The Loner

by J. A. Johnstone

  Conrad was at his desk a few days later when Edwin Sinclair, his secretary, came into the office. Most people thought of secretaries as frail and bookish, but Sinclair hardly fell into that category. He was taller and heavier than Conrad and fancied himself an amateur pugilist. The only thing typical about him was that he had to wear spectacles at times, as a result of years of doing close work on ledgers and files.

  Sinclair had a stack of papers in his hands. Conrad groaned at the sight of them and said, “Not more reports?”

  “The wheels of the business world are lubricated with ink, Mr. Browning,” Sinclair said. “You know that.”

  Conrad chuckled. “You’re right, of course, Edwin. Set them down here, and I’ll start going through them.” He pulled his watch from a vest pocket, flipped it open, and checked the time as Sinclair placed the stack of papers on the desk. “And a start is all I’ll be able to make. There are too many to finish this afternoon. I wonder if I should take the others home with me.”

  “I’d be glad to come to your house and help you go through them this evening, sir,” Sinclair volunteered.

  Conrad considered the offer for a second, then shook his head. “I’m sure you have better things to do with your evenings than help me wade through paperwork,” he said. “But I appreciate the offer.”

  “I really don’t mind—” Sinclair began.

  “No, that’s all right.” Conrad pulled the papers closer to him. “That’s all, Edwin, thank you. And as late as it is, you and the boys might as well go on home.”

  “Well, all right, if you say so, Mr. Browning,” Sinclair replied with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Conrad nodded, already distracted by the summaries of the business dealings conducted by the companies covered in the reports.

  Not so distracted, though, that he didn’t look up with a frown a few minutes after Edwin Sinclair had gone. He knew he was probably wrong to feel this way, but he didn’t want Sinclair spending a lot of time around Rebel. The secretary had come to their home a few times in the evenings to help Conrad when the press of work threatened to become overwhelming. Rebel had insisted that he have dinner with them on those occasions. Western hospitality and all that, Conrad supposed. And he had to admit that Sinclair had been as polite and charming as he could be. Conrad thought he had seen something in Sinclair’s eyes, though, when the man glanced at Rebel . . . It was nothing overt, and of course he wasn’t the least bit worried about Rebel ever being tempted to return the illicit affections of another man, but still . . . Conrad was just more comfortable keeping his dealings with Sinclair strictly at the office.

  He worked a while longer, then finally pushed the papers away, rubbed his eyes, and yawned. When he stood up, it felt good to stretch muscles that had stiffened from long hours spent bent over a desk. As Conrad began getting ready to leave for the day, he thought about how good it would feel to climb up into a saddle and ride out into the mountains, to breathe some air that hadn’t grown stuffy from being confined inside four walls, to see something besides those walls.

  He had really enjoyed that excursion with Rebel a few days earlier, he thought, at least until those men interrupted them. They ought to spend more days like that.

  His father would certainly be surprised to hear him say such a thing, he told himself with a smile as he gathered up the papers he was going to take home.

  A few minutes later, carrying a case with the reports fastened securely inside it, Conrad left the building. His house was half a mile away. It was a good walk, and today he was looking forward to it. He thought about how Rebel had looked, stretched out on that blanket with an inviting smile on her beautiful face, and his stride lengthened in his eagerness to get home.

  In a café located across the street from the bank building where Conrad Browning had his office, Edwin Sinclair watched through a window as Browning walked away. Sinclair had a cup of coffee in front of him, but he had barely touched the brew. His hands clenched into fists on the table as he watched Browning.

  “Something wrong, sir?”

  The unexpected question made Sinclair give a little start. He looked up and saw that the waitress had paused beside him, a coffeepot in her hand. She looked slightly startled, too, and he supposed that was because of his reaction.

  He forced a smile onto his face and said, “No, I’m fine, thank you.”

  “Some more coffee, Mr. Sinclair?”

  She knew him because he ate lunch here fairly often. It was convenient to the office. But it had been a mistake for him to come in here this afternoon, he told himself. He didn’t want the waitress or anyone else remembering—afterward—that he had been here today, watching Conrad Browning leave the bank building.

  Still smiling, he shook his head and said, “No, thank you. In fact, I must be going.”

  “You hardly touched your coffee. Is there anything wrong with it?”

  He wanted to yell at the stupid woman and tell her to stop badgering him with questions. Instead, he said, “No, it’s fine as always. I guess I just wasn’t thirsty after all.”

  What he was thirsty for was a shot of whiskey. That was all right. He could get one at the place he was going to next.

  He left a bill on the table to pay for the coffee and placate the nosy waitress, then left the café and strode off in the opposite direction from Browning. His steps led into a rougher part of town. Although Carson City was the state capital and a bustling, modern city, it wasn’t all that many years removed from the mining boomtown and cattle town it had once been. The frontier was still alive here, just not quite as visible as it used to be.

  That was why Sinclair felt almost as if he were stepping into a dime-novel illustration as he entered the Ace High Saloon a short time later. Frock-coated gamblers, cowboys in boots and spurs and tall hats, painted doves in gaudy dresses and rolled stockings . . . Sinclair was the one who was out of place here in his gray tweed suit and soft felt hat.

  He spotted the man he was looking for at a table in the rear of the long, smoky room. He had met with the man once before, nearly a week earlier. At that time, Lasswell had been alone. Tonight, the gunman had a companion, a large man with a florid, rough-hewn face. A bottle and three glasses, one of them empty, sat on the table.

  Sinclair tried to ignore the raucous talk and laughter around him as he made his way through the crowded saloon. When he was halfway across the room, one of the women who worked there blocked his path. “Buy me a drink, honey?” she asked as she smiled up at him. The heavy perfume she wore wasn’t quite strong enough to cover up the smell of unwashed flesh. The neckline of her spangled dress gaped so low that he could see the upper edge of one nipple.

  “No, I don’t believe so,” he replied with a shake of his head.

  “You could buy something else if you wanted to,” she said, putting a mock pout on her rouged face. “Big handsome fella like you, it’d be a pleasure, not just a chore.”

  Sinclair just wanted to get away from her. “Maybe later,” he said, and reached around her to give her rump a squeeze. That made her laugh and jump and say, “Oh, you!” Mainly, though, it got her out of his way.

  Lasswell grinned at him when he reached the table. “Thought you was gonna stop for a little slap an’ tickle,” he said.

  Sinclair pulled back a chair, sat down, and nodded at the empty glass. “Is that for me?”

  “Yeah.” Lasswell picked up the bottle, splashed some of the amber liquid into the glass, and then pushed it across the table toward Sinclair. “Bottoms up.”

  Sinclair followed that suggestion, tossing back the drink and savoring the fiery path it traced down his throat and into his stomach. He returned the empty to the table with a thump.

  “Is it all set?” Lasswell asked.

  Sinclair didn’t answer. Instead, he asked a question of his own. He nodded toward the other man at the table and said, “Who’s this?”

  “Name’s Vernon Moss,” the man said, “and
I can answer for myself and everything.”

  “I meant no offense, Mr. Moss. I simply wanted to know if it was all right to speak frankly.”

  “Vernon’s in on the plan,” Lasswell said. “I reckon you’d say he’s my second in command. Anything you can tell me you can tell him.” Lasswell leaned forward. “Now, is it set up? Are you gonna be at Browning’s house tonight?”

  “No,” Sinclair said, aware of the bitter edge that crept into his voice. “He refused when I suggested that I come over to help him with the paperwork.”

  He had held back reports all day so that there would be a thick stack of them by late afternoon. He had done the same thing several times in the past, whenever he felt that it would be impossible to live through one more day without the sight of Rebel Browning. Since the trick had worked before, it should have worked again. Damn the luck anyway, Sinclair thought.

  Lasswell frowned. “You was supposed to be there, so you could put Browning out of the picture.”

  “I know that,” Sinclair snapped. He had played the scene over in his head time after time, figuring out how he would make some excuse to leave the room, then sneak back in behind Browning and knock him unconscious. Later, after Lasswell and his men carried off Rebel, he would have pretended that they had attacked him first, so that he had no idea what had happened while he was out cold. No one would have been able to dispute his story. But now it wouldn’t happen that way.

  Lasswell scratched at his beard. “That means we’ll have to deal with Browning.”

  “For God’s sake, you have at least a dozen men at your disposal, don’t you? Isn’t that enough to handle one man?”

  “Me and some of the boys took a look at Browning the other day. I got a hunch he’s tougher than you give him credit for, mister. When we bust in, there’s liable to be shootin’.”

  “You can’t kill him,” Sinclair said. “You know that.”

  “I know what the orders are. I also know that bullets don’t give a damn about orders when they start flyin’ around. I can’t guarantee that Browning won’t be hit.”

  “That would ruin everything.” Without waiting for Lasswell to pour, Sinclair grabbed the bottle himself and filled his glass. He drank half the whiskey and then said, “Let me think.”

  There had to be some way to salvage the plan. Everything had been carefully thought out. It couldn’t collapse just because of one minor obstacle.

  He wasn’t sure who had come up with the scheme. His only contacts with his mysterious benefactor had been through letters, letters that he had been careful to burn after committing them to memory. So he had no idea why the man wanted Rebel Browning kidnapped. It was enough to know that he, Edwin Sinclair, was going to be her savior.

  Once the ransom had been paid, he would slip into the isolated cabin where the outlaws had confined Rebel and “rescue” her before they could return to kill her, as they would make plain was their intention before leaving to collect the ransom. Then, grateful to him for saving her life, Rebel would finally see that she should be with him, not Conrad Browning. It was foolproof, Sinclair thought, even though certain elements of it did smack of a bad stage melodrama.

  An idea began to come to him. He wrestled with it for a few moments while Lasswell and Moss drank and watched him with their dull eyes. Finally, he said, “How about this? I’ll show up at Browning’s house this evening with a telegram. I can tell him that it’s an urgent wire from the San Francisco office or some such, and claim that the messenger delivered it to me rather than him by mistake. That will get me in the door, and then I can say that as long as I’m there, I might as well go ahead and give him a hand with all the paperwork he took home from the office.”

  Lasswell looked over at Moss. “What do you think?”

  Moss’s beefy shoulders rose and fell. “It might work, I reckon.”

  “It will work,” Sinclair said. “For one thing, once I’m there, Mrs. Browning will insist that I at least stay and have a cup of tea with them. I’ll find a way to get Browning alone and knock him out.”

  “That’s the only way we can be sure he won’t get ventilated,” Lasswell said. “You better have it done by eight o’clock, though, because that’s when we’re comin’ in the back. You’re sure there won’t be any servants there?”

  “They only have a woman who does the cooking and cleaning, and she goes home by six. It’ll be just the two of them . . . and me.”

  Lasswell nodded. “There’s one more thing we been wonderin’ about. Do you have any idea where Frank Morgan is these days?”

  “Browning’s father?” Sinclair asked with a frown. “Why do you want to know?”

  “You know who Frank Morgan is, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. He’s some sort of dime-novel gunman.”

  Lasswell gave a harsh laugh. “Not hardly, mister. Morgan’s the genuine article. If he’s anywhere around these parts and hears that his daughter-in-law’s been kidnapped, he’ll come a-runnin’ to get on our trail. And we don’t want that. We don’t want no part of it.”

  Sinclair suppressed the impulse to sneer. “You’re that afraid of one man?”

  “It’s not a matter of bein’ afraid. It’s a matter of bein’ careful.”

  Sinclair sighed. “I don’t know where Morgan is, but I can tell you that not long ago he was in California, down around Los Angeles. Browning mentioned that his father was lending a hand to one of their lawyers.”

  “That don’t make no sense at all,” Lasswell said with a frown. “Morgan’s a gunfighter, not a lawyer.”

  “All I know is what Browning said. It had to do with some sort of dispute over oil wells, or something like that.”

  “Oh,” Lasswell said. “Some kind of ruckus. Gun work, more’n likely. I can see Morgan bein’ mixed up in something like that.”

  Moss said, “California’s too close. I wish he was over in Texas, or way the hell and gone up in Montana or the Dakotas.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Lasswell said. “The whole thing won’t last long. It’ll be over and done with, and we’ll be gone before Morgan can ever get here.”

  “You hope,” Moss said.

  “Damn right I do.”

  “All right, it’s settled,” Sinclair said, not bothering to try to keep the impatience out of his voice. “I’ll do my part. You do yours.”

  Lasswell poured himself a drink. “You can count on us.”

  “One last thing . . . Under no circumstances is Mrs. Browning to be hurt in any way, shape, or fashion, do you understand? No one lays a finger on her except to restrain her and bring her along.”

  “Sure, sure,” Lasswell said. “We know we got to be careful with her.”

  “Good.” Sinclair gave them his best steely-eyed glare. “Because anyone who harms her will answer to me.”

  When Sinclair was gone and Lasswell and Moss were sitting there polishing off the whiskey, Moss chuckled and said, “That young fool don’t have any idea what’s really goin’ on, does he?”

  Lasswell shook his head as he emptied the last drops from the bottle into his glass. “No, he don’t,” he said. “Not one damn bit.”

  Chapter 4

  Conrad enjoyed dinner with Rebel, as he always did. A cloth of fine Irish linen covered the table in the dining room. The china and the crystal sparkled. The meal prepared by Mrs. O’Hannigan was delicious. But of course, it was Rebel’s company that really made the meal special. She sat at the other end of the table in a white blouse and dark gray skirt, with her blond hair pulled up on top of her head in an elaborate arrangement of curls this evening.

  Conrad could hardly wait to pull loose the pins that held Rebel’s hair and allow it to tumble freely about her shoulders. Bare shoulders by that time, he hoped.

  But of course, he had to show some restraint and decorum. He wasn’t an animal after all, consumed by his lust. Almost, but not quite. And he had brought home that pile of work from the office, he reminded himself. He needed to get at least some of i
t done before he and Rebel retired for the evening.

  He mentioned that as he lingered over a snifter of cognac following dinner. “If I don’t take care of some of it, I’ll be too far behind when I start in the morning,” he said. With a smile, he added, “Then I’ll never get caught up.”

  “You should have had Edwin come over to help you with it,” Rebel said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded. He’s such a hard worker.”

  Conrad hesitated. Over the past few years, he had learned a great deal about the sort of natural caution that most Westerners practiced. Living in an often harsh and unforgiving land ingrained that in a person. Rebel was no different. She was probably more suspicious of people as a rule than he was.

  Like everyone, though, she had her blind spots, and Edwin Sinclair was one of them. She seemed never to have seen the things that Conrad had, and he had never mentioned them to her.

  Now, he said, “He offered to help, but I told him it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Why would you do that?” Rebel asked with a frown. “Helping with paperwork is part of his job.”

  “Not after office hours it isn’t.”

  “Yes, but if he doesn’t mind . . . Anyway, you could always pay him a little bonus for extra work like that, if he’s not too proud to accept it.”

  “I suppose.” Conrad didn’t want to argue with her, not tonight, so he smiled and promised, “I’ll certainly keep that in mind next time.” He swirled the cognac left in the snifter, then tilted it to his lips and drank the last of it. As he got to his feet, he said, “I won’t work for more than an hour or so.”

  “I suppose I can be patient,” Rebel said. “I’ll clear away these dishes and then go upstairs to read for a while.”

  On several occasions, Conrad had suggested that they ask Mrs. O’Hannigan to stay in the evenings until after dinner, but Rebel had insisted that she was perfectly capable of cleaning up. Not only that, she said, but Mrs. O’Hannigan needed to get home to her own family as well.

  That was another point Conrad hadn’t argued. He knew that Rebel would be just as happy sitting next to an open campfire out on the trail as she was in the dining room of this big, two-story house on the outskirts of Carson City. Maybe even happier. So it was best, he thought, to let her do just as much as she wanted to do.