The Loner: The Big Gundown

by J. A. Johnstone

  “I was thinking you’d better let me have it—”

  “I can handle a gun, Mr. Morgan. I know one of those men managed to knock the shotgun aside just as I pulled the trigger the other day, but they took me by surprise.”

  Three guns were better than two, he decided. He jerked his head in a nod and said, “All right.” He reached over, slipped the Colt out of its holster, and held it at his side, just out of sight under the sheet.

  He didn’t like this at all. If trouble broke out, he would have a limited field of fire, just what he could see through the doorway. And the boy was out there, along with Sean.

  It was possible that there was nothing to worry about, he reminded himself. The strangers might be peaceful. They could be just passing through, as he himself had been a few days earlier.

  The Kid didn’t believe it for a second…but it was possible.

  Cyrus pounded to a stop next to his father and looked up at Sean. “See, Pa? I told you we had company!”

  The man who was in the lead reined in. He reached up and tugged on the brim of his hat as he nodded. “Good evening to you, sir,” he said. His voice was deep and powerful. “I hope we didn’t interrupt your supper.”

  “We were just about to sit down and eat,” Sean said. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  It was the sort of invitation you issued out there on the frontier as a matter of habit, no matter who had come to call. If a band of Hottentots showed up on your doorstep at dinnertime, The Kid thought, you’d just naturally ask them to light and sit a spell and have something to eat.

  The man shook his head. He wore a fringed shirt of soft buckskin, blue cavalry trousers with a yellow stripe up the outside of the legs, high-topped black boots, and a cream-colored hat with a couple of tassels attached to the band. The hat also sported the crossed sabers insignia that meant the wearer had been part of a cavalry outfit at one time. He might still be in the army, although the men with him all wore civilian clothes.

  From what The Kid could see of them, he didn’t like them. They looked like the same sort of hard cases as the ones who had invaded the Williams ranch a few days earlier.

  “We’re much obliged for the offer,” the leader said. “We wouldn’t want to put you out any, though, and we have our own supplies.”

  Sean shrugged. “Suit yourself. You’re welcome to water your horses, though.”

  The stranger smiled. Dark hair curled out from under the cavalry hat, and he sported a pointed goatee of the same color. “Now, we’ll take you up on that kind offer,” he said as he gestured for his men to move their horses up to the water trough and let them drink.

  The man went on, “I’d like to ask you a question, too, if you don’t mind.”

  “I reckon that would be all right.”

  “We’re on our way up the San Pedro to the Santa Catalinas, and some friends of ours were supposed to meet us in Bisbee and come with us. They didn’t show up, and I was wondering if you might have seen them pass through here. Four men…Hudgins, Culp, Brentwood, and Dobbs.”

  Sean shook his head, and The Kid had to admit that the rancher’s voice and attitude were convincingly casual as he replied, “Those names don’t mean a thing to me, mister, but I can tell you there haven’t been any strangers pass through here for a month or more. Sorry.”

  “They didn’t stop just to water their horses or anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  The stranger nodded. “Well, it was worth asking, I suppose. If they do happen to come by here, can you tell them that the colonel was asking about them?”

  “That would be you?”

  The man smiled and touched a finger to his hat brim again. “Colonel Gideon Black, at your service, sir.”

  From his place just beside and behind Sean’s leg, Cyrus asked, “Are you a real soldier, mister?”

  Colonel Black smiled down at the boy. “I was, son. I’m no longer in the army, though.”

  “But you were a real colonel?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Sean said, “That’s enough, Cyrus. Run on in the house.”

  The rest of the men had watered their horses and the light was fading from the sky. Frannie hadn’t lit the lamps inside the house yet, and The Kid thought that was a good thing because the men outside probably couldn’t see him watching them from the shadows. Nor would they be able to see Frannie standing beside a window where the shutter was open a couple of inches, clutching a rifle in her hands, ready to use it if she needed to.

  Colonel Black let his horse drink as well, then lifted a hand in farewell. He called, “Move out!” to his men as if they were an actual military detail, and the group trotted off to the east, toward the San Pedro River. Sean stayed outside for quite a while, watching them go. Finally, he came back inside.

  Then, and only then, did The Kid holster his gun.

  “Well, they’re gone,” Sean announced.

  “You’re sure of that?” The Kid asked. “They’re not doubling back?”

  “I don’t think so. I could see their dust for quite a ways. If they plan on doubling back, they went to a lot of trouble to make me think they weren’t.”

  Cyrus said, “They didn’t look like soldiers, Pa.”

  Sean hung the Winchester on a couple of pegs near the door. “That’s because they weren’t.”

  “But that man was a colonel.”

  “Yeah, and he said he wasn’t in the army anymore. That means he’s not a real colonel anymore, no matter what he calls himself.”

  “Oh. I understand…I guess.”

  The Kid understood. Colonel Black was something of a wild card, but he had seen plenty of men who looked like the ones who’d been with the former officer. He knew without anyone having to tell him that they were outlaws, and that didn’t surprise him a bit, considering the circumstances under which he had killed their four missing friends.

  The question now was whether they had believed Sean and would ride on…

  Or whether they would be paying a return visit to the Williams ranch.

  Chapter 5

  To The Kid’s relief, the men didn’t come back. Laid up as he was, he wasn’t sure if he would have been able to handle them, even with help from Sean and the four vaqueros. The rancher and his men were tough, sure. They had to be in order to survive out there.

  But those men with Colonel Black were killers. Stone-cold killers.

  Sean called his vaqueros into the house when they rode in a short time later and told them what had happened. He gave orders for them to set up guard shifts so that someone would be awake and keeping an eye on the place all night. That was a smart move, The Kid thought, and he hadn’t even had to suggest it to the rancher. Sean seemed to be a pretty canny young man.

  The stew tasted as good as it smelled, and as The Kid ate, he felt strength flowing back into him. It would take a while, but he was confident that he was on the mend.

  He slept soundly that night, a good honest sleep instead of the unconsciousness that had gripped him before. The rest revitalized him, so that when he awoke the next morning, he was actually anxious to get out of bed and try his legs again.

  Frannie wouldn’t hear of that, however, and The Kid sensed that she was so strong willed that arguing wouldn’t do any good. So he didn’t bother. He just lay there and rested and let her fill him full of good food for a couple more days. While that was going on, he checked frequently with Sean to find out if he or any of the ranch hands had seen any sign of Colonel Black and his men. Sean reported that they hadn’t.

  On the third day after he regained consciousness, The Kid was too restless to stay in bed any longer. Frannie brought him a heavy hickory cane with a carved wolf’s head for a grip.

  “This cane belonged to my grandfather,” she told him. “Be careful when you use it.”

  “I’ll take good care of it while I’m borrowing it,” The Kid promised.

  “I’m not worried about the cane. I don’t want you falling down and hurting y
ourself even worse.”

  “That’s not going to happen.” The Kid grinned at Cyrus, who stood nearby watching with a rapt expression on his face. “I’ll have Cyrus close by to give me a hand if I need one, won’t I, son?”

  “You bet, Mr. Morgan!” the boy replied.

  The Kid talked Frannie into turning around while he pulled his clothes on. Cyrus helped him with his boots. Then The Kid got a good grip on the cane and pushed himself to his feet. He felt a twinge of pain in his wounded leg, but it didn’t buckle. He took a tentative step, then another and another, keeping as much of his weight off the injured leg as he could.

  Suddenly he swayed a little, but Cyrus was right there so that The Kid was able to rest his free hand on the boy’s shoulder and balance himself. “Ma…” Cyrus said.

  Frannie turned around and fixed The Kid with a stern stare. “I think that’s enough for now, Mr. Morgan.”

  “I’m going to the door and back,” The Kid said. He knew he was being stubborn, but he didn’t care. He wanted to push himself, to find out just how much he could do.

  “All right, but take it slow and easy,” Frannie said with obvious reluctance.

  With the cane in one hand and the other hand on Cyrus’s shoulder, The Kid walked slowly to the door. By the time he got there, his heart was pounding and he felt dizzy. He stood there looking out and catching his breath for a moment and then turned to make his way back to the bed. Frannie was there to take his arm and help him lie down again.

  “You tried to do too much, didn’t you?”

  The Kid answered without hesitation. “No. A man’s got to push himself. If he’s satisfied with what’s easy, that’ll never be enough.”

  She smiled down at him. “You’re talking to a woman who married a man determined to start a ranch in the middle of nowhere. I know all about a man pushing himself.”

  The Kid tried to keep his eyes open, but the lids sagged closed anyway. Next time he would walk farther and do more. And the time after that, and the time after that…

  He dozed off with that thought in his head.

  By the time three more days had gone by, the pain in The Kid’s leg was almost gone. Using the wolf’s-head cane, he could get around everywhere in the ranch house and in the yard outside. With Cyrus keeping an eye on him and helping him if necessary, he walked over to the barn to check on his horse and was glad to see that the buckskin was being well cared for. He hadn’t expected anything less from Sean and the ranch hands, but it was good to see that with his own eyes.

  Cyrus never went far from his side, and the boy was full of questions. One thing he wanted to know was where The Kid was from.

  “Oh, here and there,” The Kid told him.

  He didn’t mention that once he had been an Eastern-born-and-raised businessman named Conrad Browning. Nor did he say anything about his real father being Frank Morgan, the notorious gunfighter known as The Drifter, or explain that he had once been married to a beautiful young woman named Rebel, who had been taken from him tragically because of greed and a lust for vengeance. All those things had gone into shaping the man who was now known only as Kid Morgan, who had developed a reputation of his own as a gunfighter. Only a handful of people knew the truth, knew that he had turned his back on a whole other life, and that was the way The Kid wanted it. He was content to drift, a loner who wasn’t headed anywhere in particular.

  But even a loner could not live totally isolated. He had to run into people from time to time, just as he had come across this ranch, and where there were people, there was trouble. The Kid knew that, and he felt a nagging curiosity about the man called Colonel Gideon Black. It was none of his business, of course, but he wondered why an ex-army man would team up with a bunch of gun-wolves like the men who had accompanied him the other day…not to mention the ones now buried in that arroyo, who had planned to meet the colonel in Bisbee.

  A youngster like Cyrus wouldn’t understand any of that, so The Kid didn’t try to explain it to him. He just gave noncommittal answers to Cyrus’s questions about who he was and where he had come from.

  There was the time Cyrus asked, “Can you teach me how to use a gun like you, Mr. Morgan?”

  They were standing by the corral fence, watching one of the vaqueros work with a balky horse, trying to get it used to wearing a saddle. The Kid looked down at the boy and said, “It ought to be your pa’s job to teach you to shoot, Cyrus.”

  “Yeah, but Pa can’t shoot like you do, Mr. Morgan. I never saw anything like it when you killed those four men! That’s what I want to do.”

  The Kid shook his head. “You don’t want to kill anybody, Cyrus. Not unless you have to, to protect your life or the life of someone you love.”

  “Well, then, I want to be able to do that.”

  It was certainly a worthwhile ability to have, The Kid reflected. Even though civilization had made a lot of inroads and people liked to talk about how the turn of the century would mark the beginning of a new, kinder and gentler era, The Kid knew that was a bunch of bullshit. Life was still harsh and dangerous, especially out here on the frontier, and that wasn’t likely to change any time soon. In many ways, so-called civilization just meant surrendering to the wolves and hoping that they wouldn’t devour you. That never worked.

  As his father had once told him, “The meek aren’t going to inherit anything west of the Mississippi.”

  “Maybe you should start by learning how to shoot a rifle,” The Kid told Cyrus. “Have you ever used one before?”

  “Nope. Ma says I’m too little.”

  “What’s your pa say?”

  “Whatever Ma says.” Cyrus grinned. “Whenever she’s around, anyway.”

  The Kid chuckled. “I’ll have a talk with him. Can’t hurt.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Morgan! I really would like to learn how to draw and shoot a handgun like you, though.”

  “I hope you never have to,” The Kid said softly as he watched the half-wild horse trotting around the corral, trying to avoid the vaquero.

  That evening, when Sean Williams went outside to have a last look around the place after supper, The Kid followed him. The Kid didn’t take the wolf’s-head cane with him since he didn’t need it anymore. He felt a little twinge of pain in his leg from time to time, but the wound had healed and his leg was strong again.

  “Cyrus told me he wants to learn how to shoot,” The Kid said as he and Sean walked toward the corral. An arch of reddish-gold in the western sky marked the place where the sun had set.

  Sean glanced over at him. “I intend on getting around to teaching him one of these days.”

  “I figured as much. The thing is, he wants to learn how to shoot like I do.”

  A frown creased Sean’s forehead. “No offense, Mr. Morgan…you know how much we appreciate what you did for us…but I’m not sure I’d ever want Cyrus learning how to be a, well, a…”

  “Gunfighter,” The Kid finished for him as Sean’s voice trailed off.

  “To be honest, yes. I thought your name sounded familiar, so I asked the hands if any of them had ever heard of you. Pablo said he thought you were the man who killed Jack Trace over in New Mexico Territory a while back.”

  The Kid nodded slowly. “That was me, all right. Didn’t have much choice in the matter.”

  “I never said you did. But I know how trouble seems to follow a man like you.”

  “Not always. Sometimes I walk into it,” The Kid said pointedly.

  Sean grimaced. “I know, what I’m saying sounds bad. Sounds like we’re not obliged to you for saving our lives—”

  The Kid raised a hand to stop him. “One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other. I saved your lives, but you and your wife saved mine. We’re even on that score.”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten hurt if not for us.”

  The Kid shook his head. “I already had this conversation with Mrs. Williams. Look, Sean, don’t worry about it. I don’t want to teach Cyrus how to be a gunfighter, either. In fa
ct, I’m thinking it might be a good idea for me to pull out early in the morning, before he gets up.”

  “He’d be really disappointed if he didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to you.”

  “And that might not be such a bad thing,” The Kid said.

  Chapter 6

  This part of Arizona Territory, not far from the Mexican border, could be blistering hot during the day, but at night the dry air cooled quickly and by morning, there was often a little chill lurking around the edges of dawn.

  That was the way it was the next morning when The Kid slipped out of the house and went to the barn while the sky was still just gray in the east. His breath even fogged a little in front of his face.

  Sean and Frannie would be glad to get their bed back, he thought. They had put a corn-shuck mattress on the floor next to Cyrus’s bed in the part of the room where the boy slept, that was closed off by a blanket hung from a rope. After the first couple of nights, The Kid had offered to bunk in with the youngster, but Frannie wouldn’t hear of it. He would recuperate better in a real bed, she had declared, and as usual, there was no arguing with Frannie.

  The buckskin tossed his head in greeting when The Kid walked into the barn and came up to the stall. “You’re ready to get back on the trail again, aren’t you, old boy?” The Kid asked. “So am I.”

  Sean hadn’t tried to argue him out of leaving this morning. Although The Kid hadn’t spelled it out, they both knew that it wasn’t a good idea for Cyrus to be idolizing The Kid just because he was particularly good at killing. If leaving like this made Cyrus angry at him, that was fine. Cyrus didn’t need to grow up wanting to be like Kid Morgan. He’d do better to follow in the footsteps of his father.

  The Kid had the buckskin saddled and ready to ride when a soft footstep made him turn swiftly toward the double doors of the barn. His hand moved with blinding speed to the butt of the gun on his hip. The reaction was all instinct, no conscious thought at all.

  “Whoa!” Sean took a step back. “Easy, Kid. It’s just me.”