A Place Called Harmony Read Free

run his hand over one of his daughters’ curly hair would almost take him to his knees. They were gone so fast, like his parents and all the boys he’d joined up with to go to war. Some nights, in his nightmares, he felt like a time traveler going back to them all. They’d smile at him and wave, then curl up and die like dried leaves caught in a campfire.
    Clint took a long drink of his coffee and waited for the sheriff’s lecture. He’d heard it before: different people, different towns. If he had enough caring left in him to change, he would try one more time, but he no longer saw the point.
    “Truman,” the sheriff began. “I need your help with a matter.”
    Clint raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t expected the sheriff would want a favor. Lightstone was only passable nice to him on a good day, and the huge man had very few of them in a town like Huntsville.
    “Now, hear me out before you decide. Promise. This is me asking for something, not me telling you what to do. You make up your own mind.”
    “All right. I’ll hear you out,” Clint answered. He didn’t plan to walk back over to the saloon until the rain let up anyway. He had no other clothes to change into.
    Lightstone leaned back. “I got a friend I fought with during the war who wants to build a town. He’s been running a trading post up in the wild part of Texas where the Indian Wars have been going on for ten years. He makes good money, thanks to the cattle drives coming through and crazy settlers who wanted to move that far north, but he wants more. He wants to have a community. He says his wife refused to go with him because that part of the state is too wild. Thanks to Colonel McKenzie and a new fort moving in, it may be settling down.”
    “How does this affect me?”
    “My friend is a good businessman, but the war left him crippled up. He’s been robbed several times, and once they shot him and left him for dead. If he’s going to do this, he’ll need someone good with a gun working for him. I’ve heard, even if you don’t usually wear a gun belt, that there is no better shot in the state.”
    “I’m not a hired gun, Sheriff. Not interested.”
    “Oh, you wouldn’t be that. He’s offering every man who comes to work for him forty acres and a house to live in. If you stay two years, he’ll deed the place over to you. He’ll pay a fair wage and you help him build the town. A real town where folks can walk the streets without worrying about being robbed or shot.”
    Clint was low on money and knew he’d have to look for a job soon, but he never planned to settle anywhere again. He might get attached to folks if he did that, and he never, ever planned to let that happen again. Signing on to be his friend or loved one was a death warrant.
    “You’d be hauling supplies and running cattle and who knows what else, but you’d also carry a gun. You’d be protecting hardworking folks and running off those who are looking for trouble. This time you’d be fighting to keep people alive. That part of Texas has very little law of any kind. Trouble will ride in at full gallop more than once over two years, I’m guessing. You’ll earn that house and land.”
    Lightstone leaned halfway across the table and yelled for Maggie to bring them a couple of meals. He didn’t have to say more; she only served one choice a day.
    She yelled that he needed to stop yelling at her.
    The sheriff smiled. “I’d marry that woman if she’d have me, but she says four husbands were enough.”
    Clint didn’t want to picture the two in bed, but the image came all the same. Both were built wide and thick. Maggie told him once that she was simply big-boned. Proof of dinosaurs, he remembered thinking at the time. If she and the sheriff ever did get together and make love, they’d shake the house.
    Lightstone drew him back to the conversation. “What have you got to lose? The trip north, even if you decided not to stay, would do you good.”
    “All right. I’ll