Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Birds arc overhead from the south into the northern sky where the late afternoon moon hangs into the dwindling evening. Dust rolls in billowing clouds from the inside of town, not yet dampened by spring storms in an unseasonably dry trend, as Matt and Chester stride in synch from the outskirts of Dodge City toward the hub of Front Street, the former with fishing poles on his shoulder and the latter toting a bucket of fish. The loose sand and gravel crunch under their boots.

"Boy, that sure was a big catfish you reared up, Mr. Dillon. I thought it was about to snatch you back into the pond with it."

"Yeah? Thought it would, too, for a second there."

"Better you than me, 'cause I never much took to swimming."

Matt snorts. The fishing line tickles at the back of his neck, and he swats at it like a mosquito, batting it away. "Don't worry, Chester. I wouldn't let you drown." He tucks the line over his shoulder.

"Aw…" Chester grins his silly broad grin, pleased with himself and preening. "You wouldn't, there, you wouldn't much like watching me drowning 't all."

"Course not. I'd just stand back for a minute and gander at you floundering so I knew exactly what to tell everybody after I pulled you out of water no deeper than a baptismal."

"Aw, you—" The abashed face wears off as Chester shakes himself. "Mr. Dillon! You don't mean that." Matt shoots him a smirk, and Chester recoils, eyes narrowed. "You wouldn't."

"Oh, surely not, Chester, surely not."

Chester seldom lets the space go unfilled with words, so he chatters again. "You think we ought to invite Doc and Miss Kitty before we fry up these fish? We got twelve of 'em, we won't be able to eat all of them."

"Sure, they can come."

"And Moss Grimmick! We haven't offered him nothing in awhile, being all the extra he does for our horses."

"Yeah, Moss, too."

"And—"

"Unless you're planning on splitting these dozen fish to feed five thousand men, let's quit while we're ahead, eh, Chester?"

He ducks his head. "Yessir." The cicadas whir with the buzz of near nightfall. A dry bullfrog hops its way across the path, its flanks heaving. Matt steps around it, but Chester stops. "Look, here, little feller. You's headed in the wrong direction to be making friends. The men that way is all thirstier than you." He stoops, scooping the water from the fish bucket and showering it on the frog. "Reckon this is a frog, ain't it, Mr. Dillon? Not one of them hop toads? I hate to drown the little guy."

Matt stands back, tilting up his head, arms crossed. "Sure, Chester, sure." Most men wouldn't think twice about stepping over a frog, or even stepping on it out of misery or loathing, but Chester eagerly pours another cupped handful of water on it. "Just get him pointed in the right direction, will you? We've gotta get home."

"Yessir." Chester straightens up, lugging the bucket of fish alongside him. Matt allows him to remain a half-pace ahead, so his lopsided stride is leisurely and patient. So much of their time is spent in a rush, with Chester scrambling to keep up. The days when moments pass easily are rare and bright. Matt seeks to savor them.

Apparently, so does Chester, for as he limps along, he surveys the horizon. "Y'know what, Mr. Dillon?" The mid-March wind carries the flocks of birds north, back toward their summer homes, bringing with them the promise of warmer times to come. The days like this are rare through the bitter winter and scorching heat of the plains, but with the low sun and the gentle brisk breeze, they can scarcely complain about Kansas weather today.

"What's that, Chester?"

"I think we had a mighty fine day today."

"I think so, too."

"I think a day like this, just every once in awhile, is good for a man. Good for his soul."

"Yeah?" Matt crushes a mosquito on his arm. "Didn't take you much for a soul searching man, Chester."

"What's there to search for? Bible tells us to rejoice in the Lord always. It's right there in the good book. I ain't gonna argue with what God tells us. If we're meant to have leisure, then I think we should just frolic like a batch of lambs."

Matt snorts. "I'll hold off on any frolicking." The lamps have not yet begun to light the windows of Front Street, a few men milling about the boardwalk, women leaving the hat store as it closes up for the evening, but with the early hour, no one has yet gotten inebriated. With any luck, they won't, and Matt will get to maintain the peace of the day well into the night. "I take it you've been listening to the street corner revival a bit too closely. I'll make sure our next fishing trip is on Sunday morning. Keep those vultures from sticking their claws in you."

"Street corner revival? I spend every Sunday pouring lime in the stalls with Moss Grimmick."

"How'd you roll off and become a tinhorn prophet on me, then?"

"Well, I's just rereading the book of Philippians again last week—"

Gunfire silences Chester's justification. They whip around in synchronization, Matt's mind not needing to register the smoking gun pointed at their backs fifty yards off. He fires back once, twice, thrice, before the shooter sways and buckles, his throat shot through. As he collapses, his sixgun clatters off of the yellow-dusted road.

Men congregate from the boardwalk and storefronts, clustering around a few yards away, all murmuring to themselves and shuffling.

Matt fixes on fallen figure in the growing puddle of scarlet. "Who is he, Chester?"

He doesn't answer.

"Chester?"

At the second stretch of silence, Matt turns to face him. Usually by now, Chester has gone to the side of the fallen man, verifying if he is dead or calling for Doc if he isn't, but he hasn't moved from where he stands beside Matt, like his boots are rooted to the gravelly path. He faces Matt, whiter than a winter sky, eyes wide and glazed. Then, they narrow, troubled, like he's trying to remember something.

His next breath catches in his throat. His hand opens, fumbling, dropping the bucket of fish. It dumps over. The water splashes their boots, the dead fish sloshing along with it, the light glinting from their scales, as Chester's hand rises to his chest. Matt's gaze darts there where a scarlet patch blossoms in the front of his flannel, as he pats there blindly, like he can cover the bullet hole with his palm. His knee buckles, bad leg skewing out from under him.

Matt lunges forward to catch him. "Chester!" A hand flies to his back, where the bullet entered, and his front, pressing where it exited, holding him together as he eases him to the ground. Gun thunder roars in his ears. As he cradles Chester's lean body between two broad hands, he doesn't think it will ever quiet again. "Chester—" He can't think of anything else to say, just his name, clutching him like a child to his favorite doll.

Violence has not struck Matt into a blind panic since boyhood. But with Chester's blood on his hands, everything stalls, realizing the glazed eyes are fixed on him, on him, like he can fix this, like he's God, he was just talking about God, what was he saying, it was Philippians, or was it Ephesians, I don't remember, it was important—

Chester's ugly rattling breath shakes him from his spell. A death rattle. The cool eases back over his skull, calculated and logical, like it never left. He turns and shouts, "You there! Help me!" at the growing gaggle of men crowding the street around the shooter. They all stare blankly, like deer in a hunter's sights. "Are you all deaf?"

A small figure bolts from the pack ahead of the others. Tommy, the orphan boy, charges up to him, with one loose suspender slipping from his shoulder. "Marshal Dillon? Can I help?"

"Yes, son, come here, take his belt off." He complies, unbuckling Chester's belt. "Slide it up, up where my hands are. Good, like that. Listen, I'm gonna count to three. When I hit three, I'm gonna move my hands, and you're gonna pull that belt. Pull it tight, just as tight as you can, you pull it like an ox, you hear me?"

"Will I hurt him, Mr. Dillon?"

"Maybe. He might make an ugly noise. Don't let that stop you. Got it?"

"Yessir."

The boy wrangles the belt through the buckle. "One. Two. Three." Matt releases, and Tommy heaves on the belt with enough force to knock another wet breath out of Chester's mouth, where blood spittle mars his lips.

"Good job, son, good job—"

"He didn't make a ugly noise, Mr. Dillon, he didn't make no noise at all—"

"I know, I know, you did good—" Matt slips an arm above Chester's knees and under his shoulders. "I'm going to pick him up. You get those men to clear the way and then run ahead, tell Doc Adams we're coming, y'hear?"

"Mr. Dillon, he's saying something, he's trying to say something, he's'a talkin' to ya!"

Matt quiets enough to hear the catch in Chester's larynx, the buffering of his bloody lips, the shape of his words barely visible: "I'm alright, Mr. Dillon." He sags against Matt's chest, still.

Of all his complaints, of every moan of hunger and whine of thirst and gripe of ague and snivel of cough, never has Chester ever reassured Matt he was alright. Somehow, this scares him more than anything. "Easy, Chester, easy," he soothes, "be easy, now." His mind flashes with the memory of his father using those words, an echo, Easy, there, easy, as he patted the neck of a downed horse before he shot her out of mercy.

A man Matt recognizes, but whose name he can't produce, approaches. "Marshal, that man's dying."

"He's not dying. I'm taking him to Doc's."

"Not Chester—that other one, the one who shot him. His throat's shot through, and he's choking on the blood. Oughtn't somebody put him down?"

Chester doesn't make another sound. His hat flutters from his head and lands upside down in a puff of dust. Matt swallows the surge of venom in the back of his throat, down into the pit of his gut, where it festers and curdles. "Let him drown." Without another word, he collects Chester into his arms like a bride.

Under ordinary circumstances, he might complain about the weight. But the deadened drape of Chester's ragdoll body sinks into his arms like a sack of feathers. As he stands, the sea of bystanders parts, and he half-jogs, half-lopes toward Doc's office, fighting not to jostle Chester, hastening the best he can, feeling absurdly like he has a stiff leg—like this is the moment he should acquire a limp not unlike Chester's own.

Tommy runs ahead like Matt instructed, tearing the door to Doc's office nearly from its rusted hinges. Matt is halfway up the narrow staircase when he emerges. Chester's boots scrape the hand rail, and Matt turns sideways to keep from knocking his head on the side of the building. "Matt, what in tarnation—"

He stops midsentence. Matt doesn't speak. Tommy holds the door open for both of them, Doc going for his surgical kit, Matt depositing Chester on the cot in the corner. His eyes are open, fixed, blood oozing from around the taut belt on his chest, limbs dangling at splayed angles, no effort placed in keeping his joints comfortable. The only sign of life is another crackling breath, slower now, farther apart than a few minutes ago. It sounds wet.

"Doc—" Matt's voice sounds strangled.

The surgical kit clangs where Doc drops it beside him. "Get out." He slashes the belt and cuts his shirt off in one fluid motion.

"Can I—"

"Get out." The scalpel glints in his hand.

"Is he—"

"Get out of here, Matt!" His bellow sends him staggering away like a coyote retreating from the herd under gunfire. Doc's body blocks Chester from view, his arm trailing to make an incision along the exit wound on his chest. "Take that boy with you."

Fortunately, Tommy listens, for Matt doesn't have the words to usher him out. The door slams behind them. The boy scampers down the stairs first, slipping through the gathering crowd of men and women clustered along the boardwalk below. They're all awaiting Matt, faces varying from grim to hopeful. His boots produce hollow sounds on the wood as he marches down toward them.

Kitty is among the faceless masses. "Is Chester alright?"

He doesn't look at her. "I don't know." He stares at his bloodied hands. They're absurdly large, his hands. Doc has a globe in his office, and when Matt holds it, his broad palms blot out the entire American continent, covering ocean to ocean. Yet as Chester's blood coagulates and browns in the creases, his huge hands are utterly powerless. He's a helpless little boy stuffed in the skin of a grownup man, hiding behind a leather vest and a tin badge and a peacekeeper with three missing rounds (three, but not enough to save Chester, even all six couldn't have done that).

Kitty tries to take his hands, holding a cloth to his knuckles. It looks like the one Sam uses to wipe down the bar, damp and dirty in the wrinkles with a crust along the hem. When she takes his wrist, he tugs away from her, folding his fingers up toward his chest. He doesn't make eye contact. He walks past her. She says his name quietly in protest, but when he doesn't answer, she doesn't follow him.

Nobody else is brave enough to speak. They follow from a distance as he steps off of the boardwalk and lumbers (lumbering, when did he start lumbering, why is he limping? Did it hurt his back to pick Chester up off the ground? Or is he merely channeling some part of his spirit, letting him briefly possess his bones, to try to keep him earthside a few minutes longer?) toward the corpse lying in the middle of the road, the dust not yet settled upon it. The gush of bright arterial blood has died into a trickle where Matt shot through his carotid. An agonizing way to die.

"How long did it take?" he asks a bystander, the same man who approached him earlier.

"Er—few minutes, I suppose."

A growl builds in the base of his throat. "Not long enough." Chester is upstairs still bleeding. This man deserves to suffer as much as Chester, the same fate, shot through the back while taking a stroll with a bucket of fish to share with his friends. This dead man can't feel pain.

That's Matt's only regret: he killed him too quickly.

"Do you know him, marshal?"

His mouth tastes like the drought-sour dust misting through the evening air. Tilting his head, he peers at the dead gunman's face. Realization sinks into the pit of his stomach. "I know him."

"Who is he?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Was he aiming for you, then?"

"Yeah." The lie boils in his stomach with his venom and his hate and his terror, but the man doesn't ask him more questions; it's believable enough, the idea that Matt was the target and Chester was a victim of circumstance, standing too near him. Matt has a reputation. Everyone wants his notch on their gun. Chester is a fairly well-liked man, and he's known to be unarmed. No one will suspect otherwise.

"Do you want me to fetch the undertaker, then, marshal?"

"No." The man stops mid-step, face falling with shock. "I'll dispose of him. Tell Moss to saddle our horses. Mine and Chester's."

The cowboy is troubled. "Chester's horse?" he echoes.

"That's what I said, isn't it?"

"Yessir." He turns on his heel and retreats to the stable, leaving Matt standing alone over the body. Rubbery knees feel like they'll cave underneath him, but he can't allow himself to crumble. He inhales deeply through his nose, out through his mouth, the way his father taught him to shoot, and then he bends and heaves the corpse onto his shoulder. I hope you feel this. I hope you feel every ounce of this.

The man flops like a sack of potatoes, dead weight in Matt's arms (dead weight like Chester, but he doesn't allow himself to think this). Blood pours out of his mouth down Matt's clothes. The dry air sticks to the slick on his back.

By the time he reaches the stables, Moss has saddled both horses, standing outside the barn, a troubled wrinkle between his brows. He looks up at Matt, and for a split second, he looks young, filled with hope, or desperation, the way a salivating child envies a lollipop. "Is it true, marshal?"

Matt has never been a biblical man, has never read much of the good book, unlike Chester, who gained his literacy by perusing its pages. But right now, Matt prays. He prays to blink into a different universe where this isn't real. He prays to open his eyes again to an hour ago, plopping fish in a bucket to carry back to Dodge, laughing with Chester. He prays he'll have this premonition in that universe, so he'll take Chester a different route home, and maybe later when they're settled in for the night, he'll confess he had this errant thought of a world where Chester was shot through for the crime of existing after he poured water on the skin of a dehydrated bullfrog. Chester will make a face and chide him for his misbegotten head running off with him, and they'll go to bed, and Matt won't be standing in front of Moss Grimmick where he looks at him, pleading with him to say it isn't true, Chester isn't hurt, he'll be by in just a minute to match dimes. Matt prays.

Just because he prays doesn't mean he'll get an answer. Moss is still standing there. The corpse weighs him down. "It's true." He lifts the body across the seat of Chester's saddle. He wants to be rough, to toss him, to thrash him in death, but he won't jostle Chester's horse, the sturdy sorrel cowpony who puffs up each time his cinch is tightened. The bald-faced gelding mulls his bit, ears flicking, when the corpse settles on his back.

"Is it bad?" Moss's eyes are like the horse's, wide and milky and innocent.

Numbness cools Matt's fingers. "Yeah."

Moss hesitates. "Is he gonna die?"

"I'm not a damn oracle!" When he raises his voice, it vents the pressure off of his chest, and he whirls to the punch of his flaring temper, but Moss is patient and mild as ever. Unsettling regret ripples through his chest like a stone tossed into a pond. Of all the places to discharge his anger, the elderly stablekeep, the one who keeps Chester's company just as well as he and Doc, isn't the place it belongs. "Go check your weather vane if you wanna know the future so bad," Matt mumbles.

Usually, he's not above apologizing when he's wrong. But right now, he doesn't think he needs to apologize to anyone. Except Chester. Chester is the only person to whom he owes anything, and the only one to whom he cannot pay his debt. The next best thing is vengeance, this dead man strung across his saddle.

Silent, Moss helps Matt tie the body down to the seat of the saddle, looping the rope along the girth where it won't pinch the gelding's belly, keeping it taut between his legs and through his belt so he won't slide down on the way. "This is the man who done it?"

Matt unties the pony's reins, looping them around the pommel of Buck's saddle. He nods.

With a thick retch in the back of his throat, Moss coughs. Then, he spits on the dead man's face. "I want that saddle blanket back, marshal. Don't you bury him in it."

"Ain't planning on it."

Moss pats the gelding's neck. "You see after him, Scout," he whispers to his ear. One of his idiosyncrasies, talking to animals, which he shares with Chester. Matt seldom pays any attention to it, nor does he often exchange conversation with beasts who can neither understand nor reciprocate; while he has never done wrong to an animal, he seeks them for their utility, not their companionship. Chester, though, enjoys the hours spent with his pony and the street dogs and his favorite alley cat, and Matt gives him the graces of pretending he doesn't know he sneaks the cat inside during the bitterest winter days.

Now, he wishes he would have listened to more of those one-sided conversations between Chester and his four-legged company. "Scout? Is that what Chester calls him?"

Moss looks startled. "Why, yes. Yes, 't is."

Matt nods once. I should have known that. I should have remembered that. I was never listening. He mounts Buck and clicks his tongue. A half-pace behind, the pony pricks his ears as the reins tug on his mouth, ambling along after the buckskin.

"Marshal?"

Matt pauses. "Yeah?"

"The cat. Her name is Pidge. You'd do right by Chester to keep feeding her."

He swallows. "If Chester wants some flea-bitten stray fed, he'll do it himself."

Moss blinks, slow and sad. He presses his lips into a thin line. "Yes. Yes, I suppose he will."

Chapter Text

The navy-violet hour after dusk bleeds across the horizon on Boot Hill. From the crest, the silhouette of Dodge City stands out along the sky, a view Matt often appreciates, thinking enviously of how the men buried on the hill don't deserve to overlook the beautiful prairie they tormented before their pitiful ends. But this one deserves it even less. He tethers the horses in the grove, loosening their saddles so they can graze, and cuts the ropes from the dead man.

With a sickening splat, he lands prone on the grass. Matt grabs him by the ankle and drags him through the yellowed stems, illuminated only by the moon and stars, into a loose bed of branches, where the sticks snag on his clothes and skin.

Huffing, he kicks him supine. The blood has gathered in his face from the ride across the prairie, turning it swollen and purple. Splinters have torn his eyes and lips open. "Serves you right." Matt kicks him in the jaw. Bones snap. He stomps, feeling the give of teeth and cartilage under the sole of his boot.

It earns no reaction. Dissatisfaction festers inside of him. "Stupid bastard. Had to have known I'd kill you. I hope it was worth dying for, hurting him." He kicks his limp hand, but it doesn't make a difference. Chester is still hurt. The man is still dead, and Matt is still holding all of his rage in his hands with nowhere to put it.

It's not like the other times Chester has been hurt, even near death. With the cowboys who dragged him, or the drifter who wanted vengeance for his brother, or the uncle who wanted a job for his nephew—there was always a reason, and Matt always had someone on whom he could exert his rage, always had a puzzle to solve to occupy him. Now, he has nothing except a shovel for a man who doesn't deserve to be buried.

He sweeps the ground for a soft spot to start digging. But when he picks up the wooden handle, he can't bring himself to puncture the earth. He bashes it over the corpse's head, caving in his face. "Even your mother wouldn't know you now."

The carcass will poison the earth if he plants it. So he doesn't. He lashes him over some of the dry branches in a pile, kicking the dirt out in a ring. Though he's embittered by loathing, he doesn't want to start a wildfire. Then, he strikes a match on a fistful of dry prairie grass and tosses it onto the heap of sticks.

The moonlight sifts over the black smoldering flinging dust bunnies in the air like constellations. Rising smoke blots out the stars, for which Matt is grateful; that the ancient gods won't witness his sacrilege. The toxic fumes of broiling flesh assail his senses, similar enough to cooked meat but more rotten. He takes several long steps back, just under the cover of the tree line, and sits facing the campfire of man and puny sticks.

As the firelight licks the air around Matt's face, the orange dances forms and figures, like spirits. He thinks he sees Chester in the fire. The snowblind gleam blotches his sight from visions into memory: the color draining from Chester's face, the bright cerulean spring sky filtering over him as he pales, the slight buffering of his lips, the perturbed squint to his eyes, how confused some men get when they're dying.

"He's not dying," Matt says aloud to himself.

The blood on his shirt dries brown with the flames, stiff and creased. He sits crosslegged like a child before a teacher. He has so much left to learn—like how a bad man saw Chester and decided to snuff out his light purely for some sick sense of achievement, how a bad man can do something to a good man and only get shot for it instead of suffering. How Matt considers himself a good man, and so do other people (Chester among them), but he keeps warm in front of the charring body of a man he decided didn't deserve a resting place in the earth.

Chester wouldn't approve of this. It's too late. Anyway, Matt isn't sure he cares what Chester would think of this.

A hot breath puffs over the back of his neck. He startles, glancing back to Scout, who has his ears pricked and flicking uneasily. He paws at the earth behind Matt's body. "Oh, you old fool—Chester always fusses about you untying your knot." In the grassy knoll, Buck is tethered, uninhibited as he mulls over the grass. But Scout's eyes drink in the bonfire where the man who shot Chester is vanishing soot into starlight.

"You see?" Matt whispers. "I killed him. I killed him. Nothing to worry about now." He isn't sure about that, nor does he know why he's speaking aloud to the horse—perhaps because there's no one else to tell. Perhaps because, on some level, Scout may be the only one who understands.

He doesn't, of course; he can't. He bumps Matt's hat off of his head with his nose, and then he turns and champs at the grass a few feet away, nonplussed by the flames. And in the light, Matt sits until it burns down to ashes.

When only cracked, cinder-blackened bone remains, he stands to kick dirt over the dying string of tar trickling up into the atmosphere. There's not enough left to bury, just enough to scrape under the soil enough so the fauna won't make off with it.

The foliage breaks and snaps. Matt swings, hand flying to his gun on his belt. "Hold it! Who goes there?"

A small form, too dark to make out, tumbles out of the copse of trees and overgrown prairie grass. "Marshal Dillon! It's me, Tommy." He doubles over, hands on his knees. "Sorry—awful long way—couldn't find Mr. Grimmick—didn't wanna steal a horse—"

"Steal a horse? Tommy, what are you talking about?"

He chokes on his words, the way a throat dries and cracks when burdened by moving too much air. "Doc Adams sent me for you. He said for you to come right off, right as quick as you can, it's real important, that's what he said."

Any other time, Matt would leap onto Buck without another word and kick him into a gallop. Doc isn't a man of incredible urgency, and when he asks Matt to run, it's always important. But he's frozen on the spot. He doesn't want to go back to Dodge. He doesn't want to learn the answer to a single question. He asks Tommy. "Is Chester dead?"

It's inappropriate for him to put this on the shoulders of a twelve year old boy, an orphan at that. Once, some twenty years ago, this was Chester: a little boy forced to become a man in lieu of anyone else to do it for him. It's both right and wrong for Matt to stand in front of him now and expect the world from him.

Tommy gulps. "No, sir, no—least, I don't think so. He ain't said he was dead. He just said I was to come get you fast, real fast, fast as I could."

Matt stares over the roll of hills to the twinkling lit silhouette of Dodge in the distance. "You came on foot? It's over two miles."

"Yessir. I reckon I wasn't as quick as Doc hoped I'd be—I don't think he figured you was all the way out here."

Whatever he needed immediacy for is past now. "No sense in you running all the way back. Come here, son." He clicks his tongue to summon Scout's head up from the grass. Tommy approaches, tripping over his clumsy feet. Matt feels the stirrup notches to shorten them.

Then, he stops. They're Chester's stirrups. The right is longer than the left, the leather warped from a knee unbent. He can't bring himself to change the length. "You can take my horse."

"Ain't you awful tall for this here cowpony?"

"He's short, but he's sturdy. He can be mean-tempered. I don't want him to throw you in the dark." Matt gives Scout a pat on the neck, and then he goes to untie Buck, shortening the stirrups so Tommy can reach them. "Don't rush off. He'll take you back to the stable." Tommy swings up onto him.

"Yessir."

Matt mounts Scout. He leaves his feet out of Chester's uneven stirrups. Then, he boots the pony into a gallop, crests the hill, and starts down the shallow slope back toward the city outline on the nighttime horizon.

They bolt off across the prairie in the dark, the obscured moon providing insignificant light, but Scout gallops confidently, except for the break when Matt feels his saddle start to slip and pulls him up to tighten the cinch. ("Infernal animal, ought to be whipped, I've told Chester to be rid of you every time you do this ignorant puffing, sometimes a man's got places to be and doesn't have time for this nonsense!" he curses, and Scout lazily flicks his tail.)

The streets are clear as they reenter Dodge. Matt slows to a lope, rounding the block to Doc's office. He ties the reins to the post in front of the building and takes the stairs two at a time. The bell jangles when the door slams closed behind him.

Doc is sitting behind his desk. He moves altogether too slowly for Matt's tastes as he scoots back and stands. The lamplight reflects on the lenses of his readers.

"The boy said you needed me right away. If that horse had run any faster, he'd be foundered. What is it?"

"Matt, I think you should sit down."

His heart leaps. "I'll stand." Doc takes off his glasses, folding them up and tucking them into the V of his shirt. The lines of his face are aged far beyond his years. "Say it out."

The tension in his jaw cracks as he grinds his teeth. "You listen here. I could just about strangle you right now, Matt!"

This shakes him from his reverie of doom. "What—me?"

"Yes, you! You run up here right in the middle of my evening word square with a dying man bleeding all over the place looking at me like I can call Lazarus right out of the tomb!"

"He wasn't dying," Matt says feebly.

"Wasn't dying—he was rattling, Matt. Now you spent enough time on the battlefield to know what a rattle sounds like and what it means. I work in medicine, not in miracles. Ruint my whole night—"

"Chester's dead and you're admonishing me over your word square? You told that boy he was alive!"

"He's alive, alright, keep your pants on. I told you to sit down and to listen to me, but you go off making assumptions—"

"If he's not dead, then he wasn't dying, Doc—"

"He was dying, and he probably still is." Doc points to the couch. "Now sit, and let me tell you."

The space between where he stands in the door frame and the couch where Doc intends for him to sit feels like a canyon. He moves slow as molasses pouring from a jar. Maybe if he moves slow enough, the time won't pass, and he'll remain right here, right now, where Chester is alive, and not in some unknown future where he isn't. Sinking onto the couch, he feels heavy, steel in the marrow of his skeleton.

Doc pulls up a chair across from him. "I sent the boy for you thinking you were right outside. I didn't realize you'd gone up to Boot Hill. You weren't here, so I did what I thought was best."

"That's what I would've told you to do, anyhow, Doc."

"I figured." Doc licks his lips, and then he wipes around his mouth with the back of his hand. "You know, for all the hell I give Chester, he's one of my best friends. I think that clouded my judgment. The same as it clouded yours, hauling him up here like you did." Matt glances down at his boots, rubbing the toe along the seam of the wood. "He was shot through the lung. A clean shot, right between the ribs, in his back and out his front. It didn't hit nothing else, didn't bounce around and bust him up inside like they usually do."

"That's good." Doc doesn't speak immediately, so Matt looks up at him. "That's good, right?"

"Well, I don't know. If it had done like a typical bullet, he would've been dead before he hit the ground. Whether or not it's good is gonna depend on if he lives. It might've just caused him a whole bunch of unnecessary suffering." He clears his throat. "An injury like that is mortal. A hole in the lung, spitting up blood the way he was. Makes it collapse, so oxygenated blood stops circulating, and it's a miserable death that nobody can stop. Takes a few minutes, like you saw, with the gargling and the rattling."

Matt hasn't vomited from seeing injury or death since his first battle in the war—it only took once to desensitize him—but now, his stomach is flipping, and he keeps swallowing thick strings of saliva so the nausea doesn't overtake him. "How'd you stop it?"

"I cut him open and sewed up his lung. I had to break two of his ribs to get to it."

He traces the hem of the pockets on his jeans. "Most men have broken ribs at some point, Doc. They come out alright."

"Oh, yes, his ribs are fine—I put them back, y'see, right where they're meant to go, and they'll heal up straight and new. The ribs aren't what I'm worried about. It's the lung. A man's organs, Matt, they're not meant to be accessed like that. Heart and lungs in particular, they're very sensitive. What with me shoving my hands in there, lining up a wound with catgut. I got his lung reinflated, and he's moving air again real good, no more rattling."

"You don't think that's enough."

"No. No, Matt. I'd put money he's about to come down with the worst case of septic pneumonia either of us will ever see." Doc tuts. He reaches into his desk behind him and takes out a half-full bottle of whiskey. "I don't feel good about it. I don't feel good about it 't all."

Matt sits on the edge of the couch. He holds up his hand in refusal at the proffered bottle. Liquor on his stomach will certainly make him lose his battle with queasiness. "You had to try, Doc."

"If it was anyone else, I wouldn't have. No, sir. Anyone else, I would have held his hand, kept him comfortable, til it was over. But for Chester—for him, I had to try something. I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't done something. And you never would have forgiven me, neither."

"That's not true."

"It is true. You toted him in here dead and wanted me to make him alive."

"Lots of men have done that. You've made alright letting most of them down easy."

A crooked, rueful smile touches Doc's face. "Matthew…" He shakes his head. "For Chester, you wouldn't let down easy. You'd go barreling down the streets like Samson in the temple. You'd bring Dodge to ruin pillar by pillar." Matt stares at his big hands again—broad hands, hands that have held infants and hanged criminals and shot firearms and carried corpses, lined with dirt and dried blood. "The trouble is, I don't think I'll have a much easier time living with myself if he takes ill now."

He picks at the soil under one fingernail with another dirty fingernail. "He's strong, Doc. He'll weather it."

"Some things, a man can't weather. Some things, no man is made to live through." Doc drinks from the whiskey bottle. "The man that done it. Do you know why?"

"He was aiming at me."

Doc eyes him. The lie that others so easily bought doesn't fly as readily with him. "He had pisspoor aim for a gunman."

"Lots of them do."

"And no value for his pride or reputation, trying to shoot you in the back."

"Mhm." Doc isn't appeased by Matt's explanation, but he doesn't press again, merely staring at him in the lamplight, until Matt asks, "Can I see him?"

He knows the answer before Doc says it. "I've quieted him down with ether and morphine. The last thing he needs is you riling him up to trip over your apologies or explanations or whatever else you think he needs right now. If he comes to right now, he won't be thanking either of us for saving his life, that's for darn sure."

"I won't talk to him. I just—I just want to see he's alive, that's all."

"I wouldn't lie to you."

"I know, Doc, I know that, but—" I can't stop feeling his body in my arms every time I close my eyes. "Please?"

Reluctantly, Doc acquiesces, standing and opening the door to the other room. Matt follows him.

In the far corner, Chester is stretched on the narrow cot. He rests like a prepared corpse, except for his right hand, which dangles off the side of the mattress, hanging out from under the blanket. Matt doesn't intend to touch him, but the sight disturbs him, how Chester usually curls under his blanket and bundles up like a child, how if he has any awareness at all, he won't like that his hand is cold. So he crosses the space to gingerly lift his hand and place it on his belly, safe and warm.

At the pressure on his palm, Chester clutches Matt's fingers. He freezes. It's a loose grasp, not firm, not quite a fist, just a reflex for a hand to wrap around whatever brushes against it, and Matt can easily pull away, but he doesn't want to. His dirt-crusted fingers are held in Chester's smaller grasp, so weak and brittle his wrist trembles with the effort. He squeezes once. Then, he releases, easing under the blanket with a grumble and a long, sweet snore.

I'm never going to get to sleep without him snoring in the next room.

Doc's face tells him he has overstayed his welcome.

"You'll stay with him tonight?" Matt asks.

"What kind of a question is that?"

"Yeah. Dunno what I'm thinking."

"You're not thinking, that's the trouble. This mess has crawled right up into your skull and laid eggs. It's done about the same to me. Now, if you've got any sense 't all, you'll go back home and have yourself a drink, a little something to eat, and get a full night's sleep. I'll see you tomorrow."

Matt nods. "If anything changes—"

"—come get you. This ain't my first time doctoring. This ain't even my first time doctoring Chester, and you're being every bit as infuriating now as you were then. Now scram."

"G'night, Doc."

"G'night."

He returns Scout to the stable, finding Buck already stalled and resting for the night. Then, he takes the back way to the jail, avoiding the meandering folks on the boardwalk. He pauses in the dirt lot where Chester always says he's going to plant something every year; this year, nothing has sprouted except the pesky wildflowers he keeps watering, saying they're pretty, no matter how much Matt says they're places for snakes to hide.

When he unlocks the back door, the weeds part, and with a mew, the tabby cat pushes her way around his ankles. Usually, Matt gently bumps her out from under his feet, shooing her back into the bushes, and admonishes Chester again for feeding her, and Chester repeats that she kills the varmints and earns her keep, and Matt lets it lie. Tonight, he stands as she rubs around him.

His voice cracks. "Pidge, was it?" He bends over to give a long stroke along her spine. She purrs. When he pets her again, she pounces to shove her face into his palm. "Pidge. Moss says that's your name. I guess I have to take his word for it, seeing as I never cared to ask Chester."

The door creaks as it opens. "Go on, then. Go inside." In his whole life, Matt has never shared a home with an animal, except on the brief occasions he slept in barns—no indoor dwelling ought to be shared with some dirty dog or cat. But tonight, everything feels different. Pidge darts into the jail between his feet. He locks up behind them.

He sits on Chester's cot in the office. She jumps up onto it beside him. "Oh, no. No, you, listen. It's against my better judgment that you're in here. You sleep on the floor like any decent animal ought to. Go on, then. Go."

She doesn't go. She curls up in a circle in his lap, purring contentedly. When he rubs at her ears, she chirps. And he thinks of all the times he's seen her outside snoozing in Chester's lap while he naps in the chairs outside the jail. "Alright. Just for tonight." He reclines on the bed with a sigh. As he inhales in the pillow, it has a scent, woodsy and salty, the dust that rises in a wind cloud and settles in the crook of a man's sweaty neck during a hot day's work.

It's Chester's smell. Matt plucks it tighter under his face, inhales deeper, drinking it in. I wish I would have smelled it sooner, he thinks as he falls asleep.

"Matt?"

The sound of his name rouses him from his slumber with a snuffle, half-asleep. Foot falls clip on the floorboards. "Mm… Chester, get the door, will you?" he mumbles into his pillow, drawing the blanket up over himself.

"Matt? Are you in here?"

"Ngh…" Matt gives another halfhearted sound into the mattress, waiting to hear the lopsided sound of Chester's boots crossing the floor. Chester is a light sleeper, he has already heard the voice calling out, he'll answer the door any minute. Matt settles, content Chester will call for him if he needs him, and until then, he can keep resting until the scent of coffee (even bad coffee, even tainted by whatever strangeness Chester wants to put in it today) lures him out of bed.

The footsteps grow louder. They're even, no limp, and the sound is softer than the roughness of leather and wood, more like suede. It's a woman's footsteps, a woman's voice. "Oh, Matt… There you are."

The mattress sinks beside him, hand fluttering to his shoulder, and only then does he snort himself awake, jerking to protect his face on instinct as his eyes shoot open. The soothing touch rubs a circle on his upper arm. "It's just me." Kitty is sitting beside him.

He blinks a few times to clear the fuzz from his vision. "Kitty?" He sits halfway up, snug under the blanket that's trapped beneath her weight. "What are you doing here? What's wrong?"

"Why—nothing's wrong, Matt. Nobody'd heard from you. Doc spent the morning waiting for you. When you hadn't come by ten, he sent me after you, to make sure you were well."

"Sent you after me? What for—" What for makes him remember, as he registers that he's lying in Chester's bed downstairs with an alleycat between his knees. "Oh. Right." He picks the rheum out of his eyes. "I take it nothing's changed?"

"No. I'm sure Doc would've sent for you sooner if it had." Kitty places her hand lower on the bed, disturbing Pidge, who rouses with a mewl. "Oh! You're sleeping with an animal!"

"It's a cat, Kitty, not a sow. And I didn't intend for her to get on the bed. Shoo, you." He bumps his legs until Pidge jumps down and circles the floor of the jail. She meows once loudly, rubbing against the furniture, and stands on her haunches to paw at the base of the bed frame.

"What's she doing in here, then? Doesn't Chester usually throw her scraps in the alley?"

"She darted in last night between my feet. I didn't have the ambition to chase her back out." Matt pushes himself up to sit when Kitty rises. He takes care not to disturb her petticoat. "I guess I'm expected to feed her now. Flea-bitten critter. I ought to run her off while I have the opportunity." Pidge is purring with her eyes narrowed, giving slow blinks in his direction.

Kitty tilts her head, peering at him fondly. "Oh, Matt. You don't have to act like that for me."

As he musses a hand over his dirty, sweat-damp hair, he doesn't look her in the eye, instead staring at the woodgrain of the floor. It's dusty. Chester mentioned two days ago he wanted to take the time to sweep and mop, but yesterday was so nice, Matt insisted on going fishing, and Chester never turned down an opportunity to shirk work and enjoy some company at the water hole. I shouldn't have. I should've let him mop the floor. Nothing would've happened if we had stayed here to clean house. "Like what?"

"You miss Chester. It's okay to say so."

"I'm fine."

"You're sleeping in his bed."

Matt takes stock of the cot, his boots resting on the floor beside the frame. "Long walk upstairs. I was tired." He slips on his boots one at a time. He's worn a hole in one sock, but he doesn't care enough to change them. "You've been to see him this morning?"

"Yeah. I sat with him for an hour so Doc could eat. I offered to sit longer so he could get some rest, but he booted me out. I'm not sure it made much of a difference, anyhow. Doc's got him drugged into oblivion."

He wipes off his hands on his jeans. "He's not been awake yet?"

"He opened his eyes a bit. Whether or not he's aware of anything is a question for Doc, or for God, maybe."

There are brown stains on his jeans, and when he notices, he sees he's wearing the same soiled shirt. He unbuttons it. "Better than yesterday, then." He'll be fine. I told Doc he'll be fine, and he'll be fine. Doc knows what he's doing. He's the best there is.

"I guess." As he strips off the shirt, tossing it behind him, Kitty snatches it up. "Oh, give that here. You won't know what to do with it, Chester not doing your washing for you." She folds it up in her arms, crinkling her nose at the odor. "What happened yesterday, Matt? I thought you guys were going out to the crick. How'd Chester wind up on the wrong side of a sixgun with his fishing pole?"

He grates his teeth. "Doesn't matter." He stands and kicks Chester's box of belongings out from under the bed, taking the only shirt he sees—after all, Chester won't be needing it any time soon—and starts to button it up.

"It matters to me." When Matt doesn't answer, she persists, "Doc said you told him it was a gunfighter. He said he was aiming for you."

"He was. Tell me, Kitty, if you saw a man stabbed, would you twist the knife in his gut for clarification?"

Pidge wraps around his ankles. He stands still so he won't trip over her. When she chirps, he turns, tossing her a few scrapes of jerky from his desk. Kitty doesn't retreat from his smart comment; she rears up with her own. "If I saw the knife had the consistency of wet paper, yeah, I'd have a few questions, which is exactly what I think about your story."

"A gunfighter tried to kill me. That story singlehandedly keeps the mortuary in business. How come everybody seems to think it's so unbelievable?"

Kitty isn't convinced, her dubiousness palpable on the surface of her expression, but she doesn't press him anymore. "I'll wash your shirt. Can't promise to get all the stains out, I'm sure they've set by now, but at least it'll be clean. You better go up and see Chester before Doc sends someone after me, taking so long sending for you. He'll think there's something afoot."

The irritation in his throat ebbs. He reminds himself she's here because she cares, and it's not her fault Chester is hurt. "Right. Thanks, Kitty."

"Anytime, Matt."

After she leaves the jail, he sniffs the collar of Chester's shirt, a long draw from the hem. The scent matches his pillow. Then, he opens the door, ushers out the cat, and heads to Doc's office. 

Chapter Text

The first day, Chester is asleep every time Matt comes to check on him.

The second day, he has his eyes open. Matt sits beside him and talks to him, but he only mumbles and twitches, dozing off between nonsensical words. Doc tells him this is the medication.

The third day, Matt finds his Bible and brings it to him. He isn't a man who could draw swords studiously, but fortunately, Chester marks his page with a twig, so he reads to him where he left off. Chester scratches himself viciously, muttering under his breath about fire ants. Doc says this is also the medication. Matt tries to get him to eat, but after two bites of porridge, he refuses to take any more. That night, he insists on staying late, mostly to relieve Doc, who is exhausted from sleeplessness, but also because the anxiety of Chester's inappetence has driven him to insomnia. As long as he's known Chester, he's never turned his nose up to a meal.

The fourth day, he's more alert. He's in pain, and he's very tired. He eats when Matt tells him to, only stopping before the plate is empty because he dozes off. Matt doesn't have the heart to wake him up when he's hurting. He can't lie flat in the bed without holding his chest. "'M okay," he says when they ask. Doc says it's probably normal. There's a stitch between his eyebrows that Matt doesn't like. That night, he goes back to the jail, sleeping in Chester's bed with Pidge again, which gives him an idea.

The fifth day, he brings Pidge up to Doc's office, getting clawed in the process. She jumps into Chester's lap, and he grins from ear to ear. When Doc sees, he thunders, "Matt, get that filthy creature out of my office!" and Chester feels well enough to object, "Don't you be hollering at him jus' for letting me see my cat. Ain't his fault I'm holed up in here with your ornery behind." Matt considers it a victory as he obediently collects Pidge and releases her back outside.

The sixth day, when Matt visits, Chester is sitting up in a chair in his usual posture, his leg jutting out, whittling, and Doc is at his desk, twirling a quill betwixt his fingers. Their familiar persiflage soothes him. "Was your Ma a woodpecker? Leaving your sawdust bits everywhere—I'll remind you we don't all take kindly to sweeping up messes the same's you do, Chester!"

"Now, I don't know what my Ma done for work, but whatever it was, it sure was less irritating than you are."

"Irritating—Matt, would you explain to him that I don't have a housekeeper?"

"Mr. Dillon, would you explain to him that I wouldn't whittle woodchips all about his floor if he'd just let me sit outside for a few minutes? I been cooped up here for too long and I'm just about to go stir crazy."

Matt raises his eyebrows. "Sounds like the two of you don't need me. You may benefit from a messenger pigeon."

Doc tosses his quill onto the desk. "I've explained it to you once, Chester, but maybe you need simpler terms. You can't walk from the couch to the chair without passing out. Letting you sit on that staircase is a recipe for you ending up with more broken body parts than the ones I'm already trying to fix. You're in pain, you're short of breath, and you're staying right where you are."

"I'm in pain and short of breath no matter where I'm put." Chester fidgets, rubbing at his chest, and he pauses between sentences to catch his wind. "You may as well let me go back home so's I can hurt in my own bed."

"Let you go back home, is that right? How do you propose you'll get there? You'll roll to the foot of the stairs, and then, what, you'll crawl onto the boardwalk?"

"I made it in here somehow, didn't I?"

Matt holds up a hand. "Hold it, Chester. You made it in here breaking my back, and I'm not feeling inordinately herculean today. You're going to stay right here until Doc says it's okay for you to go. You just keep on whittling and tying knots and whatever else you need to do to keep from coming down with cabin fever."

"Suppose what I need to do is gag him—"

"Oh, blast it, I ought to have cut out your tongue while I had the opportunity—"

"Well, I'm sorry, Doc, but three days stuck in here with you feels more like three years."

Doc hauls up from behind the desk. "You've been here for seven days, and in that time you've managed to age me a decade!"

Matt chuckles, shaking his head. "You two ought to be kept apart for your own safety. If I had civilians arguing like this, they'd be in separate jail cells. Take a deep breath, Doc, Chester's got nothing better to do than to rile you up."

"I could have something better to do. I could make a pot of coffee."

"I did not save your life to be subjected to any of your leather-tanning swill."

The door swings open, and the clattering sound interrupts their argument, for which Matt gives his gratitude. He stands to greet Henry Lawrence, a rancher from outside of Dodge, who removes his hat in deference. "Marshal, Chester."

"How'd you do, Henry?"

"Oh, well, I'm alright—I'm not here for me. Doc, it's the Williamses, neighboring me. Mrs. Williams seems to have started having her baby, they think."

Chester isn't looking at his whittling anymore. "They think? Ain't a baby coming if it's coming, and not if it's not?"

Doc huffs. "You would know so much about it, seeing as you've had so many."

"Not as many as you, the number of cows you've had since I've been here."

He sputters. "I—you—as a matter of fact, it's Mrs. Williams's first baby, so no, she might not be completely sure. But she's due any day now, and with the distance, I'm sure they thought it best to send for me sooner rather than later."

"Sounds like you'd better go, Doc." Matt resists the urge to glance anxiously at Chester.

"They'd be much obliged, Doc," Henry says. "Mrs. Williams was a mite concerned, it being her first baby and all. Mr. Williams would have come himself, but he was afraid to leave her."

Doc hesitates. For all of his talk, he has the calling now to leave Chester's side, and he doesn't want to, the reluctance playing out clear across his face. He glances first at Matt and then takes a long look at Chester, assessing him, trying to find something to justify staying here with him. Chester purses his lips into a baby-faced pout. "I'm alright, Doc. You's can go on ahead."

"It's nearly forty miles. It's a hard day's drive."

"I'll stay with him," Matt volunteers, even though he doesn't need to say it, because Chester and Doc both already know it. "Go on, get your stuff. I'll harness your horse."

Doc isn't convinced. He gives another long look at Chester. Chester pleads, "You go where you's needed. I won't go nowheres, Doc, I swear."

"Yes, well, you'd best not." He grabs his bags as Matt leaves the office with Henry.

Henry helps Matt harness the horse, volunteering to ride with Doc back to the Williams ranch, which Doc accepts, loading his things into his buggy. "Now, Matt, listen here, about Chester. I've got whiskey in the drawer of the desk for him if he gets feeling poorly. If you get him drunk, you got to keep your hands on him, else he'll try to stand up, his blood pressure will bottom right out, and he'll hit the floor."

"Don't get him drunk. Got it."

"Don't you get smart with me. I haven't finished. Keep him drinking plenty of water. There's extra pillows and blankets in the back room. He's been getting cold at night. He'll need help getting back in the cot, no matter what he says. Now, it might be a few days before I get back, seeing as we never know how long these things might take, but I'll come back right off to see him."

"You're acting like I've never kept anything alive before, Doc. Feed him, water him, don't let him colic. Basic horsemanship." Doc sputters. "Go. Chester will be fine."

For all of his confidence, Matt isn't so sure. Neither is Doc. But he doesn't have any more reasonable objections, so he drives away, and Matt goes back to the office to sit with Chester, who has resumed his whittling. Nothing is wrong at all. They eat dinner, and when the pain is too much for Matt to witness anymore, he compels Chester to take a few sips of whiskey before he puts him to bed. He sleeps propped on his side. Matt sleeps in the chair opposite him, snuffling awake every so often. Each time, he hears gunfire in his head, and he sees Chester careen and collapse again. The visions disappear when he sees the steady rise-fall of his flank under the blanket.

On the seventh day, they sleep through breakfast time, which is unlike Chester, who usually awakens when the sun comes up and his feet start sweating. But before Matt can worry, he's stumbling dizzily out of bed on his own, and Matt is catching him to put him in the plush chair. He gets a rather moody, cross look when Matt refuses to let him make a pot of coffee. "You're just no better than Doc, are you?"

"I'm worse than Doc. You haven't had seven days to wear me down. Sit. Sit! Stay."

"Am I a dog?"

"If a dog listened like you, most men would shoot him." Somebody did, he reminds himself silently, his belly pitching. He shudders in spite of himself.

It elicits a thoughtful look from Chester. "Mr. Dillon?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't…" He fumbles with his words. "I ain't real sure what happened to me."

"What do you mean?"

"I ain't got no recollection, y'know, of very much. Last thing I remember is coming out of Delmonico's at breakfast, saying I was gonna mop the floors. After that, it's like I just felled asleep, and I woked up here a couple days later, feeling I got smited by God." His knife and his whittling stick rest into his lap, not making any progress on shaving it down today.

Reticence sticks to the roof of Matt's mouth. The possibility hadn't occurred to him that Chester might not remember what happened, that he might need an explanation, that he definitely deserves one, for all of the pain he's endured sitting trapped in Doc's office. Words jumble up in his head and in his throat, strangling his voice, as a dozen thoughts occur at once: We were just walking down Front Street and you poured water over a bullfrog and wanted to share our fish with the entire city of Dodge and I should've let you, you told me about the book of the Bible you were reading and I forgot because someone shot you shot you shot you I still hear it and I want to remember what you said about little lambs but— When he closes his eyes, he sees Chester's blood on his hands.

Instead of anything helpful, he says, "You got pretty sick, Chester." It tastes bitter, like dishonesty.

His brow is thick and furrowed. He raises his gaze to Matt, all pleading brown eyes, like a street mutt begging for scraps (it wasn't inaccurate, calling him a dog). But when he looks at Matt's face, he decides not to ask. "Well, I sure hope I got that floor mopped. It was getting awful dirty."

"Yeah," Matt says. He trails his tongue over the backs of his teeth. "It's fixing to be lunchtime. Let me go get us something to eat."

"Naw, Mr. Dillon, you ain't gotta. I ain't real hungry."

Something pangs inside of him—alarm, confusion, concern. "We didn't eat breakfast. You've got to eat." He sweeps Chester up and down, how he isn't actually whittling, just holding his stuff, his posture slightly slumped, holding up his head with one fist under his chin. "You're feeling alright?"

"You're starting to sound like Doc. Yessir, I'm just fine. I'll eat whatever you put in front of me. You know I ain't never turned down a meal in my whole dadgum life, and I ain't planning on starting."

"Alright, that's more like it."

Chester makes good on his promise, eating everything on his plate. The hair on the back of Matt's neck is standing up, refusing to lie flat, as his brain pings with the sixth sense that always tells him when he's in the sights of a gun. He consoles himself that Chester is fine, eating, talking to him, not grasping at his chest or complaining of the pain. His anxiety is only because Doc is out of town and not because there's anything wrong with Chester, who takes to his whittling at long last. But a quieter part of him whispers that Chester isn't vociferous with his meal—he's eating slowly, like he's forcing himself, like he's only doing it because Matt asked him to—and that his thumb caresses the knife more clumsily than usual, that he's moving much more slowly in his carving.

Matt asks him more than once if he's sure he's feeling alright. The last time, Chester offers both wrists for Matt to check his pulse, "If it'll stop your blathering," and he listens closely to his breath. It's short. But not noticeably shorter than it has been for days.

"Doc set me to take care of you, and he won't take it very kindly if he comes back to find I've messed it up."

"Well, I suppose not, Mr. Dillon. But I'm alright. Really." Chester fidgets uncomfortably in the chair. Matt wants to ask him more questions, wants to worry aloud more, but he knows Chester hurts, so he holds his tongue, leaving the canteen of water full beside him. He occupies himself with some circulars he brought up, perusing the wanted pictures and descriptions and crimes, but no one stands out from the crowd; few of them are suspected to be in the state of Kansas, none of them pointed toward Dodge, for which Matt is grateful. In Chester's condition, he has no interest in cracking the whip to keep civilians law-abiding. He prefers to maintain the peace and quiet exactly as it is.

For supper, Kitty brings up plates for the three of them. She sits beside Matt on the couch, and Chester holds his dinner in his lap. "I heard you two were holed up here together. Thought I'd bring you something to eat. Lord knows without Chester able to cook, you'd both be liable to starve and turn into the Donner party."

Chester produces a thin, disgusted noise in the back of his throat. "You go mentioning stuff like that when you're just about to feed us—you've no manners 't all, have you?"

"Manners?" Kitty repeats. "Why, I might've had them, but then I met you, so they've all but been forgotten. Chin up, Chester. It's not like you to balk at a meal."

"You've got that right, Miss Kitty." Chester cuts up his steak into pieces. He's picking at it, but when he catches Matt watching him, he forks up a bite into his mouth.

Kitty smiles. "Sure thing. Say, why'd Doc have to make off so quick, anyhow? He said himself two days ago it'd take the entire army to drag him away, but seeing as I didn't notice any troops marching through town, I take it something else drew him."

Matt chuckles. "Sure. Chester drove him off, making him madder than an old wet hen." This earns a shake of his head, scooping up the speckled gravy with his potatoes. "Mrs. Williams was ready to have her baby. Henry Lawrence rode in. We thought it best for Doc to go check it out. Chester won't have any baby waiting on his account."

"You know, it's a good thing you men don't have wives. You'd both be pretty sore at the whole fathering business. I'm surprised Doc trusted you to keep Chester alive while he's gone."

"I'll tell you the same thing I told Doc: Feed him, water him, don't let him colic."

"Mr. Dillon, I think both a man and a horse benefit from some sunlight."

"Doc gave me orders to keep you contained, and I'm not a bit sorry that you're feeling cooped up. Eat your eggs."

Continuing to pick at his meal, Chester mumbles, "Eat my eggs. Might not ever get to see a chicken again long as I live. I'll eat my eggs alright."

Kitty hums. "If I didn't know any better, I'd think being stuck in here was making you a little sour, Chester. Don't let it worry you. Your sunshiney demeanor is what keeps us coming back to you."

He ducks his head. "Aw, Miss Kitty…" He blinks long and slow down at his plate, his curled eyelashes framing his glistening brown eyes, and the back of Matt's throat tastes sweet as horehound at the sight of his face, like a lump of sasafrass root is buried under his tongue.

Matt doesn't dare acknowledge it. "How are things at the Long Branch, Kitty?"

"They're alright. Folks are keeping quiet. Not expecting any more trail herds until next month, and those are two small ones, according to Red. It's early in the season."

Napkin between his thumb and forefinger, Matt wipes off a dab of gravy from his hand. "It is early in the season. Up from Texas?"

"South from Nebraska and Missouri. If you believe anything Red says. I guess he used to ride with them some time ago, before he landed in Dodge. He always seems to be in the know-how about trail herds, so I suppose he knows what he's talking about."

Thoughtfully, he uses a hushpuppy to push his food around on his plate, sopping up the gravy. "I can't think of many cowboys who would be foolish enough to move cattle south at this time of year. They ought to have moved them south for grazing before winter. Moving south in March is pushing them onto grass that's about to be crusted with drought, after a season of feeding them over snow. They're gonna be thinned out and worth a lot less. Does Red know these men?"

"Oh, if a man trips over a root on the prairie, you think he's crooked, Matt. All I know about it is what I told you. You'll have to talk to Red if you want to learn more. But I really don't foresee it being an issue. They're small herds."

"Have they sold in Dodge before?"

"Do I look like I know?" Kitty shakes her head. "Honestly, it's a shame. You're a good man, but this law-making business has made you cynical. A little touch of naivete sometimes can benefit a kind heart, you know."

Matt snorts. There aren't many people who would have the right to describe him as kind-hearted. Perhaps Kitty is among them. "It can stop a kind heart, too." The label makes him itch under the collar of his shirt.

Scraping her fork along her plate, Kitty shakes her head. "Maybe by the time they get here, Chester will be feeling up to ride out and check out the camp. Moss says that pony of his is getting awfully maltempered with no proper work. He gave one of the new stable boys a nasty bite this morning."

"Chester's pony is maltempered regardless, and he doesn't take well to strangers. With the pawing and the puffing, I don't know why Chester paid the price for him he did."

The conversation breaks where Chester would ordinarily cut in with some defense of his horse, both Matt and Kitty waiting, and when he doesn't answer, they glance up from their plates in synchronization, where Chester appears to be dozing off in his chair, slumping to the right, spilling the gravy in his lap.

He probes, "Chester?" as Kitty stands and takes the plate from him, placing it on the coffee table.

At her touch, Chester shoots upright, and then he makes a wounded, "Oh," protectively placing a hand over his flank, grimace setting deep in his face. "'M sorry, Miss Kitty, I just nodded off for a second there—"

She dabs the gravy from his pants. "Hold still, now."

"Naw, you ain't gotta, I can wipe up my own self." His nostrils flare as he takes a deep breath, like the few words he's spoken are too much to get out. "I ain't a child—" He bats at her hands. When she persists, he brushes up against her again. "My, your hands is cold."

She freezes. Her fingers ghost along the backs of his knuckles. The perturbed frown on her face rouses Matt from his seat before she moves, but when she does, she cups Chester's face between both of her palms. His shying back is delayed, like through syrup, a bee buzzing with a torn wing. "Matt, he's burning up."

Chester wriggles, hissing through his teeth in pain as he escapes her hands too late to keep her from drawing a conclusion. He tries to speak, but it dies in his throat, swallowing his cry as he adjusts his posture in the chair.

Crossing the room makes it spin, surreal, to Matt as he bends over him, flanking Kitty. Chester's eyes are glossy, struggling to focus. Red tinges his cheeks.

"He's all flushed, Matt, see?"

"Just 'cause you's both starin' at me, 's all." He stops mid-sentence to breathe, a hand supporting the wall of his right chest. He doesn't move away when Matt touches his face, merely dropping his chin lower; it hurts too much for him to flee, and it's a fight he won't win, so he resigns himself to Matt brushing his hand along his cheek and forehead.

"You have a fever."

"Mr. Dillon, I'm alright." His hand flutters up. His intention isn't clear, but Matt only notices the tremble in his fingers. That's why he wasn't whittling. His hands aren't steady. "'M alright," Chester repeats.

His mind harkens back to the same place it did when Chester first collapsed in his arms a week ago: He never says he's alright. Chester complains about everything. The reassurance frightens Matt so badly, his ribs rattle. "We need to get you into bed."

"Naw, I'm okay right here."

Chester tries to scoot himself back in the chair. He winces and slumps halfway over again, lacking the machismo to endure the pain in silence, his gaze darting to Kitty, like he fears letting her see him weak or suffering.

"Matt, he's hurting. He's sick."

"I see that, Kitty. Chester, c'mon, you need to lie down."

He paws around another refusal. "I'm alright." He shivers. "I'm jus' cold."

"You've got a fever—" Kitty tries, but then she shakes her head. "There's no reasoning with men, especially not sick ones. Let's get this flannel off of him." She undoes the top buttons of his shirt. "Get his boots, Matt, he's not going anywhere. He needs to air out."

"Hey—'s indecent," he protests weakly.

"We'll tell it to the reverend when you're feeling better. If he wants us to get married, Matt will shoot him for us." She peels the shirt off of him.

Chester pleads, "Mr. Dillon?"

"It's alright, Chester, you've got your underwear. It's nothing she hasn't seen before." Matt removes his boots and his socks. His feet are damp, sweaty, which Chester hates, and ordinarily, he wouldn't tolerate it; he's either too sick to notice or too weak to do anything about it, and neither of those things soothes the hair rising on the back of Matt's neck.

She puts his shirt aside. "I'm going to get some more water. Get him into bed, will you? You're better at arguing with him." She retreats to the front door. The hinges wail when she leaves.

"You heard her. C'mon, grab onto me. We've gotta get you into that cot before you get stuck laid up in this chair." Matt lifts up Chester's arm, trying to slide around his shoulders. Chester's throat tightens in a swallowed cry, and he stiffens against Matt's body, the strongest resistance he can offer. Matt balks in spite of himself. He doesn't enjoy the notion of tossing Chester around against his will. "You're going to like it better if we get you moved before Kitty gets back."

"Mr. Dillon," Chester exhales, "I ain't—I ain't gonna be able to breathe if you lay me flat in that bed." The more he talks, the more clear it is he's struggling to catch his breath, like he's run a considerable distance. "I gotta sit up. Can't—Can't get my wind otherwise."

Matt peruses the past day, how Chester hasn't talked much more than necessary, how he hasn't spun any long stories about the misery of Texas or the poverty of his childhood; he's been covering for himself. He's been doing it well. "How long have you been feeling sick?"

"'M fine."

"You are not fine. You have a fever, and you're writhing in agony."

"'T only hurts when I breathe."

"It's not like a man has to do that a couple times a minute!" Matt snaps.

"Don't be hollerin' at me. I don't feel good."

He softens at the quiet reminder, quiet because Chester can't manage anything more than that. "I know, Chester, I know." At least I got that much out of him. Gingerly, he tugs on Chester's arm again. "Stand up, here. We'll prop you up on some pillows in bed and get you some whiskey. I've got you, now. C'mon."

As he stands, he turns his head to muffle his cry into Matt's arm, his knee buckling into rubber, and Matt half-carries, half-drags him to the cot across the room. "Easy. Easy." Sweat beads on Chester's brow as he sits on the mattress, and Matt stacks up the pillows behind him. He hunches over, grasping at his chest. "Here. Let me see. Let me look at it."

Reluctant but obedient, Chester allows Matt to unbutton the front of his underwear. The right side of his chest, a few inches below his nipple line, between his ribs, which expand and contract with every labored breath, bears a string of sutures. The skin around it is red. Matt prods at it, and Chester wheezes. "Sorry. Lie back. Here, take the whiskey bottle. Have a swig."

It occurs to Matt that this is the most medicine he knows: to pass a bottle to relieve the pain. It's all Doc told me to do. Chester can't recline much on the mattress, but he obediently swallows the whiskey until it dribbles out of his mouth, and then Matt places it on the floor beside the bed.

Kitty returns with more water. "Get that blanket off of him, Matt." She opens the windows. The mid-March breeze buffets the curtains and curls across their faces. "We're not doing him any favors, keeping him hot."

"Ain't hot," Chester murmurs.

Matt takes his blanket. His protest is feeble. For a long moment, all Matt can hear is his breath whistling. "I ought to send someone for Doc."

Chester says, "Naw, 'm alright. 'Twill break soon."

Kitty and Matt exchange a glance. In spite of both of their qualms, they listen to him.

In a few hours, it's clear the fever isn't breaking. He's hotter than before, and the pillows piled behind him aren't relieving the pressure on his chest. Dusk dwindles into nightfall on the horizon. Chester is in and out of a fitful sleep, gasping each time he awakens, like the chest pain is new for the first time again. Matt paces back and forth across the office. Kitty sits on the floor beside the bed, passing the whiskey bottle up to Chester's hand.

When it finally clinks, empty, on the floor, Kitty presses her hand to her brow. "He's not getting better. We've got to send for Doc." She uses the bed frame to pull herself up, standing.

Chester pants, half-awake. "Naw… Can't come no faster. Mrs. Williams havin'a baby. He said he'd come—right as quick—quick as he could—"

Kitty places her hands on her hips. "I don't mean to be callous, but the baby'll be born whether Doc's there or not."

Mid-stride, Matt stops. "You're right." I should've sent for him hours ago. He reaches for his wallet. "Kitty, take this. Go down to the Long Branch, find some cowboy you trust, and give him however much he wants to ride out to the Williams farm and bring Doc back. If you don't see anyone you trust, then just pick one who looks half-sober. Tell him to take a fresh horse, and if he doesn't have one, he can take mine."

"Mr. Dillon—" Chester wants to resist, but he can't muster much more than the whine of Matt's name.

Kitty nods. "I'll get some ice and another bottle of whiskey." She rushes out with her dress in a frill.

"Why'd—" He pushes himself up onto his elbows. "Why'd you do a fool thing like that—"

Matt pivots from his spot on the floorboards. Losing the rhythm of his footfalls on the wood tosses his spirit into disquiet. "It's not a fool thing. I'd take out a loan if I had to." Chester's elbows threaten to cave under him, shoulders trembling. "Just lie back, would you?"

"Can't, it hurts—" He sucks in a desperate breath through pursed lips. "Can't breathe."

Matt has used every pillow in Doc's office, but it's not enough to ease Chester's breath. "Here." He sits beside him on the edge of the cot. "Budge over a little. I'll sit behind you. You can lean back against me." Chester gasps a pained sound when the mattress rocks with Matt's weight. Matt sits up behind him, tugging him between his legs. The wet crackles in his lungs drone out his ability to scream. "Lean back. See, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere."

It's not comfortable, bearing Chester's weight on his chest, but he imagines it's better than the crushing enormity of illness inside of his friend. "Mr. Dillon, you ain't gotta—" He breaks off in a pinched sound, like he wants to cough and he can't.

"I know, I know. Relax. It's okay." Matt places his arms around Chester's middle, trying to soothe him. Chester tenses under his touch. "Easy, Chester."

He goes quiet as he leans back, slowly settling more and more of his weight on Matt, and when he doesn't cave, he seems to trust more in him, tilting his head back. "Mr. Dillon?" he peeps.

"Yeah?"

He blinks blearily. For a second, Matt thinks maybe he's beginning to fall asleep. "Mr. Dillon?"

"What is it, Chester?"

His eyes close. When they open again, he mewls a pathetic, "Mr. Dillon?" and Matt realizes he's no longer talking to Chester as he knows him, but someone else, completely addled and transformed by fever.

Doc didn't tell him what to do if this happened. "Sh, Chester, I'm right here." Each time Chester utters his name again, he repeats this: "I'm right here. I'm here. I'm not leaving you."

It feels like hours, though only a few minutes have passed, before Kitty returns to Doc's office. She's carrying a cooler with ice and a bottle of liquor. "Emil is going after Doc. He wouldn't take your money, Matt, but he said he'd need your horse. I think Bill might ride with him."

"That's good, Kitty, that's good." As Matt speaks, Chester mutters his name again, turning his head, and Matt bows so his lips are nearly on the shell of Chester's ear. He wants to whisper something, but he doesn't know what to say. It doesn't matter. I'm not making him feel any better.

"Get up from there so I can pack this ice around him. We have to get the fever down."

"He can't breathe if he lays any flatter than this." Chester gasps his name again. "Just pack it around me with him."

"It'll freeze you."

"I've been cold before. Chester, it's okay, I'm here." Matt lifts the hem of Chester's underwear for Kitty to place a towel wrapped around a melting ice block on his abdomen. His breath hitches and quells. She puts more under his arms, under his back between their bodies, around the collar of his throat. Chester shivers and moans miserably. "We've gotta cool you off. You're cooking."

"Mr. Dillon?"

"Hush."

"What's wrong with him, Matt?"

"He's delirious. The ice will bring the fever down." It burns through Matt's skin, bitter as winter, but he grits his teeth and bears it as Chester scoots against him, like he wants to sit up straighter. "Easy, easy." When he tilts his head back, his breath pants across Matt's throat, and it smells sour. Matt picks up the bottle of liquor and wills his hands not to shake. "Drink, Chester. Hey, listen, drink this. Drink. You'll feel better."

Whatever remains of Chester's mind is, as always, obedient to Matt, slurring something that might be, "Yessir," before he swallows until, blessedly, he passes out. Matt smooths a hand over the top of his head and holds the melting ice to him.

His clothes are saturated. "Matt, what are we going to do?"

"Keep him drunk until Doc gets back."

"You're just going to sit there? That ice is melting on you."

"I've been wet a time or two."

She looks despondent. Matt feels it, too.

After the first hour, his back hurts. After the second, his neck aches, and he shifts enough to pop it. After the third, he's dozing forward with his forehead falling to Chester's shoulder. Then, Chester coughs with a wounded sound. It startles Matt awake.

Kitty hasn't left. She's opposite him in the chair, a hand fanned over her forehead. "Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know." Matt adjusts beneath him. "Doc said he might get pneumonia. It's good for folks with pneumonia to clear their lungs, ain't it?" He's grasping at straws, not knowing what to say, what to do, what's right.

Chester coughs again. He's too weak to wail a second time. His face twists up, gnarled like a root. His skin is cooler than before, sweat beaded on his forehead. "Mr. Dillon?" he croaks.

"It's alright, Chester."

The little noise of despair he produces resonates in his skull. "Hurts."

"I know. Kitty, will you pass me that whiskey?" Matt brings the bottle to his lips. He swallows once, but when he tries to swallow again, it chokes him, and he hacks, and then he doesn't speak at all, but tears roll down his face, and Matt doesn't know what to do anymore except clutch the bottle of whiskey and hold Chester against his body like his life depends on it.

"He's crying. Oh, Matt—"

"I see, Kitty, I see." Chester's hand slides down from his abdomen to Matt's wrist, and it wraps around, gripping tight, holding fast to the first thing he finds that feels human, fingernails digging into his skin at the pulse point. Matt gently shakes him off and takes his hand instead. "It's okay, we're right here." As Matt talks to his ear, two more tears squeeze from his eyes. Kitty hands him a handkerchief, and he uses it to blot away the saltwater from his forehead and cheeks.

"We've got to do something. We can't just watch."

"Look in those cabinets, will you? Find something that'll relieve his pain—morphine or something." Kitty obeys, darting to Doc's cupboard. "Doc's on his way, Chester, we sent for him. He'll come help. He'll come help."

Kitty finds a box of morphine. "Here, here's this."

"What about those, uh, those hypodermic needles, is that what they're called?"

"I don't know, Matt. Do you know how to use them if I find them?"

"I don't even know what they're called, Kitty. I don't know what to do with them." Matt has never given a man anything in a needle before, and he can't say he aspires to start now, but in lieu of other options, he would try it. He would try anything for Chester right now. "What about, uh, chloroform? Is there any of that?"

"I don't see any of that, either. Do you know what color I'm looking for? All of these labels look the same."

"No, I—" Chester shuffles against him. Matt helps draw him backward. "Easy. Is that better?" He can't tell if the little sound Chester makes is positive or negative. "Easy. You're alright." The panic isn't helping him, a furrow between his eyes where he always feeds on Matt's emotions. Matt can't afford to stress right now. "Just forget it, Kitty. Sit down. There's no use messing up all of Doc's cabinets. We wouldn't know how to use anything if we found it."

"Maybe I ought to get Moss. He tends sick horses, doesn't he?"

"All that'll accomplish is getting Moss upset. Sit down."

She isn't happy, but she listens. Chester closes his eyes. His body feels tense through his sopping wet clothes, his skin nearer to normal temperature, and Matt feels his intention: pretending to be asleep. Maybe he thinks it will calm them, or maybe he thinks lying still is the best possible option for narrowing his agony, or maybe something else—he can't give the answer if Matt asks.

Kitty refuses to go home. She brings up more oil for their lamps, more ice from the Long Branch when Chester's fever rises, some porridge that no one touches. "How much longer until Doc might be back?"

"It's a few hours of hard riding during the daylight, Kitty, and longer in the dark. We've got awhile yet."

Midnight stretches into the wee hours. Kitty dozes off in the chair. Matt is restless, fidgeting with his hands, until Chester spans out his fingers over his wrists, and then he forces his limbs still. When Chester rouses enough to shift, Matt brings the whiskey bottle to his lips until he quiets. The last time he presses the rim to his mouth, he turns his head away and grunts a wet sound.

When he manages to speak, only a single word emerges: "Water."

Matt unscrews the water bottle and helps him take a drink. "Here, right here."

He coughs. He wheezes. His eyes flicker, fighting to focus in the candlelight. "Matt?"

My name. Chester has never called him his name before. Maybe the alternative is too many syllables. "I'm here. You're alright, you hear me?" With the next cough, Chester peeps a puny sound, his abdomen flexing as he tries to sit up, struggling to rise off of Matt's body. His pallor is poor, gray, in lieu of the fever flushing him throughout. Cold air sticks to where the ice melted into their clothes. Chester shudders, gooseflesh pebbling down Matt's arms. Despair clutches the inside of his chest. "Hey, no, don't—Lean back against me. I've got you."

His core muscles cave, flopping him backward against Matt. Matt tugs him back to sit up taller. He wants to wallop some wind into him, but he's afraid to hurt him more than he's already hurting. "Muh—Muh—"

"Sh, easy. Lean your head back. Close your eyes. Just try to rest, okay?"

"Uhn—"

"Hush up and do what I tell you." These stern words send Chester into a kneejerk cascade of obedience, dropping his head back onto Matt's shoulder. He fidgets just once, shifting his weight more onto his left side, trying to alleviate the pressure from the wound on the right, and then rests with his mouth open, nose brushing the hinge beneath Matt's jaw, sick-sweet breath wafting across his cheek. "There you are. Good."

"I—I—"

"You're not resting if you're trying to talk, are you?"

His glassy eyes open. He studies the side of Matt's face briefly. They're too close; Matt can see all of the pores of Chester's face, the prickle of stubble on his jaw, the sweat creased onto his forehead, his own partial reflection in those deep eyes, and he knows Chester can see all of that, too. Can he see that I'm scared? Matt doesn't believe in showing fear, ever.

Whatever Chester sees, he doesn't speak to it. But his pathetic hands flutter, landing on top of Matt's where they rest beside his hips on the cot. He entwines their fingers together. Matt freezes, unable to move, uncertain if he wants to. Chester squeezes his hand three times.

Memory cascades over him: a boy, in church, clutching his mother's hand, being led out among the congregation. He squeezes her hand three times. She squeezes back twice. Then he clutches her hand hard, tight, like a life raft in the ocean. She laughs, commending, "You get a much stronger grip, Matt, you'll have more love than I do." In a few years, he has a stronger grip, though never as much love, never as much love—

The most love he's felt in decades fits between his arms. It rises up in his throat and swells like bile. He swallows it desperately. He wants to shake his hands free of Chester's and scold him. He wants to squeeze back, twice, the way his mother did. He wants to dial back the passage of time and realize all of this much sooner. "I know," he whispers, "I know."

Chester's hands shake. He doesn't let go. Even when he falls asleep, he doesn't let go.

Matt bows his head forward and inhales deeply in his hair. Please. Please. Please. He's not sure what he's begging for.

Chapter Text

When Doc returns, he kicks Matt and Kitty out of his office, speaking as crudely as if they were squatters on a rancher's land, and neither of them can afford to be miffed. It's a crisp early evening, the whole day passed with their hours buried in Chester's congested lungs. Cerulean sky highlights the amber cloud of silt in the air, dry and pleading for rain.

"Do you want a drink, Matt?"

"No, thanks, Kitty. I'm just going to go to bed."

"I don't blame you. Goodnight."

He goes to Chester's bed. The pillow doesn't smell like him anymore; Matt remembers the sweaty musk of his hair. It clings to his damp-stiffed clothes. He peels them off of himself, wearing uncomfortably against his skin. But then he drops them on the mattress and sleeps with them wrapped around his face, so he can smell the thing that makes this mattress more soothing than his own.

The next day, Doc confirms the suspicion he voiced over a week ago: "It's pneumonia. Just like I thought, messing around with his lung was no good. His body can't cope with it. A man's body isn't made to be opened up the way I done to him, Matt."

"Is he better?"

"He's no worse."

"Can I see him?"

"He's sleeping."

"But if I just—"

Doc crosses his arms. "I've darn near lost my patience for your mule-headedness. You saw him plenty yesterday, and he's the same now. You need to go out and think about something a bit more marshal-like, clear your head. This whole mess is going to burn you up inside if you let it."

That night, he gets to take out his frustrations on an idiotic cowboy in the Long Branch. The ache in his knuckles doesn't make him feel any better.

The next day, before he makes it to Doc's office, Jim runs into the jail to tell him the stage was held up. He rides out on Buck and finds the fools who did it, two of them, both too dumb to come easily, so he shoots them off of their horses and buries them in the same hole. He takes the horses back to Dodge with him.

Outside the livery, a stable boy is leading Scout away from the barn toward the pasture. As they ride up, Scout spots Buck. The sorrel pony nickers and prances. When the stable boy jerks on his lead, Scout whips back with pinned ears and bites his arm. The boy howls and slaps him across the nose. He half-rears, head held back out of reach. The boy yanks on his lead again, and Scout rears again, higher this time.

Matt calls a low, "Whoa!" and dismounts, jogging over to them. "Whoa, boy, easy—" Scout's nostrils flare, his eyes rolling white, but he calms as Matt takes his halter.

The boy makes to hit him again. Matt catches his hand by the wrist. "That's enough!"

"He bit me!"

He gives the teen a push, putting himself between him and Scout, who paws anxiously behind him. "He bit you, and you smacked him. Now you've got him all worked up. Do you make a habit of hitting other people's animals?"

"Ain't your horse, is it, mister?"

"He belongs to a friend of mine, and I know he'll take none too kindly to anybody whooping on his horse. He treats him gently and expects the same from you."

"Maybe that's the problem with him, then! Ain't been walloped enough, is what my pa says, problem with all these here gentle-broke horses—"

Matt bristles. "What your pa says has no bearing when it comes to—Youch!" He whirls, stumbling over his boots to face Scout, who champed him once on the shoulder. The stable boy has the audacity to grin. "You shut up," Matt grumbles at him.

Moss pokes his head out of the barn. "Marshal? I heard a yell." He wipes off his hands on his apron as he approaches. "Kyle? Is that ornery beast giving you trouble again?"

"He was. He bit me good, and then he bit the marshal." The boy holds up his bruising arm to Moss as evidence. "The marshal says I ain't to hit him no more."

"Now, an animal misbehaving is no excuse for swinging on him. You run and wash off that bite, make sure the skin's not broken. I'll turn him out for you." The boy trots off back into the barn, retreating from sight, and Moss takes the rope from Matt. "Sorry about that, marshal. This here pony of Chester's gets to acting awful foul when he ain't worked. His brain just gets to rotting up on him, turns him into a right miscreant." Scout opens his mouth to bite Moss, but he catches him by the nose and pushes his head away. "C'mon, you." He leads the pony to the gate and removes his halter, smacking him on the rump as he prances off. Then, Moss returns to Matt where he collects Buck's reins. "You haven't heard anything on Chester today, have you?"

"No. I just got back into town from those cowboys who held up the stage this morning. Got two horses and saddles for you—sell them, lease them, whatever you want."

"O' course, marshal. I sure thank you kindly. Let me have Buck, here. I'll get him some grain."

"Thanks, Moss. And, uh, if I have cause to ride out again, I'll take that ornery pony. Get him out of your hair for a bit."

"Well, he'd be mighty grateful for it. He's just too smart for his own good. When he doesn't have good work occupying him, it makes him fester up, like a sore. Like a dog that has to go through winter without herding any sheep, y'know? Some horses are like that. They gotta be worked, and without it, they turn into these too-bright minions of the devil himself."

"Yeah. Yeah, I suppose they do."

"Let me know how Chester's doing, will you? We're all waiting for him to be up and moseying around again."

Matt licks his lips. "Sure, Moss. I sure will."

When he makes it to Doc's, the nighttime chill pierces the air. He smells the wood stove burning inside. He knocks twice, and then he enters. The front room is empty. "Doc?" he calls. He sweeps the space with his gaze. He wouldn't leave Chester here alone. The door to the back room is closed. "Doc, it's me."

The door opens. Doc passes through and closes it behind him. "Matt. This isn't a great time."

"Why not? Is it Chester?" Through the wall, he hears a low sound. "What's that?"

Doc opens his desk drawer and takes out a bottle of whiskey. "It's him. He's taken a fever again, and I'm having an awful time making it break. He can't breathe worth a damn, neither. Now you get out of here. Some of us are busy!"

Matt stands in his way, barring him from the back room. "Now, hang on a minute, Doc. What are you saying?" Chester calls out again, sounding no better than he did two days ago.

"I'm telling you what I'm saying. He's a very sick man, and he'll thank you to let me get back to him."

"Can't I—"

"You can't help, and you can't see him. Git!"

But then, through the wall, Chester's voice becomes more clear: "Mr. Dillon?" The sick-ravaged bones of his breath echo. "Mr. Dillon?" It's the same fever delusion from before. Whatever Chester thinks is going on, whatever his mind is playing, he wants Matt to be with him, can't stop calling out his name, like there's something urgent Matt needs to see right away. "Mr. Dillon?"

It's a reflex for him to close his hand around the doorknob. Doc or no Doc, Matt hears his name being called, hears Chester's distressed voice, and he has no choice but to answer, just as Doc seemingly has no choice but to stop him, grabbing him by the wrist. "Matt, you listen to me. He's confused. You barging in there now isn't gonna fix anything. It may upset him even more. You ought to go home and come back tomorrow."

"Mr. Dillon?"

Matt shakes his head. "I gotta see him, Doc."

"Matt—"

"Would you much like hearing somebody yell your name and not be able to see them?"

With a relenting sigh, Doc releases him, and Matt enters the room, where Chester is in the cot propped up on cushions. His face is hot and red, a damp cloth on his forehead, one arm outstretched toward the light. His eyes don't register Matt's presence immediately, but at the sound of footsteps, he stirs. "Mr. Dillon?" His voice is a croak.

The space between them feels vast, though only a few feet. Matt crosses it with care, fearing the wood will buckle under his feet, or that his bones will. "Hey." Keeping his voice natural takes effort. "How are you feeling?" He pulls up the chair beside Chester's bed.

"Didja get 'em?"

He's not sure what Chester is referring to, but he forces himself to remain steady. "Sure. I always do, right?"

"Mhm." Chester relaxes for a second. Then, he lifts his head again. "Mr. Dillon?"

"I'm right here." He scoots the chair closer, the legs making a scuffing noise on the floor, but that doesn't keep Chester from calling out his name again in a moment, like he forgets Matt is sitting beside him, or worries Matt will leave him. "I'm not going anywhere, alright? You can get some rest. Doc would be obliged to you if you did. You've turned him into a withered up raisin."

Chester grunts. He falls silent for a few minutes, almost long enough for Matt to think he's sleeping well, but then he rises. "Mr. Dillon?"

Under the mattress, the corner of the Bible juts out where Matt brought it to him last week. "Yeah, I'm here." He pulls it out. "You'll probably have an easier time getting some rest if you get your Bible study, yeah? I'll find some boring passage about Roth, the son of Ira, the son of Jebediah, the son of Aaron, and that'll knock you right out." Chester mumbles in return, probably some part of him trying to correct Matt's biblical genealogy, as Matt turns to where the twig marks the page. The sheet is creased. "Well, you're on the book of Titus. I can't think of a single thing that happens in the book of Titus."

"'S like…" Chester's speech is unclear except for a few scattered words, "… letters… Paul… tellin' him…"

"Then if you know what happens, how come you keep reading it?" Chester makes another little sound, and Matt gives a half-smile at his feeble defense, the way he always does when Matt picks at him. "Alright. Say, you were telling me one day about how you think we should all frolic like joyful little lambs. Where would I turn to, if I wanted all the instructions on how to do it right?"

Chester's heavy eyes close. "Philippians… four."

"Philippians four," Matt repeats. To his own shame, he opens the table of contents, and then he turns to the proper page. "This will be kind to you, you think? Get you rejoicing properly." His heart thunders in his throat as he speaks, but he pretends he can't feel it, holding the book between steady hands, thinking of all the nights Chester lay flat on his bed and held it up over his head, mouthing along the words. It fits the same between his hands now. He licks his finger to dab at the frail page without tearing it. Then, he begins to read aloud. "Therefore, my brethren dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and my crown, so stand fast in the Lord…"

Whether it's the continuous sound of his voice soothing Chester or his primal need to be quiet and respectful during scripture, he doesn't call out Matt's name again. He eases on the bed. Occasionally, he snaps back to attention, but then he drifts off again, until finally, he lies still and does not reawaken. Matt finishes the chapter, anyway, either for Chester or for himself—he isn't sure. Then, he tucks the book under the mattress and smooths the blanket out over him. "Maybe he'll settle for a bit, Doc." He doesn't get an answer. "Doc?"

He turns. Doc is slumped over in the plush chair, head resting on his arms, asleep.

Matt is very quiet on his way out.

The day after, he tries three times to visit, and Doc turns him away each time. Chester isn't yelling from inside. Matt thinks maybe this is good. When he asks, Doc says, "I don't know," and he looks grave.

Matt doesn't sleep that night.

He visits again at dawn, when the sky first begins to blue. Doc opens the door for him. The office smells of coffee, but the pot is full—he hasn't drunk any yet. He doesn't go to pour some for himself or for Matt. He rakes a hand down his face.

"How is he?"

"Asleep, finally. I gave him morphine to quiet him down."

"You said you'd stopped giving him morphine. You said it messes with—with—"

"Respiratory drive, yes. Well." Doc turns away. He takes the coffee pot by the handle, but he doesn't pour it. Instead, he sloshes around the fluid inside of it, watching it rotate, a convenient excuse to avoid Matt's eyes. "We're, uh. It's just that—y'see, with what he's going through—all this considered—"

Matt takes the coffee pot away from him. Tell me. His speech is frozen in his throat, looming expectantly over Doc, who tilts his head back to look him in the face. It's painful, it's agonizing, but Doc isn't too much of a coward to face him head-on. And when he scans him up and down, he finishes his thought. "All I can do now is try to make him comfortable."

He doesn't want to ask a clarifying question, but he does. "He's dying?"

"Yes. Yes, I think so." Matt reaches for the door to the back room. "Now, listen, I've just got him lying still for a bit. You won't serve any good waking him up and making him hurt again. As long as he's asleep, he's not in any pain, and that's what we're doing right now, you hear me?"

"I just need to sit with him for a minute." Matt cracks the door open. "You can go get some breakfast."

He doubts Doc is any hungrier than he is, but to his credit, he understands the implicit meaning: right now, Matt wants to be alone with Chester. "Alright. Alright, Matt." Doc pats him reassuringly on the shoulder, feeling too much and not enough like his father, and then he leaves, and Matt shuffles into the room, closing the door behind him.

Chester is asleep. Matt starts to pull up a chair, but that doesn't feel intimate enough, and he won't risk disturbing him to sit on the bed with him, so he kneels on the floor. Chester's hands are on top of the blanket. He picks up one of them, cradles it between both of his, thumbs trailing over the veins and ridges along his knuckles. Reverently, he studies his hand, the scars on it, old guitar callouses softened by age, the rough spots of a hard life lived. But his skin has the turgor and tone of a young man, one far too young to die. His breaths are wet-sounding, crackling, but he isn't fighting for his wind, eased by the drugs.

Bowing his head, Matt closes his eyes. He doesn't dare speak. Chester's hand wraps around his, squeezing once, and he glances up at his face, eyes open and questioning. "Chester—" His voice hiccups through a throat narrowed by grief. He swallows and clears it with a cough, wiping off the corner of his mouth on his shirt, looking everywhere but into Chester's eyes. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you."

Chester merely squeezes his hand again. His brow furrows, troubled, but his breath isn't hitched, not like pain, more like trying to come up with a checkers strategy.

"Sh. Sh, it's okay. Doc will be back right quick." He strokes the crease of Chester's palm with his thumb. Chester loosely grasps his hand, mostly limp, too weak to grab hold. He doesn't make a sound. He simply stares at Matt, like he wants Matt to be the last thing he sees.

That's ridiculous. Matt has been dying a handful of times in his life, and never has he spent those moments thinking about the last thing he's going to see, nor would he like to—after all, death has always pointed his direction from the barrel of a gun. He has never been conscious, aware, and dying in front of someone who loves him. Maybe if he were in Chester's shoes, if Chester were in his, he'd like Chester's face to be the last thing he sees. They've lamented the men who die ill with no one at their bedside, no kinfolk as Chester says. Matt hopes this is just as good.

He fights to keep his tone steady. "Did you hear that thunder this morning? It missed us, the rain, it—" His voice cracks. "But maybe next time. It's not April yet. We've got plenty of time. We may not get stuck in a drought. And after it rains, we can go to the crick and catch more fish, some for Moss and Doc and Kitty. Maybe you can get to be real mean to Doc and threaten to boil his again. He sure fell for it the last time. He sure—"

Chester's hand slackens in his as he closes his eyes, drifting off, and Matt can't bring himself to speak any more, though he kneels there until his bones throb with protest. The Bible juts out from under the mattress. Some part of him wants to take it, but he doesn't. Instead, he bends to kiss Chester's sweaty forehead, tucks him in, and leaves him resting peacefully.

Doc isn't back in the office yet. Matt closes the door silently behind himself and walks down the boardwalk to the jail among the singing dawn birds. He takes out his wallet and places twenty dollars on his desk, placing it under a rock that Chester picked up months ago, declaring it was pretty enough to be a paperweight. Alongside the cash, he leaves a note: For Chester.

After all, he promised Chester he'd pay for a proper burial. A pine box and a modest marker and a slice of land that isn't Boot Hill—if the time comes before Matt gets back, there's more than enough money to make all of the right arrangements. Doc and Kitty will see to it.

He sees himself in the mirror. This isn't right. The person staring back at him is not a man at all, an antelope fleeing a hunter, catching sight of the gleam of tin on his front and making off into the wilderness. With the thought, he makes eye contact with his reflection as he removes the star from his chest. He tucks it into the top drawer of his desk. I'll be back in a bit.

Sometimes, he wants to be somebody else.

Right now, he wants to be someone whose best friend isn't dying. But he'll settle for temporarily, briefly, having a reprieve in simply being a man, not a lawman, not a marshal—someone who is allowed to hurt, just for a few hours.

He walks to the stable. Moss is currying a mare. "Marshal! You're up early."

"Yeah." He coughs. "I'm going to take Scout for a ride. Do you mind packing a few days of vittles in my saddle bags?"

Moss drops his comb in the straw. "Sure. Where are you off to?"

"We're going to take a message to Hays City. We'll stay overnight."

Moss sizes him up. He grazes the spot on Matt's shirt where he always bears his badge. He doesn't speak to it. Instead, he asks, "Is it Chester?"

"Is what Chester?"

"He's gone bad, hasn't he?"

He sweeps the area. There are no stablehands around. "Yeah," he says quietly. "It doesn't look good."

Moss glances over to where Buck and Scout are stalled side by side. "Leaving town ain't gonna help him none."

"Staying isn't, either. I still have a job to do."

"Your job, huh?" Moss studies the bare patch on his shirt, the crinkle where his badge is missing, the fabric worn thin. "Alright. I'll send you with enough vittles for three days. Hays City and back, and inclement weather. No more."

Matt hesitates. "Do you think that's going to stop me?"

Moss shakes his head. "Marshal, there's nothing in the world that can stop you. Nothing in the world at all."

When Matt rides away on Chester's pony, he never once looks back.

Chapter Text

When Matt leaves Dodge, he has the decency to head northeast, in the general direction of Hays City, and only when he's several miles out where no one can see him does he turn Scout's nose west. He pauses long enough to tighten his cinch. "Really is a half hour process trying to get you to unpuff, isn't it?" he murmurs to the sorrel gelding. "It's no matter. I'm not in a hurry." He has nowhere to go, after all, except home, and home is full of things he doesn't want to see right now: Chester's whittling, his half-finished riata, his Sunday best clothes, his hat on the rack. So he and Scout keep west at a leisurely pace.

The first day, he's too close to Dodge, so he avoids the ranches to keep anyone from recognizing him, yielding to an abandoned well to pump water for Scout. He sleeps under the stars during a clear night. In the morning of the second day, he wakes to sharp claps of thunder and heat lightning fracturing the blood-red dawn, and in spite of his efforts, he's unsuccessful in beating the torrential rainfall. He and Scout flee across the prairie with sheets of downpour and pea-sized hail whipping their hides until at long last, they stumble into a ravine and take shelter. He struggles to find enough dry wood to light a fire. He has a full book of matches, but he won't waste them, so he keeps the flames alive long enough to dry his clothes and saddle blanket, and then he allows it to die out.

The third day is another wet one, but the rain is soft and steady. They travel until he finds a patch dry enough to make a fire. As Moss promised, he's out of food—no more than three days' supply enclosed, gone now. It's no skin off Matt's teeth. He shoots a rabbit and stews up some dandelions while Scout munches on a thresh of green clover.

The spring storms have flushed the prairie with life, and he doesn't think twice about the fact that he's near running out of supplies, or the fact that he promised to be back within a few days and now he's a hundred miles away from home, no more ready to go back than the day he left.

In fact, he doesn't think about home much at all. Dodge City exists in his memory in some nebulous form, where the occasional transient thought passes through: What are they doing right now? And he gets the brief opportunity to picture Doc and Chester having drinks at the Long Branch, laughing with Kitty, waiting for him to come back.

The illusion shatters, and he pushes it away before he has the chance to think about what is actually happening back at home. He buries his grief in a foolish gallop through another thunderstorm, and Scout is kind enough not to toss him, though his nostrils flare pink and his thighs froth white with exertion. The cantankerous pony doesn't fight him through any of the chaotic spring weather, much to his surprise, and Matt finds himself becoming acquainted with his foibles.

By the seventh day, some latent part of him knows Chester is almost certainly dead.

Somewhere in northwestern Kansas, he comes upon a homestead. It's another dreary, drizzly day, the drought long vanished into the claps of thunder and heavy brewing clouds. He's hungry, and if he has to eat another prairie chicken, he might shoot himself, so he approaches the small house with a set mud floor. A woman is tossing feed to a couple hogs in a corral behind the shack. The door is open, and he can smell meat cooking inside.

"Morning, miss."

She has a knife in the pocket of her apron, one hand on the handle. "Morning." At first glance, she seems old, with heavy lines around her eyes and gray frizzes in her hair, but her voice is that of a much younger girl. She must be younger than I am. She eyes him warily. He takes off his gun belt, draping it over his saddle horn, and dismounts, leaving the rifle in the boot. "You've no need to pump water here, much rain as we've had. Get back on that horse and be on your way."

"I will, miss—it's not water I'm after. I've been traveling awhile, and I'd be much obliged for a plate of whatever you've got. I'll give you a nickel for it."

"It's ma'am," she corrects sternly.

"Yes, ma'am. Is your husband home?"

"Sure. He's been home for six months. Hope you're not aiming to talk to him, 'cause where he went, they don't send telegrams."

"Sorry to hear that, ma'am."

She glares, seemingly peeved at how her unfriendly demeanor hasn't run him off yet. "Well. For a nickel, I suppose. I've got sausage, eggs, and potatoes. If that don't please you, be on your way."

"Why, that pleases me greatly. I appreciate you, ma'am."

She growls something under her breath at him and enters her shack, and after Matt ties Scout, he follows her inside, where she sets another place at a small table. "Don't you go telling any other drifters about this place. I don't want nobody treating me as a boarding house. I got enough living to do without freeloaders."

"Yes, ma'am."

Her expression remains sour, and they don't exchange many more words over their meal. She doesn't introduce herself, nor does she ask his name, and though Matt has always prided himself in having very proper manners, he doesn't volunteer anything about himself. In this one-room house with a lonely woman whose face is as mean as it is sad, he doesn't have to be Matt Dillon, US Marshal. He's just another drifter, one persistent and generous enough to pester a widow into feeding him. In a day or two, she will forget his face, and he will forget hers.

"Could I trouble you for a few eggs, ma'am?"

"If the meal wasn't enough for you, by all means. You want one of my hogs, too?"

"No, ma'am." He gives her two nickels, one for the food and one for the handful of eggs, and then he bids her farewell, untying Scout and making his way across the wet meadowlands once again. He feels her stony eyes on his back until the homestead is long out of sight.

They ride on, still taking west, into territory Matt knows mostly by studying maps, not by the visible topography around him. He estimates they're somewhere northwest of Scott County, but it's guesswork. They continue to travel with leisure, no destination in mind, meandering the rainy countryside, and while he's reluctant to admit it to himself, he's slightly lost, which is to say he knows they're not going in circles, but he's not entirely sure what they'll encounter if they continue in this direction. They continue, all the same.

Where they end up is irrelevant. What they're leaving; that's what matters. Chester once told him, "It wasn't so much about coming here as it was about getting away from there." Matt didn't understand when he said it; Matt never drifted merely for the sake of drifting. Now, he understands.

He pats Scout on the neck. "We're not getting away from anything, old boy. We'll get started home right soon." He doesn't believe it when he says it.

At dusk, they camp in a low, moist grove protected by foliage and rocky siding. Matt hobbles Scout so he can graze, and he finds a dry patch on a stone under an overhang where he places his blanket. Over a shallow ridge, easy to traverse on foot, there's a rain-swelled brook, so he washes his face and hands and drinks his fill, and by the time the sun has vanished completely from view, he wraps himself in his blanket roll and goes to sleep, listening to the horse's breathing a few yards away.

The next day, sunlight rouses him. His body aches with dull throbs, reminding him he isn't young enough to sleep on stones anymore, but he rubs the cricks out of his neck and shoulders, rolling over and bumping his head on Scout's knee. "Huh?"

The pony puffs indignantly at him, shaking out his overgrown forelock. Matt reflexively scrambles back from the animal lying on the ground beside him, legs folded neatly up under him, muzzle resting on the grass. "You—I—" He springs to his feet. Scout, however, is in no hurry to rise. A few feet away, the rope Matt used to hobble him rests in the dirt, untied. "Of course you can unhobble yourself. You're always untying Chester's knots. Why did I think this would be any different?" Matt grumbles to himself. "Guess I'd best tie you before you decide to play keep-away. I don't much fancy the idea of chasing you all over this misbegotten prairie."

Scout rolls on his back in the grass before he stands and shakes himself.

"Didn't anybody ever teach you horses sleep on their feet?" Matt grooms him for the day's journey as he speaks, dusting his coat off with his hands. The lack of friendly human interaction has left a void in him, and where previously he wasn't the sort to socialize with his mount, the pony is his only prayer not to forget language entirely. "Chester says you get tangled in your line. I can't imagine why, trying to lie down on it, rolling around with it."

He starts a fire, cracking the eggs he bought yesterday into a pan, and then he mixes the shells into his coffee grounds, feeling reminiscent of a time much worse things were mixed with his morning swill. When the cooking is done, he douses the flames, sits in the dewy grass to eat his eggs, and drinks his coffee. Nostalgia sucks him in like the undercurrent of a river, drowning him, only interrupted by Scout nuzzling into his lap, sniffing for the sugar cubes in his pockets.

"Now, listen here, you beast. I bought those for my coffee, not for your pleasure." He pushes the pony's head away. "You were not taught any boundaries. Acting like you can trod on me, lying down like a man on the grass, sharing my food. You're bigger than I am, and I don't much care for you trying to butt me around."

Scout mouths at Matt's boots until, relenting, Matt pulls a single sugar cube from his pocket and offers it to the gelding in the flat of his hand. "There you are. I ought not reward you for it. Shoo." As he munches, Matt finishes his breakfast, and then he lazily tacks him up, making no great haste.

Hoofbeat thunder vibrates the earth, both Matt and Scout perking up to attention. Matt tosses his remaining eggs and coffee into the dirt. Scout jerks his head up, ears flicking, prancing with a nervous whicker. At the crest of the shallow ravine, a mass of charging cattle rears their heads, pushing down the path straight toward them. Swinging into his saddle, Matt collects his reins and his rope, booting Scout up the steep rocky knoll and out of the way. That's somebody's livelihood. The herd is scattered and deranged, their eyes white-ringed. No cowboy is leading them point. They're terrified in their charge, spooked up, no steadfast mind in sight.

As it passes, he spots the leader of the cattle, a panicked steer. Of course it's a steer. A cow would be smarter. He digs in his heels, and they bolt after it, weaving into the perimeter of the running herd. Looping his riata above his head, he cuts in the middle, tossing the rope.

He doesn't startle the pony to a stop. He pulls up gradually, slowing the surge to a trickle as he eases back on the reins, so the herd doesn't bifurcate but instead trots on to the green grasses on the other side of the stony ridge.

The rain has made the lowlands florid and bountiful. Matt supposes they're somewhere near a body of water, perhaps the Saline River, and the cattle know it, dropping their heads into the sprouting greenery. They're not longhorn cattle, he observes, not gathered up from Texas, but from somewhere else. The clopping sound of shod hoofbeats approaching tells him he's about to find out.

A lone cowboy gallops at the rear of the herd, pulling up when he sees it has stopped in favor of grazing, circling around the outskirts on a sweat-drenched bay mare. The man's face is confused, lost, as he lopes the perimeter of the small herd, almost displeased in a sense, like he can't understand why the stampede ended its charge, before he spots Matt.

With the rim of his Stetson tipped back, the sunlight illuminates his face briefly: how anger furrows his brow and slashes a line into his mouth. He has a rifle in the boot of his saddle, but he doesn't grab for it, so neither does Matt go for his gun.

Instead, Matt dismounts. "Howdy, stranger." He approaches the unruly steer with the flared nostrils, still puffing from his interrupted warpath. "I take it this is your herd?"

The cowboy glances back over his shoulder, considering something. "I'm a hand." He has a ruddy face and ruddier hair. As he scans the landscape behind him, two more men on horses gallop up through the sagebrush into the grove. "We got 'em," he calls back to them. "Or this feller did, rather." He extends a hand to Matt in gesture.

Matt removes his riata from the neck of the steer, returning it to his pommel. The two men approach in turn, one a tall thin man with blonde hair and a drawn face like a mule, the other short with olive-toned skin and meticulously clean fingernails. The tall one speaks first. "We're much obliged to you, mister. They got a big start on us. Would've taken us quite awhile to run them down, and we might've lost a few." His partner nods astutely. "And with the numbers we're running, losing a few isn't something we can afford."

"I'd say not. Three men on sound horses ought not have a problem managing this many cattle. How many are there? Fifty?"

"Less than that," says the short man. He has a thick German accent. "Was more when we left Missouri."

"What started them out? How'd they get the drop on you?"

The tall man gestures between the two of them. "We were riding point. We didn't see much. Just the herd broke in the middle and bolted. Startled our horses something fierce, took us a minute to get our bearings. Ram was on them hot, though."

"I see. You're Ram?" he asks the redheaded cowboy, who nods. "You were driving from behind, then. You see what happened?"

"Just that steer tearing off like a bat out of hell."

Matt hums to himself. I don't buy it. The anger has all faded from Ram's face, but he knows he saw it initially, and the pang of distrust rattling his stomach is rarely ever wrong. "Where are you boys headed?"

"Eagle Tail."

"Eagle Tail? You're nearly there, I should think."

"Sure are. Just four more days, maybe five if the storms lay in rough again."

This is outside of my jurisdiction. This isn't Ford County, and he promised to be home days ago. But then, he thinks of home, Dodge City, the way it is in his memory (Chester, waiting for him at the jail with bad coffee on the stove), and the way it is in actuality (empty jail, empty desk, empty bed, Bible buried with him in a pine box, god, I should have taken his Bible, it's wrong to take from a dying man but I'd shoot someone right now to hold it in my hands). He can't stop himself from asking, "How would you folks like some company along the way?"

After all, he may not be wearing a star, but he's still a marshal. He suspects Ram for trying to run off the herd, though he won't say so. Surely he has a responsibility to stick around until he sees what trouble is afoot or sees these men safely to Eagle Tail.

The mule-faced man and his German partner both brighten, the former replying, "Well, we can't afford to pay another hand. But you're welcome to ride along with us if you'd like, if you're headed in the same direction." Their hired hand makes a face like tasting vinegar.

I'm onto something here. "I sure am. Better traveling with company. Let me pack my roll."

Ram disguises his fury by turning away with a noncommittal sound. He loosens the rein on his mare and allows her to meander along. The short German man dismounts, handing his reins to his partner, who leads both horses along at a steady walk.

Matt leaves Scout grazing near the edge of the herd and doubles back to his small camp. Most of his things are already bagged up. He puts away his grounds and sugar cubes. When he looks up, he finds the German man standing beside him, ambling and friendly.

The stranger asks, "What was your name, then, mister?"

His tongue adheres to the roof of his mouth. Yesterday, the widow never asked his name, and he didn't tell her. He tells himself accompanying them is part of his responsibility as a marshal, keeping them safe from a suspicious cowhand. In all of his years of service, he has rarely ever balked at telling anyone his station; he bears the star and title with pride.

But when the question is asked of him now, he doesn't answer honestly. "Dill. Dill Matthews." If Ram knows, he won't act up again. It's easier to catch him in the act if he doesn't know. Matt will rest easier thinking this to himself, but he knows it isn't true.

Some part of him only wants to hear the name Dill Matthews for the rest of his life.

"Dill," the man repeats. "I'm Otto Weisz, and that there's my partner, Elmer Wright. You've met Ram already."

"Briefly." Ram and Elmer are pushing the cattle more tightly together for their travel. "This is your herd, then, Otto?"

"Mine and Elmer's. We've run this little bit of nothing for ten years. Suits us better, being away from folks. We drive to Eagle Tail from Missouri every year since the station opened, make our little bit of money, and head back out to roam for awhile."

Matt tosses his coffee pot into his saddle bag. "You're a Dutchman, huh?"

"In a way, I suppose."

"In a way?" Matt echoes.

"What does it matter?"

"Oh, it doesn't. I meant no offense. I've just never known a Dutchman cowboy before. I suppose you hear that pretty regular, then."

Matt's soothing tone works, quelling the briefly ruffled feathers. "Yes, I do. Usually with a quip about how Germans are better inclined to swine."

"Almost every Dutchman I've met raises hogs."

"As a matter of fact, I find swine quite unclean. Never acquired a taste for it."

Matt shrugs. "To each his own." He finishes rolling up his few belongings. "What's special about Eagle Tail? An odd place to drive toward."

"Ram says the same thing. He says we ought to push on to Denver, get twice the price."

Is that so? Matt keeps his gaze along the horizon at Otto's musing, careful not to look at the cowboy as he allows his horse to breathe, neck outstretched over the bright spring grass with purple clover. "He's not wrong. Mountain towns pay high prices for cattle."

"Denver's two hundred miles out of the way. Prices are up because it's a hard drive. Me and Elmer like it as it is. Small herd, small drive." Otto peruses the beasts as they move about them, all lazy with cooling sweat, patting a heifer as she sways out of his way. "Truthfully, we've never had a hand before. Only hired Ram this year. Elmer took a sour spill in December on some ice, broke his arm. Run into Ram January, and he offered his help. Figure after this drive, we'll pay him off, and next year, we won't need any help again. It's good for us. We prefer our own company, me and Elmer. It's nothing personal, y'see, just neither one of us has ever been the type of man to spend much time with other folks."

Matt puffs a short breath out his nose, nodding. "Except each other, I take it?"

"My father always said one close friend is worth a dozen kinfolk."

The high sun casts their faces into shadow under the brims of their hats, but the tingle on the back of Matt's neck tells him crooked man is eyeing him more closely than ever. "Your father was a smart man." Otto and Elmer both appear to be none the wiser.

I won't tell them. Not yet.

It's less than a week of travel to Eagle Tail. Whatever move Ram is planning on making, he'll have to make it sooner rather than later.

The first day stays sunny until the middle of the evening, when black clouds curdle the horizon like stained cotton and the frizz of lightning stings the air. The cattle become uneasy, pressing farther south, where Matt and Ram push back, trying to keep them on the path. The cattle are persistent, and the weather has the horses antsy, champing on their bits. "Where do they think they're going?" Ram calls to him over a crack of thunder, the hatred on his brow softened by uncertainty.

Otto falls back from riding point. "Follow them!" he shouts. "We're less than a mile from the Saline." We're in a flood zone. "Keep old Bessie in the lead—she'll take us to higher ground."

"So we can get struck by lightning instead of drowning?" Ram asks, but Otto trots off, catching up with Elmer, who nudges two panicked yearlings back into the thick of the herd. When the rain crashes upon them, it slicks Elmer's dappled mare black, only lightning illuminating the cattle's backs. As the storm obscures day from night, the herd drifts to a halt near an incline in a bend of the prairie grass, where the red cow in the lead lowers her head to rest.

They circle the perimeter of the small herd for a few minutes, but as the torrential rainfall persists, they cluster along the slope of the hill. "We need to make camp," Elmer says. "By the time this passes, it'll be dark."

"We can't push these cattle around in this weather. One of us is liable to get blown off our horse. They're not far from another stampede," Ram objects.

Matt tilts his head forward so the collecting rainwater pours out of the brim of his hat. He faces Otto and Elmer. "You both know the landscape better than we do."

"Dill's right. One of us ought to look for a spot to shack up," Otto says.

Elmer says, "I'll go up over the crest of this hill and scout out a place."

"Take Ram with you. If there's trouble, it's safer together."

Ram scowls. "The only trouble we're going to find in this weather is a damn twister!" But when Elmer gestures with his head and nudges his horse up out of the dip in the flatlands, Ram follows him reluctantly.

Matt and Otto take turns pacing the herd. Within an hour, the rain lightens, and three gunshots in a sequence draw them up, so sliding through the mud, they drive toward the sound. Otto's horse, a black gelding, is unsteady in the slick, tossing muck every which way, but Scout is steadfast and quick to push errant youngsters back into the fray, until they spot Elmer in the distance waving them onward.

Behind a thin line of sparse trees, they find an old nester's cabin. The shanty is near collapse, but Ram and Elmer drag the tin roof off and prop it up in some low branches to create a dry patch where they wring out their clothes and hang their hats.

"That was downright miserable!" Ram curses. "Now we're all wet, and no closer to Denver than we were four hours ago."

"How now, Ram, you won't melt," Otto chides. "And we're not going to Denver."

"The mess you just had us wade through—Denver will pay three times the price for these cattle, and the mountains are dry this time of year. Eagle Tail is a ridiculous place to sell when you could have riches in another two hundred miles."

Elmer exhales patiently through his nose. "We're not mountain men, and we're not interested in riches. We've got enough miles behind us as it is. Now we're nearly there."

"That storm just added two days to our travel! The Saline is going to be swelled from its banks, and the ground's going to be so slick, we'll end up with one of these horses lame. No ramuda—that'll do us in. We should count our lucky stars we didn't get blown clean off of this prairie."

The hair on the back of Matt's neck stands up at the way Ram raises his voice. A tingle in the pit of his stomach, like an ice cube, drives him to stand from the wet earth. "We all need to calm down and collect ourselves. One of you, go tend to the horses. I'll take the first watch. We've got a good camp here. If the weather starts again in the morning, we can stay here instead of moving out. It'll be safer than getting caught in the open again."

Ram huffs. "Who made you such a cockle-doodle-doo?"

Otto chuckles. "Take a breath, Ram." He stands, dusting off his hands on his sopping wet pants. "Tall men like Dill get used to calling the shots, courtesy of everyone looking up at them all the time." Ram curls his lip, but Otto doesn't seem to notice, extending a hand to pull Elmer up with him. Their fingers interlock for a second, and they exchange a look that's almost private. "Me and Elmer will tend the horses. You sure your pony's up for another round of mucking through?"

"He's stout." He tightens Scout's cinch again before he mounts and resumes his patrol around the herd.

With nightfall, he only occasionally prowls near to where the other men have bedded down. Ram sleeps on the other side of the treeline beneath a canvas he found in the shanty, leaving Otto and Elmer to shelter under the tin roof alone. They lie together, close enough to touch, which they do on occasion, one mumbling in his sleep and reaching out for the other, until they're nestled on one saddle blanket, sharing the other as a cover.

Perhaps it's intrusive, but he finds he can't help but stare, watching as Elmer stirs enough to press his face into the back of Otto's neck and inhale deeply, smelling his skin. It twists a knife in Matt's gut. No amount of fresh rain or dew can vanquish Chester's smell from the senses of his memory. I never did that with him. I didn't even know I wanted to.

He doesn't ride near their sleeping quarters again. He keeps his eyes to the sky, cloudy but dry, and to the bovines mulling about, content where they're parked for the night. He stops to examine a heifer with a limp, using his knife to rupture an abscess in her cloven hoof. Other than that, nothing on the prairie moves, quieted and stilled by the weather.

In a few hours, Elmer rouses to relieve Matt, and after he tethers Scout on a shallow slope with a wide lawn of grass, he nests under the tin roof a few feet away from Otto's sleeping form, his body just far enough under the shelter to keep the water in the canopy from falling on him. As he reclines, propped up with his saddle behind him, he feels watchful eyes peering at him, and he rocks forward onto his elbows, scanning the foliage in the darkness.

"It's just me," Otto mumbles from a few feet away. "Elmer trod on my fingers." He rolls over and yawns. "You're mighty jumpy for such a big man."

Out of sight, but not out of earshot, Matt hears Ram snore, and he watches the silhouette of Elmer on his horse round the outskirts of the open. "Just a little."

"Where are you from, anyway, Dill?"

He doesn't know why he feels so reticent. "A man is from a lot of places." Otto accepts his silence without remark. Reclining on his saddle again, he closes his eyes, listening to the lowing of the cattle and the hiss of cicadas and crickets.

In spite of all of his suspicions, the lull of the plains around him soothes the tingle down his spine. He knows when he falls asleep, conscious on some level, unable to move, but acutely aware of Chester's smell wreathing around him, the warm sensation of arms enveloping him, with the damp caress of a kiss planted on his cheek. It's nothing but a dream. For a blessed moment before he descends into slumber, it feels like so much more.

Chapter Text

For the first time in a long time, Matt wakes to the smell of coffee already brewing. A single blessed moment lingers in his psyche wherein Chester is at the stove, pouring from the pot into the mug, calling his name. "Mr. Dillon? I gotcher coffee for ye. We's just got more cayenne yesterday, so it's nice and hot." In his memory, or his imagination, he lifts his head from his pillow and peers across the jail, watching as Chester hovers, the steam obscuring his face from view.

As he struggles to blink into full wakefulness, it doesn't clear, and he realizes with horror the crystalline lines of Chester's sweet smile and doe-brown eyes are marred, sweat and tear rivulets gnawing down his cheeks, lips twisted into a wet fevered gasp, so, "Mr. Dillon?" no longer sounds inviting or loving. His skin against Matt's palm is hotter than a brand, so hot it builds in the back of his throat, it's scorching him, I can't move—

"Achtung!" A boot kicks his hand out of the fire. He snaps awake and scrambles back from the smoke strangling him, his hand yanked protectively to his chest where Otto stands over him, giving another hearty kick in his direction, like he thinks Matt might try to crawl toward the flames again in his confusion. "Dill! What's the matter with you?"

Matt lifts his head from where he rests on all fours like an animal, half-wrapped in his blanket. Ram stands back, his mouth twisted into shock, while Otto bats at Matt's body with his feet, shepherding him back from the campfire, and Elmer hovers over him with a pot of water, prepared to dowse him. He pushes himself up onto his knees. "I, uh—I was just having a dream."

"A dream?" Elmer repeats with his eyebrows raised.

Ram is equally unconvinced. "Dreams don't make people crawl into fires."

Otto brushes them off. "Hau ab, boys." He extends a hand to Matt, tugging him up to his feet. "Leave him alone. Everyone gets a nightmare on occasion. No need to make a fuss about it. How's the hand? Did you get a burn?"

"It's fine." On reflex, Matt keeps his fingers curled up to himself, but Otto insistently unfolds them to examine his palm. "I told you, it's fine. No burns."

"Lucky Otto didn't smash your fingers, kicking you the way he did." Elmer places the pot of water on the ground. "I was gonna splash you. You started the moaning and groaning. We thought it was kind of a hoot, til you scooted your happy little behind right into the fire. Eyes wide open." He nudges Otto with his arm. "Give the man a swaller of coffee. I'll start tacking the horses." Otto grins and nods as Elmer walks away.

Otto hands him a cup of coffee. "Much obliged," Matt says. "And, uh, thanks. For not letting me incinerate myself, there."

"Kein ding, Dill. Couldn't have Elmer saturating your clothes again, what with us just getting dry and all."

Matt sips his coffee, and it just tastes like coffee, not like cayenne. "Do you get more German in the morning, Otto?"

"In a way, I suppose."

Still staring at him, Ram scarcely blinks. His straight posture doesn't relax, a tense wrinkle between his brows, his jaw shifting with an inaudible grind of his teeth. Matt catches his gaze. He tilts his head back marginally, jerking his chin into the light. "What were you dreaming about?"

Maintaining steady, unwavering eye contact, Matt dips his jaw. "Nothing in particular."

With two even strides nearer to the fire, he stands in front of Matt. It's a challenge. "You said the name Chester." Matt's shoulder twitches inadvertently. Ram cracks a smirk, believing he has won. "Who is that to you, Dill? A friend? A brother?"

"Nobody in particular," Matt repeats, keeping his tone level.

He doesn't fold. "Someone else, then." His sly eyes dart to Otto and then to Elmer, untethering the horses across the way. "Someone closer than a brother."

Reflex and temper jointly scream for Matt to bruise his knuckles. But Otto placidly steps between them, reading the fierceness crackling between their faces and diffusing it with his narrow shoulders. "Why don't you go help Elmer saddle the horses?"

Ram's lopsided smirk doesn't fade. "Sure. Sure, I can saddle the horses. Traveling the prairie with a simpleton, a Dutchman, and a raging lunatic. Nothing can possibly go wrong." He stalks away.

Matt takes another long sip of his coffee as Ram pursues Elmer. When he's out of earshot, Otto flanks him closely, keeping his voice low. "You sure you're alright, Dill?"

For good measure, he gives him a hearty clap on the shoulder. "Dandy. C'mon, let's get a move on while the sky's clear."

They drive onward through the day, the sky never brightens beyond a pale slate hue like limestone. It doesn't rain. Though the sun fails to part the dense cloud cover, heat broils from the crust of the earth, steam rising through the prairie grass, thickening the air between them into the sticky sort of warmth that Matt remembers from his visits to Florida. The moist misery of humidity damps their faces, and the cattle feel it, too, moving sluggish as cold molasses through the prairie. Even Scout hangs his head low.

"Where are we now, Elmer?" Matt calls across the herd sometime between late afternoon and early evening, when the daylight has just begun to dwindle.

"We're a little less than a mile off of the river. If we keep following it, it'll take us right up to a split toward Eagle Tail. With the pace we've made today, we'll reach the bend sometime tomorrow."

Ram pulls up beside them from where he drives the rear of the herd. "We ought to move farther inland, higher ground. These flats are bogging up already. If the rains start again, we'll be treed."

"We can't do anything right now," Matt objects. "We need to make camp quick, while we've still got some visibility. This close to the river with the humidity, we're about to be in a fog thicker than buffalo hide."

"Dill's right," Otto says. "We've got about an hour."

"It's more than two hours to nightfall."

"Soon as the sky starts to dusk, it's going to mist up. We won't be able to see where we're stepping," Elmer says. "There used to be a dirt round behind the briar threshes up here. It's high enough, it won't go underwater too quickly if we have to move all of a sudden. C'mon."

The flash of anger Matt noted on Ram's face the hour they met returns now, and he puts little effort into hiding it. He's going to start trouble. Matt taps Scout with his heels, staying a few paces behind.

At the stopping point, they scrape together enough dry grass to start a fire. Otto and Elmer split a tin of tomatoes while Matt and Ram patrol the outskirts of the herd, the latter objecting that he doesn't need help. Matt finds himself running out of excuses to accompany him, especially when Otto calls him down from his saddle. The silver mist rises as predicted across the dip in the valley, mingling with the smoke from their campfire. He strips Scout of his saddle and props it on the earth to rest upon it, and soon, the fog obscures everything from view, visibility no more than a few feet before them.

If it weren't for the heavy breathing of his companions, the whicker-stamp of the horses just out of sight, Matt would think he's completely alone.

The clop of shod hoofbeats on the damp grass slows nearby. "C'mon down, Ram," Elmer calls. "You can't see more than we can. There's no use making rounds. The cattle aren't going anywhere."

"I'll ride awhile longer."

"Suit yourself."

The silhouette of his mare vanishes into the thickness of dusk, where dark gray light dims to nearly nothing. Matt leans with his back to his saddle bent across the roots of a spindly willow tree. He strains his ears for movement around them.

An uncharacteristic stillness possesses the grassland, no breeze to ruffle between them. But save for the lowing of the animals and the whiz of cicadas, the soft breathy speech exchanged between Elmer and Otto (quiet enough he can't discern more than a few words and muffled laughter, something like, "No, he can't hear," and then a moaned, "Sh, I've got you," which forces him to stop eavesdropping, lest he overhear something truly private), nothing disturbs the atmosphere.

A few more times, he hears Ram's mare pacing. He halts and dismounts a distance away from the rest of them, loosening his cinch and leading his mare until he again disappears from view into the haze a final time, seemingly scanning the ground for a place to rest. Not tonight. No man would be stupid enough to try to bolt when he can't see more than a few feet in front of him. As much as Matt believes Ram has intentions he hasn't let on about, he also believes Ram is genuine when he says the weather is too foul for traveling—the rogue cowboy, whether good or bad, isn't brave enough to make off alone.

Beyond, more stifled tittering ripples from Otto and Elmer. Matt turns onto his side, facing away from them, and he covers his ears with his hands. If he hears too much, his mind goes elsewhere, floating through the gray to a shrouded morning at the riverside, sharing a damp saddle blanket with Chester. Warmth trickles across the back of his neck, a quiet, "Scooch over, Mr. Dillon," exhaled to his ear, and he smells a smell he didn't appreciate then, but oh, how he misses it now. At the time, in the past, he didn't roll over. He didn't turn to face Chester and wrap his arms around him and share the heat in the humid air between their bodies.

He wishes, now, he would have. It just didn't occur to me at the time. It didn't occur to him until he held Chester's fever-balmy body between his hands and thought of all the happier opportunities he missed, days passed by without a consideration to the contrary, now lingering with bitterness in the back of his throat. Why didn't I realize it sooner?

His feelings aren't new. They're as ancient as time itself, carved into his very bones. Did Chester feel the same way? Did he realize it? Was he swallowing it for Matt's sake? He squeezed my hand three times. Three times. I didn't squeeze back. I didn't say anything. I didn't— He exhales a long breath through his nose and forces back the thoughts before they overtake him. Reaching for his water bottle, he takes a long drink, hoping the tepid tinny flavor will clear his mind.

Curly hair ruffles with a puff of breath. He flinches and looks up at Scout, who has left the other horses to find Matt in the mist. "Untied yourself again, did you?" The sorrel pony turns his head away, mulling at the grass a few feet away from the saddle and blanket roll, his rope loosely dragging the ground. "You're a strange beast. Most horses like their kindred spirits." It occurs to him too late that, as he can hear Elmer and Otto, they can also hear him, but when he makes out another muffled moan, he decides they have no space to judge him for talking to his horse.

He sleeps facing Scout's hooves, listening to him rip up the green prairie grass.

A few hours pass before he opens his eyes again. The butter-thick fog and new moon cast the night blacker than ink. The campfire glints from the dew drops in the air, an orange shroud. He lies there on his side, hands folded under his head. I heard something. Something disturbed him into waking. In the blind darkness, he can't see.

Faint thunder rolls across the prairie. Was that it? Moisture stiffens the air, but it hasn't begun to rain. Heat lightning illuminates the camp for a split second, and that's when he sees it: Scout standing a few yards away, his head held up high, ears pricked, and nostrils flared, giving a nervous whicker. Don't spook him. "Easy," he whispers, "easy, boy." He collects his feet under him and feels through the darkness, taking him by a single rein. He takes his bridle from his saddle horn, slipping the bit into his mouth, as unease tingles in the pit of his stomach as he secures the head stall. Then, he follows Scout's gaze.

Nothing stands out from the sheet of solitary eternity.

Footfalls tramp on the grass across the way, on the other side of the campfire, the source skewed by the crackles of the flames.

"Yah!" Gunfire splits the air, a flash of powder. "Yuppah! Yah!"

Scout jerks back away from Matt, prancing, but he steadies under Matt's hand on his nose. The cattle spring to their feet blindly, stampeding in a splayed pattern, driven up by a single man on horseback. Elmer's and Otto's horses, tethered on the edge of camp, break their ties and bolt away from the commotion.

"What's that? Elmer?"

"I'm right here—who—"

Hoofbeats rattle the ground as Matt runs to the side of the two sleeping cowboys. "It's Ram—" Lightning flashes again, the surge of livestock barreling upon them, Otto folded in his blanket, Elmer staggering to his feet. Matt fires his gun into the air twice to drive back the stampede. "Ay-yah! Ay-yah!" He drags Otto back by the seat of his pants, clear out of the path of a terrified animals, the gunfire sending them in the opposite direction. The loose blankets tangle around their boots, snagging Matt's spurs, and as he stumbles, his gun clatters to the ground, his back bouncing off of Scout's shoulder.

The white light dies just as he discerns the silhouette of a man on a horse. Matt hauls Otto to his feet with hands under his arms. "A broch! What does he think he's doing?"

"He's running up your herd," Matt says grimly.

Elmer lunges for his rifle. "No, he's not!"

The next flash of lightning betrays nothing but the outlines of men—the three of them on the ground, Elmer with his arm extended toward the rifle a few feet away, hand not yet wrapped around the handle, and Ram mounted in the saddle with his sixgun trained on Elmer's chest in return. Time freezes for an instant, and Matt knows what's going to happen before it does, this scene he's somehow witnessed before.

"No!" Otto lunges against Matt's arms, and Matt reflexively tightens up, holding him fast, clear of the single shot.

One shot is all it takes to blow Elmer away from the rifle, flat on his back. Ram spurs his horse after the cattle. Matt dives for his gun on the ground. He fires once into the darkness. The bullet ricochets off of a tree trunk and pings into oblivion. I can't fire at nothing. Otto collapses beside Elmer's body.

A sound wrenches from him. This is what drives Matt upward—collecting his reins, one hand on Scout's withers, swinging Indian-style onto his back. "I'm going after him!" He bolts, guided only by the clatter of shod hoofbeats ahead of him.

In their panic, the cattle have dispersed, littering the land. Through a thin patch of withered trees, Ram pushes at them, trying to collect them, his shape among the gray when the lightning flashes again. Matt surges at him, one hand on the reins, one on his gun. Ram's mare darts ahead.

Matt knows it's fruitless to chase through the opaque night, especially bareback. He can't help himself. The undergrowth tears around them, thorns and brush snagging on his clothes, but Scout doesn't balk, and Matt doesn't pull him up, leaning forward over his neck with a loose rein, damp mane streaking back into his face.

"Yah!" Ram cracks at his horse's rump. We're gaining on them—

With an almighty crash, the hoofbeats cease. Scout skids to a halt. Matt tumbles face-first onto his neck, catching a mouthful of forelock, arms stringing around Scout's throat, legs flipping to the side. "Fah—" Scout half-rears as Matt dangles from his head, feet kicking out. His ankles plunge into an unforgiving current of water. It's the river! It's swelled the banks!

Scout tosses his head and backs up from the weight dangling around his neck. Matt scrabbles at nothing until his feet strike the shoreline. He stands up straight, one hand still fisted in Scout's mane, one in the reins. Too breathless to speak through the choking fog, he pats Scout's neck in gentle, reassuring strokes, silently mouthing, "Good boy, good boy."

"Help me!" It's Ram's voice, gargling with water.

The next flash of lightning brightens the scenery, a storm encroaching from the distance. Thunder rattles Matt's teeth. He sweeps the riverbank with his gaze— The light disappears, casting them back into darkness. "Give me a reason, Ram!"

"Help! Please!" He follows the voice, too panic-stricken and wet to be feigned, the rushing current nearly muffling it completely.

I can't listen to a man drown. Stumbling along the wet shore, Matt follows the next cry. "Where are you?"

His mewl is pathetic, a shadow of the man who shot Elmer in cold blood. "On a rock! Throw me a rope!"

"I don't have a rope!" He has nothing but himself, his tackless horse, and his gun.

Thunder cracks viciously. White light bleeds over the sight: Ram in the middle of the river, clinging to a mildew-slicked boulder, his grip growing weaker as the water pummels him against the stone. His head bobs at the frothy surface, dunking under and then surfacing every so often, crazed with terror.

Blackness consumes them again.

Matt feels the seam of the riverbank with his boots. Scout balks a few feet away, tossing up his head when Matt pulls the reins to draw him nearer, and he remembers now Chester's complaint about the pony being water-shy— "Don't bother me none, seeing as I ain't a swimmer myself."

"Hang on."

"I can't!"

Hauling a dead tree limb up from the ground, Matt extends it into the water. The current snatches at it, nearly dragging it from his grasp, but he holds fast. "Can you reach this?" The next blink of light illuminates the branch, not nearly long enough to come within arm's reach. Ram doesn't even try. He rests his wearied cheek on the stone. He's about to give up.

As much as Matt doesn't think he's worth the breath in his lungs, he also doesn't want to pull his body off of the bank at dawn.

Mossy stones protrude from the water. Teetering unsteadily, Matt sways with one boot on a rock, sliding under his weight. He coils his reins around his hand. "Whoa, whoa, boy, whoa." Scout stamps uneasily.

Water froths at his ankles, threatening to pull him in. He thrusts the branch toward Ram again. "Grab on."

"I can't!"

"Do it!"

"I'll drown!"

"You'll drown if you don't!"

One final flicker of storm light from the heavens shows the expression on his face. It's an expression Matt has seen before, but it never fails to take his breath away: evil. He has no opportunity to retreat. Ram seizes the branch with both hands. He pulls.

It yanks Matt's boots from the wet-slick rocks into the torrenting water.

The reins, his only tether to dry land, snatch taut. He flounders to grab on with his other hand, but instead, he finds himself dragged back—Ram clinging to him, bracing against him, shoving him under the water, fingers digging into his neck and face, using his body as leverage to clamber ashore.

Sweet river water pours into his mouth and nose, silt-stinging and fiery. He clenches his arm around Ram's torso. In the other, the incessant pull of a weight more than his own, Scout anchoring him, dragging them back toward the bank. The gelding screams a pained whinny, pouncing, half-rearing, desperate to escape the men hanging from his face and mouth, pitching backward with his whole weight to haul them to shore. When their heads breach the pounding water, the muddy soil of the bank welcomes them, and finally, Matt relinquishes the reins, flopping onto the earth with a desperate gasp for air. Scout gallops away, his bridle askew.

Ram lunges for his gun on his belt. Matt jumps on top of him, tears it from his grasp, and tosses it into the river. A solid swing to his jaw knocks him to the side. Matt grabs his own gun.

Ram has the audacity to laugh. "Wet gunpowder, eh, Dill?"

Matt cracks it over his skull. Then, collecting himself in his sodden clothes, he staggers to his feet.

On the bank downriver, Ram's mare lies dead alongside the bodies of a dozen cattle. When Ram awakens from his pistol-whipping, he doesn't put up another fight, too dazed as Matt punches the barrel of his gun into his back. "Walk."

"You can't see the way back to camp."

"I'll find it. Another move and I'll break your skull."

"You're not going after your horse?"

"He'll turn up."

Incidental lightning keeps them from marching into any briar bushes, and when they emerge from a tree line, the distance glow of firelight guides them. A hazy gray dawn on the horizon lightens the mist.

Otto hunches over in the same place where Matt left him, resting on his ass in the dirt with Elmer's head in his lap. Tears roll down his face. He doesn't speak when they approach, head bowed, gaze not leaving Elmer's face. He covers Elmer's eyes with his hands, like he can find no other way to keep them closed, and this tells Matt everything he needs to know. A thin sound breaks in the back of his throat. He bunches a fistful of his own shirt and tears it down the right shoulder.

Ram turns to face them. He doesn't speak. His face is blank, no anger, no hate, no contrition. Matt resists the urge to bruise his knuckles. Instead, he speaks quietly to Otto. "I've got two nickels in my bag. Should be heavy enough to hold his eyelids."

"Why waste a dime when two pebbles will do?" Ram asks.

Matt backhands him. "You're either going to start digging, or you're going to get another nap and wake up hogtied. Your choice."

"Why? He was going for his gun."

"He hadn't even touched that rifle before you blew him off of his feet. You're a cattle rustler and a murderer. Now you're going to get that planting shovel out of Elmer's saddlebag, and you're gonna dig until your hands are blistered."

"No," Otto says quietly. They both stop and face him, but he doesn't look up at either of them, reverently stroking Elmer's pale cheeks. He kisses his fingertips and then presses them to his cold lips. "He's mine. I'll bury him." His voice trembles. "He wouldn't want this to be a punishment."

Matt sets his jaw. "Alright." Otto seems to be in no great rush to put Elmer underground. With their cattle all scattered or dead, horses loose on the prairie, several days' ride from the nearest settlement, Matt supposes a hurry is unnecessary. He takes his rope from his saddle. "Put your hands behind your back, Ram."

"Let him go, Dill."

Startled, Matt again whips around to face Otto. "What?"

Dark intense eyes meet his. "I didn't ask you to catch him. Let him go." He drags his thumb languidly over the ridge of Elmer's brow. "We don't believe in lynching."

"Neither do I," Matt replies.

"So what are you planning to do with him? We can't drag him across the prairie against his will forever."

This is an opportunity, Matt knows; he changed his name for this reason, to go undetected until he caught Ram. He's done it. He can tie him to the saddle of the first horse he catches, haul him back to Dodge, hurl him into a jail cell, and wait for the circuit court judge to make his rounds. He can reveal everything now. It's safe. This was his excuse, and now it has outlived its usefulness.

He can't bring himself to break the spell.

"Another week on the trail gets us to Arapahoe County. There's a sheriff there. They'll write him up on murder charges." He sweeps Ram up and down. "Seeing as you wanted to go to Denver so bad. We're just going to give you your way."

He scowls. "You never would've caught up with me if it weren't for your fool horse wandering away from the others. I should've shot him."

"If it weren't for my fool horse, you'd have drowned with all those cattle you drove up. We ought to have let you." Matt lashes his hands behind his back. "You say one foul word, and you'll spend the next week with my sock in your mouth."

"There's no need for that, Dill," Otto whispers. "There's no need for any of that, now." He strokes Elmer's hair like petting a cat in his lap.

Despair curdles in the pit of Matt's gut. "I'm going to look for our horses. Fire some shots if you need me." He leaves Ram tied, sitting on the ground, and wanders after the round hoof prints on the damp ground.

Elmer's and Otto's horses aren't far away, grazing peacefully. Elmer's mare skitters away from him, perhaps smelling the death-scent of her master on his clothes, but when Otto's gelding peacefully follows without a struggle, she gentles and allows Matt to catch her. Scout is nowhere to be found. But when he returns to the camp, he finds the pony waiting beside his saddle on the ground, resting one hind leg. He lips idly at the saddle bags, bloody saliva foaming from his mouth, where the bit shanks split his lips and the joint pinched a wound on his tongue.

Matt removes his bridle, replacing it with his rope halter. "I'm sorry, old boy." Scout champs at the hem of the saddle bags until Matt caves, opening a sack and taking out a sugar cube. "Saved my ass back there. I thank you for it." Scout slurps up the sugar cube, lapping at the flat of Matt's palm, stripping the salt from his skin when he has champed the sugar to nothing.

With his craving satiated, Scout ambles away, shaking out his tangled mane. Guilt prickles in Matt's stomach, a lingering thought that if Chester knew, he'd be furious at the unkind treatment toward his beloved ornery pony.

But Chester doesn't know. Seeing Elmer's body go stiff reminds him of that. Otto is still holding him. Matt kneels beside him. "Where do you want to bury him?" he prompts gently.

He snivels. "Augh… Anywhere." He wipes at his face with his sleeve. As he unbends his knees, they pop from sitting in one place for too long. Matt holds out a hand to pull him to his feet. Otto stands, trembling, and stares down at Elmer's gray face. The blood settles in his extremities, discoloring him in places, and his arms have frozen where they landed when he died. Otto is in a trance.

Matt covers the corpse with a blanket. It seems to break the spell. "I'll help you."

Ram, to his credit, remains silent, just as Matt instructed him.

Otto weeps silently as they dig the grave. With a single planting shovel, it's slow, difficult work to open a hole in the earth large enough for an adult man. But Matt has done it hundreds of times, sometimes with just his hands. He doesn't ask any questions or interrupt Otto's quiet train of thought. He waits.

Eventually, Otto asks, "How did you get all wet?"

"He ran his horse into the river. He thought he'd be slick to drown me when I pulled him out."

Otto gives him a long, sad look. "You saved his life after what he did."

"You think I shouldn't have?"

He blinks slowly. He doesn't answer. Instead, he says, "You're a good man, Dill."

It's after high noon when they place Elmer in the ground, Otto bending to kiss him before he covers his face. Death has twisted the fear out of him, so he doesn't care that Matt sees. Ram produces a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, but when Matt whips around to face him, he quiets again. Otto gathers stones to mark the site while Matt shoots a rabbit, and by late afternoon, they have something like supper prepared.

"I counted ten of your cattle wandering. I'll help you round them up."

"No bother." Otto isn't eating, instead picking the browned bits off of the rabbit. "No use."

"They're Herefords. Surely they're worth a lot of money."

"Some other cowpoke will find them."

Matt shifts his jaw. You're throwing away your livelihood because you're hurting, he wants to say, but it tangles up like kudzu in his throat. After all, it's not like he hasn't considered it himself.

In fact, it almost sounds like a good idea.

Otto doesn't want to leave the place they laid Elmer in the earth, so Matt doesn't ask him to. He gives Ram a few bites of rabbit and a drink of water. At sunset, Otto goes to his bags and pulls out two candles.

"We have a fire," Matt says.

"It's Friday."

This is, apparently, an explanation, though it's not one Matt understands. "Your stupid little Friday night ritual isn't going to bring him back, you know," Ram sneers. Matt slaps him.

Otto's dark eyes are sharp as a knife blade and clearer than still water as he looks up. "Come here, Dill." Obediently, Matt approaches, and he sits beside Otto with his beckoning, watching as he strikes a match, lights the candles, and extends the lit match to him. He accepts it and then extinguishes it in the dirt. Otto covers his eyes with his hands and speaks in another language—German, maybe, but he's not sure—and then he sits back and stares at the flickering candlelight.

Matt watches him carefully. "Did you call me over here just to hand me a used match?"

"I called you over here to keep you from knocking out his teeth."

Tilting his head, he shifts his jaw. "I'm surprised you wouldn't prefer him toothless." Otto peers at Ram across the newly lit candles. His face is blank, unreadable, except for the sheen of tears in his eyes. The flames reflect in the dark depths of his irises. He merely shakes his head, swallowing whatever he would like to say. "You're allowed to be angry," Matt tells him, like he needs to know.

"I know." His hands shake. "I'm not, though."

I was angry. I was angry, when it was me. I was angry enough to burn a man's body. I was angry enough to break his face, even in death. Why aren't you angry? "Maybe you ought to be."

He stares into his lap. "I can't be." His fingers tremble. "I—I can't figure out how I'm going to sleep ever again."

When night comes, Matt ties Ram's ankles to keep him from making off. He lies near enough to Otto to hear him breathe, not quite touching, but close enough that they could if they wanted to. Neither of them does. Each of them wishes the other were someone else. Neither of them manages to sleep.

Matt wonders if he'll have this yearning for the rest of his life.

Chapter Text

Denver spreads out before them as welcoming as a woolen blanket after a blizzard. Matt leads the way with the reins of Elmer's mare, carrying Ram, looped around his hand. Otto trails behind with his gelding's head low and his own bowed even lower. They scan the street in search of the sheriff's office.

Matt has never met the sheriff of Arapahoe County, but he has corresponded with him many times, and he has a reputation of a just, fair man. He hopes that's enough: the character of a good man who will trust two drifters when they turn in a stranger for murder.

The businesses lining the street share a boardwalk, narrow allies between them that reek with runoff. The crowded street spills over with people and horses, mostly haggard Chinese men, their wagons bearing the same logo: Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. A single dude in slick attire rushes by a team of mules and men with sooty faces.

The office is larger than his in Dodge, marked by a bold wooden sign with yellow letters. "Up here." At the hitching rail, he dismounts. Letting the mecate hang slack from the base of Scout's halter, he tethers him; his mouth is too sore to hold a bit, so the rope halter has sufficed in the days since the river nearly consumed them. "Well, Ram? You wanted to be in Denver so bad. Here we are."

The outlaw curls his lip. He doesn't reply, the acerbic wit drained from him in the past thirty miles, the point at which he seemed to realize he wasn't going to escape.

Otto dismounts and ties his horse beside Scout. The pony whips around to nip him, but Otto catches his nose in his palm and pushes his face away. "We've got to stable these horses, Dill." He smears his sweaty hands off on his trousers. "They've been rid hard. They're going to need some grain."

"Once we've gotten rid of him, we'll tend the horses. C'mon, Ram, get down from there. You're late for your date with the sheriff. We all know how lawmen feel about their deadlines."

With his scowl entrenched in his face, he hacks, and then he spits on Otto. Matt seizes him by his lapels. "Hold the horse." Obedient, Otto steadies the reins, and Matt hauls Ram off of the mare's back. Ram bares his teeth. Matt backhands him. He staggers toward Scout.

The pony pins his ears. Ram howls louder from Scout's teeth than he did from Matt's hand. When he whirls to kick at Scout, Matt drags him away by his collar. "You touch my horse, and I'll tear out your throat."

"Man as big as you, getting pushed around by that ornery pony—"

"That pony has never pushed me anywhere I wasn't already headed. Walk." With a shove in the direction of the sheriff's office, Ram finally cooperates, more to avoid another bite from Scout than to comply with Matt's demands. Otto trails behind them.

The sheriff's office is impressive, a large jail block out back, new signage crisp up top. As Matt pushes the door open and ushers Ram inside, his eyes adjust to the dim light.

The aura of jail washes over him—dust, human waste, deceit, alcohol, bad decisions boiling up into a stench of destruction. Under other circumstances, in another life, Matt would want to explore, would have questions for the sheriff about the new amenities available and how they work. But in this timeline, the overwhelming reek of imprisonment twists his stomach up into knots. I hope I never step foot in another jail as long as I live.

The errant thought takes him aback. He thinks it so wholly, so completely, so naturally, that it feels genuine. Of course it's not. He'll see his jail again. He'll go back to Dodge soon.

The office holds a few desks, though only one is occupied: a bespectacled man old enough to be Matt's father. Behind him, a buck is mounted on the wall between two racks of guns, and below that, a board of wanted posters. Some of them are familiar, but most are new to him. My mail is overflowing by now.

This is the prime time to introduce himself honestly. He can turn in his prisoner, give his word for what he witnessed, and head for home in the morning. Ram is apprehended. There is no more reason to lie. There is a county with hundreds of people relying on him to come home. Hundreds of people… and none of them are Chester.

Beside him, a thin sound croons from Otto's sealed lips. I can't leave him here alone, Matt decides. And though he has escorted many a mourning drifter to Dodge to recover with people he can know as friends, that seems unnecessary.

The old man bears a tarnished bronze badge, rusted but readable, marking him as the sheriff. Lamplight reflects from his spectacles. "Gentlemen."

Matt's tongue decides for him. "I'm Dill Matthews, and this is Otto Weisz. We'd like to proffer charges against this man for murder." Ram snarls.

His bushy white eyebrows push toward his hairline. Lips pursed, he nods slowly. "Why don't you all start at the beginning?"

It's an infrequent occurrence for frontier justice to happen like this, one man bringing in another; neither Matt nor Otto have the appearance of bounty hunters, and Sheriff Leroy Dixon has gleaned that from looking at them. He removes his spectacles and folds them clipped to the front of his shirt as Matt begins to speak.

He tells the story from the start. How he met Ram and Otto, how he rode along with them for company, how the fog set in, how Ram stampeded the herd toward them and shot down Elmer, how Matt caught him. He skips the unimportant parts, how Elmer and Otto exchanged whispers under the cover of mist, how Otto kissed his face before they covered him in dirt, how Matt lied to them all and is still lying now. "If you need a body, we buried him there along the Saline. It's a four day ride. But I'd be glad to show you."

"No," Otto croaks. His downcast eyes crawl up from the floor to face the sheriff. "Please. Don't dig him up." Twin tears track down his cheeks. "Let him sleep." His tongue flits across his glossy lips. Dabbing at his face with his handkerchief, he pockets it and stares at the floor again.

"I take it you witnessed all of this as well, then."

"Yessir."

"What was your relation to the deceased?"

It's a prying question. "He's my partner." It's not something he can manage to say in the past tense.

Sheriff Dixon nods astutely. "I'm sorry for your loss." He asks them each to sign the complaint, which they do. "Ram, then."

"Uh-huh."

"What's your real name?"

"Ain't had one of them in so long, I forgot what it was."

"Suit yourself. Circuit court judge will try you as Ram." He flicks a ring of keys from his belt to open the door into the cell block behind the office. Pushing Ram into the first cell, he locks him in.

He closes the wooden door snugly behind himself. "If you gentlemen are staying in Denver, your testimony will be helpful at court. There's a backlog of trials—you'll be waiting a few weeks."

"Of course," Matt says, unthinking. Otto peers up at him, a curious wrinkle to his brow, mystified at the promise to stay here indefinitely. "We'd be obliged for you to point us toward the stable. Our horses have had a long ride."

"I keep my animals down at the south end of town. Man named Elias. He's brusque, but he's gentle. He runs some pastures outside of town for the regulars. Keeps them fat."

"Thanks."

"Dill, was it?"

It's natural to answer this call now. "That's right."

"Elias has been on the hunt for a man to keep the stable overnight a couple nights a week. As long as you two are waiting for the trial, you could spell him. Ask him, if you're interested."

This is a technique Matt knows well: a lawman setting up newcomers with work to keep them out of trouble. "We'll keep that in mind." He tips his hat in farewell, and then he steps out of the jail, Otto on his heels. His spurs clink absently as he walks to the hitch rail. "What do you say we get these animals resting up and then find something to eat?"

Otto ducks between the gray mare and Scout. "You don't need to keep doing this, Dill."

With a sharp tug, Scout's knot comes undone. "Doing what?" He bites his tongue between his back teeth, trying not to think about what Otto means—that his job is done, he isn't obligated to stay here any longer, he can go home now.

"You were headed somewhere when we met you. There's nothing for you to gain from staying here with me." Otto coils the mare's reins in his hand, avoiding eye contact. "No reason to linger on my account."

"I'm not headed anywhere."

"You're no drifter. You don't look the part." He sticks his thumb in his back pocket, absently stroking the horse's nose with his other hand. "You did a kindness bringing me here, and you can go living as you were before you met us. I can't offer you anything now." He scuffs his boot over the road. "Not even company, really."

Matt trails the tip of his tongue over the front of his teeth. "I'm not headed anywhere," he repeats. Otto tilts his head dubiously—he knows better, senses Matt's dishonesty. His dark eyes reflect Matt's face, milky with emotion. Matt backs Scout up from the hitching rail. "My horse needs water, grain, and rest, the same as yours."

Otto sizes up the horses, Elmer's gray mare and his own black gelding. "I suppose I don't need two horses."

"Lots of men keep a pack horse."

"I've no need for that. Besides, it wouldn't be fair to him." He strokes his gelding's nose. "Moshe has always cared about his work. He ought to be sold to somebody who can put more miles on him than I can."

Of course Otto will keep Elmer's horse and sell his own; of course he'll carry that memory of his partner sooner than lose it, the same way Matt saddled Scout when he rode out of Dodge and left Buck behind, no matter Scout's troublesome demeanor as opposed to his beloved well-mannered buckskin. "Maybe the livery will know somebody who's looking for a horse. Get you a good price for him."

With a tense swallow, Otto nods in muted agreement. A hand on the reins of each horse, he leads them down Main Street, Matt following behind him with Scout. The sounds of hoofbeats on the dense dirt road reminds him of home, how the clip-clop of hooves in Dodge City passed in the background of so many fond conversations with Chester. He can still hear the laughter now, the initial chuckle blooming into a snort, the way Matt's poker face remains unchanged, until Chester doubles over with cackles and Matt's facade breaks, laughing alongside him.

He focuses on Otto's movement, touching the horses on their necks with rueful pats as he leads them away.

At the entrance of the stable, the owner stops him, an old man much like the sheriff. "We'd like to stable these animals, if you please," Otto says.

The man spits his snuff. He gives Otto a critical look, ripe with scorn. "Twenty-five cents a horse for the night."

Otto flicks out a dollar from his wallet. "These two, and the red pony." The stablekeeper gives him a quarter in change. "I've some interest in selling this gelding. His tack along with him, if the price is fair. He's about eight years old, front-shod, sound all the way around."

His lip curls downward at the corner. He peers past Otto to Matt. "You, there. He's paying your keep. He a friend of yours?"

Matt tugs Scout nearer. Tossing his forelock, Scout paws impatiently. He pats on his chest to quell him; the pawing pauses for a second, and then he begins again. "He's a friend of mine." Scout puffs a sharp breath in aggravation. He can smell the water and the grain, and he doesn't care to wait for his meal.

"You can vouch his word is good, then?"

His mouth tightens, his jaw clicking into place. "Sure, yeah. Why wouldn't it be?"

The stablekeeper dips more snuff into his mouth. He turns and gestures over his shoulder for them to follow, pointing to where they can stall their horses. As he walks away, he mutters something unintelligible Matt can't quite make out. Matt interrupts his retreat. "Mister, these horses have been rode hard. They ought not be put up wet with no grain."

"I'll give them grain. It's no matter to the horse, the man who rides him." He nods in Otto's direction. "It's just that some animals do better staying away from the likes of him." Matt arches an eyebrow, perplexed not by the stranger's bigotry, but of its source. The stablekeeper doesn't explain. He walks away.

Matt stalls Scout beside Otto's horse and loosens up his cinch. Scout sucks in a huge gust of wind as Matt untacks him. With a dusty towel from the side of the stall, he slicks the lather into his red coat. His mane is knotted up with burrs and thorns. Matt coarsely rakes his fingers through it a few times to unsnare the seeds and thorns. Chester never lets his mane get like this. Chester always combs it out. Chester always curries him. He doesn't like to rely on a stablekeep to do it.

Scout plunges his muzzle into the bucket of water and stamps in the soft bedding. He flicks a fly from his flank with his tail.

How many times did Chester do this same process? Does Scout think it's different? Does he understand anything about this? Does he remember?

You're being ridiculous. Matt hunts down a comb to calm the tangles in Scout's mane, anyway, picks his hooves, and ensures there's sweet oats in his pail before he steps away with Otto. "What do you say we find some supper?"

Otto restrains a sigh. "Alles klar, Dill." His boots shuffle over the dusty dirt, his strides short and slow, like he struggles to pick up the enormous weight of his own feet. Matt walks beside him, one arm escorting him, not touching but offering invisible support. They find a restaurant on the corner called the Denver Delta, where a bald man in an apron leads them to a table.

He tucks the napkin into the collar of his shirt. It feels too tight. Otto appears rather sullen, so they settle in silence until the waiter brings them out two bowls of stew. The first meal he's seen since that prairie widow's ranch—suddenly, he's hungrier than he imagined. Otto picks listlessly at the bowl with his spoon, stirring it more often than he takes a bite.

Matt prompts him. "That stew isn't going to eat itself."

Startled, Otto's eyes widen, seeming to remember Matt is beside him. "Right. Right." He takes a reluctant bite, slurping the broth from the spoon. Matt tears a bread roll, careful not to interrupt as Otto nibbles on the stew. He slides his spoon through the potatoes and carrots, chopping them into smaller and smaller bits. "You're kind to see me here, Dill."

"We both need to eat. If I had to spend one more day schlepping Ram over those boulder fields, I was going to chew off my own arm."

"I haven't much of an appetite." His woeful hand quivers, dripping broth back into the bowl of soup. "Doesn't feel as if there's much purpose in it, I suppose."

A stifled grimace twitches in Matt's cheek, unspoken empathy raking its claws through his gut. "We'll find a room, somewhere to put us up for the night. Find something to occupy our time as long as we're here."

He pouts, the way that sadness can make a man both childish and wise. "We've no need for a room. We always stay in the stable with our horses. Cheaper. More privacy. Nobody ever thinks to eavesdrop through the boards of a stall." He drops his spoon into his bowl, where it clinks and settles in the broth. "You can get a room if you like."

We doesn't refer to Otto and Matt. It refers to Otto and Elmer. Otto realizes it at the same time, a reflexive glance to his left, where the space beside him is vacant. His hand flares open, like there was a time (not long ago, not long ago at all) he would have reached to hold onto another.

He snaps his fist closed so quickly, his knuckles crack and blanch. He shuts his eyes, throat bobbing.

Matt claps a hand onto Otto's forearm. "C'mon. Let's get outta here. We can find a spot to have a few drinks." He's not sure what will help—he's not found anything to help himself—but corn liquor sounds as poor of a place to start as any.

After all, he's not in Kansas, he's not a marshal, and he's not even Matt Dillon anymore. He can act foolish for a spell.

The toe of one boot scuffs over the rough wooden floor. "I'm not much interested in having drinks." He's patient in spite of his sorrow.

Matt presses his lips into a thin line. "Then we'll go back to the stable. I'd like that stablekeep to have a look at Scout's mouth. His tongue has been bothering him." The bridle fixed to Scout's face saved him from drowning, at the expense of the pony's mouth, torn bloody by a shanked bit. Chester will be furious when he finds out. He would never tear a horse's mouth like that. The thought takes his breath away.

Chester won't ever know Matt split open his horse's mouth.

The notion makes him feel sick. "C'mon, let's go."

They return to the stable at dusk, the orange reflecting off of the craggy stone faces, the terrain rugged compared to the flat, barren expanse of Kansas. The stablekeeper tends a mare at the front of the barn, checking her hooves. He spares Matt and Otto a glance as they enter, and then he focuses on what he's doing, holding a lamp above one of the mares' hind legs. She jerks at the disruption. He holds her leg between his knees, clamping the hoof between his thighs as he reaches for his knife. The blade digs into the abscessed flesh along her white line.

The mare squeals and pins her ears, whipping around. She thrashes her hind leg. Otto catches her head to keep her from biting. "Easy, Zeeskeit. Easy." He keeps his voice low, stroking the mare's nose.

The man carves out the abscess in a burst of pus. He dislodges a pebble from the heart of the wound—the source of the mare's limp. Champing her teeth, she tugs on her leg until he surrenders it. He jumps clear before she can kick, but she merely rests the sore hoof on the earth, shifting her weight on it, testing herself. When she feels the relieved pressure, she chews thoughtfully.

The stablekeep rights himself, facing the source of his help. At the sight of Otto, he deflates, gratitude shrinking into distaste, a thick noise of disbelief rattling in his throat. "Much obliged." It's stiff and insincere. Wiping off his palms on his soiled apron, he hangs the lamp on the rung above the mare's stall. "Your animals been tended to. They got water, grain, been curried. You want something else for 'em, it's gonna be extra."

"We'd like to stay the night here, if you're unopposed," Otto says mildly.

Skepticism riddles his expression. He asks Matt, "You staying with him?"

"I am, if it matters that much."

"I reckon, then. If you're staying with him."

Neither Otto nor Elias clarifies the stablekeeper's disdainful aura. "You didn't happen to get a look at my horse's mouth, did you?"

The man scowls. "Your ornery pony? Yeah, I got a decent look at him." He holds up his forearm, deep bruises set in it shaped like a horse's mouth. "That animal is full of piss and vinegar."

He suppresses a wince. The days when he rode Buck into any stable without second thought are long behind him. Scout isn't his beloved mellow buckskin; he's a spunky creature, so loved by Chester in spite of his unpleasant foibles. "His tongue," he clarifies. "I took a spill. The shank pinched him pretty bad. I'd like somebody to look at it."

"That why you rode in here in a halter and rope?"

"That's right."

The stablekeep spits. "Alright. I'll look at him. But I'm charging a nickel for a bite and a dime for a kick, y'hear?"

"I hear."

Scout is lying down in his stall, his legs folded up under himself. Matt clicks his tongue in summoning. The gelding pricks his ears, but when he sees Matt, his sagging lower lip droops again, his whiskers trailing through the straw underfoot.

"Is he down?"

"He sleeps like a dog."

"He's lying on his tether."

"He does that." Matt clicks his tongue again. He unties Scout's tether and threads it out from under his folded legs. "Up." The gelding's ears flick, puffing in distaste. "C'mon, up. Up!" Reluctantly, he climbs to his feet. "What's your name, mister?"

"Elias. Yours?"

He trips on the truth. "Dill. And this is Scout."

"It ought to be Killer, the way he uses those teeth." Elias steps into the stall, giving Scout a pat on the rump to clue him to his presence. "Is he always maltempered, or only with strangers?"

"He's trying you." Scout champs absently, licking his lips. "Here. Open." Matt lifts the pony's head into the air, snaking his forefinger into the gap behind his back teeth to tickle his tongue. Scout's nostrils flare in an unflattered snort, and he tries to pull his head back from Matt's grasp, but with a, "Whoa, whoa," he steadies, ears flicking in distaste.

Elias examines the inside of his mouth. "My god. What did you do to this animal? Give him a knife in place of a bit?"

Matt grimaces, sparing a glance at the bloody slash at the center of Scout's tongue, the scabs at the corners of his lips splitting backward.

"He must not be as awful as he seems. Any of my animals would've stomped you for a stunt like that, and none of them act like he does."

"He saved me from drowning."

"From the looks of things, I'd go so far as to say he regrets it." Elias proffers a sugar cube from his pocket. Scout's ears prick. Matt releases him, and he chases the sweet scent, nuzzling the cube from Elias's palm with his whiskers before he lips it up, careful to dodge the sore spots in his mouth.

"What's your question, then? You know you tore his mouth. You rode him here in a halter, so you've got the sense not to pitch another Tom Thumb in his mouth—I presume that's what you were using." As Elias pats Scout's neck, he shies away, but then he lips at his pockets, seeking another sugar cube. Elias sternly pushes his nose away.

"He takes a curb between his teeth."

"It won't matter anymore. You're not gonna ride this animal in a bridle again."

"Til when?"

Elias scoffs. He rounds the back of the stall with a dismissive pat to Scout's rump. "Question for the farrier. But I don't see that healing whole. Not a good idea to saw a piece of metal over a scar, day in and day out. You're gonna trade him in to some family with kids, take a loss, get yourself another saddle horse, and move on."

Matt bristles. From behind them, Otto follows, curious in the hollow sort of way, trailing around like a lost dog. "I've no interest in selling him."

"Mister—Dill—that pony is all of fourteen hands high. He's too short for you, and now you gashed his mouth. Get a doctor to look at him if you want. But my thinking is he ain't good for pushing cattle no more, he ain't good for hard riding on tough terrain, and you got no use for a horse you can't work."

Matt sets his teeth. "We made it here in a halter. I'll work him like that if I have to."

"Did you enjoy riding him here like that?"

"Pony enjoyed it more than Dill did," Otto observes mildly, the most friendly thing he's said in days. "He said his piece about every trail."

Elias inclines his head. "If I were you, I'd find a boy with too much spunk for his own good, and make the pony his problem. Ramuda horses go for the trade around here, when the herds come up the Goodnight-Loving trail. You won't get the cost of a saddle horse for a crippled pony, but you'll make something, twenty dollars if you're lucky."

Hooking his thumbs into the front pockets of his pants, Matt shakes his head, obstinate. "I wouldn't take a hundred dollars for that pony." Otto purses his lips in confusion. "I'm not selling him. If he can't hold a bit anymore, I'll take him back to a bosal."

Incredulous, Elias ogles, before he waves him off; the notion is ludicrous, and he won't waste more time with it. "It's your funeral." He walks toward the front of the barn, summoned by incoming riders and wagoners.

In his stall, Scout paws his bedding into an arrangement he likes, and he folds up lie down again, upper lip grazing the ground, worn by the long days of travel. Beside him, Elmer's and Otto's horses hang their heads, each resting a hind leg with drooping eyelids and still tails. Matt leans over the wooden paneling to watch Scout's face, where he rests on the ground.

Of all the horses Matt has handled in his life, few have trusted him enough to lie down with him nearby. None of them have been like Scout—more willing to stand by his man than another horse, sprawling out while Matt oversees him. Even after being hurt, he still trusts him. Matt clenches his hand on the wood. Chester trusts you that much. Scout's big brown eyes, framed by thick lashes, Matt's reflection in them gooey and whole, the same shape he saw reflected in Chester's eyes dozens of times, by campfires, in the jail, at the riverbank. It was always different, but it was always the same. And it's not something he's going to throw away.

"Dill."

Matt flinches at Otto's voice, pulling him from his reverie. "Hm?"

"You can have Moshe if you'd like him. I'd sooner sell him to a friend than some stranger. I've been good to him. I'd like to know the next man will be, too."

In the empty stall beside their horses, Otto tosses his blanket roll. Matt takes his own from his saddle and unfurls it beside his. "I don't need a horse. I've got Scout." With a low whumpf, he sits on top of his blanket, squashing it into the straw underfoot—a better landing than any of the stones and soil he's slept upon since they left Dodge. He undoes his canteen and takes a sip. The livery has the contented sound of horses stamping and chewing. Moshe, Otto's gelding, turns to peer over the side of the stall at them before he settles beside Elmer's mare.

"He's not wrong, you know. You'd be better suited to a taller animal."

Matt shrugs.

"What is it about that horse that makes you so partial to him?"

Matt stretches out in the straw. "He belongs to friend of mine. He's not mine to sell."

Otto's brow furrows, deep in thought. "I should think your friend would be antsy to get him back, then. You being gone this long with his horse."

Matt grinds his teeth. There is no way to explain that the pony lying down in his stall with his rope bunched under his legs is precious. If there were, he wouldn't share it, regardless. "He won't be needing him."

Outside, the cicadas trill, and bullfrogs sing their lullabies. It could be another evening in Dodge City, sitting in front of the jail, watching people pass by; it could be another night out back, watching the fireflies, Chester catching them gently in his hands like a child and then holding them out to Matt over and over again, caught up in the sweet whimsy of spring. It could be a busy night in the Long Branch with Doc and Kitty and Chester, sharing a pitcher of beer, with the ragtime playing in the background. It could be any of those things, but it isn't.

It's nightfall in a stable in Denver, Colorado, hundreds of miles from home, with Chester's horse (Chester's horse, because Chester doesn't need him anymore), beside a man he barely knows.

Otto is right. Matt should go home.

But what awaits him is so terrifying, it bulges in his throat and engulfs his voice.

How can he go back when the thought of it makes his boots heavier than steel?

"Dill," Otto whispers. "What on earth are you running from?"

Matt rolls onto his side, facing away from him.

Otto doesn't speak again. Beneath his prying gaze, the hair prickles on the back of Matt's neck. The horses keep breathing, whickering, stamping. Matt picks out the distinct sound of Scout's puffing snore, focusing on the rhythm of it.

Sleep comes easier than he anticipates. He doesn't dream.

Chapter Text

The livery shifts with activity before first light, pearlescent sun splitting the wet gray of dawn. Rain patters on the rooftop. Outside, galloping hooves pound the street, steel against stone. Matt's eyelashes flicker, disturbed at the rustling of straw beneath his head.

A man shouts at the livery doors. "Elias! Elias!" Spurs rattle with impact of leaping from the saddle. "Elias, help!"

Help. This cry rouses Matt from his half-sleep. When someone calls for help, they need him. He isn't a marshal here, isn't anything more than Dill Matthews, a man who was born last week and is quickly becoming familiar to him. But he is still a man who can help. Habit drives him to his feet, dusting off of his wrinkled vest.

"Elias!"

Beside Matt, Otto is curled up with his hat over his eyes. He huffs an unhappy grumble. As Matt pulls himself up, guiding himself with a hand on the wooden paneling, Otto reluctantly follows suit, sitting up to rub his eyes.

Matt follows the dancing shadows toward the front of the stable. "What's going on?"

The door to the office shrieks with a rusted hinge, Elias stumbling out. "I'm here." He's wearing crooked spectacles, smudged and dirty. He jerks them off of his face and shoves them into his shirt pocket. "What's the matter, Grover?" The lamps flicker from lack of oil.

Grover is a fuzzy-faced man leading a mule, his beard slicked to his face. Outside, there's another mule and two horses, all drenched into a lather. The mule pulls a travois with a wounded Chinese man writhing; one of the horses carries a body slung over its back. The last horse limps heavily with a fractured leg; its handler stands beside it, his arm bent at an odd angle, face drawn and pale.

"Mud slide." Grover steadies himself against the shoulder of his mule. "Took out our camp down along the new rail line. Most of the pack animals, swept them over the cliff—the men, too—Elias, all those men!"

The hinge to the stall creaks as Otto exits, his boots falling silently on the damp straw underfoot. He flanks Matt, cautious fear crossing his face. "Dill?"

Thunder cracks overhead. Elias's tongue darts out across his lips, his pale mustache ruffled. "In this weather? Nobody is going out onto those cliffs like this. We've gotta wait for it to blow over."

"They fell down toward the creek. If it swells the banks—"

Elias's mouth presses into a grim line. "The odds anyone's alive out there…"

The pit of Matt's stomach sinks into a sick, boiling feeling. "I'll go."

Lightning casts long, brief shadows across the floor. Elias gawps at him, the irritated look an old man gets when a young man says something foolish. "You're thinking you're gonna scale your way up to Pinecliffe in the pouring rain on that crippled pony you've been riding with a rope halter." Matt nods tightly. "You're mad. You'll drive that animal off of the ledge sooner than you breathe." The man with the broken arm weeps into his horse's mane.

"We'll get there." The corners of Elias's lips crinkle in distaste. "Do you have a bosal I can use?"

"I suppose, if there won't be any talking you out of it."

Silently, Otto retreats toward their horses, running his hands down the sleek expanse of the gray mare's back, before he flips a saddle blanket onto her.

Grover shivers. "I—I can take you back out there, I'll show you the way—"

"These men just drove up from the prairie. They're hill people. They don't have any prayer of scaling even those little peaks."

"I've ridden in a lot of places," Matt says.

Elias scowls. He points at Otto. "What about him? His kind don't ride out here."

Matt glowers. He opens his mouth to snap something in return, some call for Elias to mind his own damn business, but Otto goes to wake Scout, who decided to sleep on his feet at some point. The pony's lower lip dangles, half-asleep, or pretending to be; his ears flick backward, threatening to pin. "Watch it, he's liable to—"

Scout whips to nip. Otto catches his muzzle and pushes it away. "You old momzer," he mutters under his breath. "I've got an eye on him." As Otto cinches the saddle, he puffs up a deep gust of wind. "Oy, you insolent devil."

Matt meets him at Scout's flank. "You don't have to come with me. I know mountain routes were something you hoped to avoid."

"I've sought to avoid a lot of things, Dill." Scout drags his hoof over the top of Otto's foot. "Oy-yoy—" He earns a smack in the center of his chest, quieting the incessant pawing. "I'd like a word with the man who raised this creature."

Matt slips the bosal over Scout's nose. "That brand belongs to the best horseman I've ever known." Moss Grimmick's brand is as familiar to him as tumbleweeds, as drought and snowdrifts and an endless horizon, but outside of Ford County, there's nothing recognizable about the brand. It means as little here as his name.

Leading Scout out of the stall, he approaches the cluster of men. Grover is saddling a fresh horse, flipping his saddle off of the exhausted mule onto a gelding who doesn't look to be entirely awake yet. The man on the travois has quieted his writhing, laying very still, nearly dead except for the occasional moan or cry of, "Feng Hua—" He sputters, gasps, and then repeats, "Hua?"

The man with a broken arm clings to the horse with a broken leg. He speaks in a thick Chinese accent, the pain threatening to overwhelm his English. Elias palpates the horse's favored leg, which buckles whenever she attempts to put weight on it. The ankle dangles at a sickening angle. "Help her," the man pleads.

Elias takes a step back, shaking his head. "I can't."

"Please!"

The mare lowers her head and exhales a weary sigh. She attempts to shift her weight, but when she does, her knees give out, threatening to dump her over. "Mister, I couldn't have helped this animal before you dragged her over that rugged terrain with a broken leg. I sure can't help her now."

The man on the travois shouts, "Feng Hua?" again, more steely.

"What is he saying?" Otto asks Grover.

The cowboy wipes a streak of mud through his whiskers. "Feng Hua is his wife."

His wife. It paralyzes his voice, how a dying man calls for the one he loves the most (Chester calling his name again and again, Doc insisted he was unaware but Matt knew otherwise, the pull from his solar plexus guiding him to Chester's side, cowardice so polarizing that he can't stand to hear the words Matt Dillon). "Did you send someone to fetch her?"

"Came straight for help."

The mare finally collapses. She spindles her legs for a second, too fatigued to attempt to stand again. The man wails into her neck. Gruff, Elias puts a hand on the man's shoulder. "C'mon, son. She got you back here. She's gave up."

He covers her face with his handkerchief. He turns away, hiding his eyes behind his fingers. Elias loads his rifle. Everyone gives him a wide berth. A single shot rings out.

No one speaks except for the wounded man, another puny, "Hua?" mumbled from the corner of his mouth.

The gun smokes where the dead horse lies. Her young handler stands crestfallen, cradling his broken arm. The man on the stretcher is older, middle-aged, with a long pigtail (queue, Matt corrects himself). He utters his wife's name again.

Scout, impatient with standing in one spot, paws at the dirt. "Elias, will you—"

"I'm about to call on the sheriff and the doctor. Leroy will send some deputies out to help you—if the lot of you aren't crushed in a canyon or swept away in a flood before they make it." He is stern and disapproving, but he nods his blessing as Matt and Otto mount their horses, letting Grover lead the way.

Rain collects in the brim of Matt's hat and pours out when he tips his head. Grover leads them up a steep, mucky trail through the canyons. They're headed northwest, bending along the natural worn spots in the terrain.

"Where are we going?" It occurs to him too late that they didn't ask any questions. They merely saddled their horses.

"Toward Coal Creek."

"We're not from this territory. How far?"

Grover is ashen. Spots of blood seep through his torn shirt. He needs medical care, but without a guide, Matt and Otto are helpless to find the missing men. "Some ten, twelve miles. Leveling out for the railroad. Doesn't take much to unseat that bedrock, the way we've dug at it. When it rains—" He coughs.

He doesn't need to. "Mud slide." He's seen the devastation before: trees torn up from the roots, buildings lying in a heap, animals swept away, the earth swallowing men whole and sparing them the cost of a burial.

"We thought we were safe camped out on the rise. It was so solid. But all the rain, it washed the whole woods right up over us."

The horses walk single file along the path. He flattens himself over Scout's neck to avoid the lowest branches, reminding himself why he's never become overly familiar with navigating the woods—he's simply too tall for it to be convenient. When he looks back, Otto is fast on his heels.

The wind and deep bass of rolling thunder keep them company.

"What did you men say your names are?" Grover leans in the saddle. He's struggling to keep himself awake.

"I'm Dill Matthews, and this is Otto Weisz."

"Dill, Otto." He says nothing more.

They're forced up the mountainside by uneven terrain, becoming more rocky, less florid, by the mile.

By the time they've followed the craggy earth to the site of the rail construction, Scout's spirit is stifled, throwing white froth from his neck. Water races a sheer drop below, the torrent less of a creek and more of a river, busted out of the banks by rainfall.

The scattered wreckage of tents and a mess wagon are difficult to discern the campsite, but the earth is still.

Matt dismounts and tethers Scout to a tree, walking toward the rubble. "How many men were out here?"

"Eleven of us, altogether. I was on watch." Grover takes stock of it. "I shouted when it started. Everyone was running—I don't know which way."

Framing his mouth with his hands, Matt shouts, "Hello?" and his voice is carried away by the wind.

Otto steers Mina uphill, choosing the shallowest route. "I'll see if I can spot anything from above." The humid air rises from the earth in clots of steam, screening everything from view.

Matt trudges across the rubble of muck, tree limbs, and stone. He treads upon the hand of a corpse, outstretched toward the surface, forever trying to dig himself free. The earth is soft enough for Matt to churn with his hands, which he does with great caution. He leaves the body submerged, only clearing enough to wipe the silt from his face.

Otto shouts something. Matt can't make it out. Turning back, he watches as Otto points to his left. Obediently, he scans the area, arms outstretched on the precarious unlevel ground. "What is it?"

He spots it, flickers of movement at the far corner of the deluge. He shuffles through the waste.

It's a horse buried up to its shoulders, eyes rolling. Its forelegs slap the ground anxiously, not strong enough to pull itself out. The tree trunk across its hips tell the whole story: the animal can't stand because it's paralyzed.

"Easy, now, easy." Easy, Chester, easy.

He brushes the horse's forelock from its petrified eyes, the last soothing he gives a suffering animal before he ends its life, the same his father taught him. Then, he shoots.

The shot sends Grover pedaling himself back up the ravine. He waves his arms in question. Matt waves back, holding up a single hand in an O.

Blood trickles from the dead horse's mouth. An act of mercy. A man's body ain't meant to be opened up the way I done to him, Matt. He chokes. You'd go barreling through town like Samson in the temple. You'd tear Dodge apart pillar by pillar. A dull ache pangs in his chest, growing sharper, more acute. I don't think he's going to thank me for it. The boiling in his stomach threatens to rise up. He resists the urge to retch.

Beneath the horse's neck, something rustles. Precarious on the balls of his feet, Matt braces himself for another slide, dirt sweeping downward. But instead, the disturbed soil caves downward into a sinkhole, around the face of a man pawing desperately at the air above him. "Whoa—Hold still—Mister, hold still, don't move—"

He claws at Matt for leverage, terrified, one hand braced against the chest of his dead horse, whose body he had used to carve a hollow spot for air. "Bāng wǒ!"

"Hold still, stop moving—" Each motion unseats more dirt.

"Qing, bāng wǒ—xiānshēng, qǐng—"

Talking to him isn't going to help. Pulling him out could disrupt everything that seems to have finally gone still. But Matt can't explain that to him, and each thrash is another risk of starting another mud slide. Leaning forward, he threads the man's single free arm around his neck. "Alright, hold tight—" He hauls him out of the ground, kicking with bare feet.

The dirt slumps beneath them. The horse's corpse goes first, tons of earth gulping it beyond view, snatching Matt's ankles out from under him. He clings to the man, waiting to be consumed.

It quiets, the weight of the horse's corpse enough to immobilize it. Matt drags the stranger to the perimeter, where the ground is more stable, before he allows himself the freedom of standing upright again.

The man drops to his knees clearing the silt from his eyes with filthy hands. Matt takes his handkerchief to wipe his face. He is scarcely more than a boy.

"I've got a live one, Grover." He sprawls out on his belly. "Hey. Hey, son." Matt jostles his shoulder. "Son, are you hurt?"

Unsteadily, Grover ascends the ravine down into the overflowing creek. "It's Li Bo." He asks him a question, which Li Bo answers with a quiet, "Bu," and shake of his head. "He didn't see anyone else. He hasn't heard anyone."

The soil threatens to pitch Otto's mare off of her feet, so he dismounts and loops her reins around the nearest tree, sliding down to them. "There's another over there, and another at the roots of that elm—he's alive, he's moving."

Blessedly, the storm dissipates, and the overcast sky gives way to the first rays of daylight. Within the hour, Sheriff Dixon arrives with two wagons and three deputies. He tilts his head at Matt and Otto, giving them an appraising look. "You boys got yourselves wrapped into a real task this time." He gives them each a towel to clean their faces and hands. "What brought you out here?"

"We were in the stable when they rode in."

"So you decided the two of you ought to make off alone to come to the rescue?"

"They needed help."

Otto concurs, "It wouldn't have been just, leaving them here alone."

The sheriff ponders, trying to decide if they're being deceitful, before he concludes it doesn't matter much—regardless of their motives, they have willing hands.

Together, they find five men, two living and three dead. When thunder peals distantly again, the sheriff pulls up. "We're not going to find more survivors. We need to get down from here before the next storm blows through."

Li Bo is under a cover in the wagon, supporting his colleague, an older man who has no sensation in his legs. The corpses are wrapped in linen and laid side by side. When Grover attempts to mount his horse, he becomes unsteady. Otto catches him from falling and guides him to the back of the wagon, helping him clamber up. He takes the reins from Grover's horse and tethers him to the wagon.

The wrinkle of grief between Otto's eyes is softer, preoccupied by the activity. When he mounts Mina again, the dappled mare slicked black with rainfall, he appears satisfied in some way. Beside her, Scout paws with impatience, heaving up the rain-soft ground and layer of dry leaves.

"I think that pony was born to be a plough horse. He comes equipped with the skill of turning soil."

Scout sniffs at his pockets, but when he doesn't smell any sugar cubes, he lowers his head to the ground, lipping at the toes of Matt's boots. He collects his mecate and swings onto his back. "He comes equipped with the skill of being a menace."

Otto removes his hat to wipe the diluted sweat from his brow. The bald spot in the center of his head glistens. "That was a given, Dill." For the first time in days, he doesn't appear miserable, not ruminating in his grief and sorrow.

The miles to Denver were agonizing; the miles returning are equally unlivable, the stones wet and rolling underfoot. The sheriff mounts his mare to lead Otto and Matt back down the path they took to the railroad camp.

He's at the front of the single file line, his mare a strawberry roan wearing studded shoes all the way around. At one steep drop, she makes the jump with ease, but Scout balks, tossing his head. Matt boots him forward, and again, he refuses. "Go on, then." He clicks his tongue and pinches Scout with his spurs. The pony pins his ears and bounces into a half-rear.

He's not moving.

"That animal isn't listening to you, young man," the sheriff says patiently.

With a sigh, Matt dismounts, collecting his mecate, glaring at the objectionable pony. "He's not a mountain horse. I'm not a mountain man." Scout swishes his tail as Matt chooses a shallow path a couple yards off into the brush, picking his way down the slope on the balls of his feet in a zigzag pattern. His boots skate out from under him, catching one of his spurs and dragging it through the slop. Where the ground levels out, he mounts again.

"He's shaved to be full in the bridle. Why isn't he wearing one?"

"Tore his mouth with the bit shank. He needs a rest."

"He needs a bit of discipline."

I'm beginning to think that myself. The pony flanks the sheriff's horse, mild as milk with the satisfaction of having won the brief battle of wills. Otto collects his reins and steers Mina down the steep drop. She gathers her feet at the edge of the leap, braces herself, trembles, and then pounces in an uneasy stride.

The set dirt slumps under her hooves. It pitches her midair. She lands on both crumpled knees, momentum rolling her forward. Otto launches his feet out of the stirrups. She flips herself over. There's a snap as the saddle tree collapses beneath her weight, the wood splitting out of the leather.

Scout lunges to the left, the sheriff's horse to the right, to give them a wide berth as the mare scrambles to her feet. Otto flops flat on his back and gives a guttural sound. "Oy vey." He coughs pathetically.

Matt swings off of Scout's back again. "Otto—" Sheriff Dixon goes to Mina. Matt drops beside Otto. "What's hurt?"

"My chutzpah." Palms flat on the earth, he pushes himself up, wincing as he touches his shoulder. "Aye." He drags a muddy hand over the top of his balding head with his wiry dark hair, his hat in the brambles. Eyes narrowed critically, he examines the horses, Mina shaking with dirt clumped in her pelt, his broken saddle strapped to her back. His gaze slides to Scout, who stands with his mecate dangling. The longer he's idle, the farther back he pins his ears, until finally he succumbs to his baser urges and paws. "I think I'll ride the pony next time. He seems to save you some trouble."

Scout is digging a trench in the mud with his impatient hooves. Easier to walk down a hill than to replace a saddle. He pulls him to his feet. Otto sways. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Nothing that can't be fixed. How's Mina?"

The sheriff gives her a once-over. "She's sore, but she'll get you home. That saddle's probably gonna be a wash, though."

He smears the back of his hand over his brow. "Better the saddle than my neck, I suppose."

Matt claps him on the shoulder. "We'll take a look at it back at the stable."

Before Matt mounts, he strokes Scout's nose. His pink lips lap at the palm of Matt's hand. "Good boy."

The ride back to Denver is quiet. The sheriff asks them a few prying questions, to which Matt gives unsatisfactory, vague answers. Otto massages parts of his body with grimaces and winces. The overcast gray never clears from the horizon, sprinkling intermittently.

Elias waits for them at the mouth of the barn, fiddling with his hat. He takes it off to scratch the top of his head, all sparse white hair sprouting from sunburn scars and moles, as they approach. Taking stock of them, he appraises the three horses, then the men on their backs—typical enough for a good horseman, Matt thinks.

"Leroy," Elias says brusquely, as if he can mask his concern, that he happened to be at the front of the stable awaiting them, in spite of a couple horses stalled still sweat-slicked and wearing their saddles.

The sheriff dismounts. "Elias." He gives his horse a pat on the neck. "The wagons are on their way back."

"Any survivors?"

"Two." He glances back at Matt and Otto as they slide from the saddles. Otto winces and paws at his neck. "Your misbegotten prairie men were holding their own."

"I see." He studies Scout first, as if in some state of disbelief, before he sees Mina, her pale gray coat slicked with mud from her fall. "What happened to the mare?"

"Loose mound slumped under her."

Elias's lips turn downward at the corners. "Mountain gets the best of prairie men and horses alike." Otto wobbles on his feet, grimacing. "You look worse for wear yourself. Lucky that saddle tree didn't squash you up inside."

"Oy. I'm not feeling very lucky right now." He rubs the back of his neck. He lifts his gaze to the sky again, judging the gray sunlight, critical of it in some way Matt doesn't see.

Elias arches an eyebrow and faces the sheriff again. "Feng Wei died. Other one's at the doctor's office. He's waiting for the rest."

"They're on their way in."

Scout paws. Matt gives him a discouraging smack to the chest. He whips with bared teeth, and for once, Matt is too slow in dodging; Scout nips his upper arm. He shoves his face away by the muzzle "If it's all the same to you men, I'd like to stall him before his impatience becomes a force of destruction."

"Force of destruction with too much brains to be good for him." Elias spits his snuff. "That mare fell on you, she'll lame up stuck in a stall. Throw them in that pen yonder. And you men will need to find other housing tonight. No room at the inn."

"Alright, Elias. Appreciate it."

Matt leads Scout to the hitch post. He unsaddles him, sliding a rope halter over his face, and curries the filth and flaking winter pelt, the dark red forming damp fluff balls in the palms of Matt's sticky hands. He picks the stones out of his feet. "We'll find you a farrier, old boy. Get you shaped up for this mountain terrain, long as we're staying here."

Staying here. He has no plans of staying. He's supposed to be going home. On the prairie, they'll have no use for studded shoes or climbing techniques. They'll be going home soon. They'll be going home soon.

Otto hangs his head in fatigue as he works, brushing Mina's dappled pelt. "Let me help." Matt takes the brush away from Otto, who has a comb between his teeth, working the tangles out of her hair with water and persistence. When he moves his weight the wrong way, he grunts in pain. "You know, a horse never died from having burrs in its mane. Never died from getting it all cut, either."

"Elmer loves a clean horse." As he picks the mats out of her mane, he braids it. "Where will we go tonight, Dill? If—If you were still planning on staying, that is."

"I'm staying." Matt nearly bristles, measuring himself, reminding himself he could be leaving any time now, he should be, he's hundreds of miles from home, over two weeks gone by with no marshal, and while Chester is good at keeping everyone safe while he's away—

Truth spits into his eyes like acid. His hand clenches where it grasps Mina's rope. "I've got a couple dollars. We'll find a room." The mare hangs her head low, spent from her day tramping about the mountain. "C'mon. You're wearing her down. Let her walk it out."

"Is that ornery pony of yours going to be mean to her?"

He snorts. "Meanness to other horses doesn't seem to be one of his vices. He saves it all for us."

"He sure knew that ground was unstable up the mountain. I don't think he would've carried you down that slope if you'd whipped him for it. And I know a lot of men who would've tried."

"That horse has never been handled by any man who would raise a hand to him. Moss made sure of it."

"Moss." Matt's eyes widen imperceptibly as Otto repeats the name back to him in his typical, placid tone of voice. He's not confrontational, and he's not prying. But the hair stands up on the back of his neck. "I suppose that would be the greatest horseman you've ever known, then." Matt stares back at him, fighting himself on making it an intimidating glare—Otto hasn't said anything out of place, only invited him to talk about himself.

It's not his fault Matt's recent past is painful enough to split his tongue open if he speaks it aloud.

Taking the comb from Otto's hand, Matt tosses it in the pan of tools. "Let's turn her out. If I don't get something to eat soon, I'm not gonna be fit to live with."

"I'll grab Moshe. No sense keeping him from stretching his legs."

"Alright."

They turn out the horses into the corral, and then they dredge into a seedy saloon, which offers a free meal of steak and potatoes for the cost of a drink, and in his current state, he'll benefit from both. A portly bald man runs the bar in an apron with gray handprint stains, wearing a wrinkled shirt with the sleeves pushed up over his elbows. "Oi! 'Ello, boys."

"Evening." He glances at Otto. "We'll have a bottle and two glasses."

He procures an amber bottle and two glasses. Matt flicks him two quarters, trying not to think of how his wallet has gotten thinner than he anticipated. His paycheck won't find him in Colorado. He didn't intend to be gone this long. We just have to stay until Ram's trial. Then he'll head home. He'll have this long story to tell everyone, how a rustler caused a ruckus on the trail, and a man was dead, and he ended up here—they'll get a kick out of it, Doc and Kitty and Chester.

Chester.

Pouring whiskey sloshes it over the brim of his cup. The force of throwing it back sends it trickling down his chin. It smarts on his palate, sharp as holding his hand over an open flame. Smearing it away with the back of his hand, he nudges Otto's glass toward him. It rotates on the glossy surface. Words evade him, caught somewhere between the present and the past, this night in a saloon so similar and yet so different from everything. He fills Otto's glass, and then he refills his own.

Otto objects with a quiet, "Dill."

"Don't make me drink alone."

When Matt nudges the glass again, he obediently puts up the shot. His face gnarls and twists, shaking vigorously, before he finally settles. "Always thought whiskey tastes like piss on fire."

Matt has never drank in excess. The bottle is two-thirds empty before he feels satisfied with his fuzziness, when his steps begin to skew crooked but not so broad to disturb others. They eat supper and excuse themselves from the saloon.

Otto limps along beside him, sore from his fall and inebriated from the cheap whiskey, on a boardwalk tapping hollow under their boots. If Matt closes his eyes, he walks in a space parallel to this universe, a ghost imprinted in time. He needs to hold out his hand, and he'll touch against pilled flannel. His arms swinging at his sides would once have left his knuckles brushing against Chester's, how their bodies fell in step naturally in spite of Chester's frozen knee.

Otto doesn't limp like that, and he doesn't walk so close, and the cold breeze of springtime in the mountains reminds Matt of Chester's stories, why he left the mountains and prefers to live where the land is level and flat. "I just ain't cut out for all that cold and climbing much anymore," Chester recounted once in a tale Matt can't recall.

"'Ey! Matthews! Weisz!"

The shout sends Otto stumbling. Matt steadies him. Sheriff Dixon trots down the boardwalk, waving his hand to hold them up. In one hand, he clutches an envelope. Plodding toward them, a hand on his flank, he massages an invisible stitch in his side. "Didn't think I was ever going to catch up with the two of you."

Matt teeters on the boardwalk. He steps down, bracing himself on a pillar to keep from betraying the drunken sway in his gait. "You slung dirt with the rest of us this morning, running horses down the mountainside. You get wore out in town?"

His eyes spark with irritation, and it occurs to Matt too late this was, perhaps, an impolite thing to say. "I should like to see you doing the same, but from the smell on your breath, I'd wager you'd break your nose." He can hide his inebriation in his body, but he can't disguise the fruity pant of liquor on his breath, coating his mouth with a foul flavor.

Shamed, Matt ducks his head, permitting the remark with a thick swallow. Sheriff Dixon, having made his point, unfurls the envelope tucked under his arm. It has a single sheet of paper. "Got this today while we were away." He holds it up on display for them.

WANTED: Ronald Hopkins, aka Ram.

REWARD: $1000

Mid-thirties, 5'9", light hair, blue eyes. Felony rustling and murder.

The poster displays a dated picture of Ram in its center. Pursing his lips, Matt takes the poster from him, holding it nearer, squinting like the print will change once he has a clearer picture. Otto peers past Matt's elbow to read it, brow furrowed, gently accepting it as Matt passes it to him. "You made a circular on a man who's already in your jail?"

"I got a circular on a man who's already in my jail." The sheriff crosses his arms. "Mail was delayed. Take a look at the date."

"This was sent four days ago," Otto observes quietly.

They caught an outlaw, if entirely by accident. "You men are due something for all your troubles." He carries a roll of bills in the pocket of his shirt, catching it between his index and middle fingers. It puzzles Matt, how something worth so much fits so easily in a man's hands. "You two are some of the queerest men I've ever met. I can't get a read on you."

"We're not bounty hunters," Matt says. Otto's eyes haven't flitted away from the picture of Ram on the circular, glossy with tears. He doesn't speak.

"I can't figure out what you are, either one of you." He stands with his shoulders square, arms crossed, taking stock of them.

Folks who don't fit the mold are always a novelty with lawmen—peculiar, interesting, potentially dangerous, potentially valuable allies. A thousand dollars is a lot of money to put in the hands of two strangers with unclear intentions. They didn't know Ram was wanted; Sheriff Dixon could withhold the reward if he wanted. But as he uncrosses his arms, he extends the fat wad of money to Otto and Matt, an olive branch. "You boys are entitled to this."

It floats in the air, suspended between his fingers. Neither of them reach for it. The twitch of movement draws Otto's dark eyes away from the circular, the folded bills holding his attention. All of the drunken color drains from his flushed face, leaving him gray. A cold hand covers his mouth. Air hisses from between his teeth, a thin whistle of grief. His eyes clench closed, throat bobbing in desperate, horrified avoidance.

The brief high of their victory is miles behind them. Any other semblance of joy was covered with dirt in Elmer's grave. His hands shut into fists, knuckles pale with tension, along his lips, like he'll bite them, though he doesn't.

Softly, Matt prompts, "It's yours."

His throat bobs. Shaking his head in a stark refusal, he turns his face away, folding at the middle, hands clasped at his solar plexus. He walks away.

Sympathetic, the sheriff continues to hold the money out to Matt. "You can have it, Dill. You'll do right by him."

"I can't claim reward money."

"Why not?"

His lips part to give the obvious response, his reflex—the government already pays him to catch outlaws. But he's not wearing a badge. The crinkled spot on his shirt has smoothed over. This isn't Kansas, and more importantly, he's not Matt Dillon.

Nobody in Denver knows that name.

Matt reluctantly accepts the roll of bills. "I'll take care of him, sheriff."

He smiles. "Call me Leroy."

It sinks like a cold stone inside of him. "Right. Leroy. So long."

"So long."