David Carnegie rode through Clear Creek, watching for faces he would recognize from his stays years earlier. He saw a few, but they did not recognize him, for he had only visited three times, and had never stayed long. This was just as well with him. Better to be in a town where no one knew him. The next thing to do was get a look at the Sheriff. Was it the same one they’d had years before, or was there a new man in town? David had to know, so he went into a hotel dining room across the street from the Sheriff’s office, requested a seat where he could see the street, because, as he put it, “he was expecting someone.” His request was granted, though he never saw any man with a badge go in or out of the Sheriff’s office while he was eating. After he got done, he stepped outside and joined an old-timer sitting in front of the hotel. After two hours of listening to the old-timer talk, he was rewarded for his suffering through the tales of the past. A man wearing a badge was riding down the street. As David peered at the man, trying to catch any clues to whether the man was the Sheriff himself or a deputy, he reminded himself to stay unseen, and tugged at the brim of his hat a little to hide his eyes. The law officer did not notice him, but the old-timer called out to the man. David quickly bowed his head and pretended to study his hands, taking note of the old-timer’s farewell to the lawman, “See ya later, Sheriff.”

A sigh shook David’s body. He was safe, for the moment. If the Sheriff was still in the town, at least he was no longer Sheriff. Which meant the next thing he had to check was the house.

I had no idea, on that bright spring day, that all the forces which would combine to confront me with the greatest challenge of my life were gathering outside my little town. They were numerous and deadly. The names meant nothing to me at the time. I had no idea that only a week earlier, the man I would soon be hiring as my new deputy, David Carnegie, had been let out of jail for crimes related to a bank robbery ten years earlier. I did not know that a gambler, his brother Leland, would try to hoodwink more than forty outlaws while attempting to gather almost six million dollars. I didn’t know that a man who had a grudge against for something I thought was history would repeatedly try to kill me, and not in a kindly fashion at that.

I was simply concerned with getting another deputy. I put the posters up in all the normal places, in front of the general store, the jail, the saloon (reluctantly). On a whim, I put one on a tree in front of my house.

~

The reunion was not what would be termed enthusiastic. Closeness not a thing the men of the Carnegie family valued, except perhaps Mike, the youngest brother. David, the gunslinger, was out of prison, and the task they had to accomplish was known to all as they met him. Well, all except for David’s uncle, Tad, who had telltale liquor bottles strewn around and was sleeping off another night of partying at the nearest saloon. David remarked upon this.
“He still holds his liquor. Doesn’t look a bit more wasted than he was.”
“He’s good for nothing. Waste of money if you ask me.” This from Bill.
Leland and David cast a glance towards one another, neither willing to say what they were both thinking. Mike studiously gazed into the fire, having just finished cooking the excuse for breakfast, some pancakes. They were burnt, as usual, and Bill spat into the fire.
“Burned ‘em again, kid.”
“Better ‘n the slop they feed you in that jail… that stuff tastes like a shoe compared to this.”
Bill grunted disapprovingly. An awkward moment.
“So, what have you all been… what have you been doing the last ten years.”
Leland began to respond. “The usual.”
“Waiting.” Bill again, with a glower in David’s direction, which was met with an even glare.
“Not breaking me out…”
“What did you want? Us to all get arrested, somebody get shot, names get known?”
“Just a little loyalty, that’s all.”
Bill snorted in indignation.
“To you?”
Indignant or not, Leland spoke.
“Enough. We know why we’re here, just say it. The jabbering won’t get us anywhere.”
Bill and David paused, staring at Leland. It was not usual for Leland to say much, except within the family, so it was not him speaking that surprised them, but the unusual force with which he spoke. After a moment, Bill fairly roared at David.
“I want the money, I want to get out. Now.”
“You’ve gotta give me time.”
“No time!”
“Then no money.”
Bill was again glowering, a powerless roaring lion. Leland interjected again.
“All right, David, what do you need?”
David paused, thinking for perhaps the first moment in the conversation.
“I’m gonna go see the place where I put the money. Might be able to get it out quick, might not. Might not even still be there. It’s always possible that someone else found it.”
“It’d be just like you not to hide it good enough…”
“You were the one who wanted me to hide it, Bill. Give me the job…”
“Don’t you dare call me Bill…”
“…and let me do it my way or do it yourself. Bill.”
The silence hung in the air for what seemed to Mike to have been a minute. Leland quietly riffled a deck of cards. Tad slept on, undisturbed by his brother’s quarrels with his nephew.
“What’s it gonna be?”
Bill gave no reply.
“Well, since we’re agreed. I’ll be going into town today. I’d be obliged if you gentlemen held your places here at camp.”
Bill suddenly jumped, as if stung.
“I am your father, boy! Stop right now, or I’ll stop you myself!”
David stopped. Did not turn.
“I don’t hardly think you’ll try to stop me.”

With that, David Carnegie hopped on his horse and rode off. Leland dutifully riffled his cards one more time.

The eyewitnesses said they had never seen anything like it. Jack Miles drew and shot so rapidly that a blink would not have only missed the draw, but the shot one immediately succeeding the first. Yet, in that short blink, one would have also missed Jack Miles dropping to his knees, letting the gun hit the deck, and grabbing his wrist, numb from the shock. For the first shot was not Jack’s, but Tim’s. A bystander remarked that the victor of the duel must have known beforehand when Miles was to pull his gun, because he could not have possibly reacted that fast. Tim Wheeler had no comment.

He took Jack Miles back to the town of his crimes, and saw him hanged. Shortly thereafter, Tim Wheeler, the friendly, affable, talkative farmboy mysteriously transformed into the only man to have ever outdrawn the most feared man in the country became Sheriff of a little town in the middle of Missouri.

The time had come for the small-town sheriff to meet a man with a grudge as large as New York City.

Chip Raleigh had just sat and listened to one of his top men give a report of the law presence in Clear Creek, Missouri. It was sparse… a sheriff and his lone deputy. But it was a quiet town, with mostly quiet men, who were armed and ready. But only a few of them were fighters, and so the target should be easy. They would fight, but they would lose. The law, though it had proved its skill in how it handled the brawl on the man’s final night in town, was too few in number to stop the forces it would be facing. So went the man’s report.

Raleigh knew otherwise. In all his years he had never met the man who could match Jack Miles. Jack was proud, sure, but Jack was the best. He had, without hesitation, in order to escape a posse, once killed an old man who was on a horse. He did consider stopping to ask the man, even kindly with a gun under the nose, if he could borrow the horse. He just shot the man. Raleigh had nearly gagged when he heard the tale, but this was before he and Miles were thrust together by circumstance. His way of thinking and acting was gradually shaped to Miles’ as they pillaged and plundered their way across the west. They had become close during that time, both repeatedly saving the other’s life, and had built a following of men, men who were fiercely loyal to them, partially for the money they paid them, but for other reasons. The gang had survived intact, with one exception, for a dozen years. That one man had died, not of a gunshot, but with a fever. They had buried him, and then the next day raided the town where he had contracted the disease. The name of the Miles-Raleigh gang was feared throughout the west. Yet, for all their work, no one knew what Miles or Raleigh actually looked like. They ran their gang efficiently, but invisibly. Raleigh, a veteran of the War between the States, and Miles, a bushwhacker from Missouri, were regarded as the invisible legends. When they traveled in public, they never conducted the “business” of terrorism. They never appeared in a town or city except as drifting cowboys, always headed for the next town, never finding the work they wanted. In all, they had taken over seven hundred thousand dollars during a long and illustrious career.

Then Miles saw the girl named Tessie from Missouri. He had weakened, and told Raleigh to ride on. He was tired of living outside of the natural world. He wanted to be human again. For eight months he lived in Clear Creek, and though Raleigh tried to get him alone and talk to him, he would not be dissuaded. It was shame, Chip reflected, how he had refused to let the old riding partner even get a chance to tell of the journal he had found. He would have dropped what he had right then and there. But he never did, and so he married the girl. Raleigh watched from afar and fell into despondency as he saw the man find happiness in the arms of a girl. He rode away from the county of Clear Creek just two days before Jack got spooked and decided to get out. Chip never forgave himself for leaving, because he was not there to help Jack. It seemed that the family of the girl did not approve of Jack, and things came to a head not long after the two were married. He left, but not before killing Tessie, her grandfather, and parents.

When the story was told Raleigh, he could not believe what he heard next. The man said that the likes of the mad pursuit had never been seen before. Miles was chased for six weeks before the brothers finally found him. They gave him one chance to surrender, and then… then the unthinkable happened. Jack Miles drew his gun.

It was going well into my second year as Sheriff of Clear Creek when I saw the stranger on the street. I had seen him somewhere before. Perhaps on a wanted poster, but I was not sure. And since I was not sure, all I could do was make a mental note to keep an eye on him, and a verbal note to my lone deputy Alan. While Clear Creek was a good-sized town, and the surrounding county somewhat dense with farmers, it was certainly not violent, so I needed little outside help. I had to swear in a couple of temporaries once a few years before to chase after a man who had burned a barn, but nothing more than that. However, the town was growing, and so I was considering hiring another permanent deputy. I was especially concerned by the addition of the second saloon into the town, which, from what I’d seen and heard and knew from experience, was the chief breeding ground of violence in the town. My opinions were confirmed when a fight broke out between two homeless drunkards one night in the new bar, which carried out onto the street, and got a few more people involved than should have been. I was at the office, but Alan was out on the street, and was highly effective and plucking the brawlers off of one another, seeing as how he outweighed and outmuscled most of them by a good fifty to a hundred pounds, and was raucously sober at that. By the time I got there, he had mostly finished them off, and all that was left to do was the sorting out and the determining who would spend the night in prison. I decided the next morning that we had to have another deputy, because I was intolerably sore from sleeping at the jailhouse on guard duty.

Oddly, I did not see the stranger on the street anymore after that. And as soon as the drunkard that I did not recognize was let go after his hangover stopped, he disappeared. My detective mind kept that stored away in a file-box somewhere as I posted the opening for a sheriff’s deputy all around town.