Riders From Long Pines by Ralph Cotton

that it might be a good idea to get the stage horses off the street. “Out of sight, out of mind . . . ?” Brewer added.
    Mackenzie nodded. “Good thinking,” he whispered.
    Â 
    Outside town, Stanton “Buckshot” Parks slid his tired horse to a halt and reined it back and forth as he squinted and watched the four drovers and the man in the swallow-tailed coat walk along the boardwalk toward the Blue Belle Saloon. “Frazier, you greasy-thumbed son of a rattler,” he growled to himself. “Touch one dollar of my money and I will open the top of your head and stir my fingers around in your brains!”
    But he settled down as he watched the young drovers follow Frazier into the saloon. “Who do I know in this one-horse miserable gnat’s ass of a town?” he asked himself.
    Keeping the worn-out horse running back and forth in a frenzy, the shotgun he’d taken from the site of the stage coach robbery in hand, he finally stopped abruptly as a name and face came to mind. “Hell yes, that’s my man!” he said aloud. Then he smacked the shotgun barrel on the horse’s rump and rode away, wide of the town’s streets and off along a littered alleyway behind a long row of buildings.

PART 2

Chapter 9
    Former deputy Fred Mandrin awakened to the sound of a rocking chair creaking slowly back and forth on the bare wooden floor. Before he opened his eyes, he slipped his hand beneath his pillow and felt around for the butt of his big Remington pistol. When he noted that the gun wasn’t there, he froze for a moment trying to remember where he might have put it, knowing that any second he might be called upon to use it. He’d been drinking hard the night before; he recalled that much. . . .
    â€œLooking for this, Fearless Fred?” said Stanton Parks, cocking the Remington, holding the tip of the barrel only a few inches from Mandrin’s face.
    Mandrin opened his bloodshot eyes and blinked a couple of times to get rid of the cobwebs and get a focus on Parks. “Nobody calls me Fearless ,” he said in a gravelly, testy voice, “leastwise, not to my face. Not if they don’t want to die bloody.” He raised himself onto an elbow and raked his hair back from his eyes.
    â€œYou’re awfully prickly for a man staring down the barrel of his own gun,” said Parks.
    â€œA man staring down his own gun barrel might as well be prickly,” Mandrin said. He looked around at the nightstand for the bottle of rye he’d placed there the night before, saving it as an eye-opener. “Did you drink my whiskey?” he asked, his face becoming grim at the prospect of having nothing to drink.
    â€œNo,” said Parks, “you must have lost it wallowing in the dirt last night, like a pig.”
    Mandrin gave him a curious look. “Were you here last night?”
    Parks gave a slight dark chuckle. He reached behind his back, produced Mandrin’s corked bottle of whiskey and pitched it over onto the bed beside him. “I’m only funning you, Fred.”
    â€œYou’re a real funny man,” Mandrin said in a stiff, dry tone. He picked up the bottle, pulled the cork and drained the two inches of rye with one deep swallow. Then he let out a whiskey hiss and tossed the bottle aside. “Unless you’re going to shoot me, point that smoker another direction,” he said, reaching out and shoving the barrel of the Remington away from his face. “I’m shaking so bad I might cause it to go off.”
    Parks chuckled again, but he eased the hammer down on the big Remington and laid it on the nightstand.
    Mandrin felt the whiskey go right to work, soothing him, filling in all of the raw jittery holes it had left in him overnight. “What brings you up this way, Buckshot?” he asked with a more steady voice.
    Parks shrugged. “I’m on the run, sort of,” he said as if uncertain of