The Loner: Dead Man’s Gold (6 page)

The hills ran north and south, so The Kid kept them on his left as he led the wagon northward that day. By mid-morning, he spotted a blue-gray line on the horizon ahead of them that marked the location of more hills angling from the southeast to the northwest. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that beyond those hills, they would come to the valley of the Rio Grande. They would have to cross the river somewhere, because they were west of it and the Jornada del Muerto lay to the east.

He dropped back alongside the wagon. Annabelle had had a spare hat among their supplies and she wore it to protect her head from the scorching sun. She wore a fresh shirt, as well, since the one she’d had on the day before had been ruined by the bloodstain and the fact that The Kid had ripped the left sleeve off to treat her wound. He had changed the dressing on the injury that morning before they broke camp and was pleased with the way it looked. There didn’t seem to be any infection around it.

“Why didn’t you just take the train from El Paso to Las Cruces?” The Kid asked. “It’s not far from there to the Jornada.”

“We didn’t come through El Paso,” Annabelle replied. “We bought this wagon and outfit in Chihuahua and then swung around El Paso because we were afraid Fortunato might have spies there waiting for us. We were trying to give him the slip, in case he was already on our trail.” She made a face. “Clearly, we were unsuccessful. We spotted him following us a couple of days ago and hoped that we could stay ahead of him until we found the treasure, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to be the case.”

“You don’t know that,” The Kid said. “In hot, dry country like this, if he has a wagon he can’t move much faster than you can. There’s only so much a team of horses or mules can do under these conditions. If he pushes his animals too hard, he’ll find himself stuck.”

“I’m sure he has a wagon. I can’t imagine Count Eduardo Fortunato traveling without his creature comforts, even in a godforsaken wasteland like this one.”

Father Jardine said, “No land can be godforsaken, my child. Only those unfortunates who choose to forsake Him.”

“Maybe so, but it’s still a wasteland out here.” Annabelle looked around. “Why would anyone choose to live in such a place?”

“You may have noticed, it’s not real crowded,” The Kid said with a smile. “But don’t sell it short. Every place has its charms, I guess. Even the desert can be beautiful under the right conditions.”

“You’d know better than I would, if this is your home.”

The Kid didn’t really have one of those anymore, not since Rebel died, but he didn’t bother explaining that to Annabelle. It was none of her business, and he didn’t know if she would understand, anyway. Most of the time, he wasn’t sure that
he
understood.

In the middle of the day, The Kid found a spot under the overhang of some rocks that provided shade from the sun. He watered the horses from one of the barrels lashed to the wagon, which they had topped off before leaving the spring that morning. Then he called Annabelle over and showed her how to make a tiny fire from dried mesquite branches that gave off almost no smoke. He boiled coffee and fried some bacon, since they had plenty of supplies and could replenish them in Las Cruces tomorrow or the next day.

“Who taught you how to build a fire like that, Mr. Morgan?” Annabelle asked. “I’m just curious. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t mind,” The Kid said. “My father taught me.”

“When you were a boy?”

“When I was younger than I am now,” The Kid said. As a matter of fact, he had been almost a grown man before he ever met Frank Morgan or knew that the notorious gunfighter called The Drifter was really his father. But Annabelle didn’t need to know that, and these days, The Kid made it a habit to keep private as much as he could about himself. The less folks knew about you, the more difficult it was for them to hurt you.

“Is your father the one who taught you all these things you know about getting along in the wilderness?”

“Pretty much,” The Kid admitted.

“I suppose it’s good, that a father can pass along such things to his children.”

He looked up at her from where he hunkered next to the fire, tending to the bacon. “What about your pa? He ever teach you anything?”

Annabelle sniffed. “My father was too busy being a professor of antiquities and ancient languages. He didn’t have time for his children, especially his daughters. They couldn’t follow in his footsteps, you see.”

“But you did, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t make him change his mind about you, though, did it?” The Kid guessed.

“I wouldn’t know. He passed away a month before I received my doctorate.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She shook her head. “It was a long time ago.”

Couldn’t have been that long, he thought, since she was only about twenty-five or twenty-six. But despite the momentary lapse he’d just made, he tried not to pry in other people’s lives, just as he didn’t want them prying into his.

He could be thankful, though, that Frank had always had faith in him, even when he didn’t deserve it. And probably the last thing in the world that Frank had wanted was for his son to follow in his footsteps.

That was what had happened, though. The world was a funny old place.

After the three of them had eaten, The Kid drank the last of the coffee in his tin cup and then said, “Why don’t we see just what you can do with that gun, Doctor?”

Annabelle frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

The Kid stood up and pointed. “See that little rock over there, sitting on that bigger rock? Let’s see how many shots it takes you to hit it.”

Annabelle squinted. “What rock? That little-bitty one? It must be fifty feet away! Handguns aren’t that accurate.”

The Colt flickered into The Kid’s hand in a draw so swift that the eye couldn’t follow it. The gun roared, and the rock he had pointed out to her flew into the air, splitting into two pieces under the impact of the bullet.

“Just a matter of knowing your weapon,” The Kid drawled as he pouched the iron.

For a moment, Annabelle stared at the spot where the small rock had been, then turned her head and glared at The Kid. “You’re just showing off,” she accused.

“Showing you what can be done,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

Father Jardine pursed his lips. “I’m not sure you should be doing this, Doctor. This isn’t just…target practice. Mr. Morgan wants to teach you how to be a more efficient killer.”

“Again, no offense, padre,” The Kid said, “but getting your hands on that artifact you’re after might depend on how good Dr. Dare is with her gun. Both of your lives might depend on it, as well.”

“Don’t worry, Father,” Annabelle said. “If it’s Mr. Morgan’s goal to turn me into a gunfighter, he’s going to be disappointed. When this is over and we have the Konigsberg Candlestick and the secret of the Twelve Pearls, I’m going straight back to Yale.”

The priest sighed. “Very well. I suppose that if you’re going to carry a gun, it’s best to be proficient in its use.”

“Amen, Father,” The Kid said. He held up both hands, palms out. “Didn’t mean anything by that.”

Annabelle pointed to the spot where the smaller rock had been balanced on the bigger one and asked, “What am I supposed to shoot at now? You ruined the target.”

“Hang on. I’ll find something else.”

The Kid walked over to the rocks and found another one about the size of his fist. He placed it on top of the bigger rock.

“There,” he told Annabelle. “Shoot at that. Just let me get out of the way first.”

She waited until he came back to her side, then drew the Smith & Wesson .38 and held it out in front of her as far as she could reach. Her arm was as stiff and straight as a board.

“See, there’s your first mistake,” The Kid said before she could pull the trigger. “You’re too stiff. Loosen up a little. Bend your elbow. Not much, just slightly.”

“Like this?”

“No, that’s too much.” The Kid took hold of her arm to position it and show her what he meant. “Like that.”

He realized after a second that he still had hold of her arm and could feel the warmth of her flesh through the shirt sleeve. He let go and stepped back.

Annabelle peered over the barrel of the gun with her right eye and screwed her left eye shut as tightly as it would go.

“No, that’s going to throw your aim off,” The Kid said. “Keep both eyes open.”

She bared her teeth at him. “Are you going to let me shoot or not? This was your idea, you know.”

He stepped back and spread his hands, then crossed his arms over his chest. “Go ahead.”

“Fine.” Annabelle turned her attention back to the target, and a second later, she pulled the trigger. A shot blasted from the .38.

The rock didn’t budge. There was no sign that the bullet hit anything else, either.

Annabelle lowered the gun and frowned. “Where did it go? I didn’t see it hit anything.”

The Kid waved a hand toward the flat. “It landed a few hundred yards out yonder. You were way high. That’s because you jerked the trigger too hard, and you were aiming too high to start with.” He nodded toward the rocks. “Want to try again?”

“Yes, I most certainly do.” Annabelle aimed and fired again. This time the slug plowed into the ground about halfway between where she stood and the rock she was aiming at. “Oh!”

“You corrected too much. Try this. Don’t aim.”

“Don’t aim?” she repeated. “How can I hit anything if I don’t aim at it?”

“You’re not hitting it when you do aim at it,” The Kid said. “
Point
the gun. Just point it, like the barrel was your index finger. And then squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it.”

“I don’t think it’ll work, but…all right.”

Annabelle did like he told her, taking a casual stance as she pointed the gun and fired. The bullet hit the big rock about a foot and a half below the target and whined off.

“Oh, my goodness!” Annabelle cried as her eyes widened. “I almost hit it!”

“Almost will usually get you killed out here,” The Kid said. “Try again.”

She frowned at him. “You could tell me that I did a good job, you know. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

“When you were back there at Yale, did your teachers tell you you did a good job every time you answered one question on an examination?” The Kid pointed at the rock. His meaning was clear. The target was still there.

Annabelle muttered something under her breath, shook her head, and pointed the Smith & Wesson at the rocks again. This time her shot was a foot low and a little off to the right.

“Turn your body,” The Kid suggested. “Again, not much. All these adjustments need to be slight, because the gun will magnify them.”

“Fine.” She shifted her stance.

“Take a deep breath and hold it,” The Kid said. “Not long, just for a second while you pull the trigger.”

“All right.” She pointed the gun, took a breath, held it, squeezed the trigger.

The little rock leaped in the air.

“I hit it!” Annabelle cried. She turned to The Kid and smiled. “I hit it! Did you see that?”

“Yep. Get to where you can do that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and you might survive your next gunfight. Assuming, of course, that there is a next one.”

Her face grew serious. “With Fortunato after us, I’d wager that there will be.”

“You’d bet a hat.”

“What?”

“That’s what folks out here sometimes say when they’re sure of something. I’ll bet a hat.”

“Well, I’m not betting this hat,” Annabelle said. “It’s the only one I have left, and I don’t like the sun on my head.”

The Kid laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Want me to find you another rock to shoot at?”

“Yes, please.”

He glanced over at Father Jardine, who was sitting on the lowered tailgate of the wagon. The priest still wore a look of disapproval on his lined and weathered face. The Kid could tell that he was just aching to quote some Scripture, probably “Thou shalt not kill.”

The Kid remembered some words from the Good Book, too, about the Lord helping those who helped themselves. Out there on the frontier, helping yourself usually involved gunsmoke.

“Here you go,” he told Annabelle a moment later as he balanced a slightly smaller rock on top of the bigger one. “Take a shot at this.”

The rest of that day passed without incident. The Kid kept a close eye on their backtrail but saw no signs of pursuit. Annabelle was adamant that Count Fortunato was still behind them somewhere.

“He won’t give up,” she said. “I’ve heard enough stories about him to know that. He’s like a bulldog once he gets his teeth into something.”

That night was quiet. The Kid and Annabelle took turns standing guard again. The Kid couldn’t think of a good excuse to deny Father Jardine’s request to take one of the shifts, so he said bluntly, “I’m sorry, padre, but if there’s any trouble, I have a hunch you might hesitate before you pull the trigger. That could cost all of us our lives.”

“Very well,” Father Jardine replied stiffly. “It’s true that my beliefs would never allow me to kill as swiftly and without remorse as you, Mr. Morgan.”

The Kid felt a surge of anger. If the priest wanted to talk about remorse, The Kid was old friends with that emotion. But instead of saying anything, he just gave Father Jardine a stony nod and moved to the edge of the camp with the Winchester, where he could keep an eye on things.

They arrived at Las Cruces late the next day, crossing a long wooden bridge over the Rio Grande just west of the settlement. Annabelle was still a little leery of going into a town.

“Fortunato could have spies there, waiting for us,” she said as she drove the wagon toward the cluster of frame and adobe buildings.

“He’s already dogging your trail,” The Kid pointed out. “It’s not like he doesn’t know where you’re going.”

“But how
could
he know? That’s what’s puzzled me all along.”

“How many people in Mexico City knew where you were headed?” The Kid asked.

“Not many. A few church and government officials. We had to have their help while we were trying to track down Konigsberg.”

“Well, there’s your answer. An hombre who has as much money as this fella Fortunato and doesn’t mind spending it to get what he wants can find out almost anything. He probably just started bribing folks in Mexico City until somebody told him where you and the padre had gone.”

“You seem to think money is the answer to everything, Mr. Morgan.”

“No, not everything,” The Kid said with a shake of his head as he thought about all the things money
couldn’t
buy. “It won’t stop a bullet, or bring back somebody you’ve lost.”

He knew that all too well.

Annabelle frowned at him and looked puzzled, as if she wanted to ask him what he meant by that. He heeled the buckskin to a faster pace and rode ahead. The last thing he wanted was to have to answer a bunch of nosy questions from some doggone curious female.

Las Cruces was a good-sized settlement. The railroad tracks ran along the western edge of town, so The Kid came to them first. He crossed the tracks and looked toward the depot, a large adobe building with a red tile roof a couple of blocks to his right. The street that dead-ended at the train station appeared to form a dividing line of sorts, with the respectable businesses and residences, along with the churchs and the school, to the north of it, and the saloons, cantinas, gambling dens, and whorehouses to the south.

It was a common enough arrangement in frontier towns, The Kid knew. If there was no natural boundary to set the high-toned folks apart from their more rough-hewn fellow citizens, they would come up with an arbitrary one.

The Kid turned in the saddle and waved the wagon on. It bumped roughly over the railroad tracks. As Annabelle drove up alongside The Kid, he pointed out a large emporium to her and said, “Take the wagon over there. We’ll stock up on supplies, then go down to the public well there at the end of the street and top off the water barrels.”

She nodded. “All right. Then what?”

“Well, we could push on toward the Jornada and make camp somewhere, but there’s only a couple of hours of daylight left. By the time we pick up those supplies, there’ll just be an hour or so. Doesn’t hardly seem worth it.”

“Are you suggesting that we spend the night here in Las Cruces?”

“I reckon it would make the most sense. You could get a good night’s sleep in a real bed for a change.”

Judging by the look on her face, Annabelle didn’t like the idea very much. She turned to the priest and asked, “What do you think, Father?”

“Mr. Morgan is right,” Father Jardine said, although he sounded like it pained him a mite to admit that. “We should make a fresh start in the morning.”

“All right…but I think we should guard the wagon overnight.”

The Kid pointed to a livery stable and wagon yard across the street. “The outfit will be fine over there,” he said.

“You don’t understand. If Fortunato has agents here, they could sabotage the wagon and hold us up long enough for him to catch us.”

If it hadn’t been for the things he’d seen so far, The Kid might be starting to think that Annabelle was a little loco on the subject of Fortunato. She seemed to believe that the count or his men were lurking behind every rock and bush, ready to jump them.

But he recalled those men who’d been chasing the wagon and the long-range shot that had creased Annabelle’s arm, and he couldn’t guarantee that she was overstating the threat. Maybe she was right.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll stay with the wagon. You and the padre can get rooms in one of the hotels and get a good night’s sleep.”

“That hardly seems fair,” Annabelle protested.

“I can bed down just fine in the wagon, so if anybody tries to bother it, they’ll get a mighty big surprise.”

“Well…it
would
feel nice to sleep in an actual bed again.”

The Kid smiled. “It’s a deal, then. Come on, let’s see about getting those supplies. That way, we’ll be ready to pull out first thing in the morning and won’t have to wait.”

Annabelle had tucked her long red hair up under her hat, but there was no disguising the curves of her body. The sight of a woman wearing men’s clothing and packing a gun drew some curious looks from the people in the street as she drove the wagon over to the general store and parked it in front of the high front porch that served as a loading dock. The Kid saw the stiff set of her face and knew she was doing her best to ignore the stares.

Annabelle and Father Jardine climbed down from the seat. “I’m going to walk over to the church,” the priest said, nodding toward a large adobe building topped by a bell tower.

“All right, but be careful,” Annabelle said. “Don’t tell anyone who you are.”

Father Jardine just smiled. “I agreed not to wear my cassock in an attempt to conceal my identity, Doctor, but obviously, that ruse failed. I see no need for further deception.”

“Just humor me, Father, all right?”

The priest sighed and then nodded. “Very well. It will be as you wish.”

Father Jardine ambled off toward the church. The Kid and Annabelle went into the store.

The place was fairly busy. They had to wait to be helped by one of the aproned clerks behind the counter in the rear of the store. While they were standing around, The Kid consulted with Annabelle about exactly what they would need, so they had a list worked out by the time it was their turn. The clerk used a stub of a pencil to scrawl their order on a piece of butcher paper, then set about gathering up the supplies.

Feeling eyes on him, The Kid glanced over and saw a couple of little boys standing in front of a glass-fronted candy case, stealing glances at him and whispering to each other. He smiled at them, and that emboldened one of the youngsters enough for him to come a couple of steps closer and ask, “Mister, are you a gunfighter?”

“What makes you think so?”

The boy pointed at the revolver riding in the buscadero holster on The Kid’s hip. “My pa says that men who carry a six-shooter like that are gunfighters.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to go against anything your pa told you,” The Kid said, still smiling. “I’m not really a gunfighter, though.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I just pretend to be one.”

“But…ain’t that dangerous?” the boy asked with wide eyes.

“Not if you pretend good enough.” The Kid took a couple of pennies from his pocket and held them out on the palm of his hand. “You and your pard have some licorice on me.”

“Gee, thanks, mister!” Both boys snatched a coin from The Kid’s hand. They turned eagerly toward the candy counter, but the one who’d been talking glanced back and asked, “What’s your name?”

“Morgan,” The Kid said.

“Thanks, Mr. Morgan!”

A minute later, as the youngsters scampered out of the store trailing long strings of licorice they had bought with the pennies The Kid had given them, Annabelle commented, “That was nice of you.”

“You sound surprised.”

“You put up a hard façade, Mr. Morgan. It’s nice to know that there are at least a few tiny cracks in it.”

The Kid didn’t think it was so nice. In fact, he told himself that he was going to have be more diligent about being a hardcase. He didn’t want anybody thinking that he was turning soft, even his traveling companions.

A few minutes later, the clerk set a couple of wooden boxes on the counter. “Here you go, folks,” he said. “These are the supplies you wanted.”

“Much obliged,” The Kid said. “How much do we owe you?”

“Three dollars and six bits.”

The Kid reached for his pocket. Annabelle said, “Wait a minute. I can pay for this.”

“No need,” The Kid told her. “If I’m going to be traveling with you, I can pay my share of the freight.”

The fact of the matter was, he could have bought and sold their whole outfit thousands of times over. He didn’t have that much cash on him, of course, but there was plenty of money in bank accounts in Boston, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, and Carson City. Of course, the name on those accounts wasn’t Kid Morgan, but he could put his hands on the funds any time he wanted them, just by sending a few wires to the attorneys who handled his legal and business affairs. His father Frank, who was equally wealthy because they had shared in the inheritance from Vivian Browning, had the same sort of set-up.

That was just one more thing he had learned from Frank Morgan, The Kid thought with a faint smile.

He handed a five-dollar gold piece to the clerk, collected his change, and then tried to pick up both boxes. Annabelle took one of them out of his hands.

“The least you can do is let me help carry them out,” she said.

“All right,” The Kid said as they took the boxes and turned toward the open double doors that led out onto the general store’s porch.

They stopped short as three men suddenly appeared in the doorway, blocking it. “Morgan? Kid Morgan?” one of them challenged in a loud, harsh voice.

“Oh, hell,” The Kid said softly, under his breath. He knew all too well what was coming next. Those varmints wanted to prove that they were faster on the draw than he was.

And there he stood, his hands full of flour, salt, sugar, and a side of bacon instead of a six-gun.