The Loner: Seven Days To Die by J.A. Johnstone

Author:J.A. Johnstone [Johnstone, J.A.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp
Published: 2011-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

The three riders and the extra horses moved through the pass. An hour later they were far enough down the mountain that they could no longer see the pass, even if they had turned around in their saddles to look.

No one was watching as a lone man on horseback, leading a pack animal, rode through the gap in the peaks and took the same westward trail.

Chapter 22

On the seventh day after escaping from Hell Gate Prison, the three riders drew rein atop a low, rocky ridge, and Carl Drake said, “There it is. Gehenna, Arizona.”

The Kid rested his hands on his saddle horn and leaned forward in the leather. A few days earlier, he had finally taken the time to shave with a razor he’d found in one of the saddlebags. Now that he’d scraped off the whiskers, his face was all hard planes and angles again. His skin had been pale at first, but it was acquiring a healthy tan once more.

“Let me get this straight,” he said. “We’ve come from Hades to Gehenna?”

Drake grinned. “That’s right. Bledsoe said that was one reason he had a soft spot in his heart for this place. Said he’d lived like the devil all his life, so it was fitting that he came from a town called Gehenna.”

“The place of punishment,” The Kid murmured, remembering the Bible stories of his youth.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Jillian said from where she sat on horseback between the two men.

Gehenna wasn’t impressive, that was true, even as frontier settlements went. Its only street stretched for five blocks lined with a dusty, sun-bleached mixture of buildings. Several dozen adobe dwellings were scattered haphazardly around the town’s business district of frame buildings. A creek with banks dotted by scrubby mesquite trees meandered past the southern edge of the settlement.

The landscape had changed dramatically from the mountains of New Mexico where their journey had begun. The Kid figured the peaks looming in a bluish-gray line several miles to the south were in Mexico, since Gehenna wasn’t far from the border.

The terrain in the area was flat except for some occasional rolling hills and long, shallow ridges like the one on which the three riders had reined to a halt. The sandy, semi-arid plains stretched as far as the eye could see to the north, east, and west.

“Why is there even a town here?” Jillian continued. “There’s not a railroad or any other reason I can see for anyone to settle in such a godforsaken place.”

Drake pointed to the mountains across the border. “I’m just going by what Bledsoe told me, you understand,” he said, “but there are supposed to be several big ranches over there in Mexico, as well as some gold and silver mines in the mountains. This is actually the closest place for the dons who own those haciendas to get supplies, and their vaqueros come here to blow off steam. The mines are owned by Americans, and they send their ore out by mule train to Tucson.

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