Frank jacked another shell into his saddle gun.
'Everybody stay put!' a muffled voice commanded from inside the cabin. 'Don't show yourselves. It's gotta be Morgan!'
* * * *
Ned Pine's gray eyebrows knitted. He peered through a window of the cabin.
'How the hell did Morgan get past our lookouts?' Tommy Sumpter asked in a grating voice.
'How the hell should I know,' Pine spat, finding nothing among the scrub pines encircling the shack. 'Royce Miller is good at what he does ... maybe the best.'
'He ain't all that good,' Tommy answered, watching the front door where Charlie lay trembling in the snow. 'Ask ol' Charlie there if Royce was good at bushwhackin'.'
'Shut up!' Pine snapped. 'There's another shooter up on the rim.'
'I thought you said Morgan always worked alone,' Tommy remembered.
'He does. That's what I can't figure,' Pine replied, his pale eyes moving across the valley rim.
Pine's eyelids slitted. 'Ain't heard no fire from Daryl or Pike.'
'Morgan probably got to both of em,' Victor suggested, 'or the other bastard shootin' at us got 'em. We don't know who the hell he could be.'
'Reckon that happened to the others?' Herb Wilson asked, facing a window. 'They shoulda been back by now if they had any luck.'
'Luck's a funny thing,' Pine said. 'Royce an' his boys may have run into Lady Luck when she was in a bad mood. The others oughta been back here by now.'
Victor leaned against the door frame. 'My daddy always said that if a man is lucky he don't need much of anything else. I got it figured that the others are all dead.'
'What the hell would you know about it?' Pine cried, both hands filled with iron.
Victor was not disturbed by Ned's question, nor was he disturbed by Pine's bad reputation. 'I'm an authority on luck, good and bad, Ned. I say our luck just ran out. Whoever this bastard Morgan is, he's good. It'll take a lot of luck for us to kill him.'
Ned backed away from the window. 'We ain't done yet with Morgan,' he said.
Jeff Walker leaned against the windowpane. 'There ain't nobody out there, seems like,' he said.
Seconds later a bullet smashed the glass in front of his face. A slug from a .52-caliber buffalo gun entered his right eye.
'Damn!' Tommy said when Jeff was flung away from the window.
Jeff went to the dirt floor of the cabin with the back of his skull hanging by tendons and tissue. A plug of his brains lay beside the potbelly stove. A twist of his long black hair clung to the skull fragment.
'Holy shit!' Tommy cried, backing away to the center of the room. 'Them's Jeff's brains hangin' out.'
'Shut up!' Ned bellowed. 'Give me some goddamn time to think!'
--------
*Sixteen*
Frank heard a distant rifle shot, figuring Buck had found another target. Then suddenly something struck his left shoulder and he went down, stunned, tumbling through the snow, his mind reeling.
He tried to scramble back to his feet. He heard Dog give a soft whimper, and then everything went black around him. He knew he was falling and couldn't help himself.
* * * *
He awakened to the smell of wood smoke. He saw the dim outline of a cabin roof above his head. Very slowly, waves of pain shot through his left side, down his arm, and across his ribs.
He heard himself groan.
'You okay, Morgan?' a faintly familiar voice asked from the mist around him.
'Where am I?'
'My place.'
'Where the hell is your place? What happened to me down in that valley?' Slowly, events returned to him as he regained consciousness.
He saw a man with a tangled red beard leaning over him, and he tried to remember who the stranger was.
'You took a chunk of lead, Morgan. It ain't too bad nor too deep. I dug it out with my knife. I'm sure as hell glad you was asleep when I done it. You hollered like a stuck pig after I got it out.'
'I suppose I'm lucky to be alive,' he said, unable to recall how anyone could have gotten behind him to catch him with his guard down.
'That's fair to say.'
'Your name is Buck ... Buck Waite. Things are coming back to me now.'
'This here's my daughter, Karen. She fixed you some soup made outta dried wild onions an' elk meat.
