CHAPTER 41

Leo Sweetwater was troubled and feeling increasingly more so by the hour.

The young gunfighter prided himself on always keeping a cool head, no matter the situation, and one of the ways he did this was to clearly see things as being black or white in accordance to his own values. Never any shades of gray.

The key, of course, was that Leo’s values were pretty simple and straightforward, unencumbered by the boundaries of the law or religion or any other such influence. For Leo, it was as basic as hiring his gun out to somebody and then doing whatever it was that somebody directed him to do.

But all of a sudden, he’d run up against a situation with complications.

First off, he didn’t like a quitter—somebody who’d cut and run at the first sign of serious resistance. That’s surely what Thomas Wainwright had done. He’d gotten his ass burned in the conflict with Don Pedro and then, receiving the bad news from town on top of that, had folded and lit a shuck with only hollow words left behind as far as putting up any more of a fight.

Sweetwater didn’t like being around anybody who showed that much yellow. It made him feel squirmy and uncomfortable inside, like he was afraid it might rub off on him.

Besides that, going on the run with Wainwright also meant running from the personal matter still left unsettled between him and Buckhorn. The man who’d emptied his guns, handcuffed him to his saddle horn, then shooed him on his way like a minor annoyance. Since it came at the direction of his employer, riding off without settling that score wasn’t really the same as turning away on his own, Sweetwater told himself. It didn’t mean showing his own streak of yellow . . . but it felt awful damned close.

There’d certainly been times when he’d terminated his employment from previous men who hired him. Sometimes the job was finished, sometimes it just got stale and came to a mutual parting of the ways. Sweetwater considered doing this with Wainwright, once the latter revealed his true color and announced his intent to run off for Mexico, but before he could speak up, Wainwright had specifically asked him to stay on. Practically pleaded. It was in that moment Sweetwater had seen the deeper torment in the man, something more than defeat and fear exposed.

Something had broken inside the old general. He’d become unhinged in the attempt to cope with the realization that his dream of Silverado was crushed and was never going to happen. There could be no mutual parting of the ways under those circumstances and, somehow, Sweetwater had not been able to force the break.

Finally, there was the woman. Lusita. Mrs. Wainwright. In his months at the Flying W, Sweetwater had certainly been aware of her. What red-blooded male could help but be?

He had drawn the line and held it firm right there. By his values, he didn’t lust after another man’s wife and for sure not the wife of the man he’d hired out to. He froze shut any such yearnings in himself and let it be known to those around him that the crude remarks and explicit fantasies they tended to regale one another with when he wasn’t on hand were to be stifled when he was within earshot. He wasn’t a prude, not by any means, but letting those kinds of thoughts go running in directions they didn’t belong only clouded a body’s brain and left a trail for potential trouble that plain wasn’t worth it.

With the change in their circumstances, all of that had changed, too. It was clear Lusita didn’t want to be part of any of it. Equally clear, she no longer wanted much to do with Wainwright, either.

His treatment of her wasn’t doing anything to help Sweetwater keep to his values. The feelings a body could hold in check for the wife of a man who was kind and loving to her was one thing. A wife who was abused and taken for granted by her man was something else.

What was more, in addition to the way Lusita was being treated by her husband and the conflicted feelings it stirred in Sweetwater himself, the young gunman also had a keen awareness of how the other two men traveling with them looked at her. What else might be contained in the ill-concealed yearning that shone in their eyes, he could only guess. But it wasn’t good.

The two men—Brazos Kent and Abe Tarvel by name—were two of the crudest, most foul-mouthed gunnies to have signed into the ranks of Wainwright’s now defunct army. Their only saving graces were a shared propensity for ruthlessness and lightning speed with a gun. There’d been no indication back at the ranch of them being prior friends, but they were sure showing signs of getting chummy with one another and it was becoming more apparent with each passing mile.

Yeah, Sweetwater had good reason to feel troubled. It was because there was so much potential for trouble on all sides.

From what lay in back of them.

What lay ahead.

And what simmered from within.