Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats (8 page)

Silence.

Longarm couldn't help but allow himself a savage grin.

“No, they didn't get me!” he shouted, listening to his own echo vault around the canyon. “But I'll be back to get the rest of you sons o' bitches! And when I do, there'll be hell to pay and no hot pitch!”

Longarm wheeled and quickly climbed the ridge, chuckling savagely.

Longarm didn't think any of Drummond's men were coming for him. When he'd climbed to the top of the ridge, he paused and stared out over the canyon.

Nothing but silence. He could see the flickering lights of the cabin, and little else. The moon had risen higher, shifting shadows.

Longarm looked down the slope to the right, where he'd left McIntyre and the rest of the posse. Only silence from that direction, too. An eerie, ominous silence like that in a graveyard at midnight.

Longarm hated to leave the posse, but he had no choice. Drummond might figure on him returning for them. He'd likely have at least one, maybe two men picketed over the dead men. Longarm couldn't take the chance. He'd camp a ways away from the canyon for the rest of the night and return the next morning to see to both the posse and Drummond's bunch.

Weariness was heavy inside him as he made his way back to where he and the others had tied their horses. He'd untied the sorrel and was about to step into the saddle when he stopped. He looked back toward the ridge.

He couldn't leave the posse without one more look and listen. One or two might still be alive . . .

He retied his horse and walked back up to the ridge. He dropped to a knee just below the crest, doffed his hat to make himself a smaller target, and waited, staring into the valley that was dark save for the lights of the cabin. He looked down the ridge into the trees. No movement. No sound. Nothing.

Drummond's bunch had most likely made sure they'd killed all of the posse members before heading back to the cabin.

Longarm leaned his rifle against his shoulder and raked a gloved hand through his ­close-­cropped hair. He set his hat on his head and rose. He'd started back down the slope toward the horses when brush crunched and crackled behind him. There was a thump and a groan.

Longarm wheeled, quietly racking a round into the Winchester's breech and aiming straight down the dark slope from his right hip. He scowled into the darkness, waiting for a gun flash. None came.

Another groan. About thirty yards down the slope, at the edge of the pines, a shadow moved.

Longarm walked slowly, cautiously back up to the ridge crest and down the other side, keeping the rifle aimed from his hip. The shadow was a man writhing on the ground at the edge of the trees, groaning. Longarm quickened his pace. He knelt down beside the man, who lay belly down, trying feebly to rise to his hands and knees.

It was McIntyre. Longarm could see the man's thick, ­gray-­blond hair and mustache, the lanky frame clad in dark trousers, cream shirt, and brown vest. Longarm grabbed his arm.

“Thrum!”

The man jerked his arm away with a start and lifted his ­fear-­sharp eyes to Longarm. He blinked, relaxed. “Custis,” he rasped.

“How bad you hit?”

McIntyre shook his head. In a pinched voice, he said, “Not as bad as the others.”

With Longarm's help, the sheriff rose to his knees and sat back on his heels. There was a dark stain low on his right side. The moonlight glistened in it. “I . . . I went back to fetch . . . medicine from my . . . saddlebags. I'd just started back when I heard the shooting.”

The old lawman wagged his head. His breath rattled in his throat. “I ran down to try to stop ­it—­I figured it was a bushwhack. Drummond was holed up in the trees ­yonder—­waitin' to dry gulch us. I went runnin' down through the trees, yellin' to warn the others. Several of Drummond's men fired on me though I don't think they ever saw me. When I took this here bullet, I hid amongst some rocks.”

“Can you stand, Thrum?”

Breathing hard, McIntyre nodded. He gave Longarm his arm, and the federal lawman helped the man to his feet. The man's knees wobbled. Longarm wrapped an arm around McIntyre's waist and led him up and over the ridge, heading back in the direction of the horses.

“Goddamn, ­low-­down, dirty, ­dry-­gulchin' bastards!” McIntyre rasped. “They musta been waitin' in the trees, snuck around behind us.” He looked at Longarm, showing his teeth beneath his thick, gray ­soup-­strainer mustache. “They just walked down there and executed those men. Ten of my ­friends—­all good ­businessmen—­from Arapaho! Just like they was shootin' sick cattle, Custis!”

“Easy, Thrum. Don't talk. We gotta get you to a camp, warm fire, see about tendin' that bullet hole.”

“Fuck the bullet hole. They killed my boy! They just killed ten of Arapaho's most prominent businessmen!”

“Nothin' we can do about it now, Thrum.” They were almost back to the horses shifting around in the darkness, the mounts' eyes reflecting the moonlight. “Later . . . after we get that hole tended.”

Longarm helped McIntyre onto his buckskin and then he untied the other horses so they could roam and forage. Some area rancher would likely add them to his remuda. Longarm swung up onto his sorrel's back and, leading McIntyre's horse by its reins, rode back down the trail.

Some of the other horses followed as he cut off the trail and headed nearly straight west, toward a sloping, forested ridge. The shrubs and junipers around him were silvered by moonlight, revealing a deer path, which he followed to the edge of the trees and then up through the trees toward a relatively flat, ­rock-­rimmed shelf in the ridge wall.

He decided the shelf would be a good place to camp, as the fire he'd build to get McIntyre warm and to brew coffee would be concealed by the heavy pine growth.

When he'd helped the old lawman out of his saddle and had eased him onto the ground, he unsaddled the horses, gathered wood, and built a fire. He gave his bottle of rye to the sheriff and told him to take several good pulls. McIntyre did so, weakly, as he sagged back against a rock outcropping, cursing between breaths.

By the light of the fire, Longarm opened his friend's shirt and inspected the wound. The ­thumb-­sized hole was oozing thick, red blood that looked black in the darkness tempered by the fire's low flames. The blood ran down the sheriff's side, staining his cartridge belt, holster, and pants.

“How's it look?” McIntyre asked, tipping his head back against the outcropping and stretching his lips away from his teeth. He shuddered as pain waves rolled through him.

“Ain't gonna sugarcoat it for you, Thrum. It don't look good.”

“Don't feel good, neither.”

Longarm gently leaned the man forward, lifted his bloody shirt up, and inspected his back. “The bullet appears to have gone all the way through. Hard to tell how much damage it did. Might've torn up your liver. About all I can do is clean it the wound, stuff something in it so you don't bleed dry, and wrap it.”

When McIntyre didn't say anything, Longarm looked at the man. He was surprised to see his old friend smiling at him.

“Ah, fuck, Custis, it don't matter one way or the other. When I seen my boy lyin' there in the street yesterday, most of me died right then. A good chunk of me died when his ma passed on over the range three years ago. It was my boy, Ryan, who kept me goin'. I figured even after the heart seizure that I might live to see a grandchild or two, but now . . . ah, fuck it. If you can keep me alive for a few hours, shit, all I really want to do is kill Drummond. Then I'll be on my way out of this old world. Truth be told, it ain't really worth a shit, anyway”—he smiled again, ­ironically—“is it?”

“It don't look like ­it—­no,” Longarm had to admit.

He hadn't seen so much ­cold-­blooded murder in a long time. The depredations of the Drummond gang might have been the worst he'd ever seen. He thought of the girl he'd left in the cabin and berated himself once more for not getting her out when he'd had the chance.

He used water from his canteen and whiskey to clean McIntyre's wound. He tore a clean handkerchief in two, soaked both swatches in rye, and stuffed one into the entrance hole, the other into the exit hole, and wrapped a long bandage tightly around the old sheriff's waist.

McIntyre had an extra shirt in his saddlebags, and Long­arm helped him into it. When the sheriff was resting relatively comfortably in his blankets, Longarm offered him some jerky and coffee. McIntyre waved it off.

“Do believe I'll sleep now, Custis,” McIntyre said.

Before Longarm had time to respond the man was snoring beneath his hat.

Longarm finished off his jerky and sat sipping his coffee, which he'd liberally laced with rye. He stared off through the dark forest toward the canyon in which the Drummond gang was residing for the evening.

While fatigue was an anvil on the federal lawman's shoulders, he wished desperately for the sun to rise so he could get back after the gang. He'd hunt them like a professional wildcat hunter hunted mountain ­lions—­so quietly and stealthily that his quarry wouldn't know it was being hunted.

He'd try to isolate them and kill them off by ones and twos. And in that fashion, he'd slowly make his way to Casey Summerville . . . if she was still alive tomorrow or the next day, that was. Longarm didn't doubt that as soon as they tired of the girl's body, they'd kill her and dump her somewhere along the trail.

It was nearly false dawn before Longarm finally slept for an hour, maybe a little more. When he opened his eyes, the sun was poking its head above the eastern ridges.

He rose on his elbows, wincing at the stiffness in his bones, and looked at the fire. It had burned down to a mound of gray ashes. Birds chirped in the branches. Dew lay heavy in the grass and pine boughs.

Longarm looked over at McIntyre, who lay in the same position as when Longarm had last seen him. Only, the sheriff's chest was not rising and falling. In fact, he lay still as stone beneath his blankets, his face obscured by his ­tipped-­down hat.

Longarm tossed his own blankets aside and crawled over to McIntyre. He nudged the man's arm. “Thrum?”

No response.

Longarm shook the man again, lifted his hat brim up off his forehead. McIntyre's lower jaw hung slack. His blue eyes stared up at Longarm, glassy in death.

Longarm would have buried his old friend if he'd had the shovel and the time needed to dig a grave. As it was, he had neither. He knew that McIntyre wouldn't mind being left there by the cold ashes of the previous night's fire, wrapped in his blankets for his final sleep.

Relinquished to the bobcats and wolves and whatever other ­carrion-­eaters wanted to clean his bones. What did it really matter if the worms and maggots got you under the sod or the coyotes and crows got you on top of it?

McIntyre would have wanted Longarm to get after Drummond as quickly as he could, to retrieve the young woman who would have been his daughter-in-law, and to see that as many of Drummond's gang as possible died hard.

Longarm saddled his sorrel and Thrum's buckskin. He'd take the second horse for Casey. If he managed to rescue the girl, she'd need a mount for the trip back to Arapaho.

Longarm gathered his gear and mounted up, then glanced at the ­blanket-­wrapped bundle of Thrumond McIntyre, hat showing at the top, boots at the bottom. He tipped his hat brim to the man, said, “Have a good sleep, old friend,” and rode off through the trees, trailing the buckskin by its bridle reins.

He dropped into the valley and the morning light that seemed far too bright for his mood.

He'd come to this country for a wedding. What he'd found instead was death piled atop death and bad men running like hydrophobic wolves with an innocent girl they'd likely abused every night since they'd taken her.

Longarm rode cautiously southeast to where he and the posse riders had tethered their horses the night before. He rode on past the place and carefully scouted the ridge before riding over it and into the trees. He looked around as he let the sorrel and buckskin pick their own way down the steep slope through the forest, angling toward where he'd remembered leaving McIntyre and the other men the night before.

The sorrel gave the first indication he was close. The horse stopped and nickered, shaking its head. It smelled death.

Longarm rode a little farther down the slope. And then he found them. Or what was left of them after the coyotes and possibly a bobcat had been on them, ripping and tearing. One of the men had been dragged a good ways from the others, his guts eaten out.

He found the banker lying in a bloody pile farther down the slope from the others. Stanley lay on his back, ankles crossed, as though he'd just laid down for a nap. Aside from the blood and the torn clothes, of course. And one ­pecked-­out ­eye—­likely by the magpie that had been sitting on his forehead until Longarm had ridden up.

The bird had winged up to light on a near branch, waiting.

Longarm dismounted, dropped the horses' reins, and slid his Winchester from his rifle boot. He walked down the hill to the edge of the forest. Shouldered up against a pine, he studied the ranch yard below.

No smoke rose from the stone chimney. Both corrals flanking the place were empty, gates yawning wide. The cabin's front door stood open. An eerie silence lay over the yard.

Drummond's bunch had apparently ridden on, as Long­­arm had suspected they would. Still, the outlaw leader might have left someone behind to scour him, Longarm, from their back trail, for they knew they'd left one man alive last night. He hoped they wouldn't suspect that only one man would follow a gang of their size, but he'd best assume they would and proceed with caution.

Mounting the sorrel and leading McIntyre's horse, he rode slowly down out of the trees and into the ranch yard, swinging his head from left to right and back again, wary of an ambush.

He carefully checked out the cabin and the outbuildings, and then, satisfied that all of Drummond's gang had ridden on, he followed their tracks out of the yard and onto a wagon trail running along a creek that flowed west through the canyon.

He put the sorrel into a jog but did not slide his rifle into its boot. He rode with a cartridge in the chamber, the hammer at half cock, the barrel resting across his saddlebow.

Ready.

He had to assume that Drummond would hold a couple of riders back to watch for shadowers, because that's what he'd done before, when they'd grabbed Cynthia.

Cynthia . . .

The beautiful heiress had been a perpetual concern in the back of Longarm's mind. He glanced behind once out of some vague sense that she might be back there somewhere, following him. He'd seen no sign of her, however, and he hoped like hell she'd returned to Arapaho.

The trail that Drummond's bunch was following curved east toward a little mining town. The gang did not head east, however. It continued along what appeared to be an old Indian hunting trail westward along the canyon and then up and over a steep ridge through thick evergreen forest.

They dropped into yet another canyon on the other side and picked up another trail, proceeding to the southwest, heading ever closer to the Never Summer range and their hideout canyon on Purgatory Creek.

Longarm thought that he and the gang had crossed the Wyoming border and were in Colorado Territory now, heading into the maze of mountains northeast of Longs Peak, whose ­flame-­shaped crest he could occasionally glimpse between mountains.

The gang was moving fast, stopping their horses only once every ninety minutes or so and then only long enough to let the beasts draw water at creeks and eat a little grass. Judging by the sign, the men dismounted and smoked quirleys or cigars and in one case, a ­pipe—­Longarm saw a cold dottle of gray ash in some bromegrass under a ­cottonwood—­before riding on.

He kept a sharp eye out for the girl's body, knowing it was likely the gang would dispose of Miss Summerville at any time. The thought graveled him with dread. He wanted to be able to save at least one person from the gang. One more in addition to Cynthia. They'd done enough killing for one spree.

Drummond's outfit was a hard-to-predict bunch, however. By four o'clock that afternoon, Longarm had come upon no drag riders who'd attempted to bushwhack him, as he'd suspected they would. That led him to believe that they were cocky enough to believe that the one man they'd left alive on the ridge the night before would not be foolhardy enough to shadow them solo.

And that was just fine with Longarm. Maybe they were also cocky enough to let their guards down enough to allow him to sneak into their camp later that night, and try to pull Miss Summerville to safety . . .

After dusk, Longarm slowed his pace and rode with a keener sense of caution. Now would be a good time for Drummond to dry gulch him. And there was also the possibility he could ride right up onto their camp without knowing until he saw the flashes and heard the ­gunfire, and then it would be too late for him as well as the girl.

The sun had drifted all the way down and darkness had closed over the canyon while leaving a tinge of green in the sky, when Longarm heard voices and smelled wood smoke. Immediately, he reined his horses off the trail and into the forest, slipping quietly out of the saddle and tying both mounts to a branch.

“Stay, fellas,” he said, patting the sorrel's wither.

He shouldered the rifle and walked up through the trees. There was a gradual incline that led to a rocky ridge crest spiked with cedars and junipers.

The wind was blowing up here. It blew the smoke up toward Longarm, flavored with the smell of boiling coffee and roasting meat. Rabbit, Longarm thought, having eaten only jerky and canned peaches with water all day.

His mouth watered and his stomach ached at the smell.

He crouched amongst the rocks and stared down into the canyon on the other side of the ridge. The outlaws' camp was only a hundred yards down the slope. Longarm could see the flames bending and sparking in the wind, see shadows moving around them, hear the voices of the men speaking, occasionally laughing. Someone dropped a pan on a rock.

There was an ironlike clang and a curse before a shrill voice yelled, “Damn, that was hot!”

Another man said, “Well, what do you expect, ­Billy—­it was on the fire, ya damn fool!”

Another man laughed.

The wind obscured the conversation for a time but between wind gusts, Longarm heard one man say, ”. . . .ught to have the little bitch cookin' for us. I mean . . .”

Then another said with a chuckle, “Hell, she's too damn busy . . . !”

Another gust of wind and the ensuing cracking of a pine branch drowned the rest of the man's sentence.

Longarm was grateful for the wind. Its noise would cover any sounds he might make, and, since it was blowing out of the south, it would keep the gang's horses from scenting him.

He wasted no time in moving down out of the rocks and into the trees, quartering left of the camp. He kept the fire a good hundred yards away on his right, picking his way carefully through the trees.

He'd find a place to hole up beyond the firelight, out of sight and hearing of the gang, and try to locate Casey.

When he had a good handle on her location, he'd wait for the gang to roll up in their blankets and to fall good asleep. Then he'd see if it was possible to sneak in and slip the girl out from under the outlaws' noses without getting himself and the girl killed.

When he'd stolen around amidst the dark columns of the creaking pines for about fifteen minutes, he stopped and dropped to a knee. The fire was about seventy yards away, ahead and on his right. He had a fair view of it through a natural aisle in the forest.

He could see the men sitting or lounging around, drinking and talking, occasionally reaching toward their ­steel-­frame spit and pulling a chunk of meat from what appeared to be a deer they were roasting. He could hear the men talking but he couldn't hear them now amongst the creaking, blowing trees, beneath the steady sighing of the wind.

Longarm saw the fire reflected in the grease drifting off the spitted beast, see the smoke the dripping grease lifted when it hit the coals. He swallowed, aware of the stabbing hunger in his belly.

What he wouldn't give for a cup of coffee laced with rye and a good chunk of that meat . . .

He shook the thought aside and frowned as he scrutinized the men and the piled tack for Casey. No sign of the girl. One of the men had said she was “busy.” What did that mean?

He knew what it meant.

He slipped out away from the tree, tracing a broad half circle around the camp. There were lots of shrubs and rocks amongst the pines, offering good cover. He wove his way around them as he continued circling the fire, looking for both Casey and the gang's horses that might wind him and give him away with a startled nicker.

Longarm was moving between two aspens when he glimpsed a shadow moving amongst the trees between him and the fire, which was about eighty yards away now, due to the course he'd followed between patches of cover. He stopped, dropped to a knee behind an aspen, doffed his hat and looked out around the tree.

There were two shadows milling around what appeared a few scattered, gray boulders between Longarm and the fire, about thirty yards ahead and on his left. He thought he saw the firelight glint off blond hair, and his pulse quickened.

He stepped away from the aspen, moving slowly to his left, crouching over his rifle to shield the light from the barrel and breech. He made his way toward the two shadows, and when he was about thirty yards away from them and could hear a man's voice as well as a woman's, he hunkered down behind a boulder.

They were ahead of him now, and slightly right. They stood in front of a low volcanic dike humping up darkly from the ground. The man was speaking in low tones. He was facing the girl, who cried out softly when he swung her away from him and threw her up against the escarpment.

“Goddamn you!” she said.

The man laughed and grabbed a handful of her hair and leaned close to speak into her left ear. She wore a ­red-­and-­black checked shirt and denims that were too large for ­her—­the pants of one of the gang members, no doubt. They must have ripped the clothes she'd started out with off of her.

Longarm looked around, saw a boulder nearer the man and Casey, and scuttled quietly over to it, staying so low that he was almost crawling. When he reached the boulder, he doffed his hat and kept his head down, squeezing his rifle in his hands.

He could hear the girl grunting. When he slid a cautious look around the edge of the boulder, he saw why.

The man had her bent forward against a boulder about the same size as the one covering Longarm. Her head bobbed and she clutched at the rock as the man thrust against her from behind.

He wore a black hat banded with hammered silver, a black shirt, and a red neckerchief. He was about Longarm's size, maybe a little shorter. Longarm thought he had a trimmed beard and mustache but it was hard to see much about him in the dark.

As the killer rammed his cock in and out of the girl, he grunted sharply and lifted his chin to suck air through his clenched teeth.

“Mighty fine!” he rasped, reaching forward to squeeze her breasts between the flaps of her open shirt. “Oh, ­yeah—­you're mighty fine, Miss Casey. Woulda made that sheriff a right fine wife. You sure would!”

Two small fires of rage burned behind Longarm's eyes. He started to raise the rifle.

He'd shoot the son of a bitch before he finished, and then he'd cut loose on the camp and try to kill as many of the other gang members as he could before he swept the girl over his shoulder and carted her the hell out of here.

The gang would be so surprised by Longarm's ambush that they'd think twice or three times before following him and Casey in the dark.

Longarm rose to a crouch and pressed the Winchester's rear stock against his shoulder. He clicked the hammer back to full cock.

Casey laughed. At least, Longarm thought she'd laughed.

He eased the tension in his trigger finger, scowling at the two people entangled nearby.

The girl laughed again and groaned as she turned around, squirming, to face her tormentor.