Miles City, they called it, which Reardon figured was because it was miles away from anything important and miles between anything useful in town. Though Montana in fall could be downright charming, the shield of blisters on his feet was immune to charm, and the dark had long since soaked up the beauty of the sky.

He ground his lips together as though the pressure could keep them warm. The quack who'd told him a leather duster could hold off the chill obviously had never wintered north of Lost Angels in his life. But at least in winter, the bay-koks stayed asleep in the forests and not in town, hunting for livers. At this time of year, wendigo were the worst a prospector was likely to face, and the locals—who probably weren't so local in a rush-town like this one—would have handled them long ago.

As he stepped over the railroad tracks towards the tent-ringed stores, he fingered the gold of his pocket watch, nervous before work. But he could count the remaining two minutes in his head, and without permission his feet fell faster.

Tipping his hat, he tossed a grin and a glance to the few locals still up. Though the town was small enough his face would mark him a stranger, Reardon hoped the dopey smile followed that up with "harmless."

With a hand on the swinging door, he brought his body from cold air to hot smoke, most but not all smelling of wood and tobacco. The acid-and-hops overtone spelled saloon, and he was sure the place had a name, but damned if he could read it.

It wasn't so different here than in the City of Angels. Sure, there was no phalanx of crosses nailed to the door to keep away vampires, but at least the piano was going on about something, and folks were well beyond wetting their whistles and on to washing them. The playing tables had that confounded dominoes-like game he didn't care to figure out, and there wasn't a woman in sight, which boded well. No one to talk sense to a sucker.

Reardon sidled by some likely prospects deep into poker. Boomers, he could tell, making steady money, using silver dollars for chips rather than the other way round. Some hands settled downwards as he eyed the piles for a second too long. He waited at the bar long enough for a glass and an empty seat before beelining for the table.

"Evenin' boys. Mind if you deal me in for the next hand? I'm fresh off the rail myself, and achin' to sin." He settled in as if he belonged, but no one else seemed to share the opinion.

"We don't work the railroad." The first man to speak had a face weathered by sun and wind, with flint-hard eyes and a thick cigar not far from his mouth. A miner.

"Never said you did or didn't, but I would lay money your friend here has made serious tracks to catch such fine blankets of what looks like the Moki peoples if I'm not mistaken, and yet come all the way up here."

He gestured to the one wrapped burrito-style in three layers of thick Southwestern wool, in crimson, white, and black. The man was looking poorly, thin from the neck up, with a tired frailty that Reardon recognized better than what the dime novelists called pale or waxy skin. Sick with the fall, no doubt.

"I believe in judging a man by the character of his actions, and occasionally the condition of his poker deck, which in your case looks well-worn. My name runs to Odysseus Myron Albert Joseph Reardon, but most folks just stick with the last."

No response but a glance among the table's men, and a few mutterings Reardon couldn't reason out. He dropped his hat and broke in a fresh Bicycle, filling the dead air with riffles.

"Bring my own cards, bring my own whiskey fresh from my grandmother in Tennessee, and as my one-time offer, seeing as I've filled up recently, the first hand plays for shots. Five-card draw. What do you say?" The silver hip flask was pouring already, Daniels family recipe.

"Hm," said the human burrito.

"Mm," said the mighty oak with the cigar.

"Rrrmm." said the tattooed one, intent on stacking his winnings.

"I don't play with stupid people," growled the fourth.

Reardon tried to keep his reaction to a friendly raise of the brows. "I was always told they was the best types to game with, 'long as money's on the line. And it looks like your friend here could use a shot to warm his heart rather than this, uh..." he read the label on the bottle, "...sebaceous extraction of Mexican kingsnakes."

The fourth barely relaxed his scowl to speak, and Reardon noticed his clenched hands had a familiar look. The last three knuckles were ape-like, bulging out and strangely scarred, as if from rope-burn. "My grandfather had his saying, too." He flexed his grip. "Never play cards with smiling men in suits."

"Well..." Reardon paused, scratching the back of his head, and brushing the woolen shirt as if he'd spotted dandruff. "I suppose this here could be called a suit, but a Mississippi riverboat'd like to throw me off for dress code, if that's what you're gettin' at."

"It was sold as an outfit this morning," Knuckles continued, not buying the pose. "At Kell's."

"It was?" Reardon looked askance.

"To a fella kicked out of the casino for cheatin', called Ten-Fingers Joe."

"Damn shame on the range, everybody always got the same style-"

"In the white section of town, mister gwai loh fuck-head."

The piano stopped, along with anything resembling conversation, and a lot of eyes did what they were good for. The oak stabbed out his cigar on the table and stood up, though whether to hold back his friend or pick up a chair, Reardon wasn't sure. He kept his attention on Knuckles' hands, slowly placing the toes of his boots on the ground.

"Cong Ying..." warned the tattooed one, looking up from the piled coins.

"Stay out of this!"

Reardon flinched, sticking an arm out, but kept the gesture vague enough to be non-threatening. His voice was a little shakier than he would have liked. "I was hoping not to bring up the subject of race this evening—"

"And cheat us like you cheated the tongs in Lost Angels? Ten-Fingers Joe, bet his own left hand against four hundred dollars that he could come up with a flush or higher? Conned Kwan Tso's men into betting with the payroll and stole it once he'd drugged them with morphine?"

The human burrito gave Reardon a look, debating whether to spit out the shot of whiskey he'd been sampling, and apparently decided he'd drunk worse.

Cong Ying's breathing rasped a little, like an incidental leopard growl. "What the hell were you thinking? Changing your outfit means nobody'll recognize you? You act all open and friendly just so you can get the chance to cheat our people?"

Reardon glanced toward the bar for staunch defenders, but the doors were flapping and hats tipping. The last man in, tall and quiet under a Texas hat, threw his money on the bar as a few remaining tables looked on expectantly.

Shi, the big miner, waved a hand to calm them. "This won't take but a second." He grasped the collar of Reardon's duster, but Reardon only lay a gentle hand on his shoulder in response. He had to stay calm, or he'd lose the one man on his side.

"Gentlemen, I believe in playin' fair or crooked as the game demands," Reardon began, "and seein' as you no doubt squash cheaters bad—"

"We kill them."

He tried to continue unimpeded. "It's time to play fair. Please, sleeves rolled up, scout's honor, I'd like to make amends for whatever gambler tales you may have heard about me. I suggest we be only of the human race tonight, brothers and sisters together in harmony." His left hand folded slightly over his right, which he held in a fist. "All right?"

Cong Ying's head made a funny jerk back. "What do you think that is?"

"Left hand symbolizes the moon and self-control, covering the right, the sun and aggressive power. Hand signal of the Ming Dynasty Triad supporters and the monks of the Little Forest Temple, afore it got sacked and burned. Reversed, it's a challenge, and incidentally the salute of Beautiful Springtime kung fu." He switched hands, staring Cong Ying in the eyes before glancing at Shi's hand, still on his coat.

The big miner let go, wiping imaginary lint from the back of it.

Cong Ying's scowl was still carved above his chin. "Nobody teaches white men Beautiful Springtime."

"'Course not," Reardon said, holding his too-soft hands up in surrender, "I'm sure the honorable instructors wouldn't have me. I don't know any fist, any gung, whatever you want to, um, call it. A friend," he elaborated, voice jumpy before he smoothed into the explanation, "name of Liu Yangshu. He was a lawman partner of mine in '76, he told me about it. We were both deputies in a place called Bishop, down California way." Reardon stroked his clean-shaven chin as they relaxed a mite. "He was a good man. Had the best kung fu of...well, just about anyone alive."

"Closin' time!" yelled the bartender very loudly in English.

"Did I say something?"

"I think you said a mouthful." Cong Ying started forward, but the sound of laughter stopped him sharper than a bit. Burrito-man's blanket was shaking, giggles leaking out.

"It's not funny, Hui."

"Yes it is! You ruffled and he just lyin'. He don't know any kuen. Your friend, he tell you about hing gung? Fly from tree top to tree top?"

"He couldn't do that type of kung fu," Reardon confessed.

"See? He don't know hing gung, what good is he?"

"I don't mean blasts of chi," he added hastily, fiddling with his hat on the table, "not all the leaping and magic and fabulous feats. I believe it translates as 'hard work,' determination, time spent in study."

Hui gave another "Hm," and Shi sat down as Reardon continued. "Yangshu, he never started no fights, and never disobeyed the precepts his sifu laid down."

"So...useless kung fu." Cong Ying nodded.

"I would not call it such."

"Well, if he doesn't fight, he never tests his kung fu, so..." Cong Ying shrugged.

"Said he started no fights," came the reply. "Yangshu fought the best."

Shi picked up the cards, sorting through them for marks. "Death match?"

"Worse," Reardon said with a faraway look. "He fought the devil himself."

* * *

It was the thirteenth of June when it happened, 'round about a quarter to twelve.

Yangshu, Reardon, and a big solid-boned gent called Karl Ritter were tossing back rabbit stew on the back porch of the sheriff's office. Not two days before, the rail had brought Karl a package he'd been waiting on for months. Needle-gun, they called it in the old country, a '71 Mauser rifle with pointy little bronze-tipped shells, and as Reardon recalled, the three of them oohed and aahed appropriately before Yangshu started up his usual racket.

Though he rarely said, for he wasn't much for talking about himself, Liu Yangshu wasn't like the other kung fu students back home. At age four, he was picked for training in the growing art of choi li fut with Chan Sing in Fatshan, which was normal for boys of his body type when martial arts ran in the family. But when the others were through with fists and feet, and on to advanced lessons of licking red-hot shovels, flying, and catching bullets with their hands, Yangshu couldn't follow. His chi was imbalanced, and he couldn't take a sledgehammer to the ribs no matter how hard he tried or how loosely he relaxed.

Frightened for the boy's future, Chan Sing sent him to a Chen family t'ai chi and chi gung master when he was eleven, who stuck twenty-one needles in him a day to no avail. By fifteen, Yangshu had given it up in favor of Leung Yee Tye of the wing chun system, who declared it a curse. Nonetheless, to succeed without chi, master and student had to establish ways to beat those who had it. At twenty, Yangshu traveled to San Francisco, spending the whole ocean trip wheedling a chin na practitioner for what he knew. Fell in love with a sweet young thing who broke his heart, and decided to retire at the ripe age of twenty-five to Bishop to do some good. Marshal Pratt figured he needed a deputy that spoke Chinese once the railroads turned Chinatown large, and the locals took kindly to his appointment, excepting the criminal element.

Trouble was, at least for Reardon and Ritter's long-suffering eardrums, no one in Bishop's Chinatown knew kung fu, and Yangshu was afraid that practicing with clumsy folk would rot his technique. So every day he practiced alone, and he'd hung an old stove belly on the wall to toughen his hands at lunch. The stove usually got the worst of the deal, though the drunks in lockup would have liked to see it win a round, especially when Yangshu got up early to practice before breakfast.

But that day, somewhere around punch three hundred, Frankie Hollis came running in, yelling that there was trouble. Someone had found James Urban's body with a hole in it, slung out by the southeastern mines. They had all known then, Reardon thought, that this was trouble worth a gun. Yangshu popped a hat over his stubbly head, and walked off without so much as a goodbye kick.

Reardon racked a shell into the Mauser. "This beast might turn a head peaceful just by sight," he muttered. "I'm bringing it."

"Have it. I'm not goin' to a fight with a new weapon, no matter how ugly." Ritter checked the spin and sights on his ever-present Schofield.

On the walk over, they talked about what it might have been. There'd been death curses from the brujo ring they'd broken up, and displaced ghosts from the Navajo shootings, but it hadn't been a year and a day yet, so revenge got ruled out quick. Ritter started back into the rogue wendigo theory he'd been working on all spring, and to shut him up, Reardon talked to no one in particular about the vagaries of indoor plumbing just before they came upon James' body.

The tin of his blasted badge had been driven through his heart and bits of it sparkled on the cliff face behind him. Not three yards away, the corpses of Moses Ladlemyer and Harvey Pruitt stained the dust with black-cherry red, lying there like half-carved buffalo, picks still in hand, both their heads blown open at high noon.

"Desperate man in town," Ritter said ominously. "Don't like witnesses and he ain't afraid of the law."

"Wild wolf wants no money," Yangshu said. "But it still kills."

Reardon nodded. A scratched-up lump of pale green ghost rock, the crystalline kind, lay not three feet from them, still smelling of its sulfurous bed.

* * *

"Ghost rock not come with sulfur," coughed Hui, sorting through his cards. "Sulfur occur sedimentary layer. Ghost rock far below."

Reardon politely nodded at the damn miner. "Well, I am not as familiar with the how-done-its of mining as you, perhaps, but I assure you, the smell of sulfur that day was un-mis-takeable."

"But you say mined with pick. Hot water boil sulfur away, come flowing up, no work. Your call, Ten-Finger."

Reardon looked over his three eights. "I'm still in, and I'll raise you a dollar." He paused for thought. "Boil it away?"

"You don't know about boiling water?" Cong Ying glanced at the other miners. The table got a bad outbreak of laughter.

"What?" Reardon asked blankly. "Like washing it away?"

"Whoo, and I thought we worked hard," Cong Ying said, recovering. "All right, um, how should I tell you this? Uh...sulfur...it, uh..."

"Melts." Shi announced.

"You don't need to waste time out there with a pick." Cong Ying ran a hand over his face. "Okay. I'm in. Ning?"

"I'm..." The tattooed man looked over the table, "...out."

Reardon flexed his toes inside his boots, chewing his cheek for want of tobacco.

They drew. No raises sounded, and they lay them down. Flush of clubs.

"Come to daddy!" Hui had gotten many miles out of that particular English phrase, Reardon guessed, as the burrito confidently raked in the cash.

"You're not kidding here?" he asked Ning, who looked ready to stand and go.

"We did it just this morning," he said, and Hui handed him a hand to shuffle. "Got to get the stuff out of the way before you reach anything. Making that pump set up is a nasty bitch, though." Reardon noticed him watching the Texas-hat gent by the bar, who tossed out a wave before letting the half-door swing shut behind him.

"You needin' a hand?" Reardon asked, bringing their heads and attention back where they ought. "I know some mystic types, could sniff for a vein."

"Mmm," Ning pushed his chair back, stretching his legs with a crackle of hip joints. "We gonna do it again tomorrow, we gotta get some sleep." He swished a mouthful of whiskey in his cheek like fine wine.

"Not while he's got all my cash." Reardon frowned at Hui's mound of silver. "Does he play better when sick or something?"

"No. Play better when well. Beating you like beating old woman." Hui paused to drink again. "But hand not as tired."

"We'll see about that," Reardon said as he picked up his five.

* * *

Their jog back to town became a dash when the shots started, and by the time the screams followed, they had damn near collided with Marshal Pratt, who was covered in sweat and kicking up dust like a Roman chariot. "RUN!" he screamed, which sounded awful queer to Reardon. Not the word choice, mind you, since Pratt was a direct fellow, but Pratt had rustled out three bandits for a trial week before last and shot down a pair of murderers alone, so he and gunpowder had met before.

Two men and a woman followed at high speed. Yangshu fanned out to the left and Ritter to the right as Reardon hung back, trying to get the chin-strap of his hat to stay put while carrying too much rifle. With his back to a house, Ritter was first around the corner.

The thing just outside the bakery must not have looked directly at him, because he stood still for the first few seconds, with a furious face that thinned and ran like paint. He cracked right as Reardon arrived, leaving him to stare the thing down.

It was a man but not a man. Were it clearly a beast of darkness with seven heads and horns and such, Reardon would have found it more comforting. The thing sitting on the albino Cheyenne mare looked like its human skin had been borrowed for the day, and not picked out too carefully at that. Its pure black coat was a little slice of space that drank in anything that brushed against it, even dust and light.

It was facing the bank, where Ragweed Bill had just come out with a shotgun. Clonk, clonk, went his boots on the boards, and he got as far as "Hey!" before the thing's voice broke the air like a crack in ice.

"William Maddock," were its only words, and then Bill might have raised his gun, but they'd never know, because the rider had an Army .44 in its hand, not like a quick-draw but like a fencer lunging, with the gun appearing where it was needed. Poor Bill jerked as the gun went whap, then held very still, like he was pinned in place with an invisible sword. It must have been what the killer was thinking, too, because he pulled the smoking weapon back and Bill collapsed. And somehow, there was bright red blood running down the muzzle of that pistol twenty feet away.

It turned toward Reardon, and under its black hat was a face with no eyes that looked like it had murdered Christ before breakfast and was waiting for the news to get around about who was God now. The skin was white and bloodless, dry as a saddle and stretched thin over a bony trapezoid of a jaw. It threw open the left side of its coat to put back the old iron, a beast forged in the fires of Hell by Hephasteus and Samuel Colt. It stroked a nail up the butt.

"Matthew Laramie Pratt," it said.

Reardon swore that lightning had just struck next to him.

In his nightmares, Reardon used to see himself shooting outlaws while the dream-gun bucked and smoked and never dropped a soul, and he knew at that moment that the Mauser would do the same awake. And he thought maybe if Ritter had run, he'd cleared a path through the air behind him that'd be a damn shame to waste.

But the adrenaline had pissed his muscles away and after thirty feet of running there was a split in his side. Though when he looked back at that death-white mare and rider, he decided he could live without such modern luxuries as air in his lungs. He'd made it six blocks and around the theater when he caught Ritter, with Yangshu right behind.
"What in God's name was that?" The yelling didn't even make him feel better. That thing would kill screaming men just the same.

"Big wolf," answered Yangshu. "Very bad."

"Gimme that rifle," Ritter said, taking it.

"It's gonna kill the marshal, ain't it?"

Ritter nodded. "Don't see how it can't. That there's the Revenant."

Reardon tried to breathe slowly and deeply while his brain kicked, but it faltered on that name and went nowhere. "So..." he said, "so now, uh..." He stopped, unable to find a conclusion that didn't include them being very, very dead.

"You know this man?" Yangshu asked.

"Ain't a man," Ritter said. "It's a spirit."

"Oh, not another goddamn—just when we were about to have some—" Finally, he kicked his tongue into gallop. "Okay," he announced. "Okay, you was in the Masons, Karl, you know this occult shit, fine, you're in charge. I'm gonna start running now, and I'll stop when I hit the goddamn Mississippi."

"I need you, Reardon."

"Spirit like wendigo?" Yangshu asked. "We get medicine bag again?"

"Did that fuckbake look Indian to you?"

"That's not the point," Ritter tried. "Or it kinda is. What I hear tell, the thing comes over the Threshold or what-ya-call-it bent on nothin' but killin' honest lawmen. Challenges 'em to a gunfight when it calls them by name, and makes trail rations of anyone who comes between."

"Can it die?" Yangshu followed without a beat.

Ritter frowned. "Haven't heard of more than one, so I don't reckon anybody's done it before."

"Iron never kill tree, either," said Yangshu, "then human make axe."

"Oh, shit," Reardon broke into the semantics. "Oh, shit! All right, all right, let's go get some dynamite. I ain't gettin' in a gunfight with some ghost vampire sumbitch that never misses. If it can be killed, dynamite'll do the trick from a distance. We just lead it into a saloon or...or a mine shaft, and drop the roof in."

Ritter shook his head. "Never heard of anyone who got near enough to try it, but the books back east say the only chance is for an honest lawman to put a bullet through its heart. Don't reckon I'm volunteering, but we can't let it get the marshal." He paused. "Dynamite's an idea, though. If it don't kill it, maybe we can at least slow it down, or pin it in place. Then..." he mimed a gun with his finger.

"Bullet to kill spirit?" Yangshu looked puzzled. "In China, we fight spirits. Always use chi."

"American spirit, Yangshu," Reardon said tiredly. "Gotta use a gun." He held out his left Peacemaker. "You seen it done, right?"

Yangshu pushed the pistol back. "Never."

"Look, Yangshu, we don't have time for this. If the man says it's the only way to do it, it's the only way to do it. He sees you coming with your double hook swords and shit, he's gonna blast you down and kill everyone else besides and your sifu ain't gonna be smiling about that."

Yangshu frowned, which he did very rarely. "Then you get dynamite."

* * *

"So he took the gun?" asked a man from the next table over, who'd pulled his chair nearer to listen. Reardon had an audience of eight now.

"Not a bit," he answered. "This cigar's quite fine, by the way, Shi. Um, Liu Yangshu, he had made quite a promise to one of his sifus, Chan Sing if I'm not mistaken. Some of the family got shot in a ruckus one time, and they took the oath seriously."

Shi grunted his appreciation as Reardon gave Cong Ying a quick once-over while checking out his three draws. The man's swollen knuckles bunched and tensed as he slid his cards into order. Reardon had noticed the habit in his last four games, and by the way he'd shuffled these about, Cong Ying had at least two pair, beating Reardon's own lousy one. Hui was having a bad run of luck, and the liquor made him easy to rattle, so Reardon moved on to Shi. The mighty oak was still impossible to read; he drew two cards no matter what he had and kept his face up at all times, but he wasn't any more friendly with luck than with his tablemates, so Reardon didn't worry. They dropped the hand, and Ning raked in eight dollars.

"Back and forth, back and forth," muttered Cong Ying.

"Wing chun man got no patience," cackled Shi. "In the old school, we learned Shaolin Five Animal poker. Shuffle iron cards, one million times each morning."

"Aah, you got tai chi poker," Cong Ying snorted. "You lose real slow, all night. We come back tomorrow and you'll still be losing."

"I got chi gung poker," Shi retorted. "No matter how bad I lose, I feel no pain."

"No, you got drunken monkey poker is what you got!" Cong Ying's laugh was infectious. "And you the sifu who's teachin' us gooood." Reardon made a note to water the whiskey from now on, or they'd fall unconscious before he won back his money.

"We been here too long," Hui muttered. "We need another game limit."

"Mmm. I think that was eight..." Shi said, looking over the glasses, "...teen. Make it thirty-six hands of Shaolin."

"No, we got to be going."

"I want to hear the end of this," Shi protested.

"Well," Reardon said, "if I might sum up a bit, Yangshu and I ran a cart out to the mine and back. Meanwhile, the Revenant spent his time huntin' about. Damn nearly shot Marshal Pratt, even though he ran halfway through town, round about and up and down and well into the second floor of the hotel before he died."

Ning looked up from shuffling. "I thought you said it nearly shot him."

* * *

"Jesus Christ Almighty, Reardon, you done killed the marshal!"

The Hotel Mays was now thirty feet shorter than it used to be, and from his vantage point atop the bank, Ritter could see an upper torso crushed by falling beams. Pratt had been blasted clear as he tried to crawl out the second-story window, but not all of him had come along for the ride.

Reardon was in no condition to hear or answer. He'd taken cover in the mining registry across the street, but that was close enough, he'd learned, when the front window burst, sending a million slivers jack-knifing to the floor around him. The registry itself took only a few cracks, but by the time he staggered out, bleeding from a dozen tiny wounds he was too freaked to feel, the dust had graduated from a cloud to a fog bank.

"Ha-haaaa!" he yelled at the crater. "Whatta you think of that, you son of a bitch?"

"Reardon!" yelled Ritter. "Marshal Pratt's dead!"

He turned and saw the other deputy on the roof, and his expression fell.

"Whatcha say?"

"He was crawlin' out the back window and you exploded him! He didn't make it!"

Reardon felt a numbing pang go through his body, and slowly put a hand to his mouth as he saw the red smear that was the only visible sign of Pratt's former life. Slowly, he picked his way further into the debris. The blast had done its work. The whole keg had been in the lobby when he lit the braided fuse, and it looked like it had blown everything on the ground floor up and out, through the beams above, letting the structure collapse inward in a heap.

Reardon stopped as he saw the rest of Marshal Pratt.

There was a clatter that he first thought was the wreckage settling, but as the second floor kicked up from underneath a shredded couch and the wall of a third-floor bedroom, he had a growing horror that it was doing quite the opposite.

"Holy shit, Reardon!" was the next thing he heard, and he turned to see Ritter hunker down over that Mauser rifle. Reardon needed no coaching to run, but the floor was an obstacle course of still-moving debris, and he had to lift his knees practically to his chest to stomp down the wreckage. The boot skidded once, and he went down with a squish on a jutting nail.

When he looked over again, the Revenant was killing Ritter.

It hadn't needed more than a clear line of sight, and while Ritter zeroed in on the heart, it just drew. There was a pop that sounded much flatter this time, and a stain painted Reardon's friend. Ritter dropped to his knees and skated to the edge of the roof, but only his arm went over, clattering the rifle onto the street two floors below.

The Revenant turned to Reardon again, without putting its bloody pistol away. Reardon waited on his butt, still wincing from the nail that had stitched red up his thigh and torn into him deep. His own iron was on the ground next to him. He couldn't hope to be fast enough, but miracles might happen.

"There ain't no marshal no more." Its voice sounded like acid gargled with gravel, but there was an odd note in the whisper.

It was confusion.

"No," Reardon managed to say.

"Then I'm lookin' for the senior lawman in this town." It nodded to itself, then hesitated.

"I senior lawman," came a voice, and it turned around easily to where Yangshu waited, carrying the Mauser and stalking towards the Revenant with cold death in his eyes. Reardon bit his tongue. It was true. Though Reardon had known Marshal Pratt since they were young bucks, and had hung around the sheriff's office since coming to Bishop, Yangshu was deputized four months before him. Yangshu headed straight toward the walking evil, though Reardon could see it wasn't as easy as he was trying to make it look.

"Liu Yang Shu," it said quietly.

Yangshu laughed, and it didn't seem to know what to make of that. "Liu Yangshu," he said, holding up the Mauser, barrel in the air. "You can't even pronounce name? Who you supposed to kill, babies?"

"I dine on the memories of lawmen," it whispered. "I eat their souls, I learn their ways."

"You kill American law."

"Yep," it said, taking out a cigar and lighting it contemptuously.

"Good." Yangshu smiled at the thing and racked the Mauser's bolt once before tossing the gun to the Revenant. "American not know how to fight."

* * *

The whole saloon laughed.

* * *

The Revenant caught the Mauser, though it was sharp enough to realize Yangshu wouldn't throw it a loaded gun and went straight for trying to deck him with it. This was what Yangshu had hoped for, and he slammed his hands on the gun long enough to pass it under his arm, check its hand with his, and flick his fingernails sideways where its right eye should have been. It flinched, and that was a start, though Yangshu was hoping for something more like screaming and crying blood.

It twisted away, hand reflexively loosening as it dropped the rifle and went for its Colt, cigar still undisturbed. Yangshu followed it down by instinct, fingers tightening on the hand as it came out, twisting aside and yanking the gun straight down the side of his body before it went off. The hole in the floorboard splintered a stretch the length of a hand and like to kill any human it had gone through, but it had missed Yangshu's foot by half an inch.

The Revenant kicked aside the rifle that had fallen as Yangshu ducked under the thing's arm, trying to drive his shoulder into its elbow in an arm-break. But the creature twisted easily, keeping the arm bent as it snatched to switch hands on its gun. Yangshu didn't have time to curse. Too long without practice.

He switched hands himself over its wrist, and somewhere in that motion the gun dropped. It clawed at him, raking his collar and face, but the armhold kept it off balance, and there was no weight behind its flailing. Yangshu split its hands with his, trapping its wrist to his body with one hand while trying to palm its face with the other, though the outstretched limb only succeeded in half-deflecting its clawing grab and depriving it of its smoke.

That was enough fooling around for Yangshu. With a wheel of forearms, he reached the outside of its elbow, where he could hit with both hands and it only had one to resist. Then, with a small movement, he stomped once.

It wasn't much of a stomp, and though Yangshu had a hard-soled snake-hide boot, the Revenant's were made of sturdier stuff, and he didn't hear anything so dramatic as popping bones. But the demon, at that point, was his.

Both choi li fut and wing chun had drilled him endlessly on the muk jeung, a wooden dummy against which they trained infighting with forms of two hundred or more movements, until blocks and attacks became one and the same, cracking against the muk like an eggbeater. They knocked arms up and down to disorient the foe, snuck in shots to the floating ribs, chops to the throat, fists and fingers to the muscle groups. The short movements were natural and hard to see, let alone counter, and often the only saving grace an opponent had was to back away, the breaks and locks useless when the opponent didn't have the courtesy to stand there like a block of wood.

But with Yangshu's boot square across the Revenant's toes, it was holding still.

Nobody ever really knew what happened next, except to say that Yangshu hadn't forgotten a single move in the set and the Revenant had never learned a one. Its ribs cracked as he drove the heel of his palm into them, the arm gave way to a hard slap at the elbow, and as it tried to hit back, Yangshu folded the second hand in on itself, the elbow joint locked in somewhere as he got down to the serious business of hitting it so hard and so often its pinned ankle popped as it got knocked over. Never lifting the foot, Yangshu crossed his legs to knock aside its feeble kick and did a two-step up it, grinding the knee into the dirt like a cigar stub.

Trouble was, being hit didn't bother the thing more than a bear getting wet, and it was still kicking. This time Yangshu wasn't ready, and the Revenant's sharp-toed horse-boot drove deep into his left thigh. Even through adrenaline, the fuse-burn pain stopped him, though numbness soon banked the fire.

"The gun!" Reardon shouted. "Get the gun!"

The Revenant rolled up and drew a boot knife, a move that Yangshu thought was dumb as a coal cart and twice as slow. He kicked it in the face, taking the jaw sideways like a door half off the hinge. But it grabbed his leg when he tried for a second, and though he stomped the knife handle down and crushed a finger, it latched on like a wolverine. They rolled in the wreckage together.

Yangshu didn't like the teeth in his shoulder, but they weren't much danger with no jaw to grind in, and he put his priorities on the knife and gun. Snake-clinging, he felt for the eye socket below the skin and dug in with a thumbnail, but the thing didn't need sight at this range, and all it did was make a mess. As his head got knocked into Room 10's steel washtub, Yangshu saw the future. With its broken arm, the Revenant couldn't do much but flail and pinch, but it could pound on him all day with the other. The pain would creep up behind him.

He sank beneath the Revenant, and, as an acupuncturist might say, disrupted its chi flow through sapping the center of its aggressive yang energy on the generative meridian. This feared technique was kept out of challenge matches and dreaded by even the most advanced students of the fighting arts. It had been adopted into choi li fut through the hung kyun family of kung fu, which had learned of it from the monks of the Little Forest Monastery on Mount Songshan, hidden in the warrior exercises known as the Eighteen Hands of Arhat that the monk Da Mo brought over from India fourteen hundred years ago. Its name was spoken of in polite whispers as bai yuan jing tao, White Monkey Plucks the Fruit.

In American terms, Yangshu reached real low, grabbed real hard, and yanked.

While the Revenant didn't shoot off sparks or scream, and its aggressive chi flow seemed perfectly intact, even Reardon could see that it was a mite distracted when it realized just what was now bouncing around loose in its pants leg that should have been attached.

Yangshu let go of its ribs long enough for it to twist, then tightened his legs, riding its back like a half-tamed mustang as he looped choke after choke on it from behind. Each time it grabbed his arm, he slid it away and replaced it with the other until his grip couldn't be budged, and it could only kick the ground and shove them backward like running lobsters. Something sharp stabbed Yangshu in the back. Beam of wood, maybe.

Nothing happened, of course, but he waited until the thing realized there was no danger and relaxed its neck. Yangshu reeled it sideways, snapping it. The Revenant didn't care for that much, and drove its good elbow down to loosen his thigh. When it reached his ribs, Yangshu's breath left in a rush, but as he crumbled, gasping, he saw where he'd dropped the rifle. He lunged for it, and the Revenant chased him on its knees, raining elbows and flailing fists until he had little choice but to make like a turtle.

Still, Yangshu clung to its boots, ignoring the taste of blood, shit and leather hitting his teeth, and when it got to its feet again, he launched himself up and forward, adrenaline fueling him ten times hotter than steam, and down they went.

But he knew he would wear out first, and when he wiped what he thought was sweat from his forehead, his shirt came back stained red. He hit it again, knowing his arms were too weak to push it back, then dropped to let his hand sweep, seemingly by accident, over the wrecked floor.

Letting his knees relax, Yangshu dropped into a sideways roll, ducking two punches, a kick and a stomp, then rose a final time, on legs that shook like rail ties with a train coming through, though his hand was steady as death itself as he drove it high. The last look Reardon saw on the Revenant's face was astonishment, 'cause it never figured on being beaten, period, let alone like this. Yangshu let out a scream that could have killed mice from the volume, and with a strike and crack like a coffin nail, put a spitzer bullet through the twisted black lump that thing called a heart.

It had probably expected that lawman's bullet to come out of a gun.

They fell together, Yangshu's blood dribbling down his back and head, and the Revenant howling like wolves in an echo canyon and clutching its chest with its remaining arm. It bucked and writhed, but even Reardon could see its movements had slowed to harmless as dark, sludgy tar came crawling out of the bullet hole with each breath. Yangshu crawled on his banged-up forearms across a plank, lay down and closed his eyes for quite a time longer than he had planned.

* * *

The bar had grown quiet except for Reardon's gradually slowing speech, and he found himself staring at the haze of smoke just above the table. It hung there, white and ethereal, out of his reach, but solid enough to turn his tablemates into faceless ghosts.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, where was I?"

"Calling," Shi said quietly. He put down his cards. A pair of jacks and a pair of sixes.

"Very well, gentlemen. I do indeed call." He put down the other two jacks and three fives, glancing at the mound of money on the table. Cong Ying shook his head and put down garbage, sliding a reserve of two dollars out of his coat pocket.

"That's all I've got."

Hui dropped his hand. Pair of aces. The others glared at Reardon, and Ning drummed his fingers on the table near where the winnings lay. There were eighty-one dollars there, plus Hui's top blanket, Cong Ying's felt hat, and Reardon's silver flask. Ning looked at the jacks and fives and tossed down the cards one by one. King of diamonds. Two of diamonds. Queen of diamonds. Three of diamonds. He paused, sitting up to his full height, as if to contemplate the mystery of the universe, or perhaps recite an appropriate passage from the teachings of Lao-Tzu.

Instead, he merely said in a solemn tone, "My kung fu is superior."

Ace of diamonds.

With the sound of a sheathing sword, he pulled the coins and a few paper bills across the wood, wrapping the flask and hat in the blanket. There were few other people left in the saloon, and the bartender had been washing out tin cups for a good while.

"Well..." Reardon sighed, "I am forced to admit so. Quite a game, my newfound, very drunk friends." He smiled. "I shall certainly remember your names as the people who cleaned me out and taught me a lesson, namely that I should stick to cheatin'." They laughed, and he checked his pocket watch. Fifteen until. "Good evening, and may you meet many more challenshes...pardon me, challen-geez in the future." He showed them the ming again, and they flashed it back. Hat on, duster securely wrapped, he stepped out into the cold with a final glance.

They were laughing.

The night air was still, and Reardon's eyes adjusted to the moonless starlight easily. His footsteps on the deserted street sounded mighty loud in his own ears as he placed his feet carefully to miss the patches of ice.

He had not gone further than the end of the block, where the facades of stores turned to the short rooftops of houses, when the hoofbeats started. Slow, steady, eight separate beats followed by the dull scrape of wheels through packed dirt. Reardon stooped, teeth set hard so they wouldn't chatter, as the wagon pulled out from behind the First Bank of Montana.

"Best get out of here," the driver called down. Under the wide-brimmed Texas hat, Reardon recognized the familiar face of the last of the saloon's customers to enter and the first to leave once the poker game had drawn a crowd. "Take the reins. My hands are killing me."

"Capital idea, Yangshu," Reardon said, climbing in with a sway that was half drink and half pride.

Reardon slapped the horses and their plod became a trot. "They knew you were Ten-Fingers?"

"Yep. They knew the coat, the whiskey routine, the time down in California, oh, they would 'a checked my shoe size if I'd let 'em." He sighed a sparkling breath in front of him. "Cooperatin', cheatin', you could see it all. Got taken for one-fifty-five and the flask."

Yangshu winced and wrapped himself in a blanket. "I'll buy you another dozen."

"Yeah..." Reardon said forlornly, listening to the clopping of the horse hooves before he took a look back. "You have any trouble finding their mine?"

"Only one with a sulfur pump set up. Like stealing prayers from a nun." Yangshu tried settling down into a comfortable position on the wagon. The bed was piled high, and even in the dark, Reardon could make out the sharp edges masked beneath a cover of tarp. Raw ghost rock. It must have taken Reardon's new friends close to a month to dig up. It would take less than an hour to sell.

"Hey, Joe?"

"Mmm?"

"You ever figure I should actually learn kung fu one of these days?"

"Oh, you know kung fu!" Reardon cackled. "When did we hatch this idea? December? And the routine? And finding a good city, and scoping out the quiet ones who avoided watchmen and didn't ship it off? Hard work, Yangshu. We got the best kind of kung fu in the world." He leaned back on that seat.

"They did mine it," Yangshu sighed.

"They were bilking me! Come on, I got a buyer waiting in Cheyenne, and then I hear the motherlode is up in Black Hills country."

"Am I gonna be Sioux again?"

Reardon whistled, and Yangshu turned away, huffing. Soon he had settled down to sleep. Eyes still closed, he nudged his companion.

"Reardon?"

"Yeah?"

"Mighty warrior drives bullet home with tomahawk, you reckon?"

"Sounds like an ending," Reardon agreed.