The Loner: Book One

by J. A. Johnstone

  “Baby’s over there in the crib,” Bearpaw said, gesturing toward a little bed on curved rockers that sat in one corner. “Don’t look, Kid.”

  This time, Morgan followed the advice.

  “Where’s the mother?” he asked.

  Bearpaw nodded toward a doorway leading into another room. “She’ll be in there, I expect. That’s probably the bedroom.”

  He was right on both counts. The woman lay naked on the bed, arms and legs spraddled out, the sheets around her head dark with dried blood from the hideous wound in her neck. Someone had cut her throat almost from ear to ear.

  “Esquivel,” the Kid breathed.

  “That Mexican traveling with Buck and Carlson?”

  The Kid nodded. “He cut Edwin Sinclair’s throat the same way.”

  “I don’t see how you could really tell something like that…but I’m sure you’re right, Kid.” Bearpaw stepped over to the bed and reached down to close the woman’s staring eyes. She had been pretty, with short blond hair that curled around her head, until her face had frozen in lines of agony and torment.

  Bearpaw jerked his head toward the door. “I need some air,” he said.

  Morgan knew just what the Paiute meant. He felt the same way himself.

  They had to step over the dead man in the doorway again, but once they did, they were back in the open air, with the hot sun blazing down on them. Morgan said, “Maybe we can find a shovel around the place so we can bury them.”

  “Yeah, there’s bound to be one. Come on. I want to have a look at the corral.”

  The Paiute opened the gate and walked into the corral, circling around the bloated corpse of the milk cow. Numerous piles of horse droppings littered the dirt. Bearpaw hunkered on his heels next to one of them and studied it for a moment, then reached out to pick up some of it and rub it between his fingers.

  “This isn’t more than seven or eight hours old,” he said.

  Morgan frowned. “What does that mean?”

  Bearpaw wiped his fingers in the dirt. “Those three left Immelmann’s place a week ahead of us. Even given the fact that we’ve been pushing our horses and they probably weren’t, they must have arrived here at least four days ago. And they only left this morning.”

  Morgan frowned and shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

  Squinting against the sun, Bearpaw nodded toward the ranch house. “The man’s been dead the longest. Three days, maybe a little more. But the woman and the kids were killed a lot later, maybe as late as this morning.”

  Morgan tried to figure out what that meant, and as he did so, he felt horror growing inside him. “Those three we’re after rode in here, and the family offered them food and water for their horses and a place to spend the night,” he said, putting it together in his head.

  Bearpaw nodded. “Yes, and then they got up the next morning and murdered the man. They probably told the woman that if she cooperated, they would spare her and the children. She had to know that was unlikely, but she had to try to save her kids any way she could. So she went along with whatever they wanted.”

  Morgan took a deep breath. He knew that Buck, Carlson, and Esquivel must have put that poor woman through three days of hell and degradation. They had assaulted her in her own bed, again and again, with her children in the next room and her husband’s body lying only yards away.

  And then, when the bastards were tired of their sport, they had brutally slaughtered all three members of the family and ridden away as if the whole blood-drenched business meant nothing. Morgan hoped that Esquivel had slashed the woman’s throat before her children were killed, so she hadn’t had to hear the shots that ended their lives. But he wouldn’t have wanted to bet on that. That would have been one last bit of torture to end things on.

  He forced his mind on to more practical considerations. “They’re less than a day ahead of us now. If we push on, we’ll be able to catch up to them tomorrow for sure.”

  Bearpaw came out of the corral and closed the gate behind him, even though there was nothing alive in there to get out. “What about the burying?” he asked. “If we do that, it’s going to be so late that we can’t push on today. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  A part of Morgan didn’t want to accept any delay. The need for vengeance was stronger than ever in him after seeing what had happened here.

  But he knew he couldn’t just ride away and leave these poor people as bait for the scavengers. “We’ll bury them,” he said, “and we’ll let our horses get a little extra rest while we’re doing it. Because tomorrow…we’re going to ride like hell.”

  Chapter 17

  The sun was almost down before Morgan and Bearpaw finished scraping out a single grave big enough for all four members of the luckless ranching family as well as their dog. There was nothing they could do about the milk cow. The two men took turns using a shovel they found in the barn. Digging in the hard ground was backbreaking work, and neither of them could do it for very long at a time.

  Morgan’s side ached quite a bit when they were finished. If Eve had been here, she would have warned him that he was going to damage that wound and undo all the healing he’d done, he thought with a grim smile. He knew he was all right, though. He just needed some rest.

  He would get that rest once they were done. They wrapped each body in a blanket and carried them out one by one, placing them carefully in the grave. Then they had to cover it up again. The sun was down and night was falling when they finished that. A dwindling arc of orange and gold light remained in the western sky as Morgan tamped down the mounded dirt.

  They had removed their hats and shirts while they were digging. Now, the breeze that sprang up felt chilly on the Kid’s bare, sweat-soaked torso. He drew his shirt back on and buttoned it up, then stood by the grave with his hat in his hand. Bearpaw followed suit.

  “Are you saying the words, Kid, or am I?” the Paiute asked.

  “You know better words than I do, Phillip. You should do it.”

  Bearpaw nodded solemnly. He held his black hat over his heart and intoned, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Morgan closed his eyes, and as he listened to Bearpaw continue with the Twenty-third Psalm, he wondered what words had been said at Rebel’s funeral.

  It didn’t matter, he told himself. No words on earth held the power to bring her back, and that was all he would have wanted if he had been there.

  “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” Bearpaw concluded, “and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Morgan murmured. He hoped these poor people were at peace now.

  They didn’t spend the night at the ranch. It was too ghost-haunted a place for that. Instead, they followed the creek for about half a mile and found a good place to camp. That night, as they sat by the embers of the fire, Bearpaw asked, “What are we going to do when we catch up to them, Kid? That’s going to be tomorrow or the next day, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  “We’re not going to do anything,” Morgan said. “I’m going to confront them.”

  “I don’t know if you’re ready for that,” Bearpaw replied with a frown.

  “You’ve been working with me for more than a month now. How much more do you have to teach me?”

  “A man never stops learning, not if he’s wise,” Bearpaw said.

  “But you know I’m fast,” Morgan insisted. “And I hit nearly everything I aim at.”

  “Nearly can get you killed.”

  “So can getting up in the morning.”

  The Paiute shrugged. “I suppose you can look at it that way. What you’re asking me, Kid, is if you’re good enough to face three hardened killers. And what I’m telling you is…I don’t know. But between the two of us—”

  “No,” Morgan said.

  “Listen, Kid, be reasonable. Three against two is better odds than three against one. I can hold my own in a fight.”

  “You said yourself that yo
u’re not a gunfighter,” Morgan pointed out. “I won’t have your blood on my conscience, too, Phillip. When I face them, it’ll be alone.”

  “Then you’re a damned fool,” Bearpaw said hotly.

  Morgan shrugged. “I’ve been called worse. I’ve called myself worse.”

  With a surly expression on his face, Bearpaw said, “We’ll talk about this in the morning. I’m turning in.”

  “Fine. But things won’t be any different in the morning.”

  As a matter of fact, though, things were different, because Morgan and Bearpaw had visitors in the morning. The sun wasn’t up yet when they heard a dog barking, and then a moment later, bells ringing.

  Morgan rolled quickly out of his blankets and snatched up the Winchester from the ground beside him, but Bearpaw said, “Take it easy. I’ve heard sounds like that before. Listen closer.”

  Morgan frowned as he heard some sort of bleating. “What is that?”

  “Sheep,” Bearpaw said. “Some sheepherder is bringing his flock down to the creek to give them water before he turns them out on their graze.”

  The sheep came in sight a few minutes later, fifty or sixty of the woollies being herded along by an old Mexican man in a sombrero and serape, aided by a long-haired, black-and-white dog that dashed back and forth with seemingly endless energy, keeping the sheep bunched up.

  The Mexican stopped short at the sight of Morgan, Bearpaw, and their horses. A worried look stole over his face, which was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut. Bearpaw greeted him in Spanish, though, and although Morgan wasn’t fluent in the language, he was pretty sure the Paiute was telling the sheepherder not to worry, that they meant him no harm and had simply camped here for the night.

  “Ask him if he’s seen the men we’re looking for,” Morgan suggested.

  For the next few minutes, Spanish flew back and forth between Bearpaw and the Mexican, the conversation going too fast for the Kid to keep up with it. Then Bearpaw turned to him, nodded, and said, “He saw them yesterday, over east of here. He moves the sheep around every day, bedding them down in a different place along the creek each night so they’ll have fresh grass. Sheep are hell on the grass.”

  “What about those three bastards?” Morgan prodded.

  “Emiliano—that’s this fellow here—says they were headed toward Gomez’s place. According to him, that’s a cantina in a village about twenty miles east of here. I hadn’t heard of it before, but evidently it’s the same sort of place as Immelmann’s trading post, where a man can get what he wants without too many questions being asked.”

  “How does he know that’s where they were going?” Morgan asked.

  “He overheard them talking about it. He savvies some English, even though he doesn’t speak it very well. He was afraid when he saw them coming, so he took his dog and hid in an arroyo until they had ridden past. He was lucky; they didn’t notice his sheep.”

  Morgan nodded as he thought about the information Emiliano had given them. “They’ll probably stay for a while at Gomez’s,” he said. “A few hours anyway.”

  “They’ll stay the night more than likely.”

  “That should give us plenty of time to get there today.”

  “And what are you going to do then, eh?” Bearpaw asked.

  Morgan gave him an honest answer. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I know I won’t ride away from there until I’ve dealt with them…and found out where we need to go next.”

  And that was the way it had played out, the Kid thought now as he rode away from what had been Gomez’s cantina.

  Bearpaw had continued to argue fervently that Morgan ought to let him come along, but in the end he had sighed and agreed to stay out of the fight.

  “I’m warning you, though,” he had told Morgan, “if you make me go back to Sawtooth and tell Eve McNally that you’re dead, I’ll find you in the happy hunting ground one of these days and make you wish you had listened to me.”

  “The happy hunting ground?” Morgan had said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Ugh,” Bearpaw had said.

  As Morgan rode back toward the spot where he had left the Paiute, he raised his right hand and looked at it. He saw it tremble, just slightly. He had felt no fear when he faced the three killers, only a cold desire to see justice done. Now, however, a little reaction was setting in. A tiny case of nerves. He would have to work on that. One of these days, he hoped, he would ask his father if he felt the same way after a gunfight.

  Luck had been with him today. Skill, too, of course, but no man survived such a battle without at least a smidgen of luck on his side. And there was more at stake than just survival. He really had been a damned fool, just as Bearpaw had warned him. He had come within a whisker of killing all three of his enemies without finding out where any of the other kidnappers had gone. If Julio Esquivel hadn’t clung stubbornly to life for a few minutes, until Morgan realized his mistake…

  But despite everything, Esquivel had lived long enough to tell him that Clem Baggott and Spence Hooper had been headed for Gallup, New Mexico Territory. According to the Mexican knife artist, Baggott’s sister ran a whorehouse there, and the two men planned to stay with her for a while, until they decided what they wanted to rob next.

  Bearpaw must have been watching for Morgan. The Paiute came galloping out of the little canyon where he had stayed while Morgan rode into the village. “Kid!” Bearpaw greeted him anxiously. “Are you all right? I heard the shots from down there.”

  “I’m fine,” Morgan assured him. “They came close…but not close enough.”

  “They’re dead?”

  Morgan nodded.

  “All three of them?”

  “That’s right. But before he died, Esquivel told me that two of the others were on their way to Gallup.”

  Bearpaw heaved a sigh of relief. “I was afraid you might forget we needed to question one of them.”

  “When they started shooting at me, I almost did forget,” Morgan admitted with a slight smile. “Lucky for me, I didn’t kill Esquivel right off.”

  Bearpaw’s shaggy black brows drew down in a frown. “How’d you get him to talk? I thought I was supposed to be the one in charge of torture.”

  “I had something he wanted,” the Kid said. “A quicker death than a bullet in the gut.”

  Bearpaw let out a little whistle. “Yeah, that would loosen a man’s tongue, all right. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  “On the way to Gallup,” Morgan said. “And that is…which direction?”

  Bearpaw pointed south.

  Gallup was a railroad town, and in less than ten years of existence, it had become noted for two things. One was its high Indian population, which was no surprise because it was located in the middle of several reservations. The other was that it was rough as hell, also no surprise, because most settlements that sprang to life along the railroads were that way. The term “Hell on Wheels” had originated with the railroad towns, and Gallup certainly fit the description. It had a multitude of saloons, gambling dens, and whorehouses.

  One of those whorehouses was called Rosa’s, and according to what Julio Esquivel had said, Rosa was Clem Baggott’s sister. The first thing Morgan and Bearpaw did when they rode down out of the mountains north of the settlement was to stop a man walking along the street and ask him if he knew where the brothel was located.

  The hombre frowned indignantly and demanded, “Do I look like the sort of man who would know anything about a house of ill repute?”

  As a matter of fact, the man had been weaving slightly as he made his way down the street, and his nose was red from drink. So yeah, the Kid thought, he looked exactly like the sort of man who might know such a thing.

  But the Kid just said, “Sorry, mister, didn’t mean any offense. I just thought I might stand you to the price of a drink if you could help us out.”

  “Oh.” The man hiccupped softly. “Well, in that case…you go down this street a couple of blocks, then turn righ
t just past the railroad tracks. Rosa’s will be on the left, four blocks down.”

  Morgan dug a coin out of his pocket and flipped it to the drunk. “Much obliged.”

  “They may not let the Injun in, though,” the man warned. “Depends on what kind of mood Rosa’s in.”

  “Bearpaw take his chances,” the Paiute intoned.

  As they rode away, Morgan said, “You like doing that, don’t you?”

  “People expect it. If you give people what they expect, then they don’t get suspicious. And if a fellow thinks that I don’t speak much English, he’s not going to be as careful about what he says around me.”

  That made sense, the Kid thought. It had been a lucky day for him in more ways than one when Bearpaw heard that splash and came along to pull him out of the creek.

  Rosa’s was a large, two-story clapboard building across the street from the railroad tracks and down a ways from the depot. A balcony ran along the front of the building so that the soiled doves who worked there could stand outside in their skimpies and wave to passengers as eastbound trains pulled in. The hope was that some of those passengers would disembark from the trains and hurry back up the street to take advantage of the local hospitality. It probably worked, at least some of the time.

  A corral stood next to the whorehouse. Morgan and Bearpaw led the buckskin and the Appaloosa into it, unsaddled the horses, and placed the saddles on the corral fence along with seven or eight others. Morgan wondered which of the other horses in the corral belonged to Baggott and Hooper, if indeed any of them did. Since the two outlaws were staying a while, they might have stabled their mounts somewhere else.

  It didn’t matter, Morgan told himself. Baggott and Hooper weren’t going to have any need of horses for much longer.

  They went up the steps onto the porch underneath the balcony. A large black man sat in a wicker chair next to the door. He wore a derby hat and a dusty black suit over a collarless white shirt. “Afternoon to you, sir,” he said to Morgan. He looked at Bearpaw and added a noncommittal grunt, then went on. “Lookin’ for some fine ladies, are you?”