Read Online Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) by Frank Leslie - Free Book Online Page A

happy with how things went tonight.”
    She didn’t say anything. Then she rolled toward him, bounded up quickly, and swung the Colt at him butt first. Yakima threw up his right hand, grabbed her fist. He pulled her across him. She snarled like a wildcat, kicking, until he jerked the gun out of her fist and returned it to its holster hanging from the near bedpost.
    â€œBastard!”
she squealed.
    Then she flopped back down, gave him her back, and sobbed herself to sleep.

Chapter 7
    Lee Mendenhour rolled off his wife.
    Glendolene closed her legs, pushed her nightgown down around her thighs, drew her knees toward her belly, and turned onto her side. Lee dropped his long legs over the side of the bed, ran his hands through his thick, wavy auburn hair, and glanced over his shoulder at her.
    â€œYou might have at least feigned a little pleasure from that.”
    â€œI could say the same thing to you.” She drew a ragged breath. “Maybe you got all the pleasure you needed over at the Silk Slipper last night.”
    He scowled though the nubs of his handsomely sculpted cheeks flushed slightly beneath his brown eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t partake of what the females are selling. I play cards and I drink. I socialize with my friends. That’s all.”
    She wondered if he was telling the truth. Funny how she’d never wondered about that before. They were drifting apart, so that neither could really tell what the other was thinking. At least, she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Maybe it was because she didn’t care anymore.
    After only three years of marriage?
    Guilt was a bone in the pit of her stomach. He’d given her so much—wealth, a sprawling Victorian-style house, several servants who helped her tend the place and the large irrigated garden behind it. Her aunt and uncle had a story-and-a-half shack a couple of miles outside Belle Fourche, and they’d been married—happily, as far as she could tell—for over fifty years.
    She’d fallen in love with the Lee Mendenhour she’d met in Council Bluffs four years ago—the precocious, somewhat freewheeling, and romantic young man reading for the law in Iowa, where she’d been attending a teacher’s college. They’d met at church, and he’d visited her at her boardinghouse bearing flowers he’d picked along the river; they’d picnicked on weekend afternoons in the country, sharing their life’s stories, their dreams.
    He’d wanted to be a lawyer—a prosecuting attorney—and eventually a judge. He’d wanted to bring law and order to the lawless land he’d grown up in. The land in which his mother had been killed by a stray bullet fired by rustlers stealing horses from the Chain Link corral.
    Glendolene had wanted to be a teacher, but she’d fallen in love with the dashing young Westerner, and his dream had seemed more important than hers. So she’d come to Wyoming with him, where they’d been married in the house Lee had grown up in as an only child. Those first few weeks, his father, Wild Bill, had openly scrutinized her as though she were a mare bought for one of his Morgan steeds.
    She’d never measured up for Wild Bill. She’d once heard the gruff, bandy-legged old man telling his son that she was too pretty, her hips not stout enough. She didn’t have the sand it took to raise tough sons out here.
    â€œOh, well,” he’d muttered. “The first flu of next winter will likely take her.”
    She stared at her husband’s bare back now as he walked over to the window and, crouching, slid the curtain aside with the back of his hand. Gray morning light washed into the room, silhouetting Lee against it. She watched his profile as he stared across the street. She’d once known him to smile more, but he was smiling less and less these days, and his sense of humor had all but vanished. That had been