Massacre Canyon by William W. Johnstone Read Free Book Online Page B

right.”
    Kroll opened the copy of Harper’s Weekly to the story about Mordecai’s capture. Some of the paragraphs concerning Luke Jensen mentioned that Jensen’s brother was Smoke Jensen, the famous gunfighter who now owned the Sugarloaf ranch near the town of Big Rock, Colorado. The author touched on Smoke Jensen’s own notorious history and played up the fact that he was one of the most dangerous gunmen who had ever slapped leather. Perhaps even the most dangerous of them all....
    Rudolph Kroll’s mouth tightened into a grim line as he read that passage again. An idea had begun to form in his head. He needed Luke Jensen, not so that he could take vengeance on the bounty hunter, but for another purpose entirely. Everything might depend on it.
    Anger surged up inside Kroll. He threw the glass in his left hand into the fire. The glass shattered, and the tequila that was still in it ignited and went up with a whoosh!
    In the next heartbeat, Kroll flung the magazine into the fireplace, too. The flames, burning even hotter because they were fueled by the liquor, consumed the pages in a matter of moments. As the cover illustrating Mordecai’s downfall curled and blackened into ash, Kroll watched it and said to Galt without turning around, “I don’t care what it takes. Bring me Luke Jensen.”

Chapter 8
    Skunk Creek, Wyoming
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    The town lived up to its name, Luke thought as he walked the dun along the settlement’s muddy main street. A cold rain sluiced down and dripped from the low-pulled brim of his hat. But even in the rain, which usually washed the air clean, the place smelled bad. Something about the seeps along the edge of the creek that ran behind the buildings, he supposed. Didn’t really smell like polecat, but it was bad enough on its own.
    He wore a slicker, but of course the stubborn rain had found ways to worm trails under the oilcloth and soak his regular clothes. That meant Luke felt cold and clammy and wanted nothing more than to find a nice hot fire to sit beside, so he could dry out some and warm his bones.
    Instead, there was a good chance that in the next twenty minutes he would either have to kill somebody . . . or be killed himself.
    It was only the middle of the afternoon, but the thick gray overcast made the sky look like dusk. Because of that, the lamps were already lit in most of the buildings along either side of the street in the block where Skunk Creek’s business establishments were located. The windows showed up as yellow rectangles in the gloom.
    One of those businesses was the Panther Saloon. A while back, somebody passing through Skunk Creek had recognized the bartender there as Andy Eggleston, who was wanted for fatally gunning down a deputy marshal during the getaway from a botched bank robbery in Rawlins, Wyoming Territory, a year earlier. Eggleston must have believed that Skunk Creek was far enough away from Rawlins to be safe, but he was wrong about that.
    The man who had recognized him had told somebody else, who had mentioned it to somebody else, and eventually the news had drifted to Luke in Cheyenne. He recalled having a poster on Eggleston in his saddlebags, and when he dug it out, he saw that the bank had put an eight hundred dollar reward on the would-be robber’s head. The town council had added a couple of hundred to it in order to make the total an even one thousand dollars. That wasn’t bad.
    Of course, he wouldn’t need a bounty like that if all the rewards due him for the capture of Mordecai Kroll would come through. As usual, though, the banks and railroads and state and territorial governments were taking their own sweet time about paying him. If a fella owed money to any of those places, they wanted it right then and there, and you were in trouble if you didn’t pay up.
    But when the dinero was supposed to go the other way, it was a different story. Then it was, Risk your life killing or jailing this