by a strong jaw, ice-blue eyes separated by a blunt, moderately large nose. His attire was simple—homespun shirt and denim trousers, the latter tucked into a pair of high-topped buckskin boots with fringes around the top cuffs. He wore a walnut-handled Frontier Colt in a well-worn holster on his right hip, and moved like he knew how to use it. And although the stranger had seen the marshal’s wide grin and the laugh crinkles at the corners of his ice-blue eyes, he’d also noted those eyes narrowing and deepening to a much darker blue during flashes of anger. In summation, the stranger made McQueen for a self-assured, generally easygoing individual, but one with a dangerous edge that marked him as no one to be trifled with.
Setting aside his bar towel and raising the shot of red-eye Farrelly had placed before him, the marshal said, “I thank you for this, mister. Could thank you more properly if I knew your name, which, it occurs to me, I never got around to hearin’.”
The stranger raised his own glass. “It’s Lofton. Henry Lofton.”
“And I’m Elwood McQueen . . . Here’s to you.”
Both men tossed down their shots.
Returning his glass to the bar top, Lofton said, “Now you’ve got me curious. You say your name is McQueen. But your deputy—the big fellow you referred to as Moosejaw—kept calling you ‘Firestick.’ It may not be polite to probe too much since we’ve only just met, but I’m thinking there’s got to be an interesting story or two behind such colorful names. Care to enlighten me?”
CHAPTER 3
Without waiting to be asked, Farrelly had already begun pouring refills. As he did so, one side of his mouth pulled into a wry smile. “Oh, there’s stories behind those names right enough,” he said. “Don’t keep the poor fella in suspense, Firestick. Go ahead and tell him.”
“Now, Art. Don’t go makin’ more of it than there is.”
“Aw, come on,” the barkeep protested. “I’ve heard you tell plenty of tales about your mountain-man days. No need to be shy about it now.”
“Mountain-man days?” echoed Lofton. “Now I’m really intrigued. You must tell me more.”
McQueen tossed back his second shot, then pushed the emptied glass toward Farrelly, saying, “Okay. But enough panther juice. Pour me a beer to keep my tongue oiled for the tellin’. That’ll be strong enough.”
After downing his own drink, Lofton said, “Same for me on the beer.”
Once a tall brew was in front of him, McQueen began. “I was born and raised a farm lad back on the flatlands of Iowa. One of my pa’s brothers, Uncle Eugene, ran a little country inn on the main road that bordered the south end of our land. Most of the travelers who stopped by his place were headed out West, some were comin’ back. The yarns he heard from those returnin’ and then passed along at family gatherin’s were wondrous tales to the ears of this restless farm boy. I knew at an early age I wasn’t cut out to be chained to a plot of land or a backbreakin’ plow or any of the rest that went with it. Hearin’ those tales of the West pretty much set the course I knew I’d be followin’ the first chance I got.”
McQueen paused for a moment, a trace of sadness passing briefly over his face. “Reckon I’ll always feel a mite guilty about leavin’ my pa with one less set of hands to work the farm,” he continued. “But I think he knew early on, just like I did, that it wasn’t something I was cut out for. So I tell myself I sorta balanced it out by also leavin’ him one less mouth to feed. I remain hopeful he didn’t think poorly of me for the rest of his days.
“At any rate, light out is what I did at about seventeen or so. Headed straight for the Colorado Rockies. The glory days of mountain-mannin’—the beaver-trappin’ and such—had mostly run out by the time I got on the scene. But there was still a livin’ to be made in pelts and hides and huntin’ meat for the minin’ camps. I lucked out by fallin’ in with some fellas here and there who showed me the ropes and didn’t leave a greenhorn to starve or freeze to death those first couple winters. In the end, I had some pretty good years there in the Rockies.
“But then”—the marshal sighed after taking a pull of his beer—“I got a fresh dose of wanderlust, and knew the only way to scratch the itch was to roam farther west. So that’s what I did. Spent some time in and around Yellowstone. Moved on to the Cascades. Looked out on the Pacific Ocean . . . Eventually, though, the Rockies beckoned me back. It was on the way there, at a rendezvous in Wyoming, that I met a couple of rascals who I wasn’t able to shake—and never really wanted to, truth be known. The three of us have stuck together from that point on.”
“Let me guess,” Lofton interjected. “I’m betting I just met one of them, sort of, in Deputy Moosejaw.”
“That’d be another bet you’d win,” McQueen allowed. “His real name is Hendricks, by the way. Jim Hendricks. I’ll get to how he came to be called Moosejaw in a minute, but while we’re at it, you might as well know that the second rascal I ran into at that rendezvous can be found hangin’ around these parts also. He’s my other deputy, in fact. His name is Malachi Skinner.”
“No nickname for him?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute, too.” McQueen took another drink of his beer. “After the three of us throwed in together there in Jackson Hole, we spent the next several years in the high country. Meager years, from a money-earnin’ standpoint, through much of it. But some mighty good times all the same. We were wild and free, and we always had meat to eat and a tight shelter from the cold and rain.
“When the Civil War came along and tore hell out of most of the rest of the country, it never really touched us up there where we were. Hell, the two armies had been fightin’ for months before we ever even heard anything about it. When we did, on account of all three of us livin’ away from so-called civilization for as long as we had . . . well, we never really understood what the fuss was about and we weren’t rightly sure which side we belonged on if we would’ve decided to go off and fight.”
“Too bad more didn’t feel that way,” Lofton said bitterly. “It might’ve saved the senseless slaughter of a lot of innocent young men.”
McQueen shrugged. “What it boiled down to, in the end, was that the war never came around us, so we never went lookin’ for it. Thinkin’ back on that time now, after the passin’ of years, I wonder if we did the right thing. We weren’t cowards, I’m certain of that much. But that’s the only thing I’m certain of. We live in this country, we reap the benefits, such as they are . . . But we never fought for ’em. Maybe we should have.”
“But neither did you fight against the side that prevailed,” Lofton pointed out. “There’s always that to consider.”
“Reckon that’s one way to look at it.” McQueen heaved a sigh. “Anyway, we gradually worked our way down out of Colorado and into the southern Rockies and the San Juans in New Mexico. It was there that we ran into some serious trouble with hostile Indians. Oh, we’d had skirmishes before. Plenty of ’em in plenty of different places. But it was usually a hit-and-run kind of thing, never nothing that dragged out for very long.
“Once we got in amongst the Jicarilla and Coyo-tero Apaches, though, it was a whole different kettle of fish. They got real intense about lettin’ us know we wasn’t welcome in their mountains, and we took a stubborn—and probably not too smart—stance when it came to lettin’ ’em know we wasn’t of a mind to be run out. And so it went for the next handful of years. Lots of run-ins,
