Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance (30 page)

“What in the hell are you doing?”

“Making mud pies. Wanna help?”

Behind her, her horse cropped weeds between a couple of boulders still damp from the previous night’s rain. It was dawn, the sun not yet up, the rolling, rocky, creosote-stippled desert relieved in misty blue shadows.

Longarm extended a hand to the woman squatting before him. “Help me up?”

She half straightened, extending a gloved hand to him. “You look
awful
!”

When he stood before her, his soaked, muddy clothes sagging on him, he spat mud from his lips and said, “Ah, hell”—he gulped a breath—“I been hurt worse shaving.”

“What happened?”

“Long story.” Longarm felt weak, like he might pass out. His head pounded from all he’d been through. His heart was
still hammering. He leaned forward, pressed hands to his knees, and took a deep breath.

“You’d better sit down for a while.”

He spat more grit, drew another breath, and shook his head. “No time. We gotta get to Cochilo Gulch, warn the gold train.”

“The
what
?”

“I’ll explain on the way. Where in the hell are we, anyway?”

Longarm straightened, looked around at the purple hills and bluffs spilling rocks down their sides. Morning birds were chirping in the brush. The flooded wash gurgled and chugged against the sides of the wash behind him. The surrounding terrain looked vaguely familiar, but because of the near darkness and his scrambled brains, he couldn’t quite make it out.

“We’re a half mile away from the canyon where Big Frank said Santana buried the gold. I rode out here yesterday from the Double D.”

Longarm frowned at her. “Why?”

“Why?”
she said, grimacing as though she were dealing with a half-wit. “That’s my
assignment
, remember? To find the stolen
Wells Fargo
gold!”

“Ah, Christ.” The exhausted, battered, and bloody lawman laughed without mirth. “There ain’t no fucking gold, Haven.”

“Clean up your language, please,” she said, reverting to her prim daytime self and planting one fist on her comely, duster-clad hip. “And whatever are you talking about? Big Frank said it was there, and I believe him. I have to believe him. I’m finding that gold!”

Longarm walked over to a flat-topped boulder and sagged onto it. He needed to get to Cochilo Gulch as fast as he could and be there when the gold train arrived, to warn the guards and drivers about the coming ambush by Leyton and
Mercado. If he tried to ride out at just this moment, however, he was likely to pass out and tumble out of the saddle.

He needed a breather, time to unscramble his brains and gather his wits.

“Like I said, there ain’t no gold. Them rangers died for nothin’. No one was worried about them finding Santana’s gold. Vonda’s men saw ’em snoopin’ around out here, and the Double D riders shot ’em because they thought they was onto Leyton, Mercado, and Vonda’s plan to rob the gold being hauled out of Mexico from the secret American mine.”

“Vonda Azrael?”
Haven walked over to him and sandwiched his face in her hands. “Poor man. I’m afraid your ride down the arroyo has turned you into a blubbering fool. I mean, even more so than before.”

“It’s true, damnit!”

Haven shook her head, walked to her horse, removed the canteen from her saddle, popped the cork, and handed the flask to Longarm. “Maybe this will help.”

“The only thing’s gonna help is a couple pulls from a whiskey bottle.” He took the canteen, anyway, and drank greedily, unable to stop himself. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was in spite of all the mud he’d drunk in the wash.

When he’d had his fill, he lowered the flask, sloshed around what water was left in it. “I hope you have more.”

“Fortunately, I brought both of my canteens,” she said ironically, taking back the one he held out to her. “Now, suppose you tell me how you ended up in that flooded wash? Where’s your horse?”

“My horse,” Longarm said. “Yeah, damn!” He looked at her steeldust idly chomping galleta grass. “I suppose that’s the only one you have?”

“Two canteens,” she said in her patient way, dead certain she was dealing with a man who’d gone soft in his thinker box. “Only one horse. We’re gonna have to ride double back to the Double D.”

“Not to the Double D,” he said, rising with effort from the boulder and unwrapping the steeldust’s reins from a creosote shrub. “Cochilo Gulch.”

He groaned as he hauled himself into the saddle and then extended his hand to Agent Delacroix. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll explain the whole thing on the way. We have to get there ahead of Leyton and Mercado, not to mention Vonda.”

“Vonda?”
Haven said again, her voice pitched with the same disbelief as before as she took his hand, thrust a boot into the stirrup he freed for her, and hoisted herself onto the steeldust’s back behind him. “How in the world could that silly wife of Stretch’s have anything to do with
robbing a gold shipment
?”

As he rode on along the flooded arroyo and then crossed it where it leveled out and became only a few feet deep, he told Haven about ex-ranger Jack Leyton, Mercado, and Vonda’s alliance. He outlined how Vonda, Mercado’s woman, married Stretch to get closer to the mine company’s secret gold-shipping route as well as to get her hands on the Azraels’ small fortune.

He told her about how Leyton had by then already thrown in with Mercado because if you couldn’t beat the border bandits, why not join them and make some
real
money?

But then Leyton had learned of the covert gold shipments from the secret mine in Mexico. He shared the information with Mercado and their female partner and former Texas saloon girl, Vonda.

Now, likely knowing there was a whole lot more money to be had on Double D range than what was in Whip Azrael’s office safe and in Stretch’s remuda, Vonda arranged for Stretch to hire several men from her and Mercado’s gang, so they could all keep a sharp eye out for the gold train route without attracting suspicion from the rangers.

“Incredible,” Haven said, riding behind Longarm as they made their way southwest, across the gradually lightening desert.

“Yep.”

Quickly, the sky turned from pink to salmon to yellow. Rocks and desert flora stood out in relief against the rolling buttes and mesas. As the sun climbed, steam snaked along the damp ground.

Longarm followed a flooded wash toward Cochilo Gulch, rising and falling over the broken land, threading his way between rocky slopes and shelving mesa walls.

He kept his eyes and ears open for Leyton’s men, who would be riding in from Holy Defiance in the east though he didn’t know by which route. He cursed to himself, knowing he wasn’t making good time. But he couldn’t push the steeldust overly hard on the wet desert terrain in the intensifying steamy heat, for fear of maiming or killing the beast.

He wished he had a second horse. He’d have left Haven in a shaded arroyo and ridden on ahead himself astraddle her horse and come back for her later, but with Leyton out here, Longarm could very well have been throwing the Pinkerton agent to the wolves.

He couldn’t leave her alone out here on foot.

Mid-morning, he reined up suddenly, turned his head and cocked an ear, listening. Crackling sounded in the distance, straight ahead along the wash they’d started following when the floodwater had gone down. Few guns made a cacophony like the one he was hearing.

It was the Gatling gun opening up on the gold train.

“Oh, shit!” Haven said.

Longarm yelled,
“Hi-yahh!”
and ground his heels against the steeldust’s loins, putting the horse into a gallop. The horse was already tired, and Longarm couldn’t get much speed out of it. His heart hammered and twisted in his chest as he continued to hear the staccato, seemingly endless belching of the Gatling gun.

When the machine gun fell silent, there were a few cracks and booms of pistol and rifle fire. Men shouted and screamed, horses whinnied. Hooves thudded.

As he put the steeldust up the long, gravel-floored wash that sloped up to a pass dead ahead, Longarm thought he recognized Leyton’s jubilant voice rising above the din.

The steeldust was slowing and shambling uncertainly, blowing hard. Longarm could feel the pounding of the horse’s heart between his knees. It couldn’t go much farther. No point in killing the poor beast in trying to get at the most a dozen more yards out of it.

Longarm stopped the weak-kneed horse, and as he hiked his stiff right leg up over the horn and leaped to the ground, Haven frogged back over the horse’s tail, landing on her boot heels.

Longarm turned to her. “I’m gonna need one of your LeMats.”

She unholstered the pistol in her left-side holster, tossed it to him butt first. He snatched it out of the air, rolled the cylinder across his forearm, and turned to stare up the rocky slope. All of his senses were alive, ushering into the background all of his physical aches and miseries.

On the other side of the pass there was only silence now.

The guns had stopped clattering. The battle was over. After having heard Leyton’s voice, it wasn’t hard for Longarm to decide who the victor was.

He glanced at Haven. “Stay here.”

“Like hell!”

They jogged together up the wash. Only a little water remained, the rest having run down to the flat land or soaked into the wash’s gravelly bottom. There wasn’t much water around here, which meant there probably hadn’t been as much rain in this neck of the mountains as up at Holy Defiance, and the gold train had kept to its schedule.

And Leyton and Mercado and probably Vonda, as well, had been waiting for it.

The slope wasn’t steep but it was long, and the fatigued and badly bruised lawman was breathing hard when he and Haven reached the crest of the pass a half hour later. Bending
forward, hands on his knees as he gulped air, he stared down the long slope of the wash before him. Horror clamped down hard on his belly, and he felt his knees weaken.

“We were about an hour too late to warn them,” Haven said, staring down the slope, her face grim beneath the brim of her hat.

Longarm took another deep breath and ran forward down the wash, staring ahead at the dozen or so bodies strewn across the wash’s floor a hundred yards away.

Leyton’s men had hit the gold wagon about halfway up the pass and where the rocky walls rose steeply around it. Here, the driver had no escape. He hadn’t been able to whip his mule team into a run ahead because of the steepness of the grade, and because the canyon wasn’t wide enough to turn what was likely a four- or six-mule hitch, he hadn’t been able to retreat, either.

Leyton’s men had likely scouted the canyon well and had known exactly where to set up the Gatling gun where it could cut down the gold guards most efficiently.

They’d done their job well, judging by the carnage before Longarm now, who ran heavy-footed, wincing, Haven jogging beside him. They’d also worked quickly. They were gone, leaving blood and bullet-torn bodies to mark their passing.

The gold wagon sat, its tongue drooping, in the middle of the wash and at the center of the carnage. It was a nondescript Murphy freighter that would draw little attention. No one would suspect it was being used to haul a fortune in gold.

A dirty cream canvas cover had been stretched over the box; the canvas now hung in bullet-torn tatters from the wagon’s ash bows. The mules that had pulled it were gone, likely used to pull the wagon that Leyton and Mercado had brought for transporting the gold back down the wash and, probably, south to Mexico, where the outlaws intended to live as rich men.

Only dead men were left here. Dead men and several dead horses.

A ways down the sloping wash beyond the wagon, three live horses stood cropping grass along the base of the wash’s east wall, reins dangling. The saddle of one of the horses hung down the mount’s side.

The riders were bleeding out on the floor of the wash—twisted and slack, some grimacing up at the sky, teeth bared beneath mustaches—likely the same expressions they’d worn when they’d started hearing the savage hiccupping of the Gatling just before the bullets had shredded them.

The freight team had relied too heavily on the secrecy of their route. The mine administrators hadn’t hired enough guards and the guards they had hired—likely ex-cowpunchers or lawmen—hadn’t scouted the trail ahead of them thoroughly enough. Most of these men—three appeared Mexican, were older, judging by the liberal gray in their hair. They’d gone soft and careless, and they’d paid for it with their lives.

Longarm stared off down the wash, his own fateful grimace creasing his muddy, blood-crusted, swollen-eyed face.

No sign of the outlaws. As he stepped around the dead men and the wagon, he saw where the gang had pulled their own wagon up behind the gold wagon. He saw the boot prints they’d made when they’d switched the gold bars from the gold wagon to their own, probably smaller wagon, which they’d likely turned around before they’d hitched the team to it.

A couple of the outlaws must be good with mules. They’d switched the team quickly to the first wagon, while the other men had switched the gold, and then fogged off down the wash at a fast clip, heading for the border.

Longarm kicked a rock in frustration, cursed loudly, hearing the reverberation of the epithet dwindle gradually between the canyon’s stony walls.

“Custis,” Haven said sympathetically, “don’t blame
yourself. You didn’t even know this was going to happen before last night. There’s really not much either of us—both of us together—could have done to stop it. We’ll have to alert the nearest ranger outpost, the army…”

“I’m going after ’em, goddamnit.” Longarm continued to stare down the wash. The gang was probably not yet a mile away though he couldn’t see them because of the bending floor of Cuchilo Gulch.

He looked at the three horses standing thirty yards away. They still had their saddles. Carbines even jutted from their scabbards. Leyton had struck so quickly that some of the guards hadn’t even had time to unsheath their weapons.

Longarm turned to Haven, tossed her LeMat to her. She grabbed it with one hand, keeping her eyes on Longarm, shaking her head fatefully. “No.”