The Loner: Rattlesnake Valley

by J. A. Johnstone

  Yet there was something about Malone, something about the way he looked at Diana, that told he didn’t want to hurt the young woman. The Kid’s own fate was another story. He had a hunch Malone would kill him without blinking an eye, if the whim struck to do so.

  “Is there a town in the valley?”

  Malone looked a little surprised by the question. “Aye. Bristol, about fifteen miles east of here.”

  “I need to replenish my supplies, and my horse could use a little rest before I ride on. I’m not looking for trouble from you or anyone else, Malone. Just let me ride on to the settlement and in a few days I’ll be gone.”

  Malone frowned. “Are you sure Owen Starbird didn’t send for you?”

  That would be Diana’s uncle, The Kid recalled. “Never heard of him until now,” he replied honestly.

  “Well…” Malone scratched at his beard and hesitated as if he were considering what The Kid had said.

  While that was going on, the little man in gray turned his horse from the trail and started riding around the area, his eyes directed toward the ground as if he were searching for something. After a moment, he found it. He reined in, dismounted, and reached into the brush to pick up the skull. He turned and held it up to show the others.

  “Look at this, Terence.”

  “My marker,” Malone rumbled angrily. “Part of it, anyway.”

  The bald-headed man pointed toward the trail. “Only one set o’ fresh tracks comin’ from the west, Terence,” he said. “And the bones were there earlier. I seen ’em with my own eyes.”

  Malone glared at The Kid. “That means you disturbed my marker, mister…what is your name, anyway?”

  “It’s Morgan.”

  Malone smiled, but his eyes were flintier than ever. “Like Henry Morgan, God rest his soul.”

  Or like Frank Morgan, The Kid thought. But he didn’t mention his father, the notorious gunfighter known as The Drifter. He fought his own battles these days, with no help from anyone.

  He recognized the name Henry Morgan, though. He had no doubt that Malone was referring to the infamous English buccaneer from the seventeenth century who had led a fleet of pirate ships against the Spaniards in the Caribbean and Central America and captured Panama City. The skull and crossbones that had been planted in the trail left no doubt about Malone’s interest in pirates and piracy.

  “I’ve been known to let travelers use this trail, Mr. Morgan,” Malone went on, “if they can pay tribute. I’m afraid I can’t do that with you, though.”

  “Just as well…because I don’t intend to pay you one red cent.”

  Malone’s lips drew back from his teeth. “Destroyin’ my marker is like a slap in the face, Morgan, and I can’t allow you to go unpunished for that. You can go on down the trail…but you’ll have to go past either Greavy”—he nodded to the small, gray-clad gunman—“or Wolfram.” A jerk of the bearded chin indicated the bald-headed man. “Guns or fists, Morgan. It’s up to you.”

  Wolfram held up his right hand and opened and closed it into a fist as he grinned at The Kid. He flexed those strong, knobby-knuckled fingers and chuckled.

  Greavy’s face was cold and expressionless. He was clearly the fast gun of the bunch. The Kid was confident that he could beat Greavy to the draw, but if he did, that didn’t mean the others would let him pass. They might just use the shooting as an excuse to kill him.

  But if he took on the bruiser called Wolfram and bested him in single combat, that might be different. The rest of them might be impressed enough by such a victory to let him go. More importantly, such an outcome wouldn’t expose Diana Starbird to the danger of flying bullets.

  And the anger that was always seething not far below the surface of The Kid’s mind would have an outlet again.

  The Kid looked at Malone and said, “I have your word of honor that if I defeat one of them, you’ll allow me to ride on to Bristol?”

  “Word of honor,” Malone said. He looked at his other men. “You hear that? If Morgan lives, no one bothers him…today.”

  The Kid caught that important distinction but didn’t challenge it. First things first. He added, “And Miss Starbird comes with me, either to the settlement or wherever else she wants to go.”

  Malone frowned. “Diana knows I’d never harm a hair on her head, and none of my men would dare to do so, either. I think the world of her.”

  “Then you wouldn’t want to hold her against her will, would you?”

  Before Malone could answer, Diana stepped closer to The Kid and said in a quiet voice, “You don’t have to do this on my account, Mr. Morgan. I’ll be all right.”

  “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”

  She shot a glance at Malone and his men and admitted, “Well…no.”

  “Then you’re coming with me.” His words had a tone of finality to them.

  “It’s mighty confident you are that you’re goin’ to live through this,” Malone said. “Greavy is a talented man with a gun, and I’ve seen Wolfram break bigger fellas than you in half with his bare hands.”

  “I’ll risk it,” The Kid said. He took off his hat and handed it to Diana, who had a worried look on her face as she took it. The Kid didn’t want to demonstrate his own gun-handling prowess just yet, since it might come in handy later if he needed to take them by surprise, so he unbuckled his gunbelt and handed it to the young woman as well. Then he stripped off his coat and dropped it on the ground. “I’ll take on Wolfram.”

  The bald-headed man had already figured that out. Grinning, he slid the rifle he carried into its saddle boot and swung down from the back of his horse. He didn’t wear a handgun, but he had a knife sheathed at his waist. He removed the sheath from his belt and tucked it into a saddlebag, then took off his derby and hung it on the saddle horn.

  “I’m gonna enjoy this,” he said as he turned toward The Kid, who was rolling up his sleeves while Diana stood there looking more frightened by the second.

  “Bust him up good, Wolfram,” called one of the other men.

  “Yeah,” another man added in a raucous shot. “Show him he can’t mess with us.”

  Wolfram started forward, moving at a slow, deliberate pace as he approached The Kid. He was still grinning and flexing his fists. The Kid stood there, arms at his sides, apparently waiting calmly even though his blood surged at the prospect of battle.

  Wolfram charged without warning, swinging a malletlike fist at The Kid’s head with surprising quickness, and the battle was on.

  Chapter 3

  The Kid moved with the same sort of speed he exhibited when he drew his gun—fast. He ducked under the looping punch that Wolfram threw and sprang aside from the bull-like charge.

  Wolfram’s momentum carried him past his intended victim. The Kid kicked out behind him as Wolfram went by, driving the heel of his boot into the back of Wolfram’s left knee. The bald-headed bruiser howled in pain and pitched toward the ground as his leg folded up beneath him.

  The Kid whirled toward him, intending to kick Wolfram in the head and finish the fight in a hurry, but to his surprise he saw that Wolfram had slapped a hand on the ground and managed to keep from falling. A supple twist of the big body brought Wolfram upright again, facing The Kid. The lips under the handlebar mustache pulled back in an ugly grin.

  “Well, now I know you’re fast, you little son of a bitch,” Wolfram said as he began to circle more warily toward The Kid. He limped slightly on the leg that had been kicked. “I won’t make that mistake again.”

  The Kid knew his chances of surviving the fight had just decreased since he hadn’t been able to dispose of his opponent quickly. But the battle was far from over. True, Wolfram had advantages in height, weight, and reach, but as Conrad Browning, The Kid had been a boxing champion during his college days.

  More importantly, his vengeance quest as Kid Morgan and the wandering existence on the frontier that had followed it had taught him to do whatever was necessary to win when he was fighting for his li
fe.

  He didn’t hang back and let Wolfram bring the fight to him again. Instead he launched an attack of his own, darting in to throw a flurry of punches. The blows were almost too fast for the eye to follow, and they were too fast for Wolfram to block all of them. A couple of The Kid’s punches got through, hard shots that landed cleanly on Wolfram’s shelflike jaw and rocked his head back and forth.

  Wolfram roared in anger and counterattacked, managing to thud a fist into The Kid’s breastbone with staggering force. The impact stole his breath away and sent him stumbling backward a few steps.

  Wolfram bellowed again—obviously, he was one of those fighters who liked his battles noisy—and surged forward to press his advantage. As The Kid gasped for air, he saw the light of bloodlust shining in Wolfram’s eyes and knew his opponent thought the fight was just about over.

  The Kid went low again, sliding under pile driver punches that would have broken his neck if they had landed. He threw his body against Wolfram’s knees in a vicious block that cut the man’s legs out from under him. Wolfram wasn’t able to recover and he went down hard, his face diving into the dirt.

  The Kid rolled and came up fast. He’d managed to get a little breath back in his lungs. His heart pounded madly in his chest and his pulse played a trip-hammer symphony inside his skull. He leaped and came down on top of Wolfram, digging both knees into the small of the man’s back as hard as he could. Wolfram jerked his head up and yelled in pain.

  That gave The Kid the chance to slide his right arm around Wolfram’s neck from behind. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and hung on for dear life as he tightened the pressure on his opponent’s throat. He kept his knees planted in Wolfram’s back and hunkered low so that the awkward, frantic blows Wolfram aimed behind him couldn’t do any real damage. The Kid forced Wolfram’s head back harder and harder and knew that if he kept it up, sooner or later the man’s spine would crack.

  Wolfram might pass out from lack of air first, though, and he appeared to know it. In desperation, he rolled over and over. The Kid felt the big man’s weight crushing him each time he wound up on the bottom, but he didn’t let that dislodge his grip. He clung to Wolfram’s back like a tick.

  Suddenly, he felt Wolfram’s muscles go limp. Either the man had lost consciousness, or he was trying to trick The Kid into relaxing that death grip. The Kid wasn’t going to be fooled. The muscles of his arms and shoulders bunched. One more good heave would break the bastard’s neck—

  A shot crashed like thunder. The Kid’s head jerked up. He saw that Malone had dismounted and loomed over him, blotting out the sun as he aimed one of those pearl-handled revolvers at The Kid’s head. Smoke curled from the barrel as a result of the warning shot Malone had fired.

  “Let him go,” Malone said. “You’re gonna kill him. Let him go, Morgan.”

  “He would’ve…killed me…if he could,” The Kid said between clenched teeth.

  “I reckon that’s right, but I’ve got the gun, and I’m tellin’ you to let him go. We been partners too long for me to let you just snap his neck like that.”

  “You’ll keep your word and let me and Miss Starbird go on to Bristol?”

  “Aye, go and be damned!”

  The reluctance with which Malone uttered the words convinced The Kid that he was telling the truth. The Kid eased his grip on Wolfram’s throat, then released it entirely. The man’s head slumped forward into the dirt. He was out cold, all right, not shamming. But he was still alive. The Kid heard the ragged rasp of breath in Wolfram’s throat.

  With an effort, The Kid kept his muscles from trembling as he climbed to his feet. He didn’t want Malone to see how shaky he felt. Instead he reached out to Diana as she came closer to him, took the gun belt from her, and buckled it around his hips. The weight of the holstered Colt felt good to him.

  “For your own benefit, you ought to keep movin’ instead of stoppin’ in Bristol,” Malone went on. “There’s no place in this valley that’ll be safe for you after today.”

  “Then if I see you or any of your men again, I might as well go ahead and shoot on sight, is that what you’re telling me?” The Kid asked.

  Malone’s lips twisted in a snarl, but he didn’t say anything else. He slid his gun back into leather, then bent to grasp one of Wolfram’s arms. Without being told to, a couple of the hard cases dismounted and hurried over to help their boss hoist Wolfram’s senseless form back on his feet. Wolfram began to come to, shaking his head groggily.

  The Kid took his hat from Diana and put it on, then picked up his coat, folded it, and stuck it in his saddlebags. The sun was too hot for the garment.

  He asked in a low voice, “Where’s your horse?”

  She inclined her head toward the boulders where she had been hidden as she watched him kick the skull out of the trail. He figured he hadn’t heard her ride up because the echoes of his shot had been rolling away over the hills at the time.

  “Go get it,” he told her.

  “Not yet,” she replied. “Not until they’re gone.”

  He understood what she meant. She believed that Malone would be less likely to break his word and try to gun The Kid down as long as she was close by.

  She was probably right about that. He stood there holding the buckskin’s reins in his left hand and kept his right close to his gun. Greavy kept a close eye on The Kid while Malone and his men helped Wolfram climb onto his horse. The Kid had a feeling that Greavy sensed the presence of another fast gun. He saw the appraisal and the challenge in the little man’s eyes. Greavy was trying to figure out if he could take The Kid.

  Once Wolfram was mounted again, Malone swung up onto his own saddle and motioned for his men to follow suit. They turned their horses around and started jogging away, following the trail that led through the valley. They rounded a bend and rode out of sight.

  “Do you think they’ll try to find a place to pull an ambush?” The Kid asked.

  Diana shook her head. “Not now. Black Terence keeps his word…most of the time.”

  The Kid glanced over at her and lifted an eyebrow.

  Diana waved a hand and said, “I’ll explain on the way to Diamondback.”

  “Diamondback?”

  “The ranch my uncle and I own.”

  “I was headed for Bristol, remember?”

  Diana shook her head. “Not anymore. It won’t be safe for you. I’m pretty sure Malone has spies working for him in town. Anyway, there are a lot of alleys where bushwhackers could hide.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, if that’s what you’re thinking,” The Kid told her.

  Diana let out a snort. “Me owe you anything? It’s the other way around, Mr. Morgan. If I hadn’t been here, Malone and his men would have killed you. It was your shot that drew them in the first place. When you saw the skull and crossbones, why didn’t you just turn around and ride away? Don’t you know what they mean?” She drew in a deep breath. “They mean death.”

  The Kid wasn’t in any mood to argue with her. “I’ve seen plenty of it,” he said. “Let’s get your horse.”

  “You’ll come to the ranch with me?”

  The Kid shrugged. “Why not? The main thing I wanted was a chance to rest my buckskin. I reckon I can do that at your place as well as I can in town.”

  “Better,” Diana said. “Our hands will take good care of your horse.”

  They fetched her mount, a fine-looking chestnut, from the rocks where she had left it. She put her foot in the stirrup and stepped up in to the saddle with a lithe grace that didn’t surprise The Kid. From everything he had seen so far, he guessed that she had been born and raised in West Texas. He knew a Western girl when he saw one. He had married one, in fact, and a pang went through him at the reminder of what he had lost. Months had passed since Rebel’s death, but he still reacted the same way every time he thought about her.

  As they started along the trail, he kept his eyes peeled for any sign of trouble, just in case Diana was wrong about M
alone and his men trying to ambush them. The range seemed peaceful enough, though.

  “Where is this Diamondback ranch?” The Kid asked.

  Diana pointed to the line of trees that marked the stream’s course. “Everything in the valley north of the Severn River is Diamondback range.”

  “The Severn, eh?” That was the name of a river in England, he recalled, and Bristol, of course, was an English town. He wondered if that meant anything. He had been to England, and while Rattlesnake Valley certainly wasn’t as dry and barren as most of West Texas, it was still a far cry from the lush green English countryside.

  Diana didn’t offer any explanations. She was watchful, too, as if she didn’t have complete confidence in her assurances that Malone wouldn’t attack them.

  “Why the skull and crossbones?” The Kid asked after they had ridden a mile or so. “I know they put it on the labels of liquids that are poisonous, but I never saw anybody use it as a road marker before.”

  “It’s the symbol from the pirate flag,” Diana said, telling The Kid something he already knew. “I suppose Malone thinks that it’s appropriate.”

  “Appropriate?” The Kid repeated. He frowned over at her. “Are you telling me that—”

  “Black Terence Malone is a pirate,” Diana said with a nod. “At least, he used to be, and just because he’s not on the high seas anymore, doesn’t mean he’s any less of a brigand.”

  Chapter 4

  The Kid looked at her in silence for a long moment, then said, “You’re going to have to explain that. I suppose it has something to do with Malone being known as Black Terence.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. Twenty years ago, Malone was a pirate in the Caribbean Sea. He’d been a sailor on a blockade runner for the Confederacy during the War of Northern Aggression, and after the war was over, he took what he’d learned and put it to use for himself. He got a ship, gathered a crew of like-minded men, and started raiding the shipping lanes. He looted and sunk a number of British cargo vessels. The Royal Navy sent warships after him, but Malone had learned how to dodge pursuit so effectively that he was able to avoid capture for several years.”