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idea.”
    “It is,” Nick said as he reached over to rub her cheek. “And it does put people off my trail, but that doesn’t mean I’m safe from anyone else who comes through here looking for me. How long do you think it’ll be before that man you were talking to finds out who I am and where I can be found most every day of the week?”
    “You’re out at that cemetery or your workshop more often than that parlor you run. A squirrelcan’t get within twenty yards of any of those places without you knowing about it.” She patted Nick’s hand and smiled lovingly. “Perhaps you should talk to Stilson about being a deputy in more than just title. It…probably pays better, you know.”
    “I’m doing the only work I know,” Nick said. Looking away from her, he added, “Well, the only work that won’t land me in jail, anyways. Things around here have been good. I’d rather not fool with that.”
    “Good for the town isn’t exactly good for an undertaker, which is your chosen profession. You can still do that job when it’s needed, but we could use a salary that doesn’t require a steady stream of people dropping over.”
    “It’s been a while since the last funeral,” Nick said. “Some of the folks around here are bound to keel over sooner rather than later.” He met Catherine’s eyes and smirked. “When it rains, it pours.”
    She wasn’t amused.
    “All right, so maybe I just don’t like wearing this thing.” With that, Nick took hold of the badge and tore it off his shirt. He looked down at it and then flipped it over to find shreds of cotton hanging from the pin behind the star. “What did that fellow want?”
    “Who?”
    Looking up at her, Nick said, “The fellow who you were talking to outside not too long ago. The one who scampered off the moment he saw me coming.”
    Catherine took a deep breath and ran her finger along the top of the bar. After pausing for a while, she realized that Nick was still waiting for an answer. “He was asking about you.”
    Nick straightened up as his hand immediately drifted toward the gun at his side.
    Watching him go through that simple, practiced motion was almost enough to bring tears to Catherine’s eyes. Under most circumstances, she looked at him the way any wife would look at her husband. There were moments when she was exasperated and moments when she wanted to laugh at him, but all of those moments were shaded by the love that flowed so easily between them.
    When Nick made that subtle reach for his gun, he became the man he’d been when they’d first crossed paths. That also drew her attention to the gnarled stubs that remained of the middle two fingers on his gun hand and the pieces of his left hand that had also been torn away. Even the parts of his hands that were intact were covered in old wounds that made them look as if they’d been cobbled together from spare parts.
    The gun at his side wasn’t much different. It had begun as a Schofield revolver but had been restructured into something else. Its handle was whittled down to less than half its original size. Catherine had seen the gun enough to know the barrel was gnarled and grooved as well, as if it had been heated, twisted and then allowed to cool. Mostpeople figured the gun was a cheap piece of garbage only used to fire a round at the occasional snake.
    Those people would have been dead wrong.
    Catherine had seen what that gun could do in the proper hands. In fact, there was only one hand for the pistol and it was the same hand that hovered over it now.
    “What did he want with me?” Nick asked.
    Snapping herself out of the silence that had enveloped her, Catherine replied, “He said he needed to ask you something, but didn’t say what it was. I know it had something to do with a lot of money.”
    “How much is a lot?”
    “So much that he was willing to hand over a thousand dollars as an advance if I could help steer him in the right direction.”
    “Are you serious?”
    She