The Loner: Dead Man’s Gold

by J. A. Johnstone

  The dog, a scrawny yellow animal with floppy ears, reached up with its head and tried to lick The Kid’s face. The Kid laughed and petted it some more. Then he gathered it up into his arms.

  When he walked into the hotel lobby, quite a crowd had gathered, including Dr. Annabelle Dare and Father Jardine. Several people wanted to know how Acting Sheriff Nye was doing.

  “The doctor’s tending to him now,” The Kid reported. “I think he’s going to be fine.”

  Annabelle looked at him and said, “When I heard all that shooting, somehow I had a pretty good idea you were mixed up in it, Mr. Morgan. After all, it had been more than an hour since you shot at anybody.”

  The Kid didn’t have to reply to that gibe, because Father Jardine asked, “Who was it this time, Mr. Morgan?”

  “That fella Jackson, the one who made it out of the church this afternoon. He must have been lying low somewhere in town, waiting for a chance to bushwhack me and even the score.”

  “It would hardly be even, considering that you killed five of his friends.”

  “Well…as even as he could get it, anyway. He wound up just catching a bullet, though.”

  “He’s dead?” Annabelle asked.

  The Kid shook his head. “No, he got away.”

  “Then he could still come after you,” Father Jardine pointed out.

  “He could,” The Kid admitted.

  “Doesn’t that worry you?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Annabelle said, “Why should it, Father? Mr. Morgan already has plenty of people with a grudge against him. One more shouldn’t really matter.”

  For somebody who wanted his help, she sure had a sharp tongue on her, The Kid thought. He supposed that was just her nature, though. She couldn’t help it.

  With a nod toward the dog, Annabelle went on, “What are you doing with that mangy beast?”

  “I don’t see any mange on him,” The Kid replied, “and he and I have sort of become friends.”

  “You’re not thinking of taking him along with us, are you?”

  The Kid shook his head. The Jornada del Muerto was no place for a dog. It was no place for humans, either, but he and his companions didn’t have much choice.

  “No, he’s not coming with us,” The Kid said. “But I think I know somebody who might be interested in giving him a home.”

  Chapter 16

  “You want me to keep him?” the little boy called Jamie asked the next morning as he hugged the dog to him and looked up at The Kid. “Really?”

  “Really,” The Kid said. “As long as your ma and pa say it’s all right, that is.”

  “They told me a while back I could have a dog. We just ain’t gotten around to findin’ one yet.”

  “Well, there you go.” The Kid grinned. “And I bet you’ll be the only youngster in Las Cruces with a dog that helped somebody win a gunfight.”

  “Yeah!”

  The Kid ruffled Jamie’s hair, then scratched the dog’s ears before he stood up. Jamie’s folks stood on the porch of the neat little house behind the boy. The Kid had asked at the general store where he could find Jamie, figuring that the clerks there might know the youngster. Sure enough, they had been able to direct him to the right house on one of Las Cruces’s side streets.

  The Kid lifted a hand in a wave to the little boy’s parents, then said, “So long, Jamie. Have a good time with your new friend there.”

  “I will!” The boy paused, and then as The Kid turned away, he went on, “Mr. Morgan?”

  The Kid looked back at him. “Yeah?”

  “Will you ever be comin’ back this way again?”

  “Well, Jamie, I don’t rightly know.” Given the sort of life he led, The Kid had no idea how long he would survive, nor any way of knowing where his trail might lead him next. “But if I do, you can be sure that I’ll stop by to say howdy to you and that floppy-eared varmint.”

  Jamie smiled. “All right. Thanks!”

  The Kid waved again and then strode back to the main street. The wagon was parked beside the public well, where he had used the windlass and bucket to fill up their water barrels earlier. The buckskin’s reins were tied to the rear of the wagon.

  Annabelle and Father Jardine sat on the driver’s box. Annabelle wore the new trousers, shirt, and hat that The Kid had purchased at the general store that morning. The Chinese laundryman had insisted, loudly and at length, that nobody could get those kerosene-soaked clothes clean.

  Annabelle also had a new gunbelt strapped around her waist, along with a new revolver in the holster. It wasn’t a Smith & Wesson .38 like the one she had carried before. It was a .41 caliber Colt Lightning, the model sometimes also known as the Thunderer, with a four and a half inch barrel. Comparable in size and weight to the S&W .38, it fired a slightly heavier round, and The Kid thought Annabelle could handle it.

  “Ready to go?” he asked her as he walked up.

  “We’ve been ready for a good while,” Annabelle said. “Did that little boy like his new pet?”

  The Kid smiled. “He sure did. I think he’ll take good care of the little fella.”

  He went to the back of the wagon and untied the buckskin. He swung into the saddle and moved the horse up alongside the driver’s seat.

  “Let’s go,” The Kid said.

  Annabelle slapped the reins against the rumps of the team and got the horses moving. The Kid rode alongside. As they passed the building that housed the doctor’s practice, one of the deputies stepped out onto the porch to watch them go. His eyes were narrowed and unfriendly.

  The Kid had stopped by earlier to let Acting Sheriff Nye know that they were leaving. The young lawman’s left arm and right leg were heavily bandaged, but he seemed alert and fairly strong as he sat propped up in the bed where he had spent the night.

  “I don’t know where you’re going, Mr. Morgan,” he had said, “but be careful along the way. No offense, but you seem to attract trouble.”

  The Kid had chuckled. “None taken. You’re not the first person to point that out.”

  “I expect not.”

  The Kid and his companions were leaving, and with any luck, peace and quiet would descend on Las Cruces once more. The Kid wouldn’t have bet a hat on that—there were always troublemakers around any town—but at least maybe the odds would be a little better for the settlement’s tranquility with him gone.

  They kept the valley of the Rio Grande on their left and some low, rugged mountains on their right as they headed north. They hadn’t gone very far after leaving Las Cruces when they came to a row of empty adobe buildings. The structures had been abandoned and were slowly crumbling away. To The Kid’s eye, the way they were arranged had the look of a military post, and when he asked Annabelle about them, she nodded.

  “This used to be an army outpost called Fort Selden,” she said. “The army withdrew its troops six or seven years ago, and since then it’s just been sitting here.”

  “You must’ve studied the route you plan to take through the Jornada del Muerto,” The Kid commented.

  “Of course. We’d have been fools not to.”

  The Kid reserved comment on that. He couldn’t very well tell Annabelle and Father Jardine that they were loco to attempt what they were doing, when he was going along with them of his own free will.

  Annabelle hauled back on the reins and brought the team to a halt as they passed the last of the abandoned military buildings. The Kid stopped the buckskin beside the wagon. Annabelle pointed to the Rio Grande, which curved away to the west.

  “We leave the river here and head almost due north for a while. The trail curves gradually to the northwest. At least, it did on the old maps I studied.”

  “You don’t really know what we’re going to find up there, do you?” The Kid asked.

  Annabelle hesitated before answering. “Not firsthand, no. But I’ve read several accounts by Spanish missionaries and traders and conquistadors who traveled through the area in the past.”

>   “How long ago?”

  “A hundred years or more. But just how quickly do you think an empty, uninhabited desert changes, Mr. Morgan? I suspect the Jornada del Muerto will look almost exactly the same a hundred years from now as it does today.” She smirked at him. “In fact, I’d bet a hat on it.”

  “Careful,” The Kid said. “We didn’t bring along a spare this time.”

  Father Jardine chuckled, then looked away innocently as Annabelle shot him a quick glare. She turned back to The Kid and went on, “There’s supposed to be a waterhole at a place called Paraje Parillo about twenty miles north of here, but that’s the last water we can count on for another eighty miles after that. There are some dry lake beds that sometimes have water in them if it’s rained recently, but you can imagine how uncommon that is in country like this.”

  “Pretty rare, I expect,” The Kid said. “We have enough water in those barrels to last us ten or twelve days, depending on how careful we are. I’d suggest we be mighty careful.”

  “I agree. There’s another waterhole at Paraje Fra Cristobal, at the northern end of the basin.”

  “Sometimes waterholes go dry in this part of the country,” The Kid pointed out. “What if we get there and there’s no water?”

  “Then I suspect we may all die. If you don’t want to run the risk, Mr. Morgan, you can always turn around and go back to Las Cruces…although I’m not sure the citizens there would welcome you with open arms.”

  The Kid said, “Once I take cards in a game, I play the hand out to the end.”

  “Sometimes that just means you’re throwing good money after bad. Or in this case, risking your life.”

  “It’s mine to risk,” The Kid said.

  Annabelle shrugged and nodded. She clucked at the horses and snapped the reins against them. The wagon lurched into motion again.

  From the sound of what Annabelle had said, she had put in a lot of work before she and Father Jardine started north, studying everything she could find about the trail through this desolate landscape. Even so, the Jornada del Muerto was big and empty, and The Kid had to wonder how she expected to find something as small as the Konigsberg Candlestick and the secret of the Twelve Pearls, whatever that turned out to be. That old German fleeing from the Inquisition could have hidden his so-called treasure anywhere. An hombre could search blindly through the desert for a year and never find it.

  Which suggested to The Kid that Annabelle and the priest really knew more than they had told him so far. They had to have some sort of clue that pointed them to the location of what they were looking for. The Kid didn’t particularly blame them for holding it back. Even though he had risked his life to help them on several occasions, they probably still didn’t trust him one hundred per cent. They were smart to feel that way. He wasn’t going to double cross them, but they couldn’t be sure of that.

  The heat built rapidly as the sun rose higher in the sky. The Kid was glad for the broad-brimmed hat he wore to keep the sun off his head. When that fiery orb reached its zenith, it was capable of frying a man’s brain in its own juices without something to shield it from the glare.

  Because of the heat, they had to stop fairly often to rest the horses. During one of those halts, The Kid said, “You might want to consider traveling at night and laying up in the shade somewhere during the day.”

  “Just how much shade do you think we’ll find out here, Mr. Morgan?” Annabelle asked with a nod toward their flat, almost barren surroundings. The only vegetation to be seen were occasional clumps of coarse grass, some stunted mesquite trees, and beds of thorny cactus.

  “How would we see where we were going?” Father Jardine added.

  “You can always crawl under the wagon,” The Kid said. “That doesn’t help the horses, but they can stand the heat better than we can. As for seeing where we’re going, padre, the stars give plenty of light. When there’s a big moon, it’s almost like day out here.”

  “I thought you hadn’t been through the Jornada del Muerto before,” Annabelle said.

  The Kid shrugged. “I haven’t. But I’ve been through other deserts. I know a few things about them. For example, we can get a little moisture from cactus if we have to. It’s hard to live on that and nothing else, but it’ll keep you alive for a while, anyway.”

  “Well, I’m glad we have an experienced companion, if not a guide.”

  “Guiding is your job, Doctor. I know north from south, but I don’t know where anything is out here, as far as landmarks go.”

  He resisted the impulse to ask her where they were going to start looking for the Konigsberg Candlestick. Annabelle and Father Jardine would get around to revealing their secrets in their own good time, The Kid supposed.

  The slow-paced journey through the almost featureless landscape grew mighty boring, mighty fast. The Kid’s interest perked up when some low mountains came into view ahead of them and to the west.

  “Those should be the Caballos,” Annabelle said when he pointed them out to her.

  “The Horse Mountains,” The Kid said.

  “Exactly. Don’t ask me how they got the name, though. I have no idea.”

  They weren’t going toward the mountains. Their route would take them east of the Caballos. They didn’t draw even with the mountains as they traveled on. Those low, rounded peaks seemed to keep receding to the north.

  The Kid knew that was an illusion. He and his companions actually were putting some miles behind them; it was just difficult to tell that out there in the wasteland.

  The Kid estimated that they covered about ten miles. That wasn’t bad, he thought. If they could maintain that pace, he was confident their water would hold out until they reached the other end of the hellish passage. Especially if the waterhole at Paraje Parillo hadn’t dried up. With luck they would reach it the next day, and if there was water there, they could top off the barrels.

  When they called a halt for the night and the horses had been taken care of, The Kid built a small fire to cook their supper and boil some coffee before darkness fell. Once they had eaten, he scooped sand on the flames to put them out.

  The light vanished suddenly, almost as soon as the sun had set. That didn’t surprise The Kid. It seemed to spook Annabelle a little, though. As she sat on the wagon’s lowered tailgate and looked at the desolation all around them, she said quietly, “It’s very lonely out here, isn’t it?”

  The Kid hunkered on his heels, his hat thumbed back on his head as he sipped the last of the coffee in his cup. “It is,” he agreed. “Some places look empty, but they’re really not. The life just hides during the heat of the day and comes out at night. You’d find birds and coyotes and all sorts of other varmints moving around once it cools off a mite.” He shook his head. “Not out here, though. I’ve got a feeling that not even the coyotes venture very far out into this desert. They’ve got more sense than that. Might find a snake or a lizard, but that’s about it.”

  “What about God’s children?” Father Jardine asked.

  “You mean people?”

  “Who else would I mean?”

  “I don’t know, padre,” The Kid said. “The way folks act sometimes, I’m not sure even the Good Lord would want to claim them.” Before the priest could argue with him about his bleak outlook on life, he went on, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the only human beings within ten miles, maybe more.”

  But as he glanced off to the south, the way they had come from, he thought that he wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t the only people out there that night.

  Somewhere back there, their enemies were still on their trail, The Kid’s gut told him.

  The only questions were who and how many.

  Chapter 17

  Manuelito lay on his belly, watching his quarry, separated from them by perhaps half a mile. The brilliant stars that had popped into view in the blackness above the desert cast enough of a silvery glow for the Apache to be able to make out the dark shape of the wagon with its lighter canvas
cover. The two white men and the woman had no fire tonight.

  They were learning.

  But their caution would not save them, Manuelito vowed to himself. In the end, he would kill the men and have the woman. His need for that burned even stronger than the fiery pain in his side where the bullet had plowed a furrow in his flesh several nights earlier.

  He had made a poultice from the flesh of the cactus and bound it in place over the wound with strips of cloth cut from his tunic. That should have drawn out the corruption and allowed him to heal, but Manuelito could tell that he had a sickness growing inside him. He was confident he could hold it at bay long enough for him to have his revenge, and once he had done that, he didn’t really care what happened to him afterward. He could die happily, his lust for vengeance—and for the woman—satisfied.

  “Manuelito!”

  The whisper came from behind him. Manuelito looked over his shoulder and saw that Azza-hij had crawled up almost even with him. The young warrior sounded nervous—which came as no surprise considering the way he had turned and run when the whites put up a surprisingly strong fight. As the rest of the war party had died, Azza-hij had fled. For that reason, Manuelito had come very close to slitting the young man’s throat himself.

  But Azza-hij might help him achieve his desired goals, so Manuelito allowed him to live for the time being. How he conducted himself from then on would have a lot to do with whether he survived to return to the mountains across the border in Mexico.

  Manuelito knew he would not survive that trek. Not with the burning in his side. But he could live with that…and die with it.

  “What do you want?” he asked Azza-hij.

  “They are up there, the white men and the woman? We have found them?”

  Manuelito’s lip curled in a sneer. “Look for yourself. Use your eyes, young fool! Do you not see them?”

  “Yes. I see them.”