by Evans, Tabor
“This isn’t exactly an easy trip, is it?” Heidi said.
“I hate this trip,” Carrie Blue snapped with surprising anger. “And I don’t like going up to the Canyon and the Colorado River, either.”
“Why not?”
The girl started to explain, then froze into silence when she saw Virden and Seth approach. “Please just forget I said that,” she whispered. “Don’t tell Frankie or Seth what I told you.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
An hour later they were back in their places on the stagecoach as it rumbled along, and everyone grew sleepy as the day warmed and the dust began to thicken. Suddenly, however, they heard a shout from up top where John Wallace and his driver were seated.
“Whoa! Whoa!”
“What the hell?” Seth asked, sticking his head out of the window and peering through the dust up ahead. “There’s a body up there by the road!”
“Is it a Navajo?” Frankie asked.
“Nope. Mrs. Long, I hate to tell you this, but it’s your husband.”
Heidi felt her heart drop to her feet. It was all she could do not to cry out with alarm. Instead, she bit her lip, almost hard enough to make it bleed, and gripped her purse. “Is he…really dead?” she heard herself ask.
“Nope,” Seth told them all after another few minutes. “He’s moving, but barely.”
“Oh my,” Heidi whispered.
Carrie Blue leaned across the coach and took her hands. “If he’s moving, then he’s alive and we’ll take care of him.”
Heidi nodded. “But I’ll bet the nearest doctor is way back in Flagstaff.”
Carrie didn’t deny the fact. Instead, she just squeezed Heidi’s hands more firmly and then gently touched her cheek. Heidi bowed her head and tried not to cry.
Chapter 13
Longarm was weak as a kitten when they gathered around him. John Wallace had set the brake on the stage and was now offering him water from a canteen. “Good gawd, Marshal Long, what happened!”
“I was ambushed by two men…One of them I’m sure is dead, because he was shot worse than I was.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“Yeah. The man I shot and almost certainly killed was Carl Whitfield. I have no idea who the other rifleman was.”
Everyone glanced around, and finally Frankie Virden asked the question that was on all their minds. “Where’s Carl Whitfield’s body if you actually killed him?”
Longarm looked up at the dandy and ignored the question. “Heidi,” he said, “I was shot, but the bullet passed in one side of me and out the other. A couple of Navajo men found and took me to their hogan for a few days, where their women used medicine to help staunch the bleeding and stave off a fever or infection. They saved my life, and in return, I gave the kid my horse and saddle.”
“You gave him my best horse?” John Wallace asked, clearly shocked and displeased.
“It was the right thing to do. He and his father could have gotten into a lot of trouble by helping me, and I wasn’t forgetting that one of the ambushers got away clean.”
“And you’ve no idea of who he might be?” Virden asked.
“No.”
“Or where Carl Whitfield’s body can be found?”
Longarm rolled his head side to side. “The young Navajo whose name I’m not going to speak, said that he found a fresh grave…or rather a fresh pile of rocks and brush laid over a body. I’m sure that Whitfield is lying under that pile. He and his father also said that the other ambusher shot a good horse, which was probably the one that Carl Whitfield was riding.”
“Why would he shoot a good horse if he could have taken it to some trading post and gotten money for the animal?”
“Who are you?” Longarm asked.
“My name is Seth, and I asked you a question.”
Longarm judged Seth to be a gunman and someone that rode both sides of the fence when it came to obeying the law. “I’ll answer your question, Seth, but next time you’d better show some manners.”
“Marshal,” the young man growled, “you’re hardly in any shape to tell me or anyone else how to act.”
Longarm’s handlebar mustache twitched and he stared up at the younger man. “I’m not going to be under the weather very long, Seth. That’s something you had better keep well in mind.”
Frankie Virden scowled and said, “Seth did ask a good question. Why do you think the other man shot Carl Wakefield’s horse?”
“So it wouldn’t tie him to the ambush that they laid for me,” Longarm replied.
The stagecoach owner said, “There isn’t a doctor up at the Grand Canyon, Marshal. I suppose that I’d better turn the stagecoach around and head on back to Flagstaff.”
“No!” Longarm lowered his voice. “The Navajo gave me some herbs to stew for a poultice. They said that the wound would heal clean and without infection. Heidi, would you mind?”
“Of course not!”
“You’re staying at my new hotel,” Virden announced. “There are some girls there that will give you all the help you’ll need.”
“I’ll be glad to help, too,” Carrie offered, looking to her supposed fiancé to see if he would have an objection. “I’ll help do whatever I can.”
Virden shot her a disapproving glance. “You have other things to do, Carrie. I need you close at hand, and I’m sure that the marshal will have all the help he needs without your interference.”
Carrie’s face fell as she hurried away. Heidi looked up at the gambler and hotel owner and she was seething inside. “I don’t know what your game is, Mr. Virden, but I can tell you right now that I don’t like the way you’re treating that girl and I don’t like you…either.”
Virden laughed. “Well, Mrs. Long, try to imagine how little your opinion on anything matters to me.”
“All right,” John Wallace interceded, “I think we’ve heard just about enough of this squabbling. Let’s help the marshal into the stagecoach.” He looked into Longarm’s gray eyes. “Are you sure that you don’t want me to turn around and head straight back to Flagstaff?”
“Positive,” Longarm firmly replied. “And I’ll make sure that you are repaid for the value of that buckskin mare and saddle.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Wallace said. “She was pretty special to me, and I was afraid that something bad might happen to her. Turns out it happened to you instead.”
“For what it’s worth,” Longarm told the stagecoach owner and liveryman, “the young Navajo that now owns her will take very good care of the mare. He was not much more than a kid, and when I gave him the horse and wrote him out a legal bill of sale, I thought he was going to jump over the moon with happiness.”
“Glad to hear it,” Wallace said, still not looking a bit happy. “Most of these Navajo Indian ponies are treated pretty poorly, and a lot of them are underfed.”
“That won’t happen to the buckskin,” Longarm assured the man.
“Okay,” Wallace said. “Let’s get you up into the coach and then on up to the Grand Canyon and that new hotel.” He looked around at the group. “One of you gentlemen is going to have to sit up top on the driver’s seat with me.”
When none of the men volunteered, Carrie Blue said, “I’d enjoy a better view and more fresh air. I’ll gladly join you up there.”
The stagecoach owner scowled at Virden, Seth, and Elmer Potter, but when they refused to meet his eyes he said, “All right, Miss Blue. I’ll give you a hand up, and you can sit beside me until we reach the stage stop where we’ll change teams and rest up for the night. Until then I’ll try to avoid the worst of the potholes and rocks so that you don’t get bounced around up there any more than necessary.”
“Thank you.”
Heidi shot all three of the male passengers a look of pure disgust. “I see that around here they use the term ‘gentlemen’ very loosely.”
Virden and Seth both barked a disdainful laugh. Elmer Potter took his wife’s hand and walked away.
T
hey helped Longarm to his feet and assisted him over to the stagecoach. With a little boost from the others, he managed to drag himself up onto a seat and then the others climbed into the coach.
“Here,” Wallace said, handing Longarm a good wool blanket. “You can use this to steady and prop yourself up against those cushions. I’m afraid the road north is pretty rough.”
“Can’t be any rougher than riding over rocks and brush in a travois,” Longarm replied. “Let’s get moving.”
A short while later the coach was rolling along at a steady and ground-eating pace. John Wallace had four good horses in harness, and although the wagon track they followed was narrow and uneven, the animals were in excellent condition and Wallace was an outstanding driver.
“So,” he said to Carrie after a time, during which he had considered the ambush and what was going to happen to the marshal, “you and Mr. Virden are engaged to be married?”
Carrie Blue glanced sideways at him and seemed to reach a decision. “Mr. Wallace, just between you, me and those horses? No, we’re never going to get married.”
“But…”
“The truth is, Mr. Wallace, I’m Frankie’s woman for the time being and nothing more.”
Wallace blushed. “Listen, Miss Blue, I didn’t mean to pry or anything. What’s going on between you, Mr. Virden, and that character named Seth is simply none of my business.”
“It should be your business.”
Wallace swung his head around to stare at her. “And why is that?”
“Well, what if Frankie were to tell you one of these days that he was tacking on a charge for every passenger you bring up to his hotel?”
“What kind of a charge?”
“Ten dollars a person.”
John Wallace made a face. “And why on earth would I pay the man ten dollars per passenger?”
“Because,” Carrie said, “if you don’t, then Frankie will buy a stagecoach and bring his own passengers up to the hotel and he won’t let any of your passengers stay there for even one night.”
Wallace felt his gut tighten and he saw that such a rotten thing could be done to him. “But…why on earth would he do that?”
“He would do anything to make money.” She took a deep breath of the clear and heavily scented sagebrush air. “Mr. Wallace, if you tell Frankie what I’ve just told you, I’m going to be in a lot of trouble.”
It was all that the driver could do to ask, “What kind of trouble?”
“Bad trouble.”
“Meaning another black eye?”
She wrung her hands together. “And much worse.”
John Wallace snorted in anger. “Why do you even stay with him and that two-bit gunman named Seth? Why don’t you just leave them?”
“And do what?” she asked bitterly. “Become a street prostitute? Maybe work for some madam at a nice whorehouse because I’ve still got my looks?”
Wallace gulped with embarrassment. “Miss Blue, I didn’t mean…”
She was angry. “You’re a man and you own a stagecoach line and a stable, so you don’t understand that women don’t have the same chances. Prostitution is my only other future, and…and I’ve decided that it’s better to be one man’s whore than a whore for hundreds.”
“Jaysus,” Wallace whispered, snapping the lines and wishing the stagecoach would move faster. “I just didn’t…”
“Mr. Wallace, you don’t go to whorehouses.” It wasn’t a question but a professional’s observation.
“No.”
She was looking right through the side of his face. “And you don’t have a wife?”
“Had one. She died of diphtheria about three years ago. We were only married eighteen months and we didn’t even have time to start a family.”
“I’m sorry,” Carrie Blue said, expression finally softening. “I never had a husband…just men who came and went. Frankie and I have only been together six months, and there are women in Flagstaff who say that’s some kind of a long-term record with him.”
“That may be true, but it’s no life for you.”
“It is a life,” she said fiercely. “And I haven’t given up on everything quite yet. Maybe I can walk away from Frankie before he dumps me for a new girl, and maybe I can take some money with me when I go.”
They rode along, with the day growing short and a faint pinkness settling into the western sky. Songbirds were flitting in the brush, and they saw a huge bird floating up high against the clouds.
“That sure is a huge buzzard,” Carrie said, breaking a long silence.
“That’s a condor,” Wallace told her, relieved to get off the subject of their personal lives. “They have such a huge wingspan that they can glide for hundreds of miles and never flap a wing.”
Carrie Blue wiped a tear from her eye. “Got a little dust in it, I think.”
“No, you didn’t,” Wallace said, looking closely at the woman. “We’re not in a dusty stretch.”
“Well…”
“Well, what?”
Carrie thought a moment and then confessed, “I was just wishing I could soar like that over the face of this hard, damned country. Wishin’ I could sail on and on and never stop.”
“You’re envyin’ a buzzard?” he asked in an awkward attempt at humor.
“That’s not a buzzard…You just told me it was a condor.”
Wallace chuckled. “Big buzzard is what it really is.”
“Maybe so,” Carrie said as the rest stop for the night, with its adobe cabin, outbuildings, and corrals, finally came into view, “but it can do the thing that I’d most like to do now…just fly and fly and never stop until I was on the other side of the whole world.”
John Wallace wondered just how much pain Miss Carrie Blue had suffered already. Probably more than he could even imagine or want to imagine.
And then he got to thinking about Frankie Virden and how the son of a bitch was fixin’ to put him out of business or charge him a per-passenger rate of ten dollars. Ten dollars! Why, the fare he charged each way wasn’t a hell of a lot more than that.
John Wallace shook his head with worry. He reckoned that maybe Miss Carrie Blue and he were both caught in Frankie Virden’s clutches.
Chapter 14
Al Hunt watched the stagecoach through a pair of binoculars as it rolled into the little adobe stage stop to rest its passengers for the night. He watched the driver and stage line owner, John Wallace, help a pretty woman down, and for a moment he was sure it was the federal marshal’s wife, but then he realized that there was another woman stepping out of the coach along with the other passengers.
So, Hunt thought, there were two young women on the stage, but the one that had been in the coach was the rich woman married to the United States marshal. She was the lady that he wanted to capture for his pleasure and for ransom.
“Son of a bitch!” Hunt hissed a moment later as he stared in disbelief at the big marshal being helped out of the stagecoach. “Shit!”
And not only was the federal marshal still alive, he was able to walk with some assistance from his wife.
Al Hunt was lying spread-eagled in the dirt on a hillside, and now he laid his head down on his forearms and beat the earth in anger and frustration with a bare fist. How in the world could the marshal still be alive! He’d shot the man and saw him bend forward as the buckskin mare raced away into the brush.
Son of a bitch! The marshal was alive…no getting around the fact. But, and this was the good part, it was clear to see that he was in rough shape.
Hunt lay still while thinking hard. What was he going to do now? He could ride away and just go back to Flagstaff with his horse and claim he had been given the livery by his late friend and cousin. But if he did that…wouldn’t it then be obvious that he must have been with Carl when the marshal was ambushed?
Of course it would! When the big United States marshal returned to Flagstaff, he would immediately understand that he, Al Hunt, had been the other ambusher at the gap.
As the sun went down and night fell upon the high desert country, Hunt climbed to his feet, slapped the dirt off himself, and decided that he had one big advantage, and that was that the federal marshal had not seen his face and had no idea that he had been one of the two men involved in the ambush.
“I’ll just circle around that stage stop and go on up to the Colorado River and Grand Canyon,” he decided out loud. “And when that stagecoach pulls in to Frankie Virden’s Rimrock Hotel, I’ll act like I’m just another tourist. And then I’ll pick my time and kill that marshal and have his rich widow all for myself just as poor old Carl and I had planned…Only Carl won’t be around to have his pleasures.”
That decided, Al Hunt climbed back on his horse and gave wide berth to the stage stop as he purposefully rode on to the north. He would make a dry camp tonight, and tomorrow, when the stagecoach rolled up to unload its passengers, there he’d be looking just like everyone else when those two pretty women arrived. He’d made the mistake of not getting on his horse and going after the badly wounded marshal to finish him off somewhere in the sagebrush.
He’d not make that same mistake a second time, by gawd!
Longarm was damned glad to get out of the coach and onto a cot at the stage stop. He was weak and light-headed, but he knew that he simply needed a bit of time to rebuild his strength and replenish a lot of spilled blood.
“So,” Heidi asked when they were settled into a little screened-off room and had some privacy to themselves. “What exactly happened?”
“I told you…I was riding through this gap and I was ambushed. Lucky to get away, and even luckier when a Navajo lad and his father happened to be close enough to get me to their family’s hogan. The Navajo women have some very powerful medicine and they pulled me through.”
