“Evidently, he knows you,” Ditch said, “at least by reputation. You’re tellin’ me you ain’t a little worried?”

“Nah,” Pritchard said. “What’s worryin’ get you? Anyhow, I’m almost finished puttin’ the last leg on my chair. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“Sometimes a little worryin’ can keep you alive. What am I supposed to tell your sister, Idelle, after you get shot to pieces sittin’ at your desk, covered in sawdust, fiddlin’ with a wooden chair?”

“You worry too much,” Pritchard grinned, fitting the final leg into the seat. He placed the chair on the floor, sat in it, and smiled in satisfaction. “After all we’ve been through together, do you reckon I’m gonna let a fancy-pants, foreign duelist put a hole in me?”

Pritchard stood to his full six-and-a-half-foot height and smiled down at his medium-sized friend. “Besides,” he said, “I have no choice but to make my own office chair. The old one is too small. The only way I can get furniture big enough to fit me is to make it myself.”

“I just don’t want to see you get shot again,” Ditch said, looking up at the towering marshal. “Neither does Idelle. She is the mayor, after all. She’s insisting on going to the station herself to meet this Count Strobl. She plans to ask him not to provoke you. She doesn’t want to see anybody get hurt.”

“Sometimes,” Pritchard said, “people get hurt. That’s a fact. Occasionally it can be prevented, other times it can’t. More often than not, it’s their own damned fault. Idelle ought to know that as well as anyone. You, too.”

“I reckon so,” Ditch agreed.

Samuel Pritchard and David “Ditch” Clemson had grown up as friends, neighbors, and blood brothers in rural Atherton. Teenagers when the Civil War began, they fled as partners after Pritchard’s father was murdered, his family’s property and lumber business were stolen, and his mother was forced to marry the man who’d orchestrated it all: Atherton’s corrupt mayor, Burnell Shipley. Young Pritchard was shot in the head, presumed dead, and buried in an unmarked grave.

That was when his fiercely loyal friend, Ditch Clemson, dug him up and found him still clinging to life.

After his resurrection, and bearing a telltale gunshot scar on his forehead over his right eye, Pritchard assumed the alias “Joe Atherton” to protect what was left of his family. Departing Missouri, the boys enlisted in the Confederate army as guerrillas in Arkansas. After a series of harrowing escapades, Pritchard and Ditch, no longer boys, survived the war and parted ways.

Ditch, a skilled horseman, had grown weary of war and killing. He went farther south and sought his fortune in Texas. Within a few years he flourished as a rancher and cattleman.