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  For

  Glendon

  and

  John “Duke” Wayne

  the real shootists

  Acknowledgments

  The 1954 black-and-white photograph of the famous alligator pond in El Paso’s downtown San Jacinto Plaza is reprinted by permission of the El Paso Public Library from their Aultman Collection, with the assistance of librarian Danny Gonzalez.

  I’d like to thank publisher Tom Doherty of Tor/Forge Books for allowing me another book in print and editor Bob Gleason for once again helping with good story notes. Assistant editor Kelly Quinn and copy editor Susannah Noel were also helpful in readying this text.

  Former Northland Press editor Tom Carpenter from Flagstaff and frontier-weapons expert Phil Spangenberger from Leona Valley, California, both provided their expertise, as did Los Angeles producer/filmmaker Marcos Cline-Marquez with my weak Spanish. Mr. Spangenberger can also be enjoyed on two of Mark Allen’s DVDs, Gunplay Made Easy and Gunplay: The Art of Trick & Fancy Gun Handling. Wes Patience is a Western historian retired to Bisbee, Arizona, who pointed me in right directions research-wise.

  And lastly, my dear mother, Kathryn Swarthout, for her help removing modern words from these Old West characters’ mouths. Without these experts’ wise suggestions, this Western tale could not have been polished.

  As for the master storyteller himself, the great Glendon, well, he knows.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epigraph

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God.

  —Psalm 104:21

  Prologue

  The Final Scene from Glendon Swarthout’s Western Novel The Shootist

  Gillom Rogers inched through the doors of the Constantinople. Eyes watering from the smoke, he gaped at Jay Cobb and Serrano and Koopmann, and at Jack Pulford, seated against the wall.

  Skirting the three bodies near the bar, avoiding the blood and brains as best he could, he looked over the bar, then scuffled in wonder through the carnage of glass behind it. A dollar bill stopped him. He put it in his pants pocket that held the other money. A black-handled Remington lay in the walkway. He picked it up and holding his breath approached the prone man, who seemed small to him now, even puny.

  “Mister Books?”

  He saw the torn coat and the blood on it and the right arm extended stiffly, gun aimed. He moved slowly to Books’s side, bending.

  “It’s me, Gillom,” he said.

  He got down on his knees. Books was incapable of speech. His chin was clamped upon his left wrist. Gillom did not care to look into the face, but the eyes arrested him. They considered. They considered not only the archway, as though something implacable waited on the other side, but something transcendent beyond that as well, far beyond.

  “Mister Books, it’s me, Gillom.”

  The mouth opened. Nothing inaudible issued from it, but the lips formed two words: “kill” and “me.”

  “Kill you?”

  Gillom chewed his lips.

  “Sure thing,” he said, then stood, moved behind the man, straddled him, and put the muzzle of the revolver he had picked up to the back of the head. He turned his own head away, shut his eyes tight, gritted his teeth—pulled the trigger.

  The hammer clicked.

  “Shit,” he groaned.

  He despaired, aware on the rim of his consciousness of the smoke and the reek of the air and the solemnity of the fans. He got down on his knees again beside the prone man and worked at the fingers clenching the pearl handle of the second Remington, prying them free until he possessed that weapon, too.

  He stood again, straddled the prone man, and put the muzzle of the revolver to the back of John Bernard Books’s head a second time, into the hair. He turned his own head away, shut his eyes tight, gritted his teeth, and pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  He walked out of the Constantinople into chaste air. A crowd of men and boys had gathered across the street. Waiting for a buggy to pass, then a buckboard, he crossed the street to the crowd.

  “What happened in there?” at least six asked.

  “They’re all dead,” said Gillom.

  “Who?”

  “J. B. Books. Jay Cobb. Jack Pulford. A Mex name of Serrano, a rustler. And some guy I don’t know who. A big guy. He killed ’em all.”

  “Who?”

  “Books.”

  Someone had counted. “Five! Whooeee!”

  “Jesus Christ, boys, he killed every hard case around!” someone exulted. “Jesus, boys, we fin’ly got us a clean town!”

  “Oughta put up a statue of the murderin’ bastard!” someone else enthused.

  “These are his guns.” Gillom held them up for all to covet. “He gave ’em to me before he died.”

  “Look at that!”

  “Short barrel, no sight, specials by God—hey, kid, wanna sell ’em?”

  “Hell, no,” said Gillom. He grinned and waved at the Constantinople. “Okay, folks, step right over and see the show! Drinks on the house!”

  As the crowd tided across the street, Gillom Rogers strode away down it, swinging a gun in each hand. An alchemy of false spring sunlight turned the nickel of the Remingtons to silver. He strode head up, shoulders back, taller to himself, having sensations he had never known before. One gun was still warm in his hand, the bite of the smoke was in his nose and the taste of death on his tongue. His heart was high in his gullet, the danger past—and now the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.

  One

  One thing he knew for a fact: he had to get these pistols hidden quick or his mother might kill him, too. They were much too valuable to flash around town. Sweet bearded Jesus! He now possessed J. B. Books’s matched Remingtons!

  Gillom
Rogers slowed his walk, wondering where he would get a double-holster rig to house these legendary nickel-plated Remington .44s. Or should he have a silk vest made like Books’s, with leather holster pockets sewn on either side of the chest, angled forty-five degrees inward for a cross-handed draw? Too late to get J. B.’s own now. That special weapons vest was all shot up and bloody on his corpse. Books was too heavy to clothe Gillom’s skinny frame anyway.

  If I can just learn to handle these pistols as well as Mr. Books did, quick draw, spinning tricks, a sharpshooter, I can become as famous a shootist as that old man was! With a little gambler’s luck, if nobody fills me fulla lead, makes me look like a colander. Famous and feared.

  “Hey, kid! Kid! Wait up!”

  Gillom halted in El Paso Street and stepped back from the steel trolley tracks to turn to see who was hulloing. Shading his eyes against an afternoon sun, he squinted at the hullabaloo stirring around the Constantinople saloon, spectators shouting, hurrying in and out of the opened front doors. A spindle-shanked fellow in a striped suit and derby hat galloped out of the crowd and waved at Gillom.

  “Dan Dobkins! Daily Herald!”

  Gillom Rogers nodded as the young journalist caught his breath. “You interviewed Mister Books at our house.”

  “Well, almost. Before that cranky old bastard booted me out.” Dobkins pointed at one of the shiny revolvers Gillom held. “His pistol?”

  Gillom straightened, displaying a nickel-plated Remington in either hand.

  “J. B. Books himself gave ’em to me the moment before he died.”

  Dobkins couldn’t resist running an index finger along the five-and-a-half-inch sightless barrel of the made-to-order Remington.

  “You stole ’em off a dead man.”

  “I did not! It was our deal. If I told Cobb, Pulford, and Serrano over in Juarez to meet Mister Books in the Connie today at four, when the shooting was over, Mister Books said I could have these specials.”

  Dan Dobkins only had about ten years on this callow youth, but he surveyed the teenager with a cynical eye. “So you took ’em off a dead man?”

  Gillom reddened. “No! He asked me to finish him off. Hell, he was all shot up anyway, almost dead. So I pried this loaded pistol from his fingers and did what he asked.”

  Dobkins’s mouth fell open. “You issued the coup de grâce?”

  “The what?”

  “Executed him?”

  “Yup.” Gillom Rogers raised his narrow chin defiantly, risked twirling the revolver in his right hand by its finger guard, just once.

  The star reporter of the El Paso Daily Herald noticed bystanders halting to overhear. He grabbed the teenager by the shoulder, turned him round, and marched them both toward the swinging doors of the Pass of the North’s best-known saloon, the Gem.

  “Let’s get a drink. I’ll make you famous, kid, but I need your whole story.”

  Opened in the fall of 1885, the Gem Theatre was a full-service establishment with a restaurant and saloon in front and its gaming rooms moved upstairs by order of a reformist town council. A stage at one end of the barroom hosted variety musical shows with singers and dancing girls, sometimes even dog fights and boxing matches, which were heavily bet.

  “My name’s not kid. It’s Gillom Rogers.”

  “Fine. But hide those guns, Gillom, or somebody will shoot you to steal ’em.”

  Gillom stuck the Remingtons carefully under the waistband of his woolen trousers, covered by his light wool coat. Dobkins steered him into one of the red leather wine booths in a back corner.

  “Two beers, Jimmy! McGintys!” Pulling a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket, the ace reporter got right down to business. “So at J. B. Books’s behest, you summoned Jay Cobb, Jack Pulford, and that Mex, what was his name?”

  “Serrano. El Tuerto. Cross-Eye, they called him. He was one bad bandido from Juarez.”

  “So why were all three of these gunslingers summoned to the Connie today?”

  “’Cause they were all good with guns. Mister Books was dying of cancer and expected one of those gunmen would save him the trouble of doing himself in.”

  “Cancer? Books?”

  “Yup. Doc Hostetler told him he didn’t have much time to live. That’s why my ma let him stay on in our bottom guest room even after all our other boarders fled, after those two jaspers tried to shoot him in bed earlier this week. He had nowhere else to go.”

  Dobkins chewed his pencil. “Fits. I did hear a rumor Books was dying, but after what he did to me…” The journalist made a face at the sour memory of the great gunman booting him ignominiously in the ass off Mrs. Rogers’s front porch.

  The rotund barkeep put one huge mug of warm beer in front of Mr. Dobkins, but he gave the young customer the fisheye. “Kid’s too young to drink in here, Dan.”

  The reporter shook his head. “Not today he isn’t, Jimmy. This is the young man who just killed John Bernard Books.”

  The barkeep gave Gillom a long stare. “On the house then. For helpin’ rid El Paso of our last pistolero.” Jimmy left to go draw another beer. Dobkins slid his stein of ale across the table to young Rogers, who grinned as he sucked it down. The teenager found killing worked up a thirst.

  Dan gave him a smile oily enough to grease a locomotive.

  “Okay, Gillom, who shot who first?”

  “Well, most of the blood had been spilled by the time I snuck in there. Books had shot ’em all—Cobb, Pulford, that Mex, and some other joker I don’t even know. All the hard cases he invited to his funeral.”

  Gillom gulped more beer as Jimmy approached with another huge mug, named after the McGinty Band, El Paso’s famous musical drinking society. The journalist’s eyes drifted to the ceiling.

  “Invitation to a funeral … or, or, a gunfight. What a headline.… Or the title of a book…”

  Gillom nodded, remembering. “Yeah, the gunsmoke and pistol fire echoing off those tile floors burned my nostrils and deadened my hearing. Heavy…”

  Dobkins nodded, transported. “A vibrating mantle … of death. Like something out of Poe.”

  Gillom slugged his beer. “Who?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe. Dissipated Baltimore poet you might like.”

  “Listen, Dan,” said Gillom. “It’s after five. I gotta get home for supper.”

  The reporter snapped out of his wonderment. “Me, too. Gotta see if that photographer’s gettin’ those death photos. Crucial with a headline. So Books actually asked you to shoot him?”

  “He was bleedin’, wounded bad, dyin’ anyway. Whispered ‘kill … me.’ So I blessed him with a bullet.”

  Dan Dobkins listened transfixed. “A bullet’s blessing…”

  Gillom’s chair scraped as he got up, remembered his manners. “Thanks for the beer.”

  Dobkins hastily rose, too. “Sure, kid, uh, Gillom. Gonna make you famous. Tomorrow’s paper.”

  They shook hands a little awkwardly under the circumstances.

  “Thanks, Dan. Maybe this’ll lead to a good job. Something exciting involving firearms is what I fancy.”

  “Finish your schooling first. You’re a game young man, Gillom Rogers. More education, you’ll go far.”

  “Already on my way, thanks just the same.” With a spring in his step, Gillom was off, checking the weighty guns in his waistband as he bounced through the Gem’s swinging front doors. Dan Dobkins smiled as he dropped four bits on the table, leaving an uncharacteristically decent tip. Headline story this hot might make him famous, too.

  Two

  The McGinty Coronet Band, its brass blasting and drums rattling, marched up El Paso’s main street to its free Saturday night concert in the Gem. Dobkins elbowed his way through the marching throng to reach the bottleneck outside the Constantinople’s front doors.

  “Make way for the press! Please! Daily Herald coming through!” A strong hand pushed back his chest. The imposing, red-necked man was one of the smaller marshal’s muscles. Turning to catch Walter Thibido’s eye
, the deputy got the nod to let the press in.

  Dobkins stepped carefully into the saloon’s mess. He noted the bullet holes in the carved mahogany bar, the jagged glass teeth left in the wide, shattered mirror behind it. Amazingly only one light fixture, designed like a cluster of glass grapes, was broken. The burnt gunpowder filled his nostrils with an acrid scent of sulphur, like the devil’s vapor trail.

  Moving around the big stranger’s body near the front door, Dobkins gave a kick to a short-haired mongrel licking brain slime off the green and white floor tiles next to the gaping hole in Jay Cobb’s head. The dog let out a yelp, but circled out of boot range to go lap more blood from the viscous pool around the other stranger’s torso.

  Marshal Thibido mopped his brow with a blue silk handkerchief. “Books hasn’t any relatives I know of, so I’ll handle his personals until this shooting investigation’s finished. Where are his guns?”

  The lawman was addressing Skelly, the photographer, who was propping Books’s upper body against the bar’s mahogany front, closing eyelids over vacant orbs, arranging the corpse in a position more suitable for infamy. The gunman’s skeletal features, emaciated by his prostate cancer, were ghastly gray to look at, but aside from wiping away blood splatters, there was nothing much Skelly could do to improve J. B. Books’s gaunt death mask. No time to get any face powder, makeup from his studio. Skelly had to tilt the gunfighter’s Stetson to cover up the hole on one side of his head. Luckily the bullet hadn’t exited through the face or he couldn’t shoot a saleable photograph.

  “No weapons on him. No watch, no wallet, no money. He was robbed, Marshal.”

  “Goddammit, he used those guns. Deputies! I want these shooters’ guns confiscated, especially Books’s. Find ’em! They’re valuable … evidence.”

  Dan Dobkins curried favor. “Kid’s got those pistols, Marshal. Gillom Rogers took ’em before finishing Books off, that shot to the head there.”

  “You saw those Remingtons?”

  Dan nodded. “Ten minutes ago, talked to Gillom. He’s gone home.”

  Thibido blew relieved air. “Well, least we know where they are.”