Two Brothers Read Free

was still dark in the jail cell, where he had made his bed after a night passed in the card room behind the Yellow Garter Saloon, and all he could make out, looking up through his eyelashes, besides the blue-black barrel of the gun, was a glint of light hair and an impression of wolf-white teeth.
    Delicately, the stranger relieved him of the .45 in his holster, still strapped to his hip, spun it fancy-like on one finger, and laid it aside with a clatter. A match was struck, and Shay caught the sharp, familiar scents of sulphur and kerosene, mingled. Thin light spilled over the jailhouse cot and dazzled him for a moment, but he knew he was still square in the other man’s sights.
    The visitor whistled low through his teeth. “So,” he said. “It’s true.”
    Shay blinked a couple of times and then squinted. Except for a few minor differences, mostly matters of grooming and deportment, he could have been looking at himself. The other man’s hair was a shade or two darker than his own; the stranger wore a full beard, too, and a cheroot jutted from between his teeth, but virtually everything else was the same—the lean build, the blue eyes, even the lopsided grin, tending toward insolence. “What the—?”
    The specter chuckled. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? You always sleep in your own jail cell, Marshal?”
    Shay ventured to sit up, and the other fellow didn’t shoot him. Taking that for a good sign, he swung his legs over the side of the cot and made to stand, only to find himself looking straight up the barrel of the pistol.
    “Not so fast.”
    With a sigh. Shay sat down again. “Who the devil are you?” he demanded. Now that he was sure he wasn’t dreaming, he was beginning to feel fractious.
    His antagonist grabbed the rickety chair in the corner of the cell, turned it around, and sat astraddle of the seat, all in virtually one motion. His left arm rested across the back, the .45 dangling idly from one gloved hand. An odd sensation prickled Shay’s nape, but he forbore from rubbing it. “Maybe I’m you,” the man said. It was downright irritating, the way he took his sweet time answering.
    “I gotta quit drinkin’,” Shay observed philosophically.
    His reflection grinned. “The situation isn’t that drastic, though I will admit you look as if you’ve been overindulging of late. How old are you?”
    “I’m the one asking questions here,” Shay snapped.
    “I’m the one with the gun,” came the easy reply.
    “Hell.” Out of habit. Shay polished the star-shaped badge on his vest with his right shirt cuff. “I turned thirty last September.”
    “So did I.”
    “Well, write-home and hallelujah. I hope somebody baked you a cake.”
    The response was a slanted grin that gave Shay a whole new insight into why his pa had felt called upon to box his ears now and again. “Somebody did. I believe her name was Sue-Ellen. How long have you had this job, Marshal?”
    Shay put his foot down, figuratively, at least. “Oh, no,” he said. “I asked for your name, and I’m not saying anything else until I get it.”
    “Saint-Laurent,” was the crisp reply. “Tristan.” Still holding the gun, Saint-Laurent used the thumb of that same hand to scratch his chin.
    Shay pondered the revelation, mentally leafing through the piles of wanted posters on his desk for a match, and was relieved when he came up dry. “It’s plain that you’ve got me at a disadvantage,” he said. “So why don’t you just go ahead and tell me how the hell it happens that a man comes awake in the middle of the night to find a gun at his throat and his own face looking back at him?”
    Saint-Laurent watched him narrowly for a few moments, as though making some kind of calculation, then threw down the cheroot and ground it out on the wood floor with the heel of one scuffed and mud-caked boot. “Your folks never told you what happened? How you were orphaned and all?”
    Shay shook his head. He had two older sisters, Dorrie and