Stanson learns his mother had died, and on her grave he speaks a promise and an apology. He uses his Sight to help the village, as his mother once did, and keeps a watchful eye over his own diminishing Glare. Virtue feels good. His guns gather dust.

But the march of progress finds Stanson, and Whitman wears its face with pride.

“You were our best,” he says. “Shame to see you throw away everything we sowed just to be among the weeds."

Whitman leaves without bloodshed. He owes Stanson that much. “The Rail is coming,” he warns in parting.

And it does, years later, with a violence against which the Westlings have no voice. His gunbelt creaks as he fastens it on his hips. “Are you sure?” his revolvers ask.

Stanson can only save so many lives.

Village by village, the Westlings are pushed out to make room for Railway tracks and towns.

Stanson cracks. He seeks out Whitman, saving one bullet for each of his eyes, and discovers his vengeance is lawfully sanctioned; Whitman had gone rogue. The rest of the gang had already been captured or killed.

The bounty is old, but the payoff is too much to let go. The coin’s not bad, either.

“Might need to hire a Sight-hunter, though,” the collection office advises.

The trail’s dead cold, but Stanson’s not worried.

~*~

“That’s him.” Father Guinevere pointed at a stone marker. It was unadorned, even ugly.

Fitting. Stanson stared at the grave. He’d need to have the sheriff draft up a copy of the death certificate, he figured, and—

Wait. “Father, tell me again how you picked out Whitman as the one I’d been lookin’ for?”

The Reverend nodded towards Stanson’s guns, resting unused in their holsters. “A man that paranoid was bound to have some enemies come calling for him. You fit the type.”

“Did you know he had a bounty?”

“Yes. Him and most his crew. They’d all died, one way or another—alcohol poisoning, dustmen, overdose, and all the rest that could befall men of those type. Good number of them were picked up by the law, too, of course.”

“But the bounty is still live. Why didn’t you collect? Why didn’t you—”

Oh.

The Reverend Father Guinevere laughed. When he talked, his voice lost the patient, kindly affectation. “Miles, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost. I’ll admit, I was certainly surprised to see you. Figured you’d given up the bounty hunting life.”

“Whitman,” Stanson growled. The years had not been kind to the man, and he’d shaved his beard and hair. When they’d run jobs together, his Glare had been too bright to look him in the eyes. He was completely unrecognizable.

Stanson’s hand jumped to the butt of his gun.

“Ah-ah,” Whitman chuckled. “Killing an innocent man’s not good for the soul. You’ll catch some Glare, and we both know how you chickened out of sinning as often as you could. So, that bounty says dead or alive, I’d warrant?”

Stanson kept his hand where it rested. “We both know you’re not innocent. You’ve murdered dozens, if not hundreds, of innocents. And that’s not to mention the rest of your crimes.”

“Don’t you have the Sight, Miles? Isn’t that why you always kept your head down, never looked up from under that hat of yours? Well, look at me now!” Whitman spread his white-sleeved arms wide.

Stanson hesitated. Glare could fade, but even for someone as immoral as Arthur Whitman? How long would that take? What would it take? No, there was no way he’d found an honest life. A decade was nowhere near enough time to work off that much corruption.

“I thought so. No wonder you never looked me in the eye,” Whitman said, dropping his arms. “Figured you were scared of me. I miss that. And to think I bought all that crap about getting in your enemy’s head, not letting them see your face when you dueled. All that time, you were just another Sight-hunter, playin’ with the big boys.”

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Whitman’s hand went to the red medallion at his breast and, before Stanson could discern why, yanked it from its cord.

Whitman’s Glare exploded from him like a dying star.

Stanson cursed and fell backwards, landing hard, his vision gone white.

Whitman was talking. “—risk any Sight-hunters seeing the head of a church covered head to toe in sin, could I? That would really give everything away! Luckily, I heard demons having something of an appetite for the stuff.”

Stanson held up a warding hand, but the Glare was too bright. He scuttled backwards, trying to get some distance between himself and his former gang leader. His back pressed against the cool stone of a grave marker.

Whitman continued, dismissively tossing the blood red medallion aside. “I’d already made sure anyone with the Sight wouldn’t be trusted in my town. Just in case. Nobody could speak against me. But I figured you’d be coming for me some day, and I’d had quite the hunch you were a Sight-hunter when you went native. Ah, look!”

The soft moaning and susurrus shuffling of dustmen reached Stanson’s ears from outside the cemetery. Then, the telltale click of a pistol’s hammer cocking back came from Whitman’s direction.

Stanson rolled behind the headstone. His hands felt at its edges, trying to gauge how much cover it provided.

Whitman fired twice. One of the bullets shattered the headstone and rained debris on the back of Stanson’s tucked neck. The second shot took Stanson in an unguarded calf, and he screamed. He blinked through tears, but his vision was returning fast.

Metal rattled from behind them, followed by a snap as the cemetery gate broke. Stanson grit his teeth and twisted to look over his shoulder.

There must have been dozens of grey-skinned dustmen surging through the breach in the graveyard’s fencing. Whitman swore.

Stanson used the distraction. He dove from his cover and tumbled behind a new tombstone. The horde behind him brought down more of the gate, widening the gap like water through a dam. The bullet-wound in his leg roared its displeasure; he wouldn’t be able to outrun the shambling corpses, not without giving the Reverend plenty of time to shoot him in the back.

Several more shots rang out, but mercifully none of them were aimed at Stanson.

Stanson’s eyes widened as he realized why the dustmen hadn’t attacked him under the tree while he slept.

They couldn’t see him. The words of the woman who had taken him in all those years ago came back to him, and he realized why his people always defended each other from immoral behavior. Not for honor or simple tradition, but for protection.

“The sinner draws dustmen to their flesh, demons to their mind.” The woman had said something to that effect, but Stanson had thought it was a metaphor. A comparison. Dustmen were literally drawn to the flesh of people with the Glare! Stanson had spent a decade expunging his soul of sin, and now the dustmen couldn’t see him.

Stanson heard the click of Whitman’s handgun once more, only this time it was the snap of an empty chamber. He was empty.

The dustmen surged past him. If Stanson shot the man now, he risked incurring Glare of his own. The dustmen would be on him in seconds, and there was no chance of outrunning them with the bullet in his leg. Evil man or no, Stanson had too much hatred in his heart for Whitman. Whatever powers assigned sin to the acts of mankind, killing in anger seldom had their favor.

The medallion. He couldn’t shoot Whitman, but Whitman had let slip something Stanson could use. He didn’t need to act within justification if he could hide the Glare he earned.

Stanson hurled himself from his cover and hobbled toward the medallion. He fell to his knees and closed his fingers around the medallion’s cold metal casing.

Whitman arrived just ahead of the dustmen, and a second later a heavy kick drove into Stanson’s ribs. Stanson grunted and pitched over, screwing his eyes shut against Whitman’s Glare.

The gunslinger felt his father’s pistol being lifted from its holster. The other was pinned beneath him.

“It’s over, Miles Stanson,” Whitman said. “Give it here, now.”

Stanson rolled over, reaching for his second gun with his free hand. Whitman stomped on his wrist and held it there, and Stanson heard the familiar hammer clicking of his father’s gun. The dustmen groaned and gasped nearby.

Whitman spoke quickly. “That medallion can’t stop bullets, Miles. Best hand it over, fast, unless you want me to prove it to ya.”

Stanson feebly lifted the medallion up to the waiting cleric, but before Whitman could take it from him, Stanson brought it down, hard, against the jagged edge of a broken tombstone.

The crystal burst. Something like white flame heaved itself from the remains of the medallion and rushed upwards. Whitman screamed, and Stanson tucked his head as the demon’s Glare melded with Whitman’s.

The screams cut off abruptly. When Whitman spoke again, it was in a wordless gibberish. The pressure lifted from Stanson’s wrist, and he heard Whitman walk slowly, inexorably, toward the approaching hoard of dustmen.

He didn’t have to go far. The dustmen were upon them. Stanson tucked into a ball and squinted through his eyelashes in time to see his father’s gun clatter to the dirt. Ragged, torn feet trampled over the graves of the truly dead or kicked him emotionlessly. A moment later Whitman collapsed with a thud, just out of sight. The Glare was gone, along with the false priest.

The gunslinger extricated himself from the frenzied dustmen, invisible, then took one last look at the writhing huddle of undead. One of the dustmen wore a familiar poncho, and Stanson might have laughed in other circumstances. He knew there’d be a bullet hole through the corpse’s forehead if he looked.

His father’s gun was trapped somewhere beneath that press of bodies, but after a moment’s consideration, he turned his back on the mob. He didn’t need to carry any demons home with him.

He hobbled to the grave Arthur had pointed to as his own. Miles Stanson stood over it for a moment, then pulled the bounty flier from his coat and dropped it onto the hard-packed dirt. Then the gunslinger took a deep breath, turned toward Road’s End, and started walking.

He wouldn’t earn a warm welcome from the town after killing their leader, but Stanson was done running. He had spent his life hunting down sinners; now it was time to help them instead.

It had been a long road to the peace he now felt, but he was finally at it’s end.