Savage Country

by William W. Johnstone

  Frank looked the same direction, narrowing his eyes as he searched the shadows. After a moment, he caught his breath as he glimpsed movement on the framework of the giant bridge, far out from the edge of the gorge and almost at the top of the trestle. As hard as it was to believe, someone was climbing up the trestle from the bottom of the gorge.

  Frank realized that he had overlooked that possibility. He had made sure that a guard was posted at this end of the trestle, so that no one could get to it from the camp, but he hadn’t thought that anyone would climb up from the bottom of the gorge. He broke into a run along the rimrock with Dog bounding along beside him.

  The guard at the end of the trestle heard somebody coming and challenged him. “Who’s there?” the railroader called.

  “Frank Morgan. Somebody’s out there on the trestle.”

  “Can’t be!” the guard exclaimed. “Nobody came past me.”

  “They climbed up from the bottom,” Frank said as he stepped past the rifle-wielding sentry. “Come with me. Dog, stay here!”

  Obediently, Dog sat down, but he was still growling and clearly didn’t like being left behind.

  Frank and the guard started out onto the trestle. Their footsteps rang on the planks that made up the floor of the bridge, undoubtedly carrying a warning to whoever was skulking around out there, but there was nothing they could do about that.

  The gorge was about five hundred feet wide, and the trestle already spanned more than half that width. Frank and the guard passed over the river, boiling and foaming along a hundred feet below them. As they approached the end of the trestle, a dark shape suddenly rolled onto it from the side, pulling itself up and over the edge. “Look out!” Frank barked as he lifted his Peacemaker.

  Colt flame erupted from the black shape that crouched at the end of the trestle, blooming like a deadly crimson flower in the night.

  Chapter 16

  Earlier in the day, on the road to Ophir, Conrad and Rebel rode side by side, trailed by the two railroad workers who hung back about fifty yards. From time to time Conrad heard them laughing. He figured they were lagging behind so that they could talk about him. Or else they were making crude comments about Rebel. Or both.

  He found himself wishing he was alone out here with her.

  That would have been quite pleasant, riding along under the vast blue dome of the Western sky with spectacularly beautiful mountain scenery all around them, accompanied only by this beautiful, independent, self-reliant young woman.

  Instead, Frank and Sam Brant had sent along a couple of rough-hewn nursemaids. Conrad was still angry about it, but he realized it was a reasonable precaution, what with all the trouble that had been going on in the area.

  “What sort of place is Ophir?” Rebel asked him.

  “It’s a typical mining boomtown, I suppose.”

  “That’s just it. I’ve never been to a mining boomtown. Our ranch was about halfway between Fort Davis and Marfa, and those are just little cow towns. El Paso is the biggest city I’ve ever seen.”

  “Ophir is nowhere near as big as El Paso,” Conrad said. “It’s becoming a respectable-sized town, though. At first there were only tents and a few rough shacks there—at least so I’ve been told, because I never visited the place while it was like that—but in recent months people have begun to put up more substantial buildings. There are even a couple of brick buildings in town now. Ophir has three hotels and a newspaper and a number of stores and restaurants.”

  “What about saloons?” Rebel asked with a smile.

  Conrad sighed. “Yes, there are plenty of saloons, unfortunately. I suppose they’re a necessary evil anyplace where you have a lot of men working as you do in the mines. They certainly pander to a rough element, though, and they contribute nearly all of the crime and the disturbances of the peace in the settlement.”

  “What about whorehouses?” Rebel asked mischievously. “Are there whorehouses in Ophir?”

  Stiffly, and without looking at her, Conrad replied, “I’m sure I wouldn’t know.” He felt his face growing warm.

  “Well, maybe not from experience, but you’re bound to have heard about them if they’re there.”

  “Of course there’s talk.... I suppose there are places where a man can . . . can relieve himself of his more unnatural urges . . .”

  “You think it’s unnatural? I grew up on a ranch, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world to me.”

  “It’s not the same,” Conrad insisted. “A cow doesn’t have to pay another cow to . . . to . . .”

  “That’s true,” Rebel agreed. “I never saw any money change hands . . . or hooves.”

  This was the most absurd conversation. Conrad wished Rebel would change the subject. If she wouldn’t, then he’d be forced to.

  “I reckon it’s different where men and women are concerned,” she went on.

  “Of course it is. There has to be a certain amount of decorum involved. Without that, humans would find themselves descending to the same level as animals.”

  “We wouldn’t want that,” Rebel said with mock seriousness.

  “No, we wouldn’t,” Conrad insisted. “It’s our sense of right and wrong that sets us apart from the animals, and when we lose that, we’ve lost everything.”

  “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that. Animals may not know much about right and wrong, but they have a certain innocence about them, I reckon. They live their lives and take their pleasure where they find it, and they don’t waste even a second worrying about what’s proper or not or what tomorrow’s going to bring.” A wistful note crept into Rebel’s voice as she added, “I think it would be nice if human folks could live like that for a while, every now and then.”

  “You’re talking about anarchy,” Conrad said.

  “I’m talking about doing what feels right, not what some set of rules allows or what some sour-faced preacher or politician says is right.”

  Conrad shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t imagine living that way, even for a short period of time.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Conrad. Not all of us are as stiff-necked as you are.”

  He glanced over at her. The smile on her face took most of the sting out of her words. Most, but not all.

  He asked himself why her disapproval mattered one little bit to him. She was nothing more than a somewhat attractive annoyance. Well, more than somewhat attractive, he supposed, but still a definite annoyance. And not that long ago she had been even worse than that. She had been an active danger to him and Frank.

  Could a leopard change its spots? Could a wild frontier girl with a grudge put all that behind her? Rebel claimed that she had, and Conrad’s instincts told him he could believe her. The problem was, he didn’t fully trust his instincts. Was he letting her beauty blind him to the facts?

  The questions went around and around in his head, but there were no answers for them. For the past few days, Rebel had certainly seemed trustworthy enough. But it would take only one moment of betrayal to change everything.

  They had brought food with them, and stopped for lunch next to a little pond formed by a spring that trickled out of a rugged rock wall. Conrad thought it was a pretty spot, but he didn’t really pay that much attention to it. He talked to the two railroaders as he ate, asking them questions about the work on the spur line. The men seemed a little uncomfortable chewing the fat with the big boss, the owner of the line, so Conrad didn’t press them on anything. He knew they would have a certain loyalty to Sam Brant, and he didn’t want to challenge that.

  He noticed after a while that Rebel had wandered off to the other side of the pond, which was about a hundred feet across. She was standing there tossing rocks into it. Conrad walked around to join her while the other two men took advantage of the opportunity to smoke for a few minutes. One took out a pipe and filled it with tobacco from a canvas pouch, while the other rolled a quirly.

  “What are you doing over here by yourself?” Conrad ask
ed as he came up to Rebel.

  “I didn’t want to intrude on the conversation between you railroad men.” She picked up a rock and threw it a little harder than she had before. It skipped across the surface of the water.

  “It wouldn’t have been an intrusion,” Conrad told her. “I was just passing the time of day with those men.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  A frown creased his forehead. “Are you feeling like I neglected you? My God, you can’t be upset because I talked to them instead of you!”

  “Ha! Don’t flatter yourself, Mr. Browning.”

  “I thought you were calling me Conrad.”

  She picked up another rock. He wondered for a second if she was going to throw it at him. But then she lobbed it into the water and said, “Right now Mr. Browning seems more like it.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug. He felt confident that he could plumb the minds of the young women he met back in Boston, since most of them were interested primarily in prestige and money. He had no real idea what a girl like Rebel might value. Livestock perhaps. Or a good saddle.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” she asked.

  “I have no earthly idea,” he replied honestly.

  “I’d like to take all my clothes off and go swimming in this pond.”

  “Good Lord!” Conrad exclaimed without stopping to think about it. “Have you felt that water? It’s ice-cold. You’d freeze to death.”

  “I don’t reckon I would. I’ve gone swimming without a stitch lots of times, even when it was cold. Once you jump in, you get used to it.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “You never did that? Took off all your clothes and . . . jumped in?”

  He couldn’t answer. An unwanted image appeared in his brain. He seemed to see Rebel standing there at the brink of the water, poised to dive in, divested of all her garments so that she was nude. He could imagine the sunlight playing on the thick blond hair tumbling around her shoulders and striking highlights off her smooth, bare skin. In his mind’s eye he saw her arrow sleekly into the water, and as she came up her hair would have darkened from being wet and the cold would cause her nipples to grow hard and erect, turning into pebbled buds of brown flesh....

  He turned away abruptly, jerking around with a sharply indrawn breath. “Conrad?” Rebel said anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said hastily. “Not a thing. Everything’s fine.” Without turning around, he stalked off toward some nearby trees.

  He wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard her laughing softly to herself as he strode away.

  * * *

  After a while, he was fit to ride again, and the group continued on toward Ophir. Rebel didn’t say anything about the conversation they’d had beside the pond, and Conrad was grateful for that. He was convinced that she had known exactly what she was doing. She was upset with him because he had ignored her, and so she had punished him by planting that tantalizing but utterly improper image in his mind.

  It wasn’t that he was a puritan—though he had some in his family tree—or that he was unversed in the ways of the world. But Rebel had a boldness about her that was shocking. He put it down to the way she had been raised on the frontier without a proper grounding in the proprieties. Even if certain things were done, they certainly were not talked about.

  He hoped to reach Ophir by nightfall, but as the sun continued its westward journey, it became obvious that wasn’t going to be the case. In the late afternoon one of the railroaders asked, “You want to make camp, Mr. Browning, or would you rather push on after dark?”

  Conrad thought about it for a moment and then said, “The trail is easy enough to follow, and I don’t think it will take us more than another hour or so to reach Ophir. It makes more sense to push on.”

  “Whatever you say, Boss.”

  They rode on, and once again the two men from the construction camp fell back a good ways. Conrad kept stealing glances at Rebel and wondering whether or not she was still upset with him. She hadn’t been very talkative this afternoon. That was all right with him. He was still thinking about the things she had said earlier, even though he didn’t really want to dwell on them. His mind wouldn’t let him forget the pictures it had conjured up.

  Still, he wasn’t so distracted that he didn’t hear the gunshot, or see the sudden spurt of dirt and rocks ahead of his horse as a bullet plowed into the ground.

  Conrad yanked back instinctively on the reins, causing El Diablo to rear and paw at the air. Almost unseated, Conrad grabbed the saddle horn desperately and clung to it as another shot rang out. He didn’t see where this bullet went.

  El Diablo’s front legs came back down on the ground with a jarring impact that went all through Conrad. He looked over at Rebel and saw that she had whipped her Winchester out of its sheath and was looking around for some sign of the bushwhackers. Another shot blasted, and the slug clipped a branch in a nearby tree.

  “Come on!” Conrad called. “Let’s get out of here!”

  The two railroad men were already fleeing, galloping toward Conrad and Rebel as fast as they could ride. Conrad jabbed his heels into El Diablo’s flanks and sent the big black horse lunging forward. Rebel was right behind him on her chestnut gelding. She still hung onto her rifle in case she needed it.

  Conrad thought it was much better to run than to fight. He leaned forward over his mount’s neck, making himself a smaller target. A glance over his shoulder told him that Rebel was doing likewise. Her hat had come off and hung by its neck strap behind her head. Loose now, her blond hair streamed out behind her. Conrad paid no heed to it at the moment, but he would remember later how lovely she looked like that.

  Right now he was more concerned with staying alive. He didn’t hear any more shots, but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to over the rolling thunder of hoofbeats. Gradually, he became aware that he had pulled well ahead of the others. El Diablo was running with efficient, powerful strides, carrying Conrad along faster than he had ever ridden before. He might have been frightened by that if he hadn’t been so worried that he was about to be shot out of the saddle. He was worried about Rebel too. He didn’t want to run off and leave her to the mercy of the bushwhackers. He began to pull back on the reins, trying to slow El Diablo.

  The big black didn’t respond, but kept running as swiftly as ever. What was wrong with the horse? Hadn’t the little Mexican liveryman back in El Paso told Frank that El Diablo was a terrible racehorse despite his speed and strength? According to Pablo Gomez, El Diablo was content to run behind the other horses. Well, not today! Today the horse seemed determined to outrun everything else on the face of the earth.

  Conrad looked back again and saw that Rebel was a good fifty yards behind him. Sawing viciously at the bit, Conrad tried again to slow El Diablo. Finally, the horse began to ease his pace. He was still running fast, but he was no longer pulling away from the others. They began to catch up.

  “Conrad, slow down!” Rebel yelled when she came within earshot. “The shooting stopped!”

  “I’m trying to!” he shouted back. El Diablo fought him every step of the way, but gradually he managed to pull the horse down to a trot.

  Rebel spurred up alongside him. The two railroaders were a short distance behind them. Rebel said, “We got away from those damn drygulchers! I saw them up on a ridge back there a ways!”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t shoot at them!”

  “I thought about it,” she said grimly. “I was afraid you were going to fall off that black devil and break your fool neck, though, so I came after you instead.”

  They slowed their horses to a walk, although El Diablo tossed his head in irritation and impatience. “Lord, that big fella of yours can run!” Rebel went on. “Those bushwhackers never had a chance to draw a bead on you.”

  “Are you all right?” Conrad asked anxiously. “You weren’t hit?”

  “No, I’m fine.”


  He turned in his saddle and called back to the railroaders. “Are either of you men wounded?”

  “We’re all right, Boss,” one of them answered. “Just a mite spooked.”

  The other man said, “That’s the sort of thing that’s been happenin’ all the time lately. No wonder all the boys are scared.”

  “Frank Morgan will find out who’s responsible for this trouble and put a stop to it,” Conrad declared. “That’s why he came up here.”

  “I sure hope you’re right, Boss.”

  Conrad’s pulse was still pounding, but he wasn’t as breathless now as he had been a few minutes earlier. That wild ride on El Diablo’s back had literally stolen his breath away. As he got himself under control again, he said, “We’re still going on to Ophir. Now that we know some of the miscreants are around, it’s more important than ever that we reach the settlement.”

  “I’d like to line up one or two of them miscreants in the sights of my rifle,” Rebel said savagely.

  “With luck it won’t come to that.”

  “You’ve got your kind of luck and I’ve got mine,” Rebel snapped.

  That was all too true. Everything was different about them, Conrad told himself. It seemed unlikely there could ever be a true meeting of the minds between them, no matter how physically attractive he found her.

  They rode on, bunched together more closely now. Conrad didn’t know if that was a good idea strategically, but it was certainly more comforting that way. Night fell, but they kept moving. As darkness cloaked them, Conrad relaxed a little. Ambushing them would be more difficult now.

  Ophir was set in a valley between two peaks in the Mimbres Range. About an hour after dark, the four riders topped a ridge and were able to look down into the valley where they saw the lights of the boomtown glittering invitingly. Conrad heaved a sigh of relief.

  “There it is,” he said. “We’ll be there shortly.”

  The trail followed an easy slope down from the ridge. Less than fifteen minutes later, they reached the southern end of Gold Street, Ophir’s main thoroughfare. The business district stretched for five blocks in front of them. The side streets were lined with tents, shacks, and in a few cases more permanent dwellings that were so freshly built they still smelled of raw lumber. Lights burned in most of the buildings along Gold Street, and plenty of horses and wagon teams were tied up at the hitch racks. The boardwalks were crowded with men. It hadn’t rained for a while, so the street, which was often a muddy morass, had dried out and was now dusty instead.