Carson’s aim was better. The rifle bullet caught the man in the shoulder and jerked him around so hard that he fell from his horse. The times before when Carson had seen a man twist like that, a bullet had smashed into a shoulder bone.

  But it hadn’t been a killing shot. Carson had a sixth sense when it came to knowing how badly a man was wounded. The wound was probably enough to kill the man eventually, but he’d have to bleed to death. His rearing horse had spoiled Carson’s shot at the last instant.

  “Toss the gun away.”

  “You shot me!”

  Carson moved behind the protecting wall of rocks to get a better angle. By the time he found a spot affording a clean shot, his target had snaked away and slid down the shallow embankment toward the muddy creek. Carson fired when he saw a hat poke up. The brown Stetson went flying. He’d drilled it smack in the crown. But from the way it sailed, it hadn’t been on the man’s head. He’d used his hat to draw fire and find where Carson hid among the rocks.

  “Got you!” Carson called. He waited. His patience paid off. A minute later, the wounded road agent poked his head up to see why Carson hadn’t come over to finish off his victim.

  A second shot tore through the man’s other shoulder. The shriek of pain couldn’t be faked. His collarbone was shattered on that side, too. Any movement had to be fiercely painful.

  “Throw out the gun.”

  “Can’t. Can’t move my arms. You done ruined me.”

  “How’d you know my name?”

  A muffled string of curses was the only answer. The last thing he intended was to troop over and give the man a chance to plug him. He felt in his gut that the road agent wasn’t lying when he said both his arms were useless. Carson intended to play it safe, just in case his old instincts had gotten a mite rusty.

  He moved to a spot where he spotted his would-be attacker. The man leaned against the pile of rocks where he hid. Bright red blood stained the stones, more proof of Carson’s marksmanship.

  Duckwalking, Carson reached the spot where soft earth fell toward the stream. He slid down and lay unmoving, to be sure the gunman hadn’t spotted him running this flanking maneuver. When he was sure the other man’s patience would have reached an end, he edged back in the direction of his horse.

  The bay whinnied and jerked about, trying to pull its reins free of the rock, where he had fastened them.

  Between the horse’s legs, under its belly, Carson saw movement. He fired. The passage of the hot lead caused the bay to sunfish. It jumped straight into the air, all four hooves off the ground. He tried to get off another round, but the cartridge jammed in the breech.

  He clambered to his feet and drew his six-gun in a smooth, practiced move. Three shots drilled into the man trying to hold his own six-gun in both hands. The road agent stared at his useless gun, then dropped it. His hands came up to press into his chest, but never made it. The bones broken in his shoulders, caused by Carson’s earlier gunfire, betrayed him.

  He dropped to his knees and twisted slowly. He splashed into the creek.

  Carson approached carefully. The others in the gang had always accused him of being a coward. The ones loudest about delivering that insult ended up dead, usually due to their own carelessness.

  Nary a twitch showed life remaining in the road agent’s body. Carson stepped on the man’s six-shooter and crushed it into the mud. No amount of grasping would return it to those shaking hands. Even if the man did pick up his gun, the barrel was filled with mud now.

  He cautiously poked the man’s side with the toe of his boot.

  “You tangled with the wrong desperado,” Carson said softly. He grabbed a handful of coat and yanked hard, turning the man over. Sightless eyes stared up into the bright blue Texas sky. A thatch of bright red hair covered his head. The man’s splotchy complexion showed how little simple hygiene had mattered. Skin and soap were strangers when it came to this man. He was well enough fed. Carson doubted the man ever missed a meal, judging by the paunch above his gun belt.

  But the man was a stranger. Carson had come across dozens of desperadoes before taking refuge on the Bellamy farm, and this man wasn’t any of them.

  A quick rummage through the man’s pockets revealed less than a dollar in small change, two one-dollar greenbacks, and a pocket watch. Carson slid the money into his own vest pocket, then examined the watch.

  It wasn’t running. He shook it and heard small clicks inside. Something was busted. He opened the scratched case and ran his finger over the rough inscription inside the lid.

  “Whoever BS was, he won’t need this anymore.” Carson added it to his loot. Some watchmaker, somewhere, sometime, might give him a dollar for the watch. That was small enough reward for getting shot at.

  He heaved a sigh and set about the chore of burying the dead man. It was easier than he expected. Rather than caliche, he found nothing but soft earth along the creek. Coyotes might dig up the body, since he only buried it a couple feet, but it was more than the owlhoot deserved. He wished the coyotes the best in not getting bellyaches if they did dine out.

  Carson finished patting down the last of the dirt and stood in silence, hat in hand. For a long minute, he just stared at the low mound before him. No headstone. No words. Just a man returned to earth, the way they all did, no matter how they rode.

  He walked back to his stallion, which had quieted, snorting now and then at the wind whistling through the grass. Clay ran his hand down the animal’s neck and whispered a few words of calm before tightening the cinch and mounting up.

  As he turned back to the road east, he looked once more to the mound by the creek. A buzzard circled high overhead.

  “Let the scavengers have their say,” he muttered. “Not much left worth saving anyway.”

  Clay Carson rode into Hidetown at noon the next day.

  CHAPTER 5

  Hidetown looked exactly as Carson imagined it would. He’d passed a dilapidated church on the way into town. It needed paint and the front doors hung from single hinges. The only evidence that anyone patronized the church stretched to one side. The graveyard had at least three new residents. And the only wagon tracks going to the church ended at the graveyard. That had to be where the real services were held.

  Before he got halfway down the main street, he’d seen a dozen saloons. Some were in tents or lean-tos. One had been built by draping large quilts over poles. As the wind flapped the walls, he saw the sawhorses inside held a single plank of wood. More than a dozen customers pressed close, swilling whatever vile brew was served.

  Only two saloons were in actual buildings, testifying to how rapidly the town was growing. On the prairie, snorting up against Indian Territory, trees were a scarcity. The lack of wood for building and repair wasn’t much of a surprise, then, but he expected more brick or adobe buildings. It was as if the Hidetown residents knew this wasn’t a place to call home.

  At best, it was a stopover on the way somewhere more appealing. The ripsnorting business being done in the saloons, though, belied that. Hidetown had hidden secrets driving its growth from being a hovel filled with buffalo hunters waiting for the next big kill.

  More than a few soldiers wandered the street. He’d heard that Fort Elliott was just outside town. In spite of that, Hidetown had the reputation of being a hideout for some of the most vicious crooks in the area. The fort and its detachment of bluecoats chased after the Indians who had escaped their reservations, or even tracked down those who had never been caught. From here, the renegades would be shipped to Fort Sill or temporary encampments in Nebraska and Kansas.

  He had no idea where to find Lemuel Jones. The leader of the Dirty Creek Gang wisely had never been one to advertise his presence when holed up in a town. In that, he and Carson shared a certain caution. Asking around for him hardly seemed a wise course of action.

  Unlike Carson, he probably had the good sense to use a nom de guerre and avoid casual, curious lawmen passing through who might recognize his real name. That eliminated most of the obvious places to ask after Lemuel. He had never been much of a drinker. The saloons would never see him get into a fight or too drunk to stand. For a moment, Carson thought about the church. Attending services was something so alien to the Lemuel Jones he knew, this might be the exact place the outlaw would alight.

  Especially if the “dying” part of the telegram carried even a kernel of truth. Lemuel might want to scout a future eternal resting spot.

  Then he decided Lemuel would never put up with listening to a sermon, even one over the grave of a friend. The first one he disagreed with would be the reverend’s last one. Lemuel was as good a shot as Carson and had a volatile temper when provoked.

  But where else? A slow smile curled his lips as an idea bloomed.

  The telegraph office drew him. If Jones had sent the telegram, resting like a lead weight in Carson’s pocket now, the telegraph operator had to know him. Or where to find him. It took only a few minutes and he didn’t even have to inquire of the citizens. Wires dangling down from crooked, termite-ridden poles betrayed the telegraph office.

  He rode around the solitary building, noting that it used a considerable amount of wood planking in its walls. The telegraph company had money to burn. With his horse secured behind the building, Carson edged around and waited at the corner of the building to see if anyone had followed him or took special interest in him.

  The saloon across the street sounded boisterous. The townspeople hunting for lunch had filed in and created the ruckus. He was so keyed up that he jumped a foot when gunshots rang out. His hand flashed to his six-gun, then stopped short of drawing. Two drunks stumbled through the saloon’s swinging double doors and came into the street. They faced off.

  Both slurred their insults and waved their pistols around. One stood as still as a statue. He’d have a hard time hitting his opponent. That gunman was so drunk he wobbled from side to side, unable to stand upright. He screwed one eye shut to do away with double vision. His inability to even squarely face his opponent showed this tactic didn’t work.

  “You ’pologize. Now.”

  His adversary, the one Carson thought was closer to sober, started to return the taunt. Instead, he turned and puked out whatever lunch he had eaten—or drunk.

  “You all right, Benji?” The drunker of the pair stumbled forward. He put his arm around the man still heaving out his guts. They sank to the dirt, using each other for support. Heads together, feud forgotten, they sat in the middle of the street, forcing riders and wagons to go around them.

  This gunfight that turned into a mutual aid society told Carson the type of town Hidetown was. Men were quick to anger, then forget the reason for the fighting just as quickly. It was the perfect place for Lemuel Jones.

  He slipped along the front of the telegraph office and entered. The acrid smell of lead and battery acid made his nose wrinkle. He hated the stench and wondered how the telegraph had ever replaced the Pony Express. That service, at least, was an honest one, with men riding horses outdoors.

  The man sitting at a desk at the side of the room, feet up as he read a dime novel, took no notice that he had a customer.

  Carson drew his gun and rapped the counter with the butt. When the telegrapher looked his way, he found himself staring down the barrel of a six-shooter.

  “Don’t get yourself into a state, mister. I’m comin’. What can I do you for?”

  “You send this ’gram?” Carson pulled the copy from his pocket and smoothed it out on the counter. The man tried to pick it up. Carson pinned it down with the muzzle of his pistol.

  The telegraph operator gave him a sour look. With great care, he turned the telegram around under the barrel pressing it down into the counter.

  “That’s got my code on it. See? That number? Means I sent it.” He bent over, squinted, and looked harder. His finger tapped the bottom where otherwise-meaningless letters and numbers had been added. “Yup. Mine. I coded it.”

  “I want to talk to the man who sent it.”

  The telegrapher shrugged and said, “And I want Sadie over at the Penny Farthing Saloon to spend the night with me.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Neither’s gonna happen.”

  “Why not?”

  The telegrapher heaved a deep sigh and shook his head.

  “Sadie’s got this thing about—” He cut off his lament when Carson cocked the pistol. “Look, mister, the company’s got rules ’bout divulgin’ such information.” The man swallowed hard when Carson lifted the pistol and took aim, but it was his forbidding expression that convinced the telegrapher how company policy wasn’t necessarily etched in stone.

  “It was that redheaded loon, Schuster.”

  “How many telegrams did he send?”

  The question caused the man to blink. His mouth opened, then snapped shut. He frowned and shook his head.

  “Mister, he sent that one. Let me give you some advice. You don’t want to cross him. He’s loco. You can’t ever know what’s goin’ on in his head. He’s got crazy eyes and not a lick of sense. He’d as soon kill you as shake your hand.”

  Carson lowered the hammer on his six-gun and slipped it back into his holster. He wasn’t getting anything out of the telegrapher, other than a name. He reached the door when the telegrapher called out to him, “You won’t find him or his brothers around Hidetown anymore. They left, or so I heard.”

  “How long back?” Carson watched with growing frustration as the man shrugged again. Everyone he wanted to talk to had just left or were in town months back. Options turned increasingly bleak for finding Schuster or any of this family.

  He hesitated to mention Lemuel Jones by name to avoid being saddled with the outlaw’s legacy. He realized this was taking caution to an absurd limit. The telegrapher wasn’t likely to know anyone with that name since Lemuel likely called himself something else to avoid the law.

  Lemuel Jones was smarter than Carson about a lot of things.

  He left without pressing the matter anymore. The best thing he could do was find answers to his questions without causing too much of a fuss.

  The two men in the middle of the street used each other as a support to stand. They turned in a complete circle, then somehow managed to head back into the saloon. Carson considered trailing them in. Asking them about Jones wasn’t likely to produce useful information. He doubted anyone else in the saloon would know about a reclusive outlaw on his deathbed.

  That sudden thought sent him walking quickly down the street to where a wooden shingle swung fitfully in the hot breeze.

  Carson stepped into the doctor’s office. A youngish man without much hair, and the look of an owl because of his thick glasses, glanced up at him. He had the innards of a dismantled watch spread on the desk before him.

  “How do?” the man said. He took off the glasses and put them to one side. Seeing Carson’s look, he said, “I use them as magnifying lenses. Fixing watches is a hobby.”

  “You’re the town doctor?”

  “When I’m not doing a lot of other chores around here that have next to nothing to do with healing. The post has its own medical facility. Two doctors, I think. One of them keeps the undertaker working hard. The other?” He shrugged.

  He ran his hands across his sweaty bald pate.

  “They stayed in the army after the war, but they lost rank. One was busted down to sergeant.” He smiled ruefully. “That’s a fate worse than death for a doctor, ending up a noncom in the army. But enough of that. You don’t want my appraisal of bluecoat sawbones. What’s your ailment?”

  He pushed away from the desk and put on his coat. A quick tug got out wrinkles in the sleeves. With a deft swing, he wound a stethoscope around his neck. Carson saw how this made him look a tad more competent.

  “I’m looking for a sick friend.”

  “Not many who’re ailing in Hidetown.”

  “Nobody gets sick?”

  “Either killed or ride off. Few women to give birth. Distances out to the ranches are such that they tend their own hands rather than bring ’em into town.” He looked as if he’d bitten into a sour lemon. “The undertaker gets more business than I do, and not all of it is from the army post’s trigger-happy soldiers.” He glanced toward the desk where the watch parts glinted in the sunlight. “I could make more repairing guns than I do repairing men.”

  “Lemuel Jones,” Carson said. He watched the reaction.

  “Now, there’s someone who had need of my healing talents, yet someone I failed. He has a bad case of consumption.”

  “He died?”

  “I gave him what medicine I could. He’s still alive, but not kicking the way he used to, from what I can tell.” The doctor eyed Carson. “You a friend of his. From before?”

  “Before he came to Hidetown? Reckon so.”

  “You’ve got the look.” He held out his palms as if to push Carson back. “Wait, I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s that you and Mr. Jones have an air about you that suggests a colorful history.”

  “Outlaws,” Carson said.

  “He doesn’t mince words, either. I have to say, he—you—have come to the right place.”

  “So I gathered. Where can I find Jones?”

  “He confided in me. Folks around town, the ones he bothers to even say howdy to, think he’s somebody else.”

  “Why’d he fess up to you?”

  “I have an honest face.” Seeing this wasn’t the explanation Carson wanted, the doctor pressed on, “He had a bad spell about a month ago. He wanted me to know his real name to get it spelled right on a gravestone.”

  Carson remained quiet, waiting. Most men found it impossible not to blather on to fill the silence.

  The doctor considered the matter, then said, “Even if you mean him harm, there’s nothing you can do to him that nature hasn’t already done in spades.” He looked a bit angry. “If you do mean to put him in the ground, you’d save him considerable pain. He’s got a place not a half mile from the fort.”

  “From Fort Elliott?”