The westbound train came into Rawlins a little after four in the afternoon with the wind behind it, and the wind did not stop when the train did. It came right on through the depot and down the street and out the other side of town, carrying half the dirt of the Territory with it, and it would be back tomorrow for the other half.

Amos Tidwell stepped down off the car with his saddle over one shoulder and his rifle in its scabbard under his arm, and his left knee told him about every one of his fifty-eight years. He stood on the platform a moment, letting the knee have its say, and looked the town over. It hadn't changed much since the last time. More saloons. A new coat of paint on the hotel that hadn't improved it.

The boardinghouse was two streets back from the tracks, a narrow white building with green shutters and a sign that said CREEL — ROOMS — MEALS. There was a boy sitting on the front step with a pocketknife, whittling a stick into a smaller stick. He looked up at Amos's badge, then at his face, then back at the badge, the way a person checks a coin.

"You're the marshal," the boy said.

"Deputy," said Amos. "You'd be Toby Ware."

"I'd be." The boy folded the knife and put it in his pocket. He was small for twelve, with his hair cut short and a scab on his chin, and his eyes did not stay still. They went to the street, and back, and to the street again. "Pa said they'd send somebody. I thought you'd be younger."

"So did I," said Amos, "once."

The front door opened and a woman came out onto the porch, drying her hands on her apron. She was maybe twenty-six or twenty-eight, with dark hair pinned up tight and a face that had decided a while back not to be surprised by anything. She looked Amos up and down exactly the way the boy had.

"Mrs. Creel," Amos said, and took off his hat.

"Marshal. You'd better come in out of the wind. Supper's in an hour. Toby, carry the man's saddle."

The boy did, staggering a little under it, and wouldn't let Amos help.

She sat him down in her kitchen and poured him coffee that could have held up a fence post, and Amos told it to her plain, because she looked like somebody who'd want it plain. The Dace brothers, Cal and Lyle, were in the jail at Juniper Flat. Judge Pruett was riding circuit and would sit there on the twentieth. Without the boy's word, the county attorney had a couple of saddle horses and a lot of hard feelings and not much else. With it, the Daces would go to prison for a long time for what they'd done at the Sweetwater station. Somebody had to bring the boy up there. The county had sent for a deputy marshal, and the deputy marshal was Amos.

"Six days," Hannah Creel said.

"About that, horseback. There's no stage running up that way till the end of the month."

"And the third one?"

Amos looked at her over his cup. "You know about him."

"My brother is lying in a bed in Fort Steele with a bullet hole in his shoulder, Marshal. He wrote me every word of it, left-handed. I know there were three."

"Then you know as much as I do. Nobody saw his face but Toby."

She was quiet a moment. Out in the front room, the boy was pretending not to listen and doing a poor job of it.

"Then I'm coming," she said.

"Ma'am, I don't think—"

"You'll need somebody to cook," she said, "and somebody to make him wash behind his ears, and somebody to sit up nights so you can sleep, and you don't look to me like you're any of those. My boarders can fend for themselves a week. I rode before I walked, Marshal. I won't slow you down."

Amos had been married once, a long time ago, and he knew the sound of a question that had already been answered. He finished his coffee.

"We leave before light," he said.

At supper there were four boarders at the long table, two railroad men, a traveling dentist, and a quiet old Swede who worked at the depot, and they all took a good look at the marshal and then very carefully didn't. Toby sat next to Amos and ate his biscuits in silence until the pie came. Then he said, "Have you ever shot anybody?"

"Toby," said his aunt.

"It's all right." Amos put down his fork. "I have. Not anybody who didn't ask me to first, and not one I don't still think about. It's nothing like the books, son. You don't want it to be."

The boy considered that. "The one who held the horses," he said, low, so only Amos could hear. "He didn't go in. He just sat out there on his horse the whole time, and he was laughing."

Amos didn't say anything. He'd find out about it on the trail, when the boy was ready.

After supper he went out on the porch to smoke his pipe and look at the weather. The wind had died down some. The saloon across the street had its doors propped open, and the light and the piano music came out onto the boardwalk in a yellow square. There was a man standing in the doorway. He wasn't doing anything. He was just standing there with a glass in his hand, looking across at the boardinghouse. He wore a gray hat, and there was something pale wound around the band of it that caught the light.

When Amos looked straight at him, the man turned and went back inside.

Amos stood there a long time after that. Then he knocked out his pipe, went in, and locked the door behind him, and sat up in the kitchen chair by the window until it was time to saddle the horses.