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“You’re probably right about that,” the cowboy agreed. “So where do you want to go?”
Where? Where? Where? The question hammered at him. But it was impossible to answer because he didn’t know
what the hell town they were in. That discovery brought a wave of panic, one that intensified when he realized he didn’t know his own name.
He clamped down tightly on the panic and said, “I don’t know yet. Let me think.”
He closed his eyes and strained to dredge up some scrap of a memory. But he was empty of any. Who was he? What was he? Where was he? Every question bounced around in the void. His head pounded anew. He felt himself slipping deeper into the blackness and lacked the strength to fight against it.
He simultaneously became conscious of a bright light pressing against his eyes and the chirping of a bird. Groggily he opened his eyes and saw filtered sunlight coming through the curtained window. It was daylight, and his last conscious memory had been of riding in a truck through night-darkened streets.
Instantly alert, he shot a searching glance around the room. The curtains at the window and the rose-patterned paper on the walls confirmed what his nose had already told him: he wasn’t in a hospital. He was in a bedroom, one that was strange to him.
His glance stopped on the cowboy slumped in an old wicker rocking chair in the corner, his hat tipped over the top of his face, his chest rising and falling in an even rhythm. Surmising the man was his rescuer from the night before, he studied the cleanly chiseled line of the man’s jaw and the nut brown color of his hair, details he hadn’t noticed during the previous night’s darkness and confusion. The man’s yoked-front shirt looked new, but the jeans and the boots both showed signs of wear.
He threw back the bedcovers and started to rise. Pain slammed him back onto the pillow and ripped a groan from him. In a reflexive action, he lifted a hand to his head and felt the gauze strips that swaddled it.
In a flash the cowboy rolled to his feet and crossed to the bed. “Just lay back and be still. You won’t be going anywhere for a while, old man.”
He bristled in response. “That’s the second time you’ve called me an old man.”
After a pulse beat of silence, the cowboy replied in droll apology, “I didn’t mean any offense by it, but you aren’t exactly a young fella.”
Unable to recall who he was, let alone how old he was, he grunted a nonanswer. “Where am I, anyway? Your place?”
“It belongs to some kinfolk on my mother’s side,” the cowboy answered.
He studied the cowboy’s blue eyes and easy smile. There was a trace of boyish good looks behind the stubble of a night’s beard growth and the sun-hardened features. A visual search found no sign of the pistol the cowboy had been carrying last night.
“Who are you?” His eyes narrowed on the cowboy.
There was a fractional pause, a coolness suddenly shuttering the cowboy’s blue eyes. “I think a better question is who are you?”
“Maybe it is,” he stalled, hoping a name might come to him, but none did. “But I’d like to know the name of the man who quite likely saved my life last night so I can thank him properly.”
“You dodged that question about as deftly as a politician.” Blue eyes glinted in quiet speculation. “But I don’t think that’s what you are. You strike me as a man used to asking the questions rather than answering them.”
“Now you’re the one dodging the question.”
“My friends call me Laredo. What do your friends call you?”
His head pounded with the strain of trying to recall. Automatically he touched the bandages again.
Observing the action and the continued silence, the cowboy called Laredo guessed, “You can’t remember, can you?”
“I—don’t you know who I am?”
“Nope. But I’ll tell you what I do know—the material in that suit you were wearing wasn’t cheap, and those were custom-made boots on your feet. It took money to buy them, which leads me to think you aren’t a poor man. There’s no Texas drawl in your voice, which tells me you aren’t from around here, at least not originally.”
“We’re in Texas?” he repeated for confirmation. “Where?”
“Southwest of Fort Worth.”
“Fort Worth.” It sounded familiar to him, but he didn’t know why. “Is that where we were last night?” he asked, recalling the city streets they had driven through.
“Yeah. In Old Downtown, next to the stockyards.”
“There’s an old cemetery not far from there,” he said with a strange feeling of certainty.
