Yule Sherwin had reached a fresh sort of crossroads. Impersonating the law had not been premeditated, but at least it was a plan he felt somewhat qualified to execute. After all, the jail did stand immediately next door, and from time-to-time Yule had caught himself eavesdropping out back while brushing the colt or burning refuse. He'd overheard the sheriff some, engaging in lock-up small-talk – and thought he sensed that end-of-the-line intimacy in the cyclops's tone. The preamble to the final plea; building toward a confession.

Still, there was a missing ingredient.

“Would you take some whiskey alongside me?” Yule asked.

“Sure will.” They passed the bottle back-and-forth. “So much obliged.”

“I'm sorry Westman did that to your eye.”

“You ought fuckin’ forget I said anything. He'll kill us all.”

“Not if, before he gets the chance, I haul him in for the murder of Madame’s son.” Emboldened by whiskey, Yule got directly to the point.

“You gonna bring him before the magistrate in Cripple Creek?” When Sam the cyclops chuckled, it was a wholly derisive cackle. Yule leaned conspiratorially near, till the whiskey bravado reverberated between them like lightning-charged vapor.

“Or mayhap straight to the gallows here in the town center – at the crossroads,” he said. “What happened to that boy?”

“I can’t!” The cyclops cried. “Don’t make me say what I seen! I can’t tell ye who done it! I’ve only the one eye left! Don’t you understand?”

“I need your help, Sam.” Yule knelt and firmly gripped him by the shoulder.

Then he lied and said, “I can protect you.”

The sniffling subsided some.

“That a fact?” Sam asked. “You gonna put me up here in the jail? I ain’t got no place to go.”

“You needn’t ever go back to Westman’s.” The lies came easier as Yule added more whiskey to his mettle. “You will be considered evidence of the state.”

“Deputy, I wouldn't know where to get started.”

“Start at the beginning.” Yule handed over the whiskey. He sensed a few more swallows would have the cyclops overflowing. “Tell me everything you can about the boy you brought to the Bare. Do not omit even a single detail. ”

“You truly reckon you can keep me safe?” Sam asked doubtfully. He drank a mighty slug.

“On mine badge,” Yule swore.

“Can’t ye do any better than that?” Sam laughed. He guzzled the whiskey. “I mean no offense, Deputy, but what makes you think Rex won’t burn this jail down with the both of us and whoever else inside?”

“If you are unsure of mine ability to keep mine word,” Yule began. He took the bottle back from his prisoner before concluding, “You have the right to go quietly back to his compound and take your chances therein.”

“Alright,” Sam said. He held his hands out in the darkness, pawing for the whiskey. “Whattya want to know first?”

“Did you know the boy?” Yule asked. He handed the bottle back to Sam. “Before you dropped him off at the bordello?”

“Yep,” Sam answered. He drank. “I known him a few months now. I met him in Independence, Missoura – same day as I met Tom Savage and Geoff and Mister Oliver. We was all hired by that Injun – all us white fellers. He was our boss. Ain’t that somethin’ fuckin’ awful, right there? A heathen trail boss? Shoulda cut out right then.”

At the mention of Tom Savage, Yule was hooked. Already, the story was suiting his investigative keen exquisitely. He leaned in nearer, listening intently.

Sam had been hired to escort a wagon of medical supplies all the way from Independence to the Westman Compound in the Rocky Mountains. The job would pay two-thousand dollars – enough to fulfill most of a feller’s wants out West. He'd worked a cattle-drive or two in his day, but those were flat-land treks from Kansas to Texas and back-again.

“But never before had I seen nothin’ like the Rockies,” Sam remembered. Yule recognized the gleam in Sam's eye – even minus the benefit of light in the workshop. “None of us had, exceptin’ Tom Savage, of course.”

“Tell me about the others,” Yule said.

The cast assembled by Sam the cyclops was a motley one.

His traveling companions were of lonesome, loathsome stock.

They were led by Rex Westman's chief scout, Tom Savage. On the trail, he wore a pin-striped blazer over a turquoise-beaded shirt. A fly-bit top-hat capped the sleek, pitch-black hair which grew to the middle of his back. Feathers adorned the cuffs of his jacket in the manner customary of sophisticated heathen savages. He spoke English fluently, as well as several heathen tongues including Spanish – but Sam reckoned Tom communicated for the most part in telepathic trespasses. Part specter, he never slept save for brief naps with his eyes open and his white-knuckled fist upon his tomahawk. He was a Devil even amongst savages.

Also along for the ride was that scalped youth – the Madame's boy. In life he had gone by the name Roger and he had been mossy-green around his gills. To hear Sam tell it, the boy had been downright feeble-minded. He was come along as a passenger but for all the good he was he might well have been human cargo.

Driving the wagon was Geoff Sindenburg, an enforcer of some infamy around Independence – well known for his method of bouncing rowdies from saloons. His persuasion was said to be sold with the heavy end of a sledge. Repeat trespassers exited the saloon with a crack in their head rivaling that of their ass. A veritable brute of a man, Geoff lumbered with his knuckles almost dragging.

“Rex cut out his tongue with a straight-edged razor,” Sam recalled. “Because he talked too much.”

Joining their crew last was Truman Oliver – the gunfighter. He was also a pederast. Back East he'd absconded with the son of an upholsterer and had thusly fled West to avoid further entanglement. In the company of grown men he was a valuable asset, his gun repelling brigands by its mere reputation.

“You've heard the name Truman Oliver, ain't ye?” The cyclops assumed any lawman worth his salt knew the name. “Let me tell you – his wit were a mite quicker than his gun, n'even. It’s some kind o’ sin what happened to him and that boy Roger.”

Sam had found his road-mates on a sticky June morning at the entrance to Independence's pharmaceutical enclave. He imagined the work of necromancers and alchemists went on behind their doors. The wagon was loaded with four chests, all locked heavily with iron. The locks were filled with wax, and the keys were carried in a separate wagon which had already gone ahead a month earlier to Red Junction. There were short and long firearms provided for each man, and ample ammunition for defense and hunting. Blankets, cookware and an ax – all provided. Sam brought on his person the long, bone-handled filleting knife his uncle had gifted him upon passing. That had been the last of his kin. He carried a change of clothes in a rucksack and both his eyes in their sockets.

Tom Savage drove them westward. His every word was a lethal discharge; syllables succinct and powerful, flashing out from his muzzle. The heathen had the audacity to command, “Move 'em out, white men!”

July 12th they arrived in Cherry Creek and the wagon had already rolled across a thousand miles of indistinguishable plains. The white men found quarter in the inn, while Tom camped outside town. They washed for the first time since Independence, ate warm bread and drank cold cider. Their tongues loosened in a way they never had around the campfire:

“I saw the savage eat a frog last night,” Geoff reported. “Right from the edge of the trail, after we'd settled in. Scooped it up the way a barn-owl would and—” He plucked an imaginary frog from the table and mashed it into his beard-hole.

“Don't doubt it,” Sam agreed.

“He likely intends to use our persons as live sacrifice to some feathery serpent,” Mr Oliver said, offering his best explanation. “Perhaps tomorrow we should behave in kind and pray to a cow's ripened pie, thus ingratiating ourselves amongst our rustic, heathen overlords?”

“That's some jargon you got there. How come you talk that way?” Geoff asked. “You think you're better than me?”

“How many men have you gunned, Truman?” Sam wondered. Mr Oliver had gone to bed without another word.

That was the sum of the long haul. Every day the wagon was more cramped. Ruts in the trail became shallower, and oxygen scarcer. They marched solemnly, and by day's end only whiskey kept them together. At night, the fire would see them sat about it and their whispers would return to the common enemy: Tom Savage. Each supper left them with an aftertaste of paranoia – the way even his most favored, familiar morsel might unnerve a man awaiting his turn at the gallows.

“I been on a bad cattle-run once before,” Sam the cyclops told Yule in the darkened workshop. “Where the hands turned mutinous against the trail boss. Well there weren't no herd, but our hearts sure were full of treachery for our boss. Whites just ain't meant to follow savages, reckon. Doin' so for so many weeks made us quarrelsome even amongst ourselves.”

By the time they made their last camp on the prairie, the men were strung out and raw as whipped slaves. All except the Madame's boy, Roger, who prattled on about Kit Carson and Daniel Boone. Sam envied the kid's obliviousness. The grown men had been able to reach a lone consensus: the end of the line was fast approaching. Mr Oliver continued to insist Tom was planning to butcher them and use their blood to practice moon-worship. Geoff suspected the heathen was leading them toward an ambush for their scalps. Sam feared they'd be traded to the Comancheros for a few jugs of whiskey, and their last days would be sweated out south of the border in white bondage. As the sun went down, the Rockies carved the horizon. The silhouette of its many peaks and ridges was stark as a line of guillotines. The next morning, they'd start up the pass.

“On the mountain, men may find bear and cougars,” Tom Savage had told them that last night on the plains. “Stay near wagon if bear comes. Cougar, too.”

They all five sat around the fire, each of the whites gifted with a rabbit caught by Tom and spiked on the spit.

“White men! I offer these bunnies so that you are strong for the climb, and as token of trust!” Tom spoke – part preacher; half-tamed. “Tom feed you many bunnies over many moons, and never once does Tom try and kill white man while he sleeps. Still, Tom hear white man whispering. Tom hear whites whispering about Tom.”

“Now Chief,” Geoff said. “Try an' understand—”

“Tomorrow, wagon rolls up mountain pass,” Tom said, ignoring Geoff altogether. “Must work as team. If white men want out, they may eat bunny and they may cut-and-run – but they will not be paid. I leave you white men to eat trust-bunnies and think.”

He went into the night, led away by preternatural heathen instincts the civilized could scarcely fathom. They went about their hushed, fearful supper ritual. All except the kid, who groaned over the succulent rabbit, praising the heathen's culinary exploits.

“He's a fuckin' demon,” Geoff said, but only after Tom had been gone awhile – and quietly, close to the fire.

“These heathens, being regularly in the company of wraiths and specters, often employ the departed for reconnaissance against their would-be victims,” Mr Oliver explained. He was filing the trigger on his pistol again like he did most every evening, and Sam reckoned it must have been hair-thin by that point. Mr Oliver spoke a stark truth, “Have no question – he hears even the quietest of thoughts in your skull.”

“Reckon you might shut the fuck up then?” Geoff growled. Whistling a slow tune, Mr Oliver took his supper under the wagon where he stretched out his bedroll.

“Why you gotta pester him?” Sam asked. “You want him to gun you next?”

“He's got a big name but I don't think he's got the nerve no more,” Geoff answered, loud enough for Oliver to hear. “And I think might be I can take a piece o' that name for mine own.”

“Well could ye let it rest till the job's done at least?” Sam pleaded. Geoff reached over and snatched his bunny.

“'Could ye let it rest?'” Geoff mocked, and he chowed Sam's grub.

“Give it back!” Sam squawked, but that was about it.

The campfire crackled and Geoff tore greasy meat from the carcass with his fingers. He laughed with his mouth full and said, “That's what I thought.”

Gun-play at night is seen and felt before it's heard. The muzzle flashes, then the bullet comes out quicker-than-sound. It's heard hitting the target before the echo of its original discharge catches up.

A flash, a thud, and a bang – in that order – and warm fluids spattered Sam's face.

“Shit-fuck-fire!” he yowled.

Sam had never seen a man wide-eyed as Geoff. He had become a petrified brute, frozen in that instant before the bullet struck. His hands clutched the empty breeze out in front of him, above the campfire – but the bunny he'd stolen was gone. Sam exhaled for the first time in what he reckoned was eternity. In the flickering firelight he saw bits of the rabbit scattered, and then Mr Oliver materialized from a plume of his own pale gunsmoke. Keeping his pistol trained on Geoff, he came up beside Sam.

“Have mine.” Mr Oliver gave him the last of his own supper. He kept his gun leveled and said, “You leave him be.”

“Sure thing,” Geoff promised, raising his hands like a busted culprit. He repeated, “Sure thing.”

Sam picked at the bunny, but he was too numb to taste it. He was exhausted just having witnessed their prairie-wide dance for dominance. Geoff had stepped on Oliver's toes the whole while, but finally he'd be tread upon no more. Sam watched the gunslinger slink back to his bedroll beneath the wagon, where he knelt and holstered his pistol. Even if the rabbit had come to be a somewhat bitter ration, Sam was grateful for it and awed to be treated so kindly by a celebrity. Truman Oliver was a bona fide legend.

But legends out West came crashing to the abruptest of ends, often after unfair fights. The quickest pistols didn't die at high-noon during showdowns, but rather at night with their backs turned.

Sam fingered the bunny-meat and admired his famous, bigger-than-life friend. Oliver was bedding down. He laid his mythical gun-belt beside his well-worn boots.

In one swoop, Geoff snatched a stone from beside the fire and slung it viciously across the campsite. It skipped in the dirt and cracked against the wooden hull of the wagon. Sam shrunk away from Geoff, expecting Oliver to gun the dumb brute down finally – but there was no such luck. The stone had struck a blow not against the wagon, but terribly upside Oliver's skull. He was seizing in the dirt.

“Oliver!” Sam hollered. He skidded to the gunslinger's side and turned him over so he wouldn't gag on his own tongue.

“He should've known better,” Geoff laughed, “than to bring a gun to a rock-fight.”

“You've killed him!” Sam screamed. Roger was crying inside the wagon.

Geoff spit in the fire and went to sleep out in the night.