Dedicated to David, who lost his dog recently, and to my buddy Greg, who loves David Brown Eyes           He wasn't certain what had alerted him to another presence. Conditions were almost a whiteout, and Artie had sworn to come after him if he didn't return within half an hour. But the horses had to be fed, and water brought to them from the relative warmth of the parlor. He went down the steps gingerly, holding onto the rail with one hand and lugging a bucket of water in the other, slipping on the ice anyway, the rope around his waist digging into him even through the layers of clothing. The precaution of a rope seemed excessive but Artie had been adamant, and given their new and still somewhat fragile relationship, he hadn't wanted to argue.           Caring for the horses had taken no more than the time he'd promised Artie and now he was groping his way back toward the parlor, one gloved hand on the side of the stable car, staggering against the howling wind, wincing from the sting of snow on his face. Ahead of him was the barely visible yellow rectangle of the parlor car door, and half of Artie's body leaning out to look for him.           "Get back in there!" he roared, annoyed with Artie for exposing himself to these conditions when he didn't have to.           That was when he heard something, or thought he might have heard something, or perhaps there was a flash of something that shouldn't have been there. He bent down into the space between the cars to see what it was, wondering whether a cat, or perhaps a fox, had tried to find some kind of refuge there. It would have been better off completely underneath one of the cars, but the snow was already piled so high that nothing could have gotten through. The space between the cars was relatively clear because the wind blew through there, keeping the snow from piling up.           It was a dog. A brown and white dog, a setter perhaps, mostly hidden in the snow. An old dog, he saw immediately. The white around its muzzle wasn't all snow. "Oh, my God," he breathed. He knelt down to touch its head, fearing it was already frozen, but at his touch, its eyes opened and there was the sound again, a faint whuff. He stripped off his heavy coat, wrapped the dog in it, and stood, staggering. The dog was a dead weight, too cold to fight him.           Artie popped out of the doorway again, this time wearing his coat and hat, and Jim lunged through the drifts and handed the bundle up to him. "Dog!" he yelled, through the gusts of wind. "Half frozen." Artie nodded and went swiftly back inside, while Jim struggled to get the rope untied with numb fingers.           When he finally freed himself and slammed the door against the blizzard, Artie was kneeling on the floor beside the dog. "Get a blanket and warm it in the oven," he said over his shoulder. "And warm some water too."           Jim brought him the warmed blanket and a bowl of water, and together they coaxed the dog to drink a little. He couldn't hold his head up, but they lifted and supported him, wrapped in the blanket, and managed to get some water into him, and then some broth that Artie had made earlier that year and cooked down to a gel.           He had a sweet expression, a long plume of a tail, and brown eyes that followed their movements even when he couldn't lift his head. No telling where he'd come from, Jim thought. They were stopped on a siding, but there was no town nearby. Just the water tanks and coal sheds, and a rough shanty where the Chinese laborers stayed. He might have been someone's pet, accidentally left behind when the train moved on, or just a stray that no one had ever befriended.           Artie brought an old quilt out from under their bed and made up a pallet for him in front of the fire, and they very reluctantly left him there and went to bed. Went to sleep almost immediately, as well, too tired to do more than exchange a few weary kisses.           Jim woke in the middle of the night, crawled gingerly out of bed so as not to wake Artie, and then found his partner putting wood on the fire. The parlor was warmer than they usually kept it at night, and the dog's blanket was open and tucked around him like a bolster. He lifted his head as Jim came in and made that little woof-ing sound again, very softly.           Jim knelt and ruffled his ears. "Good old boy. Where'd you come from, huh? You sure chose a heck of a night to be outside."           Artie smiled down at him. "Didn't mean to wake you up," he said.           "You didn't. I just decided to get up. I thought you were still asleep in there."           "Want some cocoa?" Artie asked him. "Or tea?"           "Cocoa would be good." One of the few pleasures of this kind of weather was that milk would stay cold and fresh for days. Jim had grown up on cocoa on cold winter nights, and Artie had learned now to drink it as well, in preference to his more familiar tea.           Artie went into the galley, and Jim eased down onto the floor next to the dog. In spite of the heat in the air, the floor was still very cold. He lifted the dog, quilt and all, into his lap and held him, petting him and talking to him, until Artie came back with two steaming mugs.           "Mm, that's good. Wish we could get him to drink something hot like this."           "I gave him more of the broth," Artie said, sitting down next to him. "As much as he would take."           "Is he going to live, Artie?"           Artie didn't answer him for a long time. "Hard to say for sure. He's so weak and so old that he may not have the will to live any more. He's not much more than skin and bones."           "There must be something we can do," Jim said in frustration.           Artie reached over and took his hand. "Just love him, sweetheart. I don't know what else to do for him. I don't have any medicines that will bring a dog back from the brink. Just the broth and clean water and warmth and . . . love. If he wants to stay here, he will."           They sat there together into the dawn, Jim holding the dog and Artie holding Jim. The dog twitched and whined a little, dreaming of happier days, Jim thought, but as the interior of the car began to lighten, he drew a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and was gone. Jim felt him grow flaccid and sensed his spirit depart. Somewhere in the distance–but perhaps he only imagined it–a dog barked joyfully in the sunshine, but here, he cradled only its discarded shell.           Artie's arms tightened around him, and he turned his head into Artie's neck and tried not to weep. Artie rocked them both, whispering, "Love you, Jim. Love you, sweetheart."           After a while, when he had control of his breathing, Jim eased the dog down onto the floor and let Artie help him up. "Let's go to bed," he said wearily. He wasn't sure why he was so affected. It was only a stray dog, and an old one at that. It probably hadn't been far from the end of its life even under good conditions. They hadn't been able to save it, and now they'd have to figure out how to bury it, with the ground frozen a foot deep.           Lying with Artie in the big comfortable bed, he tried to articulate how he was feeling. "I felt really helpless. Like it was foreordained, or something, and nothing we could do was going to make any difference."           "His last hours were comfortable ones," Artie pointed out, but reason wasn't what Jim needed.           "Do you ever have the feeling that nothing we do makes any difference?" he asked. "We catch a criminal here and stop Loveless there, and on the other side of the country, someone else gets murdered and some other maniac is on the loose. It's just a waiting game. One of these days, we're going to be old too. One of us isn't going to react fast enough to save the other one, much less perform the mission." He rolled over and grabbed Artie's shoulders. "I don't want to lose you that way."           Artie pulled him down and kissed him, kissed him hard at first, and then tenderly. His eyes gleamed brown when he opened them, and the memory of the dog's soft brown eyes slammed into Jim. "Don't leave me, Artie," he whispered, ashamed of his base need but unable to stop himself from voicing it. "I couldn't bear it."           "Never," Artie promised. "I swear it." Under the quilt, his hand groped for Jim's cock, but Jim pushed it away and just held them together. They hadn't undressed when they went back to bed; the temperature in the bedroom was cooler than in the parlor, and they had let the fire die down in the stove anyway.           "Too cold," Jim murmured, thinking that Artie wanted them naked.           Artie shoved him away, and reached for the tie of his drawers. "Don't take them off," he said. "I just want to hold you."           Jim nodded and they managed to get each other's pricks out without disrobing. They rocked together at first, using their hands to caress other places, Artie's muscular shoulders that Jim loved, Jim's ass, whose perfection Artie described to him in a breathless whisper. Then Artie pressed him over on his back and lay half over him, kissing him passionately, while his hand slid down Jim's belly to his prick. In a haze, Jim reached for Artie, found him unerringly, and matched the strokes of his hand until Artie moaned against his mouth suddenly, and stiffened. Artie's hand tightened on his prick, and he pushed hard into it and climaxed himself, shuddering with the release of more than one kind of tension.           Artie's head slid down to his shoulder, and Jim hitched the covers up over them both and held him close. After a while, Artie said softly, "Want us to find something else to do? Are you ready to think about that?"           They had spoken of it before, but to Jim it had seemed like an acknowledgment of failure. Of his inability to solve the case, bring in the bad guys and protect his partner, all at the same time. Now he thought of the trust in that old setter's eyes. He had to have been someone's loved pet, and whoever that someone was had let him down. Had lost him out of carelessness, or out of simple inability to provide for him, and that failure had left the dog freezing to death in a howling blizzard. His own misplaced pride could put Artie in harm's way. Nothing was worth taking that chance.           "Yeah," he said. "I think it's time."           Artie cuddled closer and slipped his arm across Jim's chest, and Jim drifted off to dream of a house, warm against the winter wind, with a setter lying before a fire and something small and elegant and yappy in Artie's lap, and smiled finally in his sleep.