horsefly buzzing around Nate Bohannan’s left ear woke him. Instantly he regretted returning to awareness, for it felt like an anvil had been dropped on his head and was still bouncing on it. Opening a cautious eye, he saw that it was early morning, and he was lying in the open meadow. Strange. He usually slept under the wagon. The ground at his fingertips dropped away, and he heard a gurgling splash below. Gingerly, he raised himself up on his elbows, and was rewarded with rocketing pain that left him retching onto the grass beside him.
Once the spasm passed, he felt a tad better and was able to cast a bleary look around him. Had Salali been attacked, too? Was his partner lying somewhere nearby, beaten insensible or worse?
He was alone in the meadow. The horses and the medicine wagon were gone. There was no sign of Salali. Where was he?
Then he caught sight of the tin bowl that he used for shaving, lying in the grass a few feet to his right, next to the skillet. It all came back to him then. He’d been about to fill the bowl with water and shave before walking into town to eat at the café, and the two of them had been arguing about Salali’s intention to drink and gamble. And then...blackness.
He felt a wave of dizziness as realization hit him. Salali had hit him over the head—probably with the skillet—and taken everything, including the contents of his back pockets, his banjo, the horses and the wagon. And the money concealed in the wagon. He had vanished, leaving Nate Bohannan with only the clothes on his back and a tin bowl.
He let a curse fly then. What in the name of blazes was he going to do now?
Had Salali fled in the direction of his hideout, where he kept the ingredients to make the elixir? If so, he must be counting on Nate not having the wherewithal to follow in time to catch up with him there, for Nate knew where it was—just two or three days’ ride to the southeast, a makeshift hut hidden atop a limestone hill. Nate guessed he’d probably left right after he’d knocked Nate unconscious, and if that was so, maybe someone in Simpson Creek had seen him, and the direction he was heading.
The one thing Salali hadn’t remembered to do was to relieve Nate of his gold pocket watch—probably because when he fell, he’d sprawled face-first on the ground, on top of it. The weight of it still rested reassuringly in his breast pocket. It was all he had to purchase a horse and saddle, but perhaps there was a way to avoid selling it. It was worth way more than the price of a horse and saddle, after all, and it was his only inheritance from his father. He might not want to be like him, but the old man had loved him.
Maybe he could arrange to borrow a horse and revenge himself against that thieving charlatan. Just how he’d pay Salali back when he caught up with him, he hadn’t yet decided, but he’d have plenty of time to cogitate on it while he pursued him.
Now that he’d made his decision, time was of the essence. He levered himself to his feet, swaying slightly, feeling the earth beneath his feet tilt as if he was on the deck of a storm-tossed ship. Nausea still churned his stomach, and he blinked to clear his vision. He turned toward the bridge that lay across the creek.
And saw four very angry-looking people heading straight for him.
He blinked again, sure his headache was making him hallucinate, for one of them was Miss Ella, the proprietress of that café. Why was she making a beeline for him, her hands doubled into fists and thunder in her dark eyes?
The other three were men, and the only one he recognized was the stocky saloonkeeper he’d met yesterday. Judging by the tin stars on their shirts, the remaining men were lawmen. Sweet mercy, what had Salali done?
“I’m Sheriff Bishop, and this is my deputy, Luis Menendez. You Nate Bohannan?” asked the older of the two lawmen, his tone hard as granite.
Nate nodded, the motion sending waves of vertigo surging over him again. “What’s this about, Sheriff?” he asked, keeping his gaze averted from Ella.
“Did you and that partner of yours willfully destroy the inside of the Simpson Creek Saloon, along with Miss Ella’s café in the back of it?”
Nate closed his eyes, feeling his desire for revenge against the medicine-show man multiply tenfold. Not only had Salali robbed him blind, but by the sound of things, he’d gone on a tear in town, too.
Bishop must have taken his closed eyes as an admission of guilt, for the next thing Nate knew, the deputy had taken advantage of it to swoop behind him, grab his forearms and clamp a set of come-alongs around his wrists. His eyes flew open. “No,” he breathed. “I didn’t... And he’s n-not my partner. We had a deal—”
“You’re under arrest,” Bishop said, his eyes as cold as if he’d just condemned Nate to hang. “Come with us peaceably now, or I’ll let Miss Ella slug you in the nose as she’s been threatening to do. Destroying the saloon’s bad enough, but what kind of man wrecks a lady’s business?”
Nate let himself look at Ella then—anything to escape the implacable, hawk-eyed stare of the sheriff, and the equally accusing gaze of his deputy. But looking into the wrath-mixed-with-hurt eyes of Ella Justiss was worse, for tears flooded down her cheeks. Even though he hadn’t done what he was charged with, he felt lower than a snake’s belly just for having been associated with the scoundrel that had done the damage.
“I didn’t do it, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ve been robbed, too. Salali laid me out with a frying pan last evening and took everything I had—the wagon, the horses, the profits—and skedaddled. I only just came to, as a matter of fact.” He felt guilty not mentioning the pocket watch, but if he was able to talk his way out of the charges, he was going to need it.
“You expect us to believe that?” Bishop demanded.
Dizzy again, Nate closed his eyes. “It’s the truth. The last thing I remember before being hit over the head was arguing with Salali about going into town. I wanted to go have some supper at Miss Ella’s café, since I’d had a sandwich there before the show and it was mighty tasty.” He darted a glance at Miss Ella then, hoping to find some softening in her eyes, but there was none. “Salali wanted to go drink and gamble at the saloon. I didn’t want him to because whiskey and my employer don’t mix well—”
Without warning, the deputy’s fingers roughly probed the back of Nate’s head, sending fresh waves of sickening pain piercing through his skull.
“There is a lump back here, Sheriff,” the deputy confirmed in a Spanish-accented voice.
“Let me see...”
That was the last thing Nate heard before he passed out again.
* * *
When Nate woke, he was lying on a straw-tick mattress facing the bars of a jail cell. From inside. He groaned. Surely locking up a man when he was insensible was against the law somehow.
“You gonna live?” a woman’s scorn-laced voice inquired.
A dark skirt and small, laced-up boots hovered into his line of sight. When his gaze traveled upward, he recognized Miss Ella staring down at him through the bars.
“I’m not sure,” he said honestly, still feeling the pounding in his head, but it had diminished, somehow, as if the hammer pounding the anvil was only hitting the end of the anvil, rather than right in the middle.
“Humph. Mighty convenient, I’d say, passing out like that.”
He stared at her, his headache and her disbelief making him even testier than he might otherwise be under the circumstances. “For the sheriff, maybe. Why would you care? I’m behind bars anyway, aren’t I?”
She ignored that. “Dr. Walker says as long as you woke up, you aren’t gonna die. Oh, yes, Sheriff Bishop had the doctor check your noggin all right and proper. You’re awake, so I guess you’ll survive.”
Having to put up with the lash of Ella Justiss’s tongue, along with the pain in his head, was surely more than any man ought to have to bear. “Where’s the sheriff? I want to talk to him,” he said.
“You’ll just