Avenger

by William W. Johnstone

  That unexpected maneuver was effective for the moment, but it had its drawbacks too. The raiders didn’t know which one he was, but the people inside the houses didn’t know that he was on their side either. They opened fire with rifles and shotguns, and the deadly lead that clawed through the night was just as likely to strike Frank as it was the others.

  He leaned forward over the horse’s neck, making himself a smaller target, and burst out from the clump of raiders. Twisting in the saddle, he threw a couple of shots at them, and saw one of the gunmen grab at a wounded shoulder. The Peacemaker was empty, so Frank jammed it back in its holster and then reached up to take off his hat and rip the hood from his head. He whirled the horse and rode around one of the settlers’ houses. A couple of the raiders pounded after him.

  In a matter of moments, he had struck a significant blow at the crew of gunmen. Half of them were either unconscious or wounded, and the people who lived here were putting up a good fight and peppering the remaining raiders with hot lead.

  So Frank wasn’t surprised when he heard the leader of the gunmen bellow, “Let’s get out of here!” Having met stiffer resistance than he’d expected, and an equally unexpected enemy in the midst of his gang, he was prepared to cut his losses.

  The order to retreat didn’t slow down the two men who were giving chase to Frank. Shots blasted after him, searching for him in the darkness. One of the bullets came so close, he heard it whisper past his ear. He sent his horse darting around the corner of a barn, and in the brief moment when he was out of sight of his pursuers, Frank pulled his Winchester from the saddle boot and dropped off the back of the horse.

  He pressed himself against the wall of the barn, holding the Winchester slanted across his chest. The two raiders thundered around the corner. Frank stepped out and swung the rifle, gripping it by the barrel. The stock slammed into one of the riders and swept him backward, right out of the saddle. He crashed to the ground on his back with a loud grunt.

  Frank turned the Winchester around, held it normally, and snapped it up to his shoulder as the other gunman wheeled his horse. The man triggered a wild shot at Frank that thudded into the barn. Frank’s rifle cracked, a tongue of flame licking from its muzzle. The gunman slewed sideways under the impact of the bullet, and then fell off his horse. One of his feet hung in the stirrup, though, and he was dragged along as the horse bolted.

  If the bullet hadn’t killed the man, being dragged like that probably would. Frank didn’t have time to worry about that. He spun around in time to see the other man, the one he’d knocked off the horse, struggle to his feet and take off in a stumbling run. All the fight had been knocked out of him.

  Frank fired at the fleeing man, aiming low in an attempt to knock a leg out from under him and bring him down without killing him. The man didn’t slow down, so Frank knew his shot had missed. The raider vanished into the darkness.

  The rest of the shooting had stopped. Frank heard rapid hoofbeats receding in the distance. That would be the hooded riders taking off for the tall and uncut. He wondered if they had taken their wounded with them. He hoped at least one of the raiders had been left behind so that Frank could get the answers to some questions.

  At the moment, he had another problem, because several men came running around the barn and leveled shotguns at him. “Don’t move, you bastard!” one of them yelled. “Drop that rifle or we’ll blow you apart!”

  Frank didn’t drop the Winchester, but he lifted both hands to shoulder level so that the men could see he meant no harm. “Take it easy,” he said, keeping his voice calm and level so that maybe they would be calm too. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not wearing a hood. I’m not one of the bunch that rode in yelling and shooting.”

  “You were with them,” one of the men replied. “You had to be.”

  “That’s because I knocked out one of them, stole his hood, and took his place until I could find out what they were going to do. I heard them talking when they came by my camp, and I knew they were up to no good—”

  “No good?” another man broke in. “All they want to do is run us off our own land, and if they can’t do that, they’ll kill us all! I’d say that was bein’ up to no good.”

  “So would I,” Frank agreed. “That’s why I wanted to stop them. Were any of your people badly hurt?”

  “Roy Wilson got a bullet through the leg. Reckon he’s the only one who was wounded. They shot a couple of milk cows too.” There was a tone of grudging respect in the first man’s voice as he added, “But I expect they would have done a lot worse if they’d gotten the chance. You can put your hands down, mister.”

  Frank lowered his arms gratefully. The Winchester had been getting heavy. He asked, “What is this place?”

  “We call it Elysium. It’s from mythology and means a place of perfect happiness.”

  The man’s voice held some bitterness as he explained what the community’s name meant. Based on what Frank had seen tonight, he would have been willing to bet that things hadn’t been perfectly happy around here lately.

  “The Elysian Fields were the abode of the dead,” he pointed out, having read the classics himself. He always had a book or two in his saddlebags. “Some folks might not want to name a settlement after a place like that.”

  “Yes, well, this isn’t the time or place to argue such things,” the man who seemed to be the leader said. “Come with us.”

  They stepped back to let Frank go in front of them. He noticed that although they lowered their shotguns slightly, they kept the Greeners pointed in his general direction. He walked back to the large open area in the center of the settlement. The houses were scattered around it, so that it formed a sort of public square.

  Lamps burned brightly in all the houses, and several men in the large group that had gathered in the square held lanterns. As Frank and the men with him came up, one of the men carrying a lantern swung it toward them and asked, “Who’s that? Did you catch one of the miscreants, Horace?”

  “He claims he’s not one of them,” the leader replied. “Says he pretended to be so that he could try to stop them from harming us.”

  A man snorted in disbelief. “A likely story! He’s just trying to save his own hide!”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” another man put in. “I was watching, and I saw one of them who seemed to turn suddenly on the others. He shot at them and then rode off with a couple of them chasing him. That must have been this fellow.”

  Frank looked around the group. Some were fully dressed, some just wore trousers pulled on over long underwear, and a couple were dressed in nightshirts. They must have turned in early, only to be shocked out of bed by gunfire. Most had the rangy, weathered look of men who worked long and hard and spent most of their time outdoors. Frank wasn’t surprised that they were farmers. They looked the part.

  “Yes, that was me,” Frank said. “Like I told you, I was trying to stop them.”

  “Looked like he did for four or five of them. I think he must be tellin’ the truth, Horace.”

  The leader grunted. “We’ll reserve judgment on that.” He said to Frank, “Who are you, mister?”

  Not for the first time in his life, Frank thought about giving a less-than-honest answer to that question. His reputation was widespread, and it often caused him more problems than it did benefits. But lying went against the grain, so he said, “My name is Frank Morgan.”

  He saw the quick glances that several of the men exchanged and knew they recognized his name. One of them said, “Morgan the gunfighter?”

  Before Frank could answer, one of the others said, “Yeah, it is him! I’ve seen his picture in the Illustrated Weekly and the Police Gazette!”

  Horace asked, “Is this true?”

  Frank couldn’t resist responding, “Which part? The fact that some call me a gunfighter or the business about having my picture in those magazines?”

  Horace frowned. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, rawboned man with a lined, sunburne
d face and white hair. He said, “You know damned well which one I meant, Mr. Morgan.”

  “You seem to have made up your own mind, so there’s not really any point in me answering, is there?”

  “Yeah, he’s the gunslinger, all right,” another man said nervously. “You better be careful, Horace. You don’t want to rile him.”

  For God’s sake, Frank thought, what was wrong with these people? He had risked his life to help them, and now they were suddenly looking at him as if he were some sort of rabid beast that had wandered into their community.

  Although he wasn’t in the habit of explaining himself, he said, “Look, I don’t mean you folks any harm. Like I told you, I just happened to hear those men talking, and when I saw that they were wearing masks, I knew they were going to cause trouble for somebody. I’ve seen their sort before.”

  “So have we,” said Horace. “They’re hired guns. They work for a man named Carter. Their boss is called Parmalee.”

  The name Parmalee was familiar to Frank, but he couldn’t quite place it right off. “You know who they are and why they attacked you?”

  Horace snorted in disgust. “Of course we know. We’re not fools. This isn’t the first time they’ve raided us. But they wear those masks so it wouldn’t do us any good to call in the law. We couldn’t identify them positively or testify against them in court.”

  “Say,” one of the men suddenly exclaimed, “Carter hired Parmalee and his killers. Maybe we could hire Morgan here to fight back against them.”

  Frank stiffened. “No matter what you’ve heard about me, my gun’s not for hire.”

  “You’ve gotten mixed up in plenty of shooting wars before, unless everything we’ve heard about you is a lie.”

  “I’ve seen my share of trouble,” Frank admitted. “But any ruckus I took part in was because friends of mine were in trouble, or because one side was clearly in the right—”

  “We’re in trouble,” a man said.

  “And we’re in the right,” added another. “We just want to be left alone to live our lives and raise our crops and our families.”

  “We don’t have a whole lot of money,” a third man said, “but we could pool all our resources and afford to pay you something—”

  “Forget it,” Frank broke in. The hated image of Charles Dutton lurked in the back of his mind. “I’m sorry you folks are in trouble, but I have business of my own to attend to. I’m just passing through these parts.”

  “But—”

  Horace interrupted the plea before it could really begin. “You heard what the man said.” He went on gruffly. “Look, Mr. Morgan, we appreciate what you did for us tonight. But this is our problem, not yours, and if you want to just move along, don’t let us keep you.”

  Frank wondered for a second if Horace was trying to trick him into offering his help, but he decided that the man was too genuine and plainspoken to do that. Horace was the sort of man who said what he meant and meant what he said.

  “Did all of them get away?” Frank asked as he looked around.

  “Yeah,” one of the farmers said. “The fellas who weren’t hit picked up the ones who were and carried them off.”

  “Well, I know where I left the man I knocked out and whose place I took. I’ll go get him, and you can turn him over to the law. Maybe he’ll talk and implicate the others.”

  Frank’s offer caused a mutter of excitement among the men. “That could help us, all right,” Horace said. “If one of their own men testified against Parmalee and Carter, the authorities wouldn’t have any choice but do something about them.”

  “Just let me find my horse,” Frank said.

  Horace spoke decisively. “We’ll do more than that. Some of us will go with you.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Maybe not, but Parmalee and his men could still be out there somewhere. If you were to run into them, it could go badly for you.”

  Frank shrugged. “All right, but let’s get moving. The longer we wait, the more chance that hombre has of getting away.”

  Chapter 6

  The horse Frank had taken from Bonner hadn’t gone very far. It didn’t take long to find him, and while Frank was doing that, Horace and several of the other men saddled horses to accompany him.

  Their mounts were all plodding, shaggy farm animals, Frank saw as they gathered in the square. They didn’t have very far to go, though, so he supposed the others would be able to keep up.

  “The rest of you men stay here and be alert for trouble,” Horace told the ones who weren’t mounted. “I don’t think Parmalee and his bunch will come back tonight, but you can’t ever tell about renegades like that.”

  Frank headed back the way he had come with the rest of the men following him. He had been through the Smoky Hills in years past, but that had been quite a while ago and he didn’t know his way around all that well. It was night on top of that, so he had to be careful not to lose his way. He had kept his eyes open after leaving his campsite, though, and he had the frontiersman’s knack of being able to follow a trail once he had been over it.

  Horace moved up alongside him and said, “We weren’t properly introduced back there. I’m Horace Duncan. And I know who you are, of course.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Horace,” Frank said. “Even under the circumstances.” He paused, unsure whether to say what he was thinking, but curiosity and his own plainspoken nature compelled him to go on. “You strike me as a well-educated man. Most of the others do too.”

  “For a bunch of farmers, you mean?” Horace grunted testily. “You don’t have to be ignorant to till the soil, you know. As a matter of fact, I used to teach botany and horticulture at one of the universities back East. Most of us have at least some college education. Before we came out here, we all decided to settle together and apply scientific methods to our farming. There’s a fellow out in California named Burbank who’s had quite a bit of success crossbreeding various strains of plants to improve the crops, and we’re trying to follow his example.”

  Frank chuckled. “Yeah, I can tell you used to be a professor. Warm up real nice to your subject, don’t you?”

  “You asked,” Horace said tartly.

  “Yeah, I reckon I did.” Frank paused for a moment, then went on. “I think I’ve heard of Parmalee. He’s just a hired gun, maybe a little worse than some. But who’s this fella Carter who’s got it in for you? I didn’t think there were any cattle barons left in this part of the country. All the big ranches are farther west.”

  Horace sounded a little confused as he said, “Carter’s not a rancher. Why would you think that?”

  “Who else would want to run a bunch of farmers off their land?”

  “Thaddeus Carter works for the railroad. He’s a businessman. He hates us because we’ve formed a Grange with some of the other farmers in the area and we’ve been trying to persuade the state legislature to regulate freight rates on the rail lines. They’re so high that no matter how efficiently we produce our crops, we can’t make a decent living because we have to pay so much to ship them to market.”

  Frank reined in. “Wait a minute. You mean this fella Carter hired a bunch of hooded night riders because of a business dispute?”

  “It may not be the sort of trouble you’re used to,” Horace said stiffly, “but I assure you, it’s serious to us. Deadly serious. You could see that for yourself tonight.”

  “Yeah, I reckon,” Frank said. He clucked to the horse and got it moving again. If he had needed any more evidence that the West was changing, surely this was it. People had started shooting at each other over freight rates and political arguments. More than ever, Frank felt like a relic of a vanished time.

  He wasn’t going to sit around and brood about it, though. For one thing, he and the other men had reached the creek where he’d made camp earlier. The dun and the chestnut he had left here nickered, calling out to the other horses.

  Frank rode across the creek and dismounted. Bonner was gone.
Frank looked at the place where he had left the unconscious gunman lying and saw that it was empty. He bit back a curse.

  “He’s not here. I tied him up, but it looks like he worked himself loose quicker than I thought he would.”

  “Damn it,” Horace said. “This was finally our chance to get something we could use against Parmalee and Carter—”

  Frank lifted his head suddenly and held up a hand for silence. He had heard something, a faint rustling in the brush along the creek....

  “Get down!” he called sharply, instinct taking over. He dived to the ground as a gun roared. The muzzle flash came from the brush where Frank had heard the noise. With a sound like the crack of a whip, the bullet passed over his head.

  His Colt was already in his hand when he hit the ground. He pulled the trigger twice, aiming low and neatly bracketing the spot where he had seen the flash of the other gun. No more shots came from the brush, but Frank heard a groan of pain.

  “Anybody hit back there?” he asked Horace and the other men behind him.

  “No, we’re all right,” Horace replied. “What about you, Mr. Morgan?”

  “I’m fine,” Frank said as he climbed to his feet, keeping his gun trained on the dark clump of brush. He advanced slowly toward it.

  “Be careful,” Horace warned. “The man could be trying to trick you.”

  Moans still came from the brush. “Could be,” Frank said, “but I don’t think so.”

  Using his left hand, he dug in his shirt pocket and found a match. He snapped it to life with his thumbnail as he reached the brush. The harsh glare from the match showed him a man lying in the undergrowth. Frank recognized Bonner’s duster. Now there was bright red blood splashed on the long coat.