Longarm and the Diamondback Widow

by Tabor Evans

  Garvey stepped back, regarding the sheriff uncertainly before lifting his chin toward the boy hanging from the tree.

  “George Bear-Runner,” Garvey breathed. He clucked and shook his head. “Sure as shit.”

  Rainey walked up to within a foot of the boots that hung level with his nose. He looked the body over closely, walking around to inspect the dead boy’s backside.

  “No wounds,” Rainey said.

  He walked around to the front and inspected the boy’s face. The Bear-Runner boy had a split lip and a swelling around his right eye. Several buttons of his shirt were gone, exposing part of a threadbare long-handle top.

  He’d been roughed up before he’d been hanged. He’d likely been led out from the house by one man while another shot the kid’s family and burned the cabin.

  “Why?” Rainey said, lower jaw hanging, as he stared incredulously up at the hanged half-breed boy.

  He turned to Garvey. “Who would do this, Dan? Who had it in for these people?”

  A shadow moved on the slope of the ravine behind the rancher. As Garvey turned to Rainey, slowly shaking his head and opening his mouth to speak, the sheriff sprang forward, shouting, “Look out, Dan!”

  He bulled into the rancher, knocking him off his feet. Garvey yelled as he hit the ground on his back, Rainey on top of him. At the same time, a rifle thundered loudly.

  The slug plunked into the left shin of the hanging Bear-Runner boy, nudging the body sideways. Rainey rolled off of Garvey and raised his Smith & Wesson, aiming at the shadowy figure bounding out from behind a tree halfway down the southern slope and scrambling up toward the ridge.

  The sheriff’s revolver belched twice, his slugs merely pluming dust and leaves at the bushwhacker’s heels. He fired again, but the bullet merely plinked a tree as the shooter ran up and over the ridge crest.

  “Jesus Christ—what was that?” Garvey shouted.

  “Stay here, Dan!”

  Rainey heaved himself to his feet and started running up the southern ridge. Halfway to the top, he had to pause and catch his breath. His chest ached and his throat was dry.

  Good Lord, he hoped he wasn’t about to have a heart seizure!

  He drew a deep breath and continued climbing until he was within a few feet of the top of the ridge. He slowed his pace, breathing hard and holding the S&W straight out in front of him, edging a cautious look over the brow of the hill.

  Seeing nothing but the few shrubs and yucca plants capping the slope, he continued to the top. From somewhere ahead, a horse whinnied. As hooves began thudding hard, Rainey ran straight south along the bluff and stopped, casting his gaze down the far side.

  A rider was galloping away on a dun horse through a crease in the buttes, his elbows and saddlebags flapping like wings. Crouched low over his horse’s neck, the bushwhacker held a rifle in his right hand.

  “Hold it!” Rainey shouted, dropping to one knee.

  The rider kept galloping away.

  Rainey extended the pistol in both hands, taking hasty aim at the jostling figure, and fired twice. Both slugs landed far short of the quickly receding rider.

  He fired once more. The bullet spanged benignly off a rock well behind the man.

  Rainey cursed and lowered the weapon, holding his gaze on the rider, unable to make out much more about him than that he wore denims, a cream hat, a cream shirt, and a brown vest. He had short hair—hard to tell what color from this distance. He rode a dun horse with three white stockings. Nothing else he could see of the man distinguished him. Rainey did not recognize the horse.

  When he was a hundred yards away, the bushwhacker looked back over his shoulder toward Rainey, but he was too far away for the sheriff to tell anything about his face. Frustrated, Rainey looked around carefully, making sure there were no other bushwhackers out there, and then he holstered his weapon and walked back down the ravine to where Dan Garvey was on one knee, looking nervous.

  “You get him, Sheriff?”

  Rainey shook his head and looked up at the dead Bear-Runner boy, who was partly turned away from him. The boy’s long, blue-black hair blew in the breeze that funneled down the ravine. The rope creaked softly.

  “You see who it was?”

  “No.”

  Garvey straightened, adjusted his funnel-brimmed Stetson on his head, and brushed his wrist across his short, blunt nose. “Why the hell you suppose he was shooting at us?”

  Rainey felt the frustration well inside him. “Dan, you’re askin’ too many questions—you know that? Just too damn many questions.”

  The truth was, Rainey himself was asking himself all the same questions, only he wasn’t giving himself any answers.

  He walked over to where the hanging rope had been tied off around a low branch, and said, “Let’s get this poor boy down and dig us some graves.”

  * * *

  It was late in the day when Rainey tossed the last shovelful of dirt on the grave of the elder Bear-Runner.

  All four bodies were buried side by side on a little knoll north of the burned cabin, overlooking the creek. The sheriff thought the Bear-Runner family would have a nice rest there. At least, as nice a rest as anyone could have, having been shot and burned in their own cabin.

  Or hanged from a tree in their backyard . . .

  Rainey sighed as he leaned on his shovel and looked toward the burned out, still-smoldering hovel. Garvey was sitting on a nearby rock, smoking and looking as tired as Rainey felt after pulling the bodies out of the rubble and digging four graves on a hot, late-summer day in the high desert country of central Wyoming.

  Clouds were building, as they often did in the afternoon this time of year. Large, angry, brooding clouds moving in fast on a cooling western breeze that rattled the leaves of cottonwoods and aspens down along Diamondback Creek.

  “Who do you think done it, Sheriff?” Garvey asked, sweeping his gray-flecked sandy hair back from his sharp widow’s peak and blowing out a long plume of cigarette smoke. “Who would’ve done such a thing? The Bear-Runners—they may have been Injuns, but they left folks alone. They went about their own business. Sure, Tanner Webster claimed they long-looped a few of his beeves, but just between you an’ me, that could’ve been anyone. Tanner just assumed the Bear-Runners done it ’cause they were Injun.”

  Rainey pondered that information and then he let it go. Leaning on the shovel, he tended a bad feeling inside him.

  He looked at Garvey. “Dan, did you know either one of the Bear-Runner boys to go to town much?”

  Garvey stitched his brows together and then shook his head slowly. “Nah, I never seen ’em in town. That said, I don’t get to town all that often myself. I never knew those boys to frequent the watering holes in Diamondback, though.” Keeping his brows knitted, he studied Rainey. “Why do you ask?”

  “Ah, hell, I don’t know.” Rainey looked at the clouds that were turning the late afternoon to an early dusk. “You’d better get on back to your ranch, and I’d best hit the trail for town, Dan. Gonna be rainin’ soon. Thanks for letting me know about this, and for your help buryin’ these poor people.”

  “Don’t mention it, Sheriff. I’m torn up about it, myself.” Garvey was walking beside Rainey as they headed for where they’d hobbled their mounts in the grass by the creek. “Just don’t understand who could kill a whole family like that. Shoot ’em an’ burn ’em . . . hang one of ’em. It’s just like what happened east of the pass, three years back . . .”

  As the two men swung into their saddles, Garvey turned to Rainey once more. “Hangin’s usually done for folks caught rustlin’, Sheriff.”

  Rainey nodded. “Yeah, it is.”

  “You think maybe George was caught rustlin’ and whoever owned the beef he rustled made his whole family pay?” Garvey winced at the thought.

  “Could be,” Rainey said. But he didn’t think so. H
e gigged his horse across the creek. “Thanks again, Dan. I’ll be checkin’ in with you again soon.”

  “See ya, Sheriff,” the rancher said as he turned his mule southwest along an old horse path that ran along the creek.

  Rainey followed the secondary trail northwest to the main trail and then headed east toward Diamondback. He was so busy pondering the situation and tending that raw, burning feeling inside him that he wasn’t aware it was storming until his sorrel started at a nearby thunderclap.

  Lightning flashed on Rainey’s right, flickering across the sky like two witches’ fingers. The twin bolts hammered the top of a bluff on the far side of the creek, blowing up dirt and rock from a clump of boulders and causing a small rockslide.

  It had been raining up to then, though Rainey had been only vaguely aware of the drops splattering his face. But now it was like a dam had broken loose, and the rain came in cold, white, buffeting sheets out of a sky the color of ripe plums. The sorrel whinnied and shook its mane but kept jogging up the winding trail that rose slowly toward Diamondback.

  By the time the town appeared in a broad flat in the middle of the mountain-ringed basin, horse and rider were thoroughly soaked and mud-splattered. The horse was in a hurry to get in out of the rain. Rainey was, too, but he’d had a long think on his way into town and had more pressing business first.

  He rode through town along its soupy main street to the other, eastern end of the modest little settlement. On the street’s right side sat the long, low, mud-brick, brush-roofed building that was the Diamondback depot for the Wyoming Stage Company and also housed a telegraph and the local post office. Beyond the building was nothing but sage, yucca, prickly pear, and piñon pines studding the mountains all the way to Chugwater on the Wyoming-Dakota border.

  Rainey put the sorrel up under the roof overhang, so that the cascade of rainwater missed the mount’s hindquarters by a foot or two, and swung down from the leather.

  He flung the reins over the hitchrack and then walked up onto the long front porch built of unpeeled pine poles, where he gave the closed plank door a tap and then tripped the string latch and pushed inside.

  “Edgar, you here?” he called into the dingy shadows, his soaked clothes hanging on him.

  A gravelly voice rose on the sheriff’s left. “For cryin’ out loud, Des, you don’t have to scream at me! I’m sittin’ right here and I may be hard of hearin’ but I ain’t deaf!”

  Rainey turned to his left. Edgar Winthrop sat at one of the depot’s long, pine-log tables, smoking a cigarette, a steaming mug of coffee on the table before him. A liver-colored cat stood atop the table, near the coffee cup and an open newspaper. It arched its back owlishly at the stranger who’d burst into the building unannounced and likely disturbed its nap there atop the newspaper.

  “Sorry, Edgar,” Rainey said, doffing his hat and wincing when a cupful of water sluiced off its crown and its brim to splash the scuffed pine floor at his soaked boots. “I’m just wonderin’ if you can send a message to Denver for me.”

  The gray-bearded old depot agent/telegrapher/postmaster shook his head as he drew on his hand-rolled quirley, the coal glowing in the room’s near-darkness. The rain hammered on the roof, punctuated by frequent thunder booms and the heels of lightning flashing in the windows.

  “Wire’s down,” Winthrop said, blinking beneath his green eyeshade. “I’m thinkin’ lightning mighta struck up on Murphy Butte east of town and caused rocks to slide and mow down one of my poles. I’ll send someone to check on it as soon as the weather clears.”

  The older man studied the Diamondback sheriff closely. “Say, you not only look soaked to the gills, Des, you look like someone danced a two-step over your grave.”

  Rainey said, “I just rode out to the Bear-Runner place.”

  “I heard about that from Calvin. You was supposed to meet Dan Garvey. Who you suppose killed those poor people, Des?”

  It was no surprise to Rainey that word of the killings had already traveled around Diamondback. Garvey’s hired hand had most likely let the cat out of the bag in the Dragoon Saloon several hours earlier, and it had probably run around Diamondback twice since then.

  “I’ll tell you later,” Rainey said, glancing at the window over his right shoulder. The rain was still coming hard and fast, forming a long waterfall roaring over the depot building’s overhang, behind the tied, jittery sorrel. The sheriff cursed under his breath and turned back to Winthrop. “Fetch me when you get the line back up—will you, Edgar?”

  “Sure. You wanna leave your message, and I’ll send it soon as I can start transmitting again?”

  Rainey thought it over. The fewer people who knew about his suspicions the better. He didn’t want the killer or killers to know he was on to him or them, and he didn’t want to get himself back-shot, either.

  On the other hand, he needed to get the message out as quickly as possible. He didn’t need to explain the whole nasty business, he just needed help.

  “Why not?”

  “Here, scribble it on that,” Winthrop said, sliding an envelope down the table toward Rainey. He fished a pencil stub out of his pocket and set it atop the envelope.

  Rainey leaned down, touched the pencil to his tongue, and scribbled a short note.

  “There ya go, Edgar. Send that out just as soon as you can, will you? I’ll be in my office.”

  Winthrop read the pencil-scrawled missive and raised an eyebrow. “The U.S. Marshals, eh? This must be serious, Des.”

  “Just let me know when you’ve sent the telegram, Edgar,” Rainey said, and turned to the door standing partly open behind him.

  “Stay and have a cup of mud with me, Des,” the old station agent said, raising his own steaming mug enticingly. “You look like you could use some. I’ll splash some busthead in it. Settle your nerves a little.”

  “Nothin’s gonna settle my nerves today, Edgar,” Rainey said as he went out, drawing the door closed behind him.

  He rode over to one of the two livery barns in town and turned the sorrel over to Ronnie Brown, the son of one of the two brothers who ran the place. Rainey shucked his Winchester from the boot and then strode east along the street toward his office, not bothering to stay under the awning roofs on the street’s north side.

  He was so soaked that the rain no longer mattered. Also, he wanted to keep a keen eye on both sides of the street for any gunmen who might be lurking there.

  Apprehension raked cold fingers across the back of his neck, and he probed the shadows between buildings for a possible bushwhacker—the same man who’d tried to dry-gulch him and Garvey back at the Bear-Runner ranch.

  He was relieved when he reached the wooden porch of his small, mud-brick jailhouse and office. He stopped just off the stoop and shuttled a careful gaze up and down the muddy street, and then, seeing nothing suspicious, he mounted the porch. There was no lock on the door, just a steel-and-leather latch outfitted with a six-inch curl of wire.

  Rainey looked forward to getting out of his wet clothes and sitting back in his chair with a tall brandy . . .

  He threw the door open, stepped inside.

  The sheriff stopped suddenly. “What the hell . . . are . . . you doing . . . here . . .?”

  His last word was drowned out by a shotgun’s thunderous explosion. The blast lifted Des Rainey three feet in the air and threw him back across the porch and into the street, where he landed with a splash in the ankle-deep mud.

  Chapter 3

  Deputy United States Marshal Custis P. Long, known far and wide to friend and foe as Longarm, checked his army bay down in the shade of the cottonwoods lining the stage road he was following west toward the little ranch supply town of Diamondback, Wyoming Territory, and curveted the mount as it switched its tail at blackflies.

  Longarm stared back the way he’d come, at the trail winding up and around the shoulder of a bullet-shape
d butte the slopes of which were littered with small boulders and tufts of sage and yucca. No movement on the trail. At least, not for as far back as he could see, which was only about a half a mile.

  He saw no dust plumes rising on the other side of the butte, either.

  The federal badge toter looked to either side of the bluff, squinting his keen brown eyes beneath the brim of his flat-brimmed, snuff-brown Stetson, tipped over his right eye, cavalry-style, to investigate every nook and cranny, small rocky shelf, and wedge of purple shade, though shade was damn scarce out here except under the occasional tree.

  Nothing along his backtrail looked suspicious in the least. In fact, he could see nothing but the facets of the land itself—brush, rocks, a few piñon pines, a scattering of scraggly junipers. At this time of the day, around two, even the jackrabbits were hunkered down in their burrows, out of the hammering sun.

  No deer or elk. Damn few birds even, except a couple of warblers scurrying around in the aspens above and behind him.

  Damn strange.

  For the past half hour, since he’d left the Lone Pine Relay Station of the Wyoming Stage Company, he’d felt that itchy feeling beneath his collar that he felt at only two times. One was just after he’d gotten a haircut and the barber hadn’t properly whisked the trimmings away from his neck. The other time was when he was being shadowed—usually by someone with the dreariest of intentions.

  It was a feeling the lawman always heeded. Having been a deputy United States marshal in the service of Chief Marshal Billy Vail and Colorado’s First District Federal Court in Denver for more years than he cared to count, he’d made his share of enemies. Every year it seemed that either someone he’d once locked up or the family or friends of someone he’d locked up or put away for a long time came gunning for him with the intention of turning him toe-down, sending him off pushing up daisies from the bottom of a deep, black grave.

  At the moment, he could see no one on his backtrail. But the prickling under his collar told him that someone was back there, all right.