The Loner: The Blood of Renegades

by J. A. Johnstone

  Kingman had leaped forward with matching swiftness. The second guard barely had time to react when Kingman’s gun crashed against his head and knocked his hat flying. The man crumpled.

  The commotion roused the third guard. He burst out of the tent with his suspenders flapping around his hips and ran right into Conrad’s hard fist, which caught him solidly on the nose. Cartilage crunched and blood spurted as the man’s nose flattened, and he went over backward. As soon as he hit the ground, Kingman finished the job with a sharp rap from his gun butt. The man sighed and stretched out in a limp sprawl.

  Conrad and Kingman holstered their Colts. A second later, Conrad saw a reflection of moonlight on steel and realized Kingman had drawn a knife. As he bent toward the unconscious men, Conrad said quietly but sharply, “What are you doing? We were just going to fix it where they couldn’t raise the alarm.”

  “I guarantee they won’t make any racket if their throats are cut,” Kingman said.

  “Hold it. You’re too quick to resort to murder to make sure people don’t cause problems for you, Kingman.”

  “Blast it, this is none of your business!”

  “As long as I’m risking my life and the life of my friend to help you, it is. Kill those men in cold blood and you and Ollie and the others are on your own. Arturo and I are riding away.”

  “You’re awful high and mighty.” Anger seethed in Kingman’s voice. “You never did anything that was over the line, Browning?”

  Conrad remembered several times he had pulled a trigger in cold blood and ended the life of an evil man. The thing of it was, he had known the evil those men had done. Maybe these guards were guilty of things just as bad. Whether that was the case or not, he didn’t have any knowledge of it himself, and he wouldn’t stand by and watch them slaughtered like sheep while they were unconscious and helpless.

  “We said we’d tie them up and gag them, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “Fine!” Kingman jammed his knife back in its sheath. “We’re wasting time.”

  Conrad couldn’t argue with that. He and Kingman worked quickly, using the man’s belts to tie their hands behind them, ripping strips from their shirts to lash their ankles and knees together, and stuffing bandannas in their mouths as gags. They dragged the unconscious men deeper into the trees and left them there.

  While Kingman looked up the canyon to make sure no one else was around, Conrad hurried to its mouth, about fifty yards away from the guards’ camp, and dug a lucifer out of his pocket. He snapped it to life with his thumbnail, and moved his other hand back and forth in front of it in the signal he had told the others. He blew out the match and ground it under his boot heel.

  A couple minutes later he heard the steady thud-thud-thud of approaching hoofbeats. Shadowy shapes came into sight. “Conrad?” Arturo called quietly.

  “Here.”

  Arturo, Ollie, and the other three men led the horses up to the mouth of the canyon. “Kingman’s scouting the other way, but it should be all clear,” Conrad told them. “Come on.”

  He led them into the canyon, where they met Kingman trotting back toward them a few minutes later. “Everything’s quiet and peaceful, as far as I can tell,” he reported.

  “All right,” Conrad said. “Lead the way.”

  “You can’t get lost,” Kingman said. “There aren’t any side canyons or anything like that. But I’ll go first.”

  They moved at a deliberate pace so as not to make much noise with the horses they were leading. It took three-quarters of an hour to reach the other end of the canyon. Once again Conrad worried that too much time was passing, that the sun was going to come up soon, but hurrying could be disastrous. He had to be patient, which wasn’t always an easy thing for him.

  They stopped a couple hundred yards before the canyon widened into the basin where the settlement was located. “Who’s staying with the horses?” Kingman asked. “And you’d better not say that I am, Browning, because I’m telling you right now—”

  “Take it easy,” Conrad said. “Arturo, you’re staying.”

  “I’m perfectly willing to come along and shoulder my share of the risks,” Arturo said.

  “I know that,” Conrad told him. “But we also need somebody dependable to keep up with these horses. We’re liable to need mounts in a hurry when we get back here.”

  Arturo nodded. “Yes, that does seem to be an important job. All right. I agree. It’s the logical thing to do. I’m probably not as proficient at violence at these other gentlemen . . . although Lord knows circumstances have forced me to become more so than I ever thought I would be.”

  “Life has away of doing that,” Conrad agreed. He turned to the others. “Where will Hissop have Selena and the other women? What would he consider proper, since he’s going to be marrying her soon?”

  “Selena would have been returned to her father,” Kingman said. “I can show you the house.”

  “What about the other women?”

  One of the men said, “They’ll have gone back to their families, too. They’re all promised to some of Father Agony’s cronies. That’s why they ran away to start with. Their fathers will have the job of keeping them under control until those weddings can be set up.”

  “Then you know where to look for them,” Conrad said. “Can you get into the houses?”

  “Just try and stop us,” the man said grimly as he rested a hand on the butt of his gun.

  “Don’t get trigger-happy,” Conrad warned. “A bunch of shooting will rouse the whole settlement. Ideally, what you’d like to do is get in and rescue the women without anybody even knowing about it. If that’s not possible, don’t shoot unless you absolutely have to.”

  Ollie said, “I’ve got an idea. Instead of us splittin’ up, why don’t me and these three fellas all go together to each house where one of the gals is bein’ held? That way if there’s trouble, we can all handle it. And I’m big enough I can usually stop trouble before it really starts, if I do say so myself.”

  Conrad grinned. “Ollie, that’s an excellent idea. The four of you gather up the other women, Arturo will take care of the horses, and Dan and I will go after Selena.”

  “What about Leatherwood?” Kingman asked in a tight voice. “You said we were going to get vengeance on him. And on Hissop.”

  “What’s more important? The lives of the women and the lives of your friends, or vengeance?”

  “We can’t let them get away with the things they’ve done,” Kingman insisted.

  “If we get those women away from them, I think there’s a mighty good chance you’ll have an opportunity to deal out some revenge to Leatherwood and Hissop,” Conrad said. “They’re not going to let you ride away with Selena and the other ladies.”

  “That’s true,” Kingman admitted with a shrug. “And I know you’re right, the most important thing is rescuing the women. I just hate to miss a chance to kill those two like the low-life snakes they are.”

  “Speaking of Leatherwood,” Conrad said, “where do he and the other avenging angels stay while they’re here in Juniper Canyon?”

  “Their quarters are in a long, low adobe building next to Hissop’s house.”

  “So if there’s any trouble at the elder’s, they’ll be handy.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where does Selena’s father live?”

  “A little farther away, in another adobe house.”

  “We can’t count on a racket going unheard by the avenging angels, then,” Conrad mused.

  “Not really.”

  “Then I guess we’d better not make any more racket than we have to.” Conrad looked around at the men. “Anybody think of anything else?”

  They shook their heads.

  “I guess we’re ready to go, then.” He looked at the sky. “There’s maybe an hour and a half until it’ll be light enough to see. We need to be out of here before then if we’re going to have any chance to get away. Good luck.”

  Several o
f the men echoed that sentiment.

  They started off at a trot through the darkness. Conrad hesitated just long enough to shake hands with Arturo, then started after Kingman. He never went into something thinking he wasn’t going to survive, but he knew that possibility always existed. It was definitely a lion’s-den situation. Elder Hissop had a couple hundred devoted followers at his beck and call, ready to help him with whatever trouble he had, and about three dozen of them were avenging angels, fanatical triggerites who would just as soon kill a man as look at him. Conrad had six desperate young men. Those were pretty piss-poor odds, Conrad thought. They went beyond piss-poor. They were downright suicidal.

  But he and his companions had come too far to give up. Too much was at stake.

  He caught up to Kingman as they reached the end of the canyon. Even in the bad light, Conrad saw the slopes falling away and the land in front of him opening up into that basin. Compared to other basins, like the Humboldt in Nevada, it was tiny, just a speck in a vast, rugged landscape. But it was a whole world to the people who lived there. He was an interloper, Conrad thought, who had no real right to be interfering with their lives . . .

  Other than the certain knowledge that Agonistes Hissop and Jackson Leatherwood were evil men who had evil plans. Somebody had to put a stop to those plans, and it looked like that was going to be up to Conrad and the men who had come with him.

  A number of paths branched out from the trail that ran through the lower part of the canyon. Kingman took one leading toward the center of the basin. As Conrad trotted along beside him, he saw what appeared to be cultivated fields, as well as orchards and pastures where herds of woolly sheep grazed and moved around sleepily.

  “Are the fields irrigated from that spring you mentioned?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Kingman said. “Hissop put in a series of aqueducts and irrigation ditches all over the basin. He has a steam-powered pump that pumps water to the ditches, as well as some windmills. He’s a smart man, I’ll give him that. Makes him even more dangerous when you’re going up against him.”

  Conrad understood. An intelligent enemy was always worse.

  Kingman stopped short, touched Conrad’s arm, and pointed. “There. That’s Father Agony’s fort.”

  It was deserving of the name, Conrad saw as he peered through a gap in the trees. The big house stood several hundred yards away on a slight knoll that gave it a view of the large, calm pool formed by the spring and surrounded by rocks. Junipers grew all around the house, which, as Kingman and Ollie had said, had a bizarre look to it because of the way it had been enlarged over the years. Wings ran off at all angles, at different lengths and heights, sprouting from the main, original part of the structure like the legs of a spider from its body. In fact, Conrad thought, if you looked at the house from above, it might even resemble a fat, deformed spider that had stopped scuttling along through the Utah landscape and squatted there motionless, waiting to trap any unwary insects that ventured near it.

  Not a very comforting thought, he told himself with a shadow of a smile.

  “Does he keep guards in that watchtower all the time?” Conrad asked.

  Kingman shook his head. “Not unless things have changed since I was banished. He puts guards up there only when he’s expecting trouble.”

  “Like now, since he stole Selena back from you?”

  “Oh. Yeah, there might be guards up there. Stay behind cover as much as you can, especially when we’re sneaking up on the Webster house. It’s close enough that anybody on the tower could see us without much trouble.”

  “What about the Webster house?”

  “It’s just a regular adobe ranch house, about a quarter mile east of Hissop’s fort. We can circle around behind it and keep the house between us and Hissop’s while we approach.”

  “Sounds good.” Conrad nodded. “Let’s go.”

  No lights appeared to be burning in the house as they moved silently toward it. Suddenly, dogs began to bark somewhere else in the basin, and Conrad wondered if the other men had run into trouble. More dogs started carrying on, as dogs always will, and within a minute or two it sounded like every dog in the basin was barking.

  “This is good,” Kingman whispered. “If old Soames Webster hears his hounds barking, he’ll think they’re pitching a fit because every other dog around here is.”

  It might be a lucky break for the two of them, all right, Conrad thought. He still worried about Ollie and the others, but concentrated on his own mission. “Selena never said anything about having any brothers. Will there be any men in the house besides her father?”

  “She doesn’t have any brothers. Webster had only the one wife, Selena’s mother. Never wanted any others, or so he claimed. And after Selena was born . . . well, I guess her mother couldn’t have any more children or something. She was the only one. That made her pretty unusual.”

  “I imagine.” Conrad knew Mormons were noted for their large families.

  “Being unusual made Hissop want her even more, I think. He’s always regarded her as special, even when she was a child.”

  They came to a stop behind the house. As Kingman had said, it was a typical, low-ceilinged, flat-roofed adobe ranch house. Thick beams known as vigas protruded along the upper edges of the walls. A shaded, arbor-like portal was set in the center of the building.

  “The kitchen is inside that door,” Kingman whispered. “Selena’s room is to the right. Her father’s room is the other way, at the left front of the house.”

  “Unless Webster’s changed things around in case somebody tries to sneak in and get her.”

  Kingman grunted. “You’re giving the man credit for too much intelligence. Webster never had a thought in his head that Father Agony didn’t have first.” He started forward. “Come on.”

  Conrad catfooted along behind Kingman. The young man had just reached the door and was about to pull the string that would open the latch when light suddenly blazed up all around them. Men with torches had lit them and stepped around both corners of the house, and the reddish glare washed over Conrad and Kingman, blinding them for a moment.

  Conrad could hear just fine, though, so he had no trouble hearing the deadly clack-clack of Winchester levers being worked, followed by a honeyed purr of a voice declaring triumphantly, “See, brethren, how the Lord has delivered the evildoers right into our hands?”

  Conrad knew without being told that the voice belonged to Elder Agonistes Hissop.

  Father Agony.

  Chapter 27

  Despite the glaring torchlight, from the corner of his eye Conrad saw Kingman reach for a gun. His hand shot out and closed around Kingman’s wrist, stopping the draw before it could really begin. Half blind, surrounded by riflemen, slapping leather would only get them shot to pieces. That wouldn’t help save Selena or anybody else.

  “Easy,” Conrad said. “They’ll kill you.”

  “You’re blessed right we will,” a familiar voice rumbled. It belonged to Jackson Leatherwood, Conrad realized. The leader of the avenging angels was somewhere behind the light. “Sooner or later, we’ll kill you no matter what you do, you heathens, so you might as well go ahead and reach for your irons now and get it over with.”

  “Now, now, Jackson,” another voice scolded. “There’s no need to gloat, simply because we have emerged triumphant from our travails with these young men. You gentlemen drop your weapons, please. Carefully. Use your left hands.” It was Hissop.

  Kingman glanced at Conrad. A muscle jumped in his tightly clenched jaw.

  “Better do what he says,” Conrad warned. “This isn’t over.”

  Hissop chuckled. “Listen to your Gentile friend, Daniel, but be advised he’s wrong about one thing. This is most definitely over.”

  Conrad reached with his left hand and slid the Colt out of its holster. He leaned over and placed the revolver on the ground. Beside him, Kingman sighed and followed suit. He dropped his knife on the ground next to the gun.

  Once th
e two of them were disarmed, several men hurried forward. They wore the wide-brimmed hats and long coats of avenging angels, but Conrad didn’t recognize any of them. He figured the men would grab them and hustle them off to wherever Hissop intended to lock them up, but without warning, one of the men rammed a rifle barrel in his belly. Conrad doubled over in pain. Another man kicked his feet out from under him. The same thing happened to Kingman. As the avenging angels closed in around them, Conrad thought they intended to stomp the life out of him and Kingman.

  Instead, the men stopped, then the circle parted. Conrad lifted his head. Jackson Leatherwood came through the gap first and looked down at the prisoners with a sneer on his ugly face, making it even uglier. Then Leatherwood stepped aside to allow the much smaller man to regard Conrad and Kingman with a solemn expression.

  The man was in his late fifties or early sixties, with a slightly round face and wispy white hair. Unlike most of the Mormon elders, he was clean shaven. He wore a sober black suit and a string tie. His mild demeanor and small stature made him seem harmless at first glance, but Conrad saw the madness burning in his pale blue eyes.

  “You men have caused me a great deal of trial and tribulation,” Hissop said. “I cannot tell you how much it saddens my heart to see that you still oppose the will of the Lord, Daniel.”

  “It’s not the Lord’s will I oppose,” Kingman said through teeth gritted against the pain of getting hit in the stomach. “It’s yours!”

  “I am the voice of heaven on earth,” Hissop replied calmly. “My will is the Lord’s will.” He looked at Conrad. “As for you, young man, I expect nothing but heresy and blasphemy from an unbeliever, and you have not disappointed me. Unlike some of my faith, I bear no ill will toward Gentiles, but I cannot allow your sins to go unpunished. You made a bad mistake when you cast your lot with this defiant young sinner.”

  “I was just trying to help a young woman,” Conrad said.

  “Help her to do what?” Hissop shot back. “To fly in the face of everything that is divine and holy? The will of the Lord will not be thwarted . . . and neither will mine.”