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  The six ranchers gathered in front of the hay bales. Frank noted that while Patterson, Guthrie, and Lopez all greeted Northam politely enough, they displayed the same sort of coolness toward the big man that Sandoval had. Clearly, Northam was something of an outsider here.

  Still feeling a little odd about it, Frank stepped up onto the hay bales. The buzz of conversation in the barn died. With everyone’s eyes on him, Frank said, “I want to thank all of you for coming tonight, and especially Señora Montero for agreeing to have this meeting here at her ranch. I reckon you all know who I am . . .”

  Nods of agreement came from the ranchers.

  “The reason I came here to the San Fernando Valley,” Frank went on, “is because I wanted to lend a hand to Mr. John J. Stafford. Mr. Stafford’s law partner, Claudius Turnbuckle, is a friend of mine.”

  He didn’t mention that Turnbuckle and Stafford also represented some of his own business interests. His connection to the Browning business empire wasn’t widely known, and that’s the way Frank wanted to keep it.

  “I knew from Turnbuckle that Mr. Stafford was having some sort of trouble down here, and I thought maybe I could help,” he went on. “Once I got here, it didn’t take long to figure out what the trouble was.”

  Sandoval spoke up, saying, “It didn’t take you long to kill one of my sister’s ranch hands either, did it, Morgan?”

  Frank’s jaw tightened with anger for a second, but he suppressed the reaction. “That doesn’t have anything to do with the problems you folks have been having.”

  “If it had been one of my men you gunned down, you never would have left my rancho alive,” Sandoval snapped.

  “Jorge, please,” Dolores said as she put a hand on his arm. “Mr. Morgan and I have reached an understanding on that matter. Lonnie forced him into that gunfight.”

  Sandoval just snorted as if his sister’s argument didn’t mean anything to him, but he crossed his arms over his chest and shut up.

  Frank tried to ignore the instinctive dislike he felt for the man and continued. “As I was saying, it’s pretty obvious that you’ve got oil wells crowding in all around you. That’s bad enough, what with the noise and the smell and the oil fouling your water supplies in places. What I want to hear about is the rustling and the bushwhacking that’s been going on.”

  Several of the ranchers started to talk at once. Feelings ran high, and Frank had to raise his arms and call for order to get them to settle down. Then, one at a time, he listened to their complaints.

  It was the same story over and over: cattle disappearing, cowboys being shot at as they rode the range, barns set on fire. Typical range war tactics, Frank thought.

  “The authorities haven’t done anything to try to put a stop to this?” he asked. He knew what Stafford and Dolores had told him, but he wanted to hear from the others as well.

  Dave Guthrie laughed humorlessly. “That blasted Magnusson flat out told me that the law was on his side. He’s right, too. The sheriff claims he can’t do anything without proof.”

  Ben Patterson said, “What more proof does anybody need besides missin’ cows and shot-up punchers? I’ve got two men laid up with bullet holes in ’em right now! It’s just pure luck that one or both of ’em ain’t dead!”

  The others joined in that chorus, with the exception of Edwin Northam. In fact, the big Englishman hadn’t contributed anything to the meeting so far. Curious, Frank looked at him and said, “What about you, Mr. Northam? Have you been having the same sort of trouble as everybody else in the valley?”

  Northam had caught his breath, although just standing seemed to be an effort for him. “Actually, no,” he said. “I’ve lost a few head of stock to rustlers, but no more than usual.” He moved a hand in a languid wave. “Any cattleman is going to have a cow taken now and then to feed a hungry family of farmers.”

  “This is not like that,” Jorge Sandoval insisted. “This is organized, widespread rustling!”

  “It is those oil drillers who are eating our beef!” Augusto Lopez put in. “And they who shoot at us when we ride on our land!”

  “Nobody’s ever spotted any of the bushwhackers, though, is that right?” Frank asked.

  “Who else could it be except them?” Dolores said.

  Frank turned back to Northam. “You haven’t had any of your men shot?”

  “No, sir, indeed not.”

  “You don’t find that a mite suspicious?” Frank mused.

  Mustache bristling, Bartholomew Fox stepped forward. “See here, sir!” he said in a high-pitched voice. “What are you insinuatin’ about Mr. Northam, sir?”

  Northam put out a hand. “No need to get upset, Fox. I’m sure that Mr. Morgan wasn’t accusing me of anything.” His silky voice hardened. “Are you, Mr. Morgan?”

  “I don’t have any reason to accuse anybody of anything . . . just yet,” Frank said. “But I intend to find out what’s going on here in the valley.”

  “Simply as a favor to your lawyer’s partner?” Sandoval asked. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Well, you can believe this, Señor,” Frank said. “Somebody’s taken potshots at me twice now, and I don’t like it, not one bit. That makes it personal. That’s why I intend to get to the bottom of things.”

  Sandoval sneered. “Surely, a man such as yourself has many enemies. You can’t be sure that these attempts on your life are because you came here claiming to want to help us.”

  “Maybe not,” Frank admitted. “Maybe one of you can shed some light on what happened.”

  He signaled to Linderman, who left the barn and came back a minute later accompanied by two cowboys carrying a blanket-wrapped shape. They brought it to the front of the barn and placed it in front of the hay bales.

  Frank stepped down, bent and grasped the blanket, and straightened. The body of the dead bushwhacker rolled out onto the ground in front of the startled ranchers.

  “Take a good look at him,” Frank said to them. “Maybe he belongs to one of you.”

  Chapter 15

  Startled, angry exclamations came from all the ranchers except Dolores, who had seen the dead man earlier. Even so, she paled again at the grisly sight.

  “Do you actually mean to say that you believe this man was working for one of us, Morgan?” Northam demanded.

  “Was he?” Frank shot back at the Englishman. “Do you recognize him?” He swept his gaze over the other men. “Do any of you?”

  “He’s no ranch hand,” Dave Guthrie said. “Look at those damned boots!”

  Ben Patterson nodded in agreement. “No cowboy worth his salt’d be caught dead in a pair o’ clodhoppers like those.”

  “It’s obvious that he’s one of the oil drillers,” Sandoval snapped. “Magnusson sent him after you because he’s afraid of you, Morgan.”

  That possibility had occurred to Frank, but he wasn’t sold on it just yet. The attempt on his life in town had occurred before his run-in with Magnusson. That first night in Los Angeles, the oilman shouldn’t have known anything about Frank, let alone that he had come to southern California to help the ranchers. Frank had barely found out about it himself by that time.

  Of course, he had no proof that the same man had been responsible for both ambushes, he reminded himself.

  “Just take a good look at him,” he told the ranchers. “Do any of you remember ever seeing him before?”

  A couple of them groused about it, but they studied the dead man’s face for several moments, then one by one they shook their heads and denied knowing him. All the denials sounded convincing . . . but Frank didn’t know these men well enough to judge yet how good they were at lying.

  “All right.” Frank motioned to Linderman, who moved forward along with the two men who had carried the body into the barn. They rolled it up in the blanket once more and carried it out.

  Frank turned to Dolores. “Linderman tells me you’ve got your own icehouse here, Señora. I’d like for you to keep the body here tonight and see that i
t gets taken into town in the morning.”

  “We can do that,” she said with an uncertain nod. Clearly, she didn’t like the idea of storing the corpse overnight, but that was the only practical solution.

  “What are you going to do, Morgan?” Sandoval asked with a challenging glare. “Just how do you intend to get to the bottom of this, as you put it?”

  “Those stolen cows have to be going somewhere,” Frank said. “Maybe I can find out where, and if I do, that may tell me who’s behind the rustling. Likewise, if there are any more shootings, I intend to track down the men responsible. If I can get my hands on some of them, they’ll tell me who’s been giving them their orders.”

  “You seem quite confident of that, sir,” Northam said. “What do you intend to do, torture them?”

  “Whatever it takes,” Frank replied coolly, although in reality he didn’t have any intention of torturing anybody. Usually, when he wanted information from someone who didn’t want to give it, all he had to do was threaten to turn Dog loose on him.

  “So you’re gonna be like a regulator,” Guthrie said.

  “That’s just another name for a hired killer,” Patterson put in.

  “More like a range detective,” Frank said. “I don’t plan on killing anybody . . . unless I have to.”

  The feeling of hostility was still thick in the air inside the barn. Northam turned to Dolores and said, “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to give this man free rein, Señora. Despite his claims, he’s known to be a killer. You may all wind up in trouble with the law for turning him loose on the valley. As for myself, I wash my hands of the matter.”

  “You would rather go it alone against Magnusson, Edwin?”

  The Englishman smiled. “If you’d ever served on a schooner caught in a typhoon in the South China Sea, my dear, you’d understand why Magnusson fails to frighten me. If he causes trouble for me, I shall deal with it in my own fashion.”

  “All right,” she said with a nod. “If that’s the way you feel.” She looked around at the others. “But it seems to me that having Mr. Morgan look into things is the best thing we can do.”

  Stafford stepped up, speaking for the first time in a while. “I agree, Señora. I’m sure you gentlemen aren’t aware of it, but Mr. Morgan has served as a lawman himself in recent years. I know what sort of reputation he has, but it’s not fully deserved.”

  Once, it had been, Frank thought. He had been a pretty cold-hearted son of a bitch at times in his life. Only in recent years, as Stafford said, had that begun to change.

  And he wasn’t sure that it ever would change completely. He didn’t really like any of these people, with the possible exception of Dolores, and it would have been easier just to mount up and ride away, leaving them to their troubles. The Drifter could go on the drift again.

  But he’d been shot at twice, he reminded himself, and until he was sure that the dead man had been responsible for both attempts, he hated to leave that question unanswered. He hated like hell being shot at.

  “It’s settled then,” Dolores said firmly as she looked at the other ranchers. “Mr. Morgan will find the evidence we need to make the law stop Magnusson.” She turned to Frank. “I know you said you didn’t want us to pay you, but—”

  He would have refused any offer she was about to make. Their money didn’t mean anything to him.

  But he didn’t get a chance to, because at that moment guns began to roar outside. Frank’s hand flashed instinctively to his Colt as he heard the slamming of six-guns interspersed with the sharper crack of rifles being fired.

  Startled shouts and curses filled the air in the barn. Bullets thudded into the walls. “Everybody down!” Frank yelled. “Blow out those lanterns!”

  Gun in hand, he ran toward the open doors. A slug whined through the air near his head. Somewhere in the barn, a man yelled in pain.

  Frank glanced back and saw that Jorge Sandoval had grabbed his sister and forced Dolores down behind the hay bales. Sandoval crouched beside her, holding a gun. The other ranchers had scattered, hunting cover, except for Edwin Northam, who shuffled slowly toward the cover of an empty stall. Bartholomew Fox backed along beside his employer, also with a drawn gun. His head darted back and forth as he searched for something to shoot at.

  Linderman dashed into the barn before Frank reached the doors. Frank grabbed the foreman’s arm and jerked him to the side just as a hail of bullets scythed through the air where Linderman had been. They sprawled on the ground and rolled clear of the doorway as more slugs searched for them.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Frank demanded.

  “Hell’s the right word for it,” Linderman gasped. “Must’ve been twenty or thirty men opened up on the place from the dark. Snuck up on us like a bunch of damned redskins! At least a dozen men went down in the first volley, some of ’em our boys, the rest hands who rode over here with the other ranchers.”

  Frank nodded as darkness began to fall inside the barn. His order to blow out the lanterns was finally being heeded. That didn’t keep the hidden riflemen outside from continuing to pour lead into the building, though.

  The cowboys who had been outside the barn were putting up a fight, but they had been riddled by the opening volley of the ambush. The firing from the defenders was sporadic and ineffective.

  Linderman cursed bitterly. “Judgin’ from the muzzle flashes I saw, they’ve got the place surrounded. That damn Magnusson must’ve brought every driller in the valley with him!”

  Frank wasn’t convinced that Magnusson was behind this attack, but at the moment it didn’t matter. He had to figure out a way to turn the tables on the gunmen, or everybody in the barn might be wiped out.

  “I’m going out there,” he told Linderman through gritted teeth.

  The foreman reached out in the darkness and gripped Frank’s shoulder. “Don’t be a damned fool! It’s a hornet’s nest out there. At least in here there’s a little cover.”

  “Maybe so,” Frank said, “but what’ll we do if they kill all the men outside and then set fire to the barn?”

  Linderman cursed again, then said, “You’re right, Morgan. Let’s go.” His hand tightened on Frank’s shoulder. “But let’s go up, not out.”

  Frank smiled grimly as he realized what Linderman meant. The two men stood up. Linderman knew the barn like the back of his hand. In the flickering light of muzzle flashes from both inside and outside, the foreman led Frank to a ladder that took them up into the hayloft.

  “There’s a trapdoor onto the roof,” Linderman explained. “If we can get up there without them seein’ us, maybe we can pick off enough of them to make the others hightail it.”

  Frank nodded. That was their best chance, he knew. The defenders weren’t necessarily outnumbered, but taken by surprise and pinned down like they were, their numbers didn’t matter all that much.

  Morgan and Linderman climbed rungs nailed to the wall to the trapdoor. Linderman unfastened it and pushed it up and out of the way. He and Frank crawled out onto the roof and hugged the sloping boards.

  Using elbows and knees, they pulled themselves to the crest of the roof and peered over it. Muzzle flame bloomed like crimson flowers in the darkness around the barn. Frank focused his gaze on the spot where one of the flashes had appeared and waited for another one. As soon as he saw the jet of orange flame, he squeezed the trigger of his Colt.

  It was impossible to tell if he’d hit the rifleman behind those muzzle flashes, but as a long moment passed, he didn’t see any more from that spot. A few yards away, Linderman’s gun blasted as he followed Frank’s example.

  Frank was already selecting another target. He waited patiently, saw the flash he was looking for, and fired. Again, no more flashes came from that spot.

  “We can maybe whittle ’em down this way,” Linderman called to him, “but if they ever figure out we’re up here, we’ll be sittin’ ducks!”

  The foreman wasn’t telling Frank anything he didn’t already know
. Frank drew a bead, waited, fired again. He was convinced that he and Linderman were doing some damage . . .

  But it was probably too little, too late. There were too many of the mysterious attackers. The odds had tilted too far for Frank and Linderman to tilt them back again.

  And those odds were about to get a whole heap worse, Frank realized as he spotted an orange glare from the corner of his eye. He rolled onto his back in time to see the blazing torch that was arching through the air fall onto the barn roof. It rolled down a few feet, stopped, and continued burning fiercely. More torches followed, spinning through the air as they were thrown from below.

  “Hell!” Linderman cried.

  The foreman was right about that, Frank thought. If the barn started burning, it would be hell indeed.

  And he and Linderman would be caught right on top of the inferno.

  Chapter 16

  Frank leaped to his feet and jammed his gun back in its holster. “We’ve got to put those fires out!” he yelled as he ran awkwardly across the roof toward the spot where the first torch had landed.

  He kicked the torch and sent it flying off the barn, then began stomping at the flames that had already started trying to take hold of the wooden shingles.

  Linderman followed suit, scrambling desperately across the roof toward another torch. Frank knew that by doing this they were calling attention to themselves, but they had no choice. If the barn burned, they were doomed anyway, along with everybody inside it.

  As soon as the fire started by the first torch was out, Frank hurried over to another one, bent down and grabbed it, and flung it off the roof. As he did so, a shot from down below whistled past his head.

  With the muzzle flash still imprinted on his eyes, he palmed out his Colt and snapped off a shot. The rifle cracked again, but this time the flame from its barrel jetted straight up, telling Frank that the attacker had pulled the trigger as he was going over backward.

  That was one of the bastards down anyway, Frank thought with grim satisfaction.