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  The three robbers rode out up the trail, the boys' horses tied behind their own; only the young, demented one looked back and smiled—pain and death to him were no more than occasional pleasures to be inflicted when time permitted. He waved back merrily before he disappeared into the darkened forest.

  "You listen to me, bro," Chance called down, trying to sound brave. "If I go, I go, and that's not your doing, you hear me? I don't want to die and have to worry about your conscience too." He tried to make the words sound flippant, but his voice was hollowed out by fear—his brother knew him too well to mistake the sound.

  Hart struggled to stay upright. If he moved, the body above him swayed precariously; if his shoulders gave way before he got his hands free, Chance would die.

  Hart forced himself to concentrate on the knots around his wrists, instead of on the agony in his shoulders or the dizzying sway of Chance's body above his own. Or his rage at what had been done to them.

  He felt the stickiness of blood spread into his palms from the abraded skin of his wrists. The prickly hemp bit harshly into flesh, but he welcomed the pain, for he hoped the blood would make his hands slippery enough to pull free.

  "You still down there, bro?" Chance's voice wavered with anxiety. "If worse comes to worst, Hart, I'm gonna jump off of you, you hear me? So don't you go thinking it was your fault, whatever happens." Hart squeezed his eyes tight shut, but the tears fell anyway.

  "Jesus, Chance! Shut up, will you? Shut up about dying. I'm gonna get out of these ropes somehow." Hart's voice came in short, strident bursts—the strain of staying upright was making breath hard and rapid.

  A strange crack sounded under Chance's right foot and he knew Hart's shoulder had split from the strain of his weight. He'd heard such a sickening sound once, in a horse whose foreleg had splintered when his foot turned on wet stone. If he shifted his weight to try to lessen the strain on his brother's broken shoulder, he might lose his balance. He could only imagine the agony Hart must be enduring, but his brother made no further sound.

  "I love you, brother," Chance called down, hoarsely. "I want you to know whatever happens, you couldn't help it. If I die, I'll just be going on to meet Mama and Daddy anyway, so you gotta promise me you won't take on like it was your fault." The sob that shook Hart's body was his only reply.

  Hart McAllister closed his mind against the inevitable and fought his own body for control. His knees trembled dangerously, and twice, as he worried the knots that secured his wrists, he felt the shift in weight above nearly overcome his balance. Eventually his own screaming muscle and bone would be unable to stand the strain and he would buckle beneath the grotesquely swinging body of his dying brother. How long could he hold out? He willed himself not to crumple... just another hour... just another minute. Dear God, don't let my brother die like this!

  The crack of a single gunshot rent the darkness. Hart felt the rope jerked taut, felt Chance lurch, felt his brother tumble from his perch to roll miraculously away into the night. The pain of his broken shoulder exploded into white-hot agony; the bliss of freedom befuddled his movements and Hart fell to his knees in the rocky dirt, senses reeling.

  Somewhere in the gloom in front of him a man sat on a fine black horse, a smoking .45 in his hand. Christ Almighty! What a shot that must have been, to sever the rope with only the light of a dying campfire. What kind of man had confidence enough to risk another's life on the strength of a single impossible pistol shot?

  The stranger holstered his shooting iron, dismounted and unsheathed a knife almost in the same movement. Wordlessly he cut the ropes that bound Chance's wrists, then Hart's. The two dazed boys turned tear-streaked faces to their savior with a mixture of gratitude and bewilderment.

  The stranger was a dark and brooding man with a face of the kind the ladies think handsome. He wasn't overly tall by McAllister standards, perhaps a hair shy of six feet. He was dressed all in black, his clothes trail-worn but cared for. You didn't need to see the holster tied down at his thigh to know what he was, for it was written in his watchful eyes and in the astonishing shot that had freed them.

  Hart tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't hold him; the stranger pushed the boy back to a sitting position and Hart was startled by the strength and gentleness of the gesture.

  "Jesus, mister!" Chance blurted. "That was some kind of shooting, but what if you'd missed?" Hart marveled that even now his brother could find words to speak what was on both their minds.

  The man's mouth curved into the barest hint of smile, as if to say that missing shots was not something he ever did.

  "Thank you, mister," Hart gasped, finding his tongue with difficulty. "I don't know how we can ever thank you for what you did for my brother and me. We were dead for sure without you."

  The man nodded acceptance of the thanks; he had noted the we and understood what the death of the dark-haired boy would mean to the other.

  Hart saw that the stranger's face beneath his black Stetson was narrow, and fine-boned. He had great serious eyes with dark lashes long enough to be a woman's, yet there was nothing womanly in their brown depths—betraying no stories of the man within, except perhaps that he was cut from a different cloth and you'd do well to respect him. Hart noted with an artist's perception that their corners turned down, as if weighted by sorrow.

  "My name's Jameson," the stranger said. "Ford Jameson. That was Jerry Hogan and Ned Putnam you ran a cropper of." He dismissed the third man as of no consequence. He had a deep voice, low and curiously monotone, as if each word was dredged from someplace fathomless and sorrowful within him.

  "They don't come meaner," he continued as he motioned Hart near so he could examine his injured shoulder. "Been tracking them on another matter all the way from the Dakota Territory, but it seems like you boys got a score to settle right here and now. If you want to come with me, you can get back your gear." Simple as that. Ford set Hart's broken shoulder with the skill of a surgeon and was pleased by the manly way the boy bore the pain of it. It was obvious to him that Hart cared more about his brother's safety than his own, and counted a broken shoulder little enough payment for deliverance.

  Ford was as good as his word; the following day their horses and goods were restored to them, and a bit more, too. It was Hart's and Chance's first experience of killing men, and it wouldn't have sat well except for the vengeance left in their hearts after the gang's enthusiastic sadism. They were surprised when Ford said they could ride with him for a while; he didn't seem the kind of man who craved companionship. Hart's sketching interested him, though, that and the fact that the boys had been well educated by their mama. You could tell from Ford's speech that he, too, had come of a decent family.

  He taught the boys things about guns their daddy never knew. Never to draw unless you meant to kill; never to kill unless there was no possible alternative. How to shoot with either hand; how to clear leather so fast, it was nearly a blur.

  Both McAllisters absorbed all Ford had to teach, for he was a learned man on more subjects than guns. He could track like an Indian and knew enough about the land to live forever on its bounty. He knew books, too, and made the two boys thirst to get hold of some he talked of. But it was the guns they would always remember about him, for they were what Ford was best at.

  "Killing is an addiction, like opium," he told them. "If you let the power take hold of you, you'll be a slave to it. One day you'll find you've killed a man and it didn't prick your gut or your conscience. After that, there's no turning back.

  "Gain a reputation as a fast gun and every moron with a six-shooter and a thirst for glory will be on your trail. You'll get no peace, and one day, one of them will be faster than you. Or more ruthless. Or luckier.... Out here, the way a man handles a gun determines his future," he said, and set them to practicing for hours every day. "If you're better with a pistol than the next man, you've got options. If he's better than you, he'll do all the deciding."

  "It's the brain that's your weapon," Ford told Cha
nce as he watched the boy practice. "The gun is only an instrument, like Hart's charcoal. It's the brain behind the instrument that decides how you use any gift." For Ford had seen from the first that Chance had a natural talent with a pistol far beyond the ordinary. By the end of summer the older boy looked nearly as elegant in the way he handled a weapon as Jameson did. He could twirl the heavy .45 around and slip it in and out of its leather with ease and grace. He could draw straight or cross-handed and could put a bullet through the ace on a playing card before it hit the ground.

  Hart had a keen eye for straight, fast shooting too—the same trick of nature that coordinated hand and eye for sketching served him well with a gun, but Chance's gift was far beyond his brother's.

  And if Chance was handy with a pistol, his prowess with a deck of cards was prodigious. Even Ford, who seldom smiled, laughed out loud a few times over Chance's dexterity. The three travelers played cards at night on the trail and there wasn't much Ford didn't know about gaming, clean or dirty.

  "You've got to understand the superstitions, son," he told them. "A gambler's life is chancy, so he wants the odds in his favor. Like tying a bat's heart with a red silk string to your right arm is supposed to make you lucky."

  "Does it?"

  "Not so's I ever noticed," Ford said, looking Chance in the eye with that disconcerting dark stare.

  "Do know you'd best never gamble with a one-eyed man, though. That's bad luck. And never count your chips while you're still at the table, or let any man look over your shoulder—women don't count for that last part, son. A man who draws a pat hand of jacks full or red sevens won't leave the game alive."

  He showed Chance how to mark a deck and soon his ability was nothing compared to the boy's, for Chance could deal an ace from the bottom, top, or middle before your eye could blink or your brain could suck it in. Chance was to cards, Hart said, what Ford was to guns.

  "By God, Chance," Ford said one night as they bedded down. "With that talent of yours you could be a millionaire or a dead man by the time you're twenty-five."

  The time they spent with Ford was growing-up time for both McAllisters. They took on their full height and weight and began to feel the cockiness that comes with being bigger than other men. Chance's extraordinary good looks turned ladies' heads on the streets of the towns they passed through; and although Hart didn't share his brother's startling handsomeness, there was something in his size and ruggedness that drew them as well.

  Ford took them to their first sporting house to learn what a man does with a woman. He taught them how to survive such places without succumbing to the special pitfalls that abounded: the chloral hydrate in your drink to knock you out long enough to be relieved of your wallet... or the nicotine they spiked the whiskey with, so you'd end up in an alley throwing up your chow while a pair of toughs helped themselves to your cash. Or the girls who lured you to their beds so someone else could pinch your poke.

  He shepherded them through enough poker games to keep them all in beans and bacon, and he let them borrow the books he always carried in his saddlebags—books by men like Shakespeare and Milton and Virgil, whose work he liked to read aloud to them by the campfire, late at night.

  The two McAllisters spent nearly two years in Ford's company, then one day he said he was moving on—just like that. The brothers were upset at the news, but men don't show such emotions to each other, so they simply thanked Ford for all he'd done and asked him where he was going, but he declined to say.

  It was their time with Ford, they always said later, that made them into men as much as anything ever did. There were plenty of tales about the gunfighter that would stand a man's hair on end, but there're two sides to everything, and the teaching side was the one they always chose to remember about Ford Jameson. That, and the fact that he'd saved their lives.

  Over the next two years Chance and Hart did a little of everything a man could do—herded cattle, did day labor, worked on a couple of ranches in the Territory, had good times and bad. Eventually something inside a man makes him ache for more, if he's got sand. The McAllister boys grew up and started aching.

  They trailherded one last cattle drive, took their wages, and headed for the nearest town big enough to offer a taste of a different kind of living. The town was Denver. Hart had it in his mind to apprentice himself to an engraver, for in those days, when art school was an impossible dream to a boy with his predilections, apprenticeship was the only way to learn to be an artist and every big town had a newspaper with an engraver attached.

  Hart was seventeen, and Chance a year older, when they rode into Denver. They had not the slightest notion when they turned their horses' heads onto Larimer Street that one day their names and Denver's would be set down together in the history books.

  Chapter 16

  The man with the unlikely name of Hercules Monroe stood just over five and a half feet, shoes and all. He was a master engraver and an artist, but of more importance to Hart, he was in need of an apprentice and had advertised in the Rocky Mountain News for applicants.

  "Taught yourself, son?" he asked Hart, waving the boy's grubby sketches at him in the little shop on Arapahoe Street. Hart had liberated the dog-eared pages from their repository in his saddlebag, and they were the worse for wear.

  "Yes, sir," Hart replied, embarrassed that he towered so far above Here that the man had to look nearly straight up to hold a conversation with him. "My mama studied painting back East, sir, and she showed me most of what I know."

  Here peered up from the level of Hart's belt buckle, never commenting on the boy's size, not in the least put off by it. The man had a fine square bead, Hart noted, abundantly covered with un- ruly dark-hair that didn't appear to have felt the benefit of a comb for a while, although he ran his fingers through it often. Here's eyes were lively and took in the world with the amused and affectionate tolerance of a longtime lover.

  "Did she teach you about hard work, too?" he demanded, screwing up his eyes and trying to look fierce and businesslike.

  "No, sir," Hart answered him with a quiet smile. "She sort of left that up to my daddy."

  "And just what'd he do?"

  "He was a farmer in Kansas, Mr. Monroe."

  "Well then, go ahead..." the man prompted, "tell me what he taught you."

  Hart thought hard for a moment. "He taught me to shoot straight, to fish and to farm," he replied slowly, thinking as he spoke. "Other things, too, I guess. To live righteously, to help your neighbor, to protect the ones you love. To get to be good at something you could be proud of..." Hart stopped and smiled shyly. "I guess whenever I fail at doing things the right way, it seems to me I've transgressed my daddy's rules more than God's."

  Here tilted back his head to search the boy's face with renewed interest.

  "That sketch of the prairie house you're holding is all I've got left of them," Hart finished, his voice low and reverent.

  Here nodded, and rifled the sketches he held for the one described. "There's love here," he said, examining it carefully. "And respect. You draw from the heart, McAllister. No one can teach you that. Not your mama, not Michelangelo nor Leonardo da Vinci. They could alter your sense of line and perfect your draftsmanship, maybe. But the heart... that is a country beyond the province of the greatest teacher."

  Hart didn't know what to reply to that exactly, or who those fellows were who couldn't teach him anything, so he said nothing. He started working for Here the following day.

  The shop was a revelation to him. Big-time newspapers and magazines like Harper's Weekly or Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper were always on the lookout for roving artist-reporters who could do pen-and-ink drawings an engraver could convert to wood engravings. As there was special interest back East in the goings-on west of the Mississippi, there was a ready market for on-the-spot drawings of western events. Men like Here, who were both artists and engravers, were in great demand and earned a fine wage.

  "Engraving is painstaking, and if you don't have the
guts for hard work, you might as well not even try," Here told Hart as he showed him through the shop. "Once a drawing has been done by the artist, it's copied line for line in reverse, on wood. In a big shop, where they have apprentices, each one specializes, as they did in the Middle Ages—one lad does foregrounds, one figures, one backgrounds, and so forth. Here I do everything myself, which is why I advertised."

  Hart, whose whole life had been starved for access to the work of other artists, was entranced by the clutter of the engraving shop. Sketches lay everywhere—large studies were tacked up on walls and small ones overflowed every surface. Here looked with approval at the excitement his work provoked in the boy.

  "Engravings are done in small sections," he said, holding one up for scrutiny. "Later they're bolted together. Once the reversed drawing has been completely transferred to wood, the blocks are unbolted and you cut away all the areas between the lines of the drawing. The more exquisite the detail you achieve, the more memorable the engraving. You'll learn the art of the accented line here, lad... the nuances of light and shadow... the emotional power that can be transmitted by a simple black-and-white drawing."

  By the time Hart left the shop, his head was bursting with new terminology and an explosion of hope.

  Chance let his eyes grow accustomed to the dim light of the saloon's interior—he had questioned several men on the street as to the most likely watering hole for Denver's elite. He needed a job with prospects and he needed money for a working wardrobe. He looked with distaste at the trail-worn clothes he had spiffed up as best he could for the occasion. It beat all how his brother Hart could be content in trailhand shirts and denims, while he longed for the kind of custom-tailored haberdashery you saw on politicians and businessmen.

  There were four tables with games in progress—three seemed populated by ordinary citizens; the fourth was just what he was looking for, a table full of prosperous men. The kind who smoked good cigars and ordered decent whiskey; the kind who could spot