“Why not something more than partners, after
a while, Jack?”
She smiled strangely up to him.
“Because of this, Dick.”
And fumbling at her throat, she showed him the glittering
metal of the cross.
“The cross goes on, but what of you, Jack?”
A long silence fell between them. Words died
in the making.
The great weight pressing down on that slender throat
was like the iron hand of a giant, but slowly, one
by one, the sounds marshalled themselves:
“...God knows...” It was the passing
of Judgment. “God knows...not I.”
But what of the legendary gunfighter, McGurk?
How could the spirit of any man survive that terrible
defeat at the hands of Red Pierre?
After that night, when he had walked from the dark
heart of the mountain without horse or gun, head bowed,
eyes glazed, it seemed that the life of Bob McGurk
had burned down to black ash.
Indeed, no one heard of him for five long years.
Then, phoenix-like, he was reborn in fire, emerging
in the raw border country of Texas. His rebirth
was spectacular. No longer the lone phantom fighter
of past days, he led a gang of coldhearted thieves
and killers that became the scourge of the Rio Grande.
But McGurk never returned to the mountain-desert country
of his shame and defeat. And only he knew that
the face of Red Pierre never left him; it blazed in
his mind by day and haunted his nights.
Then, as suddenly as he had reappeared, after proving
his skill and courage afresh in a score of wild, bullet-filled
encounters, the great gunfighter vanished from the
world of civilized men. His gang dispersed and
the border country saw no more of him.
McGurk was finally gone.
Only the legend remained.
