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  It was cool out—brisk, actually—and there was no wind, no breeze. Sinclair shifted in his saddle, the Sharps across the tops of his thighs, the metal of the barrel cold, even through the denim of his pants. He shifted his weight slightly again and felt the slightest stutter-step in Mare’s gait. She wasn’t used to nervous movement from Jake in the saddle.

  This isn’t right, he thought. Something’s wrong here. I don’t know what it is, but something’s wrong. Mare’s ears flicked to the side where some small night creature rustled in the scrub brush and then quickly returned to their forward-pointing position. Jake felt the sensation of dampness in the hand that rested against the forepiece of the rifle—his palm was sweating. What the hell? This is just another assignment—it’s taking down an officer. How many times have I done it—and done it well, quickly, surgically—in the past? Too many to count—too many kills to remember. He shook his head angrily. They weren’t kills.They were . . . what? Excisions. I was excising men who could—would—give the orders that would kill me, kill the men around me. War is war.

  The very first vestiges of light began to hint at themselves in the east. There was no color and no real light yet, but a faint, ephemeral glow almost too vague to discern was indicating that the night was beginning to draw to an end. Jake rode on, his horse working smoothly under him, the steady, rhythmic drumming of her hooves the only sound in the universe. Pictures flickered in his mind, passing and changing so quickly that he couldn’t completely see one before the next replaced it: blue-coated men swept from the backs of their horses, faint red mists hanging in the air for a part of a heartbeat in the space they’d just occupied, a sweating, bare-chested fellow directing Union cannon fire, a longhaired, bearded officer who seemed to be gazing straight at Sinclair through a spyglass from a half mile away, a courier at a full gallop on a good horse, plucked from his saddle. Jake fought the images, fought whatever was going on in his head. I told Lou Galvin this was war and that’s what it is. I signed on to help here. I’m a sharpshooter. The Night Riders need me. I won’t let them down.

  The colors and the light at the eastern horizon were stronger, more vivid now. The shadows placed by the bright moonlight were being swept away and the land becoming more distinct. Jake reined in at a small sinkhole and dismounted. There was, he noticed, a parchment-thin glaze of ice over the surface of the water. He led Mare to it and she poked her nose through it, sucking water. When he mounted and rode on he could see fingers of smoke rising from a couple of places in Fairplay, reaching up toward the sky before being dissipated by the wind.

  Jake’s vantage point was pretty much as he recalled it. The hill was a low one, but tall enough for his purposes. The slope was thickly covered with dead prairie grass and scarred here and there with sizable rocks protruding from the soil. The breeze passing stirred the brownish yellow stalks of grass and weeds slightly, creating random patterns before moving on. Jake hobbled Mare on the far side of the hill, untied the tripod Bull had crafted for him the day before from behind his saddle where he’d carried it, and walked with it in his left hand and the Sharps in his right, to the top of the hill.

  The day had broken crystalline clear, the air sharp and sweet. Main Street of Fairplay lay, by Jake’s estimate, three hundred yards away, slightly below him, the road a dusty rectangular line between the buildings on either side of it. A mule-pulled farm wagon driven by a man in a heavy gray coat was the only traffic, and as Jake watched, the driver swung his rig down an alley and out of sight. Jake set up the tripod, the longer leg extended in front, and rested the rifle on the plate Bull had fitted to it. The device was solid, sturdy, the half-inch round stock it was made from heavier than necessary to do what little it needed to do. Jake placed melon-sized rocks at the base of each of the three legs. He pushed against the tripod lightly. It didn’t move. He pressed harder and it remained in place. “Good,” he said aloud.

  Jake cleared the dead grass and bits of rock from the ground at the stock of the Sharps and lowered himself to the ground, a boot on each side of the steel triangle in front of him. He dug his heels into the soil a bit and shifted his butt back and forth until he was settled and stable. Only then did he peer down the sights.

  The view of the farther saloon was marginally better than that of the closer one, simply because of his perspective from the hill. The whitened rack from a longhorn steer mounted on the wall over the batwing doors on the farther gin mill winked bits of the morning sunlight back at him. The glass of the two lanterns, one hung on each side of the doors at about head-height on a tall man, glinted light back at him. He had an unobstructed view of the front of the closer bar. Smoke from the chimney of that one indicated the place was coming awake.

  The calm—the period of thoughtless inactivity—that Jake always experienced as he waited on a stand settled over him, and he welcomed it. This state of being totally aware of what was happening in the target area but detached from everything else, as if nothing or no one existed other than the target, was a prerequisite of any truly effective sniper. Sinclair had begun to learn it many years ago in tree stands while wild boar hunting with his father. “Just go away, Son,” his father had told him. “Don’t be here in any physical way. Only your eyes should move and your mind should be as quiet and calm as your body. . . .”

  Early morning traffic in Fairplay was moving. A swamper emptied a bucket in the street in front of the farther saloon. Some hammering—greatly reduced by the distance—reached Jake from inside the wrecked sheriff’s office. Five men rode out of the livery stable corral, each in separate directions. Within fifteen minutes, five others rode into town, tied their horses to the rail in front of the bar with the steer horns, and pushed their way through the batwings.

  Sinclair sat, watching, his eyes the only part of his body that moved.

  There was more traffic on Main Street now, both pedestrian and mounted. Men, in twos and threes, strolled back and forth between the saloons. A couple of workers used a draft horse and a chain to wrestle lengths of board from the front of the sheriff’s office. Amazingly, the tinkling of a piano reached Jake at a time when most people would barely be finishing breakfast.

  When Jason Mott and one of his cohorts stepped out and stood in the sun under the steer horns, Jake’s hands moved slowly. His left went out to the stock of the rifle resting on the tripod plate made to accept it. His right hand moved to the breech and his index finger curled within the trigger guard. Only after his hands were in place did he lean slightly forward at the waist, easing the right side of his face against the walnut stock. What breeze there had been had dwindled to nothing as the sun rose higher; now the air was dead still. Jake found Mott’s face in his sights and lowered the rifle a hair, sighted on Mott’s chest. A head shot at four hundred yards was too risky—the chest was a broader target and actually, a slug from a Sharps placed pretty much anywhere on the upper body would kill a man just as dead as the same round would entering the target’s forehead. Jake drew a long breath. The barrel of his weapon was perfectly steady. This isn’t right.

  This doesn’t feel right. Jake released the breath. Mott was waving one arm, making some sort of emphatic point to the outlaw he was speaking to. He moved his body slightly and Jake had to adjust his rifle accordingly. He’s going to start walking in a few seconds. A still shot is always more sure than one at a moving target. This is the time.

  Sinclair took in another long breath. His finger quivered the slightest bit against the smooth, highly polished curve of the trigger. What the hell? I’ve never trembled before when I was on a target. Never.

  It was a matter of a slow, steady squeeze and his job would be finished. He could ride back to Galvin’s place and tell Lou and the men that he’d cut the head off the rattlesnake. Then he could move on.

  Beads of sweat started from his hairline and wandered down to his eyebrows, the liquid quickly turning cold on its journey. He swallowed hard. This isn’t a war. I can’t kill like this, a sniper in a civilian world. I’ll f
ace Mott and take him down, but I can’t do this. Mott deserves to die, but . . .

  Faster than he liked to move while aiming, Jake adjusted the position of the Sharps slightly and tugged the trigger. Mott, his hands stopped in midgesture, stood for the briefest part of a moment and then dropped to the wooden sidewalk. So did the man he was talking to. Another, who’d just begun pushing through the batwings from the saloon, hit the floor and rolled to the side. The dried, bleached bovine skull between the long sweep of the horns exploded in a puff of grayish smoke, scattering shards and splinters of the thick bone in all directions. Mott scrambled to his knees and dove into the saloon, a half heartbeat ahead of his cohort. The report, a deep, flat crack to Sinclair, rolled over the prairie and the town with the heavy resonance of an artillery round.

  Jake stood, ejected the spent cartridge, and slid another into the breech. He raised the Sharps to his shoulder. This time, he noticed, there was no quiver as his finger touched the trigger. The lantern above and to the left of the batwings shattered, the metal base and tank ruptured and twisted, spun away. A blue flame appeared immediately, lapping at the dark stain of kerosene on the wood. Jake reloaded and took out the lantern on the right. It too spewed fire. Three men rushed out of the nearer saloon, two shouldering rifles, followed almost immediately by another pair of outlaws armed only with pistols. A rifle barrel appeared from behind the batwings, between the escalating fires on either side of the swinging doors. Sinclair put a round into the center of one door, tearing it from its moorings and hurling it back into the saloon. A livery wagon sagging on its steel springs from the weight of the six barrels of beer it carried had emerged from an alley a moment before Jake had fired his first shot. The driver scrambled for safety and the confused and weary pair of draft horse stood in the traces, heads hanging, apparently familiar with the sounds of gunfire. Jake swung the rifle to a barrel and squeezed off a round. Beer arced in a delicate, glistening stream to the ground. Sinclair was a man with a long-established fondness for beer and ale. He licked his lips as he watched the amber fountain, his mouth moving in swallowing motions without his being conscious of it. Loading, aiming, and firing had already become an almost instinctive procedure—without thought, his hands steady and sure. He created two more beer geysers, shooting at points low on the barrels.

  Jake grinned as a pair of old rummies—bar hounds who spent their days running errands or emptying spittoons in exchange for a shot of red-eye or a schooner of beer—lumbered out of the saloon waving bar rags as peace flags, hustling to the beer wagon. They sat in the growing puddles at the barrels, filling their hats and drinking them dry, hurrying frantically to repeat the process before the sources ran out.

  Buckets of water were being hurled at the flames from the lamps on either side of the batwings, killing the fire before it could entrench itself and begin to do some real damage. A pair of rifle barrels poked through the flimsy glass of the front windows of the saloon, quickly joined by another, and then another. The reports sounded to Jake like the Chinese firecrackers kids shot off on the Fourth of July—puny, insignificant when compared to the crashing roar of his Sharps. He stood, arrogantly, waving to the riflemen, knowing full well the rounds from their rifles, even with a sharpshooter behind the trigger, couldn’t reach him. He smiled broadly and was considering hauling the red bandana from his pocket and waving that when a slug whistled past his head, slicing through the air with a screeching hiss long before the resonant bellow of a Sharps or a similar caliber weapon reached him. “Holy shit,” he grunted, dropping to the ground.

  Jake knew that there was an enclosure behind the sheriff’s office and adjacent to the railroad depot where several of the outlaws’ horses were kept, and he knew that it wouldn’t be long until those horses were saddled and bringing their riders into the reach of rifles. As attractive as the thought of further shooting up of the town was, Sinclair crab-crawled backward, dragging his tripod with him, the Sharps cradled in his arms, until the top of the hill was between himself and Fairplay.

  Mare was ready to travel. As accustomed to gunfire as she’d become, the percussive blast of the buffalo gun was a bit much for her nerves. She danced when Sinclair mounted, and she wanted to run. He gave her all the rein she wanted. Within moments, Jake heard the sharp crackle of gunfire behind him. The sound brought a grim smile to his face. The range, he knew, was too long for the standard rifles, and he’d yet to meet a man who could shoot at a moving target from the back of a galloping horse with even a cannon such as a Sharps and hit anything smaller than a good-sized barn.

  Jake had started up a gradual rise when blood erupted from the left side of Mare’s neck and spurted into the breeze generated by her gallop. The horse stumbled half a step, shook her head violently from side to side, but recovered her gait, blood still flowing freely. It was then that the deep, hollow boom of the high-powered weapon reached Sinclair. He spurred Mare over the top of the rise and dragged her to a sliding stop, out of the saddle and on the ground at her head before she was fully halted. It was a flesh wound, he saw—a furrow about four inches long dug into Mare’s neck muscle a half foot below her ear. She’d bleed a bit, but it didn’t look like the major artery that ran through the set of neck muscles had been hit. He grabbed the hobbles from his saddlebag, fastened them onto Mare’s front legs and shoved her a bit more down the grade. Then, hauling the Sharps from the back of his saddle, he threw himself to the ground, crawled ten feet or so, and peered back at the riders pursuing him.

  Ten or a dozen men rode in a foolishly tight cluster, firing even though now they had no visible target. One rider sat his still horse fifty yards behind the group. The sun sparkled off the breech of his rifle as he raised it to his shoulder. Jake fed a bullet into his Sharps, aimed, and plucked the marksman out of his saddle with a hole in his chest the size of a large man’s palm. The outlaw’s rifle spun up and away from him and raised a puff of grit when it struck the ground. Jake reloaded. The knot of men had spread out and one of them had pulled ahead of the others, reins in his teeth, riding hell-for-leather, cranking the lever on his rifle and shooting at the gun smoke that rose from Jake’s last shot. Sinclair fed his Sharps with steady fingers, quickly but not hurriedly. The leading, hard-riding outlaw’s horse—a shiny bay with a good long stride, continued on for several yards before he realized that he no longer had a rider and then broke sharply to the side, shaking his head, reins flailing, keeping pace with the other riders for a few moments and then slowing to a stop, sides heaving. The man was a crumpled figure facedown in the dirt, the back of his shirt already saturated with blood.

  Sinclair reloaded and set his sights on the buffalo gun in the dirt and grass a couple of hundred yards away and fired. Dirt, rock, bits of gleaming metal, and shards of wood burst from the ground and a second report followed the bellow of Sinclair’s round. Again, the grim smile appeared. There must have been a round in the chamber and that’s what Jake’s shot had found. He no longer had to worry about the big gun, nor the man who’d fired it at him.

  Jake got the hobbles off Mare’s legs, barely avoiding a slashing hoof as the horse, now almost frantic with the pain from the gash in her neck and the heavy smell of her own blood, reared, squealing, eyes wide. He scrambled as close to Mare’s side as he could get, rifle clenched in his right hand, saddle horn and reins in his left, and danced a clumsy, unbalanced two-step with her until a misplaced hoof and a half stumble gave him the momentum he needed to haul himself into the saddle. He used his heels against Mare’s sides to urge her into a gallop, letting her drain off her panic through exertion. He held the gallop for a mile or so and when he checked the mare to a lope, she responded as always, her fright left behind. He turned in the saddle to check on his pursuers. They were stopped, clustered again, over a mile behind him. He rode on at the lope, letting Mare pick her way through the scrub.

  Why did they rein in? There was still a good bit of ground to cover before he reached Galvin’s place. The outlaws couldn’t catch him, not un
less his horse went down—which was certainly a possibility, given the terrain. Why, then—why didn’t the outlaws push him, hoping a rock or woodchuck hole would grab a hoof, snap a pastern or a leg? It didn’t figure. Jake rode on and when he began to hear his mount’s breathing become heavier, he reined her down to a canter. The furrow on her neck was still weeping blood, but the wound had already begun to form a crust along its length, the blood clotting well.

  He scanned a line of trees ahead and picked out a watchman in a tree. He waved and watched the look-out’s hat wave back. Jake swung Mare toward him and stopped under the tree. “Something caught my eye,” he called up into the branches. “A bit of light.”

  The lookout shifted his position on the branch he sat on, leg on either side, and looked down at himself. “I don’t see what . . . son of a bitch!” His eyes—and Jake’s—came to rest on the guard’s belt buckle, a fancy, Sears catalog-ordered model in silver, embossed with the Union Eagle, the size of a twenty-dollar gold piece. “Damn,” he said. “My wife give this to me a couple years ago for Christmas.” He nodded to Sinclair. “You got a good eye on you, Jake.” He set his rifle carefully across his thighs, released the buckle, and began hauling the belt through the loops in his pants. “I’ll jus’put this away till this whole deal is over.”

  “You do that,” Jake said. “Fine-looking buckle, though.” He rode on, holding Mare at a walk.

  When Sinclair reached the Galvin barn he was hungry, very thirsty, and his Sharps needed cleaning before the acids released by the firing could set into the rifling of the barrel, but Mare put all that into the background. He rubbed her down, avoiding the wound, checked the set of all four of her shoes, and offered her a half bucket of fresh water, which she sucked at enthusiastically. He left her stall as she munched a scoop of crimped oats from her feed box and returned a few minutes later with a bottle of alcohol, a tin can of bag balm, a pan of hot water, and some strips of clean white cloth provided by the ladies in the kitchen. One of them—the woman who had embarrassed him so thoroughly several days ago with her comment about Doc, stood on her tiptoes and used a washcloth to clean the stippling of burnt powder from his face, commenting that “you need a wife to keep you tidy an’keep your rooster crowin’,” again bringing a bright rush of blood to his face.