Hell Town

Chapter 2

Frank Morgan had only a second to recognize the rider as the kid called Conwell. Then he threw himself across the bar, rolling over it and grabbing Johnny Collyer. He hauled the bartender to the floor behind the bar as Conwell’s shots shattered several bottles sitting on the backbar.

Frightened, angry shouts filled the air as the saloon’s customers scattered. Some of them turned over tables and dived behind them, seeking cover as the kid’s Colts blasted wildly and sent bullets flying around the room.

Gun in hand, Frank surged up behind the bar. He fired, but Conwell pulled his mount into a tight turn at the same instant. The panicky horse reared up and pawed at the air with its front hooves. Frank’s slug plowed a furrow in the horse’s shoulder instead of knocking Conwell out of the saddle. The horse screamed in pain, twisted and bucked, and came down hard. Floorboards cracked under its weight. The horse arched its back, sunfishing madly.

With a startled yell, Conwell flew out of the saddle. He came crashing down on a table, busting it to kindling. His left-hand gun slipped out of his fingers and skittered away across the floor.

He managed to hang on to his other Colt, however, and as he clambered up out of the debris of the broken table, he swung the weapon toward Frank.

Before Conwell could fire again, the Peacemaker in Frank’s hand roared a second time. This shot didn’t miss. It caught Conwell in the chest and threw the youngster backward. His finger tightened on the trigger and the gun in his hand exploded, but the barrel was angled upward by now and the bullet went into the ceiling without hurting anything. Conwell landed on the splintered tabletop. He gasped in pain, his back arched, and his boot heels beat a tattoo on the floor as death spasms wracked him.

Then with a rattling sigh, the life went out of him and his body relaxed.

The horse, still spooked half out of its mind with pain and fear, headed for the big window, rather than the open doors. It lifted off its feet in a leap and smashed through the glass, shattering the window into a million pieces and sending shards and splinters spraying over the boardwalk. The horse cleared the window, clattered across the boardwalk, jumped into the street, and bolted away.

“Somebody go after that horse!” Frank shouted. “It’s bound to be cut up from the glass, and it’ll need some attention.”

A couple of the men who had been drinking in the saloon before the trouble erupted ran outside, and a moment later the swift rataplan of hoofbeats testified that they were giving chase to the runaway animal.

Frank helped a shaken Johnny Collyer to his feet and asked, “You all right, Johnny?” He knew the bartender had had health problems in the past.

Johnny nodded and said, “Yeah…yeah, I’m fine.” He gazed around the room with a dismayed expression. “But look what’s happened to the place!”

There was plenty of damage all right, and all of it could be laid at the feet of Conwell, who must have decided that he couldn’t live with backing down, even to the famous gunfighter known as The Drifter. He had gone outside, gotten his horse, given in to his anger, and charged back into the saloon, guns blazing.

The tactic might have worked. Most men would have been too shocked to see a man on horseback bursting through the batwings to react in time to save themselves.

But not Frank Morgan. His reactions were lightning-swift, and years of living a danger-filled life had honed his instincts to a razor-sharp keenness.

He came out from behind the bar and went to check on Conwell. Frank was confident that the reckless youngster was dead, but it never hurt to be sure. More than one man had been gunned down by a “corpse” that wasn’t really dead yet.

Conwell was, though. Frank looked over at Mitchell and Beeman, who had ridden into Buckskin with the kid. They had dived to the floor when the shooting started, and they were just now picking themselves up.

“Sorry I had to kill him,” Frank told the two men.

“I’m not,” Hap Mitchell said with a snort of disgust. “He was a hotheaded fool who nearly ruined lots of jobs for us—”

He stopped short, as if realizing that he might be saying too much. Frank knew good and well that the “jobs” Mitchell referred to were robberies of some sort, probably bank or train holdups. He and Beeman were known to ride the hoot owl trail. But those crimes hadn’t taken place here in Buckskin, and Frank didn’t have any wanted posters on the two men, so he didn’t have any call to arrest them.

“Anyway,” Mitchell went on after a second, “you won’t hear any complaints from us about you killin’ that idiot, Morgan.”

“He had it comin’,” Beeman added. “Hell, the way he was throwin’ lead around, some of those shots could’ve hit us!”

Still kneeling beside Conwell, Frank felt inside the dead man’s pockets. He found a roll of bills and a leather poke with several double eagles inside it. He straightened and set the money on the bar.

“Reckon this should go to repair the damage he caused here in the saloon, and anything that’s left over can go toward the cost of burying him.”

Mitchell shrugged. “Fine with us. We got no call on that money.”

Frank figured it was loot from some robbery, but he couldn’t prove that. He pointed to the money and told Johnny Collyer, “Give that to Tip when he gets back here.”

“He’s the one who fetched you, right?” Johnny asked.

Frank nodded. “Yes, I was in the jail. Tip went on down to Jack’s cabin to roust him out too, in case I needed some help. Must’ve had some trouble waking him up, because I expected them to be here before now.”

As if they had been waiting for him to say that, a couple of men hurried along the boardwalk and then turned in at the saloon, stepping through the opening where the batwings used to be. With a stricken look on his face, Thomas “Tip” Woodford gazed around at the destruction and groaned.

“Lord, it looks like a tornado hit this place!”

“That’s what happens when a fella rides his horse around inside,” Frank said.

Catamount Jack walked over to Conwell’s corpse and nudged it with a booted foot. “If this is the varmint what done it, I don’t reckon he’ll be ridin’ again any time soon. Leastways, not unless the Devil’s got some saddle mounts in hell.”

The tall, lean old-timer had a tuft of beard like a billy goat, and had sometimes been accused of smelling like a billy goat too. His buckskins were old and grease-stained. A shapeless felt hat was crammed down on his head. He had been a mountain man, prospector, buffalo hunter, scout, wagon train guide…. You name it and Jack had done it, as long as it was west of the Mississippi. Frank didn’t know what the old-timer’s real name was; he was just Catamount Jack. He had been working part-time as Buckskin’s deputy marshal since Frank had taken the job of marshal a month earlier.

Professor Howard Burton came over to Frank and said, “I owe you a debt of gratitude, Marshal. I was fully aware that that insolent young pup was trying to goad me into a fight, but I almost let him do it anyway.”

“Yeah, you looked like you were about to make a grab for that Colt when I came in,” Frank said. “I’m glad you didn’t, Professor. I’m afraid Conwell would have killed you before I was able to stop him.”

Burton hooked his thumbs in his vest. “I’m a peaceful man by nature, of course, but sometimes my temper gets the best of me anyway.”

Frank wondered if it had been an outbreak of Burton’s temper that had led him to resign from his teaching position at a university back East and come West, winding up in the nearly abandoned ghost town of Buckskin, Nevada. When Frank had gotten here, Burton was one of a mere handful of inhabitants in the town. He didn’t do anything for a living as far as Frank had been able to tell, but seemed to have plenty of money, which meant he had brought it with him. A few times, Burton had made cryptic comments that Frank took to mean the professor was writing a book, but he had no idea what the volume was about or if Burton would ever finish it. The professor could be a mite stuffy at times, but Frank liked him.

Tip Woodford, who was also the mayor of Buckskin, looked at the shattered front window and shook his head. “I’ll have to have another pane o’ glass freighted out here from Virginia City,” he said. “Won’t be cheap.”

Johnny said, “We’ve got the money here that kid had in his pockets. Marshal Morgan said we could use it to fix up the place, right, Marshal?”

Frank nodded. “That’s right, Tip. Whatever’s left over goes to Claude Langley.”

Tip nodded. Claude Langley was a newcomer to Buckskin, and a welcome one because he provided an important service.

He was an undertaker.

Before Langley’s arrival in town, whenever somebody needed buryin’, it was up to the citizens to take care of the chore. They had a small cemetery at the edge of town, and now they had somebody who specialized in putting people in it.

Although some might say that Buckskin had two people who specialized in putting people in graves, if you included the marshal.

Frank didn’t want to think about that, though. These days he was trying to live down his reputation as a killer, not expand it.

Mitchell and Beeman had finished their drinks and now declined Johnny Collyer’s offer of refills. “We’ll be ridin’ along,” Mitchell said. “Just so you know we’re leavin’ town, Morgan.”

“I don’t suppose you want to take the kid with you?” Frank asked. “I’ve been assuming we’d have to bury him here, but if you want—”

“No, thanks,” Beeman cut in. “You plugged him, you plant him.”

Frank nodded, and the two gunmen walked out of the saloon. “Tough hombres, looks like,” Catamount Jack observed when they were gone.

“Tough enough,” Frank agreed. “I guess somebody needs to go fetch Langley, so he can bring his wagon up here and collect the body. I’m surprised he didn’t hear the shots and come to see what happened.”

“No need to make Langley come all the way up here.” Jack stooped, caught hold of Conwell under the arms, and lifted him. His wiry muscles handled the deadweight as if it didn’t amount to much. Jack slung the body over his shoulder and started toward the door.

“Good Lord,” Tip said. “You plan on carryin’ him all the way down to the undertaker’s place?”

“Won’t be the first time I’ve lugged a dead body around,” Jack said.

Frank wondered what the stories behind the other times might be, but he decided it might be better not to ask. He followed the old-timer out of the saloon as Jack toted the grisly burden toward Langley’s place at the other end of town.

Frank stopped at the marshal’s office. He had been alert and careful during the walk, just in case Mitchell and Beeman had been lying to him and had come back to settle the score for their former partner with an ambush. Nothing of the sort took place, though. The night seemed quiet and peaceful again after the earlier disturbance.

The marshal’s office and jail were located in a sturdy log building that had been constructed during Buckskin’s first heyday as a silver mining town. Like many of the other buildings, it had fallen into disrepair during the decade it sat there empty and abandoned. With help from Tip and Jack, Frank had fixed the place up, patching the roof and the walls, rehanging the thick door that led into the cell block, and moving in a small stove, a table that functioned as his desk, and several chairs. Either he or Jack spent most nights here, and a cot in one corner gave them a place to sleep. Frank had a room in the boardinghouse run by Leo Benjamin and his wife Trudy. Leo also owned and operated one of Buckskin’s general mercantile emporiums, and was probably the wealthiest man in town who didn’t have a successful silver claim.

Frank hadn’t gotten that cup of coffee in the saloon, so he checked the pot on his stove. What was left in there had turned to sludge, so he set it aside and told himself that he didn’t need any coffee anyway. He’d been about to turn in for the night when Tip came in, huffing and puffing from the run, to tell him that there was trouble in the Silver Baron. So now Frank hung his hat on the nail by the door, took off his gunbelt, coiled it and placed it on the table, and sat down on the cot to remove his boots.

Footsteps outside told him someone was coming. A knock sounded on the door. He glanced toward the holstered Colt lying on the table and wondered if he ought to get it before he answered. Never hurt to be careful, he reminded himself as he stood up and grasped the gun’s walnut grips. As he slid the iron from leather, he called, “Who is it?”

A woman’s voice answered, “Diana.”