Amos Whitley had grown tired of having nothing. Seems he’d had a lot of nothing for more years than he could remember. When a man’s got nothing for too long, well, he starts to feel like nothing too.

His wife and son had died ages ago, almost nine years now. They had succumbed to fever on the hard trail west, and were buried side-by-side beneath an anonymous stone cairn somewhere on the Great Plains. Like the sand and dust that blew over them, Amos drifted where life took him. From town to town, job to job, but lately, mostly just from saloon to saloon.

He had tried mining, but had no luck and no friends who could teach him all the things he didn’t know. He had tried working the herds, driving cattle and eating dust from the mountains of Montana to the Rio Grande. But the vastness of the land had

made him feel too tiny. It had gotten inside of him, unnerved him. He had felt compelled to retreat to the more secure villages and towns springing up across the territories.

But the town type jobs were for town type folks, and Amos could never quite fit that mold. He didn’t have the skill in numbers to work in a bank or a store. He wasn’t clever or skilled with his hands. So he sold the strength of his back, and with so many younger men around his rates had had to be cheap.

But with his very first try at thieving he had done quite well for himself. It had been real easy too. A few days back, while mucking stalls in some barn for a meal and a bed, he’d found an old buffalo rifle. The gun had been worn and rusty but all the parts were there so he’d cleaned it up and made it work. The previous owner would never miss it. He bought one shell with his last three cents.

Lying in ambush along the trail he’d been able to drop the cowboy from his saddle from a fair ways off. The poor fellow never knew what hit him, the bullet finding its target before the rifle’s report reached his ears. And Amos never even had to look into the face of the man he’d killed since the powerful rifle had taken the rider’s head clean off. ‘No big deal,’ Amos thought, ‘I’ve already got a hat.’