No Name, Colorado
Monday, April 6, 1891
D
In the early-morning breeze, his shoulder-length hair drifted across his face, making everything look limned in gold before he lazily pushed the strands back. How long had it been since he’d felt this relaxed? At least a year, damn it, or his eyes weren’t blue. Being tense and on guard all the time wasn’t good for a man’s constitution. Feeling certain he wouldn’t be awakened by the sound of gunfire last night, he had slumbered deeply. Hell, he felt so good he could swear he wasn’t a day more than twenty instead of the venerable thirty that he actually was. It was hard to believe he’d turn thirty-one in only a couple of months.
Old Mose Hepburn, the local drunk and David’s only prisoner, was sleeping it off in the cell block, as happy as a grub worm in a rotten log to be snoozing on a lumpy cot.
Most times, he had to compete with rats for space in the hayloft of Chris Coffle’s livery stable. If the cantankerous old fart kept to his usual pattern, he wouldn’t come around until along about noon, and by then Billy Joe Roberts, one of David’s deputies, would be on duty to walk across the way to get Mose some breakfast. David sighed with contentment and flexed his shoulders, glad to be slothful for
a change and let his mind wander. No appointments, no meetings, and no rowdy cowpokes. His languorous mood was magnified by Sam, his fluffy gold and white dog, who lay beside him, snoring louder than a two-man crosscut saw.
It was a long-missed pleasure for David to watch the town of No Name awaken. And, oh, what a fine morning it was, putting him in mind of his early years, when he’d sometimes had nothing better to do than sit on the back stoop and watch the grass grow. The planks of the boardwalk creaked as he shifted his weight. A fly, the first David had seen since last autumn, buzzed in to cut circles in front of his nose. Sunlight spilled over the roof peaks at the opposite side of Main Street and slanted under the overhang. Butter yellow warmth bathed the lower half of his face where his hat brim didn’t cast a shadow and seeped through his leather duster and shirt to make him feel toasty despite the chill temperatures of early spring. Yep, and boy howdy, it was shaping up to be a great day.
Slumped on the tottery contraption of ancient wood he still called a chair, David extended his long legs and crossed his booted feet to study his spurs. He hated the damned things, would never use them on a horse, and felt silly wearing them, but his sister-in-law Caitlin insisted they were “necessary accoutrements” to his new marshal’s outfit. Trust her to come up with a big word for every little thing. Turning his ankles, he noted with grim satisfaction that the once-silver rowels were now pewter gray and specked with dry mud. Not so long ago, he would have rushed over to Gilpatrick’s general store for some polish to restore their sparkle. Not anymore. He’d learned the hard way that a town marshal who paraded about in a starched shirt, pressed blue jeans, and spit-shined boots was asking for trouble. Now,
under the direction of his elder brother Ace, a renowned ex-gunslinger, David dressed more like a roughrider than a peacekeeper, and he sure did appreciate the results. No upstart fast guns had called him out into the street in well over three months.
A loud thump brought Sam’s snoring to a halt and caught David’s attention. Squinting against the light, he directed his gaze across the way to the source of the noise. Roxie Balloux, the buxom and ever-cheerful proprietress of No Name’s best restaurant, had just emerged from the establishment from a side service doorway with a five-gallon slop bucket in each hand. Reddish brown hair caught at her crown in a coiled braid, she looked fetching in a tidy, blue-checked gingham housedress with lacy shoulder caps and a fashionable new bustle that was supposedly more streamlined than its predecessors. To the delight of most men, the effect was lost on Roxie. She was plump in all the right places and needed no posterior enhancement. Hell, Roxie wearing a bustle was sort of like ladling whipped cream over apple pie à la mode, a bit too much of a good thing. Not that any man with blood still moving in his veins could think about food when he admired her backside. Sadly, she would turn thirty-five in August, making her a mite too long in the tooth for David, who still hoped to marry and raise a family.
As Roxie descended the porch steps, Old Jeb, a black dog belonging to Jesse Chandler, the chimney sweep, appeared out of nowhere, barking excitedly and circling at her feet as she upended the buckets over the trash barrel. She let loose with a sigh, audible even at a distance, and gingerly routed through the slop to find the shaggy beggar a treat. She tossed the canine a ham hock generously peppered with what looked like coffee grounds. Jeb wasn’t fussy and dropped onto his belly in a patch of grass, still yellow from winter, to gnaw happily on the bone.
Sam, who either heard Jeb chewing or caught the smell, jerked awake and whined. David lowered a hand to his pet’s head. “No way, you rascal. Every time you eat Roxie’s slop, you get the squirts.”
The shepherd grunted and went back to snoring. David
rocked, shifted, and went back to lollygagging, his gaze idly scanning the businesses across the street. Next door to the eating establishment, Tobias Thompson, so thin he didn’t cast a shadow standing sideways, emerged from his dry-goods store with broom in hand. Same as always, he wore a blue bib apron over black trousers and a white shirt with a turned-down collar that sported a red necktie. Even in the shade of the boardwalk overhang, his bald pate gleamed like polished agate as he bent to the task of sweeping his doorstep.
Watching the man work, David reached under his hat to scratch, hoping to high heaven he’d never lose his hair. He guessed he’d just wear a hat all the time when he got old. He wore one most of the time, anyhow.
The batwing doors of the Golden Slipper saloon creaked open just then. David glanced to his left, expecting to see Mac, the owner of the establishment, stepping out for a breath of fresh morning air. Instead, Marcy May Jones, the newly hired upstairs girl, posed in the doorway. David damned near swallowed his tongue. She wore a pink wrapper—in a manner of speaking—with the sash looped carelessly at her waist, one slender shoulder and most of one breast artfully displayed. David was so taken aback that he couldn’t think what to do or say. He was the marshal, after all, responsible for law, order, and upholding the decency codes of the town, but how in the Sam Hill did a man tell a lady to get her pretty little ass back inside where it belonged?
David wasn’t the only male on the street who reacted with a start. Tobias froze with his broom in midswing, and his grown son, Brad, the town’s newly appointed garbage collector, almost took out an overhang post with the right rear wheel of his fully loaded wagon as he cut the corner from the alley onto Main. One of the mules brayed in protest as Brad jerked hard on the reins to stop.
“Good morning, Mr. Thompson,” Marcy crooned to Brad as she caressed one hip, smiled, and tipped her head so that the henna tint of her brown hair flashed in the morning light. “I keep hopin’ you might pay me a call one of these
nights, and my little heart’s just broken that you never come.”
Trying to back up his team, Brad turned three shades of crimson and gripped the lines in one hand to tug at his shirt collar, which apparently had shrunk a size between one breath and the next. “I . . . um . . . Well, lands, Miss Marcy, I’m a happily married man.”
“I’m partial to happily married men, Mr. Thompson. They know how to treat a lady.”
Brad coughed and ran a hand over his face. “Well, um, my Bess—she wouldn’t like it if I visited you. No, ma’am, she wouldn’t cotton to that at all.”
Marcy sighed theatrically. “Too bad. Her bein’ in the family way and all, I bet you’re not gettin’ any at home. If you should start to feel cross and out of sorts, you come see me. I’ll cure what ails you. You have my personal guarantee.”
Tobias glared at Miss Jones and then at his son’s broad back. He was clearing his throat and about to speak when Brad’s wife, Bess, a petite and very pregnant blonde, emerged from the dry-goods store. Prior to having children, Bess had been the schoolteacher, and despite her diminutive stature, she still carried herself with an air of authority even though she now had the swaybacked posture common to so many women heavy with child. She stepped off the edge of the boardwalk into full sunlight, circled the wagon, and stood between her husband and the saloon as she met Marcy’s gaze. The sparks that shot from her green eyes could have set fire to stone. David realized her anger stemmed from jealousy, which baffled him. Miss Marcy was easy enough on the eyes, he guessed, but she didn’t hold a candle to Bess.
“Where is Mac?” she demanded of the prostitute. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know his upstairs
girl
is indecently exposing herself on the town boardwalk in broad daylight!” Bess had perfected the schoolmarm haughtiness that always snapped kids to attention. Chin up, eyebrows arched, she almost made David want to dive for cover. “You’ll kindly remove yourself from public view, Miss Jones, or I
shall report you to the city council. We do have laws in this town to protect the innocent!” With a fling of her left arm, Bess gestured up the street at the schoolhouse. “
Children
are out and about, my good woman. I don’t believe that Charley and Eva Banks would be pleased to learn that their boy Ralph witnessed this indecent display on his way to school.” Bess fluttered her fingers in front of her chest and added with shrill accusation, “Your feminine
protrusions
are showing.”
“They’re called tits, honey,” Marcy replied drily. “You got so much starch in your petticoats, it’s a wonder you don’t crackle when you walk.”
David was greatly enjoying himself until Bess turned that fiery green gaze on him. He leaped to his feet as if he’d just been prodded with a pitchfork tine. “We do have a city ordinance about appropriate public attire, Miss Marcy,” he said loudly, so Bess would hear, hoping as he spoke that
ordinance
was the proper term. The city council had so many names for laws—
appendages
,
bylaws
, and all manner of other shit—that he could never keep them straight. Bottom line, he had been appointed marshal because he was halfway smart and fast with a gun, not because he had a gift with words. “Standing about on the boardwalk in nothing but a—” David glanced at Miss Marcy and, like Brad, had a sudden urge to loosen his collar. Even worse, he plumb forgot what that pink thingamajig she wore was called. It had slipped farther off her right shoulder, and the brown of her nipple was playing peekaboo with him every time the breeze shifted. “Well, ma’am, no offense, but parading about in one’s birthday suit, even if it’s sort of covered, is against the law. You need to go back inside.”
Wearing a jade dress that matched her eyes and sporting a belly as big as a Texas watermelon, Bess pointed a rigid finger at the prostitute. “Immediately!”
“I’m goin’, I’m goin’,” Marcy replied with a seductive thrust of her hip as she turned away. “Don’t get your lacy little knickers in a twist. I ain’t never stole anybody’s husband yet and don’t plan to start. They come of their own free will.”
Bess’s face turned as red as her husband’s. She reached
up to rest a fine-boned hand on Brad’s knee, and the man jerked as if he’d just been touched with a hot brand. David, who’d been courting Hazel Wright, the new schoolteacher, and was thinking about asking her to marry him, got an itchy feeling at the nape of his neck. If this was any indication, maybe wedded bliss wasn’t so blissful. Hell’s bells, all Brad had done was accidentally look, and as a result, he’d probably get burned biscuits for supper.
Bess abandoned her husband to march across the rutted street, which was still muddy in spots from a recent rain. As she approached David, he wondered how a perfectly wonderful morning had so quickly gone to hell.
“Marshal Paxton,” she said, using a tone that took David back in time to the classroom, when nuns had cracked rulers over the backs of his knuckles when he misbehaved. “We, the citizens of No Name, pay you well to keep this town respectable, yet you sat there on that dilapidated chair doing absolutely nothing while a harlot hawked her wares on Main Street at eight o’clock in the morning!”
David rubbed his whiskery jaw and repositioned his hat. “You heard me tell her to go back inside, Bess. What else can you expect me to do, get her in a headlock and drag her back in?”
“That is
not
the point!” Bess’s lips drew back over her teeth in a snarl so fierce that David cringed. Sam whined and crossed his snow-white paws over his eyes. “The
point
is that you
gawked
at her for a full three minutes before you said a single word.”
“Gawked? I didn’t gawk.” Well, he guessed he had, but not on purpose. “I was just taken aback, Bess, and as the marshal, I can’t go off half-cocked. I needed to think of an appropriate way to handle the situation.”
Judging by the flare of pink on her cheeks, Bess was less than mollified by his explanation. “Mark my word, I will attend the next city council meeting and lodge a complaint. You never hesitate to arrest a
man
who disturbs the peace, yet you fail to act when the perpetrator is a half-dressed female of ill repute!”