Savage Country

by William W. Johnstone

  Music and revelry came from the saloons. Conrad was more interested in reaching the Holloway Hotel, where he always stayed when he was in Ophir. He was tired and covered with trail dust and wanted a hot bath and then a hot meal. He hoped there would be a room at the hotel for Rebel too. He didn’t care where the two railroaders spent the night. They would probably find some squalid saloon or brothel to occupy their time, and that was all right with Conrad as long as they protected the company funds Sam Brant had given them to use for the supplies.

  “Looks like a mighty lively place,” Rebel commented as they passed the Big Nugget Saloon. Raucous whoops came from inside the place, and Conrad didn’t even want to think about what might have prompted them.

  “Yes, it’s far from genteel,” he began, but then he stopped as they passed one of the mercantile stores and he heard his name called. He reined in and turned El Diablo toward the boardwalk. A young woman with brown hair stepped up to the railing and waved.

  Conrad swung down from the saddle and stepped up to the boardwalk, holding onto his horse’s reins. With a happy squeal, the young woman threw her arms around him and kissed him hard on the mouth. Instinctively, Conrad embraced her as well.

  “Well,” Rebel said coldly from the back of her horse, “the gals sure know how to welcome a fella in this town. That a friend of yours, Conrad?”

  Carefully, Conrad broke the kiss and disengaged himself from the pretty brunette’s arms. He looked around at Rebel. Her face was set in taut lines. He said, “Uh, yes, I suppose you could say that. Rebel, allow me to present Miss Pamela Tarleton . . . my fiancée.”

  Chapter 17

  Frank felt as well as heard the sizzle of the bullet through the air as it passed within inches of his cheek. He heard the guard behind him cry out in pain as the slug thudded into flesh, but there was no time to turn around and check on him. The Peacemaker in Frank’s hand bucked and roared as he squeezed off a couple of shots.

  The man crouched at the end of the trestle rocked backward as the bullets struck him, but he didn’t fall. He managed to stand upright and fired again. This shot was wilder than the first, whining several feet over Frank’s head. Frank triggered again, and this time the bullet burrowed deeply into the would-be killer’s belly, doubling him over. He swayed back and forth for a second, and then toppled off the side of the trestle, pitching out into the empty air above the gorge. Even though he was already mortally wounded, he managed to utter a short scream as he plummeted through the darkness. That cry was cut short as he slammed into the rocky ground below.

  Frank whirled toward the guard who had accompanied him. The man lay on his back with arms outflung where he had fallen when the first shot struck him. Frank grimaced as he saw that the bullet, riding on an upward angle, had caught the guard just under the left eye and bored on through his brain before exploding out the back of his skull. The guard was dead, a pool of blood staining the timbers of the trestle under his shattered head.

  Frank knew that could have just as easily been him. The bullet that had killed this man had missed him by bare inches. Grimly, Frank turned back toward the end of the trestle. The man who had climbed up from the bottom of the gorge had been up to something, and Frank figured it couldn’t have been anything good. He hurried toward the end of the trestle.

  As the echoes of the shots died away and Frank approached the point where the partially completed trestle stopped, he heard a hissing and sputtering sound. Dropping to a knee at the edge of the structure, he leaned out to peer down into the forest of support beams and crosspieces below him. The thick shadows under the trestle made the flaring sparks of a burning fuse all the more visible as they raced toward a wooden crate that had been wedged between a couple of crosspieces about fifteen feet below the top of the structure.

  Frank went cold inside. He didn’t have to see the writing on the crate to know that he was looking at a boxful of dynamite—and there was no time to climb down and put out that fuse.

  Instinctively, he lunged upright, whirled around, and broke into a run, trying to get off the trestle before the dynamite exploded. He hated to leave the guard’s body behind, but the man was already dead and there was nothing Frank could do for him. He dashed past the corpse.

  The shots had roused the camp, and Frank saw some of the railroad workers hurrying toward the trestle, carrying lanterns that made bobbing points of light in the darkness. “Get back!” he shouted at them. “Dynamite! Get back!”

  Dog knew that something was wrong. The big cur stood at the end of the trestle and barked furiously, almost as if he were encouraging Frank to run faster. Frank was already legging it for safety as fast as he could.

  One of the men from the camp must have heard his warning shouts. A new cry went up: “Fire in the hole!” The railroaders who had been approaching the trestle turned around and headed back the way they had come, fleeing frantically.

  It seemed to Frank that it had been an hour since he had spotted that sputtering fuse, rather than mere seconds. He had been running forever, and the end of the trestle still loomed in front of him, seeming to retreat instead of drawing closer. He knew it couldn’t be much longer before the sparks reached the dynamite....

  With a huge thunderclap of sound, the night seemed to split in two behind him. The darkness was ripped apart by the sudden hellish flare of the blast. The roar pounded Frank’s ears like giant fists, and another one slammed into his back, lifting him and throwing him forward. For a second he felt like he was flying, but then he slammed into something hard and unyielding and tumbled over and over. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his stunned brain, he was still thinking clearly enough to realize that the explosion had thrown him the rest of the way off the trestle and he had landed on the ground at the edge of the gorge.

  He came to a stop sprawled on his stomach. For a moment or two, all he could do was lie there and try to catch his breath. A terrible ringing filled his ears.

  Something wet touched his face. He jerked his head up. His ears might not be working that well, but he could still see all right. In a reddish, flickering light, he saw Dog’s face close to his. The big cur was standing over him. That had been Dog’s tongue Frank felt on his face.

  He reached up shakily and grabbed hold of the thick fur around Dog’s neck. Using Dog to support him, Frank pulled himself into a sitting position. Dog crowded against him, licking him again, and Frank said, “It’s all right, Dog. It’s all right, old boy.”

  At least, that was what he was trying to say. He couldn’t even hear his own voice over the strident ringing that filled his skull. A cold feeling of horror struck him. Was he deaf? Was his hearing gone forever?

  If that was the case, there was nothing he could do about it. He told himself to concentrate on more pressing problems. Climbing unsteadily to his feet, he swung around so that he could look toward the trestle.

  Or what was left of the trestle, to be precise, and that wasn’t much. The explosion had torn a lot of it apart, and more of it had collapsed following the blast. What was left was on fire.

  Something crashed down right beside Frank, and he had jumped aside before he realized that he had heard the impact. The ringing was beginning to subside. Something else slammed to the ground not far away. Frank jerked his head in that direction and saw a big piece of one of the support beams. The explosion had thrown debris high in the air—and now it was coming down.

  “Come on, Dog!” he called. “Let’s get out of here!”

  This time he heard the words he spoke, although they still sounded muffled and distorted. In a stumbling run, he moved back away from the edge of the gorge, heading for the construction camp itself. Smaller pieces of wreckage continued to rain down around him and Dog, and several of them stung as they hit him.

  One of the lantern-wielding men suddenly loomed up in front of Frank. Grabbing his arm, the man yelled, “Frank! You all right?”

  The words sounded like they came from far away, but Frank understood them. He nodded as he
recognized the strained face of Sam Brant. The construction boss’s normally ruddy features were drained of color as he stared past Frank at the destroyed trestle.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Dynamite,” Frank said. “A whole case of it jammed between a couple of support beams. There was nothing I could do . . . to stop it.”

  “Who would do such a thing? How’d he get out on the trestle? We had a man standing guard!”

  Frank had to draw a couple of breaths before he could speak. “Somebody climbed up . . . from the bottom of the gorge. Never thought about anybody . . . trying that.”

  Brant cursed fervently for several seconds before he got control of himself and asked, “Did the bastard get away?”

  “No, I got him. He fell off the far end of the trestle with a couple of my bullets in him. I spotted him climbing up and the guard and I went out there to see what was going on, but he opened fire on us before we got to the far end.”

  “Walt Desmond was standing guard,” Brant said. “What happened to him?”

  “Sorry, Sam.”

  “Good Lord! He was caught in the blast?”

  Frank shook his head. “No, the first shot the saboteur took at us hit Desmond and killed him. There was nothing I could do for him. Then I saw the fuse burning and got off of there as fast as I could. I’m sorry I had to leave Desmond’s body out there.”

  Brant shook his head. “We’ll be hard put to find enough left of him to bury, but we’ll try.” The hand that wasn’t holding the lantern balled into a fist. “But the son of a bitch who planted the dynamite, you said you shot him and he fell off the far end?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then his body should be somewhere down below in the gorge. We’ll have to find it and see if anybody recognizes him.”

  “Yes, and we’ll do that tonight,” Frank agreed. “This one won’t get away from us after he’s dead.”

  Frank stayed where he was for a few minutes, catching his breath and letting his hearing get back to normal while Brant hurried off to supervise the effort to keep the fire from spreading to the vegetation on the edge of the gorge. The trestle itself was probably going to be a total loss, but the destruction would be even worse if the fire spread to the camp.

  As the men worked to contain the flames, Frank reloaded the chambers in his Colt that he had emptied during the brief gunfight. Then he holstered the weapon and went over to rejoin Brant. “I’m going down there to take a look,” he told the construction boss.

  “I’ll come with you,” Brant said. “Things are going to be all right up here, I think. The fire’s not spreading.”

  He called to a couple of the railroaders and told them to come with him and Frank. It was a grim-faced group of men that followed the trail down into the gorge with Brant’s lantern lighting the way. They trooped across the temporary pontoon bridge, past the spot where the trestle had ended before the explosion, and then spread out a little to look for the body of the man who had planted the dynamite.

  Frank knew about where the saboteur had fallen, so it didn’t take long to find him. “Over here,” he called to the others, and a moment later the yellow glow from Brant’s lantern washed over the bloody, crumpled body as it lay on the rocky ground about fifty feet from the edge of the river.

  Frank rolled the man onto his back. The beard-stubbled features were contorted in a grimace of death, but one of the railroaders Brant had brought with him exclaimed, “Say! That’s Mike Lovejoy!”

  “You know him?” Frank asked Brant.

  The construction boss nodded. “Yeah, he worked for the line a while back, when we first started building the spur north out of Lordsburg. He was a gandy dancer, but I fired him when he wouldn’t do his job. Damn loafer.”

  “Looks like he decided to get back at you and hooked up somehow with the gang that’s trying to stop the spur line,” Frank mused. “Had he worked on trestles before?”

  Brant shrugged. “Yeah, he’d been in the railroad business for a while, so I reckon he must have helped to build trestles before. It would take an experienced man to climb up there in the dark, especially carrying a case of dynamite. He had to know where to put it to do the most damage too.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, so I’m not surprised he used to work for you.” Frank rubbed his jaw in thought. “Was he close friends with anybody else who’s still part of the crew?”

  “I don’t really remem—” Brant stopped short and exclaimed, “Hey! Are you thinking that there might be other members of the bunch still working against us from the inside?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Frank said.

  The man who had recognized the saboteur spoke up again, saying, “I don’t remember Lovejoy havin’ any friends, let alone close ones. He was a prickly son of a bitch. Good worker, though . . . but only when he wanted to be.”

  “The fact that he wasn’t close to anyone doesn’t mean there are no men in the crew who are really working for whoever’s trying to stop us,” Frank pointed out.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Brant said glumly. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about already, now we’ve got to be looking over our own shoulders all the time, wondering if the fella behind us is really working for the enemy.”

  That suspicion would damage morale, Frank knew, but Brant was right—if a former member of the crew could be working against them, there was nothing to prevent someone who was still in camp from turning traitor too.

  Frank turned his head and looked up at the wreckage of the trestle. Small fires still burned here and there, but most of the flames were out. A few of the pillars were still in place, but they went up only so far and then ended jaggedly where the explosion had ripped the rest of them away.

  “How long is this going to set you back?” he asked Brant.

  “No telling,” Brant said with a shake of his head. “Several weeks at least. Maybe a month or more.”

  “But you can rebuild the trestle?”

  “Sure.” Brant gave a hollow laugh. “It’ll just cost time and money and a heap of sweat, that’s all.”

  The railroad could afford the time; there was no real hurry about getting the spur line to Ophir, although the sooner it was completed the better. Frank thought that Conrad could probably afford the cost of rebuilding the trestle too.

  But it was one more expense, one more disaster pushing the New Mexico, Rio Grande, and Oriental that much closer to the edge of ruin. Conrad had asked him to come here so that he could stop that from happening.

  But so far, Frank thought bitterly, he wasn’t one step closer to accomplishing that goal. Men had died and havoc had been wreaked, and somewhere the mastermind behind all of it was laughing....

  Chapter 18

  “Fiancée?” Rebel echoed as she looked at Conrad and Pamela Tarleton standing there on the boardwalk beside Gold Street in Ophir.

  “That’s right,” Pamela said a smug smile. “And who is this . . . person, Conrad?”

  “This person is sitting right here,” Rebel snapped, “and she can speak for herself. My name is Rebel Callahan.”

  “Rebel?” Pamela’s smile became less smug and more scornful. “One of those dreadful unreconstructed Confederates, I suppose.”

  “I wasn’t born until after the War of Northern Aggression, but I carry the name proudly,” Rebel said. “Proudly enough to get down off this horse and—”

  “Ladies, please,” Conrad said nervously as he moved to put himself between Rebel and Pamela. Rebel had started to swing down from the saddle, and Conrad wouldn’t put it past her to step up onto the boardwalk and start a physical altercation with Pamela. That was just the sort of untamed frontier girl she was.

  She had Pamela beat where looks were concerned, though. He had to admit that.

  But not by much. Even here in a mining boomtown in the middle of the Mimbres Mountains in New Mexico Territory, Pamela Tarleton managed to dress in an elegant, stylish manner. Her dark green gown was cut low enough in
front to reveal the top of the valley between her rather large breasts, and it hugged her slender waist tightly before flaring out over her hips and thighs. Her brown hair fell below her shoulders in the sort of thick curls that made a man want to plunge his hands into it and run his fingers through the silken tresses. The hair framed a lovely face highlighted by a pair of compelling green eyes. Back in Philadelphia, where she came from, she was widely acclaimed as a beauty and deserved every bit of the reputation. Now that he looked back and forth between them, Conrad wasn’t sure if Rebel was prettier or not. It would have been a damned close contest.

  Pamela put a hand on his arm and said, “Conrad, dear, you should have told me that you were coming. The prospect of seeing you again would have brightened considerably the dreary days I’ve been forced to spend here.”

  “I didn’t know exactly when I’d arrive. Besides, I wasn’t sure you’d be here either.”

  “Where else would I be? My father insists on dragging me along with him, although why he thinks I need to come on these business trips, I’ll never know!”

  “I’m sure he just wants to show off his beautiful daughter,” Conrad said. Flattery was usually effective with Pamela, and he wanted to distract her from Rebel—and from asking questions about Rebel.

  But the tactic didn’t work, because Rebel said, “I reckon you forgot to tell me that you’re engaged to be married . . . Conrad, dear.”

  Good Lord! Could she have said anything worse?

  Pamela stiffened. “What does this . . . this woman mean by that?” she demanded. The way she said “woman” made it sound almost as insulting as if she had called Rebel a whore.