Avenger Read online

  The window of a building to Frank’s left suddenly shattered as someone inside fired a gun through it. The bullet kicked up dust in the street about ten feet in front of Frank. Without drawing his gun, Frank turned and paced steadily toward the building.

  “You’ll have to do better than that, Dutton,” he called.

  Dutton burst from the door, sobbing in fear and triggering wildly as he ran along the boardwalk. Frank came after him inexorably.

  “Justice, Dutton,” he said as the gun in the crooked lawyer’s hand clicked on an empty chamber. None of the shots had come close to Frank. “That’s what you’ve got coming to you, and that’s what you’re going to get.”

  Dutton cried out raggedly and threw the empty six-shooter at Frank. It sailed harmlessly over his head. Panting and gasping, Dutton stumbled on down the boardwalk. He ran into the front door of a building and fell through it when it sprang open. Scrambling up, he ran on into the darkened interior.

  Just as Frank reached the doorway, he heard Dutton scream again. That shriek was cut off by a loud thump. Frank paused and looked at the faded lettering on the building’s window.

  LUCKY LIZARD MINING COMPANY.

  The finality with which Dutton’s scream had ended gave Frank a pretty good idea of what had happened. He stepped inside and struck a match. The connecting door between two rooms stood open. In that back room, a square hole yawned in the floor where the trapdoor had been flung back when Frank and Catamount Jack went through there earlier. Frank stepped over to the opening and held the match up so that the light from it fell down into the hole. Charles Dutton lay unmoving at the bottom of the shaft that provided an entrance to the tunnel. The fall wasn’t a long one, but it had been long enough. Dutton’s head was twisted at an odd angle on his neck, and his eyes were already glassed over in death.

  The room got brighter, and Frank glanced over his shoulder to see Catamount Jack coming in with a lantern in his hand. Behind the old-timer came Tip Woodford, his daughter Diana, and several other citizens of Buckskin.

  Jack looked down into the tunnel and said, “That’s him, all right. Dutton. Wound up with a broke neck just like he’d dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows with a hang-rope around his neck. Sort of fittin’, if you ask me.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah. Like I told him, justice was done.”

  Jack looked over shrewdly at The Drifter. “But it don’t change one damn thing that happened in the past, does it?”

  Frank shook his head slowly. “No. No, it doesn’t.”

  He dropped the burned-out match into the hole. Then he turned away from the trapdoor and didn’t look back.

  By the time a week had passed, Buckskin was back to normal. The debris of the burned buildings had been cleared away. The dead had been buried in a small cemetery up on the hillside, left over from the settlement’s boomtown days. The wounded had been patched up, and several of the townspeople had volunteered to take the prisoners into Virginia City so they could be turned over to the law.

  Frank stayed there in Buckskin, enjoying the chance to rest for a few days, to sit in the shade and sip coffee and talk with Catamount Jack and Tip Woodford, both of whom he liked a great deal.

  He liked Diana Woodford too, other than the fact that he was a good fifteen or twenty years too old for her. That didn’t seem to bother her much, though, judging by the way she sort of hung around and talked and smiled a lot. Frank told himself he was going to have to do some serious thinking about how he wanted to proceed where Diana was concerned. Might be best for all concerned if he rode on out of here before things got too complicated, he decided.

  And yet he didn’t leave. It felt good here. He liked the people, and now that the stink of gun smoke had been blown away by the mountain breezes, the air was fresh and clean.

  Still, he never stayed in one place for long. He was The Drifter, after all . . . wasn’t he?

  He was eating breakfast in the café run by Lauren Stillman, Ginnie Carlson, and Becky Humphries, the three former prostitutes, when Tip Woodford came in and walked across the room to his table. “Mind if I join you?” Tip asked.

  “Sure, have a seat,” Frank said. He liked the burly old prospector.

  “All the fellas are back from Virginia City,” Tip said. “They didn’t have no trouble gettin’ those prisoners there. Don’t know if they’ll hang or not, but if they don’t, they’ll be behind bars for a long time, where they belong.”

  Frank nodded in satisfaction. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “I been talkin’ to some folks,” Tip went on. “Professor Burton and ol’ Catamount Jack and Leo Benjamin and some others.”

  “What about?” Frank asked.

  “Well, we’ve been thinkin’ that Buckskin might turn into a real town again someday soon, and if it does, the place will need a mayor. The others sort of insisted that I take that job.”

  Frank nodded. “Sounds like a good idea. You’ve kept the place going all these years since the silver played out.”

  “Yeah . . . Do you know how come I happened to name my mine the Lucky Lizard, Frank?”

  “Can’t say as I do. I don’t think I ever heard the story.”

  “Well, I hadn’t had any luck prospectin’ around here, and one day when I was about to give up and go back East, I sat down on a rock and happened to see a lizard a-scurryin’ along. Now, it ain’t like I’m overfond of lizards or anything like that, but this little fella caught my interest somehow, and I watched him run around until he went up the side of the hill and disappeared in a crack. When I was lookin’ at the place where he ran into the hill, something about it sort of made me look again. I took my pick and started chippin’ away at the rock . . .”

  “And that was where you found your vein of silver,” Frank guessed.

  Tip nodded solemnly. “That lizard brought me luck, so I figured the least I could do was name the mine after him. It paid off pretty handsome for a while too. But then I lost the vein and couldn’t ever find it again.”

  Frank shrugged and said, “Silver is like luck, I guess. It runs out sometime.”

  “Yeah. And sometimes it comes back, like a lizard pokin’ his head out of a hole in the rock.” Tip reached into the pockets of his overalls and brought out something from each one, keeping his hands closed so that Frank couldn’t see what he had. “Got two things here I want to show you, Frank.” He opened his left hand and set a lump of dark gray rock on the table. “You know what that is?”

  Frank felt his pulse quicken. “It looks like silver ore,” he said.

  Tip nodded. “That’s what it is.” His voice shook a little with excitement. “I’ve found the vein again, Frank. And it’s bigger and better than the one before. Buckskin’s gonna be more than just a real town again. It’s gonna be a boomtown!”

  “Congratulations, Mayor,” Frank said with a smile. “I’m happy for you and all the rest of the good people here.”

  “You ain’t seen this other thing yet,” Tip cautioned. “If Buckskin starts boomin’ again, it’ll need more than a mayor.” He opened his right hand to reveal a tin star lying on his palm. “It’ll need a marshal too. Interested in the job, Frank?”

  All Frank could do for a moment was stare at the badge in Tip’s hand. The offer had taken him completely by surprise. He had had plenty of run-ins with the law over the years—but nobody had ever asked him to pin on a badge until he’d gotten mixed up in that range war down in Arizona a few months earlier. Now it had happened again.

  Maybe somebody was trying to tell him something.

  “What do you say, Frank?” Tip prodded. “I know you’ve always been a mite fiddle-footed, but I’ve talked Jack into bein’ your deputy, and if that old pelican can settle down, I reckon anybody can.”

  Frank looked past Tip out the window of the café, along the main street of Buckskin. If Tip really had found a silver bonanza, this sleepy little ghost town would be transformed nearly overnight into a hell-roaring boomtown. And that transformation would
likely bring with it all sorts of problems, trouble that the good citizens of Buckskin couldn’t handle on their own.

  He thought about Elysium too, and the way those folks had stood together for what they believed in. About Buffalo Bill and the bittersweet way the old showman’s Wild West extravaganza represented the end of an era, the passing of a time that would never come again. And about the weariness that came to a man when he had drifted for too damned long, always leaving behind friends and family and striking out for someplace new, even though he had never found true contentment in places, but only in the people who lived there.

  Frank Morgan drew in a deep breath, reached across the table to take the badge out of Tip’s hand, and said, “You’ve got yourself a marshal.”

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  Copyright © 2007 William W. Johnstone

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-1737-9