'I can see well enough.'
Frank reined his horse toward Glenwood Springs. He was a shade over six feet tall, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped, a very muscular man. He was in his mid-forties, and had carried the doubtful brand of a gunfighter ever since he was fifteen years old and was forced into a gunfight with an older man down in Texas.
Frank had killed the man, and several years later he had been forced into a gunfight with the man's brothers.
He had killed them all with deadly precision.
His reputation as a gunfighter had been etched in stone from that day forward. That was many, many years in the past, many gunfights ago.
The number of dead men Frank left behind him could not equal that of Smoke Jensen and a few others, nor did Frank want it to, but nonetheless that number was staggeringly high. He didn't count the dead any longer. Frank had not started a single one of those gunfights, but he had finished them all.
Frank had married in Denver, a lovely girl named Vivian, but her father, a wealthy man, hated Frank. He framed him for a crime he did not commit, then said he would not pursue it if Frank would leave and never see Vivian again.
Frank had no choice; he pulled out of Denver and didn't see or hear from Vivian for years. Her father had the marriage annulled.
Vivian remarried and took over her father's many businesses after his death, and she became one of the wealthiest women in America. Vivian's husband had died a few years back. She had a son, Conrad, and it was not until years later that Frank learned the young man was his own.
It came as quite a shock.
Frank had drifted into a mining town in northern New Mexico and discovered that Vivian was there, overseeing a huge mining operation. But a few weeks later, after Frank and Vivian had begun to pick up the pieces of their lives and get back together, Vivian was killed and their son was kidnapped by the Ned Pine and Victor Vanbergen gangs.
Frank swore to track them all down and kill them, even if it took him the rest of his life.
He dreamt of the men who had faced his guns in the past and died for their folly ... there was that kid in Kansas in that little no-name town right after the war. Billy something-or-other, about eighteen or so. Frank had tried to warn the kid off, had done his best to walk away from him, but Billy had insisted on forcing Frank's hand in a deadly duel.
Billy died on the dirty floor of the saloon that night. He hadn't even cleared leather before Frank's bullet tore into his heart.
There was that older man in Arizona Territory, one afternoon years ago, who called Frank out into the street in the mistaken belief that Frank had killed his brother.
Frank repeatedly told the man he'd never heard of the man's brother and to go away and leave him alone, but the man persisted, cursing Frank and calling him yellow.
Seconds later the man went for his gun, and in a single heartbeat was gut-shot, writhing in pain and dying in the street.
Frank turned away, mounted up, and rode out of town at a jog trot.
Then there was the fight with the father and his sons to haunt him. Frank had stopped off in a small blot on the map in the panhandle of Texas for supplies.
There was a liquored-up young man in the store/trading post/saloon. The young man had a bad mouth and an evil temper that fateful day.
He kept bothering Frank, who just tried to ignore him, but the punk kept pushing and pushing, and he finally made the fatal mistake of putting his hands on Frank.
Frank didn't like people to put hands on him. He flattened the young man with a big hard right fist and left him on the floor.
Someone yelled for Frank to watch out. Frank turned, his .45 ready in his hand. The punk had leveled a .44 at him with the hammer trimmed back.
Frank shot him right between the eyes and made a big mess on the floor, a bloody mess.
The young man's father and his other two sons caught up with Frank on the trail about a week later.
The father and sons didn't believe in much conversation. They opened fire on Frank as soon as they got within range.
Frank headed for an upthrusting of rocks and brush, and an all-day battle ensued. The father and one of his sons were killed, the remaining son badly wounded. Frank patched up the wounded boy as best he could, buried the two others, and pulled out.
There wasn't much else he could do.
He remembered the time he found a family butchered by Indians. Frank was prowling through the ruins of the cabin when a small posse from a nearby town rode up, and in their ugly rage they thought Frank had committed the atrocity. That was a very ugly scene, involving a hanging rope ... until Frank filled both hands with Colts.
He made a believer out of the sheriff and what remained of his posse before the affair was over, a bloody shootout and a pile of corpses.
Frank made it a habit to avoid Arizona Territory for several years after that. He knew there would be a price on his head in Arizona.
He rode into Glenwood Springs now, and halted his horse in front of the town's only hotel, Gold Miner's Lodge. He pulled off his hat and ran fingers through dark brown hair peppered with gray, making a mental note to buy a comb or a brush. Then he popped the cover on his pocket watch and checked the time. It was past four
