The Loner: Seven Days to Die

by J. A. Johnstone

  The night passed peacefully, although while he was awake and standing his turn on guard duty, he noticed how restless Jillian’s slumber was.

  She tossed and turned and made little noises as if her sleep was haunted by nightmares. It probably was, considering everything that had happened to her and all the violence she had witnessed in the past twenty-four hours.

  Before dawn the next morning, he started coffee brewing and began frying up some flapjacks and bacon. The smells woke both Jillian and Drake.

  When Jillian said that she needed to step outside, Drake said, “Fine, but I’m going with you.”

  She gave him a hard stare. “I’m not going to run off, Mr. Drake. I told you, I want to go with the both of you and help Mr. Morgan clear his name.”

  “Yeah, I know, but at this time of morning, there are liable to be bears or mountain lions wandering around out there. I’ll give you as much privacy as I can, but you’re liable to want somebody with a rifle close by.”

  “Oh.” Jillian looked down at the split-logged floor. “I see. In that case…thank you.”

  They went outside and came back a few minutes later. The Kid hadn’t heard any sort of ruckus and assumed no varmints had interrupted anything. The coffee was ready, so he poured it into tin cups from the gear of the dead outlaws.

  After breakfast, The Kid and Drake went out to look over the horses. The mounts that had belonged to the dead outlaws appeared to be good ones.

  Jillian stayed in the cabin to look through the clothes and try to find something more suitable for riding. A short time later she came out dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. The shirtsleeves were rolled up several turns, as were the trouser legs, but other than that the clothes seemed to fit fairly well.

  She had donned the boots that had belonged to the smallest of the outlaws and held a battered black hat in her hands. When she piled her auburn hair on top of her head and then put the hat on, it fit fairly well.

  She asked the question most women would have asked under the circumstances. “How do I look?”

  Drake smiled. “Not quite like a man, but at a distance you might pass for one.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  The Kid said, “It is when the authorities are looking for two men and a woman. A posse would be less likely to pay attention to three men.”

  “Oh,” Jillian said. “I understand.” She paused. “Should I have a gun?”

  “There’ll be a rifle in your saddle boot,” Drake told her. “Have you even shot a handgun?”

  “Well…no.”

  “You’re better off without one, then,” The Kid said. “You’d be liable to shoot yourself, or one of us.”

  She looked a little offended at that blunt statement, but she shrugged and nodded. “All right. When are we leaving?”

  “As soon as we can pack up all the gear and supplies we’re taking with us,” Drake said.

  That and getting the horses ready to ride took another half hour. The Kid tied the three spare mounts together and fastened the lead rope to his saddle horn.

  “I’ll bring up the rear with the extra horses,” he said as he swung up into the saddle. “Drake, you take the lead, since you know where we’re going. Miss Fletcher, you can ride between us. That’ll be the safest spot for you.”

  She summoned up a smile. “You told me to call you Kid,” she said. “If I’m going to do that, you have to call me Jillian.”

  He didn’t know if she was flirting with him or just trying to be friendly. Either way, he didn’t see any need to be rude to her, so he nodded and said, “All right, Jillian. You need any help getting up there?”

  She shook her head and said, “No, I’ve ridden before. Not astride, mind you, but it can’t be that hard.”

  She grasped the horn, put her foot in the stirrup, and lifted herself, swinging her other leg over the horse’s back. A cry of alarm escaped from her as she leaned too far and almost toppled off the other side of the horse. Only a desperate clutch of the saddle horn prevented the fall.

  As she straightened in the saddle, she said quickly, “I’m all right, I’m all right. I’ll get the hang of it, I promise.”

  The Kid managed not to chuckle. He saw Drake hiding a grin as well.

  “I’m sure you will,” The Kid said. “It just takes some getting used to, is all.”

  He knew by the time the sun set again, after a day in the saddle, Jillian’s muscles would be sore as hell. He could do nothing about that. It was her choice to continue along with them, after all. She wasn’t really a prisoner anymore. From a practical standpoint, staying with the two men was the smart thing for her to do.

  They set out, Drake leading the way along a twisting path that serpentined its way up the mountain. The landscape around them was wild and lonely, which came as no surprise to The Kid. Men who rode the owlhoot trails spent a lot of their time as far from civilization as possible.

  The day was as long and hard on Jillian as The Kid had worried it would be. She didn’t make any complaint, but every time they called a halt to rest the horses, he saw the way she bit her lip to stifle a groan of pain as she dismounted. Her face was pale and drawn.

  They switched horses at midday, ate a cold meal of flapjacks and bacon left over from breakfast, and moved on. It was impossible to travel very fast in those rugged mountains. By the time they made camp that night, The Kid estimated that they had gone less than twenty miles.

  But it was that many more miles between him and Hell Gate Prison, he told himself. The best thing about the day was that they hadn’t seen any signs of pursuit. It would be pushing their luck to think they had already given the slip to the search parties Fletcher must have sent after them, but that appeared to be the case.

  After everything that had happened during the past few weeks, he would take all the luck he could get, however improbable.

  Drake had found a secluded glade high on the shoulder of a mountain, not far below a pass. He reined in and said, “This is as good a place as any, I reckon.”

  Jillian couldn’t hold back her reaction when she swung down from her horse. “Ohhhh,” she said as she slumped against the animal and clung to the stirrup to keep from collapsing as her legs tried to fold up beneath her.

  The Kid had already dismounted. Quickly, he stepped over to her and grasped her arm to steady her.

  “It’ll get better,” he assured her.

  “When?” she gasped. “I didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much.”

  “Well, it’ll take a few days,” The Kid admitted.

  “Is there anything that will help it?”

  “Maybe some liniment, if we had any…which we don’t.”

  And if they’d had somebody to apply it, he thought. He certainly wasn’t going to rub liniment into the sore muscles of Jillian Fletcher’s bare inner thighs. That would have been just asking for trouble. So in a way it was a good thing those outlaws hadn’t had any liniment among their supplies.

  They had had several bottles of whiskey, though, one of which Drake now pulled out of a saddlebag.

  “A dollop of this in your coffee tonight will make you feel a little better,” he told Jillian.

  “I’ll take it,” she muttered as she let go of the horse and with The Kid’s help tottered over to a large, flat rock, where she sat down. “I’d like to help make camp, but I don’t think I can right now. I’m not sure I can even move again.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” The Kid said.

  “Yes, but I don’t want you to think I’m not pulling my weight.”

  “Just help me clear my name,” he said. “That’s all I want from you, Jillian.”

  He turned away to unsaddle his horse. As he did, he saw something flicker in her eyes. He couldn’t be sure because the light was fading, but he thought it might be disappointment that he didn’t want anything else from her.

  The Kid and Drake took turns standing watch again that night. Jillian was restless once more, most likely from sore muscles. T
he whiskey in her coffee might have helped, but it couldn’t make the aches go away entirely. She would hurt even worse in the morning, when those muscles had had a chance to stiffen up.

  Sure enough, The Kid had to help her to her feet when it came time to rise. She hobbled around the camp like she was a hundred years old.

  “Maybe you’ve changed your mind about coming with us all the way to where we’re going,” The Kid said.

  She frowned at him and shook her head. “No, I haven’t. I’ll be fine.” She winced as she took a step. “Eventually.”

  “Suit yourself. The coffee will be ready in a few minutes.”

  A short time later, they mounted up and pushed on. Jillian insisted she didn’t need any help and managed to get in the saddle by herself.

  She was a tough young woman, The Kid thought. But with Jonas Fletcher as her father, it wasn’t surprising. She would have to be tough to survive being raised by a man like that.

  They rode through the high pass, and the view in both directions was incredible. Miles and miles of the rugged New Mexico landscape spread out before and behind them. The blue dome of the sky arched over snowcapped gray peaks and deep green valleys. The world appeared new, just born, untouched by man’s violent hand.

  The Kid knew how deceptive that was. Death often lurked behind the beauty. The man who let himself be lulled into believing the world was a peaceful, pristine place wouldn’t live very long. Savagery went hand in hand with tranquility and could strike at any time, without warning.

  Thrusting those gloomy thoughts out of his head, he started down from the pass with his companions. “We’re still heading west,” he called to Drake, who rode at the head of the short column.

  The man looked back and grinned. “That’s right, we are. You trying to find out where we’re headed, Kid?”

  “Just curious, that’s all.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Drake promised. “You’ll be face-to-face with old Bloody Ben before you know it.”

  That day couldn’t come soon enough to suit The Kid.

  The three riders and the extra horses moved through the pass. An hour later they were far enough down the mountain that they could no longer see the pass, even if they had turned around in their saddles to look.

  No one was watching as a lone man on horseback, leading a pack animal, rode through the gap in the peaks and took the same westward trail.

  Chapter 22

  On the seventh day after escaping from Hell Gate Prison, the three riders drew rein atop a low, rocky ridge, and Carl Drake said, “There it is. Gehenna, Arizona.”

  The Kid rested his hands on his saddle horn and leaned forward in the leather. A few days earlier, he had finally taken the time to shave with a razor he’d found in one of the saddlebags. Now that he’d scraped off the whiskers, his face was all hard planes and angles again. His skin had been pale at first, but it was acquiring a healthy tan once more.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “We’ve come from Hades to Gehenna?”

  Drake grinned. “That’s right. Bledsoe said that was one reason he had a soft spot in his heart for this place. Said he’d lived like the devil all his life, so it was fitting that he came from a town called Gehenna.”

  “The place of punishment,” The Kid murmured, remembering the Bible stories of his youth.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” Jillian said from where she sat on horseback between the two men.

  Gehenna wasn’t impressive, that was true, even as frontier settlements went. Its only street stretched for five blocks lined with a dusty, sun-bleached mixture of buildings. Several dozen adobe dwellings were scattered haphazardly around the town’s business district of frame buildings. A creek with banks dotted by scrubby mesquite trees meandered past the southern edge of the settlement.

  The landscape had changed dramatically from the mountains of New Mexico where their journey had begun. The Kid figured the peaks looming in a bluish-gray line several miles to the south were in Mexico, since Gehenna wasn’t far from the border.

  The terrain in the area was flat except for some occasional rolling hills and long, shallow ridges like the one on which the three riders had reined to a halt. The sandy, semi-arid plains stretched as far as the eye could see to the north, east, and west.

  “Why is there even a town here?” Jillian continued. “There’s not a railroad or any other reason I can see for anyone to settle in such a godforsaken place.”

  Drake pointed to the mountains across the border. “I’m just going by what Bledsoe told me, you understand,” he said, “but there are supposed to be several big ranches over there in Mexico, as well as some gold and silver mines in the mountains. This is actually the closest place for the dons who own those haciendas to get supplies, and their vaqueros come here to blow off steam. The mines are owned by Americans, and they send their ore out by mule train to Tucson. The trail comes right through here. So between the vaqueros, the muleskinners, and the American pistoleros hired by the miners to guard those ore shipments, Gehenna is full of tough hombres. It’s a wide-open town. The people who live there make most of their money off various forms of vice, if you know what I mean.”

  The Kid grunted and commented dryly, “Bledsoe must have talked a lot about the place.”

  “What else was there to do in Hades?” Drake asked with a shrug.

  “So what do we do now?” Jillian asked. “Ride in and start asking people if they’ve seen Bledsoe?”

  “That’s a good plan,” Drake said, “if you want to get shot in the back.”

  Jillian flushed. “Well, I don’t know anything about tracking down an outlaw!”

  The Kid glanced at the sky, which was rosy from the glow of the lowering sun barely above the horizon. “It’ll be dark in a little while,” he said. “Probably best to wait until then before we ride in.”

  “That’s right,” Drake agreed. “But you’ll be the only one riding in, Kid. If Bledsoe spotted me, he’d recognize me right away.”

  “He won’t recognize me? I’m the one who’s supposed to look so much like him!”

  “Yeah, but he doesn’t know you exist, so he won’t be expecting to see anybody who looks like him.” Drake smiled. “He won’t be on the lookout for you, so to speak. Now that you’ve shaved that beard off, the resemblance will be even less. If he sees you, he might think you look a little familiar, but he won’t know you.”

  “What about me?” Jillian asked.

  “He saw you at Hell Gate, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “He’ll remember you. Men don’t forget a beautiful woman.”

  Jillian glanced down at herself. “I’m not very beautiful now, sunburned and dressed in men’s clothes and covered with trail dust!”

  The things she said about her appearance were true, but The Kid could have argued with her opinion on whether or not she was beautiful. The sun had put color in her cheeks and the hard days of riding had taken some of the softness out of her features. She had gotten used to spending hours in the saddle and no longer had trouble keeping up with him and Drake. The steel core that could be found in all good frontier women was starting to show through in places.

  But Drake was right about Bledsoe recognizing her. The Kid said, “There’s too big a chance he might spot you. I’ll go in and have a look around first. Once I’ve gotten the lay of the land, we can rendezvous and figure out how to proceed from there.”

  “All right,” Jillian said with a sigh. “It sounds like this could take a while.”

  “It could,” The Kid admitted.

  “I was looking forward to a hot bath. It seems like a year since I’ve had one.”

  “You’ll have to wait a while longer, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about me.”

  Drake said, “We’d better find a place to camp where we won’t be in such easy view of the town.”

  The Kid pointed down the slope. “What about those trees ov
er there by that wash?”

  Drake nodded. “Yeah, it looks like there’s a little bowl there where we can build a fire without it being seen.”

  They rode down the ridge, rocks clattering and sliding around the hooves of the horses, and a short time later came to the grove of cottonwoods next to a dry wash. No water flowed in the arroyo at the moment, but every time it rained a torrent likely rushed through, providing enough moisture for the roots of the trees to take hold.

  A little grass grew, so the horses would have some graze. The Kid and Drake unsaddled and picketed the animals with some help from Jillian, who was growing more experienced in such things. She lent a hand around camp, which she hadn’t been able to do starting out.

  She caught a moment alone with The Kid, while Drake was working with the horses, and said quietly, “I’m a little worried about staying out here alone with Mr. Drake.”

  “He’s treated you proper so far.”

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s true, but you’ve always been close by, Kid. He wouldn’t try anything as long as you’re around.”

  The Kid thought back to the swift ruthlessness with which Drake had acted at times and said, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I don’t think he’s scared of me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Maybe not, but he respects your abilities. That’s the reason he brought you along. He thinks you can help him get what he wants from Bledsoe.”

  The Kid shrugged. “As long as we both get what we want, that’s all right.”

  “I just wish I was going into town with you.”

  “Maybe you can, in a day or two. I’ll have to see if Bledsoe is still in these parts first, and if he is, where he spends most of his time. We might be able to sneak you into town and get you into a hotel room or something like that.” The Kid smiled. “Maybe even get you that hot bath.”

  “I would be eternally grateful for that,” she told him fervently.

  Drake came along then, so they cut the conversation short. He had his arms full of dry cottonwood branches.

  “While you two were gabbing, I got us some firewood,” he said, but he didn’t sound particularly resentful about having to take care of that chore.