“Were you in the Army?” he asked.
Griffiths gave a dry laugh. “Not me. I don’t take orders well. But I’ll say it wasn’t difficult to track down that cavalry regiment you served with up in the Black Hills. And it was even easier to persuade one of those men to come down here and work for me. I don’t know what you did to Robert Wallingford, but he jumped on the first train out of Denver at my telegram.”
Nate fought to keep the surprise from his face. Wallingford had served with him at least half the time Nate had been in the cavalry. He hadn’t done a thing to Wallingford, but . . . He closed his eyes. The man was a gambler. The lure of easy money was likely enough to turn him against a fellow soldier.
“He was never a sergeant,” Nate said to keep the conversation going.
Griffiths shrugged. “Doesn’t matter much to me.”
“I imagine he also skipped town the second you paid him.” If he wasn’t holed up in a gambling hall nearby, but Nate surmised the man had a little more sense than that.
“Hmm,” was all Griffiths said.
Nate didn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t have long to think on it before Griffiths spoke again.
“He was awfully forthcoming with how cowardly you acted back in the Great Sioux War. Said you near about froze in the middle of a fight. Jumped off your horse and just stood there.” Griffiths laughed again and looked at Miss Flagler, as if she might laugh with him. But all she did was shake her head and silently cry.
Nate sucked in a breath. Just the mere mention of the battle he’d never forget sent the horrifying memories flaring across his mind.Not now, he tried to tell himself, but it was impossible to push them away. The woman, sobbing over her dead husband. The children, the blood, the fires, and through all of it, gunfire and smoke and horses running and him, just standing there unable to move at the horror of it all. It would always be there. And there was nothing Nate could do to send it away.
He’d always told himself it wasn’t cowardice, the way he’d been unable to follow orders that day. But maybe Griffiths and Wallingford were right. He’d been assigned a duty, and he couldn’t fulfill it.
It was a betrayal of everything you thought you were. It wasn’t what God wanted.That’s what he’d always told himself.
“See, he’s not right in the head,” Griffiths was saying to Miss Flagler, who was watching Nate with the most sorrowful expression. “I believe he did you a favor, turning you away like he did.”
Maybe this was what he deserved—to die at the hand of a man like Griffiths. After all, he couldn’t bring himself to act when the moment called for it. He couldn’t protect himself. He couldn’t protect Ruthann.
He was a broken shell of a man.
“I’ll give you a choice. You can leave town, or I can put an end to your misery right now,” Griffiths said.
“Paul!” Miss Flagler gripped his arm again.
“I’m doing this foryou,” he said.
“This is enough. It isn’t what I wanted!” She pulled his arm again, distracting him from Nate.
It was the only opportunity Nate would get to act. He could jump forward, tackle the man to the ground, and wrench the gun away.
But he couldn’t do anything. He was too useless, too enmeshed in the past, too . . . cowardly.
“Mr. Harper, please, do something!” Miss Flagler was pleading with him now as Griffiths shoved her aside, shouting that he loved her.
But he still couldn’t move.
The door opened again. And this time, Nate knew his world was ending.
Ruthann stood there, her face changing in half a second from one of determination to pure fear—just as Griffiths grabbed hold of her arm and hauled her inside.
