Short bumped back through the cars with Bryant’s Winchester at carry. A black porter stood on the platform between the Pullman and the baggage car holding a step stool against his knee. Short took his hat off and leaned out into the air. His blond hair blew flat on his head.

“What’s the next stop?”

“Waukomis. About two minute away.”

Blackface Charley Bryant, heard Short’s voice, shoved the baggage door open, lifted the deputy marshal’s revolver up. “You should see the surprise on your face, Mr. Short.”

Short glared at him, then swung Bryant’s rifle up to his hip and fired it just as Bryant pulled the trigger of Short’s revolver. It sounded like two doors slamming, and all the air was blue. Bryant was flung back against the steel of the car; Short staggered back a step with a dark hole in his vest that he brushed at like it was food crumbs. Bryant grimaced and started to sag down and the deputy marshal shot him again and Bryant sat down hard.

Bryant saw his legs twitching and the urine making a stain on his pants but his back was broken and the nerves were dead: his pain was small as heartburn. He closed his eyes and lowered the pistol and Short took him for dead. Short leaned against the railing with blood oozing through his vest and saw the depot a quarter-mile ahead with women in bustles on the dock. He pushed away to drag his prisoner out of the doorway and spare the women’s eyes, but he hadn’t walked a half a yard before Bryant lifted his pistol again and fired five explosions, even clicking the trigger through three empty cartridges before he let the pistol drop to his lap.

Short slammed back against the Pullman door with the blasts and took bullets in his lung, his liver, his kidney, his spleen. Smoke rolled between the cars and sucked out as the brakes screeched on the rails. The porter and the conductor were crouched at the end of the Pullman and passengers knelt on the floor. The baggage man shoved the baggage door wide and wrenched the pistol from Bryant’s hand and dragged him back by the collar of his shirt and kicked his head until it was soft, shouting, “You bastard!” over and over again.

Short heaved forward from the Pullman car and walked across the platform and into the baggage car. (I’ve never heard of a stronger man.) The front of his suit was blood. “Let’s lay him up on this trunk,” he said.

The baggage man stared at him, disbelieving. Short bent for Blackface Charley Bryant’s trouser cuffs and the baggage man took his shoulders and they lifted the body up that way. The dead man’s eyes were closed and blood slid out of his mouth like saliva.