Carey Seaman stood in the alley not twenty feet behind me with both hammers cocked on his shotgun and a bead on my back where he figured my heart was. The shotgun kicked and I was blasted into my horse. His mane straggled across my face. It was hot from the sun. I was sliding from the saddle and I saw Julia in a white dress and it was only a second later when the shotgun kicked again and I took all the double-ought shot in my shoulder blade and shoulder and when I dropped to the ground it was like slamming into a board of eighteen nails, for I had eighteen black shot two inches under my skin, ruining muscle and bone.

I stared at my brother Bob but he was slunk down and his cheek was in his vomit and his eyes were rolled back in his skull and a fly crawled into his open mouth.

21

I COULDN’T HEAR ANYTHING. Nothing at all. Then the I dogs barked, maybe fifty dogs all over town, and there were boots rasping in the alley and Kloehr was yelling, “They are all down!”

He nudged Bob with his boot and squatted by me stern as Melchizedek, his hot rifle against my temple. “Put your hands up, you no-good-for-nothing!”

I was stupid with shock and awfully woozy but I lifted my left hand as well as I could, then dropped it down. He grabbed the money sack. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie McLaughlin.”

“I got something to tell you: you’re dying. I bet you never believe it is possible.”

I turned my head. About twenty men were already in the alley and others were running through the side lots with their rifles clenched, hollering the news. Only twelve minutes had elapsed from Cubine’s first shot to Seaman’s last. Henry Isham turned around in the middle of the alley and saw four dead horses, four dead men, and me. He said, “We got ’em, by God, didn’t we? We put ’em all down!”

They tenderly lifted City Marshal Connelly but his head flopped back and his soul departed before Dr. Wells could see to him.

Carpenter stood at the Condon bank’s southwest doors, his fists on his hips. Ball had the discarded silver in a tin box. He sat with it in a chair. Carpenter said, “I guess we’d better board up these windows.”

“Yes,” said Ball. “That should be the first thing.”