The Loner: The Blood of Renegades

by J. A. Johnstone

  Conrad hadn’t spotted Leatherwood during those few minutes of bloody chaos in the pass. He hadn’t been leading the charge, but his horse could have fallen behind some of the others. If he had been in the middle of the pack, Conrad wouldn’t have seen him.

  “Jackson Leatherwood’s death is one more sin for which the Lord will exact vengeance,” Hissop went on. “And the time for that vengeance has come. You men throw your guns aside. We have a long ride back to Juniper Canyon.”

  Before Conrad and Kingman could even start to follow that order—which they probably wouldn’t have, anyway—Selena said in a loud, clear voice, “Don’t do it, Dan. Don’t give up.”

  “But Selena . . .” Kingman’s voice was twisted from the strain he was under. “He’ll kill you. He’s loco enough to do it.”

  Hissop’s chin jutted out defiantly. “I am the living embodiment of God’s will, that is all!”

  “Let him kill me,” Selena said. “Better yet, you do it. Or you, Conrad. Draw your guns, kill me, and then kill him. He has to be stopped, even if it costs my life, all of our lives. Kill me, so he dies, too.”

  Kingman shook his head. “I . . . I can’t do it.”

  A smug smile stretched across Hissop’s face. “Of course you cannot. I am under divine protection. The angels watch over me and protect me—”

  Suddenly, Selena let out a scream and twisted violently in Hissop’s grip. He couldn’t hold her. Both her hands wrapped around the gun barrel and wrenched it away from her side. She wrestled the weapon out of his hand and grabbed the butt, slipping her finger through the trigger guard.

  Instead of turning the gun on Hissop, she lifted it toward her own head, crying, “Daniel, I love you! Kill him!”

  “Selena, no!” Kingman sent his horse plunging forward.

  He was too late. The gun roared and flew out of Selena’s hands as the impact of the bullet drove her backward off her feet.

  Chapter 38

  Conrad knew the other gunmen were more dangerous than Hissop, who was disarmed at the moment and not that much of a fighting man to begin with.

  But he also knew the avenging angels would hesitate to shoot if the elder was in the line of fire, so he drove his horse forward and left the saddle in a diving tackle, catching the fleeing Hissop around the waist and pushing him to the ground. Conrad crashed down on top of the smaller man and pulled his gun.

  “Hold your fire!” he shouted as he pointed the Colt at Hissop and eared back the hammer. His thumb was all that kept it from falling. Even if the avenging angels riddled him with bullets, the gun in his hand would go off and splatter Hissop’s brains all over the ground.

  Conrad looked at Kingman and Selena. Kingman had flung himself out of his saddle, fallen to his knees, and gathered up Selena’s limp body in his arms. Her head hung back so Conrad could see the bloody streak along her temple. Tears rolled down Kingman’s face as he moaned, “No, no, no, please, God, no!”

  “Kingman!” Conrad said sharply. “Dan! Listen to me! I think she’s just creased. She’s still breathing, Kingman!”

  Kingman blinked and shook his head as Conrad’s urgent words finally got through to him. He looked down at the wound on Selena’s head, then lowered his ear to her chest and listened with a tense, hopeful expression on his face. After a moment he let out a whoop and jerked his head up.

  “She’s alive! I hear her heart beating!”

  “Get her out of here,” Conrad said in a low, compelling tone. “There’s no time to waste. Get her to cover, now.”

  The avenging angels were holding their fire for the moment because of the threat to Hissop, but that might not last. He had been stunned when Conrad tackled him, and so far he was just lying there, semiconscious. When his wits came back to him, he might order his men to shoot anyway, even if it meant he wouldn’t survive. He was crazy enough to do such a thing.

  Staggering because of his wounded leg, Kingman struggled to his feet with Selena cradled in his arms. He stumbled toward some trees about fifty yards away. The cabins would have provided better cover, but there was no way of knowing which ones the avenging angels were lurking behind.

  As soon as Kingman reached the trees with Selena, Conrad raised his voice and called, “Listen to me, you men! Come out in the open now and throw down your guns, or I’ll kill Hissop!”

  From behind one of the cabins, a man called, “You shoot him and you’ll be full of lead a second later, mister!”

  “I know that,” Conrad replied calmly, “but Hissop will still be dead. It’s your choice.”

  Conrad heard muttering from the men but couldn’t predict what they might do. At that moment, Hissop tipped the balance by starting to squirm. The elder jerked his head up and yelled, “Kill him! Kill the Gentile!”

  Conrad threw himself to the side, knowing the avenging angels would follow Hissop’s order. Guns roared and bullets whipped past him as he desperately rolled for the nearest cover—the ruins of Kingman’s cabin. A shot blasted closer and a slug burned along the top of his arm as he surged to his feet. Hissop had scrambled on all fours over to the long-barreled revolver Selena had taken from him and then dropped. He clutched it in both hands and fired as he knelt in the dirt. Conrad felt the wind-rip of the bullet pass his ear as he triggered two swift shots in return.

  Still on his knees, Hissop bent over backwards as both bullets drove into his chest. He came up again, like a doll that refuses to be tipped over, but blood welled from his mouth and the gun in his hands sagged. The weapon went off a final time as he pitched forward on his face, the bullet flying harmlessly into the ground.

  Conrad caught only a glimpse of Hissop’s final seconds of life. As the elder was dying, Conrad was flinging himself behind what was left of the foundation of Kingman’s cabin. The smell of ashes and charred wood was sharp and unpleasant. He had hated that smell ever since his house in Carson City had burned down following Rebel’s murder.

  The avenging angels stopped shooting, shocked to see Hissop’s lifeless body. He had believed he was protected from harm by his status as a prophet, and surely some of the avenging angels had believed that, too.

  But it wouldn’t keep them from trying to exact vengeance, Conrad thought. Taking advantage of the lull he thumbed fresh cartridges into the empty chambers of his gun’s cylinder. With a full wheel, he waited for the attack he knew wouldn’t be long in coming.

  It wasn’t. Men darted out from behind cabins, firing as they came, and charged toward the burned-out cabin. Conrad lifted himself enough to return the fire and saw at least a dozen men coming toward him with guns blazing. He could stop a few of them—in fact, he knocked a couple off their feet with his first two shots—but he couldn’t prevent them from overrunning his position and killing him.

  Kingman pitched in, firing from the trees where he had retreated with Selena, but he was a little too far away to be very effective with a handgun. Once Conrad was taken care of, the avenging angels would go after him and probably kill all the prisoners in a frenzy of revenge. Before the morning was over, Paradise Valley would more likely be Slaughter Valley.

  Conrad drew a bead and spilled another man with a well-placed shot, then heard shouts and the whipcrack of a rifle. Glancing toward the barn, his heart leaped as Ollie Barnstabble emerged from the building with a rifle in his hands and fired again. The bullet smashed between the shoulder blades of one of the avenging angels and drove him forward on his face, where he landed in a limp, lifeless sprawl. More men raced out of the barn, firing handguns and rifles.

  The prisoners had gotten free! They joined the battle, making the odds a lot more even. Through swirling clouds of dust and gunsmoke, Conrad caught a glimpse of Arturo firing a shotgun, cutting down two of the avenging angels. Leaping to his feet Conrad ran toward the fight. From the corner of his eye, he saw Kingman hobbling into battle as well.

  Orange tongues of flame flew from gun barrels. Conrad whirled through the chaos, firing until the hammer of his gun clicked on an empty chamber.
As one of the duster-clad avenging angels loomed up in front of him, Conrad crashed his revolver down on the man’s head. The big hat absorbed some of the blow, but not enough to keep the man from collapsing, out cold. Conrad picked up the rifle the man dropped and brought it to his shoulder. His first shot with the Winchester drilled a gunman through the head.

  He found himself standing with Kingman, Arturo, and Ollie as three men who had managed to get mounted suddenly charged them on horseback. The four of them stood their ground and fired at the same time, the shots ripping out in a concerted volley of lead that scythed through the avenging angels and swept them off their saddles. Three lifeless, shredded bodies thudded to the ground.

  And just like that, it was over. An eerie, echoing silence settled over the battleground as tendrils of powdersmoke floated here and there, carried lazily on the breeze.

  Conrad looked over at Arturo and Ollie and saw they were both bleeding from minor wounds but appeared to be all right otherwise. A glance the other way told him Kingman was barely staying on his feet. “Ollie, help Dan. Selena’s back in those trees. He can show you. She’s hurt, but I think she’ll be all right. Arturo, you and I had better check on Hissop’s men. We don’t want any surprises.”

  Arturo broke open the Greener, took out the empty shells, and slid in two fresh ones. “No, we certainly don’t.” He closed the shotgun with a sharp clack.

  “You’re turning into a real triggerite.” Conrad told him with a weary smile as they made sure all the avenging angels were either dead, unconscious, or too badly wounded to pose a threat.

  “I’ve had an exceptional teacher.”

  Only three avenging angels were still alive, and one was gut-shot and wouldn’t live much longer. Conrad had some of the men from Paradise Valley tie up the other two. “Don’t kill them. You’re going to need somebody to send back to Juniper Canyon with an offer of a truce.”

  “Do you really think those people will agree to that?” Arturo asked.

  “I think they might. Hissop and Leatherwood were the ones holding everything together over there, and they’re both dead. If Kingman offers to leave them alone and everybody lets everybody else live in peace from now on, they might accept it. If they don’t . . .” Conrad shrugged. “Nobody will be coming through the pass anymore. Kingman needs to find all the other ways in and out of the valley and make sure they’re guarded all the time.”

  “That sounds like a rather nerve-wracking way to live.”

  “People on the frontier have been doing things like that for a long time. It’s part of the price folks pay for freedom.”

  They walked to the cabin Kingman and Selena had been using. Ollie was cleaning the wound on Kingman’s leg.

  “Selena’s in bed. She’ll probably have a pretty bad headache when she wakes up, and she’ll have to take it easy for a few days, but I think she’ll be all right. The bullet barely clipped her head.”

  “She was trying to kill herself, so she’d be out of the way and we could take care of Hissop,” Conrad said. “She thought she was about to die. Kingman, what was the last thing she said?”

  Kingman grimaced and looked down at his bloody leg. “That she loved me,” he admitted.

  Actually, the very last thing she’d said was a plea for them to kill Hissop, Conrad thought, but that was close enough. “That’s right. I hope you know you don’t have anything to worry about where Selena and I are concerned. You can forget any kind of crazy notion about having some sort of showdown with me.”

  “I already have,” Kingman said. “Blast it, you saved my life out there in the pass . . . again! I can’t very well have a shoot-out with you now.”

  “You’d lose if you did,” Arturo pointed out. “Mr. Browning is quite the triggerite.”

  “You like that word, don’t you?” Conrad asked.

  “It has a certain ring to it.”

  Conrad laughed and turned back to the others. “How did you get loose, Ollie?”

  “Well, Elder Hissop left three men watchin’ us when he went out with the others to wait for you and Dan. Turned out that wasn’t enough. When all the shootin’ started, they got distracted, and I was able to jump a couple of ’em and bang their heads together. I guess I banged ’em a little too hard. They’re both dead.”

  “A well-deserved fate,” Arturo said. “While Ollie was doing that, the third guard took a shot at him and put that crease in his side, but I and a couple other prisoners were able to overpower him. Somehow in the struggle the man was fatally wounded with his own gun. We took their weapons and came to take part in the altercation.”

  Conrad nodded. “It’s a good thing you did. Another thirty seconds and they would have been shooting me full of holes.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Arturo said. “You would have thought of some clever method of turning the situation to your advantage, sir. You always do.”

  Conrad appreciated the vote of confidence, but he knew Arturo was wrong. He didn’t have any sort of divine protection any more than Agonistes Hissop did. One of these days a bullet would find him and end his life, just as his slugs had ended Hissop’s. . . .

  Unless he gave up the sort of life he had been leading since Rebel’s death. Unless he put away his guns for good and went back to being a businessman. A businessman . . . and a father.

  But before he could do that, he had to find his children. Pamela had already left a number of traps for him along the way as he searched for the twins. She had hired men to kill him if he came too close to locating them, and Conrad fully expected he would run into more trouble.

  The trail was getting short, though. It wasn’t all that far to San Francisco. Unless Pamela had doubled back, little Frank and Vivian had to be somewhere between Utah and the Pacific coast. Maybe, even quite possibly, in San Francisco itself. The city by the bay was big enough to hide a lot of things, including two young children. Pamela’s twisted brain might have found the idea of hiding them there, right under the noses of Conrad’s attorneys and friends, particularly amusing.

  “Sir?” Arturo said. “Conrad? You look as if you were a million miles away.”

  Conrad shook his head. “No, not a million miles.”

  Just the distance to San Francisco. The last leg of the long, hard, bloody trail.

  Chapter 39

  “You could stay longer, you know,” Selena said with a smile. “You’d be welcome.”

  Kingman nodded to show he agreed. “That’s true. You can stay in Paradise Valley as long as you like, both of you.”

  A couple days had passed since the explosions closed the pass forever and the bloody battle that followed. The bodies had been buried, and Kingman had sent the two surviving avenging angels back to Juniper Canyon with a letter he had written to Jason Hissop, Father Agony’s oldest son and the one who presumably would take over the leadership of the community. In the letter, Kingman had followed Conrad’s suggestion and proposed a truce between Juniper Canyon and Paradise Valley.

  “We appreciate the offer,” Conrad said as they stood on the cabin porch. “Arturo and I need to be heading on down the trail, though.”

  “I understand,” Kingman said. “You have to find your missing children.”

  Selena leaned her head against his shoulder and rested a hand lightly on her belly. “You won’t have to go very far to find your child, Daniel. He’s right here.”

  Kingman’s eyes widened as he turned his head to look at her. “You mean . . . ?”

  Selena nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Congratulations,” Conrad told them with a smile. “I hope the little one is raised in a nice peaceful home.”

  “He will be,” Kingman said. “Or she. Either way, I’m going to do everything in my power to make peace. This valley has known enough war.”

  “Amen to that,” Conrad said. He stepped off the porch and climbed up on a big roan with a white star on its face. He didn’t know what had happened to the black gelding, but Ollie, who had a knack for horseflesh, had a
ssured Conrad that the roan was a fine animal.

  “And if that black of yours ever turns up, we’ll take good care of it,” he had promised. “The next time you come back this way, you can pick it up.”

  Conrad doubted that would ever happen, but he’d thanked Ollie anyway.

  A team of good horses was hitched to the buggy. Arturo was on the seat, holding the reins.

  Selena stepped down from the porch and leaned into the buggy to plant a kiss on Arturo’s cheek. “Good luck to you, and thank you for everything you did for me. For all of us.”

  Arturo reddened. “I assure you, Miss Webster, I was merely trying to stay alive under difficult circumstances.”

  “Of course.” Selena smiled at him. She turned to Conrad and held a hand up to him. “Conrad, I don’t know what to say . . .”

  “Then don’t say anything,” he told her as he gripped her hand.

  Kingman had followed her down from the porch. He shook hands with Conrad and Arturo, then put his left arm around Selena’s shoulders and raised his right arm in farewell as they turned the roan and the buggy and rode away from the cabin.

  Ollie was waiting in front of the community barn. Conrad leaned down to shake hands with the big man. “You’re the rock this place is built on, Ollie. I’m counting on you to take care of everybody and help Dan make it a real home for your people.”

  Ollie’s head bobbed up and down. “I sure will, Mr. Browning,” he promised. “Good luck. I hope you find your kids.”

  “So do I, Ollie. So do I.”

  Conrad and Arturo headed for the far end of the valley. Some exploring had revealed a narrow gash in the mountainside leading up to a stretch of tableland that curved around the peak. That was how Hissop and his men had gotten into the valley a couple days earlier. The opening was wide enough for a couple men on horseback, or for the buggy, but that was all. It would be relatively easy for the inhabitants of the valley to keep it guarded around the clock, if that proved to be necessary.