Professor. I’m afraid Conwell would have killed you before I was able to stop him.”
Burton hooked his thumbs in his vest. “I’m a peaceful man by nature, of course, but sometimes my temper gets the best of me anyway.”
Frank wondered if it had been an outbreak of Burton’s temper that had led him to resign from his teaching position at a university back East and come West, winding up in the nearly abandoned ghost town of Buckskin, Nevada. When Frank had gotten here, Burton was one of a mere handful of inhabitants in the town. He didn’t do anything for a living as far as Frank had been able to tell, but seemed to have plenty of money, which meant he had brought it with him. A few times, Burton had made cryptic comments that Frank took to mean the professor was writing a book, but he had no idea what the volume was about or if Burton would ever finish it. The professor could be a mite stuffy at times, but Frank liked him.
Tip Woodford, who was also the mayor of Buckskin, looked at the shattered front window and shook his head. “I’ll have to have another pane o’ glass freighted out here from Virginia City,” he said. “Won’t be cheap.”
Johnny said, “We’ve got the money here that kid had in his pockets. Marshal Morgan said we could use it to fix up the place, right, Marshal?”
Frank nodded. “That’s right, Tip. Whatever’s left over goes to Claude Langley.”
Tip nodded. Claude Langley was a newcomer to Buckskin, and a welcome one because he provided an important service.
He was an undertaker.
Before Langley’s arrival in town, whenever somebody needed buryin’, it was up to the citizens to take care of the chore. They had a small cemetery at the edge of town, and now they had somebody who specialized in putting people in it.
Although some might say that Buckskin had two people who specialized in putting people in graves, if you included the marshal.
Frank didn’t want to think about that, though. These days he was trying to live down his reputation as a killer, not expand it.
Mitchell and Beeman had finished their drinks and now declined Johnny Collyer’s offer of refills. “We’ll be ridin’ along,” Mitchell said. “Just so you know we’re leavin’ town, Morgan.”
“I don’t suppose you want to take the kid with you?” Frank asked. “I’ve been assuming we’d have to bury him here, but if you want—”
“No, thanks,” Beeman cut in. “You plugged him, you plant him.”
Frank nodded, and the two gunmen walked out of the saloon. “Tough hombres, looks like,” Catamount Jack observed when they were gone.
“Tough enough,” Frank agreed. “I guess somebody needs to go fetch Langley, so he can bring his wagon up here and collect the body. I’m surprised he didn’t hear the shots and come to see what happened.”
“No need to make Langley come all the way up here.” Jack stooped, caught hold of Conwell under the arms, and lifted him. His wiry muscles handled the deadweight as if it didn’t amount to much. Jack slung the body over his shoulder and started toward the door.
“Good Lord,” Tip said. “You plan on carryin’ him all the way down to the undertaker’s place?”
“Won’t be the first time I’ve lugged a dead body around,” Jack said.
Frank wondered what the stories behind the other times might be, but he decided it might be better not to ask. He followed the old-timer out of the saloon as Jack toted the grisly burden toward Langley’s place at the other end of town.
Frank stopped at the marshal’s office. He had been alert and careful during the walk, just in case Mitchell and Beeman had been lying to him and had come back to settle the score for their former partner with an ambush. Nothing of the sort took place, though. The night seemed quiet and peaceful again after the earlier disturbance.
The marshal’s office and jail were located in a sturdy log building that had been constructed during Buckskin’s first heyday as a silver mining town. Like many of the other buildings, it had fallen into disrepair during the decade it sat there empty and abandoned. With help from Tip and Jack, Frank had fixed the place up, patching the roof and the walls, rehanging the thick door that led into the cell block, and moving in a small stove, a table that functioned as his desk, and several chairs. Either he or Jack spent most nights here, and a cot in one corner gave them a place to sleep. Frank had a room in the boardinghouse run by Leo Benjamin and his wife Trudy. Leo also owned and operated one of Buckskin’s general mercantile emporiums, and was probably the wealthiest man in town who didn’t have a successful silver claim.
Frank hadn’t gotten that cup of coffee in the saloon, so he checked the pot on his stove. What was left in there had turned to sludge, so he set it aside and told himself that he didn’t need any coffee anyway. He’d been about to turn in for the night when Tip came in, huffing and puffing from the run, to tell him that there was trouble in the Silver Baron. So now Frank hung his hat on the nail by the door, took off his gunbelt, coiled it and placed it on the table, and sat down on the cot to remove his boots.
Footsteps outside told him someone was coming. A knock sounded on the door. He glanced toward the holstered Colt lying on the table and wondered if he ought to get it before he answered. Never hurt to be careful, he reminded himself as he stood up and grasped the gun’s walnut grips. As he slid the iron from leather, he called, “Who is it?”
A woman’s voice answered, “Diana.”
Chapter 3
She didn’t have to give her full name. Frank knew perfectly well who she was.
Diana Woodford was Tip’s daughter. She was blond, beautiful, and had lived back East with her mother until the older woman had passed away a couple of years earlier. After that, she had come West to live with her father in Buckskin. Tip had still been married to Diana’s mother even though they hadn’t lived together for many years. She hadn’t been able to stand life on the frontier, and Tip couldn’t abide the thought of moving back East. He’d had plenty of money at the time, so they had set up separate households and he had supported them both. After the silver played out, Diana and her mother had been forced to take care of themselves. If Diana resented her father because of that, though, Frank had never seen any sign of it.
Diana had surprised her father, and probably herself too, by the way she took to living in the West. She was a good rider and could most often be found wearing boots, denim trousers, and a man’s shirt. She could handle a rifle with a considerable amount of skill.
She was also twenty-four years old, which meant Frank Morgan was a good fifteen or twenty years too old for her. That wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that in the time Frank had been here, Diana had demonstrated a definite interest in him.
Even if there hadn’t been the age difference, Frank would have been cautious about developing any relationship with Diana. He had been married twice in his life, and both of his wives had met violent deaths. That tended to make a man leery of getting romantically involved, at least on any kind of serious basis.
And he respected Diana too much, not to mention his liking for her father, to consider anything that wasn’t serious with her.
But he couldn’t just send her away now that she knew he was here and awake, so he called, “Come
