Facing odds of three to one and not knowing how fast on the draw these men were, Frank couldn’t afford to waste any time. He drew smoothly and swiftly, in less time than it would take a man to blink his eyes. Stormy stood absolutely still, having experienced many moments like this before. Frank fired without seeming to aim, the Colt in his hand bucking and crashing twice, the shots so close together they sounded almost like one. He put the first two slugs in Dewey’s chest, since Dewey was the first one to get his gun out. The hard case went backward out of the saddle like a giant hand had slapped him down.
The third shot came hard on the heels of the first two and slammed into the chest of the man whose name Frank hadn’t heard yet. And he might never know it, because the man toppled from his saddle and was dead before he hit the ground. That left the one called Terrall, and Terrall managed to get one wild shot off before Frank’s fourth bullet punched through his sternum. Terrall’s shot had gone harmlessly into the ground between Stormy and the other horses. He dropped his gun and clutched the saddle horn with his right hand as he swayed backward. Shakily, he lifted his left hand and pressed it to his chest. Blood welled between his fingers.
“You’ve killed me!” he gasped.
“Your choice,” Frank told him coldly. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“You ... you’re Frank ... Morgan!”
A line of crimson leaked from the corner of Terrall’s mouth as he gasped the name. With a groan, he swayed back and forth and then toppled out of the saddle, falling heavily to the ground like a cut-down tree going over. He flopped in the dust and didn’t move.
Dog padded forward and sniffed at all three of the men. When he didn’t growl at any of them, Frank knew they were all dead. Trusting Dog’s senses, Frank holstered his Peacemaker and swung down from the saddle. He stepped over to the wounded rancher and knelt beside him. The man’s wife was on his other side, and she looked at Frank with something like amazement in her stunned eyes.
“You ... you killed all three of them,” she said in awed tones.
“They slapped leather first,” Frank told her. “I wouldn’t lose much sleep over the likes of them, ma’am.” He bent his head to take a look at her husband’s wound. “Let’s see about patching up this bullet hole, friend.”
“I ... I’m much obliged, mister,” the rancher said through teeth gritted against the pain. “I reckon they would’ve killed me, and no tellin’ what they would have done ... to Doris...”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Frank assured him. “Those hard cases won’t ever bother anybody else.” He slipped an arm around the man’s shoulders and another under his knees. “Let’s get you inside.”
Grunting a little from the effort, Frank lifted the wounded man and carried him into the ranch house. The man’s wife hurried ahead and indicated the room where Frank should take him. “Put him down there on the bed,” she said as Frank carried the man into a small bedroom.
“Dang it, Doris,” the rancher said, “I’ll get ... blood on the sheets.”
“If you think I’m worried about a little thing like that, then you don’t know me very well, Howard Longwell,” she told him.
“I’d listen to her if I was you, Howard,” Frank said with a smile as he lowered the man onto the bed.
Longwell’s wife fetched a basin of water and a clean cloth and began washing the blood away from his wounded shoulder. Frank thought there was probably a broken bone or two in there, but if the doctor came out from San Rosa and set them properly, they might knit up all right. Longwell might not ever get the full use of his arm back, though, and Frank felt anger burning inside him as he watched the woman minister to her husband. Those bastards outside had sure enough had it coming, he thought.
Longwell appeared to have lost consciousness, either from loss of blood or the shock of being shot, or both. Without looking up from what she was doing, the woman said quietly, “You’d better get back on your horse and ride, mister. Don’t stop until you’ve covered a lot of miles.”
“I was thinking I ought to ride into San Rosa to find a doctor for your husband, ma’am.”
“You don’t want to do that. You’ve done enough. You saved Howard’s life, and probably mine, too. They wouldn’t have wanted to leave any witnesses behind. But that’s no reason for you to throw away your own life.”
Frank frowned. “Are you saying those fellas had kinfolk or partners or something like that who might come after me?”
She looked up at him then, her face startled in the light from the lamp on the table beside the bed. “You don’t know, do you?” she said. “You really don’t know who those men were.”
“Drifting owlhoots, from the look of them,” Frank said.
The woman began to laugh, but there was no humor in the sound. “Go take another look,” she told him, “and then ride out, as far and as fast as you can.”
Frank didn’t intend to run, no matter who the men had been. When the Good Lord was putting him together, he hadn’t put in much back-up. But Frank was curious, and he stepped outside the little ranch house to satisfy that curiosity.
Only a faint red glow remained in the western sky, all that was left of the daylight. Frank reached into his pocket, dug out a lucifer, and snapped the match to life with a thumbnail. He held it down so that the glare from the flame washed over the men he had killed.
Terrall and the man whose name Frank didn’t know lay on their sides, facing away from him. But Dewey had landed flat on his back and lay that way still, with his arms flung out to the sides. He stared up sightlessly into the deep blue sky where stars were beginning to be visible. His vest had fallen open so that the light from the lucifer shone clearly on the breast of his shirt.
And on the five-pointed silver star set inside a silver circle carved from a Mexican five-peso piece. Frank recognized it with a shock that went through him all the way to the bone.
Pinned to the dead man’s chest was the badge of the Texas Rangers.
28
Frank stood there stiffly for a long moment, trying to figure out how it had come about that he had shot and killed three Texas Rangers. He had always considered himself a law-abiding man, even when peace officers who were distrustful of his reputation had tried to run him out of their jurisdictions. His closest friend in recent years was a Ranger, and Frank Morgan had helped that famous organization on more than one occasion, even to the point of risking his own life.
But now, in the blink of an eye and the flash of six-guns, everything had changed. Even though Dewey and the other two had wounded the rancher, Howard Longwell, and had drawn first on Frank, in the eyes of the Rangers, Frank would be considered a murderer. They would add him to their Doomsday Book and hunt him down....
The flame reached Frank’s fingers. He shook out the lucifer and dropped it at his feet, only to take another one from his pocket and light it He stepped over to the other two men and used the toe of his boot to roll them onto their backs. He wanted to make sure they wore Ranger badges, too.
They did. Frank hadn’t seen the badges during the confrontation because what little daylight had been left was at the backs of the three men, throwing their fronts into even deeper shadow. Frank cursed silently anyway, telling himself that he should have noticed the silver stars.
The dead men’s horses, spooked by the shooting, had wandered off a short distance. Frank walked over and rounded them up, taking the reins of all three animals and leading them back to the corral, where he tied them to the top rail. Stormy was all right where he was and would stay there in front of the house, ground-hitched, until Frank told him otherwise. “Guard,” Frank said to Dog, and then went back inside. If anyone approached the ranch house, the big cur would let him know.
Doris Longwell must have heard his footsteps in the front room, because she appeared in the doorway to the bedroom and asked, “What are you doing still here? You have to get away before anybody comes to look for those men.”
“They’re Rangers,”
Frank said sharply. “Texas Rangers.”
The woman gave that same hollow laugh. “I know.”
“What were they doing here? Why did they shoot your husband?”
She didn’t answer the question. Instead she said, “I heard one of them call you Frank Morgan. Is that your name?”
“It is.”
“The one they call The Drifter?”
“Some do,” Frank said with a nod.
“I heard about how you helped Cecil Tolliver a while back. You even rode with the Rangers when they were chasing that Black Scorpion fella.”
“That’s right.”
“But you don’t know what the Rangers are really like around here,” Doris Longwell said. “They don’t really care about the law. They just run things to suit themselves.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead again. He recalled Cecil Tolliver saying something about how the Ranger company under Nathan Wedge operated in a sort of heavy-handed manner. He could understand how some folks might see it that way, even if it wasn’t actually the case. The Rangers were accustomed to being pretty much a law unto themselves. They didn’t have to answer to local authorities, only to the governor back in Austin.
It suddenly reminded Frank a little of the way the Rurales operated across the line in Mexico.
But that was crazy, he told himself. Estancia and the Rurales had turned renegade and were working for themselves now, not for El Presidente Diaz. The same couldn’t be true of Wedge and the other Rangers.
But Howard Longwell, apparently an honest rancher, was lying in the other room with a bullet-shattered shoulder, having been gunned down by a Texas Ranger. Longwell hadn’t even been packing iron when he was shot. And Dewey and the others had tried to steal Stormy, Frank reminded himself. True, they had believed him to be a Mexican at the time, but that was no excuse for stealing a horse.
“How’s your husband?”
“Sleeping right now,” Doris Longwell said. “He needs a doctor, but I reckon it’ll be tomorrow before I can get one out here from town.”
“You don’t have any ranch hands you can send to San Rosa?”
She shook her head. “There are a couple of boys who work here during the day, but they go home at night. That’s all Howard and I can afford.”
“I’ll fetch a sawbones, then,” Frank said. “But first, I want to know what happened before I rode up. The whole story.”
Doris Longwell sighed. “I reckon I owe you that much. We raise horses here, Mr. Morgan, not longhorns. Mighty good horses, if I do say so myself. A couple of days ago Howard was in the settlement, and that Captain Wedge came up to him and told him he wanted to buy some of our riding stock for the Rangers. But the price he offered Howard wasn’t even half of what the horses are really worth. When Howard told Captain Wedge he couldn’t sell them for that price, Wedge got upset and said that since it was for the Rangers, he could just take the horses if he wanted to and not pay Howard a dime.” She smiled sadly and shook her head. “Howard, bless his heart, isn’t much of one for arguing. He just shook his head and told Wedge he couldn’t do that. Wedge went on his way and Howard figured it was all over. But today those men showed up and said they’d come for the horses. When Howard said they couldn’t take them, that man ... the first one you shot . . . he pulled his gun and ... and shot Howard. He didn’t warn him or anything, just ... shot him.”
Tears were rolling down her cheeks by this time, and she was trembling. Frank stepped closer to her and said, “Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll ride on to San Rosa tonight and see to it that the doctor comes out to tend Howard.”
“What about ... what about those men?” she asked, rolling her eyes toward the door.
Instead of answering her directly, Frank said, “Does Howard have a pistol?”
“What? A pistol? Yes, but ... why do you want to know?”
“Better let me have it for a minute,” Frank told her.
She went into the bedroom and came back with a coiled shell belt and holstered Colt. “He usually wears it when he’s out working on the ranch, but he’d already taken it off for the evening. We were ... we were going to be eating supper soon.”
Frank took the revolver out of the holster and checked to see that it was loaded. It was, with five rounds in the cylinder and the hammer resting on an empty. He carried the gun outside, cocked it, and fired one round into the ground. Then he put it back in the holster with the hammer still on the spent cartridge.
“Howard’s not much of a hand with a gun, is he?” Frank asked when he came inside and gave the Colt and the gun belt back to the woman.
Doris smiled again, this time with genuine fondness. “Bless his heart, no. He’s a hard worker and a fair shot with a rifle, but nobody would ever mistake him for a gunfighter.”
“Good. If anybody asks, he was about to start cleaning this pistol when it went off and accidentally shot him in the shoulder.” Frank looked at her intently. “You understand that, Mrs. Longwell?”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I think I do.”
“You never saw those three outside. They never rode up here.”
“That’s right. Howard and I haven’t had any visitors this evening until you rode up.”
“And that was after Howard accidentally plugged himself,” Frank went on. “So when I saw that he was hurt, I offered to ride to San Rosa and fetch the doc.”
“And that was very kind of you,” Doris Longwell said.
Frank nodded and went out, taking up Stormy’s reins and leading the Appaloosa toward the corral and the Rangers’ horses. He didn’t know if the woman would be able to stick to the story or not, but he thought she might. He untied the other horses and led them away from the corral.
Doris Longwell stepped into the doorway with the light behind her as Frank bent and hefted each corpse in turn, throwing the bodies over their saddles. Frank said to her, “You might ought to get a broom and brush out all these hoofprints once I’m gone.”
“You’re taking a big chance, Mr. Morgan.”
“No reason for this trouble to come back on you and your husband. I’m the one who shot these men.”
“To save us.”
“Well, that was part of it,” Frank admitted with a smile. “But they threatened to take my horse, too, and I’m a mite touchy about things like that.”
“Be careful, Mr. Morgan,” she said quietly.
“I intend to,” Frank said.
He lashed the bodies in place and then mounted up himself. Saying, “Come on, Dog,” he rode out, leading the other horses with their grisly burdens and putting the Longwell spread behind them.
Frank rode toward the Rio Grande, steering by the stars and his own reliable sense of direction. He reached the river a short time later. The moon had not yet risen, so it was a dark night.
One by one, he lifted the bodies from the horses. He unpinned the badges from their shirts and threw them out into the river as far as he could. Then he rolled the dead men off the bank into the water. The Rio Grande was a slow-moving stream, but it had enough of a current to carry the corpses downriver for quite a way. They might travel for miles if they didn’t hang up on some sort of snag. Then Frank led the now-riderless horses across the river to Mexico. He removed the saddles and hid them in some thick chaparral. Then he used the sombrero Don Felipe had given him to swat the horses’ rumps and send them trotting off to the south. Somebody would probably find the animals and claim them. At the very least, he had delayed the discovery of what had happened at the Longwell ranch, hopefully for several days.
But it had been hard, he mused as he rode Stormy back across the river to Texas. Each big splash as a body landed in the Rio had been like an accusation to Frank. Even though he had killed the three men in a fair fight, and even though they had been trying to steal the Longwells’ horses and might have even killed the couple, they were still Texas Rangers. Killing them rubbed Frank the wrong way, no matter how much he told himself that it shouldn’t. Concealin
g what had happened bothered him, too. He had always been the sort of man to carry out his actions in the open, where everyone could see them. Sneaking around just wasn’t in his nature.
It was necessary, though, to protect the Longwells. Once he got that through his head, he felt better. When you got right down to it, Dewey, Terrall, and the other man had been acting like outlaws, not Rangers, and as Frank had told Mrs. Longwell, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over ventilating them. They had deserved it.
He made his way back to the road and turned left this time, toward San Rosa. The moon rose, providing enough light so that he could push Stormy at a faster pace. It wasn’t long before he spotted a small clump of twinkling lights up ahead. The lights grew larger, and he knew he was approaching the settlement.
A few minutes later he got his first look at San Rosa as he walked the Appaloosa down the main street. It was a typical Texas cow town, with a main street lined with businesses for several blocks, a few cross streets, and a scattering of houses and churches around the downtown district. The Spanish influence from nearby Mexico could be seen in the large open plaza in the center of town and in the architecture of the buildings made of adobe. There were frame buildings, too, including a couple of false-fronted saloons. Quite a few horses were tied up at the hitch rails in front of each oasis, and a few people strolled along the boardwalks in spite of the relative lateness of the hour. A lot of the citizens of San Rosa probably went to bed with the chickens, but not everybody.
Frank hailed one of the men on the boardwalk and asked him, “Is there a doctor in town?”
“There are three,” the townie replied with a touch of pride in his voice. But then he added, “You don’t want Doc Caldwell tendin’ to you unless you just have to, though, mister. I don’t reckon he’s been completely sober since ’85 or ’86. And Doc Kuykendall’s gone down to Laredo. That leaves Doc Ervin, I reckon.”
“Where can I find him?” Frank asked, trying to contain his impatience.
The citizen pointed. “Right on down the street a couple of blocks. Look for a white house on the left side of the road. The doc lives there with his wife and son, got his office there, too.”
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