The High Plains of Wyoming's open range are a chance for men to make a killing--or just to kill. Rourke, a bounty hunter with a trail of graves and gunfights behind him, is drawn into a high-stakes game where the greedy and powerful want to exploit the West for their own gain, regardless of the rules. In a time and place where death and violence are as much a part of life as untamed herds of buffalo and the wild freedom of the raging winds, Rourke has to choose between drifting through life and taking a stand, knowing it could be his last. Battling unseen enemies as well as audacious rustlers, Rourke rides with a blacksmith whose best years are long past him, and Caledonia MacReynolds --a girl as free and wild as the Wyoming sunsets--to stand up against the odds. As the dark side of progress spills greed across the Plains, drifters and grifters must make their choices, and take their stands. As the final showdown nears, Rourke must decide which friends are still true, which ones are betraying him, and who--if anyone--can be trusted. The powerful forces of change spreading from the East meet the free spirits of the West in a confrontation that forces Cal and Rourke to stand tall and shoot straight.
Wispy dust blew across the hard-baked packed dirt of Broken Corners' one and only street. It left a gritty coat of white on horses and men who had long since inured themselves to the omnipresent irritant. Along both sides of the short space of buildings that marked the town, cracked, sun-baked, weather-beaten boards gleamed through the flecked paint of the false-fronted buildings. Deep gray clouds far off to the west spoke of looming rain, rain that would slake the thirst of wilting corn while turning the town's pitted street into an impassable trough of Wyoming mud. That would be another day--a day when life was lived according to its usual routine and the street would be all but empty because everyone had work to do on the ranches and farms that spread around the small settlement.
Today, Broken Corners' one street was filled to overflowing. Knots of men and boys gathered along the hitching rails by the hotel and the store. Voices rose and faded like the rolls and swells of the sea as their tension of anticipation grew. The pounding of the boys as they ran along the duckboards added drumbeat-like spikes of tension as men waited. Women remained inside, where they pushed aside curtains as they pretended to dust furniture or straighten displays in the stores. More than one woman wished men would simply kill each other far from town so that these gory spectacles could be avoided. Many also feared that--like the town over the hill--men who had wagers on one man or the other might turn the gunfight into an occasion for a violent brawl. The women knew full well who would have to sew up the wounded.
However, even the women who disapproved knew that the fuss was to be expected. In this late summer of 1868, little varied the work-a-day life in a hard-bitten Wyoming frontier town as much as the exhilarating spectacle of two armed men walking out into the street with each planning to kill the other in a gunfight. Unlike the times when drunken cowboys staggered out of the saloon and fired at each other, being as likely to hit the sky as the man they were angry with, this showdown was for real. The deadliest bounty hunter in all of Wyoming had challenged one of the most famous outlaws of the territory, a man with a string of killings who always came back to Broken Corners.
The time for the showdown had been set in a note delivered to the outlaw back in the morning. Advance notice gave the crowd time to grow. There was more attendance than for the travelling preacher. Men argued over whose watch was right, as if any of them were. One thing they knew as the sun passed its peak: It was almost time.
From the direction of the hills that shimmered distantly through the heat, a lone rider slowly neared the scraggly collection of buildings. The man had been resting in the shade of the trees by the craggy brook a mile to the west. One of the men coming into to town to see the gunfight insisted that had Red Jim gone out to get him, it would have been easy because the gunfighter was sleeping. The truth was not quite that simple, but the bounty hunter knew that when there was nothing to do but wait, he might as well be comfortable. He had done this often enough, after all. All he had wanted while he waited was a place to be alone.
Now, he seemed indifferent as the horse walked down the street. He dismounted and hitched his mount to a rail, talking quietly to the horse for a moment. He smiled at the animal as if this was another day, another town. The horse was a giant black stallion with a white mark on his forehead. To a man, the townspeople and ranchers admired the animal, which combined beauty, strength and speed. Plans were already being made to sell him or steal him when the stranger would need him no more, so confident that today's drama would end in the way all others before had finished--Red Jim standing tall with a smoking weapon in his hand and the lifeless body of a challenger who was not quite fast enough being dragged away to be buried at the edge of town in what was the beginning of a gunfighters' cemetery.
The man who walked away from the horse did not impress the onlookers. He was medium-sized, carelessly dressed and thin in the face. His boots looked old. His clothes were worn and covered with trail dust. Saloon bums often dressed better. The flat-crowned black hat was nondescript. Beneath it, his face was shadowed by the hat, hidden by a beard and muted beneath the layers of dirt. The eyes that burned holes from beneath the brim radiated intensity that was in contrast with the rest of his actions, but not many townsfolk had ventured close enough to look. They did notice the pistol strapped to his right leg below the hip in a gun belt that seemed to be as much a part of the man as his arms and legs. They knew his name was Rourke. What he was trying to do this day he had done before. Some said he had killed fifty men; others put the number lower. Despite the lack of information, all were convinced he was deadlier than almost anyone else--except for Red Jim. On that one, they were not yet convinced. They knew what Red Jim could do. There were graves on the edge of town to prove it. They had told this to the man when he issued his challenge to Red Jim. The man accepted the information without comment. If he cared, it didn't show. ..
From Chapter 1 of "Wyoming Showdown."
