Tom Sheehan

Herman Longburrow, a flat-out 100 per cent Cherokee boy about 9 years old, got his name from a German minister who rode a big black stallion, carried a bible for ready use when he came upon possible converts or those who wanted to pray, and a Colt on his right hip, generally hidden under his black coat in case a different statement was needed.

Tom Sheehan

Jackson Alsop, sheriff of Dunkirk Falls in the Montana territory, rode back into town as evening settled itself like an October blanket, snow promise sitting in the air, a chill with it, and his horse tired from the long chase.

Tom Sheehan

Travis Henry, young sheriff of Winslow Hills, in the Wyoming Territory, was back from his honeymoon of sorts, and was on the job after a quiet period when he was away. He was 21, three times wounded in his short life, and considered lucky by most men who knew him, and gun-fast by everybody else in town.

Going back to work was easy, with a smile on his face.

Tom Sheehan

They were near Pueblo Ande, at the old walls, and talking to the old man who could have been 70 or 90 and no difference to them. And he could have been as old as the mountains or the winds that played around up there. And that no difference either. He might have been as old as the walls. Maybe he had put the last stone in place. It was all gone now, or almost. Like him, the old Mex.

Tom Sheehan

The host of them, after a great fire destroyed much of their property in Wellesley, Massachusetts, headed west, for open spaces, free land and a new life. Joshua Weddles, a young 50, strong, adventurous, industrious, eventually led the seven wagons out of Missouri bound for the setting sun.

Tom Sheehan

John Bevans Tailback came on the scene in lower Wyoming Territory when he was 15 years old, riding into the town of Looping Wells, looking for the two men who murdered his mother and father in cold blood over the last loaf of bread in her oven. He told the sheriff what had happened, all the details including the descriptions of the two men he had seen on that unforgettable day four years earlier.

He had grown well.

Tom Sheehan

Pvt. Alexander Mulvihill, still bleeding from a serious wound, sat with his back against a big rock, the Texas night sinking like a lost swimmer, a breath of prairie air mixed with a promise of cool shadows. He kept thinking of home and the smell of a roast from his mother’s great iron stove, her voice lilting and lifting angelic in the kitchen all the way back there in Pennsylvania, and the hills around home lit up in the leaves like flares the whole length of the Allegheny Valley.

He waited through the long night for the sun to come up.

Tom Sheehan

Sgt. Quinn Cosgair, two days from the end of his current enlistment, September of 1871, three hash marks earned for his left sleeve, participated in the battle with Comanches at Blanco Canyon, nearly 40 miles long, and when the Comanche women and children finally were able to flee the attack, the fighting Comanche braves drifted off into the silence of the Llano Estacado, Palisaded Plains, like high spirits of old, the invisible ones.

Tom Sheehan

The body was prone in the middle of the dusty street, a late morning sun beating down on it, flies checking their prospects, and silence reigning over the entire town.

Tom Sheehan

The train sat at a water stop miles before Humphrey Station on the Dakota-Idaho Line, a rifle jammed in the back of the engineer, the conductor temporarily locked in a caboose closet, the telegraph lines already cut in a few places, and Pearl Weber’s gang holding the train for her. She was 10 minutes late coming from the hideout, the wires cut after an incoming message addressed to a “Virginia Alexandria” had included the coded line, “Mother is keeping her bed warm at home in Purchase.”