Massacre Canyon by William W. Johnstone

Author:William W. Johnstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2014-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

Bitter anger filled Deputy United States Marshal Simon Ford as he stood at the bar in a Prescott saloon and nursed a glass of bourbon from his home state of Kentucky. All the long, hard months he had spent pursuing the Kroll gang, he thought, and he had been cast aside like he was nothing.

Once a spring blizzard had caught him by surprise in Wyoming after they had robbed a bank in Laramie, and he had come perilously close to freezing to death before he found shelter.

Another time he had been following their trail across the Texas Panhandle when a sudden thunderstorm swooped up and a tornado descended from the clouds and nearly snatched him up. He’d had to pull his horse into a little wash and force the animal to lie down. Then he’d flattened himself as much as possible while the twister roared past only yards away like a runaway freight train.

Then there was the time some of the outlaws lingered behind the others and bushwhacked him. When the weather was damp, his side still ached where the bullet had drilled him. He’d been forced to hole up in some rocks and had nearly bled to death before the human buzzards finally left. He was pretty sure Mordecai Kroll had been among the men who ambushed him.

Ford could come up with a dozen more instances like those, occasions when he had almost caught up with the gang or when he had almost lost his own life trying to bring them to justice.

The knowledge that a bounty hunter—one of the lowest forms of life on the face of the earth as far as Simon Ford was concerned—had brought in Mordecai Kroll was like a knife in the gut to him. He could have lived with it, though, since Rudolph and the rest of the gang were still out there somewhere and he could continue devoting his efforts to tracking them down.

But then this Smoke Jensen—brother to the bounty hunter and a gunslinger and former fugitive from justice himself—had to show up and convince Governor Frémont to let Mordecai go. The crazy scheme that Jensen had hatched would never work. Ford was certain of that. All it would accomplish was having Mordecai Kroll free in the world again to rob and rape and kill.

Ford picked up the shot glass in front of him and threw back the rest of the bourbon.

“You drink that like a man who has some serious business to attend to.”

Ford frowned and looked over to see who had spoken. A young, attractive, dark-haired woman stood there with a half-smile on her richly curved red lips. She wore a gray traveling outfit that she made look elegant, despite the fact that it wasn’t terribly expensive.

“A saloon like this is no place for a respectable woman,” Ford told her. He hadn’t downed enough bourbon to be drunk, but he felt the liquor a little.

“I’m not a respectable woman,” she said. “I’m a reporter.”

“Newspaper?”

“Magazine. I write for Harper’s Weekly.

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