A Cowboy's Heart. Liz Ireland

told Paulie. “I don’t know if the vittles is what you’re used to, but I’ve got plenty of ’em.”

      The judge led Paulie, Oat and Trip into the saloon, leaving his companion on the porch unintroduced. Will turned to the man, a mean-looking character who didn’t even bother to glance up at him. He just kept staring at the dusty planks that made up the saloon’s porch, pivoting once to spit off to the side. Frankly, the stranger gave Will the shivers, but he couldn’t say exactly why that was. He was a regular-looking fellow with sandy blond hair peeking out from under the brim of his hat. Only he had a hardness in his eyes that made Will uneasy.

      After a few more moments of the silent treatment, Will followed the talking and laughter into the saloon and found the group of men nursing drinks around Paulie, who was seated at the head of a long table, stuffing herself with a plate of some sort of concoction of rice and beans, with a few hunks of nondescript meat mixed in for good measure.

      They all glanced up at him when he took a seat nearby, then looked quickly away again, focusing all their rapt attention on Paulie.

      She swallowed down a gulp of food and said, savoring every syllable of what apparently was a punch line, “...And so I told the man, ‘I don’t know about your wife, Mister, but you sure could use a new horse.”’

      The men roared with laughter. Even Oat. Roy was all but slapping his knee, and of course Trip was laughing so hard there were tears in his eyes. He had probably heard the silly joke about a thousand times already. People in love certainly did make fools of themselves, Will thought, crossing his arms sourly.

      Roy took note of his demeanor and turned to him for a moment. “Well, Will, I keep expecting you to come out and tell me what it is you’re doing here any minute now.”

      As if he hadn’t already tried to tell the man twice already!

      “Why so closemouthed, Will?” Roy went on.

      Glad for the opening to finally get down to business, Will took a breath.

      Paulie downed another heaping spoonful of that unappetizing mash of Roy’s and blurted out, “We’re looking for Night Bird. That’s why we’ve come. Everybody thought maybe you’d heard of his whereabouts.”

      At this explanation, Roy looked almost startled. His narrow eyes widened and he rubbed his stubbly jaw in wonder. “Night Bird, huh?” he asked, looking at Will as if he’d just gone plumb crazy. “You got a death wish, Brockett?”

      Will opened his mouth to defend his mission, but Paulie once again beat him to the punch.

      “That’s what I said!” Paulie exclaimed. “But the trouble is, we suspect Night Bird ran off with Oat’s wife.”

      They suspected? Will thought. The last time he’d checked, Paulie considered the Night Bird theory to be nothing but pure flapdoodle. Now she was almost making it sound as if chasing the renegade had been her idea!

      “That pretty Redfern girl I heard so much about?” Roy asked, uninhibited in his shock. He didn’t have to mention that he’d heard so much about her precisely because she had married Oat, either. Despite her beauty, Mary Ann hadn’t gained any real notoriety until she’d made a surprising choice of husband.

      “That’s the one,” Paulie said.

      “I lost her,” Oat added, still as puzzled as ever.

      “Good Lord!” Roy exclaimed. Then he called out to the porch. “Cal, you hear that?”

      When they looked up, the man with the cold gaze had it fixed on Will, as if sizing him up for the task of chasing Night Bird. “I heard,” he said curtly.

      “What do you think, Cal?”

      The man shrugged.

      Roy looked at his assembled guests. “You all have something in common with Cal here. He’s been hired by the family of one of those men Night Bird killed to catch him dead or alive.”

      A killer. That would explain his demeanor, Will thought. One glance at the man was enough to know that he didn’t give a fig about whether his quarry was alive or not when he laid him at the feet of the family who hired him.

      “Do you know where Night Bird is?” Will asked.

      The man spat on Roy’s floor, then shrugged. “Mexico.”

      “Are you going after him?”

      The bounty hunter shook his head. “Nope.”

      “It’s foolhardy to chase a bandit into Mexico, Will,” Roy said. “He’ll get more trigger-happy the closer he is to the border—and the farther away from American law.”

      Will shook his head, feeling the weight of his responsibility more sharply the worse the news became. “I can’t just let him go,” he explained. “Not while he’s got Mary—I mean, Mrs. Murphy.”

      “I promise you one thing, Oat,” Roy said. “If that damned renegade comes within smelling distance of this place, he’s a dead man.”