Buckston drew his gun and pointed it at Frank. “Don’t move, you son of a bitch! Try anything and I’ll blow your damn head off!”
It had been mighty difficult for Frank to just stand motionless while Buckston slapped leather. Every instinct in his body cried out for him to draw and fire. But part of knowing how to use a gun was knowing when not to use it, and Frank sensed that this was one of those moments.
“Take it easy, Buckston,” he said, his voice loud and clear and powerful over the pounding of the rain. “I didn’t shoot your boss.”
“Then who in blazes did?” Buckston demanded. “You’re the only one here!”
“Another man traded shots with Flynn. I rode up right afterward and saw him. He threw a shot at me and then headed for the tall and uncut. I was winged and took a tumble off my horse when it slipped in the mud, so I wasn’t able to go after him.”
Frank gestured toward the bullet-torn shoulder of the slicker as proof of the wound. Buckston just shook his head stubbornly and said, “Mr. Flynn could have grazed you. We heard shots from two different guns, and I recognized the sound of that old Remington of his.”
Actually, there had been three different guns fired, Frank thought, but the killer had been using a Colt Peacemaker like his, so they had sounded the same. The report of the Remington had been the heavier, duller booms he had heard. Come to think of it, the shot that had winged him had been fired from that gun, which now lay beside Flynn with the rain pouring down on it. The killer had picked it up, fired it toward Frank, and then dropped it before he ran off. Frank put that chain of events together in his mind and knew it was the only explanation that made sense.
But why? What the hell was going on here?
He was in deadly danger, that’s what was going on, he reminded himself. Flynn’s men looked like they wanted to fill him full of lead, at the very least. Or they might just throw a lariat over a tree limb and string him up. Frontier justice for what looked to them like a clear case of murder, with the man whose brand they rode for as the victim.
“That other man shot Flynn, I tell you, not me,” Frank insisted. “Why in the world would I want to kill him? We parted on decent terms yesterday, if you’ll just remember, Buckston.”
“Maybe,” Buckston said. “Or maybe you been playactin’ all along, Morgan, and really are workin’ for Sandeen. You’ve got a rep as a gunfighter, and that kind of man usually rides for whoever’s willin’ to pay the most.”
“That’s crazy. Sandeen hates me because I refused to work for him. Not only that, but I killed several of his men, including Carl Lannigan last night.”
Buckston’s bushy eyebrows rose in surprise. Obviously he hadn’t heard about Lannigan’s death. But then he said adamantly, “You can talk all you want, but it don’t change what I saw with my own eyes.” He gestured with the barrel of his gun. “Shuck your hogleg and hand it over.”
Frank hesitated. Once Buckston saw that three rounds had been fired from the Colt, he would be more convinced than ever that those were the three bullets in Flynn’s body. But faced with these odds, there was nothing else Frank could do except cooperate. He pushed the slicker back, drew his gun slowly and carefully from the holster, and handed it up butt-first to Buckston.
Meanwhile, Caleb Glover had dismounted and knelt beside Flynn’s body. He moved the cattleman’s shirt aside to get a look at the wounds.
Buckston checked the cylinder of Frank’s Peacemaker. “Three empty shells!” he said in a scathing voice. “Damn it, Morgan, if that’s not proof—”
“I fired those three shots at the man who really killed Flynn—” Frank began arguing.
Glover cut them both off by exclaiming, “The boss ain’t dead! He’s still alive!”
That got everyone’s attention. Frank turned toward Flynn and saw that the old man’s eyes were open. They were unfocused, however, and he was only barely conscious. His head moved a little from side to side as his mouth opened and closed and he struggled to breathe. The rain had tapered off some, so it wasn’t as loud now. Frank heard a whistling sound coming from Flynn and knew that at least one of the slugs had gone through a lung.
Glover leaned over him and said, “Boss! Boss, can you hear me?”
With a visible effort, Flynn turned his head toward Glover and tried to lock his eyes on the puncher’s face. “Sh-shot!” he gasped.
Glover didn’t offer Flynn any false hope or encouragement. All of the men knew that with three bullet holes through his chest, the cattleman wasn’t going to make it. So instead, Glover asked, “Who shot you, Boss? Can you tell me? Who did this to you?”
“Sl-slicker . . . yellow slicker . . .”
Buckston, Glover, and the other Lazy F men looked at Frank, who stood there wearing a yellow slicker.
Knowing that he was probably wasting his time, Frank said, “The other man had on a yellow slicker, too, pretty much like this one. Hell, half the men in the country wear one when it rains! A couple of you are wearing them right now.”
“Yeah, but we were all together,” Buckston said. “That does it. I’ve heard all I need to hear. You’re gonna swing for this, Morgan.”
“I tell you—”
Buckston jerked his gun savagely. “Shut up! I don’t want to hear any more of your lies.” He turned his head. “Caleb, get back to the house as quick as you can and bring the wagon back for the boss. Maybe we can patch him up. . . .”
Buckston fell silent as he saw the way Glover was shaking his head. “No need for hurryin’ now,” the black cowboy said. “Poor Mr. Flynn’s gone. Those were his last words.”
Buckston took a deep breath and his face hardened even more. “A dying man’s last words,” he said. “You don’t get any better proof than that.”
“Except in this case you’re wrong,” Frank snapped. “And you’re letting the real killer get away.”
“I’m gonna enjoy seein’ you dance at the end of a rope, Morgan,” Buckston said, his eyes narrowing.
Frank’s breath hissed between his teeth. Buckston wasn’t going to believe him. Hell, he thought, if the situation had been reversed, he might not have believed a story like the one he had just told, either. So there was only one thing left for him to do.
As Glover wearily stood up from where he had knelt beside Flynn, Frank suddenly lunged behind him. The numbness had started to wear off in Frank’s left arm, which meant it was beginning to hurt like hell, but the muscles still worked and he flung that arm around Glover’s neck and tightened it as much as he could. At the same time, his right hand plucked the Colt from the holster on Glover’s hip. The gun rose menacingly.
“Hold your fire!” Buckston yelled. They couldn’t start shooting without running too big a risk of hitting Glover.
Frank hated like hell having to hide behind somebody. It went against the grain, went against everything that made him who he was. But right now he had no choice, because he realized that his only chance of clearing his name was to find out who had really killed Howard Flynn. He couldn’t do that if he was locked up somewhere. He had to be free to move around and investigate.
“Drop your guns!” he ordered Buckston and the other Lazy F cowboys.
“Mister, you’re makin’ the worst mistake of your life,” Buckston grated.
“No, the worst mistake would be letting you railroad me for something I didn’t do. Now drop ’em, damn it!”
Glover said, “Don’t you listen to him, Buck. He killed the boss. You go ahead and ventilate him, and don’t worry about me.”
Buckston’s face worked as different emotions warred inside him. Finally, he said, “You know I can’t do that, Caleb. For one thing, Mary Elizabeth would never forgive me if I got you killed.” He sighed. “You heard Morgan, boys. Drop ’em.”
He started by letting his own pistol fall to the ground. Slowly, reluctantly, the other men dropped their pistols. Frank told them to shuck their saddle guns, too.
“Now back your horses away,” he ordered. “I want you a
t least a hundred yards up the trail before I turn Glover loose.”
“You can’t get away,” Buckston warned. “We know every foot of this country. We’ll hunt you down like the lobo wolf you are, Morgan.”
“Just do what I told you, and nobody will have to get hurt.”
“Too late for that,” Buckston said with a meaningful glance at Howard Flynn’s body.
“Back off,” Frank said again.
Buckston and the other men backed their horses for several yards, then turned and rode along the muddy trail in the direction they had come from.
“That’s far enough,” Frank called to them. “Now dismount and stampede those horses!”
“Damn you, Morgan—” Buckston began.
Frank pointed the gun in his hand at Glover’s head. “Do it!”
Threatening an unarmed man like that gnawed at his vitals, too. When word of this got around, it wouldn’t help his reputation. But again, it couldn’t be helped.
The men swung down from their horses, shouted and waved their arms, and slapped the animals on the rump with their hats. The horses bolted, running off down the trail. Now the cowboys wouldn’t be able to give chase as soon as Frank released Glover. They would have to round up their spooked mounts first, and that would take a while. With that much of a lead, Frank was confident that he could give them the slip on Stormy.
“Mr. Morgan, you’re a dead man,” Glover croaked past the arm that Frank pressed firmly to his throat. “I hope you know that.”
“Listen to me, Glover,” Frank said, his voice pitched low enough so that only the black puncher could hear. “I’m sorry I had to grab you like this. I’d rather face my troubles straight on. But Buckston wasn’t going to believe me, no matter what I said.”
“Why should he? Why should any of us?”
“Because I’m telling you the truth,” Frank said. “I swear, Glover, I didn’t shoot Flynn. It happened just the way I said. There was another man in a yellow slicker. He had a horse tied somewhere up the hill. I’d tell you to go look for the tracks, but the rain will have washed them all away by now.”
Glover grunted. “Mighty convenient rain, ain’t it?”
“Not for me. But one way or another I’m going to find out who killed Flynn, and I’ll prove it. All I need is a little time. . . .”
“You won’t get it,” Glover said. “Buck meant what he said. Every man on the Lazy F is gonna be huntin’ you now, Morgan. You won’t get away. Be better if you just give up and take what you got comin’ to you.”
“I can’t do that,” Frank said. He whistled, and Stormy came trotting over to him. “I’m sorry about this, Glover. Believe that if you don’t believe anything else I’ve said.”
And with that he delivered a short, chopping blow with the gun to Glover’s head. The cowboy’s hat absorbed some of the force, but Frank hit him hard enough to stun him, and a hard shove sent him sprawling on the ground next to Howard Flynn’s body. Frank whirled away, stuck a foot in a stirrup, grabbed the saddle horn, and swung up into the saddle even as Stormy was breaking into a run. Behind him, Frank heard angry yells from Buckston and the other men. He knew they had seen him wallop Glover. When he glanced over his shoulder, he saw that they were already running after their horses, eager to get mounted and on his trail.
Frank slipped Glover’s gun into his holster as he leaned forward in the saddle and sent Stormy up the hill toward the trees where the real killer had disappeared a short time earlier. He saw the angry red welt on the Appaloosa’s neck where the same bullet that had nicked Frank’s shoulder had grazed the horse. The rain, which by now was just a drizzle, had washed the wound clean of blood. Frank knew Stormy would be all right.
He couldn’t say the same for himself, because in a matter of minutes he would have a group of angry cowboys coming after him, like a pack of hounds after a fox, eager to tear their prey to shreds.
But there was one big difference.
This fox was Frank Morgan, The Drifter.
Chapter Seventeen
It was a fuming mad Jeff Buckston who led the sorry procession into the yard in front of the big house around noon. Although the rain had stopped, the sky overhead was still heavily overcast, so that it was impossible to tell exactly where the sun was. Everyone was mounted again, and since they had found the boss’s horse a few hundred yards down the trail, Flynn’s body had been put on it and tied over the saddle.
That was after they had chased Frank Morgan for a while and found that the bastard had gotten away. At that time the rain was still falling hard enough to wash out any tracks Morgan had left, and anyway, it was difficult to follow a trail through those thick stands of pine. The carpet of fallen needles on the ground had a tendency to spring back up and conceal any evidence of someone passing that way.
That Appaloosa of Morgan’s was fast and strong, too. Buckston and his companions had searched all over the hill and for a mile beyond it without finding a trace of Morgan. They had left Glover to watch over the body of their murdered boss, just in case any scavengers tried to bother it.
Now, as they rode in with Buckston leading the horse that carried the grim burden, the foreman of the Lazy F thought about what Howard Flynn’s death was going to mean. As far as Buckston knew, the boss’s only living relative was his niece Laura. Flynn had made a will once, leaving everything to his wife and children, and Buckston happened to know that the document hadn’t been changed after the deaths of the other members of Flynn’s immediate family. He wasn’t the nosy sort, but he had seen the will among some papers on Flynn’s desk recently and had read enough of it to see the terms before he told himself to quit poking into things that were none of his business.
So as far as Buckston could see, that meant Laura Flynn was now the owner of the Lazy F. That was probably going to come as one hell of a surprise to her—along with the fact of her uncle’s murder, of course.
Laura didn’t know anything about running a ranch. She would have to rely on someone else, and Buckston knew who she would rely on—him. That thought made him uneasy. He liked Laura and knew she liked him, but he didn’t want anybody thinking that he was trying to take advantage of her now that she owned the Lazy F. He wanted Laura to think that least of all. So he was going to have to be careful and make sure everything was done properly, open and aboveboard. That might make it harder in the long run for whatever had been developing between him and Laura to grow into a real romance, but if that was the case, then so be it. Jeff Buckston’s honor meant more to him than almost anything else.
That was one reason he was so damned mad now. His instincts had told him at first that Frank Morgan was a good man, despite his reputation as a gunfighter. The first day they had met, Buckston would have almost said that he and Morgan were kindred spirits.
That sure had changed in a couple of days’ time.
Now Morgan was the enemy, a kill-crazy gunman who had murdered the finest man Jeff Buckston had ever known. Buckston was going to hunt Morgan down and avenge Howard Flynn’s death if it was the last thing he ever did.
As they drew rein in front of the house, Caleb Glover said quietly, “I sure don’t envy you the job you got comin’, Buck. That little gal and the boss were close, especially considerin’ she ain’t been out here all that long.”
Buckston sighed and nodded. “Yeah, I know.” He looked over at Glover. “How’s your head?”
Glover lifted his hat, gingerly touched the spot where Morgan had clouted him, and winced. “Hurts like blazes. Got a nice goose egg up there, too. But I reckon I’ll be all right. This ol’ noggin o’ mine is pretty hard. And if I didn’t know better, I’d say that Morgan was bein’ careful not to hit me too hard.”
Buckston scowled. “Why would a gunslingin’ bastard like that care who he hurt?”
Quietly, Glover said, “You know, Buck, he told me again that he didn’t shoot the boss.”
“You saw the evidence with your own eyes,” Buckston said impatiently.
�
�Yeah . . . but sometimes there’s more’n one way of lookin’ at the things you see.”
“Not to me,” Buckston snapped. He swung down out of the saddle and whipped the reins around the hitching post. “Wait a few minutes to give me a chance to talk to Miss Laura, then a couple of you bring the boss’s body into the parlor.”
He went up the steps and into the house. He didn’t know where Laura was, but he found her a moment later in the kitchen, where she was talking to Acey-Deucy.
“Hello, Jeff,” she said as she turned toward him with a smile. She looked fetching in a white blouse and a long green skirt. Her left arm was cradled in a black silk sling. Buckston hadn’t seen her that morning before he and the boys rode out to make their usual rounds of the high country pastures. As always, her loveliness almost took his breath away.
What he was about to tell her would drive that smile right off her face, he thought regretfully.
But postponing it wouldn’t make things any easier, so he took a deep breath and said, “Miss Laura, I reckon you’d better sit down. I got some mighty bad news for you.”
Her eyes widened, and sure enough, her smile disappeared. “My goodness,” she said. “What is it, Jeff?”
He pulled out a chair from the table. “Sit first,” he said.
She sank into the chair and stared up at him. Acey-Deucy looked pretty worried, too. Laura said, “You’re scaring me, Jeff.”
“Sorry,” he said. “There ain’t no good way to tell you this, so I’ll just say it straight out. Your uncle’s dead. Frank Morgan shot him.”
Laura’s wide blue eyes blinked a couple of times. They began to glisten with tears. “Uncle Howard?” she said in a hollow voice. “Uncle Howard is . . . dead?”
“I’m afraid so. We’ve got his body outside. Some of the boys will, uh, bring it into the parlor.” Buckston looked at the cook. “Acey-Deucy, get a blanket and spread it on the divan in there. The boss’s clothes are wet from the rain.”
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