by Evans, Tabor
He waited a few minutes, gritting his teeth with quiet fury as the bullets continued to hammer the cabin though more sporadically than before. They must have figured out his plan and realized, even in their kill frenzy, that they were playing into his hands. He pushed away from the wall and, glancing at Jo, who was hunkered belly down on the bed now, moved over to the window in the wall facing the stable.
A couple of slugs hammered that wall as he reached out to flip open the shutter’s latch, then pushed the shutter away from the frame with his rifle barrel. He waited for one more shot to hammer the wall from that direction, then snaked his rifle out the window.
It was light enough now that he could see smoke wafting from between two lower corral poles, even saw a vague figure hunkered there and raising his rifle’s barrel as he cocked the weapon.
Longarm aimed hastily and fired three shots, the ejected casings clicking around his boots, and grinned as he heard the shooter curse and watched him throw himself over the stock trough and out of sight.
The man out front of the cabin shouted, “You all right over there, Crowfoot?”
“Got a chunk o’ wood in my eye!” Crowfoot shouted. Then, louder: “You son of a bitch in there!” Longarm latched the shutter as two slugs hammered it furiously.
Again, Longarm grinned. As all three shooters continued to send slugs careening into the walls around him, the lawman made his way across the cabin to the window just behind the eating table. A bullet hammered it, and then he flipped the latch and nudged the shutter open with his rifle barrel.
He edged a look around the frame. There was enough light now that he could see the shooter hunkered down behind a deadfall log, aiming a rifle toward the cabin.
Longarm jerked his head back as the rifle stabbed smoke and flames from its maw, the slug chewing into the frame exactly where the lawman’s head had just been. Cocking the Winchester, he poked the rifle out the window and squeezed the trigger. He watched the slug blow chunks of wood from the top of the log a quarter second after the man had pulled his head down behind it.
He ejected the spent shell and narrowed his eyes as he continued staring out the window. About ten feet behind the shooter, between the log and the creek, the shooter had built a small fire. Several dead branches lay in the fire, half in and half out of it.
“Goddamnit.”
“What is it?” Jo asked from the bed, lifting her head to peer up between her elbows.
Longarm pressed his cheek against the Winchester’s stock, aiming. He waited. The crown of the shooter’s hat appeared. Longarm waited another moment, and when he saw the shooter’s eyes beneath his hat brim, he squeezed the trigger.
The man pulled his head back down behind the log. Longarm’s slug blew his hat off and set it sailing into the fire.
“You son of a bitch!” the man cried, his voice muffled by the log.
Longarm hammered the log with three more angry rounds, then pulled his head back away from the window and closed and latched the shutter.
Jo was still staring at him. “What is it, Longarm? What’d you see out there?”
“Oh, nothin’.” Longarm waited, pensive, running his thumb along his Winchester’s breech. “They’re gonna try to burn us out. That’s all.”
Chapter 17
“Send that blond-headed poontang out here, lawdog, and save yourself! You keep her in there, you’re both gonna die!”
The shouted threat had come from behind the low knoll at the front of the cabin.
Jo gasped.
Longarm opened the shutter over the front window right of the door. “You want her?” he shouted.
Jo gasped again.
“Here she is, you son of a bitch!”
He triggered three shots at the knoll, behind which the shooter there dropped just in time to avoid the hot lead blowing up dirt and grass clumps. Longarm slammed the shutter and latched it. A half second later, the three shooters opened up, hammering the cabin once more until dust sifted from the rafters.
Longarm dashed over to the window facing the corral, opened it, and clipped off two shots, missing Crowfoot again by a hair but setting him to squawking. Longarm cursed and slammed the shutter. He wanted to get the trio pared down. No way he and Jo were holding out for much longer . . .
The man shooting from the front paused to give a rebel yell. Longarm pressed his back against the wall, frowning as he slipped fresh cartridges through his Winchester’s loading door. Had the yell been a signal?
He slipped one more shell through the loading gate, then headed over to the window behind the table, nudged it open with his rifle barrel. At the moment, no shots were being triggered from back there. He nudged a look toward the log behind which the west-side shooter had been firing.
Nothing—no movement except the fire whose light was fading now as the sun continued edging closer toward the eastern horizon, filling the canyon with a murky, pale glow.
Longarm ran across the cabin toward the window at the far end. Running footsteps sounded on the other side of the shutter, growing louder. Longarm unlatched the shutter, flipped it open, poked his rifle out the window, pressed his cheek against the stock, and grinned.
A man stopped dead in his tracks about twenty feet from the cabin, his eyes snapping wide in shock. On his head was a battered brown Stetson with a hole through its crown. He was unshaven, long-haired, with a small blue cross tattooed on the nub of his right, leathery cheek.
With his right hand he gripped a burning branch. His carbine was in his left. Obviously, he’d been making a run for the cabin, intending to toss the burning branch onto the roof.
Longarm’s grin widened. The man’s eyes acquired a look of bald horror. He screamed and cocked his throwing arm, bringing the branch back behind his shoulder, cocking it to throw.
Longarm’s Winchester roared. The slug tore through the middle of the man’s chest, between the flaps of his red-striped blanket coat. The man dropped his rifle. Both hands fell to his sides as he stumbled straight backward and fell hard on his back, tossing the branch in the air.
The torch landed on his chest. The man screamed and flopped his arms and legs as though trying to shuck the branch away from him. After a few seconds, it slithered down his side to the ground but not before flames were leaping up from his burning shirt and coat and he was screaming like a schoolgirl who’d just found a coiled diamondback in the privy.
The other ambushers had stopped shooting. All Longarm could hear at the moment was the crackling of the flames now edging up and down the length of the dying man’s flopping body.
A voice yelled from the front, “You’re gonna pay for that, lawdog.”
Longarm sensed someone behind him. He turned, saw Jo crouched beside him, staring out the window. She slid her eyes from the burning man to Longarm. Her green eyes looked more hopeful than horrified.
Longarm closed and latched the shutter. He strode to the front window, peeled the shutter back, and pressed his back against the wall beside it. “Why don’t you come in here and make me pay? Or pull out now while you still can,” he shouted. “How many did you start out with? How many you down to?” Fury burned bright in the lawman’s eyes. “Come on, you lame-assed son of a bitch. You wanna dance—let’s dance!”
Longarm jerked his rifle out the window, took aim at the pale oval of the man’s face beneath the curled brim of his piss-yellow Stetson, and fired three shots. The gunman gave a mocking whoop as he pulled his head down, and Longarm’s bullets blew up dust where the killer’s face with its devilish, close-set eyes had just been.
Longarm pulled the Winchester out of the window and pivoted to the window’s other side, leaving the shutter open.
“Jo, I’m gonna need your help.”
She was kneeling in a corner of the room, holding her pistol in both hands against one thigh. Her eyes were bright as she nodded and hardened her jaws. “You got it.”
“We’re gonna get this thing over with, goddamnit,” Longarm said, jerking his head t
oward the open shutter. “Come over here but stay clear of the window.”
When she was standing on the other side of the window from him, holding her pistol up against her breasts and looking at him anxiously, he said, “One down. Two to go.”
She swallowed, gave her chin a little, tense dip. “That’s right.” She paused, gazing at him. “What’re you gonna do, Longarm?”
Both men had started shooting again, the slugs plunking into the window frame near Longarm and Jo, the others peppering the northern wall. The shooters were cackling and yowling like demented banshees, trying their hardest to add terror to their fusillade.
“I want you to very carefully trigger shots from this window while I trigger shots from the other one. When we have both men down behind their covers, I’m jumping out that window over there and making a beeline for the corral.”
“What about the man in front?”
“You’ll hold him down with the pistol. Don’t worry about hitting him. Just keep his head down.”
“But I only have six shots.”
“That’s all you’ll need. When I’ve beefed the killer in the corral, I’m gonna circle around behind the other man and beef him, too.”
Jo just stared at him, eyes wide as wheel hubs.
“You know how to shoot that thing, right?” Longarm asked her hopefully.
“Yes. I’ve fired a pistol before.”
Longarm chuffed, remembering the hotel in Snow Mound. “Yeah, I remember.” He gave her an encouraging wink. “Good enough.” He started to edge away from the front window. “When I give the word, start shootin’.”
Longarm slipped over to the north window. A shot battered the shutter. He jerked it open, waited for one more shot from the corral, then glanced at Jo. “Wait for a break, then start shooting. Keep his head down but if you see his rifle, pull your head back out of the way!”
“Be careful, Longarm!”
Longarm poked his rifle out the window and fired three rounds, blowing up dust and horseshit around the stock trough behind which the man in the corral was hunkered, causing him to pull his own head down out of sight. Continuing to shoot, Longarm dropped one leg out the window, then the other, and hearing Jo open up on the man in the front, started running as fast as he could while triggering the Winchester from his hip.
He was ten feet from the trough when his rifle clicked on an empty chamber. The shooter bolted up from behind it, mouth wide as he gave a victorious bellow, eyes spitting fire. He jerked his rifle up just as Longarm snaked his hand across his belly to grab his Colt, bringing it up in a blur, crouching, and firing.
The shooter did a weirdly graceful little pirouette as he fired his Henry repeater straight down, blowing a hole through his own left foot, then raising both arms as though to click his thumbs in mariachi rhythms before falling facedown in a cloud of wafting dust. Blood pooled quickly beneath his bullet-riddled chest.
Behind Longarm, Jo screamed. Even muffled by the cabin walls, it bespoke unbridled terror.
Longarm spun, crouching over his six-shooter extended straight out from his belly. He held fire when he saw the third and sole surviving killer throw himself through the cabin door with a loud roar of breaking wood and flying hinges. Again, Jo screamed.
The killer laughed loudly.
Longarm ran, scissoring his arms and legs, terror clawing at him. Jo had likely fired all six of her pistol shots . . .
The screech of shattering glass emanated from the gaping cabin door. The man yowled.
“Ahhh . . . no! No, no, noooo!”
Longarm stopped when he saw a ball of fire come flying out of the cabin. The burning ball had arms and legs and even a piss-yellow hat. Longarm could smell the burning leather and hair. The man ran shamblingly about twenty feet out from the cabin and, still yelling and burning, swung his rifle toward Longarm, who crouched and capped the last three shells in his Colt.
Bam-bam-bam!
The killer spun like a giant, burning top, then dropped to his knees. Longarm could smell the burning flesh. Jo appeared in the cabin’s open doorway.
“Oh, God!” she cried, clapping a hand to her mouth.
“The lamp?” Longarm asked.
She nodded.
“You did damn good, gir—”
A loud pop cut him off. Jo gasped.
“Get back inside!” Longarm shouted, then ran to the cabin. He shoved the girl inside, pulled her down beside him, and they both hunkered against the front wall.
More explosions sounded like a string of Mexican firecrackers detonating at a Cinco de Mayo parade.
“Are there more gunmen?” Jo cried, covering her ears and staring worriedly up at Longarm.
“Nah.” Longarm shook his head, grinning. “That’s just the shells in his cartridge belt goin’ off!”
There were a few more sporadic explosions, then silence. Longarm placed two fingers under the girl’s chin and tipped her head back, smiling. “It’s over,” he said. “And you did damn good, Jo.”
Her eyes brightened. She lowered her hands from her ears and threw her arms and body around Longarm with such passion that he fell over his heels and hit the shack’s floor on his back. “I’m not doomed,” she cried. “I’m not doomed after all!”
Longarm laughed.
She rammed her breasts tight against his chest as she mashed her hungry lips against his and snaked her tongue into his mouth, groaning like a bobcat with the springtime craze.
He and the girl stayed down there a long time before retiring to the bed.
Two weeks later, the narrow gauge pulled into Denver’s Union Station, which was bustling with itinerant cowhands and drummers even at midnight on a Tuesday.
His shoulders bowing beneath the weight of all his gear, Longarm stepped off the train with a tired groan, weary from the long trek out of the hills with Jo Pritchard. He’d seen the girl back to her town and waiting family.
She wouldn’t be returning to the bank or her former boss, Mr. Cable, however. She thought she might teach school, as Pinecone had been looking for a teacher for quite some time.
Now, remembering the slow journey with the doomed young woman from Pinecone, the long nights of tender, passionate frolic around crackling campfires, he made his way through the big sandstone hulk of Union Station and rented a hansom cab on Wynkoop Street. A half hour later, he paid the driver, stepped down from the cab, and made his way up the brick walk of his rented digs on the poor side of Cherry Creek.
Oh, Lordy—his bed was going to feel good!
He tramped up the outside stairs of his second-story flat in the neat, white-frame rooming house and froze in his boots. He stared down past the knob and lock plate of the green-painted pine door, his tired heart picking up a reluctant warning rhythm in his chest.
The half length of stove match he’d wedged between the door and the frame had fallen to the sill. It lay there on the painted oak, its red sulfur tip and ragged opposite end staring up at him in mute testament to surefire danger.
Longarm studied the door before narrowing a hopeful eye. “Cynthia . . . ?”
Watch for
LONGARM AND THE RANGE WAR
the 398th novel in the exciting LONGARM series from Jove
Coming in January!