With his eyes on Bowdre, Foster let the heavy pistol drop into the holster. He walked away from the wagons of rifles and Colonel Muncie, and moved casually toward The Cantina That Has No Name. Yet his eyes never left Corporal Bowdre.

  The man might be a professional gunfighter, but not all professionals were completely trustworthy.

  I know, Foster thought to himself, that I’m not.

  He grinned. He also made sure not to let Muncie or Muncie’s other riders out of his sight.

  This would truly be a test.

  He came to a stop about six feet to Soledad Tadeo’s left.

  Bowdre raised a finger on his right hand, near the Navy, and pointed at Foster’s holster. “You prefer those cannons, I see.”

  Foster nodded. “A .45 makes sure.” He nodded at Bowdre’s direction. “Yet I see you like those old Navies.”

  “They shoot true,” Bowdre said. “And the ball stays inside the body of the man who is dead. That .45, it could go through a person and kill a couple innocent bystanders.”

  Foster chuckled. “Then it is a good thing I’m standing in front of the wagons, Corporal. If I were standing where you are, when I shot you, my .45 slug might’ve hit one of those bottles of nitroglycerin.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something to see!” Bowdre also laughed slightly. “Don’t worry. My .36 ball will stay in your heart.”

  “I’m not worried,” Foster said. “Those wagons are out of range for a kid’s toy like a Navy. I mean . . . in this wind.”

  “There is not much wind, sir,” Bowdre said.

  Foster laughed again.

  The lean Confederate gunfighter turned away from Foster and bowed at Soledad Tadeo. “Ma’am. You’d be wise to return to that saloon. I’m not a wild shot, but when people get hit by bullets, they aren’t always so gallant. They shoot wild. I’d hate to see you harmed.”

  She acted as though she did not hear.

  Bowdre shook his head and looked at Foster. “Does she not speak English, Captain?”

  “I think she just wants a front-row seat. This kind of show doesn’t play very often at Rancho Los Cielos.”

  “Where were we, Captain?” Bowdre asked.

  “Talking about your preference for old Navy Colts.”

  “Ah, yes. They served Wild Bill Hickok well,” Bowdre said. “The Navy .36 was his pistol of choice.”

  “Indeed.” Foster smiled. “Of course, Wild Bill Hickok is dead.”

  “But not,” Bowdre said, “on account of his choice of weapons.”

  “Indeed, sir, you are right. It was his seating arrangement that led him to cash in his chips.”

  “How true, Captain Foster. We must all know where we take our seats.”

  “Yes. Too bad you are seated on the other side. I could use a man like you, Corporal.”

  “Well,” Bowdre said, “such is the way fate deals the cards.”

  Foster sighed. “I suppose that if I offered you, say, one hundred dollars a day, a bag of gold, and your pick of an 1880 Springfield rifle, you would be repulsed.”

  “I would be insulted, sir. Once you wear a uniform, you do not disgrace that uniform. Once you give your word, you do not break your word.”

  “You are truly a Southern gentleman, Corporal Bowdre, and I knew you would be.” Foster grinned. “I, of course, am no Southern gentleman. I offer you my sincerest apology.”

  Bowdre shrugged. “There is no need to apologize, Captain. You were thinking hypothetically. Thinking out loud. And, sir, for your edification, I would have enjoyed serving under your command . . . if you were not a damned bluebelly . . . but . . . well . . . any such union between two men of our backgrounds would have had an unpleasant finish.”

  Foster nodded. “Yes. Two men like us cannot survive for long. At least, one of us couldn’t.”

  Bowdre laughed. “Sooner or later, we’d have to know, wouldn’t we? A couple of fast guns mix like oil and vinegar.”

  “Or a .36 paper cartridge,” Foster said, “in a chamber made for a Colt .45.”

  Bowdre laughed again, and his laugh was filled with the confidence of a seasoned veteran.

  “I’m glad you volunteered, Corporal,” Foster said.

  “I’m glad Colonel Muncie gave me the opportunity, sir. It has been an honor.” Bowdre bowed.

  Foster returned the bow. “The honor, Corporal Bowdre, has been all mine.”

  Each man took a slight step back. Their hands fell just above the handles of their revolvers. They crouched.

  Foster’s heart raced like a thoroughbred that had just finished the Kentucky Derby. His throat turned dry. He hadn’t felt anything like this since before he had met up with Grat Holden just before that ambush near Dos Cabezas. And Grat Holden was nowhere near the man Jed Foster was facing. Grat Holden was a boy. Grat Holden could never kill Jed Foster. But the man in gray named Bowdre?

  Such challenges made life worth living.

  “Your count, Colonel,” Jed Foster said.

  “On three,” Corporal Bowdre added.

  They did not breathe. Nor did they dare blink.

  Colonel Will Muncie’s voice sounded weak, as though he already knew the outcome. “One . . . two . . . three.” Muncie did not even shout the last number.

  CHAPTER 42

  Foster’s right hand shot down for the .45, and the Colt practically leaped into his hand. He saw Bowdre’s. 36 coming up instantly. Foster dropped to his left and moved closer to the Mexican woman standing by the hitching rail. That, he figured, was one direction a Southerner like Corporal Bowdre would never have anticipated.

  Indeed, he had calculated correctly. Corporal Bowdre had aimed in the opposite direction and quickly tried to adjust the .36 Colt’s barrel.

  All that was happening so fast, no one could say what had exactly happened. They just saw two men slapping leather and clawing their guns. They just heard two gunshots that sounded like one. For all Soledad Tadeo or any of Foster’s men or any of Colonel Will Muncie’s Rebs could say, no one had even moved. They had just pulled their pistols and fired.

  They would be able to say, however, that Corporal Bowdre’s body was lifted off the ground and driven back three feet. They would be able to say that Bowdre’s. 36 slug dug up dust in the street a few feet behind Jed Foster. They would be able to say that the Colt bullet went completely through Bowdre’s body and left a fist-sized and gory, bloody hole in the back of his muslin shirt. They would be able to say that Bowdre landed hard, kicking up a mound of dust, bounced up slightly, and rolled onto his side.

  His eyes remained open. His mouth was locked in an eternal smile.

  Corporal Bowdre was dead. But he had died game.

  The woman looked at the dead man, she looked at Jed Foster, and then she stepped away from the hitching rail and moved back to the door, out of the sun. But she did not return inside The Cantina That Has No Name.

  “You lose, Colonel,” Foster said. “Reese, keep that pistol aimed at one of the nitro bottles . . . in case these Southern gentlemen want to try this bit again.” He thumbed back the Colt’s hammer, but kept the barrel aimed at the dusty street.

  “Colonel. You can leave Bowdre here for me to bury. Or—”

  “He will be buried, suh, in the post cemetery,” Muncie said. “He will be buried as a soldier who gave his life for his country.”

  Two men quickly dismounted. They picked up the corpse of the man who had been incredibly fast with a pistol and carried him to his horse.

  They left his smoking Navy .36 in the dirt.

  Post cemetery? Foster had to stop from laughing. Deep down, he figured a gunfighter like Bowdre would have preferred to have been buried near the street where he had died. But, well, when you’re dead, you don’t get a say in such trivial matters.

  Foster had to give Colonel Will Muncie credit. The man knew how to make himself look as if he were not turning tail and running away. Muncie straightened, and methodically closed the covering over his revolver in the holster. He found the gauntlets he had stuck in his frock coat, and these he pulled back onto his hands with a show. He straightened his hat, and trained those eyes of a madman directly at Captain Jed Foster.

  “Then, suh,” Muncie said. “I will see you at that canyon.”

  “I’ll send a man to fetch you, Colonel,” Foster said, affecting an over-the-top Southern accent. “Since I don’t believe you or your boys have had the privilege of visiting that canyon.”

  The colonel frowned. “I would not say, from the stories that I have heard, that visiting The Canyon of The Sorrows is a privilege, Capt’n.”

  “You are most correct, Colonel.”

  “But you happen to know this nefarious place, Capt’n?”

  “Well.” Foster shrugged his shoulders. “What would you expect from a nefarious scoundrel who wears the blue.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I’ll see you at The Canyon of The Sorrows, Colonel.”

  Will Muncie bobbed his head. “Noon. July Fourth. I bid you good day, suh.”

  “Be here on the evening of the third. I will send a guide to take you to the canyon where we shall begin the auction. With luck, you’ll ride out of there with plenty of rifles to resume your war.”

  The colonel saluted.

  Jed Foster touched the brim of his hat with the barrel of the Colt and lowered the .45 again, keeping it cocked and aimed at the nearest gin bottle.

  “Gentlemen,” Muncie called out to his command. “About face.”

  The men turned their horses. It wasn’t the best Foster had ever seen, but considering just how scared out of their wits those old boys appeared, it ranked pretty good nonetheless.

  The flags whipped in the wind. Colonel Muncie yelled out a command, and he led his men out of Rancho Los Cielos.

  “Reese,” Foster called out softly when the former soldiers of the Confederacy were too far away to hear anything anyone in Rancho Los Cielos said.

  “Yes?” the gunman said.

  “Mount your horse. Take one of the boys with you. Make sure the man knows how to follow men and not get spotted. Follow Muncie. You ride just far enough out of here to make sure that crazy old coot isn’t coming back. Your boy needs to follow him all the way back to his camping spot. He should stay there. Out of sight. With his eyes always open. If Muncie decides on another plan of attack, if he leaves or sends out a rider anywhere before he needs to take off for El Cañon de Los Dolores, your man needs to get back to us. That means he’s to ride hard and fast and I don’t care how much dust he raises.”

  “You bet, Foster,” the man named Reese said. He appeared happier than a possum on a stump, wanting to get away from the wagons and those bottles of gin as quickly as possible. “Bateman. Get your horse. Make sure you got enough water and jerky to last till the Fourth.”

  When Bateman and Reese were gone, and when the dust from Colonel Muncie’s command had faded from view, Jed Foster smiled across the street at the Mexican beauty. He winked at her.

  “Did you like the show, Soledad?”

  The woman stepped back toward the hitching rail.

  Foster moved to the nearest wagon. He reached carefully and took the bottle of gin off the seat, and he grinned at the woman as he held the bottle up as though raising a glass in toast.

  “Have you ever tasted nitro, honey?”

  She was picking up the Navy .36 that had once belonged to the gunfighter named Bowdre.

  Foster suddenly frowned. He saw the dark-skinned woman thumb back the hammer, lift the Colt, and he heard the shot, saw the flame from the muzzle. She missed the bottle.

  But Jed Foster was diving into the dirt—while the bottle he had been holding plummeted to the hard, hard ground.

  CHAPTER 43

  The bottle shattered.

  Rancho Los Cielos was not destroyed. The only casualty was a bottle of Old Tom Gin—and Jed Foster’s dignity, along with the dignity of many of his men who had dived for cover, begged for forgiveness, or wet their britches.

  The bottle struck the ground at an angle, snapping the neck cleanly so quickly that the cork did not even pop out. The jagged edge of the rest of the bottle bounced off the dirt, somersaulted in the air, and smashed to pieces on a rock that rested just inches from a mound of mule droppings. The ground promptly sucked the clear liquid deep into the bowels of the earth.

  The liquid was not nitroglycerin. It was gin. Cheap gin at that.

  Foster came to his knees, drawing his Colt .45 again, cocking the hammer and drawing a bead on Soledad Tadeo. He did not squeeze the trigger for one very good reason—the Mexican woman had the late Corporal Bowdre’s .36-caliber Navy Colt trained on Foster.

  For all Jed Foster had joked with the now dead Confederate gunfighter about the accuracy of that particular weapon, he knew any pistol Wild Bill Hickok had used was more than reliable, and although Soledad Tadeo had missed her shot at the bottle Foster had been holding, he didn’t think she would miss again.

  Foster wet his lips and waited until he had regained the façade of composure. He watched his own men picking themselves off the ground. Some made the sign of the cross. A few tried to crawl a ways to hide the telltale signs of embarrassing urination by coating the front of their trousers with sand.

  Eventually, Foster lowered the hammer on his long-barreled revolver and made himself stand.

  “You take chances,” he told the woman, and made a fine display of sliding the .45 back into the holster. He reached inside a pocket and pulled out the makings of a cigarette.

  “No,” the woman spoke in English. “I do not.”

  “You were that sure?” Foster cocked his head and made himself grin. Deep down, though, he wanted to strangle the lousy little wench. He wouldn’t be disrespected and embarrassed by some Mexican hussy who hung out in a miserable cantina in the middle of nowhere, raving about and practically worshipping a cut-rate Mexican bandit who pretended to be a patriot of the people and a revolutionary like John Adams, Patrick Henry, and Francis Marion. Foster would have to bide his time, but eventually Soledad Tadeo would rue the day she had ever shamed Jed Foster in front of his men.

  She lowered the Navy but did not uncock the pistol, which she kept in her right hand—ready to lift it and pull the trigger quickly and accurately should the need arise.

  “All right, señorita, pray tell. What made you call my bluff?”

  She did not answer.

  “Come on, sweetheart. This is purely for my own education. I want to know how I could fool a man like Colonel Will Muncie and not a charming, wonderful, gorgeous little beauty like yourself.” He switched to Spanish. “Por favor. Concédeme este pequeño deseo.”

  She was too far away for Foster to read her eyes, yet she did grant him that wish.

  “You left those bottles on the wagons last night.”

  Foster had to consider this. Had she watched him take the bottles out of the cantina and place them on the hard wooden seats of the wagons? No. No, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. He had done that when no one else was looking.

  “And you know this,” he asked in Spanish, “how?”

  She shrugged. “They were not there when I retired to bed. They were there when I awakened to the crow of the rooster.”

  “A present for the night guards?” he asked in English.

  Her head shook.

  “Digame,” he pleaded. “La mayoría lo sé.”

  She told him in rapid-fire border Spanish . . . almost too fast and too hard for him to comprehend, but his ears remained sharp, and he could make out just enough of what she was saying to realize his mistake. One thing Jed Foster prided himself on was not repeating any mistake.

  If bottles of gin, gringo whiskey, or even tequila had been left outside during the night, Soledad Tadeo told Foster, those bottles would have been drained completely empty by the time the rooster crowed to announce the dawn of another day. Soledad Tadeo had been in Rancho Los Cielos long enough to realize that much about men—Mexican men and norteamericanos.

  There was, Foster had to concede, a certain amount of truth to that logic. He shook his head and sniggered, correcting himself. There was a hell of a lot more than a certain amount of truth. The little Mexican hussy was dead-on. Lucky for Foster, Colonel Will Muncie didn’t know exactly when the bottles had been set on the wagons.

  “But,” Foster countered, “if my men thought I had placed nitroglycerin on those wagons, that would explain why no one had taken liberties and emptied those bottles.”

  She shook her head and went on in her Spanish. One would not leave bottles out overnight in such a place as Rancho Los Cielos. Just sitting on a wooden bench? In a place where the wind has been known to blow down trees? Or where an owl might swoop down, or a packrat might climb up to investigate?

  “No,” she told Foster in Spanish. “You told your mercenaries that those bottles held the potent explosive, but you are not that stupid, even for a Yanqui. You are just cocky, like all norteamericanos. You think all Mexicans, and especially Mexican women, are stupid. You will pay for your arrogance one day.”

  Foster laughed, though he told himself that someone would pay for that arrogance, and that someone was Soledad Tadeo. He would enjoy making her pay. And she wouldn’t look so beautiful when he was finished with her.

  “What,” he asked, “if you had been wrong? That I had put nitro in those bottles?”

  CHAPTER 44

  “Then,” she said in English, “we would all be dead. So be it.” She turned to go, saying, “Los Cielos sería un lugar mejor.” She stopped and added, “Sin ti y tus asesinos.”

  He waved at her and watched her disappear inside the cantina. Would Los Cielos ever be a better place? He wondered. He fumed at her remark that it would be better without the presence of himself and his hired men. Did that bandit Amonte Negro do anything for the people there? Yes, he told himself, the uppity witch would pay, and pay dearly.

  For the time being, he had other concerns. “Jesús,” he told one of his men. “Get mounted. Just make sure our lovely little lady’s pistol shot didn’t draw any attention.”