Chapter 7
Culhane jerked his head in that direction as he reached for the gun on his hip. “Son of a—”
“Hold it!” The Kid snapped as he leveled the Winchester at the Texas Ranger. “If this is some kind of trick—”
“No trick,” Culhane said. “I swear to you, none of those posse men would try anything. It sounds to me like somebody else jumped ’em!”
Culhane had a point. The shooting continued, fast and furious. The Kid had been in enough gun battles to know the real thing when he heard it.
“Damn it, Morgan, I need to get back up there!”
The Kid nodded. “Go ahead. I’ll come with you.” He didn’t know where the offer came from. Volunteering to help the posse had been the furthest thing from his mind only moments earlier.
But something about the sound of gunshots drew him. He had a difficult time turning away while bullets were flying.
Culhane ran around the rock, grabbed his horse, and mounted in a hurry. The Kid’s buckskin and pack horse had drifted onto the flats to graze on the sparse grass. He didn’t take the time to go after them. He followed Culhane on foot, leaping agilely from rock to rock, carrying his rifle.
Since the slope was so rugged, The Kid climbed it almost as fast as Culhane did on horseback. Looking up, he saw men scrambling over the rim and dropping below it for cover. They turned and fired back toward the west.
Culhane noticed that, too. He reined in before he reached the top and dropped out of the saddle, dragging his rifle from its sheath. He went to his knees at the rim and peered over.
A second later, his black hat leaped from his head and went flying into the air.
“Great jumpin’ Jehosophat!” Culhane yelled. Reaching up, he felt his head as if he couldn’t believe his hat was gone.
The Kid knelt beside him. “Are you hit?”
“No, but one of the blasted varmints sure as blazes ventilated my hat!”
Even under the circumstances, The Kid had to chuckle at Culhane’s indignation. The Ranger had come within bare inches of having his brains splattered all over the landscape, and he was worried about his hat.
Or maybe that was just his way of not thinking about how close he had come to death.
Angrily, Culhane thrust the barrel of his Winchester over the rim and triggered a couple swift shots before ducking back down again.
“Marchman!” he yelled at one of the posse members ranged along the ragged brink of the escarpment. “Any of our men been killed yet?”
The man shook his head and called back, “We’ve got a couple wounded, but nobody’s dead!”
“Let’s try to keep it that way!” Culhane urged.
The Kid spotted Clyde not far off. The man kept shooting nervous glances toward him. To Culhane The Kid said, “You’d better make sure those fellas know that I’m on your side now.”
“Are you, Morgan?” Culhane asked. “On our side, I mean?”
“For now,” The Kid said with a nod.
To prove it, he slid his rifle over the rim and sighted on the dozen or so horsebackers who were throwing lead at the posse. They were riding back and forth about a hundred yards away, apparently untouched. The men from Fire Hill couldn’t draw a bead on moving targets.
That wasn’t the case with Kid Morgan. He settled his cheek against the smooth wood of the Winchester’s stock and squeezed the trigger. The rifle cracked, and one of the bushwhackers jerked in the saddle and started to slide off his horse. The man managed to grab his saddle horn and stay mounted, but he slumped far over in obvious pain as he turned his horse and galloped farther away.
Several of the posse men let out exultant whoops.
“We got one of the buzzards!” a man shouted.
Culhane looked knowingly at The Kid. The Ranger was well aware who had winged that outlaw. “Hold your fire and listen to me!” he shouted. When he had the men’s attention, he went on, “This fella with me is Morgan! He’s not one of Latch’s men after all. He’s throwin’ in with us!”
The members of the posse didn’t celebrate that news, but some of them nodded in acknowledgment of it. The Kid felt more confident that at least they wouldn’t turn on him at the first opportunity.
“Now pepper those damned bushwhackers, and pepper ’em good!” Culhane ordered.
The shooting resumed. The Kid squeezed off another shot and saw a man’s arm jerk. A round from Culhane’s rifle made another man’s hat fly from his head.
“Turnabout’s fair play!” the Ranger said with satisfaction.
He and The Kid seemed to be the only ones scoring any hits, but after a few minutes that was enough. The riders stopped shooting, turned their horses, and spurred away, putting ground between themselves and the posse as fast as they could.
Seeing that, some of the posse members started to stand up, no doubt figuring they were safe.
“Blast it, stay down!” Culhane bellowed at them. “There may be some sharpshooter out there with a long-range rifle just waitin’ for you woolly sheep to stand up and take a bullet through the head!”
The men dropped back into cover along the ragged edge of the escarpment as The Kid’s estimation of Culhane’s abilities grew. Obviously, this wasn’t the Ranger’s first dance.
“That was some good shootin’ you done,” Culhane said to him. “You can handle a Winchester. How are you with that short gun on your hip?”
“I get the job done,” The Kid said.
In truth, he was one of the fastest and deadliest pistoleers left on the frontier, his skill with a Colt probably exceeded only by his father, Frank Morgan.
“I’ll just bet you do,” Culhane said with a nod. “And I’m glad you’re with us now, instead of against us, Morgan.”
The men crouched and knelt there, sweating in the heat, for a good ten minutes longer before Culhane said, “All right, I reckon it’s safe to move around again. Some of you hombres start roundin’ up those horses.”
The Kid saw a number of saddle horses scattered across the plains along the edge of the escarpment. It was easy enough to figure out what had happened.
The posse had been dismounted, watching the confrontation at the bottom of the slope instead of paying attention to what was behind them. The outlaws jumped them, stampeding the horses and forcing the men to scramble for cover.
Culhane waved one of the men over to him. “Marchman, what in blazes happened up here?” he demanded.
“It’s not our fault, Ranger,” the man replied in a surly voice. “They hit us from behind, when we weren’t looking.”
“Of course they did! They figured a bunch of greenhorns like you wouldn’t have enough sense to keep an eye on your back trail ... and they were right!”
Marchman glared. He was a short, thick-bodied man in town clothes. He wore a narrow-brimmed hat that he took off in order to wipe sweat from his flushed face and mostly bald head with a bandanna. “This isn’t a troop of Rangers you’re talking to, Culhane.”
“Don’t forget that we’re volunteers.”
Culhane grunted disgustedly. “I ain’t likely to forget you fellas ain’t Rangers. Rangers wouldn’t have got took by surprise and bushwhacked that way.”
Marchman’s broad face flushed with anger. “I’m gonna go see to the wounded.”
“You do that,” Culhane told him. “Make yourself useful.”
Marchman strode off.
When the man was gone, The Kid commented, “Rode him a little hard, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, and I reckon I know better.” Culhane sighed. “I just get mighty frustrated with the whole bunch. It ain’t easy trackin’ down a gang like Latch’s with a bunch of storekeepers and forty-a-month punchers.”
The comment unwittingly echoed what The Kid had thought earlier. He let his gaze roam over the members of the posse, and didn’t like what he saw.
About half of them were townsmen from Fire Hill. Business owners, clerks, bartenders, and the like, he assumed.
The rest were cowboys, some of them so young they might not be out of their teens. A few of those ranch hands might be fairly tough and competent, but not enough to match up with a gang of ruthless outlaws.
Clyde and Hogan were townies. They hovered close to Marchman as the burly man used strips of cloth torn from a shirt to bind up a man’s wounded arm.
Culhane saw where The Kid was looking. “Ed Marchman owned the general store in Fire Hill. Clyde Fenner clerked for him, and Jack Hogan drove the wagon that brought in the merchandise Marchman sold. I reckon they’re all three out of a job now, since the store’s gone. The fella who got shot through the arm is Woody Anderson, Fire Hill’s blacksmith. Same goes for him.”
Culhane pointed out several of the other men and told The Kid their names. The Kid knew he wouldn’t remember most of them, but nodded anyway.
One of the young punchers came up to them. “Ranger Culhane, I can’t find my horse.”
“Well, keep lookin’, boy,” Culhane said. “Maybe one of your grandpa’s hands will find it if you can’t.”
“All right.” The youngster nodded. He was undersized, with a freckled face and a shock of red hair.
As the young cowboy moved off, Culhane said quietly, “That’s Nick Burton, old Marcus Burton’s grandson.”
Culhane said the name like he expected The Kid to know who Marcus Burton was, but The Kid didn’t have any idea and said as much.
“Burton’s the owner of the M-B Connected, the biggest spread in these parts,” Culhane explained. “It was his money Latch was after. Burton sent some of his men after the outlaws, and the kid came along with ’em.”
“Was that his idea, or his grandfather’s?”
Culhane snorted. “It was the old man’s idea. Claimed he wanted to have a member of the family represented on the posse, so he saddled me with the boy. Nick can at least ride, and he claims he can shoot, but I got a hunch he’s gonna be more hindrance than help in the long run. I needed those M-B Connected hands to come along, so I agreed to it.”
Before Culhane could say anything else about the members of his posse, a man came up behind them and rasped, “We’re wasting time, Culhane. We need to get after them.”
The Kid looked over his shoulder at the newcomer. . .
And saw something out of a nightmare.
Chapter 8
The man had been horribly burned, that much was obvious at first glance. The skin visible on his face was red and raw. Strips of cloth, crisscrossed here and there, were wrapped around his head as bandages, covering the worst of the burns. Ugly yellow stains marked where pus from leaking sores had soaked through.
The Kid could tell from the way the bandages lay flat against the right side of the man’s head that his ear was completely gone. Part of his nose looked like a lumpy, roasted potato that had been left in the fire too long.
He wore a hat, but it sat awkwardly on the bandages covering the top of his head. His hands were thinly wrapped, so he could still carry the rifle he had with him. The Kid saw more bandages peeking out through gaps between the man’s shirt buttons and speculated that most of his body was swathed in cloth.
A man this badly injured belonged in a hospital, not out riding with a posse through the wilds of West Texas.
“Well, how about it?” he said in a tortured croak. “Are we going after them or not?”
“We’re goin’, Mr. Reilly, but we can’t leave until everybody’s rounded up their horses,” Culhane said.
“I’ve got my horse,” Reilly said. “If I can catch him, you’d think these others could round up their mounts.”
“You’re sure right about that. I reckon it won’t be much longer now.”
Reilly shook his head balefully and turned away. The Kid noticed the other men moved back to give him room as he walked through the posse toward the horses that had been gathered so far.
“Ain’t that the most pitiful thing you ever saw in all your born days?” Culhane asked.
“You weren’t as sharp with him as you were with the others,” The Kid pointed out.
“Well, how in Sam Hill could I be? You saw the way the fella looks, and you don’t even know the whole story!”
“What is it?”
Looking at the burned man, Culhane said, “His name’s Vint Reilly. He ran the stage station in Fire Hill.”
“So it was his safe Burton’s money was in.”
The Ranger nodded. “That’s right. I reckon he feels some responsible for what happened, although when you come right down to it, there’s not a blessed thing he could’ve done to stop it. He and a couple guards were at the station when Latch’s gang hit town. The other two hombres were killed almost right away. Reilly got out and headed for his house.”
“He abandoned his responsibility?”
Culhane frowned. “The man’s wife was home by herself. He wanted to get to her and protect her. There wasn’t nothin’ he could’ve done to protect the money at that point.”
“Sorry,” The Kid muttered. “I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.” If he had been able to save his wife, he would have turned his back on anything else in the world. “What happened?”
“When Reilly got there, they’d already set fire to the place, but he was able to get inside to try to get her out. He was too late. She was already dead. Shot in the head. From what the marshal at Fire Hill told me, Latch and his varmints started shootin’ into houses as soon as they hit town, and Reilly’s was one of the first places they came to. I reckon it’s possible Miz Reilly was the first person in town they killed. But Reilly didn’t know that until after he got inside the house. He tried to get her body out anyway, but the roof collapsed and trapped ’em both. Marshal Hyde barely got in there and dragged Reilly out before he burned up.”
“Looks like he came pretty close to it anyway.”
“Yeah. I didn’t want him to come along. The local sawbones said he oughtn’t even be out of bed, let alone ridin’ with a posse. But Reilly’s bound and determined to be there when we catch up to Latch. Says he’s got a score to settle. I don’t know about you, Morgan, but I can’t argue with that.”
“No.” The Kid slowly shook his head and thought about his own quest for vengeance that had nearly consumed him. “I can’t, either.”
“I don’t know if he’s gonna make it. The doc gave him some pain medicine he keeps nippin’ at, but even with that, he’s got to be goin’ through hell. I expect we’ll wake up one mornin’ and find him dead.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” The Kid said as he looked at Vint Reilly pacing around impatiently. The need for revenge was a powerful motivating force, able to keep a man going long past the time when reason said he couldn’t continue. He knew that from experience.
He looked back at Culhane. “You say there’s a marshal at Fire Hill?”
“Yeah, Alonzo Hyde. He survived the fire and the shootin’.”
“How come he didn’t come along with the posse?”
“He would’ve, but he’s an old man. Anyway, somebody had to stay there to see to the buryin’ and protect what’s left of the town. Folks will be goin’ through the rubble tryin’ to see if there’s anything they can salvage. Maybe they’ll try to clear things off and rebuild. I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t surprise me none if everybody up and moved away and let what’s left of the town go back to the earth. Might be the best thing.”
The Kid thought that was right. Sometimes you could come back from a loss, but other times it was better to just let it all go. If he had died after avenging Rebel’s murder, he wouldn’t have counted it any great loss.
But he had managed to help quite a few people since then, he reminded himself. He supposed that was worth something.
“I’m going to hike back down there and get my horse and my pack animal,” he told Culhane. “I’ll be ready to ride by the time the rest of you are mounted.”
The Ranger nodded. “Thanks for your help, Morgan. I’m glad you’re ridin’ with us. And again, I’m sorry about that little dustup earlier.”
“Just ride herd on that posse of yours, Ranger. We don’t want any more ... little dustups.”
By the time the horses were rounded up, The Kid had hiked down off the escarpment and whistled for the buckskin. The horse answered the call, and The Kid swung up into the saddle and rode after his pack horse.
The posse members picked their way down the slope, led by Culhane, and joined The Kid on the flats.
“Forty men can’t help but leave a trail,” Culhane said as they rode east by southeast.
The Kid wasn’t any great shakes as a tracker, but even he could see the wide swath of hoofprints they were following.
“And Latch don’t really care if anybody comes after him,” the Ranger went on. “Fella’s arrogant as all get-out. Thinks he can do whatever he wants to and get away with it.”
Ed Marchman, who was riding on Culhane’s other side, grunted. “So far he’s been right about that.”
“The law will catch up to him sooner or later,” Culhane responded. “That’s one thing about the Rangers ... we don’t never give up.”
“Sooner or later doesn’t do us one damned bit of good,” Marchman said. “It’s already too late to save our town, and all of our people who were killed.”
“Latch will answer for that,” Culhane insisted.
Maybe, The Kid thought, but it wouldn’t change anything. It was just something these men had to do in hopes of easing the pain inside them. Whether it would or not was pretty doubtful.
Of course, the punchers from the M-B Connected didn’t have such a personal stake in it. Their homes hadn’t been destroyed, and their loved ones hadn’t been killed.
But the man they worked for had been stolen from, and if they were like most cowboys, they rode for the brand. That would be enough motive for them to go after Warren Latch.
The Kid looked at Vint Reilly and saw the way the stagecoach station manager was swaying in his saddle. Every so often Reilly slipped a small brown bottle from his saddlebags and took a tiny swig from it.
That would be the pain medicine Culhane had mentioned, The Kid thought. Laudanum, more than likely. He was surprised Reilly wasn’t passed out in a drugged stupor.
Reilly was taking just enough medicine to make the pain bearable, but not enough to blunt it too much. He embraced the pain, relying on it to keep him awake and alert. To keep him going, along with his need for vengeance.
The kindest thing anybody could do for him might be to draw a gun and put a bullet through his head, The Kid mused.
But every man had the right to choose his own hell.
The Kid’s horse drifted away from Culhane’s mount. He didn’t realize he was riding next to Nick Burton until the young man said, “Mr. Morgan, isn’t it?”
The Kid looked over at him and nodded. “That’s right.”
“Are you the one they call Kid Morgan?”
The Kid’s eyes narrowed in surprise. “How’d you know that?”
He spoke quietly, hoping Nick would keep his voice down.
“I’ve read about you. In the dime novels.”
The Kid smiled. When Conrad Browning had been casting about for a new identity to conceal the fact that he was still alive and on the trail of his wife’s murderers, he had come up with Kid Morgan, basing his appearance and actions on the sort of characters he had read about in those lurid, yellow-backed tales.
Most people didn’t want to admit they had never heard of Kid Morgan, so to make themselves sound savvy, they pretended to know all about him and helped spread the deception when they gossiped about him.
Somewhere along the way, the carefully cultivated fiction had become fact. Conrad had settled into his life as Kid Morgan and preferred to live that way now. The few times he had adopted the identity of Conrad Browning again had not worked out well.
In an odd way, his life imitating art had become art imitating life, if you could call such fantastical scribblings as the dime novels art. In the past year or so, books featuring the totally made-up exploits of one Kid Morgan, Gunfighter, had begun to appear, published by companies back east.
The same thing had happened to his father, back when Frank Morgan first began to acquire a reputation as a fast gun. The Kid wasn’t completely surprised it was happening again.
Nick was digging around in his saddlebags. “I brought one with me, but I haven’t had a chance to start reading it yet.” He pulled out a slim volume with a yellow cover, not much bigger than a pamphlet, and held it out toward The Kid. “Here.”
The Kid took it, his eyebrows lifting as he read the title on the cheaply printed book,
Kid Morgan and The Drifter, or, Brothers on the Trail.
As he rocked along in the saddle, he opened the book and skimmed through the pages of densely packed type. “This is about me and Frank Morgan.”
“Yeah,” Nick agreed eagerly. “I never knew you and The Drifter were brothers.”
The Kid laughed and handed the dime novel back to the youngster. “That’s because we’re not. I hate to disappoint you, Nick, but Frank Morgan is definitely not my brother.”
“Oh. You mean they made it all up?”
“That’s what they do.”
“But have you ever
met
The Drifter?”
“Our trails have crossed a few times,” The Kid evaded. “He’s quite a bit older than me.”
“Is he as fast as everybody says he is?”
The Kid gave him an honest answer. “Yeah. He’s the fastest I’ve ever seen.”
“Faster than you?”
“Faster than me.” The Kid nodded, adding, “But not by much.”
“And I get to ride with you and fight outlaws with you,” Nick said. “The fellas back at the boarding school in Philadelphia would never believe this.”
Obviously, the young man had a bad case of hero worship, The Kid thought. That wasn’t good. It could prove to be a distraction, and where they were, getting distracted at the wrong moment could get somebody killed in a hurry.
“Why don’t you put that up,” The Kid suggested, “and if it’s all right with you, we’ll just keep this between ourselves.”
“You don’t want the rest of the posse to know who you really are?”
“I’d just as soon they didn’t.”
Nick thought about it, nodded, and slipped the dime novel back in his saddlebag. “All right, Kid ... I mean, Mr. Morgan. We’ll just leave it at that.”
“I’m obliged to you.”
“But when I get back to the ranch, will it be all right if I send letters to some of my friends from school and tell them about this?”
The Kid laughed. “I don’t see why not.”
That was assuming Nick made it back to his grandfather’s ranch alive, The Kid thought as he grew more solemn.
From what he had heard about the men they were chasing, it was possible none of them would make it out of this pursuit alive.