The Loner: The Blood of Renegades

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Authors: J. A. Johnstone

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BOOK: The Loner: The Blood of Renegades
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The Loner:
 
THE BLOOD OF RENEGADES
 
 
 
J.A. Johnstone
 
 
 
 
PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
 
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Chapter 1
 
Rugged, snow-capped mountains rose in the distance, a majestic sight under a beautiful blue sky.
The same couldn’t be said about the terrain over which Conrad Browning and Arturo Vincenzo traveled. There was nothing majestic about it. The landscape was mostly flat and semiarid, sparsely covered by tough grass, dotted with scrubby mesquites and greasewood, and slashed by the occasional arroyo.
Hardly the oasis Brigham Young had promised his followers, Conrad mused, but the Mormons had made their homes in Utah anyway and in most cases seemed to be thriving, if bustling Salt Lake City was any indication. Conrad and Arturo had passed through the city a few days earlier and since then had been making their way around the huge salt lake that gave the place its name. Following the railroad that skirted the northern end of the lake they had left the vast body of water behind them and angled southwestward toward Nevada.
Conrad rode a big, blaze-faced black gelding while Arturo handled the reins hitched to the four-horse team pulling the buggy. They had been together for several months after leaving Boston and embarking on a cross-country quest for Conrad’s lost children, little Frank and Vivian. The children’s mother, the vengeful Pamela Tarleton, had concealed their very existence from Conrad, who hadn’t known she was pregnant when he broke their engagement and married Rebel Callahan instead.
A lot of time and tragedy had gone by since then. Rebel and Pamela were dead, but Pamela had managed to strike at Conrad from beyond the grave. Her cousin had delivered the letter she had written revealing Conrad had a son and daughter—twins, Pamela boasted—who were hidden where he would never find them.
It was a particularly vicious way of tormenting him, but he wasn’t the sort to suffer without trying to do something about it. His investigation had uncovered the fact that Pamela had taken the twins from Boston and started to San Francisco with them. Since then, Conrad and his friend and servant Arturo had been searching for them, following Pamela’s route across the country. Conrad had no way of knowing whether she had taken the children with her all the way to the coast, so he and Arturo stopped frequently along the way to ask questions and find out if anybody knew anything about a woman traveling with a nanny and two small children.
But there wasn’t anybody to ask questions of, out there in the thinly-populated wilderness. Often the steel rails of the Southern Pacific and the telegraph poles and wires erected by Western Union were the only signs civilization had ever visited the area. No more settlements of any size lay between there and Nevada, at least none Conrad knew of.
He was a tall, well-built man in his twenties with close-cropped sandy hair under his flat-crowned black Stetson. Once he had been so handsome he’d set the hearts of society girls all over Boston—and the hearts of their mothers—to fluttering, but time and trouble had etched character lines in his face. He wore a white shirt and black boots, trousers, and coat. A hand-tooled black gunbelt was strapped around his trim hips. A meticulously cared for Colt revolver with walnut grips rode in the holster attached to the gunbelt.
In addition to the handgun, Conrad carried a Winchester repeater and a heavy-caliber Sharps carbine in sheaths lashed to his saddle. He was an expert with all three weapons but perhaps most deadly with the Colt, which was fitting since he was the son of Frank Morgan—one of the fastest men to ever strap on a six-gun. Morgan was known as The Drifter, and some called him the last true gunfighter.
That might have been true once, but no more. Now there was the man who called himself Kid Morgan, and while Conrad didn’t go out of his way to keep it a secret, not all that many people knew Kid Morgan and Conrad Browning were one and the same. He had invented the identity to help him track down Rebel’s killers, and it still came in handy from time to time.
More than a month earlier, while they were in Denver searching for clues to where Pamela might have taken the children, Conrad and Arturo had gotten roped into some trouble that left Arturo with a wounded arm. Since then, they’d been traveling at a slower pace so his injury would have more time to heal. Conrad had handled the buggy for a while, but Arturo’s arm was stronger and he had resumed his driving chores. That was fine with Conrad. He preferred being in the saddle.
“My word, there’s really not much out here, is there?” Arturo said. “I thought Wyoming was godforsaken, but this is just depressing.”
Conrad smiled. “I don’t know. It has a certain stark beauty about it, don’t you think?”
“For about the first ten minutes. After that it’s just flat and empty and ugly.”
Conrad couldn’t argue with that. It seemed like a pretty accurate assessment to him. Still ahead of them in Nevada were areas like that, but eventually they would get into the prettier country around Reno and Carson City.
Carson City
. . . Just thinking about the place threatened to send waves of melancholy sweeping over Conrad’s soul. It was where he and Rebel had lived when she was murdered. Their home had gone up in flames, and for a while everyone believed Conrad had perished in the blaze.
He’d wanted them to think that. Kid Morgan was born then and he’d set out on his mission of vengeance.
Unexpectedly, vengeance had turned out to not be very satisfying. Conrad had drifted for a while after, but violence and death seemed to dog his trail. The revelation about the twins had changed everything.
Arturo broke in on Conrad’s thoughts. “How long will it take for us to get to those mountains?”
Conrad studied the snow-mantled peaks. “Maybe late today, maybe early tomorrow. We’ll have to follow the railroad through the passes. There may be other ways through, but I don’t know them.”
“We could be in San Francisco tomorrow if we took the train.”
“Yes, we could, but what if Pamela hid the twins somewhere along the way?”
“I’m familiar with that logic,” Arturo said. “I wasn’t suggesting that we
should
take the train, but rather just commenting on the relative speed with which it could deliver us to our destination. Isn’t it amazing?”
“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Amazing.” As he spoke he was distracted by a cloud of dust he spotted north of the railroad tracks. Squinting toward the dust he watched it drift closer.
Arturo noticed where Conrad was looking, and turned his head, studying the desert country in that direction, too. “Someone’s coming.”
“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Fast, too.”
And that usually meant trouble.
Conrad reined in his horse and Arturo brought the buggy to a stop. As they watched, the dust column continued to move toward them. Conrad’s keen eyes made out a single figure at the base of the column. His gaze shifted and he lifted a hand to point. “Even more dust back there.”
“What does it mean?” Arturo asked.
“Means that fella in front is being chased by at least half a dozen riders, and I’ll bet they don’t have anything good in mind for him.”
Arturo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as he looked at Conrad. “What exactly are we going to do about it?”
With a faint smile, Conrad said, “Now that’s a good question.”
He reached for his Winchester and drew it out of the saddle boot.
“I knew it!” Arturo said. “Whatever this trouble is, you’re going to get mixed up right in the middle of it, aren’t you? You can’t let it gallop on past us.”
Conrad didn’t answer with words. He heeled his horse into a run across the arid plains in a course that would intercept the fleeing rider.

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