J.A. Johnstone - The Loner - Crossfire

Claudius Turnbuckle said, “Really, Conrad—”

“Don’t know the man. My name’s Kid Morgan.”

“My God!” Turnbuckle exploded, and the outburst made the dun horse move around skittishly in the center aisle of the livery stable in Oakland where they had caught up to the man in the buckskin shirt. “You can’t just turn your back again on who you really are. All the charges against you have been dropped. There’s no reason you can’t return to your old life.”

The Kid took hold of the reins, put his foot in the stirrup, and swung up on the dun’s back. His Winchester was snugged in the saddle boot, and he had a fully-loaded pack horse with him carrying plenty of supplies and ammunition. He looked down from the saddle. “You’ll see to it the woman and her kids are taken care of ?”

“Of course,” Turnbuckle said, “just like you wanted. But I don’t understand—”

“Life punishes some folks enough by itself,” The Kid said. “You know what I mean, Frank.”

“I do.” Frank nodded. He had lived through plenty of tragedies of his own.

The Kid reached down and shook hands with Arturo. “I’ll be seeing you again one of these days.”

“I sincerely hope so, sir.” Arturo summoned up a smile. “I mean, pard.”

Turnbuckle sighed in exasperation and shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do to talk you out of this, is there?”

The Kid just smiled. He lifted a hand to the brim of his hat as he turned the horse. He heeled the dun into motion and rode away. The three men watched until he vanished down the busy street.

“I just don’t understand it,” Turnbuckle said. “Where’s he going?”

“Some place where nobody’s ever heard of Conrad Browning,” Frank said quietly. “Some place where the bullets are flying and there’s powder smoke in the air, more than likely. Some place where he can forget what he lost ... and what he never really had.” Frank shook his head and spoke from experience. “Too bad he’ll never find it. But sometimes. . . sometimes the only salvation people can grasp is in the looking.”

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MASSACRE MOUNTAIN:

A Cotton Pickens Western

FROM WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE

AND J. A. JOHNSTONE

Cotton Pickens doesn’t go looking for trouble—

it’s usually there when he wakes up in the

morning.

This time around, Cotton is made the town marshal in a Rocky Mountain silver mining settlement. Nobody else wants the job—reason enough for him to keep moving on—but the always confident Mr. Pickens thinks he can handle it without getting his head blown off the minute he sticks his snoot out the door. But fate has other plans—and Cotton is soon fighting it out with a greedy, dishonest mine owner, his bloodthirsty gunmen, and townfolk who don’t give an owl-hoot if he lives or dies.

MASSACRE MOUNTAIN , On Sale Now

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Chapter One

They were fixing to fire me. That’s what this was all about. There was no escaping it, neither. I’d messed up, and pretty quick now the job of sheriff in the county seat of Doubtful, in Puma County, Wyoming, would go to someone else.

All them politicos in their starchy shirts had collected at the log courthouse to have at me. Even my old friend George Waller, mayor of Doubtful, was in there sharpening his hunting knife.

Well, I’d get it over with, saddle up Critter, and go somewhere else and do something else. I ain’t one to cry in my beer.

I walked into that courtroom, which was thick with the blue smoke of cheroots. A man could hardly be a politico in Wyoming without puffing away on five-cent cigars the color of a dog turd.

“Ah, there you are, Pickens,” said Reggie Thimble, who was the big honcho in these parts. “Have a seat and we’ll land on you directly.”

He and Waller and Ziggy Camp were all parked in oak swivel chairs behind a big table. They’d brought in Lawyer Stokes, who was whetting his blades before he started carving on me. They were gonna make me stand. That’s how it worked. They would sit and I would stand until my feet howled.

“All right, Sheriff, you just tell it in your own words,” Lawyer Stokes said, a cheerful if slightly wolfish grin on his pasty face. I guessed he was going to be the prosecutor in this here inquisition.

“I got held up,” I said.

“You, Sheriff Pickens, got held up?” asked Stokes, sounding like a funeral oration. “How could this be?”

“Yep. I was doing my rounds, like usual, and the night was plenty dark, no moon anywhere in sight. I peered into store windows looking for crooks, and I rattled doors making sure the places were locked up good and tight, and I checked out the saloons, them two that were still lamplit that late, and checked out the drunks. It was just what I always do. And then it happened.”

Lawyer Stokes squinted ominously. “Would you care to elaborate?”

“Feller jumped out from between Barney’s Beanery and Maxwell’s Funeral Parlor, and waved a sixgun at me. He was wearing a black bandana and yelled at me to stop right there. I glanced around, looking for an accomplice, but this here bandit was alone, and he had a big old iron aimed at my heart.

“So I stopped. ‘Your money or your life,’ he says. And that sure got me to thinking some.

“I couldn’t quite make up my mind. My money or my life? So I thought to humor the skunk for a little, and I said, ‘You know, my pa always told me, Cotton, you ain’t worth two cents. So I figure that’s what I’m worth. You figure it’d be fine with you if I gave you two cents?’

“That bandit got plumb mad at me. ‘Your money right now, toss it down right there in the dirt in front of me, or your life.’

“Well, I figured it was a fifty-fifty proposition. My life’s worth about what I had in my purse, which was about a dollar and six bits. So I said to him, I said, ‘Your choice.’

“That only made him madder. He said he’d blow my brains out. I said I didn’t have any, least that’s what my ma was always telling me.”

“And then what happened, Sheriff ?” Lawyer Stokes asked me, kind of oily.

“I told that feller, come and get it, or shoot me, whichever came first.”

“And what did he do?”

“He shot my hat off. So I decided right smartly I’d give him the dollar and six bits, even though it meant going without breakfast for a while at two bits for pancakes, so I dug into my britches, found my bull-balls purse, and tossed it at him, real hard. It just bounced off his chest.

“Then he made me pull my pockets out, so I done it, and he got my Barlow knife.

“He says, ‘Take off your boots,’ so I done that too.

“‘Your feet stink,’ he said, and I nodded. Wasn’t no arguing with him there.

“He said for me to turn around and start walking away, which I did, and after a bit I looked behind me and he was gone. I’d been robbed.”

There was a real quiet in that room. They were all blotting up what I’d said. It came down to this: Doubtful, Wyoming, had itself a sheriff who’d allowed himself to be robbed right on the main street of town.

“And do you know who he was?”

“Nobody I ever seen before. Sort of blockylooking.”

“You’re the sheriff and you don’t know every lowlife in Doubtful?”

“Not this one.”

“And he got away?”

“I sure didn’t lasso him.”

“And now word is out that the sheriff of Doubtful is, will we say, a pushover for the criminal element? That there’s no good man keeping Doubtful safe? That the good citizens of Doubtful are in peril? That there’s no one defending the worthy housewife in her kitchen, or the blacksmith at his forge, or the lawyer in his chambers?”