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Rio Kid Justice
A Rio Kid Adventure
By Brett Halliday OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1950 Jefferson House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2541-6
CHAPTER 1
It was mid-afternoon when the Rio Kid neared the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, the sprawling city which the Spanish conquistadors named El Paso del Norte, The Gateway of the North. Having followed the Rio Grande since leaving Mexico, this was the last important outpost of civilization which the Rio Kid must pass before riding on into the Arizona border country from which he had fled three years ago with a price upon his head.
The long and lonely renegade trail lay behind him now. He had cut a wide swath during those years in Mexico, living by the two guns that sagged low on his lean hips, and had grown up from the frightened lad who fled across the Arizona border. He was a cold-eyed and hard-jawed gunman jogging toward El Paso, bent upon going back to Arizona to clear his name of the unfair charge which had stood against him for three years.
Already the Rio Kid was a changed man from the reckless desperado who had spurred his mount across the Rio Grande into the Big Bend section of Texas a few weeks previously. Then he had ridden with loose guns and with the furtive specter of fear riding ever at his elbow. He had faced each American with a challenge in his cold gray eyes, with fingers flexed for a quick draw if he was recognized as the Rio Kid with a price upon his head.
That fear of recognition was behind him now. True, the faded posters were still up in public places, but three years had wrought such changes in his face that his features were no longer recognizable as those of the wanted boy. And back in Broken Spur a Texas Ranger had restored the Kid's self-respect ... that same night when Marge Malloy had blessed him with tear-wet eyes and had forced upon him as her parting gift the magnificent black stallion which he now rode.
He felt sure of himself now, sure of his destiny. True, he would have to exercise caution in returning to his old stamping ground, where complete rehabilitation awaited the solution of a three-year-old murder mystery — it wouldn't do to be recognized in Arizona before he was ready for recognition to come, but he was eager for the final test ... and El Paso was the last stop before pressing on.
The broad, fertile valley of the Rio Grande stretched out on either side and behind him. Just ahead, nestled at the base of mountains in the curve of the river, El Paso was joined with its neighbor city of Juarez to the south by a wooden bridge across the river.
There were small adobe huts, with Mexican children playing beneath pepper trees, on the road that led into the city; ahead were the imposing two- and three- story frame structures marking the business district of the city.
Saddled horses lined hitch rails along the hot, dusty main street, with here and there a hitched buckboard or lumber wagon sent in for supplies from one of the closer ranches. Booted men lounged in doorways, indolently gazing at the street from beneath the wide brims of Stetsons; Mexicans with serapes and wearing native sandals; American women in sunbonnets and gingham dresses — a quiet, peaceful mid-afternoon scene through which the Rio Kid rode with no inner sense of disquiet.
He had business at the post office, and when he found the frame building fronting on the public square he pulled Thunderbolt up at the hitch rail in front and stepped lithely from the saddle.
A few loungers turned curious eyes at the tall, dark stranger burned as dark as a Mexican by the tropic sun and with holstered guns tied low, but there was nothing about his appearance to draw comment in a city where most punchers rode in from the range with one gun on their hip; a city close enough to the Border to draw a sprinkling of men like himself who would feel undressed without a pair of shooting irons.
He slid the reins from Thunderbolt's arched neck and lovingly rubbed the black's forehead as the stallion nuzzled him. "I won't be long, feller," he promised the impatient horse. "Got me a little job of letter-writin' to do, then you an' me'll be joggin' on."
He looped one rein over the rail and knotted it loosely, then swung up the worn sandstone steps into the cool, dim interior of the public building.
He stood in line behind a plump ranch woman at the grilled window while she inquired about a letter that hadn't arrived, then purchased an envelope and borrowed a sheet of writing paper from the green-visored clerk who scarcely glanced at him.
He strode with jingling spurs away from the window to a pine desk set against the wall, laid the sheet of paper down and dipped a scratchy pen in a bottle of thin blue ink.
At the top of the sheet he firmly wrote the date, then "Dear Charlie."
He paused, studying the two words, chewing thoughtfully on the already chewed end of the pen. Good old Charlie Barnes! How surprised he'd be when this letter came. But he knew he could trust Charlie, the squatty galoot.
His gaze lifted slowly from the sheet of paper in front of him, and he found himself staring at a flyspecked and faded reward poster tacked to the wall above the desk. Big black letters beneath the photograph of the wanted man stared at him boldly: "$10,000 REWARD FOR THE CAPTURE OF THE RIO KID: DEAD OR ALIVE."
The Kid pursed his tight lips into a low tuneless whistle. His fingers stole into his shirt pocket and came out with a sack of flake tobacco and a book of brown cigarette papers. A hot glow came into his gray eyes as he read the description of himself in small print beneath the legend, "WANTED FOR MURDER."
He detached one paper from its fellows and put the pack back in his pocket. His sinewy fingers mechanically creased the paper and he poured tobacco into the small trough without looking down. He caught a yellow string between his teeth and pulled the mouth of the sack shut, rolled the cigarette while the sack dangled from his teeth.
After reading every word of the description — which he could repeat from memory — he raised his gaze slowly to the blurred picture on the reward poster.
A clear-eyed youngster laughed down at him. It was as though the pictured lad and the Rio Kid had a secret joke between themselves.
There was the low murmur of voices behind the Kid, the shuffle of booted feet on the scuffed pine floor, but the Rio Kid was conscious of none of those near sounds. His thoughts had bridged a gap of three years and he was once more riding terror-stricken through an Arizona night toward the Mexican Border with an angry posse in hot pursuit. Behind him in the trail lay the body of a law officer shot to death by the Kid's gun — though through no fault of his own.
In that short space of time, clearly illumed now in the kid's memory, another man had also died — Hugh Aiken — and the Rio Kid had been born. A sharp hurt throbbed in the Kid's heart as he stood in the post office staring up at his former self and pondered over the illusive trick of fate that had sent him riding the renegade trail.
Behind the hurt there was a sense of grim satisfaction. No fear that anyone would recognize him from the faded poster. The change had been complete and unalterable. A change from within, for the Rio Kid no longer laughed carelessly at life.
He sighed and morosely put fire to the crimped end of his cigarette, wondering angrily if he would ever learn to laugh again. His gaze dropped to the penned salutation on the sheet in front of him and he again put the scratchy pen to paper.
"I'm in El Paso, [he wrote] heading back to Arizona where I'm going to fight that murder charge I run from three years ago. I never killed Sheriff Edwards, Charlie, and I can prove it if I'm given half a chance. But I want to know how the land lays before I ride into Chaparral again for I can't do much good if they string me up before I can nose around some. So I want you to meet me at the old Bar L headquarters south of town when I ride in. That'll be in about —"
He paused, chewing on the end of the pen again, counting the days on his fingers.
A voice spoke clearly behind his left shoulder. A prim, ladylike voice, held low so as not to disturb the others in the post office:
"You don't look very much like your picture, I must say."
The spoken words slowly, very slowly, penetrated to the Rio Kid's consciousness.
He did not move.
Here it was at last. What he had been secretly dreading ever since he crossed the Border from Mexico. Here, where he felt so safe — when he was so positive no one could possibly recognize him — with success almost within his grasp.
Hot rebellion welled up inside the Kid. Burning resentment against this newest trick of fate. He dropped his gaze to the letter he had just been writing his old friend. His lips twisted away from his teeth in a grim snarl. His gray eyes became glacially cold, set in masklike features.
His fingers let go of the pen and it dropped to the desk in front of him. They curved into claws that would just fit the worn black butts of his holstered guns.
He tensed — and he heard the murmur and chatter of cheerful voices behind him. There were women and children in the post office. Some of them would surely be killed if he attempted to shoot his way out of this trap.
"Well," the voice said severely, "you needn't act like a perfect gump. Where are your manners?"
The Kid turned his head slowly, moving no other part of his body. His bleak gaze looked into a pair of snapping black eyes not more than two feet from his shoulder.
The owner of the eyes was a woman who did not blink an eyelash under his hostile appraisal. One of the strangest looking females the Rio Kid had ever come across. She might have been thirty, or she might have been forty. Black hair was drawn back tightly from a small-boned face and fastened in a prim knot at the back of her head. She had thin, tight lips that were pressed together in a straight line above a sharp and determined chin. Her cheekbones were high, without much flesh on them, and her complexion was burned an angry red.
She had a small, compact body that stood firmly on tiny feet laced into high leather boots such as were seldom seen in the West. The fringe of a buckskin skirt came a little below the tops of her boots. Above that she wore a severely starched white shirtwaist buttoned tightly at the throat. When she parted her lips and spoke it was as though a steel trap snapped shut at the end of each word:
"I said you didn't look much like your picture. It was evidently taken some time ago."
The Kid turned his shoulders toward her, dropping his right elbow to rest on the desk. He hooked his left thumb into his gunbelt, and the flexed fingers hovered close above the black butt of a .45. No one else was paying any attention to them. No one else appeared to have overheard her accusing words.
The kid said, "Yes'm. Three years ago." His nerves were as taut as a drawn bow and his gaze darted warily around the post office, searching for some concrete evidence of the deathtrap he felt was being sprung.
"There's a lot of difference for three years," she told him tartly. "Probably the result of a roistering and ill-spent life."
The Rio Kid said, "Yes'm," again. He didn't get it at all. Why wasn't there a hue and cry all about him? Why weren't armed men converging to capture the wanted desperado? It seemed incredible, but no one paid any attention to them. In and out of the wide double doors the business life of the city moved serenely. Housewives bought stamps and mailed letters, stopped to chat with friends. Booted men approached the General Delivery window and awkwardly asked for letters.
"That's all ended now," the little woman with the piercing black eyes and commanding voice told him.
The Kid said, "Yes'm, I reckon it is." Beads of sweat stood on his sun-blackened forehead. Why was she playing with him like this? Why in God's name didn't she turn around and scream out her discovery at the top of her voice?
She was tilting her head now, her gaze sliding speculatively down from the peaked crown of his limp black hat to the toes of his hand-tooled Mexican boots. She nodded her neatly coifed head and said briskly:
"Though you've nothing to worry about, you understand, if you just keep your mouth shut and do as I say."
"Nothing ... to worry about?" The Kid swallowed a great lump in his throat. It refused to stay down and he continued to swallow it.
"Nothing at all. We'll walk right out of here as though we were old friends." She turned slightly away from him and crooked her arm from her side, waiting.
The Kid glanced down at his partly written letter to Charlie. He glanced up at the picture of himself on the wall, and a young Hugh Aiken appeared to nod and urge him on recklessly. It was as though he heard the whispered words: "Go ahead. What can you lose? Go ahead and humor her. What if she is crazy? Anything will be better than trying for a getaway here."
The Kid turned slowly and he was by her side. She started for the door, taking small, determined steps, and the Kid accommodated his stride to hers.
As they went through the doorway into bright sunlight his captor snapped, "Take hold of my arm, as if you'd known me a long time."
He cautiously linked his left arm into hers, keeping his right swinging free where it could reach a gun with the speed of a striking snake.
She tripped down the sandstone steps to the crowded boardwalk, looking neither to the right nor left. Here were loitering men, many of them armed, and women returning from their shopping.
The Kid waited impassively for what was to come. He couldn't pull a gun here without endangering the lives of many innocent people.
Stopping at the edge of the walk the woman by his side asked, "Where is your horse?"
The Kid inclined his head toward Thunderbolt standing patiently at the rail.
She said, "He looks like a good horse," with the first note of anything like approval the Kid had heard in her voice. She turned her attention to a gangling, pimply-faced youth sitting negligently in a buckboard holding the lines to a pair of flea-bitten bays.
"Climb down here, Horace," she ordered briskly.
He said, "All right, Miz Trigg," his eyes bulging and his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he furtively eyed the tall lean stranger by her side. He hastily wound the lines around the whipstock and clambered down, and she gestured toward Thunderbolt, "You get on that black horse and ride him out to the ranch, Horace. We'll follow along in the buckboard presently."
The Kid tensed and started to protest. She jerked his arm and warned in a low tone, "It's much better this way."
The Kid stood woodenly and watched the gangling youth crawl aboard Thunderbolt. He had all his chips in the pot and he could only play the cards as they were dealt to him. The odds were a thousand-to-one against him if he started anything here in the crowded city square. But later — on a ranch ...
The little woman whose arm was linked into his said, "You may call me Amanda," as the Kid watched his beloved stallion disappear up the street in a cloud of dust.
CHAPTER 2
The Rio Kid set his teeth together tightly. He pulled his arm from hers and folded both of his tightly across his chest. He said, "I don't rightly understand none of this, ma'm."
"It is Miss," she told him pertly. "Miss Amanda Trigg."
"What's on your mind," he demanded harshly. "What the Sam Hill ...?"
"Here's a man I want you to meet," Miss Amanda interrupted peremptorily. She lowered her voice, "What's your name?" she said, seizing his arm and turning him back from the street.
"Better call me Smith," he told her grimly.
She nodded and guided him toward a broad-shouldered man who lounged against the wall near the entrance. He had a florid face with heavy gray mustaches dropping down over his mouth. Sunlight glistened on a silver star pinned to the front of his sweaty shirt. The words "CITY MARSHAL" were etched on the star.
The Rio Kid hesitated just an instant when he saw the star. Then a reckless grin lifted the left side of his mouth and he sauntered forward by Miss Amanda Trigg's side. This was it, then. The showdown.
Miss Amanda said, "Good afternoon, Marshal," and the officer lifted his hat and nodded pleasantly. He rumbled, "Good afternoon to you, Miss Amanda," but his sleepy eyes were taking in every detail of the gunman by her side.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rio Kid Justice by Brett Halliday. Copyright © 1950 Jefferson House, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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