‘You don’t look very pleased to see me, Shane.’
After six years, meeting Shane again had clearly put Buchanan in a good mood. He sauntered over. ‘You might at least thank me,’ he said.
‘For what?’ Shane had not spoken in a long while and his voice was dry and cracked.
‘For sparing you the agony of a long and boring trial. Not to mention a hanging.’ He enjoyed the look of confusion that crossed Shane’s face. ‘I didn’t bring you all the way out here to kill you, Shane. I’ve something much better in mind.’
The two riflemen had come in from the flanks. They were blank-faced professionals, all in their early-thirties. They kept a good distance from each other and were careful not to stand too close to Buchanan. Necessity had brought them together, but they were not friends.
The marksman descended from the ridge. He was like the others but the way he carried himself radiated a definite malignance. Tall and thin and ramrod straight, he resembled the gun he carried. The others backed cautiously out of his way. Alone among them, Buchanan was not afraid of him. ‘Go after them,’ he said, indicating to where Noonan and his men had gone, their passage marked by a diminishing cloud of dust.
‘What about Ennis?’ the marksman replied.
‘He won’t give me any trouble.’
The marksman raised an eyebrow sceptically but he voiced no complaint aloud. He mounted his horse and the other two followed him. Buchanan waited until they had gone before turning to face Shane with a leer. ‘Alone at last,’ he whispered. ‘The time hasn’t been good to you Shane.’
‘I still have all my fingers.’
The jibe was unexpected and cut Buchanan where it hurt. His face twisted into a monstrous grimace of rage and his eyes blazed furiously. Shane tensed, expecting to die there and then, but instead Buchanan twisted away. He bowed his head and Shane heard him breathe deeply for a count of ten. He was calm when he straightened again, although the fury still simmered behind his eyes.
He controls himself better than he used to, but only just, Shane thought.
‘Too bad.’ Buchanan growled. ‘It might be better for you if you didn’t.’ He drew a Bowie knife from a scabbard under his arm and used it to cut the ropes that bound Shane’s wrists. Shane drew away from him, rubbing the circulation back into his hands.
Buchanan sheathed the knife and mounted his horse. ‘We’ve a long way to go Shane. Some old friends are waiting for you.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll figure it out soon enough.’ He kicked his heels and the horse trotted away.
Shane sat, watching as Buchanan rode off. The desert was wide and vast and he thought about making a run for it, but that, he suspected, was exactly what Buchanan wanted him to do. Buchanan was under orders to deliver him somewhere, alive. He was inviting Shane to cause trouble, to give him a reason to kill him.
And Shane was not going to do that, not when it seemed that he had been granted a few more days to live at least.

The dime novels had once called him the most dangerous man in America. Shane Ennis had been a killer so efficient that men had said he was Death itself, given form and sent among the sinners to kill the unworthy.
Those days were long gone. Shane had not so much as touched a gun since Santa Morgana and the stories that were told about him now spoke of a coward who had lost his nerve. That was not the way of it. Shane had his reasons for laying down his guns, but they were reasons that few men would understand.
Buchanan understood them all too clearly and he took every opportunity to show his contempt. He slowed his mount and rode close by Shane’s side with his revolver carelessly exposed for Shane to grab it if he chose. Other times, he rode far ahead out of sight, tempting Shane with opportunities to escape from him, but Shane never took them. He had resigned himself to his fate and he had no wish to hasten it by giving Buchanan cause to shoot him. His one satisfaction lay in watching Buchanan grow increasingly irritated the more his games failed to illicit a reaction.
They rode steadily on a north-westerly heading, winding through barren country far from settled lands. Buchanan spoke often but said little. He gave no indication of where they were going or what would happen to Shane when they got there.
They made camp that night and the following morning they rode on, ever northwest. There was no sign of the three riflemen and Buchanan seemed in no mood to wait for them. Likely they were making their own way toward whatever secret rendezvous lay ahead. That Buchanan seemed unconcerned for the safety of the money confirmed something that Shane had begun to suspect: that the money was not his but belonged instead to his employer. Somebody else was holding Buchanan’s leash, somebody else who had a vested interest in Shane; though who that somebody was, Shane could not imagine.
They rode for days. One night as they sat around a spitting fire, Shane broke his silence and asked Buchanan where they were going. Buchanan answered him with a sneer: ‘You should know that by now.’
‘Should I?’
‘I’d have thought you would. Where else do you know lies all the way out here?’
It hit Shane then what he was talking about. ‘Covenant!’
Buchanan smiled to himself. ‘I’m taking you back where you belong,’ he said.
Covenant was a ghost town way out in the badlands, so wrapped up in legend now that it was hard to separate the fact from the fiction. Some folk didn’t even believe that it ever existed.
In its day, the town had been prosperous and the land surrounding it had not been nearly as bad as it had since become. August Third, 1879 was the day that had marked the end of Covenant’s fortunes. On that day, a gunfighter by the name of Jacob Priestley had ridden into town and, seemingly without provocation, had proceeded to shoot everyone that he saw. Afterwards, he had walked out into the desert and shot himself in the head. At least, that was what the story claimed. His footprints had ended abruptly beside a rock, just high enough for him to have sat on, and beside it had been a long splash of blood and a piece of skull with Priestley’s coal-black hair hanging from its scalp. The rest of him had never been found.
Things had never been the same in Covenant after that. There were folk who said that the town had become haunted by the ghosts of those whom Priestley had slain, that gunshots and screaming had been heard in the middle of the night. Ghostly figures were seen. Suicide and murder had become a daily occurrence.
The town had been abandoned soon after. People just couldn’t stand to live there any more and the place had acquired such a bad reputation that it was struck from the maps.
But that had only been the beginning.

The fire spat, throwing hot embers into the night sky. Shane glared at Buchanan over the top of the flames. In all his worst imaginings he had not thought that he would be taken to Covenant. He did not want to believe it now.
‘They’ll kill you just as surely as they’ll take me,’ he said defiantly.
Buchanan shook his head. ‘I think they’ll make an exception this once. There’s another tournament, Shane. Or hadn’t you heard? How grateful do you think they’ll be if I see to it that you take part this time?’
Shane curled his lip. ‘Bullshit!’ he said. It was not possible that another tournament was being held at Covenant. He would have heard about it if there was. Even though he had turned his back on the Fastest Guns, he had still kept his ear to the ground. Surely he had not become so out of touch?
The first tournament had been held six years ago. More than a hundred of the best gunfighters in America had been invited to prove their worth in a series of duels to the death, intended to determine which of them was truly the best of the best. Shane and Buchanan had both been invited but neither had gone. The gunfight at Santa Morgana had taken place just weeks before the tournament was scheduled and had seen the end of both their gunfighting careers. The decision not to attend had been the hardest that Shane had ever made and he had regretted it ever since, however much he tried to tell himself otherwise.
He found it hard to speak. ‘You’re lying,’ he croaked.
‘You’d like to think I am.’ The firelight reflected in Buchanan’s eyes, making them blaze. ‘You should have known they’d never let you go.’