Ghost Valley (8 page)

Bud Johnson and George Garland sat inside a stand of trees above the lip of Ghost Valley.

Johnson was wanted in New Mexico Territory for bank robbery and murder. Garland had warrants out for him in Arkansas and Texas for petty crimes.

“It's cold up here,” Bud whispered.

“Damn right it is,” George agreed. “Ned said we couldn't have no fire on account of Morgan. He might see the flames or smell the smoke.”

“Morgan's probably dead by now.”

“Then where the hell is Carson?” George asked, rubbing his hands together. “And how come we ain't seen hide nor hair of Luke an' Will an' Mike?”

“Carson most likely made camp to wait out this storm. Same goes for the others. A horse don't travel too good into a wind full of snow.”

“Carson didn't have no provisions with him, just some whiskey and jerky. He'd ride hard for the shack if he could. I'm sure of it.”

“You're sayin' Frank Morgan got Carson? Nobody ever put so much as a nick in Carson's hide. He's the most careful man I ever knowed.”

“All the same, he shoulda been here by now. It's damn near dark. The others shoulda been back. I've got a bad feelin' about this.”

Bud took a pint bottle of whiskey out of his coat. “Have some more red-eye. It'll make the waitin' easier. Tom and Zeke are supposed to come up here to relieve us after it gets full dark.”

George took the bottle and drank a thirsty gulp. Then he took a deep breath. “This here's the best invention since the gun, Bud. A man can't hardly live without it. I sure as hell hope them boys down at the shack don't drink it all up before we get there. Besides, this ol' ghost town gets kind'a spooky when the sun goes down.”

“Whiskey helps,” Bud agreed, peering over the top of a boulder at the snow-laden mouth of the valley below. “Hell, ain't nobody in his right mind gonna ride through this wind and snowfall tonight.”

“How come Ned's so dead set on killin' Morgan?”

“It goes way back. Ned and Victor killed Morgan's woman and he come after 'em. Morgan killed a bunch of men in Vanbergen's gang and some of the boys who rode with Ned. Ned and Victor ain't never got over it. They want revenge for what Morgan did to 'em.”

“Sounds like Morgan's the one with a reason for revenge, if you ask me. That was before I throwed in with Ned. I was just comin' out of Fort Worth at the time.”

“I was there,” Bud remembered. “Morgan's a killer, a damn good shootist.”

“I used to hear stories about him. That was years ago, before I took up the outlaw trail. Folks said he was meaner'n a longhorn bull on the prod, and that nobody was any faster with a six-gun.”

“He's just a man,” Bud said, taking his own swallow of whiskey. “You can kill damn near any sumbitch if you go about it right.”

“I hope Carson got him,” George said.

“Maybe they killed each other.”

“That could be what's taking the others so long, lookin' for the bodies in all this snow.”

Bud leaned back against the rock with a blanket thrown over him. “That kid of Morgan's didn't have no backbone. When Ned started knockin' him around, he cried like a damn sugar-tit baby.”

“I'll agree he wasn't much,” George said. “Makes a man wonder why Morgan would go to all this trouble.”

“I figure Morgan's dead by now. Soon as ol' Cletus Huling an' that Meskin get here with the crybaby, we'll head back south where it's warmer to rob a few banks an' trains. This here cold weather don't agree with me.”

“It hurts my joints,” George agreed. “I hate this cold. Soon as this business with Morgan is over, Ned promised we'd ride down to Texas. You can bet on one thing . . . things swing to our side soon as Huling an' Diego get here. Huling is plumb crazy. If he took the notion, he'd kill Ned an' Victor all by hisself.”

“I'm gonna ask Ponce to take us down to the Mexican border so we can get ourselves some pretty señoritas.”

“That damn sure sounds good on a day like this, sittin' up here at the top of this canyon without no fire. We're liable to freeze to death.”

“It's gonna be pitch dark soon,” Bud said. “That fire in the potbelly down at the shack is sure gonna feel good.” He closed his eyes, pulling his hat brim over his face. “You keep an eye on that trail down to the valley for a spell. I'm gonna try an' get me some shut-eye. Zeke an' Tom oughta be up here to take over guard duty for us pretty damn soon.”

“It's too damn cold to sleep,” George said. “Pass me back that whiskey so I can stay warm.”

* * *

“I'm gonna throw in with you,” Buck said. “Made up my mind on it.”

“No need, unless you're just restless, or itching for a fight.”

“Got nothing to do with restlessness, Morgan. I've been thinking about that eighteen-year-old boy of yours, and the way things are stacked against you. You've got a dose of revenge comin' to you. Long odds against you.”

“I've never been one to worry about the odds,” Frank said as he placed more sticks underneath the coffeepot. The smell of coffee filled the clearing.

“There's times when it pays to worry a little.”

“Maybe,” Frank replied.

Skies darkened to the west. The snow had stopped falling and the wind had died down.

“I'll show you that old Injun trail down the back side of the valley,” Buck continued. “It was used by them Anasazi. If I stay perched up in them rocks with my Sharps, I can get a few of 'em.”

“I'm obliged for the offer, but there's no need to put your neck in a noose over me. I can handle whatever's down there on my own.”

“You're a hard-headed cuss.”

Coffee was boiling out of the spout, and Frank put on a glove to take the pot off the flames, placing it on a rock beside the crackling fire.

“I've been told that before,” he said, grinning. “It comes from my daddy's side of the family.”

Buck drew an Arkansas toothpick from a sheath inside his right boot. “I'll slice up some of that fatback and put chunks of jerky with it. Oughta make a decent meal.”

“Sounds mighty good to me.” Frank added a handful of snow to the coffeepot to get the grounds to settle to the bottom. “We can get moving soon as it's dark enough to hide us. That's a toothpick you're carrying. I've got one of my own, only it's a bowie. Best knife on earth for killing a man, either variety.”

“Mine's skinned many a grizzly and elk. I know the way to the valley real well,” Buck said, pulling a chunk of salted pork from a waxed-paper bundle, then cutting thin slices off with his knife. “Trapped it a few times.”

“Is there any cover on the floor of that valley?” Frank asked.

“Scrub pines. Not many. If Ned decides to hole up in the town and wait you out, it'll take an army to flush him out of there.”

“I've got plenty of ammunition,” Frank declared, “some with forty grains of powder in 'em. After I start filling that cabin with lead, they'll come out after a spell.”

“Sounds like you've done this sort of thing before, Morgan.”

“A few times.”

Buck frowned. “Do it ever bother you, thinkin' about the lives you've took? I still have nightmares about the Yankees I shot durin' the war.”

Frank shook his head. “Like I told you before, I never killed a man who didn't deserve it.”

Buck laid strips of fatback in Frank's small frying pan and added a few pieces of jerky. He set it on a flat stone close to the flames, nestling it into the glowing coals. “That oughta do it,” he said, wiping his knife clean on one leg of his stained deerskin pants.

“Coffee's ready,” Frank said, glancing up at a gray sky darkening with nightfall.

He poured himself a cup, then another for the old man, tossing him a cotton sack of brown sugar.

“Mighty nice,” Buck said with a smile. “It don't get much better'n this.”

“You're right,” Frank agreed. “Open country, a warm fire, and good vittles.”

“Don't forget about the coffee.”

Frank slurped a steaming mouthful from his cup. “I hadn't forgotten about it.”

The salt pork began to sizzle in the skillet, giving off a wonderful smell. But Frank's thoughts were on Conrad, what he had been through. Ned Pine had tortured him, making him as miserable as possible, asking questions about Frank the boy couldn't answer. Frank and Conrad barely knew each other, and the circumstances under which Conrad was born without Frank being there made the boy resentful toward his father, an understandable feeling since Conrad didn't know the whole story behind his birth and his father's love for his mother.

A back way into Ghost Valley would give Frank a tremendous advantage, and with a shooter up on the rim, things could get hot for Pine and his bunch. Frank owed the old man for his willingness to lend a hand.

The first order of business would be to take out any riflemen guarding the trail. If he made his approach very carefully, he could take them without making much noise. Then he'd make his way down to the abandoned town and start the serious business of killing off Pine's and Vanbergen's men one or two at a time.

Buck turned over the fatback strips with the point of his knife.

“Won't be long now,” the old man said.

“My belly's rubbing against my backbone,” Frank replied, taking another sip of coffee.

* * *

Zeke Giles and Tom Ledbetter were still drunk from a night-long consumption of whiskey.

Ledbetter was from Missouri, wanted for a string of robberies in his home state. Giles was a small-time cow thief who had killed seven men after the war without anyone knowing his identity.

Zeke looked up at darkening skies. “I thought this storm was gonna blow over. Looks like more of this goddamn snow is headed our way.”

“Just our luck,” Tom muttered. “We'll freeze our asses off up here if that wind builds again.”

Zeke glimpsed a shadow moving among the boulders behind them. “Who the hell is that?”

Tom turned in the direction Zeke was pointing. “I don't see nothin'. You're imagining things.”

“I was sure I saw somebody headed toward us.”

“Who the hell would it be?”

“This bad light plays tricks on a man's eyes. I wish it wasn't so damn dark tonight.”

“You're seein' things. Relax.”

“Pass me that whiskey,” Zeke said. “Could be I'm just too cold.”

Tom handed Zeke the bottle. Half of its contents were missing.

Zeke had raised the bottle to his lips when suddenly a dark shape appeared on top of the boulder behind Tom.

An object came twirling through the air toward Zeke, and then something struck his chest. “Son of a ...” he cried, driven back in the snow by a bowie knife buried in his gut just below his breastbone.

“What the hell?” Tom cried, scrambling to his feet as Zeke slumped to the ground.

A heavy rifle barrel slammed into the back of Tom's head and he sank to his knees, losing consciousness before he fell over on his face.

Zeke cried, “What happened?”

The shape of a man stood over him.

“Who . . . the hell . . . are you?”

“Frank Morgan,” a quiet voice replied.

“Oh, no. We was supposed . . . to be watchin' for you.”

“You weren't watching close enough, and now you'll pay for it with your life.”

“Please don't . . . kill me. I've got a wife back home.”

“You're already dead, cowboy. The tip of my knife is buried in your heart.”

Waves of pain filled Zeke's chest. “No!” he whimpered, feeling warm blood flow down the front of his shirt.

“I'm gonna cut your pardner's throat,” the voice said. “He has to die for what you did to my son.”

“It was ... Ned's idea,” Zeke croaked.

“You went along with it,” the tall man said, bending down to jerk his knife from Zeke's chest.

As Zeke's eyes were closing he saw Frank Morgan walk over to Tom. With a single slashing motion, Morgan whipped the knife across Tom's throat.

Zeke's eyes batted shut. He didn't feel the cold now.

Tiny snowflakes fell in sheets across the abandoned town. The bottom of the valley floor was covered with several inches of white.

An eerie silence gripped Ghost Valley as Frank made his way down slippery rocks and sheer cliffs, following the old Anasazi trail Buck Waite had shown him.

Smoke curled from a rock chimney as Frank watched a shack in the middle of town, after he had made slow but careful progress across the valley. Behind the cabin, more than a dozen horses stood with their tails to the wind in crude pole corrals. A pile of hay was stacked in one corner.

He moved quietly through the scrub pines. To the north Buck was covering the cabin from a cluster of rocks at a range of more than five hundred yards.

“I hope he's a good shot from a distance,” Frank said under his breath, slipping among the trees. The red-bearded old man had proved to be an excellent woodsman, but from the top of the rimrock he'd have to be good, better than most men, to hit anything, even with a long-range rifle like his Sharps .52 buffalo gun.

Frank thought about Conrad, safe back in Trinidad. “It's time I made Pine and Vanbergen pay,” he said, creeping closer to the cabin.

The patter of small snowflakes rattled on his hat brim and the crunch of new-fallen snow came from his boots when he put his feet down.

“No way to do this quiet,” Frank said, still being careful with the placement of each foot.

A horse snorted in the corrals. Frank remained motionless behind a pine trunk until the animal settled. A range-bred horse would notice him making an advance toward the cabin. A horse raised in a stable wouldn't pay him any mind. There was a big difference in horses. Frank had always preferred the range-bred variety.

A blast of northerly wind swept across the top of the valley, and Frank knew that Buck was freezing his ass off, waiting for things to start.

A bit of luck, Frank thought, to run across Buck Waite when he least expected to find any help tracking down the outlaws. While he usually worked alone when he was employing his guns, it was a comfort to know Buck was up there with his rifle.

Moving carefully toward the back of the cabin, he sighted an outhouse behind the place, nestled against the trunk of a small ponderosa pine.

The snowfall grew heavier.

“Maybe I can catch one coming out to relieve himself,” Frank said under his breath.

He moved closer to the outhouse. Things were too quiet, and that had an unsettling effect on him. But the silence could also be a blessing if he used it to his advantage.

* * *

Big John Meeker had been drinking all night and most of the morning. He felt like his bladder was about to burst open any minute. He was wanted for bank robbery over in Mississippi, and for a killing in Indian Territory involving a trading post operator and his wife.

John stood over the two-holer, letting his steamy water flow into the hole dug beneath the bench-wood seats. This waiting for Ned Pine's adversary was getting the best of him, and there was no money to be made from killing an old gunfighter like Frank Morgan. Unless there was a profit in it, John had little patience for personal grudges. Ned was out of his head with a need for vengeance against this shootist named Morgan, a gunman well past his prime. None of this made any sense to a man like John Meeker.

“That's better,” he sighed when his bladder finally emptied into the pit.

Pale light suddenly flooded the outhouse. John turned his head to see who had opened the door.

A knife blade was rammed between his ribs . . . he only caught a glimpse of the figure who stood behind him.

Without buttoning the front of his pants, John jerked his Navy Colt .44 free and staggered outside, cocking the hammer with blood cascading down the back of his mackinaw in regular spurts, while pain coursed through his ribs.

“You sneaky son of a bitch!” John cried, unable to find the man who had knifed him.

With nothing to aim at, John let the Colt drop to his side as chains of white-hot agony shot through his body.

His trigger finger curled. A deafening explosion filled the quiet valley, followed by a howl of pain when John, a professional gunman by trade, shot himself in the right foot with his own .44-caliber slug.

“Damn, damn, damn!” John shrieked, hopping around on his good leg, spraying blood all over the snow from both of his wounds.

“What the hell was that?” a voice demanded from a back door of the log cabin.

John was in too much pain to answer.

“Look,” another whiskey-thick voice said. “Ol' John went an' shot hisself in the foot.”

“Wonder how come he did that? All he said he was gonna do was take a piss....”

“He's dead drunk, Billy. When a man's that drunk he's liable to do anything.”

John continued to hop around in a circle, reaching for his bloody boot.

“What'll we do, Clyde?”

“Let the dumb sumbitch dance out there in the snow. If he ain't got enough sense to keep from shootin' himself, then let him jump up and down.”

As Clyde spoke, a rifle thundered from a stand of pines behind the cabin. Billy Willis, a horse thief from Nebraska Territory, fell down in a heap in the cabin doorway with his hands gripping his belly.

Wayland Burke, an El Paso hired gun, was trying to get out of the way when the next gunshot rang out. Something hot hit him in the back, pushing him forward into the door frame of the shack with the force of impact.

“I'm hit!” Wayland screamed as he sank to his knees with blood squirting from his shirtfront.

* * *

Men inside the cabin began scrambling for their guns.

Frank moved away into the curtain of snow. The sound of his rifle still echoed among the scrub ponderosa pines where he'd fired at one of Pine's men.

Frank found a new hiding place fifty yards to the north. Five more of Ned Pine's men were out of the fight, and the war had just begun.

He moved silently, deeper in the forest behind the empty town, to make his next play.

* * *

A thundering gunshot roared from the rim of the valley, and a man in front of the cabin let out a scream. Charlie Saffle, a hired killer and stagecoach bandit from Waco, ended his cry with a wail as he fell down in the snow with his hand clamped around the walnut grips of his pistol.

“Buck Waite's good,” Frank told himself in a feathery whisper when he saw a man go down at the front cabin door. “I'm not sure I could have made that shot myself. Helluva lot of range for any long gun.”

A barrel-chested cowboy came out the back door with a rifle, a Spencer, clutched to his shoulder. He swept his gunsights back and forth.

Frank took careful aim and pulled the trigger on his Winchester.

The cowboy did a curious spin before firing a harmless shot into the treetops.

The gunman went down slowly, his eyes bulging from their sockets, wishing he'd stayed in New Orleans instead of joining Ned Pine's outlaw gang last year.

“Shit,” he gulped, falling over on his face in the snow with his rifle underneath him. Winking lights clouded his vision until his eyelids closed.

Frank jacked another shell into his saddle gun.

“Everybody stay put!” a muffled voice commanded from inside the cabin. “Don't show yourselves. It's gotta be Morgan!”

* * *

Ned Pine's gray eyebrows knitted. He peered through a window of the cabin.

“How the hell did Morgan get past our lookouts?” Tommy Sumpter asked in a grating voice.

“How the hell should I know,” Pine spat, finding nothing among the scrub pines encircling the shack. “Royce Miller is good at what he does . . . maybe the best.”

“He ain't all that good,” Tommy answered, watching the front door where Charlie lay trembling in the snow. “Ask ol' Charlie there if Royce was good at bushwhackin'.”

“Shut up!” Pine snapped. “There's another shooter up on the rim.”

“I thought you said Morgan always worked alone,” Tommy remembered.

“He does. That's what I can't figure,” Pine replied, his pale eyes moving across the valley rim.

Pine's eyelids slitted. “Ain't heard no fire from Daryl or Pike.”

“Morgan probably got to both of em,” Victor suggested, “or the other bastard shootin' at us got 'em. We don't know who the hell he could be.”

“Reckon that happened to the others?” Herb Wilson asked, facing a window. “They shoulda been back by now if they had any luck.”

“Luck's a funny thing,” Pine said. “Royce an' his boys may have run into Lady Luck when she was in a bad mood. The others oughta been back here by now.”

Victor leaned against the door frame. “My daddy always said that if a man is lucky he don't need much of anything else. I got it figured that the others are all dead.”

“What the hell would you know about it?” Pine cried, both hands filled with iron.

Victor was not disturbed by Ned's question, nor was he disturbed by Pine's bad reputation. “I'm an authority on luck, good and bad, Ned. I say our luck just ran out. Whoever this bastard Morgan is, he's good. It'll take a lot of luck for us to kill him.”

Ned backed away from the window. “We ain't done yet with Morgan,” he said.

Jeff Walker leaned against the windowpane. “There ain't nobody out there, seems like,” he said.

Seconds later a bullet smashed the glass in front of his face. A slug from a .52-caliber buffalo gun entered his right eye.

“Damn!” Tommy said when Jeff was flung away from the window.

Jeff went to the dirt floor of the cabin with the back of his skull hanging by tendons and tissue. A plug of his brains lay beside the potbelly stove. A twist of his long black hair clung to the skull fragment.

“Holy shit!” Tommy cried, backing away to the center of the room. “Them's Jeff's brains hangin' out.”

“Shut up!” Ned bellowed. “Give me some goddamn time to think!”