The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  Then they were circled around him and the dead men and he looked at their faces and saw in those faces all the emotions of humanity, realized that they were neither brave faces nor cowardly ones, neither wise nor foolish.

  They were just folks, like any other folks, no better, no worse.

  “It’s finished,” he said. “You all can go home now. You’ve seen all there is to see. Take your kids and go home. This isn’t something they should have to witness.”

  But for a time nobody moved and he realized they weren’t looking at the dead so much as they were at him.

  Somebody said, “You did what you had to, Marshal.”

  Others vocally assented. Most said nothing.

  “They deserved it,” someone called.

  Then slowly they began to drift away except for Tall John and Will Bird, who knew they had their work cut out for them. They’d dig the graves and bury the dead and that would be the end of it. Until the next time.

  Jake looked for Clara’s face among the crowd.

  He was glad to see she wasn’t among them.

  About the Author

  BILL BROOKS is an author of seventeen novels of historical and frontier fiction. He lives in North Carolina.

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  Books by Bill Brooks

  Dakota Lawman

  THE BIG GUNDOWN

  KILLING MR. SUNDAY

  LAST STAND AT SWEET SORROW

  Law for Hire

  SAVING MASTERSON

  DEFENDING CODY

  PROTECTING HICKOK

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DAKOTA LAWMAN: THE BIG GUNDOWN. Copyright © 2005 by Bill Brooks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  ePub edition August 2007 ISBN 9780061741197

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