The Last Gunfighter

to meddle in the affairs of gods.

He went downstairs and started across the lobby. The clerk asked him, “Did you talk to Dr. Connelly, Mr. Bosworth?”

“I talked to him,” Bosworth said curtly. The law would be after him for killing the doctor, too, but what was one more murder? Just another annoying charge to be squashed when he was rich again. He pushed through the doors, stepped out onto the porch.

Frank Morgan was waiting for him in the street.

Frank was hurrying toward the hotel when he saw Bosworth step outside. He stopped where he was, and so did the timber baron. Slowly, a smile spread over Bosworth’s ruggedly handsome face.

“All right,” he said. “Fetch the law. I can afford the best attorneys in the country. I’ll fight tooth and nail in the courts, Morgan. You know that. I can make this last for years. But the one thing I won’t do is draw my gun on you. We both know you’d kill me.”

“We both know you deserve it,” Frank said.

“Well”—still with that smug smile on his face—“people don’t always get what they deserve, do they?”

Those words were barely out of Bosworth’s mouth when another figure appeared behind him. Someone inside the hotel lobby yelled in alarm. Bosworth didn’t have time to turn around, though. The man behind him reached around with one arm, looped it under the timber baron’s chin, jerked his head back, and plunged what looked a scalpel into his throat. With a shock of recogition, Frank saw that the second man was Dr. Patrick Connelly. The doctor ripped the scalpel from one side of Bosworth’s throat to the other, opening it so that blood cascaded out in sheets. Bosworth made a horrible gurgling noise and thrashed around, but the arm around his neck was like an iron bar holding him there. Connelly didn’t let go of him until there was a huge puddle of blood at his feet and Bosworth’s body had gone limp.

Then Connelly released Bosworth, letting him fall to the porch. The doctor gasped, “He…killed my wife…killed me…”

Connelly collapsed as well, falling across Bosworth’s corpse. Frank took a deep breath, knowing that it was finally all over, and that for once, he hadn’t fired the final shot in this bloody, tragic ruckus.

It would be all right with him if he never had to do that again.

But he knew better than to hope for that.

It took a big coffin for Ben Chamberlain, and a bigger grave than usual. But the undertaker managed, and a couple of days later, Ben was laid to rest.

There had been a lot of funerals in Eureka the past two days. All too often, that was what happened when he rode into a town, Frank reflected as he stood beside the long mound of dirt that marked the final resting place of the man who had been known for a time as the Terror.

Everyone was gone except Frank, Nancy Chamberlain, and her father, whose left arm was in a black silk sling. Dog, Stormy, and Goldy waited patiently just outside the stone fence that ran around the graveyard.

Nancy had told Frank what Grimshaw said about the events in the primitive cabin that had resulted in her brother becoming the Terror. When he heard the story, Frank was a little less regretful about having to kill his old friend. Jack Grimshaw had stepped way over the line more than once.

Frank had also found out from some of Chamberlain’s men about the gunman called Rockwell, who had actually been working for Emmett Bosworth. Frank knew he couldn’t prove it, but he was convinced that Rockwell was the man who had shot at him when he first discovered the cabin, probably acting on his own initiative because he knew Bosworth wouldn’t want Frank poking around. Frank was satisfied that was the answer.

There were no answers where Dr. Patrick Connelly and his wife were concerned. Nobody in Eureka seemed to know why Bosworth and Connelly had killed each other, and Molly Connelly’s death was a complete mystery. Everything in life had an explanation, Frank supposed…but that didn’t mean folks could expect to know about all of it.

Nancy turned to him now and laid a black-gloved hand on his arm. “Thank you for everything you did, Mr. Morgan,” she said.

“I didn’t save your brother,” Frank said with a shake of his head.

“But you tried to. That was more than anyone else did.”

“Not really,” Frank told her. “You tried, too. Sometimes, though, you just can’t save someone, no matter how much you love them. There are things bigger than us, Nancy, things we can’t fight or even explain. They just… are.”

She smiled sadly. “I suppose you’re right.” She took a deep breath. “Where will you go now, Mr. Morgan?”

Chamberlain spoke up, saying, “You’re welcome to stay with us for a while, if you’d like.”

Frank controlled the impulse to shudder. He wouldn’t spend any amount of time in that redwood prison Chamberlain had constructed for himself Anyway, he had some pressing business of his own to take care of.

“I’m heading back down to San Francisco,” he said. “A telegram one of my lawyers sent to me just caught up with me this morning. It seems that…there’s been some trouble in my family, too. A tragedy concerning my son and his wife.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nancy murmured. “I wish…sometimes I wish I was a man, a man like you, Mr. Morgan, so I could just shoot all my troubles!”

“And sometimes,” The Drifter said as he settled his hat on his head, “I wish it really worked that way, ma’am.”

As Frank rode away, a wind blew in from the sea, over the bay, and stirred the branches of the towering trees that grew to the edge of the graveyard, so that they moved back and forth almost like the arms of giants waving farewell.