Cowboy Up
"The Gaucho Code"

The second time Peter Schrader felt a noose around his neck, he figured maybe it was his fate to die by hanging.

He'd've thought he'd get the firing squad here. That's what you read in the penny dreadfuls anyway, that you got yourself shot in South America, not strung up. But no, this was a hanging, good and proper.

The rough nap of the rope already had him itching, raw and prickly and probably red. Sweat ran from his hairline, down into his eyes, and Pete blinked it away, thinking how it was good it was hot. Even he couldn't tell if he was crying.

He didn't want to die. A soft snort escaped him as the British missionary fella read the twenty-third Psalm. They called that irony, he supposed. When he'd left Texas with a bullet between two of his ribs he hadn't cared whether he lived or died. When his brother Carl had come down with the shaking fever in Mexico and passed on so fast they didn't even have time to say a prayer or two, he hadn't cared.

Damn Jorge anyway, for making him care.

Blinking, Pete looked at his judge and executioner. The stone cold old bastard stared right back, eyes burning like the lake of fire that surely awaited a man like Pete.

And he knew that whether he wanted to or not, he would die here today, dancing at the end of a rope.

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