A Man with a Past by Mary Connealy

SIX

Falcon had been wandering for a time when the shooting started.

He thought of those men who’d come gunning for him back in Independence and headed straight for the new trouble. Not the way most folks would’ve acted toward shooting, but Falcon never could resist a fight. When most folks might’ve set out running for their lives, Falcon ran toward the action, not wanting to miss a thing.

He got close about the time it stopped, and he slipped around, looking for signs. He found two horses with the RHR brand. That meant the trouble involved his family. He wasn’t overly fond of nor interested in his family, but in times of feuding back home, a boy grew up knowing you had to side with kin.

He dealt with the horses while he listened and hunted.

He found Kevin kneeling beside Win, that feisty woman who’d come to the train to meet him.

He grinned when he thought of her sass, and then he saw her back was bleeding.

His grin shrank away. The only thing he hated more than a back-shooter was a man who’d hurt a woman.

Kevin noticed he had company when Falcon knelt beside him. The two of them braced themselves for trouble as footsteps approached.

But instead of Falcon getting a chance to teach a back-shooter that he was a no-account polecat, the man coming down the trail stopped, turned, and ran. Getting away.

“You see to her.” Falcon spoke in a voice no one could hear if they were more than two feet away. “I’ll go after whoever shot her.”

He meant it with a rage that surprised him. “Get back on that trail where you left the horses.” Falcon pointed with his gun to the trail just ahead. “Keep going forward. I tied your mounts down the trail a ways. That trail will lead you to the ranch house. It’s not far.”

Falcon moved with one goal in mind. To find out who was low-down enough to shoot a woman in the back.

He was fast and silent as he put all his long-legged speed into catching up to the gunman. The back-shooter was running flat out and had a head start, but if a man lived who could lose Falcon Hunt in the woods, Falcon had not yet met him.

He closed in on the man ahead, who was making enough noise to raise the long dead and deeply buried.

This one was fast. Falcon was impressed, though maybe he shouldn’t have been. He was dealing with a dry-gulching coward. It figured when he ran, he’d do it right.

Falcon kept going. A steady runner, he had no need to step carefully because his prey was far enough ahead—and the coward ran like he was stoked with fear, so he was hearing pursuit whether there was any or not.

Suddenly the trees thinned, and Falcon ran out into a clearing. A fast-moving stream with steep banks came twisting out of the woods just a few yards to his left. The man he was after was several yards ahead of him in the wide clearing divided in half by the stream.

Falcon ran on, and then in disgust, he fired a warning shot and hollered, “Stop right there, or the next one goes through your spine.”

The man stopped so suddenly he fell forward, then spun around, flat on his belly. No gun drawn. No fight. Only fear. Nothing but a yellow coward. A yellow coward Falcon had seen before.

In Independence, Missouri.

The Tree Climber. Where was the other one? The skilled one.

Bright red pain exploded in his head. He tumbled into the water. He hit hard enough it could’ve been solid stone. Then he was under the icy surge, being swept along.

Another bullet fired. The second man was unloading his six-shooter.

Fighting for consciousness, shocked into it by the cold water, Falcon slammed against the bank closest to the firing. Then Tree Climber was on his feet, laughing, his gun pointed.

“This water goes straight over a cliff,” Tree Climber shouted. “Let the waterfall get him.”

Falcon got dragged under. The stream was surprisingly deep for a waterway so narrow. He heard more laughter. This time both men.

He surfaced well past them and behind a stand of trees at the far side of the clearing.

His head roared with pain. Or maybe the water roared.

And then he went flying out into space and hurtled into a free fall.

Cliff.

He’d heard that. A cliff and a waterfall. Falcon soared like a diving eagle.

He struck the water and was swept into a pond or a lake, but it had a current blasting through it. Then he was out the other end, and instead of flying, he was hammered. Stones and drowning water. Agony in his head that kept trying to send him into darkness.

He struck a jagged rock, then another, too many to count.

Until the darkness won.