“Word of honor,” Malone said. He looked at his other men. “You hear that? If Morgan lives, no one bothers him . . . today.”
The Kid caught that important distinction but didn’t challenge it. First things first. He added, “And Miss Starbird comes with me, either to the settlement or wherever else she wants to go.”
Malone frowned. “Diana knows I’d never harm a hair on her head, and none of my men would dare to do so, either. I think the world of her.”
“Then you wouldn’t want to hold her against her will, would you?”
Before Malone could answer, Diana stepped closer to The Kid and said in a quiet voice, “You don’t have to do this on my account, Mr. Morgan. I’ll be all right—”
“You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
She shot a glance at Malone and his men and admitted, “Well . . . no.”
“Then you’re coming with me.” His words had a tone of finality to them.
“It’s mighty confident you are that you’re goin’ to live through this,” Malone said. “Greavy is a talented man with a gun, and I’ve seen Wolfram break bigger fellas than you in half with his bare hands.”
“I’ll risk it,” The Kid said. He took off his hat and handed it to Diana, who had a worried look on her face as she took it. The Kid didn’t want to demonstrate his own gun-handling prowess just yet, since it might come in handy later if he needed to take them by surprise, so he unbuckled his gunbelt and handed it to the young woman as well. Then he stripped off his coat and dropped it on the ground. “I’ll take on Wolfram.”
The baldheaded man had already figured that out. Grinning, he slid the rifle he carried into its saddle boot and then swung down from the back of his horse. He didn’t wear a handgun, but he had a knife sheathed at his waist. He removed the sheath from his belt and tucked it into a saddlebag, then took off his derby and hung it on the saddlehorn.
“I’m gonna enjoy this,” he said as he turned toward The Kid, who was rolling up his sleeves while Diana stood there looking more frightened by the second.
“Bust him up good, Wolfram,” called one of the other men.
“Yeah,” another man added in a raucous shout. “Show him he can’t mess with us.”
Wolfram started forward, moving at a slow, deliberate pace as he approached The Kid. He was still grinning and flexing his fists. The Kid stood there, arms at his sides, apparently waiting calmly, even though his blood surged at the prospect of battle.
Wolfram charged without warning, swinging a malletlike fist at The Kid’s head with surprising quickness, and the fight was on.
Chapter Three
The Kid moved now with the same sort of speed he exhibited whenever he drew his gun. He ducked under the looping punch that Wolfram threw and sprang aside from the bull-like charge.
Wolfram’s momentum carried him past his intended victim. The Kid kicked out behind him as Wolfram went by, driving the heel of his boot into the back of Wolfram’s left knee. The baldheaded bruiser howled in pain and pitched toward the ground as that leg folded up beneath him.
The Kid whirled toward him, intending to kick Wolfram in the head and finish the fight in a hurry, but he saw to his surprise that Wolfram had slapped a hand on the ground and managed to keep from falling. A supple twist of the big body brought Wolfram upright again, facing The Kid. The lips under the handlebar mustache pulled back in an ugly grin.
“Well, now I know that you’re fast, you little son of a bitch,” Wolfram said as he began to circle more warily toward The Kid. He limped slightly on the leg that had been kicked. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
The Kid knew his chances of surviving this fight had just gone down a little since he hadn’t been able to dispose of his opponent quickly. But the battle was far from over. True, Wolfram had advantages in height, weight, and reach, but as Conrad Browning, The Kid had been a boxing champion during his college days.
More importantly, his vengeance quest as Kid Morgan and the wandering existence on the frontier that had followed it had taught him to do whatever was necessary to win when he was fighting for his life.
He didn’t hang back and let Wolfram bring the fight to him again. Instead, he launched an attack of his own, darting in to throw a flurry of punches. The blows were almost too fast for the eye to follow, and they were too fast for Wolfram to be able to block all of them. A couple of The Kid’s punches got through, hard shots that landed cleanly on Wolfram’s shelflike jaw and rocked his head back and forth.
Wolfram roared in anger and counterattacked, managing to thud a fist into The Kid’s breastbone with staggering force. The impact stole The Kid’s breath away and sent him stumbling backwards a few steps.
Wolfram bellowed again—obviously, he was one of those fighters who liked his battles noisy—and surged forward to try to press his advantage. As The Kid gasped for air, he saw the light of bloodlust shining in Wolfram’s eyes and knew his opponent thought the fight was just about over.
The Kid went low again, sliding under pile-driver punches that would have broken his neck if they had landed. He threw his body against Wolfram’s knees in a vicious block that cut the man’s legs out from under him. This time Wolfram wasn’t able to recover. He went down hard, his face driving into the dirt.
The Kid rolled and came up fast. He had gotten a little breath back in his lungs. His heart pounded madly in his chest and his pulse played a triphammer symphony inside his skull. He leaped and came down on top of Wolfram, digging both knees into the small of the man’s back as hard as he could. Wolfram jerked his head up and yelled in pain.
That gave The Kid the chance to slide his right arm around Wolfram’s neck from behind. He grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and hung on for dear life as he tightened the pressure on his opponent’s throat. He kept his knees planted in Wolfram’s back and hunkered low so that the awkward, frantic blows Wolfram aimed behind him couldn’t do any real damage. The Kid forced Wolfram’s head back harder and harder and knew that if he kept it up, sooner or later the man’s spine would crack.
Wolfram might pass out first from lack of air, though, and he appeared to know it. In desperation, Wolfram rolled over and over. The Kid felt the big man’s weight crushing him each time he wound up on the bottom, but he
