Hard Luck Money by J.A. Johnstone

adobe building that housed the Battalion’s headquarters.
    “Maybe you don’t understand, Kid,” Culhane said.
    “Oh, I understand, all right,” The Kid said. “It’s pretty plain. You want to send me to prison so I can get shot in the head.”
    “That’s what happened to Quint Lupo,” Hughes said. “The idea is to keep it from happening to anybody else, and to round up the outlaws behind the scheme.”
    “You don’t know there actually is a scheme. You said the reason that fella Lupo was behind bars to start with was because he was a bank robber.”
    “And a good one,” Hughes said with a nod. “Or maybe I should say a talented one. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a good bank robber.”
    The Kid wanted to get up and walk out of the captain’s office. He wished he hadn’t let Culhane talk him into going there in the first place.
    But now that he was, he didn’t want to get Culhane in trouble with the boss Ranger, so he said, “All right. I’ll hear you out, Captain. But I’ve got a special dislike for the idea of going to prison ... especially when I haven’t done anything to deserve it!”
    “Yes, I understand. I did some checking into your background after Sergeant Culhane came up with this idea.” Hughes shook his head. “But we’ll get to that. Let me finish filling you in on the facts as we know them.”
    Hughes had already gone over some of it, but The Kid could tell the captain was the sort who liked to be thorough. He nodded. “Go ahead.”
    Hughes glanced down at the documents on his desk. “Five years ago, Quint Lupo was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a term of fifteen years in the state penitentiary on numerous charges of bank and train robbery. The record shows that prior to his arrest, no one was ever killed during the commission of one of his crimes.”
    “We don’t have any evidence to show he ever took a shot at anybody,” Culhane put in.
    The Kid shrugged. “All that tells me is he planned his robberies well enough he didn’t have to shoot anybody.”
    “That’s how it appears,” Hughes agreed. “And except for a few minor scrapes of the sort that occur all the time in prison, he stayed out of trouble while he was at Huntsville ... until he provoked a fight with another convict and wound up in the infirmary.”
    “Which you think was deliberate.”
    “It looks like it,” Culhane said. “That ain’t necessarily the same thing.”
    “While Lupo was in the infirmary, he and three other convicts made an escape attempt,” Hughes went on. “They murdered a guard, a Sergeant Alonzo Flynn, and slightly injured two others. They made it outside the walls of the prison, but were pursued by a guard detail led by Corporal Bert Hagen. The other three convicts were shot down by Hagen and his men, but Lupo gave them the slip and got away in the woods.”
    “Men have broken out of prison before,” The Kid pointed out. As a matter of fact, he was one of them.
    “Yeah, but that ain’t all of it,” Culhane said.
    Hughes shifted around some of the papers on his desk and picked up another document.
    “Lupo dropped out of sight and wasn’t spotted until a couple weeks later, when half a dozen outlaws held up the bank in La Grange. They were all masked except for Lupo, who was recognized by one of the victims. That man wound up being killed when he pursued the robbers outside the bank, but he identified Lupo in the hearing of several other witnesses before the shooting started.”
    The Kid frowned slightly. “Wait a minute. Lupo was the only one who wasn’t wearing a mask?”
    “That’s right. Two men were gunned down during that robbery, and another, the bank president, died of a heart seizure.”
    “That doesn’t sound much like the jobs Lupo pulled before.”
    “No, it doesn’t,” Hughes said.
    Culhane put in, “When Rangers questioned some of the folks who were in the bank the day of the holdup, they said Lupo wasn’t the one who killed those