“Thanks.” Steve mounted and turned the restless horse in the direction of the town that lay west of the depot. It was all too familiar, playing out just like the last time, with the same old man to greet him. Hell, didn’t the old-timer have anything better to do than hang around the railroad station and talk to strangers?

It was eerie, the way it all came rushing back to him, as if it had happened only yesterday: the saloon with the belligerent men crowded around the bar, Jared Cady’s taunts, even the way he’d felt a weary sense of fatalism, knowing he was going to have to fight his way out or draw his gun. Then the brief, vicious confrontation with Cady before he made it out the door…only to be ambushed from all sides, bullets smacking into him and the thought that he was dying before it all plunged into dark oblivion.

If not for Elizabeth Cady, Jared’s widow, he might have died. But she’d wanted to see him hang for murder, not take the easy way out by dying.

And he’d been obliging enough to live.

Even once it was proven that he’d acted in self-defense against Cady, there were plenty of folks in Prayers End who distrusted him. Beth had ignored them, ignored propriety and her own instincts and allowed him to stay with her. But in the end it hadn’t been what she wanted. He hadn’t been what she wanted. And he’d known it, too.

Now he was back, and the town didn’t look to have changed all that much; still the same huddle of ugly wooden buildings strung haphazardly like a broken necklace. Fading light knit a sullen glow behind the outlines of the town.

It baffled him why people wanted to live here, out in the middle of nowhere in an inhospitable land. Ranchers grazed lean cattle on scrub and rock, fought over land and water rights, formed granges and went to church, made more children and died worn-out and hollow inside. Most of them never left the territory, except maybe to go to El Paso or a neighboring town.

Dust rose, drifted on the wind in stinging gusts that peppered his bare skin in a stinging assault. He reined in and dismounted in front of the livery stable, caught his saddlebags and hefted them over one shoulder.

When he turned, the livery owner was staring at him, his red face gone chalky white in the swiftly darkening dusk that promised a threat of rain.

“Steve Morgan…”

“Yeah. Si Barker, right?”

A terse nod made Barker’s heavy jowls quiver. He rubbed one hand over his face, managed a forced smile that showed tobacco-rusted teeth.

“What brings you back here, Morgan? Gonna help out with the Association again?”