Butcher's Crossing

by John Williams

A year later Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West would be published to give Butcher’s Crossing and Warlock some company in what was becoming a pantheon of western masterpieces.

He believed—and had believed for a long time—that there was a subtle magnetism in nature, which, if he unconsciously yielded to it, would direct him aright, not indifferent to the way he walked.

“A man loses lots of habits in time,”

The four men looked at one another, moving their eyes slowly and searchingly across the faces about them. They did not move, and they did not speak. We have something to say to each other, Andrews thought dimly, but we don’t know what it is; we have something we ought to say.