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them.”
    â€œWhat about you?” Clint asked as he shifted his gaze to the barkeep. “Does everyone around here approve of pushing around ladies and children?”
    Reluctantly, the barkeep said, “No, but she does bring a bad kind into this town. We do our best to keep undesirables away from here, but she offers them room and board. Them kids she puts up belong to someone and the folks that come around to claim them ain’t always the most charitable kind.”
    â€œIs that why no lawmen have come along to speak to Miss Gerard yet?” Although he didn’t get a direct answer to his question, he saw enough guilty sneers upon the faces around him to do the job.
    After a heavy silence, one of the other men with Lang finally spoke up. “We ain’t got anything against kids, but that Miss Gerard ain’t what you think she is. She’s been warned plenty of times to leave town, but she won’t go. Worse than that, she keeps bringing them strays here to attract more trouble that would otherwise pass us by.”
    â€œIs that so?”
    â€œYes, sir,” the man replied. “It is.”
    â€œThe only thing that bitch cares about is them wayward little pups she collects,” Lang continued. “You want to find out for yourself? Then go ask the sheriff. He’ll tell you.”
    â€œI don’t need to talk to the sheriff about anything,” Clint said. “If Miss Gerard is breaking the law, then she would’ve already been arrested. That is, unless your town’s law doesn’t have the gumption to pay a visit to a woman. In the meantime, stay away from her. That goes for you, Lang, as well as anyone else.”
    Nobody else spoke up, so Clint took a healthy drink of the beer he’d ordered and left.

FIVE
    As much as Clint would have liked to discount everything that had been said at the saloon, he still had a little time to kill before supper, and the sheriff’s office was on his way to Madeline’s house. The little office took up less space than the dry goods store beside it and was only occupied by one man when Clint stepped inside.
    â€œAre you the town law?” Clint asked the young man sitting behind a short desk.
    The man looked up, showing Clint a clean-shaven face and bloodshot eyes. “I’m Sheriff Bailey. What can I do for you?”
    â€œDid you happen to know a woman was attacked in the street a little while ago?”
    The sheriff stood up and asked, “Who was it? Is she hurt?”
    â€œIt was Madeline Gerard.”
    That was enough to convince the sheriff to take his seat again. “Oh,” he grunted. “Her.”
    â€œThat’s right, her. Does she somehow fall out of your jurisdiction?”
    â€œFrom what I hear, she wasn’t hurt. Just called a name or two.”
    â€œIt was going to be more than that if I hadn’t stepped in,” Clint said. “What gets under my skin even more is the fact that nobody around here seems to care what happens to Miss Gerard. Some folks seem to think she deserves a lot worse.”
    â€œThen she should have brought the situation to my attention,” the sheriff replied as he got himself situated behind his modest stack of papers. “I can’t exactly know about every little thing that goes on during the day.”
    â€œWhat’s she done to deserve so much grief?”
    Flinching at the directness of the question that had been posed, the sheriff folded his hands upon his desk and replied, “She tends to attract an unsavory bunch to this town.”
    â€œYou mean children that don’t happen to be from local families?”
    â€œThe children aren’t the problem,” Sheriff Bailey replied. “It’s the folks that come around to claim them. And it’s not just children she looks after, you know. There have been fugitives from the law as well as a few individuals who were hiding out from a gang known to kidnap