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thing about him so much as the way he took in the room, rotating his head without moving his eyes, and the easy unhurried way he stationed himself at the door, looking as if he had just stopped there to search for a familiar face.
    I figured he was the one with the orders, but it was the man in the hide coat with his back to the wall I chose to favor. Any heavy wrap worn out of season is likely to conceal something you’d rather not have exposed. While I groped for the shotgun the man by the table tugged an 1860 Army Colt with a Theur conversion out from under his duster and pointed it at Colleen Bower’s head, crackling back the hammer in the same motion.
    â€œLay back or she gets it.”
    This from the man in the hide coat, who took advantage of my instant’s hesitation to bring up a full-length Greener with both barrels already cocked. At that range the Apache Princess stood to lose two part owners, a number of paying customers, and several feet of bar. I laid back.
    The room was quiet, painfully so after the rumble of male voices and thump and rustle of human activity that had been constant since just after sundown. Colleen was motionless behind her cue box.
    â€œYou.” Hide Coat gestured at Junior with the Greener. “Put the cash box on the bar and slide it down towards the door.”
    Junior hung on a second, then lifted the tin Beacham’s bread box into which he’d been stuffing notes and cartwheels all night off the shelf under the bar and placed it on top. It turned a little after he pushed it, upsetting a shot glass and splashing the lanky young cowboy whose drink it was. He did nothing. The box now was within reach of the man with the Springfield but he made no move to pick it up.
    Duster spoke for the first time. His speech was a shrill twang, the opposite end of the scale from Hide Coat’s half-humorous baritone. “Now you, honey. Toss over that purse.”
    It was the white leather reticule, resting in her lap. Something might have fluttered over her face as she reached for it, the shadow of the reflection of the ghost of a smile, but then I was a gambler too and I noticed those things.
    Irish Andy chose just that moment to come in from the back.
    His close-cropped head was tilted down and he was tying his apron as he walked, unaware as yet of the silence in the room and what it signified. Hide Coat, startled by the sudden development, jerked his shotgun in that direction. I swung up the sawed-off, backing up a step to clear the top of the bar, and squeezed the rear trigger. Colleen fired at the same time but I didn’t look for the result. Hide Coat was off his feet and headed for the wall backward, propelled by a pattern of buckshot as solid as a croquet ball, when I swung the second barrel on the man with the rifle, my finger wrapping the front trigger.
    He was braced for a hipshot, both hands on the Springfield steadied alongside his pelvis with the hammer back. I saw him calculate the odds in an instant, a single rifle ball against shotgun spray, and I watched his muscles relax. Then he raised a palm in a brown jersey glove with the fingers cut out and backed away through the door.
    â€œDu lieber Gött.” Irish Andy goggled, his hands still behind him on his apron strings.
    Junior was the first to move. As he strode to the end of the bar to rescue the cash box the tension broke apart in two halves. Voices and creaking floorboards came through the space between.
    â€œJesus. Christ Jesus.”
    Duster was still standing by the faro table, bent over now with his hands pinned between his knees. A pattern of fresh dark circles kept changing and growing on the floor between his feet and I couldn’t tell which hand was hit. His Army Colt lay under the table. Colleen’s bag rested on the table with her hand inside, smoldering from the powder flare of her pocket pistol.
    Hide Coat was still alive and squirming in a muck of blood and sawdust on the