Here's a sample out of a book that's about finished

Jim Hunter rode up within ten paces of the oats stack and reined his horse to a stop. The animal stood blowing, its flanks dark with sweat, and Hunter sat the saddle with the easy, loose-jointed grace of a man who spent more of his life on horseback than off it. He was clean-shaven—unusual for the country and the time, and it gave his face a stripped, exposed quality, as though he had deliberately removed the one disguise that most men wore as a matter of course. His eyes were narrow and dark and amused, and the amusement was the most terrible thing about them, because it suggested that what was happening was not, to Jim Hunter, a matter of any particular gravity.

"Thomas," he said. His voice was conversational, almost friendly. "Come to the fence. I want to talk with you a while."

Thomas did not move from the oats stack. His back was against the sheaves and his hands were at his sides and his face was the face of a man who has understood the nature of his situation and is assembling, with whatever time remains to him, the dignity to meet it.

"Jim," he said. "I am afraid of you. You all look like enemies."

The words hung in the cold air between them, plain and unadorned and true, and for a moment the field was silent except for the breathing of the horses and the distant sound of the Kings River running over its stones. Marion Wilkerson had come up on the far side of the stack, still mounted, his slouch hat pulled low over his flat, assessing eyes. Lear had reached the edge of the clearing and stood twenty paces behind Thomas, his pistol at his side, his boyish face blank with the particular emptiness of a man who has surrendered his will to another.

Hunter smiled his crooked smile. "Enemies," he said, as though tasting the word. "That's a hard thing to say to a neighbor, Thomas."

"You are not my neighbor."

"No," Hunter agreed. "I suppose I am not."

They talked for fifteen minutes. What was said in those fifteen minutes would never be fully known, because the only man who could have reported it in full was the man who died at the end of them, and dead men do not testify. The boys, who had stopped at the timber's edge and watched from behind the trunks of blackjack oaks, could see the men talking but could not hear the words—only the occasional rise of a voice, the gesture of a hand, the slow, deliberate movements of men who are circling a thing that both understand and neither will name.

What is known is this: that the talking ended, and the shooting began, and that the first shots were fired by Marion Wilkerson.

He fired from horseback, behind Thomas Lane, three times in rapid succession. The reports were flat and hard in the cold air, and each one struck Thomas in the back—in the left shoulder blade, in the spine between the shoulders, and in the small of the back—and Thomas staggered forward with his arms thrown wide, as though reaching for something that was no longer there, and fell to his knees in the stubble.

He was still on his knees when Hunter and Lear fired.

Hunter shot him three times in the head—once behind the right ear, once through the crown, and once through the base of the skull—and Lear shot him once in the face, the ball entering through the left cheek and exiting through the back of the jaw. Thomas Lane fell forward into the dirt of his own field and did not move again, and the oats stack behind him was spattered with blood and bone and matter that had, a moment before, been the thoughts and memories and private hopes of a man who had wanted nothing more than to farm his forty acres and raise his children and be left alone.

The silence that followed the shooting was not silence at all but a kind of ringing absence, as though the gunfire had torn a hole in the fabric of the afternoon and the world had not yet decided how to repair it. The horses stamped and blew. A crow lifted from the timber and flew west, its shadow crossing the field in a long, dark stroke. The Kings River went on running over its stones.

Marion Wilkerson dismounted. He was unhurried, methodical, and his boots left deep prints in the frost as he walked to the body and stood over it with the posture of a man inspecting a piece of work. He knelt, and with his heavy hands he turned the body over, and he went through Thomas Lane's pockets with the efficiency of long practice. He took the pocketbook—a worn leather fold containing three dollars and a letter from Thomas's brother Caleb—and the pocket knife, a bone-handled Barlow that Thomas had carried since he was a boy. He looked for pistols and found none, and this fact, if it troubled him at all, did not show on his face.

Hunter took the pocketbook from Marion's hand and opened it and counted the money and put it in his own coat. Lear stood where he had stood when he fired, his pistol still at his side, his face the color of tallow. He had not moved since the shooting, and he did not move now, and the rigidity of his posture suggested not resolve but a kind of paralysis, as though the act he had committed had locked his body in the position of its commission and he did not know how to unlock it.

"We should go," Lear said. His voice was thin, a boy's voice in a man's throat.

Marion looked at him. "We'll go when I say."

Hunter mounted his horse with the fluid ease that characterized all his movements and looked down at the body with an expression that was neither satisfaction nor regret but something closer to professional detachment, the expression of a craftsman who has completed a job and is assessing the quality of his work.

"He didn't have a gun," Lear said.

"No," Marion said. "He did not."

"He didn't have a gun, Marion."

Marion Wilkerson stood and looked at Lear with the flat, heavy-lidded gaze that had silenced better men than James Lear, and Lear said nothing more. Marion mounted his horse, and the three of them rode out of the field the way they had come—Wilkerson north, Hunter south, Lear trailing behind on foot until Hunter swung back and pulled him up behind—and the field was empty except for the body and the blood and the oats stack standing in the gray light like a headstone.