The Last Gunfighter: Killing Ground

by William W. Johnstone

  “Well, all right then,” the old-timer said. “Didn’t mean to sound proddy. I just wanted to know where we stand.”

  “Now you know,” Frank said. “Anyway, I don’t intend to be gone any longer than I have to. I’ll ride as long as I can before it gets too dark to travel, then start out again in the morning at first light. Ought to reach Carson City by midday. If I can get in to see the governor right away and convince him to appoint a new judge to replace Judge Grampis, maybe we can start the next morning. That’ll put us back here day after tomorrow.”

  “Assumin’ you don’t run into any trouble,” Jack said. “Like more o’ them no-good bushwhackers tryin’ to kill you.”

  “I’m hoping I can get out of town without Brighton finding out about it right away. If I’ve got a good enough start, Brighton’s gunnies won’t be able to catch up to me.”

  Jack squinted in thought. “No, but once they figure out that you’re gone, they can lay for you on your way back.”

  That same dangerous possibility had occurred to Frank, but there was nothing he could do about it. “I reckon the judge and I will just have to take our chances.”

  “You could take a bunch of heavily armed men with you,” Phil suggested. “You have plenty of friends here in Buckskin who would be glad to help out, Marshal.”

  “And I won’t put any of them at risk if I don’t have to,” Frank answered without hesitation. “Besides, one or two men can move faster and be harder to trail than a whole bunch.”

  Jack grunted. “Yeah, I reckon that’s true, all right.”

  Frank packed a few supplies for the journey. As he did, he told his deputies, “I’ve talked to Mr. Turnbuckle and told him to stay here in town, with lots of people around. I’m convinced that Brighton would like to see him dead, too. That would be one more threat to his plan eliminated. But he can’t afford to have Turnbuckle bushwhacked right out in the open. Keep an eye on him, though, just in case.”

  Jack and Phil nodded. The older deputy said, “Don’t worry, Frank. We won’t let anything happen to the little fella.”

  With that taken care of, Frank sent Jack down to the livery stable with instructions for Amos Hillman to saddle up Stormy and bring him to the back of the marshal’s office and jail in half an hour. Goldy was younger and perhaps stronger, but on a possibly perilous trek like the one he was facing, Frank wanted the more reliable Stormy as his mount. Stormy had never let him down during times of trouble and never would.

  Frank had the two deputies out watching for any signs of Brighton, O’Hara, or anybody else who looked suspicious when Hillman delivered Stormy in the alley behind the jail. Dog was with them, and the big cur didn’t seem bothered by anything, which Frank took as a good sign. He hung the bag of provisions and ammunition from the saddle, shook hands quickly with the liveryman, and said, “Thanks, Amos,” then swung up onto Stormy’s back. He lifted the reins and sent the big stallion cantering toward the trees at the edge of the settlement.

  With Dog trotting alongside him, Frank rode west from Buckskin. Leaving town in that direction was a pretty transparent attempt at subterfuge, he thought, but it might work to throw off anybody who saw him heading that way. He didn’t start circling back to the north until he was several miles out of town. This would make the trip longer, but possibly safer.

  Coming back would be a different story. If he could convince the governor to appoint a new judge—and if he could convince that new judge to risk his neck by coming down here—then Frank intended to hustle back to Buckskin by the shortest, fastest route possible.

  As he rode through the rugged but beautiful Nevada landscape, it was easy to forget the seriousness of the chore he had taken on and just enjoy the spectacular scenery. Slopes covered with the deep, dark green of pine forests rose around him, and towering over them were the craggy, snowcapped peaks of the mountains. Icy, fast-flowing streams cut deep ravines through the hills. Flowers dotted lushly grassed mountain meadows. Frank saw several moose loping across one of those meadows, and he spotted a bear poking its paw into the rotten trunk of a fallen pine. An eagle wheeled through the blue sky overhead.

  Yes, it was easy to forget why he was here and what he was doing, Frank thought—but he didn’t allow himself to do so. That would be risking not only his own life but the futures of Tip and Diana Woodford, and possibly the life of Claudius Turnbuckle. Dex Brighton had committed himself to his effort to take over the Lucky Lizard, and Frank knew he wasn’t going to stop at anything to get what he wanted. Frank had run into men like that plenty of times before, and sooner or later it nearly always came down to gunplay and killing.

  This time, there was a chance that things might be settled in court instead of with powder smoke. Frank was going to hold on to that hope…

  But every instinct in his body told him that the guns hadn’t fallen silent for good.

  Chapter 21

  Dex Brighton was sitting in an armchair in his hotel room, smoking a cheroot, when a soft knock sounded on the door. He slipped his hand inside his coat and curled his fingers around the butt of the little pistol he carried there as he called out, “Come in.”

  He relaxed and let go of the gun as the door opened and Desmond O’Hara strolled in. The phony lawyer was trying to look nonchalant, Brighton thought, but worry lurked in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You read me too well, my friend,” O’Hara said. “Frank Morgan is gone.”

  Brighton sat up straighter. “Gone? What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said,” O’Hara replied, spreading his hands. “I was talking to Mason in the Top-Notch a short time ago, and he said that someone told him Amos Hillman delivered Morgan’s horse to him in the alley behind the jail this afternoon. That alarmed me, so I started asking around. It turns out no one has seen Morgan since that time.”

  Brighton slammed a fist down on the little table beside the chair. “Damn it! He’s stolen a march on us.”

  “Maybe he just left town and doesn’t intend to come back.”

  Brighton shook his head. “Not Morgan. Not that stubborn son of a bitch.” The wheels of his brain were turning over rapidly. “He’s gone to Carson City to bring back another judge.”

  Brighton gave voice to the conclusion even as he reached it, but as soon as he heard his own words he knew they were right. That was just the sort of thing Morgan would do. In the normal course of events, the death of Judge Grampis would have delayed the trial a couple of weeks, perhaps even longer. But with Morgan taking a direct hand like this, he might be back from Carson City in a matter of days.

  A glance out the window told Brighton that night had fallen. “When did Morgan leave?”

  O’Hara shrugged and said, “All I know for sure is what Mason told me. Hillman took Morgan’s horse over to the jail around four o’clock.”

  “That means he’s had several hours’ head start.” Brighton shook his head. “Morgan’s been a hunted man for most of his life. He’ll know all the tricks of throwing off pursuit. Sending Stample and the others after him now would be a waste of time. They’d never catch him.”

  “If Morgan plans to fetch another judge,” O’Hara observed, “he’ll have to come back to Buckskin for the ploy to do any good.”

  Brighton jerked his head in a nod. “Exactly. And that will be our chance to stop him. I’ll have men watching all the trails into Buckskin, just in case Morgan tries to circle around and come in from another direction.”

  “Do you have that many men?”

  A cold, thin smile curved Brighton’s lips. “I told Stample several days ago to send for reinforcements. They’ll be coming from all over, as soon as the word gets around. With any luck, by the end of the week, I’ll have between thirty and forty men working for me.”

  “And just how do you intend to pay them?” O’Hara asked. “I’m willing to work on a percentage basis, because I’ve seen you pull off audacious schemes before, Dex. But not all of those gunmen will know you as well as I
do.”

  “They know Stample, though, and they trust him,” Brighton replied. “As much as men like that trust anybody, I mean.” He lifted his almost forgotten cheroot to his lips and puffed on it. “Don’t worry, Desmond. When the big payoff comes, there’ll be enough loot to go around. You have my word on that.”

  “And in the meantime…?”

  “In the meantime, since we can’t do anything about Morgan until he tries to return to Buckskin, we’ll rid ourselves of another obstacle.” Brighton’s fingers tightened on the cheroot. “We’re going to do something about Claudius Turnbuckle.”

  It was difficult for Luther not to share the reasons for his excitement with Woodford and Diana after he went through the replies to his telegrams, but he didn’t want to get their hopes up too much just yet. There were still too many things that could go wrong with his strategy…such as the fact that a great deal of it depended on information he would have to uncover during the trial. If that didn’t work out…

  Luther preferred not to think about that.

  Taking the telegrams with him, he returned to the hotel and closed himself up in his room to go over them again. He sat at the small table in the room with some paper and a pencil and began making notes for the brief he would submit to the judge. That was assuming, of course, that Frank Morgan would be successful in his attempt to return to Buckskin in fairly short order with a jurist to hear the case.

  Luther was so caught up in his work that he didn’t really notice time passing until the rumbling of his stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten for quite a while. He glanced out the window and saw that night had fallen. Morgan should be well on his way to Carson City by now.

  With a sigh, Luther pushed his penciled notes away from him and stretched in the hard wooden chair. He stood up and reached for his hat. He would go downstairs, get a bite to eat in the dining room, and then come back up here to work some more on his trial preparations.

  His fingers were cramping a little from the writing he had scrawled across several sheets of paper. Because of that, his hat slipped out of his grasp and fell to the floor beside his chair. He bent to retrieve it.

  At that same moment, something crashed through the window, spraying glass over the floor and the foot of the bed. Even with that racket, Luther heard what sounded like a whisper just above his head. He had been in this frontier settlement long enough to realize that a bullet had almost parted his hair just now.

  Some of the unbroken glass in the window shattered as another bullet punched through it. Luther was still moving, though, so the second slug missed, too. In a continuation of the move that had saved his life, he threw himself to the floor, crying out as the jolting impact sent pain shooting through his injured arm.

  The blasted thing would never heal up if people kept shooting at him, he thought wildly.

  He rolled over a couple of times, putting the bed between himself and the window. More shots slammed, somewhere in the night. Luther thought they sounded like they were coming from a Winchester, but he was hardly an expert in such things. Anyway, he couldn’t hear the shots that clearly, since his own pulse was hammering in his head like a thunderstorm.

  Plaster showered down from the wall in a couple of places where it was stuck by bullets, and then the lamp suddenly shattered. Blazing kerosene sprayed across the table. As the flames licked out hungrily toward the piles of telegrams and notes Luther had left there, he cried, “No!” and lunged to his feet without even thinking about the fact that he was exposing himself once more to the person who was trying to kill him. The information in the telegrams could be replaced, and the notes could be recreated, but Luther wasn’t thinking about that at the moment. All he saw was his case going up in flames.

  He was reminded of the danger a second later when a bullet tugged at the tail of his coat as it passed close by his hip. He was moving too fast to stop, though. He threw himself at the table and grabbed the papers. A couple of them were already burning around the edges. He slapped out the flames.

  The garish, madly leaping light from the fire was probably what saved him, making it difficult for the ambusher to draw an accurate bead on him. Another slug whistled past Luther’s head as he gathered up the papers. By now, the wall behind the table and the table itself were burning. Smoke began to fill the room, stinging his nose and throat and half-blinding him. Luther used both arms, ignoring the pain in the wounded one, to clutch the precious documents to his chest as he stumbled toward the door. After what seemed like an eternity of fumbling with the knob, he finally managed to throw the door open and half-lunged, half-fell out into the corridor, yelling hoarsely, “Fire! Fire!”

  No cry struck as much fear into the hearts of Westerners, who had heard all the stories about entire towns burning to the ground. Some of them had lived through such disasters. Several hotel guests had already smelled the smoke and now came hurrying out of their rooms. They took up the cry of alarm.

  Luther tripped and went to one knee, then struggled back to his feet and stumbled toward the stairs. He still had belongings in the burning room, but nothing as important as what he carried with him. People crowded around him as the other frightened guests tried to escape the blaze, too.

  He felt a sudden pain in his side and nearly fell again. A man caught hold of his arm and steadied him. “You all right, mister?” the man asked as they reached the staircase.

  “No,” Luther managed to say. “Can…can you give me a hand down to the lobby?”

  “Sure. Folks got to stick together when all hell breaks loose.”

  With the man’s help, Luther managed to get downstairs, where he stumbled outside with the other fleeing guests. Buckskin had a volunteer firefighting company. Its members were rushing into the hotel as the terrified guests were rushing out. A crowd of hotel guests and onlookers gathered in the street to watch as the firemen tried to save the place. A horse-drawn wagon filled with barrels of water careened to a halt in front of the hotel, and a bucket brigade was soon set up. Other volunteers used buckets to refill the barrels from the creek at the edge of town. The line of them stretched all along the street.

  Luther’s head spun dizzily. He shoved the papers he had saved from the fire into his sling, then pressed his hand against his side where the pain had struck. When he pulled it away, he saw that his palm was coated with blood. It looked even more crimson than usual in the light from the fire. For a second, Luther thought he was going to pass out as he realized that he had been wounded again. He struggled to hang on to consciousness.

  “Mr. Turnbuckle!”

  The voice made Luther look around. He recognized Tip Woodford. Close behind Woodford were Catamount Jack and another man wearing a deputy’s badge. That must be Phil Noonan, Morgan’s new deputy, Luther recalled.

  Woodford gripped his arm. “Are you all right, Mr. Turnbuckle?”

  Luther shook his head and held up his blood-covered hand. “No, I…I don’t think I am,” he said. “In fact, I seem to be—”

  That was all he got out before his knees buckled and he felt himself falling.

  “Son of a gun!” Catamount Jack exclaimed as Claudius Turnbuckle crumpled to the street in front of him. He knelt beside the lawyer and pulled back his coat, revealing a large bloodstain on Turnbuckle’s shirt. “This hombre’s hurt! We better carry him down to Doc Garland’s.”

  He was about to grab Turnbuckle under the arms and tell Phil Noonan to get the lawyer’s feet when Turnbuckle roused enough to clutch at his sleeve. “J-Jack,” Turnbuckle muttered. “Jack…listen to me…”

  Jack leaned closer. “I’m right here, Mr. Turnbuckle. What’re you tryin’ to tell me?”

  “Somebody…shot at me…through the window…tried to…kill me…”

  Jack had to struggle to make out the words over all the commotion going on, but he heard them clearly enough to understand what Turnbuckle was saying. The words didn’t come as all that much of a surprise either, considering the violence that had plagued Buckskin and the surr
ounding area recently. Ever since the arrival of Dex Brighton, in fact.

  “Bullet broke…the lamp…” Turnbuckle was saying. His voice was getting weaker, though, as consciousness kept trying to slip away from him.

  Jack glanced toward the hotel. He didn’t know if the firefighting company would be able to save the building or not, but they were already doing all they could and didn’t particularly need his help. There was something else he could do, though.

  He could try to find the bushwhacking son of a bitch who’d taken those shots at Turnbuckle and accidentally started the fire.

  “Tip, grab hold of Mr. Turnbuckle here. You, too, Phil. Take him down to the doc’s and have Garland see how bad he’s hurt. From the sounds of what he told me, he may be shot again.”

  “Shot?” Woodford said. “You mean Brighton actually tried to kill him right here in town?”

  Jack straightened from his crouch and put his hand on the butt of the big revolver at his waist. “That’s what I figure on findin’ out.”

  Tip and Phil got hold of Turnbuckle and carefully lifted him, then started off toward the doctor’s office with the wounded man between them. Jack turned to study the hotel. He knew which room was Turnbuckle’s, and when he studied the window now he saw that the glass in it was shattered. That could have been caused by heat from the fire.

  But it could have been caused by shots being fired through it, too, before the blaze ever broke out.

  Jack turned his head to look across the street. Directly opposite the hotel was Patterson’s Hardware Store, a one-story building with a false front. It was closed at this time of night, which meant that somebody could have climbed onto its roof, hidden behind that false front, and shot almost straight into Turnbuckle’s room. Jack grated a curse. He had promised Frank Morgan that he would look after the lawyer, and then he’d let Turnbuckle sit up there like a target in a shooting gallery.