The Broken Spoke

 The Broken Spoke✓

The sun hung like a hot copper coin over the jagged ridge of the Dragoon Mountains. Silas rode a bay gelding that had seen better years, its coat caked in gray alkali dust, ribs showing beneath the hide. The animal's breath came slow and tired through its flared nostrils.

 Silas didn't mind the heat.

 He minded the silence.

 It was the kind of silence that made a man count his heartbeats, wondering which one would be his last.

 For three days he'd ridden through country where even the coyotes seemed reluctant to howl. The desert stretched in every direction, all thornbush, baked earth, and distant mountains shimmering beneath the white blaze of the afternoon. His canteen was nearly empty. His bedroll was stiff with dust. His shirt clung to his back like wet paper.

 None of it mattered.

 Not anymore.

 At the crest of the last rise, Red Gulch had appeared below him: four peeling shacks, a blacksmith's lean-to, a church without a steeple, and a jailhouse ,and broken down inn, this place was going to be is destiny.

Awaiting him were the men who raped his wife and killed his children.

He entered the town rode his horse up to  the broken down inn and preceded to enter the salon doors into a sense of cold silence.

The four men were drinking and laughing before he entered their looked at him and one saw that he had no guns on him and smiled.

(Old Yellow come to get us boys,that's have some fun,)

Before they could draw their guns,the gunman asked all the other people in the broken down inn to leave,thiwas a clatter of panic towards the salon doors.

Then the gunman walked towards the four men and in a blink of an eye draw a series of knives each hitting it's target straight in the heart.

The gunman checked to make sure all of the four men were dead got back onto his horse and rode out to be with his departed wife and children at his farm