The Loner: Rattlesnake Valley

by J. A. Johnstone

  “That may be exactly what he’s trying to do,” The Kid said. “He knows he can’t stand up to your outfit in open combat, so he’s going to employ guerrilla tactics against Diamondback.”

  “It ain’t no fair way to fight,” Rocklin complained.

  “That’s because men like Malone don’t care about being fair. They want to win no matter the cost.”

  Chapter 12

  A few minutes later, The Kid and Rocklin rendezvoused with Diana and the other two punchers at the ford. Diana and her two companions, Nick Weaver and Carl Addams, crossed the river and reined in as they emerged from the water.

  “Did you find anything in those trees?” Diana asked.

  “Some blood,” Rocklin answered. “Looked like we ventilated one of ’em.”

  “Good,” Diana said with a note of fierce satisfaction in her voice. “I hope the bastard bleeds to death.” She looked around at the men. “And I don’t care how unladylike that is!”

  “Nobody said anything,” The Kid drawled as he lifted his reins. “Come on, let’s try to pick up that trail again.”

  They rode upstream, and when they reached the trees where the riflemen had hidden for the most recent ambush attempt, Rocklin said, “Nick, you and Carl follow these two fellas. Miss Starbird and Mr. Morgan and I will pick up that other trail. I’m bettin’ they’ll meet up before too long.”

  “Are you sure that splitting such a small force is a good idea, Sam?” Diana asked.

  “The boss wants to know as much as we can tell him about the varmints who attacked the ranch, ma’am. Because of those tracks, I’m convinced the two men who opened fire on us a little while ago were part of the same bunch that attacked Diamondback yesterday evenin’, but your uncle would want to know for sure.”

  Diana thought it over for a second and then nodded. “You’re right. We’ll split up, but it won’t be for long.”

  “That’s what I’m thinkin’. Anyway, we’ll still all be within shoutin’ distance of each other. We may not even be out of sight.”

  That turned out to be the case, but not for the reasons the foreman probably thought. The Kid, Diana, and Rocklin rode along the river until they came to a spot opposite the place where the men who had raided the ranch put their horses into the stream. There were no tracks on the bank to show where the bushwhackers had emerged.

  “This ain’t good,” Rocklin said with a frown. “I know we’re in the right place. I took note of that dead limb in that tree over yonder.” He pointed across the river to a tree on the northern bank. “The trail they left ran right past it.”

  “They didn’t swim their horses straight across,” The Kid speculated. “They went upstream or more likely downstream for a ways before they came out of the water. Like you said, Sam, at first they were just trying to get away, but then they started trying to cover their tracks.”

  “And they done a good job of it, too, dang it.”

  Diana suggested, “Why don’t we just ride up and down the river until we find where they came out. They couldn’t have gone too far.”

  Rocklin scratched his jaw as he thought about it. “Might be better to follow those other tracks with Nick and Carl,” he decided. “They’re bound to join up with the others sooner or later.”

  The Kid wasn’t so sure of that. If Black Terence Malone was any sort of strategist, he might have ordered the men he left behind not to rejoin the rest of the bunch. In fact, they might have all split up, leaving the river at different spots, one by one, so that their tracks would be easier to conceal.

  The Kid suddenly had a hunch that they wouldn’t be able to prove the men who’d attacked Diamondback the previous evening were from Malone’s Trident ranch.

  He and Diana and Rocklin rode back to rejoin Weaver and Addams. Together, they followed the tracks left by the two men who had taken those potshots at them. After a quarter mile, the hoofprints reached the main road through Rattlesnake Valley. It appeared that no one else had used the road that morning, because Rocklin was able to tell that the two riders turned east, toward the settlement of Bristol.

  “Looks like they ain’t headin’ for Malone’s spread after all,” Rocklin said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Diana snapped. “They could work for him anyway.”

  The Kid knew she was right about that, but since the trail didn’t lead to the Trident, they couldn’t prove it.

  “I hate to go back to the ranch and tell your uncle we failed,” Rocklin said, “but I don’t see what else we can do. Anyway, I don’t want to leave the crew shorthanded any longer’n we have to. Malone might try something else.”

  The Kid rested his hands on the saddlehorn and said, “There’s one more thing we can do…or rather, that I can do. I’ll ride on to the settlement and take a look around. Maybe the man we wounded went looking for the doctor, and I can get a line on him that way.”

  “Hmm,” Rocklin said as he thought over the suggestion. “Maybe. But Doc Eggars ought to be well on his way out to Diamondback by now to have a look at Deuce.”

  “The wounded man wouldn’t know that,” The Kid pointed out.

  Diana said, “I think it’s a good idea. I’m coming with you, Kid.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?” she shot back at him. “Don’t you know by now that you can’t tell me what to do?”

  “I’m saying it wouldn’t be a smart thing to do,” The Kid explained. “Malone may have his suspicions that I’ve thrown in with you, but he can’t be sure of that. Most of the people in town won’t have any idea who I am. If you and I ride in together, everyone in Bristol will know that I’m connected to your ranch. That’s liable to make it harder for me to find out anything. Didn’t your uncle say that the citizens weren’t as sympathetic to Diamondback as they used to be?”

  “That’s right,” Diana admitted with a touch of bitterness in her voice. “The ones who have been there the longest seem to have forgotten how much my father did for this valley, and the people who’ve arrived more recently don’t know and don’t care.” She paused, then added, “There are times when I think that progress and civilization aren’t always such good things.”

  The Kid didn’t say anything, but he agreed with her on that score, even though for most of his life he had been a blatant representative of civilization’s steady march across the West.

  “All right,” she went on. “I understand what you’re getting at, Kid. I’ll go back to the ranch with Sam and the others. Just be careful. Malone could have spies in town.”

  The Kid nodded. “I’m always careful,” he said. He’d had to be, in order to survive the past tumultuous year.

  Diana turned her horse and rode back toward the ford with Rocklin and the other men. She hipped around in the saddle before they went out of sight and looked back at The Kid with a peculiar intensity for a few seconds. He felt her eyes on him and knew she was torn in her feelings. Her pride and stubbornness led her to argue with him at nearly every turn, and yet he knew that she was drawn to him. Under different circumstances, he might have felt the same way about her.

  But she reminded him too much of Rebel, another beautiful young woman born and raised on the frontier and blessed with the same sort of headlong recklessness and stubborn determination that Diana possessed.

  And that terrible wound in Kid Morgan’s heart caused by Rebel’s loss was still too fresh, too raw.

  It was easy to find the settlement. All he had to do was follow the road. By midday, he rounded a bend in the trail as it curved around a hill and saw Bristol laid out before him.

  At first glance it appeared to be a typical West Texas cowtown with false-fronted businesses along both sides of a main street that stretched for several blocks and a mixture of frame and adobe residences on the cross streets. But a closer look revealed that there were a number of more substantial buildings, too, including a two story red brick structure. The Kid wouldn’t be surprised if it housed the local bank, along wi
th maybe some lawyers’ offices and things like that. As he rode closer, he saw that a few of the frame buildings had actual second stories, not just false fronts. One of them sported a large, colorful sign, and as The Kid rode closer, he was able to make out the words RATTLER’S DEN SALOON. The sign had a drawing of a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike, he saw as he entered the main street on the buckskin.

  The hitch rails in front of the saloon were full, and there were a lot of horses and wagons tied up in other places along the street. Sam Rocklin had pointed out that one of the men who’d shot at them earlier was riding a mount with a large nick out of the horseshoe on its front left hoof. The Kid couldn’t pick that particular print out of the welter of hoofprints in the street, though, so short of going along and checking the shoes on every horse he came to, he didn’t see how that knowledge was going to help him. He couldn’t very well do that if he wanted to blend in.

  He angled the buckskin toward the Rattler’s Den, thinking that the biggest, busiest saloon in town was usually a good place to pick up information.

  The Kid swung down from the saddle and found a place at the crowded hitch rail to loop the reins. A plank porch ran in front of the saloon, which took up more than half a block. A saddlemaker’s shop had the rest of the frontage on Main Street in the block. The Kid stepped onto the porch and started toward the batwings.

  They swung out suddenly, just before he reached them, and he stepped back quickly to avoid being hit by them.

  Two men pushed onto the boardwalk, one of them laughing at an obscene comment made by the other about a girl who worked in the saloon. They stopped short at the sight of The Kid, and a man with an eagle’s beak of a nose and a droopy black mustache growled, “Watch where you’re goin’, mister.”

  “I was,” The Kid said. “That’s why I was able to keep the two of you from running into me.”

  The second man glared at him. “He’s got a smart mouth on him, Breck.” Like his companion, the man was tall and brawny, with a shock of rusty hair under a pushed-back Stetson. “You reckon we oughta teach him some manners?”

  “Naw, he’s just some damn stupid dude, Early,” Breck said. “We ain’t got time to fool with him.”

  He started past The Kid, who stood his ground and didn’t get out of the way. Breck’s shoulder rammed hard into his. It was clear from the man’s attitude that he thought he could brush The Kid aside easily, but that wasn’t how it worked out. Instead, the deceptive strength in The Kid’s rangy body caused Breck to stumble to the side.

  “What the hell!” the redheaded Early howled. “Did you see what he done?”

  Breck caught himself and said, “Yeah, I saw.” His upper lip curled in a snarl. “Stranger, are you lookin’ for trouble?”

  “I never go looking for trouble,” The Kid said out of habit, even though he had started to doubt that, “but I don’t back down from it.”

  “Seems to me like you’re cravin’ it, and we’re just the hombres to give it to you.”

  The Kid wondered if those two men were the ones who had shot at him and Diana and the others earlier in the day. They might have spotted him through one of the saloon’s front windows and recognized him, then staged the confrontation so they would have an excuse for killing him. Both men sported six-guns in tied-down holsters. If they made a play, The Kid figured he would have to kill both of them. There wouldn’t be time for anything fancy. But he didn’t particularly want them dead, in case there was anything he could learn from them.

  So he said to Breck, “I think you’re the one who’s hunting trouble, mister,” and to prove it, he brought his left fist up with blinding speed and slammed a punch right onto the man’s beaklike nose.

  Chapter 13

  The blow landed cleanly, with all the strength The Kid could put behind it. Taken by surprise, Breck hadn’t even tried to block it. As the punch exploded on his nose, the impact sent him flying backward to crash into the wall of the saloon.

  A surprised and outraged Early yelled, “Hey!”, but he didn’t reach for his gun. Instead he lunged at The Kid, swinging a big fist in a roundhouse blow.

  The Kid ducked under the sweeping punch and bored in, hooking a hard right then a left into Early’s midsection. One after the other, his fists buried themselves in the man’s belly. Foul, whiskey-laden breath gusted out of Early’s mouth as he groaned and doubled over in pain.

  That put him in position for the uppercut that might have finished him off if The Kid had gotten the chance to throw it. Instead, Breck recovered his balance without falling and launched himself at The Kid in a diving tackle. His brawny arms wrapped around The Kid’s waist. Both men hit the railing along the edge of the porch. It broke with a loud, splintering crack, and they sailed off the planks into the street.

  The Kid hit the dirt first, with Breck landing heavily on top of him. Pain shot through him, and for a second he thought that the man’s crushing weight had broken his ribs. It drove the air out of his lungs, that was for sure. Stunned, breathless, and in pain, for a second all The Kid could do was lie there while Breck hammered at him.

  “Lemme at him, Breck!” Early shouted. “I’ll stomp the hell outta him!”

  The words penetrated The Kid’s brain and brought a sense of urgency back to him. He knew that the two hard cases were perfectly capable of stomping and kicking him to death if they got the chance. The lone deputy in Bristol probably wouldn’t interfere against two-to-one odds, even if he knew what was going on in front of the Rattler’s Den, which he might not. The Kid couldn’t expect any help from anyone else in the settlement, either. Nobody there knew him.

  That was why he was surprised when he heard the sudden boom of a shot, and a husky voice ordering, “All right, get the hell away from him, or the next one goes in your head, Breck! The same goes for you, Early! Stay back!”

  The Kid was still shaken up, but his brain had started working again well enough for him to realize that the voice belonged to a woman. He didn’t know why she had stepped in to help him, but at least Breck wasn’t walloping him anymore. He was mighty grateful for that.

  “You better put that gun down, Sophia,” Breck said with a thunderous frown as he looked up at the boardwalk in front of the saloon. “It’s liable to go off.”

  “It’ll go off, all right,” the woman said. The Kid twisted his head, but he couldn’t quite see her. Breck’s bulky form blocked his view. She went on, “It’ll splatter your brains all over the street.”

  Muttering curses, Breck pushed himself off The Kid. He got to his feet and stepped back. “I don’t take kindly to bein’ threatened,” he blustered, “especially by a woman.”

  “Yeah!” Early added. “You can’t tell us what to do, Sophia. You ain’t our boss.”

  “Yes, well, if I was desperate enough to hire troublemaking oafs like the two of you, I wouldn’t be much of a businesswoman, now would I?”

  The two men frowned, not having a comeback for that.

  The Kid rolled onto his side, then onto his belly so he could get his hands and knees under him and push himself up. He grabbed his hat out of the dusty street as he came to his feet.

  The woman who stood on the porch held a Colt Navy revolver in her right hand and steadied her grip with her left hand on that wrist. The gun didn’t waver a bit as she pointed it at Breck and Early.

  She was a real beauty, The Kid saw, despite the rather garish getup she wore. A large purple plume of some sort stuck up from the bun of rich brown hair gathered at the back of her head. She wore a purple gown that left her arms and much of her shoulders bare. A couple of thin straps held it up. The neck was cut low enough to reveal the swell of her rounded breasts, and the waist nipped in before flaring out to emphasize the curve of her hips. The outfit was tight enough and revealing enough that The Kid wondered where she kept the Colt.

  “You two have had your fun,” Sophia went on. “Go on wherever you were headed when you left. I don’t want to see you back here for at least a week.”

/>   Breck burst out, “Damn it, Sophia, you can’t do that! You got the best liquor in the valley!”

  A thin smile curved her full red lips. “That’s right. Maybe if you get thirsty enough, you boys will remember not to start another brawl in front of my place. Look at that railing! Tell your boss I’ll send him the bill after I have it repaired.”

  “Malone ain’t gonna like that,” Early complained.

  “I don’t give a damn what Black Terence Malone likes or doesn’t like,” Sophia snapped. “You boys tell him what I said. Now get out of here!”

  Scowling, the two men turned toward the hitch rack. The beautiful Sophia had confirmed The Kid’s hunch. Breck and Early worked for Malone, and he was more convinced than ever that they were the bushwhackers from the river, even though neither of them appeared to be wounded.

  As they jerked the reins of their horses loose and swung up in to their saddles, The Kid used his hat to slap dust from his trousers and moved closer. He wanted to get a look at the hoofprints their horses left. If one of them sported a nick in the shoe, that was the last bit of proof he’d need.

  “Stay back, stranger,” Sophia warned him sharply. “Don’t go starting up that fight again after I already saved your bacon once.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not starting anything,” The Kid assured her. He brushed dust from his hat and clapped it on his head, and as he did, Breck and Early turned their horses and rode off at a gallop, causing dust to swirl in the air behind them.

  That didn’t keep The Kid from checking out the hoofprints. His forehead creased. Neither horse left the sort of print he was looking for.

  That didn’t have to mean anything, he told himself. The bushwhackers could still be Malone’s men. They might be in the saloon at that very minute. They could have spotted him and sent Breck and Early out to kill him under the guise of a brawl that got out of hand.