Two Brothers Read Online Free PDF Page B

to bear an uncanny resemblance to Shay himself.
    “If that’s what you’re figuring on doing, you’d better shoot me right here and now,” Shay said. “If you can.”
    Tristan perched on the edge of the desk, arms folded. He rolled his eyes and glanced at the .45 riding low on Shay’s hip. “Relax, Marshal. I may not be your friend, but I’m not your enemy, either. I just want to recover the money from that robbery and ride out of here. That’s all.”
    “Fair enough, but I’ve got one question. What do you need me for?”
    “I guess I must be the smart one, as well as the firstborn. I told you before. Marshal—you make it possible for me to be in two places at once. I like that idea; it ought to keep everybody off balance.”
    “Maybe I’ll agree to cooperate, and maybe I won’t,”Shay replied. He had a headache, and his nerves were raw. He wondered if Aislinn would have slapped him, if he’d kissed her. “Why should I?”
    “You’re a lawman. It’s your job to bring in those outlaws. Besides, something in my gut tells me you’ve got another stake in seeing them hang. I can find out what it is easily enough, if you don’t feel inclined to tell me.”
    Shay turned his back on this brother he had never known, never even imagined, and wondered for a fraction of a second what it would have been like if they’d grown up together. For a moment, he felt the loss of those years spent apart. “The driver of that coach was a friend of mine,” he said gruffly. “A fine, decent man, with a family.”
    “No doubt he was,” Tristan said mildly, “but you’ll have to do better than that if you want me off your back. A thing like that’s a tragedy, any way you look at it, but it wouldn’t undo a man like you.”
    It felt like every word was torn from his throat, a separate strip of hide. “There was a woman on board—Grace Warfield was her name. She and I planned to be married.”
    Tristan was silent for a long time. Then he laid a hand on Shay’s right shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    Shay turned around, unable and unwilling to say more about Grace. “What makes you think we could find those desperadoes, after all this time? It isn’t like we didn’t look, me and that posse—we did. We turned out every hayloft, every rat-hole saloon and whore’s nest for fifty miles around.”
    “So did I,” Tristan said gravely. “They’re not out there, whoever they are. And that means they’ve got to be around here someplace. Think, damn it. Who do you know who might figure they had cause to blow a bridge out from under a coach full of innocent people? Why do that instead of just holding up the stage and riding off with the loot?”
    Tristan’s reference to the innocence of the victims was calculated to get under his skin, he knew that, but the ploy was effective all the same. Shay’s right hand knotted into a fist at his side, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to smash a face that looked so much like his own.
    “Go ahead,” Tristan said quietly. “Hit me, if it’ll make you feel better. Then maybe we can get on with what we’ve got to do.”
    Shay uncurled his fingers.
    Tristan folded his arms and grinned. Again. “Maybe you’re smarter than I’ve given you credit for, up to now,” he said. “If you’d blacked my eye, and then seen the sense in what I’m proposing—which you inevitably would have—I’d have had to give you a shiner to match mine. For the sake of appearances, you understand. I’d have been happy to oblige, of course.”
    Shay huffed out a heavy sigh. “It would almost be worth it. What do you have in mind?”
    “Have a seat, Marshal,” Tristan answered, with a grand gesture toward the desk and, presumably, the chair behind it, “and I’ll explain.”
    Shay sat down, barely resisting the urge to swing his feet up onto the desktop, as Tristan had done. As he himself had done, ever since the day he was sworn in as the marshal. He folded his hands instead and