by Tabor Evans
“What will you do, Marshal?”
“There’s some errands I want t’ run,” he said. “One o’ them is to check the train schedule an’ see what we can expect come morning.”
“I . . . All right,” she said. “A short nap doesn’t sound bad.”
Longarm paid for their coffee—hers had not been touched—and walked with her back to the hotel. He collected the room key from the clerk and went upstairs with her, saw her safely into the room, but then touched the brim of his Stetson and pulled the door closed.
Longarm went back downstairs, the room key still in his pocket, and walked out onto the streets of Rawlins.
Chapter 11
He had not reached the bottom of the stairs before he was reaching for a cheroot, had not reached the sidewalk before he got out a match to light it. And he would gladly have gulped down a slug of whiskey if only he’d had a flask with him. As it was, the whiskey had to wait for a few minutes.
He did take care of business before pleasure, though. He immediately headed for the UP depot to check the board for departures. There would be a westbound passenger train coming through at nine twenty the next morning. That should do nicely, Longarm thought.
As soon as he saw that, he turned on his heel and made a beeline for the Higgins and Co., Inc., Gentlemen’s Club. He had been there before and knew it to be a pleasant place where a man could find a drink of whiskey and a game of cards without being bothered by whores cadging drinks or dealers who made their money by cheating.
The games at Higgins’s were honest and the whiskey was of high quality, a splendid combination in Longarm’s opinion.
Stepping inside was like finding an oasis of calm in a hectic world. The place was dark and quiet, sound muted by the sawdust spread liberally on the floor. It smelled of beer and cedar.
At this hour—too early for the serious gamblers—there were no tables in play, and only two men other than the bartender stood at the bar.
Longarm approached the bar with a sigh. Pretty as she was, it was frustrating being with Bethlehem Bacon knowing she was off limits. It was better being in his own sort of environment.
“Rye whiskey,” Longarm ordered when the bartender came to him, “an’ a deck o’ cards still fresh in the wrapper. Make that a bottle o’ rye.”
“Coming right up.”
An hour later the level of excellent rye in the bottle had gone down a couple inches and Longarm was on his third cheroot since leaving Beth at the hotel.
The pair of drinkers at the bar had gone but they were replaced by a trio of men in suits and ties, one of them Honus Berriman. Berriman either did not recognize Longarm . . . or chose not to. In any case, he did not acknowledge the tall deputy seated alone at a table near the back of the room.
The three took seats at a table closer to the door and were served a bottle of something without the bartender having to ask what they wanted. They began playing poker.
Longarm would have liked to join them, but it seemed clear enough that this was a private game. He doubted that he would be welcome to play with them, so dealing solitaire would have to do.
He sighed—damn, he was doing that a lot lately, ever since he’d hooked up with Beth Bacon—and began shuffling his cards preparatory to laying out yet another game.
Then the front door opened, and two men with bandanas pulled over their faces walked in.
Chapter 12
It took no great psychic powers to see what they were up to. Each carried a sawed-off double barrel. Each immediately eared back the hammers on their scatterguns.
By the time their muzzles began to lift, Longarm had his .45 in hand.
“Don’t even think about it,” he barked in a loud, authoritative voice.
The two robbers apparently had not seen him sitting toward the back of the room. Now his command threw them off their game for a second or two.
Both stopped moving and stared toward Longarm.
“Set those guns down nice an’ easy,” Longarm commanded. “Don’t drop ’em and don’t pull the triggers.”
For a moment he thought it was working. The man on his left paused, but the one on the right raised the muzzle of his shotgun and pointed it toward Berriman and his friends at the poker table.
Longarm’s shot and the killer’s—the two came in acting like robbers but made no demands for money, and there was very little on the poker table that would have been worth stealing—came at almost the same moment.
Honus Berriman was blown over backward, his chair clattering to the floor along with what remained of Berriman’s face.
Longarm’s 255 grain lead slug slammed into the breastbone of the shooter, spilling him onto the sawdust-littered floor.
When his partner dropped, the first man woke up from his reaction to Longarm’s presence. He swung the twin barrels of his 12 gauge toward the tall lawman.
Longarm did not hesitate. His second bullet took the shotgunner low in the belly and doubled him over.
The man lost all interest in his shotgun and whatever mission had brought him into the saloon. He dropped his gun muzzle down. The jolt of striking the floor was enough to dislodge the hammer sears, and one barrel fired. The recoil drove the shotgun out of the man’s hands, but by then he really did not seem to care. By then he was clutching his gut and keeling over.
The man dropped to his knees and then sprawled face forward into the sawdust with its load of mud and spit and tobacco juice.
The bartender and Berriman’s two friends rushed to help him but half the man’s head had been blown away by the killer. There was nothing they or anyone could do to help.
Longarm fought his way through the fog of acrid gun smoke to make sure both killers were dead, then went back to his poker table and began reloading his Colt, reminding himself that he needed to clean and oil it when he got back to the hotel.
Chapter 13
A squat, burly man with more chest and arm hair than some bears very cautiously came inside. He wore a tin star displayed on his coat and held a double-barrel shotgun.
Longarm grunted, thinking that shotguns were an awfully popular item in Rawlins this year.
“Who . . .” the town marshal began.
“Over here,” Longarm volunteered.
“You killed both these men?” the marshal said, his voice gruff and demanding.
Longarm gave the man a long, slow look before he answered. “Yeah. I did.”
“You are under arrest,” the marshal said, not sounding quite so authoritative this time.
“Check your facts before you decide that,” Longarm suggested, just as polite as he knew how. Which at the moment was not terribly polite. He did not much care for this marshal nor the man’s attitude.
“Are you going to give me trouble?” the marshal said. He seemed a mite nervous when he said it.
Longarm raised a boot to the seat of the chair opposite his at the table and shoved, sending the chair out away from the table. “Set,” he said firmly. “An’ find out what’s happened before you go arrestin’ anybody.”
“I can see that three men are dead here,” the marshal said.
“Yes, an’ I killed two of ’em,” Longarm told him.
One of the men at the poker table turned away from his friend’s body and said, “Leave him alone, Jonathon. He likely kept Sam and me from being shot down same as Honus was.”
“They were just robbers, right?” Jonathon said.
The well-dressed gambler shook his head. “They weren’t here to rob anybody, Jonathon. They came here to kill. Honus and likely Sam and me, too. This gentleman saved our bacon.”
“Oh. Well.” Jonathon seemed not to know what he should do next since there was no one who needed to be arrested.
“Any idea who these two were or why they would’ve been wanting to kill you?” Longarm asked.
“No.
Of course not.”
Longarm did not believe the man for a moment, but whatever the reason, he did not want to trot it out in public. “All right, suit yourself.”
The gent hesitated then extended his hand. “I’m being ungrateful, aren’t I? After all, you just saved our lives. My name is Cletus Berriman. This is Samuel Bannerman Jones.”
“Sam,” Jones put in. He had left the side of his friend’s body and come to stand with his partner.
“May we buy you a drink? A meal? What can we do for you, Mr.—um? Anything, just name it.”
“Long,” Longarm said, taking the hint and the man’s hand. “Custis Long.”
“Believe me, it is our pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Long.”
“It’s Marshal Long, actually,” he said, cutting his eyes toward the stocky town badge carrier. “Deputy United States marshal out o’ Denver.”
“Oh, well, I . . .” The town marshal seemed both surprised and a little unnerved by that news. “I, uh . . .”
“Does that arrest order still stand?” Longarm asked bluntly.
“No, uh, of course not.”
“Then get the fuck away from me before I put you under arrest for interferin’ with a Fed’ral investigation.”
“I . . . I . . .” Jonathon sputtered a little but turned tail and began loudly issuing wholly unnecessary orders about what should be done with the bodies.
“You’re here on business?” Sam Jones said.
“Yes, sir,” Longarm said, “an’ if that offer of ‘anything you can do’ still stands, there in fact is somethin’ you can do t’ help.”
“Name it, Marshal, up to my firstborn, and you shall have it.”
Chapter 14
“I know this is a bad time t’ be talking business, your partner just having been killed an’ all, but there is something I need, and you boys might be able t’ provide it.”
“Like I said, Marshal, just name it,” Jones said. Berriman, understandably, was focusing his attention on the body of his dead . . . whatever Honus had been to him, brother or cousin, uncle or, for all Longarm knew, grandfather.
“I’m here looking for a fella that seems to’ve gone missing. He was working for you at the time. Man name of Hank Bacon,” Longarm said.
Jones took Longarm by the elbow and drew him away from the crowd that had gathered around the dead. “Can we sit over here? I have to admit that I’m a little shaky. I’m not much accustomed to violence.”
Longarm went with Jones to the table where he had been playing solitaire. He pushed aside the cards he dealt minutes earlier and motioned to the bartender for another glass to go with his bottle of rye whiskey.
“Not bad,” Jones said after he took a healthy slug of Longarm’s rye. “I generally drink Scotch but this is nice.”
Longarm had a swallow and said, “About Hank Bacon?”
“Yes. Hank. We did, in fact, hire the gentleman. He seemed to know what he was doing even though he was not familiar with the country out here. Neither, for that matter, are we. We, the Berrimans and I, came out from Pennsylvania. Going to make our fortunes, don’t you see.
“The way it was told to us, there was gold . . . or at least golden opportunity . . . practically lying in the streets, waiting to be picked up by smart operators such as ourselves.” Jones shuddered and finished his whiskey. Longarm poured him another.
“You Western boys play rough, we quickly discovered. We should have been secretive about what we planned, but we simply did not know that would have been a good idea. We practically announced our intentions to the world. That would be to attract investors to build the railroad. We would relinquish ownership to them once it was constructed. What we wanted were the land grants along the right of way. We could sell them to farmers from the East who want in on the opportunities to be found out here.
“We thought it was a solid business plan. And the first step was for us to determine exactly where that right of way should be. That is why we hired Bacon.”
“Why him?” Longarm asked.
“He was recommended to us by a man back home. Hank had done some surveying for him. He said Hank was honest and good at his job. So we hired him, outfitted him, sent him on his way.
“For several weeks we received the occasional report back from him. Then . . . nothing. We haven’t heard from him in some time.”
“Did you know that much of any right of way west of the Big Horns would cross reservation lands belonging to the Shoshone and Arapaho? Those lands are not subject to sale or grant,” Longarm said. “They are already pledged to the tribes in perpetuity.”
“No, I . . . I didn’t know that,” Jones said.
Longarm finished his glass of rye and poured another for Jones and then for himself. “Smoke?” he offered, pulling a cheroot out and nipping the twist off with his teeth.
“No, thanks.”
Longarm took his time lighting the cheroot then leaned back in his chair. “Bad things can happen to a man traveling alone in this country,” he said. “But bad things can happen right here, too.”
He nodded toward the mess that the bartender was cleaning up now that the bodies had been carried off somewhere. “Like that. D’you have any enemies? You or the Berrimans, either personal or professional?”
Jones shook his head. “None that I know of. Why do you ask?”
“’Cause that was no robbery gone wrong,” Longarm said. “That was a deliberate attempt at murder, an’ I don’t care what the penny dreadfuls say, we don’t just go shooting people down out here. There was a reason those fellas came in trying to kill you three.”
“You think they were after all of us?” Jones sounded nervous when he asked the question.
“If it was just Berriman that was wanted dead, there wouldn’t have been two of them. Two men with shotguns at close range, I’d say somebody wants all three o’ you dead.”
Jones turned pale. “Dear God!”
“Think about that. Then how’s about you and me have dinner tonight,” Longarm said. “I’ll have someone with me. Hank Bacon’s wife. Or widow, as the case may be.”
Longarm stood and stuck his cheroot between his teeth.
“’Bout seven o’clock? You pick the place. Come by the Elkhorn an’ collect us when you’re ready. Bring Clete with you if he’s feeling up to it. We’ll talk some more then.”
Longarm touched the brim of his Stetson and headed back to the hotel to see if Beth was awake from her nap yet.
Chapter 15
Sam Jones was already in the lobby when Longarm and Beth came downstairs for supper. Longarm performed the introductions.
“Please forgive Clete for not joining us,” Jones said. “After seeing his brother murdered this afternoon, he just wasn’t up to going out tonight.” Jones turned his attention to Longarm. “Honus’s body will be prepared tonight, then Clete will take it home on the morning eastbound train. He should be away for several weeks, perhaps longer. In fact, we are tempted to abandon our Western enterprise altogether and turn our attention back to Pennsylvania.”
“But what about my husband?” Beth put in. “If you just up and leave, that will abandon Hank, too.”
“I wish I could tell you what has happened to Bacon,” Jones said, “but I don’t know. He could have run into some sort of trouble or he could simply have quit his job.”
“Hank would never do that,” Beth insisted.
“And you could be right about that,” Jones said. “I’m sure we both hope that Marshal Long here will discover the truth, whatever it may be.”
“What Marshal Long wants t’ discover right now,” Longarm said, smiling, “is a juicy steak an’ a heap o’ potatoes. I’m hungry an’ I’m sure Mrs. Bacon is, too.”
“Of course. I didn’t mean to be rude. Come along then. I know a very pleasant restaurant. We can talk business after we eat.”
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Three hours later but no better informed, Longarm and Beth returned to the Elkhorn.
“Mr. Jones seems like a very nice man,” Beth conceded on their way up to their room. “Do you think he was telling the truth tonight?”
“He certainly seemed t’ be,” Longarm said.
“Even about Hank’s pay?”
Longarm nodded. “I think so. A business operation the size o’ Berriman and Jones isn’t likely t’ worry about small change. Which is what Hank’s pay would be to them. No, I think they paid it, just like he says they did.”
“Then what could have happened to it?” she said.
“When we find out where Hank is, could be we’ll know about that, too,” Longarm told her.
Beth was quiet after that, obviously thinking about what Longarm said. And about her missing husband.
Longarm did not want to say anything more, but his suspicions in truth were that Hank Bacon was dead. Something had happened to him out there. Something they might never learn.
They reached their room, and Longarm opened the door then let Beth enter before him.
He was not prepared for her scream.
Chapter 16
Longarm charged forward, his right hand snatching the .45 from the holster on his belt and his left shoving Beth out of the way.
His shoulder hit her in the back and sent her sprawling to the floor.
Ahead and to his right he saw a man, an intruder, in their room, who was straddling the windowsill, one leg inside the room and the other out.
“Stop, thief!” Longarm barked.
He had his Colt in hand and could easily have shot the son of a bitch, but that seemed a heavy penalty for a man to pay for a little pilfering. And, in fact, Longarm could not tell from the fellow’s posture if he was just coming into the room or leaving it.
“Stop!” he shouted again.
The intruder, predictably, paid no attention to the shouted instructions. But he did eye the big .45 with considerable alarm. The black, gaping muzzle of the revolver must have looked like a cannon to him, for he went immediately pale. Stopped still as a statue.
