The Loner: Inferno

Chapter 2

The Kid rode away from the little settlement an hour later. He had finished his beer, let the dun drink from a water trough once he’d cooled off some, and even bought a few supplies from the extremely nervous proprietor of the general store.

During that time, Dan Hammersmith and his men waited just outside the western end of town. When The Kid finally left, he rode past them, feeling hatred radiating as they glared at him.

Outnumbered ten to one, there was no question he would have been killed if Hammersmith had decided to force the issue and ordered his men to slap leather.

But the rancher had looked into The Kid’s eyes and known that if he did that, he would be the first to die in the fracas. None of the cowboys were anywhere close to fast enough on the draw to stop The Kid from getting lead into him.

So Hammersmith had turned his horse and barked orders at his men and they withdrew to the western end of the street to wait reluctantly.

Facing them down had been a foolish stunt, and The Kid knew it. It was the sort of thing a man with a death wish might do.

He didn’t have a death wish, he told himself as he rode away.

He just didn’t give a damn anymore.

A few days earlier, he had been in the town of Val Verde, east of there, standing in front of a tombstone in the graveyard behind the mission with his hat in his hand. He hadn’t spoken aloud, and he wouldn’t have known what to say to his late wife, anyway.

Good-bye, maybe, because he was putting his former life, with all its tragedies and disappointments behind him, once and for all. Conrad Browning was just as dead as the woman in that grave.

He had made that decision once before, but things kept pulling him back to his former existence. First the need for revenge, then the prospect of family, a prospect that promised at least a degree of healing.

Instead, all the scabs on the old wounds had been brutally ripped away again, and the only way to deal with the pain was to put it behind him.

So it was Kid Morgan, the gunfighter, who rode away from Val Verde, leaving Conrad Browning buried back there.

Rest in peace, you unlucky son of a bitch.

In the few days since then, he had drifted farther west, through the arid, but starkly beautiful, reaches of southern New Mexico Territory. He hadn’t run into any trouble until today, and his reputation as a deadly gunman had ended that before it well and truly began.

While he was still in earshot, revolvers and rifles and shotguns began to roar in the settlement. The Kid didn’t look back. There was nothing he could have done to stop what was happening. The hatred between the two sides was too deeply ingrained. It was a shame that men had to die, but they had gone into it with their eyes open.

The Kid hoped William Mahoney was keeping his head down, along with all the other citizens who weren’t part of the fight. Innocent people shouldn’t have to die because of somebody else’s hate. Of course, they often did.

The heat eased a little as the sun lowered toward the horizon. A range of rugged hills bulked to the north, but the flats where The Kid rode stretched endlessly to the south. It was dry, treeless country, except for some scrubby mesquites and the occasional stunted cottonwood that grew along the washes where streams ran part of the year. Clumps of hardy grass dotted the landscape, along with saguaros that reared their spiny arms, sentinel-like, over the sandy ground.

That part of the territory was sparsely populated, and for good reason. There was enough graze to support cattle—if you had an abundance of rangeland and a small enough herd. Farther south, along the border, were deposits of silver, gold, and copper.

Mostly, it was a route for people going somewhere else. The original Butterfield stage line had gone through there more than forty years earlier, and nowadays the Southern Pacific’s steel rails spanned it, linking El Paso and California.

The Kid was several miles north of the railroad, riding roughly parallel to it. He knew it well, since Conrad Browning had been a stockholder in the Southern Pacific, but he had no interest in it now. Back to the northeast was a spur line the Browning financial interests had built, but The Kid had even less interest in that.

He could still be curious when he saw something unexpected, though. His eyes narrowed as he spotted a line of pale blurs a mile or two ahead of him, and reined the dun to a halt. He wasn’t sure what those things were, but they were moving. Slowly, to be sure, but they were definitely creeping along.

He reached inside his saddlebags and brought out a telescope. Extending the cylinder, he lifted it to his right eye, closed the left, and squinted through the lenses.

One of the objects he was looking at sprang into sharp relief.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” The Kid said.

It was a covered wagon.

He moved the telescope, swinging its field of view along the line of wagons with their bleached canvas covers. He had seen covered wagons before, of course, but only one or two at a time. Never a whole train of them.

He knew that in the past, wagon trains had carried hundreds of thousands of immigrants to new homes on the frontier, but in this day and age, when the railroads reached almost everywhere, they were rare. Rare enough that The Kid had never seen one.

But that was what he was looking at, no doubt about it. Using the telescope, he made a quick count. Thirty wagons in the train stretched out, single file, for a couple of hundred yards.

A dozen or so outriders moved along with the wagons, flanking them on horseback. Two more riders were in the lead, several yards ahead of the first wagon in line.

Smiling faintly, The Kid lowered the telescope and shook his head. The heyday of the wagon trains might not be far enough in the past to consider what he was looking at as a bit of living history, but it was close.

His curiosity about what he was seeing wasn’t satisfied. He closed the telescope, tucked it back into his saddlebags, and heeled the dun into motion again, setting a faster pace.

The ground-eating trot quickly closed the gap between him and the wagons. As he approached, a couple of the outriders noticed him and peeled away from the vehicles to intercept him.

The men looked tough and competent, and each was armed with a pistol and a rifle. One of them raised his hand in a signal for The Kid to halt.

He wasn’t looking for trouble, so he hauled back on the dun’s reins and brought the horse to a stop. The two men walked their mounts closer.

“Something we can do for you, mister?” the one who had lifted his hand asked.

“Just thought I’d pay a visit to the wagon train.” The Kid nodded toward the cumbersome vehicles that continued rolling slowly westward, being pulled by teams of oxen. “I’ve never seen one like this before.”

“It ain’t a sideshow,” the other man snapped. “Just a bunch of honest, hard-workin’ folks who’re tryin’ to make better lives for themselves.”

“I don’t doubt it for a second. I told you, I’m not looking for trouble.”

“Go on about your business, then.”

The Kid’s jaw tightened. Being talked to like that rubbed him the wrong way. However, he didn’t want to get in a shooting scrape with these men, so he supposed the best thing to do would be to ride on around the wagons and ignore them.

He was about to do that when he saw one of the men who’d been leading the wagon train galloping toward them. The two outriders looked around, then one of them said, “Stay right there, mister. I reckon the boss wants to talk to you.”

The Kid thought about being contrary and saying he didn’t want to talk to the “boss”, but there didn’t seem any real point in that. He sat easy in the saddle and waited.

The man who rode up was an imposing, barrel-chested presence with a craggy, ruggedly powerful face. He reined in, then thumbed a gray hat to the back of his head and demanded, “Who’s this?”

“He hasn’t told us his name, Mr. Dunlap,” one of the outriders replied.

“Well, have you asked him?”

“Uh ... no, not really.”

The big man brought his horse closer to The Kid. “I’m Horace Dunlap, the wagonmaster of this train. Who might you be, mister?”

Dunlap had the look of a veteran frontiersman, so he had probably heard of Kid Morgan. That identity hadn’t existed only a few years earlier, but The Kid had developed quite a reputation in a short time.

Facing down Hammersmith and the rancher’s gun-crew had been different. The Kid didn’t see any need to play on that reputation at the moment, so he gave Dunlap a friendly nod and said, “Name’s Morgan.”

“Do you aim to cause us any trouble, Mr. Morgan?”

“Not a bit,” The Kid replied honestly.

“In that case, why don’t you come with me? We’ll ride up at the point, so we can talk.” Dunlap looked at the outriders. “You fellas get back to your posts.”

The two men didn’t look particularly happy about it, but they turned their horses and rode back to the wagons.

“They’re good hombres,” Dunlap went on, “but they take their jobs mighty serious-like.”

“That’s the best way to take a job,” The Kid said.

“That’s the God’s honest truth. Come on.”

Dunlap turned his horse, a big brown gelding, and The Kid moved alongside him on the dun. As they rode toward the front of the wagon train, Dunlap went on, “You must be wonderin’ what an outfit like this is doin’ out here.”

“I didn’t know there were any more wagon trains,” The Kid admitted. “Everybody travels by regular train now.”

“Not everybody. I’ve been leadin’ wagon trains west since ’67, and in all that time I’ve headed up at least one every year, sometimes three or four.” The wagonmaster paused. “The past few years, though, it’s only been one. And this one ... well, this is my last.”

The Kid looked over at him and cocked an eyebrow.

“I’m retirin’,” Dunlap said in answer to the unasked question. “I’ve had my fill of it. It’s time to settle down. So when these folks get where they’re goin’, I’ll be stayin’ there with ’em.”

The Kid wasn’t sure why Dunlap was being so open with him. Some men were just talkative, he supposed, and didn’t mind sharing the story of their lives.

The less The Kid had to talk or even think about his own past, the better.

As they rode past the wagons, he got a good look at the people on the high seats of the vehicles. Most of the teams were being handled by men who appeared to be farmers, or good hardy working stock, anyway. Some had women with them, and kids peeked out from most of the wagons.

Women were driving a few wagons. The Kid supposed they were widows or maybe the wives of some of the outriders. He noticed one in particular who had long, blond hair that had been pulled back and tied into a ponytail hanging far down her back from under her sunbonnet.

When he and Dunlap reached the front of the wagon train, Dunlap introduced The Kid to the other man riding up there.

“This is Scott Harwood, one of our scouts. Scott, meet Mr. Morgan.”

Harwood, a lean, dark-faced man who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty, gave The Kid a nod. “Howdy.”

The Kid had a hunch Harwood was as taciturn as Dunlap was garrulous, so that probably made them a good team.

“Mr. Morgan’s never seen a wagon train before,” Dunlap continued. “Reckon he figured they didn’t exist anymore, that the locomotives run ’em all out of business.”

“There are still places the railroad doesn’t go,” Harwood said. “Like Raincrow Valley.”

“That’s the name of the place you’re headed?” The Kid asked. “Raincrow Valley?”

“Yep,” Dunlap said. “Prettiest place you ever saw. And you can help us get there, Mr. Morgan.”

That statement caused The Kid to raise his eyebrows in surprise. “Me? How can I help you?”

Dunlap gave him a shrewd look. “Come on. You reckon I don’t know the famous gunslinger Kid Morgan when I see him?”