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  “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 calle
d, “Who is it?”

  A woman’s voice answered, “Diana.”

  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.