Duff caught the revolver, then turned it around and shot his adversary at point-blank range.
“What the hell? Where did you . . . ?” He fell forward, facedown into the watering trough.
The man’s shout that there were only three of them left corresponded with Biff’s report that there had been eight of them. That meant that now there were only two. He knew that Malcolm was in the saloon, but he had no idea where the other one was.
“MacCallister, look over here!” Malcolm called.
Looking toward the front door of the saloon, Duff saw Malcolm coming outside. Another man was with him and this man was holding Lucy in front of him. Duff couldn’t see that much of him, just about half of his head as he was peeking around Lucy’s shoulder.
“Now, Mr. MacCallister, here is how we are going to play this little drama,” Malcolm said. “You and I will both raise our pistols toward each other. I will count to three, then we will fire. If you fire before I get to three, Mr. Pogue, here, is going to kill this lady. But”—Malcolm smiled, as he held up a finger—“here is what makes the game even more interesting. When I get to three, Mr. Pogue is going to kill the girl, anyway. That means you are going to have to make up your mind as to whether you want to try and save the whore or shoot me. Not fair I know, but those are my rules.”
Duff raised his pistol and shot Pogue, the bullet whizzing cleanly past Lucy and hitting Pogue in the forehead. He dropped like a poleaxed mule.
“No!” Malcolm shouted, shocked at how quickly and cleanly Duff had killed Pogue.
“I’ll make my own rules,” Duff said.
Malcolm had turned his pistol toward Lucy, but realized, at once, that he had made a big mistake. He tried to bring his pistol back to bear on Duff, but it was too late.
Duff’s bullet hit Malcolm between his eyes.
Before he headed back home, the entire town of Chugwater turned out to hail Duff as a hero. Duff had a few people of his own to thank, Biff Johnson for shooting the man off the roof who had a bead on him, Fred Matthews for tossing him a loaded revolver just in time, and Megan Parker, who reminded Duff that Chugwater held a dance, once a month, in the ballroom of the Dunn Hotel.
It was about a ten-minute ride back home, and as he approached, he saw a strange horse tied out front. Dismounting, he was examining the horse when Elmer Gleason stepped out onto the front porch.
“Mr. MacCallister, you have a visitor inside. He is a friend from Scotland.”
Duff smiled broadly. Could it be Ian McGregor? He stepped up onto the front porch, then went inside. “Ian?” he called.
It wasn’t Ian, it was Angus Somerled. Somerled was standing by the stove, holding a pistol that was leveled at Duff.
“Somerled,” Duff said.
“Ye’ve been a hard man to put down, Duff Tavish MacCallister, but the job is done now.”
Duff said nothing.
“Here now, lad, and has cat got your tongue?”
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Duff said.
“Nae, I dinna think you would. Would you be tellin’ me where I might find my deputy?”
“Malcolm is dead.”
“Aye, I thought as much. Killed him, did ye?”
“It seemed the thing to do.”
“There is an old adage: If you want something done right, do it yourself. I should have come after you a long time ago, instead of getting my sons and my deputies killed.”
“That night on Donuum Road, I was coming to give myself up,” Duff said. “None of this need have happened. Your sons would still be alive, Skye would still be alive. But you were too blinded by hate.”
“We’ve talked enough, Duff MacCallister,” Somerled said. He cocked the pistol and Duff steeled himself.
Suddenly the room filled with the roar of a gunshot—but it wasn’t Somerled’s pistol. It was a shotgun in the hands of Elmer Gleason. Gleason had shot through the window, and the double load of 12-gauge shot knocked Somerled halfway across the room.
“Are you all right, Mr. MacCallister?” Gleason shouted through the open window. Smoke was still curling up from the two barrels.
“Aye, I’m fine,” Duff said. “My gratitude to ye, Mr. Gleason.”
Gleason came around to the front of the cabin and stepped in through the front door.
“Seein’ as how I saved your life, don’t you think me ’n you might start callin’ each other by our Christian names?”
“Aye, Elmer. Your point is well taken.”
“Sorry ’bout tellin’ you he was your friend. But that’s what he told me, and I believed him.”
“And yet, you were waiting outside the window with a loaded shotgun.”
“Yes, sir. Well, considerin’ that the fella you went to meet in Chugwater was from Scotland, and wasn’t your friend, I just got to figurin’ maybe I ought to stand by, just in case.”
“Aye. I’m glad you did.”
Gleason leaned the shotgun against the wall and looked at the blood that was on the floor of the cabin.
“I reckon I’d better get this mess cleaned up for you,” he said.
“Elmer, I’m sure you don’t realize it, but you just did,” Duff said.
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THE LONER: RATTLESNAKE VALLEY
by J. A. Johnstone
On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold!
Chapter One
Kid Morgan reined his horse to a halt and looked at the bleached white skull on the ground in front of him. He rested his hands on the saddlehorn and leaned forward to study not only the grotesquely grinning skull but also the two long bones laid across each other that accompanied it.
“Skull and crossbones,” The Kid muttered. “Pirates.”
More than a dozen years earlier, in what seemed now like a previous, half-forgotten lifetime when he had still been known as Conrad Browning, The Kid had read a novel called Treasure Island, so he knew about pirates and the symbol from the flags they flew on their ships.
The question was, what was that ominous symbol doing here in the mostly arid landscape of West Texas, hundreds of miles from the sea?
The Kid lifted his head. Keen eyes gazed at his surroundings. A broad valley bordered by ranges of low, brush-covered hills fell away to his left and right and stretched in front of him for at least twenty miles to the east before the hills closed in sharply and pinched it off, leaving only a narrow opening for the trail. Beyond the hills, what appeared to be an endless stretch of sandy wasteland was visible through the gap. Behind The Kid was the pass through which he had just ridden in the rugged gray mountains that closed off the western end of the valley.
In stark contrast to the desert, the mountains, and the scrubby hills, the valley itself was an unexpected oasis of green. A line of trees marked the meandering course of a river that rose from springs in the mountains and flowed eastward, watering the rangeland on either side of it before the desert wasteland swallowed it whole at the far end of the valley. The grass that covered the range might not have been considered lush in some parts of the world, but here in West Texas, it certainly was. Not surprisingly, The Kid saw cattle grazing here and there, hardy longhorns that could not only survive but actually thrive on the graze they found here. A man who had been riding for days through sandy, rocky country that wasn’t much good for anything, as The Kid had, would find the sight of this valley mighty appealing.
Except for the skull and crossed bones in the trail that looked for all the world like a warning to keep out.
A tight smile pulled at the corners of Kid Morgan’s mouth. Even before the events that had changed his life so dramatically, he had never been the sort of hombre who took kindly to being told what to do. He lifted the reins and heeled the buckskin he rode into motion again.
As he did, movement stirred within the bleached skull, visible behind the empty eye sockets. A rattlesnake suddenly crawled out through one of those sockets and coiled on the ground. The vicious buzz of it
s rattles filled the air as it raised its head, ready to strike. Its forked tongue flickered in and out of its mouth.
The Kid’s horse was used to gunfire and the smell of powdersmoke, but the sound and scent of the snake must have spooked it. The buckskin tossed its head, shied away, and tried to rear up.
The Kid’s strong left hand on the reins kept the horse under firm control. His right hand brushed his black coat aside and dipped to the Colt holstered on his hip. Steel whispered against leather as he drew the gun, then the hot, still air was shattered by the blast of a shot.
It seemed that The Kid hadn’t even taken time to aim, but the snake’s head exploded anyway as the bullet found it. The thick body with its diamond-shaped markings uncoiled and writhed frenziedly as the knowledge of its death raced through its prehistoric nervous system. The Kid’s lips tightened in distaste as he watched the snake whip around and die.
With his gun still in his hand, The Kid dismounted. He stepped around the snake, which had a grisly red smear where its head used to be. A swift kick from The Kid sent the skull bouncing into some brush. He reached down, picked up one of the long bones, and flung it off in a different direction. The other bone went sailing away with another flick of his wrist.
You shouldn’t have done that, a voice seemed to say in the back of his head. Whoever those bones belonged to may have been innocent of any wrongdoing.
The Kid didn’t know if the voice belonged to his own conscience—not that he would have admitted to having such a thing after all the men he had killed, justifiably or not—or to his late wife, Rebel. Either way, hearing voices was a sure sign that a person was going mad.
But the revulsion he had felt toward the snake was the last straw. He’d already been a little angry about being warned to keep out of the valley. He had given in to his irritation.
That wasn’t a good thing, either. He tried to keep his emotions under control at all times. A man who wanted to live very long in this harsh land couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted by hatred or fear or loneliness.
The Kid holstered his gun and turned back toward the buckskin. He was a tall, lean young man, not yet thirty, with sandy hair under a flat-crowned black hat. He wore a dusty black coat over a white shirt, and black trousers that weren’t tucked into his high-topped boots. His saddle was a good one, relatively new, and he carried two long guns in sheaths strapped to the horse, a Winchester and a heavy-caliber Sharps. His clothes and gear were a notch above those of the average saddle tramp, but his deeply tanned face and the slight squint around his eyes, that was becoming permanent, spoke of a man who spent most of his time outdoors.
That hadn’t always been the case. Once he had spent his days either in an office or a mansion, depending on whether or not he felt like working. As Conrad Browning, he had grown up among the wealthy on Boston’s Beacon Hill, had attended the finest academies and universities, had taken his place in the business world, and owned stakes in mines, railroads, and shipping companies. He was rich, with probably more money than he could spend in the rest of his life.
None of which meant a damned thing when his wife was murdered.
So after avenging her death by tracking down and killing the men responsible for it, he chose not to return to his old life as the business tycoon Conrad Browning. Instead, he held on to the new identity he had created in his quest for vengeance, that of the wandering gunfighter known as Kid Morgan, and for months now he had roamed the Southwest, riding alone for the most part, not searching for trouble but not avoiding it when it came to him, as it seemed that it inevitably did.
For a while, a young woman he’d met during some trouble in Arizona had traveled with him, but she had stayed behind in Santa Fe to make a new life for herself while he continued drifting eastward into Texas. That was better, The Kid thought. It was easier not to get hurt when you didn’t allow anyone to get too close to you.
He was reaching for the buckskin’s reins when a voice called, “Don’t move, mister!”
Two things made The Kid freeze. One was the tone of command in the voice, which meant it was probably backed up by a gun, and the other was surprise at the fact that the voice belonged to a woman. He looked over his shoulder and saw her coming out of a nearby clump of boulders. He’d guessed right about the gun. She had a Winchester leveled at him.
“Don’t even twitch a muscle,” she ordered, “or you’ll be damned sorry.”
“Take it easy,” The Kid began, but the woman didn’t. She pulled the trigger and the Winchester went off with a sharp crack.
Just before the shot, though, The Kid heard another wicked buzzing from somewhere very close by. The buckskin jumped and landed running, racing a good twenty yards before it came to a halt. The Kid stayed right where he was, just in case the woman had missed.
She hadn’t. When he looked down, he saw a second rattler writhing and jerking in its death throes at his feet. He hadn’t seen it slither out from among the rocks bordering the trail, but there it was, and it could have very easily sunk its fangs in his leg.
The woman’s shot hadn’t been quite as clean as The Kid’s, however. Her bullet had ripped away a good chunk of flesh from the snake’s body just behind its head, a gaping wound from which crimson blood gouted, but the head was still intact and attached to the body. The mouth was open and ready to bite, and The Kid knew that dying or not, the venom was still there and the creature was as dangerous as ever.
He lifted his foot and brought the heel of his boot crunching down on the snake’s head, striking almost as fast and lethally as a snake himself.
He ground his heel back and forth in the dirt, crushing the rattler’s head and ending its threat. Then he looked over at the woman, who had lowered the rifle, and said coolly, “Thanks for the warning.”
“I shot the blasted thing.”
“Yes, but you didn’t kill it,” The Kid pointed out.
“You know how hard it is to hit the head of a snake when it’s moving?”
The Kid smiled and made a casual gesture toward the second reptile carcass that lay on the ground nearby. “Apparently, I do,” he drawled.
The woman came forward, looked at the snake The Kid had shot, and frowned. “That first shot I heard?”
“Yeah.”
She let out a low whistle of admiration. “Pretty good shooting.”
The Kid could have said the same thing about her appearance, as well as her shooting. She was in her early twenties, he estimated, with curly golden hair pulled back behind her head. She wore a low-crowned brown hat with its strap taut under her chin. Her skin had a healthy tan a little lighter in shade than her hair. She wore a brown vest over a white shirt and a brown riding skirt and boots. She didn’t look like the sidesaddle type.
She still held the Winchester, and while the rifle wasn’t pointed at The Kid, she carried it with an easy assurance that said she could swing the barrel toward him again very quickly if she needed to. Keeping her distance, she asked, “Who are you?”
“The name’s Morgan,” he replied, not offering any more information than that.
“Why’d you kick that skull off into the brush? The poor hombre it belonged to never did you any harm.”
“I know,” he said without mentioning that the same thought had occurred to him. “I took it as a warning to keep out of the valley . . . and I don’t like being told where I can and can’t go.”
“A warning is exactly what it was,” she said, “and you were foolish to disregard it. But if you were bound and determined to do that, why didn’t you just ride around it?”
“I wanted whoever put it there to know how I felt.” He paused and studied her. “Was that you?”
She bristled in anger. The Winchester’s muzzle edged toward him as she said, “Do I look like the sort of person who’d do something like that?”
“I don’t know,” The Kid said. “That’s why I asked. You’re the one who just told me I’d be making a big mistake if I rode on into the valley.”
<
br /> “Well, for your information, I didn’t put those bones there. I’m not the one you have to worry about. It’s—”
She stopped short. Her head came up in a listening attitude. Alarm leaped into her eyes.
The Kid heard it, too. A swift rataplan of hoofbeats that approached too fast for them to do anything. Half a dozen riders swept around a stand of thick brush about fifty yards away and thundered toward them.
Chapter Two
There was nothing The Kid could do except stand his ground. He had five rounds in his Colt, which meant it wasn’t possible to kill all six of the strangers if gunplay broke out.
But the young woman was armed, too, he reminded himself, and if she could account for one or two of them, he might be able to get the rest. Of course, he would probably die, too, and so would she, but he believed it was better to go down fighting and take as many of your enemies with you as you could.
Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, he thought as the riders reined in . . . although from the looks of this bunch, they were no strangers to killing.
The man who sat his horse a little in front of the others was a big hombre, tall and broad-shouldered with brawny arms. The sleeves of his blue shirt were rolled up over forearms matted with dark hair. More hair curled from the open throat of the shirt. A beard jutted from his belligerent jaw. A gray hat was cuffed to the back of his head. He wore a pair of pearl-handled revolvers. Cruel, deep-set eyes studied The Kid from sunken pits under bushy eyebrows.
The apparent leader was the biggest of the bunch, but the man who rode to his right was almost as large. His slablike jaw bristled with rusty stubble, and a handlebar mustache of the same shade twisted over his mouth. As he took off the battered old derby he wore and used it to fan away some of the dust that had swirled up from the horses’ hooves as they came to a stop, The Kid saw that the man was totally bald. The thick muscles of his arms and shoulders stretched the faded red fabric of the upper half of a set of long underwear he wore as a shirt. Double bandoliers of ammuntion crisscrossed over his barrel-like chest. He held a Winchester in his right hand.
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