Longarm 341

Longarm scraped his thumbnail across a sulfur-tipped match and touched the flame to his cigar. Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs, he sat back against a tree bole and watched the sorrel and the speckle-gray pack mule draw water from the spring bubbling up from mossy stones.

It had taken him nearly two hours the previous night, after the rogue grizzly had finally ambled away, to retrieve the sorrel from a distant meadow cloaked in velvet darkness and shimmering stars, the saddle hanging beneath its belly but otherwise intact, his rifle still snugged in its boot. He hadn’t found the mule until this morning, cropping young willows along a creek nestled in a deep gorge.

Longarm was on the trail again by ten-thirty and, following Comanche John’s scribbled map, found the second cabin by early afternoon. As he’d expected—because he’d never come across a fresh trail—the taut log structure, perched on a hillside overlooking a small ravine and rolling firs and aspens, had been abandoned, the doors and windows boarded up, a wooden bucket tipped over the chimney pipe, needle grass growing in the adjoining corral and lean-to.

Longarm took another deep drag off the cigar and stared at the rocky twin domes of Ute Peak rising from the pine forest ahead of him, its boulder-strewn slopes and rounded crests stippled with brown boulders and cedars, the trees thicker in the ravines and chutes branching around scarps protruding from its slope like rocky sores.

Ute was the highest peak around, jutting from a pine-choked canyon among other, similar formations a good eight thousand feet above sea level, above the north fork of the Diamondback River twisting at its base.

Longarm couldn’t see the river canyon from here, but crossing several steep rises earlier, he’d heard the rapids. Judging by John’s map, Magnusson’s second cabin lay just over the peak’s low, eastern shoulder, near Neversummer Creek.

He hadn’t figured on riding that far to meet John. If all had gone well, they should have crossed paths by now, but it looked as though Longarm would have to ford the north fork of the Diamondback and try to pick up John’s trail somewhere around the other cabin.

He hoped John hadn’t fallen prey to Magnusson’s wolf women. John could be nettling and tiresome, but Longarm had grown fond of the old codger, and he’d hate like hell to have to tell the Marshal of Diamondback he’d gotten her uncle killed.

Longarm was trail-weary, fatigued from the thin, high-altitude air, the bear debacle, from having to run down his mounts afoot, and from riding up and down these forested ridges, each one looking all too much like the one before it, not to mention ducking under branches and swerving around deadfall and backtracking after his trail petered out in a box canyon.

With a sigh, he stuck the cheroot in his teeth, stood, brushed off his denims, and reached into his saddlebags for his Maryland rye. He lifted it high, smiled with relief to see that the bottle was three-quarters full, then popped the cork and took a bracing pull.

Enjoying the burn in his throat and the restorative warmth in his belly, he returned the hooch to the pouch, grabbed the sorrel’s reins and the pack mule’s lead rope, and swung into the leather.

An hour later, he was walking the sorrel along the shoulder of a grassy slope, when the mule nickered. A half second later, the sorrel threw its head up sharply, snorting and twitching its ears.

Longarm drew back on the horse’s reins, glanced at the pack mule, which had stopped and was bobbing its head angrily.

Longarm peered through the trees carpeting the slope below, at the pines and rocks on the incline to his right. Magpies foraged among the branches, and a golden eagle winged around a granite scarp jutting high above the ridge crest. The only sounds were the birds and the river rapids curving along the base of the mountain on Longarm’s left.

Frowning, keeping his ears pricked and dragging his gaze back and forth across the old Basque sheep trail he’d been following from Magnusson’s empty cabin, he gigged the sorrel forward. As he moved into the shaded forest, the mule stopped suddenly, snorting loudly, nearly jerking the lead rope from Longarm’s hand.

Where the forest bled out to a steep, sunlit slope carpeted in brome grass, needle grass, and squaw currant, a young woman was hunkered down on all fours, picking currants from the bushes and dropping them into a large basket of woven yucca blades. She wore no top, and her full, pink-tipped, golden tan breasts swayed as she moved, crawling along the slope’s shoulder, plucking berries from the spindly vines.

The sorrel twitched its ears again. As it lifted its head sharply, Longarm leaned forward and, staring at the blonde who had not yet seen him in the forest shadows, closed his gloved left hand across the horse’s nostrils, preventing a whinny.

The blonde probably hadn’t heard him because of the river’s rush below, but the jittery animals appeared ready to pitch and scream.

When the sorrel lowered its head, Longarm removed his right hand from its snout and, touching his revolver’s grips once more, pulled his boot from his right stirrup, preparing to dismount. He’d just begun to swing his right leg up toward the horse’s rump, when something large appeared in the corner of his right eye.

Both horses pitched and screamed. Slamming his right boot back into the stirrup and flinging his right hand toward the saddle horn, Longarm whipped his head toward the up slope.

The grizzly stood on its hind legs at the very edge of thick woods and behind a boulder that rose to the bear’s broad belly. It could be no other bear but the one he’d already danced with, for there could be no other bear that size—or that cantankerous—in this stretch of forest.

As the sorrel screamed again and swung sharply toward the down slope, Longarm’s right hand hit the saddlehorn askance. Before he knew it, he was careening off the horse’s right shoulder. He hit the ground on his back, the air squeezed from his lungs in a single rush.

He instinctively dug his fingers into the dirt and pine needles carpeting the steep slope, but gravity grabbed him and pitched him down the mountain.

As he turned somersaults through the thin brush of the forest, grunting and groaning, he watched the arrow-straight columns of the pines whip past. His shoulder glanced off one. The blow turned him slightly.

Then he was rolling, limbs akimbo. With each downturn, he saw the blonde on the sun-splashed slope grow before him. On her hands and knees, she stared up at him, blue eyes wide with shock, breasts dipped toward her berry basket, wild hair framing her chiseled, beautiful face.

As he rolled toward her, she swerved one way, then the other, her eyes growing larger. Then he slammed into her. She screamed. Berries flew.

She rolled beneath him, then on top of him, and then they got separated for a while before he rolled on top of her once more, feeling her hair in his face, then her naked, sweat-slick right shoulder a half second before his hand swept across a full, round breast.

Longarm felt the cold water close over him, his right leg entangled with one of the blonde’s. He heard the muffled explosion of a large-caliber rifle.

His back hit the rocky bottom—a dozen hard lumps assaulting him. He got his legs under him and lifted his head from the water as another explosion resounded throughout his skull.

He spit water, shook his head, and opened his eyes. The blonde bobbed up from the pool, gasping and smoothing her hair back from her face, the water cascading down her breasts. Beyond her, a big, bearded man in a buffalo coat and leather hat sat on the riverbank, holding a heavy Sharps rifle in his hands as he stared uphill, grinning.

The grizzly tumbled down the hill like a huge boulder loosed by a landslide. The bear was heading toward Longarm and the girl, who stood gazing up at the bear, her lips forming a silent “Wooah!”

Longarm’s body was sore from toe to scalp, and his brain was addled. He was slow to react. As the bear plunged toward him, dust billowing around the huge, bouncing body, the arms and legs flying every which way, Longarm wheeled and threw himself into the blonde.

They flew ten feet upstream, landing on a shallow bar. A wink later, the bear careened over the cutbank and plunged into the river like a gargantuan cannonball, landing where Longarm and the girl had stood staring up at it.

Longarm and the girl were pelted with sand and pebbles as a wave washed over them. Spitting grit from his lips, Longarm stared at the bear.

It lay on its back, arms and legs spread wide. Blood glistened from two large holes in its chest, webbing like red smoke in the tea-colored water. The bear’s nose and toes stuck up from the surface, its brown, shot-glass eyes glazed with death.

Longarm looked at the blonde lying on her side, facing him, her shocked eyes on the bear. Sand streaked her breasts, the water beading on them and reflecting the sunlight like jewels.

Suddenly, he bolted to his knees, brushed his hand across his holster, and spewed water from his lips. The .44 was still there. He palmed it, aimed it first at the blonde, then at the mountain man sitting on the bank and staring appreciatively down at the water-logged grizzly. He held his Sharps across his knees.

“Hold it,” Longarm ordered, blinking against the water still washing down his face from his hair. He thumbed the Colt’s hammer back. “Stay where you are—both of you.”

The blonde and the big man turned to him dully, as if noticing him for the first time. He could have been a strange bird that had just dropped into their camp without warning.

Longarm glanced around and stepped back to peer over a low ridge behind the big man in the buffalo coat—Magnus Magnusson, without a doubt. Blue camp smoke rose from a notch in the mountain slope, and Longarm spotted a black mule tied with Comanche John’s dun gelding and several horses between aspens.

His gut twisted, and his heart hammered. If they had John’s mounts, John was most likely dead. Hardening his jaw, Longarm looked around once more.

Something hard slammed against the back of Longarm’s head. The world pitched. Black balloons danced in his eyes until one balloon grew larger than all the others, filling his vision as his knees buckled.