According to Hoyle Read Online Free

set fire to the Feed and Seed, the building that had shared a wall with the old Marshal Office.
    Wash had been inside the jail that night, and he had nearly lost his life trying to release the prisoners from their cells as the building burned down around them. His hands still bore scars from the burns he’d received from the heated metal of the bars as he’d opened them. The fire had leaped from the building that housed the General Store and Feed and Seed and the jail beside it, to the buildings on either side of them; the stables and the saloon.
    The horses had all been saved, which was a stroke of luck considering their value in a town like Lincoln, but the buildings had burned down like the dry kindling they were, and with them went the livelihood of some of the town’s most prominent citizens. The biggest tragedy had been the deaths of three guests renting the rooms above the saloon who hadn’t been able to get out of the upper level in time. The damage to the town and to its reputation hadn’t made anyone particularly happy.
    The prisoners Wash had risked his life to save had promptly tried to escape as the townsfolk dealt with the spreading fire. That was how Wash’s arm wound up in the sling. A bullet from a stolen gun had taken him cleanly through the shoulder as he’d tried to retake the prisoners without violence. Of course, after being shot, violence had not been one of Wash’s concerns and the escaped prisoners hadn’t made it very far.
    The Doc was certain he would make a nearly full recovery. Flynn, though, was certain that the Doc spent too much time in the saloon, and so he worried for Wash and his arm.
    The town was rebuilding, bigger, better, and more organized. The pristine façades of the new edifices made Flynn feel like he had wandered into the wrong place. The two prisoners who had attempted to escape that night now occupied permanent spots up in the shady little grove of headstones the local residents had naïvely named God’s Acre, thinking an acre would be enough to hold the dead in a town west of the Mississippi.
    Larry Fitz, the man who’d caused the whole damn mess, had gone to ground as soon as he had sobered up and realized what he’d done, and he’d been in hiding ever since. Until now, apparently.
    “Who found him?” Flynn asked softly.
    “Cyrus Beeson, over on the flats,” Wash answered, his normally friendly and easygoing tone suddenly hard and grim. “It’s a damn miracle they didn’t kill him ’fore I got to him. Just happenstance I was anywhere near when they dragged him in. They were heading for a hanging tree, making a damn mess of it.”
    “Shame you got to him at all,” Flynn muttered inhospitably.
    “Law don’t work that way, Eli,” Wash murmured.
    “It does out here.”
    “It ain’t supposed to.” Wash slid his key into the lock and turned it slowly. The man inside didn’t move as the new hinges groaned. Wash knelt and placed the tray of food on the floor of the cell.
    “Maybe it should,” Flynn argued quietly. “It’d make our lives a lot easier.”
    Wash eased his way back out of the cell and retrieved his key, locking the cell and watching to see if Larry would move. When it didn’t appear that he would, Wash pursed his lips and turned to Flynn.
    “Life’s not easy to come by,” he said in a tired voice. “I don’t mind mine being hard, and I don’t take it lightly when I’m forced to take one. You shouldn’t neither.”
    “I ain’t the one deciding to waste my life by stepping outside the law,” Flynn argued.
    Wash brushed by him and headed back out into the front office. Flynn turned and followed him.
    Wash just shook his head. “Even outlaws got their stories, Eli,” he said, his voice gruff.
    “And they can tell ’em to the Devil when they see him,” Flynn argued stubbornly.
    Wash sighed as he sat himself in front of the stove and propped his booted feet on the bench in front of him. It was an argument they’d had plenty of