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  Though it was well settled, Parker County was only just on the verge of becoming truly civilized. Mercy had been witness to more than her share of bloody gunfights. In all those fights, she’d only seen one man as fast as Rance Whitehead with a gun.

  But that was so many years ago . . . when that man was young and she loved him more than she ever thought she could love anyone.

  Mercy looked meekly at the sheriff and gave a wan smile. She prayed that man would arrive soon.

  4

  Beaumont looked a little on the fidgety side for the tough-minded Texas Ranger Morgan knew him to be. He kept rubbing his chin as if to smooth the beard he couldn’t quite grow. The broad little Ranger paid his two dollars and signed the entry book. He looked back at Morgan.

  “Why don’t you enter, Frank? I wouldn’t mind so much losing to you.”

  A tall youth in tight pinstripe trousers snickered in the line behind them. “Don’t worry, you’ll be losing to me anyhow. It won’t matter who else enters.”

  The kid wore a flashy, blue bib-front shirt and a mousy large-brimmed Stetson with a slight dip in the front. He was barely edging up to his mid-twenties if that. His blond hair hung in loose curls and reached his shoulders in the shade of the wide hat. A few wisps of golden beard and mustache adorned his chin and upper lip. He was every inch the dandy.

  “Why, Mr. Custer.” Morgan thrust out a hand. “I always did want to meet you. Must have my history all wrong. Thought you were killed on the Little Big Horn.” He eyed the kid with an interested smile. Sometimes, dandies were the best shots off the line. They cared enough about their image to put in countless hours of practice. In his experience, though, most didn’t hold up under pressure.

  The dandy returned the smile and shook the offered hand. He had a strong enough grip to be a competent gunman. “Very funny. I suppose if I wasn’t askin’ for it, I might take offense.” He let go of Frank’s hand and tipped his hat. “The name’s Ferguson. Chas Ferguson.”

  “As in the Ferguson Rifle?”

  The dandy’s mouth grinned, but his eyes gave Morgan a thorough once-over—sizing up an opponent for a fight. “Only a distant relative.”

  “Distant or not, it was hell of a revolutionary long gun. You got genius in your blood. Pleasure to meet you Mr. Ferguson. Frank Morgan.”

  The dandy’s eyes brightened as if his suspicions were confirmed. “The Frank Morgan?”

  “I don’t know about the, but I’m definitely a Frank Morgan.”

  Ferguson took off his hat. “Forgive me, sir, but I heard you’d passed away.”

  “Not by a long shot, he hasn’t.” Beaumont stuck out his hand and stepped between the two men. “Tyler Beaumont, Texas Rangers. Are you plannin’ to enter?”

  Before he could answer, Morgan shook his head and mused. “There are still a few renegades that would consider your flaxen scalp to be a hell of a trophy.”

  “That’ll be the day.” Ferguson settled the hat back over his yellow locks. “I’ve already paid my fee. I’d be glad to pay your fee as well, Mr. Morgan, if you’d care to try your skill against me.” He tossed a gold piece in the air.

  Frank’s hand snaked out and snatched the spinning coin. He placed it back in Ferguson’s open palm. “Mighty kind of you, but I can pay my own way, thank you.” Frank fished the entry fee out of his pocket and signed the book. He looked at Beaumont and grinned. “I’m feeling better. Maybe if I don’t shoot my foot off, you’ll relax and stop lordin’ over me like a mother hen.”

  * * *

  A half an hour later Morgan stood in a line of other shooters, listening to a heavyset man from the cattlemen’s association explain the rules of the contest.

  “All right, all right, gentlemen. Listen here now.” He held out both hands to shush the crowd. “My name is Harry Lofton. I’ll be the line judge and my rulings will be final. Any problems you have with my decisions you may take up with my associates.” The self-important man in the bib overalls waved with thick fingers toward two men carrying double-barreled coach guns who stood at either end of the firing line on raised platforms.

  A row of twenty-eight contestants toed the white chalk line. Four others had backed out of the competition without a refund when they saw Morgan was a contestant, but stayed in the crowd to watch him shoot.

  “On my mark you will all fire one elimination round of six shots at the targets before you.” Lofton jerked a stubby thumb over his shoulder toward a row of ringed paper targets some twenty paces away. “The best ten of you will move on to the next round of competition.” He eyed the motley line of shooters with a mixture of scorn and pity. “Take as long as you like—up to one minute. Is everyone ready?”

  “We will be if you’d get your fat ass out of our way,” a gangly rounder said before spitting a slick stream of tobacco juice at his feet.

  The line judge gave the man a pinched smile and stepped out of the way, drawing his own pistol from an absurd-looking buscadero rig cinched around the bulging girth of his bib overalls.

  Frank had taken up a position with Beaumont to his immediate right and Ferguson to his left. A grizzle-faced cowboy in a dusty black hat stood in between him and the blond dandy.

  The targets weren’t that far away, considering the distances he’d shot before, but Morgan wasn’t accustomed to having so much time on his hands. In a sure-enough, all-out gun battle, a minute was generally enough time to do his business, go get the undertaker, and maybe even roll a smoke. When the line judge fired his gun to start the countdown, Frank held his peace and watched.

  Beaumont was quick out of the holster and concentrating so hard on the target, he didn’t appear to notice Frank wasn’t shooting. Others in the line took differing lengths of time, some using two hands and squinting down the barrels and leaning way back like they were scared the guns might explode in their hands. The smart-mouthed rounder with the cud full of chewing tobacco had his tongue out to one side while he fired.

  When he looked to his left, Frank realized Ferguson was standing with his hands folded at his belt, watching, looking up the line at him. Morgan suddenly knew what the herd bull must feel like when he first learns one of the young upstarts is making up his mind to try to cut in on the action.

  The dandy looked at him warily. There was a challenge in the narrow, pale eyes. Both would wait until the last possible moment to take their shots. Only then would the contest really begin.

  Guns fired intermittently as the seconds ticked by and men finished up their last few rounds. A cloud of gray and white smoke drifted down the line on the breeze. For a short moment Morgan drifted with it to his time during the war—the time when the same sort of smoke burned his eyes and whistling lead flew by from the Union lines not a stone’s throw away. He could almost hear the cries for help as the shots tore into the soldiers all around him, but for some reason passed him by. . . .

  The shooting began to peter out and he shook his head to clear it. He didn’t have time for such useless reminiscing.

  Frank knew the minute was drawing tight. He’d been subconsciously counting it down from the first pistol shot by the steady throb of pulse in his head.

  Beaumont finished and looked over at him as he let out half a deep breath.

  “Damn, Morgan,” the Ranger whispered, sliding his pistol back into his the holster. “I never even heard you shoot.”

  “I haven’t yet.”

  Morgan slipped his Peacemaker from the holster by his side in a fluid motion. He was faintly aware of the potshots still going on around him as the rest of the line finished up. The whiskered-jowled cowboy next to him squinted downrange as he fired his last.

  Morgan’s Colt barked six times in rapid succession, each round following closely on the heels of the one before it. The hammer snapped on the last round, and he slid the gun easily into his holster just as the line judge yelled: “Time.”

  “You nearly gave me heart failure—waitin’ like that.” Beaumont’s face was all smiles as he spoke. All six of
the Ranger’s rounds were well within the center ring. He’d shot nearly as well as Frank—good enough to make the first cut, along with Ferguson, the tobacco-chewing cowboy who’d stuck his tongue out while he shot, and a ragtag group of others vying for the nickel-plated Colt.

  “Keep showin’ off like that and I might just beat you, Morgan.” Beaumont took out his pistol and began to reload it as he spoke. “You are just gettin’ over a lengthy illness.”

  “That’s fine,” Frank lied. “I’m just in on this escapade for the entertainment value.”

  “All right, boys.” The line judge nodded at the surviving ten shooters on the line. “That was the easy part. From here on out it gets a might trickier.”

  Ferguson tipped back his fancy Stetson and peered around the tongue-chewer at Morgan. “I certainly hope so.”

  The next round of fire had each contestant shooting at a swinging gourd-squash suspended from a wooden cross-timber twenty yards away. The four men with the least amount of squash still on the tether after six rounds were declared the winners. Morgan, Beaumont, Ferguson, and a rawboned farm boy named Hackenmueller moved to the next round when they each shot the strings holding up their targets.

  In the next event each contestant shot six rounds at fist-sized clay balls on top of wooden posts stuck in the ground starting some twenty-five paces away at staggered distances. Mr. Lofton, the line judge, put his hand on his own pistol while he explained that only shooters who hit every clay target would move on to the next round. If no one succeeded, no one would get the prize. That bit of news drew a rumble of angry murmurs from the crowd. It explained the reason for the assistants with shotguns.

  Beaumont missed his last target by a hair, bring his total to five. Hackenmueller got four. Morgan and Ferguson advanced.

  The young Ranger took off his hat and hung his head. “Don’t know why I thought I could shoot well enough to win anything.”

  Morgan put a hand on his shoulder. “Shooting for sport and shooting for survival are as different as thunder and lightning—they might be related but they’re a completely different animal. I’ve seen you send lead downrange when it counted. I’d want you next to me when bandits were about, and that’s for certain.”

  A gruff voice from the crowd behind him jerked at Morgan’s attention.

  “Well, bless my ever-lovin’ soul, if it isn’t Frank Morgan.” The gravel voice belonged to Bog Swenson, a ruddy-faced Swede with a bulbous nose that always looked like it had been stung by a swarm of two dozen angry wasps. Swenson was particular about his nose. He was known to get violent when anyone stared at the prominent feature. The problem was, it covered so much of the real estate that made up his face, it was impossible to talk to the man without spending at least a moment wondering what made his nose so red and swollen.

  Morgan had given the muscular Swede a sound thrashing three years before in a saloon near Lincoln, Nebraska. At the time, a good whipping seemed preferable to killing the loudmouthed bully. Now, Frank wondered if he might have made a bad choice in not finishing the job.

  “Fancy meetin’ up with you all the way down here in Texas,” Swenson said from twenty feet away. “I been lookin’ for you for a long time. Yes sir, I have at that. I don’t aim to let you get away so easy this time. No man whips me and gets away with it.”

  The pistol competition had drawn a large crowd. People were bunched tightly together to get a look at the contest, and now they were having a difficult time getting out of the way. Many such fairs staged mock events like this for the entertainment of the public, and it was likely many in attendance thought this was just such a stunt.

  Morgan looked beyond Swenson’s gargantuan beak and into his smoldering eyes. This was no stunt.

  “Bog,” Morgan said, squaring off with a slight nod of his head. His Peacemaker was empty from the last round of contest fire. He was sure his challenger knew it—likely he’d waited for the moment so he could exploit the weakness. Beaumont hadn’t had time to reload either.

  “You’re looking well as can be expected,” Morgan said.

  “I ought to give you the thumpin’ of your sorry life,” Swenson sneered from behind his nose. “But I hear you been sick and it wouldn’t be much fun breaking your brittle old bones. No, I reckon we’ll handle it this way.” The Swede’s hand hovered above the wooden grip of his pistol.

  “Hold on there, Bog.” Morgan stood completely still. “We got too many innocent folks around here that might get hurt if we go at it. Let’s let them step aside.”

  People in the crowd began to cheer them on. “Draw, boys!” The high-pitched voice of a woman came from Morgan’s right. An old man directly behind him shouted: “Quit talkin’ and earn your money. Give us a damn good show.”

  The onlookers managed to get crowded together enough to form a narrow alleyway between the two gunmen, eager to watch what they thought was playacting. A pimple-faced boy in his teens wearing an old cap-and-ball Walker Colt stood, hemmed in by the press of people, at Frank’s left elbow. He was close enough to tell the men were serious.

  “Don’t move and you won’t get hurt,” Morgan spoke in a whispered hiss. He could almost hear the boy’s knees knocking.

  “Wh . . .What?” the boy stammered.

  “Stay where you are,” Frank said from the corner of his mouth. “If you move he’s liable to shoot at you instead of me.”

  Bog Swenson would not normally have been much of a threat. In an honest gunfight, he’d be lucky to get the hammer thumbed back. But this time Morgan knew he was in a bit of a predicament. He could easily outdraw the big-nosed outlaw, but that didn’t do him much good with an empty gun.

  Frank grinned at the quaking boy beside him to set him at ease, but kept a watchful eye on Swenson. The ugly Swede was moments away from jerking his pistol.

  “That hogleg loaded?” Morgan whispered to the boy next to him.

  Bog Swenson had finally worked up enough courage to draw on an unarmed man. “Adios, Morgan, you no-account son of a bitch.”

  “S . . . sh . . . sure it’s l . . . loa . . .” the wide-eyed boy stammered.

  “Good.”

  Bog Swenson’s shoulder dropped and his hand reached for the gun at his hip. He was confident and didn’t rush. Morgan used his left hand to snatch the heavy Dragoon from the quaking boy’s holster beside him. He muttered a short prayer in the instant it took for him to bring the gun up and on target, hoping the kid knew how to load the old percussion pistol.

  Bog’s eyes got bigger than his swollen nose when he saw what Morgan had done.

  A deafening boom drove the crowd back as Morgan pulled the trigger. Bog Swenson looked down at the gun he’d never had the chance to fire, then at the growing stain of blood low across his belly.

  A woman near the dying bully screamed at the sight of his wound. The boy beside Frank swayed on his feet like he might pass out. A murmur ran through the mass of people when they began to realize what had just occurred.

  “Thought I had it figured.” Bog dropped his pistol and fell to his knees. He stared at the smoking horse pistol in Morgan’s left hand. “I never figured on that,” he moaned.

  Frank had worried about the big .44 ball passing all the way through the grumpy outlaw, and aimed low hoping the big bones in his hip would slow it down. No one behind the Swede fell over, so it must have worked.

  When he was certain Swenson was no longer a threat, Morgan turned and handed the rattling Walker back to the wide-eyed boy he’d borrowed it from. “Much obliged for the loan of the pistol, son. I’d reload it quickly if I were you. I’m about to do the same with my own.”

  The boy’s mouth hung open. He looked at the fallen man, the man who’d been killed with his Dragoon. He turned back to Frank and shook his head emphatically.

  “N . . . no, sir,” the boy said. “I don’t reckon I’ll load it. I believe I’ll just take it home and put it back in my pa’s closet where I found it.”

  Morgan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder after
he’d slid the last fresh round in his Peacemaker. “That’s a good plan, son. But I have to say, I’m mighty glad you were around when you were.”

  He fished a twenty-dollar gold piece out of his pocket and gave it to the boy. “I reckon my life is worth almost that much.”

  5

  “Well, now.” Lofton clapped his fat hands together and rubbed them in front of him like a housefly once his assistants dragged Bog Swenson’s body away from the crowd. “You need a few minutes to calm your nerves?”

  Morgan raised an eyebrow and gave the line judge a hard look. His voice was calm as a windless lake. “Do I look nervous?”

  “All right then,” Lofton said. He eyed Morgan and the dandy. “You two pistoleros are about to test your skill and provide some entertainment for the crowd at the same time.” He turned for the first time and addressed the gathered crowd. “Both of these men have proven they’re better-than-average shooters; now let’s see what they’re really made of.” The line judge gave a nod to two men on the sidelines, and they carried two draped boxes downrange fifteen paces. The boxes were flat, no more than a foot high and two feet long.

  “That’s not far enough to be much of an effort,” Ferguson said, grinning at Morgan. “I don’t reckon either of us would have much trouble hitting a wooden box.”

  Lofton ignored the remark. “Inside those enclosures are twelve bobwhite quail—six for each of you. We’ll jerk the top off and you plug as many of the little beggars as you can before they fly out of range. My helpers in the tower will act as spotters for each of you. The winner of the fine Colt Bisley is the one who gets the most quail. But, I’m givin’ you both fair warning. You gotta get at least one or nobody gets the prize.”

  Beaumont stood a few steps behind Morgan. “At least one? You’d think he’d never seen you shoot.”

  Frank just nodded and studied the box downrange.

  “Care to put a little added wager on this round?” Ferguson tapped his holster with a slender forefinger and twirled at the end of his wispy gold mustache with his pale left hand.