Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

by Tabor Evans

  Most of the men were on their feet. A middle-aged woman screamed and clutched a towheaded boy to her bosom, pressing her back against the coach wall to Longarm’s right, about midway down the car, squeezing her eyes closed.

  Most of the men—stocky and rough-hewn, with drooping mustaches—appeared to be miners. There were a couple of women in frilly dresses revealing more flesh than customary and whom Longarm pegged as whores likely heading for the mining camps to ply their trade through the summer, now that all the passes were finally open after a hard high-country winter. On the left-side grouping of benches thinly upholstered in thin green canvas, a baby was crying in its mother’s arms.

  Longarm was looking for an outlaw, but the only person here apparently not a passenger was a black porter who sat on a bench on the car’s left side, in a small open space in which a black, bullet-shaped stove hunched with a box heaped with firewood. The porter, a young man with obsidian-dark skin, stared at Longarm with as much wide-eyed fear as the others.

  “I’m a U.S. marshal,” the lawman announced, walking slowly down the middle aisle, sliding his rifle barrel from right to left and back again, ready to shoot the first man who poked a gun at him. “Any owlhoots here?”

  Aside from the baby’s crying and a woman sobbing, the small crowd was eerily quiet. Several of the standing men’s eyes kept darting toward the rear of the jostling car. When Longarm was ten feet away from the rear door, a thick man in a round-brimmed, black felt hat scrambled up from the floor, holding a young woman in a skimpy, shiny red dress in front of him with one arm. He held a pearl-gripped, black steel Colt against the girl’s head.

  The girl was green-eyed and pretty in a hard way, and while she winced against the harshness of the man’s stranglehold on her neck, she didn’t appear overly frightened. She was one of those girls who’d seen it all, and this was just one more thing to see.

  The outlaw dragged the girl to the car’s rear door, shouting, “One more step, lawdog, and I’m gonna give this doxie an extra ear!”

  “Drop it!”

  “Uh-uh.” The hard case grinned and shook his head. He had little pig eyes and a double chin, two holsters hanging low on his hips, one empty. “You drop it. You got three seconds, or I’m gonna blow her head off!”

  Running footsteps sounded on the coach roof above Longarm’s head. Two men were up there. They were shouting as they ran from the rear of the car toward the front.

  Longarm’s glance only flicked toward the hammered-tin ceiling before leveling on the hard case grinning before him and holding the cocked pistol to the whore’s head. He wore a greasy, mocking smile.

  Quickly, Longarm lined up his sights on the man’s left temple. He knew it was a risky shot, and that the hard case would likely drop the hammer on the whore as he died, but it was a shot Longarm had to take to try to save the other passengers.

  The hard case must have seen the flinty, flat cast in Longarm’s brown eyes as he arranged the sights on the man’s head, just above his right eye. The hard case’s own eyes snapped wide in horror, and just as he dropped his lower jaw and opened his mouth to scream, Longarm squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

  The rifle’s blast echoed around the inside of the rumbling car like a Fourth of July rocket detonated inside an empty tin rain barrel. The hard case smashed his ruined head back against the door so hard he broke the window, painting the sharp-edged shards with his own blood and white bone and brain matter. At the same time, he triggered his pistol, and somehow the bullet sliced up in front of the girl’s face to plunk harmlessly into the ceiling.

  As the dying man released his hold on the girl’s arm, she dropped straight down to the floor on her knees, looking more relieved than terrified, and cast her green-eyed gaze on Longarm. “Thanks,” she said raspily, breathing hard and rubbing her neck.

  The double-chinned hard case was slowly sagging to the floor, glass raining down from the door around him, his little pig eyes flat and lightless. His arms jerked as he died.

  Longarm ejected his spent shell casing. As the cartridge clattered to the wooden floor and rolled, he wheeled toward the front of the coach, where two figures shone in the door’s small window, one man looking inside. As the outlaw brought a pistol up, all the women in the car gasped in unison, and one of the miners said, “Good Lord!”

  Longarm ran toward the front of the car. “Everyone down!”

  They all cowered at the same time, and as the outlaw backed up, grinning, and aimed his pistol at the window to shoot into the car, Longarm stopped and fired three quick rounds—boom! boom! boom!—through the door. One bullet blew out the glass still splattered with the Mexican’s blood, while the other two punched through the wood. All three must have ripped into the outlaw with the pistol, because he suddenly flew up and back, bouncing off the rear wall of the next car forward.

  His pistol popped into the air above his head. Beneath the rumble of the train, which seemed to be picking up more and more speed and angling slightly downward now, the report sounded little louder than a twig snapping. The baby wailed louder, and the sobbing around Longarm grew more frantic as he ejected the last spent cartridge, levered a fresh one into the breech, and prepared to shoot the second shooter on the platform.

  Foot thuds sounded atop the coach. Longarm lowered his Winchester. Apprehension caused the short hairs along the back of his neck to bristle. The man on the roof shouted, “You made a big mistake, lawdog!”

  The train robber triggered two rounds through the roof—one hole after another appearing in the middle of the car, just behind Longarm. One bullet plowed into an empty bench while the other kissed the nap from the wool coat of one of the miners, causing the man to curse sharply as he grabbed that arm and lurched toward the side of the car. Heart thudding, knowing he might have a bloodbath involving innocent bystanders on his hands, Longarm fired three rounds into the ceiling, around where the shooter on the roof had fired.

  Longarm ejected the last spent casings and stared at the ceiling, pricking his ears. The shooter laughed tauntingly, and fired three more rounds through the ceiling, these three bullets tearing harmlessly into the coach’s floor or thumping into the wood box near the stove, thank God.

  Longarm fired three more rounds desperately, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes. He lunged to his left, and grabbed the brake chain. A sudden slowing of the train would likely knock the owlhoot off the coach.

  He jerked hard on the chain four or five times. The train didn’t slow an iota. He cursed.

  “Tried that,” one of the men near him shouted. “They musta rigged the brakes from the engine!”

  Longarm triggered the Winchester into the ceiling two more times. His last shot was still echoing around the coach, and he could hear the shooter laughing, when he ran down the center aisle and out the bullet-riddled rear door. He turned sharply right, grabbed the ladder, and climbed, glancing once to his left and cursing.

  The train had climbed to the top of the pass and was starting down.

  If there’d been an engineer at the controls, he probably would have heard the gunfire and stopped the train. Since they were still moving, and gradually increasing speed on the backside of Horse Thief Pass, the engineer and tender must both be dead. The outlaws had probably shot them when they’d first boarded the train, so they themselves could control the combination, not wanting it stopped until they’d reached wherever they intended to get off and mount fresh horses waiting for them.

  Longarm lunged up and over the top of the coach car just as the outlaw leader, Rio Hayes, fired one of the two pistols in his hands through the roof, about two feet from Hayes’s left boot. Longarm brought up the Winchester quickly and squeezed the trigger.

  The hammer pinged on an empty chamber.

  He tossed the gun aside, and as it dropped onto the vestibule below, he palmed his Colt .44-40 but not before Rio Hayes gave a jeering whoop and triggered both his pistols at Longarm.

  One hammered into the coach roof near Longarm’s
right knee. The other three sailed wide. The train was moving and pitching so violently now that the shooter couldn’t draw an accurate bead.

  Longarm raised the double-action Colt and fired. Hayes was laughing madly and dancing around, making it doubly impossible for Longarm to pink the son of a bitch.

  Longarm straightened, walked forward, holding his left hand out for balance while he fired with his right. Hayes whooped and hollered and fired from a similar posture, his bullets flying past Longarm to thunk into the wood piled in the tender car beyond.

  The wind whipped Longarm’s hat from his head. Hayes had already lost his hat, and his thin, scraggly, greasy blond hair was blowing straight back behind his bald paint. He fired his pistols, squinting his eyes, grinning, his clothes flapping madly.

  Longarm’s sixth bullet nicked Hayes’s left earlobe. The killer flinched. His smile instantly became a glare. Blood dripped from the ragged bottom of his earlobe and blew away in the wind.

  Hayes moved toward Longarm taking heavy, lunging steps, continuing to fire until both his gun hammers clapped tinnily against the firing pins. The outlaw leader tossed both empty guns away with a savage snarl and slid a big bowie knife from a sheath strapped to his right thigh.

  Longarm holstered his Colt and shoved his hand into his right vest pocket for the double-barreled derringer he kept there, attached by a gold-washed chain to a turnip-sized railroad watch residing in the opposite pocket. Hayes was on him before he could wrap his hand around the little popper. The lawman threw both his hands up, closing the left one around Hayes’s right wrist, stopping the point of the razor-edged knife about a foot away from his throat.

  He dug the fingers of his right hand into Hayes’s neck, pressing his thumb hard against the man’s prominent Adam’s apple carpeted by a two- or three-day growth of prickly, sweat-greasy, dark-brown beard. Hayes snarled, gritting his chipped yellow teeth, eyes appearing about to pop out of his head.

  Longarm was bigger and stronger. He pushed the outlaw’s knife hand back and then released the man’s throat only to slam his right fist twice and with all his power against the man’s jaw, knocking it loose from its mooring.

  “Unnghawww!” the broken-jawed Hayes screamed, falling back away from Longarm, dropping the bowie, and clutching his face with both hands.

  Now Longarm had him. He lunged toward him to deliver the final blow and throw him from the train when the coach car dropped sharply forward, behind Longarm. The sudden descent caused Longarm to lose his footing. He fell hard against the coach roof on his back and rolled to the left, clawing at the roof for purchase, to keep from rolling off. As he did, dread rippled through him.

  The sudden drop told him that the runaway train was heading down the perilously steep backside of Horse Thief Pass toward Horse Thief Gorge.

  Moving as fast as they were without brakes, they’d never make it across the one-hundred-yard bridge across the gorge in one piece. The barreling train would shatter the bridge and end up—train, bridge, the innocent passengers, as well as Longarm—in blood-basted, iron-entangled debris at the bottom of Horse Thief Gorge.

  Chapter 3

  Longarm managed to fling one hand over the ridge of corrugated tin running along the center top of the coach car and use it to keep himself from being hurled off the speeding train and having his skull and every other bone broken amongst the rocks lining the trail.

  Now, to get control of the train before it hit the bridge…

  He heard someone moaning and groaning, and saw Rio Hayes lying facedown over the tin ridge. The man was trying to gain his feet.

  Something dark appeared on Longarm’s right, ahead of the train but moving toward Longarm fast. It was a tunnel carved into the side of the mountain.

  Longarm, hunkered low atop the coach car, stared in awe—could he get this lucky?—as the dark tunnel mouth flew toward him and the day coach he lay prone upon, both boots dangling down over the side. The peak of the arching portal was only about four feet above the coach car roof.

  Longarm looked at Rio Hayes and smiled.

  Hayes had just gained his feet and grabbed another bowie knife from somewhere on his scruffy person, and had turned toward Longarm, a savage scowl that, coupled with his broken jaw hanging askew, made his entire face look horsey and crooked and even more demented than usual.

  Hayes hadn’t seen the tunnel when Longarm had. But now he saw that gaping, black portal rushing toward him like a gigantic black bird from some hellish underworld intending to swoop him up in its stygian wings.

  Hayes had about one second to widen his eyes in awe and dismay before the tunnel turned the world dark. About one eye wink later, following a clipped scream, Longarm heard a resounding, crunching thump!

  Just like that, Rio Hayes was gone.

  Turned to jelly against the side of the tunnel, over the black, arching entrance. There was a clattering to Longarm’s left, toward the train’s rear. He heard it beneath the raucous din of the train echoing deafeningly off the tunnel’s close, dark walls.

  When the train caromed on out the tunnel’s other side and into the blindingly bright daylight, Longarm saw what appeared a ragged, bloody bag of bones jouncing along a roof several cars back. It skidded off to the car’s south side and slithered down over the roof and out of sight, leaving a wide smear of dark red blood behind it.

  “Gone but not forgotten, Rio,” Longarm muttered through a grunt, heaving himself to his feet, “you son of a bitch.”

  He stared forward, past the wood tender heaped with split pine and oak, to the black iron engine with its diamond-shaped stack spewing gray smoke that billowed in ghostly snakes behind. Beyond the smokestack, the rail bed was a thin swath of iron and rock leading arrow-straight through dark green walls of forest. It dropped perilously toward a distant, gray-blue fold in the dark ridges—a fold in which the broad, deep Horse Thief Gorge lay.

  Longarm knew from having taken this line before that the grade soon got even steeper before bottoming out at the bridge over the gorge. Usually through here the engineer was clamping the brake shoes taut against all wheels, just creeping along, because he knew the bridge could only withstand a speed of less than twenty miles an hour. Any more than that, the force and pressure and vibration of the locomotive and trailing cars would rattle the whole thing apart.

  As Longarm dropped quickly down the ladder to the vestibule, he judged they were traveling at least thirty miles an hour and were probably picking up an extra mile an hour with every few passing seconds. The wind rush over the train was enormous, blowing the lawman’s close-cropped, dark brown hair flat against his skull.

  “How come we’re going so fast?” It was the girl the Mexican had been having his way with.

  She was still naked and sitting with her back to the bloody front wall of the coach car, one arm crossed on her breasts. Having seen the other doxies inside the coach car, Longarm now realized this girl was likely with them. With her other hand, she was holding her blowing hair back from her face. She looked concerned but not horrified.

  “That’s what I’m gonna find out!” Longarm yelled above the screeching and clattering of the wheels over the rail seams and the incessant whooshing of the wind.

  He climbed up into the tender car and crawled over the neatly stacked wood, wincing at the sharp edges of the wood digging into his bare hands and scraping his knees. Ahead, he saw the fireman and the engineer both slumped inside the locomotive. The fireman lay on the floor across from the firebox that heated the boiler. The engineer was half standing, as though he were suspended by something.

  Longarm continued crawling, glancing at the engineer and then out beyond the train to the gorge that he could see opening now before him, the bridge stretching a thin, silver-brown line across it. It was a mile away but it was coming up fast. The lawman knew enough about trains to know that even this narrow-gauge affair needed at least a hundred yards to stop after the brakes were fully applied, maybe more than that considering how fast the combination wa
s barreling down a steep pass.

  Longarm dropped over the bulkhead and into the locomotive, stepped over the stout boots of the overall-clad fireman, blood gushing out the side of the man’s head. He stepped over to the engineer, who had a similar hole as the fireman, in the same side of his head.

  He saw now what had happened. The gang had shot the engineer and the brakemen before Hayes’s men had leaped onto the train…probably from a perch similar to Longarm’s.

  They’d figured they could stop the train whenever they wanted by pulling the brake through chain from anywhere behind, in any of the cars. Only, they hadn’t counted on the engineer falling over the dead-release lever that disengaged the through chain, rendering it impossible to brake the train from anywhere but in the locomotive itself.

  Longarm pulled the engineer off the lever and let him drop to the floor. He turned the lever back to the right, saw the long, wood-handled brake, which looked much like the brake on a wagon, and hauled back on it. After a few seconds, he felt the locomotive tremble as the wood-and-metal brake jaws clamped over the iron wheels of all the cars.

  Only, the forward momentum was too great for the brakes. They wouldn’t hold. The lever leaped back upright, releasing the brake jaws and nearly tearing Longarm’s shoulders from their sockets.

  “Shit!” the lawman shouted into the wind, grabbing the handle with both hands and hauling back and down on it once more.

  Again, he felt the engine tremble beneath his boots. It sort of hiccupped, but the handle jerked upward despite Longarm virtually hanging on it the way the engineer had been hanging over the dead-release.

  “Need some help?” The feminine voice had sounded from behind.

  Longarm glanced over his shoulder to see the girl he’d left on the vestibule crawling over the wood stacked in the tender car. She’d thrown a thin, very low-cut, sleeveless pink dress on. The wind billowed it out in front, revealing her tender, sloping breasts, which jostled as she crawled, barefoot, across the wood.