on and on with Fire toward the Ranch house.  He realized that the strange woman was gone for good, and he found himself greatly missing her, and his own mother.

And now, as the Strangers gang rode to Shadow, and after they would go to the mountain, Rifle was missing his mother some more, and remembering how cold her fingers were when he was a little boy.  Cold from the cold wind of South Dakota.

All of the Strangers looked the same.  All of the Strangers wore ironic deputy badges on their vests, which were covered in dirt and dust and tarnish.  The people who had seen the Strangers gang and their badges did not know what the badges meant. Most of the Strangers were ex-lawmen, so that might have explained it.  But then Rifle knew that one had been a Confederate soldier at the very beginning of the War and another a bounty hunter from Mexico, and Leonard’s history was an utter mystery to both Stranger and man, so who knew what the badges meant, really?  Probably nothing.  And knowing Leonard, that was the whole idea.

The Strangers all wore pale gray hats and identical long gray coats that were only ever taken off when they were bathing, which was usually in a cold river, or a stream, or under the rain.  The Strangers did not like to be indoors, and they never went inside except for a short time, and never for the night.  South Dakota was where they belonged, Leonard told them.  And outside was South Dakota.  There was too much individuality inside.  People kept all the things they brought with them inside, he’d say.  But when they came out into the frigid western wind, they were all the same, and they knew where they really were.

So their coats were their covering, Leonard told them.  Gray, as the sky of South Dakota was gray.  When it rained, or snowed, the coats got wet, and stayed wet as long as the sky was wet.  When the coats dried, the sky was dry.  Their long gray coats moved as the sky of South Dakota moved.  When seen from a distance, the Strangers blended in neatly with the sky and the ground of South Dakota, having something of both of these things in the way they dressed and moved.  They were not invisible, of course.  The Strangers could be seen, if you looked carefully.  But they looked like ghosts in rags when compared to other riders on the plains.

Their horses were as sullen and quiet as the Strangers were, and pale, every one of them.  Spiritless animals, they were.  They could move quickly, but never seemed to hurry.  When they ran, their hooves moved lightly across the dirt, and did not make much noise or kick up much dust.  They were vapid when moving at any significant speed, formless pale blurs beneath the Strangers.  Just fog.

The infrequent descriptions of the Strangers gang in the papers or telegrams always seemed more suited to geography or weather than to men.  This was a good thing for the Strangers.  It kept potential pursuers—outlaws, the army, federal marshals or other lawmen—chasing rocks and clouds half the time instead of the gang.

Leonard led the Strangers with his one good eye, an eye that bled a little constantly from the hairline cut that ran from the bottom right corner to the upper left.  It was a cut that never healed.  Were it not for the blood, one could not see this cut unless they were very close to it, and the only man that had ever gotten that close to Leonard’s eye was the man who slashed it.

            Rifle looked up and saw the mountain in the distance.  To the right, about two miles from where the Strangers were, was the town of Shadow.  About three miles to the north was the ranch house where they had taken the fat man, Holland.  To the left of the Strangers, about a hundred yards away, were the large rocks.  Leonard told the Strangers to halt.  He told them to set up camp and to prepare dinner.  Rifle wasn’t hungry of course, but he was tired and ready to sleep and ready to dream about the woman.

            Leonard told them they would stay there for a little while.  Then they would move towards the mountain, and Van Carlo’s good boy.

            This journey, Rifle knew, all started with the meeting with Dakota Inc., several months ago.  That had been the first time the Strangers were at the large rocks outside of Shadow, because Leonard had learned that the outlaw Company was hiring gangs to work for them.

Leonard greatly hated outlaws.  Many times he would take their money, then trick them and kill them.  He used them as tools, but they were not his tools like the Strangers were his tools.  He hated them. They were simply fuel to be burned up as the Strangers moved around South Dakota.

The thing Leonard was most interested in was finding Van Carlo.  The Strangers would go from town to town, working occasionally with outlaw groups to make some money, tricking them, killing them, and looking for Van Carlo.  Leonard had sent Rifle and Fire to Shadow for a time, to negotiate a little deal with Dakota Inc., and to look around the town.

Dakota Inc. found Leonard in the way that it was whispered to them by a Stranger.  The Stranger was Fire, and he spent some time in Shadow milling around, very easily blending in and looking like someone people knew, and like someone who had lived there for years.  Fire was very good at this sort of thing.

He heard that Dakota Inc. was in need of gangs for hire, and he was the one who suggested Leonard and his Strangers gang.  Dakota Inc. felt that they knew this gang, and somehow had gotten it into their minds that they had heard some good things about them.  The Strangers worked clean, like the wind, and never left a trail.

But hired guns were a risky business, and Dakota Inc. understood this.  They were an expensive commodity that had no real loyalty.  Not even to money, and that was the problem. Hired guns could kill anyone they chose, regardless of the money.  And sometimes they did.  And if they were good, then they worked clean, and got away with it.  But Dakota Inc. also knew that hired guns were tools that, like any dangerous tool, had to be used every so often, whether you wanted to or not.  A saw might fall and cut your hand, but you still pulled it out of the shed when you needed it.

Fire told Dakota Inc. to send a man with a yellow mustache and yellow hair to a certain place outside of Shadow near some rocks.  When the man arrived, he was to waive a white handkerchief around his head.  Then the man was to remove his hat and put a black hood over his face with two holes cut out for the eyes.  Then he would put his hat back on, over the hood.

After this, three Strangers would approach him, and the man with the yellow mustache was to draw his gun and point it at the Strangers.  Then he would lead the Strangers at gunpoint to Shadow and to the place where they would meet with Dakota Inc.  The man with the yellow mustache was not to speak at all during the ride to Shadow or during the meeting, and was not to remove his hood until Leonard and his Strangers had left his sight.

***

“Why use the Strangers?” Leonard said. “We know you.  You’ve shot men in the streets of Shadow before, for everyone to see.”

Rocky Mote, the head of Dakota Inc. smiled and lit a cigar. He’d gotten over his initial shock of seeing the man, Leonard.  If he was a man, that is, Rocky thought.  There was something unnerving about the Stranger, and he found it difficult to be completely at ease around him.  He was there, standing in the middle of the relatively barren Dakota Inc. office, but there was an emptiness about him…a literal emptiness.  As if you could walk through him if you wanted to.  But not in a ghostly way.  It was not like he was some sort of apparition.  It was like he wasn’t there at all. Like you were talking to the wall, or to the air, and the wall and the air were talking back.  Rocky found himself dying to look behind the gray coat of the Stranger.  He honestly did not know what he’d find.  He half expected nothing at all.

“True,” Rocky said.  “And also true is that you know us.  This is the very reason why we hire men like you now.  The marshals and the Pinkertons have been sniffing closer lately.  So it appears that you aren’t the only ones who know us. Even the army is never far away these days.”

Leonard nodded sympathetically.

“Eastern hypocrites,” Rocky continued, “grumbling about cleaning up the west.  They send the Indians into dry gulches with nothing but diseased infected blankets.  Yankee factories with facades like shouting skulls grind their lifeless workers into meat cakes.  And yet they come out here to clean us up?  Six hundred thousand dead from the War heaped up with legs and arms twisted like circus freaks, and they’ve come to teach us ethics?”

Leonard nodded again. He approached the desk where Rocky was sitting and grunted.  On the desk was a ledger, with rows and columns of numbers and dollar signs scratched all up and down it.

“Eastern morality is simply the turning of pages,” Leonard said, leafing through the pages of the ledger, “one after the other, on and on.”  He kept turning pages until he found a blank one, then he stopped and put his finger in the middle of it. “It’s just business.  Same as everything.  Everything but the Strangers.”

Rocky reached up and snapped the ledger closed.  Leonard deftly and smoothly removed his hand before the book could catch his fingers.

With a growl, Rocky quickly put the ledger in one of the desk’s drawers.

“We do not want any connection to Holland Credence.  None at all,” he said, giving Leonard a stern look. Then he sighed and leaned back in his chair.  He looked slightly despondent. “The days of the men behind these desks going out and shooting a man dead in the streets are over.  Now, we stay behind the desks as much as we can.  It’s better for business.”

The Dakota Inc. boss lifted his left leg onto the knee of his right and removed his boot.  Grimacing, he rubbed his foot gingerly.  His feet always hurt these days.  He wore nice boots, but they were too tight.  But he liked it that way.  It reminded him of the dangers of being too comfortable.

“Your feet hurt,” Leonard noted.

“Yes.  I should put something else on, but these boots were expensive.”

“But you’d be more comfortable in something else,” Leonard said.

Rocky looked angry.  “I will decide my own comfort.  No one does it for me in South Dakota.”

Leonard’s eye began to bleed a little heavier; the bandannas went in and out of his mouth a little quicker.

“I see you prefer sitting to standing because standing makes your feet hurt,” Leonard said.  “It would seem that the ground of South Dakota has much to say about your comfort, Mr. Mote, originally of Oklahoma.”

Rocky looked at the Stranger with the one eye, and decided that he did not like him one bit.

“What are we talking about here?” he said, not hiding his annoyance. “Boots?  Posture preferences of an old man?  This reminds me of the days of fighting the Mexicans. I understood just enough of their babble for it to be maddening.  So let’s cut it.  I’m paying you, remember.  I was told by one of your Strangers to not ask you questions and to let you do what you do.  I expect the same from you, bandit.”

The depression in the bandanna that was Leonard’s mouth changed into the shape of a smile.  The eye bled even heavier.

“Bandit?  I’m the masked bandit?  Oh yes, now I understand,” he nodded, “but you.  You’ve been killing with your face uncovered and your head bald for years, and have never seen the gallows.” He pointed a finger at Rocky.  “Not because you could not be connected, but because you had power around here.  If you cannot do it yourself now, then what power do you have left?  What authority?  The President can come to South Dakota and kill the Indians in the broad daylight.  But what can you do?”

Rocky snickered.  “Money is power.  Murder is not.  Murder is something that money allows you to do.  It’s just another expensive commodity that most cannot afford.  Who cares how it’s done?  Who cares who the tool is?”  Rocky stood, and pointed a finger back at Leonard.  “But you need to understand something, Stranger.  The President is like you.  You’re a pauper, just like he is.”

“And we will take your money,” Leonard said, dropping his hand and stepping back.  “But this deal marks the end of your organization.  Hiring out this sort of thing is a gamble of long odds.  Just ask Van Carlo.”

At the mention of the gambler’s name, Rocky’s head snapped up.  He stared at leader of the Strangers with a clenched jaw.  Then he relaxed, and breathed out slowly.

“You never mind, him,” he said.  He lifted a satchel of money and dropped it on the desk with a leathery thud.  “Just do it.” Then he tipped his hat tersely, and walked quickly out of the room.

Leonard tipped his own hat and nodded at the man’s back.

“Now there is a man whose own mother would no longer recognize,” he said a few moments later.  “She would say, ‘What has happened to my darling boy from Oklahoma?  He seems so different.’”

The man with the yellow mustache was still in the office, wearing the black hood.  He stood near a window, uncertain as to what to do.

“Take off your hood,” Leonard said to him.

“But I was told…”

“How dare you,” Leonard said angrily.  “Show your face.” He pulled a long rifle from somewhere behind his coat and, with one arm only, aimed it at the man’s chest.

There was fear in the eyes inside the holes.  When the man removed the hood, the fear was still there.

“Where are you from?” Leonard asked.

“New York,” the man replied, trying to hide the fear in his voice.

Leonard lowered his rifle. “Don’t ever cover your face again.  You are no longer Leonard.  Now, it’s just me again.”

Then, all three Strangers left with the money.