Here by the Bloods by Brandon Boyce

welcoming bed somewhere. Tell me, did one of them whores toss you a free one?” He laughs at his own joke, lays back again. “Oh, I have learned all about you this night. Those two really can gossip like a couple of old hens. Until today, folks in this town did not think much of the one they call a half-breed.” I stand up, but he throws his palms open in an instant. “Easy now, friend, I am only reporting history. I have felt the sting of your overhand right and do not care to suffer it again.”
    â€œI am not your friend.”
    â€œFair enough. I see now how bringing me to incarceration took precedent over retrieving the booty. Why, you were still a boy when the sheriff took you in. What, thirteen, fourteen, thereabouts? No wonder you would trek all the way to hell and back, leaving fifty pounds of gold sitting by a campfire. Your quest was personal. I respect that. Cannot say I understand it, but I respect it. And you are quite the tracker, it seems. That is the Navajo blood in you, but you know that. And the way them whores hung their mouths open as you passed—yes, I saw that. The Snowman sees everything—why, from that I deduce that the white man who partook of your mother’s services was of a handsome stock indeed. But in a town of churchgoing white folks, you are just the bastard of an Injun whore. Hell, I know how you feel. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw, even when you go straight, whatever that means. And if you got a drop of dark blood in you, that is all the white folks will see. But what I cannot figure is why they seem to take you for simple. I know you are not simple. Surely someone along the way saw to your schooling.”
    â€œYou talk too much.”
    â€œAh, so it is a matter of education. Reading and whatnot.” The Snowman leans back, pondering, like he is gazing up at the stars. “I could see an Injun heathen woman not too concerned with tending to a boy’s schooling, but churching types like the sheriff or his wife? That does not figure.”
    I rise and cross to the door. “Fire hose it is.”
    â€œAll right, all right,” the Snowman says. “I will let it be, sir. There is no need to douse me further. Besides, I doubt the floor could take another soak. Forgive my conjecture.” I think about dousing him anyway. So be it if the floorboards rot. “I was intending a compliment—that you are a man of ability. That should be recognized. Appreciated. Even rewarded. Not brushed aside by a backward town full of timid, little cake-eaters. What you should be doing is riding with me.”
    The laugh snorts out of me in a heavy gust. The last thing I ever thought this sack of horseshit would do is fetch a grin from me. I do not believe I have smiled in three days.
    â€œI do not joke, son. A man in my line could make fine use of a good tracker. And you need to be with those who respect you, where you are no outcast, but a brother. Men would kill to ride with me. Hell, no ‘would’ about it. I got a gang of men whose hometowns did not deserve them, men who strove toward something greater. I take only the best—them with ice in their veins who can shoot the hair off a hedgehog at full gallop. They are my brothers. And hear me, son—day or night, it is the most fun you will ever have. I swear you have not lived until you have had a whore suck you till dawn on a bed made out of Union dollars.”
    â€œFrom what I seen, your gang is down to two, one of them shot, and both lost in the Sangres.”
    â€œOh boy, maybe you are dumber than I thought. You think I require the full power of my gang to knock over a hayseed bank like this one here? No, son. This is what I am trying to tell you. High up in them Bloods, miles from where you found me, in a little ass-crack of rock even you would overlook, are a dozen of the hardest, most killingest sonsabitches the devil ever made. That is the Snowman’s gang. And I