Devil's Dare. Laurie Grant

hats that some of the boys were buying, for such garb would feel foolish. He didn’t want to look like some sort of Eastern tinhorn. His only concession to vanity had been a brand-new pair of boots, complete with the lone star and crescent stitched in at the top of each. Yessir, he was ready to find the calico queens of Abilene, as the working girls were sometimes called, or to let them find him.

      He headed for the Alamo Saloon. Perhaps he’d have a round or two of poker with that cardsharp first, while he looked over the girls and selected the best one. Now that he was here, he did not feel inclined to automatically accept the first sporting woman who approached him. No, he’d do the picking, and he’d be selective.

      In addition, he felt quite sure that Earp thought he could take him for all his money, but blacklegs had thought to swindle the Devil before. The cardsharp hadn’t been born that could outbluff Devil Devlin, he thought, breaking into a grin as he sauntered down dusty Cedar Street and into the Alamo Saloon.

       Chapter Three

      Three hours later Sam Devlin, who was still sitting at Earp’s table in the Alamo Saloon, was feeling heartily glad he’d had the forethought to leave most of the money in the safe at the Drover’s Cottage. It had been a disastrous mistake to think he could play poker with the likes of this cardsharp and pick a woman with whom to spend a few agreeable hours later. Wyatt Earp was a better card player than Sam had ever played with in his life, and had quickly taken possession of the stack of twenty-dollar gold pieces Sam had brought with him.

      Several of his crew had joined them at the table, a fact that had pleased him until they’d begun to lose their money. They’d been bragging on their trail boss to Earp, asking the cardsharp how he liked playing cards with “the Devil and his boys.” Well, apparently matching wits with the Devil hadn’t bothered Earp at all. The Devil’s Boys had not only lost the best part of their own money but had seen their trail boss lose his stake, too.

      It wasn’t that he hated their teasing, or feared that their seeing him lose would mean the loss of his authority—he just purely disliked to have anyone see him get fleeced. Well, vanity never did anyone any good, Sam reasoned, but if he didn’t learn which cardsharps to avoid, he’d still be herding cattle up the trail when he was fifty.

      The way he had figured it before tonight, there would have to be at least one more drive to get the Devlins financially back on their feet and rebuild the stud. He’d known that this drive would only serve to wipe out their present debt, but if he didn’t win back the ten thousand dollars he’d lost it wouldn’t even fully accomplish that. He couldn’t stand the thought of going back to Texas with much less than what he’d been paid just this afternoon. He was going to have to figure out a way to regain his money.

      But not tonight. He knew when he was on a losing streak. “I’m out,” he announced, his chair scraping against the plank floor as he rose.

      “Hey, what’s your hurry, Devil?” the cardsharp asked him lazily, then called for another round.

      “I’ve got no more money to play,” Sam said with a shrug, grinning back as if that fact meant less than nothing. “Perhaps tomorrow night.” Perhaps tomorrow night, yes, but certainly not with you, he thought, without malice. If Earp was cheating, he hadn’t been able to catch him at it. Perhaps he was just good.

      “You ain’t goin’ t’ bed, are ya, boss? You ain’t got the other thing ya came for!” Cookie Yates protested. “What about that?”

      “Yeah, the night’s young, don’t go yet,” Earp agreed, handing him another half-full glass of whiskey. “The music plays all night here at the Alamo, and so do the girls! Thought you said you were interested in a little, ah, female companionship,” the cardsharp added with a wink.

      “Yeah, could be,” Sam admitted, eyes searching the smoky, noisy saloon. At the bar at the south side of the Alamo, a couple of gaudily dressed girls winked at him. He knew the merest nod would have brought either the blonde or the black-haired girl to his side, cooing and eager to please.

      “There’s a likely-looking pair—Florabelle and Sukey Jane,” the cardsharp drawled, following his gaze. “It’d be my pleasure to stake you an eagle—you could probably get both of them for that, if you were so inclined.”

      “Thanks just the same,” Sam said, shaking his head, “but I’ve got the money. I did have sense enough to keep a few dollars off the table. One girl will be enough, though, I reckon. Two just might kill me, on top of all the tanglefoot I’ve been drinking.”

      “Well?” Earp nodded again at the girls lounging at the ornate, brass-trimmed bar, clearly just waiting for his signal.

      “I’d take the blonde, boss,” Jase Lowry advised him. “Wouldn’t you like to see if she’s blond all over?”

      Sam hesitated, though for the life of him he couldn’t understand why. Both of the girls were pretty, in a bold, hard sort of way, and their tight dresses and low-cut bodices all but shouted that their bodies would be rewarding to explore. Hellfire, what in blue blazes was he waiting for? In five minutes he could be upstairs wrestling on the sheets with either one of them. But he just couldn’t bring himself to move his head or raise his finger to them.

      “Then you go ahead and take her, Jase,” he murmured, looking back at Earp. “Any others here?”

      “Ah-ha! A man of discriminating tastes,” the other responded with a grin. “Just look about you, my good man. There’s Conchita at the faro table, if you appreciate a little south-of-the-border spice, Kate standing by the roulette wheel if you like ‘em freckled, and Jerusha if you prefer a little cream with your coffee,” he said, pointing at last to a pretty, doe-eyed mulatto girl. “But say, I just got an idea, if you’re interested in a gamble, that is. You could please yourself and get double your money back.”

      “Oh?” Sam slid back onto his chair.

      “Devil, I’ve seen that you’re a very selective man,” Earp responded, leaning forward. “You came to gamble with the best, didn’t you?” He grinned a smug grin.

      “For all the good it did me,” Sam retorted goodnaturedly.

      Earp went on. “And you don’t tumble for the first likely-looking pair of bobbers. You want a little something extra for your dollars, even in a whore. You like redheads?”

      Sam shrugged, wondering where this was leading. Sure, he liked redheads, but no more than any other color of hair on a soiled dove. It didn’t matter once she blew out the lamp. Most of it came from a bottle, anyway.

      “You like a little challenge, too, I’ve seen. I doubled the stakes on you and you didn’t turn a hair—even when I held the winning hand.”

      Again Sam nodded.

      “All right, here it is—the queen of the Alamo Saloon is one Mercedes LaFleche, a real beauty, with dark red hair and a figure that’ll make you pant just to look at it, my friend.”

      “Mercedes LaFleche, hmm?” He looked around, but he saw no such woman.

      “It’s a French name,” Earp said with a wink.

      Sam knew there was about as much chance that this Mercedes was truly French as there was of snow on Galveston Island, but perhaps she was a Cajun from New Orleans. A lot of sporting women in cattle towns came from there.

      “The thing is, she’s so popular in Abilene, she could charge fifty dollars and still pick and choose who she wants to lie down with, and she’d still make a fortune.”

      Cookie Yates whistled. “Fifty dollars a night?”

      “Nope—that’s just for an hour with her,” Earp said.

      “No señorita ees worth fifty dollars for an hour!” Manuel Lopez, the wrangler who’d been