One trembling hand hooked around the saddle horn when pain knifed through Lane Jerico's chest.

There was this sense of great weariness, an unnatural fragility like hollow glass.

The chilling message had come last winter, the pain along with a sick gray emptiness, to be confirmed as heart disease by a Southern doctor. You have a year two at the most, came the grim prognosis. And Lane Jericho, wandering gunfighter, had accepted that.