The Rustler by Linda Lael Miller

seemed to pulse in protest.
    Doc merely chuckled.
    Sarah bent low and whispered in Owen’s ear. “Bet all your matchsticks. You’ve got a straight with ace high.”
    Â 
    T HERE WERE ONLY THREE HORSES in front of Jolene Bell’s Saloon, two in front of the Hell-bent, six lining the hitching rail at the Spit Bucket. Wyatt passed them by, making for the jailhouse.
    All was quiet there, too, so he closed the place up for the night and went around back to the barn, where he planned to stretch out in the hayloft. The weather was clear, and he’d be able to see the stars between the wide cracks in the roof.
    He was thinking about Sarah, and those blue eyes of hers, full of tragic mysteries and an almost formidable intelligence. There was something to her attachment to the boy Owen, though he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. A sort of anxious solicitude, carefully controlled. Her gaze had constantly strayed to the child, rested on him with a certain desperate hunger.
    Mulling over these things as he was, Wyatt almost fell over the dog lying in the path between the jailhouse and the barn. The critter whimpered, and Wyatt righted himself.
    â€œWhat the—?”
    The dog whimpered again. It was an ugly brute of a mutt, missing a chunk of one ear and so thin he could make out its ribs even in the relative darkness. Its tail had been lopped off square, close to the hind quarters, and a scab had formed over the wound.
    â€œRun along home,” Wyatt said.
    The dog started to rise, dropped heavily to the ground again.
    Muttering a swear word, Wyatt crouched for a closer look. “You sick, fella?”
    The animal emitted a soft, keening whine, almost like a plea.
    Wyatt’s heart sank. He couldn’t take care of his own horse, or even himself, but he couldn’t walk away from this dog, either. And about the last thing he needed was a goddamned dog.
    He felt the mutt’s sides for obvious injuries, and found none. The legs seemed sound, too. When the brute didn’t bite him, he sighed, lifted him up in both arms, and carried him into Rowdy’s tidy little house.
    He laid him on Pardner’s rug, as gently as he could, and struck a match to light one of the kerosene lamps.
    In the glow, the miserable specimen looked even uglier than he had in the dark. And there was dried blood all over his coat, some of which had transferred itself to the front of Wyatt’s borrowed white going-to-supper shirt.
    â€œIf you were a woman,” Wyatt told the sorry-looking critter, “you’d have to wear a flour sack over your head every time you left the house.”
    The dog whined again, its moist brown eyes imploring Wyatt, though for what he did not know. Mercy, perhaps. The simple privilege of living.
    â€œNo telling how bad you’re hurt, looking the way you do.” Resigned, Wyatt went into Rowdy and Lark’s fancy bathroom and ran some warm water into the tub. He went back to the kitchen, gathered up the dog again, and lugged him in for a sudsing.
    The dog endured the ordeal with the last of his dignity, and as he soaped and rinsed the critter, and soaped and rinsed him again, Wyatt’s temper, subdued by two years in prison, flared inside him, a slowly spreading heat.
    Someone—and God help them when Wyatt found out who—had beaten the dog with either a buggy whip or a tree branch of similar circumference, leaving deep, bloody stripes in his brindled hide.
    Once he’d hoisted the dog out of the tub and dried him off with a fancy monogrammed towel—the only thing at hand to serve the purpose—Wyatt rummaged through cabinets until he found a tin of salve. He applied it lavishly to the dog’s wounds, and the poor, pitiful creature didn’t even try to lick the stuff off. He just huddled there on Lark’s formerly pristine bath mat, looking forlorn and waiting for another blow.
    â€œI’m not going to hurt you, boy,” Wyatt