Tabor Evans (2 page)

Longarm grabbed the corpse by its limp wrists, and dragged it away from the woman. Then he eased her skirt down to cover her thighs before he took stock of his Surroundings.

At the edge of the clearing, two horses were tethered to a bush. Both were still saddled. Behind them, a mule was also tied up; it bore a lightly loaded packsaddle. There was nothing in the clearing, except the dying fire and a small stack of chopped tree limbs at one side of it, to give any sign that the group had intended to make camp there for the night. There were no bedrolls, no cooking utensils, not even a water bucket.

Longarm brought his own horse up and tethered it where the others stood, then he threw a few of the pieces of cut wood on the coals, hunkered down, and stripped off his gloves. In the flurry of action he'd set off, he'd forgotten about the cold wind. In the clearing, the trees cut the force of the breeze, though its presence was still indicated by the waving of the treetops. Thoughtfully, Longarm took out a fresh cheroot and lighted it while he continued to study the little glade.

From the evidence, it was impossible to tell whether the woman had been traveling with the four men, or had encountered them on the trail and been forced to accompany them to the secluded spot. Longarm gave up on the puzzle. When the woman woke up, he'd get the answers to his questions.

He did not have long to wait. The young woman sighed, and her arms moved fitfully. Then her eyes snapped open. A scream started from her lips when she saw Longarm squatting beside the fire, but she choked it off before it had gained enough volume to emerge from her mouth as anything louder than a surprised gasp.

"You startled me," she said, struggling into a sitting Position.

Longarm let a small frown gather on his brow, though it was hidden by the wide brim of his flat-topped Stetson, as he tried to put a location to the odd intonation in her voice. It was not from the South, nor was it one that carried the casual overtones of the West, or the flatness of New York. Rather, it was a nasal voice, produced in her head rather than flowing easily from her throat. Longarm had heard words inflected that way before, but not very often; the predominant regional accent of the West reflected the soft, elongated vowel sounds of Southern speech.

She went on, "Something happened that I don't remember. I don't remember you at all-"

"No reason Why you should, ma'am. Far as I know, you never did lay eyes on me before, any more than I've seen you before now."

Her brows knitted thoughtfully as she struggled to remember. "Then, what happened to me?"

"You got hit. Real hard, judging from the length of time you've been out. You don't need to worry about anything, though. Nobody laid a hand on you while you were unconscious. You're all right."

Longarm studied her while she was looking around the clearing. She was a bit older than he'd first judged her to be--in her early thirties, perhaps. Her eyes, which he was seeing for the first time, were dark brown. Her gaze, darting around the little glade, fell on the dead man who lay on the ground at one edge of the clearing.

"My God!" she gasped. "He was--he was the one-"

"He was the one that hit you," Longarm filled in when her voice trailed off.

"More than that." She began to tremble as memory came rushing back. "He was one of the guides I hired at Fort Smith. He-they-there were four of them. And they were going to rape me."

Longarm nodded. "That's about the size of it. I watched it all, from the time they commenced chasing you around until I got busy and changed their ideas."

"Is that a polite way of telling me that you killed him?"

"Well, now, I wasn't trying to be polite, ma'am. No more than I usually am, to a lady. But now that you remember what was going on, it won't bring back more bad memories than you've already got. The reason you don't know how all of it come about is that you'd been knocked cold just before I dropped that fellow there."

"My God! What kind of place am I in? You're saying you shot that man in cold blood?"

"No, I wouldn't exactly say it was cold-blooded. I was mad as hell, if you don't object to me swearing a mite. I don't like to see four men ganging up on anybody, let alone a woman, trying to hurt her."

"Hurting's one thing. Killing's another. I've never been raped, and I don't suppose it would be a very nice experience, but at least I'd still have been alive when they finished. That man lying there is dead?"

"Yep. Just about as dead as anybody'll ever be."

"You killed him deliberately, with a gun, instead of just stopping him from-from what he wanted to do."

Longarm was losing his patience. He looked into the woman's angry eyes for a moment before he replied, "If you'll recall, ma'am, there were four of them. And they weren't the kind I'd want to walk up to and try to reason with, seeing as how all of them were wearing guns."

"He should have been tried in court, not summarily executed! Even the most disgusting criminal deserves a trial before a judge and jury. You deprived him of his life without giving him a chance to defend himself!"

Her eyes were fixed scornfully on Longarm's apparently emotionless face.

"Oh, he defended himself. Him and his three friends all had a few shots at me before I winged two of them and they lit out."

"But they didn't."

Longarm's temper finally let go. "Now, you just be good enough to keep quiet a minute, ma'am."

She looked at him questioningly, and started to say something, but Longarm was already standing up, his back to her. He went to the fire and selected a branch, choosing one that had a good flame at one end and was long enough to serve as a torch.

"you follow along with me, if you feel able to," he told the woman.

"Follow?" she shook her head. "I don't understand."

"You will," he assured her.

Longarm waited for her to stand up. She got to her feet by kneeling first. The loose, unfastened skirt dropped away. She stood up quickly and grabbed for the skirt, which lay on the ground. Draping it around her waist, she fumbled for a button or snap, but whatever had secured the garment had been torn off by the dead man. She settled for holding the skirt with one hand as she took a step toward Longarm. He led her toward the edge of the glade.

"Where are we going?" she asked suspiciously.

"Not far, just a few steps over here. There's something I want you to see."

Wordlessly, still puzzled, she followed him as he led the way to the shallow grave. By the light of the burning branch, they could see a short-handled spade sticking in the ground beside the pile of dirt that had been taken from the long, narrow excavation.

"Good God!" she gasped, as the significance of the hole's shape dawned on her. "You've already dug a grave for the man you killed! I suppose you're getting ready to bury him out here in this wild place, without even a prayer?"

"You're a little bit wrong in what you're thinking, ma'am." Longarm kept his voice to a low-keyed, conversational pitch. Very matter-of-factly, he went on, "You see, it wasn't me that dug this grave. Those men did, sometime after you got here, after they'd made their plans for you while you were on the trail from Fort Smith. They weren't planning on letting you go free to testify against them, if they got caught after they'd finished with you."

"You... you mean, that grave was intended for me?" she asked. Her voice was suddenly subdued, its scolding tone gone, and she spoke almost in a whisper.

"Well, now, you stop and think back a minute," Longarm suggested. "After you and those four rascals stopped here--they said it was time to stop, didn't they? Getting too dark to see the trail, or something like that?"

"Yes. Something like that. They said it was getting dark and the horses were tiring. We'd left Fort Smith quite early, so I believed them."

"And after you'd stopped, one of them chopped up some wood, and another one acted like he was taking care of the horses, and one or two of them went off, maybe to look for water? I suspicion he told you there was a spring off this way close by?"

"Yes," she agreed. "Jasper--that's the one who's dead--said it Was too Wet closer to the spring for us to stop," she shook her head. "He wasn't gone long enough to dig a hole this big, though."

"Oh, I don't know." Longarm pulled the shovel out of the soil and pushed it back in, experimentally. "Real soft dirt. Mostly just a thick layer of old, dried leaves and suchlike. And you can see the hole's not real deep." He held the torch so the woman could get a better look at the shallow pit.

"I-maybe I'm mistaken about the time. Perhaps he was gone long enough, now that I think back."

"And while he was gone, I bet the other three kept you busy with stories and jokes and so forth?" Longarm suggested.

Slowly, she nodded. "Yes. Yes, they did. How did you know that?"

"You ain't the first woman that's trusted the wrong kind of men, and maybe dropped out of sight along some lonesome trail. Maybe wound up in a hole like this one, where nobody's likely to find the body for a dozen years or more. Mostly, the kind of men I'm talking about run in bunches of three or four, and it don't much matter how they do what they got in mind, or where it happens. They pretty generally follow the same style."

"From the way you talk, you know a great deal about the way these rapists--and I suppose they're robbers, too--about the way they operate. How do I know you're not one yourself?" she challenged.

"I guess you don't, at that." Longarm pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to show her his deputy U.S. marshal's badge. "Maybe this'll set your mind at ease a mite."

"You're an officer of the law? A U.S. marshal?"

"Deputy marshal," he corrected her.

"And you actually shot that man," she went on, as though he hadn't spoken. "Shot him without making any sort of effort to warn him to stop?

Without making an effort to arrest him? You just pulled your pistol out and killed him?"

Longarm's patience ran out. He snapped. "Now, that's all I want to hear from you along those lines! I wasn't close enough to use my six-gun, or they'd all four be dead now, instead of just one! They were four-to-one against me, and all of them packed iron. The way that fellow was going after you, once he shut you up with his fist, he'd have been on you and inside you before I opened my mouth. Warning him wouldn't have stopped him. All it would have done was to give one of the others time to kill me."

For a moment, the woman stared at Longarm as though seeing him for the first time. She saw a man taller and wider than most, with gunmetal-blue eyes in a tanned face, which was clean-shaven except for a bold, sweeping mustache. In the flickering torchlight, those gunmetal eyes reflected controlled anger.

He said curtly, "Now, if you've seen enough of what those four planned for you, let's go back to the fire. I'll drag that body out here later on and cover it up, after I go over it to see if that--Jasper, I recall you said his name was--to see if he had another name or two besides the one he told you."

"And after that?" she asked.

"After that, we'll talk about what comes next. Now, come along."

CHAPTER 2

Subdued and silent, the woman walked with Longarm back to the clearing. He tossed the torch on the fire and added two or three more pieces of wood from the fast-dwindling pile of chopped tree limbs. Night had arrived now, its blackness crowding the rim of the glade, held at bay only by the dancing firelight.

Longarm was still angry. He made no effort at conversation, but circled the glade at the perimeter of firelight until he found the deadfall log from which the firewood had been cut. Am axe was still buried in the log. He used it as a lever to roll the deadfall up close to the fire, and quickly cleared the log of its remaining branches. He motioned to the cleared log.

"Might as well sit down," he told the woman. "We've got to talk a mite. I'll cook up some supper and make coffee after a while. I guess you've got some grub and your bedding on that pack mule tethered over yonder?"

"Yes." She sat down on the log. "I gave those men twenty dollars to buy supplies. They told me they'd buy me a slicker, whatever that is, and a set of blankets. I suppose you'll find them with the supplies."

"Time enough for that," Longarm said.

He hoped there might be a bottle of Maryland rye among the supplies, but he knew the best he could hope for, if there was any whiskey at all, was a bottle of questionable origin, probably the watered-down product of one of the illegal stills in the Indian Nation that supplied half the liquor drunk in the towns along its borders.

"You've got a name, I guess," he told his companion. "Mine's Long. You've already seen my badge, so you know what my business is."

"I'm Maidia Harkness," she replied. Then, somewhat tartly, she went on, "If you'd explained to me what sort of pressures you were under in stopping those men, I wouldn't have been so critical, Marshal. But where I come from, the police don't act as judge and jury. They arrest criminals and take them to jail, and let the courts decide whether they're innocent or guilty."

Longarm decided to let that pass without comment. Instead he asked, "Just where do you come from, Miss Harkness? Or is it Mrs. Harkness?"

"It's miss. And my home's in Boston."