The Loner: The Bounty Killers

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Why the hell not?”

  She looked at him and said, “Because Rebel wouldn’t want you to.”

  His first impulse was to slap her, to warn her not to dare tell him what Rebel would or wouldn’t have wanted him to do. The fact that he didn’t wasn’t solely due to the fact that she might shoot him if he did.

  He knew she was right.

  He had fought, again and again, with the things his heart had tried to tell him. His brain acknowledged the grim uncertainty of life, but he had refused to allow himself to see the hope that his heart urged on him.

  “You talk about the truth,” Lace whispered.

  “The truth is somewhere in the middle. You’re not just Conrad Browning or Kid Morgan. You’re both of them. And that adds up to a good man, whether you believe it or not. That’s why I’m going to help you, Kid.”

  “I thought you were going to call me Conrad.”

  She shrugged. “I like Kid a little better. But it doesn’t really matter.”

  “No,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

  He took hold of her arms again, but he was gentle as he drew her toward him. His mouth found hers as her arms went around his neck.

  The parts of his being that had been locked in mortal combat with each other could take up their struggle again later.

  The rest of him was going to be busy for a while.

  They were sitting at the base of one of the pine trees near the canyon mouth. The Kid’s arm was around Lace’s shoulders, and her head rested against his arm. She wore her poncho again, but her hat hung by its neck strap.

  She chuckled and said, “It’s a good thing Nebel and the rest of that bunch of gun-wolves didn’t come along a little while ago.”

  “Yeah,” The Kid agreed, “but I was keeping an eye and an ear out for them.”

  “Sure you were,” she said, laughing again.

  Actually, it was true, but he wasn’t going to argue the point.

  The afternoon was still and quiet, so he didn’t have any trouble hearing the horses in the distance. From the way Lace suddenly stiffened against him, he knew she heard them, too.

  “Sounds like a big bunch of riders,” she said.

  “Yeah, and they’re coming closer.”

  “Maybe it’s the old man and a posse from Phoenix,” Lace suggested.

  “It could be,” The Kid agreed. He got to his feet and helped her up. “But we’d better make sure.”

  Carrying their rifles, they hurried toward the canyon mouth and stopped at the gate. As The Kid peered through the screen of brush, he spotted a cloud of dust in the distance to the east, not to the south as it likely would have been if it heralded the return of Chester Blount.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Lace said quietly.

  “No, not at all. It appears that Nebel and some of the rest of Guthrie’s crew are paying us a visit again.”

  But not all of the gunmen, The Kid saw as the riders came closer and he began to be able to make them out. There were about a dozen men in all. Six to one odds, he thought. He had faced worse. But as the grim side of his nature knew all too well, good luck always ran out. “Check the rims,” he told Lace.

  She stepped back and lifted her head to let her gaze search along both sides of the canyon. “Nothing,” she reported. “Nobody’s moving around up there.”

  “Well, that’s something to be thankful for, anyway,” The Kid muttered. “Maybe the rest of Guthrie’s men gave up and left after their last try. Those could be the only ones he has left.”

  “That’s still pretty long odds against us,” Lace pointed out.

  “Yeah, but as long as they’re out there and we’re in here, we can hold them off.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Lace bent over to look through a gap in the brush again. “Son of a bitch!”

  The Kid tensed at the sudden note of alarm in her voice.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Those aren’t all Guthrie’s men,” Lace said. “Look at those two hombres riding in front. Do you recognize the one on the right?”

  The Kid’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Good Lord,” he said. “That’s—”

  “Yeah,” Lace said. “Pronto Pike. And all the rest of his men are with him, too.”

  Chapter 30

  “I thought we gave Pike the slip days ago,” The Kid said bitterly. “How did he manage to find us?”

  Lace said, “Back when I was riding with him, sometimes I thought he could smell the men we were after, even from miles away. It was uncanny the way he could find them. Sort of spooky, too.”

  “Some predators have a nose for blood. Maybe that extends to blood money, too.”

  “Could be,” Lace agreed. “However he did it, he’s here. And here he comes.”

  Most of the men had reined to a halt a couple hundred yards away from the canyon mouth. Pike and the man with him kept riding until they were only a hundred yards away. Then they stopped as well.

  The Kid wondered if the man with Pike was Nebel, the chief of Guthrie’s hardcases. It wouldn’t surprise him if that were true.

  “Morgan!” Pike called. “Morgan, is that you in there?”

  “Don’t answer him,” Lace said. “If he knows for sure it’s you, he’ll never give up.”

  “I don’t think he’s going to, anyway,” The Kid said, but he didn’t respond to Pike’s hail.

  After a moment, the bounty hunter went on, “Hello, the canyon! I know good and well somebody’s in there! Nebel here tells me that one of you is a woman! Lace? If that’s you, come on out! Bring Morgan with you, and we’ll partner up again, honey!”

  From the corner of his eye, The Kid saw the shudder that went through Lace at the idea of “partnering up” with Pronto Pike.

  “I know you deserted me,” Pike went on, “but I’m willing to forgive you for that! All you’ve got to do is turn Morgan over to me! You don’t really think you can claim that ten grand all to yourself, now do you? Better to get a nice share you can send to that little gal of yours back in Kansas City! That’ll help keep her from growing up to be a whore like her ma and her grandma!”

  Lace thrust the barrel of her rifle through the brushy screen. “That dirty son of a—I told him to never talk about my daughter!”

  The Kid said, “Lace, no!” but before he could reach over to grab the rifle, she had squeezed the trigger. The Winchester cracked.

  Anger caused her to miss the shot. The bullet kicked up dust a few yards to Pike’s left. He and Nebel wheeled their horses and dashed back to join the other men. Lace worked the lever of her rifle and sent several more slugs after them, but the horses didn’t break stride.

  She muttered an exasperated curse as she lowered the Winchester. She glanced over at The Kid and saw the frown on his face. “What?”

  “Pike knows for sure it’s us in here now,” he said. “That’s why he was trying to goad you into shooting at him. He must have suspected it, but you confirmed it for him.”

  “Damn it, he’s not that tricky.” Lace hesitated. “Well, maybe he is.”

  The Kid put it together in his head. “Pike figured out we were behind him somewhere, instead of ahead of him, so he doubled back to look for us. He probably decided we were trying to circle around him, so he cut south, too. When he got to the Rafter G, he heard about how a man and a woman were forted up in this canyon, holding Guthrie hostage, and thought it might be us. For all I know, that Chinese cook got a good enough look at me to tell Pike what the man who grabbed Guthrie looked like, and Pike recognized the description.”

  “How does that bring me into it?” Lace asked. “Pike didn’t know I’d captured you.”

  “No, but when the two of you split up, he could have figured that you’d still be trying to find me.” The Kid shrugged. “It’s all hunches and guesswork, but it could have happened that way, and the important thing is that Pike’s out there . . . and he knows we’re in here.”

  “What happened to the rest of Guth
rie’s men?”

  “I don’t know. They gave up and rode away to find some other job?” The Kid shook his head. “Hired guns like that are loyal only as long as they’re getting paid. If they figured Guthrie wasn’t going to make it out of this mess, they might have decided to cut their losses and move on.”

  “Leaving Nebel and a handful of men to team up with Pike and his bunch.” Lace nodded. “It sure could have happened that way, Kid. What are we going to do now?”

  “The same thing we’ve been doing: stay alert and wait for Blount to get back from Phoenix with a posse. The situation hasn’t really changed that much.”

  An ugly suspicion was roaming around in the back of The Kid’s head, though. The situation had changed, and it might make all the difference in the world.

  Nebel and the remaining men from Guthrie’s crew of gunfighters knew about the ten thousand dollar reward for The Kid. Pike had mentioned it when he was shouting at the canyon a few minutes earlier, so it couldn’t be a secret.

  If Pike had promised them a share of the ten grand, they might not care any more about Spud Guthrie’s safety. They might have decided it would be better to take what they could get, and Guthrie be damned.

  In that case, the rancher was now worthless as a hostage. Pike, Nebel, and the other men could attack the canyon without any thought for Guthrie’s continued existence.

  “Come on,” The Kid said to Lace as those thoughts coalesced in his head. “We need to fall back.”

  “What about defending the canyon mouth?”

  He shook his head. “We can’t stop them from getting through here if they want to badly enough. If they attack us head-on, we’ll kill some of them, but that’ll just leave more money for the survivors to split up once we’re dead. We’ll fall back to the other end of the canyon and make our stand there.”

  Lace thought about it for a second and then nodded. “We’d have all of them in front of us that way. We wouldn’t have to worry about some of them getting up on the canyon rims and getting behind us.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” The Kid agreed. He turned and headed toward the campsite. Lace trotted alongside him.

  As they came around the big rock, Guthrie asked, “What the hell was all the yelling about?”

  “Looks like most of your boys have headed for the tall and uncut,” Lace told him as she bent to cut the ropes around his ankles. The Kid grasped his arm and hauled him to his feet. Lace went on, “Nebel and the few others who are left have thrown in with a bounty hunter named Pronto Pike.”

  “That’s loco!” Guthrie blustered. “My men would never betray me.”

  “It looks like you’re wrong about that,” The Kid said. “I’d say they don’t give a damn anymore whether you live or die, Guthrie.”

  The rancher paled. If what The Kid and Lace were telling him was true, his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel at the moment.

  They gathered up their gear in a hurry and loaded it on the buckskin and the black. Lace told Max to go watch the gate. The dog bounded off to follow the order.

  “Where are we going?” Guthrie asked. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Since when are we partners, you little snake?” Lace snapped at him. “It’d be a whole hell of a lot simpler if we just shot you in the head right now.”

  The Kid took hold of Guthrie’s arm again. A shove sent him stumbling toward the far end of the canyon.

  “Get moving,” The Kid ordered.

  They led the horses as Guthrie stumbled along awkwardly in front of them. Max started barking loudly and angrily, so Lace put a couple of fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly for him. The dog came racing back and joined them.

  The canyon twisted and turned as it penetrated for half a mile into the Mogollon Rim. As the far end came in sight, The Kid saw a steep, rocky wall seamed with fissures. Those cracks had been created in ages past by slabs of rock splitting off from the cliff face and toppling to the floor of the canyon. The slabs were heaped up in grotesque formations.

  “We’ll fort up in there,” The Kid said. “The rocks will give us some cover.”

  “They can still try to starve us out,” Lace warned.

  “You think Pike will have the patience for a siege?”

  “Well . . . maybe not. Especially as much as he hates the two of us.”

  “You didn’t give some thought to taking him up on his offer?”

  Lace gave a disgusted snort. “What offer? He was lying. If I’d gotten the drop on you and turned you over to him, he’d have cut my throat in a second and then put a bullet in your head—unless he decided to keep us both alive and have some fun with us first. It would have been fun for him, not us.”

  The Kid knew what she meant. He wouldn’t put a little torture past Pronto Pike.

  They led the horses as deep into the jumble of rocks as they could. The Kid put Guthrie in a little alcove formed by a couple of the stone slabs and said, “You’ll be as safe from flying lead here as anywhere, I suppose.”

  The rancher’s face was still pale and drawn. “If you let me go, I’ll call off Nebel and the rest of my men,” he offered. “We’ll go back to the Rafter G. I don’t care about this damn canyon anymore. That way you’ll only have to deal with those bounty hunters.”

  The Kid knew Guthrie was lying. He shook his head curtly and said, “Forget it.”

  “Morgan! Morgan, listen to me. I’ll make it worth your while—”

  The Kid ignored him and went to find a good place to make his stand.

  Lace was already lying on one of the tilted slabs of rock with her rifle thrust over the top of it. “This was a good idea, Kid,” she told him. “We can see a couple hundred yards down the canyon, and we’ve got a good view of the rims, too.”

  “Yeah, but there are enough trees and rocks that they’ll have some cover, too,” he pointed out as he settled down on another of the slabs. “It’ll be a good fight.”

  She grinned over at him. “You got anything better to do today?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said as he returned the smile. “But it’ll have to wait.”

  Chapter 31

  Time stretched out. As the sun rose higher, the temperature in the canyon rose as well. The Kid wondered if Pike was waiting to attack in order to make their nerves draw tighter.

  “Hey, Conrad,” Lace said after a while.

  “Yeah?” The Kid replied. He answered to the name, even though he didn’t think of himself that way anymore.

  “Let’s say you get out of this alive and are able to get those charges against you dropped.”

  “That’s being a little optimistic, under the circumstances, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, maybe, but let’s say that’s what happens.”

  He shrugged. “All right.”

  “What are you gonna do then?”

  “What I’ve been doing, I suppose.”

  “You mean just drifting around, calling yourself Kid Morgan? Being a saddle tramp and a gunfighter?”

  He didn’t much care for the direction the conversation was taking. She was asking him about things he preferred not to think about.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s not who you are,” Lace said.

  “You’ve known me for less than two weeks,” he pointed out. “How do you know who I am?”

  “We’ve fought side by side, and against each other, remember? You get to know somebody in a hurry when you’re mixed up in something like that.”

  She was right, he supposed. He felt like he had known her a lot longer than he really had.

  “You told me about the man you used to be,” Lace went on.

  “You think I could go back to that?” he asked harshly. “To being Conrad Browning? To sitting in an office and worrying about whether I was going to make as much money this month as I made last month?” He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, maybe not. But you can’t keep on pretending to be somebody you’re not
. You just made up Kid Morgan. Hell, you came up with the name because it sounded like something out of a dime novel. You told me that yourself.”

  “I needed the men I was after to believe that Conrad Browning was dead. That gave me an edge when I tracked them down.”

  “But that’s over,” Lace said. “It’s been over for a year. When you were done with it, why’d you keep on being Kid Morgan?”

  His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped a little in his face. “I couldn’t . . . couldn’t . . .”

  “Couldn’t face life as Conrad without Rebel?”

  His eyes stung—probably because the sun was directly overhead and beating down into the canyon.

  “Time and again, you’ve ridden right into trouble,” Lace persisted. “Why’d you do that?”

  He answered her honestly. “Because Rebel would have wanted me to help those people, like Mr. Blount.”

  “You mean because she would have wanted Conrad to help them.” Lace paused. “Rebel never knew Kid Morgan. But she loved Conrad Browning.”

  Why the hell wouldn’t she shut up, he asked himself savagely. They were going to be fighting for their lives any minute, and yet she kept hammering away at him, asking questions he didn’t want to answer, making him ponder things he didn’t want to think about.

  He saw a flicker of movement as a man darted around the nearest bend of the canyon and threw himself behind a tree. The Kid whipped his rifle to his shoulder and fired, but he was a split-second too late. The slug knocked bark off the tree trunk.

  A heartbeat later, the man opened fire, and slugs careened off the rocks around The Kid and Lace, forcing them to duck. In that moment, more of the enemy raced around the bend and flung themselves behind cover.

  Shots began to ring out from behind other trees and rocks. The Kid and Lace risked returning the fire, and as they did so, The Kid saw puffs of powder smoke from several locations.

  It was a simple but effective strategy. Pike, Nebel, and the other killers would work their way forward in the canyon, taking turns giving each other covering fire. They would lose some men along the way, but they would reach the rocks where The Kid and Lace had taken cover.