Ambush Valley

by Johnstone, William W.

  They had been married for only a few months, so the wanting for each other was still strong in both of them. Conrad moved closer to her, took her in his arms. She turned and found his mouth with hers. Their kisses were eager and even hotter than the sun beating down out side the hotel.

  That was when the shooting started.

  One shot, actually, but that was enough to make Conrad lift his head and frown. Rebel reached up, stroked her fingers through the blond hair on the back of his neck, and said, “Don’t worry about it, Conrad. Prob ably just some cowboy letting off steam in one of the sa loons down the street.”

  Rebel was a Westerner, so she knew about such things. Conrad had met her a year and a half earlier, over in New Mexico Territory, when trouble cropped up on a railroad spur line one of his companies was building. Conrad’s father, Frank Morgan, had been mixed up in that affair, too but everything had been straightened out ill the end and Conrad had found himself falling in love with the wild and beautiful Rebel Callahan. They had been married a year later in Boston. .

  Conrad felt an occasional twinge of guilt that they hadn’t invited Frank to the wedding. If not for him, the two of them might not have ever gotten together. But Conrad had spent a lot of years hating Frank Morgan, and it took time to get over something like that. They saw each other from time to time and got along all right now, but they would never be close and Conrad was all right with that.

  He turned his attention back to kissing Rebel, but a couple of minutes later what sounded like a small-scale war broke out on the streets of Tucson. Conrad couldn’t ignore the gunfire, the shouts, the screaming. Rebel was concerned, too. She said, “What the hell’s going on out there?” as Conrad got out of bed and yanked a pair of trousers on.

  Rebel had managed to bring her plainspoken nature under control while she was living back in Boston with Conrad, but some of her natural bluntness had surfaced again since they’d come West to make a tour of some of the holdings of the vast Browning business empire. She stood up from the bed, wrapping the sheet around her nudity, as Conrad went to the window and thrust the cur tain back.

  He saw several riders in long coats galloping out of town, shooting as they fled. His breath hissed between his teeth in horror as he watched a woman trampled to death under the hooves of the horses. “It looks like some desperadoes making a getaway,” he told Rebel.

  And he realized a second later that the First Territor ial Bank, which was owned by the Browning Banking Trust and was the reason he and Rebel had stopped in Tucson, was just down the street.

  “My God,” Conrad said as he reached for his shirt, “I wonder if they robbed the bank!”

  “You’re going down there?” Rebel asked.

  “I have to find out what happened. If the bank was robbed, some of the employees might have been hurt!”

  There was a time when Conrad wouldn’t have cared so much about the lives of the people who worked for him. They did their jobs, they were paid their wages, and that was the end of it as far as he was concerned. He sup posed that being around Frank had caused some of his father’s attitudes to rub off on him, at least a little.

  “Let me go with you,” Rebel said as Conrad dressed hastily.

  He shook his head. “No, I want you to stay here where it’s safe. They might come back.”

  “Not if they already robbed the bank, they won’t,” she pointed out. “They’ll want to put as much distance as they can between them and Tucson.”

  Conrad supposed she, was right about that, but he still wanted her to stay there. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said, and then he hurried out of the hotel room.

  When he got downstairs, he found a crowd of people in the lobby, peering out the windows and talking excit edly. When he asked if anyone knew what had happened, a man dressed in the garish suit of a traveling salesman replied, “Somebody said the bank down the street got robbed!”

  Conrad had been afraid of that. He pushed through the crowd until he reached the door. A man told him, “Better be careful, mister. They might start shootin’ again!”

  Conrad wasn’t worried about that. He had been shot at before. Anyway, the outlaws were gone.

  He yanked the door open and ran outside.

  As he turned toward the bank, he spotted a man with a sheriff’s badge pinned to his vest climbing to his feet next to a water trough. Obviously, the lawman had taken cover there when the shooting started.

  “Sheriff, what happened?” Conrad demanded, not bothering to hide his anger. “I’m told the bank was robbed.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Conrad Browning. I own the bank.”

  The sheriff looked surprised. Conrad knew he didn’t fit the popular image of a banker. He was too young, for one thing, and with his fair hair and slender build, he wasn’t physically imposing by any means. But that didn’t stop him from owning not only banks, but also mines, rail roads, factories, and dozens of other business enterprises scattered from one end of the country to the other.

  “Yeah, I saw some fellas who looked like bandits come runnin’ out of the bank,” the sheriff admitted. “I traded a few shots with them; but there were too many of ‘em for me to slow them down.”

  “So you took shelter instead,” Conrad snapped.

  The sheriff’s already florid face flushed even more. “It wouldn’t have helped anything to get myself shot full of holes, Mr. Browning. Somebody’s got to put together a posse and go after those sons o’ bitches. First, I got to find out just what happened.”

  The lawman strode toward the bank, his gun still gripped tightly in his hand. Conrad fell in step beside him. “I was watching from the hotel as the robbers shot a couple of men and rode right over a poor woman who was in their way.” Conrad’s voice was grim as he spoke.

  “Yeah,” the sheriff replied, his tone equally bleak. “I saw that, too.”

  One of the tellers came stumbling out of the bank before Conrad and the sheriff reached it. Conrad recog nized the man from the visit he and Rebel had made to the bank that morning. Conrad had had a long talk with the manager, Arthur Wick. He was satisfied with the report Wick had made. The bank was doing well.

  At least it had been until those robbers struck. The teller saw the sheriff coming and said, “Thank God you’re here, Sheriff! Those men shot Mr. Wick! I think he’s dead. Poor Randall Berry, too!”

  The teller was almost hysterical, but he got the in formation across. In a matter of moments, the lawman’s clipped questions had established that there had been eight robbers, that they had shot the teller named Berry as soon as they came into the bank and then the man ager, Wick, had been gunned down as the gang was about to leave. They had cleaned out the tellers’ cages and the vault.

  Conrad tried not to groan. He had seen the figures just that morning. The bank had had upwards of eighty thou sand dollars on hand. The robbers had made a good haul.

  A little boy stood near the bodies of the woman who had been trampled and one of the men who’d been shot in the street. He was screaming as if he would never stop. The sheriff grimaced and said, “Somebody go see about that kid.” A couple of women from the crowd that was gathering in front of the bank went to try to comfort him.

  Conrad thought the dead man and woman were prob ably the boy’s parents. His mind flashed back to his own mother’s death. Vivian Browning had been the finest woman who ever lived, at least as far as Conrad was con cerned, and she had lost her life because of a gang of vi cious outlaws, just like that poor woman who’d been trampled. Conrad had been considerably older than that little boy when his mother was killed, but that didn’t matter. At such a terrible moment, every man was a little boy again.

  Vivian Browning’s death had been avenged. Frank Morgan had seen to that, although it had taken several years to track down all the men responsible. When the last one of them was dead, Frank had written a letter to Conrad telling him about it, although Frank hadn’t gone into any great detail. That was all right with Co
nrad It was enough for him to know that the score had been settled.

  Now, as he watched one of the women pick up the screammg little boy and press his face against her bosom so that his shrieks were muffled, he asked himself who would settle this score. Who would see to it that the men responsible for the deaths of that boy’s parents paid the price for their evil?

  “Shouldn’t you get started organizing a posse Sheriff?” Conrad asked. ‘

  The lawman nodded. “Yeah. I’ll spread the word that I’m lookin’ for volunteers—”

  “You’ll get more volunteers if you tell them about the reward.”

  The sheriff looked confused. “What reward?”

  “The one that I’m posting for the return of the town’s money and the apprehension of the men responsible for this atrocity,” Conrad said between clenched teeth. “Ten thousand dollars. Dead or alive.”

  Chapter 3

  When the shooting started, Abner Hoyt was in bed with a woman, too. Unlike Conrad Browning, the woman wasn’t Hoyt’s wife. She was a whore named Delia he had brought upstairs to her room in the Aces Full Saloon. He was finished with her, so when he heard the shots, he decided he might as well go see what was going on. Might be something interesting. He sure as hell wasn’t interested in Delia now that he had done what he wanted with her.

  He swung his legs out of the narrow, rumpled bed and then reached back to swat her ample rump. She giggled and said, “You got some time left, mister. Anything else you want to do?”

  “Nope,” Hoyt said as he stood up and started to get dressed. “We’re done here.”

  Delia pouted like she was disappointed. There was a slim chance that the expression was at least somewhat genuine. Abner Hoyt was a big, muscular man, and while his face was a little too rugged to be called handsome, it did possess a certain strength that most women found at tractive. His thick, sandy hair was long, hanging down almost to his shoulders, and his mustache drooped down on both sides of his wide mouth. He slid his long legs into denim trousers and pulled a buckskin shirt over his head. His feet went into high-topped black boots, and he set tled a battered cavalry hat on his head. He’d been out of the army for a long time, but he still had the hat.

  A gunbelt with a holstered Colt on the right side and a sheathed bowie knife on the left completed his outfit. He’d already put a coin on the scarred dresser before he ever climbed into the bed with Delia, so his business with her was done. He gave her a curt nod and.left the room.

  Downstairs, the saloon’s customers were gathered at the front windows and the batwinged entrance, craning their necks to try to get a glimpse of what was going on outside. There had been a lot of shooting while Hoyt was getting dressed, but it seemed to have stopped now. He shouldered his way through the crowd, drawing a few angry glances. The men who were offended subsided when they saw Hoyt’s powerful form, craggy face, and dark eyes that were hard as flint. Everybody got out of his way instead.

  It had been a long time since Hoyt had worried about getting shot. He strode boldly onto the boardwalk. Down the street somewhere, somebody was screaming. Sounded like a kid. Men ran here and there, shouting curses and questions. Hoyt heard the words “bank” and “robbed,” and his pulse quickened. He didn’t get excited about many things in life, but a bank robbery was one of them.

  Because it generally meant work for him.

  He saw a group gathering and recognized the build ing behind them as the First Territorial Bank. That must be where the robbery had taken place. Hoyt headed in that direction, his long legs carrying him quickly toward the crowd.

  He spotted the sheriff standing on the boardwalk in front of the bank. The man’s name was Lamar Fortson. Hoyt had made the sheriff’s acquaintance when he came to Tucson a week earlier. In his line of work, it usually helped to know the local lawman.

  Fortson was talking to a man Hoyt had never seen before, a young gent who had the look of an Eastern dude about him. Hoyt walked up in time to hear the slen der hombre declare that he was posting a ten-grand reward for the men who had robbed the bank.

  And that reward was just the way Abner Hoyt liked it. Dead or alive.

  “Now, dadgummit, you don’t need to go posting a reward, Mr. Browning,” Sheriff Fortson said. “It’s my duty to go after those varmints, and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of civic-minded folks willing to join a posse. After all, a lot of people in town had money in your bank. Just let me get this bullet scratch on my arm patched up—”

  “My men and I will ride now,” Hoyt said.

  The sheriff and the man called Browning both turned to look at him as he stood there with his thumbs hooked casually in his gunbelt. “Who are you?” Browning asked.

  “He’s a bounty hunter,” Fortson said before Hoyt could answer. The sheriff’s voice held a bitter, disapprov ing edge. “Him and some of his friends rode into Tucson not long ago. I was afraid when you said that about a reward that he’d hear about it.” Fortson’s mouth twisted. “Didn’t figure he’d be right behind you. You got a nose for sniffin’ out money, don’t you, Hoyt?”

  “With a beak like yours, I wouldn’t be talking about anybody else’s nose,” Hoyt said. He stuck out a hand toward the dude. “Abner Hoyt.”

  “Conrad Browning,” the man said, introducing him self, as he returned Hoyt’s grip with more strength than Hoyt expected. Browning might not be quite as soft as he looked. He jerked his head toward the big brick building and added, “This is my bank that was just robbed.”

  “How much did they get?”

  “Enough to make the reward I’m offering worthwhile. And they murdered several people, including two of my employees and a defenseless woman.”

  Probably the screaming kid’s ma, Hoyt thought. Somebody had picked up the squalling brat and carried him off. Hoyt was thankful for that. The noise would have gotten on his nerves after a while.

  “Anybody get a good look at them, or know who they were?”

  Conrad Browning looked over at one of the tellers who had come out of the bank. The man shook his head and said, “They had masks on. I never saw their faces, and I don’t think anybody else did, either.”

  “Could’ve been Cicero McCoy and his bunch,” Fort son said. “I’ve heard rumors that they’re down here in these parts. They held up a train west of Flagstaff a couple of weeks ago, so they’ve had plenty of time to get here.”

  Hoyt nodded. He had seen numerous reward dodgers on Cicero McCoy. The outlaw was wanted in Utah, Cali fornia, New Mexico, and here in Arizona. If McCoy was the one who’d hit this bank, Hoyt stood to collect a con siderable amount of blood money for him, in addition to the ten thousand dollars offered by Conrad Browning.

  This trip to Tucson might turn out to be profitable after all.

  “Do you think you can catch this man McCoy, Mr. Hoyt?” Browning asked.

  “I’ve got six men who’re hard as nails,” Hoyt replied. “Several of them are good trackers. We’ll run those out laws to ground, whoever they are. Don’t worry about that, Mr. Browning.”

  “Very well. You heard the reward offer. I’ll stand behind it.”

  “Wait just a damned minute,” Fortson said. “I haven’t deputized you and your partners as members of the posse yet, Hoyt—”

  “And we don’t give a damn about that,” Hoyt re sponded. “There’s nothing in the law says we can’t go after the robbers on our own.” He gave Conrad a brisk nod. “We’ll be riding as soon as I can round up my men and get our horses saddled.”

  “Damn it!” Sheriff Fortson scurried off. Hoyt didn’t know if the lawman was upset because he thought he might miss out on a chance for the reward, or if Fortson really thought that only duly deputized representatives of the law ought to be chasing after owlhoots. Hoyt didn’t care, either.

  He had a reward to go after. Ten grand, American, at the very least.

  Rebel was fully dressed by the time Conrad got back up to the hotel room. That was a shame, he thought, but only briefly. As much as he loved her, hi
s mind was fo cused now on the outrage that had taken place a short time earlier. The loss of the money, the murder of his em ployees, the wanton slaughter of other innocents … all of it combined to fill Conrad with a smoldering rage.

  When Conrad first met Rebel Callahan, she’d been dressed like a man, which was fitting considering that she could ride and shoot as well as or better than most men. Since their marriage, she had started dressing like a lady, as befitted the wife of one of the most important businessmen in the country. Now she wore a pale blue gown that went well with her blue eyes, tanned skin, and thick blond hair. She came over to Conrad and touched his arm. His obviously agitated state caused concern to appear in her eyes.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The bank was robbed, just as I feared,” he replied.

  “The bank we visited just this morning?”

  “That’s right.” His voice caught a little as he added, “The outlaws killed Mr. Wick, the manager, and one of the tellers.”

  “Oh, my God.” Rebel lifted a hand to her mouth in surprise and horror.

  “It gets worse than that. They killed several people on the street while they were making their getaway. They cleaned out the bank, too. I checked on that myself. Eighty thousand dollars gone.” Conrad’s hands clenched into fists as futile anger filled him. “The worst of it, though, is the loss of life. I hate outlaws. I hate the way they think they can just cut down anyone who’s unlucky enough to be in their way!”

  That feeling went back to the circumstances of his mother’s death, although that tragedy hadn’t been en tirelyaccidental. One of Vivian Browning’s trusted asso ciates had been behind what happened, although it had been desperadoes working for him who had carried out the actual killing. After that, Conrad had wound up being held prisoner by the same gang of outlaws. Both inci dents had left him with an unending hatred for lawbreak ers and killers.

  “I’m sure the sheriff will go after them and bring them to justice,” Rebel said.

  Conrad shook his head. “I’m not so certain. The sheriff doesn’t strike me as being all that competent. Luckily, there’s a group of professional manhunters in town. Their leader has volunteered them to track down the killers.”