Hell Town

Chapter 3

She didn’t have to give her full name. Frank knew perfectly well who she was.

Diana Woodford was Tip’s daughter. She was blond, beautiful, and had lived back East with her mother until the older woman had passed away a couple of years earlier. After that, she had come West to live with her father in Buckskin. Tip had still been married to Diana’s mother even though they hadn’t lived together for many years. She hadn’t been able to stand life on the frontier, and Tip couldn’t abide the thought of moving back East. He’d had plenty of money at the time, so they had set up separate households and he had supported them both. After the silver played out, Diana and her mother had been forced to take care of themselves. If Diana resented her father because of that, though, Frank had never seen any sign of it.

Diana had surprised her father, and probably herself too, by the way she took to living in the West. She was a good rider and could most often be found wearing boots, denim trousers, and a man’s shirt. She could handle a rifle with a considerable amount of skill.

She was also twenty-four years old, which meant Frank Morgan was a good fifteen or twenty years too old for her. That wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that in the time Frank had been here, Diana had demonstrated a definite interest in him.

Even if there hadn’t been the age difference, Frank would have been cautious about developing any relationship with Diana. He had been married twice in his life, and both of his wives had met violent deaths. That tended to make a man leery of getting romantically involved, at least on any kind of serious basis.

And he respected Diana too much, not to mention his liking for her father, to consider anything that wasn’t serious with her.

But he couldn’t just send her away now that she knew he was here and awake, so he called, “Come in.”

She opened the door and stepped into the office with a worried look on her face. “I heard there was trouble at the saloon.”

Frank holstered the gun and put it back on the desk. “Quite a ruckus all right,” he said. “A young fella took it in his head to ride his horse into the Silver Baron.”

“What happened to him?”

She would find out soon enough, whether he told her or not, so he said, “I had to kill him.”

Her blue eyes widened. “For riding a horse into a saloon?”

“For trying to kill me and anybody else unlucky enough to get in the way of all the bullets he was throwing around.”

“Oh.” Diana nodded. “Well, that’s different, I suppose. Are you all right?”

“Fine. Not a scratch.”

“Was anyone else hurt?”

“Not that I know of,” Frank said. “Well, the horse got grazed by a bullet and jumped through one of those plateglass windows your pa’s so proud of. I don’t know how badly it was hurt. A couple of fellas went after it, but they didn’t come back while I was around.”

“Poor horse,” Diana said. “And I suppose I should feel sympathetic toward its rider too.”

Frank grunted. “I wouldn’t waste too much time worrying about him. He was an owlhoot, and before that he was trying to goad Professor Burton into a gunfight. I’m pretty sure he would have killed the professor.”

“That’s terrible! Professor Burton is such a kind, gentle man…. Anyway, Frank, I’m just glad that you’re all right.” She moved a step closer to him. “I…I’d be very upset if anything bad happened to you.” She reached out and laid a hand on his arm.

Frank had always liked it when women touched him like that, and with Diana it was no exception. She had somehow gotten even closer to him, so that she was standing no more than a foot away from him. Her head was tilted back a little so she could look up into his face, and it would have been easy as pie just to lean down and press his lips to hers in a kiss.

Instead, he turned away and said, “I’d offer you some coffee, but what’s left in the pot is so stout, I’m afraid it’d jump out of the cup and run off under its own power if I tried to pour it.”

She laughed, but he thought she sounded a little disappointed. “No, that’s all right. Thank you anyway. It’s late, so I suppose I should get home.”

Frank reached for his gunbelt. “I’ll walk you—”

“Nonsense. I’ll be perfectly fine. I walked over here by myself, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, and that probably wasn’t a very good idea.” Frank buckled on the belt and then took his hat from the nail. “Buckskin is a boomtown now. You’ve never seen it like this before. I’ve seen plenty of places like it, though, and there’s always trouble just waiting to happen in a boomtown.”

“All right, if you insist.”

Frank took a Winchester from the rack on the wall and tucked it under his arm; then they left the office and stepped out into the street. Despite the late hour, a lot of lights still burned in Buckskin. During the past month, three saloons had opened to give the Silver Baron some competition, and a couple of the stores were still open, including Benjamin’s Emporium. A wagon rolled along the street, and a few men on horseback were leaving the settlement. Music and laughter came from the saloons, the sounds drifting on the warm night air. Several pedestrians walked along the street, all of them male. There were only a handful of women in Buckskin—Diana, Leo’s wife Trudy, and Lauren Stillman, Ginnie Carlson, and Becky Humphries, the three retired soiled doves who now ran what had been the settlement’s only café. Their eatery had some competition now too, as a Chinaman had shown up and opened a hash house, and the newly reopened hotel also served meals in its dining room.

There were a few things Buckskin didn’t have yet: a school, a church, and a whorehouse. A silver mining boomtown could probably get along all right without the first two, but Frank knew it was only a matter of time before some madam showed up with a wagonload of girls and set up in business. Lauren, Ginnie, and Becky could have already gone back to their old profession—they’d had plenty of offers from prospectors lonely for female companionship—but so far they were being stubborn about maintaining their retired status.

“The town’s really growing fast, isn’t it?” Diana said as they walked along the street toward the house she shared with her father. They passed the offices of the Lucky Lizard Mining Company, where Tip handled his business affairs.

“Too fast,” Frank said as he nodded in agreement. “Boomtowns have a habit of getting too big for their britches.”

“Progress is good, though, isn’t it?”

“To somebody who grew up in civilization like you did, I reckon it is. I grew up in Texas when the place still had all the bark on it, and since leaving there I’ve traveled around to some other mighty wild places. Progress is a good thing for most folks, but there are some of us who miss the old days and hate to see them go away.”

She slipped her arm through his. He didn’t want to offend her by pulling away, and he enjoyed the warmth and the closeness too, even if he didn’t want to admit it even to himself.

“You talk like you’re a hundred years old,” she said with a laugh. “You’re not ancient, Frank. You’re not even that much older than me.”

“Old enough to be your pa,” he said with a stern note in his voice.

“But you’re not my father,” she pointed out, and he certainly couldn’t argue with that.

When they reached the Woodford house, Frank felt a sense of relief when he noticed Tip approaching the place from a different direction. The mayor’s presence would help him avoid an awkward situation. Frank had been afraid that Diana might want a good-night kiss—and he had also been afraid that he would want to give her one.

“Blast it, Diana,” Tip said as they all came together at the gate in the recently painted picket fence in front of the house. “What are you doin’ out and about at this hour?”

“I heard that there was trouble and went to make sure Marshal Morgan was all right,” she replied with a note of defiance in her voice.

“The marshal can take care o’ himself just fine. Been doin’ it for a lot of years, haven’t you, Frank?”

“That’s true,” Frank said. “I just thought it would be a good idea to walk Diana home. You never know who or what you’ll run into when it’s late like this.”

“I appreciate it.” Tip gestured toward the house. “Go on in, darlin’. I’ll be there in a minute. Got something I need to talk to Frank about first.”

Diana seemed reluctant to leave, but she nodded and said, “Good night, Marshal.”

Frank returned the nod and tugged on the brim of his hat. “Miss Woodford.”

Tip waited until Diana was in the house before he said, “That gal’s turnin’ into a reg’lar pest. Don’t worry about hurtin’ her feelin’s if she starts to bother you, Frank. Just send her packin’.”

“I doubt if it’ll ever come to that,” Frank said. “Did you really want to talk to me about something?”

“Oh, yeah. Jack got that kid’s carcass down to Langley’s all right, and I told Claude to fix up a coffin for him. Nothin’ fancy. There was enough dinero in his pockets to pay for the damages to the Silver Baron and a pine box too.” Tip rubbed his jaw and frowned. “Where do you reckon that money came from, Frank?”

“I think it was loot from some robbery,” Frank answered without hesitation. “Those hombres the kid was riding with, Mitchell and Beeman, are outlaws. I’d seen them a time or two before, in various places.”

He didn’t elaborate on where he had seen them, and Tip didn’t ask. Tip knew that Frank had a reputation as a gunfighter and had spent time in some rough places. Nobody had ever accused Frank Morgan of being a common owlhoot, though.

“You reckon it was a good idea to let them go?”

Frank shrugged. “They hadn’t caused any trouble here in Buckskin. If I’d had wanted posters on them, I could have held them for the law elsewhere, but no paper on them has crossed my desk. I don’t have any way of knowing if they’re actually wanted anywhere right now.”

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Tip said. “I don’t much cotton to the idea of owlhoots comin’ into our town, though.”

“Well, you’d better get used to it,” Frank advised him. “The word is out all over the territory that you’ve found the old Lucky Lizard vein again, and there have been a couple of other strikes in the area. People of all sorts come flooding into a place when there’s a gold or silver strike, and that includes outlaws. Might as well try to stop the sun from coming up in the morning. We’re actually lucky we haven’t had even more trouble.”

“Yeah.” Tip sighed. “I know you’re right, but I don’t have to like it. I’m just damned glad that you showed up in Buckskin when you did, Frank.”

It was violence that had brought Frank to the settlement in the first place. He had pursued an old enemy here, a man who had tried to have him killed. Once that matter was settled, Frank had stayed around for a few days because he liked the area and liked the people. At that time, he hadn’t known that Tip had rediscovered the vein of silver that everyone thought had played out ten years earlier. When Tip had told him about that and asked him to take on the job of marshal in the town that was bound to grow again, Frank had hesitated….

But not for long. He had been feeling some vague stirrings, a notion that it might be time for him to settle down at last after a lifetime of drifting. Buckskin was as good a place as any to put that notion to the test.

“One more thing,” Tip said. “Those fellas who went after the kid’s horse caught it and brought it back to Hillman’s livery stable. It’s down there now. Amos said he’d dope up that bullet graze and the cuts from the broken window. Since the kid’s partners’ve already left town and didn’t take the horse with them, I was thinkin’ maybe you ought to claim him, Frank.”

“Me?” Frank was surprised by the offer. “I’ve got a horse.”

A damned good horse, in fact. The big, rangy Appaloosa called Stormy had been with Frank for several years. They made a good team, along with the wolflike cur known only as Dog.

“Yeah, but a fella can’t have too many good horses. Think about it, anyway. Maybe in the mornin’ you can go down to Hillman’s and take a look at it.”

“I suppose I can do that,” Frank agreed.

He lifted a hand in farewell as Tip turned and went through the gate and up the walk to the house. As Frank glanced in that direction, he thought he saw the curtain over a window move a little. A lamp was burning in the room, and the yellow glow revealed a distinctively female silhouette against the curtain. A smile tugged at Frank’s mouth as he turned and started walking back toward the marshal’s office.

Figuring out what to do about Diana Woodford was a problem all right, but woman trouble had one advantage over the sort of problems Frank usually ran into.

Diana just wanted to kiss him, not shoot him!

At least, not yet….