Prologue — Sutter's Crossing
The town was called Sutter's Crossing, and it lay against the base of a long red mesa in the northern Texas country, a half-day's ride from the New Mexico line. The mesa kept the place in shadow until ten in the morning and gave the shadow back at three. Between those hours the bare sun lay on the buildings without grace and the dust in the street took on the color of old brick. It had been a stage stop once, before the line moved south, and now it was a single dirt street with twelve buildings on it and a graveyard at the western end that was bigger than any of them. The wind came down off the mesa in the afternoon and did not stop until midnight. It tasted like iron and dust, and from the second week of October on, like woodsmoke off kitchen fires. Men who lived in Sutter's Crossing long enough stopped bothering to take their hats off indoors, because the wind put them back on the moment they stepped outside.
The rider came in from the east on the day in question with the sun thirty minutes from setting. The bay he rode was an honest horse with white stockings on three legs and a saddle that had seen ten thousand miles, the leather darkened at the skirts where his thigh had ridden against it for years. The man himself was lean and weathered, the dust set deep in the seams around his eyes, and the trench coat he wore was the color of old dust as well — long enough to come almost to his stirrups, dark at the cuffs from a hundred fires he had warmed his hands at on a hundred nights. A flat-brimmed hat sat low against the wind. His hands rode the reins the way a man's hands sit on a thing he has held since he was twenty. The eyes under the brim were the color of a winter sky over open prairie. Two pistols hung at his hips, one left, one right, the grips worn smooth from work.
He came down the street at a walk. The bay's hooves were quiet on the packed dirt, no flourish in them, no hurry. A few doors he passed had men standing in them, and none of those men called out. The barber, in a leather apron with his sleeves rolled, stood with a towel over his shoulder and the lather drying on it; he watched the rider go by, then stepped back inside, closed his door, and slid the bolt across — a thing he had not done on a weekday in nine years. Above the dry goods store a child's face appeared in an upstairs window for two seconds and then a hand drew the curtain across.
Past the dry goods store he rode, past the livery with its two open stalls, past the church with the cross askew on its steeple, past the office of the man called the sheriff, who was not in. The Three Kings stood at the south end of the street, two stories of weathered board with the name painted in green above the doors in lettering that had not been refreshed since the year the railroad came in north of the mesa and took most of the town's trade. The rider drew up his horse outside it. The bay shifted once under him and then stood still.
There was a boy of about ten on the porch, sitting on the boards with his back to the wall and a mongrel dog at his feet. He wore a shirt that had been somebody's larger shirt before it was his, and trousers that ended above his ankles. A stick lay across his knee, and the dust at the edge of the porch was scratched with shapes — letters, by the look of them, a boy practicing his name. When the rider stopped, the boy looked up and went still in the way small animals go still in tall grass. The dog put its ears flat against its skull and did not growl.
The rider looked at the door of the Three Kings. He sat his horse for the time it took the wind to make one long pass down the street. Then he swung down. The reins went over the rail in a single half-hitch — the knot of a man who did not expect to untie it slow. The boards of the porch took his weight without a sound. As he passed the boy he touched the brim of his hat very slightly, no more than the small lift a man might give a stranger met on a road. Neither the boy nor the dog moved. The rider pushed through the batwing doors and went in.