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

by Tabor Evans

  “Don’t mention it.” Longarm looked behind and between several boulders. “Where did you say the gold was headed when the stage was hit?”

  “A bank in Tucson.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t believe it’s in the report, was it?” she asked. “You read the same one I did. If my superiors know, they didn’t share the information with me.”

  Longarm kept walking up the draw. “You sound testy. Was it the girl comment?”

  She stopped and gave him a sidelong look, her eyes shaded from the blazing sun by her hat brim. “I could have told you that you have mighty poor hearing for a lawman, but I didn’t, did I?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You couldn’t hear that killer walking up behind you?”

  Longarm felt a colicky burn in his gut. “He musta been particularly quiet. Besides, I was hearing the thuds of the horse of that first hombre—the one with the buffalo cannon.” He felt injured by her insult mostly because he knew she was right—he should have heard the second man walking up behind him, and he was damn lucky the man hadn’t just shot him from a distance. “Remember, Miss Fancy Britches, I’ve saved your hide a time or two myself.”

  She stopped and looked back at him again, blinking slowly. “Once.”

  “Twice. Once in Jerkwater, once in Broken Jaw.”

  She laughed caustically. “I handled myself well both times!”

  “Sure, but only because I culled the herd o’ them that was gunnin’ for ya. Only they wouldn’t have gunned ya till they’d had their fun with you.”

  She turned to face him straight on from several yards up the rocky wash, between two boulders slanting like tables with missing legs. “Those were not the only two times men have tried to have their ways with me out here, Marshal Long. I’m accustomed to it. I expect it and am always prepared for it.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re always prepared to take on so many by your lonesome. Next time that many decide to skin your panties off your purty legs, I’ll just let ’em!”

  “Quit calling my legs ‘purty’.”

  “Pretty, then. What’s the difference?”

  She raised her voice, and despite her usual restraint, it trembled slightly with barely controlled emotion. “I wasn’t mocking your uncultivated mode of speaking just then. What I meant was, I’d rather you stopped speaking about my legs or any other part of my body.”

  “Your legs are damn purty, and I’ll mention ’em any time if I feel I need to in the course of defending myself from your harangues, Agent Delacroix!”

  Longarm stared down his arm and extended a finger at her, as though he were aiming a rifle barrel. His face was flushed. He felt it grow even hotter when she just stared at him with mild amusement and then chuckled with even more hilarity.

  Shaking her head, she turned away and continued walking up the wash.

  Longarm lowered his arm, feeling ridiculous. He’d let himself be lured into her female trap, had been made to look foolish. And, somehow—he wasn’t quite sure how—she’d won the argument.

  No wonder he had no intention of ever letting himself get hitched.

  Well, since he couldn’t get any more trapped than he was: “And your tits are mighty nice, too!”

  She ignored him and kept walking. He stood in place for a time, let himself cool down despite the stifling heat burning through his hat to seer the top of his head, and then continued looking around at the rocks and boulders and clumps of tough, wiry brown brush.

  He’d just inspected the purple shadows between two stacked boulders at the ravine’s stony southern ridge, and was about to continue on up the wash, when he stopped suddenly. Haven stood at the far end of the stacked boulders, looking at him with a grim, meaningful cast to her gaze. She held her hands straight down at her sides.

  “You come back to thank me for the compliment?” he asked her snidely.

  She shook her head, took a step back, and half turned to indicate the wash beyond her. Longarm automatically brought his rifle down from his shoulder as he brushed past her and continued on up the draw, letting his right arm brush the side of the stacked boulders, and looked across their updraw side.

  A man lay in the shadows, arms stretched nearly straight above his hatless head. His ankles and boots, worn to the color and texture of older moccasins, were crossed.

  Longarm moved closer to the body, saw the thin, dark brown hair combed to the left, the ginger-colored eyes staring through half-closed lids. The man wore a grim smile on his mouth mantled with a brown, dragoon-style mustache. Around his neck was a bloody green neckerchief.

  Behind the tightly wound cloth, a long, gaping wound shone. His throat had been cut. There didn’t appear any other wounds.

  Longarm heard Haven’s boots on the gravel behind him, saw her shadow in the corner of his left eye. She came up beside him and stared down at the dead man.

  Longarm looked at the Arizona Ranger’s badge pinned to the man’s cream cotton shirt, partly concealed by a suspender strap. “Matt Sullivan.”

  “Captain Leyton’s likely around here somewhere, too.”

  Longarm doffed his hat and ran a weary, frustrated hand down his face. “Likely.”

  Haven dropped to a knee beside the dead man and pressed the back of her hand against his cheek with surprising tenderness. Her voice was matter-of-fact, however, when she said, “He hasn’t been dead for more than an hour. Wasn’t bushwhacked, though. Disarmed first, then killed. Your dead blind man must have slit his throat with one of those knives of his.”

  Longarm shook his head. “Damn. If we’d gotten here an hour earlier…”

  Haven straightened. “Someone doesn’t want anyone looking for that gold. Which must mean it’s still here.”

  “Yeah, well, you worry about the gold. Me—I’m gonna worry about findin’ out who killed Sullivan and the others. Jack Leyton, most likely, too.”

  “Since we’re on Double D land…”

  “Yeah, we’d best load up these dead men. I’m gonna go pay a visit to the Double D headquarters.”

  She scowled. “And me?”

  “You best hole up out here. Not right here, but out here somewhere safe.”

  “I’m riding to the Double D headquarters with you, Marshal Long.”

  “No place for a woman. Specially one such as you.” Longarm let his eyes flick to her breasts.

  She gave him a blandly stubborn look, her eyes faintly smiling.

  Longarm blew a long sigh, switching his gaze to the dead Matt Sullivan and then back to his partner.

  There was no point in arguing with such a woman. “Then I hope you’re ready for another fight, Miss Delacroix. A pitched battle, too, since ole Whip Azrael likely has a dozen or so men on his roll. Well-armed ones, too, judging by those we’ve met so far.”

  Chapter 21

  Longarm and Agent Delacroix looked up and down the wash for Captain Jack Leyton and/or Ranger Sullivan’s horse but saw no sign of either.

  They did, however, find the horse of the man whom Haven had sent to heaven…or wherever pale-eyed bushwhackers went when they gave up the ghost. It was tethered in the crease between the hill on which the dead ambusher lay and the next rise south—the one over which the dead man’s partner with the Big Fifty had fled.

  Longarm tied both dead men over the back of the grullo gelding, which to Longarm’s eye appeared to have some Spanish barb in it, owing to its deep flank, its short, strong loin and well-shaped head with liquid blue eyes. It wore no brand, but the lawman was still betting that the dead man was a Double D rider.

  Maybe the horse had belonged to the dead man and was not part of the rancher’s remuda. It didn’t have to be.

  If so, when Longarm delivered the dead man to the Double D headquarters, he’d likely find the man with the Big Fifty, too. He was looking forward to having a discussion with him as well as his boss, Whip Azrael. They had many things to discuss, Longarm and the rancher and the Big Fifty–wielding ambushe
r. Including the gold, which Longarm and Haven had given up looking for after they’d found the dead ranger.

  It had been getting on in the day, and looking for the gold up that twisting canyon was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, especially with the dark afternoon shadows bleeding out from the stony walls.

  Longarm and Agent Delacroix followed the stage road running parallel to Defiance Wash up into higher country marked by green foliage, including bunchgrass and gama grass, growing amongst the craggy, sun-bleached bluffs and mesas that Longarm assumed were part of the Black Puma Mountains. In the late afternoon, they crested a pass sheathed in pines and aspens, and the air was fresh and aromatic with the tang of pine resin and sage.

  As they dropped down the pass, the wash became a shallow stream, the water looking lime green as it rippled over the pale rocks between stands of trees and leafy shrubs. After drinking, washing their faces, and refilling their canteens, they continued down the pass, dropping only for a couple of miles before large, dark, formidable-looking peaks appeared ahead, seeming to block the riders’ westward passage.

  The stage road forked, one tine leading northwest around a humpbacked jog of low mountains turning spruce green and copper now in the west-angling light. The fork was marked with a wooden arrow announcing: BENSON 45 MI.

  The other tine meandered southwest toward the high, menacing black peaks. It was marked: AZRAEL DOUBLE D—3 MI.

  Longarm and Haven took the southwest fork and they soon found themselves in rolling, high-desert country, with two riders dropping down out of the hills to the north. They were coming fast and yelling, though Longarm couldn’t hear them above the clomping of the galloping mounts.

  Stopping the roan as well as the barb that he trailed by its bridle reins, Longarm slid his Winchester out of its boot, cocked the weapon one-handed, and rested the barrel across his saddlebows. Haven glanced at him edgily as the two men galloped down out of the hills, their horses’ thuds and snorts growing louder, pale dust rising.

  They came through a crease between the last knobs and reined up in the trail before Longarm and Haven. They both wore bandanas over their sun-leathered faces and rough trail garb, a couple of pistols each. Sheathed carbines were strapped to their saddles, both of which wore the Double D brand on their left withers.

  The lawman didn’t say anything as the two men looked him and Haven over. Finally, one rode back behind Longarm and drew rein beside the barb. He looked at the two dead men and then at Longarm, who squeezed the neck of his cocked Winchester.

  The Double D rider’s eyes flicked to the rifle resting across Longarm’s saddle.

  “The Azraels don’t cotton to company.”

  “They’ll cotton to ours. I’m a deputy U.S. marshal, and she’s a Pinkerton. One of the dead men behind me I’m guessin’ is one of yours, in which case I got a bone to pick with Whip Azrael, because the stiff’s partner tried to drill a fist-sized wad of lead through us both. The other’s a dead Arizona Ranger. I’m guessin’ he was killed by the same men.”

  The man behind Longarm rode back up to where his partner waited.

  The two men conferred too quietly for Longarm to hear. After a minute, they regarded Longarm and Haven obliquely, jerked their chins toward the trail ahead, and then kicked their horses into dusty lopes.

  Longarm glanced at Haven, cocking a brow, silently informing her that now was the time to hang back if she’d had a change of heart about riding into a possible vipers’ nest. If she understood, she didn’t let on. They both touched heels to their horse’s flanks, heading up the trail and eating the dust of their guides.

  After a half hour, a ranch portal appeared amongst the chaparral covering the relatively flat canyon bottom they were traversing. The Double D brand was burned into the portal’s thick plank crossbar adorned with several sets of deer and elkhorns. Beside the portal stood another sign warning: STRANGERS UNWELCOME.

  As he rode beneath the crossbar, trailing the barb and the dead men, Longarm saw the ranch headquarters sprawled along the trail that soon became a broad, dusty yard—the house on the left, bunkhouse and several other outbuildings including a couple of barns and a maze of interconnected corrals on the right. There was a round breaking corral on the near right, constructed of ocotillo branches.

  Half a dozen men stood around the corral, leaning on the top poles and watching a hatless cowboy riding a bucking black bronc in hard-pounding circles. The onlookers, a couple of whom sat on the wide wooden gate, whooped and yelled and offered advice.

  There were Anglos as well as Mexicans and one black man, who sat on a rock near the gate, a boot hiked on his knee, carefully building a quirley. He wore a red-and-white-checked shirt and sun-bleached sombrero. As the two strangers rode in with their guides, the black man half turned his head toward the others and moved his lips. The others swung their heads around to peer at the newcomers.

  A shaggy dog with some German shepherd blood came running out from the direction of the house, barking wickedly and showing its fangs. A small, wizened figure in blue jeans walked out of a stone portal fronting the house and a shaded front patio and garden. A raspy voice of indeterminate sex yelled, “Rascal!” and the dog dropped instantly belly down on the ground but keeping its aggressive gaze on the strangers.

  The denim-clad figure in a black shirt despite the heat, wearing a straw sombrero, continued to stride a little gimpily toward Longarm and Haven. The raspy, sexless voice said, “Who in the hell are you, and good Lord—what the hell are you packin’, mister?”

  One of the two guides canted his head at Longarm and said, “Law, Mrs. Azrael.”

  Missus, huh? Longarm thought he detected a couple of nubbin’ breasts behind the black shirt and knotted red neckerchief, but the rest of the person looked all male. The face beneath the sombrero was like a giant raisin. Black hair was pulled back tight beneath the hat. Longarm thought that her head might come up to his cartridge belt, but only because of the high heels of her child-sized stockmen’s boots.

  “Who’s he packin’ on the hoss there?” Mrs. Azrael said, scrutinizing the barb with her coal-black eyes.

  “Says one’s a ranger.”

  “I’ll speak for myself,” Longarm said angrily. “One’s a dead ranger. The other man I got a nagging suspicion is one of yours, Mrs. Azrael. He tried to kill me. The other tried to kill both myself and my partner, Agent Delacroix, with a buffalo gun.”

  He looked around the men now facing him from the corral. The bronc rider had dismounted and was watching from over the fence, the bronc standing slouched, reins drooping, its sides moving in and out as it breathed, in the corral’s center.

  “I’d like to palaver with the son of a bitch out in your wood shed,” Longarm added. “Your husband, too, since he hired ’em.”

  Mrs. Azrael looked at the men standing by the breaking corral and said in her toneless, nasal wheeze: “Stretch!”

  One of the men—tall, with a funnel-brimmed hat and pinto-hide vest—stepped away from the corral and walked over to the barb. He pulled the dead men’s heads up by their hair, scrutinizing each slack face, then let the heads slap down against the barb’s ribs.

  Stretch turned to Mrs. Azrael and hooked his thumbs behind the belt of his batwing chaps. “The ranger was here a few days ago. Him and the other one, Leyton. Askin’ about the five we planted over on Defiance Wash. The other one, the Mex, I wouldn’t know from Adam’s off-ox.”

  “You never seen him before?” Longarm said skeptically.

  Stretch turned his long face toward the lawman, scowling belligerently. “You heard me.”

  “Who around here carries a Big Fifty?”

  “No one,” Stretch said after a short, menacing pause, holding his glowering stare on the lawman.

  Longarm could hear several of the other men speaking amongst themselves to his right. They were getting worked up. The black man sat on the rock, smoking and glaring toward the newcomers and their grisly cargo.

  Longarm tur
ned to Stretch, hooking his thumb over his shoulder. “That bastard and the one with the Big Fifty fired on us when we were on Double D range. Now, why would they do that?”

  Stretch stepped toward Longarm, letting his arms hang loose at his sides. “You callin’ me a liar?”

  “Get your back down, Stretch,” Mrs. Azrael said with an amused air, standing a few feet from Longarm with her fists on her hips. “If you’re a lawman, how come I don’t see a badge?”

  “Badges make good targets. I keep mine in my wallet.” Longarm reached into the inside pocket of his brown frock coat and pulled out the black wallet of worn cowhide.

  He opened it up to reveal the old, tarnished moon-and-star badge he’d been carrying for years. Mrs. Azrael moved in closer to scrutinize the nickeled tin and then looked at Longarm with her black eyes set deep in leathery sockets. She looked past him at Haven.

  “She’s a Pinkerton?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A girl?”

  Haven said affably, “Since gaining the age of twenty-three, I’d prefer to be called a woman.”

  That seemed to win the leathery ranch woman’s heart. “Don’t blame ya bit, miss. Don’t blame ya a bit.”

  “I’m Long,” Longarm said. “This is Agent Delacroix.”

  “You both look hot and dusty. Miss Delacroix, I bet you’d like to freshen up. Marshal Long, you look like you could use a drink.”

  Haven might have won the old ranch woman’s heart, but Mrs. Azrael hadn’t won his yet. “Mr. Azrael around?”

  “Oh, he’s around. Upstairs napping at the moment. I’ll bring him down later, and you can talk to him for all the good you think it’ll do.” Mrs. Azrael beckoned. “Come on. Light and give them hosses a blow. You’re too far out in the high an’ rocky to head elsewhere this late in the day. You’re welcome to spend the night here at the Double D, and we’ll do what we can to answer your questions, though somethin’ tells me you’re not gonna ride out of here any more satisfied than that dead ranger and Captain Leyton were two days ago.”

  Longarm swung down from his saddle, and Mrs. Azrael called for a few of the other men to tend the horses and to bury the two cadavers. The lawman had just started to follow Mrs. Azrael and Haven toward the ranch house, when Stretch stepped up to Longarm and said tightly, “Just so’s you know, lawman or not, I don’t like bein’ called a liar.”