was still open but not very busy at that hour. Only about a dozen men were in the barroom, and more than half of them were Jardine’s men.
Including the one stretched out on the bar, bleeding onto the hardwood from the bullet hole in his side.
The auburn-haired woman who called herself Lady Augusta Winslow looked up from examining the wound and said coolly, “I charge extra for medical services, Mr. Jardine. I assume you’ll cover the expenses incurred for the care of your man here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jardine replied, not bothering to try to keep the irritation out of his voice. “How’s Three-Finger doing?”
“With the proper treatment, he should survive. The bullet’s still inside him, so it will have to be removed. If he lives through the surgery, he’ll be fine.”
Jardine gave the woman a curt nod.
“Go ahead. But be careful. He’s a good man.”
That was one of the rare occasions when someone had used the term “good man” to refer to Three-Finger Smith, so called because he had only three fingers on his left hand.
A lot of hombres on the frontier were missing fingers, but usually the loss was the result of an accident, like getting a finger caught in a rope while taking a dally around the saddlehorn.
Three-Finger had lost his index and middle fingers when the husband of a married woman caught him with those fingers where they shouldn’t have been. Faced with the choice of getting a bullet in the head or laying his hand out flat on a table, the man previously known as plain Hal Smith had chosen the table, whereupon the offended husband had promptly chopped off the offending digits with a Bowie knife.
The man would have been smarter to chop fingers off Smith’s gun hand, because as soon as Three-Finger, as he was newly dubbed, had the injury wrapped up, he returned and shot the luckless cuckold in the back.
The man was on top of his wife at the time, trying to mend the fences of her straying, and the bullet went all the way through him and killed her, too.
Jardine had heard Three-Finger tell that story numerous times, and it always provoked Three-Finger to such laughter that he had to slap his thigh with his mutilated hand.
Snyder, Joe Hutto, Angus Braverman, and Doyle Hilliard were among the man clustered around the wounded Three-Finger now. Lady Augusta reached behind her to the backbar, picked up a bottle of whiskey, and handed it to Snyder.
“Pour as much of that as you can down his throat,” she instructed. “It’ll be a lot easier to operate on him if he’s soused to the gills.”
Snyder nodded.
“Angus, you and Joe grab on to him. Doyle, pry open his mouth.”
Jardine countermanded that order.
“Just give him the bottle. Nobody ever had a problem getting Three-Finger to drink. Joe, come with me.”
Hutto nodded. He followed Jardine to a table in the corner while Smith grabbed the bottle away from Snyder, tilted it to his mouth while Braverman and Hilliard helped him sit up, and let the who-hit-John start gurgling down his throat.
“What happened?” Jardine asked when he and Hutto were seated at the table. “I left you out there to make sure nobody picked up our trail after that foul-up the other day. I’m guessing somebody did.”
Hutto nodded. On the gang’s way back to Flat Rock, Jardine had dropped off him and Smith at one of the little buttes that overlooked the trail about fifteen miles from the settlement, ordering them to stay there until he told them otherwise.
The next day, he had sent a rider out there with enough supplies to last the two sentinels a week. A few days had passed since then, long enough so that Jardine had become convinced the two men they had bushwhacked had crawled off and died or moved on somewhere else.
Either way, he didn’t think they were a threat anymore.
Judging by the way Three-Finger was bleeding on the bar, he’d been wrong about that.
“We spotted one of those hombres ridin’ toward town,” Hutto explained.
“You’re sure it was one of the men we had that run-in with the other day?”
Hutto nodded.
“Yeah. I got a good look at him through the spyglass. It was that big fella in the buckskin shirt, looks sort of like a redskin.”
“What did you do?”
Hutto rubbed a hand over his angular, beard-stubbled jaw.
“We saw where the son of a buck made camp, so we figured if we snuck up and killed him, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But he pulled a fast one on us and was holed up waiting for somebody to jump him. Three-Finger caught a slug while we were tradin’ shots with the varmint.”
Jardine said wearily, “You were supposed to light a shuck back here to town and warn me if you saw anybody like that following our tracks.”
“Yeah, I know, but we thought—”
“And that was your mistake right there,” Jardine cut in as he leaned forward. His face was dark with anger. “You’re not supposed to think, damn it! I handle that!”
He flung a hand toward the bar, where Three-Finger had polished off the whiskey and now lay there with a
