“A gruella!” Seamus exclaimed. He closed his fingers around the ivory handles of his Merwin and Hulbert revolver and again scanned the plain. “It can’t be,” he said. “It just can’t be.”
Seamus abruptly remembered the man and woman he had passed on the way there. He remembered how neither had looked at him, remembered, now that he thought about it, that the woman had been thin and wore a dress no self-respecting dove would be caught dead in. The man had been short, and Jeeter Frost was supposed to be short, and might have been wearing buckskins.
“Son of a bitch!” Seamus cursed his stupidity, and ran. He practically vaulted into the saddle and applied his spurs. His sorrel, unaccustomed to such rough treatment, shot toward Dodge as if fired from a cannon. But he only went a short way when he reined up.
“What am I doing?” Seamus leaned on the saddle horn to contemplate. So far as he knew, Jeeter Frost was not wanted by the law. Frost killed the Blights, but by all accounts he shot them in self-defense. Sheriff Hinkle would like to question Frost, but that was all. So why go barreling into town after the killer and the schoolmarm when Jeeter Frost might take exception and decide the county could do without an undersheriff?
Seamus was under no delusions about his ability with a six-gun. He was fair. Only fair. Whereas Frost had to be a wizard, given the number of hombres he had reportedly slain. Even allowing for exaggeration, Frost was still as deadly a customer as Seamus ever came across. Who in their right mind would make a man like that mad?
Not Seamus. He had survived as long as he had by sticking to what he jokingly liked to call his golden rules: Never poke a rattler, never get in the path of stampeding animals, and never, ever prod a man liable to exact payment for the affront in lead.
His mind made up, Seamus gigged his horse into a different street than the one he left Dodge by. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Sheriff Hinkle’s face when he told him. The schoolmarm and the worst short-trigger man in three states. Hinkle would find it as hilarious as he did.
Horace Dundleman had been a justice of the peace since Dodge City was founded, and before that, in St. Louis a good many years. He liked the job. He met a lot of interesting people, and Horace liked people. He also liked that it was not physically demanding because at his age, seventy-one, he was not as spry as he used to be. His joints ached and creaked, and his vision was so bad he needed spectacles.
Those spectacles delayed Horace when someone began pounding on his door. He groped for them on the nightstand and accidentally knocked them onto the floor. The knocks grew louder and more insistent as Horace groped about near the bed until he found them. Finally perching the spectacles on his nose, he went to the closet, opened it, and took his heavy robe from a peg.
“Hold your horses! I’m coming!” Horace hollered as he shuffled down the hall past the parlor that served as his office. He threw the bolt that would admit his visitors. “It is awful late.”
Ernestine Prescott glanced nervously behind her before slipping inside. She had her arm wrapped around Jeeter Frost’s and had no intention of letting go. “I am sorry but it could not be helped.”
Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, Horace’s owl eyes blinked. “Miss Prescott? What are you doing out and about at this hour?” He did not come out and say that schoolmarms should be discreet in their behavior, but he was thinking it.
“You perform weddings, do you not, Mr. Dundleman?”
Horace could not have been more stunned if she pulled out a gun and shot him. He blinked anew, then focused on her companion. The man reminded him of a ferret, and was obviously on edge from the way he fidgeted and was sweating. “I perform civil ceremonies, yes,” Horace said guardedly, thinking to himself that surely the schoolmarm was not thinking of doing what her question suggested.
Ernestine smiled. “Then I would like very much for you to perform one for us, here and now.”
“At this hour?”
