Hunter took his time walking home. He was already going to catch hell from Ella, so what difference would it make if he was a few minutes later? He could almost hear her saying, “If the trial’s more interesting to you than I am, go make love to the judge!”
Hunter chuckled at the make-believe dialogue. Yes, she’d give him a hard time, but then she’d shrug her shoulders, and unbutton her blouse. Hunter knew her like a book. He suspected that she knew him equally as well.
Thinking of Ella this way, knowing how she’d look when she slipped off her dress, knowing how smooth and soft would be the touch of her skin, and knowing just how her body would cling to his as she undulated beneath him, made Hunter unconsciously quicken his gait.
He turned the last corner that led to home, walking in the late afternoon shadows that covered the western side of what was an otherwise deserted street near the south edge of town.
That’s when he saw a man, gun in hand, near the front door of Ree and William Sloan’s house. And from the look of it, he had every intention of going inside.
What puzzled Hunter, however, was why the gunman was there. Hunter hadn’t a clue. But the time to find the answer to that question was going to have to come later. The first thing he had to do was to stop that man cold in his tracks.
Thanks to the shadows, Hunter hadn’t been spotted. But that had been sheer luck. He couldn’t count on that anymore. He knew very well that from this moment on, skill and experience would have to carry him through.
Moving deeper into the shadows, Hunter swiftly closed the gap between himself and the house. The man was on the porch, pausing there before entering for a reason Hunter, at first, could not understand. If he was going in with a gun drawn, what was stopping him? Surely it wasn’t because he had become suddenly aware of Hunter’s presence. The man with the gun had given no indication at all that he knew Hunter was stalking him. Then what was it?
Hunter drew his Navy Colt. The moment that man made a move for the door, Hunter was going to shoot him. But meanwhile Hunter crept closer, finally getting to within just several yards of the porch.
Something about the stranger looked vaguely familiar. Hunter was close enough, by now, to get a pretty good look at the man, but it wasn’t the face or the shape of the body that made Hunter think he’d seen this man before. It was the clothes.
The man was wearing an eastern-style suit. With a start, Hunter remembered the clothes—and the man—from the stage-run of the day before, coming back from High Ridge. But what really worried Hunter was that that man hadn’t been alone on the stage. He’d been with a friend who was dressed a lot like him. And where was that second man now?
Hunter suddenly knew why the gunman on the porch hadn’t yet entered the house. He was giving that second man, his accomplice, time to get inside through the back door. If that was the case, there was no more time to waste. Yet he couldn’t just shoot the gunman on the porch. There was no telling where the second man might be or what he might be doing. At this point, Hunter had the element of surprise working for him—and he had every intention of keeping it.
Back into the holster went Hunter’s Colt, and out from its sheath came his hunting knife.
And just in time.
The gunman on the porch was waiting no longer. He took a half-step toward the door, reached for the doorknob, and would’ve walked right in ... if not for the eight-inch steel blade that was impaled, to the hilt, in his side.
Harry Stowe didn’t know what hit him. He felt a searing pain just above his right hip as he staggered back to his left, his knees beginning to buckle beneath him. It took him several seconds to realize he’d been struck by a knife. Even then, seeing the blade embedded in his side, it seemed somehow unreal ... until Stowe touched the hot blood pouring from the wound.
Once he threw the knife, Hunter was out of the shadows and racing for the porch at a dead run. Stowe sensed Hunter’s approach and with his gun still clenched in his right hand, he began raising the muzzle for a point-blank shot at the figure racing straight at him. But the shock of the knife penetrating deep inside him, his staggering, and his initial bewilderment at what had happened to him cost Stowe valuable time.
Hunter got to him before he could fire, grabbing Stowe by his gun arm and opposite shoulder and heaving him down to the ground in front of the porch.
Stowe hit the frozen earth like a sack of grain. The gun went flying out of his hand and he lay there, stunned, and breathing hard.
Hunter was anxious to find the second gunman but Harry Stowe would not cooperate. He started crawling toward his handgun. Hunter couldn’t allow him the chance to warn his partner by firing a shot. Stowe, otherwise, being wounded and weaponless, was hardly a threat.
Hunter bent over the prostrate Stowe and picked up the gun, paying the man little heed. It was a costly mistake. Stowe did have a weapon—the knife that was sticking in his body. He wrenched it out of his side and slashed at Hunter, cutting him high across the right side of his chest. If Stowe had reached a little higher and a little more to the left, he would have sliced open Hunter’s throat.
Stowe had had his chance. Hunter wasn’t going to give him another. He balled his right hand into a fist and hit Stowe, flattening him out. Within a short while he would bleed to death. And that would be the end of Harry Stowe.
But what of the second man who had come in on the High Ridge stage? Where was he?
Hunter hurried up to the porch, opened the door, and went inside to find out.
Ella had undressed and crawled into bed, waiting for Hunter. Eventually she had fallen asleep. Her head resting peacefully on a thick feather pillow, her long slender body stretched out on the bed, Ella slept comfortably and easily ... unaware of the big, burly man from the East who was standing beside her.
Frank Pobe stared at Ella for a long moment, drinking in her beauty. She would be the most beautiful woman he had ever killed, and he wanted to remember her ... how her body gently swayed with each breath she took and how her skin seemed to glow in the dusky light. And he wanted to remember the way she looked the moment after he fired a slug right into the middle of her pretty face. He wanted to remember it all—and to know that he, and he alone, had been the one to change that soft breathing to utter stillness and that glowing skin to the pallor of death.
Pobe stood up close to her head and pointed the pistol down at a spot right between her eyes. He carefully cocked the pistol. Ella didn’t stir. Pobe smiled in anticipation of seeing Ella’s bloody shattered face. And then he squeezed the trigger.
But Pobe didn’t fire fast enough. Hot lead from Hunter’s Navy Colt slammed into the side of Pobe’s head, tearing through the opening of his ear and coming out the back of his neck, splitting his spinal column.
In his final act of life, Frank Pobe jerked back the trigger of his pistol. The bullet screamed past Ella’s face, ripping through the goose-down pillow only inches from her head. And then Frank Pobe collapsed and died.