Free Shadow Falls: Badlands by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff Page A

bastards to fight their own countrymen?”
    Galen could feel his toes curl inside his boots as the banker’s eyes stayed glued on his.
    “They even took a bunch of regular boys with them, convinced them our Army was made up of devils of some kind and poisoned their minds with lies and false ideas. But in the end, we hunted down those San Patricios, nearly every last one, and you know what we did to them?”
    “No,” Galen answered, gritting his teeth.
    “We flogged ‘em and branded each of them with a red hot iron. Branded ‘em with the letter ’D’ right on their faces, and then hung every last one of them as a group. That’s what we do in this country to deserters and cowards.”
    Dunburton put his glass down on the table with a bang loud enough that Galen nearly leapt out of his seat. The memories that lay buried—of those skirmishes; of the eyes of those American men he could see across the battlefield through the acrid smoke—surfaced much too easily in his mind, as did the atrocities those uncontrolled soldiers committed in their wake.
    “You have to forgive me, for when I imbibe spirits, I often find my emotions get the best of me,” Dunburton said. He attempted to get up from the chair but his drunken legs buckled. The banker dropped his tumbler to the floor, causing it to shatter. Galen hurried to his host’s side.
    The ruckus roused Matty, who rushed through the kitchen door to find Galen helping the master of the house back to his feet. The slave eyed Galen suspiciously before coming to his aid to help right Dunburton in his chair.
    “It’s okay, Matty,” he told her. “I must have had one of my spells again.”
    “Mr. Dunburton, I do appreciate the meal and the hospitality, but being as it’s late, I should probably take my leave,” Galen said, trying to conceal his desperate itch to flee this house.
    “Tom, I do thank you for bringing me that package. Please tell your employer that his debt to me is now forgiven.” He turned to Matty. “Please take me up to my bed. Now.”
    Galen thought that the rancher would have to get by without that reprieve, given his plan of never returning to that ranch.
    “Goodnight, Mr. Dunburton.” Galen said, watching Matty lift the banker back to his feet—as his groping hands seemed to make quick work of finding her breasts. “I can find my own way out.”
    “Goodnight to you, Mr. Holt,” he said without even looking back.
    It was late and a cutting February wind blew through the street as Galen trudged back to the boarding house. His task done, he’d get the first coach going west in the morning. He had no intention of staying in this town—especially given the proximity to Dunburton, the closest reminder he’d had in years to that which he thought he’d left behind.
    As he cut through the empty street, he stepped wide across the curb over the slush and piled dung from passing horses when he noticed he was standing no more than a hundred feet from the lit window of the Gypsy crone’s fortune telling parlor.
    Again, she was seated there in the ornate rocker, her raven-colored hair shining in the lamplight. Galen thought of what she had said to him the previous night.
    And now they’re hunting you. Her words echoed in his mind over and over like an endless loop.
    And now they’re hunting you.
    And now they’re hunting you.
    And now they’re hunting you.
    Suddenly, a new voice replaced the ones in his head: his own, telling him to go in there and kill that Gypsy bitch once and for all.
     
     
    *****

CHAPTER 6

    T he noise in his head forced Galen to cover his ears with his hands. He dropped to his knees—the slushy water from the sidewalk soaking through his pants.
    Again there was a sudden flash followed by a clap of thunder rumbling inside his head. From the far echoes of his mind he could hear her screaming plaintive wails of terror as the knife carved into her flesh. The sound she made—a shrieking—when she fell to the dirt was almost