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had been looking for Saul to let him know she had arrived. But now there was no need. She started to tell him so, but the man behind her suddenly yanked her to him.
    The whisper at her ear was hot and fierce. “I’ll explain everything later, but you can’t let him know I’m in here. It wasn’t murder, but I’ll never get a fair trial, and if they catch me, they’re going to hang me. Please help me, lady. You’re my only hope.”
    Worley Branson, concerned by her silence, prodded, “Did you hear me, lady?”
    “Please…” the man beseeched as he reluctantly let her go.
    Tess swallowed hard, then spoke through the door. “Yes, I heard you.”
    “Well, I hate to have to tell you like this, but the man you came to meet—Saul Beckwith—got killed a couple of days ago. It was an accident. He was caught in cross fire when a gunfight broke out in the street.”
    Tess could not have been jolted harder had lightning struck her then and there.
    The stranger sensed what she was about to do and bolted for the window.
    But he was not fast enough.
    With a scream of terror, Tess yanked open the door.

Chapter Two
    Too upset to carry out her plan to seek the preacher, Tess had endured a miserable night. The following day was not much better.
    The hotel, she quickly realized, was no more than a brothel. The girls working in the saloon below brought their customers upstairs, and, the walls being paper thin, Tess had heard everything that went on.
    Twice during the night, a fight had broken out when someone got tired of waiting his turn for pleasuring and started banging on a door.
    Tess had alternated between cringing in a corner of her room with a blanket over her head and restlessly pacing about as she worried what to do now that the world had collapsed around her.
    She had very little money. She had dumped the contents of her purse on the bed and determined that she had enough for perhaps two more nights’ lodging, and, if she did not eat much, food to last that many days.
    And then what?
    Nothing to do, she supposed, but send a wire to Aunt Elmina and ask for the money to return home, and only God above knew how she hated to do that.
    Worley Branson said he had buried Saul in the graveyard at the edge of town and that the man had no relatives he knew of. Neither did he have a home where Tess might have taken refuge till she figured out what to do next. Saul was a prospector, said to have a cabin somewhere out in the desert. Worley had no idea where, and Tess wasn’t about to go look for it.
    Also needling her was the awful memory of what had happened after she opened the door and began screaming.
    Worley had looked past her to see the stranger trying to go out the window. He’d drawn his gun and yelled at him to stop or he’d shoot.
    And the stranger, she had been stunned to see, had immediately raised his hands in surrender.
    As it turned out, she was not the only one shocked he had not attempted to make a stand. Worley had held him at bay after shouting down the hall to Lester to get help, and, while Lester was running to do so, Worley had taunted, “I thought you were supposed to be quick on the trigger, Hammond, but you ain’t shit.”
    The stranger had merely stood there in stony silence, arms over his head, looking at her like he wanted to strangle her.
    “This here’s Curt Hammond, little lady,” Worley had told her. “He killed Abe Pugh in cold blood.”
    Tess had turned away, withering beneath the scathing, hating eyes.
    Others had finally come to take him away, and they were far from gentle. She had winced at the sound of fists striking flesh as they went down the stairs, and she gasped aloud when she heard him fall and tumble to the boardwalk below.
    Lester had knocked on her door later to ask if she needed anything, and she had told him no, even though she was weak with hunger. She feared if she ate anything she would be sick because she was so upset.
    The night had dragged by, and, at dawn, Tess was