“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 in.”
She opened the door and stepped into the office with a worried look on her face. “I heard there was trouble at the saloon.”
Frank holstered the gun and put it back on the desk. “Quite a ruckus all right,” he said. “A young fella took it in his head to ride his horse into the Silver Baron.”
“What happened to him?”
She would find out soon enough, whether he told her or not, so he said, “I had to kill him.”
Her blue eyes widened. “For riding a horse into a saloon?”
“For trying to kill me and anybody else unlucky enough to get in the way of all the bullets he was throwing around.”
“Oh.” Diana nodded. “Well, that’s different, I suppose. Are you all right?”
“Fine. Not a scratch.”
“Was anyone else hurt?”
“Not that I know of,” Frank said. “Well, the horse got grazed by a bullet and jumped through one of those plateglass windows your pa’s so proud of. I don’t know how badly it was hurt. A couple of fellas went after it, but they didn’t come back while I was around.”
“Poor horse,” Diana said. “And I suppose I should feel sympathetic toward its rider too.”
Frank grunted. “I wouldn’t waste too much time worrying about him. He was an owlhoot, and before that he was trying to goad Professor Burton into a gunfight. I’m pretty sure he would have killed the professor.”
“That’s terrible! Professor Burton is such a kind, gentle man…. Anyway, Frank, I’m just glad that you’re all right.” She moved a step closer to him. “I…I’d be very upset if anything bad happened to you.” She reached out and laid a hand on his arm.
Frank had always liked it when women touched him like that, and with Diana it was no exception. She had somehow gotten even closer to him, so that she was standing no more than a foot away from him. Her head was tilted back a little so she could look up into his face, and it would have been easy as pie just to lean down and press his lips to hers in a kiss.
Instead, he turned away and said, “I’d offer you some coffee, but what’s left in the pot is so stout, I’m afraid it’d jump out of the cup and run off under its own power if I tried to pour it.”
She laughed, but he thought she sounded a little disappointed. “No, that’s all right. Thank you anyway. It’s late, so I suppose I should get home.”
Frank reached for his gunbelt. “I’ll walk you—”
“Nonsense. I’ll be perfectly fine. I walked over here by myself, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and that probably wasn’t a very good idea.” Frank buckled on the belt and then took his hat from the nail. “Buckskin is a boomtown now. You’ve never seen it like this before. I’ve seen plenty of places like it, though, and there’s always trouble just waiting to happen in a boomtown.”
“All right, if you insist.”
Frank took a Winchester from the rack on the wall and tucked it under his arm; then they left the office and stepped out into the street. Despite the late hour, a lot of lights still burned in Buckskin. During the past month, three saloons had opened to give the Silver Baron some competition, and a couple of the stores were still open, including Benjamin’s Emporium. A wagon rolled along the street, and a few men on horseback were leaving the settlement. Music and laughter came from the saloons, the sounds drifting on the warm night air. Several pedestrians walked along the street, all of them male. There were only a handful of women in Buckskin—Diana, Leo’s wife Trudy, and Lauren Stillman, Ginnie Carlson, and Becky Humphries, the three retired soiled doves who now ran what had been the settlement’s only café. Their eatery had some competition now too, as a Chinaman had shown up and opened a hash house, and the newly reopened hotel also served meals in its dining room.