Billy smiled warily and puffed his cigar to keep it burning. He was a man of leisure. That’s what having money was all about.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked under his breath as he stared into the coffee. Damn it all, he’d never been this lonely. He’d expected Danny to come back. To have at least sent word. But no post was forwarded from Helena. Nor was there a message in Helena’s Herald paper—though Billy had seen one from George Nichols dated a couple of weeks back.
He needed only telegraph if he wanted a job.
But did he?
Would it be the same without Danny?
He lifted his cigar and took another puff. Chairs scraped as a group of rough-looking men—woodcutters from their clothes—took the last empty table. They draped their thick buffalo coats on the chair backs, frozen snow melting from the hair and dripping on the floor.
It would be risky without Danny going in advance to do the scouting. More people would see him. No one would be watching his back.
“Damn you, Danny,” Billy whispered under his breath. He was the Meadowlark. Powerful men feared him, knew from his reputation that were he hired to kill them, their lives were forfeit. And here he was, wounded, a half-man because Danny had left him. And worse, Danny had fled knowing that after his desertion, if Billy ever caught up with him, that his onetime friend wouldn’t suffer the slightest remorse over shooting him dead.
It’s because of what you’ve become, the voice inside his head told him.
“And what is that?” he asked himself softly, his eyes on the rising streamers of smoke coming off the cigar ash.
You’re a monster!
For proof he need not look any further than the fragments of nightmares brewing behind his eyes. Maw—clotted dirt clinging to her grave dress—her bent finger pointing at him, red-hot anger in the empty sockets of her eyes. Or Sarah’s ghost reaching down for his hard cock, her facial features mixing with those of dead whores he’d buried, sunk, or burned.
Odd, wasn’t it? How the men he’d killed never came back to haunt him, but the women he’d wronged remained so fresh? Sometimes Sarah’s blue eyes transformed into Margarita’s doe-dark ones the moment she grabbed him. Her mouth would shape itself into Lizzie’s gap-toothed grin.
What kind of a monster are you?
The voice was probing, deep, and reverberating, as though it shook his very soul.
“The kind who belongs to the devil himself,” Billy whispered under his breath as his empty gaze fixed on the tabletop. For what seemed an eternity he stared at the grease-stained wood marked by old coffee rings.
He felt something through his boot, shocking him back to the world. Billy looked up, startled, to see the man who’d kicked the chair.
He was tall, dressed in a thick wool winter coat, a dusting of snow melting into droplets on his shoulders. The slouch hat sat crooked on his blond head, and cold blue eyes were taking Billy’s measure. The mouth behind the dark-blond beard had an amused pinch to it, as if derisive.
“Sorry to wake you, friend,” the blond man told him. “But you’ve got the only free chair in the house. Either I talk you into moving your foot and sharing your table, or I have to sit on the floor.”
“Sorry,” Billy said, removing his foot. “Lost in my head.”
The big blond seated himself, a plate of bacon and beans in his hand. “Lost ain’t the word for it. You was plumb vanished in the wilderness on beyond Jordan. First I thought you were drunk, then I wondered if maybe you was just deaf.”
Billy took the man’s measure in turn as the newcomer shrugged out of his thick wool coat; a Remington revolver had been tucked in a cross draw at his belt. He was a little over thirty, with a hard look. Deeply seated anger lay behind those slightly crazy blue eyes. Something about him bespoke a military bearing. Not that that was so unusual given the war or the disenchanted men from both sides that had flocked into Montana. What was unusual was that he hadn’t shed it as so many had. As if that strict bearing were somehow important to who he was.
Billy said, “Don’t be prodding, mister. It’s my table, and it’s a mite early in the day to be raising a ruckus.”
The blond studied him as he forked a load of beans into his mouth and chewed. Swallowing he said, “Hard case, are you?”
“Did you come here to eat breakfast or get shot?”
A slight quiver of the blond man’s lips, a cooling of his expression, seemed to stretch time. Then he smiled, a faint chuckle barely audible in his voice. “Fair enough. I just needed a place to eat. Guess I shouldn’t hold it against a man who was just looking for a place to think, should I?”
“Reckon not. And I should have been paying better attention. What brings you to Fort Benton? I haven’t seen you around.”
“Got in a couple of days ago.” He looked around. “Heard there was great doings up to Fort Benton. That this was the richest town in Montana Territory, and there was money to be made. Thought it would be like Denver or the Colorado strikes. Had it in my head to take over a fancy house, one suited to a better-heeled clientele. And what do I find? Blow-down tents, underground hovels, bullwhackers, two-bit monte dealers, and cold bitter enough to freeze a Massachusetts man’s arse off. And that, friend, is God-Almighty cold.”
“There’s money right enough,” Billy told him. “But it’s in freight and supply. You might make a fancy house pay, but only in summer when the boats are in. This time of year? I doubt
