But Sully didn't get the chance—at least not before he received another visitor.

     A few hours later he was sitting on the bench outside the clinic, nursing a cup of the bark tea.  He hadn't let on to Michaela, but his confrontation with Hank had cost him.  His shoulder was throbbing again—a deep, persistent ache that seemed to reach into his bones right down to the marrow.  He took a perverse sort of satisfaction in the pain, seeing it as his penance for attacking Hank earlier, and losing himself in his rage.  In the process, he had come dangerously close to seriously hurting Hank—maybe even killing him.  Worst of all, he had terrified Michaela and caused her anguish at a time when she was her most fragile and vulnerable.  In fact, she had been forced to return to bed and rest, the events of the morning having taken such a toll on her.  He knew she understood and sympathized with his reaction to Hank's revelation, but he blamed himself far more than he did Hank for her being frightened and upset.

     Sully was plagued with guilt about Matthew, as well   He felt a pain in his spirit that rivaled the pain in his body, when he thought of Matthew's suffering.  He must have been so torn, Sully thought, divided by his desire to be honest and loyal, and his desperate need to keep his mother and stepfather safe.  The knowledge that Matthew believed Sully could not forgive him, as well as the rage he'd felt earlier, were alarming signs to Sully of how badly things had gone out of balance.

     He  had to make things right with Matthew, but more than that, he had to come to terms with his feelings about Hank and McKay, and find acceptance within himself for what they’d done.  Only then, he knew, would he be able to be at peace.  As Cloud Dancing had said once, alluding to his own crisis of the spirit, "My anger is good—my hate is not."

     Sully didn’t hate Hank and McKay.  At his core, he knew they had acted as they thought best, and had been within their rights to withhold the facts about Flagg.  In Hank’s case particularly, his compassionate treatment of Matthew had gone a long way toward mitigating his offense in Sully’s eyes.  But Sully’s anger lingered.  Matthew had been correct in one aspect of his assessment of Sully’s state of mind—the second attack on Michaela, coming so soon on the heels of  the first—and his ignorance of the threat—were nearly unbearable to him.  Were they also, he wondered, unforgivable?

     Lost in his thoughts, Sully did not immediately notice McKay approaching him.  He looked up as a shadow suddenly blocked the sun.

     "Hello, Sully," McKay greeted him.

     "Sergeant.”

     "I—hope you don't object to my stopping by," McKay remarked.

     "You don’t need my permission,” Sully said cynically.  “I’m just a prisoner—ain’t that right?”

     McKay’s expression altered slightly.  "I was wondering if I might have a word with you," he ventured again, after a moment.

     “Free country,” Sully said shortly.  “For some, that is.”

     McKay regarded him soberly, then moved to the empty portion of the bench and sat down.

     “How is your shoulder?” he inquired.

     “How do you think?” Sully said caustically.  He knew how cold he sounded, but seemed incapable of responding any other way.

     McKay reached inside his uniform jacket and withdrew a small silver flask.  Holding it out to Sully, he said, “Care for some?  It helps to dull the pain.”

     “No thanks,” Sully said shortly.  “But don’t let me stop you.”

     “I don’t drink while I’m on duty,” McKay answered, slipping the flask back inside his jacket.

     “I won’t tell if you won’t,” Sully said.  “Go ahead if you want, Sergeant.  You’d just be breakin’ the rules a little.  You’re good at doin’ that, ain’t you?”  His tone was heavily sarcastic.

     An uncomfortable silence fell between them.  Finally McKay spoke again.  “I can see you’re angry,” he said quietly.

     “You can see that, can you?” Sully said, his voice still laced with sarcasm.  “Nothin’ gets by you, does it Sergeant?  You ‘know all and see all’—ain’t that how it is?  You control peoples’ lives and make all their decisions for them.  Must be quite a heady feelin’, havin’ all that power over folks.”

     “I’m aware you know the truth about Flagg—“ McKay began.

     “How did you figure that out, Sergeant?” Sully interrupted.  “More of them wonderful powers of observation of yours?”

     “Mr. Lawson told me of his—encounter—with you,” McKay replied, refusing to be baited.

     “I see,” said Sully.  “Does that mean you’re gonna add ‘assault’ to my list of charges, now?  Go ahead.  You can’t do much more to me than you already done.  But look on the bright side,” he added with a false smile.  “You won’t have to accuse me of murder again, ‘cause you ‘protected’ me from myself.”  He turned away, sipping at his tea and staring moodily toward the saloon.

     McKay looked out at the street as well.  The silence hung between them, thick and cloying.  After a while, McKay spoke again.

     “I see I have a lot to answer for as far as you’re concerned,” he said.  “Well, Sully, you know and I know that I need not justify my actions to you.  Nor do I owe you any apologies.  But I’d like to tell you my side of it anyway—because I respect you, and because I “do” owe you a tremendous debt for saving my life.”

     “You don’t owe me nothin’,” Sully said dismissively.  “It was just reflex—I woulda done the same for any stranger or drifter passin’ through town.”

     “I believe you would.  That’s one of the reasons why I respect you,” McKay said calmly, taking the sting out of Sully’s comment.  “Though I’d like to think that at the time, at least, my safety mattered a little more to you.”

     Frustrated by McKay’s refusal to take offense at his barbs, Sully didn’t answer.  McKay chose to take advantage of Sully’s silence.

     “Shall I take your objections one by one?” he asked rhetorically.   “Very well.

     “First of all, you accused me of ‘breaking the rules.’  Well, that statement is both true and false.  It is false, in that I did not violate any rules or code of conduct by not informing you of Flagg’s escape.  That’s not what you wish to hear, I know—nonetheless those are the facts.  This town is under martial law and I am in charge here.  I am within my purview as commander to take any legal action I see fit to maintain order, protect the populace, or apprehend criminals.  I am not required to inform you of my decisions, or my reasons for them—especially if I determine that by doing so, I would be putting your life or the lives of anyone else in danger.

    “As to the morality of my decision—well, that’s somewhat harder to defend.  I recognize that you had a right to know that a dangerous criminal who had harmed your family was on the loose.  However, I had to weigh your right to that knowledge, against the possible—and conceiveably even more dangerous—consequences.  In my estimation, based on what I’d observed and learned about you in the past several days, there was a very real possibility that you would attempt to take the law into your own hands.  This could have had disastrous consequences to your wife, your family, Robert E. and his wife—but most of all, to you.  If you had attempted to escape and go after Flagg, I would have had no choice but to hunt you down.  It might very well have become a question of whether you died from Flagg’s bullet, or one from an army pistol.  Conversely, if you killed Flagg, you would be facing a second murder charge, and either hanging, or life in prison—my bet would be on the former.

    “Yes, I ‘protected’ you, Sully.  You’re absolutely right about that.  I didn’t want to see you harm yourself, I didn’t want Dr.Quinn to lose a husband, or your children a father.  On that count, I *do* plead guilty.”

    McKay paused.  Sully remained silent, but his posture betrayed that he was listening carefully to every word.  McKay went on.

    “I told you that your assertion was true, as well.  And so it is—I *did* break the rules, recently, by allowing you to remain in the medical clinic with your injured wife, rather than being incarcerated in the jail.  This was a serious breach of regulations, and I took a tremendous risk.  Why, quite frankly, I’m not sure, since at the time I had every reason to distrust you and look upon you as a criminal.  I can only say that your passionate devotion to your wife impressed me.  It set you apart from most men I’ve known, and made me curious to understand more about you.  The more I learned, the more I grew to respect you.  It also became quite clear to me as time passed that ny faith in you as an honorable man had been justified.  I began to regret, after a time, that it was my duty to enforce the army’s charges against you.

    “Then we got word about Flagg.  And I believed that if you knew he was free, your need to protect your wife, or your desire to seek revenge, would be the two motivations extreme enough to overpower your reason, and so I sought to do what I could to prevent that from happening.

    “As for controlling people’s lives and having power over them—I would gladly give away that responsibility if I could.  It’s very difficult making such decisions—weighing one evil against another, knowing that the choices I make to protect people can very often hurt them as well.

    “I don’t ‘know all and see all,’ Sully.  I don’t have the gift of clairvoyance, I can’t see the future.  What happened last night proves that.  I’m human, and I’m flawed.  I make mistakes.  Sometimes I fail.

    “Tell me Sully—have you ever made an important decision without consulting those closest to you—perhaps thinking that what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them?  Have you ever committed an act  with the best of intentions, and seen that act go tragically wrong?”

    McKay stopped speaking.  His questions hung in the air, and reverberated in Sully’s mind.  McKay was equating himself with Sully.   Was it possible?  Could McKay’s decision to withhold the truth about Flagg from him, be comparable to his decision to withhold the truth about his actions at Palmer Creek from Michaela?  More than that, if he had known about Flagg, or Michaela had known what he was doing at the reservation, would it have made a difference?  Quite possibly—and the danger might have been even greater, the consequences even more serious.

    “Well?” McKay asked simply.

    Sully pondered what he had heard.  “I understand your meanin’,” he said finally.  “I was just thinkin’, examinin’ my heart and tryin’ to decide if there’s truth in what you say.”

    “What conclusion have you drawn?” McKay asked.

    “You got a point,” Sully acknowledged.  “I didn’t tell Michaela I was goin’ to the reservation, or why—and those decisions wound up costin’ her a lot more pain.  I’ve regretted that for a long time.  And, truth be told, I ain’t sure exactly what I woulda done if I’d known Flagg was loose.  I can’t say I would have taken the law into my own hands, but I would have been angry—and I sure wouldn’t have been willin’ to just sit by doin’ nothin.’

    “The truth is, I wasn’t there when Flagg hurt Michaela the first time,” Sully said quietly.  “I felt she was in danger, but I didn’t act on the feelin’ soon enough.  That’s no one’s fault but mine.  But you not tellin’ me she was in danger the second time—it felt like you robbed me of the chance to make it up to Michaela for not bein’ there when she needed me.  Instead I had to rely on other people to protect her—to do my job.  I—I just couldn’t accept that.”

    “It was never my intention to take your place, Sully,” said McKay.  “My duty was to protect both of you, the best I could.  Obviously I failed.  It’s hard for me to accept that,” he added.

    “Don’t appear to me like you failed,” Sully allowed after a moment.  “We’re still alive.”

    “A confluence of luck, skill and reflexes, on the part of you and Mr. Lawson,” McKay conceded.  “I can’t take the credit.”

    “I think,” Sully began slowly.  “I think maybe we all did what we had to do, and maybe the time has come to let it go and move on.”

    “That’s very generous,” said McKay.

    “I ain’t bein’ generous,” Sully said.   “I think I’m just lookin’ at the situation honestly, for the first time.   I guess sometimes it takes as much bravery to make hard choices, as it does to stop a bullet—maybe more.  Then again, some might call jumpin’ in front of a bullet kinda foolhardy,” he added, with a hint of a smile.

    “Not from where I’m standing,” said McKay.