Billy the Kid #12

Billy the Kid swears off adding notches to his gun after a shootout forces him to confront the toll of violence, but when a vengeful gambler named Gulcher Joe orchestrates an ambush in the local stable, Billy finds his pacifist resolve tested in the dark. With his gun handed over to the marshal, the young gunslinger must outwit a desperate foe using wits and fists instead of bullets in "No More Notches!" a frontier showdown that asks whether a man known for his speed can survive by any means but his trigger finger.

William Bonney—known to the world as Billy the Kid—boards a stagecoach bound for Hawkeye, hoping to prove he can live peacefully despite his reputation, but his good intentions are tested when stage bandits strike and he must defend his fellow passengers, including the banker Clayton Rall and his daughter Laura. Once in town, Billy works to establish order and protect the Ralls' fortune from further threats, all while trying to show that a man with his past can genuinely change. The real test comes when a second robbery puts everything he's built on the line.

When William Bonney encounters Lee Calder and his gang preying on a young traveler at a stagecoach stop, he's forced to reveal there's far more to the baby-faced stranger than meets the eye. Billy the Kid's lightning-fast draw turns the tables on Calder's crew in "The Next Victim," a two-page showdown that proves underestimating a quiet gunslinger is a mistake these outlaws won't forget.

In the lawless early days of Wyoming's settlement, a gunslinger calling himself Utah drifts into the frontier town of Buckhorn—but he's actually a hired operative working to infiltrate Frog Yates' notorious Hole-in-the-Wall Gang from the inside. As Utah gains the gang's trust and discovers deep rifts over how their stolen loot is divided, he finds himself caught between outlaw factions with a chance to strike a decisive blow against the territory's most dangerous criminals.

Ken Ford, a writer researching Billy the Kid's legend, travels to a ghost town where an old man called Ol' Loco claims to be the outlaw himself—but seems too far gone in age to prove anything. When Ford shows him a gun purporting to have belonged to Billy, something stirs in the old man's mind, and his hands move with impossible speed as he relives a gunfight from decades past. Ford discovers initials scratched inside the barrel that match Billy the Kid's real name, but the mysterious stranger vanishes before he can learn the truth.