“I'm going to get some water for you. You want food?”

Jeff shook his head. “Water.”

“I'm going to get that.”

“What are we going to do about these ones?” Sisson asked.

“Nothing,” Tom said. “Leave them be.”

“We killed them.”

“That's right, and that's all we're going to have to do with them.”

“I better go find the horses,” Sisson said.

“Fast as they was going, they're miles gone now,” Tom said.

“Got to find them. Can't walk out of here.”

“Well, do it, then.”

Tom went back into the cabin and poured some water from his canteen into a tin cup for the Old Man. He looked around. There wasn't much there. Some clothes and their guns. A little food. They had been eating out of cans since Ola May died. Better take it all, he thought. He saw the leather folder for the mine papers and picked that up and put it in his pocket.

“I thought I told you to wash your face,” Tom said when John came back.

“I did.”

“You're bleeding like a pig.”

“I know. You too.”

“All three of them missed us. Still messed us up, though.”

“Bastards,” John said.

“Bastards.”

“Got horses,” Sisson said. “Two horses and a mule.”

“Not ours.”

Sisson nodded toward the dead lawmen. “Theirs.”

Tom shrugged. “Ours now.”

Tom took the water and papers to the Old Man inside the mine entrance. He held up Jeff's head so he could drink a little. Jeff coughed most of it up, mixed with blood. Tom put the papers under the blanket on the Old Man's chest. “We ain't going to need these. You neither, I guess. But it's your mine. Probably always was.”

He looked at the Old Man and thought the Old Man was going to cry. “They hurt you pretty bad, Old Man.”

Jeff just coughed some more. At just a whisper he said, “Go.”

“We are,” Tom said. “Don't want to leave you here, but we got to go. Got to get out of here.”

The Old Man raised his hand an inch or two and twitched it. Good-bye. Tom walked out of the mine and up the hill toward the cabin. The bodies of the lawmen were spread evenly around. He sighed. It had started to snow.

CHAPTER ONE

1918

Tom Power had glass splinters in his eye. His brother John had a large wood splinter in his eye, and a piece of his nose had been blown off. Both were blind on the left side. The wounds were open and bleeding, and their blood mixed on their clothing with the blood of the dead and dying they had left behind.

They kept riding, moving forward. Tom Sisson, the hired man, followed them at a distance as they descended the Galiuro Mountains of southern Arizona, heading toward Redington and the northwest base of the mountains. It was Sunday, late morning. They were the only ones left alive.