by Evans, Tabor
The boat rocked and jerked as the slugs hammered it. It rumbled over and against rocks but generally stayed on course. A man on the shore yelled beneath the cracks of rifle fire, “Throw that little bitch on out here, Longarm, and we’ll leave you on your way!”
Lacy cried out as though she’d been slapped.
“Damn tempting!” Longarm spat through gritted teeth, glancing at her as he snaked the rifle over the gunwale. Taking quick aim, he fired three rounds. He evoked a yelp from behind a lightning-topped cottonwood and blew a hat off a head, but otherwise he doubted he did much damage from this distance and his moving perch.
“Come on, ya crazy star packer!” came another shout from shore. Longarm looked up to see a bespectacled man in a black opera hat and a black shirt with white polka dots on one knee beside a boulder. “Don’t die for that little witch. She ain’t worth it!”
“I’ll say,” Longarm raked out again while Lacy just sobbed and drew her limbs tighter to her body.
He fired two more shots, driving the man in the black shirt—Heck Gunn himself—back behind his boulder. As more lead hammered the boat and splashed into the water around it, Longarm returned fire. Soon, however, the boat was fifty yards beyond the shooters and their shots were landing wilder and wilder, as were his own.
Longarm scanned the shore sliding back behind him. Gunn and Cruz’s men scurried along the shore, a few slinging lead that dropped well behind the boat while the others were jogging along the rocky shore, sort of dancing around boulders and fir trees, trying to get another clear shot.
They couldn’t come far upsteam, however, because there was a large thumb of rock before them—the bulging face of a high ridge. Two of the ambushers climbed the rock a ways and slung a couple of more rounds, but now they were only venting their frustration.
Longarm lowered his smoking repeater and ran his sleeve across his sweaty forehead. He gave a ragged sigh of relief, looking back once more to see the cutthroats gathering along the shore, gesturing wildly, angrily, trying to figure out what their next course of action should be.
“Well, looks like we’re out of the woods again,” he said, resting his Winchester across his thighs and thumbing fresh cartridges through its loading gate.
“Yeah, but not for long.”
Lacy knelt near the front of the boat, staring forward. Her voice had owned a chilling flatness. Looking beyond her, Longarm saw why. About fifty yards before them, the river dropped eerily out of sight.
He dropped the Winchester as he grabbed both sides of the boat and rose to a crouch, staring ahead and hoping that what he was seeing was merely a mirage—a trick of the midmorning light on the water. But, no—the boat was drifting closer and closer to the falls, near enough now that Longarm could see beyond the base of it to where the river continued, stitched with shiny rapids.
His heart fell. His mouth went dry. It was a good fifty-foot drop. The boat wouldn’t make it. At least, it wouldn’t reach bottom without being turned into toothpicks . . .
Just as Longarm started to scramble to pick up the paddle and try to get the boat turned toward shore, the current grabbed them like a defiant hand and pulled them a little harder toward the drop between two hulking, pale boulders around the base of which water rose like windblown feather nests. It acted like a funnel, and suddenly the boat was caught within the sides of the funnel, and it was being poured along with the main current over the incline.
Lacy looked back at Longarm, her face white as a sheet, chin hanging, silently beseeching him to do something. But about all he could do at the moment was grab both sides of the boat and yell, “Hold on!”
As the prow plunged nearly straight down, the girl screamed. Longarm fully expected the boat to crack up in the next second, but after it had dropped about ten feet, shaking him and Lacy like dice in a cup, it got wedged at a slant between two half-submerged boulders.
The river pushed from above and behind, and the boat inched forward with a grating shudder while Longarm dropped to both knees in the middle of the boat and leaned ahead to grab Lacy, who had been thrown half out of the boat upon impact with one of the boulders. When he got her back in, her head was soaked, hair basted to her head, and she gave another scream as the boat lurched forward and then plunged once more.
“Ahhh, shee-ittt!” Longarm shouted as sheer gravity hurled him headfirst out of the boat. As he turned a forward somersault about six feet over the boat that disappeared in a spray of white foam ahead and below him, he caught a glimpse of Lacy disappearing into the foam just behind it. Longarm watched a half-submerge boulder sliding past him as he dropped like a stone into the water on the other side of the rock.
The cold water was like a giant fist clenched around him. Submerged in its icy, churning embrace, he fought to twist around and lift his head as one foot was rammed painfully against a submerged rock. When he finally did get his head above the torrent—at least, it felt like a torrent now that he was in it though the falls hadn’t looked nearly as high or as perilous a few moments ago—he found himself being jerked unceremoniously to the right.
A trough of fast-moving, stone-colored water grabbed him violently and hurled him down it. And then another one grabbed him and did the same, though by the time he’d been tossed about by the fourth trough, he realized he was at the bottom of the river and being swept downstream.
At the same time, the current relented somewhat, and he found that he was able to swim a little. Shaking the water from his hair and eyes, he looked around.
Lacy’s head and shoulders were twisting and turning about fifteen feet to his right, and beneath the constant chug of the river, he could hear her screaming though just barely. Her mouth formed a black circle in the pale oval of her face and amidst the spitting foam.
“Long-arrrrmmmm!” she screamed louder now.
“Throw your arms out, head back,” he shouted, “and float!”
That’s what he did, as he knew it was no use trying to make it over to her. Each of the two separate currents they were in was too strong. So he let the river carry him, weaving him between rocks and half over a boulder. He nudged another painfully with his shoulder, but then he watched the banks widen and the stream flatten out somewhat, and suddenly, his boots and then his knees were raking the bottom.
The water continued to push him along but now, finally, he was able to fight it back, and gain some footing. It was still like a fighter beating against him, but he stood and stumbled forward, weighed down by his dripping clothes and brushing the hair from his face with his hands, looking around.
Lacy was ahead and to his right about thirty yards, pinned against a boulder out where the water appeared a little deeper, the current there still strong. She hugged it like a lover, half facing him, looking at him beseechingly.
“Hang on!” He waded through the hip-deep water, feeling the river inch up his chest, but it had only reached his sternum by the time he reached the girl. He wrapped his arms around her, peeled her own arms from around the rock, and sort of dragged her back into shallower water.
For several minutes they knelt in the shallows, gasping. Longarm was shivering. It was a bright, sunny day, but the temperature was probably only in the fifties or so, and the water was probably about forty. He shrugged out of his heavy coat that had threatened to drag him to the bottom of the stream, and as he was about to toss it onto the bank in front of him, he froze.
Lacy must have seen them then, too—two hard-looking, bearded men in battered hats and checked shirts, kneeling along the top of the bank, regarding them both obliquely. The girl stopped shivering long enough to gasp.
Chapter 12
Longarm held on to his coat but automatically slid his right hand toward the pistol on his right hip, then hooked his thumb over the buckle of his cartridge belt. He stared at the two men—a younger man and an older one—watching him and Lacy with co
w-stupid expressions on their bearded faces.
“Hidy,” Longarm said, walking toward the shore and tossing his coat onto the bank.
“You two shore took a swim,” said the older gent, who knelt atop the bank nearest Longarm, absently pulling at weeds with a knobby hand. “Chilly time o’ the year for it.”
“It was sort of an accident.”
“Well, I guess it was!” said the older man, who had one steely-blue eye while the other one was nearly white, and it wandered. He had a thick southern accent, and he worked his gray-bearded jaws on a wad of chew bulging one cheek. A stream of the brown stuff dribbled down one corner of his mouth to add to the stain in his beard that hung nearly to his breastbone.
Longarm saw that the eyes of the younger man were on Lacy. Of course they were, but it made him edgy. He doubted his wet pistol would fire, as water had likely leaked into at least some of the cartridges. He’d lost his rifle along with his saddlebags and bedroll in the river.
“Pa?” a hoarse voice shouted somewhere behind the quartet of bearded starers. “Pa—what’s so goddamn fascinatin’ over there?”
Longarm saw movement behind the older man, who was likely in his fifties or early sixties—and he watched as a big figure dressed similarly to him and the younger man strode up toward the bank, moving through the hock-high bunchgrass and sage and weaving amongst the pines. Longarm couldn’t determine the sex of the person until she stopped just behind the old man, and tipped a broad-brimmed brown felt hat back off her high forehead.
Then Longarm saw the fleshy, pale female features and the two large, doughy lumps behind her gray workshirt, which she wore under a duck coat and suspenders.
“What in tarnation do we have here?” she said, setting her gloved fists on her hips. Her coat and wool work trousers were peppered with sawdust. “Where in God’s green earth did you two come from?”
Longarm figured it was probably obvious, but the old man said, “They come down the river, May. Both of ’em. Said they had an accident.”
“An accident? Well, I’ll say they’ve had an accident. Look at these two!” The big woman with mannish features called May wobbled her big, broad hips and long, fat legs down the bank, her large pale face flushing with exertion. “And you two just standing there like lumps on a consarned log! Come here, child—come to May,” she said, standing at the edge of the stream and extending her thick arms toward Lacy. “My goodness gracious, you look about frozen solid!”
Shivering, blue lips quivering, Lacy gained her feet and, her own heavy coat hanging like wet concrete off her shoulders, walked slowly toward May. “I . . . I sure am cold,” she said. “S-sure . . . sure could use a hot fire, Miss May. Maybe a hot cup of coffee . . .”
“Sure, sure,” May said. “We’ll get you back to the cabin and get you in front of a hot fire. But first, let’s get this big, wet coat off of you. Why, it’s only makin’ you colder, isn’t it, child?”
“I’ll say it is,” Lacy said, thoroughly enjoying the ministrations of the big woman.
The young man and the older man continued to ogle Lacy, as though they’d never seen a female, much less one who looked like her, before in their lives. When May got the coat off of Lacy’s shoulders, revealing the wet shirt clinging sinfully to the girl’s spectacular breasts, clearly delineating each one, hard nipples pushing against the cloth from behind, Longarm saw their cheeks and ears turn as red as a hot fire.
“Help me here, Felix!” May said as she clumsily led Lacy up the bank.
The rawboned young man scurried over to grab the woman’s proffered hand and arm, and, grunting, pulled her and Lacy up the bank. The big woman blew like a winded mule, flushed, and glanced over her shoulder at Longarm. “You’d best come, too, mister . . . whoever you are. Gonna catch your death of cold out here. You’ll be welcome in the cabin just yonder. I’ll stoke the fire, make you all some hot coffee with a nip of brandy, if you’re of a mind for some o’ the demon juice!”
She laughed at that, then, draping an arm over Lacy’s shoulders, continued leading her off through the pines, the hunched blond looking doll-sized beside her.
Longarm stood where he was, regarding the old man and the younger man before him. They were both big men, he saw now that the older man was also standing. The old man was big and stringy while the young was big and beefy and hard-muscled, though his eyes bespoke about as many brains as could be poured into a sewing thimble. That and the look that Felix had for Lacy’s comely figure had the nerves in Longarm’s trigger finger sparking. He didn’t want this to be another time the girl’s female assets put a wrench in his own plans for . . .
The old man beckoned as he, too, watched the girl walk away from the river with the woman he’d called May. “Come on, mister. You heard what May said.” He chuckled dryly and turned to Longarm. “When May says jump, we ask how high—don’t we, Felix?”
But the boy was still watching Lacy, transfixed, with his lusty cow eyes, and hadn’t heard the question. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists aggressively. Longarm took note of that, too, but he was glad to see that he wasn’t armed with either gun or knife. The older man, though, sported a Smith & Wesson Model 2 army pistol wedged behind the wide, brown belt encircling his lumpy waist, the gun’s rosewood grips angled toward the belly pushing out his workshirt.
Longarm picked up his coat and, trembling from the cold water soaking every inch of him, climbed the riverbank, his boots squeaking, water bubbling out from the soles. “Name’s Long,” he said, sitting down on the bank to wrestle one of his boots off. “Custis Long. Deputy United States marshal out of Denver.”
“You don’t say?” said the older gent. “A real honest-to-gosh federal badge toter?”
“That’s right.” Longarm emptied the water out of the boot. A good pint must have splattered onto the ground as he said, “And you might be . . . ?”
“Not just might,” the older gent said, chuckling dryly as he continued to work the chew around in his mouth, “but I am, yes, sir, Harcourt Greer. These here is my son, Felix. May’s my sister. We got us a little cabin yonder. Run a few cattle, do a little gold pannin’. This time o’ year we mostly sell wood to the miners up and down the river and cut a good bit for ourselves. Gets right cold and snowy up this high, don’t ya know.”
“The river’s right cold now.” Longarm emptied the water out of his second boot, then grimaced as he pulled it back on. The water must have shrunk it a size and a half.
“So what brings you down the river?” Greer asked as he and Longarm started walking in the same direction the women had gone.
Ahead, at the edge of the clearing, May was stepping into the saddle of a stout mule—probably the only beast stalwart enough to carry her—then reached down to pull Lacy onto the mule’s back behind her. Nearby was a big lumber dray half filled with pine logs, a couple of more mules standing in the traces. Another mule stood beside the lumber dray, cropping green fescue and trailing log chains. Apparently, the Greers had been in the process of skidding logs out of the forest and loading them onto the dray when they’d spied Longarm and Lacy roiling down the river like driftwood.
“We were ambushed half a mile or so upriver,” Longarm said, feeling every muscle in his body quivering as though he’d been lightning struck. “By the same gang I pulled Lacy out of. To make a long story short, Mr. Greer, we might have brought trouble, so we’d best not linger and make it your trouble. But I would appreciate an opportunity to get dried out and have a cup of coffee in front of a hot fire.”
“Ah, hell, don’t you worry none, Marshal,” Greer said. “Me, May, an’ Felix are accustomed to trouble. Why, this part of the Sawatch is rife with outlaws of every stripe—most of ’em cattle rustlers. But there’s plenty of claim jumpers in these parts, too, and we’re handy at runnin’ ’em off. My boy here ain’t a cold-steel artist or nothin’ like that, but he knows his
way around a Winchester.”
He glanced back at the beefy younker trailing him and Longarm by about ten feet. “Ain’t you, boy?”
Felix grunted. Longarm wasn’t sure he could speak. He was staring broodingly after May and Lacy, chewing his lower lip as though he wanted to eat it.
As Longarm and Greer walked past the dray, Greer glanced over his shoulder again and said, “Get back to work, boy. Excitement’s over now, hear?”
Felix stopped dead in the trail, looking as though he’d been slapped.
“But, Pa,” he protested, “I wanna go on back to the cabin with you. Why . . . why . . . we ain’t had company in a month of Sundays!”
Greer puffed his chest up and clenched his fist at his sides as he fairly roared, “You go on back to work and get your mind off that girl, an’ be quick of it! You mind your manners and quit thinkin’ about stickin’ your pecker in that girl. She’s too damn good for you, ya damn cork-headed fool!”
The son of Harcourt Greer cowered like whipped dog, hanging his head like his neck was broken. Cursing and grumbling, he swung around and ambled off to where the single mule stood trailing the log chains.
Greer chuckled as he and Longarm set off again, following a two-track trail through the pines and into what appeared a deep cleft in the nearly solid wall of mountain that stood on this side of the river. “I do believe he’s taken a fancy to your girl, there, Marshal.”
“Most do,” Longarm said, then spat river grit to one side of the trail. He walked with his heavy, sodden coat thrown over his left shoulder, only half paying attention to Greer as he brooded over Heck Gunn and Orlando Cruz and the fact that he now only had his Colt to defend himself and Lacy with. He sure wished he hadn’t lost his rifle in the river.
“Well, she sure is a fine-lookin’ little thing—I’ll give her that.” Greer led Longarm under a timber ranch portal and into the cabin yard tucked back in the pines, against the base of the rocky, pine-forested mountain wall. “I tell you, when I seen her take off that coat, I myself thought my old ticker was gonna give out on me!”
