Two Brothers Read Free Page A

Cornelia, and they’d wasted no time in letting him know he was a foundling, but they’d been nearly grown when he came along, and secretive about the details, probably because it gave them power over him. Neither his mother nor his father could be persuaded to part with the story; in fact, they’d taken it to their graves, dying within a year of each other, and he’d left off wondering a long time ago. Mostly.
    Saint-Laurent sighed. “You must have reasoned it through by now,” he said. “We started out from the same place, you and me. We were born in the Rockies, to a couple named Killigrew—they were headed west with a wagon train, and both of them were real young. Our panever even got a look at us—he was killed by Indians while our mama was in labor. She died of grief and blood loss before the day was out.”
    The tale was briefly and bluntly told, and it bludgeoned Shay in a way he wouldn’t have expected. He was grateful he was already sitting down, since he reckoned his knees might have given out, and for the first time in eighteen months, he was sober clear through to the middle of his brain. He thrust a hand through his hair but said nothing, not trusting himself to speak.
    “I didn’t know about it either, until last year, when I learned my mother was failing and went home to the ranch to see her. She told me the story then, and gave me a little remembrance book our mama kept.”
    “And you set out to find me?” The question came out as a rasp.
    Saint-Laurent chuckled, fished another cheroot out of the inside pocket of his long, dusty gray coat and leaned over to light it from the flame in the kerosene lamp. He replaced the glass chimney before troubling himself to reply. “I didn’t give a damn about you,” he said. “After all, if I wanted to know what you looked like, all I had to do was look in a mirror. I meant to go my own way. But then, as they say in the melodramas, fate took a hand.”
    “How’s that?” Shay asked, mildly insulted that his own brother hadn’t taken more of an interest. Folks either loved him or hated him, but they generally committed themselves wholeheartedly to one view or the other.
    Tristan looked him over, drew on the cheroot, and expelled the smoke, all without speaking. When he did open his mouth, he left Shay’s question hanging in midair. “That stagecoach robbery, over near Cherokee Bluff,” he said. “Were you wearing that badge when it happened?”
    Shay wished mightily that he were drunk again. A year and a half before, the driver, the guard and three passengers had been killed when a bridge blew up beneath the stage and sent the horses, the coach itself and everyoneaboard crashing into a deep ravine. One of the victims, Miss Grace Warfield, had been his bride-to-be.
    “Yeah,” he ground out, after a long moment. “I was the marshal.”
    Tristan was mercifully silent.
    Shay assembled words in his head and, with considerable difficulty, herded them over his tongue. “I rode out to meet them, when the coach didn’t come in on time,” he said. “Me and old Dutch Cooper, from over at the livery stable. We figured they’d broken an axle or one of the horses had thrown a shoe. We were maybe a mile off when we heard the explosion.” He stopped, unable to go on, stricken to silence by visions of the terrible things he’d seen that day. Two of the horses were still alive when he and Dutch got there, and the dust had yet to settle. Bodies were scattered over both sides of the ravine, and the coach was in pieces, one wheel spinning slowly in the breeze. The splintered timbers of the bridge made a gruesome framework for it all.
    He and Dutch had gone scrabbling down the steep incline, leaving their mounts untethered at the top. Dutch had shot the injured horses, while Shay had rushed from passenger to passenger—an old man, a middle-aged woman, and Grace. His gentle, funny Grace.
    He hadn’t expected her back from San Francisco for another