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The drinks are on the house!" Well, if the residents of Silver Spur had been law abiding enough to need one, Jesse Reardon would have been elected mayor on the spot.
     
     
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    The huge stagecoach lurched sideways as it bounced over a rut in the road near a cemetery marked Boot Hill.
    Caroline braced herself as her right shoulder hit the side of the passenger compartment and tried to ignore the sign "Murderers Row" that swung from a tree near a cluster of fresh graves. Next to her, Abby crossed herself for the hundredth time since they left St. Louis four days ago.
    "Abby, if I see you do that one more time, I shall not be held accountable for my actions. We're just a few miles out of Silver Spur and you're not accustomed to the coach yet?"
    Abby, looking decidedly bilious, glared at her employer and crossed herself once more for good measure. "No, Miss Caroline, I wouldn't be used to it yet. Four cemeteries within two miles wouldn't be somethin' a body gets used to easy." She gestured toward the other travelers with a tilt of her head. "And, if I may say so, it would be lookin' like no one else on this coach would be used to it yet, either."
    Caroline glanced around at her fellow passengers. The four spinster McGuigan sisters who had joined the trek to Silver Spur in Baltimore looked pale and slightly green. The two little red-haired Wilder girls from Dodge City had their eyes closed, hands tightly clasped in their laps. Young Reverend Nelson, the preacher bound for the one church in town, and his bride Penelope sat huddled near the door.
    Penny's high, clear voice rose over the clatter of horses' hooves and the stink of dust and booze that seemed part of the coach itself. "We should have stayed in Philadelphia, William," she was saying. "We should have listened to Father when he offered to set you up with the finest congregation west of the Delaware River."
    "They don't need me in Philadelphia, Penny," Reverend Nelson said calmly, "and I want to go where I'm truly needed."
    Penny sighed loudly and Caroline suppressed a smile. "There is sin in Philadelphia. Who needs a backwater town like Silver Spur? You are wasting your calling, William."
    Her husband looked up and reddened as he realized everyone on the coach was listening avidly to the development of their domestic drama. "My apologies," he said in the tone of solemn forbearance necessary to his profession. "I believe Mrs. Nelson is overtired. No disrespect meant to anyone from Silver Spur, I'm sure."
    "None taken," said Caroline. "Besides, I do not think there is a single citizen of Silver Spur on this coach."
    Abby gestured out the window. "Of course there isn't," she said as they passed another cemetery. "I'd be thinkin' there wouldn't be anybody left."
    Margaret McGuigan, one of the four Baltimore spinsters, looked up and spoke for the first time since they crossed the Mississippi River. "Don't you be fooled by those cemeteries, Miss Abby. There's still plenty of folks in Silver Spur." A most surprisingly girlish giggle broke through her schoolmarm facade. "And if all we've heard is true, most of them folks are men."
    Her three calico-clad sisters giggled behind their work-worn hands.
    "They better be," said Jenny Wilder, one of the Dodge City redheads. "Sarah and I sure didn't come this far to join the Baptist Sewing Circle." She glanced at the Reverend. "No offense meant."
    "None taken," he said. "I'm Presbyterian."
    "If you don't mind my asking," Caroline ventured, leaning forward toward the girls, "why have you come this far?" Aaron's letters had portrayed Silver Spur as a hard-drinking town of miners and gamblers that only came to life on Saturday night.
    "We're lookin' for men," Margaret said bluntly.
    Penelope, the preacher's wife, fell back onto the cracked leather seat in a swoon and her husband dabbed at her forehead with a limp cambric handkerchief.
    The McGuigan sisters nodded in unison. "So are we."
    "Holy Mary Mother of God!" Abby's freckled