Avenger

by William W. Johnstone

  All to protect him from one man.

  Frank smiled at that thought. He hoped he was dangerous enough to warrant all the precautions Dutton was taking.

  When he reached the settlement, he began slipping into the darkened buildings, on the off chance that he might find some allies or something else that could help him. The places were empty, though, and in most of them the air was thick with the dust of years of abandonment. A few of the cabins, the ones he had noted earlier, had been fixed up and people had obviously been living in them recently, but no one was there tonight. That strengthened Frank’s hunch that the citizens of Buckskin were now prisoners inside the saloon.

  Moving as silently as a cat, he slipped up to one of the buildings where a light showed. It was a squarish, squatty structure next to the barn, and Frank pegged it has having once been a blacksmith shop. Now, though, it was empty except for a rickety table, four chairs, and a bunk with a straw-tick mattress in one corner. A lantern sat on the table, illuminating the cards being used in the poker game going on. Four men were hunched in the chairs, studying their cards.

  Frank took in those details as he peered in through a window with most of its glass broken out. He had taken off his hat so that he could edge one eye past the window frame and get a look at what was going on inside. The men weren’t paying much attention to anything except their cards. Their conversation consisted of grunts and curses and clipped, profane comments. Frank hoped they would say something useful, but that didn’t seem likely.

  After a while, as one of the hands ended and the losers all threw in their cards disgustedly while the winner chuckled and raked in the pot, one of the men got to his feet and stretched. “Reckon I’ll step outside for a minute,” he announced.

  “Aw, hell, Floyd, just piss in that bucket over there,” another man said. “That’s what it’s there for.”

  “Who said I needed to piss?” Floyd asked in an aggrieved tone. “Maybe I just want to stretch my legs and get some fresh air.”

  “Floyd’s bashful,” another of the hardcases gibed. “He don’t like to haul it out around anybody.”

  “Bet he’d haul it out for that Woodford gal,” the fourth gunman said, then snickered.

  “Lord, yes,” Floyd said. “You reckon Dutton’ll let us have a little fun with her once this business with Morgan is all over?”

  “He’ll probably be so grateful to anybody who kills Morgan that he’ll let the fella do just about anything he wants. The way I hear it, Morgan gunned down ten men back in Boston, and they were tough hombres too.”

  There had only been seven of the hired killers at Dutton’s estate, not ten, Frank thought—not that it really mattered.

  “Aw, they was Eastern dudes,” Floyd scoffed. “One of us is just as tough as ten of them any day.” He hitched his trousers up. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “That’s all right, Floyd, you go water the flowers. We’ll just count all the dinero we’ve won from you tonight.”

  As he crouched in the darkness outside the window, Frank thought about what he had just overheard. He hadn’t learned much, but the gunmen had mentioned the name Woodford. Frank recalled that Woodford had been the name of the man who owned the Lucky Lizard mine. Woodford must have stayed in Buckskin when the silver petered out, perhaps in hopes of finding another rich vein.

  Floyd’s boots clumped on the hard ground as he circled the shack and headed for some trees. Frank left the window and moved along soundlessly behind the gunman, drawing his bowie from its sheath as he did so. When Floyd reached the edge of the trees, he stopped and unbuttoned his fly. Frank waited until the hired gun was in the act of relieving himself before he stepped closer, looped his left arm around the man’s neck, and pressed the tip of the blade against his back, pushing hard enough so that it went through Floyd’s shirt and poked painfully into his flesh.

  “Don’t fight and don’t yell,” Frank warned him in a low, menacing tone as Floyd gasped and stiffened in surprise, “because if you do, I’ll slice that black heart of yours clean in two, you son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 30

  Inside the Silver Baron Saloon, Charles Dutton sat at a table in a rear corner and mopped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief he pulled from the breast pocket of his coat. The handkerchief was a fancy one, monogrammed and everything. There was a time when Dutton had taken pride in such elegance. Now he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except wishing that Frank Morgan was dead.

  Dutton looked up and motioned to one of the men standing at the bar, drinking. The man’s name was Ed Ringgold, and he was the top man among the gun crew that Dutton had hired. Ringgold walked over to the table, the spurs strapped to his boots clinking musically with every step he took.

  “Sit down,” Dutton snapped. He pushed the half-full bottle of whiskey across the table. Ringgold had brought his empty glass with him. He picked up the bottle, splashed liquor into it.

  “Thanks, Boss,” he said quietly.

  “Do you think he’ll come tonight?” Dutton asked. “Do you think Morgan will be here?”

  “You’ve been asking that question every night for the last three nights,” Ringgold pointed out. “I don’t know, Mr. Dutton. But I do know you don’t have to worry about him. You’ve got twenty-five men you’ve paid—and paid well—to make sure that Morgan can’t hurt you.”

  “He’s killed that many men before. More than that, a lot more. He may be the most dangerous man on the face of the earth.”

  Ringgold shook his head. “Morgan is just one man, and he’s as human as anybody else. No matter how good you are, there’s always somebody better. We can handle him.”

  Dutton picked up his own glass and tossed back the whiskey that was still in it. “I hope so,” he muttered. “I damn sure hope so.”

  He looked around the saloon’s big main room. In addition to Ringgold, there were half-a-dozen other gunmen here and more upstairs, guarding the prisoners and keeping watch from the windows. The first thing Dutton’s men had done when they rode into Buckskin was to bring everyone in the ghost town to the saloon. Dutton hadn’t known how many inhabitants to expect, but he had been surprised to find that fifteen people currently lived here. He had thought there would be two or three maybe, old prospectors who believed that there was still silver to be found in the area.

  That was true of Thomas Woodford, who owned one of the played-out mines, the Lucky Lizard. Dutton had known about him. But he hadn’t known that Woodford’s daughter Diana would be here too. A beautiful young woman was an unnecessary distraction, and Dutton almost wished that Diana Woodford had gotten away when she tried to make her ill-advised escape. But of course that couldn’t be allowed. If the woman had gotten away, she might have gone to the authorities and brought back a posse of meddlesome lawmen. Dutton didn’t want any interference with his plans.

  Once Morgan was dead, everyone who lived in Buckskin would die as well, and Dutton intended to see to it that the ghost town was burned to the ground. Flames would consume any evidence that could ever be used against him.

  Then he could put this whole ugly incident behind him.

  In addition to Woodford and his daughter, the other inhabitants of Buckskin included the handful of stubborn prospectors Dutton had expected, plus several people who had had businesses here when the town was a thriving community, a lunger who had come west for the dry, clean air of the high country, and some sort of college professor. There were three women besides Diana Woodford, the madam who had run one of the settlement’s whorehouses plus two of the girls who had worked for her. Of course, they weren’t really girls anymore; all three females were approaching middle age. But they were still attractive enough to be unwanted distractions too. Dutton knew that his men wanted to molest them, along with the Woodford girl, but he had given strict orders that the women were to be left alone until after Frank Morgan was dead.

  Then, of course, Dutton wouldn’t care what happened to the women. The gunmen could do what
ever they wanted, as long as all the witnesses wound up dead and the ghost town was in flames.

  In addition to the men inside the saloon, a dozen more were scattered around the town and several outriders were patrolling the slopes of the valley. Dutton knew that Morgan might manage to slip into the settlement despite those precautions, but if he did, he would find quite a warm reception waiting for him, a hot-lead reception, in fact. Ringgold was right, Dutton told himself. Not even Frank Morgan could stand up to the odds that were arrayed against him now.

  Dutton poured himself another drink and said confidently, “I hope Morgan does show up tonight. He’s plagued me for long enough, damn him to hell. I’m ready for him to die.”

  “What’ll you do once he’s dead?” Ringgold asked.

  “Why, I’ll go back to Boston and resume my life, of course. I’m an important man. I have many responsibilities.”

  “Got more folks to fleece out of their money, eh?”

  Dutton felt his face grow warm with anger. The nerve of Ringgold, to speak to him that way! Why, if he didn’t need the man, and those other hardcases, to protect him from Morgan, he wouldn’t even associate with riffraff like them.

  “You’re being well paid,” he snapped. “Just concentrate on your job . . . killing Frank Morgan.”

  “D-don’t kill me, mister!” Floyd stammered. “Please don’t kill me!”

  Frank kept the pressure on the bowie knife so the gunman wouldn’t forget that it was there. “Take it easy,” he said. “Cooperate with me and you don’t have to die.”

  “I’ll do anything you want, mister.” Floyd swallowed hard. “You’re him, ain’t you? You’re Morgan.”

  “I’m Morgan,” Frank confirmed. “So you know I don’t have a lot to lose. I want Dutton, and I don’t care who or how many I have to kill to get to him.” That wasn’t strictly true; Frank did care, of course—but Floyd didn’t have to know that. “Where is he?”

  “In . . . in the saloon, I reckon. He hardly ever leaves there.”

  “How many men are with him?”

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know for sure. Eight or ten, maybe more.”

  “The people who live here,” Frank said. “Are they in there too?”

  Floyd jerked his head in a nod that bumped his chin against the arm Frank held around his neck. “Y-yeah. Dutton’s got ’em locked in the rooms upstairs that the whores used to use.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen, something like that.”

  Frank was surprised to hear that Buckskin had so many citizens these days. He could find out the reason for that later, though, if he lived through this night.

  “What about the rest of you?” he asked. “How many gunmen are there, and where are all of them?”

  “There’s a couple dozen, I guess. About that anyway. I never counted everybody to make sure.”

  “I know Dekker and Hansen. Who else is here?”

  Floyd licked his lips nervously. “Ed Ringgold is the ramrod. You know him?”

  “Heard of him,” Frank said curtly. Nothing he had ever heard about the man was any good. “Go on.”

  “Let’s see . . . there’s Morg Holmes and Richter and Fox-brick . . . Shoemaker . . . Spurlock . . . the Tacoma Kid . . . Walls and Barrett . . .” Floyd kept naming names, some of which Frank recognized and some he didn’t. But the ones he knew were all bad men, just the sort he would have expected a snake like Dutton to hire. Finally, Floyd said, “That may not be all of ’em, but it’s all I can remember. They’re scattered around the town, two here, three or four there. I don’t know where everybody is.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Frank said.

  “You swear you ain’t gonna kill me?”

  “Not unless I have to.”

  Suddenly, the door of the old blacksmith shop opened and one of the other gunmen stepped out. Frank pulled Floyd deeper into the shadows under the trees.

  “Hey, Floyd, you about done?” the man called. “We want to get the game going again.”

  “Tell him to wait,” Frank grated in Floyd’s ear. He put a little more pressure on the knife for emphasis.

  “Just hold your damn horses!” Floyd yelled. “I’ll be there when I can.”

  The other gunman made a crude joke about Floyd’s bowels, then went back inside.

  “Anything else you can tell me?” Frank asked.

  “Just that if you let me get my horse, Morgan, I’ll ride outta here and never look back! I don’t want no part of this. I got nothin’ against you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have taken Dutton’s money,” Frank said coldly.

  Floyd began to tremble and cry, certain that Frank was about to plunge the long, heavy blade of the bowie into his vitals. Instead, with one swift movement, Frank pulled the knife away, lifted it, and slammed the knob of bone on the end of the handle against Floyd’s skull, just behind the gunman’s right ear. Floyd went limp and sagged against the arm pressed around his neck. The blow had knocked him cold.

  Frank lowered the unconscious man to the ground. He took Floyd’s belt off and used it to tie his hands tightly behind his back. Floyd’s bandanna served as a gag. Frank left him there, confident that Floyd wouldn’t be able to interfere with the rest of the night’s activities.

  He moved back into the trees and waited. Another five minutes went by, and then once again, the door of the old blacksmith shop opened and one of the gunmen stepped out. “Hey, Floyd!” he called, and Frank recognized the voice as belonging to the man who had come out before. “Are you all right?”

  But Floyd couldn’t answer, and after a moment the other gunnie stalked toward the trees, muttering angrily.

  He stopped just before he got there and drew his gun, evidently realizing that something might actually be wrong. They were here in Buckskin to wait for trouble, after all. “Floyd?” he said softly. “Damn it, you’d better answer me if you’re able.”

  When no answer came, the man swung around quickly toward the blacksmith shop. Frank knew he was about to call to the other two men for help. Before that could happen, Frank drew back his arm and let fly with the knife, throwing it as hard as he could.

  The blade struck the hired killer in the back, burying itself deep. The man staggered forward under the impact. Frank caught up with him an instant later, reaching around him to clamp one hand over his mouth and grab the man’s gun with the other. His fingers closed over the weapon’s cylinder so that it couldn’t turn and fire. Frank used his body to drive the knife even deeper into the gunman’s body. The hombre spasmed a couple of times and then went limp. Frank eased him to the ground and felt for a pulse. There was none.

  That made two down, Frank thought grimly, one dead and one tied up so that he couldn’t cause any trouble.

  Just twenty or so ruthless killers to go.

  Frank dragged the body into the woods. He wondered, if he waited, whether the other two in the blacksmith shop would come out to check on their missing companions. Maybe he could get them too.

  But after a few minutes, one of the men stepped outside and called, “Rankin? Floyd? What the hell’s goin’ on here?” When there was no answer, he turned and conferred with the man who was still inside the building. Then he hurried toward the saloon, obviously intent on warning Dutton and Ringgold that something was going on.

  Frank picked up his Winchester. Since the cat was about to be let out of the bag anyway, he didn’t see any point in worrying about stealth anymore. He lifted the rifle to draw a bead on the man hurrying toward the saloon.

  But before he could press the trigger, a hand came out of the darkness and pushed the barrel of the rifle toward the ground. “Don’t shoot,” a harsh voice whispered. “There’s a better way.”

  Chapter 31

  Frank was astounded that anybody could sneak up on him like that without him hearing, but he didn’t have time to think about that. He whirled toward the stranger, his hand dropping toward the butt of the Colt on his hip.

&n
bsp; The metallic ratcheting of a gun’s hammer being cocked stopped him.

  “Hold on there, Morgan!” the gravelly voice said. “I’m a friend, damn it.”

  With his gun still in the holster, Frank asked, “How do you know who I am?”

  “I been skulkin’ around here for the past three or four days, tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on,” the stranger replied. “I been close enough to listen to them gunslicks talk, and they say they’re waitin’ for a man named Morgan to show up so’s they can kill him for that fancy-pants fella. I reckon you must be him.”

  “That’s right,” Frank admitted. “My name’s Frank Morgan.”

  “The gunfighter?” Without waiting for an answer, the stranger went on. “I done heard of you. Folks say you’re as fast as Smoke Jensen or Matt Bodine, maybe even a mite faster.” He chuckled. “Hard to outdraw a gun that’s already drawn, though, ain’t it?”

  “If you’re really a friend, you can stop pointing that hogleg at me.” Frank’s eyes were keen enough to make out the rangy shape of the man, even in the shadows. He saw the big revolver in the stranger’s hand too.

  The man hesitated, but only for a second. Then, he carefully lowered the hammer and holstered the gun. “This here’s an old Walker Colt. A cap-and-ball job I didn’t ever have converted to percussion. I been carryin’ it nigh on to fifty years and it ain’t never let me down yet.”

  “Who in blazes are you?” Frank demanded.

  “They call me Catamount Jack.” The stranger gestured toward the saloon. “And judgin’ by the commotion that’s brewin’, we’d best fade outta here for a spell.”