Behind him, Gibbs and Tubbs slipped from the saloon as silently as a pair of frightened barn cats.
“You men heard him,” Will declared loudly. “Sully started it. He called me a liar. This is a fair fight between him and me. Whatever happens next, he had it coming.”
Men nodded, clearing away, giving Will and Sully space.
“I…” Sully said, and whatever he’d been going to say seemed to stick in his throat. His eyes swelled, and all the color drained from his face.
He looked for his friends and gave a little start when he realized that Gibbs and Tubbs had both abandoned him.
“You’re lucky,” Sully said, sounding like a petulant child. “I don’t have a firearm. Otherwise, I’d teach you a lesson.”
Several men moved forward at once, drawing their revolvers and offering them to Sully butt-first.
“No, no,” Sully said, taking a step backward. “I never use another man’s weapon.”
“How come you ain’t got a gun, Sully?” someone demanded. “You always got a gun.”
One of the men reached over, snagged Sully’s coat, and pulled it aside.
And there, on his hip, was the revolver he’d denied having.
Will wanted to draw his own weapon and kill the man who’d threatened his wife and family, the same man who’d sent the bluebellies, hoping for Will’s execution. But if he did, Rickert or Culp would apprehend him, and some Reconstruction judge would find him guilty of murder and hang him.
He needed Sully to draw first. That was why he’d come here, his only hope at taking care of this without causing himself bigger troubles.
“Come on, you coward,” Will said. “You’re man enough to frighten women and man enough to call me a liar. Now, you’d better be man enough to fight me. On three…”
Sully’s eyes swelled, and he took another step backward.
“One,” Will said, and smiled at his enemy. “Two…”
“No!” Sully cried, his voice high and sharp with fear, and he dove from the bar.
“You’d best be careful, Will,” Jake Stall said. “You unmanned him publicly. He’ll try to kill you for this.”
“Nah,” Will said. “Sully doesn’t have the guts.”
But inwardly, he knew Jake was right. Sully would likely try to kill him for this.
That, or tuck tail and leave town.
Either of those things would suit Will just fine.
CHAPTER 37
Sully Weatherspoon had never been so angry in all his life. Not just at Will Bentley but also at his father, who had been treating him like a child ever since the incident at the saloon several days earlier.
There was other anger, deeper within him, as well; anger he refused to consider at any great length; anger at himself for not facing Will Bentley; anger at what some part of him knew to be cowardice.
Sully stood now in his father’s office, trembling with impotent rage.
“Your error is costing us dearly,” his father said, pacing back and forth behind his big desk. “Will Bentley has been coming into town every day, dragging our name through the mud. People see me passing by, they cover their mouths and laugh. I am not a laughingstock, Sully!”
“No, sir,” Sully said but wanted, out of sheer spite, to point out that his father was, indeed, a laughingstock. He’d admitted to just that.
But Sully said no such thing because his father’s other side was showing now. Not the aristocratic plantation owneror the pillar of the community, who had welcomed the Reconstructionists, or even the hard-nosed businessman, but that other side, the side only Sully knew.
The cold-blooded killer.
