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

the saloon. Behind them, the wounded man continued to thrash around, groaning. Glendolene stared, aghast, as the saloon’s double front doors closed.
    What were they going to do—just leave him there to die alone in the street?
    It was a cold night, and no one else was out and about. Smoke wafted in ghostly gray tufts over the street. A single rider materialized from the east, to Glendolene’s left, and the man dressed in a long hide coat and with a red scarf tied over his head beneath his hat merely glanced once at the wounded man and then crouched to casually light a cigarette before touching spurs to his horse’s flanks. Horse and rider trotted on past the wounded man, disappearing to Glendolene’s right.
    Her heart thudded as she stood there before the window, clad in only a towel, her thick hair piled atop her head, and stared down at the thrashing figure of the man who was surely dying. Dying alone on a cold night in a Wolfville street, while a saloon full of men and parlor girls frolicked only a few yards behind him.
    Wind gusted, blowing silhouettes of trash along the street. Something moved beyond the dying man, and Glendolene stretched her gaze toward the gallows beyond the saloon. Something long and dark swayed beneath the platform. More revulsion washed through Glendolene as she stared at the body of Preston Betajack still hanging there.
    â€œWhat on earth . . . ?” she muttered.
    But she knew why Betajack still hung from the gallows. He remained there as Lee’s and Sheriff Neumiller’s grisly example to any outlaws passing through town, and as a stern message to Betajack’s outlaw father to clear out of the county. His brand of ranching, which mostly involved rustling cattle and horses from other men’s ranches, and which had been a bane to Lee’s own spread that he shared with his own father, Wild Bill Mendenhour, would no longer be tolerated in Big Horn County. It was also Lee’s and Neumiller’s message to Betajack that, despite the hired guns on his roll, they weren’t afraid of him.
    Sending such a message was all well and good, she supposed. It was the frontier’s brand of justice. But word of the hanging likely would have spread by now. Why leave the body to the crows?
    Glendolene returned her gaze to the wounded man thrashing now with less vigor in front of the Longhorn Saloon. “Help me,” she heard him say, weakly, ramming the back of one fist into the ground beside him.
    She backed away from the window. She turned away quickly, as though to rid the man from her mind as well as her eyes. She couldn’t help him. She had no real desire to help. He’d probably deserved that bullet he’d been fed in the Longhorn, and it was none of her business, anyway. As Lee had told her over and over again, it was a harsh world out here. It begat harsh men who died badly at times. Such was the price of living at all.
    â€œHelp me. . . .”
    Glendolene tensed her shoulders, trying to fight the image of the dying man, his weakening pleas, from her mind. She tried to think about the stage ride tomorrow, of spending Christmas with the couple who’d raised her—Uncle Walt and Aunt Evelyn Birdsong. They owned a harness shop and blacksmith business in Belle Fourche, and they’d raised her since she was seven years old, when her own parents had died in a plague. She even tried to think about Lee and their life together, and if she really wanted that life to continue on the ranch where she was treated like a child by Lee and his overbearing father, Wild Bill.
    She couldn’t even ride out alone on a horse, as she’d so enjoyed doing in Dakota, despite her being as capable in the saddle as nearly any of the men at Chain Link. If she did, she incurred a loud, castigating rebuke from Wild Bill himself, if one of the hands had seen her, and by Lee if he was around and not off riding around the county with