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at them and let Philpot slump to free both hands and stood on the footboard and worked the brake. Behind him the clattering reports faded, deadened by snow and distance, then stopped.
    The lighted windows of the station were hanging ahead when he got the animals down to a canter. He reined in before the adobe building.
    “Bud?”
    Philpot was sitting with his chin inside his rough collar and his hat canted down in front of his face. Paul tore off the hat. The driver’s head drifted toward his shoulder and his body leaned over sideways. The front of his coat glittered with blood from a ragged hole over his heart. Paul left him there and climbed down. He was surrounded by a crowd, the station having emptied out at the noise of gunfire. It grew as the passengers helped one another down, everyone talking at once.
    “Stand away!” Paul jerked his shotgun at the newcomers. The coach contained eighty thousand in silver bullion bound for the railhead in Benson.
    “Who’s dead?” someone asked. “Is that Bob Paul?” He recognized the station keeper’s pockmarked face.
    “No, I’m Paul. Bud Philpot got it.” He started counting heads among the passengers. “Everybody all of a piece?” Someone said, “That fellow on top fell off back there.” Paul said, “I caught him. Not that the favor did him any kindness.”
    “Not him. The one in back.”
    He glanced up at the empty dickey seat.
    “He wasn’t moving when we left him.” The passenger speaking was an angular young man in a checked suit and chesterfield splashed with mud.
    “Christ.” Paul told the station keeper to watch the coach and started back on foot.
    “They’ll cut you down,” the keeper called.
    “Do I look like I’m carrying bullion? They are horseshit and pony tracks by now.”
    Snow fell with a sizzling noise. The big clean-faced man was a shadow, then a sensation of movement behind a curtain. After five minutes he returned, the shotgun dangling. The lights of the station shadowed the pouches in his broad face.
    “Wire Tombstone,” he told the station keeper. “Tell them the shipment is safe but we got two dead.”
    The snow slacked off after midnight. It had stopped falling when seven horsemen approached the station at a walk, iron shoes creaking on the fresh fall. At the base of the grade Bob Paul swung a lantern and they drew rein. He recognized Sheriff Behan’s big sombrero and greeted Billy Breakenridge, shook hands with Virgil Earp when he swung down with a grunt, and nodded to Wyatt and Morgan, both part-time fellow shotgun messengers. Marshall Williams, the Wells Fargo agent in Tombstone and a sunny entity by nature, smiled a greeting and rolled a cigarette. Paul didn’t know the seventh man, medium-built under a buffalo coat and slouch hat, with a round face, moustaches curled down on the ends, and kindly blue eyes that glinted in the lantern light as if hunting mischief. He was not thirty. All the men wore big hats and heavy coats and clanked when they moved. They had brought two packhorses with them. The fellow in the buffalo coat had a Sharps rifle in his scabbard.
    Virgil said, “Bob, this here is Bat Masterson. He is a good man to have on the road if you keep an eye on him and see he does not tie any tin cans to your tail.”
    Masterson pulled a small hand out of its glove to accept the shotgun messenger’s big paw. “Adobe Walls,” Paul said. “I heard about you. I thought you’d be older.”
    The glint deepened. “I came near to not getting that way on that occasion.”
    “Well, I cannot promise you Comanches, but there are four or five white men I would admire to turn over a mesquite flame. They murdered a good Wells Fargo man and a paying passenger.”
    “Where are they?”
    “Laid out up at the station. Coyotes this winter are thick as mosquito wigglers.”
    “What have you found?” Behan remained in the saddle with his arms folded on the pommel.
    Paul stepped off the road and raised his lantern. A scattering