“You might as well give up,” Frank said. “None of us are going to drop our guns, and you know you can’t just walk away from here, Mantee.”
“Mr. Morgan is right, Deke,” Leaf said. “We’ll hunt you down. All of us.”
“You killed Joaquin,” Bardwell accused.
Mantee shook his head. “I didn’t kill anybody. Ben’s the one who knifed Joaquin.”
Frank said, “Escobar’s not dead. He’s the one who told me what was going on over here.”
Mantee’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Not dead? Damn it, those Colemans couldn’t do anything right! I should’ve had better partners.”
“You should’ve been a better partner,” Hoyt grated.
“You never should’ve double-crossed us, Deke.”
“Eighty grand,” Mantee reminded him. “You didn’t give me any choice.” He glared at the others. “Are you gonna let me go, or do I blow his brains out?”
“You pull that trigger and you’ll be dead a second later,” Frank told him.
“No doubt about it,” Bardwell said.
Mantee’s head moved with a jerky desperation as he looked at Frank, Bardwell, and Leaf. He had to know that things had gone too far south to salvage now. His allies were dead, and he was faced with three utterly deadly enemies.
But he wasn’t willing to surrender, Even in the moon light, Frank could see that. So he wasn’t surprised when Mantee said, “I’ll holster my gun … if you’ll holster yours, Morgan.”
“You want to draw against me?”
“Damn right. I’ve been hearing for years about how fast you are. Reckon I’m gonna have to see that for myself.”
Hoyt said, “Morgan, don’t.”
Accepting Mantee’s challenge would get Hoyt out of harm’s way, Frank thought. And either way, no matter what happened in a showdown, Mantee wouldn’t escape. The surviving bounty hunters would see to that.
“All right,” Frank said. He lowered his iron, slipped it back into leather. “Now it’s your turn, Mantee.”
For a second, Frank thought the gunman was just going to turn the pistol away from Hoyt’s head and try to shoot him while his Colt was holstered. But then Mantee dropped his arm and pouched his gun, just as he’d said he would. He gave the wounded Hoyt a shove that sent him stumbling toward Leaf and Bardwell, then turned so that he faced Frank head on. His hand hovered over the butt of his gun, ready to hook and draw. “All right, Morgan,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Frank gave a slight shake of his head. “You’ve got it to do, Mantee,” he said.
Mantee’s lean face contorted in a snarl, and his hand flashed toward his gun in a stabbing draw.
Even without that giveaway, Frank would have had him beaten. Mantee was fast, the fastest of all the group of bounty hunters he had betrayed.
But Frank Morgan was The Drifter.
Frank’s Colt boomed while Mantee’s gun was still coming up. Mantee took a fast step backward as the bullet hit him. He stayed on his feet and tried again to lift his gun, breathing curses as he struggled against the sud denly heavy weight.
Frank fired again, and this time the slug took Mantee in the forehead and exploded on through his brain, bring ing oblivion crashing down on him for good. Mantee landed on his back with blood and brains leaking from his head into the dust of the alley.
Calmly, Frank lowered his gun and began to reload it.
The threat was over, but a wise man kept one chamber empty for the hammer to rest on-and the others full of steel-jacketed death.
The three bounty hunters looked at Mantee’s body for a second, then came toward Frank. Leaf helped the wounded Hoyt. Bardwell asked, “You said Joaquin is still alive?”
“He was a few minutes ago,” Frank answered, “but he was hurt pretty bad. I hope Cyrus Hinkley is tending to him by now.” He nodded toward Hoyt. “That shoulder could use some looking after, too.”
“Yeah,” Hoyt said. “It hurts like a son of a bitch. We’ll go find Hinkley. But somebody needs to stay here at the store and keep an eye on that loot.”
“I’ll do that,” Frank said. “I don’t think anyone else will try to bother it.”
Hoyt grunted. “No,” he said with a shake of his head as he watched Frank slide that deadly Colt back into its holster. “I don’t reckon they will.”
A week later, Frank lowered the slicker-wrapped bundle onto the desk in the office of the manager of the First Territorial Bank in Tucson and said, “Here you go. lt’s all there.”
Conrad looked up at him from behind the desk and said, “I never doubted that it would be.”
“You’ll see to it that Hoyt and those other fellas get the rest of the reward they’ve got coming to them?”
“Of course. But I’d say that you deserve it as much as they do.”
“I don’t need it,” Frank said. “And that’d be a mite silly, don’t you think, paying myself a reward that way?”
“I suppose so.” Conrad hesitated, then asked with what sounded like genuine concern, “What about you, Frank? I know the time you spent in Yuma had to be ter rible, and there was all that trouble after you and McCoy escaped. Are you all right?”
Frank considered the question. He was well rested. He had taken his time making the ride back from the border settlement of Hinkley, delaying his departure for several days until he was sure that Abner Hoyt was going to be all right. Mantee’s bullet hadn’t broken any bones, but Hoyt had lost quite a bit of blood. He’d been bouncing back nicely, though, by the time Frank left town.
Surprisingly, Joaquin Escobar had pulled through, too, and although it would be a good while before he fully re covered from the knife wound Ben Coleman had given him, at least he had a strong, fighting chance to do so. Hoyt and the others planned to bring him to Tucson when he was strong enough to travel in a wagon.
Frank would have brought the money back to Conrad by himself if he’d had to, but a couple of days after the shootout a patrol of United States cavalry from Fort Grant had shown up in Hinkley looking for him. Conrad’s status as a financier and highly successful busi nessman meant that he had numerous influential friends in Washington, so he had pulled some strings and gotten the War Department to order out that patrol. The troop ers had accompanied Frank to Tucson, ostensibly be cause of the continuing threat of Apache excursions across the border. Frank knew the soldiers were really there to protect the money. After the last war party to cross the border had gotten whipped so thoroughly, he thought it might be a while before any more renegades ventured north from their mountain strongholds.
But you never could tell about things like that. He didn’t mind having the company on his ride.
Now, freshly bathed, shaved, and wearing his own clothes and carrying his own gun, Frank had completed his mission. He smiled at Conrad and said, “I’m fine. I reckon I’ll be moving on.”
“Back to Buckskin?”
“That’s right.” Back home, Frank thought, then felt surprise go through him as he realized that he truly did consider Buckskin his home now. “And you’ll be head ing for Boston? You’ve been away for quite a while.”
“Yes, but I don’t believe that Rebel has missed it very much.” Conrad laughed. “My wife isn’t that fond of life in a big Eastern city.”
“I don’t figure she would be, growing up out here on the frontier like she did.”
“It’s not really the frontier much anymore, though, is it? What with the progress civilization has made and all.”
Frank thought about the way he had spent the past few weeks, the danger from outlaws and Indians, the waste land that was Ambush Valley, and he said, “For some of us, it’ll always be the frontier.”
“I suppose so. At any rate, I don’t think Rebel is ready to return to Boston just yet. And as it happens, there’s a troublesome situation regarding the Browning mining in terests in the area around Buckskin, so … ” Conrad stood up. “What I’m trying to ask, Frank, is how you’d feel about having some co
mpany on your journey back to Nevada?”
Frank didn’t even have to think about it. He smiled as he reached across the desk to shake hands with his son and said, “I reckon that’d be just fine.”
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
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