The Loner: The Blood of Renegades (7 page)

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Authors: J. A. Johnstone

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BOOK: The Loner: The Blood of Renegades
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Chapter 12
 
By the middle of the day, the three travelers had put the water stop at Navajo Wash far behind them. They headed west, following the railroad. No more trains had come along, westbound or eastbound.
The landscape became even more arid, fully deserving of the name “desert.” Occasional clumps of grass and twisted, stunted mesquite trees were the only vegetation. Those plants didn’t provide much color. Everywhere Conrad looked, his eyes saw only browns, tans, grays, and now and then a splash of red sandstone. He spotted a hawk gliding along high overhead in the silver-blue sky. A lizard scuttled out of their path and into some rocks. Those were the only signs of life as the threesome made their way toward the mountains.
They had too many horses to tie them to the buggy, so Conrad hazed the animals along like a remuda on a cattle drive. Not that he had ever actually
been
on a cattle drive. His father had, though, and Frank Morgan had told him stories about those days. After the Civil War, Frank had wanted nothing more than to return to the ranch in Texas where he’d worked as a cowboy and lived a peaceful life there. Fate had intervened when a bully who fancied himself a fast gun had forced him into a fight. That was when Frank—and the rest of the world—had found out just how fast and accurate he was with a six-gun. A reputation was born, and nothing had ever been the same for Frank Morgan after that.
Conrad knew the feeling. He had been through a number of life-altering events of his own in the past few years, starting with the day his mother had introduced him to Frank and broken the news that the famous gunfighter was Conrad’s real father.
Sometimes a fatalistic gloom gripped him and he believed everything had been predetermined from that moment: his marriage to Rebel, her tragic death, his transformation from a businessman into a deadly gunman who had literally killed more men than he could remember. Although he never lost any sleep over the lives he had ended—he never shot to kill except in self-defense or to save the life of someone else—it seemed like he ought to at least be able to recall the men he had killed. Their deaths tended to blend into a haze of powdersmoke and blood.
“Conrad, what’s wrong?” Selena asked from the buggy seat. “You look like your thoughts are a million miles away.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Not that far. I’m fine.” He glanced at the sky, where the sun was almost directly overhead and beating down with a fierce heat. “We need to find some shade and stop for a while to let the horses rest and cool off.”
“I’m not sure where you’re going to find any shade out here,” Arturo said. “The last place I saw land this flat and empty was down in New Mexico.”
“The
Jornada del Muerto
,” Conrad said, recalling how he and Arturo had first met, back when Arturo still worked for one of Conrad’s enemies. Or rather, for one of Kid Morgan’s enemies, since at that time Conrad had considered his past life dead and buried. “Yes, this is almost as bad. Maybe we can find another trestle and stop under it for a while, or some rocks big enough to give us some shade.”
That hope appeared to be an empty one. Even though they stopped from time to time to rest the horses, the heat drained man and beast alike of their energy. Arturo and Selena had it better because at least they had the meager shade provided by the buggy’s canopy, but the sun was getting to them, too.
Arturo said, “I’ve never understood how it can be so hot during the day in this region and yet so cold at night.”
“That’s the way the desert is,” Conrad said. “I think it must have something to do with how dry the air is. There’s nothing to hold in the heat.”
“You’re probably right. That doesn’t, however, make me feel any better.”
It didn’t make any of them feel better. Another hour crept by. Weariness gripped Conrad and made him sway in the saddle. He fought to stay awake.
Suddenly he spotted something ahead of them and lifted his head. He raised himself in the stirrups to get a better look. A narrow pinnacle of rock jutted into the air. He pointed at it. “Look there.”
Selena said, “That must be what they call Finger Rock. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been here.”
“They could call it Thumb Rock or Toe Rock as far as I’m concerned,” Arturo said. “As long as it provides some shade, I’m glad to see it.”
With renewed energy, they kept moving toward the promised shelter. For every yard they covered, Finger Rock seemed to recede an equal distance, but gradually the gap narrowed. They reached it in mid-afternoon. The rock was twenty feet wide at its base, tapering to a much narrower point sixty feet in the air. The shade it cast on its eastern side was welcome, and the air felt almost blessedly cool.
Conrad unsaddled all the horses, including Selena’s. Her saddlebags were in the back of the buggy now that there was no longer any need to keep their contents secret. Conrad didn’t think any of the horses would stray very far from the shade, so he hobbled them but didn’t picket them.
“We’ll stay here until after dark. That’ll give us a chance to rest and cool off. We can probably travel most of the night. It won’t be hard to follow the railroad, even in the dark.”
“What about Leatherwood?” Selena asked.
“How long would it take him to get back to Juniper Canyon from Navajo Wash?”
“At least half a day, I suppose.”
“And once he got there he’d have to round up more men and fresh horses,” Conrad said. “That would take a while. So at the very best, he couldn’t have started after us again until a little while ago. If anything happened to delay him, he might not be on the trail yet. We’ll be able to stay ahead of him. Anyway, we had to stop and rest the horses. Pretty soon they wouldn’t have been able to go on, and then we really would’ve been stuck.”
“I suppose you’re right. I’ll just be glad when I know I’m somewhere he can’t get at me anymore.”
Conrad didn’t say it, but he knew that wasn’t really possible. They could make it very difficult for Leatherwood to find Selena, practically impossible, in fact, but the chance that he might track her down would always exist. A man who devoted all his time and energy, even his very life, to something was hard to stop. The question was whether or not Jackson Leatherwood was that stubborn.
Selena sat down with her back propped against the rock pinnacle, and within a few minutes she was asleep. Conrad and Arturo were giving water to the horses when Conrad said, “You might as well get some shut-eye, too.”
“What about you?” Arturo asked. “Neither of us has gotten much sleep in the past twenty-four hours.”
“That’s true, but I’ll be all right. You doze for a while, then I’ll wake you.”
“Very well.” Arturo took a blanket from the buggy and spread it on the ground to sit on. He folded another blanket and stuck it behind his head to use as a pillow when he leaned back against the rock. Tipping his derby down over his face, he folded his arms across his chest, and soon dozed off.
Conrad hunkered on his heels and sipped from one of the canteens. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t know when they would find more.
He was still a little irritated Selena had hidden that money from him. On the other hand, he understood why she had done it. He couldn’t blame her for not completely trusting him and Arturo. Growing up in a Mormon community, she might have been taught all Gentiles were not trustworthy. Conrad didn’t know much about what they believed. Like most people, he was aware Mormon men sometimes had multiple wives, but that was about the extent of his knowledge.
He struggled to stay awake for a couple hours while Arturo and Selena slept. Then, quietly so as not to disturb Selena, he shook Arturo awake and took his place. In two more hours, the sun would be down and they could think about moving on.
Sleep came down on Conrad like a sledgehammer. When he woke up, his face was beaded with sweat and he didn’t know how long he had been lost in deep, dreamless slumber.
All he knew was that somebody had just screamed.
Chapter 13
 
Conrad bolted up from the ground. His gun was in his hand without him even thinking about it. The sun was down but a faint rosy glow remained in the sky. When Selena screamed again and Conrad swung toward her, the light was bright enough for him to see the large scorpion that had climbed onto her arm and was now crawling over her shoulder toward the open throat of her shirt. If the venomous creature got inside the shirt, it was bound to sting her. Conrad knew the sting of a scorpion that large might sicken Selena for days and really slow their flight from Leatherwood.
He sprang toward her, reaching out with the Colt. Moving with the same speed that made him such a deadly gunman, he used the revolver’s barrel to flick the scorpion away. It landed on the ground near Arturo, who brought his boot heel down on it with crushing force before the scorpion could scuttle away.
Selena stopped screaming, but still shuddered as she looked down at her shoulder where the scorpion had been. Conrad holstered his gun and held out a hand to her.
“Come on. Better get up in case any more of the critters are stirring around here.”
That got Selena’s attention. She grasped his hand and let him pull her to her feet. She turned around in front of him. “Are there any more of them on me?”
“I don’t see any.” Conrad was slightly amused even though he knew the situation could have been serious.
Selena noticed him smiling and punched his shoulder. “Stop that! Don’t laugh at me. That awful thing could have stung me.”
“I know. That’s why I knocked it away. You’re welcome.”
“Oh.” She looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Of course, I meant to thank you. I just . . . when I opened my eyes and saw that thing . . . I was so scared.”
“It’s fine,” he assured her.
“Were you asleep?”
“I was, but it was time for me to wake up anyway.” He gestured at the fading light in the sky. “We’ll eat a little, give the horses some water, then get moving again.”
By the time they were ready to go, the last of the light from the sun was gone. The glow of a million stars had replaced it. The heat of the day disappeared as the cool night breeze sprung up.
Conrad drove the extra horses along the railroad right-of-way while Arturo and Selena followed in the buggy. The miles fell behind them quickly.
After several hours, low, dark humps appeared in front of them. Hills, Conrad realized. Several small mountain ranges stretched across the isolated country along the Utah-Nevada border. After the flat, arid desert, the higher country would be a relief. On the other side of the border, the terrain dropped again to the vast Humboldt Basin, which was as bad or worse than the country in Utah, but at least there were a few small towns along the rail line. They would be able to put Selena on a train bound for San Francisco. As Conrad had mused earlier, once Selena reached the city by the bay, she wouldn’t be completely out of Leatherwood’s reach, but at least he would have a lot harder time finding her. Conrad planned to send a wire to his lawyers, Claudius Turnbuckle and John J. Stafford, asking them to help Selena. He was sure they would find a safe place for her.
“I’ve never been this far away from home,” Selena said in wonder. “In fact, there were times I asked myself if there really was a world outside Juniper Canyon. The elders like to teach that the world beyond the bounds of our home is nothing but a wasteland.”
“That’s a good way to keep the young people from getting restless and wanting to leave, I suppose,” Conrad said.
“I’m sure that’s part of it, but the way my people have been persecuted, I’m sure sometimes it does seem like the rest of the world is a savage, terrible place.”
From everything Conrad had heard, the Mormons had indeed suffered from persecution in the past, but they had done their own share of persecuting, too, including more than one massacre of Gentiles who didn’t share their beliefs. He had no interest in arguing religion with Selena or anybody else, so he didn’t say anything, just kept pushing the little horse herd westward.
The heavens were gray with dawn in the east and the moon was a glimmering crescent hanging in the western sky when they stopped again. For the past hour they had been following the railroad through rugged, humpbacked hills. When they came to a dry wash that cut through those hills, Conrad called a halt.
“I don’t want to try to get the buggy through that wash until we can see better. Those banks can be tricky. We don’t want to bust a wheel or an axle. Besides, the horses can use some rest again.”
“So can I,” Selena said.
Conrad and Arturo picketed the horses to make sure the animals didn’t stray. While they were tending to that chore, Conrad suddenly smelled smoke and turned to see that Selena had gathered some broken greasewood branches and kindled a fire. The flames leaped brightly.
“What are you doing?” he asked as he strode over to the fire. The sharp tone of his voice made Selena look up in surprise.
“Why, I thought you and Arturo might like some coffee this morning,” she said. “Besides, it’s a little chilly again.”
“Yes, but you didn’t even try to hide that fire.” Conrad started kicking dirt on the flames, causing Selena to gasp and move back hurriedly.
“What are you doing?”
“Putting it out so Leatherwood won’t be able to follow it right to us.” Conrad glanced off toward the flats east of them. “That is, if he hasn’t already seen it.”
“But I thought you said he’d be a long way behind us.”
“You can see these hills for a long way out there,” Conrad told her. “If Leatherwood pushed his men hard during the day yesterday and rode on through the night, he could be close enough behind us to have spotted that fire.”
“Oh, my God,” Selena breathed. “I’m sorry, Conrad. I didn’t even think of that. I . . . I just wanted to do something nice for the two of you.”
“Chances are he didn’t see it. The fire was pretty small, and it didn’t burn for very long. But there’s no point in running that risk when we don’t have to. I’ll build a fire pit from some rocks. That way we can have coffee and some hot food without giving away where we are.”
“You’re right. Of course you’re right. From now on I won’t do anything like that without asking you about it first.”
Conrad went back to the horses, and when he was finished with them he built that fire pit, stacking up rocks in a ring until he could start a blaze inside it without the flames being seen. Arturo took over from there, boiling coffee and frying some hotcakes and bacon. After the hectic, dangerous day-and-a-half they’d had, it felt mighty good to sit and eat and wash the food down with hot coffee.
“Before the day is over, we’ll be in Nevada,” Conrad said. “Might even find a town by then and get you on the train. There should be a westbound along sometime today.”
“I can’t thank you and Arturo enough for everything you’ve done,” Selena said. “If not for the two of you, Leatherwood and his men would have taken me back to—”
Conrad held up a hand to stop her. He lifted his head and listened intently. He had heard something out of place, like the stealthy scrape of boot leather on rocky ground. He dropped his plate and started to his feet. His hand streaked to his gun. As the Colt came out of the holster, men appeared in the gray dawn light, surrounding the camp and leveling rifles at him and Arturo.
“Don’t move!” a voice rasped. “Drop that gun, mister.”
“Please, Conrad,” Selena said, sending a shock through him as she went on, “Do what he tells you.”
The man who had given the order chuckled. “Yeah, you better listen to my wife, mister.”
Slowly, Conrad turned his head to look over his shoulder at Selena. She had drawn a small pistol from under that loose man’s shirt she wore, and had the gun pointed at him.
“Well, hell,” Conrad said.

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