The Loner: Trail Of Blood (13 page)

“Certainly you can talk to them,” Crowley said. “I have no objection to that at all. I just think you should be prepared for the possibility that you won’t find out anything.”

“Can you give me a list of the people who were working here three years ago?”

The stationmaster nodded. “Give me a couple of hours.”

Conrad got to his feet. “Fine. I appreciate this, Mr. Crowley.”

The man smiled. “I’m glad to do it. You’re a major stockholder in this railroad, Mr. Browning, as your mother was before you. Should I send the list to your hotel?”

“That’s fine. I’ll be at the Cattleman’s Hotel.”

“All right.” Crowley extended his hand across the desk. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for, Mr. Browning, but I wish you the best of luck in your search.”

The best of luck was exactly what he was going to need, Conrad thought.

Arturo had engaged a buggy for the two of them and a wagon for their luggage while Conrad was talking to the stationmaster. It didn’t take long to reach the Cattleman’s Hotel in downtown. With ranchers and cattle buyers making up most of its guests, Conrad thought he would feel more comfortable there than in some stuffier place. His time in the West had changed him, made him less tolerant of the artificiality that pervaded much of the East.

Which was not to say that the Cattleman’s wasn’t a nice place. The lobby was luxuriously furnished, and the dining room was famous for its steaks. The desk clerk greeted Conrad warmly and summoned bellboys to take the luggage up to the suite he’d reserved.

As promised, a messenger delivered the list of long-time employees that Crowley sent over, but it
was too late in the day to return to Union Station and start interviewing them.

The next morning Conrad used the stationmas-ter’s office to talk to them, but it didn’t take long to realize that Crowley had been right. Even though the ticket clerks, porters, and other employees wanted to be helpful, again and again Conrad got nothing but blank looks as he described Pamela Tarleton and explained that she would have been traveling with another woman and two babies. He added that she would have been hard to please and likely would have bossed around anyone she encountered, but that didn’t help.

As one ticket clerk put it, “We see hundreds of people a day, Mr. Browning. There’s just no way to remember anything that far back.”

Conrad was polite, but he felt his frustration growing. When he had talked to everyone on Crowley’s list, the stationmaster came back into the office and asked, “Any luck?”

Conrad slumped in the chair behind the desk and shook his head. “Not a bit. No one remembers her.”

“I was afraid of that. I did some checking through our records, just in case I might turn up something, but no luck.”

“It’s a dead end,” Conrad said glumly. “The trail’s too cold. There’s no way to find out where she went.” He looked at the list he had tossed onto the desk, and a thought occurred to him. Tapping the list, he asked, “What about people who were working here three years ago, but aren’t now?”

Crowley rubbed his jaw and frowned in thought. “Yes, there are some folks who fit that description, beginning with Ralph Potter.”

“Who’s that?”

“He ran this station before I did.”

Conrad sat up straighter. “Where can I find him? He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yes, he’s still alive. I can give you directions to his place. I don’t know if he’ll help you, though. Ralph can be a little … difficult.”

“I’ll take that chance,” Conrad said. Now that he thought about it, the odds of Pamela having much to do with a ticket clerk or a porter were small. Given her personality, if she’d encountered any sort of trouble with the railroad in Kansas City, she would have gone directly to the stationmaster to complain.

Crowley explained that Ralph Potter had bought a small farm south of town when he retired from the railroad. He told Conrad how to find it and then warned him again that Potter didn’t like strangers.

Conrad smiled. “I’m sure I can handle him.”

Still clinging to a shred of hope that the trail wasn’t completely lost, Conrad left the depot and went back to the hotel. When he told Arturo what he was going to do, the servant asked, “Would you like me to come with you, sir?”

Conrad shook his head. “No, I’ll be fine. I’m going to rent a horse and take a ride down to Potter’s farm this afternoon.”

The buckskin he had ridden while he was drifting across the Southwest was being well cared for
at a livery stable in Santa Fe. Conrad had paid the man for several months’ care in advance, and if it was longer than that before he got back to pick up the buckskin, the man knew how to contact the law firm of Turnbuckle & Stafford in San Francisco to get more money. The dangers Conrad had shared with the buckskin while he was known as Kid Morgan had made the two of them friends, at least as much as man and horse could be. But since he hadn’t known where his quest would lead him, he’d had to leave the buckskin behind and would have to rely on other mounts.

After lunch in the hotel’s dining room, Conrad found a nearby livery stable and picked out a rangy gray gelding, renting the horse for the rest of the day along with a saddle and tack. He mounted up and made his way out of Kansas City. It took awhile because the town was so big and sprawling.

Eventually, Conrad found himself following a road that ran through mostly flat farmland. Here and there, a small hill rose, and there were stretches of uncultivated land as well.

He wasn’t quite sure if he was still in Missouri or had crossed into Kansas. The border ran right through the area, and a swing of a hundred yards as the road curved could easily mean he was crossing from one state to the other. Not that it really mattered to him which state Ralph Potter lived in. He just wanted to talk to the man.

Following Crowley’s directions brought Conrad to a small farmhouse with a sod roof that looked
like it had been there almost as long as the region had been settled. Corn grew in the fields on both sides of the narrow lane that ran from the road for a quarter of a mile to the house. A couple of cotton-woods shaded the house itself. A barn stood behind it, along with two smaller outbuildings. Conrad saw a covered well at the side of the house.

It was a nice-looking place, especially for a man who had retired from being the stationmaster of a busy depot at one of the country’s busiest railroad hubs, or for someone who wanted to live out the rest of his days in peace.

Conrad reined to a halt in front of the house and was about to swing out of the saddle when a pack of four or five huge, shaggy dogs exploded around the corner of the building and charged at him in a yapping frenzy. The rented horse panicked and started to buck and rear. Conrad was a fine rider and normally would have been able to stay in the saddle, but he’d been in the act of dismounting and was thrown off balance. He grabbed for the saddle horn but missed.

With a breath-robbing impact, he crashed to the ground.

Instantly, the growling, snarling curs were all around him. His impulse was to reach for his guns and shoot them, but they held back, not attacking him, just surrounding and threatening him.

He was glad he hadn’t started any gunplay when he heard a shotgun being cocked. He glanced around to see the menacing twin barrels of a
greener approaching him. What really shocked him was the person pointing the scattergun at him.

She was a beautiful girl, no more than seventeen or eighteen years old, with long, straight blond hair hanging around her face and down her back. She had a sweet, innocent, heart-shaped face, but there was nothing sweet or innocent about her voice as she said, “Keep your hands away from them guns, mister, or I’ll blow your damn head off.”

Conrad swallowed hard and kept his hands well away from the guns under his coat. His hat had fallen off when he tumbled from the horse, and a hot prairie wind stirred his hair. The same wind moved several strands of the girl’s long, fair hair in front of her face, but she didn’t move to brush them away. All her attention was focused on the stranger who lay there surrounded by the dogs.

From where he lay, Conrad couldn’t help noticing the thrust of her breasts against the thin cotton dress she wore, or the way the wind molded the fabric to the curves of her hips and thighs. She was young, but a full-grown woman or next thing to it, no doubt about that.

He licked dust off his lips. “Listen, take it easy. I mean no harm—”

“Shut up! Come out here from town to take our land away from us. I know your type of skunk when I see it.”

The scornful lash of the girl’s voice bothered
Conrad almost as much as the shotgun she was pointing at him or the slavering muzzles of the dogs all around him. She had taken him for some sort of town scoundrel with his tweed suit and rented horse.

“Sara Beth!” a man’s voice called. “What you got there, Sara Beth?”

“I think it’s another fella from the bank!” the girl replied without taking her eyes off Conrad.

An elderly man limped into view. He wore gray-striped trousers with suspenders over a faded pair of red longjohns. A black cap with a stiff bill perched on his head. Conrad looked at it for a second before he realized it was the same sort of cap worn by many men who worked for the railroad. The man was short and thin, with a leathery face and a spiky white beard.

“Mr. Potter?” Conrad guessed.

The man’s pale blue eyes were deep set under shaggy brows. Those brows rose as his eyes widened in surprise. “You know me?”

“Of course he knows you,” the girl, Sara Beth, snapped. “The bank sent him out here to cause more trouble for us, didn’t it?”

“I’m not from any bank,” Conrad said, “and I’m certainly not here to cause trouble for you. My name is Conrad Browning. If you’ll call these dogs off, I’ll tell you why I came to see you.”

The old man tugged thoughtfully at his beard. “Maybe we ought to listen to him, Sara Beth—”

“No! You can’t trust anybody from the city. You told me that.”

“Yeah, but there’s somethin’ about this young
fella …” The old man’s voice trailed off as he looked surprised again. “Browning, did you say your name is? Any relation to Mrs. Vivian Browning?”

“She was my mother,” Conrad said.

That made up the old-timer’s mind. He reached over, took hold of the shotgun’s barrels, and pushed them aside. “Get away from him, you blasted varmints!” he told the dogs as he advanced, kicking at them. “Let the man alone!”

“But you told me—” Sara Beth began angrily.

“I know what I told you, girl. But this fella is the son of one of the most decent ladies to ever walk the face o’ the earth. Ever’ time a train she was on stopped in Kansas City, she made a point of it to come to my office and say hello to me.”

“Then you
are
Ralph Potter, the former station-master?” Conrad asked.

“That’s right, young fella.” Potter held a hand down to Conrad. “Lemme help you up.”

Conrad started to say he didn’t need any help, but changed his mind and grasped the gnarled old hand. He climbed to his feet and brushed his clothes off. Potter picked up the hat and handed it to him.

Sara Beth stood off to the side, scowling darkly at Conrad in suspicion.

“I reckon Crowley told you where to find me,” Potter said.

Conrad nodded. “That’s right.”

“I heard about your mother passin’ away, God rest her soul. Was sure sorry to hear about it, too.”

“Thank you.”

“I reckon you must own her share of the railroad now.”

Conrad nodded again, not wanting to take the time to explain that he shared the Browning interests with Frank Morgan. “I’ve come to talk to you about the railroad, in fact.”

“But I’ve been retired for a couple years now,” Potter said. “I don’t have anything to do with it anymore.”

“What I want to talk to you about happened three years ago, while you were still the station-master.”

The old-timer looked confused, but he nodded. “All right. Why don’t we go inside and get out of this hot sun?”

Conrad smiled. “That’ll be fine. Thanks.”

“Sara Beth, you fix us some lemonade,” Potter said as he ushered Conrad toward the farmhouse.

The girl snorted as if she didn’t like being ordered around, but she didn’t say anything.

The furnishings in the house were old and shabby, but the place was clean, almost spotlessly so. Potter and his granddaughter—she was too young to be his daughter—might be a little down on their luck, judging by Sara Beth’s talk about the bank, but they weren’t allowing that to make them give up. Potter motioned Conrad into an armchair next to a small, round table with a lace doily and a lamp sitting on it. The old-timer pulled up a ladderback chair and sat on it while Sara Beth disappeared into the kitchen.

“Now, Mr. Browning, what can I do for you?”

“Like I said, I want to ask you about something
that would have happened about three years ago. A young woman came through Kansas City on the train, probably heading west. She was traveling with another woman—I don’t really know how old she was—and a couple of small children. Infants. Twins. A boy and a girl.”

Potter took off the black cap and gave him a dubious frown. “Lots of folks come through Kansas City, Mr. Browning.”

“Yes, that’s what people keep telling me,” Conrad said, trying not to sigh in frustration.

“I can’t hardly remember—”

“It’s possible this woman would have come to see you. She probably would have been upset about something and might have demanded some sort of special treatment.”

“Oh, you’re talkin’ about Miss Tarleton.”

Conrad sat there, thunderstruck with surprise.

“I remember her, all right,” Potter went on. “Be hard to forget a lady like Miss Tarleton, if you ever had to deal with her.”

Conrad managed to nod. “That’s putting it mildly. Go on, Mr. Potter.”

“Well, like you said, she was upset because the train she was on was a mite late, and she’d missed her connection to Denver. I don’t know what she thought I could do about it. It’s not like I could reach out and catch that westbound and make it back up all the way to Kansas City just so’s she could get on it.”