by Tabor Evans
He wished he had a second horse. He’d have left Haven in a shaded arroyo and ridden on ahead himself astraddle her horse and come back for her later, but with Leyton out here, Longarm could very well have been throwing the Pinkerton agent to the wolves.
He couldn’t leave her alone out here on foot.
Mid-morning, he reined up suddenly, turned his head and cocked an ear, listening. Crackling sounded in the distance, straight ahead along the wash they’d started following when the floodwater had gone down. Few guns made a cacophony like the one he was hearing.
It was the Gatling gun opening up on the gold train.
“Oh, shit!” Haven said.
Longarm yelled, “Hi-yahh!” and ground his heels against the steeldust’s loins, putting the horse into a gallop. The horse was already tired, and Longarm couldn’t get much speed out of it. His heart hammered and twisted in his chest as he continued to hear the staccato, seemingly endless belching of the Gatling gun.
When the machine gun fell silent, there were a few cracks and booms of pistol and rifle fire. Men shouted and screamed, horses whinnied. Hooves thudded.
As he put the steeldust up the long, gravel-floored wash that sloped up to a pass dead ahead, Longarm thought he recognized Leyton’s jubilant voice rising above the din.
The steeldust was slowing and shambling uncertainly, blowing hard. Longarm could feel the pounding of the horse’s heart between his knees. It couldn’t go much farther. No point in killing the poor beast in trying to get at the most a dozen more yards out of it.
Longarm stopped the weak-kneed horse, and as he hiked his stiff right leg up over the horn and leaped to the ground, Haven frogged back over the horse’s tail, landing on her boot heels.
Longarm turned to her. “I’m gonna need one of your LeMats.”
She unholstered the pistol in her left-side holster, tossed it to him butt first. He snatched it out of the air, rolled the cylinder across his forearm, and turned to stare up the rocky slope. All of his senses were alive, ushering into the background all of his physical aches and miseries.
On the other side of the pass there was only silence now.
The guns had stopped clattering. The battle was over. After having heard Leyton’s voice, it wasn’t hard for Longarm to decide who the victor was.
He glanced at Haven. “Stay here.”
“Like hell!”
They jogged together up the wash. Only a little water remained, the rest having run down to the flat land or soaked into the wash’s gravelly bottom. There wasn’t much water around here, which meant there probably hadn’t been as much rain in this neck of the mountains as up at Holy Defiance, and the gold train had kept to its schedule.
And Leyton and Mercado and probably Vonda, as well, had been waiting for it.
The slope wasn’t steep but it was long, and the fatigued and badly bruised lawman was breathing hard when he and Haven reached the crest of the pass a half hour later. Bending forward, hands on his knees as he gulped air, he stared down the long slope of the wash before him. Horror clamped down hard on his belly, and he felt his knees weaken.
“We were about an hour too late to warn them,” Haven said, staring down the slope, her face grim beneath the brim of her hat.
Longarm took another deep breath and ran forward down the wash, staring ahead at the dozen or so bodies strewn across the wash’s floor a hundred yards away.
Leyton’s men had hit the gold wagon about halfway up the pass and where the rocky walls rose steeply around it. Here, the driver had no escape. He hadn’t been able to whip his mule team into a run ahead because of the steepness of the grade, and because the canyon wasn’t wide enough to turn what was likely a four- or six-mule hitch, he hadn’t been able to retreat, either.
Leyton’s men had likely scouted the canyon well and had known exactly where to set up the Gatling gun where it could cut down the gold guards most efficiently.
They’d done their job well, judging by the carnage before Longarm now, who ran heavy-footed, wincing, Haven jogging beside him. They’d also worked quickly. They were gone, leaving blood and bullet-torn bodies to mark their passing.
The gold wagon sat, its tongue drooping, in the middle of the wash and at the center of the carnage. It was a nondescript Murphy freighter that would draw little attention. No one would suspect it was being used to haul a fortune in gold.
A dirty cream canvas cover had been stretched over the box; the canvas now hung in bullet-torn tatters from the wagon’s ash bows. The mules that had pulled it were gone, likely used to pull the wagon that Leyton and Mercado had brought for transporting the gold back down the wash and, probably, south to Mexico, where the outlaws intended to live as rich men.
Only dead men were left here. Dead men and several dead horses.
A ways down the sloping wash beyond the wagon, three live horses stood cropping grass along the base of the wash’s east wall, reins dangling. The saddle of one of the horses hung down the mount’s side.
The riders were bleeding out on the floor of the wash—twisted and slack, some grimacing up at the sky, teeth bared beneath mustaches—likely the same expressions they’d worn when they’d started hearing the savage hiccupping of the Gatling just before the bullets had shredded them.
The freight team had relied too heavily on the secrecy of their route. The mine administrators hadn’t hired enough guards and the guards they had hired—likely ex-cowpunchers or lawmen—hadn’t scouted the trail ahead of them thoroughly enough. Most of these men—three appeared Mexican, were older, judging by the liberal gray in their hair. They’d gone soft and careless, and they’d paid for it with their lives.
Longarm stared off down the wash, his own fateful grimace creasing his muddy, blood-crusted, swollen-eyed face.
No sign of the outlaws. As he stepped around the dead men and the wagon, he saw where the gang had pulled their own wagon up behind the gold wagon. He saw the boot prints they’d made when they’d switched the gold bars from the gold wagon to their own, probably smaller wagon, which they’d likely turned around before they’d hitched the team to it.
A couple of the outlaws must be good with mules. They’d switched the team quickly to the first wagon, while the other men had switched the gold, and then fogged off down the wash at a fast clip, heading for the border.
Longarm kicked a rock in frustration, cursed loudly, hearing the reverberation of the epithet dwindle gradually between the canyon’s stony walls.
“Custis,” Haven said sympathetically, “don’t blame yourself. You didn’t even know this was going to happen before last night. There’s really not much either of us—both of us together—could have done to stop it. We’ll have to alert the nearest ranger outpost, the army…”
“I’m going after ’em, goddamnit.” Longarm continued to stare down the wash. The gang was probably not yet a mile away though he couldn’t see them because of the bending floor of Cuchilo Gulch.
He looked at the three horses standing thirty yards away. They still had their saddles. Carbines even jutted from their scabbards. Leyton had struck so quickly that some of the guards hadn’t even had time to unsheath their weapons.
Longarm turned to Haven, tossed her LeMat to her. She grabbed it with one hand, keeping her eyes on Longarm, shaking her head fatefully. “No.”
“They’ll be in Mexico soon, and then I’ll never find ’em again.”
“Custis, there must be twenty of them altogether.”
“I’ve faced long odds before. I don’t expect you to. You’re a detective. This is law work.”
Longarm slitted his good eye at her, knowing that he probably didn’t look very threatening, as beat up as he was. “You go on back to Denver, report to Billy Vail for me. Tell him to send an army, if he has one lyin’ around somewhere.”
Longarm walked over to one of the dead men. The man had three pistols holstered on his body. Longarm took two Colts chambered for the .44 rounds he carried in his shell belt. He also took a bandoli
er wrapped around the man’s waist, and slung it over his head and shoulder so that it slanted across his chest.
He twirled the Colts on his fingers, liking the weight of the guns, both of them being the older-model Colt Navy with seven-and-a-half-inch barrels and ivory grips. They’d do.
He holstered one, wedged the other behind his cartridge belts, and took the man’s hat. It was a black slouch hat, not all that different from his own Stetson, which he’d left back in the stable at Holy Defiance. Habitually adjusting the angle of the hat, he walked on down the wash toward the three horses.
The mounts eyed him apprehensively, sidled away as he approached. He cooed to one—a coyote dun with one white front leg—and managed to grab its reins while the others trotted a ways off. Longarm swung up into the saddle, slid the Winchester carbine from its saddle boot, and held it up to inspect it.
An 1869 model. The mine company hadn’t outfitted its guards with the newest model weapons—that much was obvious. Leave it to large, greedy companies to cut corners even at the detriment of the folks on whose shoulders the company stood. But the gun would do.
Longarm levered a round into the chamber, off cocked the hammer, and rested the barrel against his saddlebows.
As far as he was concerned, a war had just broken out in southern Arizona. He’d go down fighting it.
Chapter 33
Longarm did not say good-bye to Haven. He didn’t see the point. He knew he’d be seeing the beautiful detective again in just a few minutes.
One, she wasn’t accustomed to taking orders from anyone but Allan Pinkerton himself, much less from Custis P. Long. Two, she wouldn’t leave him out here to go up against twenty cold-blooded killers alone.
It wasn’t in her to do that.
All that Longarm felt when he heard her clomping up behind him on one of the other two horses—a rangy cremello that she, not surprisingly, looked sexily regal on—was a poignant but fleeting sadness that he’d likely gotten her killed now, too. But if he was going to go down fighting beside a woman, he’d just as soon it be Haven Delacroix, who had as much grit or more than most men he knew, including seasoned lawmen.
They rode down the winding wash, following the deep, narrow furrows of the wagon heavily loaded with gold. The tracks of many shod horses shone in the damp sand and gravel along both sides of the furrows. A good twenty riders. It didn’t look as though Leyton and Mercado had lost even one man in the ambush, which didn’t surprise Longarm, having seen where the bushwhack had occurred.
When he and Haven had ridden hard for a quarter hour, the sides of the canyon dropped abruptly. The main wash disappeared into the greater desert stretching washboard flat toward Mexico, while another, shallower arroyo twisted off to the southeast.
Near where Longarm and Haven reached the shallow gully angling between sparse mesquites, the wagon tracks as well as the accompanying horse tracks swerved from the gold thieves’ nearly due-south course and headed west.
“West?” Longarm said. “What the hell? I thought they’d be headed for Mexico.”
Stopping the coyote dun, he swung down from the saddle and walked around to give the tracks a closer scrutiny. As he did, a horse whinnied nearby, and Longarm wheeled, bringing up the carbine he held in his right hand, thumbing the hammer back.
Two riders were moving toward him and Haven from the east, trotting their horses, dust rising behind them. One was dark skinned but brightly dressed, and with the sensual curves of a female.
She was riding a black-and-white pinto pony. The other rider, a man, had long, gray hair and was riding a mule. Round-rimmed spectacles sagged on Kimble Dobson’s pale, hawklike nose beneath the narrow brim of a tall, black opera hat.
Haven slid, with lightning speed, both LeMats from their holsters.
Longarm said, “Hold on.”
Dobson and Cocheta stopped their horses, and Cocheta slid down from her Apache-style blanket saddle. She strode fluidly toward Longarm, her face expressionless, and placed her hands on his face. Gently, she caressed his torn, scabbed lips with her thumbs, frowning up at him questioningly. The neckerchief concealing the scar at her throat fluttered in the hot breeze.
Dobson spoke the girl’s question. “What the hell happened?”
Self-consciously glancing at Haven, Longarm removed one of Cocheta’s hands from his face, his other hand holding the carbine. To Dobson, he said, “Took a little swim.”
“We seen your horse in the stable this mornin’, after they left. Figured somethin’ was up. Cocheta wanted to ride out here, see if you got tangled up in the ambush on the gold train.”
Haven arched a brow at Longarm, planted a fist on her hip as she sat her fidgeting horse, and slid her eyes to the mute Apache girl staring obliquely up at the tall lawman. “You’ve been even busier than you let on, Marshal Long.”
To Dobson, Longarm said, “I was too late. They got the gold. I figured they were headed to Mexico, but…” He stepped away from Cocheta and walked over to where the two wagon furrows and shod hoof prints drifted off across the desert to the west. “There’s nothing that way, but…”
“The Double D,” Dobson finished for him.
Longarm stared toward the west, across the vast, rolling desert hemmed in on all sides by dun-colored mountains. In the far west rose the black peaks of the Black Puma Mountains, near the base of which sat the Double D headquarters.
“Why go there?” Haven said, echoing Longarm’s own confusion. “Why not just head on across the border?”
“There’s something they want at the Double D, apparently.” Longarm walked over to his coyote dun, picked up the reins, and switched his gaze from Cocheta, who stood near him, to Dobson. “You two go on back to Holy Defiance. There’s gonna be one hell of a dustup out here.”
Dobson shook his head and looked at Cocheta, who stared at Longarm and hardened her jaws, also shaking her head slowly. “You’re only two against twenty,” Dobson said. “We’ll lend a hand. I’m right good with a rifle, as I fought the Sioux up on the Plains. And Cocheta…she’s been waitin’ to get a chunk of Ranger Leyton.”
“Leyton?”
“He was the cavalry officer who led the soldiers into her family’s camp, killed her folks, and cut her throat. He left her to die. Only, she didn’t die. But she harbors one powerful hate. Been bidin’ her time. That’s the way of the Apache. They can wait a long time for just the right time to cut a man’s throat.” Dobson’s thin lips stretched a dark smile. “She thinks that time is up.”
Longarm looked at Cocheta, who stared back at him. “Does Leyton know?”
Dobson shook his head. “Don’t have the faintest idea. Don’t recognize her, I reckon. Him and his men were likely too drunk at the time…on tiswin. He was known for that—gettin’ drunk on the Apaches’ own brew and killin’ ’em. Cocheta was only twelve. Now, of course, she’s grown up, filled out.”
Longarm moved to her. He saw that she wore a green sash, and behind the sash was a long-barreled Remington revolver and a horn-handled bowie knife.
The lawman placed a hand on her arm and squeezed it. “This is law business. You and Dobson go on back to Holy Defiance. I aim to take down Jack Leyton if I have to die doin’ it.” He shook his head slowly. “It’ll get done. You can rest assured he won’t see another sunrise.”
She shook her head and grinned savagely. She walked back to her pony, swung up into the saddle, and batted her moccasin-clad heels again the horse’s flanks. She and the pony trotted past Longarm, crossing the wash and following the wagon tracks to the west.
“Shit,” Longarm said with a sigh, stepping into the saddle. “Looks to me like a lot of folks are eager to die today.”
He reined his horse around and booted the coyote dun into a gallop, heading after Cocheta, Dobson and Haven putting their own mounts into gallops behind him.
They rode hard, chewing up the ground behind the wagon that Longarm was sure wasn’t far ahead. Haven rode beside him, Dobson and Cocheta falling in behind but
staying close. Longarm kept his gaze on the bristling desert around him, wary of Leyton sending rear scouts and possibly ambushing him.
The wagon couldn’t be moving very fast. He should be able to catch up to it well before the gang reached the Double D headquarters, if that was in fact what they were aiming for.
He slowed his pace, raising his right hand. The others slowed their mounts, as well, scowling at him curiously. He didn’t say as much, because he was going over strategies for taking out Leyton and Mercado in his head, but he knew that with all the brush and rock out here, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead, there was a good possibility they could ride right up on the gang before they saw them. That would get them killed for certain sure.
Longarm didn’t want to encounter them before he was ready. Even then he was likely to get himself, Haven, Dobson, and Cocheta killed deader than hell…
Longarm reined in the dun as he studied the terrain ahead of him. The others stopped around him. He dismounted, rummaged in a saddlebag pouch until he found a spyglass. He carried the spyglass to a knoll capped in rock and gingerly climbed to the top of the rock pile, moving slowly and stiffly.
At the top of the formation, he stood tall and extended the glass. A couple of miles ahead, several rocky bluffs stood like a jumble of adobe-colored dominoes. He looked around and then returned his attention to the rocky bluffs. He couldn’t be sure from this vantage, but they appeared to be the same bluffs in which Vonda’s man had tried to ambush him yesterday morning—sent out by the woman after she’d enjoyed his bed.
Lusty bitch.
If so, maybe Longarm could use them in a similar fashion. If he and his small band could reach them before the gold wagon did, that was.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Longarm looked over to see Haven atop a hill on the other side of Dobson and Cocheta from him. She stood staring in the same direction he was, holding one hand up near her hat brim, shading her eyes. Longarm said, “What am I thinking, if you’re so smart.”
She turned to him, cocked her mouth in a lopsided smile, and nodded slowly. “I know what you’re thinking.”
