Chapter Six

Nightfall went unnoticed by Polk Buckhorn, since he'd passed out an hour before sundown.

By sheer luck, he'd happened across a small cattle ranch a few hours' ride north of Carter's Refuge; after a few moments of weary speculation, he'd decided to take a chance on the odds that the owners wouldn't notice a stranger sleeping one off in their barn. They hadn't so far, and that was good enough for him.

Currently, he was dreaming of the Long Branch Saloon: a place that had made a powerful - if hazy - impression upon his subconscious. He was just starting to enjoy himself when Wyatt Earp entered the tavern and announced that Abraham Lincoln had passed a ban on whiskey, and that this left no choice but to close Dodge City down forever. The saloon was going to be turned into a museum, and Earp explained that Buck was going to be kept aboard as the star exhibit; he realized at this point that his glass had been filled with embalming fluid rather than alcohol, but for some reason he couldn't seem to stop drinking.

Buck groaned softly in his sleep. He'd had this dream before, and it wasn't one of his favorites.

A hundred miles away, in the deep desert, Dancing Bird was having a different kind of dream: the kind that his Gods had always used to speak to him. He'd tried to stop having them, but without much success.

In his dream, he found himself walking a long and winding road. Looking to the horizon, he saw that he was approaching a crossroads; there, Coyote was waiting for him. A long moment passed in silence before Dancing Bird finally spoke.

"I suppose that you're going to scold me," Dancing Bird said flatly.

Coyote sat up on his haunches; as always, he seemed to be grinning.

"And what makes you think that I'd do that?" the spirit inquired.

Dancing Bird scoffed, and Coyote managed to look slightly embarrassed.

"I have cast off the old ways," Dancing Bird growled. "I have abandoned my people in their darkest hour."

"Have you?" mused Coyote. "And why have you done that?"

Dancing Bird threw his arms to the heavens.

"Because they deserve better," he snarled. "If I have nothing but false hope to offer them, then they're better off without me."

Coyote's eyes had somehow become sadder than Dancing Bird's own, and the priest found his anger failing.

"Go on, then," he sighed. "Rebuke me, if you must."

To Dancing Bird's shock, Coyote turned to stare into the distance.

"I will not," said the spirit, "because you're right. We're dying, and our ways with us. There's no point in pretending otherwise."

The response wasn't the one that Dancing Bird had expected; it was infinitely worse, in fact.

Meanwhile, Melody Chamberlain was wide awake. The good people of Baker's Stake had been most accommodating, and the news was better than any that she could have hoped for. Assuming that the mayor's thugs had been telling the truth - and she'd given them every reason to do so - she was no more than a few weeks behind her target.

Normally good news would've made for a good night's sleep, but this wasn't just another bounty. She'd been waiting a long time for this particular face to show up on a "Wanted" poster; the word was already out that she'd claimed this one for her own, and anyone who knew both the business and what was good for them would respect that claim. She smiled to herself in the darkness, imagining the encounter so near in her future.

A few minutes later, Melody finally gave up on sleep and began saddling her horse.

The monster wasn't sleeping, either. He never slept.

The creature hadn't encountered any signs of human life since the chance encounter on his first day in the desert, though his search had grown increasingly frantic in the intervening time. Now he found himself lying in a pool of moonlight, wrestling with a sensation that was entirely new to him.

He was, he had discovered, depressed.

He had initially been delighted to have found himself loosed, in all his fury, upon the mortal world. So far, however, all of his fury had gone more or less to waste; despite his limited intelligence, he was unable to avoid the conclusion that he seemed to have been loosed upon the absolute middle of nowhere. He had massacred the one startled vagrant, had wandered a bit, and then had ravaged a few of the cacti, mostly out of frustration. He couldn't help but feel, in his own vague way, as if he were meant for bigger and better things.

He was filled with savage instincts, and they were telling him that he had been made to sow discord, calamity, and sorrow. Judging solely from his experiences thus far, he was beginning to doubt that anyone would notice.

Some nearby wolves began braying at the moon, and the creature found himself taking up their lament.

At precisely the same moment, Michael Evans awoke in a cold sweat.

His surroundings were unfamiliar, and he struggled for a moment with a sense of disorientation before managing to place himself. He was in a private box aboard an overnight train; why he was here was less clear, now that he finally allowed himself to consider the question. The last few days had been like a fever dream; he'd been acting on a strange impulse, never stopping to fully consider his actions. In retrospect, it was hard to ignore the obvious conclusion, which was that his occupation had finally gotten to be too much for him.

He happened to glance at the newspaper in his lap, and saw little there to encourage him. Seemingly random passages of text had been underlined; frantic notes had been scribbled into the margins. He could vaguely recall having done all of these things, and he moaned inwardly. The risk of a nervous breakdown was widely recognized as one of the major occupational hazards of his profession, but he hadn't realized how close to the edge he'd been until now.

Evans suddenly realized that this moment of clarity might turn out to be short-lived; struggling not to panic, he began making plans for his return to Maryland. The newspaper beckoned him, and he tried - without success - to ignore it. He appeared to have emphasized one headline in particular above all of the others, and he found himself reading it, despite himself.

His jaw dropped; his mind went numb. He read the headline again, and then a third time; a moment later, he found himself reading the article below it.

The story was a rather whimsical feature, and not particularly newsworthy; the editor had probably chosen it purely for filler, dropping it into the last page of the paper in the hopes that some of the readers might find it amusing. The article told the story of a Virginia-born lawyer who - a week previously - had apparently quite blandly declared himself the Antichrist, and had gotten as far as announcing his intention to run for political office before being bundled off to an asylum.

Evans realized that he was babbling nonsense to himself, and was profoundly grateful for the fact that there was nobody around to notice.

A group of New York Theosophists claimed to have discovered proof that modern man had descended from Atlanteans; this had made page five. On page two was an article detailing the tragic suicides of a cult of Spiritualists, who claimed to have been warned of an impending disaster by the spirit of the biblical prophet Samuel. After another hour of reading, Evans no longer doubted his sanity; it was the rest of the world that he was worried about.

He couldn't have explained how, but he knew what needed to be done. Evans gritted his teeth, put the newspaper aside, and resolved to try to get back to sleep.

The train pressed onward, into the west.