The Starman was a man of his word. At dawn, as the morning light peeked above the horizon and into the bedroom window, he shook Fenimore awake.

Fenimore grumbled before opening his eyes, then forced his aching body to sit.

His head was numb but the thoughts inside it were clear. The night had been filled with nightmares and the clanging of hammers. The Starman handed him a cigar. “For yer ride,” he said. “I also filled yer canteen and cleaned and loaded yer guns. The rifle I kept, ‘cause a man’s got a right to defend himself and his own, but the revolver and my hootin’ gun is yers. The horse is ready outside. She’s groggy from yesterday’s legumes but it’s a short ride and she’ll make it.”

Fenimore put the cigar between his lips, got to his feet and stretched out his arms. The first thing he’d do in town was get a room and take a long, hot bath. Afterward, he’d wash his clothes and come up with a plan.

The Starman handed Fenimore his poncho. “I patched up the holes I blasted.”

The holes had indeed been patched. The entire inner surface of the poncho had also been covered by a layer of chainmail. The resulting poncho-armour was heavy, but not unbearably so.

“I want more than an ending,” The Starman said in response to Fenimore’s look of surprise.

The word “thanks” didn’t quite make it out of Fenimore’s throat, but he thought it, bless his soul, and at least to himself that was some kind of moral progress.

“It ain’t none of my business, of course, what a strangerman does in a feudin’ town, but if that man was me I’d bed down in the Olympus Hotel in the morning and stay in my room like a bastard till the noon redeemin’ was over, after which I might make my discreetin’ way to the tavern and listen to the drunks before ending my night with a fuck at the Rodriguez Widow’s place. But be careful what you say, ‘cause them whores there got razors and no compunctions about cuttin’ yer face with ‘em.”

“Don’t break the timepiece.”

With that, Fenimore slid the poncho over his head and put on his belt. He took out the revolver and checked the cylinder. Six bullets, and it did look clean. It spun even cleaner. He replaced the revolver into the holster and stepped into the living room. The Starman followed him.

In the living room, the shutters in all the windows had been opened and everything was awash with pale light. The fire was dead.

The Starman rushed ahead and pushed open the door.

Fenimore shaded his eyes.

Outside, The Starman’s horse stood already saddled and with the hootin’ gun hanging from a special leather holster tied around its shoulders. Although the horse didn’t look any prettier today—its eyes were hung over and its colour was still a dull, cloudy grey—at least it was mobile. Every once in a while, it lurched forward and burped.

Fenimore hopped into the saddle.

He considered it a success that the horse didn’t fall over.

The Starman stuck a tin filled with brewed coffee in front of the horse’s snout and petted the animal’s neck with genuine affection. “She sure likes her coffee in the mornin’,” he said.

As the horse drank, Fenimore took in his surroundings. The emptiness looked different in the morning than it had at night. Less foreboding, vaster. A soft fog also hung in the air and the horizon, instead of being the sharp gash from which the bad men threatened to come into the world to make pain on you and your loved ones, looked as fuzzy as the Gates of Heaven through which God Himself would emerge on Judgment Day to bless some and strike down others for the pain they’d inflicted upon their own kin and kind.

Fenimore’s hand drifted naturally to rest on the grip of his holstered revolver.

“Return, goddamnit,” was all The Starman said, before slapping the horse on the hindquarters, sending both it and Fenimore barreling towards the east, toward Hope Springs, and straight into the pale flaming orb of the rising sun…

The barreling didn’t last. Within minutes it became a jog, and then a definite stroll as the horse lost its breath and regained its appreciation of yesterday’s moonshine. It wobbled. It swayed. Somewhere between The Starman’s cabin and Hope Springs, it stopped and threw up, then refused to budge its hooves until Fenimore dismounted and walked alongside it. This seemed to make it happy, and definitely made Fenimore regret not taking his burro instead. Burros didn’t believe in equality.

The fog thickened.

Soon, they came upon a wooden sign:

“Welcome to Hope Springs,” it said in badly painted gold letters on a faded purple background. Below, “where even strangers is eternal,” had been carved into the wood and more recently painted over with white.

Beyond the sign, the silhouettes of the town’s outermost buildings faded greyly in and out of view like a drowned rat bobbing up and down in a pail of milk.

Fenimore pulled the horse by the reins and they continued onward until the buildings sharpened into focus, followed by the blurred parts of others: acutely-angled corners, worn edges and desolate porches. They weren’t particularly exciting buildings, but they weren’t rundown, either. They were ordinary. A farmhouse, a wagon repair shop, a distillery, a grave-maker’s workshop. Fenimore had expected worse. There was still money to be had here.

As the ground became a hard packed dirt street, the horse’s hooves beat louder and echoed. There was hardly another sound to drown them out. The fog was silent, the street empty, and only an occasional, dull, knock from within the grave-maker’s workshop interrupted the slurred clickety-clack of a man strolling alongside his ugly, drunken horse.

But Fenimore’s eyes were slits, and he was keenly sensitive to the flash of sudden movements. He held the reins in his left hand while keeping his right just above his revolver.

His revolver. It was the first time he’d thought that way. He’d given Pedro his due and the vultures were surely done with him by now, having picked him white and clean—a swarm of them taking flight after being frightened away by a stray gunshot, exposing a skeleton wearing a sombrero, which itself would eventually be taken by vultures of a more human kind. Nature isn’t wasteful. Dead men aren’t, by nature, possessive.

The gaps between buildings closed. Their closing pushed the fog above the town into a thick cloud that dulled the sunlight.

Although no people walked the streets, faces began appearing behind unclean window panes, taking stock of the stranger appearing in their midst. Women’s faces, children’s faces. Scared, scarred faces. Faces from a feuding town.

Fenimore came to a statue.

The horse and its clickety-clack stopped.

The road was bisected by another running left—where the buildings were squat and architecture more Mexican—and right—where a single man dressed in a navy suit was crossing from a barbershop to a notary’s office. Fenimore imagined this was the centre of Hope Springs. It was the kind of place where children gather after Sunday mass to torture scorpions with the converging power of magnifying glasses.

Beyond the statute, a two story hotel beckoned:

“The Olympus.”

The statue was of a man so tall that his head was barely visible on this side of the fog cloud and Fenimore had to look up to see the place where his massive legs joined together to form a marble crotch. He could have been Zeus. Except that his arms, whose hands both held revolvers, had been ripped off and laid in a cross at his feet, where a small, oxidised bronze plaque described him as:

Rafael Rodriguez

Founder of this here town.

May he live.

Between the statue and hotel stood a raised platform maybe ten metres by ten metres wide.

The man in the navy suit slammed shut the door to the notary’s office.

The horse upchucked on Rafael Rodriguez’ boots.

Fenimore pulled it by the reins, crossed the empty town square toward the hotel, tied the horse to a horse-tying log, grabbed the hootin’ gun from its special holster, and walked inside.