Avenger Read online

  It occurred to him that most of the dime novels he had seen that featured him as the hero—or villain—originated in New York, and the thought of walking into the publishers’ offices and confronting them with the genuine article brought a chuckle to his lips. But there was no time for that. By now, Dutton had surely gotten word that the latest ambush had failed and that Frank was closing in on him. Dutton was probably busy right now setting up another trap of some sort, Frank thought as he ate breakfast in the train’s dining car the next morning. The train had already made an early morning stop in New York and now was rolling northeastward toward Massachusetts.

  His sleep hadn’t been disturbed the night before, nor had anyone tried to kill him this morning—yet. He wouldn’t rule out the possibility before he got to Boston, though.

  When he was finished eating, he went back to his compartment to collect his war bag. The train would arrive at the end of the line—for him anyway—in less than an hour.

  He was waiting on the rear platform of the car when the train rolled into Boston’s South Station. On the way into town, Frank had gotten a look at the city sprawled on several hills around Boston Harbor and the Charles River. He wondered idly which of those heights was Bunker Hill, famous as the site of an early battle in the Revolutionary War.

  He figured nobody would ever write poems or sing songs about the battle he intended to fight in Boston.

  It was the middle of the morning when he disembarked in the busy, crowded station. The crowds meant that he had to keep a close eye on everyone around him, just in case one of Dutton’s hired killers tried to sneak up on him and slip a knife between his ribs. No one bothered him, though, as he went over to a counter with a sign above it that read INFORMATION.

  A skinny young man in a suit, with slicked-down hair and pince-nez spectacles, stood behind the counter. His eyes widened at the sight of Frank’s range clothes, Stetson, and Colt Peacemaker.

  “You can’t wear that here,” he volunteered as he pointed at Frank’s gun. “We have laws.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Frank said, “but I feel a mite undressed without it.”

  “I’m going to call a policeman.”

  Frank tried not to sigh in irritation. Did every hombre east of the Mississippi have his head buried firmly in his rear end?

  “Listen, mister, I’m not looking for trouble, just some information, like the sign says. How do I go about finding somebody in this town?”

  “Who are you looking for?” the clerk asked suspiciously.

  “A lawyer named Dutton.”

  “You’ll need a lawyer, you go parading around town wearing a gun.”

  “Well, the sooner I get out of this train station, the sooner that won’t be your problem anymore, right?” Frank said.

  The clerk scowled, but reached below the counter to bring up a thick book. As he set it in front of Frank, he said, “This is the city directory. You ought to be able to look up the address you need.”

  “Much obliged,” Frank said as he began paging through the directory.

  “Couldn’t you maybe put that gun in your . . . your duffel bag?”

  “It’s a war bag,” Frank said without looking up from the book. “I don’t rightly know what a duffel is.”

  “Are you going to war?”

  That made Frank glance up. He nodded slightly and told the clerk, “You could say that.”

  Because he had just found Charles Dutton’s name and the address of the lawyer’s office.

  The clerk at the information counter told him how to find Beacon Street and which trolley to catch just outside the station. Well aware that he was the object of plenty of curious stares, Frank left the station and rode one of the electric trolley cars to his destination. It was a solid-looking office building on a street that led up a hill to where some of Boston’s finest homes overlooked the city.

  After all the time he had spent getting here and all the trouble he’d had along the way, when Frank stood in front of the building, he had to pause for a moment before going in. It seemed hard to believe that he could just walk into that office and ask to see the man he had come to kill.

  And what was he going to do, he asked himself, gun down Dutton in cold blood? He had never done anything like that in his life. All the men who had fallen to his bullets had been trying to kill him or somebody else. Suddenly, Frank felt a hollowness inside him. He was no murderer. If Dutton didn’t put up a fight, then all Frank could do was take him to the police and force him to admit his part in getting Vivian killed. That was going to be a mighty empty revenge, Frank realized.

  But it might be all he could get.

  He took a deep breath, blew it out, settled his hat a little firmer on his head, and marched into the place.

  A young, pretty woman behind a desk looked up at him with a smile that never wavered despite her obvious surprise at seeing a cowboy walk in. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

  “I’m looking for Charles Dutton.” The words sounded forced and strange as they came out of Frank’s throat.

  “Oh, Mr. Dutton isn’t in the office this week. He’s at his summer home out in Magnolia.”

  Gone? Dutton was gone?

  “Magnolia? Where’s that?”

  “On the North Shore. What they call Boston’s Gold Coast.” She said the name of the city as Bahhston. The sound of it grated on Frank’s ears.

  “How do I get there?”

  “One of the trolley lines runs to all the North Shore communities. Just look for a car that says ‘Magnolia Station.’ When you get there, anybody can tell you how to find Mr. Dutton’s home.”

  Frank reached up and tugged on the brim of his Stetson. “Much obliged for your help, ma’am.”

  The young woman giggled. “Are you a real cowboy, or are you in a show?”

  Frank thought mournfully that the time was coming when you wouldn’t be able to tell the two apart. But for now, he said, “The genuine article, ma’am,” and left the office.

  It took him a few minutes of looking, but then he found one of those trolley cars the girl had been talking about. A sign on the front of it read MAGNOLIA STATION. As it stopped, he climbed on and found a seat.

  The trolley belonged to the Boston & Northern and Old Colony Street Railway Company, according to a plaque above the door. Frank sat there as it clanged along, leaving the city behind and following the coastline northeastward. A few seats in front of him, a little boy turned around and stared at him. When the youngster’s mother said something to him, the boy shook his head. He didn’t want to turn around and sit down right. He wanted to look at the cowboy.

  Frank smiled. The kid grinned back at him.

  The trolley ride took a little more than an hour, but the car finally pulled into Magnolia Station. Frank had already seen that this oceanfront community was small, but it was surrounded by vast green estates dotted with mansions. It came as no surprise to him that Dutton lived in a place like this. The lawyer had made a lot of money bilking and betraying his clients.

  Frank climbed down from the trolley and asked a man working at the ticket counter in the station, “Where can I find Charles Dutton’s house?”

  Evidently eager to be helpful, the man came out from behind the counter and pointed. “See that road over there? Just follow it for about half a mile down to the shore. You can’t miss the place.”

  Frank nodded his thanks and then said, “You reckon I could leave this bag here for a while?”

  “Sure, I’ll put it behind the counter and keep an eye on it for you, Tex.”

  Frank was about to tell the man that he hadn’t been in Texas for a while, but then decided it didn’t matter. He handed over the war bag and left the station.

  Like any man who had been raised in cow country, Frank didn’t cotton much to walking. The rule of the range said any job that couldn’t be done from the back of a horse just wasn’t worth doing. But this close to his quarry, he was damned if a little walk was going to stop him now.


  As he followed the road toward the water, he thought about everything that had happened, about all the trails that had brought him to this spot. He wondered if Dutton had a family and if so, would they be here at this summer home with him? That was likely, Frank decided. And again, he was assailed by uncharacteristic doubts. All his life he had moved straight ahead, always reasonably sure of his best course of action. Now, in these surroundings that were so strange to him, he wasn’t certain what he was going to do.

  There was the Atlantic Ocean, with a brisk breeze blowing off it that carried the tang of salt. Frank ran his tongue over his lips and tasted the salt there as well. The landscape rolled gently down to the water. On a knoll to his left stood a huge white house with columns in front of it supporting a balcony over the veranda. A cobblestone drive that was at least a hundred yards long led to the house. As Frank began walking along the drive, he felt eyes watching him. He was in plain sight, an easy target for anybody who might be drawing a bead on him from the house. On the lawn to his right, between the house and the water, were flower beds and shrubs, but nothing that offered any good cover. Frank kept walking. He had come too far to turn back now.

  The place looked deserted, but he knew it wasn’t. His instincts told him that. Somebody was here, and that somebody was watching him. He followed the curving drive, and as he reached the front of the house, he saw the huge, elaborately carved door swing open.

  The man who stepped out of the house had a tweed suit, a fancy vest, a tie with a glittering stickpin in it, a big belly, a derby hat, a red handlebar mustache, and a Winchester that he held like he knew how to use it. He nodded to Frank and said, “You’d be Morgan.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “But you’re not Charles Dutton.” He had seen Dutton a few times in the past, before he had been aware of the depth of the man’s villainy. Dutton was a medium-sized man with thinning brown hair and a little mustache, not at all impressive-looking.

  “Mr. Dutton asked me to meet you here,” Handlebar said. “He gave me a message for you.”

  “What’s that?” Frank asked.

  “He said to tell you that you can either go back where you came from . . .”

  “Or?”

  “Or you can go to hell. I’ll be glad to send you there.”

  Frank smiled a little. “By yourself, amigo?”

  Handlebar shook his head and returned the smile. “Nope. Me and my friends, cowboy.”

  And from the corners of his eyes, Frank saw the men who stepped around both ends of the big house, three on each side, six in all, and all of them carrying rifles.

  With a savage grin, Handlebar asked, “What’ll it be, Morgan? I’m hopin’ you’ll choose hell.”

  “Say hello to the Devil for me,” Frank said, “because you’ll be there first.”

  Chapter 27

  Handlebar’s grin disappeared as he snapped the rifle up to fire. He was too late, though, because the Peacemaker was already in Frank’s hand. The revolver gouted flame as it roared. The bullet smashed into Handlebar’s chest and drove him backward through the open door of the mansion.

  Frank was moving before the man hit the ground. He spun toward the men on his right, threw a shot at them that came close enough to make them duck, and continued whirling around to fire at the men on the left. One of them staggered and fell to his knees, hit hard by the slug.

  Then as the rifles began to crack and bullets sang around his head, Frank turned and plunged across the lawn, heading for the water.

  Everything had been too easy once he got to Boston. He had reached that conclusion during the walk out here from Magnolia Station. The girl at Dutton’s office, the clerk at the trolley station . . . they had been told that when a cowboy showed up looking for Dutton, they were to cooperate and tell the Westerner exactly where to find him. Once he realized that fact, he had known he was heading for a trap—and he had walked right into it anyway.

  He didn’t know where Dutton really was, but he would have been willing to bet that the crooked lawyer wasn’t inside the mansion. Dutton was probably somewhere far away, waiting for his hired killers to report to him that Frank Morgan was finally dead.

  But that wasn’t going to happen as long as Frank had anything to say about it. And as long as he had bullets for his Colt, he had plenty to say.

  As a slug plucked at his sleeve, he left his feet in a long dive that carried him behind some shrubs. He knew the plants wouldn’t stop a bullet, so as he hit the ground, he rolled over a couple of times and then crawled quickly to his right. Dutton’s hired killers continued firing at the spot where he had disappeared, but they weren’t content to do only that. They sprayed their lead in other directions too.

  Frank stayed as low to the ground as he could as he crawled over the close-clipped grass, but some of the bullets still came too close for comfort. When he had gone about fifty yards, he stopped and lay there, motionless and silent, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

  Gradually, the shooting died away. Frank knew what the men were wondering. They thought that maybe they had hit him, that he might already be lying out here dead.

  But there was only one way to find out for sure.

  “Where’s Chuck?” one of the men called.

  “Chuck’s dead,” another answered. “I saw him go down when Morgan shot him.”

  “Maybe he’s just wounded.”

  “Morgan’s not the sort of man who shoots to wound. When he pulls the trigger, somebody dies most of the time.”

  Frank’s mouth curved in a grim smile at that comment.

  “Spread out. We’ll look for him.”

  “I don’t know about that, Larry,” a new voice said, this one with a British accent. “He could be lying doggo.”

  “As much lead as we threw out there, we’re bound to have hit him. If he’s not dead, he’s wounded at least.”

  You just keep on believing that, Larry, Frank thought.

  He heard quiet footsteps as the men spread out and began to search the parklike estate. They were trying to be stealthy about it, but to the ears of a Westerner they sounded about as clumsy and noisy as a herd of elephants. Frank had no trouble knowing when one of the men approached him. He waited patiently until the man stepped through a gap in the shrubbery. Then, as the fella gasped and tried to bring his rifle to bear, Frank shot him.

  The bullet knocked the man off his feet. Frank surged up, knowing the shot would draw the others. He grabbed the Winchester out of the man’s hands and holstered his Colt. Then he took off for an outbuilding he spotted at the water’s edge.

  “There he goes! Don’t let him get to the boathouse!”

  So that’s what it was. All Frank knew was that it would give him better cover than any of the shrubs on the lawn. As the men ran after him, he paused and spun around long enough to crank off three rounds from the rifle. One of the killers did a backward flip like he had run into an invisible wall. The others dived for cover.

  That gave Frank the time he needed to reach the boathouse. He jerked the door open and ran inside.

  The place was actually built out over the water on thick wooden piers. It was almost as big as some barns Frank had seen. Big doors at the far end could be opened to let the yacht that was berthed here steam out and then raise its sails. The boat was just one more sign of Charles Dutton’s ill-gotten wealth.

  Frank walked along one side of the vessel, wondering if he ought to go on board. He didn’t know anything about sailing, though, so the boat really couldn’t do him any good. The walls of the boathouse appeared to be thick enough to stop a bullet. If the killers who were left wanted him, they would have to come in here to get him.

  Either that or force him out, he thought as he sniffed the air and smelled smoke. He looked toward the door where he had come in and saw gray tendrils seeping in around it.

  The bastards had set fire to the boathouse!

  Well, it made sense, Frank told himself. Dutton could afford to buy another yacht and have
another boathouse built, but all the money in the world wouldn’t do him any good if he was dead. He must have given those hired gunmen strict orders that Frank had to die, no matter what it took. Only with the death of his implacable enemy could Dutton ever hope to rest easy again.

  The Winchester fired .45-caliber cartridges just like the Colt on Frank’s hip. He took fresh rounds from the loops on his gunbelt and thumbed them into the rifle until it was fully loaded. Then he replaced the spent rounds in the Peacemaker. That left him with only a few extra bullets—but if he couldn’t end this with the ammunition already in his guns, it probably wasn’t going to matter if he could reload or not.

  The smoke was getting thicker inside the boathouse, and he could hear the crackling of the flames now. The air was hotter, too. Suddenly, a voice called from outside, “Morgan! Morgan, can you hear me? Come on outta there, and we won’t shoot!”

  Frank recognized the voice. “Wasn’t born yesterday, Larry,” he said, even though the man who now seemed to be in charge of the party of killers couldn’t hear him.

  Frank looked down at the water lapping gently at the hull of the yacht. He wasn’t sure how deep it was or how much space was under the boathouse, but it would have to be enough. He looked around quickly, found a coiled rope in a storage cabinet, and slipped it over his shoulder. Then he sat down on the edge of the plank flooring, held the Winchester in his left hand and the Colt in his right, and slid off into the water.

  He held the weapons as high as he could, hoping to keep them from being submerged, and sure enough, his boots hit the bottom when he was only neck deep. He looked around underneath the boathouse. There was a couple of feet of leeway between the water and the floor. Frank was glad he wouldn’t have to go underwater and swim out of here.

  He thought about his enemies, and decided there were at least four unwounded men out there. The ones he had winged earlier were probably hurt badly enough to be out of the fight, but he couldn’t know that for sure. Larry would have them covering the front and sides of the boathouse in case the fire drove Frank out in one of those directions.