the bar and the men who stood there. The guns in his hands spouted lead and flame.
Chapter 2
Frank Morgan had only a second to recognize the rider as the kid called Conwell. Then he threw himself across the bar, rolling over it and grabbing Johnny Collyer. He hauled the bartender to the floor behind the bar as Conwell’s shots shattered several bottles sitting on the backbar.
Frightened, angry shouts filled the air as the saloon’s customers scattered. Some of them turned over tables and dived behind them, seeking cover as the kid’s Colts blasted wildly and sent bullets flying around the room.
Gun in hand, Frank surged up behind the bar. He fired, but Conwell pulled his mount into a tight turn at the same instant. The panicky horse reared up and pawed at the air with its front hooves. Frank’s slug plowed a furrow in the horse’s shoulder instead of knocking Conwell out of the saddle. The horse screamed in pain, twisted and bucked, and came down hard. Floorboards cracked under its weight. The horse arched its back, sunfishing madly.
With a startled yell, Conwell flew out of the saddle. He came crashing down on a table, busting it to kindling. His left-hand gun slipped out of his fingers and skittered away across the floor.
He managed to hang on to his other Colt, however, and as he clambered up out of the debris of the broken table, he swung the weapon toward Frank.
Before Conwell could fire again, the Peacemaker in Frank’s hand roared a second time. This shot didn’t miss. It caught Conwell in the chest and threw the youngster backward. His finger tightened on the trigger and the gun in his hand exploded, but the barrel was angled upward by now and the bullet went into the ceiling without hurting anything. Conwell landed on the splintered tabletop. He gasped in pain, his back arched, and his boot heels beat a tattoo on the floor as death spasms wracked him.
Then with a rattling sigh, the life went out of him and his body relaxed.
The horse, still spooked half out of its mind with pain and fear, headed for the big window, rather than the open doors. It lifted off its feet in a leap and smashed through the glass, shattering the window into a million pieces and sending shards and splinters spraying over the boardwalk. The horse cleared the window, clattered across the boardwalk, jumped into the street, and bolted away.
“Somebody go after that horse!” Frank shouted. “It’s bound to be cut up from the glass, and it’ll need some attention.”
A couple of the men who had been drinking in the saloon before the trouble erupted ran outside, and a moment later the swift rataplan of hoofbeats testified that they were giving chase to the runaway animal.
Frank helped a shaken Johnny Collyer to his feet and asked, “You all right, Johnny?” He knew the bartender had had health problems in the past.
Johnny nodded and said, “Yeah…yeah, I’m fine.” He gazed around the room with a dismayed expression. “But look what’s happened to the place!”
There was plenty of damage all right, and all of it could be laid at the feet of Conwell, who must have decided that he couldn’t live with backing down, even to the famous gunfighter known as The Drifter. He had gone outside, gotten his horse, given in to his anger, and charged back into the saloon, guns blazing.
The tactic might have worked. Most men would have been too shocked to see a man on horseback bursting through the batwings to react in time to save themselves.
But not Frank Morgan. His reactions were lightning-swift, and years of living a danger-filled life had honed his instincts to a razor-sharp keenness.
He came out from behind the bar and went to check on Conwell. Frank was confident that the reckless youngster was dead, but it never hurt to be sure. More than one man had been gunned down by a “corpse” that wasn’t really dead yet.
Conwell was, though. Frank looked over at Mitchell and Beeman, who had ridden into Buckskin with the kid. They had dived to the floor when the shooting started, and they were just now picking themselves up.
“Sorry I had to kill him,” Frank told the two men.
“I’m not,” Hap Mitchell said with a snort of disgust. “He was a hotheaded fool who nearly ruined lots of jobs for us—”
He stopped short, as if realizing that he might be saying too much. Frank knew good and well that the “jobs” Mitchell referred to were robberies of some sort, probably bank or train holdups. He and Beeman were known to ride the hoot owl trail. But those crimes hadn’t taken place here in Buckskin, and Frank didn’t have any wanted posters on the two men, so he didn’t have any call to arrest them.
“Anyway,” Mitchell went on after a second, “you won’t hear any complaints from us about you killin’ that idiot, Morgan.”
“He had it comin’,” Beeman added. “Hell, the way he was throwin’ lead around, some of those shots could’ve hit us!”
Still kneeling beside Conwell, Frank felt inside the dead man’s pockets. He found a roll of bills and a leather poke with several double eagles inside it. He straightened and set the money on the bar.
“Reckon this should go to repair the damage he caused here in the saloon, and anything that’s left over can go toward the cost of burying him.”
Mitchell shrugged. “Fine with us. We got no call on that money.”
Frank figured it was loot from some robbery, but he couldn’t prove that. He pointed to the money and told Johnny Collyer, “Give that to Tip when he gets back here.”
“He’s the one who fetched you, right?” Johnny asked.
Frank nodded. “Yes, I was in the jail. Tip went on down to Jack’s cabin to roust him out too, in case I needed some help. Must’ve had some trouble waking him up, because I expected them to be here before now.”
As if they had been waiting for him to say that, a couple of men hurried along the boardwalk and then turned in at the saloon, stepping through the opening where the batwings used to be. With a stricken look on his face, Thomas “Tip” Woodford gazed around at the destruction and groaned.
“Lord, it looks like a tornado hit this place!”
“That’s what happens when a fella rides his horse around inside,” Frank said.
Catamount Jack walked over to Conwell’s corpse and nudged it with a booted foot. “If this is the varmint what done it, I don’t reckon he’ll be ridin’ again any time soon. Leastways, not unless the Devil’s got some saddle mounts in hell.”
The tall, lean old-timer had a tuft of beard like a billy goat, and had sometimes been accused of smelling like a billy goat too. His buckskins were old and grease-stained. A shapeless felt hat was crammed down on his head. He had been a mountain man, prospector, buffalo hunter, scout, wagon train guide…. You name it and Jack had done it, as long as it was west of the Mississippi. Frank didn’t know what the old-timer’s real name was; he was just Catamount Jack. He had been working part-time as Buckskin’s deputy marshal since Frank had taken the job of marshal a month earlier.
Professor Howard Burton came over to Frank and said, “I owe you a debt of gratitude, Marshal. I was fully aware that that insolent young pup was trying to goad me into a fight, but I almost let him do it anyway.”
