The Devil's Badland: The Loner by J. A. Johnstone

try to hide the truth from me any longer. He said that his men were going to kill you. He didn’t want to take a chance on you getting away again.” She shrugged. “That’s when I told him I wasn’t going to help him anymore. But he didn’t give me any choice. For the past couple of weeks, I have been his prisoner, Conrad. His men watched me constantly. I had to go to the cemetery and keep up the charade. Uncle Anthony said that if I didn’t cooperate, he…he would kill me. I believed him. He’s insane with hatred, Conrad.”
    “But you double-crossed him tonight,” Conrad pointed out.
    “I had to. When I saw them start shooting at you, I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t be a party to murder. I managed to get behind the man who was guarding me and hit him with a piece of stone that had crumbled off one of the grave markers. I got his gun and…and started shooting.” She shuddered. “I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but I wasn’t going to stand by and let them murder you, either.”
    They had carried on the conversation in quiet voices, so that no one at the other tables in the dining room could overhear. Pamela glanced up, over Conrad’s shoulder, and said, “I think someone is looking for you.”
    Conrad turned and saw a couple of the men who had come to the graveyard to find out what all the shooting was about. They spotted Conrad and Pamela and started toward the table.
    “You’re Mr. Browning, ain’t you?” one of the men asked.
    Conrad nodded. “That’s right.”
    “The doc asked us to tell you that Father Francisco is gonna be all right. The bullet knocked a chunk of meat out of his arm but didn’t bust the bone. The worst of it was the blood he lost. But he’ll recover, the doc says, and the padre wanted to make sure you knew that.”
    Conrad stood up and held out his hand. “Thank you for letting me know,” he said as he shook hands with both men. “I was worried about him.”
    “Now, if you don’t mind my askin’, Mr. Browning…what in blazes was that shootout all about?”
    “That’s a personal matter,” Conrad said.
    The man moved aside his coat lapel, revealing a badge pinned to his vest. “Well, not really,” he said. “My name’s Saul Winston. I’m the marshal of Val Verde. This is my deputy, Pete Carey.”
    Conrad looked more closely at the man. Marshal Winston was only medium-sized, with a ragged, salt-and-pepper mustache, but he had a bulldog-like tenacity in his eyes and the set of his jaw.
    Despite that, Conrad wasn’t going to tell him the truth. Not all of it, anyway. He half-turned and indicated Pamela with a motion of his hand.
    “I went down to the cemetery to speak with this lady,” he said. “Father Francisco was with me. Several men started shooting at us. I have no idea why.” That was the only actual lie. “Father Francisco was hit. I tried to drive off the men who shot him.”
    Marshal Winston frowned as he took off his hat and nodded politely to Pamela. “Ma’am, I hate to bother you, but do you know who shot at the padre?”
    “I’m sorry, Marshal, I don’t,” she said. “I think the men must have been robbers. I never got a good look at them.”
    “Why were you, uh, meetin’ Mr. Browning in a graveyard?”
    Conrad felt a surge of anger. He was about to say something to the lawman again about prying in personal matters, but Pamela said, “Mr. Browning and I are old friends. In fact, at one time we were engaged to be married. I simply wanted to say hello to him and pay my respects to his late wife, who’s buried in that cemetery.”
    Winston looked uncomfortable. “Yeah, I seem to remember hearin’ about that. I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Browning.”
    Conrad gave the man a curt nod in response.
    “No offense, ma’am,” Winston went on, “but it seems a mite odd to me that you’d be meetin’ Mr. Browning at his wife’s grave, especially at night.”
    “Father Francisco was there,” Pamela said, her voice sharper now.