“Nox didn’t say a word. He waited, counting the seconds in his mind. Sometimes you counted bullets and sometimes you counted time. Either one could kill you.”

“It is brutal. Only I never could see the sense in having folks look at your tombstone and say, ‘He was a man who didn’t believe in violence, He’s a good man… and dead.”

“Tell me you have a plan.” He swore when Colt didn’t answer right away.”

“He closed his eyes, cursing the man to hell. Colt was a dead man.”

“She looked at her right hand, where the index finger was cut to a stump. Some said she lost it in an accident, when she was playing soldier with a live grenade. Others said she was taught a lesson by the law, and they took her trigger finger to make her keep on learning. Those were the lessons the Coilhunter liked. Why, he was quite the teacher himself.”

“That was the thing about bad dreams in the Wild North. You still had them when you woke up.”

“My love for you won’t stop with my leaving. Come an evening over the years, when you step outside your door and hear the wind blowing through the cottonwoods, that’ll be me, thinking of you, whispering your name, and loving you.”

“But I don’t know how to fight. All I know how to do is stay alive.”

“Off in the distance there were galleons of shock-white cumulus coulds gathering in the wide sky’s cerulean harbor, and their azure shadows floated over the flatlands. Billy surprised himself by saying: “I love it here. I’ll never leave.”

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”