Longarm 341

When he’d grabbed his bottle and shoved the neck down into his holster, he wrapped the rope around his waist. “Get me outta here!”

Merle moved away from the pit. From above came a horse’s nicker and hoof clomps, and then the slack was taken out of the rope.

Longarm let the rope lift him and swing him against the wall. He planted his heels against the stone, and the rope tugging and jerking as hoof thuds sounded from above, he walked up the side and over the lip, into sunshine and a cool breeze and a vast expanse of sky arching over bald, rocky knobs in all directions. A teepee stood on a nearby flat expanse of gravel, surrounded by junipers, potentilla shrubs, and bristlecone pines. The teepee’s scraped hides glowed like a bleached skull in the high-altitude sunshine.

Horses and mules, including Longarm’s sorrel, were tied among the bristlecones, near where a spring bubbled up around chalky orange rocks.

Besides the gnarled, low-growing bristlecone pines, no trees grew in the area; only shrubs. They were obviously above the timberline. It was a lunar landscape, the sky scrubbed, the air clear and crisp, the sun painfully bright.

Comanche John stood beside the hole, his saddled dun ground-tied behind him. A heavy band around his waist pushed out his blood-stained buckskin tunic. The right leg of his breeches was bloody down to the knee.

“Fixed me up swell, they did, then stuck me in a hole over yonder. ’Nother diggin’ just like this one. I reckon they decided we had other uses.” John laughed and winked at Longarm. He cut the laugh short when Merle’s shadow angled over him.

“If you two have had enough fun, we might be able to catch up to ’em. I’ve been hearing explosions off and on.” She jerked a thumb over a burnt orange, mushroom-shaped nob to the northwest. “Seems to be coming from that way.”

Longarm remembered the explosion he’d heard earlier. He’d heard a couple more since then, but they’d barely registered, as he’d been in the desperate throes of trying to free himself from the cavern.

“They do,” John said. “The blonde told me so. That’s why they were keepin’ us alive. They needed two strong men to work the mine for ’em . . . once we healed.”

And in return we’d get our ashes hauled, Longarm did not say aloud. He remembered his dead pit partner. No doubt the poor gent had been forced to help out in the mine till he either got sick or flat-out refused to be enslaved any longer.

“We’ll get after ’em as soon as I’ve regained my wits.” He held the bottle up to Merle. “Drink?”

She reached for the bottle, took a drink, then handed it back to Longarm. He passed the bottle to Comanche John but kept his eyes on the marshal of Diamondback.

Merle Blassingame looked fit, if a little trail-dusty, in her white, pin-striped shirt, red and black vest on which her marshal’s star was pinned, and the black denims artfully tracing the long curve of her thighs and stuffed into her boot tops. Her silver-plated .45 rode high on her right hip, pearl grips glowing in the air as fresh and clear as champagne at this high altitude.

“What the hell are you doing here, anyway?” Longarm asked her. “You’re out of your jurisdiction.”

“I started losing sleep, worrying that you two idiots might not be able to resist those crazy wolf women, so I deputized one of the townsmen and came looking for you. I thought I was just bein’ a flighty female till I found Uncle John hogtied in that digging yonder.” She curled her nose. “And you trying to crawl up out of your own pit like a damn crab from a bucket.”

Longarm grabbed his bottle away from the old mountain man, a sour expression on his face. He felt guilty for enjoying his deerskin dance with the wolf women. At several times before they’d snuffed his fire with a whiskey bottle, he could have wrung their necks but had chosen not to.

The marshal was right. This hadn’t been his best work. But any man in his situation, even Billy Vail, would have done the same thing.

He scowled angrily at Merle and grumbled, “Instead of just sitting there insulting me, why don’t you and Uncle John try to cut their sign while I saddle my sorrel?”

“What’d they do to you—those crazy wolf women?” Merle asked Longarm as they followed the trail of three horses around the shoulder of a sun-blasted, rocky bluff.

Picas squeaked and scuttled among the rocks and the short, alpine sedge grasses lining the narrow trail carved by mountain goats. He’d found his revolver, rifle, and saddle in Magnusson’s lodge. His hat had hung from a lodgepole.

Stalling, Longarm glanced at Comanche John riding his dun behind them. “What’d they do to you, John?”

John removed his corncob pipe from his mouth, spat to one side, then returned the pipe to his teeth with disgust. “Just dressed my wound and let me sleep, goddamnit!” He stared at Longarm, narrowing his eye suspiciously. “You?”

Longarm hiked a shoulder and turned around, flushing slightly, letting his glance rake Merle riding to his left. “Same here . . . damnit . . .”

He booted the sorrel ahead and up a bald shoulder. At a narrow shelf, he dismounted and rummaged around in his saddlebags for his field glasses. He clambered up the side of a bluff, twisting around sunburned boulders and stunted shrubs, limping on his skinned and bruised feet, his headache returning as the whiskey wore off.

Near the crest of the bluff, he doffed his hat, then got down and crawled to within a foot of the crest.

As Merle and Comanche John climbed the slope behind him, Longarm glassed the funnel-shaped canyon below him, shielding the lenses with his hands.

On a shelf only about a hundred yards away, and about fifty yards below, stood a small log-and-stone cabin with woven pine branches forming the roof. The front of the shack faced down canyon, away from Longarm. The sun and the high-country winter had weathered it mercilessly. The logs were cracked and gray, the open shutters hanging askew, the tin chimney pipe jutting crookedly.

The hovel looked all the more stark for nothing but sunburned rocks and boulders lying around it. A wind-battered privy flanked the place. Constructed of slender, vertical pine logs, it leaned in the same direction the bristlecone pines leaned lower and farther down canyon—to the east.

Below the cabin, a mine portal shone in the canyon’s right wall—a small, square opening flanked by a framework of peeled pine logs. Above the portal, Ute Mountain reached nearly straight up a good two thousand feet, the ragged, crenelated wall strewn with copper boulders of all shapes and sizes.

Longarm lowered the binoculars. At the mountain’s base, and through the naked eye, the portal looked no bigger than a shoe box. Ute Peak cast it nearly entirely in shadow.

Another explosion sounded farther down canyon, the report echoing like a cannon blast. The two horses in the corral off the cabin’s far side trotted around frantically, nickering and twitching their ears at the blast.

“Looks like Magnusson appropriated old Billy and Ralph Bailey’s Ute Peak Mine.” John scowled. “I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of either Billy or Ralph in nearly a year. Now, I reckon I know why . . .”

“Makes me a little sad I came when I did,” Merle quipped as she stared through Longarm’s field glasses. “A little hard work might have done you boys some good.”

“We’ll check out the cabin first, then the canyon,” Longarm said, ignoring her. “I’m guessing all three are busting rock in the canyon, but I don’t want any more surprises.”

When they’d retrieved their rifles and Longarm had returned his field glasses to his saddlebags, they tramped back up and over the ridge crest, spreading out to approach the cabin from the rear, hopscotching the flat boulders strewn down the bluff to within twenty yards of the privy.

Longarm walked farthest right, intending to check out the privy even though the front door hung open, its leather hinges squeaking faintly in the breeze. Merle walked twenty yards to his right, Comanche John another twenty beyond Merle.

Longarm was halfway between the butte crest and the privy when he heard something that wasn’t the privy’s squeaking hinges, his own footsteps, or the wind sifting over the hard, dry rocks. He stopped, whistled through his front teeth, and raised his left hand.

Merle stopped suddenly, then whistled to stop John who hadn’t heard or seen Longarm’s signals. Frozen on separate, wagon-sized boulders, Comanche John and Merle frowned at Longarm, holding their rifles up high across their chests.

Longarm signaled the other two to stay where they were. He leaped onto the next boulder four feet beyond, landing on the ball of his left foot. He continued forward, holding his rifle in his right hand, approaching the privy’s sun- and wind-blistered rear wall. He leaped off the last boulder, stopped ten feet from the privy’s left rear corner, and cocked his head to listen.

Hearing only the hinges squawking and the wind creaking the privy’s pine frame, he continued forward, moving slowly, stepping lightly, aiming the Winchester straight out from his right hip. He could smell the sewage in the breeze blowing through the gaps between the slender pine poles. He walked along the privy’s left side, stepping into the triangle of shade darkening the stones and red gravel.

Longarm winced and ducked as the ball carved the air three inches in front of his nose while wood slivers basted the right side of his face and his right shoulder. As the ball barked off a rock to his left, Longarm turned toward the privy, swinging his rifle at the smoking, silver dollar-sized hole blasted through the wall.

Before he could level his rifle, a huge body bolted through the wall. Split pine poles flew in every direction. In a bulky buffalo coat, wool shirt, and leather hat, and shielding his face with one raised arm and his Sharps rifle, Magnus Magnusson slammed into Longarm like a ton of gold ore.

Longarm triggered his rifle into what was left of the privy wall a half second before he hit the ground, Magnusson landing on top of him. The burly mountain man was raging like a lunatic in a blazing asylum, pounding Longarm’s face with his forehead. Longarm tried to raise his rifle, but then remembered he’d already fired a shot, and he was in no position to work the cocking mechanism.

When Magnusson rose, grabbed a rock, then raised it with both hands above his head, intending to smash it down on Longarm, the lawman grabbed his pistol from his cross-draw holster, his hand moving automatically.

As he began slamming the rock toward Longarm’s head, Longarm shoved his Colt’s barrel into the man’s bulging belly and fired. The man screamed like a poleaxed mule. Longarm twisted right as the rock slammed down where his head had been, the big mountain man sprawling on top of it, bellowing into the sand. Smoke and the fetid odor of burning flesh and wool wafted as the ground smothered the fire the shot had started on the man’s shirt.

The wolf was bolting toward him from the cabin, snarling, its hackles raised, eyeing Longarm like supper. Merle and Comanche John were firing at the beast, but several boulders impeded their shots, the slugs tearing into the sand and rocks around the wolf’s flying paws.

The wolf closed fast. It was within twenty yards when Longarm jacked a fresh shell into his rifle’s breech, rose to one knee, and planted a bead on the thick, steel-blue fur of the animal’s chest.

Two more slugs, fired from the direction of Comanche John and Merle, kicked up dust and gravel around the wolf’s feet. Ignoring the shots, the snarling creature leaped toward Longarm, who squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

The wolf yipped shrilly as the slug slammed its left shoulder. Longarm threw himself right, rose to an elbow, and jacked another round. The wolf, growling and showing its teeth, had pushed off the ground and was wheeling again toward Longarm.

Longarm shot it two more times quickly, once through the middle of its chest, once through its head. The wolf flew back, twisting in the air, and fell in a heap.

Longarm turned to the mountain man, who knelt holding one hand across his bloody belly while sliding a huge Bowie from his belt sheath. He’d barely gotten the knife raised to throw before Longarm drilled him once between the eyes, the slug jetting through his head to paint the sand behind him bright red.

Longarm turned toward Merle walking toward him, angling her smoking rifle across her chest while Comanche John stood atop a boulder, staring cautiously out over the canyon south of the cabin.

Merle opened her mouth to respond. Comanche John cut her off. “’Nuff snarlin’, pups!” John was staring off down canyon. “The wolf women is headin’ this way!”