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.
