"So you gonna do me like this? Huh?"

"Looks like."

"She ain't nothing but a whore, and a Celestial one at that. Law's gonna do me for some slanty whore, means nought to no-one? I seen the colour you know, reconnoitring the rim. You hear me? I seen it and I got a fortune waiting me, I seen it. I ain't no criminal."

Hitchings let the glare of the sun have it's say on the man, watching him with keen eyes set to purpose. His, jaw, terse and angled, undulated without rhythm, spitting out a viscous, terracotta streak of tobacco.  There the man stood, in abject silence, staring grimly at the other , until the rasped sound of his breath, and the breath of the other, grew deafening.

"Seems you need some informing son. In the first, I seen you on the rocks, coming to and fro from your claim and in the taverns in the eve, and I doubt you seen dust leave alone nuggets. But you most definitely are a criminal, and coins don't make you a good man, much as some in the gaol-house might tell you to the other. But above all son-"

Hitchings paused, and in the gulf of that silence a man could have aged to dust, but to his credit, the outlaw stood firm, and flexed the sinews of his chest as if to repudiate the ill connotation of the word brute to which he had become affixed. Nonetheless his bravado was leashed, and he leaned into the silence, daring not a single sonorous breath. Finally Hitchings stirred.

"I ain't no law man."

The proclamation came with the burst of noise, and a flash so bright even the noon's glare could not muffle. With the smell of burnt powder still strong in the recesses of his nostrils, the Winchester carbine fell, as did the brute.

Hitchings turned on his foot and began the long walk to the eastern fork of the dust road that loosely led into the southern encampment. He had no love for the whore, nor for the law. He reflected without humour on the rhyme. The matter was irrelevant in its entirety. She did her part in the whoring, the soliciting of affections and infections from the hearts of weaker men, and he in turn did his, his agenda served for none other than its own purpose. The fact it fell on the obverse of the law was, to Hitchens, a matter of ill consequence, since expiation was earned not from rules in books, but from the good each man envisaged of his own deliberation.