Gunman's Song
“Don't you want to know my name first?” the gunman asked.
Shaw only shook his head slowly.
“Son of aâ” the gunman raged. His hand moved fast, as fast as any Shaw had seen lately. But not fast enough. Shaw's shot hit him dead center of his forehead before the young man got his pistol up level enough to get an aim. The gunman's shot went straight down in front of his boot. Shaw's Colt didn't stop even for a split second. It cocked toward the man in the bowler hat.
“Don't shoot!” the man pleaded, throwing his hands up.
“My God, Shaw!” Cray Dawson said, stunned by Shaw's speed, “that ain't like nothing human!”
“This happens everywhere I go,” Shaw said. “Are you sure you want to ride with me, Cray?”
“Yeah, I still want to ride with you,” said Cray Dawson gravely, “right up until I see Rosa's murderers dead.”
GUNMAN'S
SONG
Ralph Cotton
A SIGNET BOOK
SIGNET
Published by New American Library, a division of
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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, January 2004
ISBN: 978-1-101-62640-5
Copyright © Ralph Cotton, 2004
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For Mary Lynnâ¦
of course.
PART 1
Lawrence Shaw hailed from West Texas and was widely known as the fastest gun alive. But being known as a fast gun offered him no comfort at all when he got word all the way up in Arizona Territory that his wife, Rosa, had been brutally murdered by a gang of cutthroat saddle tramps who had come to their hacienda near the town of Somos Santos searching for him. By the time Shaw had ridden back to Texas his beloved Rosa lay in the ground and all of her family except for her younger sister, Carmelita, had gone back across the border and faded into the endless Mexican hill country. Carmelita had arranged to hire a buggy for the day, and when Lawrence Shaw arrived she drove him out to the Mexican cemetery behind the old Spanish mission where the silent ones had lived, the old missionary priests for whom Somos Santos had been named.
Carmelita didn't ask Lawrence Shaw why his left arm was in a sling. She could see the bullet hole in the shoulder of his shirt and the bloodstain that a stiff washing in a nameless creek had failed to remove. It was not her place to question her dead sister's husband. “A young man arrived in town three days ago,” she said. “He was asking about you.” She
looked at him to check his response. Shaw only nodded slightly, gazing straight ahead.
“There have been other men come looking for youâ¦they are gunmen who want to kill you,
sÃ
?” she asked, careful not to appear to be prying into his personal affairs.
“That is likely,” Shaw said flatly.
“They wish to kill you, and have people know they killed you, so men will fear them.” She shook her head slightly, considering it. “That seems so cruel, so senseless,” she said.
“It happens,” was all Shaw offered.
“
SÃ,
it happens,” Carmelita whispered almost to herself, thinking of the cruel, senseless killing of her sister Rosa by these same such men. They rode on in silence.
At the cemetery Carmelita stood back and watched Shaw slump in grief and helplessness, his shoulders shuddering quietly until at length he flung himself to his knees, his left arm coming out of the sling as he clenched his fists in the dry, loose dirt. “Oh, God, Rosa!” he pleaded, first to the mound of fresh earth, then to the hot, windblown Texas sky. “Why her, God? Why not me? Why my precious Rosa? She never harmed a living thing!”
Shaw cursed aloud and shook his dirt-filled fists at the heavens, raging at God with such fury that Carmelita was certain that if God had shown his face right then, Lawrence Shaw would have tried to strike him down. Carmelita waited patiently. When at length Shaw's blasphemy turned to bitter weeping, Carmelita crossed herself as if to guard from the terrible anger that filled the air. She had held herself
back as long as she could, and now that Shaw had spent his rage and sunk farther to the ground, she stepped forward and knelt and wept beside him, embracing the hardened gunman as she would an injured child.
“Oh, Carmelita,” Shaw said, purging himself of layer upon layer of grief and guilt as the two emotions came upon him, “I have been such a foolâ¦such a hopeless, blind, ignorant fool!”
“No, no,” Carmelita said tightening her embrace. “Do not say these things; it lessens the memory of my sister to say she married such a man as you call yourself.”
“But it's true, Carmelita,” Shaw said. “I had received two letters from her in a week, each one urging me to come home.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I kept waiting, putting it off, telling myself just one more dayâ¦one more day of drinking, playing table billiardsâ¦telling gunfighter stories. Oh, Rosa, I should've been here for you,” he said down to the mound of earth. “May God never forgive me for being the rotten, no-goodâ”
“Stop it, Lawrence,” said Carmelita, slipping her arm around his waist, drawing him to her. “My sister loved you very much. You must know this and tell yourself this from now on, so that you can forgive yourself as she has already forgiven you.”
“Do youâ¦do you really believe that, Carmelita?” Shaw asked. “I mean that Rosa is looking down on us right now, and she knows how sorry I amâ¦and how much I loved her?”
“Of course I believe that,” said Carmelita, “and you must believe it too. Rosa would not want you
blaming yourself. She would want you to go on living, and to find whatever happiness you can find without her.”