A Knife in the Heart. William W. Johnstone

and moved to the coffeepot on the stove.

      “Hank,” she said. Only Fallon’s friends called him Hank, and Helen was a good friend. “How was your weekend?”

      “Fine,” he lied. Filled a cup, turned, held the pot toward her. Grinning, she lifted her steaming mug, saying, “I beat you to it.”

      He hung his hat on the rack by the door.

      “There’s no need for that, Hank,” Helen said.

      He sipped coffee. She was a good-looking woman, not as beautiful as Christina, and Helen would make a fine U.S. marshal herself. Probably could, since Wyoming had granted women suffrage decades earlier. Helen did the paperwork, kept track of the schedules, and even helped some of the deputies with arrest reports and requests for warrants. Fallon would be lost without her.

      “What am I doing today?” Fallon asked.

      “Speaking to the Abraham Lincoln Academy.” That was the all-male private school on the Union Mercantile Block for mostly wealthy kids, although they always brought in a few poor boys, so they would look better, especially if the poor kid could play good baseball. “Watch your language. The headmaster is a Methodist.”

      “Do I have time to finish my coffee?”

      She held up the newspaper in her other hand. “You even have time to read the Daily Sun-Leader.”

      An hour and a half later, Helen straightened Fallon’s tie and handkerchief, dropped the newspaper in the trash, stepped back, and asked, “Can you do me a favor?”

      “Probably, if it’s legal.”

      She handed him an envelope. “Deposit my check for me.”

      He took the brown envelope with his left hand, looked at it suspiciously, and said, “It’s payday?”

      “Already. End of the month. I put yours on your desk. Did you just read the paper?” She frowned. “Tell me you did work on what you’re going to tell those future lawmen at the academy.”

      “I saw the envelope,” Fallon said. Last month, his check had remained on the desk two weeks after it had been issued, until Christina asked for some shopping money, and he realized . . . well . . . it was hard to explain to women, even men, who had never been in prison. They didn’t let you have money in the pen. Men bartered with tobacco, or illegal whiskey, a handmade weapon, something to read—for those who weren’t illiterate.

      Helen shook her head. “Stockgrowers’ National Bank,” she told him as he slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of his fancy coat. “You remember where it is?”

      Fallon nodded. “I’ve done this for you . . . how many times?”

      “Usually, though you have forgotten a time or two.”

      “Well,” he said. “That’s because I’m not used to people trusting me with their money. I am an ex-convict.”

      “My understanding is that you were pardoned.”

      “Yes.” He patted his coat. “But we can be led astray.”

      “I’ll see you after your speech.” Helen walked back to her desk. “Give them heck, Hank.”

      * * *

      This was another thing hard to get used to. Back in Fallon’s day, school was a McGuffey’s Reader and a paddle with holes cut in the hindquarters-hitting part. Most of the boys didn’t wear shoes in the spring and fall, because most of them didn’t have shoes except during winter. Typically, there would be two or three empty seats, for some of the boys wanted to go fishing or squirrel hunting or to hang from the ties over the trestle and see who would drop into the river last when the train rumbled by. During spring planting or fall harvest, more desks would be empty, because the boys had to work.

      At the Abraham Lincoln Academy, the boys were dressed in smaller versions of Grand Army of the Republic dress suits, sitting ramrod straight, heads up, paying strict attention. Usually, a Harry Fallon speech would put half the audience to sleep, and Fallon always wished he were asleep, too. But not here. The headmaster and his two teachers stood at attention, rarely blinking, and the teachers held rulers as though sabers at arms.

      Eventually, Fallon finished his talk, and asked if anyone had a question.

      A hand shot up from the blond boy with big ears on the front row. Once Fallon nodded to him, the boy stood, cleared his throat, and asked, “How does one become a United States marshal, sir?” He promptly sat down.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      How does one become a federal marshal?

      Fallon grinned as he thought about how he could answer that question.

      Well, son, first you ride herd with a cowboy with a wild streak and a taste of John Barleycorn. You’re young, going to live forever, feeling invincible, and you drink far too much one evening in Fort Smith, Arkansas. And your pal, Josh Ryker, sees a saddle in a window that he figures he ought to have, but since he doesn’t have any money, he decides to steal it. And you try to stop him, and next thing you realize is a lawman has shown up, and you’re in the middle, and then Ryker is about to kill the lawman. That’s right. Murder a man in cold blood—all because of one saddle. And while plenty of preachers and doctors and professors might tell you that only time will sober you up after a night of drinking forty-rod and cheap beer, you know for a fact that you are stone cold sober. And you stop Ryker. And suddenly you’re in jail, and the dungeon at Fort Smith is as bad as a lot of prisons. This you’ll learn. In time, you’ll become an expert on prisons.

      So somehow, because you saved the life of a peace officer, and a lawman with connections, you’re standing before Judge Isaac Parker, who is offering you a job. Take the badge, pin it on, and you’ll be earning a living—if you aren’t killed—as a federal lawman. Oh, but since you’re just in your teens, you’ll just drive the jail wagon. Tend to the prisoners as the real marshals make the arrests and risk their lives. Till the deputies you’re tending jail for wind up getting cut down by cold-blooded killers, for murdering, heartless, soulless men populate the Indian Nations just west of Fort Smith. And something comes over you, and you’re not going to let them get away with it. The next thing you’re sure of is that you’re bringing in the jail wagon to Fort Smith, with the dead and condemned criminals, and suddenly the U.S. marshal, the U.S. attorney, the other deputy marshals, and even Judge Parker look at you differently.

      You’re not just a kid. You’re a man. And now a bona fide deputy marshal.

      So it goes. Till you meet a lovely woman. She happens to stay in the same boardinghouse as you do. And you marry her. And she brings you the joy of your life, a daughter. And you start reading law with a highly regarded defense attorney, because even Judge Parker says that a young man with a future and a wife and a baby doesn’t need to be risking his life chasing the scum of society. The West will be won by lawman, but mostly by law. And good lawyers are needed.

      Sure, you still ride after the badmen, though you’re never sent against the real killers. Till one day you find yourself accused of a holdup. Not enough evidence to get you on the murder charge, but you are convicted of a crime that you did not commit. Judge Parker, though, well he thinks you’re not only guilty—since the jury found you guilty—but also a Judas. Throws the book at you and then some, but others must weigh in, and Parker agrees that sending a crooked lawman to the Detroit House of Corrections isn’t justice.

      They put you in the darkness of the Illinois pen in Joliet.

      That’s where you are when you learn that your wife and baby girl have been murdered.

      What can you do then? Just turn hard, because you have to be hard, uncompromising, to make it out of Joliet alive. You learn what it takes to survive prison. You ask for no quarter, and you never give any quarter. Just get through one day, then live through the night, and watch it start over again. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

      Until