Tom Sheehan

False dawn’s first signal slipped into the trail-end town of Bountiful, Kansas, the cattle drive over a few days earlier, the train loaded and gone, some cowpokes from the drive hanging on for a few more laughs, a few more drinks, a last look at someone special, before they had to light out for a new drive, cows, dust, work galore on top of work, lousy food some days, thirst, sore rumps, campfire camaraderie, ballads with a guitar to fall asleep with, dreams of another life.

Tom Sheehan

Kirk Taatjes, blond as fallen sunlight, fast gun unknown to most folks west of Pennsylvania, pulled his horse to a halt as they topped a rise in the trail. His gaze sped across three peaks of the Tetons as majestic as any peaks he had seen on his journey and guessed it was where he had been headed all the time, out there back of beyond as Mountain Jack Dawry called it from his last bed. “It’s where you got to go, kid, out past beyond, after the mountains, past the grass.”

Tom Sheehan

The Texas evening carried grace and expectation as the sun moved on its last legs; soft shadows fell from all heights as though they were cotton balls shaped into vague contours, and a hush moved across the land the way mystery crawls, unknown, unsure of where to put down its feet, looking for contestants in the arena where life is lived a good part of the time.

Tom Sheehan

Here was Morgan Gautry in a stoned-up cave, both hands smashed by a rifle butt, a renegade leader sparing him at length at the whim of his woman, a woman who liked the younger boy’s looks, a woman who had smiled at him so many times he couldn’t remember.

Tom Sheehan

A few folks on the one wide street of Victory Falls, Colorado saw the rider coming into town, the sun at his back not allowing some of them to see him clearly, nothing but a blur to a few others, and to others a lone man lost on his own horse.

Tom Sheehan

The sun, it seemed that day, had been Hades-hot since it came on the horizon nearly blood-red at first. The bushwhacker on the small farm of Colby Dunne had fired at the farmer and hit the woman behind him, the woman loading the exchange of rifles, the woman who was his wife, the woman who was carrying their 8-months old unborn child. When the woman fell down dead, her child with her, the farmer chased the bushwhacker onto his horse and off the farm, the killer and his horse heading for the hills.

Tom Sheehan

From a long way out on the trail he saw the tell-tale landmarks he’d been told about; “They’ll stand out not like mountains but like a row of chimneys back in Chicago or New York or Boston, or so they tell me, some other gents. You can’t miss ‘em, so head straight for ‘em. If Shady John Bigelow stole your woman, she’ll most likely be up that way.”

Tom Sheehan

“I am the Devil’s due.”

He kept hearing her words, as if they were coming out of a long, thin funnel of rocks someplace where he had been; “I am the Devil’s due,” she said, the voice as thin and as narrow as the funnel of its delivery, that old place he could not remember. In the mountains. In his past. Anywhere?

“I am the Devil’s due,” she had said, just like the dice were loaded and had been tossed, still rolling end over end.

“I am the Devil’s due.”

Tom Sheehan

It all really began with a kid’s game and the kid was touted long before he got out of Shadowdance on the trail to Abilene, because he came lit up like a store window dummy, all shiny and glittery and showing off his duds and guns the way a carnival rider comes into the show tent. Some old folks along that Abilene road said, “He come clear out of Shadowdance with his guns shootin’ and him hollerin’ all the time and all the way like they was no tomorrow.”

Tom Sheehan

Houston McKee slipped out of the water and the cluster of reeds he had hidden in when the gunfight occurred more than an hour earlier. Hoof beats of the bushwhackers had faded for at least 20 minutes. He looked back at the providential growth of the thick reeds where he had hidden from them, caught away from camp without a weapon, and thanked Mother Nature for another good stand of growth with enough shade and shadow to hide his long frame.