Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) Read online

  “She has one other man with her—apparently a Pinkerton hired by the president of the bank she works for in Pinecone. But there were two bodyguards at the start of the dance. Got a cable three days ago from the marshal up there in Snow Mound. One of the men he hired to protect the woman was shot by a sniper through the window of the café he was eating at—with the witness and the other bodyguard sitting across from him.”

  “Ouch.”

  “The killer didn’t show himself, but the marshal’s sure it’s one of Younger’s gang, which means the gang is likely hovering around the edges of Snow Mound, waiting for the witness to head to the train depot, once the narrow gauge arrives to haul her back to Pinecone. They warned her against testifying, and now that she has testified to great and irreversible detriment to one Babe Younger, Babe’s friends aim to make her pay.”

  “You want me to go up and lend a hand with said witness, get her to the train on time,” Longarm said, glancing at the banjo clock once more, then leaning forward to rub his cheroot out in Billy’s overflowing ashtray. “All right, I ain’t sure how this is a federal matter, but if you think it’s so dang important . . .”

  A little irritably, Billy said behind a cloud of roiling cigar smoke, “It’s federal in a pinch because Younger had several federal warrants on his head. And you know how we always like to help out the local law bringers, Custis—especially when they’re under siege by snarling trail wolves and cold-steel artists intent on mayhem. Most of whom are also wanted on federal warrants, I might add.

  “The Younger gang’s been pestering the mail trains for years now, but no one’s been able to get close to’em. Don’t really even know who else is in the gang besides their now dearly departed leader, Babe his own vile self. They’re a slippery bunch, holin’ up in one damn mountain range or another up there above the clouds. It’s rumored they have a main hideout over in Utah somewheres.”

  Longarm heaved himself out of his chair. “Two-, three-day trip up there, ain’t it? The train has to wind way down through Pueblo and then through the Royal Gorge . . .”

  “It’s a long shot, you gettin’ up there in time to help out. But I promised Webb Scobie—he’s the marshal of Snow Mound and an’ old friend of mine from my wild-’n’-wooly Texas Rangerin’ days—I’d send a man to try to hold Younger’s wolves at baby. And that’s you. Oh, and one more thing,” Billy added as Longarm turned to the door.

  Longarm glanced back at his boss. A sneer cut its way across Billy’s pudgy face.

  “If you’re thinkin’ what I know you’re thinking—that the female witness might be a real looker, and young, to boot—let me relieve you of your randy anticipation.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me she’s a crone, Billy!”

  Chief Vail adjusted his glasses as he slid a telegraph flimsy before him on his desk, and said, “It appears here from Webb’s missive that the woman you’re looking for is one Mrs. Josephine Pritchard. Early fifties. Light gray hair, a tad on the portly side.”

  Billy snickered as he sat back in his chair and gave another little shiver of boyish delight.

  “And sporting one wooden leg. The left one.” He tapped his knuckles against the top of his desk. “Solid oak, I’d s’pect. Ha!”

  “A wooden-legged old bat.” Longarm scowled as he pointed his cold, half-smoked cheroot at the man giggling before him, through a heavy haze of churning gray smoke. “You’re a son of a bitch, Billy!”

  “Thank you.” Billy’s grin disappeared without a trace as he leaned forward in his hair, nailing Longarm with a commanding glare. “Now hurry on out of here. Your train’s pullin’ out in five minutes!”

  “Hot-diggidy-ding-dang-dong!” exclaimed the hon-yocker sitting beside Longarm.

  He ducked his head to see out the window of the narrow-gauge passenger car’s small, sooty window. The big, blocky chunk of rawboned man, who had informed Longarm after they’d boarded the Denver and Rio Grande at Union Station that he’d been a farmer in Dakota Territory until the snow and cold had driven him and his wife away, thumped the shoulder of the muslin-clad woman in the seat ahead of him. “Look at them canyon walls, Mother. Why, they appear to be climbin’ all the way to heaven!”

  The gray-haired woman in the crisp poke bonnet paused her needlework to look once more out the window. She shook her gray head and clucked, just as she’d done each of the half-dozen times that her husband, Hansel Anderson, had directed her attention outside over the past fifteen minutes, since the little train had choo-chooed its way into the mouth of the Royal Gorge.

  “Those are some tall hills, indeed, Dad,” the woman said in her thick Scandinavian brogue. “But Hansel, there is nothing on earth that could ever equal the glory of heaven!”

  She glanced over her shoulder at her husband. As she smiled with satisfaction at her words, Longarm glimpsed the vibrant blue of her right eye beneath the brim of her cream bonnet marred by a few gray smudges of gray soot from the locomotive’s smokestack and which dusted the hats and shoulders of nearly all the train’s passengers. Esther Anderson blinked once, resolutely and serenely, then turned her head forward and resumed work on the little cap she was knitting for her new grandson.

  The Andersons were on their way to live with their son, daughter-in-law, and newborn grandchild on a horse ranch in Nevada. Over the past six hours, Longarm had heard about the Andersons’ plans and nearly their entire family history, until he’d considered taking his rifle, saddlebags, and war bag, and repairing to the roof of the pitching coach car for a little peace and quiet.

  If there had been a saloon car, he’d have ridden there, his travel lubricated with Maryland rye and a distracting game of cards. But most of these mountain trains were fairly short combinations, as was this one, and there was nothing behind the chugging, smoke-spewing locomotive except a wood tender, two coach cars, a freighter, and caboose.

  “Holy moly, though, Mother,” intoned Hansel Anderson, nearly breaking his neck to peer up the twelve-hundred-foot, rocky, sunbaked northern ridge, “it may not be the stairway to heaven, but it’s still dang impressive. Never seen nothin’ like it before in my whole life!”

  Anderson glanced at Longarm. “We don’t have any hills even close to the size o’ them ridges anywhere in Dakota, I tell you, Custis. Leastways, in no part o’ Dakota I ever seen, and I lived there my whole life until just a few weeks ago.”

  The farmer and Longarm had been on a first-name basis for longer than the federal badge toter cared to think about.

  “Oh, I reckon maybe the snowdrifts get almost that high, I reckon!” Anderson laughed at his joke and thumped his wife on the shoulder again. “Ain’t that right, Mother?”

  The old woman wagged her head agreeably and smiled down at her work. “Oh, Dad!” Anderson snorted raucously and laughed, sort of jumping up and down in his seat.

  “Easy there, Anderson,” Longarm urged. “This car ain’t none too solid. You’re liable to derail us, you keep jumpin’ around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

  The big farmer, who had a nose the size and texture of an old ax handle, guffawed as though that were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  Longarm excused himself, and went out to the rear platform for a smoke, where he enjoyed his hard-won solitude and watched the canyon walls slide by the train that was rolling along at about fifteen miles per hour, if that. They were moving so slowly along the gentle incline of the gorge’s canyon floor that, he mused for lack of anything better to do, he could jump down on off the car, build himself a fishing pole out of string and an aspen stick, dig a worm out from under a rock, and snag a red-throated trout from the glistening waters of the Arkansas river sliding by, about ten feet from the railbed, and still hop the caboose before the train was out of reach.

  He sat with his back against the coach’s rear wall. He smoked, taking a few nips now and then from the hide-covered flask he carried in the pocket of his brown frock coat, his string tie buffeting in the wind. The Royal Gorge was a damn pretty sight wi
th its sandstone walls, the river, and the cobalt-blue sky, the occasional hawk or eagle swooping over the sparkling water whose headwaters were high in the deep mountains.

  But Longarm had seen the gorge and the Arkansas enough times that he now just wished there were an easier, speedier route through the mountains directly west of Denver. He’d heard rumors of a planned east-west tunnel straight through the Continental Divide up around James Peak, but until that colossal undertaking had been met with a couple thousand tons of dynamite, not to mention that amount of weight in brass balls and human ingenuity, the southern dip down to Pueblo and the slow, western plunge through the Royal Gorge would be the only way to Colorado’s central Rockies and on to Utah and beyond.

  The proposed tunnel, he’d heard, would cut the 340-mile trip down to 180.

  No one would have welcomed that cutoff more than Longarm as, two days later, he stood on the same rear platform, smoking and watching the sun-bathed, little town of Dotsero slide into view along the east side of the tracks. The town had been constructed at the confluence of the Colorado and Eagle rivers, and it nestled on a sage-stippled flat amidst high, snow-mantled peaks.

  The winter hadn’t been gone long from this high-altitude oasis surrounded by gold and silver mines, and most of the ridges wore their ermine, ragged-hemmed gowns halfway down their bulky, granite slopes. The white powder hadn’t been gone from these lower plateaus, either, for the sage and cedars were green as polished jade, with several creeks that fed the town still flashing cobalt blue. Most likely, they were tooth-crackingly cold.

  His traveling gear mounted upon his shoulders, clutching his trusty Winchester ’73 in his right hand, Longarm leaped down from the coach car even as it screeched and rattled to a halt before the rickety plank-board depot, plowed through rabbit brush and willows, and tramped down into the bed of a creek cutting up close to the gravel-paved railbed.

  Longarm set his gear down.

  It had been three days since he’d had a drink of fresh water. To numb himself against Hansel Anderson’s innocuous conversation, he’d drunk too much rye, and his mouth tasted as though something dead had been putrefying in his throat for several weeks. Intending to rectify the situation straightaway, he got down on both knees, doffed his hat, and lowered his face to the sparkling snowmelt stream.

  The water was so cold that it instantly numbed his lips and tongue as, doglike, he lapped up the delicious brew that tasted refreshingly of snow and minerals.

  “Hey, mister!” a man’s voice called from behind him.

  Longarm turned his head, water dripping from the ends of his longhorn mustache. He squinted up at a young man dressed in mismatched wool and wearing a soft, leather holster down low on his right thigh. The brim of his sun-faded bowler hat looked as though a whole passel of mice had been chomping on it. The kid stood atop the creek bank, feet spread a little more than shoulder width apart, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, which glistened with fresh brass.

  “Who’s askin’?”

  The kid spread a devious grin. “That’s a good enough answer fer me!”

  He’d just slapped leather and was about to bring up his long-barreled, walnut-handled Remington .44, when a boom as loud as detonated dynamite sounded nearby. For a split second, the blast seemed to suck all the air out of the world.

  At the same time, the kid’s head blew apart like a tomato obliterated from a fencepost by both bores of a double-barreled, ten-gauge shotgun.

  Chapter 4

  “You blew the demon’s head clear off, Dad!” a woman trilled in jubilation from somewhere up along the tracks.

  Longarm was still crouched beside the creek, staring in awe at the headless corpse standing before him, atop the creek bank. He’d been a lawman for a long time, and he’d fought in the war before that, but he’d never seen a sight as grisly as the one he witnessed now—the young man standing there before him, blood geysering up from his ragged neck to ooze down over the shoulders of his ratty, brown wool coat.

  He stood sort of quivering, and for a moment Longarm thought he was going to break into a dance. His head had been vaporized by what Longarm assumed had been two barrels of large-caliber buckshot, and its hair, skin, brains, and bone fairly painted the ground around him. The kid still clutched his pistol, but now as Longarm watched, the young would-be shooter’s hand opened. The pistol struck the ground with a thud. The kid’s knees were buckling, and now they hit the weeds at the edge of the bank, and the lifeless, quivering, blood-oozing corpse rolled through the brush and down the bank, to pile up five feet in front of Longarm.

  “Got him, Mother!” yelled Hansel Anderson.

  Longarm saw the man running along the edge of the bank to stop at the top of the deer path that Longarm had followed down to the water. The Dakota farmer clad in blue-plaid shirt, suspenders, and knee-high, lace-up boots held a smoking shotgun low across his thighs as he grinned down at the man whose head he’d vaporized. Esther Anderson ran up to her man, lifting her gray skirts up above her blunt, black shoes, and clutched his arm as she, too, stared down at the farmer’s handiwork.

  “I reckon all that bird huntin’ on the sloughs back in Dakota done honed your aim some, Dad!” She beamed. Then she narrowed one eye and lifted her pious gaze to Longarm. “A fork-tailed demon if we ever seen one. Dad here spied him first, Custis, as the would-be bushwhacker strolled so leisurely out of the depot house yonder and sauntered in your direction. Then I, too, saw him lift that hogleg from his holster, check the loads, and roll the cylinder like he expected to be usin’ that little smoker real soon. Sure enough, he was.”

  She clamped a hand on the grinning farmer’s big left shoulder. “The Lord’s work is never done—eh, Dad?”

  Longarm slowly heaved himself to his feet. He let his hand fall away from the walnut grips of his Colt Frontier .44-40, positioned for the cross draw on his left hip. He cast his gaze between the still-quivering corpse clad in blood-soaked brown wool to the two pioneers standing proudly above him, beaming as though looking out over a field of freshly harvested wheat.

  “Holy shit,” Longarm muttered, as several passengers from the train came over to see what the blast had been about.

  “Such vulgarisms lack nobility, Custis,” admonished Esther Anderson crisply. “And there is nothing holy in dung. Come, Dad—I’m tired and hungry, in need of food and rest before we make our next connection.”

  “You go on into the depot, Mother.” The big farmer patted the middle-aged woman’s hand. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  When the woman had gone, hefting two carpetbags and leaving the bulk of their luggage to “Dad,” Longarm gathered up his gear and climbed the bank. He stood beside his coverall-clad benefactor as he glanced down at the dead man. “Thanks, Anderson.” He squinted at the big double bore in the man’s big, scarred hands. “You’re right handy with that old popper.”

  “Shot a lot of geese back in Dakota. And any jaspers that tried to crowd me. You’d best watch yourself, Custis. If this man here was out to blow your wick, there could be more.”

  “I do believe you’re right,” Longarm said, as the big farmer clapped him on the back and, setting his shotgun on his shoulder, headed off toward where his and “Mother’s” luggage was piled on the platform flanking the depot building.

  Several men from the train milled around Longarm, smoking and glancing down with looks of revulsion at the dead kid lying near the cold creek, and at the bloody, boney spot in the sage and fescue near Longarm’s boots, which was all that remained of the would-be killer’s head. All the men appeared seasoned frontiersman, but one had to gulp to keep his lunch down as he turned and walked away, fatefully shaking his head.

  Longarm saw a short, potbellied, bandy-legged man in his mid- to late fifties walk out the depot building’s rear door, under a large rack of elk antlers, and look around, squinting beneath his high-crowned Stetson. When the man saw Longarm standing on the bank of the creek, he waddled over, scowling inside his patchy gray bear
d and fingering the big pistol wedged behind his wide, brown belt.

  “What the hell’s all the commotion out here?” he said in a deep, raspy voice. He wore a soiled white shirt under a dark-blue vest and corduroy coat. Green duck trousers billowed out around his short, bowed legs to disappear into his high-topped, mule-eared boots. “Sounded like thunder, but when I come out of Murphy’s saloon, it was clear as a spring Sabbath.” He gasped when he followed Longarm’s gaze to the headless corpse. “Good Lord, man! What goes on here?”

  “You the law here in Dotsero?”

  “Constable Pete Jenkins—that’s right. Now, I’ll thank you to answer my question. I try to keep a quiet town, though it ain’t easy of late, with all you troublemakers blowin’ through, heading for the diggin’s higher up! Good Lord, man—where’s his head?”

  “Right over there, Constable. It’s the gooey stuff in the grass. And I do apologize for the mess. My name is Custis Long, Deputy Unites States Marshal out of Denver. Any chance you recognize that headless younker down there, although I’ll admit it would be a tad easier if he wasn’t missing his face.”

  The oldster made a sour look as he stared down at the now still and silent dead man. “Can’t say as I do. Oh, I seen him around town earlier, but I never got his name. Rode in last night. Stabled his horse at Greeley’s Federated. Holed up at Miss Madigan’s place. I take note of all strangers, and it ain’t hard. Dotsero only claims about fifty reg’lar inhabitants, so strangers stick out like canker sores on purty whores.”

  “Did you happen to see which way he rode in from last night?”

  “I did. He came down along the Colorado River from the north.”

  “That wouldn’t be the direction of Snow Mound, by any chance?”

  “It would, indeed.”

  Longarm fingered the trigger of the Winchester he was resting on his shoulder, peering north, where he could see the Colorado cutting down through a broad canyon sheathed in pine-covered slopes. He looked at the local badge toter, who stood with his hands in his pockets, jingling change as he pondered the dead man.