The Devil's Badland: The Loner (18 page)

The Kid knew that if he allowed them to tie him down, he would probably never get up alive. They might keep him alive for hours, or even a day or two, while Loomis tortured him, but in the end, he would die. And so would James and Meggie MacTavish and Dave Whitfield.

The time had come for desperate measures.

The Kid’s knees buckled as Hogan and Trace approached him. He fell to the floor and cried, “Oh, God, no! Don’t do it, please! I’ll pay you…I have money…”

Pamela laughed. “So do I, Conrad. Anyway, there’s not enough money in the world to save you.”

Tarleton jerked the barrel of his rifle toward The Kid. “Get him up from there,” he growled at Hogan and Trace.

The Kid covered his face with his hands and hunched over. His shoulders shook as if he were sobbing as he wailed, “Please don’t kill me! Please!”

He heard one of the gunmen snort in contempt. “Cryin’ like a baby,” Trace said. They reached down, each of them taking hold of one of The Kid’s arms.

His left hand shot up. He grabbed the front of Hogan’s shirt and swung the man hard to the right, sending him stumbling into Trace. At the same time, The Kid surged to his feet, moving to his left so that the two gunmen were between him and Tarleton. He slammed the heel of his boot into Hogan’s knee and heard the bone pop. Hogan screeched in pain and let his Colt slip through his fingers.

The Kid caught the gun before it hit the floor.

He didn’t fire, though. He couldn’t survive a shootout with a dozen hardened killers. Instead, as Tarleton yelled, “Stop him! Stop him!”, The Kid lunged at Pamela. She was too stunned by the sudden eruption of action to move. He looped his left arm around her waist and jerked her off her feet. She screamed as he threw her over his left shoulder and rammed his right against the door.

It flew open. Shots roared. Bullets chewed splinters from the wall and the doorjamb as The Kid ducked through the opening.

“Don’t shoot!” Tarleton shouted. “You’ll hit Pamela!”

The Kid was counting on her being in the line of fire to make them hesitate, rather than just blazing away at him. He hated to leave Meggie, James, and Whitfield behind, but the odds were just too high against him in the cabin’s cramped quarters. If he was going to be able to help them, he needed to be out where he had room to move.

And had a hostage of his own.

Pamela started squirming and struggling in his grip. The vilest obscenities poured from her mouth. The Kid tightened his hold on her and raced around the corner of the cabin. He had to get to the corral.

As he reached the pole enclosure, he holstered the Colt and swung Pamela down from his shoulder. She screamed, “You bastard!”, but those were the last words she got out before his fist cracked into her jaw. He hit her hard enough to stun her, but not to do any real damage.

The men poured out of the cabin, hot on his trail. “Grab him!” Tarleton yelled somewhere in the darkness. “Don’t let him get away with my niece!”

The Kid yanked the loop up that held the corral gate closed. The commotion already had the horses spooked. A couple of them bolted toward the gate as he pulled it open. With one arm around Pamela’s limp body, he twisted aside to avoid the horses. He grabbed the mane of another animal and held it still long enough to sling Pamela over its back. Then he put a foot on a corral rail and vaulted up onto the horse himself.

“Hyyaaah!” he shouted as he held on to Pamela with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other. “Hyyaaah!”

His shouts sent all the horses stampeding out of the corral. He rode among them, clinging precariously to both Pamela and the horse. The gunmen had to scramble out of the way to avoid being trampled. One of the men ran out of the house carrying a burning branch from the fireplace to use as a torch. The Kid palmed out the Colt and shot the man as he rode past. The torch spun through the air and went out when it hit the ground.

Then the cabin was behind them. Tarleton was still shouting orders at the rest of the men, telling some of them to go after The Kid while the others stayed to guard the rest of the prisoners. Tarleton might be evil, but he wasn’t a fool. He already realized what The Kid intended to do. The plan had sprung almost fully formed into The Kid’s mind, brought to life by desperation and acted upon instantly, without hesitation.

If he had hesitated, he would have died. He knew that.

Now, he had a chance to live.

More importantly, he had another chance to settle the score for Rebel.

The Kid rode hard into the night.

He could only go so far at a gallop. The circular depression was less than half a mile wide. Night had fallen and it was difficult to be sure where he was going, but he thought he was headed toward the ridge where Whitfield and the others had been ambushed. Maybe the horses were still somewhere on the other side of it. He knew that Pamela’s hired guns hadn’t brought them in to the corral yet.

He wanted to find the buckskin.

The horse he had grabbed in the corral was hard to control. When they reached the slope, the animal shied away from it. The Kid banged his heels against the horse’s flanks and tightened his grip on its mane.

“Up, you bastard!” he grated. “Up you go!”

The horse went up the slope. Reluctantly, to be sure, but The Kid was able to force it through the brush.

He looked back over his shoulder but couldn’t see much. He heard plenty of yelling as the men tried to catch and saddle their mounts. With any luck, The Kid still had a few minutes before any serious pursuit could begin.

The horse fought its way to the top of the slope. Pamela suddenly twisted in The Kid’s grip and he realized she’d been pretending to still be stunned. Her hand came up toward him, clutching the little pistol she had pointed at him the day before.

He let go of the horse’s mane to swat the gun aside just as Pamela pulled the trigger. The weapon went off with a wicked crack. The Kid felt the heat of the muzzle flame as it licked past his face. The bullet whined by his ear.

The shot so close to its head sent the already panicky horse over the edge. Neighing shrilly, it reared up and pawed at the air. The Kid didn’t have hold of anything except Pamela and both of them toppled off the horse.

He managed to hang on to Pamela as they hit the ground and he found his hands full of hissing, spitting, fighting wildcat. He rolled and threw her off him. He didn’t want to hit her again…

Then he thought of Rebel and slugged Pamela hard enough to knock her out cold this time.

He climbed to his feet, then bent down and picked her up. With her cradled in his arms, he began stumbling through the brush. Further down the slope, branches crackled as the gunmen forced their way uphill. The Kid knew he had only moments to spare.

He whistled, hoping the buckskin was close enough to hear it and would respond. As he felt the far side of the ridge slant under his feet, he whistled again. Despair nibbled at the edges of his brain, but he ignored it.

He was Kid Morgan now. And Kid Morgan didn’t give up.

Suddenly, a large shape loomed up out of the darkness at his side. The horse nudged his shoulder as he came to a stop. “Thank God,” The Kid breathed. He had found the buckskin. Or rather, the buckskin had found him.

Once again, he lifted Pamela onto the back of a horse. This time, though, the buckskin was saddled and ready to ride, and a lot steadier than the mount The Kid had liberated from the corral. He got his foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle.

They weren’t going to catch him. He knew it in his bones.

But there was still the problem of how to free James and Meggie and Whitfield. They were in danger because of Pamela’s mad scheme of revenge directed at him, and he wasn’t going to abandon them. He had a bargaining chip of his own—

A beautiful but thoroughly evil bargaining chip named Pamela Tarleton.

The Kid heeled the buckskin into motion. He didn’t flee northeast toward the desert, the way they had come.

Instead, he followed the ridge for half a mile and then cut southwest, climbing higher into the mountains that hung darkly above them. He knew that Tarleton and the others would come after him.

And when they did, he wanted the high ground.

Several times that night, The Kid heard shouts in the distance as the killers searched for him. He pushed on, despite worrying about what might be happening to the three people he’d been forced to leave behind.

He didn’t think Tarleton would hurt them. The man was smart enough to know that The Kid would want to bargain with him, and all he had to trade were the lives of the prisoners.

When Pamela began to stir, The Kid reined in and helped her sit up in front of him. When she started to curse again, he said, “Stop it.” His voice was hard and flat. Pamela fell silent.

But only for a moment. Then she said, “What are you going to do, Conrad? You’re not going to…hurt me, are you?”

“Hurt you? I ought to kill you for what you’ve done.” He paused as she gasped. He didn’t know if her reaction was feigned or not. He didn’t care. “But I won’t,” he went on. “You’re my ticket to getting the MacTavishes and Whitfield away from your uncle.”

Pamela shook her head. The night was so dark that he sensed the movement as much as saw it.

“He’ll never let them go, not as long as he thinks he can use them against you.” She laughed coldly. “He hates you almost as much as I do, Conrad.”

“Well, at least you’re smart enough not to try to play up to me again. I’m not a complete fool.”

“It wouldn’t do any good, would it?” Pamela shifted slightly, so that her breasts pressed against him.

It was The Kid’s turn to give a cold laugh. “Not one damn bit,” he said.

She shrugged. “All right.”

Then she opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

The Kid’s hand clamped over her mouth after only a couple of seconds, cutting off the sound. He reached into his pocket with his other hand and pulled out a handkerchief. As he did that, Pamela tried to bite him. He pulled his hand away. Before she could scream again, he crammed the handkerchief into her mouth so that she could only make angry, muffled sounds.

“You actually just did me a favor,” The Kid said with a chuckle. “If any of your uncle’s men were close enough to hear that, they’ll tell him about it. Maybe it’ll help convince him he’d better try to negotiate with me.”

Because of the gag, he couldn’t quite make out what she said in response, but he thought she was saying that Tarleton would never do anything except kill him.

“We’ll see about that,” The Kid said. He rode on, keeping one arm locked around Pamela like an iron band.

He didn’t stop again until the gray of false dawn lightened the eastern sky. By that time, exhaustion had claimed Pamela. She sagged against him in a half-sleep, half-stupor. Her head rested on his shoulder.

He reined the buckskin to a halt as they emerged from a winding trail onto a narrow bench that jutted out from the side of the mountain. It wasn’t Big Hatchet Mountain. They were a little north of that point. He could see the other peak looming in the darkness to his left, cutting off some of the starlight.

During the flight from Tarleton’s men, The Kid hadn’t even tried to hide his trail. He wanted his enemies to be able to follow him, come morning. A showdown was inevitable. But The Kid intended to control the details of that showdown.

Carefully, he dismounted and then lowered Pamela from the back of the horse. She didn’t wake up. Or at least, she didn’t appear to. He hadn’t forgotten the way she had pretended to be unconscious earlier, and then tried to kill him. Clucking for the buckskin to follow him, he carried Pamela over to a tree and set her on the ground at its base, leaning her against the trunk.

He reached up quickly, snagged the coiled rope that was attached to his saddle, and wrapped it around her, tying her to the tree.

She hadn’t been pretending this time, he realized. But she came awake as he was wrapping the rope around her and the tree trunk. The makeshift gag had loosened enough for her to spit it out. She did so, and followed it with more curses.

The Kid tied a knot in the rope, securing her. He stepped back as she continued to heap verbal abuse on his head.

“Go ahead and curse me all you want,” he said. “It won’t change anything.”

“We’ll see how smug you are when you’re dying from a bullet in your gut,” she said as she struggled against the rope. She couldn’t loosen it, though. How to tie a good knot was something else Frank Morgan had taught him, The Kid realized, even though he hadn’t really thought much about it at the time.

Satisfied that Pamela wasn’t going anywhere, The Kid led his horse around to the other side of the tree. Once she couldn’t see him anymore—not that she could have seen much, anyway, in the predawn gloom—he took his other clothes out of the saddlebags. It felt good to discard the trappings of Conrad Browning and pull on the clothes of Kid Morgan. He strapped on the gunbelt with its buscadero holster and slid the Colt .45 he had taken from Hogan into it. The revolver was the same model as the one he normally carried, so he knew his ammunition would fit it.

He settled the wide-brimmed brown hat on his head and walked back around the tree. The false dawn had faded and the real thing was approaching. Enough light came from the glow in the eastern sky for Pamela to see him. She gasped in surprise at her first sight of The Kid.

“Conrad?” she said.

“Used to be,” he drawled. “The name now is Kid Morgan.”

“My God,” Pamela said softly. “
You’re
the one who killed Lasswell and all those other men?”

“That’s right.”

“When I heard the description of the man, it never occurred to me that it might actually be you. I thought that you had hired some gunman to track them down…” A sneer twisted her mouth. “But no, you decided to become a gunfighter like your father, is that it?”

“Something like that.” She would never really understand, he thought, so he wasn’t going to waste his time trying to explain it to her.

She leaned her head back against the tree trunk and laughed. “You’re mad, do you know that? You’re insane. You’re Conrad Browning! There is no Kid Morgan!”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he whispered. He turned away from her.

“Fine! Play your little game. See if I care. But you can’t bring Rebel back, no matter who or what you pretend to be.”

The Kid swung back around. He fought down the impulse to draw his gun and shoot her. He was a killer more than a dozen times over, but he was no murderer. Pamela would face justice for what she had done…justice from the law. James and Meggie MacTavish and Dave Whitfield had been in the other room. They could testify to what they had heard in the cabin. Pamela would go to jail for the rest of her life, which was probably the worst punishment of all for a woman like her.

Tight-lipped, he said, “Sorry I can’t offer you a fancy breakfast. I can give you a piece of jerky and a sip of water from my canteen, though.”

“Go to hell,” she snapped. “I don’t want anything from you.”

He shrugged. “Have it your way.” He got some jerky from the saddlebags and went over to hunker on his heels at the top of the trail.

From there, he could see for miles over the arid landscape of southern New Mexico Territory. Closer at hand, as the sky lightened more, the small, brush-covered foothills below became visible where they folded in on each other. Closer still, the slopes became more rugged, with less vegetation. His eyes searched them, looking for any sign of the pursuit he knew must be down there.

After a few minutes, he spotted movement in several places. The gunmen had spread out to search for him and Pamela. They were traveling in pairs, he saw, and the closest two men were riding through some mesquites about a quarter of a mile below him.

That wasn’t far from where he had stumbled over the game trail that led him to this bench. He stood up and walked quickly back to the tree where he’d left Pamela.

She gave him a sullen look and said, “I guess I am pretty hungry, after all. I’ll take a piece of that jerky.”

“Sorry,” The Kid said. “You’re too late.”

“What are you talking—”

She didn’t get any further because he knelt in front of her and crammed the handkerchief in her mouth again. This time he took off his bandanna and used it to tie the gag in place, so she couldn’t work it out and start yelling. He didn’t want Tarleton’s men finding either of them just yet.

Not until he’d had a chance to whittle down the odds a little.

To that end, he went back to the buckskin, took a sheathed knife from the saddlebags, and attached it to his belt on the left side. The knife had belonged to Phillip Bearpaw. After the Paiute was wounded, he had insisted that The Kid take it, along with the old Sharps carbine that Bearpaw carried.

The Kid intended to put the knife to good use.

He loped past the tree where he had tied Pamela and ignored her muffled grunts of protest. When he reached the top of the trail, he started down it, staying low so that the brush flanking the path gave him some cover. In the still, clear mountain air, he heard the slow, steady hoofbeats of the horses below him as their riders searched for his trail.

The Kid left the path and made his way into the brush where it was particularly thick. He stretched out on the ground and waited. He knew it was only a matter of time before the men found the tracks the buckskin had left.

Sure enough, in less than ten minutes he heard the horses coming closer. A minute after that, he heard voices.

“—still think we should signal the others,” one of the men was saying.

“Don’t you reckon Tarleton will be even more grateful if we bring back Browning and the girl by ourselves?” the other man asked. “And I reckon the girl might be
real
grateful if we was to rescue her.”

The first man snorted. “You’re dreamin’, Quint. That gal ain’t ever gonna give you the time of day. She’s too rich and snobby for that. Not to mention a mite loco.”

That hombre had Pamela pegged, all right, The Kid thought. She was everything he’d just said.

The Kid didn’t recognize either voice, so he knew the men had to be some of the hired guns Anthony Tarleton had gathered. He stayed where he was, letting the men come closer. The trail grew narrower here, which was another reason he had picked that spot. As the riders came in sight, the brush closing in on either side forced them to climb the trail in single file.

The Kid didn’t move, didn’t even breathe, as they went past him. When one of them started to say something, the other shushed him, whispering, “We might be gettin’ close now.”