Conrad’s gaze lingered on Frank. He could never think of the gunfighter as his father. Too much time had gone by when neither of them was even aware of the other’s existence. The bond that should have been there between father and son simply wasn’t there and couldn’t be forced, no matter how hard Frank tried with his paternalistic advice.
But perhaps someday they could be friends, could feel a mutual respect for each other.
Not likely, Conrad told himself bitterly, since Frank had no respect for him. In the eyes of Frank Morgan, he was just a helpless tenderfoot, a greenhorn, a damned Easterner. And all that was true. Conrad was not a frontiersman, and doubted that he had the ability to ever fit that description. The fact that he was a canny businessman meant nothing to Frank, who judged men solely by how they handled horses and guns and things like that.
No, Conrad thought with a sigh, he and Frank would never be like a typical father and son, and they would never be friends either. Hoping otherwise was just a waste of time.
And where, he asked himself as he suddenly stiffened, had Rebel gotten off to?
Because her bedroll was empty, the blankets thrown back.
He hadn’t even noticed her leaving.
Alarmed, Conrad started to his feet. He froze as he heard a sound near him, the scraping of a foot on the rock. He turned quickly toward it, bringing up the rifle in his hands. If she thought she could ambush him—
“Conrad, wait!” Rebel’s familiar voice hissed. “Don’t shoot. It’s just me.”
She pulled herself up on the rock next to him. “What are you doing here?” he asked in an angry whisper as he settled back where he had been sitting. “You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“I know. I couldn’t go to sleep. So I thought I’d come up here and talk to you for a little while.”
“Really? I was under the impression that you didn’t care for talking to me.”
“What gives you that idea?” Rebel asked as she sat down beside him. Her hip was close to his, but not quite touching.
Butter wouldn’t melt in that one’s mouth. She would say anything, do anything, to get what she wanted, Conrad warned himself. He had to be careful—
“If you don’t want me up here, I’ll go back down,” Rebel said when Conrad didn’t answer. “I don’t want to annoy you.”
There was something in her voice, a hint of hurt feelings, and for some reason that bothered him. He said quickly, “I didn’t say that you annoy me.”
“You sort of act like it. Not only right now, but all the time.”
“You’ve misinterpreted my attitude,” Conrad said stiffly. “I have nothing against you. Well, other than that business of trying to kill us, of course.”
“I’ve said I was sorry for that. Didn’t you ever make a mistake, Conrad? Didn’t you ever do something and wish later that you could take it back, make things like it had never happened?”
“That’s impossible,” he said.
“I know that. But it’s not impossible to forgive somebody.”
He frowned. “Is that what you’re doing? Asking for forgiveness?”
With an exasperated sigh, Rebel threw her hands in the air. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past couple of days? Don’t you pay any attention to what’s going on around you? Or do you just live in a world of your own all the time?”
Wounded, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“All right,” she grated. “If you don’t notice what people say, maybe you’ll notice this.”
She turned toward him, moving quickly so that he didn’t quite know what was happening, and put a hand on either side of his face. Leaning in, she pressed her mouth hard against his.
The kiss took him by surprise. His eyes widened. And then, as if of their own accord, they closed. He gave himself over to the sensation of Rebel’s hot, sweet, moist lips moving against his. Instinctively, he returned the pressure.
Conrad couldn’t have said how long the kiss went on. Long enough so that when Rebel finally pulled her head back, he was breathless and his heart pounded heavily in his chest and he could feel the blood racing through his veins like a mountain stream cascading down from the high country.
“Oh, my,” he said.
“Damn right,” she said. And then she kissed him again.
This one didn’t last as long, but it was almost as potent. When they broke apart, he felt as if he might never be able to breathe correctly again. She had permanently impaired him with her passion. A voice in the back of his brain shouted madly for him not to trust her. She was a seductress, a jezebel, a . . . a . . .
“If that doesn’t convince you I’m sorry, I don’t know what will,” she said. “But that’s darned well as far as I’m gonna go just to say I’m sorry.”
“Was that . . . the only reason you kissed me . . . to say you were sorry?”
“Why else?”
“Well, I thought perhaps . . . I’m unsure how you feel toward me, Rebel. I don’t know if you actually, well, like me, or if you just, uh, enjoy, uh . . .”
“I don’t go around kissing fellas just for the fun of it,” she said solemnly, “if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Yes, I . . . I suppose I was.”
“And as for whether or not I like you . . . you’re not the most likable sort in the world, Conrad Browning. You don’t go out of your way to get anybody to like you. You just go your own way, and if anybody doesn’t care for it, then to hell with them.”
“I’m accustomed to having a great deal of responsibility in the business world. I have to make important decisions and see that they’re implemented properly.”
“You didn’t decide I was going to kiss you,” Rebel pointed out. “That just sort of happened.”
“Yes,” Conrad said softly, “it did.”
“And it didn’t kill you either.”
“No. It most certainly didn’t.”
“You see what I’m saying, Conrad? Just let things happen. You don’t have to be in complete control all the time. Then folks might see you a little different.”
“You really think so?”
“I kissed you, didn’t I?” Rebel stood up and brushed off the seat of her trousers. “Reckon I’ll go back down there and try to get some sleep. Morning comes early in these parts.”
“You’re leaving?” he said, trying not to sound overly alarmed by the prospect—when in truth he didn’t want her to go.
“Why not? You have anything else you want to say—or do?”
Conrad took a deep breath. “Uh . . . no. No, I don’t suppose I do. Good night, Rebel. I hope you get to sleep all right this time.”
“Thanks. Good night, Conrad.”
Did she sound a little disappointed that he hadn’t asked her to stay up here with him? He wasn’t sure. He started to call to her as she began to climb down the rocks, started to ask her to come back. But he didn’t, and a moment later she was gone. He watched as she crawled back into her bedroll, pulled the blankets tight around her, and lay still. He couldn’t tell for sure from where he was, of course, but he thought she went to sleep fairly quickly.
At least he didn’t have to worry about dozing off while he was on guard duty. After the things she had said—and done—he had a feeling that he wasn’t going to be sleeping any time soon.
* * *
After a peaceful night and a good breakfast the next morning, they followed the spur line northward, climbing into the mountains through a long pass. Frank knew that even with a good crew, building a rail line through mountains was a slow, back-breaking process. Often the rail bed had to be blasted out of the sides of the peaks with dynamite. There were tunnels to be dug, trestles to be constructed, and steep grades to be somehow tamed. More than twenty years earlier, as the great drive to complete the transcontinental railroad was under way, the Union Pacific had fairly raced westward across the Great Plains while the Central Pacific, building east from the West Coast, had been forced to grind its
way foot by foot through California’s Sierra Nevadas and then into the mighty Rockies themselves. A lot of laborers, coolies imported from China, had died before the two lines finally linked up at Promontory Point, Utah. Of course, plenty of Irish workers on the Union Pacific had been killed in construction accidents too. All in all, building railroads was just a mighty dangerous business under the best of circumstances.
The men working for Conrad didn’t need any extra dangers holding them back. That was why The Drifter was here.
Conrad and Rebel were unusually quiet today. They weren’t sniping at each other as they often did. The night before, not long after Frank had turned in, he had roused from sleep enough to think that maybe he heard a pair of voices talking softly. Dog had been sleeping peacefully beside him, so he knew the conversation, if he was really hearing one, didn’t represent a threat. He had gone back to sleep.
Now he wondered if Conrad and Rebel had had a talk of some sort while Conrad was standing guard. Maybe they had worked things out between them. Frank hoped that was the case.
As they climbed higher, there were places where they had to ride on the roadbed itself, letting the horses pick their way along between the cross-ties. The ledges on which the tracks were laid were too narrow to proceed any other way. They were on one such ledge that curved around the side of a mountain when a booming noise sounded. Frank was in the lead. He reined in, forcing Conrad and Rebel to do likewise.
“Hear that?” he asked.
“It would be difficult to miss such a sound,” Conrad said. “It was an explosion of some sort, wasn’t it?”
Frank nodded and said, “Yeah, we must be getting close to the railhead. That blast wasn’t too far away. They’re probably blasting out a tunnel or leveling a slope.”
He had just hitched Stormy into a walk again when another explosion sounded. This one was much larger and seemed to shake the very mountain.
“Frank!” Conrad said. “That didn’t sound right!”
“Yeah, it was too big for a normal blast,” Frank said with a frown. “Maybe somebody used too much dynamite.”
Worried now, Frank got the big Appaloosa moving again. They had gone only a short distance when he heard the sudden popping of gunshots up ahead. Something was definitely wrong. He couldn’t gallop up this ledge, though, not without risking a fall. There was about a forty-foot drop-off to his left, not tremendously high, but steep enough so that a tumble down it would probably be fatal. As guns continued to bark, Frank rode forward slowly, his face grim as the delay chafed at him.
Then, with a pounding of hoofbeats, a rider came into view about a hundred yards ahead of them, swinging around the curve of the mountainside. The man was running his horse recklessly. As he spotted the riders on the tracks ahead of him, he jerked up the gun in his hand and began to fire, flame spouting from the muzzle of the revolver.
Chapter 13
Frank whipped out his Colt as a slug sizzled past his head, close enough so that he felt the wind-rip of its passage as well as heard it. Another bullet struck a cross-tie in front of Stormy and kicked up splinters. The big Appaloosa stood steady, though, not spooked by the shots.
The gun in Frank’s hand came level, but before he could pull the trigger, the horse charging down the ledge suddenly faltered. Frank figured one of the animal’s hooves had hit one of the cross-ties wrong, throwing it off stride. The horse nickered frantically as it tried to regain its balance.
The rider yelled a curse and tried to bail out of the saddle to his left, away from the drop-off. He was too late. The out-of-control horse plunged over the edge, taking the rider with it. The man screamed as he found nothing but empty air beneath him and his mount.
He was still in the saddle when the two of them struck the rocky slope about thirty feet down from the ledge. The impact separated them. Man and horse bounced off and fell the remaining ten feet, landing on the rocks, among which flowed a tiny creek.
Frank had had the best view of the accident because he was in the lead, but Conrad and Rebel saw the fall too. Rebel cried out in horror, and Conrad exclaimed, “Good Lord!”
Grimly, Frank holstered his gun, knowing he wouldn’t need it again, at least not right away. He hitched Stormy into a slow, careful walk and rode forward until he reached the spot where the man and horse had gone off the ledge. He dismounted and looked down at the broken, motionless bodies below.
“Are they dead?” Conrad asked.
Frank was about to say yes when the horse abruptly tried to rear up, whinnying in pain. At least two of the animal’s legs were broken. Frank didn’t hesitate. He turned to Stormy, pulled his Winchester from its saddle sheath, and drew a quick bead. The rifle cracked, and the injured horse fell silent. Rebel turned her face toward the rock wall for a moment even though Frank knew she understood. She had been raised on a ranch, and she would be all too aware that sometimes a quick end was the greatest mercy.
The man hadn’t moved, and from the way his head was canted at an odd angle on his shoulders, Frank didn’t expect him to. Conrad dismounted, walked up alongside Frank, and asked, “Who in blazes was he, and why was he shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, but I’ve got a hunch he was mixed up somehow with that last big blast we heard.” Frank turned to Stormy, replaced the Winchester, and took his rope off the saddle. He tied one end of it to the saddle horn.
“What are you doing?” Conrad asked.
“Got to go down there and make sure he’s dead.”
“Can’t you tell that from here?”
“I’m pretty certain, but that’s not good enough,” Frank explained. “Not when you’re talking about a man’s life.”
Rebel had dismounted too. She came up to them and asked, “You want me to hold Stormy’s reins, Frank?”
“That’s not necessary. He won’t go anywhere.”
Frank tossed the rest of the rope over the edge and then put on a pair of gloves he took from his saddlebags. Grasping the rope tightly, he stepped down off the ledge and began lowering himself, bracing his feet against the rocky slope as he let himself down. It didn’t take long for him to reach the bottom.
When he got there, he stepped past the body of the horse with its bullet-shattered skull and went to the rider, who had landed a little farther out from the base of the wall. The man wore high-topped boots, buckskin trousers with fringe down the outside of the legs, and a faded blue bib-front shirt. His hat, a high-crowned black Stetson, had come off during the fall and lay several yards away. The man had a close-cropped beard and thinning dark hair. His nose had been broken at least once in the past, and a knife scar slanted from his jawline across his left cheek. Although the physical details were always somewhat different, he might have been any of a thousand hardcases and gunmen Frank had encountered over the past three decades.
And he was definitely dead, as a check for a pulse in his broken neck quickly told Frank. Other than a few scrapes, that was his only injury.
Of course, if he had kept charging toward Frank, Conrad, and Rebel, shooting as he came, he would have been dead a few seconds later. Dead from the bullet that Frank would have put through him.
A search of the man’s pockets turned up nothing except a double eagle and a few smaller coins. Then the sound of hoofbeats made Frank look up. Conrad called, “Frank, somebody else is coming!”
Several somebodies, from the sound of it, and they were in a hurry too. Frank took hold of the rope again and began walking up the steep slope.
By the time he got to the top, a group of about a dozen riders had come around the shoulder of the mountain. They weren’t galloping along the ledge the way the fleeing man had been before he and his horse fell, but they were moving at a fast clip anyway. They slowed as they came in sight of Frank and his companions. Riding two abreast, they came on down the slightly slanting ledge.
As the men came closer, Frank saw that they were fairly bristling with weapons. He saw several rifles and shotguns, and nearly all of the men wore hols
tered revolvers. One of the pair in the front had the look of a leader about him. He was big and brawny, with wide shoulders and a blunt, sunburned face. Like the others, he wore canvas trousers, a flannel shirt, and lace-up work boots rather than the higher-heeled riding boots such as Frank’s. A fedora was jammed down on his thatch of rusty hair instead of the wide-brimmed Stetson that would have been more common in this part of the country.
The man reined in and rested the rifle he carried across the pommel of his saddle. Leaning to the side, he peered down at the bodies of the man and the horse lying at the bottom of the slope and then straightened to ask, “What happened? Did they fall off?”
“That’s right,” Frank said as he coiled his rope and replaced it on the saddle. “The hombre took a couple of shots at us first, but his horse lost its balance and went over before we had a chance to do anything.”
The big man grunted. “Good riddance. Might have been helpful if we’d gotten our hands on him before he died, though, so we could ask him who hired him to blow up our dynamite shed.”
“We heard the blast,” Frank said with a nod. “It sounded like a whole shed full of dynamite going up, all right.”
“Who are you folks?” the man asked, but before Frank could answer, Conrad stepped past him and lifted a hand in greeting.
“Sam!” he called. “It’s me, Conrad Browning.”
“It sure is,” the man called Sam said with a grin. “Didn’t recognize you at first, Mr. Browning, in that cowboy getup. Don’t suppose I ever saw you before except in a suit.”
He swung down from his saddle and strode forward to shake hands with Conrad. Turning to Frank, Conrad said, “This is Sam Brant, my construction superintendent. Sam, meet Frank Morgan.”
“The Drifter, eh?” Brant gave Frank a hard, calloused hand and a firm grip. “When Mr. Browning said he knew you and thought he could get you up here to give us a hand, I didn’t know whether to believe him or not.”
“You can see for yourself that I was right,” Conrad said. He nodded toward the dead man below. “You say he blew up our supply of dynamite?”
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