Tabor Evans - Longarm on the Border

Tabor Evans

Longarm on the Border

Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long is dispatched to El Paso to extradite a prisoner from Mexico-and winds up target practice for some angry polecats.

Chapter 1

Even before he opened his eyes, in that instant between sleep and wakefulness, Longarm knew it had snowed during the night. Like the hunter whose senses guide him to prey, like the hunted whose senses keep him from becoming prey, Longarm was attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings. The light that struck his closed eyelids wasn't the usual soft gray that brightens the sky just before dawn. It had the harsh brilliance that comes only from the pre-sunrise skyglow being reflected from snow-covered ground.

Opening his eyes only confirmed what Longarm already knew. He didn't see much point in walking across the ice-cold room to raise a shade at one of the twin windows. The light seeping around the edges of the opaque shades had that cold, hard quality he'd sensed when he'd snapped awake.

Longarm swore, then grunted. He didn't believe in cussing the weather, or anything else he was powerless to change. He was a man who believed that swearing just wasted energy unless it served some purpose besides relieving his own dissatisfaction.

Last night, when he'd swung off the narrow-gauge after a long, slow, swaying trip up from Santa Fe to Denver, he'd noted the nip in the air, but his usually reliable weather sense hadn't warned him it might snow. For one thing, it was just too early in the year. It was only the first day of September, and the Rocky Mountains' winter was still a couple of months away.

Longarm hadn't been thinking too much about the weather last night, though. All that had been in his mind was getting to his room, taking a nightcap from the bottle of Maryland rye that stood waiting on his dresser, and falling into bed. On another night, he'd probably have followed his habit of dropping in at the Black Cat or one of the other saloons on his way home, to buck the faro bank for a few turns until he relaxed. He'd started to cut across the freightyard to Colfax instead of taking the easier way along Wynekoop Street. What he'd seen happen in New Mexico Territory had left a sour taste in his mouth that the three or four drinks he'd downed on the train couldn't wash away.

There was little light in the freightyard. The acetylene flares mounted on standards here and there created small pools of brightness, but intensified the darkness between them. Longarm was spacing his steps economically as he crossed the maze of tracks, sighting along the wheel-polished surface of the rails to orient himself, when he sensed rather than saw the man off to his left. He couldn't see much of anything in the gloom, just the interruption of the light reflected on the rail along which he was sighting.

"Casey?" Longarm called.

He didn't think it was Casey, who was the night yard super, and more likely to be in his office, but if it was one of Casey's yard bulls patrolling, the fact that he'd called the boss's name would alert the man that Longarm wasn't a freight car thief.

A shot was his answer, a muzzle flash following the whistle of lead uncomfortably close to his guts. Longarm drew as he was dropping and snapshotted as he rolled, throwing his own lead at the place where he'd seen the orange blast. He didn't know whether or not he'd connected. He hadn't had a target; his shot was the equivalent to the buzz a rattlesnake gives when a foot comes too near its coils.

Faintly, the sound of running footsteps gritting on cinders gave him the answer. Whoever'd tried to bushwhack him wasn't going to hang around and argue. For several seconds, Longarm lay on the rough earth, sniffing coal dust, trying to stab through the dark with his eyes, straining his ears to hear some giveaway sound that would spot a target for him. Except for the distant chugging of a yard mule cutting cars at the shunt, there was nothing to hear.

Longarm didn't waste time trying to prowl the yard. Being the target of a grudge shot from the dark wasn't anything new to him, or to any of the other men serving as deputy U.S. marshals in the unreconstructed West of the 1880s. Longarm guessed that whoever'd been responsible for the drygulch try had been skulking in another car of the narrow-gauge on the trip up from New Mexico. God knows, he'd stepped on enough toes during his month there to have become a prime target for any one of a half-dozen merciless, powerful men. Any of them could've sent a gunslick to trail him to Denver and waylay him. The attack had to have originated in New Mexico Territory, he decided. Nobody in Denver had known when he'd be arriving.

Brushing himself off, Longarm had hurried on across the freightyard and to his room. He'd hit the sack without lighting a lamp, dropping his clothes to the floor as he shed them, bone-tired.

On the dresser, the half-full bottle of Maryland rye gleamed in the light trickling around the windowshade. Its invitation was more attractive than the idea of staying in the warm bed. Longarm swung his bare feet to the floor, crossed the worn gray carpet in two long strides, and let a trickle of warmth slip down his throat. As he stood there, the tarnished mirror over the dresser showed his tanned skin tightening in goosebumps raised by the room's chill air.

Crossing the room to its inside corner, Longarm pulled aside a sagging curtain. He grabbed a cleaner shirt than the one he'd taken off, and a pair of britches that hadn't been grimed with coal dust from the cinders he'd rolled in last night at the freightyard.

He wasted no time in dressing. The cold air encouraged speed. Longjohns and flannel shirt, britches, wool socks, and he was ready to stomp into his stovepipe cavalry boots. Another short snort from the bottle and he turned to check his tools. From its usual night resting place, hanging by its belt from the bedpost on the left above his pillow, Longarm took his .44-40 Colt double-action out of its open-toed holster. Quickly and methodically, his fingers working with blurring speed, he swung out the Colt's cylinder, dumped its cartridges on the bed, and strapped on the gunbelt.

He returned the unloaded pistol to the holster and drew three or four times, triggering the revolver with each draw, but always catching the hammer with his thumb instead of letting it snap on an empty chamber and perhaps break the firing pin. Each time he drew, when Longarm had returned the Colt to the holster he made the tiny adjustments that were needed to put the waxed, heat-hardened leather at the precise angle and position he wanted it to ride, just above his left hip.

Satisfied at last, he dripped a bit of oil on a square of flannel and swabbed the Colt down before reloading. He checked each cartridge as carefully as he did the fresh round he put into the cylinder to replace the one he'd fired last night. Then he checked out the .44-caliber derringer soldered to the chain that held his pocket watch on its other end. He put on his vest, dropped the watch into its left breast pocket, the derringer into the right-hand pocket. Longarm always anticipated that trouble might look him up, as it had in the freightyard. If it did, he aimed to be ready.

Longarm's stomach was growling by now. He quieted it temporarily with a short sip of rye before completing his methodical preparations to leave his room for the day. These were simple and routine, but it was a routine he never varied while in civilized surroundings. Black string tie in place, frock coat settled on his broad shoulders, Stetson in its forward-canted angle on his close-cropped head, he picked up his necessaries from the top of the bureau and stowed them into their accustomed pockets. Change went into one britches pocket and jackknife in the other; his wallet with the silver federal badge pinned in its fold was slid into an inner breast pocket. Extra cartridges went into his right-hand coat pocket, handcuffs and a small bundle of waterproofed wooden matches in the pocket on the left.