Noelle. Diana Palmer
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groaning form and stood over him, the smoking pistol still held level in his lean hand. His eyes, to the spectators, were frightening in their unblinking blue glitter.
“Are you finished, or do you want to try again?” he asked, without a breath of sympathy. His index finger was still on the trigger, the pistol aimed at the downed man. It was evident to everyone that if the cowboy had reached for the pistol lying near his uninjured side, Jared would have sent a second bullet right into the man without hesitation.
The white-faced cowboy looked up at death in a business suit. “Say,” he managed in a rough whisper, “don’t I know you?”
“I doubt it.”
The cowboy shuddered at the force of the pain. “But I do,” he insisted. “I saw you…in Dodge. I was in Dodge City, back in the…early 80s. There was a Texas gunman. Killed another gunman…Never saw his hand move, never even saw it coming, like just now…” He was barely conscious as loss of blood weakened him, while around him people were rushing in search of a doctor for the wounded men.
A dark-eyed man carrying a medical bag pushed his way through the crowd. He looked from Dunn’s bleeding leg to the red-splattered arm of the cowboy on the ground.
“It’s 1902,” he informed Dunn. “We’re supposed to be civilized now. Put that damned thing away!”
Dunn reholstered the gun with a smooth spin that wasn’t lost on the physician, but he didn’t back down.
“Shattered his gun arm, didn’t you?” He examined the cowboy and nodded to two of his companions. “Get him to my office.” He turned and looked pointedly at the lawyer’s bleeding leg, around which he was calmly tying a white handkerchief that quickly turned red. “You can come along, too. I thought you were a lawyer.”
“I am.”
“Not the way you handle that gun. Can you walk?”
“I’m only shot, not killed,” Jared said curtly. His blue eyes met the other man’s, still cold from the confrontation. “I’ve been shot before.”
“A lawyer should expect to be.”
“Ah. An anarchist, I presume.”
The doctor was motioning to the cowboy’s friends, somewhat subdued now, to bring him along. “No, I’m not an anarchist,” the doctor replied. “But I don’t believe a handful of men should own the world.”
“Believe it or not, neither do I.” Jared walked on his own, even when a sympathetic bystander offered him a hand. He looked neither right nor left, following the doctor and the victim into the office. It amused him when the man’s friends quickly withdrew into the waiting room with nervous glances in his direction. Over the years, that reaction had become familiar.
When he’d left Texas to practice law in New York ten years ago, he’d thought that the days of cold steel and hot lead were over forever. But most of his cases took him West. And the frontier might be closed these days, but there were plenty of men around who grew up in wild times and still thought a gun was the way to settle a dispute.
Shootings even occurred in such civilized places as Fort Worth, because he read about them in the local paper his grandmother sent to him in New York. There was an ordinance against weapons there, in Fort Worth, but apparently few people obeyed it, despite the city’s large police force. Here in Terrell, the sheriff wanted to be reelected, so he didn’t encourage unpopular gun control ordinances. Such a lawman wouldn’t have been tolerated back in Texas.
Jared sat down heavily in a chair while the doctor worked on the wounded cowboy, with some assistance from a younger man who worked with him.
His mind was on the case, not his wound. He’d learned in his wild young days to ignore pain. He was thirty-six now, and the lesson had stood him in good stead.
He’d been tricked into thinking that the landowner was the victim in this town. It was only at the end of the case that he’d realized how untrue that was. His loyalty was to his client, and he’d researched the deeds well enough to know that the small ranchers had no real claim on the land at all. That didn’t make him feel any better when the judge ruled that they must be evicted from homesteads where they’d planted crops and had cattle grazing for five years before the absentee rancher even knew they were on the place.
But there was no such thing as squatters’ rights under the law. The fact that they’d been sold the land by an unscrupulous speculator, without legal counsel, was beside the point. The seller had long since skipped and couldn’t be found.
“I said, let’s have a look at that leg,” the doctor repeated testily.
He looked up blankly and realized that he and the doctor were alone in the room, the assistant having helped the other wounded man, now bandaged, out into the embrace of his friends.
Jared climbed onto the table and watched as the doctor cut his pant leg to give him access to the wound. He examined it carefully, applying antiseptic before he probed it with a long instrument. He found the bullet and began to withdraw it. He glanced up to see if he was hurting his patient and found the man’s steely blue eyes as calm as if he’d been reading a newspaper.
“Tough character, aren’t you?” the doctor murmured when he’d withdrawn the bullet and tossed it into a metal pan.
“I grew up in wild times,” Jared said quietly.
“So did I.” He applied more antiseptic and began to bandage the wound. “You’ve got some damage there. No bones broken, but a few torn ligaments at the least. Try to stay off it as much as possible and have your own doctor take a look when you get home. I don’t think there will be any permanent damage, but you’ll have a hard time walking for a few weeks. Leave that bandage on until your own doctor sees the leg. You’ll have some fever. Have your doctor check it for infection when you get back to New York. Gangrene is still a very real possibility.”
“I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Sorry about your trousers.”
Jared shrugged. “Fortunes of war.” His eyes fixed on the doctor’s face. “I’ll take care of both bills—for myself and the man I wounded. For two bits, I’d call out Hughes and make a clean sweep of this. He lied to me. I thought the trespassing had been recent.”
The doctor’s eyebrows went up. “You didn’t know that those men had homesteaded the land for five years?”
“Not until today.”
He whistled through his teeth.
Jared got to his feet and reached for his wallet. He peeled off several large bills and handed them to the doctor. “If you have any contact with the man I shot, tell him that he’s got a good case against the man who sold him the land. Anybody can be found. I know an ex-Pinkerton man who lives in Chicago—Matt Davis, by name.” He took a pencil and pad from his pocket, scribbled a name and an address. “He’s a good man, and he’s a sucker for a just cause. I’ve worked with him frequently over the past ten years.”
The doctor fingered the slip of paper. “Ed Barkley will be grateful. He’s not a bad man, but he lived on the border for years before he married and tried to settle down. Sank every penny he had into that land, and now he’s lost everything.” He shrugged and smiled faintly. “In the old days, there would have been quick justice, right or wrong. Civilization is hard work.”
Jared’s eyebrow quirked. “Tell me about it.”
He left the doctor’s office and started toward his hotel. He hadn’t taken off the gun belt.
The sheriff came toward him, clearing his throat. “I believe we should discuss this gunplay…”
Jared, in pain and furious that the official hadn’t even tried to do his duty, swept the jacket back again with cold, insolent challenge.
“By all means, let’s discuss it,” he invited curtly.
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