The Old Wolves by Peter Brandvold

doxies.”
    â€œI just wanted you to know that that in no way has this figured into your . . . uh . . . mandatory retirement.”
    â€œGood to know, but that won’t bring her back, neither,” Spurr said, splashing more whiskey into his old friend’s cup.
    Brackett waved a veiny, brown hand in halfhearted reproach, but he lifted the cup and took another sip. He set the cup down and took a pull from his quirley as he once again squinted through the smoke at Spurr.
    The chief marshal’s eyes were a little rheumy, and Spurr idly wondered if it was from the whiskey or emotion, or, possibly, both. They’d come a long way together, and in a way both men were staring out from atop the same steep precipice.
    â€œIf you yourself don’t know when it’s time to hang up the shootin’ irons,” Henry said, his ruddy cheeks reddening, “then it’s come down to me to do it for you, thank you very much, you mule-headed son of a bitch!”
    â€œHenry?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œOne more.”
    Brackett scowled at him. He took another drag from his quirley. “One more what?”
    â€œOne more job.” Spurr leaned forward on his elbows, staring at his old friend gravely. “Don’t make me go out like this, with a dead innocent girl the last thing I got to remember before they nail the lid down on top of me. After all these long years of good service. I want to go out on a better note than that. I want to go out doing something right—however small the job. When I head for Mexico, I want to take that with me to mull over for the time I have left.” He sat back in his chair. “Hell, it’s all I’m gonna have to live on.”
    â€œYou haven’t saved anything?”
    Spurr shook his head. “I always figured I’d die in some ravine somewhere down in Arizona or out Utah way, and it wouldn’t matter.”
    Brackett snored, chuckled without humor. “After all these years, you have nothing to live on. It all went for whiskey and whores.”
    â€œWell, shit, I always believed in livin’ till you’re dead.”
    â€œAnd now you’re gonna starve down in Mexico in your old age.”
    â€œWith my head propped on a senorita’s tender breast, Henry,” Spurr said, grinning over the rim of his whiskey cup.
    Brackett snorted, shook his head.
    â€œOne more,” Spurr said, his voice thickly serious again. “Just one more. Anything. But not courtroom duty, fer chrissakes. I wanna finish up on the trail—me an’ Cochise.”
    Brackett drew a ragged breath. He studied Spurr for a time, and then he turned his head toward the door and yelled, “Leonard, bring my valise!”

SEVEN

    Aboard the Union Pacific flyer headed north toward Cheyenne, Spurr closed the file on his lap, sat back in the green plush seat, and reached inside his elk-skin vest for a long, black cigar.
    He bit the twist off the panatela and scraped his thumbnail over a stove match, lighting up. When he had the slender cheroot drawing properly, sucking the sweet-peppery smoke deep into his lungs, he lowered the cigar and absently studied its coal though it was not the panatela he was thinking about but the assignment he’d just read in the file Henry had given him.
    The chief marshal had sent one old man after another one. An old man waiting in a constable’s jail in some remote mountain village called Diamond Fire.
    Well, that was fitting. The prisoner written about in the file was only two years younger than Spurr. George Blackleg was wanted on an old federal warrant for robbing a mail train six years ago in Kansas. A bounty hunter had picked up the old gent in a whorehouse up in a little mining town in the Medicine Bow Mountains and run him into the local lockup to claim his reward.
    Whether the bounty hunter just had a good memory or had recently seen one of the old federal wanted dodgers—they