“That’s right. After the road turns south, there’s still a good trail onto the B Star, but not good enough for a coach.”
Marshal Trask stayed back out of the way as the stagecoach pulled up in front of the station. Gaius Baldridge emerged from the building. Frank saw a fancy black buggy parked not far away, along with a buckboard, and knew those vehicles had to belong to Baldridge. The rancher had to be meeting someone, as Trask suspected. Baldridge would carry the new arrival out to the ranch in the buggy, while the cowhands he had brought with him would load up the person’s bags on the buckboard.
After Frank had figured that out, he wasn’t surprised when the stationmaster opened the coach door and helped a woman climb down from the vehicle. Baldridge waited on the boardwalk with a welcoming smile on his face.
“Laura, it’s so good to see you again.” Frank heard Baldridge’s greeting clearly across the street. “You look as beautiful as ever. No, more beautiful.”
The woman stepped onto the boardwalk and took both the hands Baldridge extended to her. She wore a blue traveling gown with a hat of the same shade perched on honey-colored curls. Frank couldn’t see her face, but as he hooked his thumbs in his belt and leaned a shoulder against one of the posts holding up the awning over the undertaking parlor’s porch, he thought that the woman had a nice shape in that blue dress.
Laura, Baldridge had called her.
Frank frowned. Something about that name and the woman’s shape ... something ...
She leaned forward and let Baldridge kiss her cheek, then she stepped back and turned so she could look around the town. As she did, she glanced across the street at the four men on Finnegan’s porch. Her gaze started to move on, but she stopped short and looked back at them.
Frank felt the same shock of recognition. He straightened from his casual pose as the woman stepped to the edge of the boardwalk and called across the dusty street, “Frank? Frank Morgan? Is that really you?”
Chapter 12
Marshal Trask heard the words as clearly as Frank did. His head snapped around toward the undertaking parlor.
“Morgan!” he exclaimed. “You said your name was Browning! But you’re ... you’re ...”
Frank sighed and stepped down from the porch. “Stay here,” he told Salty, Hal, and Carlin.
“Not hardly,” the old-timer said again. “I want a ringside seat for this!”
He hurried to keep up as Frank strode across the street. Hal and Carlin came along, too.
“Sorry for lying to you, Marshal,” Frank said as he reached Trask. “I just wanted to find out a little more about what was going on around here before I let on who I really am.”
“Then you’re really Frank Morgan, the gunfighter?” Trask asked. “Brady Morgan’s father?”
“One of those things, anyway,” Frank said. “Not sure about the other.”
He walked on toward the stage station, where the woman called Laura smiled at him and Gaius Baldridge stood with a puzzled, surprised look on his face.
“Frank, I never expected to see you here,” Laura said as he reached the boardwalk.
“That goes for me, too,” he told her. “You’re as lovely as you ever were.”
“Oh, now, you’re just being gallant. Not that I don’t appreciate it!”
It was the truth, Frank thought. Laura Donnelly had been a breathtakingly beautiful young woman when he had known her, but the years had been more than kind to her. Her hair was still thick and lustrous, her blue eyes as bright and sparkling as ever, and her figure remained the sort that would make any man sit up and take notice. Time had added a few lines to her face, but they were the sort that merely enhanced her beauty and gave it character, rather than detracting from it.
“Laura Donnelly,” Frank murmured. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s not Laura Donnelly any longer,” she said. “I’m Laura Wilcoxon now. Mrs. Laura Wilcoxon.”
“You’re married?”
“Widowed.”
Baldridge moved up beside her and lightly laid a hand on her arm in a possessive fashion as he said, “That’s right. Mrs. Wilcoxon is here to visit my ranch ... and her son.”
Frank stiffened as the implications of Baldridge’s words went through him.
“Your son?” he repeated quietly as he looked at Laura.
“That’s right, Frank,” she said. “Brady is my son ... and yours.”
San Antonio, Texas, 1872
“Lay your bets, gentlemen,” Laura Donnelly said as she toyed with the deck of cards in her hands. She looked at the man seated directly across the table from her and went on. “Anything else you’d like to lay, cowboy?”
Frank Morgan leaned back in his chair and grinned.
“I’ve anted up, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll wait and see what the cards bring.”
Laura returned his smile and dealt, her long, slender fingers spinning the cards to the players around the table with deftness and speed.
Frank had drifted into San Antonio a few days earlier after a dust-up with some Mexican bandits down around Laredo, and from the moment he had stepped into the Caballo Rojo Saloon and seen Laura Donnelly dealing cards, he’d been interested in her. He had sat in on several games, introduced himself to her, and bought her a few drinks. She seemed to like him, but there was a certain coolness about her. A woman who looked like her, in her line of work, probably was accustomed to keeping most men at arm’s length.
But he thought she was warming up to him, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, tonight would be the night she would consent to having a late supper with him in her room upstairs.
The Caballo Rojo was in downtown San Antonio, not far from the murky, twisting river and the old mission where a small group of stubborn Texicans had held off the Mexican army for almost two weeks before being slaughtered. Frank liked San Antonio. The town had a sleepy quality to it that was very restful, especially for a man who in a few short years had gotten used to the roar of guns and the acrid bite of powdersmoke in the air.
He was a conservative poker player, never winning or losing much but enjoying the game. Tonight, though, the cards seemed to be running his way, and even though he didn’t place big bets, the pile of greenbacks in front of him kept growing. Other players came and went, but Frank and Laura continued playing, along with one other man who had been in the game from the start. He was a hawk-faced cattle buyer named Russell, and he lost about as steadily as Frank won.
The hour was growing late when Laura gathered in the cards at the end of a hand and murmured, “That’ll be all for this evening, gentlemen. A lady needs her beauty sleep, you know.”
“Not you, ma’am,” one of the other men said. “If you were any more beautiful, us poor fellas’d be so overwhelmed we wouldn’t stand any chance at all.”
Laura laughed. “That’s very sweet of you, but I still have to bid you good night.”
They all stood up when she did, and except for Frank and Russell, the men began to drift away from the table, most of them heading for the bar and a fresh drink.
Since his growing reputation as a gunman had forced him to leave his home several hundred miles north of here and become a drifter, Frank had learned that when a man wanted something, he had to seize the opportunity to get it. Because of that, he said, “It would be my honor to have dinner with you, Miss Donnelly.”
“It’s pretty late, cowboy,” she said, but her smile took any sting out of the words. “I don’t think I feel like going out to some restaurant.”
“I thought maybe we could have some food sent up to your room.”
“Oh, you did, did you?” Her eyes sparkled even more than usual. “That sounds ... intriguing.”
Frank came around the table and held his arm out to her. She hesitated, but only for a second, and then linked her arm with his. They started toward the stairs, leaving Russell behind them at the table, where he stood watching them with a glare on his dark, narrow face.
They were halfway up the stai
rs when Russell said in a loud voice that instantly quieted the hubbub in the room, “Morgan!”
Frank stopped and turned as Russell walked quickly to the bottom of the staircase.
“You want something, mister?”
“You’ve got a lot of my money in your pocket,” Russell said, “and what you don’t have, that Jezebel with you does.”
Frank moved down a step and positioned himself so that he was between Laura and the cattle buyer. His face might have been carved from stone as he said, “I think you owe the lady an apology.”
“I don’t owe her anything, and I don’t think she’s a lady. I saw the looks you two have been giving each other all night. She’s just a damn tinhorn in cahoots with a two-bit gunman to cheat all the honest men dumb enough to sit down at a table with her!”
Laura put a hand on Frank’s shoulder as she stood behind him. He shrugged it off and came down another step.
One of the men who sat at a table near the bottom of the stairs said into the tense silence, “Mister, you best back off. That’s Frank Morgan. He’s not a two-bit gunman. He’s the Drifter.”
“I don’t care who he is,” Russell said. “They cheated me, him and that no-good slut!”
Men started to scramble out of the way, convinced that bullets would be flying any second now.
“Mister, we’ll settle this—” Frank began.
“How?” Russell demanded. He pulled his coat back to reveal that he wasn’t wearing a gun. “I’m not packing an iron. You shoot me, Morgan, and it’ll be murder. With this many witnesses, the Rangers will hang you for sure.”
Frank drew in a deep breath and let it out in an angry sigh.
“Forget it, Frank,” Laura said from behind him. “He’s not worth it. Let’s go upstairs.”
“That’s right,” Russell said with a sneer. “Go upstairs with your whore.”
Frank knew what Russell was trying to do. The cattle buyer wanted to goad him into a fight. Russell was almost as big as Frank, with the heavy, powerful shoulders of a man who knew how to brawl. Normally, Frank would have been glad to oblige him, but tonight he had more pleasant things on his mind.
“Russell, you’d better be gone when I come back downstairs,” he said. Contemptuously, he turned his back on the man and started up the stairs again toward Laura.
“Frank, look out!” she cried as he heard a rush of footsteps behind him.
Russell charged up the stairs and tackled him from behind as Frank tried to turn around again. They were big men, and as they rammed against the banister, it gave way under their weight with a splintering crash. They fell about four feet to land on a hastily vacated table that collapsed under them.
Russell hammered punches at Frank as the two men lay in the wreckage of the table. Frank blocked some of the punches and shrugged off the others as he got hold of Russell’s shirt front. With an angry roar, Frank heaved him to the side and sent Russell rolling across the sawdust-littered floor. Both men came to their feet at the same time.
Russell charged in. Frank met him with a hard left that hooked into the cattle buyer’s stomach. Russell grunted and started to double over, but Frank’s right fist came around in a looping blow that was timed perfectly to coincide with the arrival of Russell’s jaw. When the punch landed, it made a sound like an axe blade biting deep into a chunk of wood. Russell’s head slewed around on his neck as his eyes rolled up in their sockets.
He toppled to the floor, landing facedown and not moving again.
As soon as it was obvious the fight was over, the saloon’s owner, a short, slender Mexican with a mustache and an agitated air, rushed up, looked at the shattered table and the broken railing, and clapped his hands to his cheeks in dramatic fashion.
“Who’s gonna pay for all this damage?” he wailed in dismay.
“Don’t take on so, Pedro,” Laura said from where she still stood on the stairs. “I’ll pay for it. Mr. Morgan was defending my honor, after all.”
“Oh.” The saloon man was instantly all right again. “In that case ...” He snapped his fingers and motioned for a couple of the bartenders to drag Russell’s senseless hulk out of the place.
“Oh, and Mr. Morgan and I will need some supper, too, Pedro ... in about an hour.”
“I will take care of it, Señorita Donnelly,” Pedro said, bobbing his head in a nod.
Frank picked up his hat where it had fallen on the floor, slapped it against his thigh a couple of times, and went up the stairs to join Laura again.
“Sorry about the commotion,” he told her.
“You were just defending yourself—and me,” she said. “I can’t hold that against you.” She linked arms with him again. “Shall we?”
“We shall,” Frank said as they started up the stairs together again.
“Let me guess,” Laura said as she looked at him from the boardwalk in front of the stagecoach station in Pine Knob, Montana. “You’re remembering a certain night in San Antonio. The Caballo Rojo Saloon.”
“The red horse,” Frank said.
“And it was quite a ride, wasn’t it? Those were good times.”
Good times indeed, Frank thought. He had spent several weeks in San Antonio with Laura, and they were passionate weeks, cut short only when a couple of young firebrands who wanted to prove how fast on the draw they were threw down on him in front of the old mission. Both of those young men had died there, leaking gore onto ground that might well have been watered by the blood of Texican patriots thirty-six years earlier.
Until that happened, the local authorities had been tolerating the presence of a notorious gunman in their town. Less than twenty-four hours after the fight, a large group of deputies armed with shotguns had called on Frank at his room in the Menger Hotel and suggested strongly that he leave San Antonio behind him. He had refused, even though he knew it might mean more trouble, and gone to the Caballo Rojo to warn Laura that all hell might be breaking loose.
She was gone. Her room was empty, and Pedro told Frank that she had cleared out earlier in the day.
She had heard about what was going to happen and decided that she couldn’t afford to be involved with him anymore. That was the only explanation Frank could think of. And with Laura gone, there was nothing to hold him there.
He rode out less than an hour later. In the years since then, he had been back to San Antonio many times.
But he had never seen Laura Donnelly again.
Until now.
Chapter 13
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me about the boy?”
Her lips tightened a little in response to the harsh note that had come into his voice, despite his best intentions.
“I didn’t know when I left San Antonio, Frank,” she said. “You can choose whether to believe me or not, but it’s the truth. Later, when I realized ...” Her shoulders rose and fell in an eloquent shrug. “I didn’t know where you were. Over the years, I heard stories about you many times, and yes, I probably could have looked you up. But there didn’t really seem to be any point to it.”
“Except that I had a—”
Frank stopped. This was like what had happened when he was reunited with Vivian Browning after many years apart and found out about Conrad.
And how did that work out? he asked himself.
At first Conrad had refused to believe that Frank was his father. When he finally accepted that fact, reluctantly, he’d had nothing but hatred and contempt for Frank. He had turned his back on his true father, and if he hadn’t needed Frank’s help desperately a few years later, the two of them probably never would have seen each other again.
The circumstances that had brought them together had resulted in the beginning of friendship and mutual respect. But even though the Drifter and Kid Morgan would each lay his life on the line for the other now, there was still a barrier of years between them and probably always would be. Nobody’s fault, just the way things were.
If he had met Brady Morgan
years ago, there was no way of knowing how the young man would have reacted. Laura knew Brady a lot better than Frank did; maybe she had been right not to seek him out and introduce them.
Anyway, it was in the past. There was nothing Frank could do now to change it.
He had to wonder, though ... In his one real encounter with Brady, the young man had struck Frank as being cruel, arrogant, and ruthless. Would things have been different if he’d had a stronger hand than Laura’s helping him grow up?
Gaius Baldridge stepped into the brief, awkward moment by saying, “My dear, we really should be going. It will take a couple of hours to reach the ranch. I’m sure you’re already tired from your journey and would like to settle in and freshen up.”
Laura turned to him and said, “You’re right, Gaius. I am tired. Too tired to go on to the B Star today, I think. I know it means changing our plans, but if there’s a decent hotel here in Pine Knob, I believe I’ll take a room there and rest for a day or two before I go on out to your ranch.”
Baldridge didn’t look happy about that at all. “But I brought my buggy, and men with the buckboard for your bags,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Laura told him. “I didn’t know I would be quite so exhausted by the trip so far.”
Baldridge looked at Frank. His eyes burned with anger and resentment.
“I don’t believe it’s exhaustion that’s caused this change in your plans,” he said.
“Are you calling me a liar, Gaius?”
Baldridge took a deep breath and shook his head as he controlled his emotions with a visible effort.
“Of course not,” he said. “And of course I respect your decision. The men can come back with the buckboard tomorrow.”
“I may not have recovered enough by then,” Laura cautioned.
“They can come every day, if necessary,” Baldridge said. “As for myself, I’ll be here, ready whenever you are.”
“You’re not going back to the ranch?”
“I’ll take a room at the hotel as well. The Territorial House isn’t the sort of fine accommodations to which you’re accustomed, I’m sure, but it’s reasonably comfortable.”
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