My name is Wilkie John Liquorish, and I'm here for to rob you," I said.

The trip from Mobeetie to Fort Worth was a fool's errand. It's an angry hot ocean of sand, full of snakes and scorpions, Tonkawas and Comanches and maybe even ghosts, and when you're herding eight hundred head of cattle, it's akin to swimming the Colorado with a bale of cotton under one arm and a pig under the other. By the time we got to Comanche Texas, speaking of Comanches, our cattle were skin and bones, completely unsellable, and half our boys were jealous of them, because the boys were bones only.

I buried my brother Ira Lee in Meridian, and that was it for me. I had lost all my taste for cattle driving. Far as I could see, we were driving them straight into hell itself. I was ready to repent of that life. When I walked away from it, I walked from there clear to Fort Worth. It was slow and hot and lonesome. I walked mostly by night and slept by day, and, when I wasn't walking, I was riding a mule named Bird. Not my favorite way to go, but more about that later. In between all of these things, I became my own man. When I arrived on the edge of town, I had no past and no great future either. The sun meant nothing and the moon meant less. Hell's Half Acre opened its arms.

Three days after arriving, I pulled a robbery. I was dead hungry and didn't have any coin on me. Tubbs's General Store at Sixth and Main seemed to have plenty. I'd been watching long enough to know their banking schedule. Another man I couldn't identify would come in at four o'clock to spell Mr. Tubbs, and he would take the day's earnings down to the Fort Worth National Bank on Eighth and Main. Way I figured, 3:30 would be just about right. Any earlier, the pot would be smaller. Much later, you might run into that second fella and have more trouble on your hands.

"Well, my name is Bill Tubbs, young man, and I hate to tell you, but you're doing nothing of the kind," the man said.

He was standing behind the counter and seemed to be set on staying put. I was in a quandary. If I backed down now, my outlaw days would be over in a hail of laughter instead of bullets. They would most likely throw me in the hoosegow just for trying. They might feed me there, but in general the thought wasn't appealing.

"Don't reach for nothing but sky," I said.

I pulled Ira's .44 Colt out of my holster and waved it once. I knew I didn't have the luxury of time.

"You say your name is Liquorish?" Tubbs said.

I could tell by the way he said it, he was thinking of the candy. It isn't spelled that way, but I didn't have time for a spelling lesson.

"You're wasting my time," I said.

"No need to do anything hasty, Mr. Liquorish," he said. "That's an awful big gun you got."

There was something implied there, and it was something that didn't need saying. Being barely five foot tall and a hundred pounds when packed down with holsters, guns and ammo, I can tell when I'm being poked at.

"You saying I'm little," I said. "I get that. I get that a lot. But you know what? So's a bullet, and I got six of them right here."

I leveled the Colt good and steady at his face, taking in the waxed mustache, the sweat that glistened on his nose, and those eyes, blue as the Gulf of Mexico and every bit as full of crap, and I fired twice. Tubbs fell in a huff and a puff against a shelf full of flour and meal, a cloud of white rising around him like a quickly fading halo.

He left a trail of blood and flour across the back of the store as I dragged him into a mop closet, where I traded him for the mop and went to cleaning up. I pulled thirty dollars from the money box to cover expenses up until that point. Leaving more than that behind would show it wasn't personal and I wasn't greedy. I was just about to be on my way when the front door opened. In walked the High Sheriff of Hell's Half Acre.

"Bill not here?" he said.

I scanned the back of the counter and found an old rag, which I quickly dried my hands on.

"Not at the moment, Sheriff."

The sheriff scooted across the floor at me, squinting like he was looking into the sun. The man easily made three of me, and none of the three looked particularly friendly either.

"Who in tarnation are you?" he said.

"Wilkie John Liquorish, sir," I said.

He had a big Colt Navy Revolver. I knew what it was because I had seen one like it on a sailor back in my San Antonio days. I had offered the sailor three head of cattle for it.

"What the hell am I going to do with three cows on a ship?" the sailor said.

I regretted letting that damn gun get away.

The High Sheriff was a little slow on the draw. Maybe he didn't see me being all that formidable. If that's the case, it was a mistake. I shot him right in the teeth. That brought out such a holler, I was afraid the whole neighborhood was going to come running. The next two shots shut him up real good.

The sheriff joined Bill in the mop closet. Seeing as I only had one shot left, I decided it was closing time. I locked up the store and grabbed three boxes of bullets from the top shelf behind the counter. Nobody laughed when I climbed the ladder to get them. Nobody laughed when I crawled out a back window and slipped into a side street, two blocks away from the whorehouse where I was keeping a room. I was seventeen years of age, but the Madam there didn't believe it. In that instance, it was all for good, as she took pity on me and took me in. An hour after I turned Tubbs's General Store into one more crime scene in the middle of the most crime-infested town west of the Mississippi, I was sleeping like a baby in the Madam Pearlie's big feather bed, her best girl, a caramel-skinned redhead named Sunny, keeping watch over me.

Waking the next day and heading downstairs, I was surprised to hear the news being whispered from ear to ear to ear. Mr. Tubbs, the city commissioner who had muscled his way into the Acre with the plan to clean up its dirty image, had been gunned down in his own store. The High Sheriff, who had been using the store as police headquarters in enemy territory, was shot dead too. The Madam called for a day of celebration. Call girls were going for half price and so were the drinks.

I thought about taking credit for the killings, but it wouldn't have done me any good. It would've been taken as a plea for attention, which I had no need of, or, more likely, for a joke. Then I might have had to shoot somebody else. I could see it was a vicious cycle, and, anyway, I sure didn't want to shoot up the madam's establishment, a right genteel place called the Black Elephant Saloon. And yes, I had been instructed right from the get-go that there was a White Elephant Saloon on Main Street where I might better belong. But Madam Pearlie had welcomed me like a son and told me to pay no mind to any such talk, I belonged right where I was. I liked being the only white man in the Black Elephant. It made me feel important. And I liked Madam Pearlie.

It was during that half-priced celebration, while the Black Elephant's six girls lined up the men in the back and the bartender lined up the drinks at the bar, that I first met Gentleman Jack Delaney, whom Madam Pearlie said was known, to close friends and family, as Jack Rabbit. That was the only time I ever heard her refer to him in that manner. Others said Gentleman Jack had once been a slave on a plantation somewhere north of New Orleans. They said he...