Coffin Flats, New Mexico, is a nothing town in the middle of nowhere—which suits Jim Glass just fine. Looking for any job, he's courted by the local brothel owner—because Jim is good with his fists as well as his gun—but instead he is hired by Marshal Chalk Bronson.
A hothead named Johnny Waco is threatening to burn Coffin Flats down if his runaway wife's not returned to him—a lady who loved Marshal Bronson until fate and war separated them. Now Glass has a plan that could make things right . . . or far worse than they are already—the worst kind of scheme that could pull the drifter into a world of killers and heartbreak . . . and toward a destiny full of dying.
After I turned the badges into Captain Rogers in Eagle Pass, he thanked me for what I'd done and said, "Jim, I wish you could have brought those murdering bastards in alive so I could have hanged them myself."
I told him I wished I could have too but they didn't give me much of a chance to negotiate.
"It's one thing to kill one of my men," he said, "another to kill three and steal their badges and guns. To me, it's robbing the dead, which only makes the crime worse, and even though I am sworn to uphold the law, had I been you I don't think I would have negotiated with them either."
Captain Rogers was a short, blue-eyed man who'd spent most of his adult life fighting for the right things. He'd pulled me out a jail cell where I was doing thirty days for drunk and disorderly and bought me a decent meal and said he was sorry to have seen me go downhill like I had done. I said I was sorry too. Then he told me about the killings and said, "You want to be a Ranger again?" I'd most likely have turned him down but I knew all three of those boys—Frank May, Billy Higgens, and Josiah Barkley. Two had wives and children, and I knew them too. And when the Captain told me how they'd been ambushed and then executed by being shot in the back of the head, I could see myself finding the men who did it. And I could see myself doing what I did to their killers—which is exactly what happened that day in Hondo County where I found them.
Then I told the Captain I was quitting for good, I didn't want to wash my hands in any more blood. He asked what I'd do, and I said I thought I'd go work at something peaceful like on a ranch somewhere, and we shook hands and that was the end of my Rangering days and the start of all the rest of my days.
And now I was on the drift again like I had been since I quit.
I'd bet a dollar that the crow watching me from atop the wobbling sign wondered what such a raggedy looking fellow like me was doing riding a twenty dollar horse with a forty dollar saddle into a town that looked like little more than some old lumber somebody had spilled off the back of their wagon and had been hammered up into badly constructed buildings on a prairie so lonesome even the wind never stopped to take a rest.
And I'll bet another dollar I wouldn't have an answer.
The sign read:
Coffin flats pop. 756
no discharging of firearms
by order of city marshal
welcome
Summer was dying and winter hadn't woke up yet. Some called it "Indian summer." All I know was it was a sweet time of year—not too hot, nor cold—and I'd come a long ways from the last place I'd been and was thirsty and tired. I was also down to my last few dollars from the last job I quit, when the ramrod told me to go dig Mr. Watts some postholes, which was the last straw for me, considering what all had preceded it.
I told the ramrod I didn't dig postholes, and he said that I'd better go collect my pay then because he was only paying for a posthole digger that day and not some fancy duded-up cowboy who thought himself too high and mighty to do work except from the back of a horse. I said that was about the size of it. But where he got the idea I was high and mighty escaped me even though I wasn't about to disabuse him of his notions. Hell, I figured I'd already gone the extra mile by mending fence wire, something no man worth his salt should ever do.
So I went on up to the big house where Mr. Watts lived and knocked on the door, and his wife answered and looked surprised to see me. I told her I was quitting. She asked why and I told her my hand didn't fit a posthole digger was why and she rolled her eyes.
"Lord, Jim, it seems like such a little thing to be quitting over."
