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Bluebonnets. That's what I remember. It was early May and the bluebonnets were everywhere except the dirt road from the town to Riker's Butte in a pale brown stripe. A mirror of the sky, but bluer.
We'd ambushed Moriarty's gang in the arroyo east of Bakerstown. Just bullets and blood and screaming, horses and men both. Sons a bitches had dynamite, but it didn't do them any good once I'd kicked one of their sticks back down on them and blew a few of them up. Most of them scattered, the ones that weren't dead or wounded.
But Moriarty himself got away – and Sheriff Lock riding on his heels. Both of them headed to the butte. Doc and a few other men tore after the sheriff when they'd dealt with the gang.
From the front, Riker's Butte looks like a tall cut-off pillar from a Greek temple painted in brick-red. But on the backside of that formation, a rockslide drops straight into an underground cave: Puerto de Diablo, The Devil's Door. No one knows how deep it goes, for nothing that goes in ever comes out.
I stood at the outskirt and watched their approach – Doc and the other men, and two horses, and no Sheriff Lock – amid the bluebonnets. And my first thought was that it was just so beautiful.