by Tabor Evans
Dobson shuttled his incredulous gaze between them. “What’s he thinking?”
“He’s much cleverer than he looks,” Haven said.
Longarm climbed slowly, carefully down from the ancient pile of boulders that had been dropped there by some long-defunct volcano. “Come on,” he said, returning his spyglass to his saddlebags and the stepping up into the leather. “I’ll show you.”
Galloping hard despite the thunderclaps that the rough ride evoked in his tender head, Longarm led his riders in a broad semicircle around the gold train and its escort of armed killers.
Of course, he didn’t know where the wagon was exactly, because he couldn’t see it for all the brush and low buttes, but he rode far enough south of where he thought it was that his chance of running into it was minimal—and then only if the outlaws made a radical course change.
He and the others came up on the rocky bluffs from the south, heading straight for the rugged formation. A narrow arroyo led into them, and he followed it until the arroyo became little more than a rock- and cactus-strewn gulch, impassable by horseback.
The small party left its mounts in the shade of a couple of paloverde trees, then grabbed their canteens and arms and walked up into the bluffs. When he came to the north side of the formation, he stopped on a flat-topped boulder about halfway up the bluff from the ground and stared down at the gap through which he’d been riding when Vonda’s man had ambushed him.
Below and to his left was where his .44 rounds had deposited the dead man. The man himself was gone, though his hat remained hung up on a tuft of Spanish bayonet, and the rocks around were splattered with his blood. The man himself had likely been dragged off by a mountain lion.
Longarm inspected the crease below and the rocky bluff face rising on the other side of it. The gap was about seventy yards wide, and it was the only way through this rocky neck of the desert. Leyton and the other outlaws had to be headed for it.
“Ambush, eh?” said Dobson.
Longarm nodded. He studied the desert to the west, saw what appeared a murky mirage, but there was enough color in it to tell him it was most likely the wagon and its escorts heading toward him.
He regarded Dobson and Cocheta standing to his far left. They looked at him with grim expectance. Haven stood just off his left shoulder. “You all spread out along the side of this bluff. Hide good in the rocks. Don’t let them see you until the wagon’s straight below you.”
“We just gonna start shootin’?” Dobson asked. “Shoot ’em like ducks on a millpond?”
“Just like they did the mine company guards, that’s right.”
Dobson racked a round in his Henry rifle. “I like that.”
Cocheta’s copper irises glinted hungrily.
Longarm said, “I’m gonna go on over to the other side. We’ll catch them in a cross fire. No one shoot before I do. But after that, cut loose—tear down as many of those sons o’ bitches as you can.”
“You stay here, Custis,” Haven told him. “No point in you moving around any more than you have to. No offense, but you look half dead.”
She started down the slope with the rifle she’d taken off one of the dead gold guards. She stopped and turned back to Cocheta. “We’ll both go over there, we women,” she said with a cold, snide smile.
Cocheta looked at her. The Apache girl glanced at Longarm, turned back to Haven, hiked a shoulder, and canted her toward it, as if to say, “Why not?”
She followed Haven down the slope, both women moving gracefully, skipping from one boulder to the other. Sometimes Longarm wondered if Agent Delacroix didn’t have a little Indian blood in her herself.
At the bottom of the slope, they ducked low, scouted the desert to the west, and then ran crouching across the canyon. When they got to the other side, they began climbing quickly, spreading out until they’d both holed up in separate niches in the rocks about halfway up the bluff.
Longarm glanced at Dobson. “Shoot true.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” the saloon owner said, thumbing his glasses up his nose and moving off to Longarm’s right, weaving amongst the boulders, some of which were as large as small cabins.
Longarm settled into a near cleft in the rocks. The bottom of one boulder slanted over him. The side of one slanted on his right. A straight, low wall of rock abutted him on the left. He poked his head out of his pigeonhole to cast his gaze to the west.
He could see two lead riders now, both men holding rifles barrel up on their thighs. The wagon was behind them, being led by mules. The other riders flanked the wagon, spread out across the horse trail they were following.
They were within a hundred yards now, closing quickly. Longarm could hear the hoof thuds and the banging and rattling of the buckboard wagon that appeared to have a cream tarpaulin stretched over its box, concealing the gold and, most likely, the Gatling gun.
The men were talking loudly and laughing, apparently confident they weren’t being followed.
Or that they were riding into a trap.
At least, Longarm hoped it was a trap for the outlaws and not for himself, Haven, Cocheta, and Dobson.
He turned to the opposite slope and saw the two women crouched amongst the rocks with their rifles. He waved his own rifle slowly above his head, giving the “get ready” signal.
Chapter 34
Longarm doffed his hat and edged a peek around the slanting rock to his right.
The gang was close enough now that Longarm could see the distinguishing features of each rider. One of the lead riders was the black man, Tallahassee Smith, in the red-and-black-checked shirt, red neckerchief, and funnel-brimmed Stetson that Longarm had seen near the breaking corral when he and Haven had first ridden into the Double D headquarters.
The big, burly man riding to the black man’s right was Fuentes in his black, steeple-crowned sombrero, holding his Sharps Big Fifty across his saddlebows. The two were talking as they rode into the crease between the bluffs, about twenty feet ahead of the mules pulling the wagon. Longarm couldn’t hear what they were saying because of the wagon’s clattering and the team’s clomping hooves.
Ex-ranger Jack Leyton and Vonda rode in the wagon, Vonda driving, shaking the reins over the team’s backs.
Leyton leaned back with his elbows on the top of the seat back, boots propped on the dashboard, smoking a fat cigar and grinning. Longarm could see a glimpse of the man’s large, white teeth beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache and long-angling hawk’s nose, the glint of his self-satisfied eyes beneath the brim of his high-crowned Stetson.
Longarm pulled his head back into his niche, waiting for the outlaws to draw near enough for him to pick out a target and to take that first shot. Leyton would go first. Then…who? Vonda?
Why not? Her being a woman didn’t make her any less than a conniving, cold-blooded killer.
He’d pick Mercado out of the gang, and, if one of Longarm’s cohorts hadn’t taken him down by then, he’d make sure the Mexican bandito would be the next to snuggle with diamondbacks. Then the snake’s three heads will have been sliced off, removing the gang’s teeth.
Longarm just hoped that his partners would wait for his signaling shot before they cut loose with their own rifles. One misstep here, when they were so badly outgunned, would cost them their lives.
The clomping of horse and mule hooves grew louder. The wagon’s rattling grew more raucous, echoing off both rocky butte faces. The outlaws were talking in laughing, jubilant tones.
No, they thought they’d gotten off scot-free. And they were headed for the Double D. Why?
Maybe they thought it would be safer to hole up there for a while than to head across the border with a slow-traveling wagon loaded with gold, where they’d likely draw the attention of some wandering band of rurales. When word about the theft of the gold got out, they’d also likely be hunted by every bandito gang in northern Sonora and Chihuahua.
Longarm supposed that with the Gatling gun, the outlaws would have a fairly
easy tome of dispatching Stretch’s loyal segment of ranch hands.
Or…was there something at the Double D that Vonda had discovered and wanted?
In the crease below Longarm’s niche, the rattling and thudding grew louder. Tallahassee Smith came into view, straight down the slope from Longarm. Fuentes rode on the other side of the black man.
Smith carried a Winchester Yellow Boy rifle with a buffalo head carved into the rear stock. And then the mules slid from right to left in the lawman’s vision field, and a second later he could see Vonda and Jack Leyton sitting the wagon’s wooden seat that jerked on metal springs.
Longarm’s heart beat slowly, calmly, his hands steady. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He knew exactly how to play it.
He’d just raised his rifle and started to plant his Winchester’s sights on the left cheek of Jack Leyton, just beneath the upcurved brim of his hat, when a rifle barked below him and to his right. A rider who’d been trotting his horse up on Longarm’s side of the wagon—it was Mercado—flew down the far side of his horse with a shrill yell. His head slammed against the top of the wagon’s side panel with a cracking, smacking noise, and then he sagged down beneath his horse, his foot apparently hung up in his right stirrup.
Jack Leyton’s voice bellowed, “Amm-buuush!”
But by then all the riders were sitting straight in the saddles and raising their rifles. At the same time Vonda shook the reins over the mules’ backs, screaming, “Giddyup, you sons o’ bitches!”
Deciding his next target had to be the wagon driver, so she couldn’t get away with the gold, Longarm planted a bead on Vonda and fired. He watched her buck sideways with a shrill yelp as his slug punched through her upper left arm.
Longarm rose to his feet and continued firing, levering his Winchester as fast as he could, spraying the wagon box with .44-caliber lead. He couldn’t see Leyton now because the wagon had passed Longarm’s position, rattling off down the crease, but he thought he heard the turncoat ranger bellow as the other member of Longarm’s party opened up with their rifles.
“Goddamnit, Dobson!” Longarm couldn’t help taking the time to shout. “I told you to wait for my signal!”
“Mercado seen me!” Dobson bellowed in reply as smoke from his Yellow Boy wafted up from his niche in the rocks.
He was a good shot, because three riders trying to check down their prancing horses were thrown out of their saddles. Longarm resumed firing, as well, drilling one rider through his knee and hammering a round through the ear of another man taking aim at Haven on the other side of the canyon.
Return fire barked and screeched off the rocks around Longarm and Dobson.
As Longarm paused and dropped to a knee to punch fresh shells through his rifle’s loading gate, he saw three of the gold thieves wheel their frightened horses and gallop back the way they’d come. At the same time, Vonda was whipping the mule team off to the west, the wagon bouncing and fishtailing and kicking up a thick, billowing dust cloud.
Longarm pumped a fresh shell into the Winchester’s breech and cast a quick glance toward the opposite slope. Haven and Cocheta were both hunkered atop boulders and firing at the handful of remaining riders in the crease, a few still on horseback, a few hunkered behind rocks and returning fire at their ambushers.
The killers were bellowing at each other as they returned fire, thoroughly shocked to find themselves in such a predicament, the tables turned, their brethren dying bloody around them.
Longarm’s sundry physical grievances had died down considerably under the hot coursing of his blood through his veins. He couldn’t help grinning wickedly now as he descended the bluff, leaping from rock to rock and firing his Winchester from his hip.
Another killer—this one the cadaverous Jake Wade, Stretch Azrael’s so-called segundo—went down hard, turning and triggering his own rifle into the air above his head.
Haven and Cocheta each accounted for two more outlaws, the murderous bandits blown out, screaming or cursing, from behind their covering boulders, blood splashing their shirt and leather vests.
By the time Longarm had leaped to the bottom of the canyon, automatically punching fresh shells through his loading gate, all the outlaws were down and either lying still in death or writhing as they died. One man was crawling back in the direction from which the caravan had come.
It was Mercado.
Cocheta was just then leaping from a boulder to the canyon bottom. She walked coolly over to Mercado, stepped around in front of him, blocking his progress. The Mexican bandito leader looked up at her, his shaggy hair hanging down over his blood-streaked face.
He screamed in Spanish for the girl to spare him.
She punctuated the plea with a bullet from her Spencer carbine.
Longarm looked around, saw that the other outlaws were no longer a threat, the last living one expiring quickly, quivering in a pool of his own blood near his dead horse. Haven leaped to the floor of the canyon, looking around as she reloaded one of her LeMats.
“The gold,” she said.
Longarm was staring to the west. The wagon was dwindling into the distance.
“She won’t get far.”
He’d wounded Vonda and probably Jack Leyton, as well. Leyton must have stayed on the wagon, because Longarm didn’t see the turncoat ranger anywhere around the canyon. The lawman took long strides westward and reached for the reins of one of the riderless horses standing around, wide-eyed and jittery from the fusillade.
Haven ran up behind him, ran down a horse of her own, and swung into the saddle. Together, they galloped up the trail, following the twin wagon furrows, both hunched low in their saddles.
Longarm could feel the malicious little man with the hammer in his head again, but only dimly, beneath the more violently pounding desire to run Jack Leyton down and either kill him or throw him into a federal prison where he’d have a good, long time to reflect on his transgressions. There was nothing more cowardly than a lawman gone bad…
His adopted horse tore up the trail, head down. He and Haven ripped through the chaparral, following the wagon furrows as they rose and fell over the low, sandy swells, creosote shrubs and mesquites occasionally scraping against Longarm’s legs. They came around a jutting thumb of rock, and the wagon was just ahead, thundering westward.
“Look out!” Longarm yelled as Jack Leyton, lying atop the canvas stretched over the top of the wagon box, triggered a Winchester.
Amidst the wagon’s banging and clattering, the rifle’s crack sounded little louder than a branch snapping. Dust puffed from the maw once, twice, three, four times. Haven yelped and jerked sideways in her saddle. Longarm turned to her just as she twisted around and fell down her saddle’s far side, hit the ground, and rolled.
Longarm raised his Winchester as Leyton fired at him once more, and cut loose with his own rifle, taking his reins in his teeth and triggering and levering as he rode. When he’d fired his ninth round and the rifle’s hammer had pinged on an empty chamber, he tossed the gun away and watched Leyton’s slack body bounce over the side of the wagon.
The ex-ranger struck the ground and rolled.
Longarm could hear the man groaning as he continued to roll madly, limbs akimbo, out away from the hammering wagon before piling up against a rock and a spindly desert shrub. At the same time, the mules pulling the wagon turned sharply to avoid a jumble of boulders ahead.
The wagon fishtailed abruptly, slammed nearly sideways into the mound of rock. Vonda gave a high-pitched, agonized scream as she flew up and over the rock mound while the wagon disintegrated behind her.
She rolled as the mules tore loose of the hitch and continued galloping, still strapped together, to the south.
Longarm jerked back on his horse’s reins, leaped out of the saddle, and ran back along the trail toward where he’d seen Haven fall. He came upon her just as she was climbing to her knees, clamping one hand over her arm. Her hat was gone and her hair was a mess, but her eyes were all business.
&nb
sp; “Don’t worry about me, Custis. What about Vonda and the gold?”
Longarm shook his head as he reached her. “I don’t take orders from you, Agent Delacroix. How bad you hit?”
“Ah, hell,” she said, mimicking him with a smile. “I’ve cut myself worse shaving.”
Longarm inspected her arm, then removed her neckerchief, wrapped it around her arm, pulled her to him, and kissed her. It was a wild, lingering kiss. He was damn glad she was alive. Losing such a sand rattler of a female as her would have grieved him no end.
When he pulled away from her, he braced himself for a slap. But she merely stared up at him with a smoky cast to her hazel eyes. “That’s a little unprofessional—don’t you think, Marshal Long?” She drew a breath, causing her breasts to rise sharply beneath her shirt, and swallowed, lifting her mouth corners.
“Yes, ma’am, I sure as hell do.” He winked at her and gained his feet. “I’m gonna see about the wagon.”
He walked to the west and swerved over to where Jack Leyton lay against the rock and the desert shrub. The man was still alive, chest rising and falling sharply as he breathed. Longarm looked down at him, saw the several holes his Winchester had punched through the killer’s body. He was alive, but he didn’t have long.
Leyton’s eyes stared up at Longarm with an odd blandness. “They…Mercado’s men…said they done kilt you, Custis. What are you, anyway—a damn cat?”
Longarm saw that one of the two pistols the man was carrying was his own double-action .44. He ripped it out of the ex-ranger’s holster and hefted it in his hand, glad to have it back. “Trophy, Jack?”
“Yeah,” Leyton said with a faint, sly grin. “Somethin’ like that.” He coughed up blood, gasped, said, “Good Lord, Custis—I think I’m dyin’ here!”
“Couldn’t happen to a more deserving son of a bitch, Jack.”
He turned away from the dying ex-ranger and walked over to the gold wagon. Gold bars, strewn amongst the wagon’s broken boards, steel chassis, and iron-shod wheels, glittered in the harsh sunlight. Beyond the rocks and wagon debris, a blond-haired figure was staggering away from Longarm. Vonda, holding her wounded arm, was heading west.
