Maybe this was the new West.
Adam Steele, elegant in cream suit and white satin shirt, a high gloss on his fancy boots, riding into town to consult with his banker.
Steele passing the work crew from the telegraph company, stringing the wire between the newly erected roadside poles, bringing the new age of instant communication.
But maybe the old West is still around. When a young girl's brutal rape can stampede an old-style lynch mob into action. When instant communication is replaced with sudden death. When not telegraph wire but an innocent man is set to be strung up.

Mesa, Colorado, was a nice town. Settled, growing, thriving. God-fearing on a Sunday, money-making of a weekday, the citizens grew carefully richer, and their life had a pattern to it.
A pattern that Adam Steele didn't fit. Not when he rode in, sweaty and shabby after too long on the trail, leading a gelding with two dead men lashed across the saddle.
Mesa, Colorado, drew back, squeamish and shocked at the blood dried black round the gunshot wounds, at the flies and the smell.
Until the news got around that there was a fortune buried somewhere out there in the hills. And only one man had the map of its location. Then the niceness and the manners were stripped away to the bare bones of greed and hatred. And the citizens remembered how to kill.

When the stage rolled into town it brought two strangers.
A big woman with small mean eyes, a foul mouth and a taste for whiskey. A runt-like man, red-eyed with an indoor pallor and a need for a drink.
A couple clearly on close terms. Though not good terms, seeing as they arrived fist-fighting and biting and carried on cussing and swearing at each other as they scrambled out of the barely-halted stage and headed on over to the saloon.
A couple whose luggage was not much more than a carpet bag but who were clearly aiming to stay. At Adam Steele's place, to which they claimed they held title and had come to take over what was rightfully theirs.

Up to now the good people of Winton, Oregon had done a lot of things right. The town was prosperous, the buildings well-constructed and in a good state of repair. The law was upheld and all seemed orderly. The elderly judge was eloquent in his praise for the respectable nature of the citizens.
Trouble was, just before the man called Edge rode in to town, things had started to go all wrong. A woman had been brutally murdered and a man hurriedly tried and hanged. The wrong man.
And now a person or persons unknown had set up a protest movement. Not by waving banners but by setting up nooses. And beginning to kill, one by one, all the people responsible.
That was when bad law became lynch law and the formerly neatly swept streets became all littered with the bodies of those recently responsible people.

Even if a man like Edge felt like settling down, the two-street community of Ross, Oregon was not the place.
Once a gold town, till the lode was worked out, now a lumber town, but only till the timber was cut down, it was a wretched huddle of uncared-for shacks.
Nor was the meal of half-cold bacon and beans he'd just struggled through likely to let him settle for even one good night's sleep. In fact the only issue settled was that the owner of the Golden Eagle Saloon couldn't cook.
But most unsettling of all was the half-breed woman. Tall and flauntingly good-looking, Edge had seen her change hands in a poker game. Saw her look of resigned contempt when she went off with her new owners. Had even then an inkling that she was about to have a violently disturbing effect on his life in the near future ...

Somewhere between Abilene and San Antonio Adam Steele became a man of property. Not a settled man – this property was as mobile as he was. Two of the finest white Arab stallions he'd ever seen, bought on an impulse at a trailside auction just outside the small town of Braddock, Texas. Two stallions that conferred on him a certain pride of possession as he led them into town.
Trouble was, the rule may be that possession is nine parts of the law but the law in Braddock was pretty unruly. And possession turned out to be strictly temporary – for Steele and for a whole succession of new owners. Most of whom found out that life could be a pretty temporary business as well.

There was a new kid in town and an old timer out at Adam Steele's place.
The old timer was the only man who could confirm Steele's land title so he was pretty anxious for the two of them to ride into town and get
things sorted out nice and legal.
Which is why Steele ran into the new kid, who actually was aiming to leave town. Fast. On account he and his brothers had just helped themselves to the contents of the bank safe. Which is something Steele aimed to stop: shot the kid and saw him locked up.
Which is when the kid started callin' for his ma and his two big brothers to come and rescue him - and maybe kill Steele while they were about it.
So just when it looked like Steele might have legal security at last, a whole lot of illegal insecurity was heading his way.

Dead on time—the last train to Lantana Flats pulled slowly in.
Dead on the tracks—one old-timer, a prospector.
Barely alive to his predicament—the depot manager. With the railroad closing, he was out of a job and the Nevada desert wasn't exactly blooming with opportunities.
Alert as ever—Adam Steele, just ridden in on the train.
While up in the bare hills, a woman waited. Who might be able to show Steele a good and timely stash of gold. And, sure as hell, would introduce him to a whole hurricane of flying lead.

The man was sick. The man was busy.
Thin, hollow-cheeked, breathing heavy with a nasty cough, blood showing where he spat. Looked to be fifty going on seventy.
But working. Digging, determined, near exhausted but full of purpose.
The man called Edge, riding easily down from the Rattlesnake Hills in Wyoming Territory, reigned in to watch him. Knew at once was was being dug.
A grave.
Later, when he hired on with the sick man's wife, he saw the other grave. The one with the elder son, already buried. Backshot, they said, by the younger son. Whose gave was being made ready for when his pa found him and killed him.
A family that didn't so much pray together as slay together.

Like most banks, the Munro, Colorado branch of the Western States offered its customers a range of services. Like all banks, you had to pay for them.
Right now the man called Edge was availing himself of one of the facilities to wire $150 on to a sporting house woman he owed up in Cheyenne. Only one thing was holding up the transaction: the other customers, who were holding up the bank.
Four old-timers, they were overseeing the transfer of certain funds—the entire contents of the safe—to their saddlebags for onward transmission to their hideout in the woods.
Not a service willingly offered by the bank, nor one for which these customers looked likely to pay, but when a withdrawal demand is backed up by four Colt .45s, most any bank teller will do as she is told.

Accord, Wyoming.
To Steele it looked like some sort of ghost town. Nothing moving, no people, no horses, not even a cur dog. Nothing except the hot dry wind blowing down the one street, raising a little dust. His horse's hooves echoed lough as he rode warily through.
Then, suddenly, Steele found people. A crowd gathered on the far side of town, watching. Under a tree a young fear-sweated cowhand waited, his wrists bound. From the tree dangled a rope.
Steele was just in time for the hanging, just in time to get involved in a range war that would stain too much bad blood across the good land.

A good-looking woman in a good looking position. Long, long black hair, a fine figure and those long, long legs, all stretched out and waiting on the ground. Enough to raise the old Adam in Steele.
Except she wasn't offering anything. On account that she wasn't so much stretched out as staked out. Tied and pegged out, waiting, despairing and dirt-streaked, while the two Apache braves who'd captured her satisfied their bellies with a mess of chili beans before turning towards their after dinner mint.
Which was when Steele shot them dead.
And found himself saddled with a runaway señorita who spoke Spanish, spelled out an interesting proposition and added up to big trouble.

Giant redwoods clinging to the slopes of the Coastal Range as it drops down to the blue Pacific Ocean.
Man stretched out on the wide deserted beach right by the water's edge. Surf may be up but he's paying no mind. Not working on his tan either on account of his being fully dressed. Just lying there quite still on account of he's dead.
Bullet hole drilled clean between the shoulder blades. Near him a horse, a black gelding, edgy, close to being spooked, while another man, black hair, maybe some Apache blood in him, searches through the saddle bags. Hurried.
Not the sort of picture a tourist brochure would use. But a scene to freeze the blood of a man called Steele. Especially when he looks into the dead man's face and discovers his own double.

Steele.
Storekeeper, settled and accepted. Him and his wife. Until the stranger rode into town. A hard, silent man with an old newspaper photo all crumpled up in his hip pocket. A photo that just happened to show something from his past.
That was when Steele realized that there were two kinds of past. The past a man tries to forget, that forces itself into his sweat-soaked nightmares. Memories of blood, pumping, hot, vivid red on Confederate gray. Of triumphant Rebel yells that rise horribly to bone-chilling screams.
And then there is the past you didn't know about.
Until it rears up, sudden as a diamondback and strikes to kill.