by Tabor Evans
The hotel couldn’t have been missed by a blind donkey. It was a large, three-story, green-and-pink Victorian with a sprawling, white wraparound porch with several rocking chairs. Longarm had heard that Arapaho was growing, and that more wealthy ranchers were moving herds into Platte County from Texas and Oklahoma. If the hotel was any indication of prosperity, he’d heard right.
Intending to check on the women as well as McIntyre, Longarm took the broad porch steps three at a time. He stopped on the porch as Mrs. Schimpelfinnig came out, cheeks flushed crimson, eyes wide as saucers. Her big picture hat was nearly hanging down one side of her head, causing what appeared a landslide of hair, pins, and small barrettes.
“Marshal!” the old woman intoned. “Cynthia!”
Longarm’s heart thudded. “What about her?”
“She rented a horse from the livery barn and rode off after Miss Summerville and those . . . those . . . kidnapping savages!”
Chapter 6
Longarm’s jaw hung to his chest as he gaped at Aunt Beatrice. “Huh?”
“She said she was going to pick up their trail and wait for you! Oh, the silly girl! I ordered her not to! I begged her! I pleaded! I am her aunt and her chaperone, after all!” Mrs. Schimpelfinnig stomped a foot and shook a fist in frustration. “I said, ‘Cynthia, you must listen to me!’ She merely kissed my cheek and ran off in her riding clothes. I even saw her dropping a pistol—a pistol!—into her satchel!”
“Where’s my gear?” Longarm meant his rifle and saddlebags. He hadn’t brought his McClellan saddle, which he usually hauled with him wherever he went, because he hadn’t been expecting to ride in anything but the Larimer carriage.
Pressing a hand to her chest and staring south along the side street, Mrs. Schimpelfinnig said in a thin, quaking voice, “Cynthia secured a room for you. We had your gear stowed in there. Room nineteen, I believe. The key’s at the front desk.”
“Christ!” Longarm brushed past the woman and into the lobby.
He quickly picked up his key at the front desk, pausing to inquire with the elegant clerk in a black suit and foulard tie about the sheriff’s condition. The man only shrugged and said the doctor was tending McIntyre in the sheriff’s room.
Longarm cursed under his breath and ran up to his room. His mind was swirling. He couldn’t believe that Cynthia had ridden off after that passel of cutthroats led by the notorious killer and bank robber Colt Drummond. But then, knowing Cynthia and how headstrong she was and how worried she’d been about her friend, Casey Summerville, the realization that Mrs. Schimpelfinnig hadn’t been spouting gibberish hit Longarm like a rock to the forehead.
She said she’d wait when she’d picked up their trail. Longarm had a hard time believing that Cynthia could wait for anything. Once she got on the killers’ trail, she was liable to keep riding until she’d ridden right up on them.
Or suppose Drummond had held some men back along the trail to wipe out a possible posse? Cynthia, like her friend Casey, would fall right smack-dab into Drummond’s hands!
Longarm dug into one of his saddlebag pouches and took a pull from his bottle of Tom Moore Maryland Rye, calming himself down a little to figure out a plan. Like Cynthia, he’d have to rent a horse from the barn across the road. He opened his old nickeled railroad turnip. The Ingersoll announced it was nearly four o’clock. He had about two hours of good light left, which meant he had to run Cynthia down as fast as possible.
He took another pull from the bottle of rye, then corked it and returned it to his saddlebags. From the opposite pouch, he withdrew his canteen and filled it from the pitcher on the well-appointed room’s washstand. He donned his frock coat, slung the canteen over his shoulder, picked up his rifle and saddlebags, and headed back downstairs to the broad, dim lobby.
Mrs. Schimpelfennig was pacing the lobby like a horse at the head of an approaching storm, holding a lacy white handkerchief up close to her mouth to catch her sniffs and sobs.
“Marshal Long, you will find her, won’t you?” she said, rushing over to Longarm and grabbing his arm.
“Of course I’ll find her, Mrs. Schimpelfinnig. You go on upstairs and lie down.” Longarm paused near the front door to pat the woman’s hand and offer a weak smile. “Try to take a little nap and then eat something. You’re way too distraught, ma’am. I hope to be back by sundown or just a little later. Don’t worry, now!”
That last he tossed back over his shoulder as he hurried out the door and down the porch steps. He sprinted across the street to the barn and rented a stout, blaze-faced sorrel with a white-speckled hindquarters from Wendell Calhoun’s grandson, Andy, who said that “the well-setup white lady with purty black hair” rented a steeldust stallion from him about fifty minutes earlier.
“The fastest horse of our whole cavvy!” the boy in-toned, grinning.
He assured Longarm that the sorrel was the second-fastest horse in the barn. Longarm saddled the horse himself while the young man bridled him. Longarm strapped his rifle scabbard to the saddle, tossed the saddlebags behind the cantle, and swung up into the leather.
“That your wife, mister?” the boy wanted to know as Longarm rammed his heels into the horse’s flanks.
Longarm ignored the question. As he galloped past the hotel and the three or four shanties planted willy-nilly on this side of Arapaho, the boy called behind him, “She shore is purty!”
Longarm followed a southern trail on out of town, angling gradually toward the southwest and the steep, brooding peaks of the Never Summer Mountains and the Mummy Range as well as the Laramie Mountains and several other ranges out that way. Cynthia must have learned from someone, maybe the stable boy, where the gang had headed with Casey Summerville in tow.
The trail followed what Longarm assumed to be Elk Creek into a low jog of brown, piñon-stippled hills. The creek curved off to the east, but the trail continued southwest through open, high-desert country relieved by the low swells of hogbacks and stony dikes and cone-shaped bluffs.
It was a vast country out here, with rugged peaks looming distantly in all directions. This south-central country of Wyoming Territory always made Longarm feel small and insignificant, and he felt especially vulnerable now—on the trail of twenty men with one female hostage, known rapists who would find two female hostages even better.
Longarm had to catch up to Cynthia before she caught up to Drummond. He knew Drummond’s reputation as a merciless rapist as well as robber and cold-blooded killer. He’d get Cynthia safely back to town, and then go after the gang on a fresh horse in the morning and try like hell to get Casey Summerville out of the gang’s depraved clutches.
Longarm pushed the sorrel as hard as he dared for nearly a half hour. Because he knew he wouldn’t get anywhere by blowing the horse out or causing it to throw a shoe, he then stopped and rested the mount for ten minutes. When he’d watered it at a small run-out spring, he mounted up and continued along the trail for another mile before checking the mount down abruptly.
He stared at the trail beneath the horse’s prancing hooves, bile filling his belly.
Longarm swung down from the saddle and, holding the sorrel’s reins in one hand, he scoured the trail with his gaze. He could see the fresh tracks of what he assumed to be Cynthia’s mount. They overlaid the tracks of many riders—those of Colt Drummond’s bunch. But here he also saw three more tracks entering the trail and obscuring Cynthia’s.
Longarm walked up the trail a little farther, following the jumbled tracks. Then he saw men’s boot prints. They overlaid several prints of a smaller pair of boots—woman-sized, oval-toe, low-heeled boots.
Cynthia’s riding boots.
Around her tracks and the men’s tracks were many scuffles, detailing a skirmish. About ten yards farther on, the boot prints disappeared. There were only the relatively fresh tracks
of four horses moving fast.
Longarm’s heart hammered. The tracks told him the story. Drummond had indeed left men behind to watch the gang’s back trail and to likely scour it of a possible posse riding after them. But instead of a posse, the three men had spied a beautiful, black-haired woman riding toward them, and they’d overtaken her on the trail.
Longarm kicked a rock and stood with his boots spread in the middle of the trail, fists on his hips. He stared southwest, where the trail grew narrower and narrower as it meandered across the ever-darkening buttes.
They had her.
They had both Casey and Cynthia.
Longarm kicked another rock. “Damn fool girl!”
As he swung onto the sorrel’s back, he looked around. The sun had nearly dropped behind the western peaks of the Wind River Range. Soon, it would be nearly as dark as the inside of a glove out here.
He had no choice. He had to go on.
He touched heels to the sorrel’s flanks, loped on up the trail. He rode for another hour, then another. The sun sank amidst a painter’s palette of vivid colors that slowly faded to a long line of bloodred. The sky grew a darker and darker green until the red disappeared and the dark sky was sprinkled with shimmering stars.
It had been good dark for an hour, and he was riding through the middle of a valley maybe a mile wide and bordered by tall bluffs, when he saw a pinprick of orange light ahead and to his right. The light flashed irregularly.
Longarm’s blood quickened. What he was looking at, he knew from experience, was the light of a fire.
The flashing was caused by the breeze jostling branches between him and the blaze.
Quickly, Longarm reined the sorrel off the side of the trail, dismounted, and tied the horse to an aspen branch. He shucked his Winchester from the saddle boot, racked a round into the action, off cocked the hammer, and began walking slowly in the direction of the fire.
He meandered around trees, small shrubs, and rocks. He could hear the chuckling of a small creek off to his right, running along the base of the northern buttes. The breeze stirred the leaf-heavy branches of the aspens. A pinecone fell with a muffled thud.
Off in the far hills, a couple of coyotes were holding a woeful conversation.
As Longarm continued walking, setting each foot down carefully, unconsciously gritting his teeth in barely contained fury, the orange light grew steadily larger and brighter.
Finally, as he hunkered down behind a rock, he could see the flames dancing in a small clearing. The light reflected off the pine boughs angling over the bivouac. Three man-shaped figures were moving around the fire. It was a fairly large blaze, long flames dancing brightly, sending sparks skyward on columns of gray smoke.
Squeezing his rifle in his gloved hands, Longarm looked around, scowling. He couldn’t see Cynthia. Had he been wrong about the girl being taken?
One of the men stumbled drunkenly to the right of the fire. He crouched over a shadow on the ground.
Longarm tipped his head, squinting.
No, not a shadow. It was a person the man was crouched over on the ground.
Pulse quickening in his temples, Longarm looked at the other two men sitting on separate logs around the fire. They were holding cups in their hands. They had their heads turned toward the man hunkered over the fire on the ground.
The hunkered man was speaking loudly, but his back faced Longarm so the lawman couldn’t hear what he was saying. The other two men were chuckling devilishly. He could see the orange firelight reflecting off their sweaty faces in the crevices of which dark shadows pooled.
Longarm rose from behind the rock and moved closer to the fire. He walked slowly, holding his rifle high across his chest. When he was about fifty yards away from the clearing, he dropped behind a log and doffed his hat.
He hunkered low, belly to the ground. He wanted to get a good handle on the layout before he took action. One careless or hasty move on his part could very easily get Cynthia killed.
He was nearly straight out from the figure on the ground. It was, indeed, Cynthia. The man who’d been hunkered over her was sitting on a rock on the other side of her, staring down at her. He had two pistols in his hands. From what he could see by the dancing light of the fire, Longarm thought they were cocked.
He could also see that Cynthia had been stripped naked. Her clothes were strewn between her and the creek. She was staked spread-eagle on the ground, her wrists and ankles tied to the stakes.
She was writhing and moaning, straining against her ties. Her full breasts shone golden in the firelight. They jostled as she struggled. She tossed her head, and her thick, inky black hair buffeted about her narrow shoulders.
The man nearest Cynthia rose drunkenly from the rock he’d been sitting on. The firelight revealed that he wasn’t wearing any pants. No underpants, either. Below the waist, he wore only white socks.
His erect dong jutted from between his shirttails.
Longarm drew a slow, hard breath through his nostrils and squeezed the rifle in his hands as though he were wringing the naked man’s neck.
Chapter 7
“That there, my friends,” said the half-naked man loudly, standing over Cynthia and slurring his words, aiming his cocked pistols down at the naked girl sprawled before him, “is the best hunk o’ female flesh I do believe I ever laid eyes on.”
“She shore ain’t bad,” agreed one of the men near the fire. One had his back to Longarm. The other faced him. But both men were understandably looking toward Cynthia.
The one with his back to Longarm said, “If you’re gonna take her, Leon, then for chrissakes, take her, or I’m gonna come over there and take her myself!”
“You can kiss my ass, Jake!” said Leon, jerking his angry face toward the two at the fire. “We drew straws and I won, and I’m takin’ her first . . . in my own sweet time. Me—I never had me a woman this fine-lookin’, and—”
“And you probably never will again!” This from the man facing Longarm, who then tossed back whatever he had in his tin cup. Longarm had a feeling it wasn’t coffee. All three men were good and drunk.
That was good in that they probably couldn’t shoot as straight drunk as they could sober. But it was bad in that drunk men were more unpredictable than sober ones. And the very fact that they probably couldn’t shoot straight could very well get Cynthia shot if it came to shooting, which it doubtless would.
There were also the possible ricochets to worry about.
Longarm wanted nothing more than to plant a bead on each of these sons o’ bitches in turn and blow them to hell, but he admonished himself to move carefully, slowly.
“Ah, shut the hell up, George. You’re getting’ sloppy thirds!” Leon laughed and then dropped to his knees beside Cynthia. He stared down at her like a dog staring at a meaty bone.
Cynthia stared back at him. Her face was shielded by a thick wing of black hair. Her belly and breasts rose and fell sharply as she breathed. By the orange light, Longarm could see that her skin was slick and shiny with perspiration.
The poor girl had never faced anything like this before in her whole, moneyed life.
Longarm stared at the two pistols in Leon’s hands. Leon held them down near Cynthia, aimed at her side. Longarm couldn’t be absolutely sure that the guns were cocked, but if they were, they’d fire at the least bit of pressure. He had to wait until those pistols were aimed away from the girl before he started shooting.
“You sure are purty, honey,” Leon said, shaking his head slowly. “Nice. Real nice.”
“Let me go, you goatish bastard!” Cynthia spat at him. “Don’t you have any self-respect at all? Is this the only way you can get a woman into your life—by stripping her naked and tying her up and taking her by force?”
By the fire, Jake laughed. “She got some gravel in her, that one.
Purty and feisty. I like that!”
Leon chuckled, showing his teeth between his lips. He set one of his pistols on Cynthia’s rising and falling belly. Longarm started to raise the Winchester he was squeezing in his hands, but he lowered the gun to the ground again when Leon raised the other pistol—the one in his left hand—and touched the barrel to Cynthia’s nose.
He chuckled loudly enough that Longarm could hear him. Even hear him breathing through his nose. The man with the jutting hard-on slid the pistol very slowly down to her lips. He trailed the barrel down over her chin and down her neck. He slid it between her breasts that continued to rise and fall sharply as she breathed.
The man lifted the gun handle and raked the barrel up and down between her breasts, chuckling. The others chuckled, too, watching from the fire.
Flames of raw fury burned in Longarm’s belly. He squeezed the Winchester, struggled with the urge to raise the rifle and begin shooting.
He could see clearly now that the pistol that the man was raking across Cynthia’s naked body was, indeed, cocked. The slightest pressure on the trigger would cause the hammer to smash onto the cartridge, detonating it, most likely plunging the slug into the girl’s sumptuous flesh.
Longarm had to wait until the man aimed the gun away from the lovely heiress. Even for a second. Then there would be some blood flying around here . . .
The man flicked the side of the gun barrel across Cynthia’s left nipple, causing the breast to jiggle. He and the other men chuckled louder. The men by the fire were shifting around lustily. One reached down to adjust his crotch.
The man near Cynthia slid the gun barrel down the girl’s belly.
“You son of a bitch,” Longarm whispered, upper lip raised from his teeth, silently snarling.
The man slid the gun into the dark nest between Cynthia’s spread legs. He poked the barrel inside her. Longarm could see the pink folds open.
Cynthia writhed, groaned. She arched her back, bent her knees, fought against her stays to no avail.
