LITMIR.BIZ

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      Fallon looked across the room. It was a nice room, extravagant by Fallon’s standards, in a rented home—what Fallon would have considered a mansion back when he was a kid in Gads Hill, Missouri—in the upscale section of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fallon would have opted for something a little less pretentious, but the governor insisted, as did the state senators—Fallon could remember when Wyoming was just a U.S. territory. Everyone argued that the United States marshal for Wyoming needed to live in a fine house. Especially since he had a beautiful wife, and, for the past five-plus years, a lovely little daughter.

      Politics.

      All politics.

      That’s what Fallon’s life had become. Politics during the day. Nightmares for the night.

      A hell of a life.

      “Papa?” Rachel Renee pleaded.

      Fallon hugged her tightly. “Oh, I’m not too sure. Dragons, I think. Maybe a unicorn.”

      “Are unicorns mean?”

      “This one was.”

      “I know dragons are evil. They spit fire.”

      “Yeah, the two in my bad dream spit out a lot of fire.”

      “Where there any Indians?”

      Fallon looked down at her. “Indians aren’t mean like dragons and bad unicorns, or smelly boys and sweating old men.”

      “Janie Ferguson says Indians are real bad.”

      “Janie Ferguson is wrong.” He tousled her hair.

      “You know, back when I was just a regular old deputy marshal, back in Fort Smith, Arkansas, I worked with a lot of Indians. Lawmen. Peace officers like me. Scouts. They were always good folk. Really good folk. So I don’t think I met any real bad Indians.”

      “Honest?”

      Not really. Fallon had arrested Indians, too, but not as many as the white men who tormented the Indian Nations across the western district of Arkansas. But those times had changed, and after what happened at Wounded Knee so many years ago, Fallon had decided that he’d bring up his daughter to understand that you could find good and bad in all kinds of people, no matter their skin, no matter their beliefs.

      Although Fallon had a hard time thinking that for himself. Most of the men he had dealt with were rotten to the core.

      As a deputy marshal, and then as an operative for the American Detective Agency—the latter a job he had been forced into—Fallon had worked with dregs. And some of the worst of the lot were men who supposedly represented law and order, like the president of the American Detective Agency, a soulless pitiful man named Sean MacGregor.

      Often Fallon blamed MacGregor for these nightmares, for keeping Harry Fallon from being able to spend a night sleeping next to his wife—without having this fear that a nightmare would seize him and he’d wake up and realize that he had killed her by accident.

      No way for a man to live. No way for a daughter to grow up.

      On the other hand, Fallon might be having these dreams anyway, even if Sean MacGregor had not forced Fallon to go undercover into three of the worst prisons in America: Yuma in Arizona Territory, Jefferson City in Missouri, Huntsville and its prison farms in Texas.

      Because long before that, Harry Fallon had spent ten years in Joliet, Illinois—for a crime he had not committed.

      “You hungry?” Fallon asked his daughter.

      “I’m always hungry,” Rachel Renee said.

      “What time is it?”

      “Five-thirty,” Christina answered. She started to rise. “I’ll get some . . .”

      “No.” Fallon pushed himself up. “You two snuggle or at least get a few minutes more of sleep. I’m wide awake. Let me make some breakfast.”

      Christina smiled, and the baby girl crawled back to her mother, hugged her, and Fallon pulled up the sheets and blankets over them. He kissed Rachel Renee’s forehead and looked into the hard eyes of his wife.

      He kissed her forehead, too, pulled back, and mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

      Christina just nodded.

      And Fallon walked out of the bedroom and closed the door.

      One more time.

      If this kept up, he realized, he wouldn’t have a wife or a child with him.

      He could blame that on the American Detective Agency, the prison system in the United States, and the men who had framed him and tried to ruin his life.

      Tried? Hell, his life was still ruined, even five years after being pardoned. After being told he was free, with an appointment as U.S. marshal for the district of Wyoming.

      Fallon knew what most prisoners knew. Once you had spent time behind the iron, you never could be completely free again.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Situated on the high, rolling plains of southern Wyoming, Cheyenne was a nice city, although it had taken Fallon a while to get accustomed to a land where trees came hard to find. He still remembered the shade and thickness of the woods around Fort Smith—similar to his boyhood stomping grounds of Gads Hill in southern Missouri. But the city of Cheyenne itself was remarkable. The Union Pacific Railroad connected it with East and West; it had industry, cattle, the Army at Fort D. A. Russell. Mansions could be found, for once a Western man or woman found wealth, he or she saw no reason not to flaunt it. Railroad workers, cowboys, and soldiers on payday could make things difficult for the local lawmen, but drunks and brawlers were not the business of a federal lawman.

      Lawman? Fallon didn’t feel much like a peace officer these days. A United States marshal didn’t enforce the law. That’s what all the deputies he hired were for, which had been the case back in Arkansas and the Indian Territory when Judge Isaac Parker and the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Arkansas including the Indian Territory had hired a green kid, onetime cowboy and hell-raiser named Harry Fallon as a deputy marshal. In those days, Fallon risked his life to bring in whiskey runners, bank and train robbers, and more murderers than you’d find in the slums of New York or Chicago.

      Keeping law and order was for young men, unmarried men mostly. Being the top lawman in the district, Fallon knew that a U.S. marshal was appointed by the president of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. His job required kissing babies, making speeches, and every now and then talking to the U.S. attorney, taking federal judges out to supper, and on the rare occasion, saying howdy and how ya doin’? to the deputies who risked their lives chasing men who had broken federal—not local—laws.

      After making his family breakfast, then shaving and attempting to make himself presentable, Fallon left their home in pressed white shirt with four-ply linen collar, dress suspenders from Montgomery Ward & Co., a sateen Windsor tie of angled black and white stripes, and tailor-made suit of navy blue worsted wool, complete with a monogrammed gray silk handkerchief poking out of the breast coat pocket, and a solid gold watch stuck in the pocket of his matching vest. The whole rig had cost him what he made in a month herding cattle. His hat was a dark cream with what the hatmaker called a “velvety finish,” six-and-a-half-inch crown, creased in the side and dented on the top, with three-and-half-inch curled and trimmed brim, with leather band.

      The only thing he really liked were the boots, the old Coffeyville style he had worn as a cowboy and deputy marshal, although these had been made by a saddlemaker near the depot. They fit like a glove. Even had spur ridges on the heels, although Fallon couldn’t remember the last time he had been on the back of a horse. He walked from his home to the office, unless the snow came down hard and he could hire a hack to take him wherever he needed to go in town. Or the train if, for some rare reason, he needed to travel to Laramie, Rock Springs, or Washington, D.C.

      Removing his hat when he stepped inside the office,

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