The Loner: The Blood of Renegades

by J. A. Johnstone

  Selena came toward him and stretched out a hand. “I’ll take those.”

  “Not just yet.” Anger had begun to smolder inside Conrad. “I think I’ll have a look in here first.”

  “You can’t! You don’t have any right—”

  “Arturo and I have risked our lives several times for you, and as you pointed out, we haven’t even known you for a full day yet.” His voice was flat and hard. “I think that gives me the right to know exactly who—and what—we’ve been fighting for.”

  Selena stared at him with a mixture of anger and fear on her face. “Please . . .” she said softly.

  Conrad ignored her. He unfastened the catch on one of the bags, opened the flap, and turned it upside down.

  A stream of gold and silver coins cascaded out and landed on the sandy ground with a musical tinkling as they piled up.

  Selena glared at him. “Are you satisfied now?”

  Conrad shook the last few coins out of the pouch, then toed them, spreading them out so he could get a good look at them. He saw five- and ten-dollar coins and an abundance of gold double eagles worth twenty dollars apiece. There had to be close to a thousand dollars lying on the ground at his feet, maybe more. Judging by the weight of the other saddlebag, it contained just as much.

  “So Father Agony didn’t send his avenging angels after you just because he’s determined to marry you.”

  “You had no right to do that,” Selena snapped, “and you have no right to judge me, either. You don’t know what it’s been like living there for the past few years, knowing that . . . that toad! . . . was determined to have me. You don’t know what it’s like to be sold like a piece of meat by your own father!”

  Arturo came around the shed with a puzzled look on his face. “Is there some prob—Oh.” His eyes widened at the sight of the pile of coins on the ground. “Oh, my.”

  Conrad dropped the saddlebags next to the money. “That’s why you wouldn’t let either of us tend to your horse. You didn’t want us picking up those bags and realizing something was in them besides supplies. You were afraid we wouldn’t help you if we knew you were a thief.”

  “I tell you, it wasn’t like that!” Selena insisted. “I earned that money. I earned it in fear and loathing. I had to stand with a smile on my face while Hissop leered at me and patted me on the head and told me that someday I would be his wife. And my father stood right there smiling, too!”

  “I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Conrad said. “And I don’t mean to judge you. Lord knows, I’ve done plenty of things myself that I’m not proud of. But you could have told us about this. That way we would have known Leatherwood and the others were after you because of something other than Hissop’s wounded pride.”

  “What difference would it have made? Leatherwood still would have tried to kill you and take me back to Juniper Canyon, no matter what the reason.”

  Conrad had to admit she had a point. Once the lines were drawn and Leatherwood regarded him and Arturo as enemies, the violence would have played out the same way as long as the two of them tried to protect Selena. And Conrad also had to admit he wouldn’t have abandoned her and allowed Leatherwood to take her back to Hissop, even if he had known about the money.

  He gestured toward the coins. “Just to be clear . . . you did steal this from Hissop, is that right?”

  Selena’s chin jutted out defiantly. “Yes, I did. And I’d do it again.”

  “You don’t have any money your mother saved to help you get away?”

  “No. My father always kept her on too tight a rein to allow anything like that.”

  “You didn’t happen to kill anybody when you stole the money and ran off, did you?”

  Selena stared at him in evident disbelief. “Of course not! I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  Conrad nudged the pile of coins with his boot. “Maybe not, but you’ve already done more than I would have expected just to look at you. That’s why one of those gunmen reacted like he did when I called you an innocent young woman. He said I was a fool for thinking that.”

  Selena shook her head. “You’re not, Conrad. This is the only thing I’ve kept from you, and I only did it because I . . . was afraid. Think about it. You don’t know me, but I don’t really know you and Arturo, either. It wasn’t that I was afraid you wouldn’t help me. I was afraid if you knew about the money, you’d take it for yourselves and leave me for Leatherwood!”

  “Miss Webster has a point, sir,” Arturo put in. “For all she knew when she met us, we might have been outlaws. Utter scoundrels. Cads. Bounders.”

  “I get the idea, Arturo.” Conrad looked at Selena. “I don’t like being lied to, but I don’t suppose you really did that. You just didn’t tell us the whole truth. And you’re right that it wouldn’t have changed anything. So I guess”—he shrugged—“I guess I’m sorry. This money is your business, not ours. I’ll pick it up.”

  “That’s all right.” She hurried forward and dropped to her knees next to the saddlebags and the spilled coins. “I’ll get it. You have other things to do.”

  Arturo said, “I believe she’s referring to digging more graves, sir.”

  “I know what she means.” Conrad picked up the shovel.

  Selena had started stuffing the coins back in the saddlebags. She paused and looked up at Conrad. “You’re still going to take me to Nevada, or wherever you can put me on the train?”

  “That’s right. Leatherwood and Hissop won’t get their hands on you if I can help it.”

  “Thank you. I swear, I won’t lie to you again.”

  Conrad nodded. He walked several yards away, and a moment later the shovel blade bit into the sandy ground as he began to dig.

  Chapter 12

  By the middle of the day, the three travelers had put the water stop at Navajo Wash far behind them. They headed west, following the railroad. No more trains had come along, westbound or eastbound.

  The landscape became even more arid, fully deserving of the name “desert.” Occasional clumps of grass and twisted, stunted mesquite trees were the only vegetation. Those plants didn’t provide much color. Everywhere Conrad looked, his eyes saw only browns, tans, grays, and now and then a splash of red sandstone. He spotted a hawk gliding along high overhead in the silver-blue sky. A lizard scuttled out of their path and into some rocks. Those were the only signs of life as the threesome made their way toward the mountains.

  They had too many horses to tie them to the buggy, so Conrad hazed the animals along like a remuda on a cattle drive. Not that he had ever actually been on a cattle drive. His father had, though, and Frank Morgan had told him stories about those days. After the Civil War, Frank had wanted nothing more than to return to the ranch in Texas where he’d worked as a cowboy and lived a peaceful life there. Fate had intervened when a bully who fancied himself a fast gun had forced him into a fight. That was when Frank—and the rest of the world—had found out just how fast and accurate he was with a six-gun. A reputation was born, and nothing had ever been the same for Frank Morgan after that.

  Conrad knew the feeling. He had been through a number of life-altering events of his own in the past few years, starting with the day his mother had introduced him to Frank and broken the news that the famous gunfighter was Conrad’s real father.

  Sometimes a fatalistic gloom gripped him and he believed everything had been predetermined from that moment: his marriage to Rebel, her tragic death, his transformation from a businessman into a deadly gunman who had literally killed more men than he could remember. Although he never lost any sleep over the lives he had ended—he never shot to kill except in self-defense or to save the life of someone else—it seemed like he ought to at least be able to recall the men he had killed. Their deaths tended to blend into a haze of powdersmoke and blood.

  “Conrad, what’s wrong?” Selena asked from the buggy seat. “You look like your thoughts are a million miles away.”

  He shook his head and smiled. “Not that far. I�
��m fine.” He glanced at the sky, where the sun was almost directly overhead and beating down with a fierce heat. “We need to find some shade and stop for a while to let the horses rest and cool off.”

  “I’m not sure where you’re going to find any shade out here,” Arturo said. “The last place I saw land this flat and empty was down in New Mexico.”

  “The Jornada del Muerto,” Conrad said, recalling how he and Arturo had first met, back when Arturo still worked for one of Conrad’s enemies. Or rather, for one of Kid Morgan’s enemies, since at that time Conrad had considered his past life dead and buried. “Yes, this is almost as bad. Maybe we can find another trestle and stop under it for a while, or some rocks big enough to give us some shade.”

  That hope appeared to be an empty one. Even though they stopped from time to time to rest the horses, the heat drained man and beast alike of their energy. Arturo and Selena had it better because at least they had the meager shade provided by the buggy’s canopy, but the sun was getting to them, too.

  Arturo said, “I’ve never understood how it can be so hot during the day in this region and yet so cold at night.”

  “That’s the way the desert is,” Conrad said. “I think it must have something to do with how dry the air is. There’s nothing to hold in the heat.”

  “You’re probably right. That doesn’t, however, make me feel any better.”

  It didn’t make any of them feel better. Another hour crept by. Weariness gripped Conrad and made him sway in the saddle. He fought to stay awake.

  Suddenly he spotted something ahead of them and lifted his head. He raised himself in the stirrups to get a better look. A narrow pinnacle of rock jutted into the air. He pointed at it. “Look there.”

  Selena said, “That must be what they call Finger Rock. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been here.”

  “They could call it Thumb Rock or Toe Rock as far as I’m concerned,” Arturo said. “As long as it provides some shade, I’m glad to see it.”

  With renewed energy, they kept moving toward the promised shelter. For every yard they covered, Finger Rock seemed to recede an equal distance, but gradually the gap narrowed. They reached it in mid-afternoon. The rock was twenty feet wide at its base, tapering to a much narrower point sixty feet in the air. The shade it cast on its eastern side was welcome, and the air felt almost blessedly cool.

  Conrad unsaddled all the horses, including Selena’s. Her saddlebags were in the back of the buggy now that there was no longer any need to keep their contents secret. Conrad didn’t think any of the horses would stray very far from the shade, so he hobbled them but didn’t picket them.

  “We’ll stay here until after dark. That’ll give us a chance to rest and cool off. We can probably travel most of the night. It won’t be hard to follow the railroad, even in the dark.”

  “What about Leatherwood?” Selena asked.

  “How long would it take him to get back to Juniper Canyon from Navajo Wash?”

  “At least half a day, I suppose.”

  “And once he got there he’d have to round up more men and fresh horses,” Conrad said. “That would take a while. So at the very best, he couldn’t have started after us again until a little while ago. If anything happened to delay him, he might not be on the trail yet. We’ll be able to stay ahead of him. Anyway, we had to stop and rest the horses. Pretty soon they wouldn’t have been able to go on, and then we really would’ve been stuck.”

  “I suppose you’re right. I’ll just be glad when I know I’m somewhere he can’t get at me anymore.”

  Conrad didn’t say it, but he knew that wasn’t really possible. They could make it very difficult for Leatherwood to find Selena, practically impossible, in fact, but the chance that he might track her down would always exist. A man who devoted all his time and energy, even his very life, to something was hard to stop. The question was whether or not Jackson Leatherwood was that stubborn.

  Selena sat down with her back propped against the rock pinnacle, and within a few minutes she was asleep. Conrad and Arturo were giving water to the horses when Conrad said, “You might as well get some shut-eye, too.”

  “What about you?” Arturo asked. “Neither of us has gotten much sleep in the past twenty-four hours.”

  “That’s true, but I’ll be all right. You doze for a while, then I’ll wake you.”

  “Very well.” Arturo took a blanket from the buggy and spread it on the ground to sit on. He folded another blanket and stuck it behind his head to use as a pillow when he leaned back against the rock. Tipping his derby down over his face, he folded his arms across his chest, and soon dozed off.

  Conrad hunkered on his heels and sipped from one of the canteens. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t know when they would find more.

  He was still a little irritated Selena had hidden that money from him. On the other hand, he understood why she had done it. He couldn’t blame her for not completely trusting him and Arturo. Growing up in a Mormon community, she might have been taught all Gentiles were not trustworthy. Conrad didn’t know much about what they believed. Like most people, he was aware Mormon men sometimes had multiple wives, but that was about the extent of his knowledge.

  He struggled to stay awake for a couple hours while Arturo and Selena slept. Then, quietly so as not to disturb Selena, he shook Arturo awake and took his place. In two more hours, the sun would be down and they could think about moving on.

  Sleep came down on Conrad like a sledgehammer. When he woke up, his face was beaded with sweat and he didn’t know how long he had been lost in deep, dreamless slumber.

  All he knew was that somebody had just screamed.

  Chapter 13

  Conrad bolted up from the ground. His gun was in his hand without him even thinking about it. The sun was down but a faint rosy glow remained in the sky. When Selena screamed again and Conrad swung toward her, the light was bright enough for him to see the large scorpion that had climbed onto her arm and was now crawling over her shoulder toward the open throat of her shirt. If the venomous creature got inside the shirt, it was bound to sting her. Conrad knew the sting of a scorpion that large might sicken Selena for days and really slow their flight from Leatherwood.

  He sprang toward her, reaching out with the Colt. Moving with the same speed that made him such a deadly gunman, he used the revolver’s barrel to flick the scorpion away. It landed on the ground near Arturo, who brought his boot heel down on it with crushing force before the scorpion could scuttle away.

  Selena stopped screaming, but still shuddered as she looked down at her shoulder where the scorpion had been. Conrad holstered his gun and held out a hand to her.

  “Come on. Better get up in case any more of the critters are stirring around here.”

  That got Selena’s attention. She grasped his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She turned around in front of him. “Are there any more of them on me?”

  “I don’t see any.” Conrad was slightly amused even though he knew the situation could have been serious.

  Selena noticed him smiling and punched his shoulder. “Stop that! Don’t laugh at me. That awful thing could have stung me.”

  “I know. That’s why I knocked it away. You’re welcome.”

  “Oh.” She looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Of course, I meant to thank you. I just . . . when I opened my eyes and saw that thing . . . I was so scared.”

  “It’s fine,” he assured her.

  “Were you asleep?”

  “I was, but it was time for me to wake up anyway.” He gestured at the fading light in the sky. “We’ll eat a little, give the horses some water, then get moving again.”

  By the time they were ready to go, the last of the light from the sun was gone. The glow of a million stars had replaced it. The heat of the day disappeared as the cool night breeze sprung up.

  Conrad drove the extra horses along the railroad right-of-way while Arturo and Selena followed in the buggy. The miles fell behind them qu
ickly.

  After several hours, low, dark humps appeared in front of them. Hills, Conrad realized. Several small mountain ranges stretched across the isolated country along the Utah-Nevada border. After the flat, arid desert, the higher country would be a relief. On the other side of the border, the terrain dropped again to the vast Humboldt Basin, which was as bad or worse than the country in Utah, but at least there were a few small towns along the rail line. They would be able to put Selena on a train bound for San Francisco. As Conrad had mused earlier, once Selena reached the city by the bay, she wouldn’t be completely out of Leatherwood’s reach, but at least he would have a lot harder time finding her. Conrad planned to send a wire to his lawyers, Claudius Turnbuckle and John J. Stafford, asking them to help Selena. He was sure they would find a safe place for her.

  “I’ve never been this far away from home,” Selena said in wonder. “In fact, there were times I asked myself if there really was a world outside Juniper Canyon. The elders like to teach that the world beyond the bounds of our home is nothing but a wasteland.”

  “That’s a good way to keep the young people from getting restless and wanting to leave, I suppose,” Conrad said.

  “I’m sure that’s part of it, but the way my people have been persecuted, I’m sure sometimes it does seem like the rest of the world is a savage, terrible place.”

  From everything Conrad had heard, the Mormons had indeed suffered from persecution in the past, but they had done their own share of persecuting, too, including more than one massacre of Gentiles who didn’t share their beliefs. He had no interest in arguing religion with Selena or anybody else, so he didn’t say anything, just kept pushing the little horse herd westward.

  The heavens were gray with dawn in the east and the moon was a glimmering crescent hanging in the western sky when they stopped again. For the past hour they had been following the railroad through rugged, humpbacked hills. When they came to a dry wash that cut through those hills, Conrad called a halt.