Free The Loner: Seven Days to Die by J.A. Johnstone Page A

you up and did what I could for you, but I’m afraid you’re going to have some scars on your back.”
    The Kid might have laughed if he hadn’t been so weak. He didn’t give a damn about scars. He already had plenty of scars on his soul that would never heal. A few stripes on his flesh didn’t matter.
    He lifted his head a little so he could look around. He was lying facedown on a narrow mattress on an iron bedstead, in a room with bare walls and a single high window with iron bars set into it. Several other beds were in the room, but they were empty.
    The Kid still had the shackles on his wrists, and when he moved his feet slightly, he heard the leg irons clank. “Don’t they know I’m…too beat up to…go anywhere?” he asked Thurber, who sat beside the bed in a ladderback chair.
    “They know, but it’s the warden’s orders that the irons stay on. He’s not taking any chances with you, whoever you are.”
    It took a couple heartbeats for the implication of the doctor’s words to penetrate The Kid’s brain. When they did, his head jerked up, causing a fresh burst of pain that made him wince. He ignored it and said, “What do you mean? You know I’m not Ben Bledsoe?”
    Instead of answering directly, Thurber reached out and brushed back the longish hair that hung over The Kid’s left ear.
    “What happened here?” he asked.
    The top of the ear was gone, leaving an odd-looking area covered by a healed-over scar.
    The Kid closed his eyes for a second and cursed himself. He had gotten so used to his ear being mutilated that he never even thought about it anymore. It hadn’t occurred to him that the old injury could prove he wasn’t Bledsoe.
    “An outlaw used his knife to cut off part of my ear while he and his gang were holding me for ransom,” he said after a moment. Frank Morgan had gotten him out of that deadly jam, and it was the start of the thaw between father and son.
    “When did that happen?”
    “Years ago,” The Kid said. Despite the terrible shape he was in, he felt excitement surge inside him. “Go get Fletcher and show it to him. That’ll prove I’m not Bledsoe!” A thought came to him. “Unless…no, that’s crazy.”
    But he thought it was crazy that the outlaw who looked so much like him could speak Latin. “Bledsoe’s ear doesn’t look like this, does it?” he asked in a hollow voice.
    Thurber chuckled. “It didn’t when he busted out of here. There’s no telling what might’ve happened to him while he was gone. It was more than a month before you were caught and brought back here, you know.”
    “The wound on my ear is a lot older than a month.”
    “Well, it looks older than that to me, all right,” Thurber replied with a shrug. “But you have to understand, I can’t prove that it is.”
    “Of course you can! It’s your medical opinion. It’s proof . It would stand up in a court of law.”
    Thurber shook his head. “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, my friend, in this place, if it doesn’t convince Warden Fletcher, it doesn’t prove a damn thing.”
    The Kid knew that was true, but now that he had a straw at which to grasp, he wasn’t going to give it up. “You can tell him,” he said. “You have to tell him.”
    “Maybe I will. But even if I do, I’ve got a hunch it won’t really matter.”
    The Kid groaned in a mixture of pain and disappointment, then he thought of another possibility. “Tell Miss Fletcher.”
    Thurber frowned. “Jillian? Why would I want to do that?”
    “Because she already has doubts that I’m Bledsoe. Convince her of the truth, and then both of you can try to persuade her father that I’m not lying.”
    The doctor shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m not saying anything to that girl. The warden doesn’t like it when she takes any interest in the prisoners. Doesn’t like it one little bit. Getting her involved any more than she already is would just turn him against you that much more.”
    Something about Thurber’s