Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats

by Tabor Evans

  He eased the tension in his trigger finger, scowling at the two people entangled nearby.

  The girl laughed again and groaned as she turned around, squirming, to face her tormentor.

  “Hey, what you doin’?” asked the man who’d been raping her.

  “I want to watch your big, handsome face while you fuck me,” Casey said, leaning forward to kiss him. “Oh, Colt,” she said, placing her hands on his bearded cheeks, rubbing her nose against his, “I can’t wait until we’re in Mexico together, lying on a warm ­beach—­with all that money to spend!”

  Longarm was glad his lower jaw was well attached to his face. If it hadn’t been, he’d be picking it up out of the dirt at his boots about now.

  Chapter 13

  Longarm pulled his head back down behind the rock. A sick feeling threatened to overtake him. His head reeled.

  Could he have actually heard what he thought he’d heard?

  The girl’s husky laughter was all the answer he needed, but then he also heard her say between grunts, “We’ll be able to do this all the time . . . and much more comfortably . . . down in Mexico, Colt . . .”

  Colt?

  The man hammering away between her legs was none other than Colt Drummond himself.

  Longarm tried to think through his options now as the two grunted and groaned together against the rock just beyond his own. But then he jerked with a start when a near pistol barked.

  The shot was somewhat muffled but Longarm could still tell that it had come from nearby.

  Even more flabbergasted than before, he lifted his head above the boulder and stared toward Colt Drummond and Casey Summerville. Drummond was still crouched over the girl. But he’d stopped thrusting his hips. In the light of the moon just now rising, Longarm could see the whites of the outlaw’s eyes as he stared down at the girl.

  Gray smoke wafted between them.

  Near the fire, someone yelled. Then someone else yelled. Colt Drummond jerked back away from Casey, shambling backward.

  “Did you like that, Colt?” Casey said, straightening. Longarm saw the gun in her left hand. Then he saw the empty holster on Drummond’s right hip.

  “That was for Ryan, you slimy son of a bitch. Just one more thing before I let you ­die—­Ryan knew how to please a woman, an art that you obviously have never learned.”

  “You bitch,” Drummond said, standing ­wobbly-­legged in front of Casey, ­wide-­eyed in shock. The bloodstain on his shirt was growing. “You fuckin’, ­double-­crossin’ whore!”

  Casey cackled an evil laugh. “You’re the whore, you son of a bitch.” She raised the smoking gun, aiming at Drummond’s chest.

  “No!” the outlaw leader screamed, stumbling backward.

  As he got his feet entangled in his pants and started to fall, Casey triggered the Colt once more at Drummond. The outlaw screamed as he twisted around and fell on his side.

  Now the men from the direction of the fire were shouting and grabbing their gloves, some breaking into runs toward the spot of the gunfire. As Casey reached down to pull her pants up around her waist, Longarm stepped up beside her and said, “Don’t shoot me, ­girl—­I’m a friend of Cynthia Larimer’s and I’m here to help!”

  Casey gasped and stumbled away from him as he raised his rifle to his shoulder and began slinging lead toward the outlaws running toward him, their jouncing figures silhouetted by the orange light of the large fire behind them.

  One man groaned. Another screamed. A couple more hit the ground before the others fanned out, diving for cover.

  Casey stood to Longarm’s left, staring at him in ­­wide-eyed surprise, aiming her pistol at him but letting her arm sag. Her shirt was still open, her pants un­­buttoned.

  Longarm glanced at her and yelled, “Pull yourself together and get ready to run!”

  When he’d fired two more shots, his Winchester’s hammer pinged on an empty chamber. Casey had crouched down behind the boulder against which she and Drummond had been toiling. Longarm fired two shots with his Colt .44 and yelled, “Ready, Miss Sum­merville?”

  “Yes!”

  Longarm quickly emptied the pistol, holding the shouting outlaws at bay, and then holstered the weapon. He swung around and grabbed Casey’s arm. “Run! Follow me!” He nearly tripped over a deadfall. “Watch your step!”

  “Who did you say you were?” the girl called behind him, breathing hard as she ran.

  “Custis P. Long, deputy U.S. marshal out of Denver.”

  “Oh, my gosh,” Casey said with quiet astonishment. “Yes . . . Cynthia told me about you.”

  Despite the popping of pistols and the hollow crashes of rifles behind him, Longarm felt his ears warm a little in chagrin, wondering just how much Cynthia had told Casey about her and Longarm’s relationship. He ran ducking around branches and swerving around trees. Casey followed close on his heels.

  She stumbled over a fallen branch, and Longarm stopped and pulled her back to her feet. He gave her a tug, and they continued running back in the direction from which Longarm had come.

  Behind them, gunfire crackled in the direction of the fire. Men were yelling and running hard, crunching brush beneath their boots. Longarm could hear their spurs jingling raucously beneath the wind.

  At the edge of the trees, Longarm yelled, “Keep going. I’m going to make sure we’re not followed!”

  Breathing hard, Casey ran past him and started up the slope. Longarm stood facing in the direction from which they’d come, his back to a tree. Guns flashed and popped. Shadows jerked and swayed as the gang members ran through the brush.

  “They shot Colt!” one of them shouted. “They ­gut-­shot ­Colt—­get them sons o’ bitches, whoever in hell they are!”

  Longarm watched the shadows and the gun flashes. Most of the shots were wild, as the gang members appeared to have lost Longarm’s and Casey’s trail. One, however, was running and leaping through the brush, heading toward Longarm.

  About fifty feet away, the man stopped suddenly and stood facing Longarm. The federal lawman could see the man’s shoulders rise and fall as he breathed, looking around and listening, trying to get some sense of where the gang’s captive and rescuer and had gone. He couldn’t see Longarm against the dark tree.

  Up the slope behind Longarm, Casey gave a groan. There was a rattle of ­slide-­rock and a thump. She must have fallen. The man facing Longarm heard her.

  “This way!” he shouted, and continued running toward ­Longarm—­an inky, hatted shadow against the firelight.

  He hadn’t taken two steps before Longarm leveled his Winchester on him and fired three times, the Winchester roaring in his hands. The man was about ten feet from Longarm when he gave a grunt and flew to one side, hitting the ground with a thud and a crunch of rustling brush.

  Longarm turned slightly to his right and opened fire on the other jostling shadows. Someone yelped. Several shadows leaped for cover.

  Longarm swung around the tree and began running up the slope. About halfway up, Casey had fallen to her knees. She was breathing hard, staring toward him, her blond hair visible in the darkness.

  “I’m so tired,” she said.

  “We’ll rest soon.”

  Longarm pulled her up and took her hand. Running, he half dragged the girl along behind him. When they reached the ridge, Longarm found his and McIntyre’s horses. He quickly untied the mounts. Casey stood nearby, hands on her knees as she tried to get her breath. She’d been through a lot and was understandable fatigued.

  “Here we go!” Longarm said, wrapping his arms around the girl’s waist and lifting her up onto the back of the buckskin. As he did so, his hands slid up her belly, beneath her shirt, and he was aware of a momentary prodding in his loins when he felt the undersides of her warm breasts brush against his hands.

  He berated himself for the feeling. The girl had bee
n through hell and here he was getting a schoolboy’s thrill out of feeling her tits. Christ . . .

  “Can you follow me?” Longarm said.

  “Where are we going?”

  Longarm could hear the men yelling below the ridge though they’d stopped shooting for now.

  “As far away from here as we can get,” he told the girl, staring up at her.

  “I think you’d better take the reins,” she said, leaning forward and wrapping both her hands around her saddle horn. “I doubt I’d be able to keep up with you.”

  “All right.”

  Holding the girl’s reins, he stepped up onto the sorrel’s back and galloped away from the ridge.

  “Hold on good and tight!” he called back to her. “If I’m going too fast for you, yell and I’ll try to slow down!”

  He rode harder than he should have in the darkness, endangering both horses as well as himself and Casey. But he wanted to get away from the gang as quickly as he could and get the girl to relative safety, a quiet camp.

  He rode hard but not long. When he found what appeared a good place to bivouac up a narrow side canyon, west of the one in which Drummond’s bunch was camped, he stopped and helped the girl out of her saddle. She was light in his arms.

  He set her down before him, and she sagged toward him weakly. He grabbed her shoulders.

  “How you holdin’ up?” he asked her.

  She shook her head, lifted her chin. He’d only vaguely noticed how beautiful she was when he’d seen her in the dim cabin. Now her cornflower blue eyes seared through him, caused his throat to constrict. Her ­gold-­blond hair was thick and wavy.

  He bent down, picked her up in his arms, and set her on a rock near a blowdown tree. They were relatively sheltered here from the wind, but he could hear it howling along the crests of the two stony ridges towering darkly over him.

  He walked back to his horse, hauled out his rye bottle, and popped the cork. He held out the bottle.

  “Take a drink of that,” he said. “Put some warmth in your bones until I can build us a fire.”

  She took the bottle, staring up at him. The flaps of her shirt blew up, showing a glimpse of her pale belly in the moonlight angling into the canyon. “How much . . . did you see back there?”

  “Don’t worry,” Longarm said. “You did what you had to do to stay alive. No one in their right mind would hold it against you.”

  She lifted the bottle and took a sip.

  Longarm turned and walked over to the horses. He’d just unbuckled his sorrel’s latigo strap, when she said, “I only . . . laid with Drummond. Just Drummond. He kept me ­off-­limits to the others.”

  Longarm slipped the saddle from the sorrel’s back, and set it over another blowdown angling across several boulders. He didn’t like the way she was making him feel, talking like that. He didn’t want those images in his head. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, Casey.”

  She took another small sip from the bottle and then rested the bottle against her thigh. “I just feel . . . so dirty. . . . . fucked . . . the man who gunned my husband-to-be down in the main street of Arapaho. He raped me, and then I let him, and then I decided the only way to stay alive was to lay with him willingly.”

  “And then you shot him.” Longarm winked at her. “That’s A-one in my book. And young Ryan would be mighty proud of you, too.”

  “I still feel dirty. Just . . . so . . . awfully . . . dirty!”

  He glanced to where a thin stream ran down the gently sloping floor of the narrow canyon. “Water over there. Help yourself.” He removed a small cake of potash lye soap and a towel from his saddlebags, and handed both to her. “Go on over and wash. You’ll feel better. By the time you’re done, I’ll have a fire built.”

  She accepted the towel and the soap, brushing a finger across his thumb. “Thank you, Deputy Long.”

  “Call me Longarm.”

  “All right.” Casey offered a weak smile. “Longarm.”

  Casey’s horse whinnied. The sorrel followed suit. Both horses tightened their muscles and arched their tails. Longarm grabbed his rifle, cocked it, and stared down canyon.

  Now he could hear the clacks of horse hooves on the canyon’s stony floor. He raised the rifle but eased the tension in his trigger finger. The single rider wasn’t doing anything to conceal his approach.

  Puzzling . . .

  “Hello, the camp.” A familiar voice. A woman’s voice.

  Longarm scowled as the shadow of the horse and rider slid into the moonlight. He saw the young woman’s long, black hair blowing in the breeze.

  “Cynthia?”

  “Custis? Yes, it’s ­me—­don’t shoot.”

  As she approached, Longarm leaned his rifle against a rock and strode out to meet her, grabbing her horse’s bridle. “What in the hell are you doing here? I told you ­to—”

  “Cynthia!” Casey said, walking out away from the rock she’d been sitting on.

  “Oh, God, Casey!” Cynthia slipped lithely out of the saddle and ran over to engulf her friend in her arms. The two women hugged, rocking slowly together for a long time. Longarm watched them, holding the bridle of Cynthia’s horse, scowling.

  “Are you all right?” Cynthia asked, her voice muffled as the two women clung to each other.

  Casey shook her head, grunted. She lifted her head and looked at Cynthia. “They killed Ryan.”

  “I know, my love,” Cynthia said, sobbing. “I know. But you’re going to be all ­right—­aren’t you?” She placed her hands on both sides of her friend’s face. “Please tell me you are, Casey.”

  Casey nodded. “Yes, I’ll be all right. In time.” She glanced at Longarm. “But only because of your friend, Longarm.”

  Cynthia turned to the big lawman still staring in frustration at her. “Yes, he is handy to have around, isn’t he?”

  “I was just about to wash in the stream,” Casey said, holding up her towel and the small cake of soap. “Help me?”

  “Sure.”

  Cynthia glanced obliquely over her shoulder at Long­arm as she and her friend walked toward the dark line of the stream cutting down the middle of the canyon floor, at the base of the northern ridge. The water sparkled like diamonds in the moonlight.

  Longarm gave a caustic chuff and began unsaddling Cynthia’s horse.

  Chapter 14

  Longarm built a fire while the women bathed in the creek.

  He could hear them talking quietly, hear the water splashing softly, as he gathered wood and started a small fire in a ­well-­sheltered stone ring. A few times he heard Casey sob, but mostly the women talked, Cynthia consoling her friend, trying to quell the pain of all that she’d been through.

  He had the fire burning well, the camp set up, and coffee brewing, when the women returned. They sat down on the blankets that Longarm had rolled out, and gathered other blankets around their shoulders, staving off the chill. Longarm glanced at Cynthia. She did not return the look; she seemed to be sheepishly trying to avoid meeting his gaze.

  When the coffee was ready, Longarm poured them each a cup and added a liberal jigger of whiskey to each. He handed out the rest of the jerky, and they sat around the fire, nibbling the jerky and sipping the coffee. No one said anything. Casey stared sadly into the flames, as did Cynthia, who had one arm draped over her friend’s shoulders.

  Longarm took the time for only one cup of coffee. Then he grabbed his rifle and said, “I’m going to walk back down canyon a ways, see if we were followed.”

  “And if we were?” Cynthia said, looking at him now, her eyes wide.

  “Then we’re in trouble.”

  Longarm walked off, and he heard Cynthia say behind him, “He’s angry with me.”

  Casey said something but Longarm couldn’t make it out, because just then the wind howled over the top of the canyon. It
dwindled enough that he could hear Cynthia say, “Yeah, I think so,” in a wistful sort of way, looking toward him.

  She thought what? he vaguely wondered as he continued walking down the canyon.

  He didn’t think about it long. There were too many more important things on his mind.

  Carefully, he scouted the area around where the side canyon led off from the main one. Using a branch, he rubbed out his and the women’s tracks where they led into the side canyon. A good tracker could still find them by the light of day, but it would be much harder now at night. He was glad he didn’t smell the smoke from the fire he’d built.

  After a half hour of sitting and watching the main canyon from a boulder nest, and concluding that Drummond’s bunch wouldn’t follow him until tomorrow, he headed back to the fire. Cynthia had added wood to it. He found her lying against his own saddle while Casey slept curled on her side beneath her blankets on the fire’s opposite side, facing the flames.

  Cynthia had hers and his blankets pulled up to her chin.

  Longarm stopped near the fire, and looked down at her. She looked up at him, glanced at Casey who appeared sound asleep on the other side of the crackling flames, and pressed two gloved fingers to her rich lips.

  Longarm leaned his rifle against a rock, knelt beside her, and said quietly, “I oughta rip that skirt off of you and strap your naked ass for defying me like this.”

  She arched a brow. “We’d look silly if Casey woke ­up—­now, wouldn’t we?”

  Longarm glanced at Casey. “I doubt an earthquake would wake the poor girl.”

  “She’s my closest friend, Custis. I couldn’t ride back to Arapaho and leave her out here.”

  “You been following me the whole time?”

  “I lost you early yesterday until I heard the gunfire a while ago. You and Casey crossed the trail in front of me, and I followed.”

  “You’re a sneaky one, Miss Larimer.”

  Cynthia shook her head and glanced at her friend sleeping on the other side of the fire. “I just couldn’t leave her. I really thought you’d find her dead, however. Thank God you didn’t.”