He managed to go on. “Why don’t you go back upstairs and play ... while I talk to your mother some more?”
They looked at each other and shrugged in the way children have of saying all grown-ups are crazy anyway, then turned and ran back up the stairs. Conrad swung around to face Winifred Lannigan across the parlor again.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “It’s going to be hard enough for them over the coming weeks and months.” She lifted something from a small table beside her chair and held it out. “Here. This is for you.”
It was a thick envelope. Conrad crossed the room and took it from her. “What’s this?”
“Give it to Claudius Turnbuckle,” Winifred said. “I’ve written down everything, going all the way back to Boston before any of this started. I’ve explained everything Miss Tarleton did, as well as Dex’s part in it ... and mine. It should be enough to clear your name with the authorities.”
Conrad frowned. “Why would you do such a thing? Feeling guilty?”
“Of course,” she answered without hesitation. “Wouldn’t you if you’d helped torture someone the way Miss Tarleton and Dex and I tortured you? But I won’t lie to you ... If Dex had come through that door this morning instead of you, I wouldn’t have said anything about this. I’d have burned what I wrote as soon as I got the chance, and I wouldn’t look back. It would’ve been too late for that. I would have already been damned. Maybe this way ...”
Her voice trailed off. Conrad could understand clinging to a hope of redemption. Sometimes that was all people had left.
Slowly, he nodded. “All right. Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me. Not after what I helped them do to you. This is a start, just a start.”
A strained silence fell between them. There was nothing left to say. After a moment, Conrad cleared his throat. “I’ll be going now.”
She nodded but didn’t reply.
He turned and went to the door, but paused there and looked back at her. “You have a fine pair of children.”
A smile touched Winifred’s lips. “I know. Sometimes we’re blessed in ways we don’t really deserve.”
Conrad nodded. That was true.
And sometimes we’re damned in ways we don’t deserve, either, he thought as he left the house and walked toward Claudius Turnbuckle’s buggy with the confession in his hand.
“Where are you going to go?” Frank Morgan asked.
“Don’t know,” said the man in the buckskin shirt. He smiled. “Thought maybe I’d just drift.”
“But, sir—” Arturo began.
The man slapped him on the shoulder. “Not sir. Pard, maybe. That’ll do.”
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.”
TURN THE PAGE
FOR AN EXCITING PREVIEW OF
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.
Wherever Pinnacle Books Are Sold!
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.
