The moon was large and nearly orange. Countless stars sparkled in the almost cloudless sky above the rider as he forced his horse through the high, swaying grass. The tall black stallion began to shy as its master gripped his reins firmly. No amount of jagged encouragement from his sharp spurs could force the creature to take one more step in the direction that its master ruthlessly urged.
At last the muscular mount stopped completely, lowered its head and snorted angrily. It dragged a hoof over the muddy ground and then backed up by more than five feet.
The rider dismounted and dropped his reins to the ground. He hauled both his guns from his holsters and cocked their hammers before cautiously striding through the high grass.
Frank McCready was every inch the gunfighter. The epitome of a deadly assassin. Nearly six feet in height and lean, clad now entirely in black leather. He had killed more than twenty men in his thirty years of existence. Most of them had required killing, but not all. Some were just the innocent victims who had strayed in front of the deadly barrels of his Colts. Men and women who had been marked for execution by someone willing to pay McCready’s price.
For Frank McCready sold his services to anyone who was willing and able to pay his fee. To the gunfighter, it was nothing more than a job.
A career at which he excelled.
He cared nothing for his victims. Innocent or guilty, it made no difference. As long as he was paid his blood-money, he would fulfil his agreement. Never asking why. Never curious to know who his victims were. All he wanted was the money and he made sure that he got every cent.
McCready used the barrel of one his Colts to part the swaying grass. He stared down into the gully. The bright moon overhead illuminated the twisted dead body of Poke Lucas as it lay where it had fallen.
The bullet holes could be clearly seen amid the dried blood on the front of the gunman’s shirt.
McCready strode down into the gully and then knelt. He released the hammers of his guns and then twirled them until they spun into his holsters. It was a trick that he had mastered long before he had chosen to hire his lethal skill out to the highest bidders.
His hands searched the body expertly, as they had done so many times before with the victims that he had slain during his lucrative if gory career.
McCready stood up and then spotted Lucas’s Winchester a few yards away. He walked, plucked it off the ground and checked its magazine. It only had three bullets remaining in it. He sniffed the end of the barrel and could tell that it had been fired within the previous few hours. He tossed the rifle away angrily.
‘Amateur!’ he hissed.
Whoever this dead man was, McCready knew that he had probably been waiting to ambush him. He looked all around the area and then spotted the hoof-tracks left by the Colorado Kid’s mount.
‘I wonder who you are, mister. You sure can group your bullets together darn neatly,’ McCready acknowledged. ‘You killed this critter pretty good, but I wouldn’t have needed three bullets. One would have done just fine.’
The gunfighter made his way back to his black stallion. He grabbed his reins, stepped into his stirrup and hoisted himself atop the animal.
It was obvious to McCready that the dead bushwhacker had made a big error. He had mistaken the unknown rider for McCready himself. The gunfighter wondered who it was that had headed into Silver Springs ahead of him. Whoever he was, he might just regret visiting the town. For Ben Baker had been warned that someone was coming to kill him.
McCready laughed.
He then turned the head of the powerful horse and gave the body a wide berth. He jabbed his spurs hard into the flesh of the animal and continued his journey on towards Silver Springs.
As his mount gathered pace, the gunfighter kept wondering who had betrayed him. Who back in Dakota had wired Ben Baker that a hired killer was heading to Silver Springs to kill him? When McCready had left the cattle town of Twin Forks with $1,000 in gold coin in his saddle-bags he had not even considered that he might be riding into a trap.
Yet it was starting to look as if that was exactly what he was doing. Riding into a trap. He had accepted his fee and instructions from the wealthy Dakota cattleman, Brewster Doyle without question.
Doyle had many rivals and even more enemies, any one of whom would do anything to see a hired killer turn on the powerful rancher.
McCready had ridden 150 miles along the Missouri River to this place without even considering that Doyle’s rivals might have decided to warn Ben Baker.
That had to be it, he thought.
The more McCready thought about the man who had hired him, and the others who would do anything to try and bring down the most successful rancher in Dakota, the more he became convinced that he was right.
McCready knew nothing about Baker except that Doyle wanted him dead for some unknown reason. Yet that was how he always worked. He simply had the name of his victim and then did his best to kill them. Yet he knew nothing about Brewster Doyle either.
The cattle barons were a law unto themselves. They were always trying to destroy their enemies and then absorb their herds and thousands of acres of grazing land into their own already swollen empires.
They were men who never seemed to have enough.
They always wanted more. More money. More cattle and more land. McCready had worked for many such greedy creatures and yet this was the first time that it seemed that he might have been betrayed.
But it made little sense.
Spurring the stallion again and again, he began to realize that he was probably nothing more than a pawn in a deadly game of chess played by these wealthy cattlemen.
Yet that did not matter to him.
Perhaps Brewster Doyle’s rivals hoped that the legendary Frank McCready might think that it was Doyle himself who had tried to send him to his death. Hoped that the gunfighter might decide to return to Twin Forks and seek vengeance on the man who had sent him on a fool’s errand.
He drove the stallion harder and harder across the moonlit terrain. A million thoughts filled his usually coldly calculating mind. Perhaps he was simply imagining it all. Maybe the dead man far behind him had simply been the victim of a robber? Or the dead man might have been trying to rob another who was far better with his guns than he was with his Winchester. Could that be it, he wondered?
If any of Brewster Doyle’s rivals had thought that Frank McCready was capable of seeking revenge, they were wrong. Not because there was any fear in the intrepid gunfighter, there was not. He feared no man and had never once even considered that he would ever meet anyone who might be a match for him when it came to a showdown. It was simply that he had no emotion at all in his entire being. He had never felt happiness, sadness or anything else which normal men feel.
Even curiosity was a rarity and something which never lasted long enough for him to understand.
Whatever the reality of his present situation, he continued to forge ahead atop the powerful black stallion.
For McCready was a professional.
In his three decades of life, he had never once lost his temper and only killed when he was paid to do so. Revenge was an emotion which was unknown to him. Something that he had yet to feel. To him, killing was simply a business he was employed to do. A profession that he was expert in.
Whatever the truth, McCready would do his utmost to earn his fee. He would execute Ben Baker and then decide what his next move would be.
After all, there was no profit in killing anyone for free.