Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats (11 page)

“Damn!” Casey intoned, slamming her fists against her thighs. “I should have pumped one more bullet into that bastard's bread basket!”

“That's all right,” Cynthia said, quickly gaining her feet and grabbing her boots. “We'll get him.”

Longarm tossed his saddle blanket up over the sorrel's back. “We? I don't think . . .”

“Yes, we,” Casey said, sitting down on the same rock as Cynthia, both women grunting softly as they pulled on their boots. “I want a hand in his killing. In the killing of all of them.”

Longarm opened his mouth to protest, but she cut him off with, “I appreciate your saving my life back there, Longarm. But you're not going to stop me from going after that bunch, same as you. Drummond and his ­cutthroats have taken too much away from me. The only thing I have left to lose is my life, and right now, without the man I love in it anymore, my life doesn't look like much at all.”

Longarm glanced at Cynthia, who returned his look with a determined one of her own as she pulled on her second boot. The lawman merely shook his head and grunted as he continued saddling his horse.

When he was finished rigging the sorrel, he helped the women saddle their own mounts. He'd just helped Casey onto the back of McIntyre's buckskin when the sorrel jerked its head down canyon and whinnied sharply. Longarm turned to stare in the same direction as the horse.

In the gray morning shadows he saw a dark, manshaped figure sidled up to a large rock, aiming a rifle. “Down!” Longarm shouted, reaching for his Winchester.

Too late.

The bushwhacker's rifle crashed, stabbing flames toward the camp.

Cynthia had been tying her bedroll together by the cold fire ring. She screamed and flew forward over the bedroll, hitting the ground on her belly.

“Cynthia!” Longarm and Casey shouted at the same time, a half second before the lawman dropped to a knee with his Winchester and triggered three quick shots.

His slugs blew the bushwhacker back away from the rock with a startled yelp, dropping his rifle and hitting the ground on his back.

“Cynthia!” Longarm ran over to where Cynthia lay sprawled belly down over her blanket roll.

“I'm all right,” the girl said in a thin, startled voice, lifting her head. “It just grazed me.”

Longarm saw the torn left shoulder seam of her leather jacket. No blood appeared. Cynthia shook her head. “Where did that come from?”

Longarm and Casey, who'd leaped out of her saddle and come running, pulled Cynthia to her feet.

“We got company,” Longarm said, leading Cynthia to her steeldust and staring back at where the bushwhacker lay unmoving behind the boulder at the side of the trail leading up from the main canyon. “You two mount up and get moving. I'll be right behind you!”

“Custis, you come, too!” Cynthia yelled as he half flung and half hoisted her onto her steeldust.

“I'll be right behind ­you—­now haul ass!” Longarm slapped the steeldust's hip, and the horse lurched into a gallop on up the side canyon. Casey ground her heels into her own horse's flanks and followed Cynthia around a bend and out of sight behind the curving stone wall.

Longarm ran down toward where the dead man lay. He held his rifle in one hand high, ready to fire if he needed to. He looked around cautiously but saw no other movement.

He dropped to a knee beside the dead man, who lay staring up at him, eyes dull. One of Longarm's shots had blown out his left temple. The other had taken him through a shoulder. Blood trickled out a corner of his mouth.

Longarm stared down canyon toward the main one and spied the shifting shadows of oncoming riders along the narrow, ­shadow-­dense corridor. At the same time, he could hear the clacking of several sets of horse hooves on the canyon's stone floor.

“Shit,” Longarm groused and picked up the dead man's Winchester. The man had an extra cartridge belt around his waist, the loops filled with .44 shells. Longarm quickly removed it, hung it over his shoulder, and ran back up the narrow canyon to his sorrel.

He shoved the spare rifle into his saddle boot, wrapped the extra cartridge belt around his own waist, and stepped into the leather. A second later he was galloping on up the gently rising floor of the cut, casting a quick glance over his left shoulder.

The riders just then galloped around a slight bulge in the wall and reined up in front of the dead man. Longarm spied four ­riders—­inky silhouettes against the ­gray-­brown morning shadows.

They spied him at the same time, one pointing and yelling, “There!”

Longarm pulled the sorrel around a bend in the canyon wall and kept riding, climbing the narrow trail and caressing the hammer of his Winchester with his thumb. Ten minutes later, he closed on the women riding ahead between the steep ridge walls.

Cynthia stopped her horse and turned toward him. He threw his left arm forward, shouting angrily, “Go! Keeping going! What the hell you stopping for?”

“Are they coming?” she yelled back at him.

“Of course they're coming!”

Having to worry about the two ­women—­two headstrong beauties with revenge on their ­minds—­had soured his mood. He felt as though he were herding a passel of young hellcats.

He and the women pushed on up the canyon. The sun was climbing above the horizon by the time they reached the top of the canyon pass, where the stone walls dropped away and a fragrant forest took over. Longarm led the way along a breezy ridge and then swung away from the ridge and up and over a higher pass.

Now the sun was well above the horizon and the day was heating up.

He checked the sorrel down and told the two girls to keep riding. He'd catch up to them.

He rose in his saddle to see over the crest of the pass he'd just crossed and into the valley on the other side. The riders were just now making their way around an ­outcropping—­four in all.

The gang must have split up, and these four had been the first to hear the scouting bushwhacker fire at Cynthia. The others had likely heard the shots, as well, and were a little farther behind.

Longarm wanted to rub these four off his trail and whittle the gang's total number down to a more manageable size.

He sat back down in his saddle and stared down the slope, in the direction the girls were riding. Below and about a hundred yards away, the game trail they were following appeared to run through a large outcropping of limestone and ­sandstone—­probably an ancient volcanic bubble that was all that remained of a more massive dike. It was a jumble of stone dominoes tossed this way and that, studded with cedars, piñons, and juniper, with a trail splitting it down the middle.

Longarm batted his heels against the sorrel's ribs. He galloped on down the slope through ­sun-­dappled pines smelling sharply of sap and caught up to the women just as they entered the outcropping, the stony walls rising on both sides of the trail.

“Are they still behind us?” Cynthia asked.

“Yup.”

“What are we going to do about that?” Casey wanted to know, reining her horse to a stop and turning toward Longarm. Her pretty blue eyes were resolute, urgent, even savage. She had a beautiful mouth, the lips red, the top one slightly upturned. Her nose was fine and long, her jaws straight and hard.

Yes, she had gravel, this one. After all she'd been through, all she could think ­about—­maybe the only thing that kept her from thinking about what might have been had the Drummond bunch not ridden into Arapaho that ­day—­was blood justice.

Longarm stared at her gravely. He turned to Cynthia, who owned a look similar to her friend's.

“All right,” he said. “You want blood? I'll give you blood. Can either of you shoot a rifle?”

Cynthia slid McIntyre's carbine from the saddle boot beneath her right thigh. Coolly, she said, “I might have been born with a silver spoon in my mouth, Marshal Long, but my uncle gave me a little target practice now and then . . . when Aunt May wasn't looking.”

Longarm looked at Casey. “What about you, young lady?”

“Ryan knew this country. That meant he knew that women as well as men should know how to handle a revolver and a rifle . . . if things come to that.”

Longarm tossed her the rifle he'd taken from the dead man. “I reckon things have come to that.”

“Yes, they certainly have,” Casey said, gritting her pretty teeth as she racked a fresh cartridge into the action.

“This way,” Longarm said, glancing over his shoulder as he gigged the sorrel up ahead of the women and down the corridor that was about forty yards wide, with tufts of wiry brown grass growing up along the edges. The trail appeared to be used mostly by game and wild horses, maybe the occasional ­mule-­mounted prospector.

At the far end, the where the walls of rubble gradually lowered before disappearing altogether, Longarm reined off the trail's left side. He swung down and tied his horse in a small grove of aspens, behind some large rocks. The women followed suit and then he led them up into the rocks until all three were overlooking the trail.

“Keep your heads down until I give you the wave,” Longarm said. “I'll be up there.” He indicated a higher point on their right. “Take your time, pick out a rider, and blow the bastard's head off!”

“I like the sound of that,” Casey said.

“Oh, I do, too,” Cynthia said. “I do, too.”

Longarm glanced at each woman incredulously.

Their eyes were hard, jaws determined. Their mussed, dusty hair blew around their face. Longarm was, indeed, riding with a pair of hellcats. The prettiest pair of hellcats he'd ever laid eyes on, but hellcats just the same . . .

He gave a wry chuckle, then scrambled up into the rocks above the women's location and hunkered down behind a ­tongue-­shaped boulder.

He looked down the trail. The four riders were coming down the ridge, their horses lunging forward and digging their hooves into the slope for purchase, dust billowing around them. There was one lead rider, two riding abreast behind him, and one riding about thirty yards behind, a red neckerchief billowing around his neck.

The lead rider was looking at the ground, making sure he was still on Longarm's and the women's trail. They were probably trying to figure out why there were three sets of horse tracks instead of two.

Just stay distracted,
Longarm thought, pressing his right shoulder up against the side of the boulder and staring into the canyon below him.
Just stay distracted . . .

He did not risk another look at the oncoming riders. He judged their distance by the thuds of their horses' hooves. He looked down the rocks on his left. The women were hunkered low, side by side, squinting up at Longarm. They were awaiting his signal.

The horse clomps were getting louder. The riders were almost directly below, following Longarm's and the women's tracks.

“Careful in here, fellas,” one of them said. “Damn good place for . . . .
oof
!”

Longarm had signaled the women, and they'd quickly aimed and fired, blowing the lead rider off his horse before he'd been able to finish his sentence. Longarm watched the women patiently shooting, saw another man blown off his horse and getting his left boot caught in the stirrup. The horse dragged the man about ten yards before the boot slipped free, and the rider slid and rolled, bellowing.

The girls had aimed well with their first shots, but the next shots were wild. There were two riders left, and they were now swinging down from their saddles and bolting for cover.

Longarm planted a bead on one and drilled the man in his lower back as the gent flew over a boulder on the far side of the gap. Longarm triggered another round at the feet of the other gent, who stopped suddenly, dropped to a knee, and flung a rifle round back toward Longarm.

The slug smashed against Longarm's covering boulder, the shrill spang setting up a ringing in the lawman's ears. Longarm had pulled his head back behind the rock. A rifle to his left crashed.

“Got him!” Casey cried.

Longarm looked into the gap below to see the fourth man crouched forward in the trail, crossing his arms on his belly. His rifle lay in the trail at his forehead, which he was grinding painfully into the ground.

Longarm thew up his right arm. “Hold your fire, ladies.”

He looked into the canyon.

All four men were down. The lead rider lay on his back nearly directly below Longarm, a bullet hole tattooing his forehead.

The man who'd been dragged was on his back and writhing in pain, clutching a hand to the right side of his neck.

The third man lay unmoving in the rocks while the last rider just now rolled onto his back, clutching his belly with one hand, pounding the other hand against the ground, and cursing loudly. Longarm decided to go down and take a look. He rose and was about to tell the women to stay put until he told them it was safe, but they were no longer hunkered down in the rocks.

They were both scrambling down through the boulders, heading for the trail!

Longarm ground his teeth. “You two get back here, goddamnit!”

Ignoring him, they both climbed down the rocks until they were standing in the trail. Longarm headed that way himself, wending his way amongst the boulders.

When a man screamed, Longarm leaped atop a boulder near the trail. Casey and Cynthia were standing over the man who'd been dragged by his horse and who was now cupping a hand to the side of his bloody neck.

“Put that rifle down, you little bitch!” the man shouted, glaring up at the pair. “Put it down this instant, or so help me . . . !”

“So help me what?” asked Casey in a sweet little voice that made Longarm's oysters tighten and draw up into his scrotum.

She cocked a fresh round into her carbine's breech.

“Hey!” the wounded man shouted. “I'm wounded. You got no call!”

Casey said, “You're one of the men who shot Ryan.”

Longarm sucked a sharp breath. He remained atop the boulder. He saw no reason to interfere in a private matter. He wasn't really a lawman here, anyway. Officially, he was on vacation. He would be obligated to write no reports on this matter.

“Ryan? Who the fuck's Ryan?”

“Ryan was going to be my husband. He was the sheriff in Arapaho. You shot him . . . along with a few others of your gang.”

The wounded man had a broad, freckled face, big ears sticking out the side of his skull. He swallowed. His face was pale. He sat in the trail, his legs bent slightly inward, a fly buzzing around his nose.

“Easy now,” he said, haltingly, shifting his gaze between the two women. “Easy, now, you two. You girls can't kill me. Neither one of you probably ever done it before. You pull that trigger, it'll haunt you till the day you die!”

Casey snapped the Winchester to her shoulder, aimed carefully, and fired. The wounded man's head snapped back so hard that Longarm thought he heard his neck crack.

“We'll see about that,” Casey said tightly as the man sagged to the ground. Cursing, she cocked a fresh cartridge into her carbine's chamber.

The two women looked around. The last man Longarm had shot groaned to Longarm's right, about twenty yards down trail. Casey and Cynthia walked back along the trail toward the man who lay on his back, belly rising and falling sharply as he breathed.

Longarm watched the two women pass below and before him, heading from his left to his right, both holding their rifles up high across their breasts. Their hair bounced on their shoulders. Their faces were set like stone.

Longarm's loins grew heavy. He gave a wry snort, and when they'd passed, he leaped from the rock to the ground and walked up trail toward the horses. When he heard the last of the four outlaws scream, he did not stop or look back. He shook his head, chuckled, and kept walking west along the trail.