by Tabor Evans
“Oh, don’t give me that look, Custis. I’m just thinking out loud. I guess it’s just that Casey’s imminent wedding has gotten me thinking about . . . eventually settling down.”
“You? Cynthia, you can’t cage that tiger inside you. There ain’t no way to do that and keep that tiger happy.”
“I’m not getting any younger.”
“You’re only twenty-three, darlin’.”
Cynthia hiked a shoulder. “To some, I’m an old maid. Aunt May and Aunt Beatrice are always asking me if I haven’t met someone by now. You know—someone I’d like to settle down with.”
She looked at Longarm askance, a tad bit abashed. “I reckon you’re the only one I’d even consider, Custis.”
Longarm glanced around to make sure that Mrs. Schimpelfinnig wasn’t shuffling toward them, and then engulfed the girl in his arms. “You just haven’t found the right one yet. You will, sooner or later. Some prince over the big ocean yonder, no doubt. You know enough of them.”
“Oh, I know enough of them, of course.” Cynthia wrapped her arms around Longarm’s waist and returned his hug. “And of course a few have proposed, but damnit, Custis, I just don’t feel the spark for any of them.” She pulled away and walked into the trees. “My friend Casey just looked and sounded so happy the last time I saw her in Denver, when she told me about the young man she was marrying.”
Longarm reached inside his frock coat and dug a cheroot from his shirt pocket. “Hard to believe any gal you know would be marryin’ a badge toter.”
Cynthia leaned back against a boulder and slid a vagrant lock of black hair back from her right eye. “Casey had a falling out with her mother after her father died. Her father was a good friend of my uncle’s. Anyway, she decided to go off to a teaching college in Kansas City, and she met a young soldier on the train. They corresponded for a year, and then the soldier visited her in Kansas City and proposed.”
“Her family didn’t have anything to say about that?”
“Nothing that Casey listened to. If you think I’m headstrong . . . well, Casey could teach me a few things.” Cynthia chuckled and crossed her arms on her breasts. “She was so angry about what her mother had to say about her future husband, whom Mrs. Summerville had never met, that she told her mother to take her out of the family will. So, Casey gave up her family’s fortune to marry the dashing young soldier who was about to be appointed sheriff of Arapaho and the surrounding county by his father, whom you, coincidentally, know, my dear Custis.”
“If young Ryan is anything like his father, old Thrum, he’s quite a catch. I just hope Casey realizes how comparatively frugal she’ll be living, compared to how she was raised.” Longarm scratched a lucifer to life on his holster and touched the flame to the three-for-a-nickel cheroot.
“I have a feeling Casey and Ryan will do just fine. Love can make up for a lot, you know.” Cynthia dropped her eyes, pensive, and then lifted them to Longarm. Lines cut into the bridge of her nose as she canted her head to one side and asked, “Don’t you think, Custis?”
The lawman puffed his cheroot and looked off, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Wouldn’t know.”
Cynthia pushed away from her rock and walked toward him. She placed her hands on his forearms and looked up at him from beneath her straw hat. “This is a question I never expected to ask you, Custis. It’s one that I hoped I’d never feel compelled to ask, because I thought it might complicate things between us, might temper some of the nasty excitement of our . . . trysts. But . . . do you—?”
“Yes,” he said before she could even finish.
He smiled down at her. “But let’s leave it at that, shall we? Since there’s really no point in taking the conversation further—me bein’ who I am and you bein’ who you are.”
Cynthia rose on her tiptoes and planted a tender kiss on his lips. “Touché, my dear Longarm. Touché.”
A branch snapped in the direction in which Mrs. Schimpelfinnig had disappeared. Cynthia stepped back from Longarm, and they both turned to see the old woman stumbling toward them through the grass growing up around the cottonwoods, her accordion carpetbag slung over one stout shoulder.
She appeared flushed and out of breath.
“Are you all right, Aunt Beatrice?” Cynthia asked, walking over, taking the woman’s arm and leading her to the carriage.
“I’m fine, dear. I could do with something to eat, however, and a wee bit more coffee. The trip in this wretched buggy—you know how I hate long trips by carriage—is growing rather tiresome.” Mrs. Schimpelfinnig cast a cool, baldly reproving glance at Longarm and pitched her voice with peevishness. “How long before we arrive at Arapaho, Deputy Long?”
“It’s just over the next . . .” Longarm glanced toward the northwest and let his voice trail off. He frowned at what appeared a tendril of charcoal-gray smoke rising between two cone-shaped bluffs.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked as she helped her aunt into the carriage.
“Looks like a fire up near Arapaho.”
“Fire?”
“Probably just someone burnin’ a field or some dead brush.” Longarm glanced once more at the smoke and then offered his hand to Cynthia. When she was seated beside her aunt, both women shielding their eyes with their hands and staring toward the smoke, Longarm climbed into the driver’s seat, released the brake, and pulled the Hanoverian onto the trail.
While the smart-stepping sorrel pulled the carriage up toward the pass between the buttes, Longarm held his gaze on the smoke. The closer the carriage drew to the low pass, the smoke column widened, grew bushier. Longarm felt fingers of unease tickle his backbone.
Where there was smoke, as the saying went, there was fire. He hoped the fire was far afield of Arapaho. Fires in dry, western towns spread as fast as those that plowed through a mountainside of dead timber. Longarm had seen more than his share of fire-gutted or decimated settlements, and none of them had been pretty.
The Hanoverian trotted up and over the top of the pass. As it started down the other side, Arapaho spread out in a bowl in the low, piñon- and cedar-stippled hills and high bluffs to the west—a mile or so from the base of the pass. Behind Longarm, Cynthia drew a sharp breath.
“Oh, my goodness!” exclaimed Mrs. Schimpelfinnig. “The town’s on fire!”
Longarm hoorawed the fine horse in the traces, sending it barreling down the pass. As the carriage bounced over chuckholes and hammered over small rocks, the lawman stared at the column of black smoke and flames rising from what appeared the town’s center. As the horse closed on the small settlement, Longarm saw that the fire appeared to involve a large building on the main street’s right side.
He could see no scurry of movement around the building in question, which seemed odd. Usually, a bucket brigade would have been formed between the town’s main water supply and the conflagration, and men would be running and yelling as they passed the buckets.
But then the lawman started to understand. And he didn’t like it a bit.
For beneath the drumming of the Hanoverian’s hooves, the hammering of the buggy’s wheels, and the squawking of the leather thoroughbraces, he heard the rataplan of what could only have been gunfire.
“Ah, shit!” Longarm stood up in the driver’s box and whipped the reins over the horse’s back, encouraging even more speed.
All hell was breaking loose in Arapaho.
Chapter 4
Longarm could smell the smoke from the fire. He could hear the shooting clearly now. Men were shouting angrily. A dog was barking anxiously, and a baby was crying.
The edge of the town was a hundred yards away. As the Hanoverian pulled the carriage around the last bend, Longarm hauled back on the reins. The horse stopped under some scraggly aspens. The aspens and a large boulder shielded the carriage from town.
&nbs
p; Longarm set the brake and dropped to the ground.
“You ladies stay here,” he ordered, jogging to the rear of the carriage, where their luggage was stored in a rack.
“Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!” intoned Mrs. Schimpelfinnig. She stood up in the carriage and was staring through the trees toward town. “That’s shooting, isn’t it? Oh, Lord! I knew this trip was a mistake, Cynthia. Out here there are no laws except the law of the gun! These backwater settlements are populated by owlhoots!”
“Aunt Beatrice, please sit down!”
“Ma’am, I going to have to ask you to sit down,” Longarm said, sliding his prized Winchester ’73 from its leather scabbard and tossing the scabbard back into the luggage rack.
“Lawless, I tell you!” chortled Cynthia’s stout aunt. “Deputy Long, I demand that you turn this carriage around this very instant and take us back to the train at Cheyenne!”
“Ma’am, we’re a good ways out of town, so you shouldn’t be in any trouble, but I’m not going to guarantee that if you don’t take a seat, you won’t get your head blown off!”
Cynthia was tugging on the heavy woman’s arm. “Aunt Beatrice, please sit down!” She whipped her anxious gaze to Longarm. “Custis, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” Longarm pumped a cartridge into the Winchester’s magazine, off cocked the hammer, and set the barrel on his right shoulder. “You stay here with your aunt. When I think it’s safe for you to enter the town, I’ll come back for you. Until then, you both stay here and keep your heads down!”
With that he bounded forward along the trail, running as fast as his long legs could take him.
“Custis, be careful!” Cynthia yelled behind him.
As Longarm rounded the bend and approached the town, he could see down the main street, which was merely an extension of the trail he was on.
He’d been right. The building that was on fire was on the town’s right side, about halfway down the street—a corner building that appeared constructed of pink sandstone. Since the building, excepting its shake-shingled mansard roof, was stone, the fire likely wouldn’t spread as quickly to the other buildings around it. So far, aside from flames spitting from the windows, it seemed to be contained.
The shooting seemed to be coming from both sides of the street near the burning building. Longarm could see smoke puffing from behind a stock trough on the street’s left side and from the broken-out windows of another building on the right. A medium-sized spotted dog stood between Longarm and the shooters, on a boardwalk, staring toward the commotion, anxiously wagging its tail and barking its fool head off.
Longarm slowed his pace as he angled toward the first building at his end of the town, on the street’s right side. He had to size up the situation, figure out who was shooting at whom, as best he could without getting his own head shot off. Only then could he try to defuse the trouble.
He stepped onto a boardwalk fronting a small drugstore. Someone jerked a shade down over a window to his right, and he heard quick footsteps as someone hurried into hiding. Longarm continued forward along the roofed boardwalk fronting the drugstore. When he was almost to the building’s other side, he stopped and jerked back, pressing his shoulder against the drugstore’s front wall.
He edged a look around the corner and into the alley beyond. A man was walking up the alley toward the main street—a tall man in a high-crowned brown Stetson, spruce-green duster, and high-topped, brown boots with spurs. He had two pistols on his hips and a Winchester in his gloved hands.
A curly wolf, if Longarm had ever seen one.
Longarm stepped away from the drugstore’s front wall, aiming his own Winchester straight out from his right hip. With quiet, commanding menace, he said, “Hold it, feller. I’m a deputy U.S. marshal. Toss down that rifle and face me.”
The man stopped dead in his tracks, facing the street. He appeared to stop breathing for a moment. A half second later he widened his eyes and gritted his teeth as he swung toward Longarm, leveling his carbine and loudly ramming a shell into the action.
Longarm fired twice, his Winchester crashing loudly around the alley, his empty cartridge casings pinging onto the boardwalk behind him.
He levered a fresh shell into the firing chamber and watched the hard case trigger his own rifle into the ground as he stumbled back against the wall behind him.
He grunted as he dropped the rifle and tried to get his feet beneath him to no avail. One foot slipped out from under him and he fell back against the wall and slid down to the ground, where he lay on his side, shaking.
Longarm took a knee, looking around.
Soon he realized that the hard case he’d shot had likely been trying to slip around behind the men shooting from the opposite side of the main street, from in front of a feed store about a block up from Longarm’s position. That meant at least one of those fellas was a lawman—possibly Thrum’s son, Ryan, who’d taken over the local lawdogging job from his father about a month ago, due to Thrum’s latest heart attack.
The men on the side of the law were throwing intermittent spurts of lead at a building just up the street from Longarm. Judging by the shots, he thought there were five guns being fired—three on the street’s right side, two on its left side, where the townsmen were hunkered down behind a stock trough.
Longarm hoped he was right about who was who, because at the rate the pink building was burning and due to spread, he had to work fast in helping the lawman or whoever was holding off the curly wolves. He stepped out into the alley where the dead man lay, and then walked down the gap to his right, intending to get around the other three outlaws.
He shouldered up to the side of the building on the alley’s far side, doffed his hat, and edged a look around the rear. All clear. Donning his hat, he hurried around the corner and began long-striding toward the building from which the outlaws were firing. He thought it was the third one to the west.
The thought had no sooner swept through his brain than a man stepped out a back door of the very building that Longarm was heading for. Longarm stopped. The other man stopped. He was small and young, wearing a broad-brimmed tan hat. Two pistols were tied low on his hips. The eyes shaded by the hat brim were set close together, and they had a sharp, menacing light in them.
He was carrying a Henry rifle down low by his side. Now, holding Longarm’s gaze, he slowly began to raise the rifle.
“Uh-uh,” Longarm said. “You don’t wanna do that, young fella. I’m a federal lawman.”
As if to show Longarm how wrong he was, the kid gave an angry, bellowing wail and snapped his rifle up, cocking it. Longarm shot him twice in the chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him several yards straight back. His body hit the ground, and the rifle clattered down beside him a half a second later.
Longarm broke into a dead run, quickly covering the ground between him and the building the kid had come out of. The rear door was open. Longarm sidled up to the back of the wood-frame building, stepped up to the door, doffed his hat, and edged a peek inside. He couldn’t see much in the dense shadows, but he could hear men shouting and shooting from the front of the place—a shop of some kind.
He doffed his hat and hurried into the rear room, slid a curtain aside from a doorway, and peered into what looked like a woman’s dress shop, with wooden mannequins standing here and there, wearing the latest in ladies’ fashions, and bolts of cloth leaning in racks. Longarm stared past a counter to his left toward the front of the store, where three men were hunkered down by three broken-out windows.
One was just now shooting two pistols through the window nearest the closed door and shouting, “Best let us on out of here, McIntyre. You don’t, and we’ll burn it down!”
Near the outlaw, a middle-aged woman in a crisp green-and-gold-brocade dress trimmed with whi
te lace lay dead in a pool of her own blood, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling. Broken window glass was scattered over and around the woman.
The dead woman kindled a fire inside of Longarm. He stepped through the curtained doorway and dropped to a knee at the end of the counter. He could see only one of the shooters clearly—the one who’d just fired and was now sitting on the floor with his back against the front wall, punching fresh cartridges into one of his two pistols.
Blood oozed from a bullet burn on his right cheek.
Longarm pressed his Winchester’s stock against his shoulder and drew a bead on the outlaw. He shouted, “Hold it there, you son of a bitch. Custis Long, U.S. marshal!”
He was pleased as punch when the outlaw did not heed his warning but shot a fiery-eyed, startled gaze at him and snapped up one of his pistols. The outlaw didn’t get a single shot off before Longarm’s Winchester roared, punching a .44-caliber slug through the dead center of his forehead and painting the wall behind him with chunks of white brain and gobs of red blood.
“What the hell?” one of the other men shouted, whipping around.
Longarm threw himself to the floor in front of the counter as a rifle cracked three times quickly. The slug chewed through bolts of cloth or thumped into the front of the counter.
“Someone snuck up on us from behind, Bristol!” shouted the man who’d just fired.
Longarm rose, rammed his rifle between two bolts of cloth, planted a bead on the chest of a man moving toward him and crouching over an old Spencer carbine. The man saw the rifle barrel and widened his eyes. Before he could snap the carbine up, Longarm drilled three rounds through his chest.
The man screamed, dropped his rifle, and stumbled backward, pinwheeling, before he fell through the large, broken-out middle front window and out onto the boardwalk.
Another man ran toward Longarm, screaming and triggering two pistols. Longarm dropped to the floor and scrambled around behind the display holding the bolts of cloth. The shooter’s pistols blazed away at where Longarm had been, causing shredded cloth to rain amidst a thick, peppery cloud of powder smoke.