The prices for meals were chalked on the board behind the counter. Frank dug out enough coins to pay for his and Donohue’s supper and stacked them on the table, then drained the last of the coffee in his cup and reached for his hat. Mary Elizabeth paused as she was going past the table and asked if she could get him anything else.
Frank shook his head. “No, that was mighty fine. Maybe you can tell me, though.... Is that livery barn behind the blacksmith shop the only one in town?”
“Yes, sir. Fella who runs it is named Jasper Culverhouse.”
Frank stood up and settled his hat on his head. “Thanks.” He smiled at the woman and headed for the door, aware that some of the men in the room were watching him, as they had been while he and Donohue were eating. He was a stranger in town, which made people take interest in him, and some of them might have recognized him, which would make them pay even more attention. He pretended not to notice the eyes following him.
Dog waited patiently on the porch. Frank signaled for him to follow, then untied the reins and led Stormy down the street toward the blacksmith shop. Jasper Culverhouse proved to be the man Frank had seen earlier, trundling his cart toward the scene of the shooting. Now he had the gory remains of Jack Moses stretched out on a table behind the blacksmith shop and was already knocking together a crude pine coffin by the light of a lantern. Culverhouse was short and mostly bald, with the thick-muscled frame of a man who worked with hammer and anvil all the time. As Frank led the Appaloosa around the corner of the building into the rear yard, Culverhouse looked up from his work and gave him a friendly nod.
“Something I can do for you, mister?”
“I need to put my horse up for the night,” Frank said.
“Sure thing. Got half-a-dozen empty stalls in the barn right now. Just pick the one you want. Grain’s in the bin. I’d take care of it myself, but I’ve got a chore that’s a little more pressing right now.” Culverhouse inclined his head toward the corpse. “Since you’ll be doin’ all the work, how about I just charge you two bits for the night?”
“Sounds fair,” Frank agreed. “I need a place to leave the dog, and some food for him, too.”
“Sure, I can take care of him. Does he bite?”
“Not if I tell him not to.”
“No charge for that, then. I’m a man who likes a good dog, and he looks like a fine one. Maybe not quite tamed . . . sort of like his master.”
Frank ignored that comment, figuring that the blacksmith had recognized him as the notorious Drifter. “Is there a place to stay in this settlement?”
“A couple of the saloons rent out rooms, especially if you want a gal to go with it.” Culverhouse waved a thick hand with short, stubby fingers at the barn. “Or you can sleep in the hayloft, which prob’ly has less bugs in it than the beds in them saloons. That’ll be another four bits, though.”
“Again, fair enough.” Frank had no desire to spend the night in a saloon that probably stank of tobacco smoke, unwashed flesh, stale beer, and urine. Right now he wasn’t interested in bedding down with a soiled dove, either. He took six bits out of his pocket and handed the coins to Culverhouse, who dropped them in one of the pockets on his blacksmith’s apron. Frank nodded toward the corpse and added, “I hear that’s Jack Moses, the gunfighter.”
“Yeah. I’ll clean him up a mite, drape a sheet over his middle where that buckshot tore him up so bad, and prop him up on a board in front of the place in the morning. Folks like to take a look at somebody even a little bit famous, especially if he’s gotten himself killed. Burial won’t be until the middle of the day tomorrow, so everybody ought to have time to come by and take a gander at him.”
Frank nodded. Such displays were a grisly but common custom on the frontier. He sometimes wondered if he would wind up that way himself, propped up on a board so that people could stand around and gawk at his corpse. The undertaker would probably charge admission for folks to look at him. He had even heard a story about how the corpse of some famous gunman had been stuffed, so that the fella who had it could drive around with the body in his wagon and show it off while trying to sell patent medicines. That would be a hell of a way to end up, as a drawing card for some snake-oil peddler.
Frank shoved that thought out of his mind. He wasn’t dead yet, after all, so there wasn’t any point in dwelling on what might happen. He just enjoyed each day that came to him as much as he could.
And to that end, once he had put Stormy in one of the stalls in the barn and tended to the Appaloosa’s needs, he decided to stroll down to one of the saloons and have a short beer before he turned in. Vern Riley had promised to buy him a drink, Frank recalled.
He heard the raucous music coming from the Verde Saloon before he got there. It was a warm night, so the doors were open, with only the swinging batwings blocking the entrance. Frank pushed between them and walked into the saloon.
The polished hardwood bar ran down the right side of the big room and then turned to run across the back wall as well, underneath the second-floor balcony. Stairs at the end of the bar led up there. The left-hand wall had a player piano, a faro layout, and a roulette wheel spaced along it. The area in the middle of the room was occupied by tables, and most of those tables were occupied by men in range clothes. Frank had noticed that the hitch rails in front of the saloon were crowded with horses, so he wasn’t surprised to see that the place was doing a booming business. He hadn’t checked the brands on those horses, but he figured most of them carried the Saber brand. That would mean that most of the men playing poker and tossing back drinks and fondling the saloon girls who moved among them were Ed Sandeen’s men.
The ones who had burned down that line shack and killed those three men might be in here right now, Frank thought.
But he had no way of knowing, and anyway, he reminded himself, it wasn’t his fight.
He was heading for the bar when he heard his name called. When he turned to look, he saw Vern Riley sitting at a table toward the back of the room with two other men. One of them wore the rough clothing of a saddle tramp, but the other was well dressed, in a dark, sober suit that made him look almost like a preacher. No, Frank corrected himself, the hombre looked more like a schoolteacher than a minister. He had sleek dark hair and a narrow mustache.
Something told Frank that he was looking at Ed Sandeen.
Riley had his hand up to signal Frank over to the table. Frank angled in that direction, and as he reached the table, Riley stood up and said, “Have a seat and join us, Morgan. I’ll buy you that drink I promised you earlier.”
Frank rested his left hand on the back of the table’s lone empty chair. “I don’t recall introducing myself when we spoke earlier.”
Riley grinned and said, “Hell, you think I don’t recognize the notorious Frank Morgan? A few years back, I saw you clean out a saloon where some of Vanbergen’s gang had holed up. I didn’t take a hand, since it was none of my affair either way, but I haven’t forgotten it, either.”
Frank’s mouth tightened. The time Riley spoke of had been a bleak, tragic one for him. He had been reunited with his first wife, only to lose her to an outlaw’s bullet. He had learned that he had a son, only to have that son turn his back on him. Things hadn’t gone much better since then, either. He had married a second time, only to have Dixie die violently, just as Vivian had. For a while, plagued by guilt and sorrow, he had climbed into a bottle, and it had taken the friendship of the Texas Ranger Tyler Beaumont, to drag him out again. Then a face from even farther out of his past, Mercy Monfore, had come into his life again, and Frank had been faced with the possibility that Mercy’s daughter Victoria was his child, too. And Victoria, bless her heart, was now paralyzed from a stray bullet that had hit her during one of Frank’s gunfights. Again and again, the unwanted reputation that followed him had caused pain and suffering not only for him but also for those around him, those he loved.
But in recent months he had started to feel that maybe he had turned a corner of sorts. He stil
l seemed to wander into gun trouble pretty regularlike, but he had mended some fences with his son Conrad and had passed some pleasant time with a few pretty ladies, none of whom had gotten themselves killed. Frank hoped that his luck had changed.
So he didn’t want to dwell on the past. He shrugged off Riley’s comment and said simply, “That was a long time ago.”
“Sit down, sit down. I’m Vern Riley.”
“To tell the truth,” Frank said as he pulled out the chair, “I recognized you, too, Riley.”
The gunman patted the shotgun that lay on the table. “It’s hard to miss this baby, and most people know it’s what I prefer. I reckon it’s almost like a calling card for me.” Riley gestured toward the roughly dressed man. “This is Carl Lannigan.”
Frank shook hands with the man, who had a rusty wedge of a beard on his blunt jaw, and said, “Lannigan.”
“Morgan,” the man returned, equally taciturn.
“And this is my boss,” Riley went on.
“Edward Sandeen,” the well-dressed man said before Riley could give his name. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Morgan. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
His hand was smooth, the fingers manicured. It had been a while since he had done any hard labor. But his grip was still quite strong. Frank nodded to him, being polite but not overly friendly.
A bottle and three glasses sat on the table. Riley said, “I’ll get another glass.” He lifted a hand to catch the attention of one of the bartenders. Three men were working behind the hardwood tonight.
“That’s all right, I’d just as soon have a beer,” Frank said.
Riley glanced at him. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Sandeen picked up the bottle and poured himself a drink. “It’s a wise man who doesn’t muddle his brain with whiskey.” He tossed back the fiery liquor, in apparent contradiction of what he had just said. He chuckled and added, “Luckily, I wasn’t wise to start with, so I have nothing to lose.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Boss,” Riley put in. “You’re just about the smartest man I know.”
“If I was so smart,” Sandeen said, his voice hardening, “I wouldn’t have hired two men who hated each other’s guts, now would I?”
Riley splashed whiskey in his glass. “Moses had it comin’,” he said. “Carl can tell you. He was here and saw the whole thing.”
Lannigan grunted. “That’s right. Moses started it. He was to blame for what happened.”
Frank had a feeling that if the gunfight had turned out the other way, Lannigan would be singing the praises of Moses and blaming the whole thing on Riley. He knew how to take advantage of a situation, whatever it might be.
“Well, regardless of all that, I’m short-handed now,” Sandeen said, and as he turned to look at Frank, Frank understood that the conversation probably had been worked out ahead of time, so that Sandeen would have a good excuse for offering Frank a job at fighting wages. Gunfighter’s pay . . .
Before Sandeen could do that, an angry voice spoke up, interrupting him. It said, “Morgan? Morgan, it is you, damn your hide! I thought I recognized you. And now I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch!”
Chapter Seven
Frank didn’t react suddenly. He just turned his head toward the sound of the angry voice and saw a man standing at the bottom of the stairs, gazing at him with murderous hatred in his eyes.
As far as Frank could remember, he had never seen the man before.
The shout had brought silence into the room as everyone turned to see what was going to happen next. Into that quiet, Frank said, “Take it easy, mister. I don’t know you.”
The man lifted his left hand and pointed a finger. It shook a little from the depth of the rage that gripped him. “Maybe not, but I know you! I been keepin’ an eye out for you ever since you killed my old man five years ago in Wichita!”
“Damn it, Hanley,” Sandeen put in, “can’t you see I’m talking to Mr. Morgan?”
“Sorry, Boss,” the man called Hanley said. “I got a score to settle with him that goes back ’way before I was ridin’ for Saber.”
Frank cast his mind back over the years, trying to remember shooting someone named Hanley in Wichita. The name didn’t ring any bells....
Then suddenly it did, and he said, “Was your father Lester Hanley?”
“You know damn well he was!”
“I didn’t kill Lester Hanley,” Frank said. “I put a bullet through his arm, all right, when he called me out and wouldn’t let it go, but that didn’t kill him. Later that night he got drunk, fell in a water trough, and drowned.”
Several men laughed, but abruptly fell silent when the man at the foot of the stairs swung his furious gaze toward them. A girl in a short, spangled dress was on the first step, right behind him, and obviously they had just come down from one of the upstairs rooms. Hanley was a rawboned man with long, dirty-blond hair. The disreputable old hat he wore had the brim turned up in front. He wore a buffalo coat, too, even though it was a warm evening, and Frank could smell the thing from a dozen feet away.
“That’s a damn lie!” Hanley said as he looked at Frank again. “I heard all about how you shot my pa in the back!”
“What you heard were lies,” Frank said. “I’m willing to overlook what you just said, Hanley, if you’ll just let it go.”
“Let it go, hell! I’m gonna kill you, Morgan!”
Frank stood up smoothly, seeing that talk wasn’t going to do any good. “You’ve got it to do, then,” he said calmly. Panic never helped a man survive a gunfight.
He heard chairs scrape behind him and knew that Sandeen, Riley, and Lannigan were getting out of the line of fire. Likewise, the girl with Hanley turned and scurried back up the stairs, and men cleared out along the bar. The bartenders ducked under the level of the hardwood.
Hanley hesitated, and for a second Frank thought that he might change his mind about this. But then his face contorted in a snarl and his hand stabbed toward the butt of the gun on his hip. “You bastard!” he howled.
His hand had closed around the revolver’s grips and he had it halfway out of the holster before Frank’s hand ever moved. Then, in an eyelash of time, the Colt Peacemaker was up and leveled. Flame geysered from the muzzle as it roared. Frank’s first shot slammed into Hanley’s chest and drove him back several steps. He staggered against the end of the bar. The impact turned him as well, so that the second bullet entered his right side, smashed a couple of ribs, and bored through his right lung before it struck the heart that had already been punctured by the first slug. Hanley’s gun slipped from his fingers and thudded to the floor. He turned some more and faced the bar, leaning far forward over it. He braced his hands against it, trying to hold himself up. Blood drooled from his mouth and dripped on the polished hardwood. He lifted his head, groaned once, and then toppled over backward, dead when he hit the floor.
Grim-faced, Frank shook his head. He had fought too many of these battles. Wherever he went, there was always someone who wanted to even a score or make a name for himself by killing The Drifter. And so far, they were always the ones who died instead.
Frank was about to open the Colt’s cylinder and replace the spent shells, when Vern Riley said, “I wouldn’t do that, Morgan. Hanley had a brother.”
A rush of heavy steps from the balcony made Frank glance up. He saw a burly, gun-toting man in long-handled underwear reach the railing and stare down in shocked horror at Hanley’s body as it lay there on its back, the bloodstains slowly growing on the filthy shirt under the buffalo coat. The man on the balcony roared a curse. His eyes darted toward Frank, who still stood there with a smoking gun in his hand, and clearly he had no doubt who was responsible for his brother’s death. He jerked the revolver in his hand toward Frank and fired.
The bullet whipped past Frank’s ear and hit the table where he had been sitting with Sandeen, Riley, and Lannigan before the trouble broke out. Frank crouched slightly and returned the
fire, triggering twice and hitting the man with both shots. Because of the angle, the bullets took him low in the belly and ranged upward through his body, wreaking havoc on his innards. Screaming in pain, he toppled forward against the flimsy railing and broke through it. The man turned a complete somersault in midair as he plummeted from the balcony to land with a crash next to the body of his brother. He twitched a couple of times and then lay still.
“Damn it,” Sandeen said into the gun-smoke-scented hush, “that makes three men I’ve lost today, for no good reason.”
“Sorry for the one I accounted for, Boss,” Riley said. “Like I told you, though, Moses had it comin’. And I don’t see what else Morgan could have done, other than stand there and let the Hanley brothers fill him full of lead.”
Sandeen sighed. “I know. I couldn’t ask any man to do that. Mr. Morgan, are you all right?”
Frank nodded curtly. “Are there any more of them?”
“No, that’s all.”
“Maybe I can reload this time, then.”
He swung the Colt’s loading gate open, punched out the empties, and refilled the chambers with cartridges from the loops on his gun belt. Then he holstered the Peacemaker and turned toward Sandeen. “I’m sorry, too,” he said. “They wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“That sort never does. Even though they rode for me, I hold no grudge, Mr. Morgan.”
“I appreciate that.”
“However, now that I’m even more short-handed, maybe you’d care to entertain a proposition I have for you.”
Frank faced Sandeen and shook his head. “You don’t even have to make the offer,” he said. “I’m not interested in working for you, Sandeen.”
The cattleman’s eyes narrowed and hardened, but he maintained the affable expression on his face. “Why not?” he asked. “From everything I’ve heard about you, you’ve done the sort of work I have in mind before.”
“Maybe you haven’t heard the whole story.”
Frank hadn’t gotten that beer he was after, but he wasn’t all that thirsty anymore. Nor did he care for the company. Even if he hadn’t been predisposed to dislike Sandeen by the things he had been told about the man, the fact that Sandeen was gathering an army of gunmen and killers who were little better than outlaws was enough to make Frank want nothing to do with the man.
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