LITMIR.BIZ

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tellin’ me. But durned if I understand why.”

      Tugging one of the harness straps tight, Hallie’s hands faltered. She swallowed hard, gritted her teeth and forced her fingers to finish the job without shaking. “Because I said I’d look after him.”

      “I don’t think your pa meant until Ben was dried up and gray. The boy’s old enough to look after himself. Hell, Hal, you were runnin’ this whole spread when you were his age.”

      Hallie shook her head. “He doesn’t have anybody else.”

      She’d made her pa two promises before he died less than seven months past: to keep Eden’s Canyon thriving and to take care of Ben.

      So far, she hadn’t been able to do either.

      Pa had always counted on her to help him with the ranch. He’d taught her to raise cattle and break horses, and to hold her head high even when people stared and whispered behind their hands when she walked down the street in her leather britches and beat-up hat.

      But he hadn’t told her about the debts he’d left behind, debts that had cost her Eden’s Canyon. And he hadn’t shown her how to corral a seventeen-year-old brother determined to get himself shot or thrown in jail before he saw twenty.

      Climbing onto the wagon seat, Hallie tugged her hat down and took up the reins. “I’ll be back with Ben and my money,” she told Tenfoot as she slapped the leather against the gelding’s back, “one way or the other.”

      Jack Dakota figured the kid had less than ten seconds to live.

      From the way he swayed on his feet, and the unsteady fumbling of his hand at his holster, the fool boy wouldn’t even get his gun drawn before a couple of bullets laid him facedown in the dirt.

      Everyone in the Silver Snake had crowded onto the porch of the saloon to get an eyeful of the kid facing Redeye Bill Barlow. The noon sun beat down on the dusty street, rippling the air, and in a sudden moment of stillness when everyone in Paradise seemed to stop breathing, Jack swore he could hear the sweat trickling down the boy’s face as he squinted toward Redeye.

      Jack cursed under his breath. He’d come to Paradise to start new, to finally put down roots, not to get caught in the middle of the kind of trouble he’d been trying to sidestep ever since he was old enough to shuffle a deck of cards.

      It had started out harmlessly enough, a quick game with his old rival Redeye to pass an hour or two. Then Ben Ryan had insisted on joining them. Jack thought the kid looked too young to be emptying his pockets at a card table and had told him so a few days earlier, when Ben had tried to talk his way into a high-stakes poker game.

      But today Redeye had had the boy’s money on the table before Ben even sat down. An hour later, Barlow staggered to his feet, yanked out his gun and called the kid a cheater.

      Now Jack didn’t have time to consider how stupid he was about to be.

      Taking two running steps off the porch, he slid his Colt out of the holster, aiming and firing in one swift motion.

      The shot caught Redeye in the shoulder. Barlow staggered, lost his footing and fell on his backside, dropping his gun, an almost comical look of surprise twisting his face.

      Glancing at Ben, Jack saw him drop to his knees and double over, clutching his stomach.

      Jack shook his head and, holstering his gun, strode over to where Redeye still sat in the dirt, holding his bloody shoulder. Jack kicked Barlow’s six-shooter several feet to the side, resisting the urge to kick Barlow along with it.

      Redeye glared at him through bleary eyes. “Damn you, Dakota. The kid was cheatin’. He had this comin’.”

      “You had this coming. Although with two bottles of that rat poison they call whiskey in you, I don’t know how you could tell one way or the other.”

      Before Barlow could argue, Jack reached down and rifled through the other man’s vest pocket, pulling out a crumpled wad of notes. Barlow made a grab for them, but Jack easily snatched the money out of his reach. “Part of this is mine. And you might remember next time that the game’s played with only four aces.”

      He was just about to turn his back on Redeye, give Ben his share of the money and disappear before the sheriff arrived, when a wagon came clattering up the dirt street straight at him, the driver practically standing, urging the horse on in a headlong gallop.

      At the last moment, the madman holding the reins reared back, jerking the horse to a stop and jumping down from the seat before the wheels stopped sliding.

      “Ben!”

      Jack first thought the wiry figure in the baggy duster was a boy—until he saw the lumpy braid underneath her sorry-looking hat slap her back as she ran toward Ben. Even then it was hard to believe anything that dusty and rumpled could be female.

      “Are you all right? What happened?” the girl demanded, dropping to her knees beside Ben and running her hands over him. Ben, still bent over, answered her with a groan.

      “He was trying to get himself killed,” Jack said, walking up to them.

      The girl looked up, ran her eyes over him and frowned. “What would you know about it?”

      “More than you at this moment. Trust me, darlin’, he was close enough to hell to smell smoke.”

      “It looks to me like he wasn’t doing too badly,” she said, flipping a hand to where Redeye still sat in the dust, chaperoned now by Joe Bellweather from the general store as Joe waited for his son to fetch the sheriff.

      “C’mon, Hal, Ben couldn’t hit a bull’s rump with a banjo, even when he ain’t been drinkin’,” one of the cowboys still lounging on the porch of the Silver Snake called out.

      A loud outburst of laughter greeted his remark, and Hallie flushed. But she kept her chin up and refused to look away. “And I’m supposed to believe one of you gentlemen helped him?”

      “No, you should be thankin’ your friend there for keepin’ Ben out of a pine box. He drew so fast Redeye didn’t have time to blink.”

      Hallie turned back to the stranger, who seemed to think very little of shooting a man on the main street in the middle of the day. He looked more like the fancy-dressed gamblers who came through town than a gunslinger, but you never could tell. “Is that true?”

      “Oh, I think Bill probably blinked a couple of times. Here,” he said, reaching down to take Ben’s arm before Hallie could refuse his help, “let’s get him in the wagon before he decides to sleep it off in the street.”

      More than ready to end being the afternoon’s entertainment, Hallie helped get her brother to his feet and half carried him to the wagon. She started to guide Ben to the seat, but Ben’s rescuer shook his head and hefted him onto the back floorboards instead. Ben, his eyes screwed shut, curled up on his side, moaning softly.

      Jack pulled off his hat, wiping his brow with the side of his hand. He wondered how many times the girl did this in a week. From the way she handled Ben, he figured she spent a good deal of her time getting the kid out of one scrape or another, although it was hard to understand why. Ben Ryan was nothing but trouble.

      Hallie watched Ben a moment before reluctantly turning from her brother to the man who’d helped him. She supposed she owed him, but right then she wished he could have been anybody else.

      From the look of him, she guessed she’d been right from the start, and he was the kind that made his living flipping cards in every saloon and hotel he passed through. But even if he wasn’t, she immediately mistrusted that lazy, charming smile that seemed to be there in his eyes even when it wasn’t on his mouth.

      He reminded her of a phrase she’d once heard Tenfoot use to describe a rogue stallion: long, hard and fast. His hair, overlong and tousled, looked a hundred different shades of dark gold, as if the individual strands hadn’t been able to agree on a color. It insisted on falling over one eyebrow, giving

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