Riding double atop Reed’s brown-and-white paint wasn’t our preferred method of travel but, as newfound criminals, my friend and I weren’t given much of a choice. My own horse might have been loyal, but he spooked upon the first gunshot. Reed’s shot. By the time we raced out of the storefront, I was without a ride. Hoof prints plus boot prints would’ve given us away, so two cowboys a horse it was. Banjo tried to buck us at first, but we held on tight—Reed to his saddle and me to Reed’s torso. The whole ordeal looked a little funny but the discomfort was worth it, long as we made it out of town alive. What turned a supply-run for a camping trip into a shootout happened so quick that we barely registered what went down. Neither of us meant no harm toward the general store customers but, at the end of the day, Reed’s gun fired first. Didn’t matter that it was an act of self-defense. Wounds spoke louder than words here. My friend, typically the more brazen one of us two, uttered no more than a few oneworded remarks as we rode out into the wild stretch of mountain terrain where nobody knew our names. We barely ate nothing that first night under the stars. Maybe it was our nerves but, deep down, we both knew our camping rations wouldn’t last us a getaway for long. Especially without my own horse, who’d carried half of our supplies, tent included. “I shot him, Graham,” Reed whispered, curled in the dirt with his back to me. “I shot that guy.” I dropped a branch into our fire with a start, waking a flurry of embers airborne. This was the first full sentence he’d spoken since fleeing town. Removing my hat and resting it brim-side- up in the grass, I stretched out beside my friend. “After that drunk lunged at us with that foldout knife,” I reminded him.
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