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to blur when troopers starved for feminine attention and the comforts of their own hearth took wives wherever they could find them. One of her stepfather’s top sergeants had married the most popular hurdy-girl at the Blue Snake Saloon, just outside Fort Huachuca. Leaky Peg had made the transition from dance hall denizen and occasional whore to army wife with her ribald sense of humor and great, gusting belly laugh intact. Suzanne had found her stories fascinating, although she suspected Leaky Peg had censored them considerably before sharing them with the colonel’s daughter.
    Still, Suzanne probably wouldn’t have chosen to enter the doors of Mother Featherlegs Shephard’s parlor if it wasn’t also doubling as the temporary way station for the Black Hills Stage and Express Line. The charred remains of the wooden building that had previously served as the stage stop lay just across the street from the hurdy-gurdy parlor.
    The place had burned down only last month, the station manager explained. The fire almost took the barn and granary, too, but the saloon’s patrons had rushed out to form a bucket brigade and saved those structures.
    The station manager also gave the weary arrivals another bit of grim news. Big Nose Parrott and his gang had indeed caught up with the stage they’d been traveling on.
    “They kilt the driver stone-cold dead. Gut-shot one of the passengers, too. A wrangler off the Diamond J, up to Hell’s Canyon way.”
    The drunken cowboy. Suzanne didn’t waste much sympathy on him. If the fool hadn’t divedfor his gun, he wouldn’t have a bullet in his belly and she wouldn’t be standing here in borrowed boots.
    Matt slid off his horse and hooked an arm around the pommel to keep his legs from collapsing under him. “What happened to the luggage on the stage? My carpetbag was in the boot.”
    “Can’t say for sure ’bout your grip, but Parrott and his gang took whatever was worth taking, including the strongbox. We put another driver aboard and sent the stage on to Deadwood. You folks kin claim whatever Parrott didn’t make off with at the Express Office.”
    Matt looked so discouraged that Suzanne’s heart wrenched. His grand adventure was off to a shaky start.
    Well, Sloan had promised to bring them this far and he had. Now it was up to Suzanne to find another escort on to Cheyenne River and Matt the stake he needed to see him through the winter in Deadwood Gulch.
    She had a far better notion of what he faced in the coming months than he did. Winters in Ohio couldn’t begin to compare to those on the Great Plains. Blizzards howled like banshees from hell across these vast open stretches. Snow swept in under windowsills and piled so high against doors it took days to tunnel out. Even the more wooded, mountainous regions like the Black Hills offeredlittle protection from the frigid blasts and smothering blankets of snow. Men trapped in the frozen gulches without adequate provisions had been known to eat their mules…and their fellow prospectors.
    The sensational trial a few years ago of William O’Day was still talked about throughout the territories. As the judge noted when he sentenced the man to be hanged by the neck until dead, Carver County once had five Democrats. O’Day ate four of them.
    Yes, Matt would definitely need money for a stake. And Sloan’s rude response to Suzanne’s offer of a promissory note in exchange for his escort suggested she would need some hard cash to hire his replacement, as well.
    She tapped a toe in the dirt, annoyed by the way her stomach hollowed at the reminder that she and Black Jack Sloan would part company at Rawhide Buttes. She couldn’t deny the man fascinated her. Or that he stirred urges she didn’t want stirred. Urges that should have dissipated after so many hours in his gruff, unsociable company, but hadn’t.
    She’d now spent two days and nights with the man, yet knew little more about him than the lurid tales published in the penny