Decades ago — by Jupiter, a lifetime, an eternity — Jed Reno had laughed at Jim Bridger. When the old (by mountain-man standards) fur trapper, scout, and guide had teamed up with Louis Vasquez to build a trading post on the Blacks Fork of the Green River, Jed Reno had jokingly told Bridger that Bridger's nerves had finally frayed. That Bridger was selling out. That he was calling it quits. That, pushing forty years old, he was too long in the tooth to be traipsing over the Rocky Mountains, trapping beaver and fighting the weather, the wilds, and the Indians. While sharing a jug of Taos Lightning or some other forty-rod whiskey seasoned with snakeheads, tobacco, and strychnine, Reno had slapped Bridger on the back, and told him, "Well, you just enjoy your life of leisure. I'm sure you'll be richer than a St. Louis whiskey drummer with this here venture of yours."

"Runnin' a store, ol' hoss," Bridger had told him, "ain't as easy as you think it is."

"Balderdash," Reno had said.

Damnation, if Jim Bridger wasn't right.

As a bullet blew apart the copper-lined tin corn boiler, Reno ducked beneath the somersaulting axe handle that smashed the shelves behind him, sending metal-backed mirrors, salt and pepper shakers, scissors, axe blades, lanterns, baskets, jugs, matches, soaps, knives, forks, beads, containers of linseed oil, pine tar, and tins of tobacco flying every which way. He landed on the pile of pillow-ticking fabric and the woolen blankets he had not gotten around to stacking on the shelves, and he had to be thankful for that. At seventy years old, or something like that (Reno kept bragging that he had stopped counting after fifty) , the onetime fur trapper wasn't as game as he used to be.

Which is why he had followed in Bridger's footsteps, and set up his own trading post about a dozen or so years ago on Clear Creek.

"You done a smart thing," Bridger had told him. "Make some money. Watch people go by. Drink whiskey. Smoke yer pipe. Easy livin'."

A hatchet fell with the axe handle, and the blade almost cut off Reno's left ear. A brass percussion capper bounced off his eyebrow. His good eye. An inch lower, and Jed Reno figured he might be wearing leather patches over both eyes.

Easy livin'? A body could get killed running a store.

He heard boots thudding across the packed earthen floor. His left hand reached up, found the handle to the hatchet that had almost split his head open, and jerked it free from the blankets and bolts of pillow ticking just as the bearded figure appeared on the other side of the counter.

A big man, bigger than even Reno, wearing fringed buckskin britches, black boots like those a dragoon or horse soldier might be wearing, collarless shirt of hunter green poplin, garnet waistcoat, and a battered black hat, flat-brimmed and flat-crowned. He also wore a brace of flintlock pistols in a yellow sash around his belly. One of those pistols was in his right hand.

Reno saw the hammer strike forward just as he flung the hatchet. Powder flashed in the pistol's pan, the barrel belched flame and smoke, and a .54-caliber lead ball embedded itself in the brown trade blanket rolled up on Reno's right.

"Horatio!" a voice yelled. Reno could just make out the voice as he sprang up, fell forward, and crawled toward the soon-tobe-dead Horatio, whose only replies were gurgles as he lay on his back as blood spurted from his neck like water from an artesian well.

The voice swore, and then barked at the third man who had entered Reno's trading post: "Sam, he's goin' fer Horatio's pistols. Get'm. Quick."

This time, Jed Reno heard clearly. The ringing from Horatio's pistol shot had died in Reno's ears. He dived the last couple of feet, ignoring the lake of blood that was ruining toothbrushes and staining wrapped bars of soap and the beads a Shoshone woman kept bringing him to trade for pork and flour, which, in turn, Reno sold to wayfarers from New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio and even Massachusetts who had been traveling so far that many of the ladies thought those beads from Prussia or someplace were prettier than rubies and garnets.

Reno jerked the second pistol from the dead man's sash. Horatio, Reno knew, was dead now because the blood no longer pulsed, but merely coagulated. Footsteps pounded, but not only coming from Sam's direction. The Voice was charging, too, and Jed Reno had only one shot in the flintlock he had jerked from Horatio's body. His left hand gripped the butt of the .54 Horatio had fired just moments before.

Sam appeared on the other side of the counter, where Reno had been refilling a barrel with pickled pig's feet when the three men entered his store.

Sam was the oldest of the rogues, with silver hair, a coonskin cap, and dark-colored, drop-front broadfall britches — which must have gone out of fashion back when Reno was a boy in Bowling Green, Kentucky — muslin shirt, red stockings, and ugly shoes. A man would have guessed him to be a schoolmaster or some dandy if not for the double-barrel shotgun he held at his hips.

The flintlock bucked in Reno's right hand, and just before the eruption of white smoke obscured Reno's vision, he saw the shocked look on Sam's face as the bullet hit him plumb center, just below his rib cage. With a gasp, Sam instantly pitched backward as if his feet had slipped on one of the bar-pullers, tompions, nuts, bolts, and vent and nipple picks that lay scattered on the floor. He touched off both barrels of the shotgun.

One barrel had been loaded with buckshot, the other with birdshot — as if he had been going out hunting for either deer or quail — and the blast blew a hole through the sod roof, and dirt and grass and at least one mouse began pouring through the opening, dirtying and eventually covering the ugly city shoes the now-dead Sam wore on his feet.

Reno rolled over, just as The Voice leaped onto the top of the counter. The pistol in Reno's left hand — the one he had jerked off the floor near the blood-soaked corpse of Horatio — sailed and struck The Voice in his nose. Reno caught only a glimpse of the revolving pistol The Voice held, because as soon as the flintlock crashed against the bandit's face, blood was spurting, The Voice was cursing, and then he was disappearing, crashing against the floor on the other side of the counter. Reno came up, hurdled the counter, and caught an axe handle on his ankles.

This time, Reno cursed, hit the floor hard, and rolled over, but not fast enough, for The Voice jumped on top of him and locked both hands around Jed Reno's throat.

Now that he had a close look at the gent, The Voice had more than just a rich baritone.

He had the look of a man-killer. Scars pockmarked his bronzed face, clean-shaven except for long Dundreary whiskers, and his eyes were a pale, lifeless blue. Those eyes bulged, and the man ground his tobacco-stained teeth. The nose had been busted two or three times, including just seconds ago by Horatio's empty .54-caliber pistol. Blood poured from both nostrils and the gash on the nose's bridge. One of The Voice's earlobes was missing — as if it had been bitten off in a fight. He seemed a wiry man, all sinew, no fat, and his hands were rock-hard, the fingers like iron, clasping, pushing down against his throat, and cutting off any air.

He wore short moccasins, high-waisted britches of blue canvas...