Taylor came out of the barn, dragging Billy. He stopped. “Either your shooting was off, Evans, or you really didn’t want to kill him.”
Colt shrugged again. “No need to kill both of them. Enough died today.”
Taylor lifted his brow and tilted his head in a silent query, but Colt didn’t explain. Instead he walked to the cabin, aching and battered to his soul.
****
Amelia tried to scrub the feel of Billy’s coarse hands and his vile mouth from her. She felt filthy to her soul. A single lantern dispelled the darkness. Colt had been sitting out on the small porch, silent, looking off into the Medicine Bow since the moment Marshal Taylor had led Billy Matthews away.
“Amy.”
Startled, Amelia glanced over her shoulder, instinctively crossing her arms over her breasts. Colt’s expression tightened and something pained flared to life in his dark eyes.
“I’m leaving tonight, before Taylor brings Saul and Jenny back.”
Her throat clenched around the sudden lump burning there. She pulled on her robe, crossed to the kitchen table, and sank into a chair.
“Everyone except for you and me is right,” he continued, his voice flat. “As long as I’m here, you’re not going to be safe.” He pulled a hand back through his hair, disheveling it. “I kept hoping that everyone, including me, was wrong, that my past wouldn’t show up. But I made a mistake, and it’s the kind of mistake that a shootist can’t afford. The kind that usually ends up costing people their lives.”
It was then she noticed the revolver on his thigh and that his sling was gone.
“If I saddle up and leave now, it’ll be several hours before Saul and Jenny get back here, and I’ll be long gone from your lives.” Colt dropped a small leather pouch onto the table. Amelia cringed. “It’s not much, but it should help you and the kids through the winter, and repay you for what you’ve done for me.”
“What happens if someone comes along and doesn’t believe that you aren’t here? What happens then?”
His eyes darkened for just a second, and then that cold mask she had learned to despise fell into place. Ice skimmed the gray of his eyes. “They’ll find out in town I’ve left. They’ll all start looking for me in Federal, and the way the gossips in town work, everyone is going to know in a day or two I’ve left.”
He started for the door, paused, and turned to her again. “You are the only decent and good thing to have come into my life in a long time and I guess that’s why I stayed as long as I did, but I never should have. I should have left two days ago. I’ve been accused of a lot of things in my life, most of them the truth. I guess now they can add coward to those accusations because I’m too much of a coward to stay here and risk you or those kids getting hurt because of me.”
He turned toward the door again and Amelia knew she had a decision to make. Face life without him, or make peace with his past, knowing that it would forever be a specter haunting them. Her parents had confronted a similar decision, and for eleven of her nineteen years, Phillip McCollister and his wife had lived with that specter as the Reverend and Mrs. McCollister.
Amelia came to her feet. “Colt.”
He stopped, shoulders slumping, but didn’t turn around. His hand stayed on the latch, but he didn’t open the door.
Amelia struggled to form the words her heart wanted to say, to beg him to stay, to tell him that somehow they could make things work, that if they had to they could leave, go far away where no one would know who he was. But she couldn’t make any of those words move past the huge lump in her throat. She had thought she could be strong and brave if his past ever arrived to settle any scores with him. She had been so wrong. She hadn’t been brave. Or strong. She had just been terrified. After a long moment, Colt opened the door.
If he walked out, Amelia knew he wouldn’t be back. She quickly crossed the room, and stepped between him and the open door, struggling to find any words.
His shoulders sagged as a sigh escaped him. “You can’t even say it, can you?” His smile was forced and he caught her chin in his palm, splaying his fingers over her cheek. He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. “I’m going to do the only truly decent and selfless thing I’ve ever done in this life, because as sure as Saul wasn’t raised by your parents to be a shootist, you sure as hell weren’t meant to be a shootist’s whore. So I’m going to walk out that door and out of your life.”
He lowered his hand, stepped around her and out the open door. Amelia screwed her eyes shut. The dull echo of his boot heels on the porch throbbed into her chest, constricting her heart. Moments later, she heard Angel’s hooves beat out a rapid staccato that faded into the darkness. Long after those retreating beats could no longer be heard, Amelia stood with her back to the open doorway, arms wrapped tightly around her waist, hunched into herself in an attempt to assuage the pain.
The wind snarled with a bitter fury in the dark, cloud-laden skies, sending ice pellets skittering over the frozen landscape. Colt shivered deep in his coat. The lights of Rock Springs danced in the swirling snow, a welcoming beacon drawing him in from the vicious cold. He tugged Angel’s head toward the small town huddled along the banks of the Green River.
Rock Springs was as good a place as any other to hole up for the winter. The mountain passes were snowed in, and he had no intention of trying to cross the Wasatch Range in January.
He left Angel in the livery, and made his way down the boardwalk to one of the three hotels in town. After paying for a room, he crossed the frozen mud of the main street to the saloon.
He turned down the collar of his heavy coat and headed for a vacant table in the back corner of the room. As he walked past the bar, a huge man turned.
“Colt Evans, is that you?”
Colt spun, his hand dropping instinctively for the gun strapped to his thigh.
The other man threw his hands up. “Whoa, son. Take it easy. It’s only me, Bear.”
Colt straightened and grinned. “Bear. I’ll be damned. What are you doing here?”
Bear grabbed Colt and hugged him so hard his spine crackled. “I could ask you the same thing, boy.”
“Let me go, Bear. My ribs can’t take it.” Colt stepped back and studied the man’s face. Bear wore a thicker beard than Colt remembered, and there was so much gray mixed into it he had a grizzled appearance. His shaggy eyebrows were nearly all steely gray. “What are you doing in Rock Springs?”
“Same as you, I’ll bet, Colt. Holing up for the winter.” Bear gestured to the bartender. “Gimme a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. And don’t bring that trash you cut. Bring a bottle of the good stuff.”
A moment later, the bartender handed Bear a bottle and two relatively clean glasses. Bear gestured to the table in the corner of the room. “Your favorite table waits, Mr. Evans. I’ll even let you have the back corner seat.”
Colt chuckled. “As if I could argue with you if you really wanted it.”
Bear sobered, setting the whiskey bottle onto the table. “You worried me half to death when you rode out of Red Deer. Where’d you go?”
Colt eased into the chair in the corner, unbuttoning his coat. He picked up the deck of cards on the table and shuffled them. “Found myself outside of a little town called Federal, over near Cheyenne.”
The whiskey gurgled as Bear poured it into the two glasses. He shoved one across the table to Colt. Colt set the cards down and picked up the glass. He swirled the amber liquid, and then set it on the table without drinking.
Bear raised a brow, but didn’t say anything. Instead, he picked up the cards and began dealing them face up in two separate piles. “Scared the daylights out of me when you left,” he repeated, “especially when me and Hank saw the hand you’d been holding just before Mitch Matthews sat down.”
Colt glanced at the cards fanning onto the table. Aces and eights…a shiver that had nothing to do with the bitter cold crept up his spine. “Any reason you’ve cut them out again?”
Startled, Bear looked across the table at him. “Didn’t know I was doing it. Sorry, Colt. Guess I’m more superstitious than I thought. I still get a chill when I see that hand.”
Colt decided to change the subject. “What have you been up to since I rode out of Red Deer?”
“Turned in my badge. Decided I didn’t like being a lawman anymore. Played a few hands over in Deadwood, and then wandered down to Denver for a few weeks. Thought I’d head on out to sunny California and see if I can’t finally get these old bones of mine warm.” Bear collected the cards and shuffled them. “Too many squatters out on the range now. Times are a-changing, Colt. The wide open range I grew up with is going to be a thing of the past pretty soon. Maybe I can even find some pretty blue-eyed lady to settle down with out in California.”
Colt leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the wall. “Good luck, Bear.” He shut his eyes and saw Amelia’s face bathed in silver moonlight as she had been that night on the glider swing, heard Saul’s laugh, and felt Jenny’s slight weight as he carried her from the top of the granite monolith during the thunderstorm.
“Who was she, Colt?”
“What?” He sat up, opening his eyes.
“Who was she?”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You can’t lie to me, boy. Not as long as I’ve been looking out for you. You’ve been dogging my heels, just like a pup, since you was tossed out by your step-daddy so I kinda figure I know you a little better than that.” Bear’s grin stretched his seamed, weathered face. “Who was she?”
“What makes you think I was thinking about a woman?” Colt picked up the glass of whiskey and swirled the liquid again. “Maybe I was thinking about heading back across the street and hitting the hay for the night.”
“And maybe you’re handing out a lot of balderdash at the moment too.” Bear’s grin widened. “She must have been something special if she got under your hide.”
Colt lifted the glass to his mouth and swallowed the entire contents. He seized the bottle and poured himself another one. The whiskey burned all the way into his gut. He knew he would regret it, but he quickly swallowed the second glass too.
Bear leaned his elbows onto the table. “Have a couple more, boy. You always got real talkative when you’d had too much to drink.”
“Go to hell,” Colt said.
“Then again, maybe I’ll just catch the train tomorrow and head on into Cheyenne. Can’t be that many towns around Cheyenne. I think I can find one named Federal and look her up for myself.”
Colt dropped his hand to the revolver on his thigh and pulled the hammer back without sliding the gun from the holster. “You stay the hell away from her, you hear me, Bear?”
Bear’s eyes widened and the color leeched from his face at the double click of metal on metal. “You’d pull a gun on me, boy? I ain’t wearing a gun and don’t intend to ever wear one, and you’d pull a gun on me just because I want to know a little more about the lady?”
Colt eased the hammer down. “Let it go, Bear. She’s not in my life and never can be.”
“Was she married?”
“I said, let it go.” Colt sighed. “Damn it, Bear…I’m sorry and yeah, she’s one hell of a special lady. No, she wasn’t married. Probably still isn’t.”
Bear tossed his own drink down and poured another. “Tell me about her.”
Colt shook his head. “What’s the sense?” He surveyed the saloon, thinking it didn’t matter the town, or the name of the establishment, they all were pretty much the same. The sense of loss knifed through him. “What good will that do?”
“Humor me. I’d like to know what kind of a lady got under your hide. I would have bet that it would never happen to you. You got really good at spending the night with a saloon whore and walking away the next morning without so much as a backward glance.”
“She isn’t anything like that.”
“I can imagine she isn’t.” Bear shuffled the cards again and dropped them onto the table, flipping the queen of hearts up. “Imagine she was a real lady.”
Colt stared at the severe countenance of the queen of hearts. “The queen of hearts, she’s your best bet…isn’t that what you used to tell me?” He shook his head, and pushed back a shock of hair that fell over his brow. “She didn’t play by the rules, this time, Bear.”
“The lady or the queen of hearts?”
Colt tapped his finger on the card in the middle of the table. “The queen of hearts. The lady nursed me back to health. Every time I close my eyes, I see her face and taste her again. Every damn night, I dream she’s still next to me and I can feel her under my fingertips…or at least, until I wake up.”
Bear leaned back in his chair and smiled.
“I’ve got it bad, Bear, I know I do.” Colt glared at the card. “Every time she walked into the room, I would feel as if I was something more than a jaded, too-old gunfighter. I really thought I could stay there with her. I thought I could forget who and what I am, and when she looked at me, I knew she never saw me as I am. I almost did forget for a little while what I am.”
The amusement left Bear’s face. “What are you, Colt?”
Colt tore his gaze from the queen of hearts. “I’m a shootist, Bear, and we both know the only way I’ll ever be able to hang this damn gun up is when they plant me six feet under.”
“You’re sure about that?”
He nodded. “Yeah, damn sure. Two of the Matthews boys tracked me down to her place. I wasn’t there at the time.”
Bear caught his breath. “Shit.”
“I got there before they could really hurt her, and almost got her killed in the cross fire.” He poured another whiskey and downed it.
“Did she throw you out then?”
Colt refilled his empty glass. “No. I walked out before she could dredge up the words to beg me to take her and Saul and Jenny with me.”
“Who are Saul and Jenny?” Bear picked up the whiskey bottle and poured himself another drink. “She a widow woman?”
“No. She’s raising her brother and sister by herself.” The alcohol was beginning to affect him. A lethargic numbness crept into his limbs. “Living on the run, always looking over her shoulder, that ain’t no way to raise a couple of kids.”
“You should know, considering that’s how you finished growing up,” Bear said. “You know what I think you should do? I think you should get damn good and drunk and go spend the night with one of the girls here. Get her out of your system.”