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Back Montana Territory Save as PDF
Chapters (25)
  1. Also by
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. CHAPTER 1
  6. CHAPTER 2
  7. CHAPTER 3
  8. CHAPTER 4
  9. CHAPTER 5
  10. CHAPTER 6
  11. CHAPTER 7
  12. CHAPTER 8
  13. CHAPTER 9
  14. CHAPTER 10
  15. CHAPTER 11
  16. CHAPTER 12
  17. CHAPTER 13
  18. CHAPTER 14
  19. CHAPTER 15
  20. CHAPTER 16
  21. CHAPTER 17
  22. CHAPTER 18
  23. CHAPTER 19
  24. CHAPTER 20
  25. Teaser chapter

As he rode up to the two-story frame building sitting back on the lower side of town, he held Rascal to a fast walk while he looked the saloon over. There was a barn and a small corral behind the saloon, but there were no horses at the hitching rail out front. Doesn’t look like he’s got much business, he thought, which was a good thing in his opinion. A crowded bar wouldn’t be a good place to do what he had to do. David Booth was not his only problem, however. There was the matter of facing a father whose son he had just killed. Maybe I shoulda brought Porter, he thought.

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 20

Mutt Crocker heard Booth’s horse when he rode around the house to the corral. He went to the back door in time to meet Booth just as he was coming in. “Did you get him?” Mutt asked. “I heard a couple of shots. Sounded like a shotgun to me. Where’s Jesse?”

“He’s layin’ back there in the stables, dead,” Booth answered as he brushed on past Mutt, in a hurry to get upstairs to his room.

“Jesse, dead?” Mutt blurted. “What the hell happened?” He followed Booth up the steps, scarcely able to believe what he had just heard. In all his years riding with the Corbin brothers, it was always somebody else who got killed. “You takin’ off?” he asked then when Booth hurriedly started gathering up his belongings. “How’d he get Jesse?”

“It don’t matter,” Booth replied, still busy tying his extra shirt and socks up in his bedroll. “He got shot and he’s dead.”

“Two shots from a shotgun,” Mutt insisted. “That’s all I heard. Didn’t you get a shot at him, at all?” He was forming a picture of Booth that he didn’t like, and he suspected Booth should have told him what a wildcat this Hawk fellow was. He wouldn’t have sent Billy in there to call Hawk out. He could have told Billy to set up somewhere and dry-gulch Hawk. He still hadn’t accepted the story as told to him by Fred, who also got it secondhand. Hawk must have tricked Billy somehow, just so he wouldn’t have to square off against him man-to-man. Now it sounded like Jesse tried to stand up to Hawk and he ended up like the three members of Booth’s gang before him. “How come you didn’t stand up to Hawk after he shot Jesse? Sounds to me like you turned tail and ran and hung ol’ Jesse out to dry.”