Frank thought about Conrad, safe back in Trinidad. “It’s time I made Pine and Vanbergen pay,” he said, creeping closer to the cabin.
The patter of small snowflakes rattled on his hat brim and the crunch of new-fallen snow came from his boots when he put his feet down.
“No way to do this quiet,” Frank said, still being careful with the placement of each foot.
A horse snorted in the corrals. Frank remained motionless behind a pine trunk until the animal settled. A range-bred horse would notice him making an advance toward the cabin. A horse raised in a stable wouldn’t pay him any mind. There was a big difference in horses. Frank had always preferred the range-bred variety.
A blast of northerly wind swept across the top of the valley, and Frank knew that Buck was freezing his ass off, waiting for things to start.
A bit of luck, Frank thought, to run across Buck Waite when he least expected to find any help tracking down the outlaws. While he usually worked alone when he was employing his guns, it was a comfort to know Buck was up there with his rifle.
Moving carefully toward the back of the cabin, he sighted an outhouse behind the place, nestled against the trunk of a small ponderosa pine.
The snowfall grew heavier.
“Maybe I can catch one coming out to relieve himself,” Frank said under his breath.
He moved closer to the outhouse. Things were too quiet, and that had an unsettling effect on him. But the silence could also be a blessing if he used it to his advantage.
* * *
Big John Meeker had been drinking all night and most of the morning. He felt like his bladder was about to burst open any minute. He was wanted for bank robbery over in Mississippi, and for a killing in Indian Territory involving a trading post operator and his wife.
John stood over the two-holer, letting his steamy water flow into the hole dug beneath the bench-wood seats. This waiting for Ned Pine’s adversary was getting the best of him, and there was no money to be made from killing an old gunfighter like Frank Morgan. Unless there was a profit in it, John had little patience for personal grudges. Ned was out of his head with a need for vengeance against this shootist named Morgan, a gunman well past his prime. None of this made any sense to a man like John Meeker.
“That’s better,” he sighed when his bladder finally emptied into the pit.
Pale light suddenly flooded the outhouse. John turned his head to see who had opened the door.
A knife blade was rammed between his ribs . . . he only caught a glimpse of the figure who stood behind him.
Without buttoning the front of his pants, John jerked his Navy Colt .44 free and staggered outside, cocking the hammer with blood cascading down the back of his mackinaw in regular spurts, while pain coursed through his ribs.
“You sneaky son of a bitch!” John cried, unable to find the man who had knifed him.
With nothing to aim at, John let the Colt drop to his side as chains of white-hot agony shot through his body.
His trigger finger curled. A deafening explosion filled the quiet valley, followed by a howl of pain when John, a professional gunman by trade, shot himself in the right foot with his own .44-caliber slug.
“Damn, damn, damn!” John shrieked, hopping around on his good leg, spraying blood all over the snow from both of his wounds.
“What the hell was that?” a voice demanded from a back door of the log cabin.
John was in too much pain to answer.
“Look,” another whiskey-thick voice said. “Ol’ John went an’ shot hisself in the foot.”
“Wonder how come he did that? All he said he was gonna do was take a piss....”
“He’s dead drunk, Billy. When a man’s that drunk he’s liable to do anything.”
John continued to hop around in a circle, reaching for his bloody boot.
“What’ll we do, Clyde?”
“Let the dumb sumbitch dance out there in the snow. If he ain’t got enough sense to keep from shootin’ himself, then let him jump up and down.”
As Clyde spoke, a rifle thundered from a stand of pines behind the cabin. Billy Willis, a horse thief from Nebraska Territory, fell down in a heap in the cabin doorway with his hands gripping his belly.
Wayland Burke, an El Paso hired gun, was trying to get out of the way when the next gunshot rang out. Something hot hit him in the back, pushing him forward into the door frame of the shack with the force of impact.
“I’m hit!” Wayland screamed as he sank to his knees with blood squirting from his shirtfront.
* * *
Men inside the cabin began scrambling for their guns.
Frank moved away into the curtain of snow. The sound of his rifle still echoed among the scrub ponderosa pines where he’d fired at one of Pine’s men.
Frank found a new hiding place fifty yards to the north. Five more of Ned Pine’s men were out of the fight, and the war had just begun.
He moved silently, deeper in the forest behind the empty town, to make his next play.
* * *
A thundering gunshot roared from the rim of the valley, and a man in front of the cabin let out a scream. Charlie Saffle, a hired killer and stagecoach bandit from Waco, ended his cry with a wail as he fell down in the snow with his hand clamped around the walnut grips of his pistol.
“Buck Waite’s good,” Frank told himself in a feathery whisper when he saw a man go down at the front cabin door. “I’m not sure I could have made that shot myself. Helluva lot of range for any long gun.”
A barrel-chested cowboy came out the back door with a rifle, a Spencer, clutched to his shoulder. He swept his gunsights back and forth.
Frank took careful aim and pulled the trigger on his Winchester.
The cowboy did a curious spin before firing a harmless shot into the treetops.
The gunman went down slowly, his eyes bulging from their sockets, wishing he’d stayed in New Orleans instead of joining Ned Pine’s outlaw gang last year.
“Shit,” he gulped, falling over on his face in the snow with his rifle underneath him. Winking lights clouded his vision until his eyelids closed.
Frank jacked another shell into his saddle gun.
“Everybody stay put!” a muffled voice commanded from inside the cabin. “Don’t show yourselves. It’s gotta be Morgan!”
* * *
Ned Pine’s gray eyebrows knitted. He peered through a window of the cabin.
“How the hell did Morgan get past our lookouts?” Tommy Sumpter asked in a grating voice.
“How the hell should I know,” Pine spat, finding nothing among the scrub pines encircling the shack. “Royce Miller is good at what he does . . . maybe the best.”
“He ain’t all that good,” Tommy answered, watching the front door where Charlie lay trembling in the snow. “Ask ol’ Charlie there if Royce was good at bushwhackin’.”
“Shut up!” Pine snapped. “There’s another shooter up on the rim.”
“I thought you said Morgan always worked alone,” Tommy remembered.
“He does. That’s what I can’t figure,” Pine replied, his pale eyes moving across the valley rim.
Pine’s eyelids slitted. “Ain’t heard no fire from Daryl or Pike.”
“Morgan probably got to both of em,” Victor suggested, “or the other bastard shootin’ at us got ’em. We don’t know who the hell he could be.”
“Reckon that happened to the others?” Herb Wilson asked, facing a window. “They shoulda been back by now if they had any luck.”
“Luck’s a funny thing,” Pine said. “Royce an’ his boys may have run into Lady Luck when she was in a bad mood. The others oughta been back here by now.”
Victor leaned against the door frame. “My daddy always said that if a man is lucky he don’t need much of anything else. I got it figured that the others are all dead.”
“What the hell would you know about it?” Pine cried, both hands filled with iron.
Victor was not disturbed by Ned’s questi
on, nor was he disturbed by Pine’s bad reputation. “I’m an authority on luck, good and bad, Ned. I say our luck just ran out. Whoever this bastard Morgan is, he’s good. It’ll take a lot of luck for us to kill him.”
Ned backed away from the window. “We ain’t done yet with Morgan,” he said.
Jeff Walker leaned against the windowpane. “There ain’t nobody out there, seems like,” he said.
Seconds later a bullet smashed the glass in front of his face. A slug from a .52-caliber buffalo gun entered his right eye.
“Damn!” Tommy said when Jeff was flung away from the window.
Jeff went to the dirt floor of the cabin with the back of his skull hanging by tendons and tissue. A plug of his brains lay beside the potbelly stove. A twist of his long black hair clung to the skull fragment.
“Holy shit!” Tommy cried, backing away to the center of the room. “Them’s Jeff’s brains hangin’ out.”
“Shut up!” Ned bellowed. “Give me some goddamn time to think!”
SIXTEEN
Frank heard a distant rifle shot, figuring Buck had found another target. Then suddenly something struck his left shoulder and he went down, stunned, tumbling through the snow, his mind reeling,
He tried to scramble back to his feet. He heard Dog give a soft whimper, and then everything went black around him. He knew he was falling and couldn’t help himself.
* * *
He awakened to the smell of wood smoke. He saw the dim outline of a cabin roof above his head. Very slowly, waves of pain shot through his left side, down his arm, and across his ribs.
He heard himself groan.
“You okay, Morgan?” a faintly familiar voice asked from the mist around him.
“Where am I?”
“My place.”
“Where the hell is your place? What happened to me down in that valley?” Slowly, events returned to him as he regained consciousness.
He saw a man with a tangled red beard leaning over him, and he tried to remember who the stranger was.
“You took a chunk of lead, Morgan. It ain’t too bad nor too deep. I dug it out with my knife. I’m sure as hell glad you was asleep when I done it. You hollered like a stuck pig after I got it out.”
“I suppose I’m lucky to be alive,” he said, unable to recall how anyone could have gotten behind him to catch him with his guard down.
“That’s fair to say.”
“Your name is Buck . . . Buck Waite. Things are coming back to me now.”
“This here’s my daughter, Karen. She fixed you some soup made outta dried wild onions an’ elk meat. When you feel up to it, she’ll give you some.”
Frank’s eyes wandered across the small log cabin, until they came to rest on a pretty young woman dressed in deerskin pants and a fringed top, with her dark red hair tied in a ponytail.
“Pleased to meet you, Karen,” he mumbled. “Sorry it has to be under these bad circumstances. I feel like a damn fool right now.”
She came over to him. He guessed her age at thirty or less, and as he first surmised, she was pretty. “You lost a lot of blood,” she said. “Let me know when you want some soup.”
“Something smells mighty good,” Frank managed, “but I sure do wish I had a spot of whiskey to help with this pain in my shoulder.”
“We’ve got some corn squeeze. Daddy makes it himself out of Indian corn in the summer.”
“I could use some,” Frank croaked, trying to sit up on a crude cot made of rawhide strips and pine limbs.
“Lie back down,” Karen told him. “I’ll fetch you some of the whiskey.”
“Where’s Ned Pine and the others?” he asked.
“Back down in Ghost Valley,” said Buck. “I seen ’em find that patch of blood you left in the snow, so I figure they’s sure they got you.”
“They’re wrong,” Frank said. “I’m not dead yet . . . unless this is all a dream.”
“You ain’t dreamin’, Morgan,” Buck said. “But it’ll be a spell before you can move around.”
“Where’s Dog? And my horse?”
“The bay is out yonder in the corral. This dog of your’n won’t leave the foot of your bed. Every time I try to take him outside, the bastard growls at me an’ shows his teeth.”
“He’s harmless . . . most of the time,” Frank said.
“I ain’t gonna take no chance. The damn dog can stay right where he is till hell freezes over for all I care.”
Frank chuckled, although the movement in his chest pained him some.
“Here’s your soup,” Karen said, appearing above him with a steaming tin cup. “It’ll be a bit salty. It’s the only way we have to preserve the elk meat for the winter.”
He sat up slowly and took the cup she offered him, finding a cloth bandage around his left arm and shoulder. “I’m much obliged to both of you,” he said. He gave Buck a glance. “Buck didn’t tell me that he had a beautiful daughter.”
“Wasn’t none of yer damn business till now,” Buck answered quickly.
“Sorry.” Frank took a sip from the cup, resting a trembling right elbow. “It’s delicious.”
Karen came back with a clay jug. She brought it over and set it beside him on the dirt floor of the cabin. “This here’s the whiskey. Drink what you want. It’s got a touch of a burn to it.”
Buck scowled at his daughter. “It wouldn’t be worth a damn if it didn’t,” he said. “Whiskey without no kick to it is just branch water.”
“May as well take a bath in it,” Frank agreed, reaching for the jug when his pain grew worse.
“It’ll help,” Buck said.
Frank’s mind was on other matters right then. “How far is this place from Ghost Valley?” he asked.
“Far enough. They’ll never find you here.”
“You right sure about that?”
“Sure as I am that the sun’s gonna rise tomorrow. You’ll feel better by then.”
Frank pulled the cork from the jug with his teeth, spat it out, and drank deeply from the corn whiskey. He took a deep breath and drank again. “That’s mighty good squeeze,” he said when he felt the burn all the way to his belly.
“I don’t make bad shine,” Buck said. “There’s a secret to it.”
“I’d say you’ve found the secret,” Frank replied, then took a third swallow.
“Drink the soup if you can,” Karen said, smiling at him. When she did, she was prettier than ever.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. Frank’s mind returned to the business at hand. “Where are my guns?” he asked.
“I picked up yer Winchester when you dropped it. Yer pistol is over yonder by the potbelly stove.”
“Feels good to be warm.”
“It’s the whiskey,” Buck said.
“It’s the soup,” Karen added, giving her father a subtle wink.
“Like hell,” Buck snapped. “Soup never did nobody so much good as the right kind of home-brewed whiskey.”
Karen turned away without saying another word.
Frank drank more soup, chasing it with whiskey, as a dark mood settled over him. His plan for revenge against Ned Pine and Victor Vanbergen had ended with a bullet.
“Damn,” he whispered, wondering how he could have been so foolish as to let a gunman get behind him.
Buck stirred in a rawhide chair near the potbelly. “Wasn’t your fault, Morgan,” he said.
“How’s that?” Frank asked, taking note of the subtle curves beneath Karen’s buckskins while she added split wood to the stove.
“It was snowin’,” was all Buck said.
“I should have known better.”
“Careless was all you was.”
“Careless can get a man killed,” Frank replied, settling back against a lumpy pillow. “Men in my profession know that real well.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t stay in that gunfightin’ profession no longer?”
“I’d quit years ago. If it hadn’t been what they did to my wife and my boy . . .”
<
br /> Buck snorted softly. “Don’t sound like that son of yours is much good at takin’ care of hisself.”
“He isn’t,” Frank agreed, feeling the whiskey soften the pain in his shoulder. “It isn’t his fault. It’s a long story that doesn’t need telling, but I never got the chance to raise him proper.”
“Maybe I’m just bein’ nosy, but how’s that?”
“Be quiet, Dad,” Karen said. “He doesn’t want to talk about it now.”
“Sorry,” Buck mumbled, returning to his sweetened coffee as snowflakes fell softly on the cabin roof.
“I was forced to leave my wife before the boy was born.” Frank said it with anger thickening his voice. “I didn’t see him at all until he was a grown man.”
“There!” Karen snapped. “I told you not to pry into it, Dad.”
“You’ve got my apologies again,” Buck said.
Frank closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the past he wanted to forget. “It’s okay. I’ve learned to live with it over the years.”
Karen came over to him. “Do you want more soup? Or some coffee?”
“No, ma’am,” he replied, noticing that Dog had come over to the cot to lick his hand. “I might be able to use more of that whiskey.”
“Good squeeze, ain’t it?” Buck asked, grinning.
“I’ve never tasted any better. As soon as I’m strong enough I’ll need my horse . . . and my guns.”
“I figure I know why,” Buck said.
“I came all this way for a reason. I’ll feel better in a little bit.”
“It’ll be dark soon,” Buck said. “No sense gettin’ out in this cold when a man can’t see. Whatever you aim to do to them fellers, it can wait till mornin’.”
“I’m not much on waiting.”
“You’ll need your strength,” Karen said, offering him the clay jug. “If you go out in this weather, it’ll drain you something awful.”
“She’s right,” Buck said. “Wait fer sunrise. The men you’re after will be easier to see. Right now, I’m guessin’ they figure they got you, even though they ain’t found your body. In the snow back yonder you left a hell of a puddle of red, an’ they’ll think it’s the end of you.”
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