“My brother,” the city marshal said behind him. “Morgan.”

Allison turned back and looked into the marshal’s Colt held straight out at shoulder level, pointed directly at his face.

“I’ll take your gun,” the marshal said. “Give it back when you leave.”

Allison stood motionless for a moment, looking at the marshal.

“You ain’t got the stuff to face me even up?” Allison said.

“No point to it when I don’t have to. Take the gun out really slow and put it on the ground.”

Allison studied the marshal’s face beyond the bottomless eye of the gun barrel. There was nothing to see in it. The marshal’s gaze was as focused and blank as the Colt that he held steady on Allison’s face. Allison took the.45 out of his belt, holding it with his hands on the cylinder, and bent forward and placed it on the unpaved street between them. Then he straightened as slowly as he had bent forward, and smiled.

“You don’t give a goddamn,” Allison said.

The marshal kicked the Colt away from them over toward the boardwalk in front of the St. James Saloon. His brother picked it up.

“You’d kill me and not mind it a little bit,” Allison said.

Without comment the marshal walked over, took the gun from his brother, and stuck it in his belt. Allison nodded, smiling more broadly.

“Hell, you wouldn’t mind all that much if I killed you,” Allison said.

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because you’re like me, is how I know,” Allison said. “Dying don’t mean shit to you, even if it’s you.”

He told Allison he could get his gun back on the way out of town, but Allison left in the morning without it, so the marshal sold Allison’s gun to a gunsmith and gave half the money to his brother. He never saw Clay Allison again, but he thought of him often, though he never spoke of it to his brothers or to Mattie, who lived with him and called herself his wife.