The Kid’s strong left hand on the reins kept the horse under firm control. His right hand brushed his black coat aside and dipped to the Colt holstered on his hip. Steel whispered against leather as he drew the gun, then the hot, still air was shattered by the blast of a shot.
It seemed that The Kid hadn’t even taken time to aim, but the snake’s head exploded anyway as the bullet found it. The thick body with its diamond-shaped markings uncoiled and writhed frenziedly as the knowledge of its death raced through its prehistoric nervous system. The Kid’s lips tightened in distaste as he watched the snake whip around and die.
With his gun still in his hand, The Kid dismounted. He stepped around the snake, which had a grisly red smear where its head used to be. A swift kick from The Kid sent the skull bouncing into some brush. He reached down, picked up one of the long bones, and flung it off in a different direction. The other bone went sailing away with another flick of his wrist.
The Kid didn’t know if the voice belonged to his own conscience—not that he would have admitted to having such a thing after all the men he had killed, justifiably or not—or to his late wife, Rebel. Either way, hearing voices was a sure sign that a person was going mad.
But the revulsion he had felt toward the snake was the last straw. He’d already been a little angry about being warned to keep out of the valley. He had given in to his irritation.
That wasn’t a good thing, either. He tried to keep his emotions under control at all times. A man who wanted to live very long in this harsh land couldn’t afford to let himself be distracted by hatred or fear or loneliness.
The Kid holstered his gun and turned back toward the buckskin. He was a tall, lean young man, not yet thirty, with sandy hair under a flat-crowned black hat. He wore a dusty black coat over a white shirt, and black trousers that weren’t tucked into his high-topped boots. His saddle was a good one, relatively new, and he carried two long guns in sheaths strapped to the horse, a Winchester and a heavy-caliber Sharps. His clothes and gear were a notch above those of the average saddle tramp, but his deeply tanned face and the slight squint around his eyes, that was becoming permanent, spoke of a man who spent most of his time outdoors.
That hadn’t always been the case. Once he had spent his days either in an office or a mansion, depending on whether or not he felt like working. As Conrad Browning, he had grown up among the wealthy on Boston’s Beacon Hill, had attended the finest academies and universities, had taken his place in the business world, and owned stakes in mines, railroads, and shipping companies. He was rich, with probably more money than he could spend in the rest of his life.
None of which meant a damned thing when his wife was murdered.
So after avenging her death by tracking down and killing the men responsible for it, he chose not to return to his old life as the business tycoon Conrad Browning. Instead, he held on to the new identity he had created in his quest for vengeance, that of the wandering gunfighter known as Kid Morgan, and for months now he had roamed the Southwest, riding alone for the most part, not searching for trouble but not avoiding it when it came to him, as it seemed that it inevitably did.
For a while, a young woman he’d met during some trouble in Arizona had traveled with him, but she had stayed behind in Santa Fe to make a new life for herself while he continued drifting eastward into Texas. That was better, The Kid thought. It was easier not to get hurt when you didn’t allow anyone to get too close to you.
He was reaching for the buckskin’s reins when a voice called, “Don’t move, mister!”
Two things made The Kid freeze. One was the tone of command in the voice, which meant it was probably backed up by a gun, and the other was surprise at the fact that the voice belonged to a woman. He looked over his shoulder and saw her coming out of a nearby clump of boulders. He’d guessed right about the gun. She had a Winchester leveled at him.
“Don’t even twitch a muscle,” she ordered, “or you’ll be damned sorry.”
“Take it easy,” The Kid began, but the woman didn’t. She pulled the trigger and the Winchester went off with a sharp crack.
Just before the shot, though, The Kid heard another wicked buzzing from somewhere very close by. The buckskin jumped and landed running, racing a good twenty yards before it came to a halt. The Kid stayed right where he was, just in case the woman had missed.
She hadn’t. When he looked down, he saw a second rattler writhing and jerking in its death throes at his feet. He hadn’t seen it slither out from among the rocks bordering the trail, but there it was, and it could have very easily sunk its fangs in his leg.
The woman’s shot hadn’t been quite as clean as The Kid’s, however. Her bullet had ripped away a good chunk of flesh from the snake’s body just behind its head, a gaping wound from which crimson blood gouted, but the head was still intact and attached to the body. The mouth was open and ready to bite, and The Kid knew that dying or not, the venom was still there and the creature was as dangerous as ever.
He lifted his foot and brought the heel of his boot crunching down on the snake’s head, striking almost as fast and lethally as a snake himself.
He ground his heel back and forth in the dirt, crushing the rattler’s head and ending its threat. Then he looked over at the woman, who had lowered the rifle, and said coolly, “Thanks for the warning.”
“I shot the blasted thing.”
“Yes, but you didn’t kill it,” The Kid pointed out.
“You know how hard it is to hit the head of a snake when it’s moving?”
The Kid smiled and made a casual gesture toward the second reptile carcass that lay on the ground nearby. “Apparently, I do,” he drawled.
The woman came forward, looked at the snake The Kid had shot, and frowned. “That first shot I heard?”
“Yeah.”
She let out a low whistle of admiration. “Pretty good shooting.”
The Kid could have said the same thing about her appearance, as well as her shooting. She was in her early
