Killer Poker

Chapter 30





Bat Masterson was naturally skilled as a tracker, which had come in handy during his career as a buffalo hunter, army scout, and lawman. But even someone as inexperienced in the ways of the frontier as Arturo could see the tracks left behind by the large group of men who had ridden into the hills ahead of them.

“That has to be McKinney and his bunch,” Masterson said. “Nobody else would be out here on the Double Star.”

“We are,” Arturo pointed out.

Masterson grinned. “Yeah, but there’s only two of us.”

“Which means, judging by the looks of those tracks, that we’re considerably outnumbered.”

“We have the element of surprise on our side.”

“I hope that’s enough.” After a moment, Arturo went on, “What do you think McKinney is doing?”

“Well, I’ve been pondering that. McKinney loves to gamble, we know that. If he and Miss Sullivan kidnapped Conrad, they must want him dead, but I can see McKinney deciding it would be more fun if he gave him a sporting chance.”

“You mean some sort of duel? Why bring him all the way out here to do that?”

Masterson shook his head. “No, not a duel. That would be too close to an even break.”

“It wouldn’t be even at all,” Arturo said. “I’ve seen Conrad draw and fire a gun. There aren’t many men faster than him, I’m sure.”

Masterson grinned over at him. “You are talking to a man who has a certain reputation as a pistoleer, you know.”

“I meant no offense, Mr. Masterson, I assure you. But Conrad seems to have inherited a great deal of his father’s skill with firearms.”

“And there are none better than Frank Morgan. All right, I’ll grant you that. But like I was saying, even if he’s willing to gamble a little, McKinney will want to stack the deck. Instead of a face-to-face showdown, I was thinking more along the lines of a hunting party.”

“A hunting party?” Arturo repeated with a confused frown.

“Yeah. Turn Conrad loose on foot and unarmed, give him a head start, and then McKinney and his men will go after him and hunt him down like a wild animal.”

Arturo’s eyes widened in shock. “But that’s barbaric.”

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind.” Masterson shrugged.

“But shouldn’t we aspire to more than that?”

“Sure. But in the long run, nothing human beings can do surprises me all that much. That’s one of the things years as a lawman taught me.”

Arturo was silent for a long moment. “I suppose you’re right. What are we going to do?”

“Try to find Conrad first. Then we’ll give him a hand and get him out of here. Can you fire a gun?”

“I’m actually a decent shot with a rifle, and since I started traveling with Mr. Browning, I’ve been involved in several altercations that involved gunplay. But I can’t use a rifle with this ‘bum wing’ of mine, as you called it. I can shoot a pistol, but I’m not sure how accurate I’ll be with one.”

“Just make sure it’s not pointed toward me or Conrad when you pull the trigger, and you’ll do all right. You can make McKinney’s men duck, anyway. But maybe it won’t come to that.”

Arturo seriously doubted that. Whenever Conrad was involved, sooner or later things always seemed to involve gunplay.

The buckboard entered the hills. So far they hadn’t seen the rancher or any of his men, but the tracks continued to lead in that direction.

Masterson cast a worried glance toward the sky. “Sun’s getting lower. There are only a couple hours of light left. I can steer by the stars and find our way back out of here after it gets dark, but we won’t have much luck looking for Conrad if we don’t find him before then.”

“We can’t give up. Not if there’s a chance we can help him.”

“Nobody said anything about giving up.” Masterson hauled back on the reins and brought the buckboard to a gradual halt. “But that’s interesting.” He nodded toward a line of cliffs that rose in front of them.

“What’s interesting? I don’t understand.”

“See those cliffs?” Masterson pointed. “The tracks lead right toward them, but the cliffs run north and south for a long way. From here, there doesn’t appear to be any way horses could get up there.”

“So why did McKinney and his men ride toward them? Is that what you’re saying?”

Masterson nodded. “That’s what I’m getting at, all right. It doesn’t make sense . . . unless they planned to use those cliffs to help them in their hunt.”

“They could drive Conrad up against them, so he wouldn’t have anyway to escape.”

“Exactly. Like cornering a wild animal.”

Anger surged up inside Arturo at the thought of his friend and employer being treated that way. He tried to ignore it, knowing he needed to keep a cool head.

“But where are they? We can see all the way to the cliffs. No one’s out here.”

Masterson lifted his gaze to the higher ground beyond the cliffs. “Maybe they’re up there. Maybe Conrad found a way to get to the top after all, and they had to go around to chase him.”

“I trust your instincts, Mr. Masterson. What are we going to do?”

“Let’s get closer,” the former lawman said decisively. “Maybe the tracks will tell us what happened.”

That turned out to be the case. The tracks led almost all the way to the base of the cliff, and from there they went north.

“He made it up there.” Masterson grinned as he pointed at the rope Conrad had made from his shirt that was now lying at the bottom of the cliff. “I’d bet my old derby hat on it. Come on.” He swung the buckboard along the trail left by the riders.

“We’re going to follow them?”

Masterson flicked the reins and got the team moving at a faster pace. “That’s right. McKinney’s going to lead us right to Conrad, and when we find them . . . well, then I reckon we’ll probably see that showdown you were talking about earlier, Arturo.”





The Kid had no idea how long he had slept. All he knew for sure when he pried his eyes open was that the light had changed. It was dimmer. Not night yet, certainly, but probably late in the afternoon. He didn’t know what had woken him.

Then he heard the deliberate hoofbeats of a horse somewhere close by.

Carefully, The Kid slid closer to the opening. The hoofbeats were louder, sounding like the horse was almost on top of him. He moved one of the branches aside a fraction of an inch to peer out.

A man rode through the circle of brush surrounding the pool. He reined in and looked down at the stone basin. For a second, The Kid couldn’t remember what he had done with those bloody rags he’d soaked off his feet. If he had left them where the man could see them, it would be a dead giveaway that he’d been there.

His pulse slowed as he recalled he had balled up the rags and shoved them under a rock. The man might find them if he bothered to search, but he didn’t have any real reason to look for them.

The man dismounted and let his horse drink from the pool. He knelt beside the water himself and used his cupped hands to get a drink. The Kid could see the man’s profile—an angular, black-stubbled jaw—but that was all. Water dripped off the man’s sharp, pointed chin. He turned his head slightly, and The Kid saw that his left eye tended to wander.

He was one of the guards who had pointed a shotgun at him that morning in the Double Star ranch house. Judging by the slow, deliberate way the man had been riding, he had come up the canyon looking for something.

Or somebody. Namely Conrad Browning.

It was the hombre’s bad luck that he had found Kid Morgan instead.

The man took off his black hat, and sleeved water from his face. Turning his head toward his horse, he muttered, “I don’t think the bastard’s up here. We been lookin’ all afternoon and ain’t found hide nor hair of him. He must’ve fallen in a ravine or something.”

The horse tossed its head, and the gunman laughed. “Oh, you think so, too, do you? Well, I reckon we’ll keep lookin’ anyway, leastways until it gets too dark to see anything. I can sure as hell use that thousand dollar bounty. Mosey on down to Mexico, that’s what I’d do, and find me some little brown-skinned honey to tend to my every need. Yes, sir, my ever—”

The Kid exploded out of the brush at the edge of the pool and slammed into the man’s back, driving him forward.

Taken completely by surprise, he didn’t have a chance to do anything before he landed face-first in the pool with The Kid on top of him. He had opened his mouth to let out a yell, but that was a mistake. The icy water rushed into his throat.

The Kid looped his left arm around the man’s neck and wrapped his legs around the man’s torso. He planted his right hand on the back of the man’s head and forced it deeper under the water, shoving so hard he felt the impact shiver up his arm as the man’s face smashed into the rocky bottom of the pool. Looking into the water he saw crimson streamers of blood twisting snake-like through it. The man bucked and heaved and splashed, but pinned down the way he was, he couldn’t throw off The Kid.

The Kid rammed the man’s face into the bottom again. The man’s struggles weakened. The Kid held him down, waiting for the water to finish him off.

Briefly, it felt almost the same as cold-blooded murder. Normally, killing a man like that bothered The Kid. But the feeling was mitigated by the certainty the man would have killed him without blinking an eye. He thought only about the bounty he was going to collect from his employer, Rance McKinney. The Kid wasn’t going to lose any sleep over the hardcase’s death.

The man had gone completely limp. The Kid held his head under the water for another couple minutes just to be sure he was dead, then let go of him and crawled away from the body. The pool was too shallow for the corpse to float. It just lay there, head and shoulders resting on the bottom.

The Kid caught his breath for a minute, then took hold of the man’s legs, hauled him out of the water, and rolled him onto his back. The blood in the water had come from the man’s broken nose, which had been pushed down almost flat when The Kid hammered it against the stone bottom of the pool.

He hoped that none of McKinney’s other men were close enough to have heard the splashing. At least the man hadn’t had a chance to yell, before his horse had backed off, spooked by the commotion.

Talking in low, soothing tones, The Kid approached the horse. The animal relaxed slightly and allowed him to take hold of the reins. He tied them to one of the bushes and felt better now that he knew the horse wasn’t as likely to run off.

The light in the canyon had dimmed even more as he turned back to the dead man and started stripping his clothes from him. A glance at the rosy sky told The Kid that the sun was setting. Night would fall soon.

The dead hardcase had been about the same height as The Kid but twenty or thirty pounds lighter. He was able to get into the denim trousers and the faded red shirt the man had worn, but the clothes were tight on him. He didn’t bother with the black vest.

The man’s gunbelt and boots were more important. The gunbelt buckled all right around The Kid’s hips. He pulled the Colt .44 from the holster and checked it. The revolver was in good shape, which came as no surprise. A killer’s main tool was his gun, so naturally he took care of it. The Kid pouched the iron and picked up one of the boots.

The dead man had been a little skinny, but that didn’t affect the size of his feet. The boots were plenty big enough for The Kid. Maybe too big, in fact. But he used the knife he found in the man’s saddlebags to cut up the ripped and ragged trousers he’d been wearing earlier, pulled the man’s socks on, then padded his feet thickly with the strips of cloth before he pulled on the boots. When he stood up to check how they felt, he found his feet didn’t hurt all that much. He would be able to get around without being too hampered by his injuries.

The Kid hung the man’s hat on the saddlehorn and looked through the saddlebags. He found a couple dry biscuits wrapped up in some cloth and had to force himself not to cram them into his mouth. He could eat later. There was extra ammunition that would fit the revolver and the Winchester rifle in a sheath strapped to the saddle.

Now that he was armed again, The Kid felt a lot better. He had a grim chore still to do, though. He bent and grasped the dead man, dragging him over to the hidden space where The Kid had slept away the afternoon. He managed to shove the corpse under the overhang where it might not ever be found.

“Sorry, mister,” he muttered. “I don’t have a shovel or the will to bury you properly. It’s just too damned bad you threw in with McKinney.” He started to turn away but paused to add over his shoulder, “And I don’t like having shotguns pointed at me.”

With that out of the way, he went back to the horse and settled the black hat on his head. From a distance, he figured he could pass for the dead man, especially in the fading light. His hope, though, was that none of McKinney’s other men were in that canyon. If they had spread out to search for him, it was possible.

He untied the mount and led it out of the brush. Before he swung up into the saddle, The Kid stood for long moments, listening intently. He didn’t hear any other horses moving around or men calling to each other. The rugged landscape around him was quiet.

He mounted and turned the horse west, away from Double Star headquarters. Maybe there was nobody close by at the moment, but there were other men in the gathering shadows who wanted him dead. Too many for him to risk trying to get back to the Double Star while it was still light. He stood too great a chance of riding right into trouble.

He needed to find another hiding place, somewhere he could eat the meager supper he’d found in the dead man’s saddlebags and rest some more. After that he intended to head for the ranch headquarters. McKinney wouldn’t expect him to try anything like that. The Kid knew if he could get his hands on the rancher, McKinney’s men would have to think twice about coming after him with guns blazing. Such a daring ploy would be easier once darkness had fallen completely.

Later in the night would be soon enough for the killing to start again, he decided.

The Kid rode up the canyon as gloom settled around him.