"You shot him?"
"I had to. Now I got his relatives looking for me. It's the kind of thing never ends."
"Well," Charlie Burke said, "you should never've robbed those banks."
Tyler said, "Thanks for telling me."
They sat in rocking chairs on the shaded hotel porch, the day warming up, Charlie Burke in town clothes, a dark suit and necktie, his hat off now to show his pure white forehead, thin hair plastered across his scalp. In no hurry. He said, "If the market ain't Kansas City, where you suppose it is?"
"I'm trying to think," Tyler said, sounding tired from a life of scratching by and those years busting rocks, his long legs stretched out, run-down boots resting on the porch rail. A saddle tramp, if Charlie Burke didn't know better. The boy had weathered to appear older than his thirty or so years, his light tan J. B. Stetson favoring one eye as he turned his head to look at Charlie Burke, the hat stained and shaped forever with a gentle curl to the brim.
"You've been reading about the gold fields," Tyler said. "Take a string up to Skagway, not a soul around last year, now there're three thousand miners, a dozen saloons and a couple whorehouses on the site. I suppose put the horses on a boat, it's too far to trail drive. I've thought about it myself," Tyler said, though he didn't sound fond of the idea.
That pleased Charlie Burke, his plans already laid. He said, "You could do that. But if you're gonna take a boat ride, where'd you rather go, to a town where people live in tents stiff with the cold, or one that's been there since Columbus, four hundred years?" He saw Tyler smile; he knew. "Has palm trees and pretty little dark-eyed girls and you don't freeze to death you step outside."