was enough dinero in his pockets to pay for the damages to the Silver Baron and a pine box too.” Tip rubbed his jaw and frowned. “Where do you reckon that money came from, Frank?”
“I think it was loot from some robbery,” Frank answered without hesitation. “Those hombres the kid was riding with, Mitchell and Beeman, are outlaws. I’d seen them a time or two before, in various places.”
He didn’t elaborate on where he had seen them, and Tip didn’t ask. Tip knew that Frank had a reputation as a gunfighter and had spent time in some rough places. Nobody had ever accused Frank Morgan of being a common owlhoot, though.
“You reckon it was a good idea to let them go?”
Frank shrugged. “They hadn’t caused any trouble here in Buckskin. If I’d had wanted posters on them, I could have held them for the law elsewhere, but no paper on them has crossed my desk. I don’t have any way of knowing if they’re actually wanted anywhere right now.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Tip said. “I don’t much cotton to the idea of owlhoots comin’ into our town, though.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it,” Frank advised him. “The word is out all over the territory that you’ve found the old Lucky Lizard vein again, and there have been a couple of other strikes in the area. People of all sorts come flooding into a place when there’s a gold or silver strike, and that includes outlaws. Might as well try to stop the sun from coming up in the morning. We’re actually lucky we haven’t had even more trouble.”
“Yeah.” Tip sighed. “I know you’re right, but I don’t have to like it. I’m just damned glad that you showed up in Buckskin when you did, Frank.”
It was violence that had brought Frank to the settlement in the first place. He had pursued an old enemy here, a man who had tried to have him killed. Once that matter was settled, Frank had stayed around for a few days because he liked the area and liked the people. At that time, he hadn’t known that Tip had rediscovered the vein of silver that everyone thought had played out ten years earlier. When Tip had told him about that and asked him to take on the job of marshal in the town that was bound to grow again, Frank had hesitated….
But not for long. He had been feeling some vague stirrings, a notion that it might be time for him to settle down at last after a lifetime of drifting. Buckskin was as good a place as any to put that notion to the test.
“One more thing,” Tip said. “Those fellas who went after the kid’s horse caught it and brought it back to Hillman’s livery stable. It’s down there now. Amos said he’d dope up that bullet graze and the cuts from the broken window. Since the kid’s partners’ve already left town and didn’t take the horse with them, I was thinkin’ maybe you ought to claim him, Frank.”
“Me?” Frank was surprised by the offer. “I’ve got a horse.”
A damned good horse, in fact. The big, rangy Appaloosa called Stormy had been with Frank for several years. They made a good team, along with the wolflike cur known only as Dog.
“Yeah, but a fella can’t have too many good horses. Think about it, anyway. Maybe in the mornin’ you can go down to Hillman’s and take a look at it.”
“I suppose I can do that,” Frank agreed.
He lifted a hand in farewell as Tip turned and went through the gate and up the walk to the house. As Frank glanced in that direction, he thought he saw the curtain over a window move a little. A lamp was burning in the room, and the yellow glow revealed a distinctively female silhouette against the curtain. A smile tugged at Frank’s mouth as he turned and started walking back toward the marshal’s office.
Figuring out what to do about Diana Woodford was a problem all right, but woman trouble had one advantage over the sort of problems Frank usually ran into.
Diana just wanted to kiss him, not shoot him!
At least, not yet….
Chapter 4
The next morning, Frank walked down to Amos Hillman’s livery stable to take a look at Conwell’s horse. By all rights, the animal ought to belong to the kid’s relatives, if he had any, but Frank’s check of the kid’s pockets hadn’t turned up any letters or other items with a name or address on them. Even if Conwell had any family left, Frank didn’t see any way to get in touch with them. And since Conwell had had enough cash on him to pay for his burying and the damages to the saloon, there was no need to sell the horse to pay for those expenses.
So as Mayor Woodford had said, there was no reason why Frank couldn’t claim the horse as his own…other than the fact that Frank felt a mite uncomfortable about killing a man and then taking his mount. Felt a little too much like horse thievery to him.
But when Frank walked into Hillman’s stable, the lanky, one-eyed liveryman greeted him by saying, “Mornin’, Marshal. I’m damned glad you shot that son of a bitch last night. He had it comin’.”
“Why’s that?” Frank wanted to know. He thought it was reason enough that Conwell had been trying to kill him and anybody else in the saloon unlucky enough to get in the way of a bullet, but he was curious why Hillman had made that statement.
“Anybody who’d treat a hoss like that hombre did deserves to get ventilated.”
“Riding him into the saloon that way, you mean?”
Hillman shook his head. He was a tall, grizzled man in overalls, with a thatch of gray hair sticking out from under an old hat and a black patch over his left eye. He said, “I mean mistreatin’ the poor critter for months, from the looks of the scars on him.”
“The horse had a bullet graze, and some cuts from broken glass,” Frank pointed out.
“I ain’t talkin’ about those wounds. Hoss has got scars that tell me somebody beat him reg’larlike, probably with a quirt or somethin’ like that. Didn’t take care o’ the cuts, neither. Just let ’em scab up and heal over as best they could.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead. He had no proof that Conwell was responsible for beating the animal. Conwell could have bought—or more likely stolen—the horse any time, including recently.
But having seen the cruelty and viciousness in the kid firsthand, Frank had no doubt that Conwell had been capable of whipping the horse until it bled. His gut told him that was exactly what had happened.
“Let’s take a look at him,” Frank said, his voice edged with concern.
Hillman led him along the center aisle of the barn. Dog was lying in front of Stormy’s stall, but he got up to trot over to Frank and get his ears rubbed. The big cur and the Appaloosa were pals, so Dog hung around the stable most of the time while Frank was in town.
Things had been too hectic in the saloon the night before for Frank to pay too much attention to the horse Conwell rode into the saloon. Now, as he and Hillman came up to the stall where the animal stood, he saw that it was a big, strong-looking gelding whose hide had an odd sheen to it.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a gold-colored horse like that,” Frank commented.
Hillman shook his head. “Me neither, and I been runnin’ livery stables for nigh on to forty years
