Twisted Hills Read Online Free PDF Page A

the least of which was the fact that the horse bore no brand, no markings of any kind—perfect for working undercover, he’d told himself.
    Undercover . . .
    He looked out at the dun, then at the flat-brimmed range hat. He didn’t like working without a badge. There was an element of deception to it that ran against the grain of his nature. He had tried to live his life in a straightforward manner, open and honest to a fault. He preferred walking up to a man, identifying himself, and telling the man flat-out what he was accused of and what was about to happen to him. “Make your choice,” he would say with calm finality. And so it would go. That was the way he saw the law to be best served.
    As a rule, he usually carried a list of names of the men he hunted. Once he found them, he gave them a choice. They could lay down their weapons and turn themselves in, or they could buck the odds at killing him and once more staying a few steps ahead of the law. These were tough, wild, desperate men, who for the most part liked their odds at killing him. But so far he’d always managed to kill them first. As he thought about it, he pictured their faces staring up at the sky, their boot soles exposed to him as he walked forward, his Colt smoking in his hand.
    He kept no running count of how many men he’d arrested as opposed to how many he’d left lying dead in the street; he marked their names off his list and moved on to the next one. It couldn’t get more honest and simple than that. Yet he knew there were times when undercover work had to be done, and like all Territory Rangers he did whatever the particulars of a certain job called for to the best of his ability. He picked up his plain leather gun belt and looked it over.
    In this case the job involved taking off the badge and putting on a whole other identity. There was trouble a-brewing in Agua Fría. Curtis Rudabell couldn’t have made it any plainer. “It’s my kind of people running Agua Fría,” he’d said.
    So be it,
Sam told himself. He swung the two-inch-wide gun belt around his waist, buckled it, adjusted it and picked up a second ivory-handled Colt and slid it down butt forward into a cross-draw holster he’d added onto the left side of his gun belt. He tied the right holster down to his thigh, straightened and stamped the big boots down firmer onto his feet. It wasn’t the first time he’d worked undercover; it wouldn’t be his last.
    He reached down to the glowing lantern and trimmed the wick low. He had measured enough fuel to keep the lantern burning for as long as an hour after he left, rather than have anyone see the lantern light go out all at once. This was how a man covered for himself when he wanted his comings and goings to be obscure.
Get used to it,
he reminded himself.
    In the dimmer shadowy light he picked up a set of saddlebags sitting on the floor at his feet and swung them up over his shoulder. He picked up his Winchester repeating rifle, which was leaning against the wall and walked out the open back door and stepped down to the post where the big dun stood staring at him in the pale purple darkness. The horse stamped a restless hoof and shook out its mane.
    â€œI expect you’re ready to go?” the Ranger asked quietly, swinging the saddlebags from his shoulder onto the dun’s back. He tied the bags down behind a California-style saddle he’d taken from the livery tack room. As if in reply to him, the dun jerked its head against its tied reins. The Ranger shoved his rifle down into the saddle boot, untied the reins and swung up atop the dun.
    Slipping out of town like a thief in the night,
he told himself, backing the restless animal onto the narrow alleyway.
    He turned the animal toward the black shadows of a backstreet that would lead him to the border trail. For a moment he stared out through a gray-red haze of dust looming in the distance between the