“I was there,” Josh remembered. “Morgan’s a killer, a damn good shootist.”
“I used to hear stories about him. That was years ago, before I took up the outlaw trail. Folks said he was meaner’n a longhorn bull on the prod, and that nobody was any faster with a six-gun.”
“He’s just a man,” Josh said, taking his own swallow of whiskey. “You can kill damn near any sumbitch if you go about it right.”
“I hope Charlie got him,” Arnie said.
“Maybe they killed each other.”
“That could be what’s taking Sam and the others so long, lookin’ for the bodies in all this snow.”
Josh leaned back against the rock with a blanket thrown over him. “That kid of Morgan’s ain’t got any backbone. When Ned started knockin’ him around, he cried like a damn sugar-tit baby.”
“I’ll agree he ain’t much,” Arnie said. “Makes a man wonder why Morgan would go to all this trouble.”
“I figure Morgan’s dead by now. Soon as Ned is satisfied, we can kill the kid and head back south where it’s warmer to rob a few banks an’ trains. This here cold weather don’t agree with me.”
“It hurts my joints,” Arnie complained. “I hate this cold. Soon as this business with Morgan is over, Ned promised we’d ride down to Texas.”
“I’ve been asking him to head for the Mexican border so we can get ourselves some pretty señoritas.”
“That damn sure sounds good on a night like this, sittin’ up here at the top of this canyon without no fire. We’re liable to freeze to death.”
“It’s gonna be light soon,” Josh said. “That fire in the potbelly down at the cabin is sure gonna feel good.” He closed his eyes, pulling his hat brim over his face. “You keep an eye on that canyon mouth for a spell. I’m gonna try an’ get me some shut-eye.”
“It’s too damn cold to sleep,” Arnie said. “Pass me back that whiskey so I can stay warm.”
* * *
“I’m gonna throw in with you,” Tin Pan said. “Made up my mind on it.”
“No need, unless you’re just restless, or itching for a fight.”
“Got nothing to do with restlessness, Morgan. I’ve been thinking about that eighteen-year-old boy of yours, and the way things are stacked against you.”
“I’ve never been one to worry about the odds,” Frank said as he placed more sticks underneath the coffeepot. The smell of coffee filled the clearing.
“There’s times when it pays to worry a little.”
“Maybe,” Frank replied.
Skies brightened to the east. The snow had stopped falling and the wind had died down.
“I’ll show you that old Ute trail down the back side of the canyon,” Tin Pan continued. “If I stay perched up in them rocks with my Sharps, I can get a few of ’em.”
“I’m obliged for the offer, but there’s no need to put your neck in a noose over me. I can handle whatever’s up there on my own.”
“You’re a hardheaded cuss.”
Coffee was boiling out of the spout, and Frank put on a glove to take it off the flames, placing it on a rock beside the crackling fire.
“I’ve been told that before,” he said, grinning. “It comes from my daddy’s side of the family.”
Tin Pan drew a Bowie knife from a sheath inside his right boot. “I’ll slice up some of that fatback and put chunks of turkey with it. Oughta make a decent meal.”
“Sounds mighty good to me.” Frank added a handful of snow to the coffeepot to get the grounds to settle to the bottom. “We can get moving soon as there’s light enough to see. That’s a Bowie you’re carrying. I’ve got one of my own. Best knife on earth for killing a man.”
“Mine’s skinned many a grizzly and elk. I know the way to the canyon real well,” Tin Pan said, pulling a chunk of salted pork from a waxed paper bundle, then cutting thin slices off with his knife. “Trapped it a few times.”
“Is there any cover on the floor of that canyon?” Frank asked.
“Scrub pines. Not many. If Ned decides to hole up in the cabin and wait you out, it’ll take an army to flush him out of there.”
“I’ve got plenty of ammunition,” Frank declared, “some with forty grains of powder in ’em. When I start filling that cabin with lead, they’ll come out after a spell.”
“Sounds like you’ve done this sort of thing before, Morgan.”
“A few times.”
Tin Pan frowned. “Do it ever bother you, thinkin’ about the men you’ve killed?”
Frank wagged his head. “Like I told you before, I never killed a man who didn’t deserve it.”
Tin Pan laid strips of fatback in Frank’s small frying pan and added a few pieces of turkey. He set it on a flat stone close to the flames, nestling it into the glowing coals. “That oughta do it,” he said, wiping his knife clean on one leg of his stained deerskin pants.
“Coffee’s ready,” Frank said, glancing up at a gray sky paling with dawn.
He poured himself a cup, then another for the mountain man, tossing him the cotton bag of brown sugar.
“Fit for a king,” Tin Pan said with a smile. “It don’t get much better than this.”
“You’re right,” Frank agreed. “Open country, a warm fire, and good vittles.”
“Don’t forget about the coffee.”
Frank slurped a steaming mouthful from his cup. “I hadn’t forgotten about it.”
The salt pork began to sizzle in the skillet, giving off a wonderful smell. But Frank’s thoughts were on Conrad, what he was most likely going through now. Ned Pine would torture him, making him as miserable as possible, asking questions about Frank the boy couldn’t answer. He and Frank barely knew each other, and the circumstances under which Conrad was born, without Frank being there, made the boy resentful. Conrad didn’t know the whole story behind his birth and his father’s love for his mother.
A back way into the box canyon would give Frank a tremendous advantage, and with a shooter up on the rim, things could get hot for Pine and his bunch. Frank owed the old mountain man for his willingness to lend a hand.
The first order of business would be to take out the two riflemen guarding the entrance. If he made his approach very carefully, he could take them without making much noise. Then he’d make his way down the Ute trail behind the cabin and start the serious business of saving Conrad, killing off Pine’s men one or two at a time.
Tin Pan turned over the fatback strips with the point of his knife.
“Won’t be long now,” the old man said.
“My belly’s rubbing against my backbone now,” Frank replied, taking another sip of coffee.
* * *
Roger Clements and Jerry Page were still drunk from a night-long consumption of whiskey.
Page was from Tennessee, wanted for a string of robberies in his home state. Clements had been a paid assassin for the Knights of the Golden Circle in Mississippi, killing seven men after the war without anyone knowing his identity.
Jerry looked up at darkening skies. “I thought this storm was gonna blow over. Looks like more of this goddamn snow is headed our way.”
“Just our luck,” Roger muttered. “We’ll freeze our asses off up here if that wind builds.”
Jerry glimpsed a shadow moving among the boulders behind them. “Who the hell is that?”
Roger turned the direction Jerry was pointing. “I don’t see nothin’. You’re imagining things.”
“I was sure I saw somebody headed toward us.”
“Who the hell would it be?”
“This bad light plays tricks on a man’s eyes. I wish the hell the sun would come out.”
“Make a wish in one hand an’ take a crap in the other. See which one fills up first.”
“Pass me that whiskey,” Jerry said. “Could be I’m just too cold.”
Roger handed Jerry the bottle. Half of its contents were missing.
Jerry had raised the bottle to his lips, when suddenly a dark shape appeared on
top of the boulder behind Roger.
An object came twirling through the air toward Jerry, and then something struck his chest. “Son of a ...” he cried, driven back in the snow by a Bowie knife buried in his gut just below his breastbone.
“What the hell?” Roger cried, scrambling to his feet as Jerry slumped to the ground.
A heavy rifle barrel slammed into the back of Roger’s head and he sank to his knees, losing consciousness before he fell over on his face.
Jerry cried, “What happened?”
The shape of a man stood over him.
“Who . . . the hell . . . are you?”
“Frank Morgan,” a deep voice said.
“Oh, no. We was supposed . . . to be watchin’ for you.”
“You weren’t watching close enough, and now you’ll pay for it with your life.”
“Please don’t . . . kill me. I’ve got a wife back home.”
“You’re already dead, cowboy. The tip of my knife is buried in your heart.”
Waves of pain filled Jerry’s chest. “No!” he whimpered, feeling warm blood flow down the front of his shirt.
“I’m gonna cut your pardner’s throat,” the voice said. “He has to die, for what you’ve done to my son.”
“It was ... Ned’s idea,” Jerry croaked.
“You went along with it,” the tall man said, bending down to jerk his knife from Jerry’s chest.
As Jerry’s eyes were closing, he saw Frank Morgan walk over to Roger. With a single slashing motion, Morgan whipped the knife across Roger’s throat.
Jerry’s eyes batted shut. He didn’t feel the cold now.
Twenty-two
Tiny snowflakes fell in sheets across the log cabin. The bottom of the canyon floor was covered with several inches of white.
An eerie silence gripped the box canyon as Frank made his way down slippery rocks and sheer cliffs, following the old Ute trail Tin Pan had showed him.
Smoke curled from a rock chimney as Frank watched the shack, after he’d made slow but careful progress across the valley. Behind the cabin, more than a dozen horses stood with their tails to the wind in crude pole corrals. A pile of hay stood in one corner.
He moved quietly through the scrub pines. To the north Tin Pan was covering the hideout from a cluster of rocks at a range of more than five hundred yards.
“I hope he’s a good shot from a distance,” Frank said under his breath, slipping among the trees. The gray-bearded mountain man had proved to be an excellent marksman, but from the top of the canyon he’d have to be better than most men to hit anything, even with a long-range rifle like his Sharps .52 buffalo gun.
Frank thought about Conrad. Would Ned Pine kill the boy when he heard the first gunshot? Frank had never really known the boy, due to circumstances beyond his control and the distance between them.
He wondered if attacking the cabin would put Conrad’s life in danger.
“It’s a chance I’ve got to take,” Frank said, creeping closer to the cabin.
The patter of small snowflakes rattled on his hat brim, and the crunch of new-fallen snow came from his boots when he put his feet down.
“No way to do this quiet,” Frank said, still being careful with the placement of each foot.
A horse snorted in the corrals. Frank remained motionless behind a pine trunk until the animal settled. A range-bred horse would notice him making an advance toward the cabin. A horse raised in a stable wouldn’t pay him any mind. There was a big difference in horses . . . Frank had always preferred the range-bred variety.
A blast of northerly wind swept across the top of the canyon, and Frank knew that old Tin Pan Rushing was freezing his ass off, waiting for things to start.
A bit of luck, Frank thought, to run across the mountain man when he least expected to find any help getting his son away from Ned Pine. While he usually worked alone when he was employing his guns, it was a comfort to know Clarence Rushing was up there with his rifle.
Moving carefully toward the back of the cabin, he sighted an outhouse behind the place, nestled against the trunk of a small ponderosa pine.
The snowfall grew heavier.
“Maybe I can catch one or two taking a piss,” Frank said under his breath.
He moved closer to the outhouse. Thing were too quiet and that had an unsettling effect on him. But the silence could also be a blessing if he used it to his advantage.
* * *
Scott Warren had been drinking all night and most of the morning. He felt like his bladder was about to burst open any minute. He was wanted for bank robbery down in Texas, and for a killing in Indian Territory involving a trading post operator and his wife.
Scott stood over the two-holer, letting his steamy water flow into the hole dug beneath the wood seats. This waiting for Ned Pine’s adversary was getting the best of him, and there was no money to be made from killing an old gunfighter like Frank Morgan. Unless there was a profit in it, Scott had little patience for personal grudges. Ned was out of his head with a need for vengeance against this shootist named Morgan, a gunman well past his prime. None of this made any sense to a man like Scott.
“That’s better,” he sighed, when his bladder finally emptied into the pit.
Pale light suddenly flooded the outhouse. Scott turned to see who had opened the door.
A knife blade slipped between his ribs—he only caught a glimpse of the figure who stood behind him.
Without buttoning the front of his pants, Scott jerked his Walker Colt .44 free and staggered outside, cocking the hammer with blood cascading down the back of his mackinaw in regular spurts.
“You sneaky son of a bitch!” Scott cried, unable to find the man who had knifed him.
With nothing to aim at, Scott let the Walker drop to his side as chains of white-hot agony shot through his liver. As a reflex, his muscles tightened before he started to fall to the ground.
His trigger finger curled. A deafening explosion filled the box canyon, followed by a howl of pain when Scott Warren, a professional gunman by trade, shot himself in the right foot with his own .44-caliber slug.
“Damn, damn, damn!” Scott shrieked, hopping around on his good leg, spraying blood all over the snow from both of his wounds.
“What the hell was that?” a voice demanded from a back door of the log cabin.
Scott was in too much pain to answer.
“Lookee yonder,” another whiskey-thick voice said. “Scott went an’ shot hisself in the leg.”
“Wonder why he did that. All he said he was gonna do was take a piss . . .”
“He’s dead drunk, Josh. When a man’s that drunk he’s liable to do anything.”
Scott continued to hop around in a circle, reaching for his bloody boot.
“What’ll we do, Mack?”
“Let the dumb sumbitch dance out there in the snow. If he ain’t got enough sense to keep from shootin’ himself, then let him jump up and down.”
As Mack spoke, a rifle thundered from a stand of pines behind the cabin. Mack Brown, a horse thief from Arizona Territory, fell down in a heap in the cabin doorway with his hands gripping his belly.
Josh Winslow was trying to get out of the way when the next gunshot rang out. Something hot hit him in the back, pushing him forward into the door frame of the shack with the force of impact.
“I’m hit!” Josh screamed as he sank to his knees with blood squirting from his shirtfront.
* * *
Men inside the cabin began scrambling for their guns.
Frank moved away into the curtain of snow. The sound of his rifle still echoed among the scrub ponderosa pines where he’d fired at Josh.
Frank found a new hiding place fifty yards to the north. Five more of Ned Pine’s men were out of the fight, and the war had just begun.
He moved silently, deeper in the forest behind the cabin, to make his next play.
* * *
A thundering gunshot roared from the rim of the canyon and a man in front of the cabin
let out a scream. Curtis Johnson, a hired killer and stagecoach bandit from Waco, ended his cry with a wail as he fell down in the snow with his hand clamped around the walnut grips of his pistol.
“Tin Pan’s good,” Frank told himself in a feathery whisper when he saw the man go down at the front cabin door. “I’m not sure I could have made that shot myself. Helluva lot of range for any long gun.”
A barrel-chested cowboy came out the back door with a rifle, a Winchester Yellow Boy, clutched to his shoulder. He swept his gunsights back and forth.
Frank took careful aim and pulled the trigger on his Winchester.
The cowboy did a curious spin before firing a harmless shot into the treetops.
Arnie Sims went down slowly, his eyes bulging from their sockets, wishing he’d stayed in New Orleans instead of joining Ned Pine’s outlaw gang last year.
“Shit,” Arnie gulped, falling over on his face in the snow with his rifle underneath him. Winking lights clouded his vision until his eyelids closed.
Frank jacked another shell into his saddle gun.
“Everybody stay put!” a muffled voice commanded from inside the cabin. “Don’t show yourselves. It’s gotta be Morgan. I’m gonna kill his boy if one more shot gets fired!”
* * *
Ned Pine’s gray eyebrows knitted. He peered through a window of the cabin.
“How the hell did Morgan get past Bowers?” Lyle asked in a grating voice.
“How the hell should I know,” Pine spat, finding nothing among the scrub pines encircling the shack. “Charlie is good at what he does . . . maybe the best.”
“He ain’t all that good,” Slade answered, watching the back door where Arnie lay trembling in the snow. “Ask ol’ Arnie here if Bowers was good at bush-whackin’.”
“Shut up!” Pine snapped. “There’s another shooter up on the rim.”
“I thought you said Morgan always worked alone,” Lyle remembered.
“He does. That’s what I can’t figure,” Pine replied, his pale eyes moving across the Pine Canyon rim.
Slade’s eyelids slitted. “Ain’t heard no fire from Jerry or Roger.”
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