The Circuit Rider by Dani Amore Page A

seein’ as how she’s pretty upset.”
    Bird
nodded. “We won’t leave town, Sheriff.”
    “And
I wanted to warn you about the men.”
    Bird
smiled.
    “Don’t
worry about us, Mr. Ectors. I find most men can be handled quite easily.”

Twenty

    A lone
in his room, Mike Tower took off his boots, hung his shirt over the back of the
chair, and put a Bible on the bed.
    He
stacked the two pillows against the headboard and stretched out on the bed, his
right hand on top of the book. It was his prized possession, dog-eared and with
a binding that wasn’t going to last more than another year or two. It had seen
him through some dark times, and it looked like it would have to help him get
through yet another.
    Soon,
his eyes were closed as the weariness of the ride, the shock of the woman’s
attack, and the fear that hadn’t stopped blossoming in his stomach combined to
overtake him.
    He
drifted into a half sleep, and images stuttered through his tired mind.
    The
smoke of a battlefield. Gunshots. Dead men and the suffering that came after.
    Tower’s
hand twitched at the memories: the feel of a gun in his hand; the drugs from
the army surgeons who’d patched him up coursing through his veins; the hard,
desperate faces of men who had tried to kill him.
    Outside
his hotel window, someone cracked a whip and a horse snorted, followed by the
wooden creaking of a wagon as it sprang to life.
    Tower
opened his eyes.
    The
emptiness of the hotel room soothed him. He thought of his own congregation
that was waiting for him in San Francisco, once he completed this circuit ride.
    He
thought of the absence of his guns, how they had once been so familiar and
comforting to him.
    The
world before him was one he now met without fear and without a desire to shoot
first. He had been a hard man before he’d discovered a spiritual side to him
that he never would have believed existed. Once he discovered a different way
to live, he had embraced it and never looked back.
    Still,
the attack in the general store troubled him. The woman’s face had been
consumed with hatred. Try as he might, he could not place her anywhere in his
past.
    Correct
that , he thought.
    He
couldn’t place her anywhere definitely in his past. Had her face seemed
familiar? Something tugged at the corner of his memory but then let go, and,
try as he might, he couldn’t get it back.
    Like
many men who’d fought in the War between the States, great patches of time were
lost. Whether it was psychological scars from battle or chaos that had consumed
so many men like him afterward, he didn’t know.
    Especially
for Mike Tower, considering what he had done during that war. There had been a
time after the war, too, before his spiritual awakening, in which some very
dark things had occurred. Things he’d buried as deeply as he could.
    Still,
the past is never really over. Echoes reverberate for years, even generations
afterward. He knew that.
    He
picked up the Bible and placed it on his chest.
    The
line from the book of Isaiah came to his mind: “Let the wicked forsake his
way…”
    Mike
Tower knew he had not done the horrible thing the Arliss woman was accusing him
of doing.
    Yet
the thought that crossed like a dark shadow across his soul provided him no
comfort.
    He
had done other terrible things.

Twenty-One

    L ocated
directly across the street from the hotel, the Day’s End Saloon made itself an
easy choice for Bird Hitchcock.
    She
left Mike Tower to his own devices, crossed the street, and entered the bar. The
reaction was one she was used to: heads raised to see the new man entering the
bar, then a double take when they realized she was a woman, followed by
silence.
    It
all happened as expected.
    The
last part of the entrance routine, however, was when the bar’s patrons glanced
down and saw her two guns, each fastened securely to a thigh with a rawhide
strip. They were serious guns, in a serious rig.
    Rarely
did any comments about a woman coming into a saloon for a