“Got plenty of it,” Culverhouse said. He paused, then added, “Does trouble always follow you around like this, Frank?”
Frank chuckled, but there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “Seems like it,” he said.
Donohue and the other men went their own way when they got back to the settlement, while Frank and Culverhouse headed for the livery stable. Frank got dry clothes from his war bag and changed into them, then set his boots aside to dry. Then he sat down on a stool and cleaned and dried his Colt while Dog lay at his feet. Frank kept at the chore until he was satisfied that the gun was in perfect working order. Then and only then did he get some of Culverhouse’s liniment and rub it into his shoulder, massaging the sore muscles and ligaments and letting the heat generated by the liniment work its way into them.
When he was finished with that, he climbed into the hayloft and crawled onto the makeshift bed he had formed by spreading his blankets over some of the loose hay. His pillow was his saddle, as it would have been if he were still on the trail. As he dozed off, he heard the creaking of the wheels on Culverhouse’s cart and knew that he was back with Lannigan’s body.
Tomorrow, Frank would ride out to Saber and let Ed Sandeen know that Lannigan was dead. It would be interesting to see what Sandeen’s reaction was to that news. Frank had a suspicion that Sandeen was going to be mighty disappointed to see him riding up to the ranch house instead of Lannigan.
Sleep claimed him then, deep and dreamless.
* * *
The sound of hammering woke Frank the next morning. When he came down from the loft, he found that Culverhouse was already knocking together a coffin for Carl Lannigan. “Sorry if I disturbed you, Marshal,” Culverhouse said as he paused in his hammering.
“No, that’s fine,” Frank assured him. “Some chores just won’t wait.”
“That’s sure true in the undertakin’ business. You headin’ out to Sandeen’s?”
“As soon as I’ve had some breakfast.”
“Maybe some of us ought to ride with you,” Culverhouse suggested. “Mayor Donohue and I were talkin’ about it. If Sandeen wants you dead, you’ll be puttin’ yourself in a heap of danger by riding out to his ranch alone. He probably wouldn’t try anything if there were several of us from town there with you.”
Frank considered the idea. Culverhouse made a good point, but finally Frank shook his head. “I don’t believe Sandeen’s going to try anything. He’ll be aware that all of you know I’ve ridden out there, and that if I disappear, suspicion will fall on him right away. The disappearance of a marshal might be enough to bring outside law in here, and Sandeen won’t want that, at least not yet.”
“You sure about that?”
“Last time I checked, nothing in life was a hundred per cent sure,” Frank said with a smile, “but I’m not worried about Sandeen trying anything today.”
Culverhouse shrugged. “Well, it’s your funeral . . . but I’d just as soon not have to do the buryin’.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Frank told him. “If Sandeen did succeed in killing me, the body would never be found. He’d see to that.”
“That’s sort of a grim way to look at it.”
“A hazard of the profession, I guess.”
“Of bein’ a lawman, you mean?”
“Yeah,” Frank said, although it was equally true of the profession he had followed for years, that of a drifting gunfighter.
After he’d had his breakfast at the café and seen to it that Dog was fed, Frank saddled Stormy and got directions from Culverhouse on how to find the headquarters of Sandeen’s ranch. He hadn’t seen it the day before when he was riding the range on the Lazy F and Saber.
Today he followed a well-defined trail that paralleled the river for several miles and then swung southeast. The sun was shining, but there were clouds to the south that looked dark and threatening. There might be a thunderstorm that afternoon, Frank thought. He planned to be back in San Remo before any storm had time to break, though.
An hour after leaving the settlement, he came in sight of a scattering of buildings. The largest was a sprawling, one-story adobe dwelling, constructed in the Spanish style with red tile roofs and wrought-iron gates in the wall around an inner courtyard. Sandeen hadn’t started this ranch but had bought it from someone else, and the place could have had other owners before that. From the looks of it, the original settler had probably been a hacendado from south of the border.
A building that Frank pegged as the bunkhouse was made of adobe, too, but the barns, smokehouse, cookshack, and a couple of other outbuildings were made of either logs or rough planks. There were large corrals behind the barns. Judged strictly on their headquarters, the Lazy F and Saber were pretty much equal. Sandeen’s layout was impressive. But it wasn’t quite as nice as Flynn’s, Frank decided, and that fact had to gnaw at Sandeen’s vitals, because he would be well aware of it, too. Just one more reason to be jealous of Flynn.
Someone had spotted him coming. Several men came out of the bunkhouse. A couple of dogs ran out to meet Frank, barking furiously as they loped along. They sounded like they wanted to intimidate him, but when he ignored them they quit carrying on so much.
One of the wrought-iron gates in the wall around the main house swung open. Sandeen and Vern Riley stepped out. Riley had his shotgun tucked under his arm, but Sandeen appeared to be unarmed. He wore whipcord trousers and a white shirt open at the throat. He regarded his visitor coolly as Frank reined Stormy to a halt. The five men who had come from the bunkhouse—hard cases who were almost as cold-eyed and dangerous-looking as Vern Riley—stood to Frank’s right, about fifteen feet away. They struck casual poses, thumbs hooked behind their gun belts, but Frank knew just how swiftly that casualness would vanish if trouble broke out. His eyes flicked quickly over the faces of the men, and somewhat to his surprise he found that he recognized all of them.
Quint Parker and Shad Dooley were from Texas, Luther Pettibone from Arkansas, John McCormick from Montana, and the final man, Eli Franklin, was from Kansas. All of them were fast on the draw, mighty fast. All of them had numerous killings to their credit. Frank would have felt confident against any one of them, probably even two. With luck, he might have been able to take three of them. But not all five, and sure as hell not with Riley and that deadly shotgun of his on the other side.
Maybe, he thought with a grim inward chuckle, he should have taken Culverhouse up on that offer of help.
But for the moment, everybody was standing around peacefully. Sandeen had a curious expression on his face, but he didn’t appear to be on the verge of ordering his men to open fire.
“Morgan,” he said coolly, “something I can do for you, or are you just visiting?”
“I brought some news out here for you from town, Sandeen,” Frank replied. “Carl Lannigan’s dead.”
Riley and the other five gunmen stiffened in surprise. More than one of the gunnies moved a hand slightly toward his holster. But none of them tried to draw. They were waiting to see how Sandeen took the news.
Frank had been watching Sandeen’s face closely when he told the cattleman about Lannigan. He had seen anger flare in Sandeen’s dark eyes, but no real surprise. It must have been obvious to Sandeen as soon as he laid eyes on Frank that Lannigan had failed in his mission.
“And why would that be of any interest to me?” Sandeen asked.
“Lannigan works for you, doesn’t he? I thought since he was one of your riders, you’d want to see to it that he got a proper burial.”
“I would,” Sandeen said, “if he still worked for me.” He slipped a fat cheroot out of his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth, then said around it, “I gave Lannigan his time a couple of nights ago, after he got in that fight with you in San Remo.”
“You did?”
Sandeen nodded, his teeth clenching on the cheroot. “That’s right. I don’t want a man on my payroll who brawls with lawmen. Isn’t that exactly what I told Lannigan, Vern?”
; “That’s right, Boss,” Riley drawled. “That’s what you told him.”
Frank didn’t believe that story for a second. He glanced at the other gunmen, thinking that they probably knew Sandeen was lying, but their faces were impassive. He couldn’t read a thing in those stony visages. They would back up whatever play Sandeen wanted to make, just as Riley was doing.
Frank tried a bluff. “That’s funny,” he said, “because before he died, Lannigan told me that he was still working for you, Sandeen.”
Sandeen’s shoulders rose and fell casually. “He was lying,” he said as he took the cigar out of his mouth. “Simple as that. Carl probably had a grudge against me because I dismissed him. How did he die?”
Sandeen had been a little slow in asking that, Frank thought. Seemed to him like it should have been one of the rancher’s first questions.
“He tried to kill me. We traded shots, and then during the ruckus that came after that, he fell on his own knife.”
Sandeen bit off the end of the cheroot and spit it out. “Damned shame. But it’s nothing to do with me, Morgan. You can bury Lannigan in a pauper’s grave as far as I’m concerned.”
“That the way you feel about all of your men when they fail at the errands you send them on?”
That was another shot in the dark, one intended to stir things up a mite among Sandeen’s hired guns. If it did any good, though, he couldn’t tell it by looking at the men.
Sandeen struck a match, puffed his cheroot into life, and then said, “You’re whistling up the wrong tree, Morgan. I’ve told you that I didn’t have anything to do with Lannigan trying to kill you. Now, if there’s nothing else, I’ve got a ranch to run.”
“No, that’s all,” Frank said.
“So long, then. Maybe I’ll see you in San Remo.”
Frank nodded curtly and said, “Count on it.” Then he turned Stormy and rode slowly away from the ranch house. Again, he could feel that imaginary target itching on his back.
Nothing happened, though. He heeled Stormy into a trot and soon left the ranch headquarters behind.
Frustration seethed inside Frank. No sooner had he formed his plan of trying to capture one of Sandeen’s killers and persuading the man to testify against Sandeen than the perfect opportunity to do just that had presented itself. Given enough time, he could have broken Lannigan’s nerve; he was confident of that.
But bad luck had stolen that chance from him. Lannigan was dead and couldn’t testify against anyone. Now Frank had to start over, trying to keep the peace in San Remo while at the same time getting the proof he needed to put Sandeen behind bars and head off the range war.
He decided to head back to the settlement by way of the Lazy F. He was curious how Laura Flynn was doing the day after she had been shot. If he stopped there, his presence might irritate Jeff Buckston, but the foreman would just have to control his temper.
A gust of cool wind from behind him nearly lifted Frank’s hat off his head. He turned and saw that the cloud bank was moving faster than he had expected it to. It was almost overhead now, and it wouldn’t be long before the dark gray clouds swallowed up the sun. Lightning flickered faintly in the distance, slender, pale-yellow fingers that clawed at the sky. Frank heard the low rumble of thunder.
Maybe it was a good thing he had planned to stop at Flynn’s place. He didn’t want to get caught out in a thunderstorm. With so many tall pines around, lightning was always a danger. And while many areas of Arizona Territory were bone-dry most of the time, up here in this rugged range country a storm could turn quickly into a downpour. Frank had gotten wet enough from that dunking in the river the night before; he didn’t have any desire to get soaked by rain now.
“Come on, Stormy,” he said, urging the horse on to a faster pace. “Let’s find somewhere to get in out of this blasted weather.”
The wind had picked up, blowing even harder now, and Frank could smell the rain on it. The air felt strange, as if heavily charged by some force. Frank estimated that he was still a mile or so away from the Lazy F ranch house. As the wind buffeted him and he had to ride with one hand on his head to hold his hat on, he begin to think that he wouldn’t reach Flynn’s before the storm hit.
He was right. He heard a soft thud as something hit the crown of his hat. A second later there was another impact and another. A big, fat drop of rain struck his shoulder so hard that it stung a little. Yes, sir, he thought, this was going to be a real gullywasher and toad-strangler before it was over.
The rain began to fall harder and faster. Frank’s slicker was rolled up behind his saddle. He untied the thongs that held it on, shook it out, and pulled it on. His shirt was already damp, but the yellow slicker would keep him from getting completely soaked. At least he hoped so. He tilted his head forward so that water would run off the front brim of his hat rather than dripping down his neck.
Again, he wondered why he had ridden over to Arizona Territory in the first place. He could have just as easily gone north from New Mexico to Colorado. Someplace where people wouldn’t shoot at him all the time and try to wallop the hell out of him and he could go two days without getting soaked for one reason or another . . .
The sound of the shot penetrated even the rushing noise of the rain. Frank’s head jerked up. He hadn’t been hit, and neither had Stormy. He didn’t even know if the shot had been aimed at him. All he could be sure of was that the sharp report had come from in front of him somewhere. A second later it was followed by a heavier boom, the sound of a different gun, and then a quick pair of shots from the first weapon.
Somebody was in trouble up there, and Frank intended to find out what was going on. He dug his heels into Stormy’s flanks and said, “Let’s go, big fella!”
Stormy leaped into a gallop. Frank was riding on the side of a hill, on a fairly open shoulder with a wooded slope rising to his right. The shoulder curved naturally as it followed the hill, and as Frank rounded the turn he spotted movement up ahead. It was hard to see clearly through the sluicing rain, but as he drew nearer, a riderless horse suddenly loomed up and bolted past him. In the brief look he got, Frank didn’t see any blood on the saddle, but that didn’t mean anything. It was raining hard enough to wash away any blood that had been spilled.
He rode in the direction the stampeding horse had come from. Up ahead was a deadfall at the edge of the trail. Frank saw a man standing behind the fallen tree, looking down at something. Frank couldn’t make out any details except that the man wore a yellow slicker much like his.
The man must have heard Stormy’s hoofbeats, because he turned sharply toward Frank. Frank saw his hand come up with a gun in it. Frank leaned low over Stormy’s neck and reached under his slicker for his own Colt as the revolver in the man’s hand boomed.
Luck was against Frank for a change. Despite the downpour and the hurried shot, the bullet raked Stormy’s neck and then clipped the top of Frank’s left shoulder with stunning impact. Stormy jumped from the pain. Frank reeled in the saddle and almost fell, but he managed to hang on and lift his gun, triggering three fast shots toward the mysterious gunman. The man turned and ran, and from the way he scampered nimbly up the hillside, Frank knew none of his shots had found their target. He tried to turn Stormy to head up the rise after the gunman, but the horse’s hooves slipped on the trail, which had been turned muddy by the torrential rain. As Stormy jolted to the side, Frank tried to grab for the horn with his left arm, but it was numb from the bullet graze on his shoulder. He felt himself falling, and instinctively kicked his feet free from the stirrups.
He was able to hold on to the gun as he slammed down into the mud. Looking up, he blinked against the rain that streamed into his eyes and tried to locate the man with whom he had traded shots. He couldn’t see the no-good skalleyhooter anywhere. He thought he heard hoofbeats, though, which probably meant that the man had reached his horse and was fleeing.
The man had been looking at something behind that deadfall, Frank recalled. With a bad feeling inside him,
he pushed himself to his feet and stumbled along the trail toward the fallen tree. His left shoulder and arm were still numb, but he could use his right hand and his gun if he needed to. Right now, that was all that mattered.
He came around the end of the big log and stopped short. A man lay there on his back, concealed from Frank’s sight until now. Blood welled from the bullet holes in his chest, and the rain diluted the crimson into pink streams. The man’s hat had fallen off, revealing thick white hair. His tanned, weathered face was contorted in deep trenches of shock and pain.
Frank was looking down at Howard Flynn. The man was either dead or soon would be.
More hoofbeats made Frank lift his head from the grim scene before him. He saw several riders pounding toward him from the direction of the Lazy F headquarters. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought one of them was Jeff Buckston. The others were bound to be more of Flynn’s crew.
And here Frank stood over the body of Howard Flynn himself, gun in hand, three bullets gone from the Colt’s cylinder, three blood-leaking holes in Flynn’s chest.
Colorado was looking better and better . . . but suddenly Frank had serious doubts that he would ever see the place again.
Chapter Sixteen
Stormy stood several yards away, reins dangling. Frank knew he could reach the horse and get mounted before the riders got there, but they were so close he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away. And once the men saw that Flynn had been shot, they would probably open fire on Frank and blow him out of the saddle.
Like it or not, Fate had conspired to put him in a very bad situation. He hoped he could convince Buckston to listen to reason. A couple of days earlier, when they first met, that might have been possible. Now, after the trouble between them, Frank didn’t know if it was or not.
He slid his gun back in its holster and then pulled the slicker over it. When the riders galloped up to the deadfall and reined their horses to a stop, Frank stood there waiting calmly.
One of the riders was Buckston, all right, just as Frank had thought, and now that he could see the other men he recognized them from his visit to the Lazy F, too. One of them was Caleb Glover, the middle-aged black puncher who kept company with Mary Elizabeth Warren. All of them looked shocked and angry when they saw Flynn’s body.
The Devil's Legion Page 12