The Loner: The Bounty Killers (2 page)

The Kid had never seen him before.

Without moving the gun, he said, “Did you fellows ever stop to think that maybe this is all a misunderstanding?”

“Naw, you’re the varmint we’re after,” said the man behind him. “You match the description on the wanted posters.”

Bounty hunters!
The men were bounty hunters. That explained everything, and they had indeed come close to killing him over some stupid mistake. “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m not Bloody Ben Bledsoe. I just look a little like him.”

A couple months earlier, The Kid had gone through pure hell because of that resemblance. Bloody Ben Bledsoe was an outlaw who had broken out of prison in New Mexico Territory. The Kid had been captured by a bounty hunter who mistook him for Bledsoe and dragged him back to that hellhole.

It had taken all sorts of trouble to straighten everything out, and a lot of people had died along the way, some innocent, some definitely not.

“Bledsoe?” the man behind The Kid repeated. “I heard Ben Bledsoe got hisself killed down in Arizona. I’m talkin’ about Kid Morgan. You’re him, and we’re takin’ you in.”

The Kid’s breath caught in his throat. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “That’s crazy. There aren’t any charges against me.”

“That ain’t what the wanted posters say. The Territory of New Mexico wants you for breakin’ out of prison and killin’ some guards. There’s a bounty of ten thousand dollars on your head, Kid. Ten grand, American . . . and Lester and me aim to collect.”

“Be . . . be careful, Mack,” the man on the ground said. “He could kill me with the twitch of a finger!”

“Well, that’d be a damned shame,” Mack said. “But you know, if he did, I don’t reckon I’d have to share that ree-ward with nobody, now would I?”

The Kid heard the finality in Mack’s voice. The bounty hunter had decided it would be easier to go ahead and shoot him, no matter what happened to the man’s partner.

Knowing that a bullet was about to be on its way to his back, The Kid threw himself aside just as Mack’s gun roared.

The other man tried to roll out of the way as soon as The Kid’s weight was no longer pinning him to the ground, but he moved too late. The slug sizzled through the space where The Kid had been a shaved heartbeat earlier, struck Lester in the face, and tore half his jaw away.

The Kid landed on his back and spotted a short man with a big beer gut standing about ten feet away. He tried to swing his .44 toward The Kid, but he was far too slow.

The Colt in The Kid’s hand bucked as he squeezed off three shots so swiftly the blasts sounded like one long roar. The slugs punched into Mack’s midsection, boring through the layer of fat, penetrating deep into his belly. The impact of the bullets knocked him back a step and made his derby hat fall off his bald head. He stayed on his feet for a moment, groaning and staggering to the side as he dropped his gun.

“You . . . son of a . . .”

He couldn’t finish the curse. Blood welled over the fingers he pressed to his bullet-ravaged belly. He fell to his knees and then pitched forward onto his face.

The Kid leaped to his feet and swung around to check on Lester.

Moaning and flopping around as he pawed at his ruined face, he was no longer a threat. Dark red blood pooled around his head.

As The Kid watched, Lester went limp and sagged back against the ground. His head flopped to the side, and his glassy eyes seemed to be staring right at The Kid, even though they could no longer see anything.

The Kid hoped there had only been two of them.

Carefully, he checked to make sure both men were dead. Satisfied that they were, he replaced the three rounds he had fired with fresh cartridges from the loops on his shell belt under the tails of the dark coat he wore and then holstered the gun.

He looked around until he found his black, flat-crowned hat that had come off when he first leaped out of the saddle. Picking it up, he slapped it against his leg to get the loose pine needles off, and settled it on his head.

Lester’s horse hadn’t gone far, and The Kid brought it back to the place where the two men had died. The coppery scent of blood hanging in the air, along with the acrid tang of gunsmoke, made the animal nervous. The Kid tied the reins around a sapling to keep the horse from bolting again.

With that done, he fetched his buckskin and the Winchester and looked around for Mack’s horse. He found the animal about a hundred yards up the slope, tied in the trees.

Returning to where he’d been ambushed, The Kid muttered, “You were nothing but a Judas goat, Lester,” then chided himself silently for talking to a dead man.

He checked their pockets and found a small amount of money, a deck of greasy cards, tobacco pouches and cigarette papers, and, in a pocket inside Mack’s coat, a small silver flask half full of whiskey.

None of that was what The Kid was looking for. He dug into their saddlebags, and in the one on Mack’s horse, he found what he sought. He unfolded the piece of paper and smoothed it out. It was a wanted poster, all right, with his name and description on it. In big letters across the top, it declared $10,000 REWARD. The charges were murder, attempted murder, and escaping from prison.

The Kid’s pulse pounded like a drum inside his skull as he stared down at the crudely printed poster. The charges were lies, all lies. He had never killed any of those guards at Hell Gate Prison, nor had he tried to kill them.

He had escaped because it was the only way to clear his name. In the end, when the real Ben Bledsoe had been brought to justice, The Kid has been assured there would be no charges leveled at him because of the prison break.

It was all a terrible mistake.

But two men lay dead on the ground at his feet because of that mistake. And with a ten grand price on his head, Mack and Lester wouldn’t be the last ones to come hunting The Kid.

He uttered a bitter curse as he thought about what might happen if the bogus reward dodgers had spread across the frontier already. There was no place he would be safe. Ten thousand dollars was enough to put every bounty hunter west of the Mississippi on his trail. And something else on the wanted poster made the situation even worse.

Under his name and description and the list of the charges against him was the legend printed across the bottom of the paper.

In big, bold letters, just like the amount of the reward . . .

DEAD OR ALIVE.

Chapter 3

The Kid left the two dead bounty hunters where they had fallen. He wasn’t by nature a callous person, but Mack and Lester had tried to kill him, so he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over leaving them for the scavengers.

As he rode away, he pondered his best course of action. He was in the southeastern corner of Nevada, where the state extended in a triangle between California to the west and the territories of Arizona and Utah to the east. The nearest settlement he knew of was the little mining town of Las Vegas, which he had passed through a few days earlier.

A long way off in the mountains to the northwest lay his former home, Carson City, and the mining town of Buckskin, where his father had served for a time as marshal. The Kid had friends in both places, or rather, Conrad Browning did.

But both places also held bitter memories for him, memories that went far beyond the taste of wormwood and gall. Rebel had been abducted from their home in Carson City. Later Conrad had burned it down to make it look as if he, too, had died so the men responsible for Rebel’s death wouldn’t expect him to come after them.

He wasn’t going back to that part of Nevada, he decided. He might never visit Carson City or Buckskin again, and that would be just fine with him. There was nothing left for him in either place.

It would be a good idea, though, to get in touch with his personal attorney, Claudius Turnbuckle in San Francisco. Claudius would be able to contact the territorial authorities in New Mexico and find out why those wanted posters had been issued. The Kid needed to get the price on his head lifted as soon as possible, before too many bounty hunters set out on his trail.

Las Vegas had a telegraph office, he recalled. He could backtrack and send a wire to Claudius from there, so the lawyer could get started toward clearing up the mess.

The Kid rode east toward the little settlement.

It didn’t take him long to reach the edge of the mountains. He paused in the foothills and looked out over the vast sprawl of desert and plains in front of him. He could make Las Vegas in a day if he pushed the buckskin.

But it was too late in the day to start across. The sun was almost touching the rugged peaks behind him. Better to wait and get a fresh start in the morning, he told himself.

His eyes narrowed as he spotted a thin haze of dust hanging in the air. That meant riders. He couldn’t tell if they were coming toward him or going away from him.

The Kid’s frown deepened as he watched the dust for several minutes. Definitely coming toward him, he thought. More than one or two riders, maybe as many as half a dozen.

Of course, they weren’t necessarily looking for him. They could be on their way somewhere else and not have anything to do with him at all. But it wasn’t a well-populated or widely-traveled area The Kid was riding through. He was simply drifting. He’d wanted to put Arizona, and his troubles there, behind him.

The sight of that dust definitely made him suspicious. All the more reason to hole up somewhere for the night, he told himself. If those riders
were
looking for him, he didn’t want to run right into them.

With that in mind, he rode north along a rocky ridge until he came to a spot where several large boulders clustered, and he could make a small fire without it being seen. There wasn’t much graze for his horse, or water for either of them, but his two canteens were nearly full and he had a little grain left in the pouch that he carried. He and the buckskin could get along just fine until morning.

As dusk began to settle over the rugged landscape, The Kid unsaddled his horse and found enough dried brush to build a tiny fire just big enough to boil some coffee. He had jerky and some stale biscuits in his saddlebags. That would do for a meal.

It was a far cry from the times he had dined in the finest restaurants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, he thought as he hunkered on his heels next to the fire. Those days had been more comfortable, but he didn’t miss them. He felt like he had never been fully alive until he came west.

He couldn’t see the dust anymore in the fading light. The riders might have stopped to make camp for the night, or he might have just lost sight of the dust their horses raised. Either way, The Kid didn’t care. He wanted to steer clear of them, whoever they were.

And yet, as he finished his meager supper and sipped his coffee, doubts began to nag at his mind. Maybe it would be better to know who the men were. If they weren’t looking for him, he could stop worrying about them. If they were . . . he’d have some warning, and he could start figuring out how to deal with that.

To determine who they were and what they were after, he’d have to find their camp. When he gazed along the line of foothills to the south, he picked out an orange glow that came from a campfire. It had to be the bunch he had spotted earlier. There couldn’t be two groups of riders spending the night at the edge of those isolated mountains.

Well, there
could
be, he thought, but it was mighty unlikely.

The fact that they weren’t trying to conceal their campfire told him there were enough of them to feel confident they could handle any trouble that came their way. He would be a fool not to stay as far away from them as he could.

Unfortunately, his curiosity nagged at him. He finished off the last of his coffee and cleaned up after the meal. By that time, the last of the sunset’s rosy glow had disappeared from the sky. It was full dark, with millions of stars glittering in the sable sky overhead.

The Kid estimated the campfire he saw was about a mile away from the boulders where he had stopped. It was a quiet night. The sound of a horse’s hoofbeats would travel a long way in the thin, still air.

If he wanted to spy on the men, he would have to approach their camp on foot. He thought he might be able to work his way close enough to get a good look at them and perhaps even overhear what they were talking about.

He had picketed the buckskin, so the horse couldn’t wander. After heaping sand on what was left of the fire to put out any embers, The Kid put his saddle back on the horse, just in case he needed the animal in a hurry. He patted the buckskin on the shoulder and said, “I’ll be back after a while.”

If anything happened to him, the buckskin would be able to pull loose eventually. From there it would have to fend for itself. Bands of wild mustangs ran free in that part of the country and it might be able to join one of them.

The Kid left all his gear and headed for the camp in the distance. His boots weren’t really made for walking, but unlike cowboys who had spent their whole working lives in the saddle, he wasn’t totally averse to being on foot now and then.

The darkness and the rough terrain meant he couldn’t travel very fast. It took him close to an hour to reach the vicinity of the camp. As he approached he moved slower and more carefully. He didn’t want to accidentally stumble right into the middle of them.

Several different aromas told him he was getting close: woodsmoke, food, coffee, tobacco. He paused to listen and heard the murmur of voices, followed by a man’s laughter. He couldn’t make out any of the words, but he thought he heard several different voices.

As silently as possible, he crept closer. A massive slab of rock leaned away from him, and he thought if he climbed to the top of it, he might be able to look down into their camp.

It was still warm under his hands as the stone clung to the heat of the day. The air had more than a hint of coolness in it, typical of the desert atmosphere. By morning, the temperature would be cold enough to make a man’s breath steam in front of his face.

The men gathered around the campfire were still talking, so he counted on that to cover up the tiny scraping noises his boots made against the rock as he climbed. When he reached the top, he took his hat off and set it aside. Carefully, he edged his head higher to peer over the lip of the rock slab.