Just This Once Read Online Free Page A

the dancing
girls perform and to find himself a bottle of whiskey and a new
poker game.
    He scarcely watched the girls. Once or twice
he glanced at them, saw several of them meet his eyes and smile
widely as they lifted their skirts and kicked their legs, flashing
ankles and knees with abandon. Tempting, but he wasn’t sure that
even a loose woman would calm him tonight.
    Maybe later he’d find out.
    The whiskey at his elbow was good. He
usually didn’t drink much, though lately he’d turned to it more and
more. It helped to soothe the restlessness that gripped him of
late, a restlessness even the open splendor of the plains no longer
seemed to ease. Even tonight, his mind couldn’t concentrate on the
game. He’d developed a sixth sense, an instinct, for when something
momentous was about to happen to him—be it an ambush by enemies on
a mountain pass, his horse going lame, a card opponent coming up
with a straight flush.
    Instinct. Ethan Savage was known to have it
in spades.
    And instinct told him tonight that something
was going to shake up his dull little world.
    Maybe tonight he’d get shot.
    In all these years of riding, hunting,
shooting, gambling, living the solitary life in a lawless land,
he’d never been shot. But there was a first time for
everything.
    It would be a diversion, he told himself,
almost smiling as he fanned out his cards.
    Few people would consider his life dull. He
roamed the West at will, hiring himself out as a professional
gunfighter when he needed cash, now and then tracking down an
outlaw to fill his pockets with enough bounty money to stake
himself to the next poker game in the next town. All the towns were
the same to him—Deadwood and Abilene, Tucson and Laramie, Fort
Worth, Dodge. He’d passed through all the wildest places on the
frontier in the past ten years, stayed awhile in some, lingered
only a day in others, and it seemed to him that the frontier was
dying fast. Getting civilized, fenced in, closed up.
    Oh, there was still space enough, land
enough, sky enough, but something told him that the wildest,
grandest days were on the wane. The sun was setting on the West
he’d made his own when he’d flung himself away from England all
those years ago.
    England. Why was he thinking of England now?
He hadn’t thought of his native land in months. Had almost
succeeded in blocking it entirely from his thoughts, just as he’d
blocked his accent from his voice, his memories from his brain.
    He’d never set foot on British soil again.
He was an American now.
    “I’ll raise you, mister,” the old miner
rasped with a smelly grin, throwing a pile of chips onto the table
as one of the saloon girls refilled the glasses. The miner squinted
through the cigar smoke. “What’s it goin’ to be?”
    Before Ethan could reply, the doors to the
saloon swung open and a neat little man whisked inside. He was
small of stature, slightly built, and balding. He wore thin gold
spectacles on a squashed little nose. He had a pleasant face, a
round chin. He was handsomely garbed in a neat black suit and gray
bowler, and his pebble-blue eyes scanned the smoky saloon with
mathematical efficiency.
    They paused upon Ethan.
    Then the man started forward, crossing
directly toward the poker table.
    “My lord, a word with you,” he said in a
low, steady tone marked by a British accent.
    That accent and the man’s dandyish
appearance, clearly out of place in this rough western saloon, told
Ethan far more than he wanted to know.
    “Damn it all to hell.” He glared at the
small man, the same glare that had unnerved many hardened gunmen
who’d encountered it, and convinced a good number of them to back
down before pushing him to a fight. But the Englishman remained
outwardly calm, placid even.
    “He sent you, didn’t he?” Ethan threw a
card, then glanced back up at the man. “After all these years?
Whatever it is, I’m not interested.”
    “Sir, we must speak in private. The matter
is of the