The Outlaw's Last Stand

“Take a sight, Lee,” Una said weakly, crouching beside him behind the rocks. The heat and blood loss were making her tired, but she knew that she couldn’t sleep yet. She had to stay by Lee’s side. For his own sake if not for her own sanity. He needed her to be strong now. “They’ll finish us both if you don’t concentrate.” The bullet that she had taken couldn’t be too bad, Lee reasoned, if she was still concentrating on the twenty-five man strong posse that was after them and not on the fact that she could so easily bleed out and die here.

“Are you sure, Una?” he asked gently, keeping pressure on her wound. His eyes burned thinking that she even had been shot. He knew that it was all his fault. “We could bind this and follow Eli, get you to a doctor. He wouldn’t want this.” Mentally, he pleaded with her not to put herself at risk to stay with him. They couldn’t be too far from a doctor. If they could just escape. . . 

“We owe it to Eli to fight. It’s our fault they’re after. . . him too.”

Lee noticed that her breath was coming shallower now. He took her hand and squeezed it, then put it to the wound. “Don’t loosen the pressure. Everything will work out for the best.” He kissed her forehead gently. “I promise.”

She knew well that he was saying that as much to comfort himself as to comfort her, so she smiled reassuringly at him, not liking him blaming himself for her own decision to stay by his side until the very end. “I know.”

A bullet whistled past him, an inch from his head. It embedded itself in the rock behind them and chips of stone fell to the ground as if to remind them that this was a matter of life and death, although they didn’t need much reminding. Both of them knew how much was at stake.

Lee swore under his breath and propped his rifle on the rock, aiming and firing carefully in the same way that he had his whole life. One man fell dead, then two, then three, but the remaining twenty men or so never once stopped shooting back at him.

***

“Just one more job,” Lee said one evening - hardly even a week earlier - over a game of poker. “Just one more and then we’ll try going straight. For real this time.”

“And what one more job do you have in mind?” Eli asked, drinking a shot of whisky. He always kept several bottles in his pack out of habit. It was his belief that whisky could come in useful at even the strangest of times.

Lee shook his head. “I fold,” he said, throwing his cards in the dust as Eli pulled his winnings in closer. They were trading for a few small gold bits that they’d stolen somewhere with a name that neither could re-call. “The Wells Fargo bank in Santa Gertrudis. Una says that there’s twenty thousand dollars coming in on Monday at nine. She heard in the last town that we came through. If we held them up, then we’d get ten thousand dollars each. Imagine that, Eli! Ten thousand! There’d be so much that we could do with that sort of money. We’d never have to rob another bank!”

The fire light shone with the enthusiasm in Lee’s eyes, but Eli shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Lee,” he said quietly. “We already have a thousand dollars each. Do we really need anymore now? Should we not wait until they forget about us and move on to someone else before we pull another job?”

“Should we not take our opportunity where it is that we find it? Money’s never a bad thing to have. You know that as well as I do. And just think. We could buy a ranch in the new Wyoming territory. Water rights even if we had to. Get some cattle, horses, take on some men. I could get married. We could make a name for ourselves!”

“We already have a name made for ourselves. That’s the problem. They’d be expecting us to hit it, and even if they’re not they’ll be prepared for something to happen. Not to mention that there could be any number of others thinking the exact same thing as us. You need to be practical about these things sometimes and not just take a chance that things might work out alright or might be worth the risk.”

Lee sighed and stood up, knowing defeat when he saw it. It was too late to argue about these things anyway. He could always ask again and hope that Eli might come around to the idea. “Alright, Eli. We’ll try it your way this time.”

Eli didn’t say anything, just bowed his head as Lee went to his bed roll and curled up under a blanket beside his beloved Una, who was already asleep. Going to his own bed roll and lying down without even taking his boots off, Eli thought long and hard about what Lee had said. By the time that he fell asleep by the dimly glowing light of the dying fire, he had an answer.