Bad Reputation

 The bay gelding’s left ear twitched back, catching the dry rattle of a dead tumbleweed scraping against a sun-bleached wagon wheel. To my left, the sign for The Broken Spade hung by a single rusted hinge, groaning in the hot wind like a hanged man swinging from a cottonwood branch.

I didn’t need to look up at the second-story window of the dry-goods store to know the curtain was twitching. I could feel it. That familiar, cold little prickle at the base of my neck that had kept me breathing through thirty-four winters of lead-spitting malice.

Clint. They always knew the name before they knew the man.

I’d spent the last twenty miles coaxing the bay across the alkali flats of New Mexico, dreaming of nothing grander than a cup of chicory coffee that didn’t taste like boiled saddle leather and a three-legged dog to share the porch with. But trouble—quiet, greasy, persistent trouble—followed me around like the smell of a skunked hound. I never went looking for it. It just had a way of reading my tracks in the dust and deciding it liked the company.

I swung my right boot over thecantle and dropped into the dirt of Red Gulch, my spurs chiming a flat, heavy note against the hard-packed clay. My knees protested, stiff from the saddle and old iron that had settled into my left hip back in ’82 at a creek bed outside of Tucson.

The town was dead quiet. Too quiet. A stray mongrel rooting around a garbage barrel by the blacksmith’s forge tucked its tail between its legs and scuttled off the moment the leather of my coat brushed my holster.

I looped the reins over the hitching post outside The Last Drop Saloon, the town's primary watering hole and, undoubtedly, the place where my reputation had arrived three days ahead of me.

"Easy, boy," I murmured to the gelding, patting its lathered neck.

I reached up, adjusting the wide brim of my grease-stained hat to cast a deeper shadow over my eyes, then stepped across the threshold.

The heavy, batwing doors creaked open with a pathetic wheeze.

Inside, the transition from the blinding desert glare to the dim, amber-lit interior took a moment. The air smelled of stale beer, unwashed wool, and cheap lamp oil.

Then, the murmuring stopped.

It’s an odd thing, walking into a room full of living, breathing men and feeling the exact second their hearts collectively skip a beat. The piano player—a greasy-haired fellow in a vest missing half its pearl buttons—let his right hand linger too long on a high, discordant C-sharp before he snatched his fingers back as if the ivories had bitten him.

Fourteen men. I counted them without looking. Six sitting at the far poker table, their hands hovering dangerously close to their laps. Two propped against the bar, nursing whiskeys they’d forgotten how to swallow. The rest scattered like quail in the corners.

At the center of it all stood the barkeep, a bulky man with a drooping walrus mustache and a white apron stained the color of dried liver. He was holding a dirty rag, frozen mid-wipe over a glass that was already cleaner than anything else in the room.

"We don't want no trouble, mister," the barkeep said. His voice was too loud, bouncing off the low plank ceiling like a dropped horseshoe.

I didn't answer right away. I let the silence stretch, letting the weight of my presence settle into the floorboards. I walked slowly toward the bar, my spurs clicking rhythmically. Every eye in the room tracked my right hand, hovering just inches from the carved horn grips of the Remington strapped to my thigh. They weren't looking at my face. Men like that—men terrified of a ghost story—never look you in the eye. They look at the iron.

"Just a cup of coffee, mister," I said, my voice gravelly from the alkali dust. "And maybe a pull of whiskey to wash the trail down."

The barkeep swallowed hard. His Adam's apple bobbed like a cork in a wash tub. He reached behind him without breaking eye contact, grabbed a chipped ceramic mug, and began pouring from a steaming copper pot on the back burner. His hand shook so badly the black liquid sloshed over the rim, forming a dark puddle on the scarred oak bar.

"You... you're Clint," the barkeep whispered. It wasn't a question.

A murmur rippled through the poker table. One of the men sitting there—a young buck with a fancy pearl-handled Colt tucked into a velvet-lined cross-draw rig—shifted his weight. The chair legs scraped loudly against the floor.

"Sit down, Billy," an older man across from him muttered, his voice tight. "Keep your hands where we can see 'em."

"I heard he killed three men in Tombstone just for looking at his horse funny," Billy hissed, though he kept his voice down. Not down enough, though. In a room this quiet, a whisper carries like a gunshot.

I sighed, leaning my forearms against the bar. The wood was cold. I picked up the chipped mug, blew the steam away, and took a cautious sip. It was bitter, lukewarm, and tasted faintly of rusted iron. Perfect.

"I never looked at a man's horse funny in my life," I said mildly, staring into the dark reflection of my own face in the wet wood of the bar. "And it was two men in Tombstone. And they started it."

Nobody laughed. Humor is a luxury reserved for towns that don't expect to be burning by sundown.

The truth was, I was tired. My bones ached when the barometer dropped, and my trigger finger had a dull, throbbing throb that signaled a change in the weather. I’d spent twenty years trying to outrun the bloody ledger of my youth, but every time I crossed a county line, the telegraph wires seemed to buzz ahead of me. Beware the gray-eyed ghost. Watch out for the man with the notched grips.

They painted me as a demon. A cold-blooded killer who rode into peaceful hamlets just to watch the widows weep. They forgot—or maybe they never cared to know—about the sheep ranch outside of Abilene, or the storekeeper in Ojo Amarillo who tried to put a slug in my back over a card game I hadn't even cheated at. I didn't make the legends. The terrified men who survived me did that, desperate to explain why they’d run from a fight against a man who just wanted to be left alone.

"We got a marshal in this town," the barkeep said, his voice trembling as he set a bottle of amber rotgut beside my coffee. He didn't charge me. Nobody ever charged me. "He... he ain't gonna like you being here, mister."

"Is that a fact?" I poured a generous splash of the rotgut into my coffee. The amber bloomed darkly in the black liquid. "Where is he?"

"Up at the office," a voice called out from the shadows near the stairs.

A man stepped forward into the amber lamplight. He was young—maybe twenty-five, wearing a shiny tin star pinned crookedly to a stiff canvas vest. His cheeks were flushed, and he held a double-barreled shotgun tucked awkwardly under his arm, the hammers cocked back with twin clicks that sounded entirely too loud in the room.

"I'm Marshal Vance," the kid said, puffing out his chest. He was trying to sound like a seasoned lawman, but his voice cracked slightly on the second syllable. "And you're violating the town ordinance against carrying firearms within city limits."

I took a slow sip of my spiked coffee, letting the burn clear the dust from my throat. Then I turned my head slowly, looking the kid up and down. Clean boots. Unscuffed holster. A brand-new Remington scattergun that probably still had factory grease in the barrels.

He was eager. That was the dangerous part. An old, tired man with a gun knows when to walk away. A young man with a tin star thinks his badge makes him bulletproof.

"Ordinance," I repeated, my voice flat. "That a fact? Funny, I didn't see a sign at the perimeter."

"The sign's blowed down," Vance snapped, shifting his grip on the shotgun. His knuckles were bone-white. "Doesn't matter. You're Clint. Everyone within fifty miles knows what you bring with you. Death and damnation. We don't want your kind in Red Gulch."

At the poker table, Billy leaned forward, his eyes bright with a dangerous, stupid excitement. "Shoot him, Marshal," he whispered. "Earn your pay."

The silence in the room grew so dense you could have sliced it with a Bowie knife. Outside, the wind howled softly, rattling the loose shingles on the roof.

I set the coffee mug down. The ceramic made a sharp clack against the bar.

I didn't turn around fully, keeping my body angled toward the counter, but I let my right hand drop naturally, fingers resting a hair's breadth from the horn grip of my revolver.

"Son," I said softly, looking the young marshal dead in the eye. "Put that scattergun down before you blow a hole in your own foot. I’m just passing through. I got no quarrel with Red Gulch, and I got no quarrel with a boy playing dress-up with a tin star."

Vance’s face flushed a deep, furious crimson. "You calling me a boy? I've cleaned up three gangs this year alone! You think I'm scared of an old cripple?"

"I ain't calling you anything except sensible if you walk away right now," I replied, my tone dropping an octave, losing all warmth. "Because if you pull those triggers, marshal, the next sound you hear won't be the wind."

The kid hesitated. For a second, just a fraction of a second, common sense flickered behind his wide, terrified eyes. He looked at my face—weathered, lined, scarred by fire and lead—and he saw the vast, bottomless emptiness of a man who had nothing left to lose.

Then Billy laughed. A nervous, high-pitched cackle.

"He's bluffing, Marshal! Look at him! His hands are shaking!"

It wasn't true—my hands were steady as a granite marker—but it was the spark that hit the powder keg.

Vance jerked the shotgun upward.

In the span of a heartbeat, the world narrowed down to a pinprick of pure instinct. I didn't think. I didn't weigh the consequences. Forty years of survival took over, stripping away the weariness, the aching joints, the desire for a quiet porch and a three-legged dog.

My hand blurred to leather.

The Remington cleared the holster with a smooth, well-practiced hiss. The hammer cocked itself as it rose.

Bang.

The roar of the single shot filled the saloon like a clap of thunder inside a matchbox. The sulfur smoke rolled instantly, stinging my nostrils.

Marshal Vance didn't fire. He didn't even get the chance. The heavy brass slug caught the barrel of his shotgun dead-center, tearing the double barrels upward with a screech of tortured metal and ripping the weapon right out of his trembling hands. The scattergun slammed into the ceiling, showering plaster and dust down onto the poker table.

Vance stared at his empty, bleeding hands in sheer disbelief, his knees suddenly turning to water. He collapsed hard onto the floorboards, gasping for air, his right palm laid open and dripping red.

Across the room, the fourteen men sat frozen. Not a single hand moved toward a holster. Billy was pressed so hard against the back of his chair he looked like he was trying to phase through the wood.

The smoke drifted slowly toward the ceiling beams, dissipating into the amber gloom.

I thumbed the hammer of my Remington back down, slipping the heavy iron back into its worn leather home with a soft click. The silence in the room returned, heavier and more suffocating than before.

I picked up my coffee mug, took another sip—it was stone cold now—and set it back down on the bar.

I reached into my vest pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and flipped it onto the wood. It spun twice before wobbling to a halt next to the spilled whiskey.

"Keep the change," I said.

I turned my back on the terrified faces, the bleeding marshal, and the town that had judged me before I even crossed its border. I pushed through the batwing doors and stepped back out into the blinding New Mexico sun.

My bay gelding nickered softly, waiting patiently by the post.

I untied the reins, pulled myself heavily up into the saddle, and turned the horse's head toward the open flats. Somewhere out there, fifty miles west, was another town. Another saloon. Another bunch of nervous men waiting for the ghost to arrive.

I never wanted to get in trouble. But as I spurred the gelding into a steady trot, leaving Red Gulch behind in a cloud of alkali dust, I knew one thing for certain:

Trouble and I were going to be riding together for a long, long time.