“Go check with your local doctors,” Frank suggested. “I told Rawlings he ought to get the wound cleaned and bandaged. Of course, I don’t know if he took my advice or not.”
The marshal regarded Frank intently for a moment and then said, “You’re a mighty cool customer, aren’t you?”
Frank drained the last of his beer from the mug. As he set the empty on the table, he said, “I just didn’t think there was any law against defending myself.”
The lawman looked around the table. “You’ll all swear that Rawlings drew first?”
The Slash D cowboys nodded, and Rusty said from behind the bar, “So will I, Marshal. The girls and I saw the whole thing.”
Annie and Midge nodded agreement.
The marshal looked a little disappointed, but not as much as the deputy with him. Frank thought the little sandy-haired man had been itching to arrest somebody, and if the potential prisoner had resisted, so much the better.
“Looks like we’re not needed here,” the marshal said grudgingly. “Come on, Skeet.”
He turned and started toward the door. The deputy waited a moment longer, staring meaningfully at Frank as he stood there. Then he turned and sauntered after his boss. Both men left the saloon.
“Your local law isn’t very friendly,” Frank commented with a thin smile.
“Marshal Keever’s not so bad,” Dave Osmond said.
“Skeet Harlan’s loco, though,” Pitch Carey put in. “He handles most of the gun work, when there’s some to be done.”
“And I’d wager he enjoys it,” Frank said.
Carey nodded. “He seems to.”
“Which side are they on?”
“What do you mean by that?” MacDonald drawled.
“I mean, in this war that seems to be brewing between your boss and the other big ranchers and the small outfits, which side is the marshal on?”
MacDonald shook his head. “Keever says he’s neutral, just like Ace McKelvey and Newton over at the hardware store and the Covert brothers and all the other businessmen in Brownwood. I reckon they think they can’t afford to take sides. When push comes to shove, though, I imagine they’ll back Mr. Duggan and his friends. Storekeepers always know who’s got the most money to spend.”
That was true, Frank thought.
He was getting a pretty good idea of the layout now. Clearly there had been violent incidents before this shooting tonight, and he could understand why the Texas Rangers would want to get a man on the scene before the conflict turned into a full-fledged range war. Hard feelings ran deep, though, especially on the side of the smaller ranchers, and Frank wondered if Tyler Beaumont—or anyone else—could head off the trouble that seemed to be on the horizon.
He was intensely curious where Beaumont was and what he was doing, but he had already decided not to ask the cowboys if any of them knew him. For one thing, Beaumont might not be using his real name, and for another, Frank had no idea how the young Ranger was conducting his investigation. He didn’t want to do anything that might inadvertently ruin Beaumont’s plans or put him in even more danger.
No, for the time being Frank would play his own cards close to the vest and continue learning as much as he could about the situation. To that end, he said, “Getting back to what brought me here, I reckon I ought to take a ride out to this Slash D ranch of yours and talk to Duggan himself about a job.”
“That’s what you’ll have to do,” MacDonald agreed. “I ramrod the crew, but Mr. Duggan does all the hiring and firing. We’ll be riding that way in a while. You’re welcome to trail along with us if you want to.”
The other three cowboys nodded their agreement with that invitation.
“Much obliged,” Frank said with a smile as he took out the makin’s and began to build a quirly. “I reckon I’ll just do that.”
“Good,” Pitch Carey said. “Now, let’s get back to the game. The cards’ve probably gotten cold, just when I was startin’ to win a few hands.”
“Deal you in, Morgan?” Stiles Warren asked.
Frank shook his head. “I’ll just watch, if you boys don’t mind.”
No one objected, so he snapped a lucifer to life, lit the cigarette, and sat there watching as the cards were dealt and the game continued. Annie brought him another beer from the bar and then stood behind him, resting a hand lightly on his shoulder. Frank figured she would have been amenable to going upstairs with him if he had wanted to, but even though more than a year had passed since Dixie was murdered, those fires were still banked within him.
A pleasant hour or so passed while the cowboys played cards. Their luck ebbed and flowed. Ed MacDonald probably won the most, Frank judged, but everybody came out close enough to even that they were all happy when the game finally broke up.
“Guess we’d better be getting back to the ranch,” MacDonald said as he stowed away his winnings and stood up. The other men got to their feet as well, including Frank. Pitch pulled Midge into his arms for a quick kiss that made her laugh in pleasure.
A few other customers had come into the Palace while the game was going on, mostly townsmen and a couple of men who looked like freighters. Annie had drifted over to the bar to try to get somebody to buy her a drink, but as Frank started toward the door with the cowboys, she cast a wistful glance toward him, as if the evening hadn’t worked out the way she had hoped it would. He noticed but pretended he didn’t. He had enough to worry about right now without any romantic entanglements.
Before he could get out of the saloon, his plate got a little more crowded as the batwings were slapped aside and a woman strode in, demanding in a loud voice, “Where the hell’s the bastard who shot my brother?”
13
She was an impressive specimen of womanhood, even at first glance. Even though she was tall and broad-shouldered, there was nothing mannish about her. The lush curves of her body saw to that. Fiery red hair fell around her shoulders and tumbled down her back. She wore a gray wool shirt, a brown leather vest, and a brown riding skirt. A brown flat-crowned Stetson hung on her back, held there by the chin strap around her neck. A black bandanna was also tied around her neck.
It was a pretty odd getup for a woman, but the most unusual thing of all was the gun belt strapped around her waist. The butt of a Colt jutted up from the holster attached to the belt.
Angry green eyes searched the room until the hostile gaze lit on Frank and stayed there. The woman put her fists on her hips and said, “You. You must be the one.”
“Take it easy, Miz Stratton,” Ed MacDonald said. “If Al told you the truth about what happened, you already know he could’ve been hurt a lot worse. Matter of fact, he could have been killed without too much trouble on Morgan’s part.”
“Morgan?” the redhead echoed, still looking at Frank.
“That’s right,” Pitch said. “This is Frank Morgan, the gunfighter.”
The redhead didn’t look impressed. If anything, she grew even angrier. “So you picked a fight with my brother, knowing that you had him outmatched,” she accused.
A voice in the back of Frank’s brain warned him that arguing with this redheaded Amazon would be a waste of time. But he ignored it and said, “That isn’t the way it was.”
“No? Then tell me how it really was, Mr. Frank Morgan.”
He rubbed his jaw and then nodded. “All right, I will. I came in here not looking for any trouble, and your brother braced me and insulted me just because I mentioned Earl Duggan’s name. Then he went for his gun. I didn’t have any choice but to draw mine, but I tried not to hurt him too bad, just like Ed here said. And that’s the way it was.”
By the time he finished, his voice was pretty forceful, though he hadn’t really raised it. The redhead still glared at him, but she didn’t say anything for a moment. When she spoke, she said, “Al didn’t say anything about reaching for his gun first.”
“There you go,” Frank said.
“Are you calling him a liar?”
“Just saying that
he didn’t tell you the whole story. Take that for what you will, ma’am.”
“Don’t ma’am me!” she snapped. “I’m no puling little Southern belle!”
“I reckon I can see that,” Frank said.
He knew that was going a little too far, but the woman was starting to irritate him. He thought for a second she was going to haul off and take a punch at him, just like a man might have. Instead she pointed a finger at him and said, “Stay off our range. If I catch you out there, I’ll shoot you on sight. You understand, Morgan?”
“I don’t know that it’s legal to shoot a man just because he rides across your place.”
That bit of logic bounced right off her. “Just remember what I said,” she warned him. Then she turned and stalked out of the saloon, slapping the batwings aside with greater force than necessary.
Stiles Warren let out a low whistle. “I’d say she don’t like you even a little bit, Frank.”
“I got that impression,” Frank agreed with a wry smile. “Who was she, anyway, besides Al Rawlings’ sister?”
“Callie Stratton,” Ed MacDonald said. “She’s older than Rawlings and a widow woman. Moved back in on his place when her husband died. He was a tinhorn gambler up in Dallas. The way I heard it, somebody didn’t care for the way he dealt the cards one night—off the bottom of the deck—and ventilated him.”
“She talked like the ranch was as much hers as her brother’s.”
MacDonald shrugged. “I reckon that’s pretty much the way she feels about it. She’s the sort of woman who barges in and takes over, if you know what I mean.”
Frank did, although luckily he hadn’t encountered too many women like that in his life.
They left the saloon and untied their horses from the hitch rails along the street. After everyone was mounted up, Ed MacDonald led the way out of town, heading south. The sun had set and the stars were out overhead, a sparkling canopy against the black sky. The air had grown cool with the setting of the sun.
“I reckon our cook’ll have some grub heated up for us when we get there,” MacDonald said. “You’ll be welcome to join us, Frank.”
“I’m obliged. I didn’t get any supper back there in Brownwood.”
“Mr. Duggan never turns a man away hungry.”
That didn’t surprise Frank. Western hospitality demanded no less.
He thought about the geography of the area as he rode, and after a few minutes he said, “I guess Rawlings’ spread must lie east of the Slash D?”
“Due east,” MacDonald replied. “Of course, it’s pretty small, like I said. We only share a few miles of border with it. Below that is Thad Wilcox’s Flying W.”
“Wilcox is another of the big ranchers?”
“That’s right. The Slash D is probably the biggest spread in the county, but Wilcox’s place is almost as big. North of Rawlings is the Horseshoe, another good-sized ranch that belongs to a man named Calhoun. It loops around east of Rawlings, too.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead as he thought about that. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Rawlings has Duggan to the west, Wilcox to the south, and Calhoun to the north and east. Have all those spreads put up fences?”
“Damn right. Otherwise Rawlings would be running his cows on land that doesn’t belong to him.”
“But how does he get them out when it comes time to take them to market?”
“I don’t rightly know. It hasn’t come up so far, since Jim Calhoun just finished fencing his spread this past summer. But it’s Rawlings’ problem, not ours. He’s got no legal right to cut the fences, and he sure as hell’s got no right to shoot at punchers from the other spreads.”
“Do you know he has?”
Pitch Carey said, “I’ve heard more than one bullet sing past my ears while I was ridin’ the east line. The shots came from Rawlings’ range.”
“But you didn’t actually see him?”
Carey shook his head. “No, whoever was burnin’ powder was behind some trees on a hill, and he took off when I loosed a few rounds back at him. But it was Rawlings, all right, or one of those hard cases who work for him.”
“Yet you were all in the Palace tonight, getting along all right from the looks of it,” Frank pointed out.
“Well, I couldn’t prove it was Rawlings,” Carey said with a shrug. “And McKelvey’s got the coldest beer in town.”
In its own way, that made perfect sense to Frank. For the most part, range disputes stayed out on the range. Men who might slap leather if they ran into each other elsewhere would ignore each other in a saloon. Of course, sometimes the bad feelings boiled to the surface anyway, no matter what the surroundings, especially when folks had been drinking. Nothing fueled the flames of hatred quite like a few shots of Who-Hit-John.
Nor could he blame Al Rawlings for resenting the big ranchers and the men who rode for them. From the sound of it, Rawlings was penned in, surrounded by barbed wire so that he couldn’t get his stock to market without cutting one of the fences, which was illegal, and driving the cattle across another man’s land. That just wasn’t right.
But until he located Tyler Beaumont and talked to the young Ranger, there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He just hoped Beaumont had some sort of plan, and that he wouldn’t be so stiff-necked and stubborn that he wouldn’t accept a little help.
A big harvest moon rose, casting silvery light over the landscape. Frank and his four companions trotted their mounts easily along the trail. They didn’t stop until MacDonald suddenly reined in and motioned for the others to halt. He sat tensely erect in the saddle as if something were wrong.
“What is it, Ed?” Dave Osmond asked in a whisper.
“I saw something down yonder in the trees,” MacDonald replied, gesturing toward the left of the trail. “A light, like somebody struck a match.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Frank asked.
MacDonald’s voice was grim as he answered, “Right over there is where the Slash D fence starts. There shouldn’t be anybody poking around it.”
“Unless they plan on cuttin’ it!” Pitch Carey said. He reached for his gun, loosened it in its holster. “Come on! Let’s ride down on ’em, whoever it is.”
“Hold on,” MacDonald said. “Maybe they’ve got a good reason for being there. If we go galloping up and start shooting, somebody’ll get hurt.”
“Damn right,” Carey growled.
“Let’s get down and take a look-see on foot, quietlike.” MacDonald turned to Frank. “This isn’t your fight, Frank. You don’t ride for the Slash D, at least not yet. Why don’t you stay here and hold the horses for us?”
Frank tried not to bristle at that suggestion. MacDonald was just trying to do the right thing. But Frank Morgan had never hung back and held the horses in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now.
“I’ll trail along with you boys, if that’s all right,” he said softly. “We can tie the horses to those little trees.”
“It’s your decision to make. Take off your spurs, boys. We don’t want to announce that we’re coming.”
The men swung down from their saddles and quickly divested themselves of their jingling spurs. Frank ordered Dog to stay there and watch over the horses. Then the five men walked quietly toward a line of larger trees, live oaks and cottonwoods from the looks of them, Frank thought, although it was hard to be sure by moonlight.
“Those trees run along a creek,” MacDonald whispered to Frank. “The fence is just the other side of them.”
Frank could make out the fence posts now, jutting up from the ground at fairly regular intervals on the far side of the trees. He couldn’t see the barbed wire itself yet.
He hadn’t seen any lights down here, either. Maybe MacDonald had been mistaken.
But then a faint whiff of tobacco smoke drifted to his nose. The Slash D ramrod had been right. Somebody had lit a quirly, and MacDonald must have seen the flare of the match.
MacDonald had smelled the smoke, too, just like Frank.
He slid his gun from leather. The other three cowboys followed suit. Frank left his Peacemaker pouched for the moment. He could unlimber it quick enough if need be.
Voices came faintly on the night air. Frank and the Slash D men reached the trees and catfooted between them. The creek was narrow enough to step across, with shallow banks on each side. The bank on the far side had cottonwoods growing on it, too. The men paused in the shadows underneath them and looked out at the fence line.
A pair of dark shapes stood near one of the fence posts. Frank knew by their broad-brimmed hats that they were cowboys. A faint red glow marked the end of the cigarette one of the men was smoking. He said around the quirly, “We better get at it.”
“Yeah,” the other man agreed. Whatever they had planned, though, neither man made a move to carry it out.
They were stalling, Frank realized. It seemed that they were unsure if they wanted to go through with the chore that had brought them out here in the night. Once they cut that fence—and there was no other logical reason for them to be here—they would be lawbreakers, no two ways about it.
“Damn it,” the man with the quirly suddenly muttered. “It ain’t right what they’re doin’, and I ain’t gonna worry about it no more. I’m cuttin’ that damned bob-wire.”
He pulled a pair of fence-cutters from a pocket in the leather chaps he wore and stepped up to the fence. As he put the metal jaws of the cutters against the top strand of wire, MacDonald moved out from the trees with his gun leveled and said sharply, “Hold it! You cut that fence and I’ll ventilate you, mister!”
The man froze where he was. His companion turned quickly and muttered a curse as he saw the gun-toting figures emerging from the shadows under the trees. “Slash D,” he grated.
“That’s right,” MacDonald said. “We’re Slash D riders and that’s Slash D fence you’re fixing to cut. We’d be within our rights to burn down both of you right here and now. Instead, though, I want you to drop those fence-cutters and your guns, and we’ll take you into town and turn you over to the law.”
“Go to hell, MacDonald,” said the man at the fence.
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