No one moved.

Meryl knew Milly's stun-gun was out of ammunition, but she didn't think McDonough could tell. And obviously he didn't know how many derringers Meryl actually carried. She thought he was really only looking to the man in red as his opposition, and if she was honest she could understand why.

For a moment Meryl considered the man in red, his green eyes calculating as he regarded McDonough. The red jacket concealed a powerful, if wiry, frame and plenty of hidden strength and lean muscle, she knew. Meryl felt her face half-flush as she remembered how she knew…remembered lying flat on his chest behind the bar, or lying there under him…

Everyone in the room seemed to give a start as the man in red finally holstered his revolver.

"Speak your piece," he told McDonough.

McDonough had watched the other man's actions and after a moment he holstered his gun as well. Under her cloak, out of sight, one of Meryl's hands still clutched a derringer. Just in case.

They all listened in silence as McDonough spoke.

"Northeast of here there is a massive graveyard," he began. "No," McDonough corrected himself, shaking his head abruptly, "it's a killing field." Next to her, Meryl felt Milly suddenly stiffen. "My family—all our families—" McDonough gestured around the room at his men, "—lie under that ground, so barren now that even corpse weeds won't grow."

He sighed.

"When people first came here this land was nothing, just sand and dirt, and our families worked hard, every day, to make use of it. Ten years it took," said McDonough, "ten years to make the soil here arable. Our families grew the crops that fed this town, that sustained the community."

Meryl watched McDonough's face suddenly darken and just as she had felt his calm prevail before, his anger made the room go cold and bleak.

"Until your father killed them," McDonough said, turning to the young woman. His voice was full of anger but it wasn't directed at the woman herself, which Meryl thought was impressive. She wasn't sure she would be able to marshal her own emotions the same—hate the father, yet treat the daughter with no contempt?

Then McDonough spoke to the rest of them again: " 'Grim Reaper' Bostalk. He killed off whole families, in cold blood, just to steal the land they worked their whole lives to make usable and fertile. And then he let it all decay again, out there. So he slaughtered them all, for nothing.

"That man owns this town now, and he is responsible for the murder of my family," finished McDonough. "Mine and my men's. And now I've come back to this place, after fifteen years, after finally mustering the courage to face that man. To kill him, for what he's done."

Meryl had watched the young woman go more and more pale as McDonough went on, and now she finally spoke, cutting through the sort of silent trance they all seemed to be under while McDonough was speaking.

"You're lying!" cried the woman. She tried to come across as angry but just sounded unsure and she glanced sideways to the butler for reassurance. The older man wouldn't meet her eye, looking determinedly down at his feet as if he could see right through the floorboards.

"What would I gain from lying now?" McDonough asked her, quietly. He gestured out toward the street and said, "I couldn't care less about the money, it was just to draw your father here. Whatever happens next, I won't run. But I will avenge my family—all our families—" McDonough waved around the room at his men, "—now. Here, today."

The woman didn't seem able to come up with anything else to say, and McDonough turned to face the man in red, as though waiting for his judgment on the matter.

"That's not something easily forgotten," said the other man, after a moment. McDonough seemed to take this as assent and gave a brief nod. The man in red turned and took a few steps toward the door but Meryl jumped forward and seized his elbow, holding him back.

"You can't go out there!" she said, alarmed. "You have no idea whether or not they'll—"

"It's alright," said the man in red, covering her hand with his to pull it free, turning to face her. "It'll be—your arm!" For a moment Meryl didn't understand what had made his calm expression turn immediately to alarm, but then she realized he had caught sight of the bloody mangled sleeve of her tunic, still mostly covering the injury she had sustained in the gunfight earlier.

"It's just a graze," she assured him, pulling her elbow out of range as the man in red reached out to her. "But you'll get more than that out there! How do we know they won't just open fire the moment they see movement in the shadows?"

"Because we still have the girl," said the man in red. Meryl noticed immediately his choice of words.

"We?" she asked. The man blinked, seeming only then to realize what he had said. For a few moments he held Meryl's gaze as she watched him, waiting for an answer. Is he really aligning himself with McDonough? "You know he means to kill—"

"No one is going to die here today," the man in red told her, and the sincerity of both his voice and his expression actually made her believe it. He turned toward the door and Meryl held him back again, her hand wrapped more tightly around his wrist.

"I'll go," she said suddenly, though as she did so she felt a surge of panic. She forced it down and made the argument: "They have no reason to mistrust me, and as they think I'm a hostage it would come across as an act of good faith on McDonough's part."

"They have no reason to trust you, either," said the man in red, putting his hand over hers again. "I'm a known entity—an Idiot—" Meryl could practically hear the emphasis, just as she always used it, "—and besides," he went on, with just the hint of an Idiot grin, "I haven't been shot in a long while, I might be due."

Meryl stood stunned, unsure what to make of this statement, but the man in red just looked down at her, earnestly, with clear green eyes that seemed to see right through her affected bravado and into her anxiety. "Trust me," he said, squeezing her hand.

Did she?

After another long pause, Meryl released his wrist.

Yes.

He nodded to her, turned, and walked out into the street.

Meryl moved to stand at the side of the window, a derringer clutched tightly in each hand as she watched the man in red walk out into the open. His hands were raised, palms facing the men outside, and Meryl heard him call out to the sheriff and his men, explaining that McDonough wanted to exchange Bostalk's daughter for a chance to face the man himself. Then he moved to kneel over each of McDonough's men, assessing their injuries and speaking quietly to them before returning to the saloon.

"Your men will live," the man in red told McDonough. "The gunshot wound isn't severe but the other needs attention soon."

"They're already moving them," called Milly. She was standing by the wall nearest the smashed-in section of the saloon's front, looking out toward the street. Turning back to address McDonough, she asked, "Does this town have an infirmary?"

McDonough nodded. Nothing else happened.

"Well," said the man in red, when none of them moved or spoke. "Fifteen years…"

This seemed to spur McDonough into action, reminding them all what was happening there. He grimaced and took Bostalk's daughter by the elbow, guiding her out of the saloon in front of him. The man in red followed McDonough, and Meryl and Milly followed the man in red.

Bostalk was waiting for them.

Meryl almost did a double-take. Bostalk was a distinguished, clean-cut older gentleman, dressed in a tailor-made suit and matching shined wingtip shoes. Under different circumstances, she would not have imagined this man to be the murderer McDonough had described. But she remembered the anger in McDonough's voice and the pain in his eyes as he shared his story, and there was no doubt in Meryl's mind that it was true.

But she still wasn't sure it justified a quick-draw showdown. Anxiety mounted in Meryl as she tried to think of some way out of this situation, some other outcome, but the scene was unfolding around her just like a dozen other duels she had witnessed in the past. And someone always ended up dead.

They stood in the middle of the street and the man in red motioned for her and Milly to move away but Meryl hesitated, trying to catch his eye, trying to ask for help, to ask him to end this. The man turned to look at her as he gestured again for her to move, and his eyes met and held her gaze.

Trust me.

After another moment she swallowed hard and pulled Milly back a few paces. The man in red came to stand at Meryl's side and the three of them watched, and waited.

"You have what you want," Bostalk called. "Let my daughter go."

McDonough did so and Meryl watched him mouth the words, "Forgive me," as he released her. At Meryl's shoulder, the man in red offered the young woman his hand, beckoning her away from where her father and McDonough were facing off. She moved toward where Meryl, Milly, and the man in red were waiting, but she stood apart.

Meryl watched the young woman shaking with silent tears, her hands tightly gripping fistfuls of fabric at the sides of her dress as she stared at her father.

What must she be thinking, now?

"It's hard to have a past you can't bury," Meryl murmured. A swell of emotion and memories threatened to crash over her and she wiped her mind blank immediately, with practiced ease. In her peripheral vision she saw the man in red glance suddenly down at her, wide-eyed. By the time she looked back up at him he was moving away, stepping forward to stand by the young woman.

The man in red leaned down to speak to her, his lips mouthing words iches from the woman's ear, but Meryl couldn't hear them. She would give her left arm to know what he was saying now, but her attention was drawn away as McDonough and Bostalk each settled into a more solid shooting stance where they stood in the street.

An almost tangible hush fell over the onlookers: the man in red, Meryl, Milly, the woman, the sheriff, his men; all watching in heavy silence.

And they waited.

The winds that had earlier plagued Meryl's and Milly's journey picked up again as though the weather itself could feel the tension in the street. Dust blew about their ankles and in the distance above them a raging sandstorm arose and blocked out the sun. Just as suddenly, the storm was gone and the sun shone down on the scene again.

Both men drew.

Meryl heard two gunshots in rapid succession and for a moment nothing happened. The street was so silent again that she thought every man there must be holding his breath. Then Bostalk collapsed.

The young woman screamed and raced to where her father lay. Milly was kneeling there next to her only a few moments later, her experienced hands and eyes surveying the man's wounds. From across the street Milly caught Meryl's eye and tapped two fingers at a location about an ich below the end of her left clavicle, and then nodded. Meryl moved forward to tell both McDonough and the man in red.

"Just a shoulder wound," she said. "He'll live." She couldn't be sure how McDonough would react to this information; his face remained just a mask of muted anger.

"Thank you," the man in red said to McDonough. He stepped forward to rest a hand on the other man's shoulder. "For not—"

"Don't," growled McDonough, sharply. He shrugged off the hand. "A distraction threw my aim."

McDonough certainly appeared angry, for all intents and purposes, but Meryl saw him watching the young woman care for her father with an almost sympathetic expression. He looked up to see Meryl regarding him and glanced away again immediately, his lips pressing together in a more convincing expression of anger, or at least of irritation that Meryl had caught him acting contrary to his claims of hatred for Bostalk.

Meryl realized in that instant that McDonough hadn't just failed to kill Bostalk, he had actively avoided doing so; he wouldn't do to that woman what her father had done to him, to gun down and take away the only family she had. Her respect for McDonough grew still further.

Before she could say anything, he spoke again.

"It's done," McDonough said, gruffly. "I'll turn myself over to the law now." He faced the sheriff and offered his hands, wrists together.

"Whoa there," said the sheriff, laughing suddenly as he spoke up for the first time. "Not just yet."

While Meryl's attention was on McDonough, she'd failed to notice the sheriff's men forming a loose ring around the scene and now they all turned their weapons on those inside the circle. Meryl faced down a dozen gun barrels with a familiar feeling more of exhaustion than of fear or anxiety. After everything else that had already happened…

You've got to be kidding.