Then, moving with creditable calm for a man who had just committed his second murder with his own hands—and the first in open view of the public eye—John Lachley wiped the lead sap on his handkerchief and secreted his weapon in his pocket once more. He reined his horse around and tied it to the nearest tree. Dismounting from the saddle, he walked over to the man he’d come here to kill. James K. Stephen lay in a broken heap. Lachley bent down . . . and felt the pulse fluttering at the man’s throat.
The bastard was still alive! Fury blasted through him, brought his vision shrieking down to a narrow hunter’s focus once more. He stole his hand into his pocket, where the lead sap lay hidden—
“Dear God!” a voice broke into his awareness above the shriek and rattle of the train. Lachley whirled around, violently shaken. Another man on horseback had approached from the trail. The stranger was jumping to the ground, running towards them. Worse, a striking young woman with heavy blond hair sat another horse on the trail, watching them with an expression of shock and horror.
“What’s happened?” the intruder asked, reasonably enough.
Lachley forced himself to calmness, drew on a lifetime’s worth of deceit and the need to hide who and what he was in order to survive, and said in a voice filled with concern, “This gentleman and I were riding along the trail, here, when the train passed. Something from the train struck him as it went by, I don’t know what, a large cinder perhaps, or maybe someone threw something from a window. But his horse bolted quite abruptly. Poor devil was thrown from the saddle, straight under the windmill blades. I’d just reached him when you rode up.”