I was the last. I had a boot in the stirrup and my left hand on the money sack and the saddle horn when someone drew a bead on me and a slug hit my right arm and shattered the bone not two inches from the scar I had collected south of that cantina in New Mexico. It hurt terribly bad. I let my arm hang in its sleeve and swung up into the saddle and the horse skittered around lifting a hoof with every gunshot. Then I got hit again pretty hard with a second rifle bullet. It smashed through the back of my hip like a railroad spike and tore out through my groin and my right pocket. Hot blood streamed down inside my boots but I couldn’t feel my right leg at all so the ache was worse than the hurt.

I was almost deaf from the gunfire. It was coming from everywhere, snapping branches, knocking things down, singing off anything hard. My horse was cantering and champing at the bit and he was so scared the whites of his eyes showed, but I pulled him back with my one good arm. I wasn’t thinking that a coward would do this, a brave man some other thing; I merely saw that Maple Street was vacant and that I could gallop out like I’d seen Dick Broadwell do and maybe get away, but when I skirted the horse around I could see men in sleeve garters and suit coats and aprons running across the bricks and men were at the back door of every place I looked at, loading rifles or lifting them up, and my brother Bob, whom I’d loved and been next to for twenty years, was sunk down and dying and there wasn’t any question, no, I went after him. I jerked my horse around and he balked at the smoke and I kicked him at the stifle with my good leg. I sat tall as I could, lifting out of the bouncing jog with my stirrups, my Winchester rifle crossed in my lap with smoke still twisting from it, and I frowned for all the good citizens like thirty years of badman and desperado. I leaned for Bob without stopping my horse, bent as far as I could with blood dripping off my fingers and my shattered arm hanging down to help him lift to the back of my saddle. Bob was near dead; I could see that. He had his hat off and his hair stuck out and his neck and face looked blackened with coal dust except where the sweat streaked it white. He saw me and said, “Don’t mind me, Emmett. I’m done for. But don’t you surrender, boy. Die game!”