Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was Erik's third week in Pittence City, Oregon. There still hadn't been a single incident on the job. The two other hired hands had offered little info but for their names and no one had asked for more than his. Tonight Erik arrived at the same bar he'd been to last week and the week before, already routine enough that the bartender started pouring him a Southern Comfort without a word being spoken. Erik took the first shot at the bar and tipped his hat for another. When he saw a man slide up next to him out of the corner of his eye, he shifted over to make room.

The man just shuffled closer. He was leaning with his back to the bar, elbows resting on the sticky varnish. One bare wrist brushed against Erik’s arm, the one that terminated in the coin Erik had been about to drop into the bartender’s open palm. Erik glanced over.

The man was looking right at him with the quirk of a smile at the edge of his mouth. His white shirt was rolled up to his elbows and his royal-blue vest, darkly glowing among the browns and greys of the patrons in work clothes, hung open. Gold-plated buttons glinted at Erik, and his eyes rose to meet the man’s sharp, luminous gaze.

“Buy me a drink?” the man asked. There was a flush in his cheeks, but Erik got the feeling it was more due to the heat of the bar than any previous consumption.

Erik twitched his head round to look at the bartender, who was still waiting for his coin. He was eyeing the stranger with knowing resignation. He didn’t look like he’d object to getting the price of another drink out of Erik.

“His usual, please,” Erik grunted.

The bartender raised a brow sceptically. The man said, in a voice that drizzled from his throat like corn syrup, “I don’t really do usuals.”

Erik shrugged, “Whatever you feel like, then.”

“House white, if you please, Jeb,” the man turned around to face the bar and shot its keeper a quick salute.

"You looking for something?" Erik asked, as the man sipped at his wine. He had lips so red Erik thought they might have been painted, but they left no mark on the glass.

"I thought you seemed lonely," the man said, licking a drip from his bottom lip. "You've been in here a couple of times. You never talk to anyone."

"I'm not going to be in town long enough to make friends," Erik shrugged.

"Not even for an hour?" the man asked. His fingers, stubby but as clean and smooth as a new bar of soap, absently turned his glass clockwise. "It'll only cost you two dollars."

Erik put his hand on his hip. "That's a day of my wages, kid."

"Truth?" the man looked him up and down. "You, sir, are definitely underselling yourself."

"Then perhaps you should be paying me for the privilege,” Erik twisted on his seat to return his new drinking buddy’s examination in kind.

The man looked away, a smile spreading across those lively lips as he took in a slow mouthful of his wine. “Perhaps next time I will,” he tipped his head in Erik’s direction once more. “How about this. Would you wager two dollars that I can make you my friend in less than an hour?”

Gambling is a sin, boy! Erik’s two clearest memories of his mother were her commanding him to remember his prayers and not to play dice. Nevertheless, the stretch of the man’s hand-altered denim over the curve of his ass told him this was a gamble that would give good recompense no matter the outcome.

“You have any spare rooms , barkeep?”


---

Three weeks earlier he'd been loitering in the city only a few hours when one of the big estate owners found him. “Got a job for you, son.”

Cowboy. That was what he was reduced to these days. Ten years ago every train in the state had needed at least one man of Erik’s ilk, usually more, to dissuade the smaller gangs and bandits. Anyone of note taking a carriage further than the next town over would have paid him a month’s rent for his skills. But these days the cities were growing and the gangs were shrinking and you couldn’t make a living as a highwayman and that was putting the gunslingers out of work; the ecology of the old west was never constant.

You could still rely on cattle-rustlers, though. It was the most lucrative crime left, apart from pimping and selling poppy-smoke. So now Erik was a cowboy, the bottom of the barrel, sleeping in shifts with two others in the kind of green-pasture, mountain-skirted country that other people retired to but he couldn’t seem to escape. The air always smelled of dung. The nights were full of mosquitoes. Erik cleaned and oiled his pistols every evening, but never fired them – reports were there hadn’t been a single theft in this county since last summer, and practice shots would only scare the livestock.

Three nights a week, the farmer’s son slept out with them, partly to make sure they were doing their jobs and partly to give one of them a night off. It was for that particular perk that he’d taken this job in the first place. He could have got a similar placement in any dirty, rich farming town in the dairy belt. None of them would pay him much more than he needed to survive. But this one gave him a night off, once a week on Thursday. That was worth more than twice the pay.

The first Thursday he spent the whole night and most of his paycheck in the cheapest bar in town. It was a big, busy place with a terrible fiddler playing until ten, easy to get lost in. There was a buxom waitress and a bartender with one shotgun above the mirror and at least two under the cash drawer. Several ladies from the establishment next door were looking for custom, but they stayed clear of Erik and his nothing-in-my-wallet-and-no-mood-for-company posture.

The next Thursday was roughly the same. If he noticed the stout kid in the over-tight Levis who never seemed to pay for his own drinks, he didn’t commit him to memory. The man had seen him, though. Charles saw everyone who came into the bar. He also saw just about everyone, not to put too fine a point on it.

And now, the third Thursday since Erik had arrived in Pittence, Oregon, and he was on the floor of a rented room on a crumpled cotton duvet. They’d been aiming for the bed but somehow it turned out to be further away than the beds Erik was used to. He’d pulled the thin blanket onto the floor as they’d crashed down. Heat was rushing across Erik’s skin in pulses, interspersed with shudders of bone-deep chill as he sucked in breath. He arched his spine, the duvet scrunching under his clutching hands until his nails raised splinters from the unvarnished wood. He couldn’t feel anything but for the heat of a red-lipped mouth. Then soon enough he’d stopped breathing and the flora-papered walls rose and twirled around a point between his eyes, and his nerves glowed and it was only when they faded into a twitching, abstract mess that he realised he’d come.

He thudded his head back against the floor and made an undignified gulping noise. His head lolled, eyes blurring in and out of focus as he spotted a protruding nail on a nearby floorboard and a boxed shaving kit under the bed. Apparently this was Charles’ usual room. So he did have usuals after all.

Over the rise and fall of his own abdomen Erik saw a pair of blue eyes lift up. His deflating cock was suddenly cold, lying saliva-slicked in the open air. He sat up with a grunt. One of his elbows was bruised - he must have knocked it when they’d hit the floor. He began to button up his shirt. All the aches and exhaustion of a long week rounding cattle hit him at once.

His companion – completely undressed – stretched out one his side, propping himself up on one elbow while he tucked Erik back into his trousers. “Well,” he said in a businesslike tone. “If you can straight-faced tell me that wasn’t the best you’ve ever had, the next one’s half price.”

Erik huffed a laughed and stood up, holding out his hand to help the other man up. “You make that deal with all your clients?”

“Not on my life. They’re too miserly not to lie and take it up,” the man stepped right in close while he slipped on his own shirt. He let Erik run his thumb across the pale chest daubed with trails of dark hair, flicking gently at a nipple. “But I’m good at spotting liars.”

“And you think I’m an exception?” Erik reached to tip his companion’s chin up.

“I think I’m shallow and you’re,” the man grinned into Erik’s mouth, “gorgeous.”

He pulled back before he’d exerted more than the slightest pressure into the kiss. Erik had got what he’d paid for, after all. “See you round, cowboy.”

“Wait,” Erik called as the man reached the door, having pulled up his pants and toed into his shoes without breaking his stride. He looked back, fumbling with the buttons of his vest.

“Yes?”

“Do you give out your name, or is that another dollar?”

The man’s swollen lips pulled back from his teeth in a broad smirk. “It’s Charles.”

“I’m Erik. If you come asking.”

“I think you know where to find me,” Charles’ curls swayed as he tipped his head to salute. “Until next time.”

---

Suddenly the smell of cow dung didn’t bother Erik anymore. The monotony of the empty hills had become the soothing tranquillity of grass oceans rolling in the wind. At night he cleaned and checked his pistols as usual, but he didn’t go straight to sleep afterwards even when it wasn’t his watch. He lay back on his roll and stared at the stars and the slow creep of the clouds across them. Every day was a bit less dull when you were always looking forward to Thursday.

He spotted his one-time companion as soon as he pushed through the swinging doors. Charles was drinking with a cluster of card players that Erik didn’t recognise, probably visiting salesmen. By the uproar it looked like they’d been at it for a while. Erik couldn’t tell which of the well-dressed howler monkeys throwing down their hand with each loss was Charles’ John, but he felt a surge of envy anyway. He sat in a corner booth and told himself not to be puerile; a whore had no obligations. He drank deep from a pint and watched one of the out-of-towners slide a hand around a satin-edged waist and be rewarded by Charles leaning into him with a wicked grin.

He’d waited all week. A few more hours of waiting seemed an impossible task, yet it felt shamefully overeager to go up and ask when Charles would be free. Instead Erik sat in his booth and brooded and nursed his drinks, reluctant to fritter his coin away. At one point he thought Charles was looking over at him and almost raised his hand, but then the card player with his arm around Charles’ waist drew his attention and the moment was lost. Erik went back to his pint and tried to think about anything at all that wasn’t a pale, broad-shouldered chest with a symmetry of wiry hair, tried not to think of his hands following the thick trail of hair past the navel, desperately searched for anything to look at that would distract him from the image of thighs spread casually as if for a lie-in on a Sunday morning—

He was failing abysmally. This was exactly the sort of temptation the kohanim in his childhood warned would lead a man to poverty.

When the doors clapped open, Erik jumped and then settled back into his chair. He was still watching Charles when the bar began to go quiet. There was a wilting chorus of clinks as the patrons put their pints down. Erik looked up to see a tall, stretched-thin man striding with slow deliberateness across the bare wood floor. His spurs clinked with each step. Soon enough, however, the drinks were put back to mouths and the conversation returned, though not quite at the volume that had preceded the stranger’s arrival.

The barman spoke at last. “Evening, sheriff.”

“Evening, Jeb,” the sheriff’s voice was cheerful, but Erik could only see the back of his head.

“By your face you’ve got yourself a hold of some trouble,” the bartender leaned back, cleaning the glass low by his waist. Erik could imagine clearly the shotgun hidden under the lip of the bar. “Will you drink the strain away?”

“That I will,” the sheriff crooked his fingers and the barkeep moved away from the bar to pour him something amber from a bottle in the depths of the ice box.

The sheriff tipped back his head and the shot was gone. He cracked his glass down for another and drank that just as quickly. Then he turned and glanced casually around the room, but Erik was watching him in return and he could see the sheriff was looking for someone. Erik had made a long living watching out for when someone was thinking about making a scene, and he knew trouble when he saw it.

The sheriff got off his stool. He sauntered across the room, a clutter of dancers parting as easily as insects disturbed. He stopped by the card-players table behind Charles’ seat. The out-of-town players looked around at the lawman. Charles kept his eyes on his hand. He had a cigarette hanging off his bottom lip and put down a card as if he hadn’t noticed the game was in stasis.

“Get up,” the sheriff said, leaning over close so that Erik made out the words more by the shape of his mouth than by listening over the chatter of the pub. Charles didn’t get out of his chair, though he placed his cards facedown on the table.

The sheriff straightened up, jamming his hands into the pockets of his vests. “I know it was you,” he said, loud enough to carry over to Erik’s booth this time. The conversation flowing around the card table began to become stilted as people determinedly attempted to ignore the sheriff’s business. “I know it was you, you little slut.”

He was curved over Charles, who was resting his temple on the knuckles of one hand as if the verbal assault was boring him. He didn’t say anything in return.

“The bitch won’t let me in,” the sheriff continued. “Because you tattled on me. Didn’t you?”

“That’s what you ge-et,” Charles’ voice rose sing-song over the other man’s growl. He turned to look at the lawman at last, twisting right round and swinging one leg over the chair so that he could rest his forearms on the back. “That’s what you get for hitting one of Madame McTaggert’s girls, sir. You get banned from the whorehouse.”

Erik could see the sheriff’s face in profile. It was as twisted as a gargoyle. “But it’s not your house, right?” he snarled into Charles’ face. ”Right?”

Charles didn’t answer, turning his head a little with a frown to avoid the man’s discharge of spittle. He started to go back to the card game.

Before he could pick up his hand, the sheriff reached out for his wrist and wrenched it behind his back, shoving him forward. There was the crunch of Charles’ face against the table and the clunk of chairs suddenly shoved back. One of the out-of-towners’ drinks tumbled onto the floor and shattered. Erik was on his feet before he knew what he was doing, but he was the only one.

The sheriff leaned his skinny face in and hissed into Charles’ ear, far too low to be heard across the room. The out-of-towners were glancing at each other like they’d all simultaneously realised there was a better bar a few blocks down. The barman was reaching under the sink for his shotgun, but he was being slow about it. He wasn’t looking at the sheriff, but at the two fellows lounging by the door. Despite a no-pistols policy that was clearly enforced, they both sat with their jackets hanging open to display their arms. Men who could flaunt the rules like that could only be the law’s cronies.

While Erik was taking in the boys on the door, the sheriff had wrenched Charles up onto his feet, gripping both the man’s wrists so hard behind his back that through the satin of Charles’ midnight vest, Erik could see every bone and tendon clenching to agony. The sheriff’s other hand was on the back of his neck, forcing his head forward to make him walk, which he did, stumbling as they hit the stairs at the back of the room.

“Jeb—” Charles made one desperate gasp for help, twisting to look at the bartender, but the sheriff shoved him forward.

“You keep your hands off that fucking weapon, you lard-headed sack of shit, or I swear I’ll burn this place to the ground,” the sheriff snarled at Jeb. The bartender raised his hands to the taps to fill up the next tankards.

As Charles’ footsteps staggered up the stairs, the conversation began to return in uneven spurts across the pub. A few people glared at the boys on the door, but no one got up. No one even walked out. They just went back to their drinks.

Erik was still standing in his booth at the edge of the room. His heart rate was so high he was light-headed and he was breathing through gritted teeth.

Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed.

Erik’s brain fizzed, mumbled no, and stopped working altogether. He found he was striding across the rickety wood, past the cowardly out-of-towners, past Jeb the bartender who had a warning in his eyes, past a huddle of regulars who stared and began to whisper among themselves. He hit the stairs and doubled his pace, hand moving up the banister the way it had slid up the side of Charles’ ribs just a few days ago.

---

The door at the end of the corridor was unlocked and the bolt was well oiled. It scraped only a little when he turned the handle. As the door opened and the scene revealed itself, Erik stood impotently in the doorway for what seemed like half of his lifetime, but was probably less than a second. He was staring at a tangle of legs and Charles’ toes thumping on the floor. The rest of the struggle was hidden behind the bed. Erik shut the door behind him as he lurched forward.

The sheriff had Charles pinned on the floor, one hand buried in the other man’s curls to press his face down so hard Erik could almost hear the grind of cheekbone against the splintery wood. He straddled Charles’ legs, fumbling to undo the ties of his trousers with his other hand. Charles’ nails scraped up dust as he heaved to roll the larger man off, but he was no cowboy wrangling cattle for a living and he couldn’t get the leverage.

“Get off him!” Erik barked, and the sheriff turned to look at him at last. His face was blotchy-red and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. Erik lunged at him, grabbing handfuls of his shirt. “I said get off!”

The sheriff rose with Erik’s tug, and for a moment he felt a flash of triumph, and then realised his mistake just in time to clench his abdomen as the sheriff landed a blow like a charging bull. He doubled over, cursing himself, stupid idiot, he knew better than to get up in a man’s space unless he was leading with his fist. He’d been living with cows too long.

Winded and gasping, he jabbed an elbow at the sheriff’s throat, but it glanced off and knuckles like a runaway steam carriage collided with his cheek. He staggered back with white lights bursting across his vision, catching himself on the bed before he could fall.

“Oh, no you don’t,” the lawman’s sneering voice laughed. “I’m not done with you.”

Erik blinked the stars away in time to see the sheriff bear down on Charles once more. Charles had got onto his back now and one had was grappling at something under the bed while the other tried to scratch at the sheriff’s grinning face. Erik straightened up as the bastard grabbed Charles’ near hand and landed a punch that sent a red bloom splashing from Charles’ mouth and across the pale line of his jaw. The sheriff laughed again and leaned in, twisting the captured wrist against the floorboards above Charles’ head.

And then Charles raised his other hand, the one that had been scrambling under the bed. Something flicked out, a silver gleam like a minnow, and Charles slashed with a swift elegance Erik would not have expected of anyone gasping and bleeding on the floor.

There was a noise like the gurgle of a washing tub being emptied. A crimson flood as bright as geraniums poured out and over Charles’ face and arm.

Erik fell to his knees to roll the Sheriff’s shuddering body onto the floor. Charles jerked up and scooted away, still clutching the straight razor he’d taken from the shaving kit under the bed. Erik’s hands were hanging onto the sheriff’s throat and reaching for the rumpled bedlinen to stem the bleeding and trying to take the razor from Charles and hold onto the gaping, wheezing chasm that had been opened in the sheriff’s windpipe, all at once, but he didn’t have enough hands, no one could have enough hands.

“Oh, Lord,” Charles had to use the nightstand just to sit up. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Erik said, though he was holding the blood in as best he could and he’d seen men survive such wounds. Very lucky men, very occasionally.

“I should… should have let him…” Charles shook his head, his fingers still wrapped inseparably around the handle of the razor.

“Don’t say that,” Erik rasped. The sheriff’s mouth moved and his hands clawed gently at Erik’s arms, almost petting.

“I should have,” Charles repeated, rubbing his forehead and smearing the blood across his brows. His lungs made a wordless gulp of horror. “Uh.”

“He should have kept his brain out of his fucking trousers, that’s what,” Erik snapped. He had a torn hank of bedsheet pressed tight to the sheriff’s throat now, and could still feel the gush of the blood in slowing, slowing beats.

He jabbed his finger at the window. "You're gonna have to just run. Those men downstairs aren't going to give you a chance at a fair trial."

To his relief, Charles seemed steady as he stood up, folded the razor away and placed it on the nightstand. "I don't have anywhere to go," he said.

"What about MacTaggert's brothel? Sounds like she owes you."

"I think this rather exceeds any possible debt," Charles shook his head. On the floor, the sheriff's gurgles were coming less and less frequently.

Erik pressed his sleeve to his mouth to wipe the sweat from his upper lip. He didn’t know how this was going to end but he knew that if a mob got their hands on Charles – and murders in bars always made mobs – the man would not make it till midnight. Erik might have a chance on his own, but Charles needed any head start they could get. They barely knew each other… hell, who was he kidding? They didn’t know each other at all. But behind Erik’s pulsing brain, behind the whirring enmeshed clockwork of exit routes and easily stolen supplies and unlit ways out of town was a flickering image of Charles’ face beaten beyond recognition, like a chunk of offal left for the dog, and twisted limbs and that tailored and lovingly laundered shirt torn away, and what mobs did to whores who were in the wrong place at the wrong time—

He shook his head and focused himself on keeping the sheriff alive long enough to call a doctor. "Go to Pike's Stables, down the road, my buckskin mare is there. She'll answer to Anya, her saddle's by her box. Ride her fast as you can to the Pig Rock. There's a wrangler's cache buried under the rowan tree."

"What about you?"

"I'll meet you there at dawn," Erik promised. With one hand he unbuckled his pistol belt and held it out, shaking it until Charles took it. "Protect yourself if you need to. If I don't come by then, just get out of the area. I can take care of myself."

"Come with me," Charles croaked, holding out one blood-soaked hand. He hugged the pistols to his abdomen like an eviscerated man trying to hold in his organs. "He's going to die anyway."

There were shouts from the bottom of the stairs, and heavy footsteps when the sheriff didn't answer. Erik shook his head. "Run now!"

The windowpane screeched at Charles forced it open. He glanced back once at Erik as he swung his legs over, and then there was only the lamp-lit glint of his satin vest before the night swallowed him up.

---

Erik awoke to a pounding like the earth’s heartbeat, but he couldn’t tell whether it was inside or outside his head. He stretched one hand to the bare brick wall of the only cell in Pittance gaol. The roughness was almost pleasurable against fingers that adrenaline had pumped full with blood. The bruises on his torso throbbed.

He could hear wrens. Dawn would come soon, and the gallows with it.

He thought he’d get out of this one, he really had. All these years he’d fought off train bandits and vengeful swordsmen and bank robbers hurling dynamite and every sort of madness a man could imagine. Danger could be clever, it could be berserk, it could be two heads taller than you or sixty pounds of pure muscle heavier, it could be insane and it could be sadistic. But those were beatable because those were the weapons of individuals. In the end it was faceless ones that did you in, the many who acted with a different mind from the sum of their parts.

He’d been in the cell a couple of hours when the deputy came to tell him the sheriff was dead. The doctor had done his best but, well, it would have been a miracle even in the hands of the world’s greatest surgeons. And with the bastard’s last blood-bubbling breath, Erik’s fate was sealed.

“I wasn’t the one who killed him,” Erik was sitting at the back of the cell, and touched his bruised cheek when he spoke. “You know the one who killed him is long gone.”

“Aiding and abetting, far as I reckon it,” the deputy replied, kicking a flake of mud off his shoe.

“That’s for a judge to decide.”

“Waste of resources,” the deputy had replied. “See you at dawn.”

And then he had left Erik to his thoughts. Erik should probably have stayed awake and made his peace with his mother’s god, but sleep felt like the sweetest pleasure he was going to get for the rest of his life.

Now dawn was rising, and he realised he’d been woken by the sound of hammers working on wood. Pittance was so small it didn’t see a hanging more than twice a decade. No one liked having a gallows for the intervening time.

“Sorry, mama,” Erik whispered to the cool bricks. “I guess your line ends here.”

Half a dozen men came to collect him a few minutes later. They bound his hands in front and he stayed limp in their grasp and looked for any mechanism he could take advantage of. Any man who seemed reluctant to carry out the task set before him, any moment where an exit was close and unguarded, any piece of furniture or household tool that might serve as a weapon in a pinch. The sheriff’s office was in disarray and the second deputy’s shotgun sat on a desk like an unleashed dog, but there was a solid wall of hating men around Erik the whole way into the red sunlight.

As they lead him up the steps, one of the gathered men – a young one in a green shirt – said, “He needs last rites, sir.”

“No he don’t,” the deputy replied. He, like Erik, could tell that a half-night’s sleep was fraying the mob, turning them back into men like werewolves under a sinking moon. If they didn’t end Erik here, now, without a moment’s delay sir - well, it would be long months in cells instead. Trials and judges. Questions asked. The deputies and the rest of the cronies were fighting against time.

“I don’t,” Erik nodded at the young man in the green shirt. “My mother was a Jew. I never been baptised.”

The man went sickly pale in the garish light.

They put the noose around his neck. The rope was coarse like the bricks and it smelled of horses, which Erik had always got along with better than people. Erik determined in his mind that he would not close his eyes. He stood in the very centre of the trap door. He had to fall sharply, straight down. He didn’t want to dance for them.

A crack filled all the empty spaces.

The deputy, by Erik’s right shoulder, jumped and most of the watching men spun around.

Trotting down the centre of the man street with the sun at his back was the figure of a man on a horse, sliding a pistol back into its holster. The deputy put one hand up to his eyes and ground his teeth like he was trying to crush glass.

“Who the hell…?”

Erik recognised Anya’s gait before the man in her saddle, but then he saw the violet sheen of the dawn light on a blue satin vest. Soon the deputy recognised the figure too, and he gave a guttural cry.

“It’s him! The fairy, the damn murderer! Get him!”

“Ride!” Erik bellowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing against the loop of the noose. “Ride fast!”

But a clear, haughty voice replied, “Stay where you are, all of you!” as Erik finally saw Charles’ face against the glare.

Two shots rung out, but the pistols were still in the holsters on Charles’ sharp hip. He soothed Anya as two spurts of dust rose from the road between him and the gathering, and the men who had been moving forward to seize him stumbled back. Those that had weapons went for them and raised their barrels, looking around frantically for the attackers, but there was no sign of anyone. The gallows were surrounded by closed shops and empty bars – but when they looked up they all saw a dozen dark windows hanging open and gaps in various shutters.

“He had a lot of enemies in this town, Sheriff Shaw,” Charles was lighting a cigarette now, hand curved around the match before he shook it out and tossed it aside. “Lot of men were celebrating last night when they heard he’d breathed his last. They didn’t mind helping me. I got you surrounded, deputy, nice and tidy.”

“You treasonous wretches!” the deputy screamed impotently at the dark windows. “Come out here and face us like men!”

A third bullet ricocheted off the boards by his feet. He jumped and snarled. “I’ll skin you, whore,” he stabbed a finger at Charles. “I’ll hang you from these gallows by your guts and make sure you take days to die.”

Charles shrugged, waving his hand through the air with the cigarette between two fingers. It trailed a soft haze of silhouetted smoke. “I’m sure you want to, deputy – or are you the sheriff now? But I’m in the business of giving people what they want, and in this case I think the price is more than you can afford. So how about you take that rope off my friend there and let him come on down to me.”

For a moment the deputy stood shaking, fists balled by his side, and then with what looked like enormous effort he turned his head towards the man who stood behind Erik and nodded. The rope was loosened; Erik felt conversely breathless, his chest constricted as the noose was jerked past his ears and fell away. He had to wait for what seemed like hours as the deputy found the key to his heavy steel handcuffs and unlocked them. Watching the men out of the corners of his eyes, Erik forced himself to walk at the fastest pace he could manage while still looking dignified. Down each step of the gallows, a whole step away from death, a continent’s length into life. The mob parted in front of him, fracturing into individual men who didn’t have the stomach for a proper fight.

Erik had eyes, now, only for Charles, who pinched the cigarette between his lips and held out a hand to pull Erik up onto Anya’s back. It wasn’t comfortable and the saddle made him slide down until they were pressed together, Charles smelling of two-day-old clothes and fresh shaving cream, the cheek of it! Erik – not caring a rat’s arse what the watching men thought – wrapped his arms around Charles’ waist. For practicality’s sake, obviously: it could still come to a gallop.

“You boys take care, now,” Charles saluted them as he turned Anya around. She was twitchy after the bullets and surly with the extra weight, but Erik would not have kept her around this long if she wasn’t reliable.

He glanced up at the dark windows once, wondering who had been so kind as to take up the plight of a whore and a friendless cowboy. Charles would tell him later of the conjuror’s trick; it had been only Moira MacTaggert, madam of the brothel, and her most trustworthy girl Angel who were manning – womanning – the rifles in the upper levels of empty shops. Charles had told them to get back to their alibi-secure beds as soon as they’d fired the warning shots, but MacTaggert hadn’t been able to resist the final word. When the deputy’s men investigated later they would find two anonymous rifles in two different buildings with twine and a crude (and faked) sand-weighted timing mechanism attached, and hopefully that explanation would be enough of the story to satisfy them.

Right now Erik didn’t mind not knowing how the trick worked. It was magic enough that he was alive.

“To Pig Rock and then the horizon, Mr Lehnsherr?” Charles asked as the gallows behind them became small enough to fit between the gaps in Erik’s fingers. Charles tossed the butt of the cigarette down into the dust.

“How’d you know that name?” Erik asked with a frown.

Charles glanced back with a grin. He’d quickened Anya’s pace to a steady trot. Pursuit couldn’t be far behind, once the deputy realised Charles had far fewer friends than he’d claimed.

“I get around,” he answered Erik, “Fancy getting around with me?”

“Really? At two dollars an hour?” Erik grinned back.

“Why, Mr Lehnsherr,” Charles cried in mock horror. He looked over his shoulder and whatever he saw made him nudge Anya into a canter. “I hardly think I can afford you at that price!”