The Loner: The Blood of Renegades

by J. A. Johnstone

  “I don’t want to try to get the buggy through that wash until we can see better. Those banks can be tricky. We don’t want to bust a wheel or an axle. Besides, the horses can use some rest again.”

  “So can I,” Selena said.

  Conrad and Arturo picketed the horses to make sure the animals didn’t stray. While they were tending to that chore, Conrad suddenly smelled smoke and turned to see that Selena had gathered some broken greasewood branches and kindled a fire. The flames leaped brightly.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as he strode over to the fire. The sharp tone of his voice made Selena look up in surprise.

  “Why, I thought you and Arturo might like some coffee this morning,” she said. “Besides, it’s a little chilly again.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t even try to hide that fire.” Conrad started kicking dirt on the flames, causing Selena to gasp and move back hurriedly.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Putting it out so Leatherwood won’t be able to follow it right to us.” Conrad glanced off toward the flats east of them. “That is, if he hasn’t already seen it.”

  “But I thought you said he’d be a long way behind us.”

  “You can see these hills for a long way out there,” Conrad told her. “If Leatherwood pushed his men hard during the day yesterday and rode on through the night, he could be close enough behind us to have spotted that fire.”

  “Oh, my God,” Selena breathed. “I’m sorry, Conrad. I didn’t even think of that. I . . . I just wanted to do something nice for the two of you.”

  “Chances are he didn’t see it. The fire was pretty small, and it didn’t burn for very long. But there’s no point in running that risk when we don’t have to. I’ll build a fire pit from some rocks. That way we can have coffee and some hot food without giving away where we are.”

  “You’re right. Of course you’re right. From now on I won’t do anything like that without asking you about it first.”

  Conrad went back to the horses, and when he was finished with them he built that fire pit, stacking up rocks in a ring until he could start a blaze inside it without the flames being seen. Arturo took over from there, boiling coffee and frying some hotcakes and bacon. After the hectic, dangerous day-and-a-half they’d had, it felt mighty good to sit and eat and wash the food down with hot coffee.

  “Before the day is over, we’ll be in Nevada,” Conrad said. “Might even find a town by then and get you on the train. There should be a westbound along sometime today.”

  “I can’t thank you and Arturo enough for everything you’ve done,” Selena said. “If not for the two of you, Leatherwood and his men would have taken me back to—”

  Conrad held up a hand to stop her. He lifted his head and listened intently. He had heard something out of place, like the stealthy scrape of boot leather on rocky ground. He dropped his plate and started to his feet. His hand streaked to his gun. As the Colt came out of the holster, men appeared in the gray dawn light, surrounding the camp and leveling rifles at him and Arturo.

  “Don’t move!” a voice rasped. “Drop that gun, mister.”

  “Please, Conrad,” Selena said, sending a shock through him as she went on, “Do what he tells you.”

  The man who had given the order chuckled. “Yeah, you better listen to my wife, mister.”

  Slowly, Conrad turned his head to look over his shoulder at Selena. She had drawn a small pistol from under that loose man’s shirt she wore, and had the gun pointed at him.

  “Well, hell,” Conrad said.

  Chapter 14

  “Starting that fire wasn’t just a thoughtless accident,” Conrad went on. “It was a signal.”

  The gun in Selena’s hand didn’t waver as she came to her feet. “That’s right. I’m sorry, Conrad—”

  “Save your apologies,” he said.

  From the other side of the fire, Arturo said, “I’m confused. I thought you were supposed to marry Elder Agonistes Hissop, Miss Webster.”

  The man laughed again. “She can’t marry anybody. She’s already married to me. Maybe not as far as Father Agony or the rest of his followers are concerned, but we had our own ceremony and it’s good enough for me.”

  “I’ll handle this, Daniel,” Selena said as she circled the fire, keeping the pistol in her hand trained on Conrad. She told him, “I’d really feel better if you dropped that gun.”

  Conrad had done a quick head count of the men who had snuck up on the camp. There were eight of them. He had gone up against four-to-one odds before and lived through those fights, but it wasn’t really four to one because Arturo couldn’t account for as many men as Conrad could. A gun battle would get them both killed, and despite Selena’s betrayal, he didn’t want to endanger her life from any stray bullets.

  With that thought in mind, he bent slowly and placed his Colt on the ground. Then he straightened and stepped back away from it.

  “That’s good,” the man called Daniel said with an approving nod. He motioned with his rifle and told Arturo, “Get over there with your friend, mister, and leave your Winchester where it is.”

  Arturo stood up and joined Conrad. “Are you going to kill us?” he asked Daniel, sounding interested, but not particularly concerned.

  Without hesitation, Selena answered, “Of course not. The two of you helped me. I owe you my life.” She looked over at the man. “Do you hear me, Daniel? I don’t want them hurt.”

  “That’ll be up to them,” Daniel said.

  In the growing light, Conrad could see he was a little older than Selena, probably in his early twenties. Slender and medium height, he had dark hair and a wisp of dark beard. His companions, all roughly the same age, wore range clothes and battered hats. They all carried Winchesters or Henry rifles, and several of them had holstered revolvers on their hips. Judging by their faces, they weren’t true hardcases, but they all had the stamp of hard living on them. It showed up in gaunt, hollow cheeks and haunted eyes.

  “You’ll cooperate, won’t you, Conrad?” Selena asked.

  “I don’t much like being played for a fool,” he answered, “but Arturo and I aren’t interested in causing trouble for you. You ought to know that by now. Just take your horse and go with your friends. We’ll go on about our business.”

  Selena turned to Daniel. “That’s fair enough, isn’t it?” Despite what she had said to him about her doing the handling, it was obvious she was going to defer to whatever decisions he made.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I don’t much like the way you call him Conrad, like the two of you are old friends or something.”

  “They are my friends. Didn’t you hear me? Conrad and Arturo saved my life more than once. If not for them, Jackson Leatherwood and the rest of Father Agony’s avenging angels would have caught me and taken me back to Juniper Canyon.”

  “Well, then, I guess I should be thanking them,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you introduce us properly?”

  “All right. This is Conrad Browning and Arturo Vincenzo.”

  Conrad’s name obviously didn’t mean anything to the young man. He looked at Arturo and said, “Vincenzo . . . That’s an Italian name, isn’t it? What’s an Italian doing out here in Utah, especially one who sounds more like an Englishman?”

  “I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the world,” Arturo replied. “But to answer your implied question about my accent, I was educated in England and spent a considerable amount of time there, as well as in my native Italy and in this country. As a matter of fact, I speak five languanges fluently and have more than a smattering of several others.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said with a mocking grin. “Smart man.”

  “Evidently not, or I wouldn’t find myself stuck in this wilderness surrounded by people who keep trying to kill me.”

  “Nobody’s killing anybody,” Selena said. “The killing is over and done with. Right, Daniel?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, whatever you say, Selena. I just want you to be
happy.”

  Conrad wasn’t sure Daniel meant that. In fact, he felt an instinctive dislike and distrust of the young man.

  “You told your friend who we are,” Conrad said, “but you didn’t introduce him and these other fellas to us.”

  “Well, we sure don’t want to be impolite,” Daniel said, still wearing a smug grin. “My name’s Daniel Kingman. Me and the rest of these boys . . . we call ourselves the Outcast Saints.”

  “Daniel and the others . . . were forced to leave Juniper Canyon,” Selena said. She had lowered her gun, but Kingman and the others still had their rifles pointed at Conrad and Arturo. “They voiced opposition to some of Elder Hissop’s decisions, so he accused them of being blasphemers.”

  “Yes, but the main reason Father Agony wanted to get rid of us is because we’re young. We didn’t want to wait around while he and the rest of the older men took all the girls as their wives. And they sure as hell didn’t want the girls deciding they’d like to have younger men for husbands.”

  It all sounded foreign to Conrad, almost incomprehensible that people could live like that. They had a right to their own religious beliefs, of course, but to drive out their own young men . . . well, it just didn’t make sense.

  From what he’d heard about Elder Agonistes Hissop, he wasn’t too surprised the man wanted to get rid of anyone who disagreed with him or represented a threat to his plans.

  Selena said, “After Daniel and the others were banished, I decided I had to leave Juniper Canyon, too. I just had to wait until the time was right.”

  “Until you could get your hands on Father Agony’s treasure,” Kingman said. “Did you get it, Selena?”

  She frowned at him, as if she was surprised at the eagerness and greed evident in his voice. “I got it, but it’s not really what I would call a treasure, Daniel. It’s two thousand dollars, maybe a little more.”

  “When you’re broke and hungry, two thousand dollars sounds like a treasure to me! Where is it? I want to see it.”

  Selena pushed her hair back. “In my saddlebags, behind the seat in the buggy.”

  Kingman turned to one of the other men. “Fetch them, Ollie.”

  The man called Ollie, who was big and had a shock of blond hair under a pushed-back hat, went to the buggy and came back with the saddlebags dangling from a hamlike fist. He held them out. “Here they are, Dan.”

  Kingman tucked his rifle under his arm and snatched the saddlebags from Ollie. He opened one of the pouches and plunged his hand inside. When he brought it out, coins flowed through his fingers and jingled as they fell back into the leather bag. A grin stretched across his lean face. “Beautiful,” he muttered.

  Conrad thought there was something seriously wrong with a man who could call a bunch of coins beautiful when he had a woman like Selena Webster standing next to him, but to each his own, he supposed.

  The men had relaxed a little, and the feeling of impending violence wasn’t as thick in the air. Conrad said, “All right, you’ve got the girl and the money. You’ve got what you wanted. Why don’t you let Arturo and me get our guns, and we’ll be on our way. You can even take those extra horses with you.”

  Kingman closed and fastened the saddlebags and tossed them back to Ollie. “Oh, we’ll take the horses, all right. And the buggy.” He made a curt gesture, and the rest of the Outcast Saints lifted their rifles again. “And you two, as well,” Kingman went on. “You’re either coming with us . . . or we’ll bury you right here.”

  Chapter 15

  “Daniel, no!” Selena cried. “There’s no reason to do that. They helped me. They can’t do anything to hurt us.”

  “Oh, no?” Kingman asked. “What if Leatherwood catches up to them, and they tell him you’re with me? What if they tell him which way we went?”

  “Leatherwood tried to kill them twice. They don’t have any reason to cooperate with him!”

  “Not even to get back at you for lying to them? Or to save themselves from being tortured? Because you know Leatherwood is perfectly capable of that if he gets his hands on them.” Kingman jerked a hand toward Conrad and Arturo. “Anyway, how do you know what these two might do? You barely know them!”

  “I know they saved my life,” Selena told him in a half whisper.

  “And I appreciate that.” Kingman turned to his men. “Get their guns. Tie their hands and put them on horses. We need to get out of here. We’ve already wasted too much time. I can feel Leatherwood out there.”

  So could Conrad, and he wasn’t sure who was the bigger threat: the fanatical avenging angel or the bitter young outcast.

  In a quiet voice, Arturo asked, “Sir, how are we going to respond to this provocation?”

  “Play along with them for now,” Conrad answered. “This isn’t our fight, and maybe after a while they’ll realize we don’t want any part of it.”

  Kingman sent a couple men back along the wash for the group’s horses, which they had hidden while they were sneaking up on the camp after spotting Selena’s signal fire. While that was going on, the other Outcast Saints gathered up Conrad’s and Arturo’s guns, then tied their wrists together in front of them. That was better than having their hands tied behind their backs, Conrad supposed. It was more comfortable, anyway.

  Even though he didn’t like Kingman, he didn’t want to fight with the man or with the other young Mormons who had been driven away from their homes. He thought about his lost children, still hidden somewhere as part of Pamela’s twisted revenge on him, and wished briefly he and Arturo had never gotten mixed up in Selena’s troubles.

  But that was a wasted wish, Conrad thought. He knew he couldn’t have ridden off and left her in danger, no matter what sort of person she had turned out to be. Rebel’s disapproval would have haunted him forever if he’d done that.

  The sun was up, flooding the hills with golden light. A couple men hitched the team to the buggy and led the animals across the railroad tracks. The wheels of the empty buggy bumped over the rails. Once the vehicle was north of the tracks, one of the men climbed into it to handle the reins.

  The others lifted Conrad and Arturo into saddles. “I’m not the best rider in the world,” Arturo warned, “but I’ll do my best to keep up.”

  “You’d better,” Kingman warned. “You won’t like it if we have to leave you behind.”

  “I really wish you’d stop threatening them,” Selena said.

  “Of course.” Once again, Kingman sounded like he didn’t mean it.

  Everyone mounted up and rode northward through the hills. The young man called Ollie led the way. Conrad and Arturo were in the middle of the group, with their captors bunched around them so they couldn’t get away. Conrad didn’t intend to try. He still hoped he could get Kingman to listen to reason. Even if he wasn’t able to do that, maybe Selena could.

  She dropped back beside him and said quietly, “I’m sorry about this, Conrad, I truly am. I never intended for you and Arturo to get hurt. When I escaped from Juniper Canyon, I didn’t have any idea I would run into you.”

  “Just out of curiosity, what was your plan?” he asked. “Were you supposed to rendezvous with your friends here in these hills?”

  “That’s right. I was going to follow the railroad until I reached the hills, and Daniel and his friends would be waiting and watching for my signal fire. I hoped I would be a lot farther away from the canyon before anyone discovered I was gone. Somehow, Elder Hissop found out almost right away and sent Leatherwood and the others after me. That almost ruined everything. It would have . . . if not for you.”

  “Too bad that doesn’t seem to mean anything to Kingman. He’s not happy about you being back here talking to me.”

  Conrad had seen the young man cast several suspicious glances over his shoulder since Selena had dropped back instead of riding beside him. The glare Kingman sent his way was dark and menacing.

  “I don’t care,” Selena insisted. “Daniel can’t tell me who I can talk to, or who my friends are.”
>
  Her defiance, her determination to be in charge of her own life, reminded Conrad of someone, and he didn’t have to think very hard to know who it was: Rebel. She had been the same way. When he’d first met her, she had been the same sort of hard-riding, pistol-packing hellion her brothers were, and she hadn’t really changed much in the years they were together. Love had softened her a little . . . but that was all.

  Of course, Rebel hadn’t been a thief, like Selena. It wasn’t Conrad’s place to judge her for stealing the money from Hissop, but she had to have known the elder would send men after her to recover it, as well as to bring her back. He might have gotten over the loss of a potential wife, but not the money.

  “I won’t let him hurt you.” Selena went on, referring to Daniel Kingman. “He’s really a good man, Conrad. You just don’t know him. All the Outcast Saints are fine young men. They weren’t treated fairly by Father Agony and the older men in the community.”

  “Life has a habit of being unfair to folks.”

  She didn’t have any response to that.

  The air quickly warmed as the sun rose in the sky, but it wasn’t as blazingly hot as it had been out on the desert. By midday, the riders had left the railroad far behind and were climbing into a range of rugged, snow-capped mountains.

  “These are the Prophet Mountains,” Kingman said during one of the stops they made to rest the horses. “The name’s appropriate, don’t you think? But there’s no place here for Joseph Smith or Brigham Young or even Father Agony. We’re all our own prophets, and no man is going to lord it over another.”

  Kingman might say that, Conrad thought, but he was quick to give orders to the other men and there was no doubt who was in charge. There was an old saying about the corrupting nature of power. Conrad had a hunch he was seeing living proof of it in Daniel Kingman.

  The group pushed on, and by the middle of the afternoon horses and riders were climbing a zigzag path that rose to a pass between two peaks. The mountains weren’t terribly tall, but they were rugged enough that the pass appeared to be the only way through them. Selena brought her horse alongside Conrad’s again and turned in the saddle to point to the right across an expanse of arid, blindingly white flats that stretched for miles before they ended in another range of mountains.