Free A Heart So Wild by Johanna Lindsey Page A

find out what had happened to his cateyes. Cateyes was how he thought of her, even after he learned her name. And Chandos had thought of her often over the years.
    He’d never pictured her as she was now, of course. Her image in his mind had been of the frightened girl not much older than his sister had been when she died. The image had changed now, for the foolish girl had become a beautiful woman—one who was just as foolish as ever, maybe more so. He could easily imagine her raped and killed because of her stubborn determination to get to Texas, and he knew his imaginings were based in reality.
    Chandos dismounted, tethering his piebald pinto in front of Tuttle’s. He stared at the ball of hair in his hand for a few seconds more. Then, disgusted, he tossed it away and watched as the breeze took it skittering a few feet down the dirt street.
    He went into the saloon and saw that though it was only midday, there were at least twenty people scattered around the bar and tables. There were even a couple of low-cleavaged ladies. A professional gambler had a game going at one of the tables, and the town marshal sat at the other end of the room, drinking with six buddies, making as much noise as the rest of the drinkers. Three cowboys were having a friendly argument over the two whores. Two dangerous-looking hombres were quietly nursing drinks at a corner table.
    â€œDare Trask been in yet?” Chandos asked the bartender as he ordered a drink.
    â€œDon’t ring a bell, mister. Hey, Will, you know a Dare Trask?” the man called to one of his regulars.
    â€œCan’t say as I do,” Will replied.
    â€œHe used to ride with Wade Smith and Leroy Curly,” Chandos supplied.
    â€œSmith I know. Heard he was shacked up with some woman down in Paris, Texas. The other two?” The man shrugged.
    Chandos downed a whiskey. That was something, at least, even if it was only a rumor. In fact, it was by asking some innocent questions in a saloon that Chandos had heard that Trask was headed for Newton. He’d heard nothing about Smith for two years, however, not since he learned the man was wanted in San Antonio for murder. Chandos had trailed Leroy Curly to a small town in New Mexico, and hadn’t even needed to provoke a fight. Curly was a born troublemaker. He delighted in showing off his fast gun, and he picked the fight with Chandos that got him killed.
    Chandos wouldn’t be able to recognize Dare Trask, for he had only a sketchy description of brown hair and brown eyes, a short man in his late twenties. That fit two of the cowboys and one of the gunmen at the corner table. But Dare Trask had one notable feature. He was missing a finger on his left hand.
    Chandos ordered a second whiskey. “Trask comes in, tell him Chandos is looking for him.”
    â€œChandos? Sure thing, mister. You a friend?”
    â€œNo.”
    That said it all. Nothing riled a gunman more than hearing someone he didn’t know was looking for him. Chandos had found the sometimes-cowboy, more-times-drifter Cincinnati with that same challenge. He hoped it would draw out Trask, who had managed to continually elude him these last four years, just as Smith had.
    Just to be thorough, Chandos turned his scrutiny on the three men who came close to Trask’s description. Everyone’s fingers were intact.
    â€œWhat the hell you lookin’ at, mister?” said the cowboy who now sat alone at his table, his two friends having just gotten up, with the whores, to go upstairs. He had obviously lost the argument and so was forced to wait until one of the whores returned. He wasn’t happy about it.
    Chandos ignored him. When a man was itching for a fight, very little could be done to calm him down.
    The cowboy got up and grabbed Chandos’s shoulder, whirling him around. “Sonofabitch, I asked you a ques—”
    Chandos gave him a hard kick to the crotch, and the fellow went down, landing hard on his