DEAD MAN’S REACH
“He never killed a man that did not need killing.”
– Tombstone of gunfighter Robert Clay Allison, 1840-1887
Jarrod stood in waves of sleet, alone in the valley, feeling unexpectedly territorial and imposing; actually feeling, for the moment, like he had this.
The Hillwhite army was a cheerless mass in the rain and fog in the south end of the plain, and he could make out flags on spears if he squinted. His army—his army, he reminded himself, turning back to look at it and there were a lot of them—sprawled up the hill, rice grains of men silhouetted at the top against a sky of iron gray streaked with columns of smoke far beyond.
It was a good place for a fight. A wide, rolling, spongy plain between two tree-crested ridges, with a blanket of moss beneath his boot from eo
