He was a nice-looking man. He could have walked right out of a hair tonic ad, in fact. But there was still just a hint of larceny around his eyes and a touch of deceit around his mouth. And Cassidy figured the man to be in a real good mood right now, what with both his hired guns turning up on the same day.

  Those were the kind of eyes and mouth that could smile up a storm while the brain behind them was plotting to kill you.

  All this, Drug Cassidy thought in the fraction of a second it took McMahon to raise his boots again and thump them down on the desk top.

  He’d always been good at sizing men up.

  However, he pushed all that aside, and concentrated on the job at hand. After all, five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks.

  Cassidy said, “Get to the point, McMahon. Who’s this saddle bum you want shed of?”

  McMahon laced his fingers behind his neck and grinned. “You boys ever hear of some sonofabitch, calls himself Slocum?”

  During those five days, Slocum had been busy, too. He’d ridden out to the distant corner of the ranch where Jack Jamison had been bushwhacked and murdered, and gone over all the ground for a good hundred and fifty yards in every direction.

  He turned up nothing but a couple of rifle shell casings and a piece of treated deer hide caught on a thorn. He stuck these in his pocket.

  The casings were unusual, because they were engraved with a curious design, the origin of which Slocum didn’t recognize. They were a sort of panther’s head, crudely tapped in and not quite matching from one casing to the other. Somebody was marking his casings after he bought the ammunition, because it sure wasn’t a factory stamp.

  He hadn’t expected to find anything more. He hadn’t even expected to find those shell casings. Jack Jamison had been shot from a distance, Becky had told him.

  And, from what he had seen, by a man who had been lurking up in the rocks.

  He’d been a sniper, Slocum decided, and a good one at that. He’d picked his spot well, and probably lain there quietly for Jack Jamison to ride into range. Slocum had been an assassin himself back during the war, trained to shoot from the boughs of faraway trees at solitary victims.

  He hadn’t had much taste for it, although he was good. He was the best.

  Of course, rifles back then didn’t have special scopes the way they did nowadays, but Slocum was a good enough shot himself to see that whoever had killed Jack Jamison had to be a contract man, brought in just for that job.

  It wasn’t the sort of thing an ordinary man, even an ordinary hired killer, could pull off. The sniper was probably long gone by now. He’d probably left the second he got paid.

  All he’d left behind was that little chunk of leather and two empty casings.

  And the body of Jack Jamison.

  Becky had said that she hadn’t loved Jack. At least, not in the flowery poetry and pounding hearts kind of way.

  She said he’d been good to her, which Slocum figured meant that at least he didn’t beat her or make her sleep in the barn.

  No, Becky said she hadn’t loved him, but Slocum didn’t think that was entirely true. He didn’t see a gal like Becky marrying for something so common as her economic betterment.

  Besides, she’d inherited the Bar S from her daddy. It was why she’d come to the Territory in the first place. She hadn’t needed the money and she hadn’t needed a white knight. At least, once Slocum had got rid of Roy Wheeler for her. And for the whole town of Indian Springs, as a matter of fact.

  No, she’d had to have some sort of love for Jack Jamison in order to marry him.

  Slocum couldn’t decide how he felt about that. Why, sometimes he got so pure jealous of that dead man that if Jamison had still been walking, Slocum could have killed him all over again! Or at least punched him in the jaw.

  Sometimes he went mushy as a hound dog pup with gratitude, thinking about how his Becky had been taken care of after he left. Those episodes didn’t last too long, though.

  And it wasn’t as if he wouldn’t leave again, once he got this thing figured out.

  He’d talked with Becky at length, and he’d talked with the hands, who he learned had just come back from moving the herd down to the south, to the winter grazing lands. Then, with Becky, he’d ridden down to the old Bar S, read that chicken-eating cowhand the riot act, and quite literally kicked him out of the house.

  The cowhand had been in his long johns at the time. Slocum had enjoyed that part.

  She had showed him her goats, all fifty-plus of them. He’d shaken hands with all the help, from the men who tended the flock to the men who milked the goats and made the cheese in the long, adobe building out back of the house. They were all new since his time, and he hadn’t recognized a one of them.

  Becky took him down to see the aging room they had cut out of the hard desert floor. And there, fifteen feet below the ground, amid hundreds of small, fragrant cheeses wrapped in gauze and hanging from the ceiling beams, he’d made love to her.

  He’d been doing quite a bit of that, lately.

  Not that he minded.

  Not at all, ma’am, glad to oblige.

  But today he was going to take a ride into town and have a look around. He wanted to figure out just what Tate McMahon had up his sleeve for the next time. He knew it wouldn’t be a forced marriage again. At least, not right away. McMahon would have to get rid of him first.

  And to get rid of Slocum, McMahon would have to kill him.

  Slocum figured that there should be a few folks in town who remembered him fondly—or at least who wouldn’t shoot him on sight, he thought with a quick grin. He wanted to know about anybody who was new in town.

  Any further information he could dig up on Tate McMahon would be a bonus, too.

  He saddled up Concho, pausing to admire the gelding once more. Damn, he was a nice piece of horseflesh, especially when you hadn’t really seen him for a spell. Slocum hadn’t seen him that much, aside for occasional rides here and there. Most of his time had been taken up with Becky: with touching her, with making love to her, with just plain looking at her.

  “Well, I reckon that’s important, too,” he said with a grin, and mounted up. “You understand, don’t you, old son?”

  Then again, the Appy was a gelding. He probably didn’t understand.

  He probably didn’t give a damn, either.

  “Hey, Slocum!” shouted a voice.

  There was Pete, leading his horse, tacked up and ready to go, out of the barn.

  “I’m comin’ with you,” Pete announced, and swung up into the saddle.

  “No, you’re not,” Slocum said. They’d been through this before. Pete was a hell of a man, even though he’d acted a little on the addled side that first day Slocum had ridden into the S Bar J. He was honest, for one thing, and he was a good hand with stock. And a gun.

  Slocum didn’t want him along, though.

  “I’m comin’,” Pete said again, and reined his mount over to where Slocum sat Concho. “Miss Becky says go, and I’m goin’.” He whoaed his bay up, shoulder to shoulder with Concho.

  Slocum sighed. He hated to do it, but he would. He said, “You ain’t gonna take no for an answer, are you?”

  Stubbornly, Pete shook his head.

  “Sorry, ol’ buddy,” said Slocum, and suddenly swung an arm over the space between them to punch Pete in the side of the jaw.

  Like he figured, Pete went right off his horse. There were some things you just couldn’t help but remember about a fellow, and a glass jaw was one of them.

  “Dammit, Slocum!” The screen door banged and he heard Becky yelling at him.

  He didn’t look back, although he knew she was running toward him with those pretty hands balled into fists and her mouth set into a line.

  Instead, he tipped his hat to the unconscious Pete, whose horse was nuzzling him as he lay on the ground, and rode out, heading for the crossroad that would take him to town.

  9

  “You just let him ride out by himself!” Becky Jamison said angrily, and for the third or fourth time. “All alone!”

  Pete, holding a damp cloth to his jaw, looked up guiltily but said nothing.

  “Oh, Pete!” she said in nearly a shout. “I could just throttle you!”

  He hung his head, cringing slightly. “Yes’m. Reckon you could. I mean, I tried, but—”

  Waving a hand, she sighed heavily and dropped into the chair next to him, at the table. “I’m sorry, Pete,” she said wearily. “I mean, I’m sorry Slocum hit you. Are you hurt bad? Is it broken?”

  “No, ma’am,” came the muttered reply. “I mean, I think I’ll be okay.” He stuck a finger in his mouth as if wiggling a few teeth, then added, “Least he didn’t knock out any of my chewin’ teeth.”

  Becky wasn’t paying too much attention, though. She could just imagine Slocum, nonchalantly belting poor Pete in the mouth and knocking him off his horse. When she had come out the door Pete was already down. And out like a lamp.

  Men, men, men. Knee deep in male hormones, that’s what they were, and most of them were Slocum’s. Honestly! He and Pete were both idiots, when you got right down to it.

  All right, they were all three idiots, counting her. She supposed she’d contributed her fair share to all the leg-lifting going on lately, if only as a cheerleader.

  And the truth was that she really didn’t know why she’d fought Tate McMahon so bitterly and for so long and so hard.

  It wasn’t that she was courageous.

  It wasn’t as if she couldn’t go back east.

  It wasn’t even that she was driven to stay here, on this land, because of some sort of ancestral connection to it.

  Perhaps it was because, she thought, she was just too damned stubborn to do anything else. Especially when somebody she found distasteful in the first place was pressuring her to leave.

  Distasteful? She snorted softly. My, she was suddenly being very ladylike about Tate McMahon, wasn’t she?

  A murdering, thieving, double-dealing, blackguard, yellow-bellied bastard of a sonofabitch would have been more on the order of it.

  “Miss Becky?” came Tia Juanita’s voice.

  Becky looked up.

  “You were miles away from here,” Tia Juanita said quietly.

  Becky nodded. “I suppose I was. Pete, do you feel up to riding now?”

  Pete answered with an unsure, “Yup,” and started to rise, but Tia Juanita pushed him back in his chair with a firm hand.

  “No one rides anywhere, Becky Sawyer Jamison,” she said with that expression that meant don’t mess with me if you know what’s good for you! Becky was all too familiar with it.

  Becky closed her eyes for a moment, if for no other reason than self-defense. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  The dish towel, ever-present in Tia Juanita’s hands or looped over her apron, twisted loosely between her fingers. “Slocum needs no one to baby-sit with him,” she said firmly. “He is a grown man. He is very good at what he does. If he says he will ride into town alone, he will go alone.”

  The housekeeper turned her gaze to Pete. “There is a reason for this, Pete. I think he thought that hitting you was better than what might happen if you were to go along with him. I think Slocum is usually right about these things, and I think you should count yourself lucky.”

  Pete looked up, still holding the damp cloth to his jaw, and blinked. “If this is lucky, I’d sure hate to set an eye on unlucky.”

  Tia Juanita set her mouth and furrowed her brows. “Unlucky is what would have happened three years ago, if Slocum had not come. Do you forget how he saved you and Dave? How he pulled your worthless carcasses from the river?”

  Pete sat back with a thump and muttered, “After that no-count dub Wheeler had his boys tie us up and toss us in to drown.”

  Leaning back in her chair, Becky drummed her fingertips on the table, barely listening.

  “I suppose you’re right, Tia Juanita,” she said at last, and reluctantly. “It’s just . . . Pete, do you feel well enough to leave us?”

  “Huh?” he said, then scrambled to his feet and handed his jaw cloth to Tia Juanita. “Sure. Yes, ma’am, I’ll give you some privacy. Gotta see to my horse, anyways.”

  Becky waited until the screen door slammed behind him before she spoke again.

  “It’s just that I can’t bear the thought of something happening to Slocum,” she admitted, and felt hot tears pushing at the backs of her eyes. She managed to hold them in check, though.

  Tia Juanita sat down in the chair that Pete had vacated, and scooted it closer. Leaning forward, she put her arm around Becky’s shoulders.

  “I know, my peach,” she soothed. “I know how you worry. But you must remember that he is his own man. He has very much . . . how do you say? In Spanish, we call it machismo. He must do what he wishes, and when. And how. You must not interfere. In anything he decides to do.”

  Becky stared at her a long time before she said, “You’re telling me something else, too, aren’t you, Tia Juanita?”

  “Yes, angel,” the housekeeper said, and tucked an errant strand of hair back behind Becky’s ear. “And I think you know what it is. Be prepared.”

  Becky lowered her gaze. She could try to be prepared for his going, but that didn’t mean she’d have to like it.

  But a man had to do what a man had to do.

  Dammit.

  Drug Cassidy sat quietly at the bar’s back table, nursing a beer and staring out over the small crowd. Although mostly, he was looking at the show going on up front.

  He snorted softly in disgust.

  Teddy LeGrande ought to go on the stage—preferably, one far away from here. China, for instance.

  At the moment, he was holding court along the bar rail, white fringe swinging as he gestured and talked. He had an audience of exactly three men, cowhand types, who probably worked for Tate McMahon.

  He was a good-enough-looking fellow, Cassidy supposed, until he opened his mouth. He shuddered to think what a blithering asshole LeGrande would be in front of a crowd of fifty. Hell, they could just pass out the shovels at the door.

  Of course, in a crowd of fifty, there’d more likely be somebody who’d just shoot him to shut him up.

  Cassidy liked that idea.

  “Once, when I was up on the Platte . . .” LeGrande was saying.

  Cassidy tried not to hear him. LeGrande was messing up his life yet again, this time by making a whole lot of useless noise when there was thinking to be done.

  He comforted himself that LeGrande hadn’t done something totally idiotic, like point him out and introduce him as the famous Drugman Cassidy. Of course not. That would have taken attention away from LeGrande, Cassidy thought. He smirked in spite of himself.

  Well, he’d be thankful for small favors, like his daddy had taught him.

  It had been a long time since he’d run into John Slocum. Oh, he hadn’t let on to LeGrande or McMahon. LeGrande had said as how he thought as how he’d heard the name Slocum, heard he had a reputation, so he was roughly equal to McMahon on that count.

  And Cassidy? He’d just shrugged.

  McMahon had looked at him as if he were an idiot, as if he couldn’t imagine why he’d sent for him in the first place.

  “Hell, every son of a buck over the age of five’s heard of him!” McMahon had sneered with the vast superiority of one who had just come into this knowledge himself.

  “Where do you live, anyhow?” McMahon had asked incredulously. “Under a goddamn barrel? Keep up to date, man!”

  It was just as well.

  The less anybody knew, the better.

  Cassidy thought it fairly odd when McMahon confided to them that Slocum had steered clear of town these past five days.

  McMahon had been pretty damned cocky about it, too, as if he figured Slocum’s absence so far meant that Slocum was afraid of him.

  But Cassidy knew Slocum’s ways better than that. For one thing, he knew that Slocum must have a woman out at that ranch. Cassidy figured it was the only thing that could distract him. Of course, McMahon hadn’t mentioned a woman, not yet, but there was certain to be one mixed up in this deal someplace.

  As a matter of fact, McMahon hadn’t mentioned much of anything about why he wanted Slocum killed, just some sort of vague reason. “He’s in my way,” or some crud like that.

  Did Tate McMahon think his fancy hired guns were fools?

  Cassidy supposed that if you took LeGrande into consideration, McMahon was half right.

  He caught the bartender’s eye and signaled for another beer. It wasn’t the best and it was warm besides, but the stuff settled the trail dust in your throat.

  So. What to do about Slocum? After all, there was five hundred involved.

  Just as the bartender slid another warm beer sloshing on Cassidy’s table, the batwing doors of the McMahon Palace swung inward, pushed by a very large and powerful frame.

  Slocum.

  LeGrande, the idiot, didn’t recognize him. He just gave Slocum a dismissive glance, then kept on talking. Cassidy saw Slocum lift his brows almost imperceptibly as he passed, making silent comment on the show—and the show-boater—at the bar.

  Two steps later, Slocum locked eyes with Cassidy. His expression started to alter, but Cassidy gave his head a tiny shake—no, not now, dammit—and Slocum abruptly turned and sidled up to the bar rail, about halfway between himself and Teddy LeGrande.

  “Beer,” he heard Slocum say softly as he propped his elbow, then dropped a coin on the bar’s polished surface.

  It spun and spun, sparkling in the light from the front windows, then jangled to a rest.

  Five hundred dollars, Cassidy thought with a sad shake of his head. Christ on a crutch.

  10

  “Slocum? I’ve heard of him, all right!”

  The speaker, not much more than a kid, had just entered the bar, and his ears had perked up right away at the overheard mention of Slocum’s name. Teddy LeGrande was the man he was addressing.