If that was true, then what in blazes did some bandido/revolutionary want with him? Ramirez couldn’t be trying to recruit him to his cause, could he? Knocking him out and kidnapping him would be a mighty poor way of doing that.
Unable to come up with any real answers to the puzzles facing him, Frank cleared his mind and let himself rock along in the wagon. They stopped in the middle of the day to let the horses rest. With obvious reluctance, Kern held a canteen and gave Frank a drink of lukewarm water, then put a strip of jerky in his mouth.
“That’ll have to hold you until we get where we’re going,” the man said. “We won’t be stopped long enough to build a fire and cook a meal. Besides, smoke draws attention.”
“What are you worried about?” Frank asked around the jerky. “A posse?”
Kern snorted and said, “Not hardly. We got out of Tucson right at sunup without anybody having any idea you were in the back of this wagon. I’m sure somebody’s found that old man before now, but there’s nothing he could tell them about who knocked him out. Bracken may not be all that smart, but he’s good at things like that.”
Frank made a mental note of the disparaging remark Kern had just made about his fellow hardcase. That might not ever come to anything, but knowing how Kern felt about Bracken could be handy information to have at some point.
“What about Indians?” Frank asked. “Haven’t heard about them causing any trouble along the border lately, but there are still some bronco Apaches up in the mountains and you can’t ever predict what an Indian might do.”
“Not worried about them, either,” Kern said. “But being careful never hurt anybody. Now, shut up and gnaw on that jerky. You’ll get another drink later.”
Judging by the way Frank’s stomach felt, it had been a good long time since that breakfast at Sorensen’s café, so while the jerky wasn’t much of a meal, it was better than nothing. A short time later, the wagon resumed its journey.
In the heat of the afternoon, with the rocking motion lulling his senses, Frank dozed off, waking only when Kern stopped the wagon again to give the team a respite. Kern let him drink again, as promised. He didn’t see Antonia or Bracken but assumed they were somewhere close by, maybe resting their mounts, maybe scouting the trail ahead.
Late in the day, Kern slowed the vehicle again. A swift rataplan of hoofbeats dwindled up ahead. Either Antonia or Bracken had ridden on.
It was Bracken, Frank discovered a moment later when Antonia rode up behind the wagon and peered through the opening in the canvas cover at him.
“We have almost reached our destination, Señor Morgan,” she said. “Your curiosity is about to be satisfied, to a certain extent, at least. My father will tell you as much as pleases him.”
“You mean Diego Ramirez?”
Her finely arched eyebrows rose. She said, “You know of my father?”
“I’ve heard of him,” Frank said. “I’ve heard that he’s a no-good bandit.”
Antonia’s features tightened. “You would be wise to hold your tongue, señor. My father is firmly committed to the nobility of his cause.”
“But you’re not?”
She didn’t reply. Instead she pulled up on the reins and wheeled the black horse away from the wagon. Frank heard the thudding hoofbeats as she rode on ahead.
Frank leaned forward to peer past Kern on the driver’s seat. He could see that they were approaching some open wooden gates in what looked like a fairly tall, thick adobe wall. Beyond the entrance were a large plaza and some adobe buildings, and past them . . .
Rearing up was a huge pile of stone, adobe, and logs, a massive structure topped by towers and battlements that reminded Frank of pictures he had seen in books. What he was looking at was nothing less than a castle in the desert.
Chapter 8
The wagon rolled through the open gates. Frank caught glimpses of men standing guard there, burly Mexicans with high-crowned sombreros and bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossed on their chests. Inside the compound were more men. Most of them were Mexican, but a good number of gringos stood around, too, as well as a few who appeared to be Indians. All of them looked like they had gathered as if in anticipation of seeing something interesting.
Frank had a hunch that “something” might be him.
He looked out the back of the wagon and saw the gates swinging closed. From here he could also see a parapet along the inside of the wall where men could stand to fire rifles at anyone attacking the place. He didn’t see any cannon, but he wouldn’t be surprised if some of the big guns were around here someplace. He had just entered a veritable fortress.
Kern slashed the reins against the backs of the team and sent the horses forward at a faster pace. That seemed unnecessary to Frank—they had already arrived at their destination, after all—but as he heard cheers erupting from the assembled men, he realized Kern had done it to make an impression on them. Kern hauled on the lines and swung the wagon in a tight turn that brought it to a halt broadside in front of an adobe building with wooden vigas protruding from the wall just below the roof. Netting hanging from those beams cast some shade over a gallery with a stone floor.
Men climbed into the wagon, grabbed hold of Frank, and lifted him out into the late-afternoon sunlight. Those slanting rays flickered on the blade of a knife as one of the bandits cut the bonds around Frank’s ankles so he could stand and walk on his own. His wrists remained lashed together behind his back, though.
A rifle barrel prodded him toward the gallery along the front of the building. Antonia stood there under the netting. Her hat was thrust back off her gleaming raven hair now and hung by its chin strap behind her head. She placed one hand on a neatly curved hip and gestured toward Frank with the other hand.
“Look,” she said to a man sitting in a large wicker chair on the gallery. “I told you I would bring him, and I did. This is Frank Morgan, the famous Drifter!”
The man in the wicker chair regarded Frank from under the broad brim of a straw planter’s hat. His face was dark and hawklike, testifying to some Indian blood in his heritage, but his eyes were startlingly blue, a legacy from his Spanish ancestors. A thick black mustache drooped over his wide mouth. He wore gray wool trousers and an embroidered vest over a white shirt with an open throat. As far as Frank could tell, he wasn’t armed.
“Señor Morgan,” the man said, “I apologize for any indignities and inconveniences you may have suffered, but such was necessary, I’m afraid. Welcome to the stronghold of Diego Ramirez. I am, as you may have guessed, Diego Ramirez.”
“I’ve met your daughter,” Frank said with a nod toward Antonia.
“Quite an exceptional child, as I gather you have already become aware.” Ramirez looked at one of the heavily armed men standing under the shade with him and said, “Cut our visitor’s hands loose.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Antonia asked sharply.
“I never give an order unless I am sure it is a good idea,” Ramirez responded with a trace of steel in his voice.
The man he had spoken to drew a knife from a sheath at his waist and stepped behind Frank, who wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t about to get that blade buried in his back. The bandit did as he was ordered, though, and cut the ropes around Frank’s wrists. It felt good to pull his arms around in front of him again. He flexed his fingers and massaged his wrists where the bonds had chafed them.
Ramirez went on, “Nothing I have ever read or heard about you, Señor Morgan, would lead me to believe that you are an insane man.”
“I’d like to think I’m not loco,” Frank said.
“Then you understand how foolish it would be to try anything while surrounded by fifty armed men who would not hesitate to shoot you down in my defense.”
“I don’t intend to. As your daughter and I discussed earlier, I’d like to satisfy my curiosity. I figure that if I’m patient, you’ll tell me what it is I’m doing here.”
“Of course.” Ramirez took a pair of cigars from
a pocket in his vest and held one out toward Frank. “Would you care for a smoke?”
Frank shook his head and said, “Thanks, but I don’t use ’em.”
“He drinks lemon phosphates, too,” Bracken said in a jeering tone. He was standing to the side with Kern, who had climbed down from the wagon. Bracken’s thumbs were hooked in his belt, but his casual pose was obviously just that—a pose. Frank could tell he was tense and wanted to reach for his gun. Bracken wanted to kill him, and sooner or later, the man would try. That was a good thing to keep in mind.
“A man’s tastes are his own, and he has a right to them,” Ramirez snapped as he directed a slight frown toward Bracken.
“Sure, boss,” the gunman agreed quickly.
Ramirez put away the second cigar and stuck one of the cheroots in his mouth. He didn’t light it, however, but said around it, “What you are doing here is very simple, Señor Morgan. You will either make me a very rich man . . . or you will die.”
* * *
Frank Morgan was marched at gunpoint into the big, castlelike building that was Diego Ramirez’s stronghold. The inside of the place was as impressive as the outside, with granite floors, tapestries and paintings hung on the walls, heavy, overstuffed furniture, chandeliers and wall sconces with crystal fixtures.
However, when Frank looked a little closer, he saw the patina of dust that covered many of the furnishings, as well as the wear and tear, the damage from the elements and animals. Some of the walls showed signs of recent repairs.
Ramirez hadn’t built this hacienda, Frank decided. He had found it when the Rurales ran him and his men out of Mexico. Someone had settled here in the past and poured a great deal of money into establishing a ranch, only to have it fail for some reason. Indian attacks, maybe, or the harsh, unforgiving climate. Frank estimated the house was around a hundred years old, dating back to when this region had still been part of the Spanish colony in the New World. It might be even older than that. But at some point, it had been abandoned to sink back into obscurity . . . until Diego Ramirez came along and made it his headquarters.
Kern, who was in charge of the men guarding Frank, motioned him up a broad, open staircase that curved along one wall.
“The boss said to put you in one of the rooms on the second floor,” Kern explained. “The door’s mighty thick and has a good lock on it, and the only window has iron bars over it. So don’t go thinking you’ll be able to break out.” The man shrugged. “Even if you did, where would you go? You’d still be in the middle of all of us.”
“If it was up to me, I’d throw you in the damn dungeon,” Bracken put in. He was part of the detail charged with locking Frank up. He laughed and went on, “Yeah, that’s right. This place has a dungeon in it. I reckon those old Spaniards who built the place threw their Indian slaves in there whenever they gave ’em trouble. Probably tortured ’em some, too.”
Bracken sounded like he wouldn’t mind trying his hand at that. Frank didn’t rise to the bait and respond to the man’s jeering comments.
The room on the second floor, behind a heavy door and with only a single barred window, just as Kern had said, was comfortably furnished with a four-poster bed, an armchair, a wardrobe, and a dresser. Indian rugs lay on the floor. Frank supposed he couldn’t complain about the accommodations, but the fact that he was a prisoner still grated on him.
Ramirez hadn’t gone into detail about why Frank had been brought here. He had uttered only the cryptic comment about Frank making him a rich man. Easy enough to guess what the bandit leader had in mind, though. He had found out somehow that Frank was Conrad Browning’s father and a partner in the vast Browning business empire. Ramirez intended to demand a huge ransom for him. Frank had no doubt of that.
He hoped Conrad wouldn’t pay these outlaws a damned cent. He would prefer dying to giving them what they wanted. And if it ever came down to that, he would put up a fight and make sure he took some of them with him.
Kern, Bracken, and the other two gunmen who had brought him up here left then, locking the door behind them. Frank immediately checked around the door to make sure it couldn’t be loosened in its frame. Seeing that it couldn’t, he went to the window to check the bars. They had wrought iron scrollwork attached to them to make the window look decorative, but in reality they would work just fine to keep anybody inside from getting out. Frank examined the way they were set into the thick stone wall. If he’d had a hammer and chisel, he might have been able to chip away at the mortar and loosen some of the bars . . . in a month or so. Since he didn’t have a hammer and chisel and wasn’t likely to, thinking about it was a waste of time, anyway. But what else did he have to do right now?
An hour or so later, a key rattled in the door lock. Frank was sitting on the bed with his legs stretched out in front of him. He swung them off the bed and stood up as the door opened into the room. The man who had just unlocked the door stepped back in the corridor and raised the shotgun he held. He pointed the twin barrels at Frank and said, “This scattergun will splatter you all over the walls if you try anything, Morgan. The boss doesn’t want that, so just stay right where you are.”
“I don’t want it, either,” Frank said.
The man moved into the room. He gestured with the shotgun and said, “Now, move over there and sit down in that chair.”
Frank sat. The shotgunner put his back against the opposite wall and kept the weapon trained on the prisoner. Frank thought he had seen the man outside among the other members of Ramirez’s gang when the wagon arrived, but he couldn’t be sure about that and knew it didn’t really matter.
Bracken and Kern came in. Bracken moved up on Frank’s left, drew his revolver, and pressed the barrel to Frank’s head. The shotgunner stepped away from the wall enough for Kern to pass behind him, so Kern didn’t have to get into the line of fire. He moved into position on Frank’s right and put his gun to Frank’s head, too.
“Now, don’t move and don’t try anything,” Kern warned.
“I’m not likely to with two guns to my head, am I?”
Bracken said, “Who knows just how loco you really are, old man?”
Frank was tempted to give them a demonstration of how loco he could be, but he held down the urge. His time was coming, he told himself. He was sure of that.
Another man came in carrying something that Frank recognized as a camera on a tripod. He’d had a few pictures made in his life, the earliest ones the sort where he’d had to sit still for minutes at a time while the photographer worked under a big black cloth draped over him and his apparatus. This camera was a more advanced type than that. It was smaller, more boxlike, with a leather carrying handle on the top. The man opened the tripod’s legs and set it down so the camera was pointed at Frank.
The photographer was a short, heavyset Mexican with thick, curly hair. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and black string tie. Drops of sweat beaded his face, but he seemed more nervous than overheated.
“Sit very still, señor,” he said. “This will not take long.”
“I know how cameras work,” Frank said.
“Ah, but this is not just any camera,” the man said, pride in his profession and equipment blunting his anxiety for a moment. “This is a Brownie 2. The very latest thing. I saved for months to order it from the Eastman Kodak company. It takes only a second—” He reached out and pushed a button on the side of the box. Frank heard the thing click. “You see? It is done.”
“Take a few more, just to be sure,” Kern ordered.
“Sí, señor.” The man turned a knob on the side of the box, pressed the button again, and repeated that process twice more. “One of those should be perfect for what Señor Ramirez wants.”
“Damned well better be,” Bracken said. “If you can’t do the job, he’ll find somebody who can.”
The man squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t any more than four inches over five feet.
“No one in this part of the terr
itory knows more about the photographic arts than do I, Señor Bracken,” he said with wounded dignity in his voice. “I worked for Señor C. S. Fly himself in Tombstone and learned a great deal from him.”
“Yeah, yeah, Armendariz, we’ve heard you bragging about how you were there when the Earps and Doc Holliday shot it out with the Clanton bunch. Nobody gives a damn.”
The man with the shotgun said, “Take your stuff and get out of here, Armendariz. You know what the boss wants.”
“Sí, sí,” the little man said. He closed the tripod, picked it up along with the camera, and bustled out.
The shotgunner kept Frank covered while Kern and Bracken stepped away from Frank and holstered their guns. They left the room first, then the shotgunner backed out.
“You fellas plan on feeding me?” Frank asked before they shut the door.
“You’ll get fed when we’re damn good and ready,” Bracken said from the corridor outside. He slammed the door and turned the key in the lock.
What had just happened was even more proof that Frank’s hunch was right. Ramirez wanted proof that Frank was his prisoner, and a photograph of him with guns being held to his head would provide that. Ramirez probably planned on sending that picture to somebody.
Frank had a pretty good idea who that somebody would be.
Chapter 9
San Francisco
Conrad Browning closed his eyes and massaged his temples for a moment. Even though he had been working all morning, the pile of paperwork in front of him on the desk didn’t seem to have diminished any. What was it, he asked himself again, that had prompted him to give up the wandering life of Kid Morgan to resume being Conrad Browning, business tycoon?
The run-in on the docks with Raymond Moffatt and his bruisers had taken place a week earlier. Conrad still thought about it during idle moments. That brief flurry of action had been the high point of his life in recent months. Was he that addicted to excitement? It seemed so.
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