Avenger Read online

  Frank transferred the contents of his carpetbag to the saddlebags on the dun, then handed the empty carpetbag to Larch and said, “If you know anybody who can make good use of that, they’re welcome to it.”

  “Hell, it’s nearly brand-new.”

  “I’m used to traveling light,” Frank said with a shrug.

  “And money don’t mean a whole lot to you, does it? With what you gave me back in town, I was able to pay the livery owner a good price for these horses.”

  “Anybody who claims money doesn’t matter has never been without it,” Frank said. “I know what it’s like to be poor. I have been, plenty of times in my life. But I also know that money’s real value is in what it can accomplish. I’d spend every penny I have if it helped me settle the score with Dutton.”

  Larch grimaced. “Just take the horses—you paid for ’em—and don’t remind me that you’re on your way to kill a man.”

  Frank nodded. He put his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the dun’s saddle. Then he reached down and held out his hand to Larch. The marshal hesitated for a second, but then took it in a firm grip.

  “I don’t know whether to wish you luck or not,” Larch said gruffly, “but I reckon I hope you don’t get yourself killed, Morgan.”

  “I’ll settle for that,” Frank replied with a grin. “So long, Marshal.”

  As he rode out from under the trees, Frank though he heard Larch mutter, “Vaya con Dios,” behind him.

  It wouldn’t be long before Dutton heard about the shoot-out at the railroad station. In these days of telegraphic communication, news could travel hundreds of miles, even thousands, in no time at all. It was even possible that Dutton had an agent on the same train as Frank, keeping an eye on him.

  But even if that was the case, no one would know for sure that Frank was no longer on board until the train reached the next town. No one except Marshal Larch and the train’s conductor, that is, and Frank didn’t think either of them would reveal what they knew. Frank had worked out the plan with Larch and given the marshal money to buy the horses and supplies, and not until the train was already moving had Frank sought out the conductor and explained to him what he was going to do. That had been fine with the conductor, who was happy to see Frank gone before more trouble broke out.

  Of course, it was going to take a lot longer to reach Boston on horseback than it would by rail, but that delay couldn’t be avoided. Besides, Frank thought, he sort of liked the idea that Dutton would have longer to wait and worry this way. Maybe it was a little malicious to feel like that—but Frank thought that his grief over Vivian’s death had earned him the right to feel some malice toward Dutton.

  He cut north from the railroad, heading for the low, rolling mounds of the Smoky Hills. He wasn’t quite sure just how a fella would go about riding a horse all the way to Boston, but he supposed that if he kept heading in the right general direction, he would get there sooner or later.

  By nightfall, he was a long way from where he had left the train, and he wondered if Dutton had found out by now what had happened.

  Frank found a good place to camp among the hills, next to a small stream. He unsaddled the dun and took the supplies off the chestnut and hobbled both horses. If he’d been riding his stallion Stormy, he would have just turned him loose, knowing that Stormy wouldn’t stray far. As he built a small fire and settled down to fry some bacon, he thought about Stormy and the big cur called Dog, and he hoped both of the animals were doing all right back in Denver. He wouldn’t have left them behind if he had known how things were going to work out, but at the time he had planned to travel all the way to Boston on the train, and had figured that having the animals along would only complicate things, especially once he reached the city.

  The biggest towns Frank had ever seen were New Orleans, St. Louis, and San Francisco, although Denver was starting to get some pretty good size to it. He wondered what Boston would be like. The thought of being surrounded by thousands and thousands of people made him a little uneasy. Not only that, but he had heard that there were towns everywhere back East, instead of just every so often along the trail. Thinking about that made Frank shake his head. He wasn’t sure why folks would want to live like that. He’d have trouble breathing if he couldn’t get out away from everybody else once in a while . . . like in these Smoky Hills of Kansas.

  Which were about to get more crowded, he realized suddenly as he lifted his head and listened to the sound of hoofbeats that came out of the night. Riders . . .

  A lot of them, from the sound of it, and they were coming fast.

  Chapter 4

  There had been a time when a man wouldn’t want to travel alone out here, and if he did, he sure wouldn’t build a fire at night. That was just asking to have a bunch of Cheyenne or Pawnee come along and lift his hair.

  Frank knew, though, that all the Indians were on reservations now, and the odds of it being a war party galloping toward him ranged from pretty slim to almost none. Despite that, he set the frying pan aside, stood up, and kicked dirt over the flames, quickly extinguishing them. He didn’t want to announce his presence here until he had a better idea what was going on. He moved over by his horses and put his hands over their noses to keep them quiet.

  Waiting in the shadows next to a clump of brush, Frank stood motionless as about a dozen riders came up to the creek and stopped about twenty yards downstream from him. He heard a man say, “We’ll let the horses drink for a minute.”

  It was dark enough so that Frank couldn’t see the men very well. They all wore broad-brimmed hats, but there was something odd about the shape of the heads under those hats. They looked . . . lumpy somehow, like they weren’t even human. Frank felt a chill go through him.

  But then one of the men reached up, took off his hat, and pulled something else off his head. He dragged the sleeve of his shirt across his forehead, wiping away sweat.

  “Put that back on,” snapped the man who had given the order about letting the horses drink.

  “Sorry, Boss,” the other man said. He quickly donned both of the items he had taken off.

  It made sense now to Frank. The riders were masked. They wore some sort of hoods, probably made out of flour sacks with eyeholes cut in them, or something like that. Their hats were crammed down on top of the hoods.

  In Frank’s experience, men who went around with masks covering their faces seldom did so because they were up to anything good. They were usually bent on mischief and didn’t want anybody to recognize them.

  The dun and the chestnut stirred uneasily. Frank knew they wanted to call out to the other horses, so he tightened his grip on their noses. The horses ridden by the masked men nickered at Frank’s animals, but no one seemed to notice.

  “How much farther you reckon it is, Boss?” one of the other men asked.

  “Not far. Remember, we don’t plan on killing anything except livestock. But if you have to shoot to kill to protect yourself, that’s all right. And if some of those sodbusters happen to get in the way of stray bullets, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”

  Frank’s jaw tightened with anger as he heard those callous words. These masked men were on a mission of murder, and he might well be the only one besides them who knew about it.

  Another voice said, “You know, I thought I caught a glimpse of a light up here as we were ridin’ toward the creek, Boss. You think there could be somebody around?”

  “Anything is possible,” the leader replied, “but I didn’t see a light.”

  “Well, it went out right quick. Do you want some of us to take a look up and down the creek, just to make sure there ain’t nobody lurkin’ around?”

  “No, you do it, Bonner. I can’t spare anyone else. And you’d better catch up with us before we get there.”

  The man called Bonner sounded like he wished he had never brought up the subject as he said reluctantly, “Sure, Boss. I was probably wrong anyway.”

  “Just on the chance that you actually did s
ee something, I want you to check it out. We don’t need trouble coming up behind us tonight. The rest of you, let’s go.”

  The horses splashed across the creek, except for Bonner’s. Frank heard the man muttering to himself as the rest of the hooded riders pushed their horses into a trot and headed on north toward their destination.

  Bonner turned his mount and rode slowly along the creek bank toward the spot where Frank stood. Even though whatever was going to happen tonight was none of his business, Frank wasn’t the sort of man who could stand by and let innocent people suffer if he could do anything about it. His mind was racing, and he had already come up with the beginnings of a plan. He stood stock-still and waited for the masked gunman to come to him.

  The moon wasn’t up yet, but Frank saw starlight reflect off the gun that Bonner gripped in his hand. Bonner wasn’t taking any chances. He was ready to fire at an instant’s notice. That was going to make things trickier for Frank. He would have to move as fast as he possibly could.

  He kept pinching the nostrils of the dun and the chestnut so they wouldn’t give him away, until Bonner was less than ten feet from him. Then Frank lunged at the gunman, reaching up with his left hand toward Bonner’s gun. Moving with blinding speed, he closed his hand tightly around the revolver’s cylinder so that even if Bonner pulled the trigger, the gun couldn’t fire. With his right hand, Frank grabbed the man’s arm and hauled hard on it.

  Bonner came out of the saddle with a startled yell. Frank kept his grip on the man’s gun as he flung Bonner to the ground. He gave the weapon a hard wrench and heard the snap as Bonner’s finger, trapped in the trigger guard, broke under the strain. Bonner shouted again.

  Frank dropped on top of the man and drove his right fist to Bonner’s jaw in a sledgehammer blow. Bonner jerked under the impact and then went limp, knocked senseless by the terrific punch. Frank pulled the gun out of nerveless fingers and stood up.

  He didn’t know if the others had heard Bonner’s two shouts, but he thought it was unlikely. They were far enough away and the sound of their horses’ hoofbeats would cover up some noises. A shot would have been a different story—that they would have heard—so he’d had to make sure that Bonner wasn’t able to fire.

  Now Bonner was unconscious and had a broken finger to boot, so Frank didn’t think he would be much of a threat. To make certain of that, he pulled Bonner’s belt out of the loops on the man’s trousers, rolled Bonner onto his stomach, and used the belt to tie his hands behind his back. Bonner would probably be able to work himself loose, but it would take him a good long while.

  Bonner was wearing a long duster. Frank had a similar one rolled up in his gear. He broke it out, unrolled it, and put it on. Then he pulled the hood off Bonner’s head. He had guessed right; the thing was made from a small flour sack. It even still smelled a little like flour as Frank put it on.

  His own hat was the same sort that Bonner wore, so he settled it on top of the hood rather than using the gunman’s hat. Satisfied that he could pass for Bonner in the dark, he took the reins of the man’s horse and swung up into the saddle. He rode across the creek and then urged the animal into a faster pace. He wanted to catch up to the hooded men before they reached their destination and started making trouble for somebody.

  Sodbusters. That was the word the leader had used. Frank remembered how stubbornly the ranchers who had been some of the first settlers on the frontier had resisted the steady influx of farmers bent on carving up the vast cattle empires and grabbing some of that land for themselves. That conflict had inevitably resulted in trouble, often gun trouble, from Texas to Montana. Ranchers—and the Colt-men they had hired—had burned down barns, stampeded cattle through crops, killed livestock, and beaten and sometimes killed the farmers, who had been encouraged by the government to move in and homestead on land the ranchers considered their own, whether it had ever been legally filed on or not.

  Not that all the right had been on one side and wrong on the other. Farmers had been known to do some barn-burning of their own, and sometimes they poisoned water holes when they couldn’t fence them off, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of cattle. They had imported gun-throwers of their own. Hired killers didn’t care who they worked for, as long as the price was right.

  Such bloody wars between cattleman and farmer still went on sometimes, but farther west now, in places like Wyoming and Colorado. Kansas had long been established as the farmers’ domain. The extension of the railroads into Texas and the resulting end of the cattle-drive era had seen to that.

  From the sound of what Frank had overheard, somebody was trying to bring back the bad old days in these parts. Once Frank was sure what the situation was, he would do what he could to stop it before innocent folks got hurt.

  It wasn’t long before Frank came in sight of the other riders. At first, they were just a dark mass moving over the rolling hills, but soon he was close enough to make out the individual figures. They were bunched up, which was a shame. If they had been spread out, he might have been able to come up to one or two of them and fool them into thinking he was Bonner until he was close enough to bend a gun barrel over their heads. It didn’t look like that was going to be an option, though.

  One of them must have noticed him and told the others, because they all reined in and paused a moment to wait for him. As Frank came up to them, the leader asked, “Did you find anything, Bonner?”

  Frank was trusting to the hood to muffle his voice and disguise it. He also pitched it lower than normal as he replied curtly, “Nothin’.”

  “I didn’t think so,” the leader said. “Come on.”

  He urged his horse into motion again and the others, now including The Drifter, fell in with him.

  A few minutes later, they came in sight of a scattering of lights. As they rode closer, those pinpoints of illumination became the warm yellow glow of lamplight through windows. This was some sort of community they were approaching, Frank thought. Maybe a group of farmers who had all settled together.

  The hooded riders paused again at the top of a small rise. Frank estimated that there were at least a dozen houses spread out before them, along with barns, smokehouses, storage buildings, and the like. Beyond the little settlement, carefully cultivated fields stretched for as far as the eye could see. Frank spotted a couple of grain silos in the distance. A lot of hard work had gone into this community, hard work that these hooded riders seemed intent on wrecking.

  “Remember what I told you,” the boss said harshly. “Let’s go.”

  He heeled his horse into a gallop and started down the gentle slope. The rest of the gunmen were right behind him.

  Frank came last, trying to hang back without being too conspicuous about it. His left hand held the dun’s reins, while his right drew the Peacemaker from its holster.

  The other men had drawn their guns too. The sound of the galloping horses must have been heard, because a door was thrown open in one of the houses and a couple of men ran outside. Frank thought they were carrying rifles. One of them shouted, “Who’s there? Damn it, who are you?”

  The only answer was a sudden spurt of gunfire from several of the hooded riders, including the leader. Colt flame bloomed in the darkness as they started shooting.

  The two men scrambled for the safety of the house, but one of them suddenly dropped his rifle, grabbed at his leg, and tumbled off his feet. Frank knew the man must have been wounded. The hooded riders veered their horses toward him. The man who had been with the wounded man ran back out, got hold of him under the arms, and hurriedly dragged him into the house before the riders could trample right over him.

  Frank edged the horse up next to the closest of the hooded men. He reversed the Colt in his hand and struck out with it, smashing the butt of the gun into the man’s head. The hat and hood absorbed some of the force of the blow, but it was hard enough to knock him out anyway. He pitched out of the saddle and landed hard on the ground, rolling over a couple of times before coming to a stop. />
  None of the other hooded riders noticed what Frank had done. They were too busy firing their guns and whooping stridently in an attempt to strike terror into the hearts of the farming families. Frank was able to move up next to another one and strike again, and again one of the raiders tumbled senseless out of the saddle.

  That didn’t pass unnoticed this time. One of the riders yelled, “Bonner, what the hell—?” Then, as Frank came closer, the man bellowed, “You ain’t Bonner!” He tried to jerk his pistol into line for a shot.

  Frank didn’t give him the chance. He rammed his mount into the man’s horse and then struck him across the masked face with the pistol. The man sagged, but managed to stay mounted. He wouldn’t be yelling anymore, though; Frank had felt the jawbone shatter when he hit it with the Colt.

  That was three of the eleven accounted for, but that still left eight gunmen who were starting to get the idea that something was wrong. Several of them wheeled their horses around. The leader shouted, “That’s not Bonner! Get him! Shoot the son of a bitch!”

  Mounted killers leaped toward Frank, flame spouting from the muzzles of the guns in their hands.

  Chapter 5

  The hooded riders might not have intended to kill any of the farmers whose community they were raiding, but when it came to the mysterious stranger in their midst, all bets were off. Lead whistled around Frank’s head as the gunmen closed in on him.

  They called the tune, he thought. They could damned well dance to it now.

  He flipped the Peacemaker around so that the butt settled comfortably in the palm of his hand. The revolver bucked and roared as he began squeezing off shots.

  A couple of the raiders cried out in pain and slumped in their saddles as Frank’s bullets tore into them. One slid all the way off his horse. At the same time, Frank drove his heels into his horse’s flanks and sent the animal leaping forward, not only meeting the gunmen’s charge, but smashing right into the middle of them. Suddenly, in the darkness, Frank was indistinguishable from the other hooded men all around him, and they had to hold their fire because they didn’t know who was who.