“Ben!” Nancy shrieked.
She rushed past Frank as Ben fell to his knees. “Nan…cy,” he choked out as she reached him and threw her arms around him. She clung to him tightly as sobs wracked her. Frank watched as Ben lifted one huge, trembling hand and gently patted his sister on the back. Then, in a rumbling whisper, he said, “Hoooome…Nan…cy…” and died.
Rutherford Chamberlain stumbled past Frank, saying in a stunned voice, “My boy…my boy…”
Nancy still stood there, somehow finding the strength in her slender body to hold Ben’s massive form upright. Chamberlain joined her, and wrapped his feeble arms around both of them.
With a grimace, Frank turned away from the family tragedy. He still had to deal with the man who had set all this in motion.
When he got outside, the shooting was over. He saw Karl Wilcox limping toward him, blood running down the logger’s leg from a deep crease on his thigh.
“We got all of Bosworth’s men except for a couple who ran inside, Morgan,” Wilcox reported. “The boss’s bodyguards got loose, got their hands on their guns, and helped us. That turned the tide. What happened to those other two?”
“They’re dead,” Frank reported, not bothering to go into detail now. “What about Bosworth?”
A disgusted expression appeared on Wilcox’s rugged face. “Do you see his carriage? The bastard managed to get to it and drove off hell-bent-for-leather! We threw some lead after him, but didn’t stop him.”
“Which way was he headed?”
“Toward Eureka, I’d say.”
Frank nodded. Bosworth had to know that there was too much evidence against him. He couldn’t hope to bluff his way out of this mess. But he probably had enough money stashed in his hotel room so that he could make a run for it, maybe start over somewhere else, in Canada or Mexico maybe.
Frank didn’t intend to let that happen.
He whistled for Goldy. As the horse came up, Wilcox asked, “What happened to the Terror?”
“Ben Chamberlain is inside,” Frank said with a hard look. “I know he did a lot of bad things…but he died a man, Wilcox, not a monster. You remember that. Everybody damned well better remember that.”
“Well…sure, Morgan,” Wilcox said as Frank swung up into the saddle.
Frank urged Goldy into a gallop, hitting the trail that led to Eureka.
Emmett Bosworth had never been more disgusted in his life. Everything had gone wrong. He had tried to make a bold move and put an end to this, here and now, and instead, the thing had backfired on him, through no fault of his own. It was all Grimshaw, and Morgan, and that damned monster…
The law would be after him now. Bosworth knew that. But he had ten thousand dollars in a steamer trunk in his suite at the Eureka House, and if he could get his hands on that money and then get out of town before word reached the settlement of the massacre at the Chamberlain mansion, no one would stop him. He’d have to hide out for a while, and he might have to change his name, but sooner or later he would rebuild his fortune. He always came out on top eventually. It was his destiny.
With dust billowing up from the wheels, he swung the carriage into Patterson’s wagon yard and left it there. He’d be taking a saddle horse when he left there, so he could move faster. He stalked up the street to the hotel, ignoring the puzzled looks that people gave him. He supposed he did look a lot more disheveled than usual.
As he went through the hotel lobby, the clerk called to him, “Mr. Bosworth, you’ve got a—” but Bosworth didn’t hear the rest of it. He took the stairs two at a time, and hurried down the hallway to his sitting room.
When he jerked the door open and stepped inside, he stopped short at the sight of a man standing beside the window. “Who the hell—”
The man turned toward him, tall, thick-bodied, with a shock of graying hair and a close-cropped beard. “We haven’t been properly introduced, Mr. Bosworth,” he said. “I’m Dr. Patrick Connelly. It’s my wife Molly you’ve been bedding for the past couple of months.”
And with that, he lunged at Bosworth, the light from the window glinting on the scalpel in his hand as he swung it at Bosworth’s throat.
Bosworth’s reflexes barely saved him, jerking him back so that the tip of the razor-sharp scalpel just nicked his throat. He had cut himself worse shaving many times. Connelly stumbled forward, thrown off balance by the missed stroke, and Bosworth slipped his gun from his pocket and jabbed the barrel deep in the doctor’s belly. He pulled the trigger, hoping there was still a bullet in the chamber.
There was. Muffled by Connelly’s body, the shot was little more than a loud pop that might not have been heard outside in the hallway. Connelly’s eyes widened in shock and pain. Bosworth shoved him backward. Connelly collapsed on the divan, and looked down at the blood welling between his fingers as he pressed his hands to his belly. “Where’s your wife?” Bosworth grated.
Connelly looked up at him stupidly. “Wha…wha…You can’t…can’t take her with you…I fixed her…before I came down here…She said…she felt poorly…so I fixed her a tonic…” Connelly managed to laugh. “She didn’t know…I knew about…the two of you…never suspected I would…do something about it. So you…you can’t…can’t have her—”
“I don’t want her, you damned fool,” Bosworth said. “She complained all the time, and she was barely adequate in bed. I would have left her behind without a second thought, and you could have had her for the rest of your life.”
Connelly opened his mouth and tried to say something, but no words came out, only a thin trickle of blood.
Bosworth gave a contemptuous shake of his head and turned away. He got the money from the trunk, reloaded his pistol, and then walked out, carefully closing the door behind him so that no one would walk by and see Connelly’s body in there on the divan. The doctor was a pathetic fool who had gotten what he deserved as far as Bosworth was concerned. Ordinary people seemed to think that they had a right to happiness of some sort, but to him, they were just things to be used as needed, and if they came to a bad end…well, so did all mortals who tried to meddle in the affairs of gods.
He went downstairs and started across the lobby. The clerk asked him, “Did you talk to Dr. Connelly, Mr. Bosworth?”
“I talked to him,” Bosworth said curtly. The law would be after him for killing the doctor, too, but what was one more murder? Just another annoying charge to be squashed when he was rich again. He pushed through the doors, stepped out onto the porch.
Frank Morgan was waiting for him in the street.
Frank was hurrying toward the hotel when he saw Bosworth step outside. He stopped where he was, and so did the timber baron. Slowly, a smile spread over Bosworth’s ruggedly handsome face.
“All right,” he said. “Fetch the law. I can afford the best attorneys in the country. I’ll fight tooth and nail in the courts, Morgan. You know that. I can make this last for years. But the one thing I won’t do is draw my gun on you. We both know you’d kill me.”
“We both know you deserve it,” Frank said.
“Well”—still with that smug smile on his face—“people don’t always get what they deserve, do they?”
Those words were barely out of Bosworth’s mouth when another figure appeared behind him. Someone inside the hotel lobby yelled in alarm. Bosworth didn’t have time to turn around, though. The man behind him reached around with one arm, looped it under the timber baron’s chin, jerked his head back, and plunged what looked a scalpel into his throat. With a shock of recogition, Frank saw that the second man was Dr. Patrick Connelly. The doctor ripped the scalpel from one side of Bosworth’s throat to the other, opening it so that blood cascaded out in sheets. Bosworth made a horrible gurgling noise and thrashed around, but the arm around his neck was like an iron bar holding him there. Connelly didn’t let go of him until there was a huge puddle of blood at his feet and Bosworth’s body had gone limp.