“Something I can do for you?” he asked mildly.
“I hear you’re a fast gun.” There was a challenging note in the young man’s voice. Frank felt weary because he had heard that same note so often in his life. “You reckon you’re faster than me?”
“I wouldn’t know, and I don’t have any interest in finding out,” Frank said bluntly.
“People say I’m pretty fast. I’ve had gunfights in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines, and I’m still here.”
It took an effort, but Frank managed not to laugh. Winning gunfights in Iowa wasn’t any great chore. It wasn’t like that was where the real shootists spent their time.
“You’re headed the wrong direction,” Frank told the youngster.
The fancy-dressed kid frowned and said, “What the hell do you mean by that, old man?”
“You’re going east. Farther you go that way, the more civilized folks get. They don’t take kindly to gunfights. Got laws against them and everything.”
“I don’t care about that. What I want to know is who’s faster, you or me?”
“Why don’t we just say that you are and let it go at that?”
The mouth under the drooping mustache twisted in a sneer. “You’d do that? You’d back down rather than draw against me?”
The other men in the club car started edging to the sides, trying to get out of the way as much as they could.
Frank’s patience was wearing thin. He said, “I don’t want to kill you, son, and I sure as hell don’t want you killing me. If we draw against each other, one of those things is bound to happen.”
“It won’t be me dyin’,” the youngster boasted. “It’ll be you, you washed-up old fart.”
Frank sighed. Years of experience told him that he wouldn’t be able to avoid this fight. The youngster had gone into what he thought was a gunfighter’s crouch with his hand hovering over the butt of the revolver on his hip, ready to hook and draw.
“Come on, old man!” he shouted, and now the rest of the men in the club car were scrambling as they hunted for some cover. “You’re gonna either draw or dance, you decide!”
“You called the tune, kid,” Frank said. “It’s up to you to start the ball.”
As soon as the words were out of Frank’s mouth, the youngster’s hand flashed toward his gun.
Chapter 24
Back on the platform of the train station in Chicago, Frank had strapped on his gunbelt again. Now, without appearing to hurry, his hand dipped toward the Peacemaker and palmed it smoothly from the holster.
The kid wasn’t slow, but it would have been stretching the truth a mite to call him fast. Frank’s gun came level and roared before the youngster’s Colt was more than half clear of the fancy hand-tooled holster. The kid was driven backward by the bullet smashing into his chest. He went up in the air and landed on his back on a table inside a booth on the far side of the club car. The men who had been sitting in the booth a few minutes earlier had already abandoned it, but their drinks were still there. The young man smashed the glasses when he landed on them. Whiskey puddled around him, the sharp smell of it mingling with the acrid tang of gun smoke.
The youngster’s gun had fallen to the floor. He struggled to get up but couldn’t make it, slumping back onto the table instead. His face was twisted in lines of pain and surprise as Frank came over to him, still covering him with the Peacemaker.
“Sorry you made me do that, Iowa,” Frank told the dying young man.
“How . . . how can you . . . be so fast?” the kid gasped. “You’re so . . . old!”
Before Frank could answer, the youngster’s head fell back and his eyes glazed over. He was gone.
Frank shook his head as he replaced the spent cartridge in the Colt. Then, he holstered the gun and turned back to the bar. The bartender stared wide-eyed at him.
The man who had recognized Frank earlier came up to him and said, “You haven’t slowed down any, Mr. Morgan. That was really something!”
“Yeah, it was something, all right,” Frank said. “A damned waste.”
The man didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
Frank didn’t want any more whiskey. He ordered a phosphate instead. While he was drinking it, the red-faced conductor rushed in, evidently drawn to the club car by reports of a gunshot. He stared at the body of the dead young man, then demanded loudly, “What the hell happened here?”
“Frank Morgan killed that kid.” The answer came from the man who had spoken to Frank. “The kid tried to draw on him. Morgan didn’t have any choice.”
The conductor glared at Frank. “I don’t like people getting killed on my train,” he snapped.
“I don’t much like killing them, here or anywhere else,” Frank replied coolly.
“Mister, when we get to Pittsburgh—”
“You’ll have that young fool’s body taken off and tended to,” Frank cut in. “There are plenty of witnesses here who’ll tell you that I shot him in self-defense, so don’t start making noises about having me kicked off the train. My ticket’s good all the way to Boston, and that’s where I intend to go.”
The conductor’s face paled, then grew even more flushed than normal. “Damn it, you can’t talk to me like that! The railroad may own this train, but I run it!”
Frank didn’t want to trade on the fact that he was a major stockholder in this railroad. He said instead, “I’ll do my best to see to it that there’s no more trouble while I’m on board. But I can’t promise anything other than that.”
“How about if I tell you that you’ve got to give me your gun until you get where you’re going?”
Frank shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
The conductor muttered profanely under his breath, but he didn’t push the issue. He called a couple of porters into the club car, and instead of baggage they toted the corpse out. But the baggage car was probably where the body would wind up until the train reached Pittsburgh, Frank reflected.
He wondered if word of this killing was going to get back to Helen Jeffries. If it did, he told himself, she sure as hell wouldn’t want to have anything else to do with him.
He didn’t see her again that night or the next day. But in the evening, as he ate supper by himself in the dining car, she appeared at his table and asked, “Do you mind if I join you, Mr. Morgan?”
Frank got to his feet and gestured politely at the empty chair on the other side of the table. “Help yourself,” he said. He added, “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Jeffries.”
Helen sat down. Frank settled back down in his chair. A waiter came over, and Helen gave him her order. Then she looked levelly at Frank and said, “I hear there was some trouble yesterday evening.”
“I’m sorry to say that’s true.” The young man’s body had been taken off the train in Pittsburgh. Frank assumed it would be shipped back to wherever he had come from for burial.
“It’s not often that there’s a gunfight in the middle of a club car.”
Frank squinted in thought. “First time I remember being involved in one.”
Helen laughed softly and said, “You’ve been involved in so many gunfights, you have to stop and think about where each of them took place? Or are there just too many to remember?”
“Some things a man doesn’t forget,” Frank said. He left it at that and let her draw her own conclusions.
“Well, from everything I’ve heard, this one wasn’t your fault. You had no choice but to defend yourself.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“So no one can hold that against you.” Her voice hardened a little as she went on. “No one knows better than I do that sometimes you have to do things you don’t particularly want to in order to survive.”
The waiter brought her food then, and for a few minutes she and Frank ate in companionable silence. Frank took his time with his meal so that they finished about the same time.
When they were done, he asked her, “Would you like to go get a glass of wine in
the club car?”
“You don’t mind going there . . . after what happened, I mean?”
He shrugged. “It’s just a railroad car. I don’t much believe in ghosts.”
“Actually, what I’d really like is some fresh air. These cars get so stuffy.”
Fresh air was usually in short supply on a train. The windows in the cars could be opened, but often that just let in more of the smoke from the locomotive. But sometimes, the air on the rear platform of the passenger car furthest away from the engine wasn’t too smoky.
Frank stood up and offered Helen his arm. She smiled and took it, and they strolled together out of the dining car. Frank was well aware that some folks were watching them, and probably whispering behind their hands that he was the infamous gunfighter who had killed a man in the club car the night before. He didn’t care, and Helen didn’t seem to either.
They made their way through the various cars until they reached the last of the passenger cars. As they stepped out onto the rear platform, Frank looked at the Pennsylvania landscape rolling past. The train would be reaching Philadelphia in another hour or so. Unlike the vast reaches of the West where night usually brought utter darkness, there were a lot of lights in these parts, from frequent farmhouses and little towns. That was just another reminder of how many people lived in the East as opposed to the West.
“You can smoke if you wish,” Helen said as she put her hands on the iron railing around the platform.
“I smoke a pipe every now and then, but it’s in my war bag,” Frank replied. “Anyway, we came back here to get away from the smoke, didn’t we?”
She looked over at him and smiled. “Is that the only reason we came back here, Mr. Morgan? Or should I call you Frank?”
He knew she wanted him to kiss her. He was about to do just that when the door into the car opened and a man stepped out onto the platform with them, followed closely by another man. The second man pulled the door shut behind them.
Frank looked at them, saw how their faces were set in hard, determined lines, and said, “Well, hell.”
“I’m sorry, Frank,” Helen said as she took a gun out of her bag and pressed the barrel against his back. “Please don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
Frank’s mind was racing. He had suspected right from the first that she might be one of Dutton’s agents, but she had been so forthcoming, so genuine, that his suspicions had been lulled. And then her reaction to finding out that he was a famous gunman had made it seem more than ever like she was telling the truth. She had fooled him, that was for damned sure.
“You’re no whore,” he said. “You’re an actress.”
“Whore, actress, it’s all the same thing. Women use all the tools at their disposal to get what they want, and I’m no different, Frank.”
“What you want is Dutton’s money.”
“I’m accustomed to a certain style of living. I’ll do whatever it takes to maintain that.”
“Stop yammering,” the first man said. He took a knife from under his coat. “Let’s kill him and get it over with.”
He drove the blade at Frank’s chest.
Frank had already figured out that they wouldn’t want any gunshots if they could help it. He was counting on that fact to make Helen hesitate just enough on the trigger as he twisted away from the knife. The heavy blade ripped at the side of his shirt rather than plunging into his body. At the same time, he struck behind him with an elbow, knocking Helen’s gun aside. The pistol went off with a wicked little crack, but the bullet sailed off harmlessly into the night.
Frank caught hold of the knife-wielder’s arm and grasped it tightly as he brought his knee up. The man howled in pain as Frank snapped a bone in his arm. The knife clattered to the floor of the platform.
The second man was armed with a knife too. He slashed at Frank’s head with it. Frank ducked under the blade. While he was down there, he hooked an arm behind Helen’s knees and jerked her legs out from under her. She sat down hard on the platform, the impact probably cushioned a little by the petticoats she wore. Moving fast before the second man could regain his balance, Frank lunged forward and drove a shoulder into his belly. That sent the man crashing back against the rear wall of the railroad car.
The man with the broken arm had fallen to his knees, and was cradling the injured limb against his body as he cursed bitterly. Frank snatched up the little pistol Helen had dropped and drew his own gun as he straightened. He put his back against the railing and used both guns to cover the three would-be assassins. “Reckon we’ll have to do some talking to the law when we get to Philadelphia,” he said.
Suddenly, with a squealing and screeching of brakes, the train gave a mighty lurch. Someone inside, maybe a confederate of these killers, must have pulled the emergency cord. Frank had time for that thought to flash through his head before the second man’s knife slashed across the back of his hand and made him drop the Peacemaker. At the same time, Helen reached up and grabbed hold of the pocket pistol and pulled it down. Frank found himself wrestling with both of them as he tried to keep the man from stabbing him. He locked the fingers of his bleeding hand around the wrist of the man’s knife hand. The train was still coming to a shuddering halt. The group of struggling figures swayed back and forth on the platform.
The pistol abruptly went off again with a sound like a popping balloon. Frank hadn’t pulled the trigger, so he knew that Helen must have as she tried to wrest the weapon from him. She hadn’t meant to, though, because she gasped and fell back, letting go of the gun and pressing both hands to her chest. Dark blood welled between her fingers.
Frank didn’t have time to worry about her. For one thing, she had been intent on murdering him, and for another, he still had his hands full defending himself against the man with the knife. Not only that, but the one with the broken arm got back into the fight by lunging against Frank’s legs and throwing him off balance. Frank suddenly found himself with nothing underneath him but empty air. In a desperate grab, he caught hold of the railing around the platform and swung out away from the car, with only the strong grip of his fingers saving him from a possibly deadly fall to the roadbed.
“Get him!” the man with the broken arm urged his partner. “Chop the bastard’s fingers off!”
Frank had no choice but to let go as the knife flashed toward his hand where it gripped the railing. He hit the ground hard, the rocks of the roadbed digging painfully into his flesh through his clothes. The train wasn’t going very fast by now, though, and he was able to break his momentum by rolling over and over. He came to a stop on his belly as the train finally shuddered to a halt a few yards away.
The little pistol he had taken away from Helen was still in his left fist.
Colt flame lit up the night as the man on the platform picked up Frank’s Peacemaker and fired it at him. The slug kicked up gravel only inches from Frank’s head. Shooting left-handed, with an unfamiliar gun, he sent two shots at the platform, aiming for the muzzle flash. The man cried out and slumped back against the door. He doubled over his belly where the small-caliber bullets had dug into him, then collapsed on the platform.
That left only Helen and the man with the broken arm, who lifted his good arm as Frank stood up and trotted toward the platform. “Don’t shoot, Morgan!” he cried. “I give up, damn it!”
Frank swung up on the platform, ignoring the pain from the battering his body had taken when he fell from the train. “Have you got a partner inside this car?” he demanded. “Who pulled that emergency cord?”
The answer came in the blast of a gun as the door was jerked open. Frank heard the wind-rip of the bullet as it went past his ear. He fired at the man who had just tried to kill him, and saw the hombre spin off his feet. As the man slumped to the floor of the car, half in and half out of the door, Frank was surprised to see that he was the man who had recognized him a couple of days earlier, the one who claimed to have seen him gun down the Rock Springs Kid in Cheyenne.
&nbs
p; Maybe that had been true, and maybe it hadn’t. Frank realized now that the man had been working with Helen and these other two. It was even possible that the man had goaded that kid from Iowa into picking a gunfight with him, just on the slender chance that the kid might have won. That would have been an easy way for the man to get rid of Frank without risking his own life.
But when that hadn’t worked, the four of them had gone back to their original plan, which had been for Helen to lure Frank to a spot where they could kill him quietly. He could see it all clearly now.
His Colt lay on the platform where it had been dropped by the man who had picked it up and tried to shoot him with it. Frank scooped it up now and checked on the two men he had gunned down. They were both dead.
Helen was still alive, though. She sat with her back pressed against the rear wall of the railroad car. The front of her gown was dark and sodden with blood. “Frank,” she said in a weak, ragged voice.
He knelt in front of her, at the same time keeping an eye on the man with the broken arm. All the fight seemed to have gone out of that gent, but Frank knew better than to risk his life on that assumption.
“What is it, Helen?” he asked.
“Am . . . am I going to die?”
“I’d say there’s a good chance of it,” he answered honestly. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“I . . . I’m sorry, Frank. For what it’s . . . w-worth . . . most of what I told you . . . was true. And I enjoyed . . . talking to you.”
“But yet you were willing to kill me.”
She smiled faintly. Her face was unmarked and as beautiful as ever despite the lines of strain on it.
“A girl does . . . what she has to . . . to get by.”
Frank didn’t think that was a very good explanation, but there was no point in arguing about it now, not with the rest of Helen’s life being numbered in minutes or even seconds. Instead, he said gently, “I’m sorry we couldn’t have met under different circumstances.”
“So . . . am I.” She lifted a bloodstained hand toward him. “Frank . . . be careful . . . Dutton will . . . stop at nothing. I know him . . . know how evil he can . . .”
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