Free Wild to the Bone by Peter Brandvold

coal soot and travel dust. “You got any Sam Clay on board, or is that too civilized for this boil-on-the-devil’s-ass country?”
    â€œI got plain old drinkin’ whiskey and bottled beer. I might even be able to rustle up a bottle of tequila , if you give me a minute.”
    â€œAh, shit, just—”
    â€œBear Haskell!” said a man behind him, cutting him off. He looked into the back bar mirror to see a sharp-faced redheaded gent in a black suit and a string tie rise from the table where he had been engaged in a poker game with two others.
    He was tall and slender, and he was wearing an eye patch. He was also wearing two pearl-butted Colts on his hips, both positioned for the cross-draw.
    Haskell turned to face the man and said, “Well, I’ll be jiggered if it ain’t ‘One-Eye’ Clem Magnus, his own mean an’ ugly self.” He glanced at the other two men, both glaring at him, and said in the same droll voice he’d used to address Magnus, “And Charlie Butters and Dawg Anderson. What privy pit did some old hydrophobic bobcat drag you two out of ?”
    â€œSame one it drug you out of, Bear,” said Charlie Butters, who gave a grunt as he hauled himself a little drunkenly out of his chair. He was as tall as Magnus, with dark, weather-beaten features and small, muddy eyes sunk deep in his bony face. He wore a fringed buckskin tunic and two shoulder holsters filled with Schofield .44s. A knife handle jutted from his high-topped right moccasin.
    Butters was—or at least, he had been—a game hunter for the Southern Pacific Railroad, along with several other things not quite so civilized. He and Dawg Anderson, who stood only a little more than five feet tall and was as mean as a two-headed diamondback, had been known to sell whiskey on Colorado Indian reservations and to hire themselves out as regulators for crooked labor unions, since shooting men came as easily to them as shooting deer and antelope.
    Bear knew of at least three territories both men were wanted in, so he assumed there were more.
    The three men before Haskell, including One-Eye Magnus, had fought for the Confederacy. Since the war was still relatively fresh in everyone’s mind even twenty years after Appomattox, they took umbrage with those who wore Union blue. Especially those Union veterans whose war record was as famous—or infamous, depending on which side you were on—as Bear Haskell’s.
    One-Eye said, “You killed my cousin at Monocacy Junction, you big bastard! And then because of you, my brother Willie and two more cousins was hanged down in New Mexico!”
    Haskell dipped his chin. “Yep, you’re right about that, One-Eye. Your cousin Ambrose was a casualty of the war, though I heard he even needed killin’ before it started. And that worthless brother of yours and your own even more worthless other two cousins were claim-jumping, cheating hardworking miners out of the gold that was rightfully theirs. They hanged, all right, and I wish they could have hanged twice.”
    Haskell shook his head once, slowly, keeping his hard gaze on Magnus’s lone, angry-bright eye. “They sure deserved it.”
    All three stared at him. Magnus stood to the left of the table they’d been playing cards at. The short one, Dawg Anderson, stood in front of the table, his back to it. Butters stood to the right of it. Dawg’s fat face, fringed with dirty brown whiskers, was split in a delighted grin, big fists clenched at his sides.
    Haskell had seen no reason to be diplomatic. There was little preventing a keg of dynamite from detonating when its lit fuse was as short as the unseen one in the club car. As soon as Magnus had heard the barman call out Haskell’s name, the fight was on.
    The only question in Bear’s mind was, would it be with guns, knives, or fists?
    One-Eye Magnus left his guns in their holsters as he bolted toward Bear,