The Devil's Badland: The Loner

by J. A. Johnstone

  “He helped me,” Father Francisco went on. “In fact, he drove away the men who wounded me, at the risk of his own life.”

  Conrad noticed that the priest didn’t say anything about Pamela or the note. He saw the look that Father Francisco gave both of them, though, and he knew that sooner or later he would have to explain the relationship between them. The bullet hole in the priest’s arm bought him that much consideration, at the very least.

  As the men helped Father Francisco down the street, Conrad hung back. He turned to Pamela and asked, “Are you all right? None of those shots hit you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. She reached out tentatively, as if she were about to put her hand on his arm, then stopped the gesture. “What about you?”

  “The bushwhackers missed me,” he said. In fact, he realized that none of the bullets had come really close to him. Father Francisco’s accidental interference with their plan must have upset their aim. Even a hardcase with blood on his hands might get upset at having wounded a priest.

  “Conrad, I…I read in the newspaper that you had died in a fire in Carson City. I heard about your wife, too. I’m so sorry.”

  Conrad’s jaw tightened. Sympathy was probably the last thing he would have expected from Pamela Tarleton. She had hated Rebel, because Rebel had taken him away from her. There had been more to it than that though. Pamela’s financier father had tried to ruin him.

  Clark Tarleton had almost succeeded in sabotaging the railroad spur so he could take over building it and become one of the most powerful men in the territory. He had been willing to resort to murder to get what he wanted and had wound up in jail, thanks to Frank Morgan.

  Conrad suddenly recalled what had happened to Tarleton while he was awaiting trial. Someone had knifed him in his cell, killing him. As far as Conrad knew, no one had ever solved the slaying.

  He knew he ought to respond to Pamela’s condolences. He ought to tell her that he had heard about her father and was sorry, too. But he couldn’t. Not after the things Clark Tarleton had done, the crimes he had committed. Conrad wasn’t sorry the man had died.

  Instead, he took Pamela’s arm and said, “Let’s go up to the hotel. I want to hear all about what happened here and how you got mixed up with those bushwhackers.”

  “It’s not a pretty story, Conrad,” she warned him.

  “I’m not expecting a pretty story,” he told her. “Just the truth.”

  Conrad led her into the hotel dining room. They sat down at one of the tables, and he asked a waitress to bring them coffee. Then he sat back and took his first good look at Pamela Tarleton in several years.

  Time had been kind to her, despite the trying circumstances of her life. Her brown hair was as thick and lustrous as ever. It fell in waves around her face and shoulders. Her green eyes possessed the same compelling power they’d always had. She was still beautiful. Ever since he’d first met her, Conrad had thought that Pamela Tarleton was one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen.

  “You’ve…changed, Conrad,” she said. “I mean…of course you have, you’re older now, but…it’s more than that.”

  “My wife was murdered, and I was badly wounded. No man could come through that horror unchanged.”

  “No, certainly not. I suppose that’s it.” Pamela’s mouth tightened. “I lost someone, too, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Conrad forced himself to say, even though it was a lie. “I heard about your father.”

  She gave a little shrug. “He wouldn’t have been where he was if he hadn’t decided to break the law. It took me a long time to come to terms with that fact and accept it, but I have.” With a little shake of her head, she added, “Unfortunately, not everyone has.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The man who’s responsible for everything that’s happened to you…and to your wife. My uncle. Anthony Tarleton.”

  Conrad leaned back in his chair. There it was, just like that. The answer he’d been searching for. The identity of the man who had ripped his heart out.

  “Your father’s brother?” he said.

  Pamela nodded. “That’s right.”

  “I don’t recall you or your father ever mentioning him.”

  Pamela laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. It was cold and hollow.

  “That’s because Uncle Anthony was the black sheep of the family, as they say. He was Father’s younger brother, and he was always gone when I was growing up, off somewhere looking for adventure and trying to make a fortune for himself. Father always said that if Uncle Anthony had worked as hard at the family business as he did at avoiding responsibility, he would have been a huge success.”

  Conrad frowned. “He doesn’t sound like the sort of man who’d go to such lengths to avenge his brother.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Pamela said. “Even though they didn’t see each other very often, there was still a bond between them. When Father…was killed…Uncle Anthony inherited a share of his holdings. That’s how he was able to afford to hire Clay Lasswell.”

  Conrad’s jaw clenched at the mention of the man who fired the shot that killed Rebel. “His goal was to punish me for what happened to your father?”

  “That’s right. He planned for you to die eventually, of course, but he wanted you to suffer first. But then, the newspapers all reported that you had died in the fire that destroyed your house in Carson City.” Pamela hesitated. “The stories implied that you…you might have killed yourself. That didn’t sound like the Conrad Browning I knew, so I didn’t know what to believe.”

  Conrad gave a hollow laugh of his own. “Yes, back then I was much too fond of myself to have ever ended my own life, wasn’t I?”

  Pamela didn’t answer that. She went on, “Please understand, Conrad, I wasn’t anywhere around Uncle Anthony when that was going on. I didn’t know he was involved. All I knew was what I read in the papers. It was later that I found out he…he had hired those men to kidnap your wife and gave Lasswell specific orders to kill her in front of you when you came to pay the ransom.”

  The lump in Conrad’s throat kept him from speaking for a moment. It was just as well that the waitress arrived then with their cups of coffee. Conrad sipped the strong, black brew, and was able to go on. “How did you find out about all this?”

  “Uncle Anthony came to see me in Boston. He…he said he needed my help. By then he had heard that some of the men Lasswell hired had been killed. He thought it was too much of a coincidence, especially after Lasswell himself died. He decided you must still be alive after all, and he…he…”

  “Wanted to set a trap for me,” Conrad finished. “With you as the bait.”

  Pamela looked down at the table. Her hands tightened on the coffee cup until Conrad thought she might shatter it.

  “He asked me to help him find out the truth about you,” she said. “I’ll be honest with you, Conrad. I spent a lot of time hating you after you broke off our engagement and then Father died. I blamed you and your father for that. Eventually I came to realize that it wasn’t really your fault. At least, not that part of it. I still hated you for marrying that woman instead of me, though.”

  “So you agreed to throw in with him,” Conrad said flatly.

  “I agreed to help him find out if you were alive, like I said. I suppose…in the back of my mind…I knew even then that he planned to hurt you. But he still hadn’t told me that he was responsible for what happened to your wife. I found out about that after we came here to Val Verde. He had me visit her grave. He thought that if you were alive, sooner or later you would come here, and you would be curious about the mysterious woman who left flowers on your wife’s grave.”

  So he had figured it correctly all the way around, Conrad thought. He didn’t take any pleasure from knowing that his deductions were correct.

  “Those men in the graveyard made it sound like you were a prisoner,” he said. “Then you shot at them. But now you’re telling me you were wo
rking with your uncle of your own free will.”

  “Only at first,” Pamela said. “When I saw Hogan and those other men, I recognized them for what they are: hired killers. I demanded that Uncle Anthony tell me what his real plans were. He didn’t try to hide the truth from me any longer. He said that his men were going to kill you. He didn’t want to take a chance on you getting away again.” She shrugged. “That’s when I told him I wasn’t going to help him anymore. But he didn’t give me any choice. For the past couple of weeks, I have been his prisoner, Conrad. His men watched me constantly. I had to go to the cemetery and keep up the charade. Uncle Anthony said that if I didn’t cooperate, he…he would kill me. I believed him. He’s insane with hatred, Conrad.”

  “But you double-crossed him tonight,” Conrad pointed out.

  “I had to. When I saw them start shooting at you, I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be a party to murder. I managed to get behind the man who was guarding me and hit him with a piece of stone that had crumbled off one of the grave markers. I got his gun and…and started shooting.” She shuddered. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but I wasn’t going to stand by and let them murder you, either.”

  They had carried on the conversation in quiet voices, so that no one at the other tables in the dining room could overhear. Pamela glanced up, over Conrad’s shoulder, and said, “I think someone is looking for you.”

  Conrad turned and saw a couple of the men who had come to the graveyard to find out what all the shooting was about. They spotted Conrad and Pamela and started toward the table.

  “You’re Mr. Browning, ain’t you?” one of the men asked.

  Conrad nodded. “That’s right.”

  “The doc asked us to tell you that Father Francisco is gonna be all right. The bullet knocked a chunk of meat out of his arm but didn’t bust the bone. The worst of it was the blood he lost. But he’ll recover, the doc says, and the padre wanted to make sure you knew that.”

  Conrad stood up and held out his hand. “Thank you for letting me know,” he said as he shook hands with both men. “I was worried about him.”

  “Now, if you don’t mind my askin’, Mr. Browning…what in blazes was that shootout all about?”

  “That’s a personal matter,” Conrad said.

  The man moved aside his coat lapel, revealing a badge pinned to his vest. “Well, not really,” he said. “My name’s Saul Winston. I’m the marshal of Val Verde. This is my deputy, Pete Carey.”

  Conrad looked more closely at the man. Marshal Winston was only medium-sized, with a ragged, salt-and-pepper mustache, but he had a bulldog-like tenacity in his eyes and the set of his jaw.

  Despite that, Conrad wasn’t going to tell him the truth. Not all of it, anyway. He half-turned and indicated Pamela with a motion of his hand.

  “I went down to the cemetery to speak with this lady,” he said. “Father Francisco was with me. Several men started shooting at us. I have no idea why.” That was the only actual lie. “Father Francisco was hit. I tried to drive off the men who shot him.”

  Marshal Winston frowned as he took off his hat and nodded politely to Pamela. “Ma’am, I hate to bother you, but do you know who shot at the padre?”

  “I’m sorry, Marshal, I don’t,” she said. “I think the men must have been robbers. I never got a good look at them.”

  “Why were you, uh, meetin’ Mr. Browning in a graveyard?”

  Conrad felt a surge of anger. He was about to say something to the lawman again about prying in personal matters, but Pamela said, “Mr. Browning and I are old friends. In fact, at one time we were engaged to be married. I simply wanted to say hello to him and pay my respects to his late wife, who’s buried in that cemetery.”

  Winston looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, I seem to remember hearin’ about that. I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Browning.”

  Conrad gave the man a curt nod in response.

  “No offense, ma’am,” Winston went on, “but it seems a mite odd to me that you’d be meetin’ Mr. Browning at his wife’s grave, especially at night.”

  “Father Francisco was there,” Pamela said, her voice sharper now. “There was nothing improper about it, Marshal.”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was.” Winston turned back to Conrad. “You didn’t get a good look at the varmints, either?”

  “I didn’t see any of them at all,” Conrad said. “All I saw were muzzle flashes.”

  “Well, I’m mighty sorry this happened. Val Verde’s a peaceful place most of the time. Of course, there was a ruckus here this afternoon, too…” The lawman scratched his beard-stubbled jaw and regarded Conrad intently. “Come to think of it, you were mixed up in that, too, weren’t you, Mr. Browning?”

  “Just defending myself, Marshal. I don’t recall seeing you there when Dave Whitfield and his pet gunman were trying to run roughshod over the MacTavishes.”

  Anger glittered in Winston’s eyes. Conrad knew he shouldn’t have made the comment. He had probably just made an enemy out of the lawman. He didn’t particularly care, though. He had learned to handle his own problems, without depending on the law. The past few months had taught him that much.

  “Are you plannin’ on stayin’ in Val Verde long?” Winston asked, his voice cool.

  “I don’t know. I suppose that depends on what else happens.”

  “Don’t take it inhospitable-like, but if trouble’s got a habit of followin’ you around, maybe it’d be best if you moved on elsewhere.”

  A tight smile tugged at Conrad’s mouth. That was exactly the sort of thing that lawmen usually said to his father, Frank Morgan, the notorious Drifter.

  He supposed the apple really didn’t fall too far from the tree.

  “Thank you for letting me know about Father Francisco, Marshal.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome, I reckon.” Winston clapped his hat on. There was nothing left to say to Conrad, so he jerked his head at his deputy and said, “Come on, Pete.”

  When the two star packers were gone, Conrad sat down across from Pamela. She leaned forward and said, “I’ve caused you a great deal of trouble, haven’t I?”

  Conrad shook his head. “You just played a small part in it, and most of that was against your will. The person who really caused the trouble is your uncle.”

  “And it’s not over, Conrad. You don’t think Uncle Anthony will give up just because of what happened tonight, do you? He’ll still be coming after you.”

  “Good,” Conrad said. “Because I still have a score to settle with him, too.”

  Chapter 10

  Conrad asked Pamela where she had been staying. “There’s another hotel here in town,” she explained. “Not nearly as nice as this one, but Uncle Anthony didn’t want to call any attention to us.” An embarrassed flush spread across her face. “He allowed the proprietor to think that he and I were…well, that I was his mistress.”

  “One more mark against him,” Conrad snapped. “You can’t go back there, of course. We’ll get you a room here. What about Hogan and the rest of the gunmen?”

  “They’re staying there, too.”

  “How many are there?”

  “All I ever saw were Hogan and two other men. I can’t say for certain there aren’t more somewhere else.”

  More gunmen could be camped somewhere outside of the settlement, Conrad supposed. But that didn’t really matter. If they weren’t with Anthony Tarleton all the time, he probably didn’t need to worry about them.

  Pamela reached across the table and clasped his hand. It was an unself-conscious gesture, totally spontaneous. “Conrad, what are you going to do?”

  “First of all, I’ll make sure that you’re safe, that you don’t have to take part in any more of your uncle’s sick, twisted games. Then I’m going after him.”

  Pamela began shaking her head before Conrad even finished his answer. “You can’t do that. They’ll kill you. You should let the law handle it.”

  “You mean Marshal Wins
ton and his deputy?” Conrad laughed. “You saw them, Pamela. They might be able to handle some drunken cowboys blowing off steam on a Saturday night, but they’re not any match for hired killers like Hogan.”

  “And you are?” Pamela shook her head again. “I don’t mean to insult you, I truly don’t, and I know that you’ve changed since we last met…but you’re still Conrad Browning. You’re a businessman, not a gunfighter.”

  She didn’t know about Kid Morgan, Conrad thought. But then, not many people did know about the connection between him and the gunman known as Kid Morgan or just The Kid.

  “I can take care of myself,” he said. He put the same sort of arrogance into the declaration that the Conrad Browning who’d been engaged to Pamela would have displayed. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “But I do worry about you, Conrad,” she insisted as her fingers tightened on his hand. “You’ve already been hurt enough. I…I don’t want to see anything else happen to you.”

  He was touched by her concern. She might not look any different, but it seemed that she had grown up over the past few years. Tragedy had changed her, just as it had him.

  “Well,” he said, “I won’t do anything tonight. And we’ll discuss the situation again before I make any sort of move. All right?”

  “Perhaps you should send for your father,” Pamela suggested.

  Conrad shook his head. He knew that Frank would be glad to help him. He had said as much when Conrad last saw him in San Francisco, in the office of their lawyer Claudius Turnbuckle.

  But the days of Conrad running to Frank Morgan for help were over and done with. Frank knew that and respected it. The fact that Conrad didn’t need him as much just strengthened the bond between father and son.

  “We’ll talk again in the morning,” he said as he got to his feet. He held Pamela’s chair for her as she stood. They left the dining room and went into the lobby. Rowlett was in his usual spot behind the desk.