deathly quiet. He supposed someone had noticed her holding a gun to his head and pointed it out, and as the news spread, everyone stopped what they were doing to watch.
Marcy kissed Luke again, and someone let out a cheer, breaking the silence. Customers returned to their drinking and gambling, filling the saloon with noise once more.
Marcy took Luke by the hand and led him upstairs so they could get reacquainted properly.
That evening, Luke sat with Marcy at her private table in the rear corner of the saloon’s main room. One of her bartenders had brought supper over from the dining room of the Grand Central Hotel. It was the best food in the Black Hills, she had explained, and Luke had to admit she was probably right. The roast beef was as good as any he’d had in a long time.
As they ate, washing down the food with sips of fine wine, they talked about everything that had happened since they’d seen each other last.
“I don’t have much to tell,” Luke told her. “I’m a bounty hunter, have been ever since that run-in with the Gammon brothers.”
“I know. I’ve heard talk about you from time to time. You have quite a reputation.” Marcy smiled. “Did you know I named this place after the Gammons?”
“I wondered how come you called it the Buffalo Butt.”
“In those buffalo coats, they were as ugly and smelly as buffalo rumps.”
“I can’t disagree with that,” Luke said.
“Even though I didn’t want to admit it to you this afternoon, I reckon that was when my life started to change for the better. So I felt like I ought to commemorate the occasion.”
Luke thought about it and decided the name was appropriate after all. He lifted his wineglass. “To the good that can come from ugly, inelegant things.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Marcy clinked her glass against his, and he thought her eyes had a meaningful, mischievous twinkle in them as she looked at him.
He
But he had done some good in his life, too. He had saved Emily and her grandfather from Vincent Wolford. If the carpetbagger had lived, he wouldn’t have stopped going after them until he got what he wanted.
And Luke had helped Marcy escape a life that would have eventually killed her if she hadn’t gotten out of it. Some people might consider owning a saloon in a frontier town like Deadwood to be pretty disreputable, but those folks just didn’t know how low people really could sink. Marcy was better off. He was sure of it.
“What are you going to do now?” she asked.
“I thought I’d have another glass of this surprisingly good wine,” he replied with a smile.
“No, I mean with your life. Blast it, Luke, you know that.”
He poured the wine and set the bottle aside. “I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing. I don’t see any reason to change now. I’m not sure I
“I did,” Marcy said.
“You wanted to.”
“Wouldn’t you like to have a normal life? Maybe a business? Like . . . half interest in a saloon?”
He saw the hope in her eyes and knew it would be kinder to dash it right away, rather than letting it linger and grow. He shook his head. “I’m not going to settle down. I can’t. Now that I know you’re here, I might try to drift this way more often—”
“Don’t put yourself out on my account.” Her expression turned cold, like a blue norther blowing down across the plains.
“You don’t understand. I can’t be who you want me to be, Marcy, but knowing that I have a friend somewhere. . . well, it might make those cold nights out on the prairie a little easier to bear.”
She wasn’t going to give in easily. “I’ll think about it.” Her voice and body remained stiff with disappointment and anger.
Luke lifted his glass to her. “That’s all I can ask.”
She came to him that night seemingly as passionate as ever, but he sensed she was holding something back. His declaration that he would be riding on had changed whatever had been between them.
Late that night, as Luke was dozing off with Marcy’s head pillowed on his shoulder, he heard her whisper, “If you run out on me in the morning without saying good-bye again, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
He laughed softly and promised, “I’ll be here.”
He was sound asleep when his instincts took over and warned him. Maybe it was the faint creak of a floorboard, but whatever the reason, his eyes snapped open and caught a flicker of movement in the shadows of the room.
Reacting with the speed that had saved his life many times, Luke shoved a startled Marcy out of bed and rolled the other way. With a boom like a crash of thunder, a shotgun went off, twin gouts of flame erupting from its barrels.
Luke snatched up the Remington he had left lying on a chair right beside the bed and thumbed two shots just above the muzzle flash from the scattergun. Momentarily deaf from the shotgun’s roar, he couldn’t hear if his target cried out or dropped the weapon.
Keeping himself low to the ground, he crept forward. After only a couple steps, Luke tripped on something and stumbled. He put his left hand out to catch himself and it landed on something hot and sticky. He pulled it back and lashed out with the revolver, thudding against something soft.
“Get a light on,” Luke told Marcy, hoping none of the buckshot had winged her.
A lucifer flared to life. He squinted against the glare, his eyes adjusting as she lit a lamp on the table beside the bed. Light filled the room and revealed Luke kneeling beside a gaunt man with a scar shaped like a half-moon on his chin. The would-be killer’s chest was a bloody mess from the two slugs that had torn through it.
“Who is he?” Marcy asked. “Do you know him?”
Luke heard the question indicating his hearing had come back. He shook his head. “We never met, but I know who he is. His name’s Fescoe. I’ve been on his trail for a while. Somebody must have told him I was in town looking for him, so he asked around until he figured out where he could find me. Thought he’d get me off his trail permanently.”
Luke was going to have a talk with that liveryman, who had obviously double-crossed him.
Marcy put her hands on her hips. “My bed’s ruined from that shotgun blast, and he’s getting blood on the rug, too.”
Luke stood up. “I’ll send you money for the damages once I’ve gotten the reward. I’ll have to ride back down to Yankton to collect.”
“But you won’t be coming back?”
“Not for a while. Not after this.”
“I’ve seen men die before, you know. I’ve even had them try to kill me.”
“Death doesn’t follow you around, though. Not like it does with me.”
Marcy sighed as one of the bartenders pounded on the door and called out to see if she was all right.
“I can’t decide if you’re the best man I know, Luke Smith, or just a sorry SOB.”
Luke walked to the chair by the side of the bed and slipped the Remington back into the holster. “It’s a good question. I don’t know the answer myself.”
CHAPTER 28
Even though his visit to Deadwood had a more bittersweet ending than he would have preferred, Luke took some good memories away from there. He knew Marcy was not only still alive but thriving, and that eased one of the worries he had carried around with him for years. He made himself a promise to drift up to the Black Hills every now and then to visit her and hoped the next time they met, she would still be glad to see him.
The next year, in the summer of 1878, he was in Santa Fe when he saw another familiar face across a crowded cantina. He picked up his mug of beer and made his way across the room until he reached the table where a thick-bodied man with graying fair hair and beard sat nursing a glass of tequila.
