Luckily for me, this one came without an arm. I pried the Colt loose, picked the hand and wrist up by the fingers, and pitched it out the window to rejoin its master in whatever afterlife awaited him. The fingers were warm and a little moist. They opened as it fell, like a crumple of paper losing tension or a supplicant asking for mercy. I see that hand in dreams. At times it pleads, at others beckons. If the damned thing would just strum a guitar, or play a few bars of “Old Dan Tucker” on the piano, I might be rid of it; but it refuses to erase itself by becoming ludicrous. I thought about packing the Colt along when I left the coach, but like the Winchester it was a Mexican copy of an American original made with inferior parts and unreliable, so I left them there and balanced myself out with the Deane-Adams and Bulldog revolver. The shotgun was too unwieldy and might pitch me to my death, so I left it as well and stepped out onto the car’s verandah. A steel ladder bolted to the back of the tender led to the top, but it was open, filled as recently as our stop in Alamos, rounded over with uneven chunks of mossy-smelling wood, and offered shifting and treacherous footing aboard a moving train.
