Sam skidded backward and accidentally tumbled from the tail-gate. There, he thudded in the dirt and the gang outside laughed.

The onslaught of ornery onlookers blotted out the sun. Sam stayed planted ass-first in the dirt, hollering at heights beyond reason. The men crowded quick, had a look-see and vamoosed. Laughter turned to utter mystification – head-scratching and eye-rubbing. Then the gang split just as quick. Rex Westman had taken notice.

“That'll do,” he boomed – and stood beside Sam, studying the wagon's load. He sighed and drew a forty-five from his belt. Pointing it into the wagon, he said to Sam, “If you have a mind to eulogize your compadre, you'd better do it quick.”

Then Rex Westman gunned down what had become of Truman Oliver, the legendary gunslinger.

“It is ripe,” Tom Savage materialized to interject.

“A fine fuckin' vintage,” Rex agreed. He leaned inside and inhaled the scent of the wagon's hold. He elbowed his Indian and laughed, “Funeral's in the morning.”

Sam had pissed himself that night, drunk on whiskey.

He woke the next morning amidst a squall of girls. They lured him, undressed him, and finally poured him into a hot tub. They scrubbed and stroked him, and he soaked a long while in the windowless salon. Geoff enjoyed the same pampering, and then sat himself down in the barber's chair to have a shave. The barber plied his trade with a straight-edged razor. Geoff's mug was lathered and a hot rag laid over his eyes – and then Rex Westman crept in quietly to assume the barber's position. He held the straight-razor across his pursed lips to signify the danger of making sounds, and Sam did not say a word. Westman began shearing off Geoff's tangle. He held a cigar clenched in his teeth, and he ashed it every-so-often into the shave basin.

“Been on the trail awhile?” Westman was disguising his voice. With the rag laid over his eyes Geoff was none-the-wiser. Rex sloughed off a swatch of beard and asked, “Eh, feller?”

“Yar,” Geoff answered.

“How you cotton to the Westman Mining Company?” Rex asked, still raising the timbre of his voice so it was unrecognizable. “Been a good stretch of employment for ye?”

“Do reckon I'm out once I receive my two-thousand dollars,” Geoff laughed.

“Oh?” Rex said. “Why's that?”

Geoff was just quiet a spell, and then he answered, “I reckon there's only one madman I'm out to work for – and that's me.”

“Madman?”

“Not sure what else you'd call a feller who puts a savage in charge of the job, and has us robbin' graves to boot.”

Those were the last words Geoff ever spoke. Westman wrapped his bicep around his throat and squeezed. Geoff's legs kicked out and he pried at Rex's choke-hold but to no avail. In his tub, Sam sat up but could not look away. Ash from Westman's cigar fell into Geoff's lather. He angled the straight-razor, as if to gouge and not shave. The salon was filled with gagging screams – and then nothing but silence. Rex held Geoff's tongue aloft and laughed.

“You talk too fuckin' much,” he said.

The tongue went in a pickling jar.

“The hair-lip,” Yule whispered. He realized then that it had not been a born-in defect, at all.

“Rex has the tongue still,” Sam said. “Keeps it proudly upon his desk.”

“Men who maim and kill serially do adore their trophies,” Yule said.

“Reckon that's why he's kept me around.”

Rex Westman had turned Sam into a trophy immediately after butchering Geoff. Naked and soaking, there had been no place for Sam to run nor hide. Westman crouched beside the wash-tub.

“Do you know what you just seen?” Rex asked.

“I seen a man get what he deserves,” Sam had answered honestly, and Westman grabbed him by the hair. Before he knew what had happened, the cigar was pressing into his eye.

“Wrong answer,” Rex growled. The organ lost integrity all-at-once, and the cigar slid in further. Westman said through his grit teeth, “You seen nothin', cocksucker. And don't you forget not seein' it.”

In the dimly lit workshop, the place he had come to believe was a temple – the cyclops stroked the rough patch of hide which hid his injury.

“Why couldn't he've just killt me?” Sam wept.

“Satan is never satisfied by murdering just the flesh,” Yule preached. “It is the souls of men He most wishes to kill.”

“It is a good feeling to confess unto ye.”

But what had he confessed to? Witnessing atrocities? Perhaps the trauma of recent weeks had made Sam blame himself. The Christian in Yule couldn't help but ask, “What sin is it you think you've committed, my son?”

“I killed Roger,” Sam blurted.

By maiming Sam and Geoff, Rex had committed an untenable culling. Roger alone was left to complete what should have been the whole troupe's final task. While the two of them convalesced in the infirmary, nursed by scab-mouthed whores, the deputy they'd exhumed was ripening worse. It fell upon Roger to scrape together a satchel of the deputy's maggoty sludge. Then he was dispatched to accompany Tom Savage on a ride out of Red Junction.

By hurting them, Rex had been emboldened further – if that were even possible for such a man. He spoke of his evil right in the presence of Sam and Geoff, knowing he had bought their silence well:

“There's a claim at the top of the ravine that is the richest in Colorado,” Westman said. “But it is owned by a mule from Baltimore, and that fat fuck Angus will not sell.”

There are places at altitude, alongside pitch cliffs, where the sun never shines and the creek's bend conspires to keep snow well into the summer months. Prior reconnaissance had suggested that the Baltimoreans kept reserves of meat frozen in just such a place, within a deep wash-tub half-sunk in the creek. Negotiations had not borne fruit, and other methods were deemed necessary to evict the farmer Angus and his young daughter from the land. The whole ordeal, it seemed, had been for this. Bringing medicines from Independence to Red Junction had never been the motive; rather, Sam had endured that long haul across the prairie because Rex Westman wanted the deputy dug up and relocated. Truman Oliver had died so Westman could have more Color. Something foully infectious was inside that long-dead lawman, and Roger rode out of town behind Tom Savage to poison the Baltimoreans' cold-storage. Because dead homesteaders forfeit all claims.

Roger and Tom returned a day later, and then the boy came down with a bad sick. Westman roused Sam and Geoff and told them they needed to take care of the kid. He told them to make it look like heathen's work.

“You're in debt to me for the costs associated with keeping you here in my infirmary while you recover,” Rex had said. “You can start makin' it even now. When you get it done, take the boy over to the bordello and get him fucked. Leave him there. Don't you boys take no for an answer now, ye hear?”

They had heard.

“I've feared the effects of even wonderin', sometimes," Sam admitted, and he found Yule's hand in the dark and squeezed it. “What inspires him? How is he so God-damnable? Geoff ain't et in a whole week, 'cause he can't work his jaw. I wasn't a drunk but till recently. Burnin' mine eye? Poisonin' folk? Robbin' the dead and utilizin' heathens? Who does any of that?"

Yule had no answers. He had no scripture to quote as a proper instrument of the Lord would, nor a warrant to prepare as the Law ought. He could only bow his head and pray alongside the cyclops. After a time, Sam stopped praying and was silent so that Yule thought he might be asleep. He peeled himself from their embrace. Yule reckoned it was a moment of honor, and he knew come morning he should go alongside Sam to the sheriff's office and report these crimes. He knelt beside Sam with the lamp and the drunken cyclops lifted his head and looked Yule straight-in-the-eye:

“Whatta I owe, barkeep?” Sam said, lifting himself suddenly from the floor to stand at full height.

Yule prepared to catch him in his inevitable tumble but Sam did not collapse beneath the weight of his own drunk. “You, uh...You owe me nothing, Sam,” he stammered.

“Well that's mighty hospitable, ma'am.”

“I, uh...” But Yule was unsure where to go next, nor even how they had arrived there – and before he knew it Sam found the front door by the light of Yule's own lamp.

He went out into the night, right past the burro – who clacked its teeth and snickered as the cyclops shambled by.