Ulysses Underhill glanced up and down the street, one hand resting on his holstered .45. He could feel tension in the air. A fellow opposite adjusted his gun belt and watched Ulysses. Along the street where the road split in two, a group of men was assembling. They were too far away for Ulysses to hear what they were talking about, but there was plenty of violent gesturing.

He rapped on Joe Lambert’s door again.

Two men on horseback joined the group down the street, their horses kicking up summer dust as they circled and fidgeted. Ulysses’ own horse was loosely tied to a rail just a couple of buildings away.

Joe Lambert opened his door.

“Ah, the gunman,” he said.

Lambert was a few inches shorter than Ulysses, maybe five-ten, and where Ulysses was clean shaven, Lambert had a rough beard. His eyes were bloodshot, and his shirt was dirty.

“Come in.” Lambert walked back into his house, leaving Ulysses to follow.

The house was simple, with the front door opening into the living room, a kitchen beyond that, and a staircase leading upwards. A door somewhere at the back let a light breeze in, but the place still smelled of burned food and old sweat. There were two armchairs in the living room and a table on which were an empty whisky bottle and a single empty glass.

“I’d offer you a drink,” Lambert said, “but I’m out.”

“That’s okay.”

“I can roll you a cigarette.”

Lambert sank into one of the chairs and pulled out a leather makings pouch.

“I don’t smoke.”

“You don’t smoke?”

Ulysses had smoked in the old days. There were a lot of things he’d done in the old days. He had given up smoking not long after taking the job with Conan O’Connell’s East Coast Detective Agency.

There had been a fellow Ulysses was searching for in Helena. Knowing he was being hunted and who the hunter was, the fellow had determined to kill Ulysses. The man was a smoker. He smoked so hard that the stench of it hung over him and on him like a signpost. At one point, Ulysses had been about to go down an alleyway in search of the man when he smelled old smoke in the air. Ulysses had walked around an entire block and had come up the alleyway from the unexpected direction. The fellow was lying in wait for him. Ulysses had crept up on him and knocked the guy out before he even knew Ulysses was there.

“No,” Ulysses said, “I don’t smoke.”

“Okay. Anyway, I appreciate you bringing the gun all the way over here.”

“It’s not so far.”

“Ten miles or so.”

“It’s a quiet day.”

“I had a horse, I’d have come and collected it.”

“Like I said, it’s okay.”

When Joe Lambert had ordered the Colt conversion, he had hitched a lift from Dry Falls to Helena. He had said he could no longer afford both a horse and a gun. Dry Falls was that sort of place, Ulysses figured, where the choice between a horse and a gun usually ended up with the gun winning.

“You want to check it? Want me to run through it?” Ulysses said, handing a box wrapped in brown paper to Lambert.

“Sure.” Lambert put down his makings and tore at the paper. He opened the box and took out the Colt Army revolver. Ulysses had not only opened up the chambers for breech loading and changed the hammer, but he’d cleaned, polished, and oiled the gun. It looked like new. He wouldn’t be paid for all that extra graft. But, like presenting the gun in a good box and wrapping the whole thing nicely in brown paper, it was all about doing the best job he could. It was about attention to detail and being appreciative of the workman that had made the gun in the first place.

“There’s a box of fifty cartridges like you asked for. Forty-fours are what you need when you’ve gone through all of those. If ever you do.”

“Oh, I’ll get through ’em,” Lambert said.

There was something in the way the man spoke that made Ulysses wonder just what Lambert was planning. But then, that wasn’t his business. Ulysses ran his gun shop in tandem with his work for O’Connell. If he turned down every fellow who he suspected might be using the repaired guns for nefarious purposes, he would have little work at all.

Lambert pulled himself up from the armchair. “Let’s go out and shoot some trees.”

Lambert’s back door opened onto an expanse of dead grass and dirt with a well-trodden path leading to a small copse of trees about fifty yards away.

“At least they’re starting to grow some now,” Lambert said. “There wasn’t a tree in sight for years.”

The same thing had happened in the early days of Helena. All the good timber had been cut down for building. Hell, back in the day, Ulysses recalled, when they had wanted to hang someone, there was literally only one tree to do it from.

“I can finally start to do my morning business with no one watching,” Lambert added, and as they got closer to the trees, the smell of sewage arose as if underlining his words. “If I had money, I’d get someone to dig me a new pit. Old one’s full up.”

“What’s going on out front?” Ulysses asked. “There’s something in the air.” He smiled to himself at his choice of words. “Seemed to be a lot of nervous men around.”

“You know Elijah Gold was shot dead a few days ago?”

“No.”

“Course, you ain’t from Dry Falls. You wouldn’t have heard.”

“The news will get to Helena eventually.”

“Well, Elijah—you know he struck gold a few years back, and his name being Gold? I mean, what are the chances of that? I guess I wish my name was Silver.”

“It’s some coincidence, for sure.”

“Well, anyway, the sheriff’s had word that Israel Hagan did the killing. Israel’s lit out. They’re getting ready to go and bring him back. The sheriff’s men and a bunch of townsfolk. Right, here you are. That big tree—well, it ain’t big, but it’s the biggest. Probably best not to get any closer on account of the smell. But we can shoot from here.”

There was nothing to the loading and shooting. It was far easier than the old way. Lambert even hit the tree once or twice.

“Happy?” Ulysses asked, enjoying the fact that the gun smoke was masking the smell of Lambert’s morning business.

“Yes,” Lambert said. “That’s great. I appreciate it.”

As they turned to head back into the house, they saw three fellows approaching them from around the side of Lambert’s property. The men were walking fast. They all had guns drawn.

“What in the hell’s going on?” one of them said. Ulysses wasn’t sure, but he thought it might have been the fellow he had seen opposite the house just a few minutes earlier.

“We heard shooting,” another said.

“Just testing the gun,” Lambert said, holding the Colt in his hand but letting it point to the ground. “Just had it converted,” he added proudly.

The first man shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity of others. “Testing a gun? Thank Christ. We thought Israel was back.”

“You sure picked a tender time,” the third man said.

“I don’t have to ask permission,” Lambert said.

The first man gave Lambert a cold look. After a moment he said, “How is it? Shoot well?”

“Uh-huh,” Lambert said.

“So, you going to join the posse? Maybe test it out for real?”

“Don’t have a horse.”

The man stared at Lambert some more. Then he turned to Ulysses. “How about you? That your horse out front?”

“Yes, it is.”

“You going to join us? We need all we can get.”

“He shot Elijah at point blank range,” the second man said. “You happy to let a man like that go free?”

“You should go,” Lambert said. “It’ll be fun.”

Fun, Ulysses thought. That summed up Dry Falls. You’d rather have a gun than a horse, but if you had both, you could join a posse for fun.

Then the first man said, “I know you. You run the repair shop in Helena.”

“Yep.”

“Well, best you join us. A gun man—a business man—doesn’t want word getting out that he refused to join a posse.”

“And it’ll be fun,” Ulysses said sardonically.

“Yeah,” the first man said, picking up on Ulysses’ tone. He smiled. “But the more of us there are, the more likely Israel will give up quietly.”

“When you leaving?”

“Thirty minutes. From outside the sheriff’s office.”