The Loner: The Devil’s Badland Page 16

  He didn’t have to wait very long. Someone began to cough heavily in the cabin below him. From the sound of the coughing, it was only one man. That didn’t make any sense. There were a dozen horses in the corral, and Margaret MacTavish should have been inside the cabin, too.

  Conrad suddenly had a bad feeling.

  That feeling got worse when the cabin door slammed open and one man stumbled out, holding a bandanna over his mouth and nose as he coughed. He pulled his gun from its holster, aimed at the sky, and fired three fast shots. That had to be a signal.

  But a signal for what?

  “Damn it!” Conrad breathed as guns began to roar up on the ridge. Those shots weren’t being directed at the cabin. They probably weren’t even being fired by James MacTavish, Dave Whitfield, and Whitfield’s men.

  The ambush they had been waiting for was finally there.

  He palmed out his Colt, thinking that the man who had just given the signal would be turning the gun toward him next. Instead, the man dashed into the trees. The move took Conrad so much by surprise that he didn’t fire a shot.

  Whatever happened next, Conrad didn’t want to be stuck up there on the roof. He would be a sitting duck if anyone decided to line their sights on him. He holstered his gun, then hurried to the rear of the cabin, where he sat down, slid off the edge, hung by his hands for a second, and dropped the rest of the way to the ground.

  The gunfire was still going on atop the ridge, but the shots seemed to be dying away. That couldn’t be good, Conrad thought. He drew his Colt again and hurried into the trees. Maybe he could circle around and get back up there to see what was going on without the bushwhackers spotting him.

  Making his way up the slope wasn’t easy. It was steep and thick brush covered most of it. He had climbed only a few yards when the shooting stopped, leaving an eerie silence hanging over the depression along with the thickening shadows of approaching night.

  Then a man’s voice called, “Browning! Browning, you hear me, you son of a bitch?”

  Conrad’s breath hissed between his teeth as he recognized the voice. Trace! The son of a bitch had somehow double-crossed them after all. Conrad had been right not to trust him.

  But that knowledge came a little bit late, he thought bitterly.

  “I know you’re down there somewhere,” Trace went on. “Come on out in the open, in front of the cabin. You’ve got my word that you won’t be hurt if you do!”

  Conrad wondered why Trace thought such a promise would mean anything to him. He stayed where he was in the brush and didn’t move. His brain worked furiously, trying to figure out some way he could get back to his horse and return to the spot where they’d left Pamela before any of the others could get to her.

  It was probably too late for James MacTavish and Whitfield. Chances were, they’d been killed in the ambush. That thought put a bitter, sour taste in Conrad’s mouth.

  “I know you hear me, Browning! But just in case you ain’t payin’ attention…”

  A woman screamed.

  Conrad didn’t necessarily hear pain in her voice, but she sounded utterly terrified. He wasn’t sure if the voice belonged to Pamela or to Meggie MacTavish, but then a second later, the scream stopped and she cried, “Conrad! Oh, God, help me, Conrad! You have to do what they say!”

  The world spun crazily around Conrad. Again. Again. Again. The word beat like a madman’s drum in his head. He didn’t love Pamela anymore, but he did care about her, and she was in deadly danger because of him. Sure, it had been her own choice to follow him, but if she hadn’t known him in the first place, she never would have experienced so much tragedy in her life, never would have found her life threatened that way. The same was true of Meggie MacTavish.

  Was this his fate? To bring death and suffering to every young woman who crossed his path?

  “In front of the cabin, Browning! Now!”

  Conrad took a deep breath and shouted toward the top of the ridge, “All right! Just hold on!”

  A fusillade of shots didn’t greet his response, so he figured that maybe they didn’t plan to kill him of hand. Anthony Tarleton had more in mind than simply killing him. That lunatic would want to torture him some more first.

  Conrad moved through the brush and broke out into the open. He walked toward the cabin. The sky above Big Hatchet Mountain still held a faint rosy hue, the last afterglow of the vanished sun, but there most of the light was gone.

  Conrad saw two burning brands flare into life. The men who came down from the ridge needed torches to light their way. He stood in front of the cabin, his arms at his sides, the Colt still gripped in his right hand, and watched as the torchbearers descended the slope. When the two men reached the bottom, they separated so that the rest of the group could move between them and walk toward the cabin. Conrad saw Jack Trace and another man leading the way. He recognized the second man from Pamela’s description.

  He was looking at Anthony Tarleton, the man responsible for Rebel’s death, and for all the other deaths that had followed in the past few months.

  Tarleton was a big man, as Pamela had said, and he wore a smug smile on his broad, florid face. He carried a rifle and wore the sort of clothes a rich man might wear on a hunting trip.

  Conrad could see between Trace and Tarleton and was startled to spot Dave Whitfield and James MacTavish. He had figured that both men were dead. Whitfield clutched a bloody left arm but seemed to be all right otherwise.

  James didn’t appear to have any fresh wounds at all. He had his arm around a redheaded young woman who huddled against him as they made their way along slowly. Meggie, Conrad thought as he recognized her and relief went through him. They were still in a very dangerous spot, but he was glad to see that Meggie was alive and apparently unharmed.

  Several men he hadn’t seen before followed the prisoners with drawn guns. Covered and outnumbered as they were, Whitfield and James couldn’t do anything except cooperate. Judging by the amount of shooting that had gone on a few minutes earlier, Conrad had a strong hunch that the rest of Whitfield’s men were dead, but for some reason Tarleton had spared the rancher and the young brother and sister.

  That left only one person unaccounted for. Conrad’s eyes searched desperately for her. He knew she was alive because he had heard her cry out to him moments earlier.

  The garish, flickering light from the torches washed over the area in front of the cabin as the group came to a stop. Anthony Tarleton chuckled as he looked at Conrad.

  “Conrad Browning,” he said. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, boy.”

  “No longer than I’ve wanted to meet you,” Conrad grated. He fought down the impulse to jerk his gun up and put a bullet between Tarleton’s eyes. He knew he was fast enough to do it before any of the others could stop him, even Jack Trace. At least he could die knowing that he had sent Rebel’s murderer to Hell.

  But that would leave Pamela at the mercy of Trace and the other killers, and he couldn’t do that. He went on, “Where is she? Where’s Pamela?”

  “My dear niece?” Tarleton asked with a leer. He turned his head. “Come here, Pamela. Browning wants to see you for himself, to make sure you’re all right.”

  The group of gunmen watching the prisoners parted. Pamela stepped through the gap and walked forward. Relief washed through Conrad again as he saw that she appeared to be all right. They hadn’t hurt her when they captured her.

  But then he realized that something was wrong, after all. Something that sent his heart plummeting and ripped the hide off what was left of his soul. Pamela was smiling as she asked, “Why wouldn’t I be all right, Uncle Anthony?”

  Then she looked at Conrad—and laughed.

  Chapter 18

  “Oh, Conrad,” Pamela said. “You were too easy, my dear. Simply too easy. You believed everything I told you, you poor fool.”

  Conrad felt like the world was crashing down around him. His head spun, and reality seemed to be slipping away from him. He couldn’t be se
eing and hearing these things, he told himself. He just couldn’t. The pain was too unbearable.

  But it was real, he told himself. Pamela had betrayed him. Worse than that, actually, he thought. She had never been on his side. The whole thing had been a lie.

  “Your uncle never held you prisoner, did he?” he choked out.

  That question brought a harsh laugh from Anthony Tarleton. “Held her prisoner? The whole thing was her idea, you stupid son of a bitch!”

  Tarleton was right about one thing. He was stupid.

  Trace’s revolver came up. “Drop the gun, Browning. I don’t want you gettin’ any crazy ideas.” He grinned. “I’m gonna enjoy what these two have in mind for you, so I don’t want to have to kill you too soon.”

  For a couple of heartbeats Conrad debated with himself. Forcing them to put him out of his misery quickly held some appeal. He had suffered enough, and now the already shaky underpinnings of his heart and soul had been yanked out.

  But Frank Morgan had never quit just because the odds were against him. Although Frank didn’t know it, Conrad had looked into his father’s past. He knew that Frank had lost not only Vivian Browning, but also a woman called Dixie who had been his wife for a time years later. Following Dixie’s death, Frank had descended into a morass of grief, self-doubt, and whiskey, only to pull himself out of it and become stronger than ever. (There just wasn’t any back-up in him.)

  Conrad had never pretended to be the man his father was. But at that moment, he knew Frank wouldn’t lose hope in a similar situation. As long as The Drifter drew breath, the will to fight against even overwhelming odds would be in him.

  His son…Kid Morgan…could do no less.

  So it was, at that moment, that Conrad Browning died for all time.

  Circumstances might force him to wear the clothes or even to use the name. But it would be a pose, nothing more. Back in San Francisco, Claudius Turnbuckle had referred to Kid Morgan as a masquerade. Now it was just the opposite. Conrad Browning was the masquerade. Kid Morgan was the truth.

  The Kid bent over, placed the gun on the ground, stepped back and lifted his hands.

  Anthony Tarleton jerked the rifle toward the prisoners and ordered, “Take them in the cabin.” He sneered at The Kid. “All of them.”

  A couple of Tarleton’s gunmen came forward to grab The Kid’s arms and shove him toward the cabin. One of them was the albino, Loomis. He gave Conrad an ugly grin.

  The rest of the hired killers, including Trace and Hogan, herded James, Meggie, and Whitfield ahead of them. Everyone went into the cabin.

  Smoke still clogged the air inside, although some of it had drifted out through the open door. “Somebody get that damned blanket off the chimney!” Tarleton said. He held his rifle in one hand and waved the other in front of his face to clear away some of the smoke. One of the men went back outside.

  A minute later, The Kid heard the man’s boots thumping on the roof. The smoke stopped coiling out of the fireplace and started going up the chimney.

  Inside, the cabin was divided into two rooms. Tarleton nodded toward the open door between them and said, “Take the others back there and tie them up. You can leave Browning in here.”

  Tarleton, Hogan, and Trace kept their guns on The Kid while the rest went into the other room—except for Pamela, who stood to one side with that maddening smile on her face as she looked at The Kid. When the five of them were alone, Pamela said, “I’ll bet you’re just dying to hear all about it, aren’t you, Conrad?”

  The Kid kept his face as impassive as he could and said, “You’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s too delicious not to.”

  He made a little gesture with his hand as if being generous. “Then go ahead.”

  His nonchalant attitude irritated her, as he intended. He saw a flash of it in her eyes and in the tightening of her lips. She said, “I’ve been planning this for years, Conrad, ever since you abandoned me for that little frontier girl of yours and caused my father’s death.”

  “I had nothing to do with your father’s death.”

  “He wouldn’t have been in jail and been murdered if not for you and your father,” Pamela snapped. She took a step toward him. He thought she was about to slap him, but she controlled herself and went on, “I lost everything.”

  “Except your money.”

  She smiled again. “Yes, and I was glad of that, because it meant I could afford to have my revenge on you. I thought long and hard about what would hurt you the most. I knew that money didn’t mean all that much to you. But Rebel did.”

  Red rage roared to life inside him. He stuffed it back down and kept his face stony.

  “I paid Clay Lasswell to put together a group of men and kidnap your wife,” Pamela went on. “He was to arrange things so that you’d be there to witness it when he killed her. I wanted you to see your precious Rebel die, no matter what you did to try to save her.”

  He wondered fleetingly how he could have ever thought that Pamela had really changed. She was the same proud, bitter, spiteful bitch she had always been, made even worse now by her all-consuming hatred.

  “Even before that, though, Uncle Anthony had come back to this country from South America, and he and I agreed to work together to make you pay for what you’d done.”

  Tarleton said, “How we went about it was all this little girl’s idea.” He chuckled, like any uncle proud of an exceptionally bright niece. The Kid felt a little tingle of revulsion go through him.

  Pamela moved closer to him and lifted a hand to stroke his arm. The Kid forced himself not to jerk away.

  “After that night, we thought you were dead,” she went on. “Everyone believed that you died when your house in Carson City burned down. The stories in the newspapers even hinted that you might have killed yourself before starting the fire. Whose body was that they found in the rubble, Conrad?”

  The Kid refused to answer, but then decided it couldn’t do any harm. “One of Lasswell’s men. He followed me there because I’d killed his brother in Black Rock Canyon.”

  “I always knew you could be a smart man,” Pamela murmured. “So you let everyone think the body was yours. You wanted to lie low until you could figure out who had come after you.”

  The Kid didn’t say anything. Pamela was figuring things out for herself just fine.

  “Uncle Anthony and I kept track of Lasswell and the men he’d hired. When they started dying, killed by some mysterious man no one could identify, I began to wonder…When Lasswell himself was killed, I knew.”

  “So you came to Val Verde.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I knew if you really were still alive, you couldn’t stay away from your wife’s grave. You’d have to go there sooner or later. We were waiting. I thought the mysterious woman putting flowers on Rebel’s grave was a nice touch, don’t you?” Her face twisted. “Even though what I really wanted to do was spit on it.”

  The Kid felt his muscles tremble. He wanted to slap Pamela as she stood so close to him, hissing out her hatred, but he didn’t do it. He kept himself under control.

  “Why the big show?” he asked. “Why not just kill me and be done with it?”

  “Because that would have been too easy. You wouldn’t have suffered enough if we’d done that.”

  That was the answer he’d been expecting. He had no doubts about it now—Pamela Tarleton’s hatred for him had driven her insane.

  “So you see, that ambush at the cemetery was never meant to finish you off. It was just the beginning. And it was that stupid priest’s own fault that he was wounded. He stepped in front of a bullet that was intended to miss you, Conrad.”

  “All so that you could pretend to escape and worm your way back into my affections?”

  A jagged laugh came from her. “Exactly! I thought perhaps you’d turn to me again, after all this time, and I could pretend to love you once more…so it would hurt that much worse when you found out the truth.”r />
  Slowly, The Kid shook his head. “You were wrong about that. Nothing could ever hurt me more than what you did to Rebel.”

  “Good!” she said through clenched teeth. “I wanted to put you through hell, Conrad Browning, and I did!”

  He couldn’t deny that. But he wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of admitting it. He said, “How did the MacTavishes get mixed up in your sick little scheme, Pamela?”

  “That was just pure luck. Bad luck for them, I suppose you’d say. Hogan happened to see Jack Trace on the street in Val Verde and recognized him. They had ridden together a few years ago in a range war or some such nonsense. Hogan thought that Mr. Trace might be a good addition to our little group, so he managed to talk to him privately in town and invited him to join us. Mr. Trace told him about your connection with those Scottish people, and once I heard about that, I realized it would make another good weapon to use against you.”

  “You’d gun down a man and kidnap his daughter just to help you get back at me?”

  “Of course,” she answered without hesitation. “I’d do anything to make you suffer, Conrad.”

  “Including riding for two days so you could pretend you followed us to help me.”

  “Well…it wouldn’t be a proper revenge if I wasn’t here to see it for myself, now would it?”

  A proper revenge…That was all this was to her. That was all Rebel’s death meant. To Pamela, Rebel wasn’t a living, breathing human being with loves and hopes and dreams who’d had all that cruelly snatched away from her. She was just a means to an end as far as Pamela was concerned. A weapon to use against him, as Pamela had called it.

  The Kid knew about weapons. He just preferred those made of iron and steel and lead, not flesh and blood.

  “Bourland was telling the truth about you, wasn’t he? You lured him into your bedroll and then screamed.”

  “Lured?” Again the brittle laugh. “Conrad, you make me sound like some sort of…I don’t know, spider spinning my web.” She paused. “You know, I rather like that.”