So the reporters filed embroidered stories based on heresay and sketchy information they accepted as fact. They wrote that Bren Early had been court-martialed following the Sonora Incident and cashiered out of the Army. Since then he had been:

A hunting guide.

Road agent.

Convict in a work gang.

Gold prospector.

Had shot and killed anywhere from ten to twenty men.

All this before selling his claim to LaSalle Mining and joining the company. Great stuff, plenty of material here to work with.

Dana Moon's background wasn't as colorful, though it was solid ground to build on. After Sonora he had been fired from his position as Assistant Supervisor, San Carlos Indian Reservation, and had entered the business of mustanging: supplying remounts to Fort Huachuca and stage horses to Hatch & Hodges, before they shut down their lines. He was known to be a rough customer who had shot and killed a few men himself. Now, and for the past few years, Dana Moon was in charge of the Apache sub-agency at White Tanks.

Yes, Moon and Early had crossed paths several times since the Sonora Incident, which is what made the “angle” of these two eventually tearing into each other a natural. Headlines, with facts slightly bent, practically wrote themselves.

PERSONAL FEUD SETS STAGE FOR LAND FIGHT

MOON AND EARLY FACTIONS LINE UP FOR BATTLE

Great stuff.

While all the “color” was being written, a young Chicago Times journalist by the name of Maurice Dumas, who had not yet mastered a pose of cynicism or world-weariness, did talk to both Bren Early and Dana Moon. Young Maurice Dumas asked straight questions and didn't know any better when he got direct answers.

Beginner's luck, the other news reporters said.

Was it luck? Or the fact Maurice Dumas had trained himself to jump out of bed each day at 6:30 A.M. and immediately check his list of THINGS TO DO. At seven he walked into the Congress Hotel dining room and there was Brendan Early, alone: the first time Maurice Dumas had ever seen the man without a crowd around him.

“Excuse me, but would you mind if I interviewed you?” Nervous as hell.

Brendan Early looked up from his T-bone steak, tomatoes and scrambled eggs. He looked different than he did in the C.S. Fly photos: his face was thinner and he now wore a heavy mustache that curved down around his mouth and was darker than his hair.

“Let me hear your first question.”

“Well-were you chucked out of the Army or did you retire?”

“You mean you are asking instead of telling me?” Brendan Early said. “Sit down.”

Both surprised and encouraged, Maurice Dumas took off his cap and did as he was told. He couldn't believe it.

“I quit, resigned my commission,” Bren Early said.

“What did you do right after that?”

“I rested.”

“Thought of what you would do next?”

“Thought of staying alive. I thought quite a lot about it.”

“Meaning you had to make a living?”

“I thought of ladies somewhat. But most often I thought of staying alive.”

“I believe you advertised your services to lead western hunting expeditions. In Chicago and other eastern papers?”

“It's true. The advertisement said, ‘Ladies welcome…Your dear lady will be well protected and taken care of.’”

“How long were you a hunting guide?”

“I wasn't guide, I hired guides to do the work while I led the expeditions.”

“How long did you do that?”

“Till I got tired of smiling.”

The news reporter wasn't sure he understood that; but he preferred to cover ground rather than clear up minor points. He watched Mr. Early take a silver flask from inside his dark suitcoat and pour a good slug into his coffee.

“Is that whiskey?”

“Cognac. I don't drink whiskey in the morning.”

“May I continue?”

“Please do.”

“It's said you've killed between ten and twenty men. How many exactly did you?”

“That's not the question to ask.?”

Maurice Dumas thought a moment. “Did you know their names?”

And saw Mr. Early pause over his breakfast and look at him with interest.

“That's the question. How did you know to ask it?”

“It seemed like a good one,” the reporter said.

Brendan Early nodded, saying “It's interesting that some of them-I don't mean the backshooters, of course-would announce themselves with the sound of death in their tone. ‘Mr. Early…I am R.J. Baker.’ Then stare with a hard, solemn look, like I was supposed to faint or piss my britches.”

“Really? What happened that time? The one said his name was Baker.”

“Don't you want some breakfast?”

“I'll just have some of this coffee, if I may.”

Eating his steak, watching the young reporter pour himself a cup from the silver pot on the table, Brendan Early said, “Are you sure you're from a newspaper? You aren't like the rest of that snotty bunch at all.”

“Chicago Times,” Maurice Dumas said. “There are so many things I want to ask you about.” Including the mysterious Mrs. Pierson, who lived over on Mill Street. Was she just a friend or what?

“Don't be nervous.” Brendan Early looked through the doors to the railroad clock in the hall. “We got till I get tired of talking or you decide you know more that I do. This morning I'm going shooting.”

“You mean-up there?”

“No, I'm gonna step out into the desert and limber up my revolvers and test my eyesight.”

“Getting ready for the showdown,” Maurice Dumas said, squirming in his chair a little.

“You're starting to sound like the others,” Brendan Early said. “Don't tell me things. Ask me.”

“I'm sorry. How come you're going out to limber up your revolvers?”

“Today and tomorrow. I intend to shoot off several boxes of forty-fours. Because sometime soon, I've been told, an acquaintance from long ago will arrive in Benson by train, get here somehow or other, and I don't know his present frame of mind.”

“You mean somebody who wants to kill you?”

“Ask him that one. Fella by the name of Phil Sundeen, come back from the dead.”

Maurice Dumas frowned. What was going on? He said, “Sundeen. I don't believe I've heard that name before.”

“Well, write it down. It could be an item for your paper.”

4

Dragoon Mountains: April, 1888

The smell of the mares was on the wind, but the stud did not seem to like this graze as a place to breed. He lowered his head, giving the signal, and the mares and the stallions skitting around them followed after as the lead mare moved off.

Seven days Dana Moon had been tracking this herd, gradually, patiently moving the wild horses toward a barranca they'd fenced off with brush; a week of watching, getting to know them, Moon thinking on and off: If you were the stud, which one would you pick to mount first?

It would be hard. There were some good-looking mares in that bunch. But each time he wondered about it Moon found his gaze cutting out the palomino, the golden-haired girl, from the rest of the mares. She attracted the most overtures from the stallions who'd come sniffing her flanks. Moon would watch the palomino jump gracefully and give the boys a ladylike kick in the muzzle-saving it for the stud.

Out here a week tracking with his six Mimbre riders, former members of the Apache Police at San Carlos, now mustangers working for the Dana Moon Remount & Stage Team Supply Company-if anyone were to ask who he was and what he did.

Though it was not the answer he gave the fool who came riding upwind out of the sun haze. There he was, a speck of sound and smell and the herd was gone, like it would run forever, the Mimbres gathering and chasing off through the dust to keep them located. The fool, two black specks now, came clopping across the scrub waste, clop clop clop clop, leading a pack animal, not even knowing what a goddamn fool he was.