PROLOGUE

Just before daybreak …

DENVER, COLORADO

WINTER 1879

Marsh Canton kept his face expressionless. Across the table a man who called himself Darcy wiped nervous sweat from his brow.

“About—about that marker …” Darcy stammered.

Marsh said nothing. He merely waited.

“I … I can’t pay it.”

“You will,” Marsh said coldly, “one way or another.”

Sweat beaded like tears at the corners of Darcy’s eyes; it dripped down his cheeks. His face was red, mottled from heavy drinking, and his hands trembled. “I do … do have something,” he managed to say. His expression was a study in fear as he reached inside the breast pocket of his coat.

Instantly a gun was in Marsh’s hand. The movement was so fast, it seemed to onlookers as though Marsh hadn’t moved at all. The three other men at the table pushed back their chairs, and silence fell over the crowd in the Purple Sage Saloon.

“No!” Darcy shouted. “I wasn’t reaching for a gun. I swear it!”

The gun didn’t waver. Marsh’s eyes were very dark, framed by hooked black brows that gave him a perpetually lazy look. But no one took Marsh Canton for lazy. He had the reputation of being one of the most ruthless, and deadly, men in Colorado, perhaps in the entire West.

“You were saying?” Marsh prompted. His words echoed in the cavernous hall, and men inched away even as they tried to position themselves to better hear what transpired.

Slowly, Darcy slid the paper from his coat. “A … a saloon. In San Francisco. This is the deed.”

“And what would you be doing with a saloon in San Francisco?”

“A debt. I took it, like … like now … in a poker game.”

“You must have been a better poker player a while back than you are now,” Marsh said in a low, contemptuous voice. He hated welshers. But then, he didn’t like anyone much.

He took the deed. There was a legal-looking seal, and the deed appeared legitimate enough. But why in the hell would he want a saloon? He was a gunfighter. One of the best. He brought the highest dollar.

Darcy was sweating even more profusely. Marsh cursed to himself. He wouldn’t get anything else from the man. It was very plain there was nothing more to get. Marsh could kill him. But damn, he was tired of killing—so damned tired.

His last job had made him realize exactly how tired. He had been hired by a rancher who feared a range war was in the making. One of Marsh’s competitors, a man called Lobo, had been hired by an opposing rancher. In the end Lobo and he hadn’t been forced to confront each other, but Lobo had been drawn into a showdown with another hired gun and been shot, his gun hand shattered. In that moment Marsh had imagined himself in Lobo’s place.

Nearly forty now, Marsh knew he was old for a gunfighter. He was losing his edge, those split-second responses. More and more often he awoke from a dream in which he saw himself dying on a dirt street in a worn-out, no-name cow town while people stared as if he were a freak.

And he was a freak. No heart. No soul. A shell of a man. But he didn’t want to die that way, not with an ambitious young gunfighter bending over him as a crowd cheered him on.

He looked at the crinkled piece of paper in his hand. His deliverance, perhaps? A sign? Hell, he didn’t believe in such tomfoolery. Yet …

He smoothed the paper and saw Darcy release a long breath. “This had better be real,” he said in a voice that rumbled threateningly. “Or I’ll find you.”

The man’s red face went white, something Marsh would have thought impossible.

“It’s real,” Darcy mumbled.

“Sign the deed,” Marsh commanded, pushing it back. The man did as ordered, the signature barely legible because his hand shook so badly.

Marsh Canton took the deed back, folded it carefully, and placed it in his pocket. He stood, casually sliding his gun into its well-used holster. No one moved. He took one careful look around the saloon. Only the usual fear registered on the faces of the men.

He was used to the fear. He expected it. He discovered he was also weary of it.

Marsh turned his back, satisfied that no one would try to stop him.

No one did. They simply watched the lean blackclad figure stalk out of the saloon. And they were damned glad the gunfighter had gone.

No one heard Marsh’s mirthless chuckle as he left the silent crowd behind. The gunfighter was about to become a saloon owner. Maybe the odor of fear and death, which had been his companion for more than twenty years, would no longer shadow him.…

Maybe.