Under A Prairie Moon by Madeline Baker

The Lakota were an honorable people.”
    He stared past her, looking out the kitchen window. They were gone now, his parents, all the people he had grown up with. Dead and gone. He knew, from overhearing people talk and from watching television, that times had changed. People didn’t ride horses anymore. Cowboys and gunfighters had gone the way of the Pony Express and high button shoes. He had been shocked the first time he had seen a woman in shorts. Not that he hadn’t liked it. She’d been a pretty red-haired girl with gray eyes and a dimple in her chin, one of the people who had rented the house from time to time. In his day, a man had been lucky to see a woman’s ankles; now women ran around practically naked, showing off their legs and just about everything else.
    He looked at Kathy, wondering if she ever wore shorts.
    “Dalton?”
    “What? Oh yeah.”
    For the next two hours, he told her about growing up with the Lakota, how his whole family—mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles—had all had a hand in raising him, how he had learned to ride and track and hunt, how he had learned to live off the land. He told her about his first horse raid against the Crow, and the first time he killed a man.
    “That’s something you never forget,” he said. “The heat of battle, the blood singing in your veins, your heart pounding in your ears when it’s over because you know it could just as easily have been you lying there in the dirt.”
    “What about all the other men you killed later, in gunfights? Do you remember them too?”
    “Every one.” He saw their faces in his dreams sometimes, shadow faces that haunted him as he drifted through time and space, caught between this world and the next.
    “Have you ever been shot?”
    “Oh yeah, couple times.” He lifted his hand to the scar near his hairline. “Shooter by the name of Lonnie Dwyer almost got lucky over in Bodie. I’ve got a nasty scar on my back too.”
    “Someone shot you in the back?”
    He nodded. “Some low-down coward name of Rudy Phillips.”
    “Did you…?”
    “Damn straight!”
    “Bodie? Isn’t that in California?”
    “Yeah. It was a hell of a town in my day.”
    “It’s a ghost town now.”
    He laughed softly. “Figures.”
    “What was it like, when you were there?”
    “Loud and dangerous. There were thirty mines in operation back then, and thirty-five saloons, as I recall.” He laughed softly. “And sixty brothels.”
    “Sixty?”
    “Yeah. The saloons and the brothels were open round the clock. Hardly a day went by that there wasn’t a killing in one or the other. I recollect hearing someone say the town had a man for breakfast every day. Town had three breweries. They worked round the clock too.”
    Kathy shook her head, unable to imagine such a place. Sixty brothels open round the clock. She did some quick mental arithmetic….if a girl worked an eight-hour day….three girls per day times sixty….one hundred and eighty girls times however many girls worked in each saloon…say ten girls for every saloon….eighteen hundred working girls…could that be right?
    “How long did you stay there?”
    “Couple months. Some prospector hired me to watch his back to and from his mine and while he played cards. He should have hired me to keep an eye on him when he was flat on his back.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Saloon girl claimed he refused to pay her for services rendered and stuck a knife in his ribs. He died the next day, and I hightailed it out of there the day after.”
    “Where’d you go next?”
    “Abilene.”
    “What brought you to Saul’s Crossing?”
    “Nothing. I was just passing through. It was a peaceful little town, and I decided to stay awhile.” He grunted softly. “Biggest mistake I ever made.”
    “What, exactly, did Russell Conley hire you for?”
    “There was bad blood brewing between him and Burkhart, the owner of the adjoining ranch. Water rights, as I recall.” A smooth smile