Burning

by William W. Johnstone

  Doolin tensed and then smiled, his body relaxing. “Naw, Frank. Not now. Later.” He stepped away from the table and walked to the stairs without looking back. On the landing, he paused and looked at Frank. “When I kill you, Morgan, I want it to be out in the open. With lots of people watching. I want as many people as possible to see you fall.” Doolin walked up the stairs to his room.

  “That man’s sure got a angry bee in his bonnet,” the barkeep said.

  “An old grudge is eating at him like a sickness,” Frank replied. “He refuses to see but one side of the issue.”

  “You’re gonna have to kill that man, Frank.”

  “I know.” Frank spoke the words softly. “Or he’s going to kill me.”

  “He’s that good?”

  “He’s quick as a snake. Only the real good ones are still around. Most of the others have been long in the ground.” Frank smiled grimly. “You don’t get to be Doolin’s age without knowing how, and when, to use a six-killer.”

  “How about the ones the ranchers have hired?”

  “A few are pretty good, and you can bet the ranchers paid plenty to get them here. The rest are big talk and little else.”

  “And you’re caught right in the middle between the whole bunch.”

  Frank smiled and finished his beer. “Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  * * *

  As he rode Stormy toward his new farm, Frank thought about the day he’d killed the younger Doolin more than ten years before. Frank had been in Kansas City for about a week, staying at the Dorchester Hotel. One night, while he was soaking in a hot bathtub in the communal bathroom, Frank saw a hand reach in through the door and take his hat off the peg it was hanging on. Frank jumped out of the tub and rushed to the door, only to find his hat lying crumpled in the hallway, minus the expensive and distinctive hatband it’d had on it. The band was made of solid silver conchos sewn onto a rawhide strip that encircled the hat.

  Three days later, while eating in the hotel dining room, Frank saw a young man enter with three of his friends. The man was dressed all in black, with a black leather vest and black hat that had Frank’s hatband on it.

  Frank let the men get seated and give their order, and then he approached the table.

  “Howdy,” Frank said amiably when he stood next to the man wearing his hatband.

  The man glanced up at Frank, and then made a show of ignoring him and spoke to his friends across the table.

  Frank tapped the man on the shoulder. “Excuse me, but that’s my hatband you’re wearing and I’d like it back.”

  “What?” the man exclaimed, staring up at Frank as if he were crazy.

  “You heard me,” Frank repeated in a low, hard voice. “Now, the only question is, are you going to give it to me or am I going to have to take it off your dead body?”

  The man jumped to his feet and squared off, his hand moving toward the pistol on his right hip. “I bought this hatband myself off a Mexican over a month ago,” he said angrily.

  “You’re a liar,” Frank said calmly, “and I can prove it.”

  One of the other men at the table stood up. “Now just hold on, mister,” the man said.

  Frank sighed. “Take the band off,” he said, “and look at the back of one of the conchos. My name, Frank Morgan, is engraved on the silver, as well as the name of the man who made it for me in New Mexico last year, Felipe Hernandez.”

  “You . . . you’re Frank Morgan?” the man asked, moving backward a step.

  “Yep, and that’s my hatband.”

  “Maybe you oughta just give him the band, Jeff,” the man said, sweat breaking out on his brow at the mention of Frank’s name.

  “Hell, no,” Jeff Doolin said. “I done told you this ain’t his band, it’s mine, bought fair and square.”

  Frank shrugged. “Then all you have to do, mister, is let me see the back of the conchos. If my name isn’t there, I’ll apologize and pay for your and your friends’ meals.”

  “Nobody calls Jeff Doolin a liar,” the young man said, his fingers twitching next to the butt of his gun.

  “If you go for that gun, all they’ll be callin’ you is dead, Mr. Doolin,” Frank said calmly. “Now, either hand me that hatband or hook and draw.”

  Doolin snatched at his pistol, and Frank’s slug took him in the upper right shoulder before he could clear leather. The young man spun around and hit the floor, moaning in pain, holding his right shoulder with his left hand.

  When Frank saw that none of Doolin’s friends were going to join in the fracas, he bent over and took the hatband off the wounded man’s hat. He handed it over to the man who’d spoken earlier. “You see the names Frank Morgan and Felipe Hernandez on the back of one of the conchos?” he asked.

  The man examined the band and then he nodded quickly. “Sure do, Mr. Morgan.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen. Now, you’d better get a doctor to take a look at the young Mr. Doolin there ’fore he bleeds to death.”

  As it turned out, Jeff Doolin didn’t bleed to death. Instead he got an infection in his wound and it took him almost a week to die . . . a slow, painful, agonizing death.

  Frank left Kansas City the day Jeff Doolin was buried and two days before his older brother, gunfighter Bobby Doolin, arrived and found out what had happened.

  The incident almost made Frank hang up his guns, for he’d done his dead-level best to spare the life of the young thief. Stealing a hatband was not exactly a crime a man should be killed for, Frank had reasoned, and for a time he was despondent over the results of the showdown in the hotel.

  But life went on and Frank continued to drift, moving from one lonesome town to another. It was two years later that he heard Bobby Doolin was looking for him, seeking revenge for him killing his younger brother.

  As he rode, Frank thought about this and other events in his past. Maybe it was time for him to finally settle down. Hell, the farm he’d just bought seemed as good a place as any, and better than most.

  He chuckled to himself as an image of Lydia’s pretty face flashed into his mind, and he thought of how nice it would be to have someone like her in his life, someone to come home to after a long day tilling the fields or taking care of livestock.

  Now he laughed out loud. He could just see the famous gunman Frank Morgan walking behind a plow-mule or herding stubborn cows into the barn for early morning milking.

  No, right now he had other things on his mind, like saving the lives of farmers who were too inexperienced to save themselves, or their wives and children, from the greed and avarice of the ranchers.

  When he finally arrived at his farm, he put Stormy in the barn, whistled for Dog, and was relieved when the cur staggered out of a pile of hay in the corner of the barn, yawning and stretching. Frank laughed and rubbed Dog’s ears. “I swear, you lazy hound, you’d sleep through the barn burnin’ down if I let you.”

  Dog followed him as he went to the house to fix them both something to eat.

  Over a meal of biscuits so stale he had to dunk them in his coffee to chew them and a half dozen scrambled hens’ eggs, Frank read another story in his paperback book. This one concerned a young man who traveled around the country engaging in bare-knuckle fights until finally meeting up with a farmer’s daughter who convinced him to marry her and settle down on a farm next to her daddy’s.

  Frank smiled at the romantic picture the story painted about bare-knuckle fighting and the men who made their living doing it. He remembered a few years back when he was braced in a saloon by a man who thought he was tough. The man threatened to beat Frank to death, so Frank gave him the chance, whipping the man soundly and suffering only a split ear himself.

  After the fight, a broad-shouldered man with close-cropped hair and an Irish accent came over to Frank’s table. Without saying a word, he bent over and applied a bit of plaster to Frank’s ear, causing the bleeding to stop immediately.

  “Thanks, mister,” Frank said. “Can I buy you a drink?”


  “Now what kind of a question is that to ask an Irishman, boyo?” the man replied with a wide grin, and sat down. He stuck out a hand the size of a ham and said, “My name’s John L. Sullivan, and I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Frank’s mouth dropped open. “John L. Sullivan the prizefighter?” he asked incredulously.

  John slapped his chest. “One and the same, me fine friend.”

  “But don’t you usually fight back East, in Boston and New York?”

  John leaned forward and whispered, “Yeah, but I’m out here on a publicity tour. My manager has me going into all these towns and offering to fight anyone, gloves or bare knuckles, for five hundred dollars.”

  He leaned back as the barman put a glass of whiskey on the table. John took the man’s arm and said, “Now don’t be hasty, my man. Just leave the bottle an’ we’ll settle up with ye when we’re done.”

  As they talked and became friends, John told Frank he was a very gifted amateur fighter, but he had some basic flaws in his setup, and that’s why the man had been able to hit his head and split his ear.

  After another few whiskeys, John offered to take Frank out back and give him some lessons in the manly art of self-defense. Frank readily agreed, and for the next two hours the two big men sparred out behind the saloon, John showing Frank how to keep his left hand high to protect his head and face while keeping his right fist at his side, ready to unload a haymaker when the opportunity arose.

  Frank ended up buying John and his manager dinner at the finest hotel in the town, and watching the next morning when John beat the crap out of two big, strapping farm boys who outweighed him by fifty pounds.

  As he climbed on the stage, John winked at Frank, who was standing nearby. “Remember, ol’ son, keep that left hand high,” he called.

  Frank looked down at Dog, who was chewing on a biscuit as hard as one of his bones. “Yeah, boy, John L. is some kinda fighter.”

  * * *

  The church/schoolhouse was finished in record time. The carpenters began work on a small house for Richard and Lydia Carmondy. Another team of workmen came into the settlement and began working on the two buildings that would house the new businesses. The sights and sounds of progress were very evident in the settlement.

  “And we still ain’t got a name for this place,” John Platt said. “But I tell you what we need more than a name.”

  “What?” Tom Johnson asked, waiting in the livery while his wife, Colleen, shopped at the general store.

  “A café,” John replied.

  “You know,” Tom said after a few seconds’ hesitation, “that’s what Charlie Jordan did back East.”

  “Who’s Charlie Jordan?”

  “One of the new bunch of farmers that come in last month. He isn’t happy working the land. That’s what his wife, Becky, told my wife. Charlie had him a little café back East.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Sure enough. Him and Becky both cooked, and I can tell you flat out that he’s a better cook than farmer.”

  A week after that conversation, the building that would house the brand-new Sunburst Café was started. No one knew who put up the money for the café, and when Frank Morgan was asked about it, he would only smile.

  * * *

  “We’ve got to stop it now, or give it up forever,” Grant Perkins told Mark Rogers.

  Mark said nothing in reply.

  “Did you hear me?” Grant persisted.

  Mark looked up at his longtime friend. The bruises on his face from the beating he’d taken during his fight with Frank had faded, but were still visible, like shadows on his skin. Physically, he was fine. Mentally, the rancher was slowly slipping toward the edge of a breakdown. The big man had never lost a fistfight in his adult life. And losing to Frank had taken a tremendous toll on him, especially since it happened with not only his son watching, but half the town. “Yeah, I heard you.”

  “Well?”

  “Do whatever you feel is necessary. You can use the men I hired. I done told my foreman you’re the boss.”

  “What the hell’s wrong with you, Mark?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s crap! Look, if you’re all upset about losing that fight with Morgan, don’t be. One of the gunhands on my payroll told me that Frank learned to box from a professional fighter named Sullivan. It’s gonna take a professional to beat him.”

  Mark nodded his head without enthusiasm. “I guess so.”

  “You interested in what I have in mind?”

  “No. Just do it.”

  “And I can use your men?”

  “I done said you could.”

  Grant stood up and put on his hat. “You need some rest, Mark. Maybe you ought to go to the city and get yourself a woman. Get laid. Get drunk.”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll think about that.”

  Grant moved toward the door of the line shack. He paused and looked back at his friend. “I’m going to rip the lid off this thing, Mark. Blood is going to flow.”

  “Good luck.”

  Fourteen

  Frank stood in the doorway of his house and rolled a cigarette. Just as he ducked his head and thumbnailed a match into flame, a bullet tore a chunk of wood out of the frame. Frank jumped back into the house, and Dog headed for safety behind a sofa that had been delivered just the day before.

  Frank told Dog to stay put and grabbed up his rifle, exiting the small house out the back door, circling around and working his way behind the barn. Frank would be surprised if the man who was shooting at him was anyone other than Ray Hinkle. Ray was known as an ambusher. Ray also did not like Frank. The man had made that known more than once.

  Frank waited silently. He would not make a move or throw a shot until he had a target. He’d learned a long time ago that patience was at least as important in a gun battle as shooting straight was.

  The shot had come, Frank guessed, from a small grove of trees just across the road from his house, the only logical place if the shooter wanted to remain hidden. On either side of the stand of timber there were acres of open land with little or no cover for anyone to hide behind.

  Frank waited.

  * * *

  Miles away from Frank’s place, one of Paul Adams’s sons, Jimmy, lay badly wounded in a ditch, several miles from his home spread. He had been shot in the back from ambush earlier in the day and lay unconscious. The only thing that had prevented him from bleeding to death was the mud he lay in. It had formed a natural bandage of sorts over the wound. His father and brothers were frantically looking for the young man.

  * * *

  Also miles away from Frank’s place, farmer Bob Frazier watched in horror as his wife, Nellie, was stripped naked and assaulted by masked men. Bob had been knocked unconscious, and when he woke up he had been tied to a post.

  “Stop it!” Bob shouted to the men. “Have you no decency? My Nellie is a good woman.”

  The men laughed at his pleas as one by one, they took turns raping the woman.

  Bob could do nothing except try not to look at the scene through the tears that formed in his eyes. His mental agony ended abruptly when one of the hired guns shot him in the head. Nellie Frazier was left nearly unconscious, naked, and savagely beaten on the ground, just a few feet from her dead husband.

  Nellie lay there, her mind fuzzy from the agonizing pain of her wounds, and watched through eyes swollen nearly shut as the man who shot her husband bolstered his pistol.

  He looked down and saw her watching him, and he must’ve had at least a shred of decency buried deep in him somewhere, for he blushed under her accusatory gaze. Kneeling, he growled, “What’re you looking at?” into her face, and rolled her over onto her face so she couldn’t see him anymore.

  She lay there, trying not to suffocate in the soft dirt as she heard hoofbeats of the departing desperados. Her mind went to her children and she thought, Thank God the kids are off visiting and weren’t here to see this.

  She must’ve passed out, f
or it was sometime later that she came slowly awake and realized she was going to have to get up or she would surely die here and she didn’t want anyone to find her looking like this. With teeth gritted against the pain, she dragged herself over to the post where her dead husband was tied, and pulled herself to her feet using his ropes as handholds.

  She bent over and kissed her fingertips and put them against his cold ones, and then she staggered into their farmhouse. Too weak for a full bath, she used a washcloth to clean the worst of the filth and blood from her body, and managed to pull on a dress to cover her nakedness.

  With every muscle in her body aching and burning with pain, she took a quilt from her bed and walked outside to lay it over her husband’s body, stopping momentarily to utter a short prayer and to tell him she would see him soon.

  Moving slowly, she went into the barn and let the livestock out to graze, not feeling up to milking the cow. The kids would have to do that later, she told herself.

  It took all of her strength to throw a saddle on their horse and to climb up in the stirrups. Pulling on the reins, she got the mount headed toward the neighbors’ house, where the kids were visiting, and kicked the horse into a slow canter.

  The jarring made her feel dizzy, and she almost fainted before she could get the animal stopped. She leaned over the saddle horn and vomited dark red blood onto the ground. Realizing she was more hurt than she thought, she turned the horse back around, and finally managed to get off it and into the house, where she collapsed onto her bed just before fainting once again.

  * * *

  Frank’s patience finally paid off. After almost an hour of no movement in the copse of trees across from his house, he saw a small bush move slightly. Squinting his eyes, he could see a leg sticking out from behind a large oak tree. The man waiting there must’ve cramped up and had to straighten out his leg, Frank thought. He pulled up his gun and took careful aim. After a moment, he took the shot. He heard the ambusher cry out in pain. Frank clambered to his feet, and he was off and running across the road, circling the stand of timber and coming up behind the wounded man. As Frank suspected, it was Ray Hinkle. He was trying to crawl to his horse, dragging his bleeding leg behind him and moaning in pain and frustration at being shot.