Twenty seven years of searching ended tonight, here in this Cheyenne restaurant and at this table. The woman looked straight into the eyes of the man sitting across the table, the one who had murdered her husband and sexually molested her without mercy. "I'm going to expose who you are Frank Martin. What you have said might be so, and no one will believe me. But you are the last one and I came here to see justice done even if it means killing you myself." With a sneer the big man responded, "You . . . kill me! Just how will you do that little lady . . . will you use your bare hands?" "No Frank, if it comes to that I'm going to use the gun I'm holding under this table." Suddenly alarmed the man lunged out of his chair and across the table in an attempt to grab her when there was an explosion and the .38 caliber bullet ripped upward through the table top, entered his rib cage and passed through his heart before exiting just below his left shoulder blade. He fell dead upon the table top with his crimson blood contrasting brightly as it saturated the white tablecloth. The roar of the blast had sounded extra loud within the confines of the hotel dining room.
About the Author: About the Author: Donald "Wayne" Manning. Born on a farm in rural southeastern Oklahoma, a state that is still known as the Indian Nation, and growing through childhood at a time when electricity had not yet been extended to those rural areas. Mr. Manning remembers those times when life wasn't so easy. It was a time when a family grew its own food, drew its water from the well in a buck-et, cooked on a wood burning cook stove, heated bath water over a fire and bathed in a laundry tub. Farming was done with horses or mules and crops harvested by hand. One of the highlights of his growing up was going to visit his grandparents who lived even more primitive in the backcountry of Oklahoma's Kiamichi Mountains. An avid interest in history has been his lifelong passion and along with his real life experiences has given Mr. Manning special insight into how people lived during the western expansion and he incorporates it all into his novels of adventure and the old west. He writes about people, countries, rivers, terrain, landmarks, towns and ghost towns. Many of these places he has actually been to and incorporates them and historical events into the lives of the characters in his novels. Mr. Manning now resides in northern California. He says; "Good story telling is a gift, sharpened by life's experiences. It's not something wholly learned out of text books. I thank God that I have been blessed with that gift."