Avenger Read online

  Bonner lifted his head, and in the light from the match Frank got his first good look at the man’s face. It was the lean, beard-stubbled countenance of a typical hardcase, but now it was pale and had lines of pain etched on it.

  “For God’s sake, mister!” Bonner grated. “You already broke my finger, and now you’ve shot me!”

  Frank pushed some of the brush aside, reached in with a foot, and kicked the gun that Bonner had dropped well out of the man’s reach. “A couple of you boys come here and drag him out,” he said. “His fangs have been pulled.”

  Two of the farmers came forward cautiously and reached into the brush to haul Bonner into the open. They propped him up with his back against the trunk of a cottonwood. Frank holstered his gun, struck another match, and while Horace and the others covered Bonner just in case the gunman tried something, Frank examined his wound.

  The bullet had dug a deep gash in Bonner’s side, but it hadn’t lodged in his body. “You’ll be all right once that’s patched up,” Frank told him.

  “You gonna . . . take me to a doctor?” Bonner panted.

  “Someplace better.” Frank grinned. “You’re going to Elysium.”

  Bonner bitched and moaned the whole way. Frank tore strips off the gunman’s shirt to serve as rough bandages and bound up the wound for the time being; then Bonner was lifted onto the back of his horse. Now that Frank had his hands on Bonner, he wanted to get the man back to the settlement as quickly as possible. Bonner might well be the key to ending the trouble for Horace Duncan and the other members of the farming community.

  “If I’d just been able to get loose quicker, I’d’ve been long gone ’fore you bastards got back,” Bonner complained.

  “Yeah, well, if you hadn’t been such a ruthless, greedy son of a bitch to start with, you wouldn’t be in this fix either,” Frank pointed out. “Nobody made you sign on with Parmalee and Carter to terrorize a bunch of innocent folks.”

  That finally shut Bonner up, at least to a certain extent. “Don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about,” he muttered. “I never terrorized nobody.”

  “Not tonight maybe,” Frank said.

  “You’re the one who jumped me, mister. I was ridin’ along peacefully when you attacked me.”

  “Just riding along peacefully with a hood over your head.”

  “What hood?” Bonner challenged with a sneer. “I don’t see no hood. I tell you, I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about . . . and that’s what I’ll tell the law too.”

  Bonner was a hired gunman, Frank thought, but he wasn’t a complete fool. He had already figured out what Frank had in mind, and he was serving notice now that he wasn’t going to testify against the men who’d been riding with him earlier.

  They would just have to see about that, Frank mused.

  Several armed men were waiting for them when they got back to the settlement, and Frank was glad that the farmers had had enough sense to post some guards. Horace led the way toward one of the houses, saying, “We’ll take this man to my place. My wife can tend to his injuries.”

  “I want a doctor,” Bonner said. “A real sawbones. I want somebody to fetch the sheriff too.”

  “You’re in no position to be making demands, mister,” Horace told him curtly. “And we’re in no mood to be listening to them either.”

  “Better pay attention, Bonner,” Frank said dryly. “I don’t think these folks are in a very forgiving mood right now.”

  Bonner’s complaints subsided, but he still scowled darkly as he was helped to dismount and then marched up the steps and into Horace’s house, a neat frame structure with whitewashed walls.

  Horace’s wife was waiting for them with a rifle tucked under her arm and a resolute expression on her face. She was a middle-aged but still attractive woman with graying blond hair. “Is this one of them?” she asked as Bonner was brought in.

  “That’s right,” Horace told her.

  She lifted the rifle a little. “Do you want me to shoot him?”

  Bonner blanched a little more at the hard-bitten, matter-of-fact question.

  “No, Mildred, I want you to clean and bandage that bullet wound in his side,” Horace explained. “He’s got a broken finger too that I suppose could use splinting.”

  Mildred Duncan snorted. “I’d rather shoot him . . . but I suppose I’ll do as you say, Horace.” She turned to look at Frank, who was smiling at the woman’s outspokenness. “And just who are you, mister?”

  The Drifter took off his hat and said, “Frank Morgan, ma’am.”

  That name didn’t seem to mean anything to Mildred. Frank supposed that a lady like her didn’t read dime novels or the Police Gazette.

  “Mr. Morgan’s the man who helped us fight off Parmalee’s bunch earlier,” Horace explained.

  Mildred’s expression softened slightly. “In that case, thank you, Mr. Morgan, and welcome to our home.” To the men who were holding up Bonner, she said, “Asa, you and Caleb take that man into the spare bedroom and put him on the bed. Take my good comforter off of there first, though. I don’t want blood getting all over it. I’ll gather what I need and be in there in a minute to tend to him.”

  “Keep a close eye on him too,” Horace told the men. “He might still try to get away.”

  While his wife was taking care of the prisoner’s wounds and the other men went back to their homes, Horace took Frank into the combination kitchen and dining room and offered him a seat at the table.

  “All I can offer you in the way of a drink is cider,” Horace said.

  “Cider will be just fine,” Frank replied. “I’m not that much of a drinking man anyway.”

  “Neither am I.” Horace smiled grimly. “But I have to admit there are times—and tonight is one of them—when a shot of whiskey wouldn’t be so bad.”

  He took a jug and a couple of cups from a cabinet and poured cider for both of them. Then, he sat down across the table from Frank and went on. “We really do owe you a debt of thanks, Mr. Morgan. We might have been able to fight off Parmalee and his men without your help, but they would have done a lot more damage and perhaps injured more people before we could drive them off. They weren’t expecting to be hit from behind like that.”

  “The element of surprise,” Frank said as he lifted his cup. “It always comes in handy. And call me Frank.” He felt an instinctive liking for this big, rawboned professor turned farmer.

  The two men sipped their cider in silence for a moment; then Horace said, “I won’t insult you by offering again to hire you to help us, Frank. But I don’t mind telling you . . . fighting hired gunmen isn’t something that any of us here in Elysium are well equipped to do. We’re all peaceable men.”

  “And that’s something that nobody’s ever accused me of being,” Frank said wryly.

  Horace set down his cup and held up his hands. “I mean no offense—”

  “None taken,” Frank assured him. “But there’s no point in denying the obvious. Dealing with men like Parmalee is a lot more in my line than it is in yours. Unfortunately, like I told you before, I’m just passing through. I have business elsewhere.” He thought about how it had felt to hold Vivian’s bullet-shattered body in his arms. “Pressing business.”

  “I understand. Now that we have that man to testify against Parmalee and Carter, the law is bound to help us.”

  A frown creased Frank’s forehead. Likely, Bonner would be stubborn about turning against his bosses. And even if Bonner testified, Frank wasn’t sure just how much the law would help Horace and the other farmers. According to what Horace had told him, Carter worked for the railroad, and that made him an important man. The railroads controlled a lot of money and wielded a lot of power, from one end of the country to the other. The authorities had been known to turn a blind eye to the transgressions of the rich and powerful.

  Horace Duncan was smart enough to know that, but the man was desperate, eager to clutch at any hope. Frank sensed that it had been Horace’s idea to
bring all the others out here and start this farming community. Horace probably felt like it was his duty to protect them.

  But against hardened killers like Parmalee and a ruthless man like Carter who knew how to work the legal system to get what he wanted, what chance would Horace and the others really have? No matter what they did, sooner or later they would be crushed by the forces arrayed against them.

  Unless something—or somebody—tipped the balance of power a little.

  “Tell you what, Horace,” Frank said. “I might be able to stay around for a while and lend you a hand.”

  Horace leaned forward eagerly. “Really?”

  Frank thought again about Dutton. Vengeance had waited this long, he told himself. Maybe it could wait a little while longer.

  He nodded, lifted his cup of cider, and said, “Really.”

  Chapter 7

  It was after midnight and a gentle rain had started to fall when Vince Parmalee rode down an alley in Salina, Kansas, the nearest town to the farming community of Elysium. The railroad passed through Salina too, and had an office building there. That building was the one Parmalee rode behind now. The window he sought glowed yellow with lamplight, despite the lateness of the hour.

  To get what you wanted in this world, sometimes you had to burn the candle at both ends, Parmalee thought.

  And sometimes you had to snuff out some other people’s candles too.

  He hunched his shoulders inside his slicker and tipped his head forward so the rainwater that had collected on his hat would run off. He brought his horse to a stop beside the lighted window and reached up to rap sharply on the glass. Although the rain streaked the window and made it hard to see through, Parmalee made out the shape of a man getting up from behind a desk. The man inside the building lifted a hand in acknowledgment of Parmalee’s presence and walked out of sight. Parmalee turned his horse and rode a short distance back along the alley to a door.

  The door opened as he reached it. The man who had been in the office stood there, out of the rain, and said, “Come in.”

  Parmalee dismounted and left his horse standing in the alley with its reins dangling, knowing the animal wouldn’t wander off. He stepped into the building and shook himself like a dog, causing the well-dressed man who had opened the door to move back with a look of distaste on his carefully barbered face.

  “Was that absolutely necessary?” he asked.

  Parmalee grunted. “I’m the one who was out in the rain doing your errands, Carter. Seems to me like you ought to be a little grateful.”

  “You don’t need gratitude,” Thaddeus Carter said. “You’ve been paid plenty of the railroad’s money, so that should suffice.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it does.” Parmalee took off the slicker and hung it on the doorknob. “Let’s go in your office,” he said. His tone didn’t leave any room for argument.

  Carter’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t say anything. An air of tension existed between the two men, as if they hadn’t quite worked out which one of them was really the top dog around here. Carter paid the bills, sure, but he was a paper-pusher and wouldn’t amount to anything without Parmalee’s guns to back him up. At least, that was the way Parmalee saw it.

  They walked down the hallway and went into Carter’s well-appointed office. Carter sat down behind the desk again, while Parmalee settled himself in a red leather chair in front of the desk. He fished a thin black cheroot from a vest pocket and decided that it hadn’t gotten too damp to smoke. He lit up without asking Carter’s permission.

  Carter seemed to be trying to wait Parmalee out, but after a few moments, his impatience got the better of him. “Well?” he said. “How did it go? Were you able to inflict enough damage on those troublemaking bastards to scare them off? Was anyone killed?” Carter sounded like he wasn’t sure what answer he wanted to hear in response to that last question.

  Parmalee’s teeth clamped down hard on the cheroot. “Two of my men,” he said around the tightly rolled cylinder of tobacco. “And three more wounded, plus Bonner’s disappeared. I don’t know where the hell he is.”

  Carter’s eyes widened and his breath hissed between clenched teeth. “My God,” he said after a moment. “What happened?”

  “Somebody horned in on our play. We stopped at Fulton Creek to let the horses drink, and Bonner thought he saw a light, like somebody was there. I figured he was just imagining things—Bonner’s a mite high-strung—but I told him to stay there and take a look around, just in case. Best I can figure out, somebody jumped him, probably knocked him out or maybe killed him, and caught up to us and took his place. When we hit the sodbusters, whoever it was pretending to be Bonner hit us.”

  “This is terrible, just terrible,” Carter said as he frowned down at his desk.

  “I’m not too happy about the way it turned out myself,” Parmalee said.

  For a few minutes, the two men sat there in silence. Parmalee continued to smoke. It would have been hard to find two men less alike. Parmalee was burly and broad-shouldered, with a beefy face made rugged by long exposure to wind and weather. He had a dark, narrow mustache and dark wavy hair under his thumbed-back Stetson. Carter was much smaller and slender, except for a little potbelly. His brown hair was slicked down and he sported a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard.

  Finally, Carter asked, “You have no idea who this interloper was?”

  “He was wearing what I guess was Bonner’s mask when he joined us. I never got a good look at his face. But whoever he is, he’s mighty good with a six-gun.”

  “Did you inflict any damage on the farmers?”

  “I think one man got creased, and we killed a couple of milk cows. That’s about it,” Parmalee concluded bitterly.

  Carter toyed with a letter opener on his desk. “Is it possible Duncan and the others brought in a gunman of their own to combat you and your men?”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Parmalee replied with a shrug. “I haven’t heard anything about anybody like that heading this way, though.”

  “You don’t know every gunman in the West surely.”

  “No . . . but it’s a smaller crowd than it used to be.” As Parmalee spoke, his eyes grew distant, as if he were peering back into the past, when the frontier had been a much wilder place. But a better place, as far as Parmalee was concerned. Too much of the time now, little pissants like Carter wielded the real power, and men such as Parmalee, men accustomed to making their way through life with fist and gun and iron will, were relegated to being afterthoughts and last resorts. With a little shake of his head, Parmalee went on. “I know most of ’em.”

  “What really concerns me is this man Bonner you mentioned,” Carter said. “Do you think he was taken prisoner?”

  “I don’t know. I went back to the spot where we left him, but he wasn’t anywhere around. I don’t know what happened to him.”

  Carter picked up the letter opener and pressed the point of it against a fingertip. “If he has fallen into the hands of our enemies . . . will he talk?”

  “Tell the law about you and me, you mean?” Parmalee leaned forward, a worried expression forming on his face. “I don’t know. I’ve worked with Bonner before—he’s a pretty good man—but you never know what somebody else will do to save their own hide. I thought you said we didn’t have to worry about the law.”

  “Well . . . the railroad exerts considerable influence over the political process in this state, just as they do in other states. No elected official wants to get on the railroad’s bad side. But if there was direct evidence against us . . . if there was testimony asserting that we’re to blame for all the problems that have been plaguing those farmers, up to and including attempted murder . . . I don’t know what the authorities would do. They might try to move against us.”

  Parmalee’s cheroot had gone out. He didn’t relight it. He just rolled it to the other side of his mouth and said, “Then it sounds to me like we need to find out what happened to Bonner. If he’s dead, we don’t have to
worry about him talking.”

  “But if Duncan and the others have him?” Carter said anxiously.

  “Weren’t you listening?” Parmalee’s mouth curved in a hard grin. “I said, if he’s dead, we don’t have to worry about him.”

  “Oh,” Carter said, his eyes widening. “Oh. Now I understand.” He smiled back at Parmalee. “And I agree.”

  Frank put up his horses in Horace Duncan’s barn and spent the night in the hayloft, since Bonner was in Horace’s spare bedroom. Frank didn’t mind; he had bedded down in a lot of worse places. He didn’t turn in for the night, though, until he was satisfied that Horace understood the importance of keeping Bonner under guard at all times.

  “Don’t worry,” Horace had assured him. “I know that man is probably the best weapon we have in the fight to hang onto our land.”

  Frank slept well, and when he went into the kitchen of the Duncan farmhouse the next morning, he was ready for the coffee he smelled brewing and the bacon sizzling on the stove. The smell of fresh biscuits underlaid the other mouth-watering aromas.

  “Good morning, Mr. Morgan,” Mildred Duncan said from the stove. “Have a seat. Did you sleep well?”

  Frank took off his hat and set it on the table as he took one of the chairs. “Yes, ma’am. It rained some during the night. Nothing much more soothing than the sound of rain on a barn roof.”

  Mildred smiled and said, “Yes, we get a good bit of rain around here. It helps the crops.” She brought over a cup of coffee. “Here, you can get started with this. I’m getting a plate ready for that wounded man, and then I’ll see about your breakfast.”

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “Oh, Horace has been up for hours. He’s already gone out to check on the fields.”

  Frank nodded and took a sip of the strong black coffee. It was just the way he liked it, stout enough to stand up a spoon in it.

  As he sat there, he tried not to watch Mildred Duncan going about her work, but it was difficult not to. She was a fine-looking woman. Not that Frank had any improper thoughts where she was concerned, her being a married woman and all. As he looked at her, though, he couldn’t help but think what things might have been like if it had worked out so that he could have married a nice-looking woman and lived like a normal man.