The same couldn’t be said about the terrain over which Conrad Browning and Arturo Vincenzo traveled. There was nothing majestic about it. The landscape was mostly flat and semi-arid, sparsely covered by tough grass, dotted with scrubby mesquite and greasewood, and slashed by the occasional arroyo.
Hardly the oasis that Brigham Young had promised his followers, Conrad mused, but the Mormons had made their homes here in Utah anyway and in most cases seemed to be thriving, if bustling Salt Lake City was any indication. Conrad and Arturo had passed through the city a few days earlier and since then had been making their way around the huge salt lake that gave the place its name, following the railroad that skirted the northern end of the lake. At last they had left the vast body of water behind them and now angled southwestward toward Nevada.
Conrad rode a big, blaze-faced black gelding while Arturo handled the reins hitched to the four-horse team pulling the buggy. They had been together for several months after leaving Boston and embarking on a cross- country quest for Conrad’s lost children, little Frank and Vivian. The children’s mother, the vengeful Pamela Tarleton, had concealed their very existence from Conrad, who hadn’t known she was pregnant when he broke their engagement and married Rebel Callahan instead.
A lot of time and tragedy had gone by since then. Rebel was dead and so was Pamela. But she had managed to strike at Conrad from beyond the grave when her cousin delivered the letter she had written revealing that Conrad had a previously unknown son and daughter, twins that Pamela boasted were hidden where Conrad would never find them.
It was a particularly vicious way of tormenting him, but Conrad wasn’t the sort to suffer without trying to do something about it. His investigation had uncovered the fact that Pamela had taken the twins from Boston and started to San Francisco with them. Since then, Conrad and his friend and servant Arturo had been searching for them, following Pamela’s route across the country. Conrad had no way of knowing whether she had taken the children with her all the way to the coast, so he and Arturo stopped frequently along the way to ask questions and find out if anybody knew anything about a woman traveling with a nanny and two small children.
But there wasn’t really anybody to ask questions of, out here in this thinly-populated wilderness. Often the steel rails of the Southern Pacific and the telegraph poles and wires erected by Western Union were the only signs that civilization had ever visited the area. No more settlements of any size lay between here and Nevada, at least none that Conrad knew of.
He was a tall, well-built man in his twenties, with close-cropped sandy hair under his flat-crowned black Stetson. Once he had been so handsome that he’d set the hearts of society girls all over Boston—and the hearts of their mothers—to fluttering, but time and trouble had etched character lines in his face. He wore a white shirt and black boots, trousers, and coat. A hand-tooled black gun belt was strapped around his trim hips. A meticulously cared for Colt revolver with a walnut grip rode in the holster attached to the gun belt.
In addition to the handgun, Conrad carried a Winchester repeater and a heavy-caliber Sharps carbine in sheaths lashed to his saddle. He was an expert with all three weapons but perhaps most deadly with the Colt, which was fitting since he was Frank Morgan’s son and Morgan was one of the fastest men to ever strap on a six-gun. Morgan was known as The Drifter, and some called him the last true gunfighter.
That might have been true once, but no more. Now there was the man who called himself Kid Morgan, and while Conrad didn’t go out of his way to keep it a secret, not all that many people knew that Kid Morgan and Conrad Browning were one and the same. He had invented the identity to help him track down Rebel’s killers, and it still came in handy from time to time.
More than a month earlier, while they were in Denver searching for clues to what Pamela might have done with the children, Conrad and Arturo had gotten roped into some trouble that left Arturo with a wounded arm. Since then they’d been traveling at a slower pace so his injury would have more time to heal. Conrad had handled the buggy for a while. Now Arturo’s arm was stronger and he had resumed his driving chores. That was fine with Conrad. He preferred being in the saddle.
“My word, there’s really not much out here, is there?” Arturo said. “I thought Wyoming was god-forsaken, but this is just depressing.”
Conrad smiled. “I don’t know, it has a certain stark beauty about it, don’t you think?”
“For about the first ten minutes. After that it’s just flat and empty and ugly.”
Conrad couldn’t argue with that. It seemed like a pretty accurate assessment to him. Still ahead of them in Nevada were areas like that, too, but eventually they would get into the prettier country around Reno and Carson City.
That was what he wanted them to think. That was when Kid Morgan was born and set out on his mission of vengeance.
Not unexpectedly, vengeance had turned out not to be very satisfying. Conrad had drifted for a while after that, but violence and death still seemed to dog his trail. Then the revelation about the twins had changed everything.
Arturo broke in on Conrad’s thoughts by asking, “How long will it take for us to get to those mountains?”
Conrad studied the snow-mantled peaks. “Maybe late today, maybe early tomorrow. We’ll have to follow the railroad through the passes. There may be other ways through, but I don’t know them.”
“We could be in San Francisco tomorrow if we took the train.”
“Yes, we could, but what if Pamela hid the twins somewhere along the way?”
“Yes, I’m familiar with that logic,” Arturo said. “I wasn’t suggesting that we
“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Amazing.” He was distracted as he spoke by a cloud of dust he spotted north of the railroad tracks. He squinted toward the dust and watched it drift closer.
Arturo must have seen where Conrad was looking, because he turned his head and studied the desert country in that direction, too. “Someone’s coming,” he said.
“Yeah,” Conrad said. “Fast, too.”
