But get over it they would. He was equally sure of that. These were frontier folk, and they had the sort of steel in them that might bend occasionally but never break.
The next day after the big dustup at the Lazy F, Frank was sitting in the Mogollon Saloon with Tom Horn and Mayor Donohue. Hightower’s widow had already said that she was going to keep the place open, in honor of her husband’s memory. Down the street, the Verde Saloon was locked up. Somebody had seen Jonah Speckler, who had worked there as a bartender, riding out of town before dawn with a good-sized carpetbag lashed to his saddle. Nobody knew when or if he would ever be back.
“I was just down at Jasper’s place,” Donohue said. He had come into the saloon a few minutes earlier and joined Frank and Horn at the table. “It looks like Caleb Glover is going to make it. He’s gettin’ stronger now instead of weaker. Of course, his cowboyin’ days are over. But Jasper plans to make him some special crutches and maybe a wheelchair, so he can still get around. Mary Elizabeth says once they’re married, he can help her run the café.”
“What about that fella Buckston?” Horn asked.
Frank took a sip of the coffee he had ordered instead of a drink. “I rode out to the Lazy F this morning to check on things. Buckston’s doing fine except for an aching head. Laura Flynn is going to make him take it easy for a few days, but I suspect he’ll be up and around before too long, running the ranch for her again.”
“Reckon there’s gonna be weddin’ bells for them, too?” Donohue asked with a twinkle in his eye.
Frank chuckled. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
Horn downed the whiskey in his glass and said, “Well, Buckey O’Neill ought to be here with a posse sometime late this afternoon, and since the range war’s over I reckon that’ll be the end o’ my job as special deputy.”
“Sheriff O’Neill would probably keep you on as a regular deputy,” Donohue suggested.
Horn shook his head. “Not interested. I’ve done enough lawin’ to suit me for a while. Thought I’d drift on up Wyoming or Montana way. Always lots goin’ on up there.”
“A lot of trouble, you mean,” Frank said.
Horn smiled. “You and me, it seems to follow us, don’t it, Morgan?”
Frank just shrugged. He had long since come to accept his destiny. He was one of the last of the truly fast guns. It was something he would never escape until he drew his last breath.
“So,” Horn said, turning to Donohue, “you used to be a general. . . .”
Two figures in the doorway caught Frank’s attention as his companions continued to talk. A pair of women stood there, looking over the batwings into the saloon as if searching for someone. One was in her forties, the other around twenty, and both had red hair, long and flowing on the younger one, short and touched with gray on the older one. The resemblance between them was such that Frank knew right away they were mother and daughter.
And to his surprise, he realized that they were both looking straight at him.
“Excuse me, boys,” he muttered as he got to his feet and left the table. He walked over to the saloon entrance. The women moved back onto the boardwalk. Frank stepped outside and joined them, removing his hat as he did so. He said, “Good afternoon, ladies. Something I can do for you?”
“Are you Mr. Frank Morgan?” the older woman said. Frank thought she was very attractive, although her daughter was more spectacularly beautiful. “Mr. Culverhouse told us we might find you here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Have we met?”
“No. My name is Alma Blake. This is my daughter Tess. We just came down here from Flagstaff.”
The names were familiar, but it took Frank a second to place them. Then he said to Alma Blake, “That young cowboy Rufe . . . he was your son.”
She smiled sadly and nodded. “And Tess’s brother. We received a letter from Howard Flynn about what happened to Rufe, and how you were the last one to speak to him. We came down here to visit his grave, and to talk to you.”
“Mrs. Blake, Miss Blake, I’m mighty sorry for your loss,” Frank said solemnly as he held his hat in front of him. “If it’s any comfort, I can tell you that Rufe was thinking of both of you there at the end. He seemed like a mighty fine young man.”
“He was,” Tess Blake said. “He was the finest brother anybody could want.”
Her mother held out a hand to Frank. “Thank you, Mr. Morgan. I’m grateful that my boy didn’t have to be alone when he . . . when he died.” Frank took her hand gently. “If you ever find yourself in Flagstaff,” Alma Blake went on, “please stop and say hello. We run a boardinghouse there.”
Frank nodded. “I’ll sure do that, ma’am,” he lied. He had no intention of ever stopping in to see the two of them, despite the fact that Tess was lovely enough to take the breath away from any man and Alma’s more mature beauty was even more attractive to a man of Frank’s years. But to them he would always be the man who was there when Rufe was killed, and he didn’t figure they would need reminding of that.
He shook hands with Tess, too, and then put his hat on and stood there to watch them walk away. They got into a buggy that was parked in front of Jasper Culverhouse’s blacksmith shop and drove off, heading out of San Remo on the trail that led to Prescott and on north to Flagstaff.
“Lovely ladies,” a voice said from Frank’s right.
He turned his head and saw a man he had never seen before standing on the boardwalk about ten feet away. The stranger was tall and lean and dressed in black, and he had a small, black, leather-bound book of some sort in his left hand. He wrote something in it with a stub of pencil, and as the pencil moved, the man spoke the words aloud.
“Frank Morgan.”
“That’s my name,” Frank said with a frown. “What business is it of yours, mister?”
“Just making a note of it.” The man closed the book and slipped it and the pencil into a pocket inside his long black coat. “I like to keep track of these things.”
Frank’s nerves tingled. He knew instinctively that this hombre was trouble. “What things?” he asked.
“Oh—” The man’s hand swept the long coat back. “Just the men I’ve killed.”
The same hand that had swept the coat back dropped to the butt of the gun on his hip with blinding speed. The gun was out and up in less than the blink of an eye.
But that wasn’t fast enough. Frank’s Colt was already leveled. It roared before the stranger could pull the trigger. He had never even seen Frank draw.
The bullet slammed into the stranger’s chest, lifting him off his feet. He crashed down on his back on the boardwalk, his unfired gun skittering away. A deep cough wracked him. Blood welled from his mouth.
As Horn and Donohue burst out of the saloon to see what the shot was about, Frank stepped to the stranger’s side and stood over him. He had never seen this hombre before, but he knew what sort of man he was—a hired killer. Keeping the Colt trained on him, Frank said, “Who sent you after me? Who wants me dead?”
The dying man’s mouth worked and more blood came out, and for a second Frank was afraid that life would flicker out before the man could answer. But then the stranger rasped, “D-Dutton . . . Charles . . . Dutt—”
That was all he got out before he died, but it was enough. The name hit Frank like a punch in the gut. Charles Dutton had been one of Vivian Browning’s attorneys. Vivian, Frank’s first wife and his son Conrad’s mother. The woman who had been cut down by an outlaw bullet because she’d been betrayed by a man she trusted, her own lawyer, Charles Dutton.
Dutton was back East somewhere. Frank had intended to find him someday and settle the score for Vivian, one of the few women he had truly loved in his life. But other things had gotten in the way and Dutton was still alive.
Alive, and obviously worried enough about Frank Morgan seeking vengeance to hire a killer to go after him. Frank leathered his iron and knelt beside the dead man, reached inside the coat, and dug out the small, leather-bound book. The man had bled on
it as he died. Frank flipped through it, finding page after page of names, mostly men but a few women, too. And these were all people the stranger had killed, Frank recalled. At least, that was what the snake-blooded bastard had claimed.
“Who was he, Morgan?” Horn asked as Frank straightened.
“I don’t know,” Frank answered honestly. He dropped the book on the planks next to the dead man. “He didn’t tell me his name.” The stranger had taken pains to list all his victims, yet he had died with his own name unknown.
“But why did he try to kill you?” Donohue asked.
“To remind me that some chores are best not left undone,” Frank said. His hand lifted to the breast of his shirt and unpinned the marshal’s badge he was still wearing. He handed it to Donohue and then turned away and headed for Culverhouse’s stable. It was time to saddle Stormy, gather up Dog, and move on. It was time for a showdown too long postponed.
And behind him a gust of wind blew across the boardwalk, fluttering through the bloodstained pages and the names in the black book.
SMOKE JENSEN RETURNS!
Keep reading for a very special preview of
Brutal Night of the Mountain Man
Coming from Pinnacle, December 2016.
Big Rock, Colorado
Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal had left Smoke’s ranch, Sugarloaf, earlier this morning, pushing a herd of one hundred cows to the railhead in town. Shortly after they left, Sally had gone into town as well, but she had gone in a buckboard so she could make some purchases. Her shopping complete, she was now on Red Cliff Road halfway back home. The road made a curve about fifty yards ahead, and, for just an instant, she thought she saw the shadow of a man cast upon the ground. She had not seen anyone ahead of her, and the fact that no man materialized after the shadow put her on the alert. The average person would have paid no attention to the shadow, but one thing she had learned in all the years she had been married to Smoke was to always be vigilant.
“I’ve made a lot of enemies in my life,” Smoke told her. “And some of them would do anything they could to get at me. And anyone who knows me also knows that the thing I fear most is the idea that you might be hurt because of me.”
Smoke had also taught Sally how to use a gun, and she was an excellent student. She once demonstrated her skill with a pistol by entering a shooting contest with a young woman by the name of Phoebe Ann Mosey. The two women matched each other shot for shot, thrilling the audience with their skills, until, at the very last shot, Miss Mosey put a bullet half an inch closer to the center bull’s-eye than did Sally. It wasn’t until then that Sally learned the professional name of her opponent. It was Annie Oakley.
Sally pulled her pistol from the holster and held it beside her.
As the buckboard rounded the curve, a man jumped out into the road in front of her. His action startled the team of horses, and they reared up, causing her to have to pull back on the reins to get them back under control.
Sally had not been surprised by the man’s sudden appearance, nor was the fact that he was holding a pistol in his hand unexpected.
“Is this a holdup attempt?” Sally asked. “If so, I have very little money. As you can see by the bundles in the back I have been shopping, and I took only enough money for the purchases.”
“Nah, this ain’t no holdup,” the man said. “You’re Smoke Jensen’s wife, ain’t ya?”
“I’m proud to say that I am.”
The man smiled, showing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. “Then it don’t matter none whether you’ve got ’ny money or not, ’cause that ain’t what I’m after.”
“What are you after?” Sally asked.
“I’m after some payback,” the man said.
“Payback?”
“The name is Templeton. Adam Templeton. Does that name mean anythin’ to you?”
“Would you be related to Deekus Templeton?”
“Yeah. What do you know about ’im?”
“I know that he took as hostage a very sweet young girl named Lucy Woodward, and held her for ransom.”
“Yeah, he was my brother. I was in prison when your man killed him.”
“Actually, it wasn’t Smoke who killed him, it was a young man by the name of Malcolm Puddle.”
“It don’t make no never mind who it was, Jensen was there ’n as far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing as him killin’ my brother.”
“Why did you stop me?”
“Why, I thought you knew, missy. I plan to kill you. I figure me killin’ you will get even with him.”
“Will you allow me to step down from the buckboard before you shoot me?” Sally asked.
Templeton was surprised by Sally’s strange reaction, not so much the question itself as the tone of her voice. She was showing absolutely no fear or nervousness.
“What do you want to climb down for?”
“I bought some material for a dress I’m going to make,” Sally said, “and I wouldn’t want to take a chance that I might bleed on it.”
Templeton laughed. “You’re one strange woman, do you know that? What the hell difference would it make to you whether you bleed on it or not? You ain’t goin’ to be makin’ no damn dress, on account of because you’re a-goin’ to be dead.”
“May I climb down?”
“Yeah, sure, go ahead.”
Holding her pistol in the folds of her dress, Sally climbed down from the buckboard, then turned to face Templeton.
“Mr. Templeton, if you would put your gun away and ride off now, I won’t kill you,” Sally said. Again, the tone of her voice was conversational.
“What? Are you crazy? I’m the one holdin’ the gun here. Now, say your prayers.”
Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Sally raised her pistol and fired, the bullet plunging into Templeton’s chest. He got a look of total shock on his face, dropped his pistol, then, as his eyes rolled up in his head, collapsed onto the road.
Cautiously, Sally walked over to look down at him.
Templeton was dead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE was the author of over 220 USA Today and New York Times bestselling books, including The First Mountain Man, MacCallister, Eagles, Savage Texas, Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man, The Family Jensen, and The Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty, as well as the stand-alone thrillers Suicide Mission, The Bleeding Edge, Home Invasion, Stand Your Ground, and Tyranny.
Visit his website at www.williamjohnstone.net.
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