The Last Gunfighter Page 8

  When the proprietor brought over a cup and saucer and the coffeepot, Frank said, “I’m Frank Morgan.”

  The man’s eyebrows rose, but he didn’t spill a drop as he poured the hot, black brew. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Morgan,” he said. “I suspect nearly everyone in Eureka has by this time. My name is Peter Lee.”

  Frank put out a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Peter. You sound like you’ve been in this country for a while.”

  “As far back as I can remember,” Lee said as he shook hands. “Although I was born in China. I was two years old when my parents came here to work on the Central Pacific.”

  Frank nodded. “You grew up speaking English?”

  “I did. You see, one of the supervisors took me in when my father was killed in an accident only a couple of months after we got here. My mother…” Lee shrugged. “Well, I don’t know what happened to her. She was gone by the time I was old enough to remember anything.”

  Frank took a sip of the coffee. “Some fellas might be a little bitter about that.”

  Lee shrugged and said, “I never knew any difference. The people who raised me were good folks. Taught me how to work hard and take care of myself.”

  “Looks like you’re doing a fine job of it,” Frank said with a meaningful nod at their surroundings.

  “I do all right.” The door at the end of the counter swung open, and a very attractive young Chinese woman came through it carrying a bowl of stew, which she placed in front of Frank. Peter Lee said, “My wife and our children help me run the place.”

  Frank nodded politely to the woman and tugged on the brim of his Stetson. “Mrs. Lee,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

  She smiled and didn’t say anything, just retreated back through the door into the kitchen.

  Frank picked up the spoon Lee placed on the counter beside the bowl and dug in. The stew smelled good and tasted better. It was full of big chunks of beef, potatoes, carrots, wild onions, and spices. Lee brought over a plate with a big hunk of corn bread on it, and when Frank sampled that, it was equally as good.

  “What brings you to Eureka, Mr. Morgan?” Lee asked as he leaned on the counter. “As if I didn’t know.”

  “You’ve heard about it, eh?”

  “You’re the talk of the town tonight. Some people are glad that a man with your reputation is going after the Terror, while others are upset that Mr. Chamberlain isn’t offering that ten-thousand-dollar bounty anymore. And some of the loggers think that it would be better to have a lot of people hunting the monster, instead of just one man.”

  “What do you think, Mr. Lee?”

  The man shrugged. “Until that so-called Terror comes in here and sits down at my counter, it’s not really any of my business, is it?”

  “It can’t be good for your trade if it starts to cut into the logging that’s going on around here.”

  “That hasn’t happened…yet.”

  But it would eventually, Frank thought, if the men who worked in the woods kept dying. That was something to ponder.

  He wasn’t in much of a mood for pondering at the moment, though. He’d been shot at several times today, as well as having that ruckus with Cobb at Chamberlain’s redwood mansion. All he wanted to do right now was sit here and eat some of Mrs. Lee’s excellent beef stew and corn bread.

  Lee moved off along the counter to refill other coffee cups, leaving Frank alone with his meal. For the next few minutes, he ate with great enjoyment.

  He should have known the peaceful respite wouldn’t last. It had been his experience that they never did. Because of that, he wasn’t really surprised when the door of the hash house opened and several men clumped into the long, narrow room. Frank glanced at them, saw that three of the newcomers were dressed in range clothes, while the other three were loggers.

  “Morgan,” said one of the men in range garb, “I want to talk to you.”

  This hombre didn’t have a badge like Marshal Price, so Frank didn’t see any good reason to talk to him. He spooned more stew into his mouth, took a bite of the corn bread.

  The man who had spoken took a step closer. “Damn it, I’m talkin’ to you, Morgan. You deaf?”

  Without looking at the man, Frank said, “I just want to enjoy my supper, friend, and having to kill you would put a serious crimp in those plans.”

  “Why, you—”

  Even though Frank seemed casual, didn’t even appear to be paying any attention to the man, the slightest move toward a gun would have sent him into a blur of deadly motion. Instead, one of the other men stepped forward and brushed the belligerent one back.

  “Take it easy, Dawson. I’ll handle this.”

  He was the biggest of the bunch, even bigger than the burly loggers. Long, dark red hair fell from under a high-crowned brown Stetson, and he sported a beard of the same hue.

  “Listen, Morgan,” he said. “My name’s Erickson. Maybe you’ve heard of me.”

  Frank took a sip of coffee. “Can’t say as I have.”

  That nonchalant comment made Erickson’s jaw clench for a second, but he controlled his obvious anger.

  “The talk’s all around town about how you’re gonna hunt down the Terror. Because of you, Rutherford Chamberlain took back that bounty he put on the monster. We don’t like that. My friends and I planned on finding that critter ourselves.”

  “That’s too bad,” Frank said, not meaning it at all. “But you probably just would’ve gotten yourselves killed by other fellas who were out there hunting for the Terror.”

  “That’s our lookout, not yours,” Erickson snapped. “Not only that, but you killed Jingo Reed and busted Matt Sewell’s shoulder so that he’ll never be the same again. Jingo and Matt were good men. Friends of mine.”

  Frank didn’t really believe that. Hardcases like Erickson appeared to be didn’t have many real friends. Erickson was just using what had happened to them as an excuse to pick a fight with Frank.

  “You ride out in the morning and keep going,” Erickson went on. “Leave this part of California. Leave the Terror to us. You do that, and we’ll let what happened to Jingo and Matt slide…this time.”

  “And if I’m not interested in doing that?”

  Erickson grinned. “You’ll be sorry.”

  Peter Lee had come back to stand on the other side of the counter from Frank. He leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Please, Mr. Morgan. If there’s a gunfight in here, innocent people might be hurt. That wall between us and my family isn’t thick enough to stop a bullet.”

  Frank glanced around. All the other customers in the place looked as nervous as its proprietor. Some of them probably would have made a break for the door by now if the six big men hadn’t been blocking it.

  “There’s not going to be a gunfight,” Frank told Lee with a shake of his head.

  Erickson heard what he said. “You’re gonna get out of town?”

  “Nope. But you’re not going to make me draw on you either.” A faint smile touched Frank’s lips. “I promised the marshal I wouldn’t kill anybody in his town if I could help it.”

  “You son of a bitch.” Erickson strode forward. “So you’re not going to draw on me, are you?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  Erickson reached over and picked up the coffee cup that Frank had set down on the counter. The cup was still about half full. Erickson tilted it as if he were about to pour the coffee on Frank’s head.

  The Drifter’s hand shot up and clamped around Erickson’s wrist, the fingers closing like iron bands. Erickson’s eyes widened with surprise at the strength of Frank’s grip. A man as big as he was probably hadn’t run into too many hombres brave enough to take him on in a hand-to-hand battle.

  But he had never run into Frank Morgan before.

  “I said I wasn’t going to get in a gunfight with you,” Frank told him. “I never said anything about not beating the hell out of you if you want to push it that far.”

  Erickson’s lips drew bac
k from his teeth in a furious grimace. He let go of the cup. It fell toward the counter. Peter Lee made a grab for it, caught it so that while most of the coffee splashed out, the cup didn’t shatter.

  At the same time, Erickson threw a piledriver punch with his other hand. It might have connected, if not for the fact that Frank squeezed the other wrist with such force that the bones ground together. Erickson flinched and leaned in the direction of the agonizing pain, and that threw his aim off. Frank ducked the punch, hammered a blow of his own into Erickson’s midsection. The air gusted out of Erickson’s lungs and his normally florid face turned gray. He stumbled back a step as Frank let go of his wrist. That put him in position for the sharp, crossing left that Frank slammed into his jaw. Still seated on the stool in front of the counter, Frank brought his right leg up, planted his booted foot in Erickson’s belly, and shoved him hard. Erickson flew backward to crash down in a heap at the feet of the men who had come into the hash house with him.

  Those men were staring in shock, because the whole altercation had happened so fast that it was hard for their eyes to follow it. They knew that Erickson had landed on the floor, though, something that never happened in a fracas.

  Erickson looked up, hate burning in his eyes as he glared at Frank. “Get the bastard!” he rasped.

  The other men surged forward, and the battle was on.

  Chapter 10

  The loudmouth called Dawson led the charge. He came at Frank swinging wild punches. Frank stood up and grabbed the stool he’d been sitting on, raising it sharply with the legs pointed at Dawson so that the man’s momentum carried him right into them. Dawson said, “Ooof!” and doubled over as the stool legs jabbed into his belly.

  Frank dropped the stool and clouted Dawson on the jaw with a hard, looping right. The punch drove Dawson to the floor, where the next man to attack, one of the loggers, tripped over him and fell forward. Frank was ready for him, meeting him with a left jab that made blood spurt from the man’s nose as it pulped under Frank’s fist. The logger howled in pain and fell to his knees.

  The space between the counter and the tables was narrow enough so that all of Frank’s opponents couldn’t charge him at the same time. That went a long way toward evening up the odds.

  The men who’d been eating supper in the hash house scrambled to get out of the way as the last man in range clothes and one of the other two loggers bulled their way around their fallen comrade, knocking over one of the tables as they did so. Food flew in the air. The man in range clothes grabbed a chair and lifted it over his head as he rushed in. Frank snatched the stool from the floor again and used it to block the chair as it descended. That bone-jarring impact snapped the legs off the chair.

  “Stop it!” Peter Lee cried. “Please don’t bust up my place!”

  Frank felt bad about what was happening, but these men had sought him out and started the trouble. He was defending himself. And he would see to it that Lee got paid for the damages, one way or another.

  The man who had wound up holding two broken chair legs came at Frank, slashing back and forth with the makeshift clubs. Frank had to give ground as he tried to fend off the blows with the stool he still held. Recklessly, his opponent came too close, so when Frank saw his opportunity, he lifted his leg and kicked the man in the groin. Better a pair of sore balls than a bullet.

  The man screeched in pain and dropped the broken chair legs as he clutched at himself. He toppled to the floor and curled up in agony.

  That still left three men on their feet, though, because Erickson had managed to get up again. With his jutting red beard and the long hair streaming around his face because his hat had fallen off, he looked like a berserk Viking as he came at Frank with an incoherent cry of rage. Frank dropped the stool again and bent over to let Erickson’s wild, flailing punches sail harmlessly over his head. He drove forward, burying a shoulder in Erickson’s midsection. As the big gunman’s momentum carried him forward over Frank’s back, Frank grabbed him around the thighs and lifted.

  It was quite a feat of strength, demonstrating just how much power there really was in Frank’s muscular body. Erickson came completely off the floor and turned a flip as Frank heaved the man over his back. Erickson came down with a crash that seemed to shake the whole building.

  That left two of the loggers facing Frank, and they hesitated now as Erickson rolled onto his side, tried to push himself up, and failed. With a sigh, Erickson slumped back down and lay still.

  One of the loggers held his hands palms out toward Frank. “That’s enough, mister,” he said. The man looked at the bodies scattered along the counter in various stages of pain and semicon-sciousness. “By God, that’s enough.”

  Frank’s chest rose and fell quickly from the exertion of the past few minutes, but his voice was steady as he said, “You boys called the tune. If you don’t want to dance to it, that’s your business.”

  The other logger said, “Forget it, Morgan. I don’t want to tangle with you.”

  Frank nodded and bent down to check Erickson’s pockets. He found a double eagle and flipped it to Peter Lee. “That ought to pay for the broken chair and anything else that got busted, as well as the food that was ruined. Fair enough, Peter?”

  Lee bit the coin and satisfied himself that it was real. “Fair enough,” he told Frank. “Erickson may not feel that way when he gets his senses back, though.”

  “Then he should have thought twice before he came in here to make trouble.” Frank turned back to the two loggers. “What did you do, go in the Bull o’ the Woods and get Erickson and his friends all stirred up?”

  “Don’t blame us, Morgan,” one of the men said. “Erickson was already hot under the collar. A lot of men in Eureka feel the same way tonight. They don’t like you comin’ in here and takin’ over the hunt for the Terror like you done. Hell, you’re just one man. You can’t stop that monster.”

  “You’d rather have a hundred trigger-happy fools blundering around in the woods shooting at anything that moves…including you?”

  The loggers just frowned. They didn’t have any answer for that.

  Frank shook his head in disgust. Sometimes, trying to help folks brought an hombre nothing but grief. Unfortunately, though, he wasn’t the sort of man who could turn his back on trouble.

  He picked up his hat, which had gotten knocked off during the brief brawl, and waved it at the men on the floor. “Get them out of here. They’re cluttering up Mr. Lee’s place.”

  Dawson was able to stand up and stumble out of the hash house under his own power. So was the man with the broken nose, which was still leaking crimson. The loggers helped the other two out, including a groggy Erickson, who kept shaking his head and muttering incoherently.

  Frank called after them, “If any of you fellas have a problem with what happened, you can take it up with me. If I hear about anybody bothering Mr. Lee or his family, just because this little fracas happened in his place, I won’t take it kindly. And I’ll be looking for whoever’s responsible.”

  The threat in his voice was clear. Every now and then, it came in handy to have most people think of him as a cold-blooded, gunslinging bastard.

  Peter Lee and his pretty wife and their two little kids, a boy and a girl about five and six years old, came out from behind the counter to clean up the mess left by the fight. Frank pitched in to help, and so did some of the customers who hadn’t fled as soon as they had the chance.

  “I’m sorry about this, Peter,” Frank said.

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Frank shook his head. “Maybe I could’ve tried a little harder to head it off before anybody started throwing punches. Seems the Good Lord didn’t put much backup in me when He made me, though.”

  “I got that impression,” Lee said dryly. “You want some more stew and corn bread?”

  Frank smiled. “I did sort of work up an appetite again.”

  Lee laughed as if he couldn’t help it. “I’ll see what’s left out in the kitc
hen.”

  While Frank waited for Lee to come back, he became aware that the proprietor’s two children were staring at him. He smiled at them, which caused them to scurry off behind their mother’s skirts and then peep out at him timidly. Mrs. Lee just gave Frank a tired smile and herded the youngsters back into the kitchen. The customers who were left returned to their meals.

  A few minutes later, Lee brought Frank a fresh bowl of stew and another piece of corn bread, as well as refilling his coffee cup. Frank dug in, and was enjoying the food when he heard the hash house’s front door open again. Footsteps clumped toward him, and when he glanced over, he saw Marshal Gene Price approaching him. The lawman wore a scowl on his rugged face.

  “I thought I told you not to start any trouble in my town, Morgan,” Price said.

  Frank shook his head. “I didn’t start it.”

  “That’s not how I heard it. I heard you were in here brawling with half a dozen men.”

  “Well, that’s almost true. But there were actually only four of them who got into the fight. The other two decided they didn’t want any part of it.”

  “And you didn’t start it?”

  “One against six? Do I look like a fool to you, Marshal?”

  Price just grunted and didn’t answer the question. “You’ve got enemies here,” he said. “It’d be better all the way around if you rode out and didn’t come back.”

  Frank shook his head. “Not until I finish the job I said I’d do.”

  “I could just throw you in jail, you know.” Price’s voice held a worried edge. He was digging himself a hole, and he seemed to know it. He might have to try to arrest the notorious gunfighter Frank Morgan, and chances are, that wouldn’t end well. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to back down.