The Last Gunfighter

by William W. Johnstone

  “Don’t listen to him,” Nancy warned. “We know too much. He’ll never let us live now.”

  Chamberlain squared his shoulders. “I’m well aware of that, my dear. I don’t intend to let this man win.” He faced Bosworth. “Go to hell, Emmett. I won’t sign your paper, now or ever.”

  “Well, that’s a damned shame,” Bosworth said as he took a pistol from under his coat. “I guess I’ll just have to forge your signature and take my chances in court, after you and your daughter have met with an unfortunate accident…”

  Outside, with no warning, guns blasted. Men began to yell as more and more shots rang out. Grimshaw turned instinctively toward the window.

  That was when Nancy twisted in his grasp and lunged at him, clawing his face with both hands, trying to get her fingernails in his eyes. Grimshaw let out a curse and swatted her away. His gun came swiftly and smoothly from its holster, swung toward Nancy.

  Behind him, Frank Morgan called, “Jack!”

  So this is how it ends, Grimshaw thought as he started to turn. After all these years, and not even a proper test of speed between the two of them. He was already pulling the trigger as he turned, smoke jetting from the barrel of his gun, but the crashes of Morgan’s shots blended with his own, and he felt the hammer blows against his body driving him back. He stumbled against something, fell over it as a great, searing heat washed through his body, and as he lay there, he realized that he had collapsed on Rutherford Chamberlain’s desk. The timber lease document lay beside him, with crimson splashes of blood on it now. A bitter laugh welled up in Grimshaw’s throat. All this for a damned piece of paper. All the death and fear and misery, for a piece of paper that represented trees that men would cut down and use to make more paper that didn’t really mean anything…

  “Frank,” Grimshaw croaked, “I wish…we could’ve…gone out fightin’…side by side…”

  No one heard the words, or the rattle of breath as Grimshaw died.

  The room was still full of gunfire.

  Chapter 27

  By the time Frank, Ben, and the loggers reached the mansion, their group was even larger because they had run into another half dozen of Chamberlain’s men along the way. It was a pretty formidable, well-armed bunch, in fact, even if the loggers weren’t professional fighting men. They were plenty tough anyway, and when they found out what Bosworth was up to, they were more than willing to put aside their distrust of Ben, who was on his last legs from the bullet wounds he had suffered over the past couple of days. Frank saw the haggard look on Ben’s face, the dimming fire in the giant’s eyes, and knew that he wouldn’t have to worry about figuring out what to do about Ben.

  Fate was going to do that for him.

  With Frank leading them like a general, the loggers had spread out, slipped up on the mansion, and launched their attack when Frank gave the signal. As the guns began to roar in front of the mansion, Frank and Ben headed for the back.

  They had just gotten inside when Ben groaned and collapsed. Frank managed to prop him up so that he was sitting with his back against a wall and whispered, “Stay here, Ben. I’ll go find Nancy and bring her to you.”

  “Nan…cy,” Ben said, the name barely audible now because his voice was so weak.

  Frank figured Bosworth would be in the library with Chamberlain and Nancy, and maybe Jack Grimshaw. Sure enough, that was the way it had played out. Frank had fired to protect both himself and Nancy, and now Grimshaw was down, lying motionless in death on the big desk.

  Bosworth was still alive, though, the pistol in his hand spouting fire as he swept it across the room. Chamberlain grunted as one of the flying slugs winged him, but he managed to grab Nancy and drag her to the floor, out of the line of fire. Frank snapped a shot at Bosworth, but the timber baron was already moving. With a huge crash of glass, he flung himself through the window behind the desk and toppled out of sight.

  Frank was about to go after him when another shot blasted and a bullet whipped past his ear. Still in the doorway of the library, he twisted to look down the corridor, and saw a couple of Grimshaw’s men charging toward him, guns blazing.

  Before he could return their fire, Ben loomed up behind them, roaring defiantly. He grabbed them and jerked them back. The men screamed and twisted around in his grip so that they were able to shove their guns against his body. They fired again and again, the close-range impacts forcing Ben to stumble backward as more slugs ripped through his insides. He found the strength to slam the heads of the two gunmen together, though, again and again until those heads were so broken and misshapen they didn’t look human. Their guns were long since emptied. Ben shook the corpses one more time, then let go of them, dropping them to the fancy redwood parquet floor that would never be the same after so much blood had been spilled on it.

  “Ben!” Nancy shrieked.

  She rushed past Frank as Ben fell to his knees. “Nan…cy,” he choked out as she reached him and threw her arms around him. She clung to him tightly as sobs wracked her. Frank watched as Ben lifted one huge, trembling hand and gently patted his sister on the back. Then, in a rumbling whisper, he said, “Hoooome…Nan…cy…” and died.

  Rutherford Chamberlain stumbled past Frank, saying in a stunned voice, “My boy…my boy…”

  Nancy still stood there, somehow finding the strength in her slender body to hold Ben’s massive form upright. Chamberlain joined her, and wrapped his feeble arms around both of them.

  With a grimace, Frank turned away from the family tragedy. He still had to deal with the man who had set all this in motion.

  When he got outside, the shooting was over. He saw Karl Wilcox limping toward him, blood running down the logger’s leg from a deep crease on his thigh.

  “We got all of Bosworth’s men except for a couple who ran inside, Morgan,” Wilcox reported. “The boss’s bodyguards got loose, got their hands on their guns, and helped us. That turned the tide. What happened to those other two?”

  “They’re dead,” Frank reported, not bothering to go into detail now. “What about Bosworth?”

  A disgusted expression appeared on Wilcox’s rugged face. “Do you see his carriage? The bastard managed to get to it and drove off hell-bent-for-leather! We threw some lead after him, but didn’t stop him.”

  “Which way was he headed?”

  “Toward Eureka, I’d say.”

  Frank nodded. Bosworth had to know that there was too much evidence against him. He couldn’t hope to bluff his way out of this mess. But he probably had enough money stashed in his hotel room so that he could make a run for it, maybe start over somewhere else, in Canada or Mexico maybe.

  Frank didn’t intend to let that happen.

  He whistled for Goldy. As the horse came up, Wilcox asked, “What happened to the Terror?”

  “Ben Chamberlain is inside,” Frank said with a hard look. “I know he did a lot of bad things…but he died a man, Wilcox, not a monster. You remember that. Everybody damned well better remember that.”

  “Well…sure, Morgan,” Wilcox said as Frank swung up into the saddle.

  Frank urged Goldy into a gallop, hitting the trail that led to Eureka.

  Emmett Bosworth had never been more disgusted in his life. Everything had gone wrong. He had tried to make a bold move and put an end to this, here and now, and instead, the thing had backfired on him, through no fault of his own. It was all Grimshaw, and Morgan, and that damned monster…

  The law would be after him now. Bosworth knew that. But he had ten thousand dollars in a steamer trunk in his suite at the Eureka House, and if he could get his hands on that money and then get out of town before word reached the settlement of the massacre at the Chamberlain mansion, no one would stop him. He’d have to hide out for a while, and he might have to change his name, but sooner or later he would rebuild his fortune. He always came out on top eventually. It was his destiny.

  With dust billowing up from the wheels, he swung the carriage into Patterson’s wagon yard and left it there.
He’d be taking a saddle horse when he left there, so he could move faster. He stalked up the street to the hotel, ignoring the puzzled looks that people gave him. He supposed he did look a lot more disheveled than usual.

  As he went through the hotel lobby, the clerk called to him, “Mr. Bosworth, you’ve got a—” but Bosworth didn’t hear the rest of it. He took the stairs two at a time, and hurried down the hallway to his sitting room.

  When he jerked the door open and stepped inside, he stopped short at the sight of a man standing beside the window. “Who the hell—”

  The man turned toward him, tall, thick-bodied, with a shock of graying hair and a close-cropped beard. “We haven’t been properly introduced, Mr. Bosworth,” he said. “I’m Dr. Patrick Connelly. It’s my wife Molly you’ve been bedding for the past couple of months.”

  And with that, he lunged at Bosworth, the light from the window glinting on the scalpel in his hand as he swung it at Bosworth’s throat.

  Bosworth’s reflexes barely saved him, jerking him back so that the tip of the razor-sharp scalpel just nicked his throat. He had cut himself worse shaving many times. Connelly stumbled forward, thrown off balance by the missed stroke, and Bosworth slipped his gun from his pocket and jabbed the barrel deep in the doctor’s belly. He pulled the trigger, hoping there was still a bullet in the chamber.

  There was. Muffled by Connelly’s body, the shot was little more than a loud pop that might not have been heard outside in the hallway. Connelly’s eyes widened in shock and pain. Bosworth shoved him backward. Connelly collapsed on the divan, and looked down at the blood welling between his fingers as he pressed his hands to his belly. “Where’s your wife?” Bosworth grated.

  Connelly looked up at him stupidly. “Wha…wha…You can’t…can’t take her with you…I fixed her…before I came down here…She said…she felt poorly…so I fixed her a tonic…” Connelly managed to laugh. “She didn’t know…I knew about…the two of you…never suspected I would…do something about it. So you…you can’t…can’t have her—”

  “I don’t want her, you damned fool,” Bosworth said. “She complained all the time, and she was barely adequate in bed. I would have left her behind without a second thought, and you could have had her for the rest of your life.”

  Connelly opened his mouth and tried to say something, but no words came out, only a thin trickle of blood.

  Bosworth gave a contemptuous shake of his head and turned away. He got the money from the trunk, reloaded his pistol, and then walked out, carefully closing the door behind him so that no one would walk by and see Connelly’s body in there on the divan. The doctor was a pathetic fool who had gotten what he deserved as far as Bosworth was concerned. Ordinary people seemed to think that they had a right to happiness of some sort, but to him, they were just things to be used as needed, and if they came to a bad end…well, so did all mortals who tried to meddle in the affairs of gods.

  He went downstairs and started across the lobby. The clerk asked him, “Did you talk to Dr. Connelly, Mr. Bosworth?”

  “I talked to him,” Bosworth said curtly. The law would be after him for killing the doctor, too, but what was one more murder? Just another annoying charge to be squashed when he was rich again. He pushed through the doors, stepped out onto the porch.

  Frank Morgan was waiting for him in the street.

  Frank was hurrying toward the hotel when he saw Bosworth step outside. He stopped where he was, and so did the timber baron. Slowly, a smile spread over Bosworth’s ruggedly handsome face.

  “All right,” he said. “Fetch the law. I can afford the best attorneys in the country. I’ll fight tooth and nail in the courts, Morgan. You know that. I can make this last for years. But the one thing I won’t do is draw my gun on you. We both know you’d kill me.”

  “We both know you deserve it,” Frank said.

  “Well”—still with that smug smile on his face—“people don’t always get what they deserve, do they?”

  Those words were barely out of Bosworth’s mouth when another figure appeared behind him. Someone inside the hotel lobby yelled in alarm. Bosworth didn’t have time to turn around, though. The man behind him reached around with one arm, looped it under the timber baron’s chin, jerked his head back, and plunged what looked a scalpel into his throat. With a shock of recogition, Frank saw that the second man was Dr. Patrick Connelly. The doctor ripped the scalpel from one side of Bosworth’s throat to the other, opening it so that blood cascaded out in sheets. Bosworth made a horrible gurgling noise and thrashed around, but the arm around his neck was like an iron bar holding him there. Connelly didn’t let go of him until there was a huge puddle of blood at his feet and Bosworth’s body had gone limp.

  Then Connelly released Bosworth, letting him fall to the porch. The doctor gasped, “He…killed my wife…killed me…”

  Connelly collapsed as well, falling across Bosworth’s corpse. Frank took a deep breath, knowing that it was finally all over, and that for once, he hadn’t fired the final shot in this bloody, tragic ruckus.

  It would be all right with him if he never had to do that again.

  But he knew better than to hope for that.

  It took a big coffin for Ben Chamberlain, and a bigger grave than usual. But the undertaker managed, and a couple of days later, Ben was laid to rest.

  There had been a lot of funerals in Eureka the past two days. All too often, that was what happened when he rode into a town, Frank reflected as he stood beside the long mound of dirt that marked the final resting place of the man who had been known for a time as the Terror.

  Everyone was gone except Frank, Nancy Chamberlain, and her father, whose left arm was in a black silk sling. Dog, Stormy, and Goldy waited patiently just outside the stone fence that ran around the graveyard.

  Nancy had told Frank what Grimshaw said about the events in the primitive cabin that had resulted in her brother becoming the Terror. When he heard the story, Frank was a little less regretful about having to kill his old friend. Jack Grimshaw had stepped way over the line more than once.

  Frank had also found out from some of Chamberlain’s men about the gunman called Rockwell, who had actually been working for Emmett Bosworth. Frank knew he couldn’t prove it, but he was convinced that Rockwell was the man who had shot at him when he first discovered the cabin, probably acting on his own initiative because he knew Bosworth wouldn’t want Frank poking around. Frank was satisfied that was the answer.

  There were no answers where Dr. Patrick Connelly and his wife were concerned. Nobody in Eureka seemed to know why Bosworth and Connelly had killed each other, and Molly Connelly’s death was a complete mystery. Everything in life had an explanation, Frank supposed…but that didn’t mean folks could expect to know about all of it.

  Nancy turned to him now and laid a black-gloved hand on his arm. “Thank you for everything you did, Mr. Morgan,” she said.

  “I didn’t save your brother,” Frank said with a shake of his head.

  “But you tried to. That was more than anyone else did.”

  “Not really,” Frank told her. “You tried, too. Sometimes, though, you just can’t save someone, no matter how much you love them. There are things bigger than us, Nancy, things we can’t fight or even explain. They just…are.”

  She smiled sadly. “I suppose you’re right.” She took a deep breath. “Where will you go now, Mr. Morgan?”

  Chamberlain spoke up, saying, “You’re welcome to stay with us for a while, if you’d like.”

  Frank controlled the impulse to shudder. He wouldn’t spend any amount of time in that redwood prison Chamberlain had constructed for himself Anyway, he had some pressing business of his own to take care of.

  “I’m heading back down to San Francisco,” he said. “A telegram one of my lawyers sent to me just caught up with me this morning. It seems that…there’s been some trouble in my family, too. A tragedy concerning my son and his wife.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Nancy murmured.
“I wish…sometimes I wish I was a man, a man like you, Mr. Morgan, so I could just shoot all my troubles!”

  “And sometimes,” The Drifter said as he settled his hat on his head, “I wish it really worked that way, ma’am.”

  As Frank rode away, a wind blew in from the sea, over the bay, and stirred the branches of the towering trees that grew to the edge of the graveyard, so that they moved back and forth almost like the arms of giants waving farewell.

  PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

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  Copyright © 2009 William W. Johnstone

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-2300-4