Fall into Darkness

By

Jenny Guttridge

The true sequel to ‘A Gunfighting Man’: the tale of a man’s search for the truth.

The author acknowledges with much appreciation the advice, assistance and support of Gwynne G Logan.

Fore-word

The measured tick of the French, long-case clock, lost in the darkness beside the door, marked the slow, but relentless, passage of time. Shadows filled the big room of the ranch house. The only sources of light were the pine log fire that burned in the grey-stone hearth and a single, white globed oil-lamp that stood on the table at Ben Cartwright’s elbow.

Ben was a big man in every sense of the word; it was claimed, by people who knew him, that he was larger than life. Physically, at fifty-eight years old, he was still at the peak of his strength - although, these days, he tended to sit late after breakfast on occasion with an extra cup of coffee and the latest issue of ‘The Stockman’s Journal’ or the ‘Virginia City Times’. Tall and broad shouldered, with a massive, barrel-like chest, he was as fit and as active as many a man who was half his age. His face, wide at the cheekbones, tapering down to a narrow jaw, was sensitive and expressive: a true mirror of his emotions. Above the breadth of his brow, the silvery wings of swept-back hair denied the youthful liveliness in his dark, intelligent eyes.

A man who had arrived in the west among the first wave of settlers, over the course of twenty years Ben Cartwright had constructed an empire out of a wilderness. Based, first of all, on the twin necessities of the growing community: cattle for meat and timber for the building of homes, Ben’s business had boomed with the discovery of gold in western Utah, and then of silver in the famous Comstock Lode. The huge, sprawling ranch that he called The Ponderosa was a vast sweep of land that encompassed a thousand square miles of territory. From the rocky shores of Lake Tahoe, north to the Washoe Valley and east as far as the fringe of the desert; the forested hills and rolling grasslands, the lush, green valleys and the sweeping, golden landscapes were his heart-place and home. Vast property holdings in many fine cities far to the east, interests in mining, shipping and freight and the part ownership of a cannery on the western coast had added massively to his ever-growing list of investments. Only recently a consortium of eastern investors had invited him to join them in importing silk from Japan. It was a venture he was taking his time to consider.

Possessed of an endless drive and energy, he had constructed this very house with his own, bare hands, cutting and dressing the timber and hauling the stone. It was cemented together with his blood and the sweat of his brow.

If he was a large man in body and in the scope of his achievements, he was big in the heart as well. A man who stood up for the things he believed in, he was a pillar of the local community: a philanthropist and a patron of the arts, but, first of all, he was a father and a family man. Of all the things that he had done and all that he had won for himself, he was proudest of all of his sons.

A slight frown settled across the bridge of his nose. The hour was growing very late. He had been reading for quite a long while, and the print on the page was starting to dance in front of his eyes. With a soundless sigh, he closed the book, a modern treatise on the history of India, and set it aside. Reaching down beside his chair, he sought for and found his tobacco jar. He began, with unconsciously meticulous movements, to refill the bowl of his pipe. With the frown still in place and concern glowing warmly from the depths of his eyes, he studied the profile of his eldest son.

Adam Cartwright was a son for any man to be proud of. He was as big in build as his father, if rather more finely constructed. The two men were much of a height, standing at something just over six feet, and Adam had the powerful shoulders, narrow hips and long, lean legs of a man born to ride and to work from the saddle. In Adam, his father’s barrel-stave ribcage had been redesigned into a broad, deep chest filled with heart and lungpower. At thirty two years old, he could ride and rope and brand as well as any man ever born; he could pull his end of a two-man saw with his bigger and stronger brother, and he could dig twenty-five post holes in the course of a day. At the same time, he had what was called a ‘head’ on his shoulders. He was the one who had gone east to college, returning home with honours degrees in engineering, architecture and literature. In recent years it had been he, even more than his father, who had been the keen intellect behind his family’s business success.

In looks, he was darkly handsome with an oval, evenly featured face that found favour with the ladies; ‘though none, so far, had managed to capture his heart. He had a neat, rounded chin with only the faintest suggestion of a cleft. His mouth was straight, the lips full and well proportioned, marred only by a tiny scar – the remnant of a barely remembered childhood accident.

Aristocratically narrow - a heritage of his mother’s new England blood - with neat, oval nostrils, his nose was his mother’s, as were his ears and the dimples that danced in his cheeks when he smiled. Hair as black as a raven’s wing, receding a little from a formidable brow, lay in soft waves that curled, finally, into the nap of his neck. Most impressive of all were his eyes, hidden, now, deeply in shadow. They were a tawny, gold-colour, flecked with dark amber and clouded, lightly, with mist.

For a long time now - most of the evening, in fact - he had sat sideways on to his father, perched with his butt on the low wooden table, staring into the fire. His knees were widespread, and his forearms rested across his thighs. It was an attitude that curved his spine and lowered his head; Ben found the position hauntingly familiar. Late as it was, the younger man showed no sign of moving; the rest of the family was already abed and, presumably, asleep. Something was bothering him and had been for some time. Ben knew the signs and the symptoms. This late night sitting in front of the fire was an indication that Adam was about ready to talk.

Ben scraped a match and puffed his pipe into life. Through the inevitable cloud of smoke, he asked quietly, “Is there something you’d like to discuss?”

The question was unnecessary, the answer, obvious. It was his time-honoured way of opening this sort of conversation.

Adam shifted slightly, more of a tightening of muscles than a straightening of posture: again, a familiar sign. Ben heard his faint sigh, a gentle exhalation of long, pent-up breath. His gaze still fixed on the heart of the fire, he said, “I’ve been thinking, Pa.”

Ben waited. Nothing more came. Ben wasn’t unduly surprised. Of all of his sons, Adam was the most introverted, the one who found opening up the hardest to bear. Getting him to reveal his innermost feelings was something akin to getting blood from a stone. It wasn’t a thing to be hurried. After a minute he nudged again. “Would you care to tell me what you’ve been thinking about?”

Adam sighed again, this time more audibly. “Abediah Harbinger.”

Of all the answers Ben might have expected, this was the one furthest from his mind. He went back in his memory to a sun-bright street: his son standing toe to toe with a stranger. A blaze of gunfire and sudden death. Abediah Harbinger had ridden out of nowhere and called Adam out. Adam had been faster, by the breadth of a hair, but his victory had cost him dearly. Even as he died, Harbinger had declined to name the man who had hired him. The thought that someone wanted him dead had played on Adam’s mind.

And then he’d seemed to get over it, almost over night. Ben realized now that had all been simply an act. Adam might have buried his problem deep down inside, but it was still there, eating away at him. Ben tried to appear unsurprised.

“The gunman who tried to kill you?”

“Someone paid him to do that. I need to know who it was and why.”

A log fell in the fire, and the flames danced higher. The firelight gilded the planes of Adam’s face. Ben saw the intensity of feeling etched into his expression. He took the pipe stem out of his mouth. “Are you sure it’s going to be possible to find that out?”

“No, I’m not sure of it.” Adam’s voice came quietly, calm and collected. Quite obviously, he’d thought the thing through. “But I have to try. I need to find who hired Harbinger. I have to track him down and ask him why he did it. I can’t live the rest of my life wondering if he’s going to try again.”

“You think they might? It’s been a year now. More than a year.”

“It’s the not knowing that gets to you.” Adam sounded philosophical, almost amused at his own predicament. “Every time I get up in the morning and look in the mirror, I wonder if that’s a face someone is looking for. Every time I sign my name, I wonder who’s going to read it. When I ride into town I wonder if there’ll be a stranger there, waiting for me, or someone lying in wait with a rifle just ‘round the next bend in the trail. It’s not that I’m afraid, although that comes into it too. I need to know.”

Ben sucked on his pipe while he thought about it. The clock ticked more seconds from present too past. Finally, he inquired, “How do you intend to go about this?”

Sitting up straighter, Adam pulled an envelope from inside his shirt. Ben recognized it at once: the size, the shape, the expensive, cream, laid paper. It was from the family lawyers in San Francisco. Adam had received several just like it in the last few months, each addressed to him personally in Westacotte’s spidery hand. He had read them all privately and answered at once, often riding into Virginia City at odd hours to mail his replies. Ben had assumed the letters concerned some business venture his son was engaged in and wasn’t prepared, yet, to talk about. It seemed he had assumed wrong.

Adam didn’t hand the envelope over, nor did he open it himself. He merely turned it over and over in his long, brown fingers. Evidently, he knew the contents by heart. Ben waited patiently for him to continue.

“Harbinger came up the river to Sacramento. He bought a horse from the livery stable and rode over the mountains to Virginia City. He was already asking for me by name. A year before that he was in Kansas, Missouri. He had quite a reputation as a gunfighter in the small towns thereabouts. He gunned down several men. Westacotte’s unable to trace him back any further than that.” Adam paused, tapping the envelope thoughtfully against the tips of his fingers. Still looking into the fire and not at his father, he said, “I guess it’s time to take me a little trip. With a string of horses, I can packsaddle my way across the desert to Denver, then take the stage further east. I’ll ask some questions, poke around, see if I can find out where he came from and what set him on my tail.”

Ben considered the bowl of his pipe. “You realize that whatever reputation as a gunfighter Harbinger might have had is yours now to carry.”

Now Adam looked at his father, a lightening fast glance that betrayed a great deal of the doubt he was feeling. “I’m not a gunfighter. I never asked for a reputation.”

“Nevertheless, you’ll find that you have one, and you might have to defend yourself. You’re fast with a gun, and you’re clever, but you’ll have to keep your wits about you if you’re not to get yourself killed.”

Adam stared into the fire. The flames were dying now, the embers turning into ash. Ben could see the side of his face, the planes and the angles lit by the glow; he could see the flux of emotion and the fierce determination. He knew what Adam was about to say before he drew breath to say it.

“I’ll be careful, but this is something that I have to do.”

Ben knew that edge to his son’s velvet voice. Hard headed and stubborn as he was, there was to be no dissuading him. Ben felt regret and a certain pride. “When will you go?”

Adam let out a long, slow breath. “I guess there’s no time like the present.”

The moment stretched forever. “You’ve really made up your mind about this?”

“I’ve made up my mind.” There was nothing more to be said.

Leaning forward, Ben tapped out his pipe on the hearthstone. He stood and stretched and then stepped towards the stair. Stopping, he looked at his son a good, long while – absorbing his presence, the shape and the form, the scent of his hair oil and, faintly, the smell of his sweat. He was afraid that he might never see him again. He put a hand on Adam’s hunched shoulder, feeling the coiled strength and the tension in the muscle. He gave it a squeeze. “Take care of yourself, son.”

Adam listened to his father’s familiar, slow step climbing the staircase, fading into the quiet. A few seconds later, he heard the sound of his bedroom door closing in the upper part of the house. For several minutes he sat quite still, gazing into the hearth while he considered his options again. He came to the same conclusion. If he was to live his life as a man – the sort of a man he wanted to be and not always be looking behind him – he had to make a real attempt to find out who had wanted him killed.

His bags were packed and his final preparations all made. His string of horses was already waiting for him out in the barn. The only thing that had been left to do was to speak to his father, to try to explain. Now, there was nothing left to hold him here except his desire to stay. Straightening smoothly, he crossed the room in a few, easy strides. Taking his coat and his hat from the rack, he strapped on his gunbelt and tied the holster down. If he was going to be a gunfighter, he might as well look the part.

He took a last, long look around the room. He had lived in this house the whole of his adult life, but, already, it was taking on a strange aura of unfamiliarity, as if it belonged to another man in another life: one he was putting behind him. Leaving was such a simple thing, and, yet, it was so very difficult. All of a sudden, he was eager to be gone. By the time the sun came up over the edge of the world, he could be riding the fringe of the desert, the Ponderosa behind him and the solution, perhaps, to the mystery that plagued him ahead. He set his hat on his head and stepped out into the night, closing the door, very quietly, behind him.

One

Adam tossed his carpetbag up to the driver who fitted it in among the other bags and baggage like a piece in one of those new-fangled jigsaw puzzles. Stepping back, he took a last, long look at the town.

Denver City, only recently and grandly renamed from the original St. Charles, had long been a stopping place for traders and trappers. Settled in the ‘Pike’s Peak or bust’ gold rush of eighteen fifty-nine, at the junction of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, it was affectionately known by its inhabitants as ‘The Mile High City’. Because of its elevation of more than five thousand feet, its climate tended to be crisp and dry, but this day, already, at five in the morning, there was a hint of the sultry heat that would come.

The sun was up above the mountain and cast long, dark shadows all along Main Street, a long, even thoroughfare of hard pounded dirt and stones. On either side, the buildings showed signs of hasty construction. They were mostly of wood and plaster and wattle and daub with painted false fronts and covered boardwalks. There was very little brick or stone anywhere in evidence. They huddled more closely together than Adam thought prudent. The place looked ripe for a fire.

In the three days since he had ridden in from the western deserts, he’d sampled all the various delights that the town had to offer. He’d sold his horses and taken the opportunity to sleep in a feather bed and fill his belly with well-cooked food before he’d booked a seat on the stage.

Now, rested and fed, barbered and shaved, in a dark suit for travelling with a thin white shirt and black ribbon tie underneath, he was ready to continue his journey.

Turning, he watched as his fellow passengers emerged, blinking, from the gloomy interior of the stage office into the bright, morning sunlight: two women and a man.

The driver, an ageing, greying, moustached individual who went by the name of Tom, leaned down from the high, bench seat and spat a golden stream of tobacco juice into the dirt. Carefully aimed as it was, it missed the folds of the older woman’s skirts by just a few inches and demonstrated adequately the company man’s contempt for his charges. The woman stepped away with a satisfyingly loud exclamation of disgust, and Adam suppressed a smile. Right at the outset, they had all been suitably put in their places.

“Climb aboard, folks!” the driver bellowed, “Or I’ll be a-leavin’ without ya!”

Always the gentleman, Adam stepped forward and doffed his hat. He smiled a winning smile and offered his hand. “Allow me to help you, Ma’am.”

The woman regarded him coolly through the veil of her hat, annoyance still plainly evident on her severe, middle-aged face. Then she allowed herself to be handed into the carriage. The second woman gave Adam her hand: a small hand gloved in black satin trimmed with fine lace. Veiled and hatted, she lowered her face demurely as she climbed the two steps into the coach and pulled the trailing hems of her skirts in behind her. Adam was aware of the warmth of her hand and caught the scent of summer roses.

Swinging in after her, Adam settled himself into the seat with his back to the driver. The other man climbed in beside him and slammed shut the door. With a whoop and a holler that broke the still morning, Tom-the-driver whipped up the horses and the stagecoach lurched into motion. Each of the passengers took several long moments to sum one another up.

The man who had sat himself down next to Adam was oddly deceptive in build. His height and the breadth of his shoulders were disguised by a hunched up posture and the cut of an ill-fitting suit. His clothes were a badly chosen mismatch: a grey chequered jacket and baggy grey pants, brown buttoned boots and a brown bowler hat. Under the coat was a silver brocade waistcoat that reminded Adam poignantly of that sometimes worn by his father. The whole ensemble gave the fellow the look of a drummer, a travelling salesman, inevitably, a rogue. His eyes were bright blue, the blue of the sea on a bright summer’s day, the blue of the sky, set in a moon-shaped face of loose, moist-looking skin. He smelled of pomade and the smoke of expensive cigars. From where Adam sat, he could see no sign of a gun, which struck him as kind of unusual.

After a minute or two rocking and rolling inside the coach, the drummer took off his hat and revealed a thinning mop of sandy brown hair. It made his round face look younger. The small, pointed teeth that showed when he smiled displayed several gaps. Adam guessed that a man of such unappealing appearance would have little success as a salesman unless he had a personality as big as all outdoors. The drummer pulled out a huge spotted handkerchief and mopped at his sweating face. The blue eyes switched from one face to another. He said, in a breathless, reed thin voice. “Well, folks, as we’re going to be spending several days in each other’s company, perhaps we should introduce ourselves.” Anxious for agreement, the eyes did the rounds again.

The older of the two ladies gazed at him with stern disapproval – it seemed to be her habitual expression. Adam guessed that she disapproved of the world in general and was in a constant state of irritation. She had lifted her veil and her eyes were a frosty grey. He placed her age at somewhere about forty; the fine lines about her eyes and mouth gave the lie to her raven black hair. Tightly corseted as she was, and laced into a dark and heavy travelling dress, she was certain to become more uncomfortable and a great deal more cross as the day grew hotter.

“My name,” the drummer went on, unabashed, “Is Morton Teasdale. Morton P. Teasdale, to be exact. I’m a travelling man headin’ for the Great Lakes area.”

Adam caught the flash of the eyes. The drummer was asking, begging, in fact, for him to take up the thread. Still amused, Adam was prepared to oblige. “I’m Adam Cartwright out of Nevada territory, bound for Kansas, Missouri, on business.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mister Cartwright.” Teasdale offered his hand. The fingers were limp and the palm warm and damp and ever so slightly sticky. Adam resisted the urge to wipe his own hand along the leg of his pants.

He touched the brim of his hat to the lady. “And you, Ma’am?”

The grey-eyed woman condescended to smile - the merest twitch that pulled down the corners of a thin, straight mouth as she surrendered her feelings to the necessity of the situation. “I’m Mrs. Emily Neston, travelling home to St Louis – and this is my sister Elise.”

The other woman raised her veil. Beneath the beaded and feathered bonnet, the face was younger and softer than Adam had anticipated; he found it rather attractive. At perhaps thirty years of age, Elise’s fine features had not yet started to age. Adam was taken at once by the peach-blossom pink of her cheek, the deeper hue of her full lower lip and the lustrous sweep of dark lashes. He realized that he was staring rudely and touched his hand to his hat. “Miss Elise.”

The eyes that lifted again to his were as grey as a spring-morning sky: altogether a kinder and warmer version of those of her sister. She flushed as a smile came to her lips. “Mister Cartwright.”

Adam smiled back, deep dimples playing in his cheeks, and Elise blushed again.

“My sister is an unmarried lady.” Emily Neston said sternly, her disapproval showing again.

Beyond his control, Adam’s smile widened. “That’s very nice to know.” He was starting to look forward to a more pleasant trip than he had been anticipating.

Rolling now at a faster rate as it left the precincts of the town, the stage hit a rut with a jolt that threatened to punch its passenger’s spines out through the tops of their hats. Adam heard the driver cursing the horses.

With Denver left firmly behind them in the rising haze of the day, the characteristics of the Colorado landscape made themselves apparent: the smoothly rolling foothills of the eastern Rocky Mountains, short, pale-green pasture ripening now into sere brown with the approaching heat of the summer, low-level forests and neat clumps of trees, isolated farmsteads and barns built of wood with close shuttered windows and grey slatted roofs. An occasional stretch of ancient fence line followed the lie of the land. To Adam’s eyes, used as they were to towering pines and the majestic sweep of the mountains, the mirror bright lakes and the dry, desert vistas of home, this panorama resembled a manicured parkland, long settled and tamed. Even the cattle, raising their heads from the grass to watch as the stage rolled past, were of a different breed.

They were fourteen miles out of Denver and running ahead of time when they stopped to change the horses. The fresh team was waiting, harnessed and ready at the swing-station and the job was quickly done. Tom-the-driver exchanged friendly curses with the horse-handlers, and they were on their way once more. There was no opportunity for the passengers to step down and stretch their legs.

In the rocking and rolling stagecoach beneath the brazen bowl of the sky, the temperature climbed steadily into the eighties and then to the nineties. Little air blew in through the glass-less openings in the side of the coach and what did was hot and laden with dust. Lacing closed the leather shutters only made things worse. At about mid-morning, the gentlemen asked for, and received, permission to remove their coats. Everyone suffered: the women more than the men.

It was noon and there were fifty miles of road behind them when the stage rolled into the yard of the first home station. A small scatter of wooden buildings and a sprawl of corrals surrounded a windmill that drove a clanking pump. Adam had long had a fascination with windmills; he leaned out of the coach and craned his neck for a better look. There were three, long open-ended barns of a design not seen west of the Rockies and a sturdily built, three-roomed cabin with several sheds behind.

As soon as the coach had lurched to a halt, Adam swung open the door and jumped out. He had been sitting for hours on a hard, leather seat and it was a considerable relief to straighten the kinks out of his back. Tom-the-driver threw the short stepladder down to him and spat out his well-used wad of tobacco.

“Forty minutes, ladies and gents!” he yelled at the top of his voice. “Forty minutes ta eat an’ ta piss.”

Adam was at his most handsome and charming best, smiling as he helped the ladies alight. The women made a beeline for the outhouse that stood, set back at an angle, behind the house, and the men headed with equal alacrity for the side of the nearest barn. His personal equilibrium and comfort restored, Adam strolled back to the house with Teasdale.

“What’s your line of work, Mister Cartwright?” Teasdale inquired. His bright eyes were focused away. He was watching the station manager and his two black assistants change the horses again.

“Cattle,” Adam said easily. “Timber. Mining.”

“And that sort of business brings you all the way from Nevada to Kansas?”

His feathers considerably ruffled, Adam threw a quick, penetrating glance at Teasdale’s face. It was considered bad form in the west, almost an insult, to enquire too closely into another man’s affairs. But Teasdale’s round face was bland, his features innocent of guile, his question, apparently, idle. Across the yard the sweating men were shouting as they backed a recalcitrant animal into the traces.

“I’m travelling on business of my own,” responded Adam, tartly. “And yourself?”

Unabashed, Teasdale turned his bird-bright eyes towards him. He seemed cheerfully unaware that Adam had turned his question neatly around. He pulled out his handkerchief and swabbed at his face. “It gets real hot this time of year.” As an apology, if it was intended as such, it didn’t go very far. Adam returned the grin with a small smile of his own. He pushed his hat to the back of his head and chuckled out loud. For all the fat-faced drummer’s clumsy ineptitude, it was damned hard not to like the man.

Luncheon, served on tin plates at a sturdy trestle table by the station manager’s wife, consisted of chicken and cabbage. Both had been boiled in a huge iron pot until they were all but tasteless. At least the helpings were large, and a big china bowl filled with pickle was set down in front of the diners to add piquancy and substance to the meal.

“That’s all you’ll get along this road,” the station manager’s wife declared. “Chicken an’ greens: that’s all the stage line sends us.”

“It’s better at this place than most,” Tom-the-driver added with a wave of his fork from his seat at the end of the table. He winked at the station manager’s wife and she gave him a beaming smile in return.

Emily Neston said, dryly, “I find that hardly an inspiring diet.”

“It’s a whole lot better than mesquite beans.” Determined to make the best of the meal, Adam helped himself to a generous serving of pickle and mixed it in with his greens. Elise stared at him with wide silver eyes.

“Why, Mister Cartwright, I’ve heard that you eat such things in the west. I can’t really believe that it’s true.

“You can believe it.” Adam smiled at her across the table. She really was an attractive woman with a pleasant, finely boned face perfectly shaped to house those lustrous, silver-grey eyes. He swallowed down a mouthful of cabbage and pickle and forked up another. “I have a brother who swears by a diet of mesquite beans.”

“And rattlesnake?” Asked Elise, fascinated despite a deep-seated sense of revulsion. “I’ve been told that men eat rattlesnake.”

Adam chuckled. “I guess that’s been known – on occasion.”

“I’ve heard it told that a man will eat just about anything if he gets hungry enough.” Morton Teasdale was devouring his meal with apparent relish. Glancing around the table, Adam noticed that Emily was poking at the mess on her plate with obvious distaste. Adam figured that she was going to be a very hungry lady by the time she reached St. Louis if the standard of food didn’t improve. Her sister wasn’t doing much better.

Finally, Elise put down her fork. She looked at Adam. “Do you really have mountains of pure silver in Nevada?”

Adam chewed and swallowed. He ate with the dogged determination of a big and powerful man who knew that he needed food to keep body and soul together. While he fulfilled that need, he led the conversation. He gave a vivid description of his home in the west: the magical mirror-surface of the bottomless lake that changed in aspect from minute to minute and reflected so perfectly the mood of the watcher, the endless, utterly silent forests planted at the beginning of time by the hand of the Lord, the rush and tumble of icy rivers and the glory of sunrise over the desert. Always aware of the sensibilities of the ladies, he omitted to mention the harsher aspects of life: the cruel and backbreaking work a man had to do just to wrest a living from a beautiful but unforgiving country, the privations of freezing cold winters, the scarcity of medical facilities and the sad lack of effective sanitation. He found that he enjoyed talking about his home and his family; the words came easily and made them seem nearer.

As Adam talked and consumed the last of his meal, he was aware of Elise’s eyes fixed on his face. It was not an unpleasant experience. She was an attractive and attentive audience, and, although he spoke to the room as a whole, his words were intended for her.

To follow the chicken and greens was a warm, sweet pastry filled with dried fruits and a large pot of coffee to wash it all down. The station manager’s wife cleared the dishes from the table. “Iffen you ladies want ta freshen up some, you’re welcome to use the room at the back. There’s a cold-water trough right outside fer the men-folks.”

“An’ the stage’s leavin’ in five minutes sharp!” added Tom-the–driver and chewed a fresh chunk of tobacco off a fist-sized lump. Adam and Teasdale drank down their coffee and went out to use the facilities offered.

Adam dipped his hands wrist deep in the water and used his damp palms to cool his neck. The sun, its disk too bright to look at, beat down on the top of his head. The cloth of his shirt clung to his ribs as the dry heat sucked the perspiration out of his skin. The early afternoon air was motionless, too hot to breathe; it carried the jingle of harness from the impatient horses and the constant creak of the pump.

Teasdale soaked his handkerchief in the horse trough and used it to mop his face. He winked a wide eye at Adam. “It looks like you’ve got it made there, Mister Cartwright.”

Up to his elbows in cooling water, Adam was taken by surprise. “What are you getting at?”

“Come on! Don’t play coy with me. It’s obvious to everyone.” Chuckling at his own observation, Teasdale wiped the wet cloth around the back of his neck. “You surely don’t believe that Miss Elise is all that interested in silver mining and cattle?”

Thinking about it, Adam had to agree. “No, I don’t suppose she is.” A smile came to his face and a sparkle of interest into his eyes. He laughed gently against himself and repeated, “I don’t suppose she is.”

With a sound that resembled a high-pitched giggle, Teasdale slapped him hard on the back. Adam staggered. The drummer had a whole lot more hitting power than Adam had given him credit for. Teasdale consulted his pocket watch. “Time to be on our way. There’s no doubt about it, it’s a long road from here to Kansas.”

Squinting, Adam looked up. The vanes of the windmill spun endlessly against the bronze coloured sky. “No doubt about it,” he said to himself and followed Teasdale to the coach. They ladies rejoined them almost at once, and within a few minutes they were once more on their way.

Without asking the consent of the women, Teasdale unbuttoned his waistcoat; from amongst his belongings he produced a box of cigars. He offered one to Adam, who declined. “You don’t mind if I smoke, ladies?” he inquired with a disarmingly crooked smile. “I find a cigar always helps to settle a meal.” Without waiting for a response, he struck a long match and puffed the cigar into life. Oblivious to Emily’s hard look, he retreated into his corner of the coach behind a haze of smoke.

The stage swayed and bounced along the road; the iron-shod wheels found every rut and pothole. The leather-strap springing conveyed every jounce and jolt directly to Adam’s back. A man who had always preferred the back of a horse to stagecoach travel, he could feel the bones of his butt wearing through to the seat of his pants. Inside the coach, the temperature soared to ninety-four degrees.

It was too hot to breathe. Elise fanned herself with a black-lace fan while Emily sniffed continuously at a handkerchief soaked in cologne. Adam pulled his hat down over his face to shade his eyes from the sun. The rough road and the heat, the noise of the wheels and the constant shouted curses of Tom-the-driver made it impossible to doze. Ten more miles of noisy and acutely uncomfortable travel later, Teasdale gave up all pretence of trying to sleep. He sat well forward in his seat with his hands in between his knees, and he started to talk.

Relaxed in his own corner, Adam soon found he was listening with more than half an ear. Most of the tales were old and familiar, and, cleaned up for the sake of the ladies, they lost a lot of their original appeal. Adam had heard the majority of them before in one form or another, but some were entirely new, and Teasdale told them well. Adam was amused despite himself.

Teasdale had travelled extensively south of the border, and many of the stories were a catalogue of his adventures and the things he had seen. Adam was especially interested in the graphic and detailed descriptions of Indian cities deep in the rain forests of South America, of ancient walls consumed by creepers and blunted pyramids jutting above the jungle.

Three swing stations later and three more changes of horses, the road curved into a valley between low hills. It was evening. As the sun slid slowly down the sky towards the now distant Rocky Mountains, the stagecoach’s shadow raced before it. Old Tom slapped the reins and whooped at the horses to make them run faster. Inside the coach, the passengers had lapsed, at last, into silence. Even Teasdale’s, apparently endless supply of anecdotal stories had petered out. A few minutes later, the home station came in sight.

The house was a pleasant two-storey affair, painted white and nestled into a hollow in the land. Lamps already burned at all the windows and made them glow in the greying light. A Dutch-style barn stood alongside and several corrals were filled with the stage line’s horses. As the stage pulled in, three mongrel dogs ran into the yard, yapping and snapping at the horses’ heels. A boy ran after them, calling them back and a big man’s voice bellowed in anger.

The heat, now dissipating as the afternoon died, had left the passengers exhausted. They were bruised and battered by the rough journey and sore to the bones. Adam, still in his shirtsleeves, handed the ladies down as before. The time for chatter and cheerful conversation was over. They were all tired and dusty, and none of them had the energy or the inclination to do more than visit the usual offices and trudge wearily into the house.

The chicken, this time, was fried – a crisp, golden brown on the outside and succulently moist within, and the greens were flavoured with almonds. Afterwards, there was a rich, creamy pudding that melted away in the mouth. “It’s better this place than most.” Tom-the-driver declared with conviction. Inwardly, Adam smiled. No doubt it was a phrase with which the company man favoured all the ladies along the route. It insured him a warm and friendly welcome at every stop. Not only was the meal well cooked, they had a whole hour stopover in which to eat it!

Afterwards, renewed and refreshed and with a new cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, Morton Teasdale settled back into a comfortable chair and began to talk again. Almost word for word he repeated the tales he had told before. Now, of course, he had a brand-new audience paying him rapt attention: the station man and his wife and son. Adam shrugged into his jacket, and, quiet and unnoticed, he stepped outside to stretch his legs and to spare himself the incessant sound of the drummer’s voice.

The sun had settled into the cradle of the western peaks, and the blazing fires of sunset were no more than distant, glowing embers; overhead, the sky darkened towards black. The moon, not quite full-faced, was rising, and the stars were coming out. With the coming of night, the heat had faded completely, leaking away into the immensity of creation. A light breeze had arisen, blowing down from the hills. Almost cool, it brushed softly against Adam’s cheek: the faintest touch, the kiss of a lover. He sipped at the air, then filled his lungs to capacity. Like a fine, white wine, it went straight to his head.

Around the home station, the landscape lay still and utterly silent, highlighted in silver by the light of the moon. The country was totally different from the land he knew so well. An alternative aspect of the good Lord’s creation. The hills were flattening, levelling out. A clump of shade trees stood close to the house, black, brooding forms against the brighter night. A dozen cows stood against the outer fence. Starlight gleamed in their patient, bovine eyes and fell softly on the backs of the restless horses inside the corral.

Behind Adam, the door of the house opened and, softly, closed. A small, dark clad figure, a woman’s form, slipped out and came to stand on the porch beside him. Adam straightened himself from his habitual slouch against the porch post and touched the brim of his hat. “Miss Elise.”

Elise’s head came just to his shoulder. She had taken off her gloves and her hat and carried them, now, in one hand. Some of her dark hair had escaped from its pinning. Wisps of it curled on her forehead and a dark tendril coiled against her cheek. In the moonlight her skin had a pearly opalescence, and her grey eyes were colourless. Adam again smelled the faint waft of her perfume and the scent of the woman herself, slightly spicy, strong and sweet on the evening air. His mouth was suddenly dry, and he touched his tongue to his lips. He was both interested and physically attracted. Mindful of Teasdale’s words earlier in the day, he laughed at the moon and chided himself gently. A romantic encounter was not the purpose of his journey; he not could afford the distraction. She smiled up at him, a trifle shy.

“Mister Cartwright, do you mind if I join you?”

“Not at all. It’s a beautiful evening.”

“It certainly is.” Elise raised her face towards heaven and followed Adam’s example, taking deep breaths of the cooling night air. “My, the stars are bright tonight. Do the stars shine so bright in Nevada?”

Adam squinted up at the sky. “I guess the stars are pretty much the same all over.”

“I don’t think you believe that at all. You might be a very practical man when it comes to ranching and mining, but I sense you have poetry in your soul.”

Adam chuckled. “My father tells me I spend too much time with my head in a book.”

“And have you done much travelling?”

“Some. I’ve been to Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Not as far afield as our friend Teasdale.”

“Ah. Mister Teasdale.” White teeth showed against ivory skin. “He talks such a lot, and yet he says so little. After all this time, we still know nothing about him.”

Adam acknowledged that it was true. The drummer had never said a word about who he was or where he had come from. His conversation consisted entirely of stories.

Elise said, “I think I’d like to walk a little.”

Adam stepped down from the porch. “Allow me to show you the moonlight.”

She flushed and glanced at the house. “I’m not sure my sister would like it.”

“I’m not asking you sister.” Smiling, Adam held out his hand.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be seemly to walk alone.”

Adam doffed his hat and they strolled across the yard to the fence of the horse corral. Inside, the animals stirred restlessly, a dozen or more semi-wild creatures broken only to work in harness. Disturbed by the human visitors, a wide-eyed roan threw up his head and snorted. As if at a signal, the horses moved off, galloping ‘round the corral. Barely able to see over the top rail, Elise watched with excitement. Adam, who knew very well what a horse looked like, feasted his eyes on her face.

“Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?” he suggested. “Have you travelled at all?”

“Oh, no. I’ve always lived in St. Louis.” The silvered eyes shot him a glance and then retreated again behind lowered lashes. “I nursed father for years after mother passed on; when Emily was widowed, we decided to live together.”

“You sound as if you’ve led a sheltered life.” Elise flushed again, and Adam was at once contrite. “Forgive me. I didn’t mean to be personal.”

“It’s not like that at all. I have my books and my needlework and I play piano.”

“What about a social life? Don’t you go out anywhere? The theatre? The opera?”

“Of course I do!” Elise laughed: a pretty bell-like sound that rang through the night and startled the horses again. “I have lots of friends in St Louis.” I belong to the Literary Circle and the Church and the Ladies League. And I have afternoon tea with the ladies in town each Thursday”

“The Ladies League?” Adam was suddenly amused, laughing gently. “Tell me what that’s all about.”

Elise had the grace to look sheepish and just a little ruffled. “Mainly we do good works among the sick and the needy. You’d be surprised what ladies can do, banded together.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised at all. It sounds like a very worthy endeavour.” Adam took her hand, her fingers small and starkly white against his own, deep tanned digits, and raised them to his lips.

Elise blushed. “Why, Mister Cartwright.”

Not far away along the fence, a cigarette glowed in the dark: one of the horse handlers was having an evening smoke. Aware of the proprieties and careful of the lady’s reputation, Adam offered his arm and walked her back to the coach.

Hauled along by a fresh team of horses, the stage plunged on through a tunnel of darkness, following the silver-lit road. Tom-the-driver, left behind with his endless supply of chewing tobacco to catch up on a good night’s sleep, was replaced on the high seat by big, fat Clem.

His hat pulled well down over his eyes, Adam managed to doze, but every jolt and jar of the stagecoach shook him half-awake. Once, about midnight, he woke up fully when they stopped to change horses again. The shouts of the men as they cursed the animals and the buffeting of the coach made sleep illusive for all but Teasdale. The drummer’s slow, steady snores continued unabated. Emily stirred restlessly, still half asleep, her uneasy slumber disturbed by all the commotion. Elise smiled wearily at Adam from the far side of the coach, and he was happy to smile back.

Adam looked out of the window. The view had changed yet again. Beneath the star-spangled dome of the sky, the prairie was all but featureless. It was utterly silent, and there were no signs of life. Clem yelled at the horses and slapped the reins on their backs. The coach lurched into motion again. Pulling his hat back over his eyes, Adam settled into his corner once more and tried to go back to sleep.

*******

Morning. The sun came up in a blaze of glory over the eastern skyline.

At the first, faint glimmer of daylight, the stage had pulled in to another home station. A shabby collection of clapboard shanties clustered about the sturdier wood-framed house and the obligatory corral. Smoke had risen from one of the smoke-holes: a single column of purple-brown haze that climbed half a mile into the sky before it feathered away on the wind. Several dishevelled and sleepy faced children, spindly legs showing white beneath knee-length night-shirts, had appeared in one of the doorways. Wearily, the passengers climbed from the coach and made their way into the house.

With the help of cold water and a keen-edged blade, Adam scraped the black growth of beard from his cheeks and his chin. A wholesome breakfast of eggs, scrambled exactly the way he liked them, freshly made bread and lots of hot coffee had made him a man again. The shave made him feel halfway human. Bending low over the trough, he rinsed off his face.

“Do you mind if I use the mirror?”

Teasdale’s thin voice had come from behind him. Adam hadn’t known he was there. “Be my guest.” Adam straightened and stretched his back. He groaned aloud in anguish. He was sore to the very core of his bones and every muscle ached.

Teasdale squared up to the broken scrap of looking glass that was all the home station boasted. His face had grown a soft, sandy fuzz that made him look younger. Humming the tune of a popular song, he started to apply his razor. It both irked Adam and amused him that the drummer could be so damnably cheerful at this early hour of the morning. Of course, he reminded himself, Teasdale had snored through the night before. He dried his face on a ragged towel and looked about him.

Far away in the distance, the place where the land met the sky was a hazy, dead level line. The prairie was endless, dry and featureless as far as his eye could see. The last tree in the world, or so it appeared, stood alongside the house. An olive-skinned woman with dark, hollow eyes and a shawl pulled over her head moved slowly about some unidentifiable task. A two-year-old child clung on to the hem of her skirt.

As soon as the sun was properly up, the temperature started to rise. Adam felt the sweat crawl out of his skin. Without any doubt, it was going to be another hot, uncomfortable day.

He tried in vain to brush some of accumulated dirt from his clothes. His shirt and his smart, black suit, so pristine and clean only twenty-four hours before, were stiff with perspiration and liberally coated with brick red, Colorado dust. He reached for his gunbelt and buckled it ‘round his hips.

Half-shaved, Teasdale eyed the weapon with speculation “You wear that thing as if you know how to use it.” It was a statement Adam ignored.

“Well, do you?” Teasdale asked abruptly. “Have you killed a man?”

Adam got that half-amused, half-irritated feeling again. Was Teasdale being deliberately rude, or was the drummer just what he seemed -–inept and unbelievably clumsy when it came to the social graces? He wagged a forefinger under Teasdale’s nose. “Only a talkative fat-man in an over-loud suit.”

“Oh my, that’s good! That’s very good!” Teasdale was pleased with the joke.

Adam sighed. His anger, only half aroused, faded completely away. He guessed he was just wasting his energy by getting mad. He tossed Teasdale the scrap of towel. “Dry your face. It’s time we were leaving.”

Teasdale caught the towel but made no move to use it. He was looking beyond Adam towards the horizon. His blue eyes held an expression that Adam had seen before – a mixture of excitement and dread - on the faces of experienced men expecting an Indian attack. Adam had heard of no hostile activity in Colorado for many a-year.

Not knowing what he was looking for, Adam turned. Nothing but monotony marred the landscape. By turns, the short prairie grass was brown and purple and greeny-grey. The sky, where it touched the north-western horizon, looked bruised.

Quite suddenly, Teasdale reached for Adam’s arm. “You’re right, Mister Cartwright. Come along. Let’s get in the coach.”

The new stagecoach driver was Bill. Bill was as short as Clem had been wide, and he had badly bowed legs to boot. He climbed up on the box and gathered the reins. “Get aboard, folks! It’s time ta be movin’!”

Leaving the scatter of shacks and the sloe-eyed children behind in the dust, the stagecoach rolled on eastwards.

The day was sultry; the sky was a bowl of deep, burnished bronze. Veiled by dust and a high cloud layer, the sunlight was strangely diffuse. The landscape beyond the window was singularly uninteresting, flat in the extreme and all but featureless. Adam Cartwright concentrated the whole of his attention inside the coach.

Despite Emily’s undisguised disapproval, Adam chatted with Elise. He asked all the details of her charitable work, and they discussed the books they had read. They discovered a mutual and lively interest in poetry, the arts and the theatre and matched each other, quote for quote, recalling Shakespeare’s plays. But Elise was obviously weary, and after some time the conversation flagged. Later on, tucked into the corner of the coach, she dozed.

Teasdale kept his eye on the weather, often leaning far out of the coach to study the northern sky. The brown stain was undoubtedly spreading.

“Looks like a storm,” Adam suggested.

Teasdale looked at him sharply. “It’ll be a storm like you’ve never had in Nevada.”

Fascinated, Adam paid more attention. The storm was growing apace. Adam could smell it, fierce and dusty, and he could feel it on his skin: a crawling itch caused by the increase in pressure. Clouds were piling over the landscape: flat-bottomed, slate blue, purple and brown. Their rounded heads were five miles high in the sunlight, golden lit.

From her seat on the other side of the coach, Emily watched with growing alarm. She fully grasped the implications of what she was seeing. “Mister Teasdale, can that really be?”

Raising his bowler hat, Teasdale nodded gravely. “I’m afraid that it can, Ma’am.” He leaned right out of the window and shouted up at the driver. His words were lost in the rumble of wheels, but Adam saw his arm windmill wildly in the direction of the storm cloud. Bow-legged Bill yelled at the horses in an effort to make them run faster.

It was plain that the storm was moving now, swelling visibly and tracking over the land. The whole of the sky was darkening.

The base of the clouds was starting to turn, revolving about a common centre in a slow and stately dance. Adam had never seen anything like it. He felt the first touch of wind on his face; it smelled of fire and brimstone like the breath of a demon straight out of hell. He didn’t experience any real sense of danger until he saw the look on Teasdale’s face.

“That’s a tornado, Mister Cartwright, and it’s coming our way.”

Adam had heard of a whirlwind - had read about them in books – an almost legendary force of nature, a twisting wind of unbelievable power that swept across the central states and wreaked destruction on all that stood before it, leaving only devastation behind.

From the top of the coach, Bill screamed at the horses: a string of scorching curses that cast doubt on the veracity of their parentage. The wheel hit a rock, and, for an endless moment, the vehicle was airborne. It landed with a bone-shaking jolt that bounced its passengers right off their seats. Elise woke up with a start. Wide-eyed and pale faced with fear the two sisters clung together in the back seat of the coach.

The clouds sunk lower and turned faster as the whirlwind started to spin. Made out of cloud-stuff and coloured grey, a long, slim tube reached down from the sky. Where it touched the ground, an explosion of dust erupted. Stones and soil and grass torn out of the earth by the roots flew upwards and outwards in an ascending cloud of flying detritus that climbed halfway back to the sky.

Filling more than half of the heavens, the storm had moved out of the north; it marched over the land on a course that cut across the stage route ahead of the racing coach, picking up speed as it went. It chased them clear out of Colorado and into the flatlands of Kansas, a hungry beast hunting them down.

Now, Adam could hear it: a primordial roar of elemental fury – and now he was afraid. His mouth was dry, and he could feel his fear as a solid lump deep in the pit of his belly. It was not that he lacked courage. No one could ever accuse him of that! This was an enemy that he couldn’t fight - a battle he could never win. His jaw lowered and locked; his mouth open, he couldn’t take his eyes from the terrible magnificence of the storm’s ever-closer approach. There seemed nothing to do but run before it.

Up on the box, Bill hauled back on the reins. “Whoa, there! Whoa!” he called to the horses. At once the break-neck speed began to lessen.

Alarmed at the apparent, abrupt capitulation, Adam turned to Teasdale. “Why is he stopping?”

“There’s no way we can outrun it.” Before the stage had come to a halt, Teasdale had flung the door open and was climbing down to the ground. “Help the women out!”

While Teasdale spoke a few words to the driver, Adam stepped down and held out his hand to Elise. He could feel the wind blowing, tugging his clothes, and hear its demonic howl. Emily was reluctant to get out of the coach, and Adam had to encourage her. Then he turned his attention back to the storm. The funnel, a mile high, was thicker and darker, stained with the colours of the earth and moving steadily over the prairie, heading east of south. Adam had read that the body of a man swept up in the funnel could be found ten miles away - if it was ever found at all.

Teasdale rapped him hard on the shoulder. “Run!” His voice was swept away by the wind, but his intention, and the direction of his pointing arm, was clear. Everyone clasped their hats firmly on to their heads and hurried, at Teasdale’s direction, to the side of the road. There, someone with foresight, the stagecoach-company or, perhaps, someone else, had made a ditch and a bank. Adam clambered over the edge and Teasdale lifted the ladies down to him.

Bow-legged-Bill had stayed with the horses, trying to keep them calm. Now he abandoned the animals where they stood in their traces and tumbled into the ditch alongside the passengers. It was impossible to speak above the scream of the wind. Struck with awe at nature’s fury, Adam watched the tornado approach.

Far away across the prairie, he could see another funnel leaning at a crazy angle against the wind, and further yet, made hazy by distance and dust, still another. The nearer funnel wavered away and then turned directly towards them as if it had seen them at last and was determined to sweep them away. At its base, where the sky touched the ground, was a whirling cloud of debris and dirt. It was moving towards them faster than a good horse could run.

A voice bellowed harshly in Adam’s ear, reminding him sharply of his father, “Get your head down, Cartwright, unless you want it torn off!” It was the drummer’s voice, only it wasn’t. It was strangely changed, deeper and stronger and filled with authority and determination. Adam tried to turn his head, but the hand that had been planted squarely between his shoulder blades pressed his face hard in to the dirt and made it impossible to move.

Just like the others, Adam closed his eyes tightly and shielded his face in the fold of his arm. He felt the force of the wind lift his hair and pull mightily at his clothes. Wind-borne stones and splinters stung the exposed skin on the backs of his hands. A thousand devils screeched in his ears, and a giant’s hand tried to lift him. Adam, a man not destined to fly, clung stubbornly to the earth. With the roar of a landslide, the whirlwind passed by him.

For long moments, as the force of the wind lessened and the howling died away, Adam stayed flat with his long, lean body pressed tightly against the ground. He was aware that he lived; he could hear his own heartbeat and the sigh of his blood and the rasp of his breath in his throat. While he gathered together his scattered senses, his mind replayed images of home and family and the tune of a music box.

Gradually, as his pulse settled, it became easier to breathe, but his lungs, he discovered, were full of dust. Everyone was coughing, and it took them all a while to recover. No one was seriously injured. In fact, except for a long, deep cut on Teasdale’s face that refused to stop bleeding, no one was hurt at all. They helped one another out of the ditch and looked, first at each other and then at the world about them.

Nothing had basically changed. The landscape was flat beneath the overcast sky, purple and blue and shrouded with dust. Far to the south the storms were racing away from them, playing tag and chase with each other as they headed towards Oklahoma and the states beyond. Adam gazed after them with something akin to wonder. He sensed that death had snatched once again at his coattails, and, once again, it had missed.

Like the priest and the Levite in the Bible story, the spinning vortex had gone by on the other side of the road, merely thirty yards away. Its track across the land was clearly visible. Amazingly, the horses had not bolted, nor yet been blown away. They stood wild eyed and sweating with fear in amongst their tangled harness. The stagecoach was undamaged and standing exactly where they had left it with all their belongings still safely on board. Unthinking, still stunned by the shock of their own survival, they brushed the dirt from their clothes.

Adam spat out a mouthful of mud and turned towards the ladies. “Are you both all right?”

Emily straightened her hat and rearranged her veil. “I’m quite well, thank you, Mister Cartwright,” she responded formally. Elise gave him a smile She had a smudge of dirt on the end of her nose which made her face even more appealing.

Adam looked quizzically at Morton Teasdale. The drummer’s soft, somewhat lop-sided expression was firmly back in place, bur Adam suspected that he was seeing a lie. Teasdale had read the signs in the sky and had known that the storm was coming; Teasdale had known what to do. The Teasdale who had lain beside Adam in the storm-ditch was not the Teasdale that Adam knew: that had been another man entirely and a force to be reckoned with. It occurred to Adam that Morton P. Teasdale might be more than he seemed.

His curiosity piqued, Adam wanted to know more about him, who he was, where he came from and what made him tick, but his own inbred morality and the code of the west forbade him to ask. Teasdale gave him a crooked grin and dabbed at the cut with his bloodstained, spotted handkerchief.

With Elise leaning on Adam’s arm and Emily walking with Teasdale, they made their way back to their coach. Teasdale assisted the ladies back into their seats; Adam helped Bill check over the horses. The bow-legged driver had a weird sense of humour. “That’s three times I’ve outrun a twister,” he declared with a toothless grin. “Reckon from now on they’ll be callin’ me lucky!”

Adam laughed. The world was brightening around him and suddenly he felt good. He liked the sparkle in the little man’s eye. He helped straighten out the horses, then, with a last, long look at the northwestern sky, he climbed back into the coach. Bill slapped the strap reins on the animal’s broad backs, and they were on their way again in a cloud of dust, crossing the vast flatlands of Kansas.

Two

In that hot, bright, early summer of eighteen-sixty, Kansas, Missouri - destined, one day to become Kansas City to distinguish it from the state of the same name - was a brash, brawling, boisterous township of some fifteen thousand souls. First founded forty years earlier as a fur trading settlement, it had prospered and grown on the banks of the meandering Missouri River. Parts of the town, known locally as Westport Landing, still thrived as a river port. Standing at the junction of trails from north, east and south, it was the jumping off point for folks headed west along the Santa Fe and Oregon trails, and the main distribution point for goods and commodities produced in the central plains.

To the south and the east, on the flat land where, in years to come, vast stockyards would be built, was a shantytown of crude cabins and shacks and tarred-paper shelters. On the hills to the north stood fine houses of wood and stucco and stone. On the ground in between stood the town.

Main Street was wide and partially paved; it ran east to west in the direction that most folks were going. In amongst the hardware and general stores, the haberdashers and dress shops, the places that sold leather and smoking tobacco, and fish and feed stuffs and corn, were eleven saloons, seven hotels, five high class brothels, four banks and the stage line office.

It was after mid morning when the stagecoach rolled into town. Main Street was filled with dust and noise, crowded with people and horses and oxen and mules. Small boys bowling hoops raced with the horses, and a huge yellow dog yapped at the wheels. At the very last moment, women snatched children out from under the flying hooves. The driver, the last of a very long line and a man whose name was forgotten, hauled back hard on the broad, leather reins. “Whoa now, boys! Whoa now!”

Tossing their heads, the horses broke stride and the coach shuddered and creaked to a halt. A black faced boy with stick arms and legs and huge, dark eyes, bare-footed and wearing a broad brimmed hat above a dazzling, tombstone toothed smile, ran out of the stage line office and bowled down the steps. Bobbing and bowing, he set up the ladder to the side of the coach. “Welcome, Mista! Welcome Ma’am!”

Adam was the first to emerge. It was sheer agony to unfold his long body from the close confines of the coach. His limbs were so stiff he could barely move them; his fingers and toes were cramped into immobility, and his back, he would swear, was about to break in a thousand different places. He’d been shaken and rattled and bounced for so long he was sure his teeth had worked loose. Every joint pained him, including his jaw. His eyes and his mouth were full of grit and even the skin under his clothing was coated with a fine, abrasive powder. Grimacing with pain, he leaned back on his heels to straighten the kinks in his back and flexed his wide shoulders.

“Welcome, Mista!” the boy said again.

Adam summoned a smile and tossed him a silver penny. Grinning broadly, the piccaninny snatched it out of the air and scampered off to lead away the horses. Adam, squinting against the glare of the sun, turned again to the coach.

Morton Teasdale climbed down next. The well-padded drummer had travelled well and arrived in better condition. He had bounced on the bumps and rolled with the jolts and still retained his essential good-humour. Apart from the ugly cut on his face and a skin stiffening encrustation of dried sweat and dust that seemed to be universal, he looked and acted exactly as he had on the day that Adam first met him. Sweating, he mopped at his face with the same, now soiled, blood spotted and generally disreputable handkerchief. Adam knew no more about him. The strong and capable figure that had emerged, momentarily, at the height of the storm had been once more submerged in the drummer’s personality. If Adam had been a fanciful man, he might have suspected his own imagination.

His exuberance undiminished, Teasdale, the affable clown, stuck out his hand. “I guess this is the end of the road, Mister Cartwright; the parting of the ways. I’m going on with the ladies to St Louis and then north to Chicago.”

Adam’s hand was engulfed in the moist, rubbery handshake. He found something appropriate to say and promptly consigned Teasdale’s face and form and his ill fitting, patchwork excuse for a suit to the soon-to-be-dusty corner of memory labelled ‘People I never expect to meet up with again’.

He handed down Emily and then Elise. The younger woman lingered, her small, gloved hand in his lean fingers. Gazing up through the fine, spotted veil of her hat, her grey eyes dwelt on his face. “Good-bye, Mister Cartwright. I’ve so much enjoyed your company and our little chats. I’ll remember all the things that you’ve told me about life in the west.”

Adam’s eyes softened into a smile. “The pleasure’s been mine, Miss Elise.” Through her glove he could feel the warmth of her hand. It was true that he had enjoyed their time together. Their brief walks in the moonlight beneath the endless skies of Kansas had added spice and flavour to the mundane relationship of travelling companions, and their long conversations inside the coach had relieved the tedium of the journey. There had been no time, nor the opportunity, for the embryonic relationship to develop into anything more. The stolen moments under the stars were all there would ever be.

She stood so close to him that he could smell the sweetness of her skin and hair; beneath the fine dust that powdered her cheek he could see her mature attractiveness; her cheeks reddening slightly under his gaze. They’d experienced a small slice of one another’s life, and each taken pleasure in the other’s presence. Adam was loath to let the moment pass, reluctant to say good-bye.

Emily Neston shook out her skirts to dislodge the dust that clung to the folds. She was immediately engulfed by a fine, rising cloud that started her coughing as she tried to wave it away. It broke the spell of the moment.

“I’d like to thank you for all your kind assistance, Mister Cartwright,” Emily said briskly, once she’d cleared the dust from her lungs. Adam bowed, and she turned to her sister. “Come, Elise, we have less than an hour to wash and change before the stage leaves for St. Louis.”

“I’m coming, Emily.” Elise had reclaimed her hand, but continued to hold Adam’s eyes with her own. “If you’re ever in St. Louis, Adam, you’ll be sure to come to tea?”

Adam smiled. “I’ll come to tea. And then I’ll take you to the grandest theatre in town.”

“I’d like that.” Elise returned the smile wistfully. “I’d like that very much.”

With a final flash of the silver-grey eyes and a swirl of her skirts she was gone on her way. Adam touched the brim of his hat and watched her hurry along the boardwalk to catch up with her sister, and then the two of him were lost to him among the crowding people.

A brown-skilled woman swept out the coach while two Negro men changed the horses for the next leg of the journey. For Adam, it was the end of the ride. He retrieved his carpetbag from the pile of unclaimed baggage and turned to survey his surroundings.

The thrill of the city ran through his veins. Adam loved cities! They were bright and loud and filled with endless possibilities. They shortened his breath and brightened his eyes and sent the blood singing through his ears. He had been to San Francisco on many occasions, both on business and on pleasure, and he had visited Boston and New York in his youth. He knew better than to gawk, but still the flood of sensation threatened to overwhelm him.

Kansas, already a city in all but name, was taking on a more permanent aspect than the several makeshift villages that had occupied the land before it. Ground hugging structures of wood and canvas and reed-covered cane were being replaced piecemeal by two and three storied buildings of fine, red brick and white-faced stone. Every wall was adorned with windows: lots of windows! There were more windows than Adam could remember seeing even in the cities of the east, and where he came from windows were a luxury and tended to be small and mean. He guessed that was progress for you.

Behind the grand facades that lined the principle streets, was a warren of lesser construction. Here, timber still reigned supreme as the building material of choice. It was the haunt of the washerwomen and the drovers, the cheap liquor merchants and the two-bit whores. On the flatland to the south of the town where the river tended to flood, dwelt an even poorer underclass of humanity, mostly Orientals and free black people, and settlers headed west who had gotten no farther than this before their money ran out, their animals died and the fires went out in their bellies.

The higher parts of the town were cooled by stands of white ash and elm and magnolia trees and vined with gorganvillia and Creeping-Ginny. Covered boardwalks lined the streets, with hitching rails and water troughs and tethering posts for horses. In shady corners were seats for folks to stop and rest or pass the time of day and for old-timers, men who had done their share and lived long enough to grow old, to sit and watch the rest of the world pass by. Pale skinned ladies in the latest French fashions, complete with veils and feathered hats, shaded their faces with lace parasols. Other ladies, often not so pale, offered their bodies, displaying shapely limbs and enticing smiles to the men-folk as they passed by. Hoards of children ran in the street, dicing with death as they danced in and out of the traffic. They seemed to be hunting in packs. Mangy dogs scavenged for scraps among drifts of garbage; come nightfall, they would hunt the rats. A barber stepped from his shop and threw out soapy water. The damp patch in the street outside his shop indicated it was something he’d done twenty times already that day.

Flies and mosquitoes were a constant problem. They bred in profusion in the still, swampy waters alongside the river, feasted on carrion and followed the stink of men’s sweat. They were a constant source of sickness and infection. With the coming of evening, fires would be lit on every street corner and damp rags burned in the hope that the smoke would keep them at bay.

A heavy miasma hung over all: the sharp smells of tar-oil, fish and horse manure mingled with the aroma of fresh baked pies, women’s perfume and the sweet smell of flowers. The stench of the blood and the sweat and the tears that had built and rebuilt this place over many years emanated out of the ground. Adam breathed it all in.

And the city was noisy; the clamour of it filled his head. It hummed and it buzzed and all about him there was a constantly audible drone of voices. A thousand throats spoke fifty different languages; every one of them cried out to be heard and understood. The resulting cacophony was all but overpowering. Bursts of music, shouting and singing and over-loud laughter spilled from the nearby saloons. There was a discordant clamour of meeting house bells, the barking of dogs and the bray of a mule, and, further away, the bellow of close-penned cattle and the distant, mournful hoot of a riverboat horn. Children bawled and drovers yelled blasphemies at their teams. A baby cried, and, somewhere, a woman squealed.

At any given moment, eighty percent of the population were men, and they came in all shapes and sizes: the wide and the short and the tall. Most wore the traditional cowboy garb that Adam was used to: loose fitted woollen pants for ease in the saddle, hard wearing shirts of wool or linen or close-woven silk and a leather vest to side track the wind that scavenged the prairie at night. Scattered among them were tough mountain men in buckskin and leather, soldiers in dusty blue suits with gold braid trimming and stevedores from the riverside docks. Many sported beards and moustaches or long flowing sideburns and hair that curled over their collars.

All about him, Adam saw faces of every colour, from yellow, to black, to brown. It was a gateway to the golden land of opportunity: a melting pot of humanity where all nations met and merged together in pursuit of a glorious dream. The wide streets of the town were thronged with men on horseback, mule-hauled wagons and ox carts. The hooves and the wheels kicked up a dust that shrouded the sun.

At almost mid-day, and with the sun directly overhead, shadows were non-existent. Sunlight shimmered on the rumps of the horses and glanced off the street itself, turning it into a gleaming white highway. Adam crossed over, dodging the traffic with consummate ease: a skill he thought he’d forgotten. He went to the bank to deposit the bank draft he carried in his wallet and drew come cash against the account, and then strolled to a hotel: not the best or the most expensive but a modest and comfortable establishment in a side street that had been recommended by friends.

The room he was given faced west, which made it cool in the day and bright in the evening. Looking from the window all he could see were walls and rooftops and an angled view of the street, but he knew that, out that way, if he went far enough, were the mountains and forests of home. A sudden pang of homesickness caught him by surprise. He considered sending word to his family, by pony express or the incredible cable that was stringing its way across the west, but he had nothing to tell them, yet. Best, he decided to let it go for a while. He put the feelings sternly aside. Nostalgia and melancholy were for children and weepy women; he was a man with more important matters in mind.

The room was small, but comfortable, possessed of a polished brass bedstead and feather bed with sheets newly washed and a hand-made patch-worked quilt in shades of blue and gold. A tall dresser with pitcher and bowl and a shaving mirror graced one corner, and there was a trunk at the end on the bed for his clothes.

He dumped his bag on top of the bed, eased off his boots and sat and rubbed his aching feet for a while. It had been a long and arduous journey and now that he had arrived he had to get his thoughts in order. But that bed sure looked inviting, and his eyelids were heavy. It was a great temptation to take off his coat and the gunbelt that had become his constant companion and sleep for a while.

It was a temptation that he resisted. Determinedly, he got himself up on his feet, padded to the dresser in his stockings and washed his face in the tepid water. With a brush and a sponge, the hotel bellboy, a Negroid man of thirty with one blinded eye and only nine fingers, worked wonders with his suit. By the time he stepped into the street again, Adam felt almost respectable. Nevertheless, his very next stop was the barbers shop, and then the public bathhouse for a short, but very welcome soak in hot water and suds to remove the last, lingering traces of trail dust from his skin.

Then he found an eatery and chose a seat in the window with a view of the street. The girl who served him had an evenly featured, oval face, pleasant but pale beneath a faintly olive skin. Wisps of dark hair had escaped her bun and curved on her cheeks, giving her a vulnerable look that at once roused Adam’s interest. She gave him a smile that was friendly enough but her eyes were tired.

“What can I get you, Mister?”

Adam hadn’t eaten since breakfast and that had been scanty enough. “Anything you’ve got on the menu - except for chicken and greens.”

This time, the smile was wider. “Just come in on the stagecoach, huh?”

“You got it.” Adam’s eyes twinkled, and, after a moment, the girl’s sparkled back.

“You sit tight, and I’ll see what I can find you.”

Adam sat, maybe more loose than tight with his elbows propped on the table, and, within a few minutes, found himself presented with a fine meal of liver and bacon and white mashed potatoes. He took his time eating it, watching the street; for the first time in a long time, he didn’t have a stagecoach to catch. When he was finished, the girl brought him coffee and strawberry shortcake and cream. Adam gestured to the empty chair. “Why don’t you sit down and rest for a while. You look like you could use a break.”

The waitress looked around the room. The lunch hour was almost over and most of the tables had been vacated. “Well, all right, I will, but just until you’ve finished eating, or I shall get into trouble.”

She sat down and ran a hand down a leg that obviously ached with fatigue. Her skirt was rather shorter that those that Adam was used to seeing, and he was awarded a substantial glimpse of ankle and shapely shin. Fashions were certainly changing! From then on he kept his gaze strictly about the table.

“You haven’t told me your name.”

The young woman eyed him warily. “I don’t hand out my name to every stranger that comes in and asks it.”

Deliberately forking up strawberries, Adam said, “I’m Adam Cartwright from Virginia City in Nevada. Now I’m not a stranger any more.”

First of all startled by his directness, the woman started to smile. Then she chuckled: a deep throaty laugh. “No, I guess you’re not, Adam Cartwright. My name is Rachel.”

The name certainly suited her. Chewing shortcake, Adam grinned at her. “I’m pleased to meet you, Rachel.”

Relaxing, letting the defensive tension ease out of her, the waitress met his eyes. Adam discovered that hers were wide apart and a warm, dark brown.

“And I’m pleased to meet you,” she said, “What brings you to Kansas? You’ve hardly chosen the best time of year. It’ll soon be the fever season.”

“I’m here on business.” Adam laid his fork down on his empty plate and dabbed his lips clean with his napkin. Mindful of what the woman had said, he was prepared to make the coffee last. “What I really need, right at the moment, is the name of a good tailor.”

“A tailor?”

Adam indicated the suit that he wore. “These are the only clothes I have with me. I had to travel light.”

Still friendly, but suspicious, Rachel gave him a slantwise look. “Are you sure this isn’t a ploy to get to know me?”

“A ploy?” Adam was puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Rachel clasped her hands together on the tabletop. “My uncle’s a tailor: the best there is in town.”

“Then he sounds like the man I’m looking for - unless his order books are full. I need some things in a hurry.” He was aware that she was watching him narrowly, gauging his reaction from the expression on his face. There was a new tension in her attitude.

“My uncle will sew you the best set of clothes you ever had and real’ quickly, too. You can have a new suit by tomorrow morning - if you don’t mind buying from a Jew.”

Adam sat back in his chair and regarded her thoughtfully over the rim of his cup. Her posture and expression were hunched and defensive. There was apprehensive defiance and anger in her eyes. “Why should I mind?” he inquired with gentle amusement. “I don’t see why that should affect the way he uses a needle, and I’ve heard that Jewish tailors are the best in the world.”

Rachel gazed at him earnestly, searching his face for his true intent. Adam kept his features open and friendly and allowed her to take her time. In a few seconds she relaxed again, chuckling with self-mockery. “I wish there were more people in town that felt like you do. My uncle tries so very hard, but business isn’t good.”

Adam felt sympathy and understanding and a certain resignation. He had encountered many forms of bigotry and none of them were nice. “So that’s why you work here? Do you live with your uncle?”

“My uncle and my aunt. They’re all the family that I have.” Her tone brooked no further questions on a sensitive subject.

Adam set down his cup. “If you’ll give me your uncle’s address and point me in the right direction, I’ll be glad to go along there and give him my trade.”

The same, tired smile as before lit up her face. She scribbled a few lines with a blunt stub of pencil and passed the paper over “My uncle will make you the finest suit you’ve ever seen.”

“I’m sure that he will.” Pocketing the paper, Adam stood up. He laid some coins on the table to pay for the meal and gathered his hat. “And Rachel,” he said kindly as she rose and stood beside him, “I don’t need a ploy to want to get to know you.”

Rachel’s eyes glowed, and, just for an instant, her fingertips lingered on the hem of his sleeve. Then she grabbed up the plates and the tip that he’d left her and headed for the kitchen.

Following Rachel’s directions, Adam soon found himself some streets away in the less prosperous part of the town. Here, the streets were less even but equally busy: crowded with people and horses and mules; the pace of life was just as frantic; the pulse of the city beat strong. Behind the painted, false facades was a maze of narrow passages, a veritable warren of dwellings that housed humanity of all different kinds. Adam found himself confronted with a jumble of shacks and lean-tos and sway backed cabins leaning one upon another and primitive shelters made out of heavy, tarred boards: homes and workshops, storeroom and stables. Adam could smell poverty and human despair.

Several small urchins played in the mud patch at the base of a leaking water barrel. None of them had trousers. Their only garments were coarse cotton shirts that came barely down to their navels. All of them were boys. A sloe eye woman enticed him with a smile. Bare, brown toes peeped from beneath the hem of her skirt. The sound of bells alerted him to a train of mules coming up from behind. He crowded the wall of the building to let them go by. The bundles they carried were bulky, and they didn’t smell too sweet. Walking behind them, the drover, a long-haired man with Indian blood and a scar across his face, gave Adam a lingering look of suspicion as he went by. Adam concluded that, come nightfall, this would not be a good place for a stranger to walk alone.

Adam stopped an old woman that led a laden donkey. The two of them wore identical straw hats. He showed her the scrap of paper and asked directions. She smiled at him toothlessly and pointed out the way. Crossing a yard where sheets hung drying, for all the world like sails in the wind, he stumbled his way down a rutted alley and into another street. Crossing over, he found himself on the doorstep of a wooden building simply labelled ‘Samuel Rosen - Tailor’ in blue paint over the door. He pushed the door open, and a small bell announced his arrival.

The inside of the shop was gloomy and smelled of woollen cloth. In the dim, dusty light that filtered through the single, small window Adam could see the dark bolts of cloth on the shelves around the room. The tailor emerged from the room at the back, a grey-haired bespectacled man in a dark waistcoat, white shirtsleeves held up with silver expandable bracelets above the elbows and a watch-chain slung from pocket to pocket. The top of his head came just to Adam’s chin.

Adam told him who he was and what he had come for. “I met with your niece. Rachel tells me you’re the best tailor in town - and, right now, a tailor is what I’m in need of.”

“Is that what Rachel tells you?” As Adam might have expected, Samuel Rosen’s voice was light and melodic. “A good girl, is Rachel - my sister’s child. If that’s what she tells you, who am I to say she’s not right, huh?” Already, from behind the crystal lenses, the tailor’s bright eyes summed up Adam’s physique: his height and the width of his shoulders. He assessed the way his jacket should hang and judged the fit of his trousers. “If you’ll come through into the other room, young man, then I’ll measure you up.”

Samuel Rosen held aside the curtain that acted in place of a door, and Adam ducked under. The back room of the simple, two-roomed structure was both workshop and dwelling. A large cutting table occupied one end of the room together with a long-legged stool and a large, polished, mahogany box that contained all the tools of the tailor’s trade. Into the rest of the space was crammed all the basic necessities for life: a small iron stove for cooking and heating, chairs and a cluttered table, and up against the furthest wall, curtained off from the rest of the room, a large, wooden-framed bedstead. A smaller bunk, for Rachel, was folded against the wall. In the absence of a wardrobe, clothing was hung from nails all around the walls. In pride of place was a violin, the instrument of choice of a people constantly on the move: instantly portable, just tuck it under the arm and it was packed.

Samuel bustled about, collecting his tapes and his measuring stick. There was one piece of work in progress, lying on the table. Samuel pushed it aside. “You must excuse the mess in here, Mister Cartwright, always the mess! I am not the tidiest of workmen, and my dear wife, Mrs. Rosen will not be home until supper time.”

As far as Adam could see, the confusion was not caused by any lack of neatness, merely a shortage of living space. They talked for a while, and Adam found himself liking the little tailor. The family lived very simply within the strictures of their faith and kept themselves to themselves. Most of Samuel’s customers were members of his own community, and, although he did not complain, it was plain that the business was not doing well. Reading between the lines, Adam realized that they just barely scraped a living. Mrs Rosen was out at work, cooking at one of these expensive hotels, to earn enough money to keep the family afloat.

Adam took off his hat and shrugged his shoulders out of his coat. For half an hour he submitted patiently to the indignities of the tailor’s measure. Samuel wrote everything down in the time-honoured manner - with chalk on a small, square blackboard. Then Adam made his choice from among the bolts of cloth, ordering more than he had first intended. Samuel wouldn’t take a deposit; he threw up his hands in refusal.

“Rachel is a good judge of men - very similar to her mother. She thinks you are honest or she would not have sent you here.”

Adam already had his wallet in his hand. “At least let me pay you a deposit.”

“No, no!” Determinedly, Samuel waved the offer aside. “You pay me tomorrow, in the morning when you see how your suit fits you.”

“That’s not a very good way to do business.” Adam knew he was right, but there was no way to make the old man see it.

“Business, business!” Samuel showed him to the door. “A man must learn to trust his own judgement, yes? Do you not find it so yourself?” Adam had to admit that he did. “I will deliver your suit tomorrow. You can pay me what you owe then.”

Adam found himself back in the dusty, sunlit street. He was somewhat bemused by his encounter with the tailor. Samuel Rosen was a singular type of man, representative of a persistent underclass. Persecuted throughout the ages by societies of every kind, they were far from an endangered species. Nevertheless, Adam felt a certain apprehension at the precariousness of their hand-to-mouth existence. He made his way by a different route, back to the centre of town.

Main Street was a mile long. Adam spent the afternoon strolling along the boardwalks and gazing into store windows. The windows themselves were amazing examples of modern engineering: huge panes of glittering glass that were almost as wide as the span of his arms. Beyond the windows, inside the stores, were Aladdin’s caves full of wonders. Adam felt as he had once before as a very young child, standing all by himself in the trading post at Sutter’s Fort. His father had given him money of his own for the very first time. He’d had ten cents in his hand and the entire world to chose from.

Eventually, he made several purchases, mostly items of clothing: socks and some shirts and a pair of comfortable trousers that fitted him well in the waist and loosely over the butt, ideal for horseback riding. He paid a boy a penny to carry his packages back to his hotel.

By the end of the day he found himself close to the river. He could smell the sharp scent of the water: the soft rot and decay and the stench of tannin and urine from the tannery just downstream, and he could feel the brush of its breath on his cheek. He walked down to the docks: solid timber platforms built out from the bank to provide firm moorings and easy access for the twice-weekly riverboat. At this point in its course the Missouri River was a mile wide and undammed for the whole of its length. From where Adam stood it was impossible to see the northern shore except as a dark line on the horizon. The river was a moving sheet of silver water sliding silently beneath a pewter sky. There were few people about now the day’s work was done. The piers were mostly deserted.

After the heat and humidity of the day, Adam had expected a storm. He looked north. The wavering funnels of nature’s pure savagery were permanently etched in his memory. This time there were no towering cloud-forms, no signs in the sky. The last remnants of sunset flew like bronzed banners across the darkening vault of the heavens.

From further along the wharf, Adam heard voices. They were muffled at first, then a woman cried out sharply, and a man shouted. Adam hurried, craning his neck to see what was going on. Several long jetties jutted into the water: angular fingers of black against the silver stream. They were designed to accommodate the drift barges, workhorses of the river, rather than the larger steamers. Barn-like buildings stood back from the shore: warehouses stuffed to capacity with boxes and bales, vast heaps of grain sacked up in hesian and bundles of cowhides from the southern plains.

The people moved out of the deepening shadows, moving in a group towards the river. Adam could see them more clearly now, grey figures against the gloom. There were a dozen of them altogether, mostly Negroes. The two white men were very much in charge, herding the others along a jetty towards a waiting barge. The woman whimpered again, a descending whisper of fear and desperation. Two children hung to the folds of her dress. The white men advanced. One of them raised his hand in a threat. Adam didn’t like what they were doing or the way they were doing it. He decided to intervene.

A voice came from behind him, a mid-western drawl. “Hold it right there, Mister. Put your hands out where I c’n see ‘em.”

Adam sensed, rather than felt the gun at his back. He spread his arms out wide to the sides. “You got the drop on me,” he acknowledged.

“Just you remember that,” came back the rejoinder. “You just stand real still now, while I take a look at your face.”

Adam’s assailant stepped carefully around him, giving the big man a very wide berth, staying out of the reach of his arms. Adam watched the gleam of the gun-barrel, held steady on the bottom button of his shirt. He kept his breathing even and steady and his body very still, while the puckered scar in his belly tingled. Having been shot there once before, he didn’t relish a repeat performance. The gunman ducked in quickly and lifted the front of Adam’s coat, taking in the tied down holster and the polished butt of the Colt .44. He made no attempt to take the gun, as Adam had thought he might.

By now, Adam had looked the man over: middle aged, a standard cowboy type with long grey hair tied into the nap of his neck, shirt, vest and pants in the traditional style and eagle-keen eyes. He had also seen the silver star pinned to the man’s chest.

The deputy said, “You wear that piece like you know how ta use it.”

Adam responded warily, “I’ve used it.”

“Well, don’t you get no fancy ideas.” The deputy backed off cautiously. The gun was still pointed at Adam’s middle.

“I was only...”

“I know what you was plannin’ ta do.” Seeing the sea change in Adam’s eyes, the deputy relaxed a little. “You was gonna poke your nose in another man’s business.” Adam couldn’t deny it. “I know your sort. I’ve seen ‘em before. Just you remember, it ain’t illegal fer a man to own slaves - leastwise, not yet.”

Slavery! An ugly word. It conjured a host of cruel images inside Adam’s head. “I know it,” he said carefully. He pulled a deep breath and cooled his temper. Getting himself all riled up wouldn’t do any good; the deputy would certainly shoot him. “Can I lower my hands?”

“Guess you can.” The deputy returned his own gun to its holster.

Adam indicated the jetty with a jut of his chin. “What’s going on over there?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Just curious.”

The deputy looked at him sharply. Satisfied that there would be no trouble he turned to watch the barge loading. He hooked his thumbs in his gunbelt. “A man taking a coffle south to sell it. It’s nothin’ unusual. They drift along the Missouri here as far as St. Louis, then south on the Mississippi to New Orleans.”

Adam’s expression shifted and the deputy tensed again. Here was a man who didn’t miss a trick. Adam said, “I thought the slave trade went the other way.”

“Not any more. These days, the price is better in the south. There’s talk of abolition this side of the Mason Dixie line.”

“I’ve heard tell of it.” It was an idea that Adam had taken to heart. The two men stood and watched for a while as the barge finished loading. The ropes were cast off, and it drifted away downstream on the current. A single moan of desolation drifted over the water.

“If I was you, Mister,” the deputy said, “I’d get myself back inta town. You find some real cut throats on these riverbanks at night. They’d kill you for the clothes you stand up in an’ that gun that you wear. Yours wouldn’t be the first corpse ta slide into the water an’ never be seen again.”

Adam decided to take the advice. He made his way back towards his hotel. The bonfires had been lit now; their acrid smoke hovered in the street. It burnt a man’s throat and stung his eyes, but it kept the mosquitoes away. The stores were still open; lamplight glowed pale out of every window. Lanterns, hung along the boardwalks, lit up the town as if it were day. The traffic was near as heavy as it had been at noon. Adam came to the conclusion that the city woke early, and never slept.

He visited a saloon for a leisurely beer and then, on a whim, followed the persistent ache in his groin to a high-class whorehouse where he spent two hours and several dollars on a drink and a meal and the company of a lady. Sometime after midnight, he made his way back to his hotel room and slept the night away.

*******

Adam was awake but still in bed, drowsing, when the tapping came at his door. His visitor, rather earlier than expected, was Samuel Rosen. The tailor ignored the fact that Adam wore only the bedspread and invited himself over the threshold as if he were one of the family. He carried Adam’s suit over his arm, wrapped up in muslin.

It was early, barely light. The tailor had undoubtedly worked all night to finish his stitching. Nonetheless, he had shaved and wore fresh linen beneath his well-brushed suit. He sat on the bed and waited while Adam wielded his razor, then helped him to dress.

The suit was a masterpiece of the tailor’s art. Of fine, grey broadcloth, the jacket fitted perfectly over the shoulders, was nipped in at the waist by a buttoned half-belt, flared over the hips and hung to the knee. When he was standing, it disguised the fact that Adam carried a gun. The pants fitted snugly across the front but had plenty of room in the seat for sitting. Adam paid Samuel the full amount and the tailor went away happy; he promised to deliver the rest of the clothing by noon on the following day.

Adam stood in front of the mirror. He brushed back his hair and added a narrow, shoestring tie to complete his ensemble. He had an appointment at ten o’clock, but the rumbling of his stomach reminded him forcefully of a prior engagement. Smiling to himself in anticipation, he lifted his key from the dresser and went in search of his breakfast.

The café was already open and doing a roaring trade. The window seat that Adam favoured was already occupied, so he had to take a table further inside. Rachel was very busy, and, at first, she didn’t notice him. Adam didn’t mind waiting. He took pleasure in watching her, the way she moved, the play of expressions across her face, the occasional glimpse of a shapely ankle beneath the short, waitress’s skirt. Her face was scrubbed to pinkness, and she was neatly dressed, but Adam thought she looked even more tired than she had on the previous day. Perhaps it was his imagination, or, perhaps, he was beginning to care. His interest lit his tawny eyes to gold.

By the time she arrived at his table with her pad and her little stub of pencil poised and ready to take his order, there was a smile on his face. She jumped with the shock of recognition, startled to see him.

“Mister Cartwright! What are you doing here?”

“A man has to eat.” Adam patted the vacant space just below his rib cage. “Besides, I had to come to tell you that you were right.”

“Right? I don’t understand.”

“Weren’t you the one who told me that your uncle was the best tailor in town?”

Now Rachel was smiling as well. “Yes, I did. You must think me very presumptuous.”

“Not at all. I’m very glad that you did. Perhaps you’d allow me to show my gratitude by walking you home tonight?”

Rachel flushed with hot embarrassment. “I’d like that very much.” Now, several voices were clamouring for her attention. Adam ignored them and ordered his breakfast: steak and eggs with hot biscuits and butter and half a gallon of strong, black coffee. He took his time about eating it.

Adam was on time for his appointment. There was a well-polished black plate attached to the wall of the lawyer’s offices. Engraved upon it was the immortal legend ‘Fossett, Fossett, Duncan and Brown’. At ten o’clock precisely he was shown in to an immaculate suite of offices at the front of the building, high above the street. It was there that he met Mister Fossett, ‘though whether he was the first mentioned or the second, Adam was never to know. Fossett was a tall man, fairly broad, but it was plain that his breadth came from comfortable living rather than good food followed by hard work. Light brown hair had receded somewhat further than Adam’s and had left a shiny, tanned pate with a fringe on either side. He wore a dark, sober business suit and a suitably sombre expression. Like all lawyers everywhere, he had a friendly, but cruelly calculating, look in his eye. Adam had a premonition that this interview was going to cost him rather more than he had allowed for.

“Sit down, Mister Cartwright.” Fossett gestured him to a well-padded, leather upholstered armchair, and settled into his own seat on the other side of the desk. Adam found himself facing the glare from the window while Fossett’s face remained mostly in shade. “If you’ll just bear with me a moment while I review the facts of your case..?”

Adam sat and waited while Fossett, his glasses placed firmly on the bridge of his nose, perused the contents of the slim file that carried Adam’s name. The windows of the office were open; he could hear the busy hum of the traffic below, the shouts of the drovers and, sometimes, the crack of a whip, and he could smell the stink of it wafting in on a fragile breeze. The only sounds inside the room were the occasional turn of a page, the sigh of his breath and the measured tick of the parliament clock on the wall.

A tall and elegant woman brought in a tray and set it down on the corner of Fossett’s desk. In the steadily increasing heat of the morning, she looked cool and collected in a lace-trimmed blouse and a navy blue skirt that hung to just above her ankle. She sparkled a smile in Adam’s direction. The tray held two cups and saucers, a china pot in a knitted cosy, a bowl of sugar and jugs of milk and cream. Fossett’s face brightened at the sight of it; clearly, the arrival of the tray was the highlight of his morning. “Would you care for some tea, Mister Cartwright?”

Right there and then, Adam would much have preferred a beer, but he wasn’t prepared to say so. “Tea would be very nice.” Fossett poured, leaving Adam’s black as requested but taking his own with sugar and cream.

Finally, he shuffled the papers back into order and got down to business. He took off his spectacles, folded them neatly and laid them down on the desk. “I don’t really see how we can help you any further, Mister Cartwright. As I explained to Mister Westacotte in my letter last fall, it’s proved impossible to trace any business contacts of the late Mister Harbinger or even to map his movements with any degree of certainty in the month immediately prior to his departure for San Francisco. I understand he met his unfortunate demise in a place called...” He peered at a paper. “ Virginia City.”

Adam was at once transported to a sunlit street, familiar but strangely deserted, devoid of faces, although he was aware that a thousand eyes watched his every movement from behind shuttered windows. People he knew and respected were expecting every moment to be his last. He saw again the tall, frock-coated figure of Abediah Harbinger, stern faced, his eyes out of sight below the shading brim of his hat, and felt the crawl of fear in his belly. They had confronted each other face to face in a duel not of Adam’s choosing, for reasons he still didn’t understand. Harbinger had been fast on the draw, his gun leaping from its cross-draw holster like something alive. Adam had been faster still, and Harbinger had died. Adam could still smell the powder and the hot iron and the blood.

“Mister Cartwright?” Fossett prompted, breaking the thread of thought.

Adam drew a long, deep breath as the images shattered and fell away. He knew he would never forget, but there were ghosts he had to lay.

“I trust that Mister Westacotte transmitted my findings to you?” Fossett was saying in his precise, lawyer’s voice. He was watching Adam intently over the desk.

Aware of the naked emotion that was showing on his face, Adam composed himself. “Indeed he did. I have his letter here.” He laid a hand on the breast of his coat where the oft-read missive resided in an inner pocket. “I can’t understand how a man can simply step out of nowhere - how he can have no apparent past, no contacts, no friends.”

Fossett’s face took on an appropriate look of concern. “From our investigations, it’s plain that Mister Harbinger was careful not to instigate a relationship that might be construed as friendship. He seems to have been a difficult man to like.”

“No one at all?” It seemed unlikely.

Fossett pursed his lips. His fingers fiddled with the folded spectacles on the desk. “He had acquaintances, of course,” he said finally. “‘Though most would be considered of a casual nature: drinking companions, a woman or two. I understand he was not adverse to a game of cards. There was no one we could trace who related even indirectly to the -er...” He hesitated and coloured slightly before finishing. “unpleasant affair in which you were involved.”

“You say he had acquaintances? Women who knew him?” Adam’s eyes narrowed.

“Of course - everyone has acquaintances. We traced them all according to your instructions and questioned them as closely as the law would allow. To be quite blunt about the matter, none of them had ever heard of you.”

Adam thought about it. It really did seem that the trail had gone cold. Here, in the relative peace of Fossett’s office, drinking tea and surrounded by all the trappings of civilization, he was almost prepared to let the matter go - to draw a thick, black line under the the whole grisly business and attempt to get on with his life. If Ben Cartwright had been there at his elbow, he could probably have persuaded his son to give the whole thing up and go home. But Adam knew that he had to try to get to the bottom of the matter if he wanted to sleep at night without the haunting dreams or live without the waking nightmare of wondering who was waiting behind every closed door. Who had hired Harbinger to kill him - and would he try again? “You won’t mind if I ask a few questions myself?”

Fossett gazed at him mournfully. “Of course not. But I really don’t see that it would be to your advantage to pursue this any further. Our enquiries have been quite exhaustive...”

Politely, he was saying that Adam was wasting his time.

“I’m sure that they have.” Adam gathered himself, stood up and offered his hand. “Thank you, Mister Fossett, for all your efforts on my behalf.”

“You’re very welcome, I’m sure.” Fossett didn’t have to add that he would be forwarding his account. He showed Adam towards the door. “If we can be of any further service to you in the future, in this or any other matter...”

Once again on the boardwalk in the mid-morning sun, Adam pulled a breath. It was hot and the air stank of dust and horses and sweat and other things a good deal less pleasant. With renewed determination, he set out along Main Street, headed west.

The sheriff’s office and gaol-house had been built entirely of timber and had recently burned down. The replacement structure had, of necessity, quickly arisen from the charred ruins. It was impressive, built of brick on two levels with the cells on the upper floor. Adam quickly discovered the sheriff inside: a lanky individual just short of middle age with deceptively wide shoulders and the hips, not of a horseman, but of a man who ate carefully and kept himself in shape. Long faced and dark haired, he had a droopy moustache just tending to grey. He had a wry sense of humour somewhat belied by the steely look in his eye. He looked Adam over as he came through the door, and Adam got the feeling that those eyes missed nothing. Adam stepped forward and held out his hand. “Sheriff, I’m Adam Cartwright.”

“Are you, by God?” The sheriff inspected the proffered hand as if it were something that had just crawled out of a barrel. Then he took it gingerly in his own and shook it. The keen eyes studied Adam’s face. “I ain’t seen you before, Mister. You new in town?”

“New in yesterday. Came in on the Denver stage.”

The sense of humour asserted itself. “Then you have my sympathy for all the bumps and bruises. I know what that road’s like.”

The sheriff sat down behind his desk, folding his long frame into a chair that didn’t look large enough to contain him. He cleared a small space among the not-too-untidy collection of paperwork on the desktop and parked his boot heels, one on top of the other. Still eyeing him with suspicion, he gestured Adam into the other chair. Every movement was considered and wary and carefully designed to put his visitor securely in his place. This was a man who intended to live a while despite the silver star pinned to the front of his vest. “I’m Zachary Tomas. What can I do for you, Cartwright?”

Adam sat down and took a moment to inspect his surroundings. It might be new, or thereabouts, but the sheriff’s office looked lived in. One long wall boasted an array of ‘wanted’ posters, circulars, local civic ordnances and such; on another was a long rack of business-like firearms. Adam didn’t doubt for a moment that they were all loaded and ready for instant use. Tomas didn’t seem like a man who would be caught short of firepower. A black iron stove sat in the corner, belching heat and raising the temperature to furnace-like proportions. The essential coffee-pot resided on top. There was a bureau of monumental proportions that showed scorch-marks along one side and had obviously been salvaged from the blaze that had destroyed the previous building. The rest of the room contained an assortment of tables and chairs and was strewn with dime novels and newspapers and discarded clothing and all the paraphernalia that made it a home from home. At the back was a firmly closed door that undoubtedly led to rooms at the back and a staircase to the upper storey. The big room smelled of wood smoke and coffee and bacon grease, whiskey and tobacco and the essential odour of men.

The sheriff was waiting patiently for him to finish looking, not hurrying him, letting him take his time. At the same time he had been studying Adam Cartwright: the way he carried his head on his shoulders, the confidence in his eyes, the big, heavy Colt almost concealed beneath the skirts of his stylish coat.

Adam knew what was expected. He eased back in the chair and forced himself to relax. “I’m looking for some information.”

“Information is something I’m good at.” Tomas said promptly. His mouth twitched in an attempt at a smile but didn’t quite make it. “What particular brand of information did you have in mind?”

Adam fingered the silver-studded band of his hat. He still had a problem putting the essence of his inquiry into words. “I’m trying to trace the business contacts of a man named Abediah Harbinger, a resident of these parts a couple of years ago.”

“By God, you are!” Tomas put his feet back on the floor and straightened up in the chair. “Why do you want to know about Harbinger? I heard tell that he’s dead.”

“He’s dead.” Adam shifted his eyes to his fingers, then made a determined effort to look the sheriff right in the eye. “I’m the man that killed him.”

The silence lengthened while Tomas considered. The two of them eyed each other warily. Eventually, Tomas said, “Then you must be quite a hand with that pistol you wear, Mister Cartwright. Harbinger had quite a reputation. How come you’re back-trackin’ his trail?”

“Someone hired him to kill me. I want to know who.”

Typically, Tomas cut right to the point. “Why?”

Adam found it a difficult thing to say. “Because I need to know, I guess - for my own peace of mind.”

“Peace of mind is a luxury most men can’t afford.” Tomas gazed at Adam with open speculation. “I can’t tell you much. Harbinger came into town a few times, perhaps three or four. I can’t say I exactly made him welcome. Mostly he drifted from one place to another, working the towns to the south. That’s where he did most of his killin’“

Adam felt vaguely sick. He could hear the contempt thickening Tomas’s voice and had a feeling deep down inside that he was being tarred with the same brush as the man who had hunted him. He didn’t much like the idea. “Can you think of anyone local who might have hired him?”

Tomas shrugged. “Lot’s of folks, I guess. But I ain’t never heard anyone mention a grudge ag’in someone called Cartwright. Most folks are too much tied up in their own affairs.”

“I guess I can understand that.” Adam let out a pent-up breath. It was another dead end. He got to his feet. “Thank you for your time, sheriff.”

Tomas stood up, but before he could speak the street door opened. A deputy came through it, knocking the accumulated dust out of his hat by banging it on his hip. It was the same grey-haired man that Adam had encountered on the docks the night before. He pulled up short and looked from Tomas to Adam and back. “Zak, this is the fella I was tellin’ you about. The one I found down by the river.”

“Is it, by God.” Tomas looked at Adam with a new light in his eyes. “Jed here tells me you were watching John Masterson’s coffle leave with fire in your belly.”

A muscle worked along Adam’s jaw line and anger glowed in his eyes. “I guess Jed’s right. I can’t say it was something I enjoyed.”

Tomas nodded grim understanding. “I know how you feel. I want you to make me a promise, Cartwright. While you’re in my town, stay out of trouble. I don’t want to throw you in a cell.”

Adam locked his teeth together, biting off the words he knew he’d regret. His breath whistled in. “I’ll do my best to keep out of your hair.”

“See that you do. This gaol’s a Goddamned hard place to get out of.”

With the sheriff’s warning ringing loud in his ears, Adam discovered he wasn’t hungry for lunch, nor was he in the mood for sightseeing. He went back to his hotel and spent the afternoon catching up on his sleep.

He woke up to find the room airless and hot. The sliding sun sent shafts of light directly into his window. Soon, the brassy sky would turn to gold. Adam yawned and stretched with the luxury of pure relaxation. He had slept long and deep, and his body had finally healed. For the first time in a while he was free of residual soreness. He turned on his side and slept again, but lightly, dozing. The next time he opened his eyes the room was cooling and almost dark. Above the dark rooftops the sky was silver. Adam washed and dressed with care and went in search of his supper.

The café closed at half past ten. Adam sat in a corner seat and drank endless cups of after supper coffee while he watched Rachel work. Every time he caught her eye he smiled at her, and she flushed and smiled back until she mastered the art of ignoring him. When the last customer finally left and the tables were cleared, he helped her on with her wrap and fulfilled his promise to walk her home.

She took him by a different route to the one he had followed the previous afternoon. It was a dark and dangerous path that led through parts of town so iniquitous that Adam would have hesitated to go there in broad daylight, at least, not without the comforting bulk of his oversized younger brother alongside. He didn’t like the look of the men who huddled in corners and followed them with their eyes. Furtive noises issued from the lightless alleyways between the buildings: Adam felt sure that some of them were made by human beings. Adam loosened his Colt in his holster, and Rachel laughed lightly at his unease.

“I walk this way every night,” she told him. “It’s safe. We’re a community. We all look out for each other.”

Despite his efforts to maintain a civilized conversation, Adam still didn’t like it. He felt the tension as a pressure against his eardrums; felt the heat of unseen eyes burning into his back. He was more than relieved when they emerged from the unmapped and constantly changing maze of back streets and passages and found themselves on the street where Rachel lived. Across the way, a light burned dimly in the tiny window of the tailor’s shop, evidence that Samuel Rosen was still at work. He walked the lady right to the door and took off his hat. Rachel turned to him; her eyes were dark and lustrous in the filtered light. “I’d like to thank you, Mister Cartwright. It’s been a long time since anyone has been so kind to me - since anyone has treated me like a lady.”

Adam’s cheeks dimpled into a smile. “That’s because the men around here haven’t figured out what they’re missing. It would please me if you would call me Adam.”

She lowered her face, and, in the darkness, he had to imagine the flush of colour that darkened her cheek. “ I’d like that, Adam,” she said quietly into his chest. “I have to go in now. My uncle and aunt are waiting up for me, and I have to start early in the morning.”

“I understand.” He dared lift her chin with the point of his finger so that he could look at her face. Her lips trembled. He resisted the urge to lower his face and kiss her. It was too early in their relationship for him to take such liberties with her person. The moment passed by. She opened the door and slipped inside. He caught the flash of light in her eyes as she looked back at him, and then the door closed and he was left with only the lingering scent of her perfume.

Adam replaced his hat and took note of his surroundings. Here, in the poorer suburbs, the streets were all but deserted. A solitary mule stood tethered to a hitching post, forgotten by a drunken owner who lay snoring somewhere in a loose woman’s crib. A dog snuffled somewhere in the deeper shadows - leastwise, Adam hoped that it was a dog. On the other side of the street a man and a woman swayed, arm in arm, along the boardwalk towards him, laughing together at some unknown amusement. Briefly, a child cried, a man shouted; closer, a door slammed shut. With a residual smile still stuck to his face, Adam filled his lungs with night air and stepped down into the street.

He chose not to walk the dark warren of back streets on his own but to go by the longer, more open, route. Almost at once he knew he was being followed. Adam had a seventh sense that told him these things. It manifested itself as a pertinacious, bone deep itch in the middle of his back, just below the line of his shoulder blades. Tonight the itch was driving him mad. He stopped and looked back. The couple had passed him now. They walked on; their heads bent close together. The rest of the street was deserted. Adam knew that didn’t mean a thing. He walked on a few steps, the itch still burning, then looked again. Still nothing. Turning once more with what was almost a shrug, he pulled up short. The men he was expecting were standing in front of him. Adam cursed himself for all sorts of a fool. It was an old Indian trick - they’d been trailing him from in front - and he’d fallen for it.

Three possibilities popped into his mind: one, he was slipping; two, he was tired, or these three were very good at what they did. He’d not heard a sound - not even a footfall. Adam glanced ‘round. Sensing trouble, the strolling couple had disappeared and the mule was prepared to ignore him.

They were an ugly trio he had to admit. They were big and looked mean. There were sneers on their faces and guns on their hips. Adam considered, but only briefly, making a fight of it there and then. He knew that he wouldn’t win. His own gun was out of sight beneath the skirt of his coat. That made it almost out of reach as well. If they didn’t know he was armed it might be to his advantage later. If he got to a later.

Adam spread his hands. “You’re blocking my way, gentlemen.”

The man in the middle, the ugliest one of all, grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. The remaining stubs of his teeth were stained brown with tobacco juice. “My, don’t you talk pretty!” he said to his friends. “You hear that boys? We’re in the Pretty Man’s way!” He was obviously the spokesman of the little group, and he liked to play to an audience.

The audience laughed in dutiful appreciation. They spread themselves out on either side of their main entertainer, effectively cutting off any chance Adam might have of slipping past them and making it harder for him to watch them all at once. He took a step backward to keep them all in view. Clearly, this encounter was going to amount to more than a little pushing and shoving. He touched his lips with the tip of his tongue; the inevitable butterflies were starting to flutter in his belly as the adrenaline surged. “What do you want?”

The ugly in the middle gave a beatific smile. He had a wide, yellow tinged face covered with warts and greasy black hair that hung from under his hat. He glanced over his shoulders, first at one companion and then the other to make sure that they were paying the proper attention. “We want everythin’ you got, Pretty Man. An’ we’re gonna take a good slice o’ your hide along with it!”

He took a long step forward, and Adam, retreating, came up hard against the wall of a building. The principle ugly reached out a thick, stubby hand and fingered the stitching on the lapel of Adam’s suit. “That little yiddisher tailor’s made a real’ fine job o’ this sewin’.” His smile widened, and his breath gusted into Adam’s face. Adam smelled the rancid rot of decaying teeth and spicy, Mexican food.

Adam looked down at the hand on his collar. The short, blunt fingers were far from clean; there were warts on the knuckles and a permanent encrustation of dirt beneath the fingernails. Adam supposed there was no point in waiting until the pack moved in on him like rats for the kill. Lifting his gaze back to the ugly’s face, he decided to make it personal. “Why don’t you keep your filthy hands to yourself?” he suggested mildly.

The ugly lifted himself up onto his toes and sneered in Adam’s face, “You gonna make me, Pretty Man? You gotta learn ta stay away from the dirty yiddishers. Especially the yiddisher girl. White man ought ta stick ta his own kind.” His voice became deeper and harder as his resolve hardened. “I’m gonna cut up that pretty face so that every time you look in the mirror, you’re gonna remember.”

Adam knew that he meant what he said. The three must have been watching him to know his movements so well. He was glad they had waited until Rachel was safely indoors before they had made their move. He wouldn’t have wanted to see her hurt - and, now, he had only himself to defend. He saw the glint of a blade in the ugly’s fist; time was running short.

He figured the man was standing just about close enough. All he needed was a small diversion, and then, at least, he would go down fighting. He might even manage to take one or two with him. Adam breathed in, bracing himself for action. He watched the edge of the blade. The ugly one was smiling, anticipating blood.

It was the smaller of the other men who provided the distraction that Adam needed. Eyes bright, he giggled with excitement. The ugly one’s eyes flickered, and that was all that Adam needed. He brought his knee up hard and fast - felt it connect with bone and followed it up with his fist. The ugly reeled, and the blade went spinning. The other two snatched for their guns, and Adam pulled iron. As it had once before, time slowed down;

the butt of the Colt slid into his hand, and the rest of the world stood still.

The double click of a shotgun’s hammers sounded loud in the night. “Reckon that’s enough of it, fellas. Anyone don’t agree, I’ll fill ‘im full o’ lead.”

A lanky figure stepped out of the dark. Zachary Tomas looked from one man to another, taking in the frozen tableau: two men in crouched positions, their guns half out of their holsters, Adam standing erect, his Colt in his hand and the hammer back. The other man was still on the ground, groaning and clutching his belly. Tomas stepped over him and hefted the double-mawed shotgun in the direction of the ugly’s companions. “You two drop them gunbelts. Then pick him up an’ carry him home.”

The two men unbuckled leather and dropped it in the dirt at their feet. Adam watched as they picked up the ugly and started to haul him away. Tomas eased back the hammers of the heave bore gun and walked over. He had a stiff-legged gait that swung from the hip. Adam realized that he was partially lame. It was a matter of wonder how he held down his job.

“A little out o’ your way, ain’t you, Cartwright?” he inquired by way of conversation.

Still hearing the song of his blood, Adam pulled a long breath and let it hiss out through his teeth. “I was seeing a lady home. Aren’t you going to arrest those three?”

Tomas gazed after the shambling trio. “Jonas Tillby and the Mountebank brothers? There ain’t no point. What am I gonna charge them with?”

“I’ll bring charges.” Adam was feeling belligerent. Filled to the ears with adrenaline, he wasn’t prepared to let the matter go. Shrugging, he settled his shoulders back into his coat.

Tomas eyed him keenly. “Where am I going to find a jury in this town? Most folks feel the same way they do. ‘Sides, I’m not too sure I want you hangin’ around to wait for a trial. You’ve got trouble ridin’ alongside of you, and I can’t say as I like the smell of it much.” He hesitated, looking Adam over again. “One thing I’ll say for you; you’re as fast as greased hell when you handle that gun.”

Adam realized that he still held the Colt in his hand. He lowered the hammer and put it away. “So they get away with it?”

Shrugging, Tomas scooped up the gunbelts and casually shouldered the shotgun. “It happens all the time. I’ll read the riot act to them when they come around to pick up their iron, but there ain’t no point in locking them up. There’s a hundred different breeds of people in this town, and every one of them hates all the others. It’s as much as I can do just to keep the lid on it. Mind you,” he cocked a bright eye at Adam. “You ain’t helpin’ much, Mister.”

“Me? What did I do?” Adam was regaining his composure, but his blood still ran hot. The words came out sharp and angry.

Tomas leaned back on his heels and told him right to his face. “Of all the Goddamned foolish things I ever saw, what in hell did you think you were doing?”

“I told you,” Adam squared up angrily, driven by the fire in his veins. “I was seeing a lady home!”

“You were walkin’ out with Samuel Rosen’s niece! People don’t take kindly to that around here. Folks mostly rub along together as long as they keep themselves to themselves.”

Adam pulled up short. It seemed that everyone knew his business. “You trying to tell me something, sheriff?”

“Smooth down your feathers, Cartwright.” Tomas looked at him sternly. “I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’. I’m just sayin’ that if you’re gonna come round these parts sparkin’, all dressed up like a peacock, then you’re gonna end up dead. I’ve got more to do than haul you out of trouble by the seat of your pants.”

Adam had to concede the point. The sheriff started to stroll toward town, the scattergun still over his shoulder. Adam cooled his temper and fell into step beside him “So what do you do to protect the Jewish community? With men like that about, surely nobody’s safe.”

“Me? I don’t do nothin’. The likes of Tillby and his crew don’t cause that much trouble. A little rough housing on a Friday night. The Jews, the blacks, the Chinese, like I said, mostly they all rub along together.” At the top of the street where the lanterns burned he came to halt. “Your hotel’s that way, Cartwright. Go get yourself some sleep.”

Adam touched a hand to the brim of his hat. “Good night, sheriff.”

It was way past midnight, but Adam wasn’t tired. He went to a saloon where the lights were bright and the music, loud. He bought a bottle of medium grade whiskey and took it into a corner to think. The good Lord knew he had plenty to think about. It was some hours later, and with the best part of that whiskey inside him, that Adam finally went to bed.

Three

Adam went to the livery stable and hired a horse: a leggy black gelding with an intelligent eye and, so he discovered later, a tendency to kick. He loaded the saddle with a small sack of corn, some bacon, sugar and coffee and a newly purchased rifle and scabbard. He had spent the last several days going all over the town asking questions of all sorts of people, and, ultimately, he had come up empty. He was frustrated by his lack of progress, but his time had not been entirely wasted. Determined not to be fazed by his encounter with Jonas Tillby and his like-minded cronies, he had gotten to know Rachel a whole lot better. On her day off he had taken her driving in the hills outside town and shown her some of the pretty country that bordered the river. In exchange, she had taken him home to supper, and he had spent the evening talking to Samuel and listening to haunting melodies played on the violin. He had enjoyed spending time in Rachel’s company. He still hadn’t kissed her, but he’d come close once or twice.

Thinking about it put a slight smile on his face as he tightened the cinches, unconsciously avoiding the swing of the gelding’s back foot. He had come to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that if he wanted answers to the questions that plagued him, he would have to take his enquiries to the smaller settlement south of the town where Harbinger had, apparently, spent most of his time. With almost all of his belongings in storage at the hotel, Adam was travelling light. As he would do with any strange horse, he ‘cheeked’ the gelding as he stepped lightly into the saddle, countering its tendency to buck by keeping the reins taut and using the cheek-strap of the bridle to pull the animal’s head ‘round against his shoulder. The gelding danced for a moment, then settled. Adam turned his head south.

The city had grown like a malignant tumour spreading over the ground to the east and west of the original settlement. These were the poorer districts far away from the glass-fronted stores and the fine hotels and the grand houses that stood on the hills. The shelters, such as they were, had been put together from whatever materials could be salvaged from the cast-offs of the city and the riverbank. Sometimes there was no shelter at all, merely a sad huddle of humanity at the side of the trail with a can of water suspended over a smoking fire and a few, threadbare blankets to keep out the chill of the night.

Faces watched him pass, mostly coloured or Oriental with a scattering of poor whites. Few of the children had a full set of clothes; none of them had shoes. They watched the tall man on the coal-black horse ride by with the potbellies of poverty clearly on display and huge, hungry eyes. Adam saw hopelessness on the faces of the women, on those of the men, a bitter despair.

Despite having eaten breakfast, he felt an emptiness deep inside – a void that was not caused by hunger, a hollowness under his ribcage produced by pity and shame; it threatened to rise up into his throat and choke him with tears. He didn’t dare look too closely; he didn’t dare stop. The obvious need and want disturbed him greatly. He might have helped a few of them with what he had in his pocket, but not many and not for long, and how was a man to choose? He felt both relieved and guilty when he left the sight and the stench behind.

Now he rode through depleted pastureland. Here, at a later time in the year, the large herds of cattle driven up from the southern ranges would be held and fattened before being moved on to the slaughter houses that fed the city, or loaded on to barges for shipment east. In these months of early summer, the grass was still sparse. The previous year’s grazing had stripped it to the roots, and, only now, the first fresh shoots of green were beginning to show.

Adam rode easily, not pushing the gelding, letting him take his own time. The animal had grown soft from spending too much time in the stable and needed to be trail-hardened before Adam could expect any appreciable mileage out of him. Adam was prepared to be patient. There was no point in having the horse go lame and leave him afoot. He had dressed himself for comfort in the coat of his dark suit with a white, cotton shirt underneath and a pair of pants sewn for him by the tailor. Made of a twilled, black wool cloth with a fine, white stripe running through, they were cut loose in the seat for ease in the saddle and elegantly slim in the leg.

The Osage Plains of western Missouri were flat, prairie lands broken in places by low, rolling hills with wide, shallow valleys between. Here and there the gently undulating landscape was broken by vast stands of trees: ash and elm, bald cypress and flowering dogwood. The grasslands were stained by vast swathes of purple asters, each tiny flower with a bright yellow heart. Clumps of tall-flowered goldenrod glowed in the sunlight, and shy, violet faces peered from damp, shady spots in among the trees. Their fragrances enriched the air. The dome of the sky was a clear, cloudless blue that reached, unbroken, over all.

Adam was glad to be back in the saddle, to have a horse moving smoothly under him, the fresh air in his lungs and the sun beating down on his back. Living in town had its advantages; meals available on a frequent and regular basis, a soft bed to sleep in and the close company of fellow human beings. It was Adam’s opinion that they were all good things that a man could easily have too much of, and he’d about had a belly full. He found that, despite an initial stiffness in the small of his back, his fit body soon began to relax in the saddle and sway to the rhythm of the horse’s movements. His eyes refocused on the middle distance and scanned the far horizon.

Once beyond the city limits he encountered less than a dozen fellow travellers in the whole of the rest of the day, and none of them happened to be travelling in his direction. They passed each other with a nod, sometimes a word, and Adam touched his hat to the ladies. It was good to be away from people for a while, from the noise and the smell and the frantic pace of living. Adam allowed the peace of the wide-open spaces to re-enter his soul.

Around mid-afternoon he turned off the trail into a shallow vale where cottonwoods grew on the banks of a small, nameless river. Sweet stemmed grasses grew in profusion and willows bent low to trail supple branches in the water’s edge. The unfit gelding was stiffening and starting to blow, and Adam was unwilling to push him any further.

A bunch of white-tailed deer broke out of cover, leaping and bounding away down the valley. Adam watched them go. There was no point in bringing one down with the rifle – one whole animal would yield far more meat than he could eat and more than he could carry away. Instead, he made a fine meal of Jack Salmon, fished by hand from the deep-flowing stream. He wrapped the fish in a thick coating of mud and roasted it, stuffed with wild growing mint and garlic, in the ashes of his fire.

While he ate, finishing the meal with coffee and a handful of nuts from his saddlebags, he kept careful watch. This was the border country that lay on the line between Missouri and Kansas – the one, a slave-owning state, the other staunch abolitionist. It had long been a site of conflict and guerrilla activity. Adam had no desire to become involved in any ad hock skirmishes between the two sides. As the evening grew darker and cooler, he began to relax. He was totally alone in the vast open landscape; the land lay peaceful under the sky.

With the black gelding hobbled in the long grass to graze and the fire banked against the night, Adam lay on his backs with his head cradled in the bow of his upturned saddle and contemplated the slow and stately wheel of the stars. He thought about home: the land and the people that he loved, and then his mind turned, wistfully, to far away places. Eventually, he pulled his blanket up around his shoulders, turned onto his side and slept.

Some time after midnight, he awoke with a start. For a moment he thought that someone had shouted his name. His body was soaked in a cold, clammy sweat. He been dreaming, once more, of that sunlit street in Virginia City when one life had ended and another had changed, perhaps forever. The night was chilly and velvet dark; a crescent moon lingered above the western horizon. Adam listened to the silence. He heard only the breeze that moved among the cottonwoods, the soft flow of dark water and the fidgety shift of the horse. A stone, overlooked when he’d laid down his groundsheet, had insinuated itself under his shoulder blade and was digging a small hole in his back. He was going to have a bruise in the morning He wriggled around for a while, trying to get comfortable and, finally, got back to sleep.

The next time that Adam opened his eyes, a broad band of silver light bridged the eastern horizon. The approach of dawn had already driven the stars out of the sky. It was cold. A fine, grey mist filled the valley. The cottonwoods loomed in the first of the early light. Adam, well used to rising early, got up without any preamble and stretched. He flexed the stiff muscles that he knew, with work, would ease into suppleness and rubbed the sore spot on his shoulder. The breath steamed in front of his face. He kicked the embers of the fire back into life and fed it sticks, then put the coffeepot on to boil before he went to catch up with the horse.

By the time the sun was fully up and the sky had turned from silver to gold, he was back in the saddle. He had a fine breakfast under his belt: bread and bacon and coffee from his meagre supply. The horse was well rested and fed and moved more easily than he had the day before. Still drifting south, they began to make better time.

It was mid-afternoon and he had covered twenty miles when he came across the small homestead. It lay in a dip in the prairie, a pocket sheltered from the prevailing wind by bitter-nut hickory, silver-leafed maple and hawthorn trees. A well-built barn stood foursquare in front of the yard. Two cows were penned alongside, and a stretch of broken fence line suggested a road that led nowhere. The house huddled close to the trees: a simple, single storey structure with a porch and a stoop and a sharply angled roof. A line of washed clothing hung to one side, supported by a crazily leaning clothes post. A single thread of smoke drifted from the smoke hole – sure evidence of occupation.

Adam rode into the yard. The gelding was starting to tire again, and Adam knew he would soon have to stop. He was rather hoping for a bed for the night and a stable for the horse. The sky, a vivid blue in the earlier part of the day, had taken on a hard, brassy glare. Although there was no breath of wind, he feared a storm might be brewing.

Brown chickens scattered, squawking, from in front of the horse’s feet. The gelding shied and snorted. Adam raised his voice and hailed the house. “Hello! Anyone home?”

The chickens settled and went back to their scratching. The door of the house remained closed but Adam saw a flicker of movement in the window alongside. He shouted again, “Hello the house!”

The door opened, just a few inches at first: a wide enough gap for someone to peer out from inside. Then it swung wide and a woman came out onto the porch. No longer young, but not yet old, she might once have been pretty. Her face, both tanned and reddened by exposure to sun and to wind, was tired and careworn. Fine lines gathered about her eyes, and her thin lips were pinched together.

The long skirted, grey green dress that she wore had seen better days. In her hands she carried a long gun. She looked like she knew how to use it. From where he sat on the back of the gelding Adam recognized the unmistakable lines of an old, muzzle-loading Henry. The woman had just one shot, but the ball would pack enough punch to put a hole right through him. I was pointed right at his chest.

“What d’you want, Mister?”

“Ma’am.” Politely, Adam raised a hand to the brim of his hat. “Is your husband home?”

The woman’s mouth pinched even tighter. “He’s about here someplace.” The maw of the Henry didn’t waver. The woman’s face was set hard into lines of determination.

Sensing Adam’s unease, the gelding began to fiddle his feet, dancing in the dust of the yard. Adam tightened the reins. Turning in the saddle, he looked the place over. The barn had been painted recently, but the house had not. The pump in the yard was greased and in good order, but the stack of firewood alongside the house was almost used up. There was no sign of a saddle horse anywhere about. There was a man about the place all right, but not within earshot, and he hadn’t been there for a while.

He straightened himself. With the Henry pointed right at him, he wasn’t about to call the woman a liar. “I’d be rightly obliged if you’d call your man for me, Ma’am.”

The woman looked nonplussed. “Why’d you want ta see him?”

“I was hoping to stay here the night.” Adam was honest. “My horse is tired, and it looks like there’s going to be a storm.”

The Henry lowered very slightly. The woman looked at him over the barrel instead of along it. They both knew the unwritten rule of the west: to turn away any man in need of a meal and a bed was considered uncivil in the extreme - almost a crime.

On the other side of that self-same coin, no gentleman would ever compromise a lady who happened to find herself alone. Adam was prepared to move on. He touched the brim of his hat again. “Ma’am, if I might be allowed to water my horse, then I’ll be moving along.”

The woman lowered the rifle still further. Rightly, she remained uncertain of him and of his intentions. “I guess there’s no harm in that,” she said warily. “You c’n step down and water your horse. Trough’s over there; water’s free.”

Grateful for that concession at least, Adam swung out of the saddle and led the gelding across the yard. The horse was thirsty; he buried his muzzle deep in the water and Adam pumped for a fresh supply. He took of his hat and used the cold water to cool his face and his neck. He was aware of the woman watching him; her eyes never left his back. She came closer, still careful. She looked at the sky.

“Reckon you might be right about that storm,” she suggested.

Adam said nothing. He completed his ablutions by swilling his mouth out with water and spitting it into the dirt. Wearing a friendly face, he waited for her to continue.

“Don’t seem right ta turn you away,” she said finally. “Could be a dry storm – ain’t fit for a man ta sleep out in.” Pausing again, she searched his face. “You could eat in the house an’ sleep in the barn, if it suits you.”

Adam smiled and dispelled the last of her doubts. “That would suit me fine, Ma’am. My name’s Adam Cartwright.” He held out his hand, and, after a moment, she loosed her grip on the Henry long enough to take it.

“I’m Mrs John Hillier. Maudie Hillier. My husband owns this place.”

“Ma’am.” Adam nodded gravely. He went to the side of the horse. Cottontail rabbits abounded on the prairie, and he had taken a pair for his supper; they were strung by a string from his saddle horn. Unhitching them, he handed them over. “D’you reckon you could stretch these out and make enough for two?”

A faint light replaced the watchful deadness in Maudie Hillier’s eyes. They were blue, Adam noticed, the pale, clear blue of an early summer sky. “Reckon I could, if you don’t mind rabbit stew.”

“Rabbit stew would be fine.”

Adam picked up the reins and led the weary gelding into the barn. Maudie Hillier watched him go. Holding the heavy Henry with just one hand, she lifted the other to pat the fine strands of her hair.

With his horse watered and bedded down in the otherwise empty barn, Adam set about making himself useful. Unbidden, he found a whetstone and a long-handled axe and assiduously applied one to the other. Once satisfied with the edge on the blade, he sought out the woodpile behind the house and went to work.

It was hard, hot labour. Adam enjoyed the surge of his muscles and the burn of his hands. Soon he was sweating as his heart rate and his breathing increased, driving the powerhouse of his body as steam drives an engine. Before very long his shirt joined his jacket, hung from a nearby snag. Perspiration dripped from his face and wended its way in rivulets through the dense, dark fur on his chest.

An hour passed, and the best part of another before Maudie Hillier came to the corner of the house. “It’s supper time, Mister Cartwright, if you’d care to come into the house.”

She’d done something to her appearance. She had tidied her hair and changed her dress for another, a pink one, doubtless the only other that she possessed and the one that she saved for Sundays. Here face looked softer, younger, with a touch of corn flour taking the shine off her nose. Adam buried the blade of the axe in the top of the chopping block and wiped his forearm across his face. He was slightly breathless from his exertions and faintly embarrassed at appearing partially unclothed in front of a lady – even a married lady –although she didn’t seem at all disconcerted by the state of his undress.

He gave her a smile. “That’s mighty kind of you, Ma’am. I’ll just wash up.”

Adam went to the pump and worked the handle and doused his head beneath the flow of cold water. Then, he rinsed the sweat from his chest and shoulders with his hands. The water beaded in the crisp, dark curls and made him shiver with the sensations of being alive. He dried himself on a scrap of towelling and studied his surroundings again. The farmstead was isolated in the midst of the prairie: a tiny ship tossed in an ocean of grass. For all he could see, the world started and ended within a few yards of the trees and the broken down fence. All the human life it possessed was himself and the woman, Maudie Hillier.

Adam shrugged into the shirt and started work on the buttons. The sky had darkened with the onset of evening and still threatened violence. He could smell the gathering storm: hot and dusty and dry. He could feel the crawl of it over his skin.

It didn’t seem right, he reflected, that a woman should be left along and unprotected. Whatever had called her husband away from home had been, he didn’t doubt, unavoidable, but her state of isolation concerned him. It couldn’t be easy for her, out here in the wilds on her own, but he knew it was none of his business.

His thoughts were interrupted by a rumble of thunder, followed immediately by a vivid, blue flash that dazzled the eyes and the sharp crack of an electrical discharge close at hand. Adam snatched up his coat and sprinted for the house. It was not good thinking to be caught out in the open.

The rabbit stew was cooked to perfection; the meat was so tender it fell off the bones. The gravy was rich with fat and flavoured with onions and turnips and sprigs of wild rosemary. Maudie served him up a huge portion in a blue china bowl. With it were pancakes and, to follow, hot biscuits with freshly churned butter and a sweet preserve.

Maudie sat and watched him eat with hungry, anxious eyes. She ate her own meal with scarcely a glance at what her spoon contained. For a time, the room, furnished simply in the chunky, homespun style of the frontier was filled only with mellow lamplight and the aromas of food and coffee, the comfortable sounds of eating – the chink of spoons on china – and the continuing rumble of the storm outside. Finally, filled to capacity, Adam sat back in his chair and stretched his long legs out under the table. He didn’t quite pat his full belly, that wouldn’t have been polite, but the thought was there. “That was a fine meal, Mrs. Hillier.”

“It’s nice of you to say so.” Maudie fussed about gathering the dirty china and stacking it in the sink, and Adam sat and watched her. She returned to the table with the topped-up coffeepot. Adam had never been known to refuse an extra cup after eating; he wasn’t about to start now. He held out his cup for a refill. Maudie chatted on, “It’s a pleasure to cook for a man who appreciates his food. John tells me I’m the finest cook in the whole of western Missouri!” She said it brightly, but her quick, tense movements belied the lightness of her tone.

Adam’s eyes twinkled over the rim of the cup. “I’m sure he’s not wrong.”

Maudie bustled about clearing the rest of the table and putting the room in order. “John will be home any minute. He likes to find the place tidy.”

Adam put his cup down carefully in its saucer and cocked a quizzical eyebrow. Whatever the woman might choose to think, her husband wouldn’t be home before morning. Only a fool or a man driven by desperation would ride the range in a dry, electrical storm. He said, “You must find it very lonely out here on your own.”

“On my own?” Maudie stopped still and stared at him. It was as if the thought were new to her. From outside came a ferocious crack of thunder that made her jump. She wrapped her arms around herself in defence. “I’m not on my own. Most of the time, John is right here with me.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Adam sucked in a breath. The situation was becoming uncomfortable.

“John drives me to town every month without fail,” Maudie went on anxiously, “and I have lots of friends! People call by here all the time!”

Adam climbed to his feet. He could sense the way the conversation was going. “I’m sure that they do, Mrs. Hillier.” He reached for his hat.

Maudie patted her hair into place. She straightened her back and lifted her chin. “John says I’m the prettiest woman about these parts. I used to be pretty. Do you think I’m pretty, Mister Cartwright?” She shifted her hips suggestively.

The thunder rumbled again. Adam, his hand on the door latch, considered his options. He could see the need and the longing plain in the woman’s eyes. It was an open invitation. He found himself in a compromising situation, alone in another man’s house with another man’s wife. He took the easy way out and nodded politely. “You’re a fine, handsome woman, Mrs. Hillier,” he said with complete honesty. “I’ll wish you goodnight.”

The night was not dark nor was it quiet. Lightening danced in the overcast sky and lit up the landscape. The rumble of thunder was continuous, both near and far away, and an occasional, startling crack. A hot, dry wind blew over the prairie. Holding on to his hat, Adam dashed for the barn. It was in the forefront of his mind to saddle the gelding and put some ground underneath him, but experience and common sense argued strongly against him. A man in the saddle was a prime target for a lightening strike. Instead, he unrolled his blanket and made up a bed in the straw.

Sleep was a long time in coming. The wind and the thunder and the flashes of lightening conspired with an uneasy mind to keep him awake. He lay for a while with his head on his elbow while he watched the storm through the open barn door and wondered what it was that could be so all-fired important that a man would leave his wife all alone. He supposed he would never know.

Around eleven, he closed his eyes and dozed, only to wake with a start an hour later. The gelding was shifting uneasily in the stall next door, and instinct told Adam that they were not alone. Even before he was fully alert, his hand slid to the butt of the Colt where it lay in the holster beside him. He cracked open his eyes and peered through the lashes. The storm still raged, but further away now, off in the distance, a far-off grumbling of thunder. A flash lit up the sky and silhouetted the figure that stood in the doorway. Maudie Hillier, dressed in her nightgown and with her pale hair flying in the wind, had her back to the light. Her face and the expression she wore were barely visible, but Adam knew that she looked at him with a deep and hungry yearning. He knew that it would be best for both of them if he pretended to be asleep. He kept his breathing slow and even and closed his eyes. When he looked again, a few minutes later, the woman had gone. By the time the sun crept over the horizon next morning, Adam had long since saddled the gelding and ridden away.

The town didn’t warrant a name. A place, merely, where four trails came together, it was known, by those who lived there and those who dwelt round about, simply as ‘The Crossings’. A cluster of buildings had grown up piecemeal about the crossroads. There was no bank, no hotel and no Post Office. A barn-like stable, a blacksmith’s shop and wagon menders, several stores of different varieties and the inevitable saloon – this one called ‘The Wagon Wheel’ – two neat houses and a collection of shacks and shanties lined the right-angled streets. One entire corner was occupied by a corn exchange run by the local farmers and a trading centre. The streets were busy. A queue of wagons lined one side waiting their turns, and any number of saddle horses stood at the rails.

Sweaty, unshaven and very grimy after a week in the saddle, Adam had only two things in mind, getting the gelding out from between his knees, and finding a drink to cut through the thick coating of dust that lined his throat.

Stepping down from the saddle outside the saloon, he wound the gelding’s reins around the hitching rail and stretched the innumerable kinks out of his back. He paid the drinking establishment the brief courtesy of knocking some of the dust out of his clothing before he stepped inside.

It was just turned mid-morning by the face of the battle-scarred, brass-pendulum clock that hung on the barroom wall. The saloon was open for business; its resident customers were already firmly installed in their accustomed places. A game of poker that had about it an air of long-standing permanence was being played out in a quiet and business-like manner in a cubby to one side of the bar. Two bearded old-timers sat at a favoured table with two half finished beers and a game of dominoes set up between them and argued in a resolute manner about the turn of a tile. From the tone of their voices Adam got the impression that the argument, if not the game, would go one forever – or until one of the old men died.

A couple of cowboys and three farmers sat drinking at separate tables. Their voices were low and they eyed each other with the usual degree of suspicion. The rivalry between the two walks of life was not to be resolved within Adam’s lifetime. An unkempt individual held up one end of the bar. Adam had seen the likes of him in every town he had ever been in. He didn’t have to get close enough to smell the stains on his shirtfront or the reek of stale liquor on his breath to recognize the local town drunk. A lanky boy of about seventeen pushed dirt in front of a broom. The eyes he lifted to stare at Adam were pale and vague. A dark-haired bartender with expressive, brown eyes and a large, black moustache wiped glasses behind the bar. Still brushing off dust, Adam gave him a nod of greeting and crossed the room to the bar. He held up two fingers in the universally understood request. The barman produced a glass and a bottle and poured out the required two fingers of good, rye whiskey, and Adam swallowed it down.

The raw liquor scorched its way through the slime on his throat all the way down to his belly. The pain of it stole his breath away. He pursed his lips in appreciation and pulled in air. The bartender looked at him with some degree of sympathy. Adam fished for a coin and nodded “Hit me again.”

The barman obliged. Adam sipped the second drink more slowly. The liquor burned somewhere under his ribs. The barman put the stopper back in the bottle but left it on the top of the bar. “Passin’ through?” he asked, by way of general conversation.

“Passing through,” Adam agreed. Both of them knew that there wasn’t much in ‘The Crossings’ for a man to linger for. “I’m looking for some information. Perhaps you could point me towards the sheriff’s office?”

“We ain’t got no sheriff here.” The barman chuckled. “Ain’t enough of us to cause that much trouble.”

Adam sighed. He turned the glass in his fingers and watched the swirl of the amber liquid. The bartender studied his face. “You want some information, stranger, you’ve come to the best place there is. I know all the folk around these parts and most of what goes on. Why don’t you try askin’?”

Adam grinned wryly, the smile cracking the mask of dirt on his face. “Why don’t I try that? I’m asking after a man named Harbinger.”

“Harbinger?” The barman’s eyes shifted sideways.

Adam listened to the noises in the room. He heard the steady flick of pasteboards and the low murmur of conversation from the table at the back, the click of dominoes and the ongoing rumble of disagreement and the steady tick of the clock. The sound of sweeping faltered. He watched the barman’s careful expression.

“Harbinger used to come this way every once in a while – passin’ through,” the barman said. “I haven’t seen him now for two – three years. Don’t know where he went.”

Adam told it simply. “Harbinger was a gunslinger. Someone hired him to kill me. I’m trying to find out who.” The room was silent now - except for the tick of the clock.

The bartender uncorked the bottle and filled up Adam’s glass. “Since you’re here, and Harbinger isn’t, I’m assuming he’s dead.”

Adam sipped the whiskey and savoured its flavour. “That’s a fair assumption.”

Pulling a face, the bartender inquired, quietly, “Fair fight?”

“It was fair. He drew first. Any idea who might have hired him?” Adam was clutching at straws, and he knew it.

“Don’t reckon.” The bartender shook his head. He picked up a cloth and methodically wiped down the bar “Ain’t no one ‘round here would have hired him. Ain’t no one ‘round here got that sort of money, lessen you count old man McPherson.”

“McPherson?” Adam searched his memory. He couldn’t recall ever hearing the name before.

“Scotsman – owns a big spread south and east of here,” supplied the barman helpfully. “Never do see the man in here. He don’t drink and don’t employ any man who drinks neither.”

Adam smiled. “Must make hired help pretty hard to come by.”

“Reckon it does.”

Sighing inwardly, Adam turned and surveyed the room. The two old men had started another game, discussing each move with quiet ferocity. Their beer was almost gone. The poker game continued. The drunk moved along the bar and sidled up to Adam. He smelled just as bad as Adam had expected, reeking of stale, cheap liquor and vomit. He hissed into Adam’s ear, “Heard you askin’ ‘bout Harbinger, Mister. Me ‘n’ him was real’ good friends in the old days. I c’n tell you all ‘bout him iffen you’ll buy me a bottle.” He gazed at Adam with hopeful, bright eyes.

Adam waved the fumes away from his face. He gestured to the bartender. “Give him a drink.”

He bartender gave the drunk a belligerent look. “He don’t know nothin’. Harbinger wouldn’t even buy him a drink.”

Adam was in a generous mood. “Give him one anyway.”

The barman fished a bottle of rot-gut from under the bar and sloshed some into a glass. The drunk pounced on it eagerly and swallowed it down. Adam noticed that his hand was shaking and thought, and not for the first time, that it was a sad way for a man to end up. He finished his own drink. The heat had spread out from his belly and filled him with a warm and comfortable glow. The bartender raised an eyebrow in unspoken question, and Adam shook his head. He was a man who knew when he’s had enough. A rumble from his stomach reminded him that he was hungry. Supper last night had been sparse and breakfast that morning, non-existent. “Have you got any food in the place?”

“Sure have.” The bartender put the bottles away, much to the drunk’s disgust. “Got us a cook ta cook it as well. Take yourself a seat, Mister, and I’ll see what we can rustle up. I’ll get the boy to water your horse. Danny!”

“Tell him the horse kicks,” Adam said absently.

“Danny!” The barman raised his voice to a bellow. No one responded. The barman swore. “Goddamn that idiot boy!”

Adam chuckled. “Not such a fool that he can’t get out of his work.” He indicated the abandoned broom that leaned against the wall with its head in a pile of dirt. Muttering dark thoughts, the barman took the order for breakfast to the cook. Adam selected a seat for himself with his back to the wall and settled down to wait.

The meal – of moist, pink ham and scrambled eggs together with cold corn bread – filled the uncomfortable void behind Adam’s belt and soaked up some of the rye. With his chair tipped back on its hind legs and his back against the wall, he took his time and savoured his third cup of coffee. The saloon was filling up, as mid-day approached, with cowboys and farmers in more or less equal parts. The two old-timers were on their second pints of beer, and the poker game broke up for lunch.

Adam went to the bar to settle his reckoning. The barman made change from a silver dollar. “What do you plan to do next?”

Adam didn’t mind telling him – asking questions and getting answers was the way the man retained his reputation as a mine of information. “I guess I’ll take a turn to the east and have a word with this McPherson. A tee-total Scotsman must be something to see.” He picked up his change.

The barman didn’t answer. Adam looked at his face. The man was looking beyond him with a strangely fixed expression. Adam realized that something was happening behind him. He turned his head to see for himself.

Two very young men had come through the bat-wing doors. One of them was the pale eyed youth who had swept the barroom floor. He gave a sideways glance at his companion and then gave Adam an accusing stare. He pointed a finger. “That’s the one what said it!”

The other young man, if shorter and broader, was of much the same tender years. He had mousy brown hair and a wisp of beard on a rounded face that could only be described as ordinary. He wore the homespun shirt, loose, canvas trousers and huge, leather boots that were the unofficial uniform of the farming community in these parts, and an ancient six-gun in a well-worn holster was tied down against his hip.

For a moment, in the doorway, he seemed to waver. Then he made up his mind about something and took two, long strides into the room. Fixed by his stare and faintly amused by the adult earnestness in his expression, Adam turned all the way ‘round to face him. “Is there something I can do for you, son?”

Breathing deep, the young man gathered his courage. He spoke up loudly in a voice that had not long broken and still held the echoes of a boyish treble. “I’ve come here ta kill you, Mister.”

They were classic words and they caused a classic disruption. Men scattered in all directions and tables cleared as farmers and cowboys alike got out of the way. Adam stared at the boy with something closely akin to disbelief. The faint smile was still on his lips and amusement sparkled in the depths of his tawny eyes. “Why would you want to do that?”

The barman peered ‘round Adam’s shoulder. “Billy Meyer, what you doin’ in here and why ‘re wearin’ you’re Papa’s gun?”

Billy Meyer grew red in the face. He wiped a sleeve over his mouth “I bin practicin’. I know how ta use it. I’m Goddamned good with it too!”

From the corner of his eye Adam saw the pale eyed youth, Danny, nodding with enthusiasm. His support gave Meyer encouragement. It seemed that the two were in deadly earnest. Adam’s amusement died. He spread his hands just a little. “Boy, I don’t know what this is all about…”

“I ain’t no boy, Mister, an’ I’ll tell you what it’s about!”

The boy – Adam could only think of him as such – was shouting, emboldened by the sound of his own loud voice. “Danny, here, tells me you killed Abediah Harbinger. Is that true?”

“That’s what he said!” Danny chimed in. His face was flushed with excitement. “That’s what he told us all!”

Adam thought of a few, choice remarks concerning big ears and big mouths and minding one’s own business but decided to save them. He gave Danny a look that said that he’s deal with him later. “It’s true,” he said quietly. “What’s it to you?”

Billy Meyer flexed his hands. He had adopted what was known as a gunman’s crouch: an uncomfortable position that thrust his head forward and threw him off balance. He looked almost comic, but nobody laughed. “Harbinger was a big man around here,” Meyer said loudly in his warbling voice. “Everyone showed him a lot of respect. When I kill you, folks are gonna respect me too!”

Adam still didn’t quite believe his ears. He’d never met this boy before in his life, and yet, here was another man who wanted him dead. How many more would there be before one of them succeeded and got what he yearned for. The same thought kept chasing its own tail inside Adam’s head: Billy Meyer didn’t even know his name! He kept his voice low and tightly controlled; “You don’t really want to do this, Billy.” He was aware that the bartender had sidled away to the end of the bar, well clear of any wild-flying lead.

Meyer’s face was pale and angry. “You don’t know what I want!” The boy was working himself into frenzy. “You don’t know anything about me!”

Adam could guess a great deal. He sucked in a breath. “I know that you’re very young…”

It wasn’t the right thing to say. The boy’s face changed. It hardened abruptly with relentless determination. His body gave a spasmodic jerk and he snatched at the butt of his father’s gun. Adam’s Colt .44 slid smoothly into his palm and he thumbed back the hammer. He sighted the boy’s chest along the gun barrel.

Meyer stood stock-still and stared at him. Now he was white faced and sweating as he looked his death in the eye. “Perhaps,” Adam suggested quietly, “you’d like to try that again?”

The hammer clicked loudly as he eased it down on the chamber, and he dropped the big Colt back into his holster. He stood relaxed and smiling slightly as he waited for the boy to make the next move. It was a hard, grim game that Adam was playing: one – that for both their sakes – he had to see through.

Meyer stood and stared at him. His face was slick with sweat. The only sounds in the room were the rasp of his breathing and the measured tick of that clock. Adam saw him make up his mind in the same instant that he did it. The .44 leapt into his hand before the boy could move more than an inch.

Meyer’s round, white face was agape. Adam could see him trembling, and, from all the way across the room, he could smell his fear. Adam said, slowly and distinctly so that everyone could hear, “The next time, I shall take that gun away from you and spank you with it.”

Meyer’s mouth worked. His hands flapped at his sides. He took two steps backwards and came up against the bat-wing doors. His face became stricken. Adam thought he was going to cry. Meyer took one last long look at Adam’s face, turned on his heel and fled.

The whole room breathed a collective sigh of relief – then broke into a frantic buzz of low conversation. More than a few anxious glances came Adam’s way. Adam eased back the hammer and holstered the Colt. The breath gusted out of him. The bartender reappeared at his shoulder complete with bottle and glass. “You look like you need a drink, Mister. This one’s on the house.”

Adam had to admit it was what he could do with. He picked up the drink and swallowed it down. The barman poured him a refill. He gazed at Adam with bright, shining eyes. “I don’t know who I hell you are, but that’s the fastest draw I ever did see!”

With his blood still running rich with adrenaline and singing in his ears, Adam responded sharply. “I just hope that boy’s learned a lesson,” he said gruffly. “Or one day, someone will have to kill him.”

Adam walked out to his horse. The gelding stood, hip-shot and unfriendly, at the rail where Adam had left him. He rolled his eye in Adam’s direction and tried to hook his leg with a sharp edged hoof. All Adam’s emotions had coalesced into anger. He was mad at the boy and mad at the horse, and, for no reason he could properly account for, he didn’t like himself very much either. He was in no mood for playing games with a recalcitrant animal. Right there and then, all he wanted to do was to get in the saddle and ride away - to forget that a place called ‘The Crossings’ and all its inhabitants even existed. He gave the gelding a sharp jerk on the reins and reached for the stirrup.

“Hey, Mister.” It was the voice of a full-grown man and it came from behind him. With both hands on the saddle-horn, preparing to mount, Adam froze in position. The sweat broke out on his skin and his belly tightened. Was this yet another stranger wanting to make a name for himself? Very slowly, he unwound himself and turned.

The man behind him was tall and wide with a heavily muscled body. He had grey hair and a heavy, work-worn face. He didn’t look to Adam as the sort that would fancy himself as a gunman. The homespun and the dirt underneath his nails marked him out for what he really was as surely as if he’d been branded: he was a farmer through and through. Adam realized, belatedly, that he wasn’t wearing a gun.

Adam eyed him warily and tried to relax “What can I do for you?”

The farmer stuck out a paw-like hand. “I don’t know who you are, an’ I guess I don’t really want to. My name’s Bill Meyer. I heard what happened in the saloon just then, and I want to thank you for not shooting my son.” The farmer shook his head sadly. “I don’t know what’s to become of that boy, but his Ma ain’t well right now, an’ anythin’ happen ta Billy, I reckon the shock would kill her.”

Adam shook the farmer’s hand and watched him walk away. Then he heaved a big breath and let go of the anger.

Henry Ian McPherson’s star-bright eyes gazed at Adam from beneath the fierce jut of his eyebrows. “Harbinger, you say? Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of anybody with such a name. Never met with anyone with the name of Cartwright either, for that matter.”

Adam sucked at his lip. His long ride to McPherson’s ranch had proved fruitless, another dead end. It was a thing he didn’t regret one bit. He had liked McPherson from the moment they’d met. The Scot was neither dour nor wiry as he had imagined. He was honest and forthright and possessed of a boundless energy and a wry sense of humour. His love for his adoptive land was without question: it shone like sunlight out of his face. Physically, he was not very tall. He was wide in the shoulder and deep in the chest. The skin of his cheerful, rounded face was fine textured and fair, burned to a state of constant redness by exposure to the sun. His mass of shining, white curls had once been a fiery red.

“I don’t understand,” McPherson was saying, “why one man should put a death wish on another.”

“Neither do I, Mister McPherson.” Adam couldn’t explain it; he didn’t understand it himself.

“I’m sorry you had to kill the man, Mister Cartwright. As sorry as I can be.”

McPherson put a kindly hand on Adam’s shoulder. Once more, Adam heard the roar of the Colt in his head, smelled the burned powder and the dusty sunlight and the hot stink of the blood. McPherson’s hand fell away. “It can be a hard country,” the Scotsman said. “But it’s a beautiful one as well.”

Adam lifted his head and looked. It might not be the sharp edged peaks and towering forests of home that he saw, but the green and gold of the rolling Missouri landscape, and the rising hills in the purple distance, blue against the greyer blue of the sky, had a wild and magical beauty all of their own.

“A God given country,” McPherson said.

Adam heard an echo in the back of his brain. Other words spoken a long time ago. “You sound just like my father.” A slight smile came to his face.

“A God fearing man?”

“Indeed.”

McPherson slapped Adam on the back. “Then his son is welcome under my roof. We’ll find a room for you up at the house, and you’ll eat with the family tonight. First of all, let me show you around.”

McPherson was lame – he walked with a stick – and so they made a slow and stately tour of the barns and the stables and the outlying corrals. McPherson ran a strain of longhaired, highland cattle on his high, plateau rangeland. They were hardy beasts that thrived on the thin air and withstood the severity of the winters well. McPherson was proud of them, justifiably so, and of the fine horses he raised as a sideline. Mostly bays and blacks with an occasional grey, they had intelligent heads, powerful shoulders and quarters and long, strong legs. Adam had to admit to being impressed.

McPherson introduced him to most of the hands. They were the usual mixture of men; about a third of them were Negroes, and there were two Mexicans whom the others called ‘greasers’. McPherson treated them all with a cheerful even handedness.

The McPherson home was a fine, white painted house that stood on a hill and presided regally over the ordered sprawl of fences and barns and outbuildings. It had high, pointed eaves and neat, green shutters at all the windows and a small, carefully tended garden of roses planted in front of the door. Mrs. McPherson was a small, brisk woman with eyes as bright as her husband’s. She welcomed Adam into her home as if he were one of her own. Before he knew it, he found himself installed in a pleasant room on the upper storey with a window facing south. He was provided with clean towels and lots of hot water and a set of borrowed clothes while his own were whisked away to the laundry.

The entire McPherson family gathered at the table for dinner. There were three redheaded sons and two fiery daughters ranging in age from fifteen to thirty. Adam liked all of them. McPherson said grace – a rather more protracted affair than that which Adam was used to – calling down the blessings of the Lord on the family and their household and all their employees and even the beasts in the field. Adam received a special mention as an honoured guest. Then they were served a splendid meal of roast, Angus beef and vegetables from the garden. The family were strict Presbyterians and there was no wine at the table, but there was crystal-clear water to drink with the food and lots of hot coffee to follow. Adam was more than content. Afterwards, they spent the evening in conversation, and listened as the McPherson daughters played duets on the grand piano in the velvet draped parlour. That night, Adam slept well in a fine, feather bed.

Nightingale Springs was a town more worthy of the title than ‘The Crossings’ would ever be. Clustered about the water-source that gave it its name and provided it with life giving sustenance, the town was laid out in an orderly fashion. Instead of having grown,

amoeba-like, a blot on the landscape, the streets formed a rectangular grid-work that appealed to the engineer in Adam’s soul.

It was already afternoon and the town sweltered in the heat. It lay beneath a shroud of fine dust kicked up by five hundred horses and a hundred wagon wheels. Adam walked the gelding along the principal street. He was tired, bone weary and saddle sore after long days of riding and many nights spent sleeping on the unyielding ground. As he rode, his eyes picked out the primary places of interest – from his point of view: the bathhouse, the hotel and a prosperous looking saloon. But before he could tend to his creature comforts, he had other things on his mind. He stopped to ask directions from two men loading a wagon and then rode on to the low, wooden building that bore the painted sign ‘Sheriff’s Office and Gaol’.

He necked reined the gelding ‘round to the rail and climbed stiffly out of the saddle. Fists pressed hard in the small of his back, he stretched the ache in his shoulders. The gelding, trail-hardened now, lean and strong and as tough as an old leather boot, lifted a threatening hoof.

A long, grey animal lay on the boardwalk, sprawled in the only available patch of shade. It looked more like a wolf than a dog. Adam stepped carefully over its tail and banged on the office door.

The sheriff was a middle-aged man with a horizontally folded face and arched black eyebrows that gave him a look of constant surprise. There was a battered and stained grey-felt hat permanently affixed to his head; leastwise, Adam never saw him without it. He got out from behind his huge cluttered desk just long enough to shake Adam’s hand.

He gestured Adam into a chair and introduced himself, “Albert Morrison: sheriff around these parts. What can I do for you, Cartwright?”

In the stifling heat of the sheriff’s office, Adam told his story again. Morrison gave him the courtesy of hearing him out, but his expression darkened at the mention of Harbinger’s name and became even darker as the telling progressed.

“Is there anyone you can think of that might have hired Harbinger?” Adam concluded in the usual way.

Morrison gave the expected response, “No one around these parts. Folks are too tied up in their own affairs, tryin’ ta scrape a living. They don’t worry too much what goes on in a far-away place like Nevada. That’s one hell’ve a long way from here, Cartwright.”

Adam didn’t need telling. “Did he have any friends around town? Anyone he might have talked to?”

With steepled fingers, Morrison sat back in his chair. He considered Adam’s face. “Seems to me he was friendly enough with one of the women down at the Silver Slipper saloon. In fact, they were mighty sweet on each other for a while. Looked like he might even settle down.”

Adam was all attention. He felt vaguely sick with excitement. It was the first indication he had come across of any attachment Harbinger might have made. “Would you mind telling me the lady’s name?”

“Just you hold on a bit and let me tell you what happened.”

It was hard to contain his impatience. “So what did happen?”

“Well now, I’ll tell you. One night, Harbinger got in a fight with a couple of local men. Killed ‘em both. Shot ‘em right out there in the street.” Morrison scowled at his hands, then looked up again into Adam’s face. “It was a fair fight, as far as it goes. Except that Harbinger was a gunman, an’ the boys he shot were just that – boys.”

Adam figured he hadn’t yet heard the whole of it. “And then?”

Morrison shifted around in his seat. “I don’t hold with that sort of thing in my town. I ordered Harbinger out of town, and I told him not to come back.”

Adam said, “I’d still like to talk to the lady.”

Morrison sat all the way forward and leaned on the desk. “You don’t get it, do you, Cartwright? I don’t like gunfighters in my town. You say you killed Harbinger, an’ I’m prepared to believe you. In my book, that makes you just the same as he was. Trouble follows your kind about. I want you out of my town.”

In the overheated quiet that filled the room, Adam drew a long breath. He was dirty and hungry and so tired that he could feel the gritty pull of sleep on his eyelids. He let the breath go. “Look sheriff, I’m not a gunfighter. I don’t mean to start any trouble. All I want is a meal and a bath and a bed for the night and a chance to talk to the lady.” He thought it sounded perfectly reasonable. Morrison didn’t agree.

The sheriff’s expression hardened. “You look, Cartwright. I want you to get on your horse right now and ride on through. No ifs, buts or maybes.”

Abruptly, Adam got to his feet. All of a sudden he had run out of patience. This was as

close as he had come to obtaining any meaningful information about Harbinger and his movements, and no hard headed, small town lawman was going to get in his way. “I’ll leave alright, Morrison,” he said shortly, not bothering to disguise the edge in his voice. “Just as soon as I’m good and ready. And that won’t be until I’ve spoken to the lady.” He turned on his heel and took the two, long strides to the door.

“Cartwright!” Morrison’s voice cut through the fog of anger that clouded his brain. His hand on the doorknob, Adam looked back at him; his eyes were dark with resentment. Morrison stood up slowly, unfolding himself out of the chair. “In half an hour, I’m going to come looking for you. That’s just enough time to water your horse. You make sure you’re not around to be found.”

Adam’s eyes spat venom. He went through the door with enough force to leave it swinging wildly on its hinges, narrowly avoided tripping over the dog and swung himself into the saddle on the black gelding’s back. The animal snorted in protest as Adam pulled his head round sharply and dug in his heels.

Adam Cartwright was a law-abiding man; it was the way his father had raised him. He had learned from a very young age to respect any man who wore a badge on the front of his vest. Old Ben had also taught him to think for himself and to do, always, those things that he honestly believed to be right. And Adam had learned for himself, as the years had gone by, that not every man who wore a silver star was a paragon of virtue – or intelligent – or was even right all of the time. Besides, he had half an hour. He kicked the horse into a canter and rode back to the saloon he had taken note of earlier.

The Silver Slipper saloon was just starting to get busy. There was a long row of horses tied up outside. Adam added the gelding to the end of the line and made his way inside. The pain in his back was aggravating his old hip injury and made him walk with a limp.

Men already stood hip to hip at the bar. Adam had to push his way in and await his turn. The bartender was working alone, and he was working his butt off. Harassed, he finally came Adam’s way. “What’ll it be, cowboy?”

“Whiskey,” Adam said, “and I need to talk to the woman who used to know Abediah Harbinger.”

The barman looked at him sharply, but he was too busy to argue. “That’ll by Sylvie: the blonde over there. It’ll cost you a bottle to sit with the lady.” He put the requisite item up on the bar, and Adam pulled out the coins to pay for it. With the bottle held by the neck and two shot glasses in his other hand, he turned to look the room over.

Sylvie was the only blonde there was, which, from Adam’s point of view, was fortunate. Somewhere on the wrong side of thirty-five, she had a hard, angular face and the eyes of a woman who had seen everything there was to be seen at least twice. In a bright, red-satin dress, she sat at a table in front of the window with one knee crossed over the other and a bored expression. The red dress revealed her pale arms and a great deal of very white bosom. Adam carried the bottle over.

“May I join you?”

Coolly, the woman looked him up and down. He face gave no indication of what she thought. “You bought the bottle, cowboy.” She uncrossed her legs and prepared to pay attention.

Adam hooked out a chair with his foot and sat down. He poured two generous drinks. “I’d like to ask you some questions.”

“I’m paid to drink with you,” she said shortly, “and to listen, if you want to tell me you life’s story. I’m not paid to tell you anything.”

Adam stacked five silver dollars on the table. “I want you ask you about Abediah Harbinger.”

The woman’s hand froze with the glass carried half way to her lips. Very carefully, she put the drink down again. Her narrow face was suspicious. “What makes you think I ever heard of anybody by that name?”

Adam sat back with an air of studied nonchalance and gazed at her over the rim of his glass. “The sheriff thinks that you do, and so does the barman.”

The woman, Sylvie, sighed. “I wish some damned people would mind their own damned business,” she said without passion, and tossed back the drink in a single swallow. Adam poured her another.

“Did you know him?”

Sylvie picked up the coins and let them drop back through her fingers onto the table. They made soft, ringing sounds as they chinked one against another. “I knew a man by that name once.” Her voice was lifeless and dull. “The good sheriff ran him out of town. He said he loved me; he said he’d come back – but he never did.” Her hard eyes fastened on Adam’s face. “He send you with some sort of message?”

Adam took a deep breath. “Harbinger’s dead.”

A muscle jumped sharply alongside the woman’s jaw. She searched Adam’s expression, then dropped her gaze to the glass on the table and watched as her fingers turned it around and around, endlessly… “That’s about what I figured,” she said at last. “Was it a gunfight?”

Adam nodded. “I’m trying to trace someone who might have hired him. Did you know anything about his business interests?”

“He never told me anything.” The woman’s eyes stayed fixed on the glass, turning, turning… “Not even about his other woman.”

Adam swilled whiskey around inside his mouth before he swallowed it down. He raised a politely inquiring eyebrow that disguised the turmoil of excitement that he felt inside. Now it looked like he might really get somewhere. “Other woman?”

Sylvie drank down the warming whiskey and reached for the bottle. “He never knew that I knew anything about her. I wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t looked in his pant’s pocket for the price of a drink and found her letter.”

Adam concentrated his attention on his own hands as he refilled his glass. “Do you remember anything about this letter? The woman’s name? The return address?”

Sylvie’s eyes flashed as she shot him a glance. “Her name was Ruby Pollard.” She reached for the bottle again. “The address was someplace in St. Louis. Why’re you askin’ me all these dumb questions, cowboy? Why’d you wanna know?”

Adam was still trying to think of a safe answer when a dark shape loomed over the table. It was Albert Morrison. The sheriff had his huge, grey hound trailing at his heels and a rifle in his hands. The long gun’s muzzle was pointed right at Adam’s gut.

“I told you to get out of town, Cartwright.” His voice was shaded by cold, hard anger.

Adam put down his glass with deliberate care and gathered his legs under him, rising gracefully to his feet. He held his right hand out wide, well away from the Colt on his hip. “I’m going, sheriff – right now!” He started to edge for the door. The grey dog snarled a warning and the hackles started to rise on its neck. Adam found himself sharing his attention between the man and the dog.

“I won’t have gunfighters in my town,” Morrison rumbled, echoing the threat. If you ain’t on that horse and ridin’ in thirty seconds flat, you’ll spend the next thirty days in my gaol, unless I decide ta shoot you…”

Adam didn’t waste any more time. He remembered enough of his manners to touch his hat to the lady, then got on his horse and rode out of town. His abiding memories of Nightingale Springs were the woman’s haunted, empty eyes and her despairing voice, “He said that he loved me…”

He was five miles out of town and looking for somewhere to stop for the night when he saw two horsemen riding towards him out of the gloom. He couldn’t see their faces – they had their backs to the fading sunset – but he recognised the horses they rode. They were two of Henry McPherson’s prized stock. It occurred to Adam to wonder what they were doing so many miles from home.

He collected the gelding’s reins, preparing to ride on by with no more than a polite nod of acknowledgement to fellow travellers on the trail. The two horsemen separated, each pulling his horse to one side of the trail. It was an unusual manoeuvre and one that gave Adam pause for thought. Still, there was room left for him to ride the gelding in between them. He nudged the horse on with his heels and gave him an encouraging click with his tongue.

The black horse didn’t like it. He didn’t like the creeping shadows or the cooling wind that blew off the prairie and chilled the sweat on his skin. He didn’t like the smell of the strange horses coming towards him, their iron-shod hooves striking sparks from the stones in the trail. Most of all, he didn’t like the sudden tension that communicated itself directly from the man in the saddle. The gelding laid back his ears and began to fight the bridle.

Adam’s knees clamped tight on the fidgety animal’s barrel, but controlling the horse was instinctive to a natural born horseman and that simple matter was the furthest of all from his mind. The men in front of him, one on either side of the road, had pulled up their horses and were sitting waiting for him. Now that he was closer, Adam could recognize their faces; they were two of the ranch hands he had met, briefly, at McPherson’s spread. Adam remembered thinking then that he hadn’t much liked the look of them. What he saw now wasn’t inclined to change his opinion. He tightened the reins, stopping the gelding, but the jittery animal danced sideways, kicking up dust. Adam had his work cut out to keep both men in view at the same time. It was plain that they knew him as well; Adam was riding west, into the sunset, and the last of the light lit his face. Finally, he got the gelding to settle.

The two men exchanged long looks across the trail. Adam got the impression that they were exchanging some unspoken message – and he thought that it might concern him. He sucked at his breath. His mouth was suddenly dry and he had butterflies in his belly. The gelding shifted again.

One of the two men smiled; Adam could see his teeth, white in the gathering night. “Well,” came the voice in a slow western drawl, “if it ain’t our local gunfighter: the man who claims he shot Harbinger.”

Adam looked from one shadowed face to the other. “Is there something specific I can do for you men?”

“Wow-ee!” The other man joined in the conversation “Don’t he talk fancy?”

The first man grinned again. “That’s what you call an education.”

“He don’t look such a big man ta me.” The second man shifted around in his saddle. “Perhaps we should find out just how fast he is with that gun.”

Adam was suddenly very much aware of the weight of the Colt on his hip. Moving carefully, he clasped his hands together on top of his saddle horn. “I’ve got no fight with either of you.”

The two exchanged another look. “You’ve got yourself a big reputation about these parts,” the first man said. “Might just be worthwhile taking it off you.”

Adam felt his skin crawl. The little hairs at the back of his neck started to stand up on end. He was fast with a gun. He could comfortably take out one of the men if only the damn gelding would stand still long enough! But there were two of them, and they were spread across the trail. Sitting wide apart the way they were, they had him covered. He couldn’t get both of them, and all of them knew it. Adam wasn’t about to try. He pursed his lips into something that resembled a smile. “Why don’t you just get out of my way?”

The grins on the two men’s faces died. One of them said, “You gonna draw that gun, Mister?”

Adam thought about it. There was no point in getting himself killed for another man’s reputation. “No.”

The second man sniggered. “Looks like he’s scared.”

The first man had a speculative look on his face. “You a coward or something?”

Adam considered his hands. When he looked up again, he still wore that same, pleasant expression. “No. But I’m not going to fight you.” He gathered his reins. “I’m going to ride on down the trail, and you’re not about to stop me.”

Holding the gelding together with his hands and his knees, Adam walked him forward down the centre of the road. The two men sat and watched him with sneers on their faces, but they made no move to stop him or to get in his way. Adam didn’t look back, but it was a long time before the burning itch in his back subsided enough for him to think about stopping and making a camp. The accusation of ‘coward’ rang loud in his ears and made his cheeks red. He guessed it was part of the price a man had to pay. That night, he didn’t sleep at all.

*******

The city lay much as he’d left it, broiling gently in the heat, cloaked in its own miasma of dust and noise and stink. Adam stopped at the hotel and managed to secure the same room that he’d occupied before. He dumped his rifle and his saddlebags on top of the bed and then sat down and pulled off his boots. Shaving in front of the mirror, he made a long and critical examination of his face. He had lost weight and was fit and slim and strong after spending so long in the saddle. His cheeks had become hard, flat planes, and his complexion had been browned by the sun. It gave him a lean and hungry look. His eyes were far-focused from looking at distant horizons.

Washed and wearing fresh linen, he dressed carefully in his new grey suit and rode the gelding back to the livery stable. The horse tried to disable him with a final, parting kick.

Chuckling with amusement, Adam threaded his way through the now familiar back streets and alleyways that would lead him, eventually, to Samuel Rosen’s shop. He exchanged a word or two with several people that he had come to know and threw pennies to a group of ragamuffin children who sat on the edge of the boardwalk with their naked feet in the street. He was looking forward cheerfully to spending some time with Rachel.

There was a smile of anticipation broadening his handsome face as he strode ‘round the last, well known corner and started to cross the street. It was then that it hit him that something was badly wrong. The smile died quickly and his long stride faltered when he saw what lay in front. The wood built structure that had housed both the tailor’s shop and his family had been burned to the ground. It was no more than a blackened ruin.

Adam stopped dead in his tracks and stared, his face gone suddenly blank with shock and disbelief. Memories leapt into his mind, so fresh he could smell them and taste them: syrup laden pancakes and bolts of woollen cloth, scented candles and fragrant, fruity wine. He heard a woman’s laughter and the music of a much-loved violin.

“Har there!”

Adam leapt aside in the nick of time as a mule drawn wagon rolled inexorably by. The heavily muscled shoulders of the animals and the iron-rimmed wheels missed him only by inches. Their passage spun him around. The burly driver leaned down from his high seat and shouted an obscenity into Adam’s face. Adam stared after him, stunned, then managed to gather enough of his scattered wits to get himself out of the middle of the street.

A faint smell of smoke still lingered in the ruins, but the ashes, when he touched them were cold. Nothing was recognizable except for a few, charred beams. Adam straightened slowly, staring at the greasy ash that stained his hand, still not able to grasp the fact that the home, and the family, was gone.

He searched out the huge Italian woman who lived, together with what seemed like eighteen or twenty children, in the shanty next door. He didn’t speak more than a few words of her language, nor she of his, but by use of word and gesture she managed to convey some sense of what had happened. The fire had started late one night more than a week before. Frantic activity on the part of the local community had managed to prevent the blaze from spreading to the rest of the neighbourhood, but nothing could be done to save the tailor’s shop. When Adam tried to ask what had happened to Rachel and the Rosens, of the torrent of rapid Italian he only understood one word – ‘morte’ – dead!

Seeing the shock on his face, the woman offered him coffee, but Adam refused. Hat in hand, he stepped back into the street. The town was still bright and noisy, but, for Adam, the heat had gone out of the sun. He felt cold inside – chilled to the core. He had confronted death before, on more than one occasion. It never failed to leave him empty and despairing at its wastefulness. He supposed he had to feel that way to be the man he wanted to be. He took one last look at the burnt out husk of the tailor’s dream, then started out towards Main Street and the central part of the town. He didn’t look back.

Adam went to the sheriff’s office and barged his way inside without the preamble of knocking. Jed, the deputy with the long, greying hair, whom Adam had met on the docks –it seemed like a lifetime ago – was asleep in Tomas’s chair. Adam’s noisy arrival woke him up with a start. The raised front legs of his chair hit the floor with a crash, and he reached for a gun that wasn’t nearly close enough to do him any good. Adam leaned forward with both hands on the desk. Flames had kindled anew; they burned in Adam’s eyes, reflections of the anger he felt deep down inside. He refrained - just barely – from reaching over and grabbing the sleep befuddled man by the front of the vest. He did, after all, wear a badge. “Where’s Tomas?” Adam demanded. His temper was roused, and his tongue was razor edged.

Jed gathered his decorum and straightened his hat. He blinked into Adam’s face. “He’s out on his patrol. Could be most anyplace. Say, Cartwright, we thought you left town.”

“I did,” Adam told him shortly, “and now I’m back. What happened the night the Rosen place burned down?”

“Happened? Lots of flames and smoke is what happened. Folk running every which-away with buckets of water trying to get the Goddamned thing put out. That’s the way it is with fires. Now there’s a whole lot of talk about buying one o’ those new fire-engine thing fer the next time it happens.”

Adam straightened up and took his hands off the desk. They promptly coiled themselves into tight, white fists. He worked his jaw to get some of the tension out of the muscles and drew a deep, calming breath. “What’s Tomas doing about the Rosens?”

Jed gazed at him as if he were slightly stupid. “Well, nothin, I guess. What’s there to do?”

Adam leaned forward again; his hot breath scorched the deputy’s face. “Three people burned alive in that fire, and Tomas does nothing?”

“Tomas figured it might have been an accident.” Jed’s eyes narrowed. “‘Sides, only the old man died. The two woman-folks, they got away. Didn’t you know that?”

For Adam, the whole world had stopped, then started again with a jolt. A phrase of his father’s rang in his ears: the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. A friend had been lost to him, a talented man with a kind trusting heart and a deep love of music, but the man’s wife and his niece were still alive. Adam breathed in carefully. “It was no accident,” he said with assurance.

“That’s not what Tomas thinks.”

“Then Tomas is wrong,” Adam said. “When you see him, you tell him I’m back and tell him I’m going to find out what happened.”

Jed nodded; his eyes were fixed on Adam’s face. “I’ll tell him Cartwright. You can count on me telling him that.”

Adam made his way to the café, dodging the afternoon traffic in a kind of otherworldly daze. Things were happening a shade too fast. Rachel was there, serving at tables and looking as if nothing untoward had occurred. Adam noted with part of his brain that she had acquired a new pencil, the stub of the old one having been entirely worn away. It wasn’t until she turned in his direction and he saw her face that he saw the havoc of grief. Her face was the same, but drawn and pale and even more tired than it had been before. Her eyes were deep wells of tragedy.

Adam took off his hat as he went through the door. “Rachel?”

She looked up at the sound of her name. Her face changed when she saw him, seeming to crumple all at once as a mask fell away. “Adam!” All he could do was wrap his arms round her as she clung to him, her shoulders shaking. The smell of her hair filled his head.

The storm didn’t last long. Within moments he felt her stiffen as she pulled away. Sniffing and knuckling tears out of her eyes, she drew a cloak of composure around her. “Adam, I’m so glad you’re back.”

Adam steered her into a chair and organized coffee for both of them. Then he sat down himself and reached for her hand. Her fingers were skeletally white against his deep, golden tan. They both looked at them; they defined the differences between them, accentuated the gulf that lay between their two worlds. Adam said, “Why don’t you try to tell me what happened?”

Rachel sucked in her breath and took back her hand. She picked up her cup and wrapped her white fingers around it. “I hardly know what happened. I was asleep when the fire started.”

“Try and remember.”

She stared hard into her cooling coffee. “It must have started in the shop at the front. When I woke up, the room was already filled up with smoke. My aunt and I escaped through the door at the back. My uncle tried to save some of his stock, but the whole building went up like dry tinder. My uncle never came out.” She closed her eyes tight as fresh tears threatened.

Adam felt the sharp pain of empathy. “Was there anything to make you think it might not have been an accident?” He tried to ask the question gently, but he couldn’t keep the edge from his voice.

“Why no!” Rachel looked at him, frowning, startled, as if the idea had never occurred to her before. “How could it have been anything else?”

“I want you to think about it. Think very hard. Try and tell me everything that you saw and heard that night.”

Rachel shook her head, refusing to remember the horror. “I can’t!”

“Yes you can.” Adam reached out and took her hand again in the grip of a friend. “It’s important that you remember everything.”

She stared at him, at the intensity in his face and at the light that glowed deep down in his amber eyes. “I remember my aunt screaming my uncle’s name. When she realized that he wasn’t coming out, she tried to run back into the flames. A neighbour and I had to hold her back.” Rachel’s voice faltered; for a moment, she couldn’t go on.

Adam’s grip tightened. “You’re doing well. What else do you remember?”

Rachel gathered herself. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I remember the heat and the smoke and the crackle of burning wood and the play of firelight on peoples faces…” She opened her eyes and stared into Adam’s face. She didn’t see him, what she saw was inside her own mind. “I saw faces,” she said again. Her expression changed; her chin trembled. The grip of her fragile fingers on Adam’s hand became painful.

He prompted her gently, trying hard not to break the spell, “Rachel, tell me about the faces.”

She shook her head slowly, trying to dispel the vision, afraid to let it go. “Ugly, ugly faces, laughing! One of them covered with warts!”

Adam let go of the breath he hadn’t know he was holding and pulled in another. It was what he had feared and what he had expected. He felt empty, drained, and yet filled with a seething rage. A hard knot of anger had formed in his belly, and it was starting to burn white-hot. He was a man with unfinished business. He looked at Rachel earnestly. The fire of his intentions was bright in his eyes. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Yes.” Rachel nodded and took back her hand. “My aunt and I have been taken in by members of our community. They’re taking good care of us.” Looking at her, Adam could see it was true.

His expression had already hardened into an expression of unrelenting determination that would have made anyone who knew him well run for cover and hide. Quietly, he said, “Then you can leave the rest to me.”

Adam submerged himself in the underclass of society. He knew who he was looking for, but it was far harder than he had expected to track his quarry down. The people he talked to were suspicious of strangers – particularly one who was obviously wealthy and educated. He discovered that, in the end, there was little that money wouldn’t buy. He succeeded by the judicious application of stealth and bribery, a few small, but, perhaps, justifiable threats of violence and the sad fact that the men he was looking for hadn’t the sense to keep their heads down.

He traced them, after several days of looking, to a Mexican style cantina about a mile from the centre of town - a place where, so he learned, the three ate regularly. It was evening when Adam arrived.

The room was large and high ceilinged with some sort of fancy balcony along the walls to give it a second floor. The tables were pushed up close together and there were a lot of people crammed inside. It wasn’t the place for a confrontation, but Adam wasn’t prepared to consider his options. It was filled with colour and noise and movement: men eating and drinking and dancing with women in bright dresses, music and voices all shouting at once to make themselves heard above the general clamour. The heat and the smell of bodies and beer and greasy food all conspired to turn Adam’s stomach – that, and the turmoil he felt inside. He pushed his way through the crowd to the long, wooden counter that ran the length of the furthest wall. His eyes, narrowed and watchful, searched every face. He was so focused on what he was looking for that it didn’t take long to find them. The three of them sat with their heads close together at one of the closely crowded tables eating spiced Mexican beans. It crossed Adam’s mind to wonder what new evils they might be plotting.

He ordered a glass of whiskey so sour that it puckered his mouth, then turned to give them his undivided attention.

Jonas Tilby was every bit as ugly as Adam remembered. In fact, in the brighter lights of the cantina, he looked even uglier. He has warts on his chin and warts on his nose and a whole fresh crop of them over his forehead. At least his stench was submerged in the general stink of his surroundings. At one and the same time he was talking and laughing and eating; his mouth was stuffed full of beans. He gestured with hands that were short fingered and stubby, swollen with infected skin eruptions and lined with ingrained dirt. Adam recalled the touch of those hands on his clothing and suppressed an inward shudder. He experienced a fresh and overwhelming sense of revulsion. Tilby was the kind of man he liked least: loud and bigoted, crude and, above all, cruel.

Adam was never certain if it were him or the suit that Tilby first saw. The ugly man stopped talking and chewing at precisely the same instant. His gaze settled and centred about Adam’s middle button and drifted upwards from there. Adam met his eyes with a steady, level stare.

Tilby’s chair scraped against the wood of the floor as he got slowly on to his feet. As before, he was wearing the customary western garb of shirt, vest and pants – Adam strongly suspected it was the same shirt – and a Colt strapped down on his thigh. The Mountebank brothers, seeing him rise, turned their heads to see what had caught his attention. Seeing Adam, they stood up, ranging themselves alongside Tilby. The cantina began to empty abruptly as diners abandoned their plates and their tables and fled in a tidal wave of panicky humanity, intent only on getting out of the way. Much of the crowd reformed itself at the two sides of the room, anxious and eager onlookers as the drama unfolded.

Adam nodded grave greeting, “Tilby.”

Tilby produced some sort of grin. The bits of bean stuck on his teeth did nothing to enhance his appearance. “Well, if it ain’t the Pretty Man.” He chuckled, glancing at his companions to see if they understood the joke. The Mountebanks were more anxious than amused. They read more into Adam’s expression. They spread themselves wider. Tilby said, “I bin waitin’ fer you, Mister. I had a feelin’ you’d come creepin out o’ the woodwork once you found out what happened to your Yiddisher friends.”

Adam’s emotions were welling inside him; he struggled to keep control. The hard knot of anger he had been carrying around in his belly swelled until it threatened to cut off his breath. “You set fire to the tailor’s shop,” Adam said in a carefully measured tone. “You didn’t care that the family were sleeping inside.”

The grin returned to Tilby’s face; now, it was more of a smirk. “The law says it was an accident.”

“I know differently.”

“Is that a fact?” Tilby sneered. “That’s somethin’ you’re gonna have to prove, Pretty Man.”

One of the mountebanks sniggered, a thin, broken sound in the attentive silence. Adam said, concisely, “You were seen laughing after the fire started.”

The other Mountebank fidgeted. Tilby shook his head. “That don’t prove nothin’.”

“It does to me.” Adam didn’t need any more convincing.

Tilby licked dry lips. “So what do you plan on doin’ about it?”

Adam drew a long breath. Now, he came to the difficult part. “I’m taking you down to the sheriff’s office.”

“An’ supposin’ we don’t want ta go?” The Mountebank giggled again.

Left handed, Adam reached behind his back and gathered the skirts of his coat out of the way of his Colt. His right hand flexed. With a conscious effort, he forced himself to relax. An attack of cramp in his fingers was not what he needed – not a thing a man could afford. It was all the response that Tilby needed; he grabbed for the butt of his gun.

Between one racing heartbeat and the next, faster than he could think, Adam’s Colt leapt into his hand. It bucked and roared twice before Tilby’s gun cleared the leather. One of the Mountebanks went over backwards. Tilby sat down hard. A surprised look came to his ugly face and blood blossomed brightly over the front of his shirt. Adam stepped over him to get to the other Mountebank, trapping him up against the bar.

The man cringed and tried to duck out of the way, but Adam had him firmly by a fist-full of vest and bent him backwards over the counter. A red haze drifted over Adam’s eyes. His breath hissed out of his mouth. “You’re going to tell it to the sheriff just the way it happened, Mountebank.”

Mountebank whimpered, “I didn’t do nothin! It wasn’t me!”

Adam brought up the Colt and pressed the muzzle hard into Mountebank’s mouth. The man’s lips split and bled, and then his teeth loosened. He opened his mouth and Adam shoved the gun-barrel inside. He thumbed back the hammer. “You fired the tailor’s shop: you and your friends,” Adam suggested. “You burned the old man alive!”

Mountebank’s eyes were wide open. He was shaking and crying with fear. The tears ran down his face and dripped on the floor. He nodded enthusiastic agreement – as far as he was able.

Shotgun in hand, Zachary Tomas stepped out of the crowd. He took in the scene with a sweep of his eyes. “All right, Cartwright. Let him go.”

“These three killed the tailor,” Adam said. “This one admitted it.”

“I was here. I saw it.” Tomas gestured with the shotgun. “One of these two is dead. I’ll see to it that the others hang. Now let the man go!”

Adam’s breath sighed; his blood sang melodies inside his head. Slowly, he withdrew the Colt and unwound his fingers from Mountebank’s greasy clothing. Mountebank slumped to the floor, his back to the bar. His face was parchment yellow and sweating and his breathing didn’t sound right. His eyes were still leaking tears. Adam felt not the slightest twinge of remorse. He stood back and watched while Tomas arranged to have the three men taken away. Finally, the sheriff gave him his attention. He shouldered the shotgun and hooked his other hand in his belt. He looked at Adam with some degree of belligerence. “You told me you weren’t a gunfighter.”

“I’m not.”

Tomas eyed the Colt in Adam’s holster pointedly but didn’t press the point. “I guess you’ll be movin’ on?” It wasn’t a suggestion.

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Well, think about it now.” Tomas looked down at the blood on the floor. “I know your sort. I’ve seen it before. You think you can put the whole world to rights with that gun. Well, you can’t! This time, you got lucky, Cartwright; this time you were right. Next time - who knows?” He gave Adam a long, hard stare. “I don’t want ta be the one ta hang you.”

The shotgun still on his shoulder, Tomas limped, stiff legged, to the door. He looked back, once, then stepped out into the night. Adam leaned back against the bar. The cantina was getting back to normal: music was playing, people were eating and drinking and talking, the noise level steadily rising. The dead man was forgotten, the other two taken away. The only reminders of what had happened were the stains on the floor and the memories etched inside Adam’s head. Adam decided that what he needed most of all was a good, stiff drink.

Four

The name of the riverboat was ‘The Missouri Rose’. A proud sternwheeler, she was an amazing feat of the engineers craft. At one hundred and sixty-two feet in length, she was the biggest boat on the river. She had a narrow, overhung, needlepoint prow that broadened quickly into a beam of almost forty feet. With a feather-light superstructure and a flat-bottomed hull, she drew only a meagre thirty-seven inches of water over the shallow and ever shifting sandbars of the river known throughout the land as ‘The Old Muddy’.

Moored at the end of the timber built pier with a full head of steam and long streams of flags flying from every corner and cornice, she was a sight to stir a man’s soul. She was white painted above and black below with the curlicues of her name emblazoned in gold leaf and garlands of flowers depicted in the brightest of colours above the promenade deck. Seen from the shore, surrounded by an adoring retinue of barges and tugboats and dories, it was all too easy to think of her as the Queen of the River.

The smell of her drifted over the water: hot iron and oil and steam and the stink of humanity crowded together. Black and white, free and slave, men swarmed on the dockside around her, preparing her for departure. Burly, bronzed stevedores with bulging muscles and brilliant sashes tied ‘round their waists loaded supplies and unloaded the baggage of those going west and carried aboard the sawn off billets that served her boilers as fuel.

Adam found himself caught up by the bustle, swept along by the noise. He couldn’t help but be excited at the prospect of adventure. He felt his blood surge. Bag in hand, he picked his way through the clamour and confusion and showed his ticket to the man in the seaman’s cap who stood at the shoreward end of the gangplank. The rest of his belongings, packed up in a box, had already been sent aboard.

Just for one moment, as he stepped onto the deck, his legs felt unsteady. He felt the heave and the flow of the powerful current passing under the boat.

Adam had booked a stateroom amidships. It was a grand affair with generous space for one man travelling alone and rather too many frills and flounces for a man of his moderate tastes. Still, the bed was comfortable, and the wide windows afforded a view of the bank, which was what he had paid for. He dumped his belongings on the counterpane and hurried back on deck to watch the boat leave.

The boat gave vent to a long, wailing whistle, then three short, sharp hoots in quick succession. Twin chimney stacks belched columns of smoke to be swept away by the wind. The gangplank was swung inboard and the boat fended off with long, padded poles. Helpless and vulnerable, she began to drift with the flow of the stream. Then, with a grate that Adam felt deep in his bones, the gears engaged, and the massive paddlewheel at the rear of the boat began to turn.

At once, the steamer made headway; her bow lifted out of the water as she carved her way through the crosscurrents and steered for the centre of the stream. Adam felt a distinct shove in his back and the movement of air against his face as the steamship carried him forward. The city of Kansas moved slowly by on the bank. He wondered if he would ever come there again and, if he did, would anything be the same? The world was changing so swiftly around him it was all a man could do to keep up.

The Missouri River forms a part of the Kansas-Missouri border and then meanders eastwards across central Missouri to its eventual union with the mighty Mississippi. In eighteen-sixty, the river was wide and swift, loaded with mud and silts and shale and carrying with it a varied assortment of debris. There were half submerged barrels just bobbing along and water-logged bales floating low down in the current, rolling tree trunks charging like battering rams and the bloated carcasses of horses and cattle and one, lodged up on a mud-bank, that might have been a man. They didn’t stop to investigate. It was a treacherous maze of shifting channels that were a nightmare to navigation; because of the speed of the current, the sandbanks were always moving and no two journeys were ever the same.

With the sights and sounds of the city behind him, Adam stood a long time at the rail and watched the landscape go by. Driven by rainfall and the thaws in the distant Rocky Mountains, the river was prone to frequent flooding. Its banks were often eroded and washed away. They were lined with ugly, fly-infested swamplands, exposed roots and drowned, dying trees.

The steamboat was a floating, self-contained city with a resident population whose working lives were devoted to the vessel and the transient, ever-changing flow of passengers that used her as a highway east and west. The boat was appointed in the manner of the most elaborate, southern hotels. There were richly coloured, oriental rugs on the floors and fine, silken drapes and brocaded furniture in all the lobbies; oil paintings hung on the walls and chandeliers from the ceilings. The kitchens were presided over by a chef of renown, and the cuisine was truly superb. Adam had never tasted finer. He sat in the dining room for a long time after he had finished his meal. He took the time to enjoy a second, large brandy and a rare cigar while darkness settled in like a blanket over the river. A hundred lamps were lit and ‘The Missouri Rose’ shone like a water-borne palace of lights.

Adam realized that he had grown to miss the sophistication of the east. He had spent several years there as a very young man, attending college classes and lectures. He had attained honours degrees in architecture and engineering and a very sound grounding in all the social graces of Victorian society. He had learned to appreciate the finer things of life: art and music and literature, good food and wine and the company of educated friends. He had also come to understand a differently structured community and to accept the service of others. Here, he found it again. There were grave faced butlers in long-tailed coats after the English style and blackamoor maids in caps and aprons. Their duty and desire was to serve the whims of the paying guests. A man of two worlds, Adam found himself uncomfortable. Part of him, the westerner, the independent, self-sufficient man, was embarrassed by the willing servitude; the other part felt he was coming home.

Replete, well rested and relaxed, Adam returned to his stateroom to change his clothes. He dressed with care in a full-skirted black coat and a finely pleated, white silk shirt. He brushed back his hair and completed the desired effect with a black, silk cravat elaborately tied at his throat.

Outside his room, he was approached by a respectful, brown-skinned man in knee britches and a red striped waistcoat trimmed with gold braid. He looked in perfect accord with his grand surroundings. Under his arm he carried a box of brushes and polishing cloths. “Shine yore shoes, Masta?”

It was on Adam’s lips to refuse until he saw the look in the brown man’s eyes. It was an expression of self-esteem. There was no subservience; the man wasn’t begging. Adam gave him a nod. “Are you somebody’s servant?”

“No, Suh!” Adam got a flashing, bright smile. “I’s a free man. I work here ‘cause this is a good place ta be!”

Adam paid him in silver.

The casino was a cathedral dedicated, in theory at least, to the twin gods of Luck and Chance. It occupied most of the stern of the boat and was exposed on both sides to the open air. Adam paused on the threshold and took a deep breath. His lungs filled up with the atmosphere of fevered expectation and foetid, animal exhalation, the mingled smells of perfume and sweat and fine, bourbon whiskey. It was like entering some gilded underground cavern touched with magic from a fairy tale. The walls were lined with mirrors, and the room was filled with swirling colour and a rising tide of noise and heat. A dozen cascading crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling. Below, in among the shoulder-to-shoulder press of seething humanity, was the facility for every conceivable game of chance. There were tables for craps and roulette and chemin-de-fer and every variety of poker.

While Adam was in no way adverse to a quiet game of cards in the Silver Dollar or The Bucket of Blood back home in Virginia City, he wasn’t, in essence, a gambling man. He considered himself more of a student of human nature. Moving among the smartly dressed men and the women in gorgeous dresses and jewels, he surreptitiously studied their faces and their body language. Most moods swung between enforced gaiety and intense concentration, with occasional, deep despair. Every available seat was filled. Small fortunes changed hands at the roll of a dice or the fall of a card. There was a constant, high-level buzz of conversation, laughter and groans of disappointment mingled in equal measure with the tinkle of glasses and the clink of coinage. The flash and the rattle of spinning wheels caught they eye only to have it distracted by the hard gleam of silver and the softer glow of gold. Over all came the showman’s call from the Wheel of Chance that stood tall in the centre of the room; “‘Round and ‘round and ‘round she goes; where she stops, nobody knows.”

Adam was amused and bemused by it all. He bought himself a drink at the bar at the back: a bourbon and water, and leaned back against the polished, mahogany counter, one heel cocked on the rail, to make another sweep of the room.

It was the woman’s hair that first caught his eye. It was a metallic, golden-yellow fancifully dressed with pearl-headed studs and a peacock blue ostrich feather that bobbed with every movement of her head. She sat at a nearby table dealing faro for the house. He watched her awhile. Clearly an accomplished professional, she was very good at what she did. She handled the pasteboards with swift, economical precision and spoke in cool, clipped tones without any emotion shown on her face. From the neat stacks of coins in front of her it was plain that, inevitably, the house was winning. Adam, observing closely, could detect no sign of subterfuge; he was convinced in his own mind that the lady was playing a straight table.

He sipped his drink and appreciated the mellow glow of distilled corn and barley as it pooled in his stomach. It mixed well with the food and gave him a warm and comfortable feeling. He nursed the rest of the bourbon until it warmed in the glass.

Somehow, the woman felt the weight of his gaze. She looked up quickly and trapped his eyes with her own. Hers, he discovered, were blue – not the vivid, bright blue of the feather but the cool, grey-blue of wet slate after rain. She had hard, high cheekbones and flat planed cheeks that captured the yellow lamplight, a very small mouth and a pointed chin. She was not beautiful or even attractive, but her face was not one a man would soon forget. Adam estimated her age at forty. She gave him a long, hard stare. A slight smile brushed against Adam’s lips. He ordered another drink.

The woman’s attention returned to her cards and her customers. She didn’t look at him again.

Eventually, he tired of the diversion. He left his empty glass on the bar and continued his casual explorations. The lure of music led him, at last, to a curtained wall. Beyond it he discovered another large room, this one completely enclosed. The lamps were turned low, and the atmosphere was smoky and dense. At the end of the room, on a small, raised platform, three young women had interlaced their arms and danced in a bright pool of limelight. They performed some garbled version of the French can-can. The country-boy in Adam’s heart watched the shameless display of white skinned limbs with open-mouthed fascination, while the more sophisticated, man-about-town merely observed with a certain cynical amusement. The dancers were enthusiastic but not very good. He had seen any number of better performances in private theatres and clubs in San Francisco. Nevertheless, the trio had a certain naïve charm , and, between them, they had enough feminine attributes to keep a man interested for quite a while.

A hand slipped in to the crook of his elbow. It was the faro dealer with the bright yellow hair. “Hello, handsome.” In high-heeled shoes, she was almost as tall as he was and could look directly into his eyes. “It’s no use you looking at those fancy fillies; they have their own clientele – and they charge some mighty high prices.”

Adam chuckled, “Was it that obvious?”

“I’ve see that look on a man’s face before.”

Adam spared the spangled dancers one final glance. “I don’t think they’re quite my type.”

The small mouth smiled. “Well, if you’re looking for a lady…”

Adam looked her up and down. In addition to bring tall, she was slim and neatly made. He saw that she wore a dress of the same, vivid blue as the feather in her hair. “Back there at the table, I didn’t think you were interested.” His expression was one of open speculation. Perhaps the diversion was just what he needed.

“I’m a woman who knows what she likes. I never need look at a man more than once.” She still had her hand in the crook of his arm. Through his coat and his shirt she squeezed the hard muscle of his arm. “I’ve got an hour before I’m due back. Perhaps you could take me outside for a breath of fresh air. We could get to know each other.”

Adam touched the tip of his tongue to his lips. The woman was following, exactly, his own train of thought. “That would be my pleasure.”

She gave him a long, sideways look. “I guess we’ll see about that.”

They strolled along the promenade deck with their arms still linked together. The woman clung closely and allowed her body to brush against his as they walked. It was a dark night and rather cool. The sky was shrouded in enough high cloud to blot out the light of the stars. The moon, half-faced, shone through as a fat, misty crescent, It’s faint light turned the surface of the river into a highway of silver. It revealed the burgeoning surge of the water: ever changing, always the same, and the treacherous flow of the crosscurrents over the sandbanks.

The river smelled stronger at night – of rich silts and oozes washed from fertile hillsides and swept along by the stream in its frantic dash to reach its convergence with the wider and slower Mississippi. It smelled of rot and decay. The breeze blew down from the land, carrying with it the scent of the swamp. The man and the woman stood at the rail and watched the dark bank glide by.

She told him that her name was Lily. “Lily Marshal. I’ve been on these rivers so long that I can’t even remember where I got on.”

“I’m Adam Cartwright out of Nevada.”

“You’re a long way from home, Adam Cartwright.”

“People keep telling me that.” They shared in each other’s laughter.

For a brief span of time the boat was a world apart, divorced from the rest of creation, and Adam Cartwright was living a different life. The steady pulse of the engine, transmitted through the wood of the deck and the iron of the rail and the thrust of the paddlewheel, fired his blood. The sweet smell of the woman’s perfume rose into his head. She smiled into his face, and the smile was an invitation. He put a familiar hand on her waist.

An angry voice came from behind him, “Lily, what you doing walking out on another man’s arm?”

Adam knew the voice; there was no way on Earth that he could ever forget it. When he turned, he knew the face as well, although it was thirteen years older than when he’d last seen it. “Charlie Fullerton!” He stuck out his hand.

Anger faded from dark-brown eyes and disbelief dawned. “Adam! Adam Cartwright!”

Lily looked from one to the other. “You two know one another,” she said with sudden perception.

Charlie Fullerton crowed with sheer delight. “I’ll say we do! We were at school together!” He was still trying to shake Adam’s arm off. “Do you still see Brett Hansen?”

“From time to time I do.” A westerner like himself, Hansen had always been Adam’s special friend. During their years together at college they had been all but joined at the hip, and, often, Charlie had tagged along. Adam recalled one frenetic, east-coast summer when the three of them had combined their initials and dubbed themselves ‘The ABC Cavaliers’. They must, he thought wryly, have terrorised the local population. Charlie had changed in the intervening years, but then, so had Adam. Both men had put on weight. Charlie’s added flesh was soft and rounded compared to Adam’s iron-hard muscle.

“What in hell are you doing here, Adam?” asked Charlie, still amazed, “I thought you went back west to run that whopping great ranch of your father’s.”

Chuckling ruefully, Adam remembered that long-ago, young man’s boast. “It didn’t quite work out that way. Now I’m travelling, looking for someone.”

“Well. I’ll be damned! You’re the last man alive I expected to find on this river!”

The three of them ended up in the steamer’s luxurious bar, seated at a table with a bottle of bourbon between them. Lily had only the time for one drink before she had to hurry back to her job at the faro table. The two men settled down to share the rest of the bottle and to catch up on the last several years.

Charlie had always preferred to do his drinking sitting down. He came up several inches shorter than Adam and had always been painfully aware of the fact. Seated, the difference in height was less apparent. He reached for the bottle and filled up both their glasses. “So, Adam, what do you do with yourself these days? Are you putting all that fine education to good use?”

Over the next several glasses Adam told him all about the cattle business and the timber trade and the mines and all the other assorted pies in which the Cartwright family had their collective fingers. Even in its abbreviated form, it took considerably longer that he had expected. When he was finished, Charlie raised his glass in salute. His eternally cheerful face was smiling. “I’m glad that at least one of my classmates has done so well for himself: senior partner in the family firm, first born son and principle heir. What more could you want out of life?”

Adam smiled self-consciously. “I hadn’t really though of it like that. Tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself.” He refilled his glass and sat back in his chair, stretching his legs out under the table. Certainly, Charlie looked prosperous enough in a fashionable, dark-coloured suit and a plum coloured waistcoat, complete with a silver watch chain, buttoned over his belly.

Charlie grinned crookedly into his whiskey. “You know how it goes. I make my living right here on the river: a little of this, a little of that, buying, selling, gambling. I make enough to get by.”

Adam hid his momentary confusion behind the rim of his glass. Charlie had been among the brightest in class, if somewhat lazy and sly. He thought that his friend could have done rather better. “You certainly look well on it.” And Charlie did; he looked plump and satisfied. Adam asked a relevant question, “Where does Lily come in all this?”

Charlie grinned. “Still got an eye for the ladies, eh, Adam?”

Adam held up a hand. “I wouldn’t throw my rope on another man’s steer.” The heat from the bourbon was spreading out from his belly and filling him up with a comfortable glow. He had already consumed far more than was usual on a Friday night back at home.

“Lily’s a friend,” Charlie said. “We’ve know each other a lot of years; don’t let that stand in your way, old buddy.” He emptied the bottle into his glass and signalled for another. It was well into the early hours when Adam wended his way, just a little unsteadily, back to his stateroom.

He slept late in the morning. When he woke up it was already broad daylight. The sunlight streamed in through his portside windows and fell full on his face. With a groan, he screwed his eyes shut and turned his face away. It was already too late. Physical discomfort ensured that he couldn’t go back to sleep. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a tar barrel, and his head was stuffed with what felt like a feather bed. The excess of liquor had turned sour in his stomach, and he felt vaguely sick. He remembered, belatedly, why it was that he had given up late night drinking sessions with his friends the same autumn that they had left college. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hold his liquor – that had never been a problem – but he wasn’t fond of the prolonged after effects. The woolly head and the upset stomach were what his father would call ‘his just deserts’. Ben had no objection to any man drinking, but he firmly believed in moderation. Adam could see his point of view. He would very much liked to have stayed in bed, but his bladder demanded he answer the call of nature.

He rolled onto his elbow, and then, with a considerable effort that made the room rotate very slowly around him, he sat up. He looked at his feet. At least he had managed to pull off his boots before he got into bed. He didn’t remember doing it. His coat and his gunbelt hung from the bedpost. The rest of his clothes were rumpled and uncomfortably damp. Doggedly determined, he stripped to the skin and washed himself down with cold water. Then, with great care, he shaved his face and his throat. His hand was absolutely steady. He recalled from the days of his youth that the discipline of wielding an open edged razor concentrated his mind wonderfully and cleared his head.

Washed and shaved and dressed in clean linen, he felt halfway human again. His legs were still a trifle unsteady as he made his way to the dining room. He put the unaccustomed phenomenon down to the roll of the boat. At almost noon, they were still serving breakfast.

“Hey, Adam!” A long arm, waving, beckoned him over.

Charlie Fullerton was already installed at a table by the window. Beyond him the day was dazzlingly bright with sunlight glancing off the water. The now distant bank of the river moved by at a steady pace. Adam found the motion somewhat unsettling.

Eternally cheerful, Charlie was smiling. He seemed to have suffered no ill effects from the night before. He wore fresh linen under his waistcoat and had a huge breakfast of kidneys and bacon and fried potatoes, corn bread and sweet preserves spread out on the table before him. Adam’s stomach dared him.

Charlie looked at him quizzically, taking in the shadows around his eyes and the somewhat queasy pallor of his face beneath his tan. “The Adam Cartwright I remember could have spent a night drinking and come back for more in the morning,” he commented mildly.

“Older and wiser,” Adam told him. The waitress came over and he settled for toast and lots of hot, black coffee. “You say you ride the rivers all the way to New Orleans?”

“That’s right. I make the round trip twice a year.” Charlie speared another kidney and attacked it with relish. “You ever been there?”

Adam shook his head. “I never have.”

“Make a point of going there some day. It really is a town that’s worth seeing.”

“So my Pa tells me.” Adam rinsed coffee around his mouth; its bitterness washed the last taste of sour whiskey out of his mouth.

Charlie looked up. “Ah! Here comes the lovely Lily to join us.”

The men got to their feet and greeted the lady. She smiled at them both and took a seat on the third side of the table. In the steadily increasing heat of the day, she looked very cool and comfortable. She had exchanged the vivid, blue dress of the night before for a demure white cotton blouse closed at the neck with a cameo broach and a long grey skirt. Somehow, the outfit did not quite suit her. Her yellow hair, startlingly artificial in the cold light of day, was wound up into a French, pleated style and pinned with an ivory comb. She ordered coffee.

Chewing on bread and bacon, Charlie said, “Adam’s sailing with us just as far as St. Louis.”

Lily’s small mouth made a moue of disappointment. “You’re not coming all the way to New Orleans?”

“Not this time,” Adam shook his head, “I have business in St Louis.”

“But you’ll miss all the fun!” Lily raised her eyes to look at him, and there was a wealth of meaning in the depths of her eyes. Adam caught the look and held it. He knew that she was teasing him, and, for the moment, he was willing to be teased. But there was something deeper in her expression, and he found himself wondering what it was – and if he would like it when he found out. “You’ll have to tell me all about it,” he said matching her look with one of his own. Charlie smiled benignly on them both.

Over breakfast, Lily and Charlie pointed out some of the more colourful characters that regularly graced the riverboat’s passenger lists. First up for scrutiny by the trio in the window seat was a southern gentleman of the old-fashioned sort. Trenchard by name, he was all fuss and bluster with a gold knobbed walking stick and a gold pin in his lavish cravat. “Owns a big plantation down Louisiana way,” Charlie said, leaning close to Adam’s ear. “Got a thousand slaves or more and just as many horses.” The southerner was a big man, tall and top-heavy with a square, red face and a sandy moustache. He was resplendent in grey, stovepipe trousers and a long, green topcoat with gold, brocade facings and a tall, grey hat. “I’m told he’s got a pretty young wife back home,” Charlie whispered, “with paper-white skin and long, black hair. Trouble is, he prefers to spend the night-times with dark skinned women – and the blacker, the better.”

Lily leaned across the corner of the table. “And those are the Milbury sisters.” With the jut of her chin she indicated the pair of elderly ladies who had just come into the room. Even at this early hour of the day they wore elaborate, fanciful gowns, face powder and paint, lots of lace trimmings and several rows of pearls apiece. They had sharp, bright eyes, and they jerked their heads with quick, short movements that reminded Adam of the little birds that feasted on pine nuts in the autumn in the High Sierra. Lily explained that the two women were quite inseparable: one was never to be seen without the other in close attendance. They lived on the riverboats the whole year ‘round, switching from one floating, palatial home to another at random, just as the fancy took them. “They visit the casino every night,” Lily confided, “They play roulette. They only ever bet very small amounts, and, somehow, they always break about even.”

“And that’s Carmody Blackman,” Charlie interrupted, sotto-voice. A thickset man of prosperous proportions in a sombre, well-cut suit passed by their table. To Adam’s way of thinking, his dark eyes had a shifty look that he didn’t much care for. “Big-shot Northern industrialist,” Charlie went on, “has a fanatical interest in ocean-going steam ships. You’ve heard about them?” Adam nodded. “In my opinion, they’ll never catch on. Every one he’s built so far has broken down, or the boiler’s blown up or they’ve run aground. He just goes right on and builds another. I’ve never seem him with a woman; he seems to prefer small boys.”

And so Adam was introduced, by proxy, to a Russian prince – a dark complexioned, loose lipped young man with slick, black hair and a constantly anxious expression – only a distant cousin to the Romanoffs, to a German count with an evil reputation and a kindly face that could have belonged to anyone’s grandfather, and to an accredited outlaw with whom Adam definitely didn’t want to lock horns.

“The duke and duchess of Camford,” Charlie said, crooking a secretive finger, “all the way from England.” Adam angled his head to look. The pair were unmistakably English to the core. The duke was a man well past middle age with a square, ruddy face and sandy-coloured side-whiskers of impressive proportions, his wife, the duchess, a tall, lean, fragile woman, wore serviceable, if inappropriate, tweeds. There were any number of rings on her fingers and three rows of large pearls around her neck. “The pair of them have more money than good sense,” Charlie confided. “One of these days someone is going to relieve them of some of it.”

Adam was amused. Charlie spoke with a boyish enthusiasm that he remembered of old. On more than one occasion, long ago, he had been led into all sorts of mischief by that same, contagious excitement – and lived to regret it later. He said, reflectively, “I recall the time you borrowed the Master’s carriage and pair to spend a night on the town.”

“Well, I didn’t know his wife was inside!” Charlie’s eyes sparkled with merriment. “And how about the time you and Brett took wagers on how many petticoats the show girls wore?”

Adam laughed, remembering. “And then we had to find a way of counting them.”

Wincing, Charlie inquired, “How long did it take that black eye to go down?”

“A long, long time! I’m just glad my Pa never saw it.”

Lily held up her hands in self-defence. “Please! Don’t tell me any more. The two of you sound like schoolboys who never grew up!”

The two men chuckled and smiled at one another. All of a sudden they were twenty years old again with the entire world spread out before them. The warmth of their friendship rekindled, but there was something else besides; each of them felt a certain reserve – a wariness born of age and experience that welled up from somewhere inside. Neither one of them quite trusted the other.

Charlie got to his feet. “I must love you and leave you both for a while. A man has to earn a living, and I have business to attend to.” He bowed low to Lily. “I’ll leave you in the company of my good friend, Adam. I’m sure he’ll think of enough stories about me to keep you entertained.” With a last, flashing smile, he set his hat on his head at a jaunty angle and headed for the door.

His departure left Adam feeling uneasy. Charlie had left him in an awkward position – quite deliberately, it seemed. He raised a speculative eyebrow across the table at Lily. “So, what shall we do with our afternoon?”

The afternoon was hot and humid and thick with the stink of the swamp. The river flowed wide and shallow; the riverboat steered the central channel with half a mile of smooth, steel-coloured water flanking her on either side. She floated, suspended, between earth and heaven. Adam and Lily strolled from the back of the boat to the bow and watched the rush of bright water go by. Lily wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to keep the sun from her face – like all fashionable eastern and southern ladies she adhered to the Victorian ideal of a flawless, paper-white skin. Adam leaned his forearms on the white painted rail. “Have you known Charlie long?”

“Around ten years, off and on.” Lily lifted her face into the wind. “We met on a riverboat, as you might have guessed. He was a gambler – not a good one. The first night he was aboard, he lost every cent he had.”

Adam nodded his head in solemn understanding. “That sounds like Charlie.”

“I suppose I took pity on him. I took him in, and he’s been coming back to me ever since: every time the going gets tough.”

The white worm of unease stirred again in Adam’s belly. “You’re a remarkable lady, Lily.”

“So I’m told.” Lily laughed and slipped her hand through Adam’s arm in a familiar gesture. “Now, Adam Cartwright, Charlie tells me you run a great big ranch out in Nevada. Why don’t you tell me all about living out west?”

Adam told her: some of it, anyway, the light-hearted anecdotes that had the power to make a lady laugh. In exchange, she related the highlights of life on the river. Adam decided that she was a complex person with many levels to her character; he was only seeing the surface, and he wondered what was underneath.

That evening, he escorted her to dinner – he dressed in his good, black suit and she in a blue satin dress that almost matched her eyes and, he suspected, was the most demure that she possessed. She clutched a lacy shawl about her shoulders to keep off the chill. The evening was cool and grey, and the moon, risen early, was waning.

Lily smiled up at him as she slid into her seat. Adam ordered wine. They gazed at each other over the candle-lit table. Lily smiled and laughed at his conversation, but Adam had the feeling all through that something just wasn’t right. The laughter never quite reached her eyes, and he had the crawling sensation that he was being observed with cool calculation. It made him uncomfortable. He was very much aware that he hadn’t seen Charlie since that very belated breakfast. He had no idea where his friend was or what he was doing. He knew only that he had been left in the company of a not-unattractive woman whose perfume was gradually filling his head.

Adam finished his meal with coffee and Lily, hers with sweet, mint tea. Her eyes smiled over the rim of the cup. Outwardly relaxed, he felt an inner tension. “Thank you for your company this evening. I must say, it’s been a pleasure.”

“You’re very gallant.” Lily started to rise, and Adam stood up to assist her.

“I guess you have to go and get ready for work, now?” he suggested. “May I walk you along to you room?”

Lily drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders, clutching it too her as if for protection as they stepped out onto the deck. The night was dark but crystal clear. The curved sliver of moon hung low in the sky with just enough hook on it for a man to hang up his hat. Its faint light tinged the river with silver. The distant banks slid by in the darkness. “As it happens,” she said, “I’ve decided to take the evening off.”

A small smile pulled at Adam’s lip. “Then, perhaps, a walk in the moonlight?”

“It’s a little chilly for that. I think I would like a drink to warm me.”

Adam was about to suggest the bar when she put a hand on his arm. “Come to my room. We could share a night-cap – perhaps pick up from where we left off last night?”

Adam considered it. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?