Ambush Valley

Book 17: Last Gunfighter

by William W. Johnstone, J.A. Johnstone

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

In this epic Western by USA Today best-selling author William W. Johnstone, the distinction between lawman and outlaw gets hazy once the gun smoke thickens. Frank Morgan, legendary gunslinger turned town marshal, has disguised himself as an inmate at Yuma Prison—hoping to root out a bank-robbing plot. But even the straightest arrow can bend when shot into a corrupt hellhole like Yuma.

Release date: December 10, 2012

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

Peace and quiet . . . There was nothing like it.

Frank Morgan thought about that as a bullet chewed splinters from the doorjamb next to his head. Several of the tiny slivers of wood stung his face as he ducked into Leo Benjamin’s general store.

“Marshal, what is it?” Leo cried from behind the counter. The emporium’s customers, a couple of men and several women, all crouched in the aisles and looked around wildly, not quite sure what to do. All hell was breaking loose in the main street of Buckskin, Nevada, the silver-mining town where Frank Morgan had been the marshal for about six months.

Peace had reigned for most of that time, ever since the labor unrest that had shut down the mines for a while and the raid by a gang of notorious outlaws. That sure wasn’t the case today. Frank had been ambling along the boardwalk in front of the store when several men came boiling out of the office of the Lucky Lizard Mining Company down the street. They had bandannas pulled up over their faces to serve as crude masks. That by itself would have been enough to alert Frank to the fact that something was wrong, but then the varmints had started shooting, too.

Their bullets sprayed around the street as the bandits fired at anything that moved, including Frank. He had dived into Leo’s store to avoid the hail of lead.

Frank knew that the merchant kept a loaded Winchester under the counter. He turned and said, “Leo! Toss me your rifle! Everybody stay down!”

Leo complied with the order. He reached under the counter, brought out the Winchester, and pitched it with both hands toward Frank. The marshal grabbed it and wheeled back to the doorway. He went through the door in a low dive that landed him prone on the boardwalk. A bullet sizzled above his head and shattered one of the store’s front windows. Frank worked the rifle’s loading lever as he brought the weapon to his shoulder. He drew a bead on one of the riders charging down the street and fired.

The .44-40 slug punched into the outlaw’s chest and swept him backward out of the saddle. One of his feet caught in the stirrup, though, so he was dragged along the street by the still-galloping horse.

Even before the man he’d just ventilated hit the ground, Frank had worked the Winchester’s lever again and shifted his aim. He fired a second shot. This time the bullet struck one of the bandits in the right shoulder and twisted him halfway around in the saddle, but he managed to stay on his horse.

There were four outlaws in all, Frank saw now. The other two had taken notice of him and directed their fire where he lay on the boardwalk. He rolled swiftly to his right as bullets smacked into the planks where he had been a heartbeat earlier. Pushing off with his feet, he lunged off the boardwalk and landed behind one of the water troughs that were spaced at intervals along the street. He thrust the Winchester’s barrel over the top of the trough as the outlaws thundered past. He began firing as fast as he could work the rifle’s lever, coming up on his knees as he did so.

The bandits had their backs to Frank now, but that didn’t particularly bother him. They had started the ball, and the way they were still slinging lead around, they were a danger to the town. His town. He had been here long enough now to put down some roots, something that the man known throughout the West as The Drifter had thought would never happen again.

Anybody who threatened the people of Buckskin would damn well get what was coming to them, at least as long as Frank Morgan was the marshal.

The deadly volley from Frank’s Winchester tore through the fleeing outlaws. They plunged from their saddles and thudded to the dirt of the street. The man he had wounded in the shoulder was in the lead. He made it all the way to the edge of town before loss of blood made him pass out. He toppled off his horse, too.

All four of the hombres were down now. Frank leaped to his feet and ran to each of them in turn, keeping the Winchester ready to fire again if he needed to.

There was no need. Three of the men were dead and the fourth, the one with the bullet-shattered shoulder, was out cold.

Frank’s deputy, the lean, buckskin-clad former prospector called Catamount Jack, came running along the street with his big old cap-and-ball pistol clutched in a gnarled hand. “Frank!” he called. “You all right?”

Frank waved Catamount Jack over to him. “I’m fine. Keep an eye on this one,” he ordered with a nod toward the wounded outlaw. “The others are done for, but he’s still alive.”

“Does somebody need to fetch Doc Garland?” Jack’s voice hardened as he added, “Or do we just let the son of a bitch bleed to death and save the trouble of a hangin’?”

“We’re not letting anybody bleed to death.” A crowd was starting to gather now that the shooting was over. Frank said to one of the men, “Run get Dr. Garland to tend to that fella.” After the townie had hurried off toward the medico’s office, Frank turned to one of the other men and told him, “Might as well let Claude Langley know his services’ll be needed for the other three.”

Catamount Jack snorted. “Never seen an undertaker yet who didn’t come a-runnin’ any time there was a shootin’.”

Frank made no reply to that. He was worried about what might have happened inside the Lucky Lizard office. Those masked varmints had run out of there like they’d been up to no good. Thomas “Tip” Woodford, the owner of the mine and the mayor of Buckskin, might have been in the office when the outlaws came storming in. So, too, Diana Woodford, Tip’s beautiful blond daughter, might have been there.

Diana had taken a romantic interest in Frank when he first came to the settlement, despite the fact that he considered her to be about twenty years too young for him. He had been successful in deflecting her attention to Garrett Claiborne, the mining engineer who worked as the superintendent of the Crown Royal Mine, but Frank still considered Diana a good friend and was concerned about her and her father as he hurried toward the office.

Tip emerged from the building before Frank got there. The beefy, florid-faced former prospector who had hit it rich with the Lucky Lizard had a hand pressed to his head. Blood seeped between his fingers. He was a little unsteady, and Diana was right beside him with an arm around him, helping to support him. Frank felt a surge of relief when he saw that Diana seemed to be unharmed.

“What happened, Tip?” he asked as he came up to Woodfood and Diana.

Tip didn’t answer the question. Instead, he asked, “Did you get ’em? Did you get the thievin’ bastards, Frank?”

“I got ’em,” Frank confirmed with a nod. “Are you shot?”

Tip shook his bleeding head and winced because the movement caused obvious pain. “Naw, one of ’em walloped me with his gun when I didn’t move fast enough to suit him.”

“I thought they were going to kill him,” Diana said in a voice that was drawn tight by strain and worry. “Are they all dead, Marshal?” She sounded like she hoped they were. Diana had a bit of a bloodthirsty streak in her that came out every so often, Frank thought.

“Three are, and the other one’s hit bad,” he replied. “Let me have a look at your head, Tip.”

Woodford moved his bloody hand away from his head. Frank saw the gash that had been opened up in Tip’s graying, rust-colored hair. The injury was messy but not too serious, Frank judged. Head wounds always bled a lot.

“We’d better go find Dr. Garland,” Frank said. “You’re liable to need a few stitches.”

“I’m all right,” Tip insisted.

“No, you’re not,” Diana said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Come on, Pa.”

Frank fell in step beside them as they started down the street. “What did those polecats want?” he asked.

“The payroll for the Lucky Lizard came in on this mornin’s stage,” Tip explained. “They knew about it somehow and figured to grab it before I could take it out to the mine and pay off the boys.”

“Did they get it?”

“Yeah. Didn’t have no choice but to hand it over. They might’a hurt Diana if I hadn’t.”

She said, “I told you, Pa, I wasn’t scared.”

“Well, I was scared enough for both of us, I reckon.”

Frank doubted that. Tip Woodford was a salty old-timer. If Diana hadn’t been there when the outlaws burst in, likely he would have told them to go to hell. But no amount of money was worth his daughter’s safety to Tip.

Frank understood that feeling. He had a son of his own, although he didn’t see Conrad very often, and in his heart of hearts he was convinced that he had a daughter, too, although Mercy Moncure, his first love back in Weatherford, Texas, had never confirmed—or denied, for that matter—that her daughter Victoria was his.

As they walked along the street, Frank’s eyes found the horses that the outlaws had been riding. All four animals had come to a stop at the edge of town and were milling around there now, unsure of what they were supposed to do. Frank saw a canvas bag with its handle looped around the saddle horn on one of the horses. That would be Tip’s payroll, he thought.

Somebody at the bank in Virginia City could have told the outlaws that the money was arriving in Buckskin this morning. Or someone connected with the stage line could be guilty of that, Frank supposed. There had to someone else involved somewhere, he knew, because the bandits had known the payroll was in Tip’s office.

He would get to the bottom of that later, he told himself. Right now he just wanted to see that Tip got the necessary medical attention.

As Frank, Tip, and Diana came up, Dr. William Garland straightened from where he had been kneeling beside the wounded outlaw. Garland was a young, slightly built man with brown hair who usually had an intense expression on his slender face. Today was no different. He asked, “What happened to you, Mayor?”

“One of those varmints pistol-whipped me,” Tip said. He moved his bloodstained hand away from the wound. “How bad is it, Doc?”

Garland studied the gash for a moment, then said, “I need to stitch it up, but you should be fine. You probably have a slight concussion, too, so you’ll have to take it easy for a few days. Miss Woodford, why don’t you help your father over to my office, and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Diana nodded. “All right, Doctor.”

“I can’t take it easy,” Tip complained as Diana steered him toward the doctor’s office. “I got a mine to run!”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of things for a few days,” she told him. “In fact, if I’d been in charge of things, I would have had an armed guard waiting when that payroll was delivered, and it would have been guarded until all the men had received their wages.”

Tip grumbled, but Frank hoped he would pay attention to what Diana was saying. Frank had been planning to suggest the same thing himself.

He nodded toward the wounded outlaw, who was still unconscious, and asked the doctor, “What about him?”

“I think he’ll live,” Garland said, “but he’ll never have full use of his right arm again.”

“Since that looks to be his gun arm, I reckon that’s probably a good thing.”

“I’ll get some men to carry him down to my office. I can’t do anything with him here in the street.”

Frank nodded. “All right, Doc. And thanks. Take good care of the mayor.”

“Of course.”

Claude Langley, the goateed, genteel little Southerner who served as Buckskin’s undertaker, had shown up with his wagon. A couple of Langley’s helpers were loading the corpses of the other outlaws into the back of the vehicle. Satisfied that that was under control, Frank told Catamount Jack to follow him and headed toward the horses that the owlhoots had been riding.

The animals had been spooked by all the gunfire and the smell of blood, so they shied away as Frank and Jack approached. Despite all the long years of drifting he had done, Frank hadn’t forgotten his days as a cowboy back in Texas. He spoke to the horses in a quiet, soothing tone, and within a few minutes they settled down enough so that he and Jack could take hold of their reins. Each lawman led two of the horses to Amos Hillman’s livery stable.

The lanky, overall-clad liveryman had a black patch over his left eye. He asked, “What do you want me to do with these nags, Marshal?”

Frank took the canvas bag containing the Lucky Lizard payroll off the saddle where it was hung. He opened it for a second to make sure the money was there. It was. He told Hillman, “Just take care of them for now, Amos. I imagine you’ll wind up selling them to take care of the burial expenses for three of their owners, as well as to pay your feed bill. The man who owned the fourth one won’t be needing him anymore, either.”

Hillman nodded. “All right. Want me to have one o’ the hostlers bring the saddlebags over to your office later?”

“That would be fine. I’ll go through their gear, see if I can find anything to tell me who they were.” If Frank could locate any relatives, he would write to them to tell them what happened. That wasn’t too likely, though. Men who were on the dodge often severed all ties with their pasts.

He carried the payroll himself as he and Jack returned to the office. There was a small safe in the marshal’s office where the money could be locked up until Tip needed it. And when it was delivered to the Lucky Lizard, Frank intended to go along, just to make sure no one else made a try for the payroll. He was only the town marshal, but he considered himself responsible for everything that went on in the vicinity of Buckskin since there were no sheriff’s deputies down here and the sheriff himself rarely made it to these parts.

Frank Morgan’s career as a law enforcement officer had been pretty spotty. He had pinned on a badge a time or two before coming to Buckskin, and on several occasions he had pitched in to help a friend of his, Texas Ranger Tyler Beaumont. But that had been on an unofficial basis. A personal quest for vengeance had brought Frank to Buckskin. He’d found that he liked the settlement and the people who lived here, and when Tip Woodford and some of the other leading citizens had asked him to stay and take on the job of marshal, Frank had surprised himself by accepting.

He would have been willing to bet that plenty of other people would have been surprised if they’d heard about it, too. In the eyes of most star-packers west of the Mississippi, Frank Morgan was more of a lawbreaker than a law enforcer.

All because of the reputation he had as a fast gun, a reputation he had never sought nor celebrated.

Once there had been quite a few men like Frank Morgan in the West. Wild Bill Hickok, Ben Thompson, Matt Bodine, John Wesley Hardin, Falcon McAllister, and the man who some said was the fastest there ever was or ever would be, Smoke Jensen. Call them shootists, pistoleers, gunfighters . . . no matter the name by which they were known, they were a dying breed now in the waning days of the nineteenth century. Frank Morgan sometimes felt that he was indeed the last of them—but then somebody else would come along, determined to kill him and make a name for himself as a gunfighter. A part of Frank believed that for him it would never end until he was dead, no matter where he rode or how much he sought peace. He could almost believe he had found it here in Buckskin, but then some ruckus like the one today would break out and the killing would start again....

Frank Morgan was a solidly built, broad-shouldered man with some streaks of gray in his thick dark hair. That gray had been well-earned in the hard, dangerous life he’d led. He wore jeans, comfortable boots, and a faded blue work shirt. A wide-brimmed, steeple-crowned Stetson of gray felt rode squarely on his head. A gunbelt was buckled around his lean hips, and a well-cared-for Colt revolver rode in the attached holster. The gun had walnut grips, but Frank had never carved any notches in them to represent the men he’d killed. For one thing, he wasn’t the sort of hombre to do a thing like that, and for another, there wouldn’t have been any grips left on the gun by now. They would have been whittled away to nothing.

A few hours after the shootout with the men who had stolen the Lucky Lizard payroll, Frank walked down to the neat little house that was both the residence and the office of Dr. William Garland. The physician answered the knock on the door. Frank asked, “How’s that outlaw doing?”

“He’s awake now,” Garland answered as he moved back and gestured for Frank to come in. “I was about to send for you, Marshal. I figured you’d want to question him.”

Frank stepped into the front room and removed his hat as he did so. “Yeah, there are a few things I’d like to know,” he said.

He followed Garland to a small room where the wounded bandit was half propped up in a narrow bed. The man’s right arm was in a sling, and heavy bandages were wrapped around his shoulder. His beard-stubbled face was pale and drawn. His left wrist was tied securely to the bedpost with a short length of rope.

“Your deputy did that,” Garland said with a gesture toward the rope.

“Yeah, I told him to stop by and do that while this fella was still unconscious,” Frank said. “I didn’t want him taking off for the tall and uncut once he came to.”

“I’m not sure a restraint is necessary. He’s really too weak from loss of blood to go anywhere or cause any trouble.”

“Better not to take a chance. A fella can usually find a little extra strength if it means avoiding a hangrope.”

The outlaw’s eyes widened. “A hangrope!” he repeated in a hoarse voice. “I ain’t done nothin’ to deserve hangin’! I never killed nobody in my life!”

“Yeah, well, that’s no fault of your own, the way you were throwing lead around in the street this morning with those other three.”

“What happened to them? Nobody’ll tell me anything, damn it!”

That was another order Frank had given. This man was to be kept in the dark about what had happened to his companions.

Frank put a tone of bitter disappointment in his voice as he answered, “They’re probably way up in the high lonesome by now, along with that payroll money.”

“They got away? And with the money?”

“That’s right. They couldn’t abandon you quick enough, hombre.”

The man started to curse in a low, furious voice. Frank let him go on for a few seconds, then cut in with a harsh laugh. “You didn’t expect them to stay behind and get caught just because you got shot, did you? They had the money. That was all they cared about.”

“The dirty sons. We said we’d stick together. Damn their hides!”

“Tell me who they were,” Frank suggested. As expected, he hadn’t found anything in the saddlebags that had belonged to the dead men to tell him their identities. “Maybe that would help me track them down.”

“I dunno. . . .”

“I imagine they’ll be living high, wide, and handsome in San Francisco within a week or two, as much loot as they carried off.”

The outlaw cussed again, then said, “All right. They’re Johnny Blanco, Matt Higgins, and Ed Wrinkle. Those are the names I know ’em by, anyway.”

“And what about you?”

The man’s mouth twisted. “I’m Cullen Bradley.”

“Where’re you from, Bradley?”

“Poplar Bluff, Missouri. That’s where I grew up, anyway. I been on the drift for the past few years. That’s where I met Johnny and Matt and Ed. On the trails where the night owls hoot, if you know what I mean.”

Frank nodded. “I know, boy. I’ve ridden a few of those trails myself.”

Bradley swallowed hard and asked, “You . . . you ain’t really gonna hang me, are you, Marshal?”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”

“It wouldn’t be right! Like I told you, I’ve never killed nobody. I’ve stole before in my life, sure, but I draw the line at killin’. You might not’ve noticed, but every shot I fired this mornin’ went high on purpose.”

Frank didn’t believe him for a second. He had seen Bradley firing, and the outlaw wasn’t aiming deliberately high. If Bradley was right about never killing anybody, it was because he was a poor shot.

But in the absence of proof, Frank didn’t intend to try to send the outlaw to the gallows. Bradley didn’t have to know that just yet, though.

Frank shook his head. “I don’t think a judge and jury will believe that, Bradley. And even if they do, I’m not sure they’ll care. The mayor was pistol-whipped—”

“I didn’t do that, neither!” Bradley interrupted, his voice rising in panic. “That was Johnny Blanco done it! I never hurt nobody!”

“Folks might be more inclined to believe you if you were willing to help us out a mite.”

“What do you want me to do?” The young outlaw looked and sounded desperate. “I’ll do anything!”

“Tell me how the four of you knew that payroll money was going to be in the Lucky Lizard office this morning.”

Bradley licked his lips and hesitated, but only for a second. Then he nodded in eagerness and said, “It was a fella who works at the bank in Virginia City who told us. He used to ride with Johnny before he went straight. His name’s Russell.”

“That his first name or last name?” Frank asked.

Bradley shook his head. “Hell if I know. I never heard Johnny call him anything except Russell.”

Frank thought about it, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll send word to the authorities in Virginia City and let them figure it out. I reckon they can find this fella Russell and see that he gets what’s coming to him for helping you.”

“What about me? Are you . . .” Bradley swallowed hard. “Are you still gonna hang me?”

“You’ll stand trial for robbery, assault, and attempted murder,” Frank said. “What the court does with you isn’t up to me.”

“You . . . you’re not gonna just string me up?”

Frank smiled coldly at the young outlaw. “You’re lucky Tip Woodford wasn’t hurt any worse than he was, and that his daughter wasn’t hurt at all. If they had been . . . well, I wouldn’t have wanted to be you, Bradley.”

The outlaw gulped and closed his eyes in relief. With a snort of disgust, Frank turned and left the room.

“Take care of him, Doc. I’ll deputize a couple of men to stand guard over him until he can be moved over to the jail. How long do you reckon that’ll be?”

Garland thought about it and said, “Give me a day or two, Marshal, just to make sure he’s out of the woods. Then you can take him over and put him behind bars where he deserves to b. . .