Disaster Creek by D. B. Newton

Author:D. B. Newton [D.B.Newton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781428505247
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Published: 2008-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The blood on the shirt was his own. He hadn’t known until he peered at himself in the jail mirror that he had taken a cut on the lip. He dabbed it with cold water until the bleeding stopped; if the lip didn’t swell too badly, his moustache would help to cover it. But the shirt was practically a ruin, and he was rummaging in his saddlebag for another before he remembered he no longer owned an extra one—he’d ripped it up yesterday to improvise a bandage for Sam Prentiss’ bullet wound.

So all he could do at the moment was sponge the blood from his ruined shirt as best he could and then put it back on and slip his coat on over it. As he looked at the effect in the mirror, he heard the distant sound of music and thought of Kit Tracy in John Luft’s arms. And he frowned, thinking of his talk with old Orin Tracy.

You really couldn’t blame the old man too much, he told himself. It would be frightening to reach his age and have a young granddaughter who must somehow be provided for when his time came to leave her. Even if Bannon considered that admiration for Luft’s importance and success had warped Orin Tracy’s judgment in choosing a husband for her, he was hardly in a position himself to say anything. He looked at the man in the mirror—a man without even a whole shirt to his name, a man with a shadow hanging over him that made it out of the question that he should think seriously about any girl. A man who would very soon be gone from here, for good.

If John Luft had serious intentions toward Kit, he told himself bleakly, the only decent thing Ed Bannon could do was stand aside and leave the field to him…

So as he went outside again to his waiting horse he was grimly determined that, from here on, he would remember the fill-in job he was here to do for the ailing Marshal Prentiss. No longer did he let himself search for Kit among the people on the picnic ground or moving along the street. The rest of that interminable day he tended strictly to business—keeping to himself, and to the saddle, at an unhurried gait and hardly speaking to anyone at all. He found it surprising, after the warnings he’d had, how orderly the town was. As the day dragged out and afternoon shadows lengthened, with first lamplight beginning to glow along the canyon, there were a couple of brief disturbances but these were caused by buckaroos who had taken on too much to drink and who subsided readily enough when Bannon gave them a warning. He began to wonder if the showing he’d made by standing up to Reub Springer might have had its effect.

Full night settled. At this season of the year, the sky didn’t completely darken until nine; but long before that, the picnic ground, the porch of the hotel, and the front yards of houses up on Piety Hill blossomed with colored fire.

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