With those thoughts in his mind, he wasn’t paying much attention to the Verde Saloon as he rode past it. The sudden blast of shots intruded on his musing, and as he twisted in the saddle, he saw a man burst through the batwings at the saloon’s entrance, guns blazing.
Chapter Five
Frank’s hand had started toward the Peacemaker on his hip before he realized that the man on the boardwalk in front of the saloon wasn’t shooting at him. Instead, the man had writhed around so that he was blasting back through the flapping doors into the saloon. Both hands were filled, and smoke from the flame-spouting irons wreathed the figure on the walk.
The fusillade lasted only a couple of seconds. Then inside the saloon a shotgun roared. Its double charge of buckshot slammed into the gunman on the walk, shredding his midsection into a bloody horror and throwing him backward almost a dozen feet to land on his back in the dust of the street. That put him almost under the Appaloosa’s hooves. Stormy shied away from the gory spectacle. Frank tightened the reins to bring the horse under control. He said, “No, Dog,” as the big cur stepped closer to the wounded man and sniffed delicately at him.
With a jingle of spurs, a man pushed the batwings aside and stepped out onto the walk. He held in his hands the Greener that had just been fired. The weapon was broken open now so that he could slide fresh shells into the barrels. He snapped the shotgun closed and looked up at Frank, managing to seem both alert and bored at the same time. He was lean and dark and well dressed, wearing a black, flat-crowned hat over a white shirt, black vest, and gray whipcord trousers stuffed into high-topped black boots. A black string tie was around his neck.
“You see something interesting, friend?” he asked mildly.
“Well, it’s not every day you see a man blown nearly in two with a Greener,” Frank said. “You going to check and make sure he’s dead?”
“Oh, he’s dead, all right. His guts are laying all over the street.”
That was pretty much true. No one could survive a wound like that.
“You know, I was almost in the line of fire. If that buckshot had spread out a little more, some of it might have hit me or my horse or my dog.”
“That would’ve been too bad. I might’ve been a little more careful about where I was shooting if that bastard hadn’t been trying to kill me at the time.”
“I know the feeling,” Frank said. He hitched Stormy into a walk again, heading once more for the café. He had seen sudden death plenty of times in his life; once more wasn’t going to bother him. But even he had to admit that the way in which the two-gun pistolero had died was pretty shocking.
“Come back down to the saloon later, I’ll buy you a drink,” the shotgunner called after him. Frank just waved a hand in acknowledgment of the offer without looking back.
By the time he swerved the Appaloosa to the hitch rack in front of the café, a small crowd was beginning to gather around the dead man. The shotgunner had gone back into the Verde Saloon. A man with a hand-drawn cart trundled it from the direction of the blacksmith shop toward the sprawled corpse. Probably the blacksmith also served as San Remo’s undertaker, as well as running the smithy and the livery stable.
Frank dismounted and looped Stormy’s reins around the hitch rail. Normally he would’ve seen to the horse’s needs before his own, but if his guess about the blacksmith was correct, the man would be busy for a while with the dead man. Frank hadn’t pushed Stormy hard during the ride from New Mexico Territory. It wouldn’t hurt the Appaloosa to wait a while to be unsaddled, rubbed down, and grained.
A man sat on the front porch of the café, puffing on a pipe. As Frank stepped up onto the porch, followed by Dog, the man said, “Howdy, mister. That your dog?”
“He’s his own dog,” Frank said, glancing at the big cur, “but we travel together most of the time.”
The man took the pipe out of his mouth and slapped his knee in amusement. He was probably sixty years old, with a short, grizzled beard and gray hair under a bowler hat. One eye was a little off-kilter. He wore a brown tweed suit that had seen better days.
“I like that answer, mister,” he said. “You sound like a man who knows dogs.”
“This one, anyway.” Frank added, “Dog, sit. Wait out here for me.”
The man pointed the stem of his pipe at Dog as Dog sat down. “He does what you tell him?”
“Most of the time. Unless it disagrees too much with his idea of what ought to be done.”
The man lumbered to his feet and stuck out his hand. “Willard Donohue,” he introduced himself. “Local character and hanger-on.”
Frank chuckled at the man’s dry humor. He shook hands with Donohue and introduced himself. “Frank Morgan. Just passing through.”
Donohue put his pipe back in his mouth, clamped his teeth on the stem, and said around it, “Morgan? The shootist from over Texas way?”
“Not that many people remember that I come from Texas.”
“Oh, I’ve read every yellowback ever written about you, Mr. Morgan. Man cultivates a life o’ leisure like I do, he has time to read and learn a lot.” Donohue removed the pipe and used it to point with again. “Take that little incident down the street as you were ridin’ into town. I know who those fellas are and why they were doin’ their damnedest to kill each other. It’s an interestin’ story.”
Frank realized that the man was hinting. He said, “Why don’t you come inside and tell me about it? Since it’s nigh on to supper time, I’d be happy to buy you a meal.”
“Well, that’s mighty nice of you, Mr. Morgan. That’s another thing I know about you . . . you’ve got a generous nature.”
Frank slapped him on the back, grinned, and said, “Come on, old-timer. I’ve got a feeling there’s a steak in here with your name on it.”
Donohue licked his lips and smiled.
As soon as Frank opened the door of the café, a blend of delicious aromas drifted out. Often the food in these cow-town hash houses was terrible, but every so often a fella found one with an exceptional cook. Clearly, the owner of this place took pride in more than its food, too, because the floor was swept clean, the tables were neatly covered with red-checked tablecloths, and several lamps were already lit, casting a warm glow over the room.
A counter with several pies on it sat to the right. Willard Donohue glanced at them and licked his lips again. He flinched, though, as the middle-aged black woman behind the counter said sharply, “Mr. Donohue, what you doin’ in here? I told you, I ain’t feedin’ you on the cuff no more. You got to pay what you owe before you get another bite!”
“Now, now, Mary Elizabeth, don’t get in such an uproar,” Donohue said. “This kind gentleman here has offered to stand me to a meal.”
The woman frowned at Frank. “You let this ol’ rapscallion hornswoggle you into buyin’ his supper? No offense, mister, but you look smarter’n that.”
“Mr. Donohue’s going to sing for his supper,” Frank explained. “Or at least tell me a story.”
“About the shootin’ down at the Verde,” Donohue supplied.
The woman snorted. She wore a crisp blue calico dress with a white apron over it. “I heard the shots, but I don’t want to know nothin’ about it. You two sit down. Steak or pot roast?”
“Steak,” Frank said, and Donohue nodded in agreement.
“Two steaks with all the trimmin’s, comin’ up.” The woman went through a door behind the counter, into a kitchen.
Frank and Donohue were the only customers at the moment, so they had their choice of where to sit. Without really thinking about what he was doing, Frank took a table in the corner and sat down so that his back was to the wall. He wasn’t as fanatical about sitting that way as Wild Bill Hickok had been, but it was an old, cautious habit Frank had no interest in breaking. He had been in Deadwood, up in Dakota Territory, nearly twenty years earlier when the legendary pistoleer Hickok had broken his custom and wound up being shot in the back of the head by Jack McCall. That was all the lesson ne
eded by the observant young man Frank had been at the time.
“Miss Mary Elizabeth Warren is the salt of the earth,” Donohue said. “And probably the best cook between El Paso and San Francisco. You don’t know how lucky you are to have stopped here, Mr. Morgan, but you’ll soon find out. That is, if you don’t mind eatin’ a colored woman’s cookin’.”
“It’s pretty hard to tell the color of the cook by the taste of the food,” Frank said.
“Very true. You’ll think Mary Elizabeth’s food was cooked by angels. Caleb Glover is a damned lucky man. He keeps company with Mary Elizabeth. Probably marry her one of these days and take her off to some ranch, and that’ll be a sad day for those of us here in San Remo who’ve come to depend on her.”
“This fella Glover rides for Howard Flynn’s Lazy F?”
Donohue grunted in surprise. “You know Howard?”
“We’ve met.”
“Then you probably know about the trouble between him and Ed Sandeen.”
Frank nodded slowly but didn’t say anything about the violent incident at the Lazy F line shack. “I’ve heard some talk.”
“Those two hombres who shot it out in the Verde . . . they both work for Sandeen. Moses worked for Sandeen, I should say, since from the looks of it the only wages he’ll be drawin’ from now on will be in Hell.”
“Jack Moses?” Frank asked, his eyes narrowing. Something had struck him as familiar about the dead man’s face, and now he recalled it. Jack Moses was a hired gun he had last seen up in Idaho, a good ten years earlier. Frank hadn’t known that Moses was even still alive.
“Yeah, that’s right. Man with the shotgun is Vern Riley. I expect you’ve heard of him, too.”
Frank nodded. Riley was reputed to be middling fast with a six-gun, but the Greener was his weapon of choice. Frank should have realized who he was.
“If they were both working for Sandeen, why did they start shooting at each other?”
“The way I heard it, they had an old grudge against each other. Riley was here first, rode into these parts several weeks ago and signed on with Sandeen’s Saber spread. Sandeen’s been hirin’ men who are good with their guns.”
“So I’ve heard,” Frank said grimly.
“Well, Jack Moses showed up a few days ago and hired on, too. I guess him and Riley tried to put their hard feelin’s aside while they were both drawin’ wages from Sandeen, but I reckon it didn’t last. One of ’em probably said something that the other one didn’t like, and before you know it all hell broke loose. They forgot that they were supposed to be on the same side. Don’t know how Sandeen’s gonna feel about that. He lost a good man in Moses. Or a bad man, might be a better way of puttin’ it.” Donohue looked intently at Frank. “I don’t reckon a fella like you would have any trouble signin’ on to replace him, Mr. Morgan . . . if you’re lookin’ for a job, that is. For all I know, Howard Flynn’s already hired you. Howard’s gonna have to start fightin’ fire with fire, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not working for anybody,” Frank said. “Just riding through on my way to Phoenix.”
“Uh-huh,” Donohue said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it. “We got us a hellacious range war about to break out in these parts, and The Drifter just happens to show up.”
“Believe what you want,” Frank told him, “but it’s the truth.”
“Maybe so . . . but how long do you think a man like you will be able to stay out of it once the bullets really start to flyin’?”
Frank was saved from having to answer that question by the arrival of Mary Elizabeth Warren with their suppers. She expertly balanced two big platters of food, each with a large steak, a mound of hash-browned potatoes, and two fat, fluffy biscuits on it.
“I got a bowl of greens and some gravy for soppin’ them biscuits,” she said. “I’ll bring ’em right over. Coffee for the both of you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frank said.
“Ain’t you the polite one, now. Dig in, gentlemen.”
She delivered the greens and gravy to the table, as promised, along with a pot of strong black coffee and a couple of cups. Frank hadn’t realized how hungry he was until he started eating and discovered that the food tasted as good as it smelled. The coffee was just the way he liked it, too, with a faint hint of peppermint to it from the stick of candy that had been dropped in the pot for sweetening. He knew when he tasted it that Mary Elizabeth had had experience making coffee for cowboys. She sure knew her way around a pot of Arbuckle’s.
Now that the hour was a little later, more customers began to come into the café. By the time Frank and Donohue were finished with their meal, most of the tables in the place were occupied. Donohue saw Frank looking around and said, “Mary Elizabeth does a good business, sure enough. I figure either Howard Flynn or Ed Sandeen would hire her to cook for them in a minute. Howard’s got a leg up, though, since Caleb Glover rides for the Lazy F. I’m hopin’ that once him and Mary Elizabeth marry up, he’ll let her keep the café open, but I reckon it ain’t likely.”
“Are folks around here worried about the problems between Flynn and Sandeen?” Frank asked, deciding to indulge his curiosity since Willard Donohue was obviously the sort of fella who liked to talk.
“Wouldn’t you be? They both like to ride high on the hog, so I reckon it was inevitable that there’d be trouble betwixt ’em. When a couple of big skookum he-wolves like that start after each other, innocent folks almost always get caught in the middle.”
“Has anybody given any thought to bringing the law in?”
“What law? The Saber and Lazy F spreads are so big they lay in several different counties. Do we send for help to Sheriff Buckey O’Neill in Yavapai County or Sheriff Glenn Reynolds in Gila County? The sheriff in Maricopa County might want to get in on it, too. Problem is, they’re all just as likely to say that it’s the other fella’s worry, not theirs, as they are to help out.”
Frank knew what the old-timer meant. Boundary lines were sometimes tenuous things, and jurisdictional disputes were difficult to settle. By the time the various authorities involved got everything squared away among themselves, it might be too late for them to do any good.
“How long do you think it’ll be before the whole thing boils over?”
“Probably not very long now,” Donohue said. “Sandeen must have forty guns workin’ for him. If he ain’t ready to make a move, I don’t reckon he ever will be.”
Frank nodded slowly. Donohue’s assessment agreed with his own. It might not bode well for San Remo and the surrounding part of the territory, but in all likelihood the burning of the line shack and the killings of Rufe Blake, Bragan, and Wardell were the opening salvo in what would soon be a bloody, full-scale war.
Chapter Six
Frank and Donohue finished off the fine supper with apple pie for dessert, washed down by a final cup of coffee. After living off his own trail cooking for a while, Frank thoroughly enjoyed the meal. Donohue seemed to as well, and he said, “I surely am obliged for your generosity, Mr. Morgan.”
“Call me Frank. I enjoyed your company, and I have a clearer picture now of what’s going on around here.”
“It ain’t a pretty picture, though, is it?”
Frank shrugged. “No, but luckily, it’s none of my business.”
“It could be,” Donohue said with a shrewd gleam in his eyes.
Frank told himself not to ask the question, but he did it anyway. “What do you mean by that?”
“It just so happens that I’m the mayor of San Remo.”
Frank’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
Donohue chuckled. “Yeah, it’s a hell of a note, ain’t it, when a layabout like me gets put in charge of anything. I guess folks decided I had the time to devote to takin’ care of the town, since I don’t do much of anything else.” He waved a pudgy hand. “But that ain’t neither here nor there. As I was sayin’, I’m the mayor o’ this here burg, and as such, I’m offerin’ you the job of town marshal of San Re
mo, Frank. The whole country may go to hell around us, but I got a hunch you could keep order here and keep the town from gettin’ caught in the cross fire.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead. “I don’t normally wear a badge.”
“You have before, though, so it ain’t like I’m askin’ you to do something you’ve never done.”
“I’m on my way to Phoenix,” Frank said stubbornly. “I’ve been mixed up in enough shooting scrapes in my life.”
“I can see why you feel that way, but the plain fact o’ the matter is, we need you here, Frank.”
Donohue made a good case, but Frank shook his head. “Sorry. If I was you, I’d write to the sheriffs of all three counties involved and ask them to send in some deputies. Surely you’ll get some help that way.”
Donohue sighed. “Well, maybe. Don’t know if it’ll be in time, though.”
“Maybe it will be,” Frank said, but he knew from the feeling of tension in the air that gripped the whole Verde River basin that serious trouble might erupt at any second. It might have already started, for all he knew.
“You sure? The pay wouldn’t be much, but I can maybe talk Mary Elizabeth into feedin’ you for free. . . .”
“Sorry,” Frank said again.
Donohue grunted and scraped his chair back. “Well, I tried. I’m obliged to you for listenin’ to me, at least, Frank.”
“Why don’t you meet me here in the morning?” Frank suggested as Donohue got to his feet. “We’ll have breakfast together before I ride out.”
“Sounds like a mighty fine idea. I’ll see you then.”
Donohue nodded and walked out of the café, waving farewell to Mary Elizabeth as he left. She was hurrying from table to table, serving meals, but she paused long enough to call after him with genuine affection, “You take care o’ yourself, you ol’ scoundrel.”
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