Avenger Read online

  It was a trap, all right, he thought as he threw himself desperately to the side. His hat flew off. The slug from the rifle whistled past his ear. The woman must have been well paid to let herself be beaten up like that. But she had played her role to the hilt and taken him in, sure enough, and he mentally cursed himself for believing her story.

  He hit the ground and rolled. Bullets kicked up dirt around him. He came to a stop on his back and saw two men charging toward him, six-guns blazing. Frank triggered twice and saw one of the men driven backward by the bullets. The other man lunged aside, still triggering wildly. One of the slugs hit the ground beside Frank’s head and knocked grit into his eyes. Blinded momentarily, he scrambled toward a fallen tree he had noticed a second earlier and threw himself behind it, grateful for the cover.

  With his free hand, he knuckled the dirt out of his eyes while bullets thudded into the trunk of the tree. He blinked until his vision cleared. That happened just in time, because a rustling to his right told him that somebody was trying to flank him. Since one of the would-be killers was still firing in front of him, that meant the man he had wounded a minute earlier wasn’t hit badly enough to knock him out of the fight.

  Frank twisted toward the flanker and spotted him through the brush. The two of them fired at the same time, the sound of the shots blending into one. The bushwhacker’s bullet chewed splinters off the log beside Frank’s head. Frank’s slug found its target, ripping into the man’s belly. He stumbled out of his concealment, doubled over, and clutched at his bleeding midsection. He collapsed on the ground and kicked feebly a couple of times before growing still.

  The other man took advantage of the distraction to rush Frank’s position. He burst out of the brush, leaped onto the log, and fired down at The Drifter at almost point-blank range. The sound of the shots was deafening as Frank rolled again. One of the bullets came close enough that he felt the heat of its passage against his cheek.

  But none of the hastily fired shots found him, and when his Colt roared and bucked against his palm again, he was firing at close range too. The bullet caught the second gunman in the chest and flipped him backward off the log. He crashed down onto his back with his arms and legs outflung, and never moved after he hit the ground.

  Frank pushed himself to his feet and carefully checked the two men, both of whom were dead. He hadn’t forgotten about the woman, but she wasn’t shooting at him anymore and he figured she had fled after opening the ball. He turned to pick up his hat, which had flown off his head when the shooting started, and froze for a second as he saw the woman lying motionless beside the trail, the Winchester near her where she had dropped it.

  Bleak lines etched themselves in Frank’s face as he slowly picked up his hat and settled it on his head. He hadn’t fired any shots toward the woman, so he knew that a stray bullet from one of the other bushwhackers must have struck her. She had lied to him and tried to shoot him in the back, but despite that, he was more bothered by what had happened to her than he was by the fate of the two male bushwhackers. She was a woman, after all, and the same chivalrous moral code that was ingrained in most Western men was deeply rooted in him too. He didn’t like to see any woman get hurt, no matter what the circumstances.

  It was possible she was still alive, so he strode quickly toward her, thumbing fresh cartridges into his Peacemaker as he did so. For a second, the possibility that she might be shamming crossed his mind, but then he saw the spreading bloodstain on her dress and knew that she was really hit. He holstered his gun and dropped to one knee beside her. Reaching out, he grasped her shoulders and rolled her gently onto her back.

  He barely had time to see the little pocket pistol in her hand as she jerked it up toward him. Her face was twisted in lines of agony and hatred, and she gasped, “Bastard!” as she pulled the trigger.

  The world seemed to blow apart in Frank Morgan’s face.

  He had no idea how much time had passed when he finally climbed up out of the red-streaked blackness that had claimed him. His head throbbed terribly, and when he forced his eyes open, he had a bad moment when he thought he was blind, because darkness was still all around him.

  But then he saw some faint pinpricks of light and recognized them as stars. It was dark because night had fallen. He had been lying here unconscious beside the trail all afternoon.

  Frank struggled to sit up. That made his head hurt even worse, and caused the world to spin crazily around him for a few seconds before it settled down again. The world hadn’t blown up after all.

  He lifted a hand to his head and found the sticky gash on his right temple. The shot fired by the woman had grazed him there, knocking him out cold for hours. But while he was unconscious, why hadn’t she gone ahead and finished him off?

  He saw the answer to that question as he looked around. The woman still lay beside him. He reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold and lifeless. The starlight was bright enough to reveal the large dark stain on her dress.

  She really had been hit by a stray bullet and mortally wounded. The shot she had fired at him must have been her last act of defiance as life slipped away from her. Frank’s mouth tightened as he realized that he had been lying there next to her corpse for all this time. If not for luck, he would have been dead too. He picked up his hat, which was also lying on the ground, and saw the hole in the brim where the bullet that had grazed him had punched through the Stetson.

  Frank pushed himself to his feet. He wasn’t too steady at first, and while he waited for his strength to return, he looked around. A faint red glow in the western sky told him that the sun hadn’t been down for more than an hour or so. He spotted the dun grazing contentedly about twenty yards away.

  “If Stormy had been here, he would have nudged me and woke me up before now,” Frank told the horse.

  The dun just ignored him. Contrary critter.

  Despite the pain in his head, Frank’s brain was working swiftly. The attempt on his life had been well orchestrated. He had no doubt that Carter and Parmalee were behind it. The fact that he had been bushwhacked on his way back to Elysium told him that his enemies didn’t want him to reach the farming community. Carter and Parmalee probably had something planned for Horace and the others tonight, and they didn’t want Frank to interfere with it.

  That thought made him realize that he needed to get back to Elysium as fast as he could.

  He whistled for the dun, but the horse didn’t come. Frank had to go over to him and catch hold of the reins. At least, the dun didn’t shy away. Frank supposed he ought to be grateful for that. He picked up the rifle and slid it back into the saddle boot.

  He didn’t like leaving the bodies of the woman and the two gunmen where they lay, but he didn’t have time to take them back to Salina. Instead, he pointed the dun’s nose toward Elysium and heeled the horse into a trot. Every step sent a fresh throb of pain through Frank’s head, but after a while he got used to it.

  His visit to Salina hadn’t gone unnoticed, he told himself as he rode steadily through the night. It was even possible that Carter or Parmalee had gotten hold of those telegrams he’d sent. That might explain why the first telegraph operator had suddenly “taken sick” and gone home. He had been forced to betray his trust. The more Frank thought about it, the more he was convinced that was indeed what had happened.

  So Carter and Parmalee knew what he was doing, and they were spooked. That didn’t surprise Frank. He had halfway expected that his visit to town would goad them into taking action. He hadn’t figured that their attempt to get rid of him would come quite so close to being successful, though.

  A grim smile tugged at his mouth. He was still alive, and that was all that mattered right now. Whatever else Carter and Parmalee planned to do, he was still around to stop it.

  But only if he got back to Elysium in time, and as he suddenly noticed another red glow in the sky that wasn’t left over from the setting sun, a chill went through him as he realized that he might already be too late.


  Chapter 11

  Parmalee wondered where Briggs and Whistler were. He had left them with Sadie to set up the ambush for Morgan, while Parmalee and the rest of the men went on to wait near Elysium until night had fallen. The two gunnies should have rejoined Parmalee and the others after taking care of Morgan, though.

  Unless they hadn’t killed the son of a bitch after all. That possibility worried Parmalee more than he cared to admit.

  The plan should have worked. Morgan was softhearted toward women; Parmalee had heard that often enough. And he had knocked Sadie around himself before riding off, just to make sure that she looked like a genuine damsel in distress. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed it, no matter what sneering comments the whore had made about him liking to beat on women. It was just business. Anyway, she had been quick enough to accept the payoff he’d offered her, and she had even volunteered to take a shot at Morgan herself.

  When Briggs and Whistler hadn’t shown up by nightfall, Parmalee figured that something had gone wrong. But Morgan hadn’t put in an appearance either. Maybe the bushwhackers had gotten enough lead in Morgan to kill him, but he had lived long enough to down them too. Could be all three of them were lying there dead, about halfway between Elysium and Salina. Sadie already had her money. She would have headed back to Salina rather than coming out here to tell Parmalee what had happened. He knew she was still a little peeved at him for what he had said to her earlier in the day in his hotel room.

  Brooding about it wasn’t going to do any good. He still had a job to do, Parmalee reminded himself. He was going to get rid of those sodbusters once and for all, and he was going to see to it that Bonner couldn’t ever testify against him. When the U.S. marshal arrived from Wichita, there would be no proof linking Parmalee to what happened at Elysium.

  Once that was taken care of, Carter would owe him quite a debt of gratitude, Parmalee thought—and he intended to collect in cold, hard cash.

  As night fell, he took the hood from under his duster and removed his hat to pull the mask over his head. “Get ready, boys,” he said to the other gunmen. “You got those torches and the kegs of coal oil?”

  “Yeah, Boss,” one of the hired guns replied. “Those damn farmers are gonna think hellfire and brimstone’s rainin’ down on ’em from heaven.”

  Parmalee chuckled under his hood. “More like gushing up from hell. Let’s ride.”

  They headed for Elysium, twenty strong. Parmalee had called in all his men and several others who hadn’t worked with him before but whom he knew by reputation. Some of them carried small kegs of coal oil, while others had torches made of cotton batting soaked in coal oil and wrapped around short lengths of wood. The plan was to ride in shooting and yelling to make the sodbusters cower in fear, then spread the coal oil around the community and set it on fire. Parmalee was confident that the blaze would spread quickly and consume all of Elysium. People would die in the flames, of course, but that was just too damned bad. He would rescue Bonner if he could, but in the end, he didn’t really care if the man made it out of the inferno or not. Bonner shouldn’t have been dumb enough to let himself get caught.

  They came in sight of the scattered houses and barns. Parmalee reined in and growled, “Light the torches.”

  Matches were scratched into life and held to the oil-soaked cotton. It caught readily. Flames leaped up.

  “Give ’em hell!” Parmalee called as he kicked his horse into a gallop, and he thought the command was particularly appropriate.

  Frank heard the shooting before he could see anything except the glow from the fires. But a couple of minutes later, he came in sight of the community and his fears were confirmed. Several of the houses were on fire, and so were a couple of the barns.

  But more than half of the structures still stood. To a certain extent, Horace Duncan and the other farmers had been able to fight off Parmalee’s attack. Frank saw riders galloping around waving torches over their heads as they attempted to spread the flames.

  Nice of them to make themselves targets that way, he thought as he brought the dun to a halt and slid out of the saddle. He pulled the Winchester from the boot and laid the barrel across the saddle, using that to steady the weapon as he aimed. The dun didn’t seem to be the sort of horse that spooked easily. Frank hoped that proved to be the case.

  He squeezed the trigger, and felt the rifle kick against his shoulder as it cracked. A couple of hundred yards distant, one of the torch-wielding night riders pitched out of his saddle. The torch slipped from his fingers and spun through the air to land in the dirt and gutter out.

  Even before the echo of the shot had rolled away across the prairie, Frank had levered another round into the Winchester’s chamber and drawn a bead on another of the raiders. He fired again, and was rewarded by the sight of the man falling and dropping the torch he carried. In a matter of heartbeats, Frank had shot yet another man out of the saddle. Three of the raiders were down in less than a minute.

  That got their attention. Several men started firing their rifles in his general direction. None of the shots came close, though. He rammed the rifle back in its sheath and sprang into the saddle again. Wheeling the dun, he rode off at an angle. He couldn’t go into the fight head-on, now that they knew he was out here.

  Circling rapidly, Frank headed toward Elysium from a different direction. He didn’t draw his gun until he was nearly among the buildings. Then, with the Peacemaker in his hand, he charged toward a couple of the hooded riders. One of them carried a torch, the other a keg. Frank had already caught a whiff of the coal-oil reek, so he had a pretty good idea what was in that keg.

  The men spotted him coming, and the one with the torch screeched, “It’s Morgan!” He had the torch in his left hand, a gun in his right. He tried to bring the revolver’s barrel around toward Frank, but the move came too late. The Colt in Frank’s hand barked and jumped, and the slug from it smashed into the raider and knocked him sideways. He fell against the other man.

  Flames shot into the air, brightly hideous as they raced up the duster of the second man. Some of the coal oil from the keg he carried must have sloshed out onto his clothes. In no more than a second, he had become a human torch.

  Frank put the man out of his screaming agony with a bullet through the head. Then, he wheeled the dun and looked for more targets.

  He found them galloping toward him, guns spouting flame. The three men didn’t have torches or kegs of coal oil. They must have already done their dirty work. Frank hauled back on the dun’s reins so that the horse reared up and pawed at the air with its front hooves. He fired three times and saw all three saddles emptied. At moments such as this, in the heat of battle, Frank was a creature of almost pure instinct, letting eyes and muscles and nerves take over so that his actions were automatic. He was one of the deadliest natural shooters to ever strap on a gun, and he had just proven that.

  But he had also been wounded and knocked unconscious earlier in the day, so his reactions weren’t quite as swift as they might have been otherwise. He brought the dun down and whirled the horse around as he heard hoofbeats behind him. More of the hooded raiders were practically on top of him. A gun went off so close, he felt the heat of its muzzle blast. The bullet from another Colt tugged at his shirt between his right arm and his side.

  Frank had only one round left in the Peacemaker. He blasted a man out of the saddle with it, then holstered the gun as he took the attackers by surprise and spurred the dun into a leap that carried him right into the middle of them. Frank’s hand shot out, closed on the collar of the duster worn by one of the men, and jerked him right off his horse. The man fell under the hooves of another raider’s mount, and his scream of fear was cut short by a meaty thud as an iron-shod hoof stepped in the middle of his forehead and caved it in.

  Frank knocked a six-gun aside as it blasted, and an instant later smashed his fist into the gunman’s face. He plucked the gun from the stunned man’s hand and used it to ventilate another of the raiders. He
was a one-man army, and his efforts were allowing the citizens of Elysium to fight the fires that threatened to consume their community without having to worry as much about being shot down. Practically single-handedly, Frank was on the verge of breaking the back of the attack by Parmalee’s men.

  Then suddenly, Frank heard someone scream, “Morgan!” and wheeled the dun to see another of the raiders charging toward him. Frank knew somehow it was Parmalee himself. Frank brought up the gun he had liberated from one of the raiders and squeezed off a shot, but another hooded rider accidentally darted between him and Parmalee and took the bullet. As the man toppled from his saddle, Parmalee seemed to realize the suicidal nature of his charge. He yanked his horse around and fled.

  The rest of the surviving raiders were lighting a shuck out of there too, as Elysium’s defenders peppered them with lead from rifles and shotguns. The community had been heavily damaged, no doubt about that, but Parmalee had failed to wipe it off the face of the earth, which had probably been his intention.

  Frank galloped toward Horace Duncan’s house. The place had been spared the flames, and as Frank brought the dun to a halt in front of the house, Mildred came out onto the porch, a rifle in her hands.

  “Mr. Morgan!” she called to him. “Thank God you’re here! Have you seen Horace?”

  Frank shook his head. “He wasn’t in the house with you?” “No,” Mildred replied raggedly. “He ran outside with his shotgun when the trouble started. He said he was going to find Parmalee and dust his hide with buckshot!”

  Frank bit back a curse and told the distraught woman, “I’ll find him!” He wheeled his horse and headed for the nearest burning building, where men had formed a bucket brigade and were dousing the flames with buckets of water drawn from one of the community’s wells.

  Frank dismounted and ran over to the line of men. “Anybody seen Horace Duncan?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the crackling of the flames.