“I wouldn’t do that! Not ever!”
“Remember that, Jennings,” Frank said, then reversed the Colt and slammed the butt against the man’s head, knocking him out cold and sending him sprawling on the ground.
Conway said, “Miss Goodwin and I checked the others, Frank. They’re all dead.” The young man’s voice was a little hollow, probably because he wasn’t accustomed to the sight of so much death, but he and Meg had handled their part of the chore just fine, Frank thought.
“Let’s go get those ladies out of there,” he said. “They’ve been locked up long enough.”
The prisoners must have heard the crash of the boulder landing, followed by the shouting and the gunfire, then the silence, and Frank figured that silence must have sounded pretty ominous to them. So as he and Conway and Meg approached the cabin, he called out, “Fiona! Can you hear me? It’s all right, ladies!”
“Frank!” Fiona’s excited shout came from inside, muffled somewhat by the thick, log wall and the heavy door. “Oh, Lord, Frank, is it really you?”
“Grab the other end of that bar, Pete, and we’ll lift it out of its brackets,” Frank told Conway. “Hang on in there! We’ll have you out in just a minute!”
They removed the bar and lifted the latch, and the door swung out, revealing that there was no handle for the latch on the inside. Ben Cregar and his gang had used this cabin for locking up prisoners in the past, and Frank didn’t want to think about the unfortunate folks who had wound up as prisoners of the outlaws. Chances were, none of them had come to a good end.
Fiona came out first, followed by the nine young women. She threw her arms around Frank, while Jessica cried, “Pete!” and ran to him. The others hugged Meg, who patted them on the back and assured them that everything was going to be all right.
Fiona stepped back a little, looked up at Frank, then raised herself on her toes so that she could kiss him hard on the mouth. She pulled away after a moment and asked, “How in the world did you find us?”
Frank glanced over at Meg, who gave him that crooked grin of hers. She seemed amused by Fiona’s demonstration of gratitude. He cleared his throat and said, “Finding you wasn’t the problem. Dog took care of that. It was getting the drop on those varmints who took you that was a mite difficult.”
“I see that you managed, though,” Fiona said as she looked around the clearing. “Are…are they all dead?”
“All but one, and he won’t cause any trouble for us or anybody else.”
“What are we going to do now?” A shudder went through her. “I’d like to get away from here.”
“That’s what I figured. Those fellas don’t need their horses anymore, and we do. So we’re taking them, and we’ll ride into Skagway first thing tomorrow morning. It’s only about five miles from here.”
“We made it almost all the way, then.”
Frank nodded. “We did. We’ve come through hell. But it’ll be over soon.”
With Stormy and Goldy, they now had almost enough horses for everybody. Some of the young women could ride double. They saddled the mounts and led them back to the beach where the bodies of Neville and the other three cheechakos still lay. In the morning, they wrapped those bodies in blankets brought from the cabins, carried them into the woods, and buried them in graves that Frank and Conway dug with shovels they also found at the outlaw camp.
Frank had collected the gang’s guns and ammunition as well, along with all the supplies he found. It felt good to have a fine Colt .45 riding in his holster again. The gun was nearly new, so he figured the man he’d taken it from had either bought it or more likely stolen it recently.
They were a well-equipped group now, especially for the short journey to Skagway that they faced. Frank surprised his companions by taking Bart Jennings with them. He had thought it over, and he couldn’t leave the blinded man to wander around in the woods alone. That was a sure death sentence. He had bathed Jennings’s scorched eyes with fresh water, then tied a rag around the man’s head to cover them and protect them from further injury.
“You got a friend for life if you want one, mister,” Jennings declared fervently. “I never should’ve fell in with that bad bunch to start with. The way I see it, you could’ve killed me and you didn’t, so I owe you my life.”
Later, Conway told Frank in a quiet voice, “I wouldn’t trust him if I was you, Frank. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw.”
Frank wasn’t sure that was always completely true. He had known some badmen who had reformed and walked the straight and narrow. He himself was considered a badman by some, simply because of his reputation as a fast gun. But he planned to keep a close eye on Jennings anyway. It never hurt to be careful. Because of that, he had Jennings double up with him on Stormy.
They rode up the beach, the young women using the outlaws’ saddles, and it was a lot easier and faster than trudging along on foot. As the miles fell behind them, the hills on the other side of the water drew closer. The inlet was getting narrower. Skagway was at the end of it, Frank recalled from Captain Hoffman’s maps.
The sky was still thickly overcast, with a cold wind blowing from the north. Jennings licked his lips as he rode in front of Frank on Stormy. He said, “There’s snow comin’. I can taste it.”
“We’ll be in Skagway before it gets here,” Frank said. He had spotted several columns of white smoke rising against the gray clouds and knew they came from the settlement.
A short time later, Conway let out a whoop as he spotted the buildings. “There it is!” he said, tightening his arm around Jessica’s waist as she rode in front of him. “We made it, by God! We made it!”
The women were excited to be reaching Skagway, too, even though it wasn’t their final destination. That was still Whitehorse, Fiona insisted. Frank reckoned she didn’t want to lose the fees she had been promised, and after all she had gone through to get here, he didn’t suppose he could blame her.
The settlement wasn’t very impressive-looking as they came closer. It was a jumble of muddy streets lined with tents, tar-paper shacks, and crude buildings constructed of raw, unplaned lumber. Plank sidewalks ran in front of the buildings and tall pines loomed over them. The waters of the inlet washed against several docks that were probably the sturdiest-looking structures in town.
From the looks on the faces of Fiona and her charges, though, it might as well have been San Francisco or Boston. They were that happy to be here.
Up ahead and to the right, Frank spotted a building with a sign over its door that read CLANCY’S SALOON. Three men leaned against one of the hitch rails in front of it. When they saw Frank and his companions riding into the settlement, they straightened from their casual poses and walked forward to meet them, the mud sucking at their boots. They had the look of a semiofficial welcoming committee.
The man in the center, who was slightly in the lead, was slender, with a close-cropped black beard, gaunt features, and deep-set, piercing eyes. He wore a dark suit and broad-brimmed hat. One of his companions was a burly, mustachioed gent in a derby. The other wore a cloth cap on the back of his head and had a clean-shaven face that reminded Frank of a ferret.
The black-bearded man raised a hand in greeting as Frank and the others reined in. His eyes took in Fiona and the young women, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. He had probably never seen this many eligible women in this rugged place before.
“Howdy, folks,” he said with a smile that didn’t reach his chilly eyes. “Welcome to Skagway. They call me Soapy Smith.”
Chapter 18
Frank remembered what Jennings had said about Soapy Smith running things in Skagway. During the ride that morning, Frank had asked Jennings to tell him more about Smith, and Jennings had related how the man had shown up not long after Skagway’s founding, accompanied by five tough companions, two of whom were probably the men with him now. Even though there was no official law, Soapy had quickly established himself as a force for law and order by stopping a lynch mob from hanging a bartender accused of murder. No one wanted to buck Smith, especially as long as he was surrounded by such obviously dangerous cronies. For that matter, as long as things stayed relatively peaceful, the entrepreneurs who had come to Skagway to set up businesses didn’t really care who was running things in the settlement.