Kindness, from Jeb Hart, always came with teeth behind it.
Now the teeth were showing.
A man stood apart from the crowd, near the fence line where the shadows pooled. Tall. Broad shouldered. A hat pulled low enough to shade his eyes. His clothes were worn thin but clean, as if poverty had touched him but not defeated him.
He looked like he belonged to another century.
Gideon Rusk.
That was his name, if the whispers were true. The mountain man who came down from the high ridges three or four times a year to trade pelts and buy flour and salt. He didn’t drink at the saloon. Didn’t nod politely to ladies on the boardwalk. Didn’t attend church.
Silence was his habit, and Dry Creek filled the silence with stories.
They said he’d buried bodies in shallow graves. They said wolves followed him like dogs. They said he carved names into the handle of his knife.
