A Town Called Fury:

In Utah the Loner finds religion—
behind the barrel of a gun . . .

The damsel is in distress, or so it seems to
Conrad Browning. On his way across the wide,
tall Utah Territory to California, the Loner
meets a beautiful Mormon girl on the run from a
forced polygamous wedding—and the gun-toting
faithful trying to hunt her down. But there are
two sides to every story. Sometimes, the one you
don’t hear is the one that can get you killed.

The runaway bride has a little history of her own.
The Loner touches off a storm of unholy gunfire,
drawing blood from an outlaw and a death
sentence from a patriarch. Among murderers
and Mormons, Bibles and bullets, the Loner
finds himself riding to a wedding—a ceremony
he intends to crash with a vengeance. . . .

The Tenth in the Blazing New Series!

The Loner: The Blood of Renegades
by USA Today bestselling author J. A. Johnstone

On sale now, wherever Pinnacle Books are sold.

Rugged, snowcapped mountains rose in the distance, a majestic sight under a beautiful blue sky.

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.

Carson City . . . Just thinking about the place threatened to send waves of melancholy sweeping over Conrad’s soul. That was where he and Rebel lived when she was murdered. Later their home had gone up in flames, and for a while everyone believed that Conrad had perished in the blaze.

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 should take the train, but rather just commenting on the relative speed with which it could deliver us to our destination. Isn’t it amazing?”

“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.”

And that usually meant trouble.

Conrad reined in his horse and Arturo brought the buggy to a stop. As they sat there watching, the dust column continued to move toward them. Conrad’s keen eyes made out a single figure at the base of the column. Then his gaze shifted and he lifted a hand to point.

“Even more dust back there,” he said.

“What does it mean?” Arturo asked.

“Means that fella in front is being chased by at least half a dozen riders,” Conrad said, “and I’ll bet they don’t have anything good in mind for him.”

Arturo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously as he looked at Conrad and asked, “What exactly are we going to do about it?”

With a faint smile, Conrad said, “Now that’s a good question.”

He reached for his Winchester and drew it out of the saddle boot.

“I knew it!” Arturo said. “Whatever this trouble is, you’re going to get mixed up right in the middle of it, aren’t you? You can’t just let it gallop on past us.”

Conrad didn’t answer with words. Instead he heeled his horse into a run across the arid plains in a course that would intercept the fleeing rider.

Arturo yelled something behind him, but Conrad couldn’t make it out over the thunder of the black’s hoofbeats. He leaned forward in the saddle and urged the animal to greater speed.

He had been torn for a second between the two courses of action that lay before him. He and Arturo could have stayed where they were and allowed the pursuit to pass in front of them and continue on to the south. That probably would have been the smartest thing to do, since he was on an important mission of his own: finding his lost children.

Or he could give in to the part of him that didn’t like six-to-one odds. That was the urge that won the mental battle. He had gotten in the habit of sticking up for anybody who was outnumbered.

Of course, it was possible the fleeing rider was a killer or a train robber or some other sort of outlaw, and that could be a posse on his trail. In that case, Conrad could stop the fugitive and do a favor for the law.

First, though, he had to get an idea of what was going on. He didn’t hear any shots or see any puffs of powdersmoke from the pursuers. Evidently they weren’t out to kill the person they were after.

Conrad suddenly realized he needed to stop thinking of that lone rider as a man. He was close enough now to see long, fair hair streaming out behind the rider’s head. Some men wore their hair long like that, but Conrad’s instincts told him this was a woman.

A woman being chased by that many men was bound to be in trouble. Conrad hauled back on the reins and brought his mount to a stop again. He levered a round into the Winchester’s firing chamber and brought the rifle to his shoulder. Aiming high, he squeezed the trigger and sent a shot blasting over the heads of the pursuers, who were a couple of hundred yards away.

The woman was closer, maybe fifty yards from him. She changed course, veering toward him. The shot Conrad had fired at the men chasing her must have convinced her that he might protect her. Conrad levered the rifle and squeezed off another round.

The pursuers didn’t return his fire. They still had to be worried about hitting the woman. She flashed past Conrad without slowing down. He caught a glimpse of her pale, frightened face. When he glanced over his shoulder after her, he saw that Arturo had followed him in the buggy and was stopped a short distance behind him. Arturo had jumped down from the vehicle and stood there with a rifle in his hands, ready to get into the fight if need be.

Conrad turned his attention back to the pursuers, who slowed their horses and then stopped, evidently unwilling to charge right into the threat of two Winchesters. They were far enough away Conrad couldn’t make out any details about them except the broad-brimmed hats and long dusters they wore. The horses milled around as the dust cloud kicked up by their hooves started to blow away.

Seconds passed in nerve-stretching tension. Finally one of the men prodded his horse forward. Conrad stayed where he was, waiting in motionless silence, as the man rode slowly toward him.

“That’s far enough,” Conrad called when the man was about thirty feet away.

“Mister, I don’t know who you are, but you’re mixin’ in something that’s none of your concern.” The spokesman for the pursuers was a thick-set man with dark beard stubble on his face. One eye was squeezed almost shut, no doubt from the injury that had left a scar angling away from it. “That woman belongs to us.”

Conrad said, “You may not have heard, but it’s almost a new century. Enlightened people are starting to believe that women don’t actually belong to anyone except themselves.”

The man grunted. “It don’t matter what century it is. The law’s the law.”

“What law?”

“The law of God!” the man thundered.

With that, things became clearer to Conrad. “You’re Mormons, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Call ourselves saints,” the man said. “Or in our case . . . angels.”

Avenging angels, Conrad thought. Gun-packing enforcers for the leaders of the Mormon hierarchy. Conrad had heard stories about them, but these were the first he had encountered. When he’d been in charge of all the Browning business and financial interests—back in that other life of his before everything he held dear was ripped away from him—he had dealt at times with Mormon leaders. You couldn’t do business in Utah without dealing with the Mormons. But they had been businessmen as much as they were church elders, their religious beliefs tempered by the desire to make money. These gunmen were very different sorts.

Despite being outnumbered, Conrad wasn’t afraid of them. He said, “Chasing a scared girl across this wasteland doesn’t strike me as being very religious.”

The man scowled and jabbed a finger at him, as if to strike him dead. “Don’t you presume to know the will of the Lord! The girl is ours and she goes back with us. She has defied the elders and must be punished!”

“You’ll have to take her from us,” Conrad said coolly.

“There are six of us and two of you,” the man pointed out with a sneer.

“Yes, but we’ll kill four of you before you put us down. Maybe five. Maybe even all six.” Conrad smiled. “Not to brag, but I’m pretty good with a gun. Maybe we’ll all wind up lying here, food for the buzzards, and then the girl will ride away. What good will that do your elders?”

The other men had been listening intently to the exchange. One of them spoke up now, saying, “Leatherwood, maybe we’d better not do this. We were just supposed to bring her back, not kill anybody.”

The leader’s head jerked around. “This man’s not going to tell me what to do. Our orders were to fetch the girl!”

“We’ll be able to find her later.” The man waved a hand at the landscape around them. “Where are they going to go that we can’t find them whenever we want to? This is our home.”

The one called Leatherwood hesitated. He glared back and forth between his companions and Conrad. “Elder Hissop was clear about what we’re supposed to do. I don’t know about you, Kiley, but I don’t much want to go back without doin’ as we were told.”

“They won’t get away,” Kiley said. “Besides, after these men have been saddled with that headstrong female for a while, they may want us to take her off their hands!”

Leatherwood nodded. “That’s a good point.” He turned back to Conrad. “All right, mister, if you want her, take her. But know that by defyin’ us, you’ve signed your death warrant. Sooner or later we’ll kill you, and the girl will go back where she belongs.”

“Talk like that makes me wonder why I don’t just go ahead and drill you right now,” Conrad said.

The squint-eyed Leatherwood grinned, which made him even uglier. “You’re welcome to go ahead and try, mister.”

Conrad began backing his horse away. Without taking his eyes off the six men, he raised his voice and said, “Arturo, take the girl and get out of here. I’ll cover your back trail.”

The Mormon gunmen stayed where they were. Conrad understood why the one called Kiley hadn’t wanted to force the issue. Outnumbered, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing and no place where they could get any help, he and Arturo were at a definite disadvantage. The avenging angels could stalk them at their leisure, and Conrad and Arturo would have no way of knowing when or where the inevitable attack would come.

But for now, more gunplay appeared to have been headed off. Conrad had a chance to find out who the girl was and what was going on here, and he wanted to take advantage of that opportunity. He didn’t mind fighting, but he generally liked to know what he was fighting for, especially when this trouble was delaying him in his efforts to find his missing children.

Conrad heard the buggy and the girl’s horse departing behind him. He waited and continued backing his horse away from the gunmen. When he had put a hundred yards between himself and them, he whirled the horse without warning and kicked it into a run. As he galloped after Arturo and the girl, he looked over his shoulder and saw that the Mormons weren’t giving chase. That surprised him a little, but obviously Leatherwood had decided they were going to bide their time.

Conrad was sure of one thing: This trouble was far from over.

Because Kiley was right. There was no place for them to go where the avenging angels couldn’t find them.

Conrad, Arturo, and their unexpected companion didn’t stop until they had gone at least a mile. Conrad kept checking behind them. He was ready to stop and throw up a screen of rifle fire to cover their getaway, but the gunmen didn’t come after them.

When they finally reined in, the horses were all fatigued by the hard run. The young woman’s horse was in the worst shape because she had been fleeing from her pursuers before Conrad and Arturo joined the chase.

The young woman wasn’t in much better shape. When she tried to dismount, she half fell out of the saddle and had to grab hold of a stirrup to keep herself from dropping to the ground.

Conrad had already slid his Winchester into the saddle boot and swung down from the black. He reached out to grasp her arm and steady her. “Arturo,” he said, “get one of the canteens.”

Arturo turned around on the buggy seat and found a canteen in their boxes and bags of supplies. He climbed down from the seat and brought the water over to them. Conrad unscrewed the cap and held the canteen to the young woman’s mouth. She grabbed it with both hands and tried to gulp down as much water as she could, but Conrad pulled the canteen away after a couple of swallows.

“Take it easy,” he told her. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

“I . . . I . . . Thank you,” she gasped. “If you hadn’t come along . . . I wouldn’t have made it much farther.”

While Conrad waited a moment before he gave her another drink, he took advantage of the opportunity to have a good look at her. She was tall and slender, and hair a little lighter in color than honey flowed all the way down her back to her hips. She wore men’s clothing: a rough cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up a couple of turns on tanned forearms, brown twill trousers with suspenders that went over her shoulders, and work boots that laced up. Despite the clothing, no one would ever take her for anything but female.

“What’s your name?” Conrad asked.

She’d been breathless when she dismounted, but she was starting to recover. “Selena,” she said. “Selena Webster.”

“I’m Conrad Browning. This is my friend Arturo Vincenzo.”

Conrad handed her the canteen, and this time he didn’t have to take it away from her. She took a long drink, but not enough to make her sick. As she gave him the canteen, she said, “I can’t thank you enough for helping me, but I’m afraid you’ve just doomed yourselves. Like Jackson Leatherwood said, when you interfere with Father Agony’s men, you’ve signed your own death warrant.”

Despite the perilousness of their situation, Conrad couldn’t help but laugh. “Father Agony?” he repeated. “That’s a pretty melodramatic name, don’t you think?”

Selena smiled, but there was no real humor in the expression. “That’s what some of his wives call him. His name is Agonistes Hissop.”

“The man’s parents had odd taste in nomenclature,” Arturo said.

“Or else they were readers and admirers of Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” Conrad said. “Agonistes being from the Latin for ‘one who struggles for a worthy cause.’”

Selena gave him an odd look. He didn’t bother explaining that he had taken a number of courses in the classics during his university days.

“The man’s parents raised a monster,” Selena said after a moment. “His name is hardly the worst thing about him.”

“He’s the elder that Leatherwood and the others work for?” Conrad guessed.

Selena nodded. “He has a ranch about twenty miles northwest of here in a place called Juniper Canyon. It’s more like his own little town, because a lot of his followers live there as well. He’s a very rich, important man, and he doesn’t let anyone forget it.”

“You mentioned his . . . wives,” Conrad said. “I seem to remember reading in the newspaper that the Mormon Church outlawed polygamy almost ten years ago.”

That brought a laugh from Selena. “Just because Father Agony is a saint doesn’t mean that he agrees with everything the church leadership does. He believes that he’s a prophet, like Joseph Smith, and that God has granted him the wisdom and right to make his own laws. He’s always had multiple wives, and he doesn’t want to give them up.”

Conrad nodded. “And let me guess . . . he wants to add you to the number?”

The grimace that momentarily twisted Selena’s face was answer enough to that question. She said, “I’ll never marry him. He can kill me first, or more likely have Leatherwood and the rest of his avenging angels do it for him, but I don’t care. That would be better than . . . than . . .”

“Maybe it won’t come to that,” Conrad said so that she wouldn’t have to go on. “I don’t like to brag, but Arturo and I are pretty good at handling trouble.”

“Have you ever had an army of triggerites after you? Because that’s what you’ll be facing if you try to help me. I appreciate what you did, but you’d be better off if we went our separate ways. If Leatherwood and the others see that I’m not traveling with you, maybe he’ll spare your lives. Maybe.”

Conrad shook his head. “We’re not going to abandon you. Once I take cards in a game, I like to play it out.” He glanced toward the sun. “It’s past the middle of the afternoon. We’ll let the horses rest for a while longer, then we can start looking for a place to hole up for the night.”

“Why don’t you sit in the buggy, Miss Webster?” Arturo suggested. “The canopy provides a bit of shade from that brutal sun.”

Selena smiled. “Thank you. You’re very nice.”

“Not really. I just know that having you suffer a sunstroke would only make our situation worse.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, in that case, I appreciate it anyway.” She climbed onto the buggy seat and heaved a weary sigh.

Conrad kept an eye not only on the area where they had left Jackson Leatherwood and the other avenging angels but also the rest of the landscape around them. He wouldn’t put it past Leatherwood and the others to circle and come at them from a different direction. This vast expanse of Utah seemed as open and empty as if it had been on the moon, however.

Selena’s exhaustion must have caught up to her. She dozed off with her head sagging forward. While she was sleeping, Arturo asked Conrad, “Are you sure that getting involved in this young woman’s problems is a good idea, sir?”

“No,” Conrad said, “it’s a terrible idea. We need to get on about our own business. I know that. But . . . look at her. She’s not much more than a girl.”

“A very attractive girl.”

Conrad shrugged. “Yes, but that doesn’t have anything to do with it. She’s in trouble, and if we don’t help her, who will? Maybe we can take her someplace where she’ll be safe from those men.”

He didn’t explain to Arturo how his dreams—and sometimes even his waking moments—had been haunted by Rebel for months after her death. Whenever he’d been faced by the decision of whether to help someone or just ride on, her sweet voice had seemed to whisper in his ear that he had to help . . . because that’s what she would have done. Rebel wasn’t here anymore, but Conrad could honor the life she had led and the legacy she left behind by not turning his back on people who needed a hand.

Or in his case, a gunhand.

After half an hour, Conrad tied Selena’s horse at the back of the buggy. She could stay where she was and ride in the vehicle. She stirred when Arturo climbed onto the seat beside her.

Suddenly her head snapped up and she looked around, wide-eyed with terror. “It’s all right, Miss Webster,” Arturo told her. “You’re among friends.”

She looked like she wanted to bolt out of the buggy and take off running blindly. After a moment, though, her fear seemed to subside, and she sank back onto the seat.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “At first I . . . I didn’t remember what happened. I thought I’d passed out somewhere and that Leatherwood and his men were still after me.” A laugh edged with bitterness came from her. “Which they still are, of course. They’ll never give up. Not as long as they’re alive.” She looked back and forth between Conrad and Arturo. “Are you sure you want to take on my troubles?”

Conrad stepped up into the saddle. “We wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said with a smile.