many hombres brave enough to take him on in a hand-to-hand battle.
But he had never run into Frank Morgan before.
“I said I wasn’t going to get in a gunfight with you,” Frank told him. “I never said anything about not beating the hell out of you if you want to push it that far.”
Erickson’s lips drew back from his teeth in a furious grimace. He let go of the cup. It fell toward the counter. Peter Lee made a grab for it, caught it so that while most of the coffee splashed out, the cup didn’t shatter.
At the same time, Erickson threw a piledriver punch with his other hand. It might have connected, if not for the fact that Frank squeezed the other wrist with such force that the bones ground together. Erickson flinched and leaned in the direction of the agonizing pain, and that threw his aim off. Frank ducked the punch, hammered a blow of his own into Erickson’s midsection. The air gusted out of Erickson’s lungs and his normally florid face turned gray. He stumbled back a step as Frank let go of his wrist. That put him in position for the sharp, crossing left that Frank slammed into his jaw. Still seated on the stool in front of the counter, Frank brought his right leg up, planted his booted foot in Erickson’s belly, and shoved him hard. Erickson flew backward to crash down in a heap at the feet of the men who had come into the hash house with him.
Those men were staring in shock, because the whole altercation had happened so fast that it was hard for their eyes to follow it. They knew that Erickson had landed on the floor, though, something that never happened in a fracas.
Erickson looked up, hate burning in his eyes as he glared at Frank. “Get the bastard!” he rasped.
The other men surged forward, and the battle was on.
Chapter 10
The loudmouth called Dawson led the charge. He came at Frank swinging wild punches. Frank stood up and grabbed the stool he’d been sitting on, raising it sharply with the legs pointed at Dawson so that the man’s momentum carried him right into them. Dawson said,
Frank dropped the stool and clouted Dawson on the jaw with a hard, looping right. The punch drove Dawson to the floor, where the next man to attack, one of the loggers, tripped over him and fell forward. Frank was ready for him, meeting him with a left jab that made blood spurt from the man’s nose as it pulped under Frank’s fist. The logger howled in pain and fell to his knees.
The space between the counter and the tables was narrow enough so that all of Frank’s opponents couldn’t charge him at the same time. That went a long way toward evening up the odds.
The men who’d been eating supper in the hash house scrambled to get out of the way as the last man in range clothes and one of the other two loggers bulled their way around their fallen comrade, knocking over one of the tables as they did so. Food flew in the air. The man in range clothes grabbed a chair and lifted it over his head as he rushed in. Frank snatched the stool from the floor again and used it to block the chair as it descended. That bone- jarring impact snapped the legs off the chair.
“Stop it!” Peter Lee cried. “Please don’t bust up my place!”
Frank felt bad about what was happening, but these men had sought him out and started the trouble. He was defending himself. And he would see to it that Lee got paid for the damages, one way or another.
The man who had wound up holding two broken chair legs came at Frank, slashing back and forth with the makeshift clubs. Frank had to give ground as he tried to fend off the blows with the stool he still held. Recklessly, his opponent came too close, so when Frank saw his opportunity, he lifted his leg and kicked the man in the groin. Better a pair of sore balls than a bullet.
The man screeched in pain and dropped the broken chair legs as he clutched at himself. He toppled to the floor and curled up in agony.
That still left three men on their feet, though, because Erickson had managed to get up again. With his jutting red beard and the long hair streaming around his face because his hat had fallen off, he looked like a berserk Viking as he came at Frank with an incoherent cry of rage. Frank dropped the stool again and bent over to let Erickson’s wild, flailing punches sail harmlessly over his head. He drove forward, burying a shoulder in Erickson’s midsection. As the big gunman’s momentum carried him forward over Frank’s back, Frank grabbed him around the thighs and lifted.
It was quite a feat of strength, demonstrating just how much power there really was in Frank’s muscular body. Erickson came completely off the floor and turned a flip as Frank heaved the man over his back. Erickson came down with a crash that seemed to shake the whole building.
That left two of the loggers facing Frank, and they hesitated now as Erickson rolled onto his side, tried to push himself up, and failed. With a sigh, Erickson slumped back down and lay still.
One of the loggers held his hands palms out toward Frank. “That’s enough, mister,” he said. The man looked at the bodies scattered along the counter in various stages of pain and semicon-sciousness. “By God, that’s enough.”
Frank’s chest rose and fell quickly from the exertion of the past few minutes, but his voice was steady as he said, “You boys called the tune. If you don’t want to dance to it, that’s your business.”
The other logger said, “Forget it, Morgan. I don’t want to tangle with you.”
Frank nodded and bent down to check Erickson’s pockets. He found a double eagle and flipped it to Peter Lee. “That ought to pay for the broken chair and anything else that got busted, as well as the food that was ruined. Fair enough, Peter?”
Lee bit the coin and satisfied himself that it was real. “Fair enough,” he told Frank. “Erickson may not feel that way when he gets his senses back, though.”
“Then he should have thought twice before he came in here to make trouble.” Frank turned back to the two loggers. “What did you do, go in the Bull o’ the Woods and get Erickson and his friends all stirred up?”
“Don’t blame us, Morgan,” one of the men said. “Erickson was already hot under the collar. A lot of men in Eureka feel the same way tonight. They don’t like you comin’ in here and takin’ over the hunt for the Terror like you
