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In the dream, Mason can't feel the gunshot.
He knows it's there—remembers the whiskey-hot burn of the bullet as it had punched a hole through his upper arm—but the dream dulls the pain of it down to a shadow, a flicker of memory as he watches himself riding across the Wyoming plains, loose horses galloping around him like a fast-moving river burst over its banks. Bone-breaking hooves drumming heavy against the dirt, setting the earth rumbling like some heartbeat stirring below its surface. Behind him, Mason can hear his pursuers, and the dream is even kind enough to take him back, to show him the moon shining tin-colored off the Sheriff's star-shaped badge, blood pooling inside the thigh of the man Mason had been lucky enough to catch with a bullet of his own.
You just need to make it over that rise, he remembers thinking, his right arm weighing heavy and the pain still burning something fierce. You can lose them in the hills, find somewhere quiet to patch yourself up and think about all the ways this went south, but you're not through yet. He can feel the horse breathing heavy under him, his own leg muscles knotting up stiff. You quit now, you'd better hope there's one last bullet in the chamber 'less you want a slow death at the end of a rope.
But Mason hadn't quit, hadn't put the gun barrel to his own temple, hadn't ended with his heels kicking the air while the rest of him hung from a noose. No, he'd survived just like—as the Gilette's Sheriff's Deputy had once told him—cockroach-motherfuckers like yourself tend to do. And the dream reminds him of the rest of it, too—takes him through that night and the others as he'd kept riding east, the landscape all blue sky and gold grassland and two-horse homesteads. Eventually, when he'd started seeing the angry red of infection around the gunshot wound, he'd stopped in some town called Beulah near the Wyoming-South Dakota border, large enough to justify a physician and small enough to have fuck-all else. Probably for the best, though; he could do with a little less excitement. The dream skips past the sharp-smelling ointment the doctor had used to clean the bullet hole, skips past the nights Mason had spent in the inn waiting for the tincture to run the fever from his system, past him counting the pennies that remained from his fold of stolen bills, skips all the way forward to that afternoon at the Beulah chapel, the preacher out front in his starched white collar.
"My children," he'd said, voice pitched low. "I hear grave tidings from the Black Hills, further reports of violence in that lawless expanse of bloodshed and blasphemy known as Deadwood."
The crowd murmured around Mason. To his left, a woman made the sign of the cross. Clearly the subject of Deadwood was a familiar refrain from the preacher.
"We've prayed before to cleanse them of their wickedness, to heal them of their penchants for gambling, liquor, and laudanum. We've prayed for the safety and sanctity of the women there, particularly those too good and pure to whore themselves away."
Seriously with this shit? Mason had thought, but God strike him down if the crowd around him weren't bought wholesale into the preacher's rhetoric, their mood turning fevered to match the preacher's fire-and-brimstone voice.
"We've prayed, and we've prayed, and we've begged our Lord to deliver them to the light, but the latest word that I've received indicates that they are only moving further into the darkness. Children, I've learned that they've been living for some time without a messenger of God among them, that they have run out their previous minister—my fellow brother of the cloth—expediting their own journeys to an afterlife of pain and torment. And I say they deserve it! I say, if they have turned their backs so fully on God, let us do the same to them!"
The crowd cheered, spitting words of bile and vitriol toward the people of Deadwood. Unsettling to be sure, but what Mason found himself most struck by was the power of the preacher, his ability to spin up that anger with a handful of words and bible-waving. Must be nice to command such attention; certainly not the sort of fellow to wind up dodging bullets with the Sheriff at his heels. Even when the "word of God" clearly wasn't anything more than bullshit dressed up in divine-sounding language, there was trust there. Respect. At the end of the day, what was the difference between Mason and any fellow in a pulpit other than a white collar under a black shirt? He'd sold harder lies than that.
On the steps of the chapel, the preacher had begun shifting tact, turning the wickedness of Deadwood into a reminder for the people of Beulah to attend his Sunday sermons. The crowd had dispersed not long after, but the idea had stuck with Mason, embedded in the back of his mind like a burr tangled into a horse's mane. After all, wasn't he tired of running? Wasn't he weary of ending up in some sort of scrape or the other? What better way to hide from the noose than to dress himself up as someone unimpeachable?
What better place to go than a lawless territory that happened to be short a preacher? It'd be easy to keep his head down in a place with enough chaos of its own.
The dream cuts short there, but Mason remembers the rest of it—the way he'd sat with the idea through the evening, considered the shape of it like a panner sifting for gold in river silt. He remembers borrowing a spare set of vestments from the Beulah preacher's laundry, catching that first look at himself in the garb and marveling at what a difference it made, how it'd seemed to turn him into someone proper. Remembers thinking that this was the start of a new life for him, turning over the name "Reverend Mason" on his tongue and liking the taste of it.
Thinks now—the burning smell of the miners thick in his nose—what a fucking mistake it had all turned out to be.