There was no reason Ronin couldn’t find his way out of Carson City for the holidays. No physical constraint was keeping him. No emotional attachment either, though there was the annual expectation he’d attend services at the Indian school south of town. He’d been a part of the American Gospel Mission’s “Christmas supper and show,” as he put it, since 1877, when he first came to Nevada’s Eagle Valley, fresh out of employment with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. A couple of missteps and they had severed their relationship with the handsome ex-preacher. He’d gotten involved with a Spiritualist client—the beautiful and shapely Madame Bovary, a pseudonym it turned out, taken from a French novel he never read. He didn’t know her real name. The work since—here a bad guy, there a bad guy, a few more bad guys and gals in-between—had been surprisingly enjoyable. He had nothing else to do. So when the mission called, via the usual holiday card and Christmas gift—a fruitcake, of all things, but it was better than a Bible he’d never pick up or let alone read—the gunfighter hesitated. He’d attempted to back away from the Presbyterian woman’s mission school a couple of years ago. Their relationship had changed—it needed to. He had no regrets, and she’d gotten married to a decent Mormon man who’d made a name for himself in eastern Nevada, when Ronin and an Ormsby County deputy hunted a short son of a bitch who’d killed a woman he’d loved in Virginia City, not that anyone knew of the relationship between Ronin and the ball-gazing twin, an eye-catching fortune teller also. He held an attraction to spiritually-minded women, though it bothered him to say so. He’d abandoned the rigid orthodoxy of the Episcopal Church in 1873—the year the Colt Peacemaker was made—leaving a log-bound Wichita church in the less capable hands of those who wanted it—a tired-eyed merchant, his ignorant wife, an angry town constable and a pack of pigeon-minded misfits and miscreants who couldn’t tell the holy story from their own, not that the church saw things that way. They figured he was simply finished. And he was, though he had some feelings about that. The thing with the women crept up on him, like suppressed desires often do. Read more…