Chapter Twenty-Six
Gideon Walker did not raise his voice, as a rule.
He considered it a mark of poor discipline, the sort of thing lesser men resorted to when they lacked better instruments.
Anger untethered from calculation was simply waste.
Wasted breath, wasted energy, wasted opportunity to make an impression that actually served a purpose.
And yet, sitting now in the back corner of the Weatherford saloon with a glass of whiskey he had no real intention of drinking, Gideon turned over the afternoon’s insult with something close to undisciplined heat. Henry Foster had put his hands on him. How dare he?
Gideon gripped the edge of the table hard enough that his knuckles went pale.
He stared down at his hand for a moment, then forced himself to release the table.
He was not a man given to losing his composure.
That much he had built, deliberately and at considerable cost, over the better part of twenty years.
Gideon had been perhaps seven years old the first time his father had struck him for crying.
Then perhaps twelve the last time, by which point he had learned not to cry at all, regardless of what the man’s fists or his boots or the buckle end of his belt saw fit to teach him that particular evening.
His father had been a drunkard and a coward in equal measure.
He was the sort of man who ruled his own house through fear precisely because he commanded respect nowhere else in his life.
Not from the men he owed money to, not from the wife he’d long since driven off, not from the town that regarded him, when it regarded him at all, with the same weary contempt one reserves for a dog too mean to keep and too pitiful to shoot.
Gideon had sworn to himself, somewhere around his fourteenth year, that he would never again be a man other men looked at and saw as weak. He would never again be poor, or powerless, or at the mercy of anyone’s temper but his own.
So after his father had drunk himself to death, Gideon had built himself, coin by coin and debt by collected debt, into a man whose name alone was enough to still a room.
He had done precisely what he’d promised himself as a boy.
That no one would ever dare lay a hand on him and believe themselves entitled to walk away from it unanswered.
He gritted his teeth as he reached for his drink. Ruth had made a fool of him in front of half of Devil’s Hollow, making a cuckold of him with another man before he’d so much as claimed her properly.
And now, Henry Foster had shown the same disrespect. Refusing to hand Ruth over to him, putting hands on him as if he had no idea of the kind of wrath Gideon could unleash.
He set his glass down knowing one thing for certain. This could not stand. Not merely for pride’s sake, though pride was not nothing. Pride was, in fact, very nearly everything. It was the only inheritance his father had ever managed to leave him besides scars.
Any man worth his salt knew that reputation was the true currency a man in his position dealt in.
Debts were collected because men feared what happened when they weren’t paid.
Let one insult pass unanswered and the whole careful architecture of that fear began to crack at its foundation.
Gideon Walker had not spent two decades building himself out of nothing only to watch it crumble because of one drunk’s daughter and the rancher fool enough to shelter her.
Just then, the saloon doors opened and he turned his head. Two men crossed the saloon floor toward his table, moving with the unhurried confidence of men accustomed to being summoned for exactly this sort of conversation. Gideon had summoned them.
As soon as he arrived in the saloon, he had sent word through the bartender that he was looking to hire a certain type of man.
It was not the first time he’d done it. In fact, it was a discreet arrangement he’d made use of in more than one town over the years.
A small commission was then paid quietly for pointing him toward men willing to hire out their particular talents without asking overly many questions about the nature of the work.
“Mr. Walker.”
The larger of the two spoke first. He was broad through the shoulders, slow and even in his manner. “Name’s Cole. This here’s Briggs.”
The second man was leaner, quicker in his glance around the room. He gave a short nod by way of greeting and took the seat across from Gideon without waiting to be invited.
“Sit,” Gideon said, a beat too late to matter. He gestured for the bartender to bring two more glasses. “I understand you gentlemen are available for work that requires a certain amount of discretion.”
“Depends on the work,” Briggs said. “And depends on the pay.”
“The pay will be generous.” Gideon folded his hands atop the table, studying them both with the same patient calculation he applied to any account still owing. “There’s a rancher some miles from here, Henry Foster.”
Cole’s expression did not change at all. “You want him hurt.”
“I want a lesson delivered,” Gideon said.
He paused, turning his glass slowly between two fingers, watching the lamplight shift across the surface of liquor he still had no intention of drinking.
“Whether Mr. Foster survives the lesson is, frankly, a secondary consideration. That will depend a great deal on how much fight he cares to put up when you arrive.”
Briggs’s mouth curved upward. “That’s the kind of work that costs extra.”
“You’ll find I pay considerably better than most men who’d ask this of you.” Gideon reached into his coat and produced a small fold of bills, sliding it partway across the table without releasing it entirely. “Half now. Half when the matter’s settled to my satisfaction.”
Cole reached out and took the fold, testing its weight in his palm before tucking it away inside his coat, apparently satisfied. “When do we ride?”
“Midnight,” Gideon said.
“Anything else we should know?” Briggs asked.
“Do not let any harm come to the woman or the child,” Gideon said.
“What do you want us to do with them?” Cole asked.
“Bring the woman to me,” Gideon said. “Her father owed me a considerable debt and I find myself unwilling to let that account close.”
“And the child?”
“Leave her there,” Gideon said. “I have no interest in the child.”
Briggs nodded slowly, tucking the instruction away without comment, the way a man files anything that doesn’t concern him. Cole said nothing at all. He studied Gideon a moment longer before he reached for his glass and drank.
Gideon leaned back in his chair, satisfied. It was, he reflected, a tidy enough arrangement. One that would return Ruth to him and teach Henry Foster a lesson.
He was Gideon Walker, after all.