Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Read Free Page B

painted ladies enjoying a midweek business boom over at the Silk Slipper Saloon & Sporting Parlor on the far side of the street, beyond the gallows.
    Glendolene cleared her throat as she stared at the hanging body, one boot lying in the street beneath it. “Is that . . . ?”
    â€œPreston Betajack, yes. You shouldn’t have seen that, Glen. What a time for your stage to roll into town!” He thrust his dimpled, confident chin toward the jehu, Charlie Adlard, a middle-aged man standing nearby. “Adlard, couldn’t you see what was happening here? Good Lord, man, you might have stopped outside town and waited for this grisly affair to be finished!”
    Part of Glendolene was glad she’d seen it. It gave her a better idea of who her husband was. Maybe it would help her make up her mind whether she wanted to stay married to him, a question that had been haunting her for several months now.
    â€œIt’s all right. It’s fine,” she said as he took her carpetbag and steamer trunk from the shotgun messenger, Melvin Coble, who was unloading the coach’s rear luggage boot. “I’d just like to go on into the hotel and have a hot bath. It was a chilly ride in from the ranch.”
    â€œCertainly, dear,” the young prosecutor said. “He turned to a tall, broad-shouldered Indian standing nearby and who Glendolene knew worked for the hotel. He said, “Luther, would you please take my wife’s bags on over to the hotel? Room twenty-two.”
    The Indian accepted the nickel proffered by young attorney Mendenhour and dropped the coin without looking at it in a pocket of his worn duck trousers. As he took both bags in his large red-brown hands, Glendolene could not help watching him, feeling a flush rise in her cheeks as she remembered a man with similar hands, with a similar build, and also with native blood running through his veins. She studied Luther’s broad back clad in a black wool vest, remembering the grizzly claw necklace that dangled down the broad chest of this other man she’d known for a short time, as the full-blood turned toward the hotel beyond the stage station depot.
    Glendolene looked away from the retreating Indian’s back, the man’s long blue-black hair braided with small gray feathers hanging down from beneath his bullet-crowned black hat to brush across his shoulders, but the memory of the caress of those other hands—large brick-red hands, rough but gentle—was slow to leave her.
    Another flush rose in her cheeks when she saw the sheriff and several other men, including Lee’s assistant, Mark Pettitbone, staring at her from where they stood near the stage. The men, business associates of Lee, had followed him over to the coach, and they studied her now with faint but obvious male interest, smiling as they puffed on their cigars. Glendolene was well aware, by the way she’d been turning men’s heads since she was barely out of diapers, that she was a beautiful woman. But the men back home were able to conceal their goatish lust a little better than the breed of male out here. She supposed it was because that, outside of sporting parlors, even plain-faced young females with lush bodies and full sets of teeth were rare in these parts. The lascivious looks she attracted from even the most civilized males, like the ones she evoked now, caused a pang of revulsion to tighten her smile.
    â€œSheriff Neumiller,” she said in greeting with a cordial nod, watching the lawman’s lusty eyes flick furtively across her. “Mr. Pettitbone.”
    â€œNow, Glendolene,” said Sheriff Neumiller, “I thought we agreed you’d call me Dave.”
    â€œDave it is,” she said with her winning smile, though wishing only to get off to her room to be by herself. “How’ve you been?”
    â€œVery well, very well.”
    â€œGlendolene and I are catching tomorrow’s stage for Belle