The gunslinger hung his gun where he always did, as he always did, at his hip available for ready access to at least draw, feint, front, threaten, pose, posture, bait, bluff, deceive, distract, and on that rare occasion send the bullet flying as fast and accurate as possible so as to maim or murder those who would do him harm.

He stood with his back to a corner, in as much shadow as he could find, folding himself into the darkness knowing he was more invisible to the town square than he probably seemed to himself.  That the naked eye happening upon the warm nighttime scene--a romantic vision cast upon the hub of this growing western metropolis--general store, saloon's yellow light aspill, tinkling piano music, Red River Valley, laughter from the whorehouse, put-on but so deftly so, his cock stirred slightly in the crotch of his jodhpurs, gas lamps red flicker--the naked eye would never notice the spider in the corner.  Tending his web, keeping to himself not asking for more than the occasional meaty fly to satisfy the hunger.  Nothing more.

From here he might watch as they fired past, for they could never really hit one another.  "They's like two sides of one soul so's there's no way for one to really damage t'other," or so he'd said, the old man.  He wasn't sure if he'd wait around for it.  Probably would though.  Couple o' strong ones they are.  No one asks his opinion.  Neither invites him in.  They speak, in tongues, artifice signifying nothing--nothing at least intended for him for he was always aware of some other audience that maybe the words were intended for.  Like he had a part in some larger play but was depended on only for his dull remonstrations, like a young lover pleading for the hand of a more sophisticated object; pleading his case weakly to a Peter at the gate, given his one last due if only for the amusement of the undamned, poking their heads at the bars of heaven, longing again for the taste of lovely dull desire, the tender beauty of contrast with eternal perfection.  

He understood why the best of his kind longed for the anonymity of the grave.  Some thought it to be a question of fatigue but he knew better.  It had nothing to do with being tired of running, of not wanting to look over your shoulder any longer.  None of that really mattered.  His body and mind were trained to react.  He played no conscious part in the mechanism.  And it moved his emotions not one bit.  The bullet through the eye of the minster in Georgia meant nothing.  He had drawn, inexplicably really, the minister did, shouting something about the righteous hand of Jesus and from 10 paces he could see the finger searching for the trigger and then in a moment he could see his own gun in his vision as if it appeared from nowhere and it had already been fired and the minster's finger already draped in his own blood spurting from his eye no where near his own trigger, dead before he'd had any real chance .  And he had walked away.  Unmoved.  Even not caring whether anyone would follow and dispute the validity of the fight and its outcome.  They didn't but it did not matter.  

It was more a question of destiny.  His life really amounted to that.  A search for and a discovery of destiny. His was that corner, first, as an approximation of the ultimate corner into which we were all backed into before long.  It was the quiet, the cease of motion, the constraint, the abnegation of the mechanism, the surrender of self; to disappear into nothingness.  To watch and participate in the dissolution of essence and of ego.

In this way he was witness to the culmination of the improbable argument.  To the ways in which they sought to torture and abuse, the subtle, cancers in still-life and the motivated musings of the innocent by-standers.  They did not see him there.  They did not notice that he had already gone.