He didn’t flinch. He didn’t think.
He just waited. One half-second, long enough for Wilder’s barrel to line up, for the glint to flash...and then he fired.
The sound cracked through the tunnel like thunder.
Wilder’s shot went wide, shattering a lantern on the far wall. Blaze’s bullet hit home, center of his chest.
The outlaw staggered back, gasping. The lamplight wavered, flickering across his face as he looked down at the spreading red on his shirt.
“You . . .” he wheezed. “You got his eyes.”
“Maybe,” Blaze said. “But I ain’t got his sins.”
Wilder stumbled against the wall, knocking over crates. Gold coins spilled across the floor, rolling and ringing in the dust. He laughed, choked, and coughed blood.
“All that gold,” he said. “Ain’t worth a damn now.”
“No,” Blaze said quietly. “It ain’t.”
Wilder’s hand twitched toward his Smith & Wesson again, but his strength was gone. He slid down the rock wall and hit the ground hard, legs folding under him. His pistol clattered from his fingers.
He looked up one last time.
“You’ll never change it,” he gasped. “Your name . . . his name . . . they’ll remember what he was . . . what you are . . .”
Blaze raised the revolver. “Maybe. But they’ll remember you worse.”
He fired once more.
Wilder’s head snapped back. Silence followed.
The only sound left was the soft clatter of gold coins settling into the dirt.
Blaze stood still, breathing slowly. The gun’s smoke drifted around him in thin blue threads. He lowered the weapon, thumbed open the cylinder, and saw one round left.
The wanted poster lay nearby, half-buried in dust. He crouched and picked it up, staring down at the face of the man who’d raised him...different name, same eyes.
“You lied to me,” he whispered. “All this time.” His fingers trembled once, then he folded the poster and slid it into his coat pocket. “Guess it don’t matter now,” he said.
Behind him, the tunnel dripped and creaked. Somewhere deep within the mine, timbers cracked, echoing like distant thunder. But Blaze didn’t hear it yet. He just stood there, staring at the dead man and the gold scattered like fool’s light across the dirt.
He holstered his revolver, exhaled through his teeth, and shut his eyes for a long moment.
“Patience wins a gunfight,” he muttered. “You were right, Pa. But to hell with you for everything else.”
The lamplight flickered again, dimmer now. Shadows stretched over the rocks and bodies. The air trembled faintly. It was the first hint of the coming collapse.
Blaze looked up toward the entrance, where faint daylight spilled down through the smoke.
It wasn’t over. Wilder might have been dead, but Robert Kane wasn’t.
“Rachel,” he whispered.
Then he turned, boots crunching over the coins, and walked toward the sound of cracking beams.
Chapter 38
Blaze couldn’t think straight. It felt like he had been running from the truth all this time. Had he been blind to it? It had been there all along.
