by Tabor Evans
Some passing travelers had used the stack of firewood he had laid there, but his things were untouched. The unknown travelers were honest men, it seemed, and he wished them well.
Once again he laid his bedroll out on the rocky ground, and while he still had a little daylight he scrounged enough wood for coffee come morning.
Longarm sat for a time smoking and looking out over the wave after wave of mountain peaks laid out before him. Frank Nellis’s silver lode could be hidden within any of the thousand canyons that lay north of Silver Plume.
And the kidnappers of a sixteen-year-old girl named Sybil could be in any of those canyons or in any of the countless villages and mining camps out there.
How in hell was he supposed to find either? he mused.
He was fretting about those questions when he lay down to sleep, but he was finding no answers to them.
Chapter 14
There were three men. No, correct that, there were at least three men. There could have been more, he supposed.
The number that he was reasonably sure of came from Jane Nellis by way of LouAnne, who said it was the way Jane described it to her in her rambling. Three men and one little girl. At least he sure as hell hoped there was still a girl out there to find. It was not beyond the realm of possibility that the sons of bitches took her, used her, and threw her away.
Despite his grumbling back there in Silver Plume, the thought of a child being abused made Longarm’s blood boil.
He had no jurisdiction over most common crimes, up to and including murder. He could not go after these men in his capacity as a deputy United States marshal.
But as Custis Long, private citizen . . . the bastards would do well to go find a judge and throw themselves at his feet. Beg the man for protection inside a jail cell. Because the wrath of a thoroughly pissed off private citizen could be an awesome thing to behold.
It would be even worse to view from the muzzle end of Longarm’s .45.
With any luck . . .
He stirred the coals of last night’s fire and built it afresh, put a short pot of coffee on to boil, and took the rest of his water to the brown mare and the fuzzy burro. By the time he was done with them, his coffee water was bubbling at a brisk boil.
He used a stick to lift the lid off the pot and tossed in a handful of ready-ground coffee, then pawed through his saddlebags until he found a chunk of jerky that did not have too much lint sticking to it. That and the steaming hot—if a trifle weak—coffee was breakfast. Not quite in the same category as the plates and platters of biscuits, sausage, flapjacks, and gravy he’d had back in Amanda’s kitchen, but it would do.
When he was done with his sketchy meal, he poured the leftover coffee back into his canteen and saddled the mare. The burro took his packs without complaint, and once again their little caravan took to the trail, this time winding ever lower on the north shoulder of the mountain that sheltered Silver Plume.
Three or more men and a little girl.
They could be anywhere.
He intended to find them.
Chapter 15
“No, sir, I don’t recall any such,” the gent leading the pack train said. He turned in his saddle and motioned for his helper to come up from the back of the train. “Say, Bob, you seen anything of a bunch of men, three or maybe more of ’em, traveling with a young girl? Would’ve been sometime in the past few days. This fella here is looking for ’em.”
The helper rode around their string of mules and stopped beside the leader. He scratched his beard for a moment in thought, then shook his head. “Seen a couple other pack trains, but there wasn’t no women with them. Sorry.”
Longarm’s fear was that a group with no females included might only mean that the girl was dead by now, but that was not something that would be easy to ascertain, certainly not just by looking. Hell, for all he knew these two could have been among the men who raided the Nellis camp and took the girl.
And what of Frank Nellis? If he were still alive, surely he would show up somewhere soon. Or languish and die somewhere in one of those countless canyons if he’d been wounded and left behind by the raiders.
Come to think of it, why did Jane Nellis abandon the man? Sheer terror, he supposed. Nighttime. Guns going off. Her daughter in the hands of the raiders. So she ran. It was not an unreasonable thing to do.
Longarm had known women with sand, women who would have fought the raiders tooth and toenail to defend their child. Jane Nellis was not that kind.
She did run for help, she said. That was what brought her to his little mountaintop camp, trying to steal a horse.
Now the woman lay in Amanda Carricker’s feather bed, warm and comfortable and well fed. Taken care of by a pair of helpful women while he was up here on the mountain trails trying to sort out what had happened to her daughter.
With very little effort, Longarm could resent Jane Nellis.
But then who was he to judge? Certainly he would have reacted differently in that situation. But he was not a frightened, perhaps normally timid woman under assault by strangers, strangers who shot her husband and may well have killed the man.
He sighed and thanked the men with this pack train. It was the third he had encountered and stopped to question so far today. No one had seen three or more men traveling with a young girl.
“Good luck to you, mister,” one of them said, pulling his horse off the trail and motioning for his partner to lead their mule train on up the mountain.
“And to you,” Longarm returned.
He nipped the twist off a cheroot, lighted the slender cigar, and hooked a knee over his saddle horn. He sat smoking—and thinking—while the mule train lumbered past on its way south to Silver Plume or beyond.
There were times, Longarm had to admit, when he wished he had the sort of simple life that those men had. Nothing to worry about except their animals and getting their cargo delivered on time.
He grinned and blew out a series of smoke rings. Who the hell was he kidding anyway? He had tried the simple life. He had cowboyed, worked half a dozen other jobs. None of them had challenged him the way this one did. He was proud of his deputy U.S. marshal’s badge. He was proud of the work he did with it.
And now he would be proud—and damned lucky too—if he could find out what happened to Sybil Nellis and get the kid back to her mother.
The first step toward that end, he knew, would be to find Frank Nellis’s prospecting camp. That had to be the starting point. Everything else would follow.
Longarm touched the brim of his Stetson in a silent salute of thanks to the tail man on the mule train, let the last animal pass, and then started on down the winding trail he had been following since morning.
Chapter 16
Shortly before sundown Longarm reached a . . . he supposed it would be considered a village. Certainly it was not a town, but it was larger and better established than a mere encampment. It remained to be seen whether it would survive and prosper enough to eventually become a town.
A sign carved into a split shingle and posted beside the road read BEDLAM.
Longarm did not know the cause for Bedlam being established here beside a rushing mountain stream. Almost certainly the people here would be mining something from the rock, silver or gold, copper or magnesium. What really mattered was whether there was enough of the material to justify the creation of a real town.
As it was, Bedlam was mostly a collection of tents. Half a dozen structures along the side of the main street had log walls and canvas roofs. Those, Longarm assumed, would be business locations. The population lived either in tents or in mud dugouts carved into the sides of the canyon.
Longarm located a cook tent mostly by following his nose. Literally. A mouthwatering scent of frying meat reached him even before he entered Bedlam, and he followed it to a ragged tent where two men and a haggard woman were cooking slab
s of meat and a huge pot of rice.
The diners lined up under the shelter of a canvas fly, paid their two bits, and walked away with a tin plate of meat and rice. Split logs laid beside the creek served for seating. You brought your own utensils if you wanted any—a good many of the men who were having their supper now did without, just grabbing with their hands and shoveling food in as best they could—and you were expected to turn your plate in when you were finished. Washing those plates appeared to be optional, although perhaps the owners of the establishment would do some washing up between meals.
Longarm tied his horse to a sapling that somehow had survived the rush to collect wood, paid his quarter, and got his plate.
“Beef?” he asked the man who slapped the slab of meat onto his plate.
“You have to be kidding, mister. It’s elk.”
“Ah, right.”
“That okay with you?”
“Plenty. Elk is perfect by me.”
“Move along then. There’s others that want to eat too.”
Longarm was fairly sure that Colorado had enacted game laws that restricted the taking of elk to the fall and winter, and this meat was certainly fresh. And out of season.
Not that it was any of his business. Out of his jurisdiction, like so much of what he was running into lately.
He had a fork in his packs on the burro, but he did not want to bother digging it out. He settled for a seat on one of the log benches, picked up the chunk of fried elk steak and gnawed a hunk off with his teeth. The meat was tasty. A little dry but otherwise past excellent, the poorest elk being better than any piece of beef he could get in the finest restaurant in Denver.
The rice, of course, presented a messier problem, but hunger made up for the lack of that fork. He scooped the fluffy grains onto his fingers and stuffed them into his mouth the way nearly everyone around him was. The rice had a slightly nutty flavor. It was not his favorite food, but out here it made sense. It was easy to transport in bulk, cooked up larger than when dry, and stored far easier than potatoes.
Longarm was nearly done with his supper when he saw someone standing on the other side of his burro.
Longarm dropped his plate unheeded onto the muddy ground and ran across what passed for a street.
A man in bib overalls and a tattered red undershirt had one hand stuffed into one of Longarm’s packs while trying to appear disinterested, as if he just happened to be standing beside the burro.
Longarm did not wait for an explanation.
He charged the thieving son of a bitch and used that momentum behind a powerful right, straight to the thief’s jaw.
The man went down, out cold or as close to it as did not matter.
Longarm barely stopped himself from delivering a kick once he had the piece of shit down on the ground.
He stepped back, ready to take on any of the man’s friends who wanted to join in, but not only did no one come to the fellow’s defense, no one seemed to pay any attention to the dustup.
The one reaction he did get was from one of the cooks in the dining tent. “Hey, you. Pick up that plate and put it in the bucket if you expect to eat here again.”
Welcome to Bedlam, Longarm thought, as he went back to collect his plate and put it into the bucket ready for the next man.
Chapter 17
A gent who had shipped in some five-gallon casks of whiskey—or anyway of alcohol, since coloring and water could be added locally—was doing a bang-up business in a large tent beside the creek. Longarm stepped up to the raw plank that was serving as a bar and laid a quarter down.
“You want change or a second shot?” the barkeep asked. The man was tall and bald and seemed to have no joints in his floppy limbs.
“The shot,” Longarm told him.
The fellow bared his teeth in a grin. “Ah, you’re a brave man,” he said as he poured a double shot into a mug. “I have water if you want to cut that.”
“Thanks, but let me try it first.” Longarm tasted the raw whiskey, made a sour face, and shivered. “Good Lord, man, what’d you put in this stuff?”
The grin flashed again. “You don’t want to know.”
“Friend, I believe you’re right about that.”
“So, do you want some water to smooth that out?”
“Did you dip it out of the creek over there?”
“Yeah. The fellows pissing upstream give it that snappy flavor.”
Before Longarm could react, he added, “But I’m joshing you about that. We have a well over there a ways.” He pointed. “I get my water from there. Although I would think that whiskey would be strong enough to cleanse pretty much anything it touched.”
Longarm tried the vile stuff again. It went down easier that time.
“Water?” the barman offered again.
Longarm shook his head and tossed back the rest of the liquor. “Whew! One more time then.” He placed another quarter on the plank. It quickly disappeared, and another double shot was poured into his mug.
“I’m looking for some folks,” he said.
“One second, friend.” The barman held up a finger, turned, and hurried down to the other end of the plank to serve some other gents, then quickly returned to Longarm. “You were saying?”
“I said I’m looking for some people. Three men. Traveling with a young girl.”
“What do they look like?”
Longarm shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s the thing, I don’t know what they look like. I was told to meet them. Three men . . . more could’ve joined them by now . . . and a young girl.”
“That isn’t much to go on,” the barman said.
“You aren’t telling me anything I don’t already know.”
“Is it important that you meet these people?”
Longarm nodded. “It sure is.”
“When are you supposed to meet them?”
“A couple days ago, actually. Is that a problem?”
“Not for me, it isn’t,” the friendly barkeep said with another toothy grin. “If you like, though, I can keep my eyes open. I’ll let you know if I see anybody that might be your party.” The man was careful to avoid asking anything that might have been of a personal nature, anything that Longarm might have taken offense to.
“I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”
Longarm had another couple whiskeys—they tasted better and better the more he had of them—and went back out to collect his animals.
He walked a hundred yards or so outside Bedlam and laid out a camp of sorts. He did not need to cook for himself this time, not even coffee, but he could certainly use some sleep.
Bedlam was as noisy as, well, bedlam, but he was pretty much beyond the distance where the noise might bother him, so he stretched out in his blankets with his .45 resting in his hand. Just in case.
Then he closed his eyes and went promptly to sleep.
Chapter 18
“Shit!” Longarm snapped up into a sitting position seconds after a bullet slammed into his bed, not missing his head by more than inches.
“Watch where you’re shooting, asshole. There’s somebody tryin’ to sleep over here,” he yelled.
His answer was another gunshot. This time the slug passed on the other side of his head with a loud crack.
The son of a bitch was shooting at him deliberately.
Longarm jumped to his feet and snapped off a shot of his own. In the darkness he had nothing to aim at except the muzzle flash of the other man’s gun, so he sent a .45-caliber sizzler of his own in that direction and was rewarded with a yelp. Whether that sound was a matter of pain or of frustration he could not tell.
He dropped back onto his blankets to pull his boots on, and another gunshot came at him out of the darkness, and from a different location.
This one passed overhead by a good two or three feet. Apparently the
y had not seen him drop down.
Two shooters? Or one man quietly on the move. He could not know that.
Longarm stayed low and moved silently in the direction of that last gunshot, Colt in hand, alert for motion within the shadows. His night vision had been disrupted by his own gunfire, but it was returning now.
He did not know how long he had been asleep. More to the point, he did not know how long the nightly drinking and rowdiness in Bedlam generally went on, but by now there were few lights and no noise coming from the village. He would have welcomed more light, actually. It would have made it easier for him to find the bastard or bastards who’d shot at him.
Longarm darted forward from shadow to shadow all the way down to the creek without finding anyone to shoot at and without being shot at again himself.
Disgusted, he turned back uphill and returned to his bedroll.
It was quite obvious that whoever it was that wanted him dead knew where he had laid out his blankets. Equally obvious was that the person or persons, whoever he was or they were and whatever his or their motives were, could choose to try it again.
It just did not seem like much of a good idea to lie down and go back to sleep in that same spot, and so, reluctant but resigned to the necessity, Longarm saddled the mare and loaded his burro again. Then he led the two animals well away from Bedlam, to a grassy spot just above a grove of young aspen.
For the second time that night, Longarm laid out his bedding, removed his boots, and lay down.
This time he did not drop into sleep immediately. This time he lay awake for a little while trying to work out who might have wanted to shoot him.
Jane Nellis’s attackers? They would certainly have good reason to want him dead or at least wounded badly enough to stop him from following them. But that made no sense. Not at this point, since they would have no way to know that Longarm existed, much less that he was on their trail.