It would be one hell of a shot if he made it, he thought as he squeezed the trigger.
Sandoval’s horse broke stride and then went down, its legs crumpling underneath it. Sandoval flew out of the saddle, crashed to the ground, and rolled over several times before he came up running.
That fall should have been enough to knock him out, Frank thought. But Sandoval was being fueled by his insane hatred, and he kept going, heading straight for the derrick. Frank angled the horse after him.
Sandoval turned and fired, but Frank kept coming. Where Sandoval was headed, though, the horse couldn’t go.
As he reached the derrick, Sandoval began climbing up the wooden framework.
Frank grimaced. Sandoval had to be plumb loco now. Once he was up on that derrick, there was nowhere else for him to go.
But maybe he didn’t plan to go anywhere. Instead, he held on to a crossbeam with one hand and twisted around to fire down at Frank with the other hand. The bullet whined past Frank’s ear. He brought the Colt up and squeezed off a shot.
Nothing but a click as the hammer hit an empty chamber.
Frank reined in and reached to the loops on his shell belt. They were empty as well, he discovered. The hardcases had taken all his bullets while he was their prisoner.
He flung himself out of the saddle as Sandoval fired again. Frank ran around to the other side of the derrick to put its wooden structure between him and Sandoval. That wouldn’t give him much cover, but it was better than nothing.
“Give it up, Sandoval,” he called. “Magnusson and the others will be here in a minute or two. There’s nowhere for you to go.”
Sandoval didn’t answer. He just kept climbing.
Frank sighed. The smart thing to do would be to wait for help to arrive. Somebody else could shoot down Sandoval from the derrick if need be.
But something inside Frank stirred, and he knew he couldn’t do that. Because of Jorge Sandoval, life had nearly been ruined here in the valley. A lot of good men were dead—and so was Astrid Magnusson. Pete Linderman might be, too, and Frank hadn’t forgotten what had happened to Goldy.
He started to climb, too. If he could work his way around to Sandoval, he might be able to disarm the man and take him down to face justice . . .
Sandoval fired again, the slug chewing splinters from one of the beams near Frank’s head. But then as Sandoval jerked the trigger for another shot, the hammer clicked on an empty chamber just like it had with Frank’s gun a few moments earlier. Sandoval screamed a curse, drew back his arm, and flung the gun as Frank came around onto the same side of the derrick.
Sandoval was about twenty feet off the ground, Frank maybe ten or twelve. Even if the empty gun had hit him and knocked him off, he probably wouldn’t have been hurt too bad.
But he ducked and let it sail past him, then resumed his climb after Sandoval, who now seemed to be scrambling for the top of the derrick.
Frank took his time about it. There was only so far Sandoval could go. The derrick was only about fifty feet tall.
Sandoval reached the top while Frank was still ten feet below him. Hearing hoofbeats, Frank paused and looked over his shoulder. He saw riders galloping down the road toward the derrick. That would be Magnusson and the others, he thought.
“Time to call it quits, Sandoval,” he said. “We can wait for you all night, if that’s what it takes.”
Sandoval clutched the square framework at the top of the derrick and laughed. “Now you’re wrong, Morgan. If I’m going to hell, you’re going with me!” He fumbled inside his shirt. Frank heard paper crinkling, then the rasp of a match. Flame flared up. “I’m going to blow this well up with both of us on it!”
He dropped the burning ball of paper down the center of the derrick.
Frank watched it fall, hit some of the drilling equipment, bounce off, and come to a stop against one of the derrick’s legs.
“Too bad you don’t know much about drilling for oil, Sandoval,” he said. “I don’t either, but I know this well hasn’t come in. There’s no oil down there to burn.”
Sandoval screamed a curse as he glared down crazily at Frank. His grandiose, last-ditch play had failed.
So he dived at Frank instead.
That took Frank by surprise. He barely had time to swing himself out of the way before Sandoval’s plummeting body could slam into him and knock both of them off the derrick. As it was, Sandoval hit Frank’s shoulder and jolted one hand and both feet loose. He hung for a second by that hand as he swung his feet back onto a crossbeam.
Sandoval was just below him, hung by one foot that had caught in the angle between a diagonal support and a crossbeam. Frank thought he had heard a sharp crack, and he figured Sandoval’s ankle was broken. Sandoval didn’t seem to notice, though, as he grabbed the crossbeam and levered himself back up. He used his hands to pull himself upright and lurched toward Frank, reaching out in an attempt to grab his enemy by the neck and choke the life out of him.
Frank warded off Sandoval’s arms and slammed a punch to the man’s blood-smeared face. Sandoval grabbed a support with one hand and slugged with the other. Forty feet above the ground, the two men traded punches for a long, desperate moment.
Then Sandoval slung a looping right at Frank that The Drifter ducked under. Frank hooked a left to Sandoval’s midsection, then let go with his right and drove it into the man’s jaw. Sandoval went backward off the crossbeam, shrieking as he fell down the center of the derrick. He tried to catch hold of one of the cables that supported the drill bit, but his hand slipped off it.
A second later, with a grotesque crunching sound, he landed on top of the drilling rig at the bottom.
Frank leaned on the derrick for a long moment to catch his breath as Magnusson and the other riders galloped up. Magnusson dismounted hurriedly and ran over to stomp out the small fire that had been ignited by Sandoval’s futile attempt to blow up the derrick. Then he tilted his head back and called, “Are you all right, Morgan?”
“Yeah,” Frank replied. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
“No hurry,” Magnusson said. “Sandoval’s not going anywhere. He’s dead.”
No, Frank thought, Sandoval wasn’t going anywhere. He had already crossed the divide, and right about now he was probably shaking hands with the Devil.
There were a few unfinished bits of business, but for now, Frank was content to rest there on the derrick and look up at the stars, a mite closer to heaven than he normally was.
Chapter 35
When they got back to Salida del Sol, Frank was glad to discover that Pete Linderman was still alive. Sandoval’s bullet had put a deep crease in his side, but that was all. However, Linderman had lost enough blood from his various wounds so that he was going to be pretty weak for a while.
Frank figured that Dolores Montero would be more than happy to nurse him back to health.
Now he had to break the bad news to Victor Magnusson. There was no way of getting around it.
“You’d better brace yourself, Magnusson,” Frank said as the two of them stood in the hacienda’s courtyard. “I found your sister’s buggy in a gully on the other side of the ridge. It looked like the team had run away from her.”
“Astrid!” Magnusson cried in horror. “Was she with the buggy? Is she all right?”
“I’m sorry.” Frank shook his head. “As best I could tell, the crash broke her neck. I don’t reckon she suffered much, if any.”
“Oh, my God.” Magnusson covered his face with his hands and sobbed, a big, brawny roughneck brought to tears by something more powerful than any drilling rig—love and sorrow. “What . . . what was she doing out here anyway?”
Frank took a deep breath. “I reckon she was looking for you. I guess she brought the buggy out when you didn’t come back to town. Maybe she ran into Sandoval’s men and they tried to capture her. I reckon they might have thought they could use her for leverage against you.”
“The bastards! I’m glad they’re all dead, bu
t even that’s more merciful than they deserve!”
Mercy came in all forms, Frank thought. And he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t show some of it to Victor Magnusson by keeping the true details of Astrid’s death to himself. It sure as hell wouldn’t change anything for Magnusson to know the truth now.
With that unpleasant chore taken care of, Frank borrowed a horse from the Montero remuda and headed back to town. Dog trailed along behind him, head down, as if he were already missing Goldy, too.
When John J. Stafford opened the door of his hotel room in response to Frank’s knock, the lawyer was wearing a dressing gown, but he didn’t appear to have gone to bed yet. He stared in shock at Frank’s battered appearance and exclaimed, “My God, Mr. Morgan, what happened to you?”
“Plenty,” Frank said. “But the important thing is that the trouble in the valley is over.”
“Over?” Stafford repeated. “But . . . but how?”
“Why don’t I come in and tell you all about it?”
“Of course, of course,” Stafford said as he moved back and swung the door open wider. “I was just dictating some notes to my clerk—”
He turned as he was speaking and started to gesture toward the man who sat at a desk on the other side of the room, then stopped abruptly as he saw the gun that had appeared in the man’s hand.
“Howdy, Mitchell,” Frank drawled.
The little man he had seen in the hideout bolted up out of the chair and fired. Frank was already moving. His left hand shot out and shoved Stafford out of the line of fire. His right dipped to the Colt on his hip and drew it in a flicker of motion too fast for the eye to follow.
The heavy revolver roared. Mitchell was slammed back against the chair by the impact of the bullet as it shattered his shoulder. The chair overturned and Mitchell toppled over it to land groaning in the floor.
“Oh, my Lord,” a wide-eyed Stafford whispered. “What . . . what . . .”
Frank moved across the room to kick the fallen gun well out of Mitchell’s reach . . . not that the wounded man had any fight left in him. In fact, he appeared to have passed out from the shock of his wound.
“I thought for a while that you were double-crossing me, Stafford,” Frank said to the lawyer, “because somebody tried to kill me the same night I got here to Los Angeles, and I figured you were the only one who knew I was coming.”
He lowered the gun but didn’t holster it, just in case Mitchell was shamming and had some trick up his sleeve.
“But then I remembered that your partner Turnbuckle has a law clerk who travels with him on cases, and I figured you might, too.”
“Yes, of course,” the shocked attorney managed to say. “Mitchell came down here with me from San Francisco.”
“And proceeded to sell you out and pass along information to Jorge Sandoval.”
“Sandoval! You mean, Señora Montero’s brother?”
“Like I said, it’s a long story.” Frank heard rapid footsteps in the hall. “And I reckon that’ll be the police coming to check on those shots, so I think I’ll wait and just tell it once, if that’s all right with you.”
He was surprised to find Pete Linderman up and around when he rode Stormy out to Salida del Sol the next day. The men were busy cleaning up after the battle the night before, and Linderman was supervising, leaning on a cane on one side with Dolores on his other side ready to help him if need be.
“There’s a lot of work to be done around here,” Linderman said when Frank commented about expecting to find him resting in bed. “We’ve got to rebuild the barn and the bunkhouse, not to mention patchin’ a whole heap of bullet holes.”
“And there’s a contract to negotiate with Victor Magnusson, too,” Dolores added.
Frank’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “You’re going to let Magnusson drill on your range?”
Dolores sighed and nodded. “Yes. I hope Francisco understands, wherever he is. But you were right about there not being anyway to turn back the clock, Mr. Morgan. Things will never be as they once were, and if I hadn’t been so stubborn about insisting that they could be, Jorge wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the situation like he tried to.”
Frank heard the catch in her voice when she mentioned Sandoval, and said gently, “I’m sorry about your brother.”
“So am I, Mr. Morgan. So am I. But I’m not the only one who lost a loved one. The death of Astrid Magnusson is even more tragic because she didn’t even have anything to do with all of this.”
“I suppose so,” Frank said. None of Sandoval’s gun-wolves had survived the battle, so he was the only one who knew the truth about Astrid. Keeping it to himself was really more than she deserved . . . but after thinking it over, he still didn’t see a good enough reason to heap even more grief on her brother’s head. Let him mourn her, and let the truth be buried with her, Frank had decided.
“Say, we’ve got something for you, Morgan,” Linderman said, speaking up. He turned to call to his nephew, who was over by one of the corrals with several other punchers. “Hey, Jeff, go fetch that surprise for Mr. Morgan.”
Frank frowned. “I don’t much cotton to surprises,” he said.
“I don’t figure you’ll mind this one,” Linderman said, and a moment later a grinning Jeff led Goldy out of a shed that hadn’t burned.
Frank caught his breath as he saw the big, golden-hued stallion. Goldy was limping a little, but seemed to be all right otherwise.
“He came wandering in this morning,” Linderman explained with a smile. “He’s a little lame in one leg, like he fell and hurt it. You might want to have a horse doc take a look at it. But I’ve been around horses plenty and I think he’ll be fine. He just needs plenty of rest and some good graze.”
“He can get those things right here on Salida del Sol, Mr. Morgan,” Dolores said. “If we can talk you into staying for a while, that is.”
Frank went over to Goldy, stroked the stallion’s shoulder, and let Goldy nuzzle his shoulder. “I reckon I could do that,” he said as he grinned at Dolores, Linderman, and Jeff. “I can’t think of anywhere I have to be.”
The Drifter could drift on some other day.
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Copyright © 2009 William W. Johnstone
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s’s superb storytelling.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2002-7
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