Maverick Marshall Read Online Free

tomorrow. You can’t go heeled in any place that sells whisky. Including this dive.” Frank went out.
    He could, of course, have searched the place, but not without laying up trouble. If Tularosa was here he’d have to come out.
    Frank got on his horse. He scowled, knowing he couldn’t afford to hang fire here. He had the whole town to patrol and the riskiest hours were still ahead.
    He breathed a sigh into the darkness and swore irascibly. It was in his mind the Council had jobbed him, keeping Tularosa back until he’d taken the oath. Yet in fairness he had to admit he couldn’t blame them. Nobody would have touched this job with a prod pole if it had been aired Tularosa was the first thing on the docket. The man was like a wild animal.
    Frank shook his head and cursed again, and observed Danny Settles shuffling along with his sack, threadbare coat flapping around bony legs as he picked a muttering way toward the Mercantile. Probably going after groceries, trying to reach the doors before Krantz locked up.
    Perhaps because he was a loner himself, Frank had always had a soft place in his heart for Danny Settles who was the nearest thing South Fork had to a halfwit. He had a cave or a burrow somewhere out in the Barrens. It was the measure of his queerness that he made pets of crawling varmints. He’d been around as long as Frank could remember, the butt of coarse jokes and a lot of fool horseplay, a wizard at repairing firearms and the credulity of a child. He pieced out a precarious existence doing exacting odd jobs for Bernie, the gunsmith, while waiting for the monthly pittance mailed West by his father, a Boston industrialist who had gone to great lengths to be shed of him. He was the result, it was said, of too much education.
    Frank’s thoughts went resentfully back to John Arnold. Arnold and Gurden had played him for a sucker. There was no doubt about it. They’d known Ashenfeldt was dead, and by whose hand, when they’d set this up for him.
    He was mad enough to shove the damned badge down their throats. Yet even as this occurred to him Frank saw in his mind the face and shape of Honey Kimberland and licked parched lips. The one good thing, Frank guessed, in his life. Actually, he supposed, he’d ought to thank the damned Council for giving him this chance. But, hating abysmally to be maneuvered, he scowled at the dust-fogged shine of the Opal, knowing it was Gurden who’d kept Tularosa hidden till they’d got Frank clinched into the job. Chip Gurden had known Frank couldn’t back down after that.
    Frank yanked his six-shooter savagely out of its leather and let the dun carry him across the hundred-foot width of the hoof-tracked road.
    The blacksmith was still working by the light of a lantern. Frank, cutting around to come up from the holding grounds, caught the iron-dulled strokes of his hammer. Frank heard the mumble of voices as he moved up on the door. He walked the dun into the light of the lanterns, seeing the smith bent over his bellows and the squatted-down shape of a cow wrangler watching him. He was an old coot, this trail hand, weathered and wrinkled as a chucked-away boot. Frank, eyeing the both of them, spoke to the smith. “You got that hub ready yet for Draicup’s wagon?”
    The smith’s head came around. “Why, hello, Frank. Just about, I guess.”
    “Don’t turn loose of it till I give you the word.”
    The smith and that other one traded quick glances.
    “I’m a-waitin’ on thet wheel, son,” the squatted gent said mildly.
    This meekness didn’t deceive Frank. There wasn’t one trail hand in twenty who was not plumb willing, night or day, to tackle his weight in wildcats. Frank said to the trail hand:
    “Slide out of that shell belt.”
    The mild eyes measured him.
    The smith said nervously, “Man, that’s Frank Carrico!”
    The old man, grunting, finally let the belt drop.
    “Want I should git it fer you, Frank?” the smith asked.
    “Just hang onto that wheel till I