Painted by the Sun

ONE Breckenridge, Colorado Fall 1875 Cameron Gallimore hated hangings. He hated the gallows standing stark against the sky. He hated the way crowds gathered beneath it hours before. He hated the anticipation in their faces and the bottles of whiskey they passed from hand to hand. He especially hated hangings when he was the judge who'd condemned the man to die. Drawing a dry, sharp breath of resignation, Cameron resettled the low-crowned Stetson on his head and stepped off the end of the boardwalk. The vacant lot near the edge of town where the gallows had been constructed was full of miners. As he waded in, the men closed ranks around him, clapping him on the back and offering congratulations. Their approval rankled him. It wasn't as if he'd done anything to be proud of. It wasn't as if he'd earned the right to condemn a man by setting a fine example. He'd done his job. He'd done his job so well in the last four years, he'd sentenced eleven guilty men to the rope. They'd hang the twelfth this afternoon. Cam was pushing his way toward the base of the scaffold steps where he would stand to watch the sentence carried out when he caught sight of something he'd never seen at an execution before. Dead center and half a dozen yards back from the deck of the gallows a photographer had set up his camera. The very idea that someone was going to immortalize Crazy Joe Calvert's execution stoked up a firestorm in Cam's chest. He came about in mid-stride and shouldered his way toward where the photographer stood all but hidden in the folds of the camera's focusing cloth. Dear God! Cam thought with a shudder. What kind of a man took pictures of a hanging? No kind of a man, as it turned out. Cam stopped dead when he saw there was a green twill skirt flowing from beneath the drape of the camera's dark-cloth. Scuffed black leather boots with high heels and embroidered shanks peeked from below the skirt's fashionably banded hem. The hand adjusting the knob on the side of the lens was small, delicately boned, stained black at the fingertips--and distinctly feminine. Feeling unaccountably more aggrieved, Cameron stepped closer and smacked his own big palm down on the top of the square oaken box. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded. The figure beneath the heavy fabric jerked back, popping from beneath it like a gopher bolting out of its burrow. The photographer was a woman, all right--a small, sweetly rounded woman; all startled and smudged and glaring mutinously. She'd hung her bonnet over one of the camera's tripod legs, and the friction with the dark-cloth had mussed her hair. It stood out in curly, gingery-brown wisps and straggled in corkscrews at her temples, cheeks, and nape. Her jaw angled gently above the high, banded collar of her jacket, and her mouth was bowed and soft as a baby's. It was a far more open and arresting face than Cameron had been expecting. "And just who are you, sir," she demanded, narrowing eyes of cool, luminous green, "that you've a right to ask me what I'm doing here?" Though the words were clearly belligerent, they were sweetened with the hint of Irish brogue.[read more]