Tabor Evans - Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

“Vonda Azrael?” Haven walked over to him and sandwiched his face in her hands. “Poor man. I’m afraid your ride down the arroyo has turned you into a blubbering fool. I mean, even more so than before.”

“It’s true, damnit!”

Haven shook her head, walked to her horse, removed the canteen from her saddle, popped the cork, and handed the flask to Longarm. “Maybe this will help.”

“The only thing’s gonna help is a couple pulls from a whiskey bottle.” He took the canteen, anyway, and drank greedily, unable to stop himself. He hadn’t realized how thirsty he was in spite of all the mud he’d drunk in the wash.

When he’d had his fill, he lowered the flask, sloshed around what water was left in it. “I hope you have more.”

“Fortunately, I brought both of my canteens,” she said ironically, taking back the one he held out to her. “Now, suppose you tell me how you ended up in that flooded wash? Where’s your horse?”

“My horse,” Longarm said. “Yeah, damn!” He looked at her steeldust idly chomping galleta grass. “I suppose that’s the only one you have?”

“Two canteens,” she said in her patient way, dead certain she was dealing with a man who’d gone soft in his thinker box. “Only one horse. We’re gonna have to ride double back to the Double D.”

“Not to the Double D,” he said, rising with effort from the boulder and unwrapping the steeldust’s reins from a creosote shrub. “Cochilo Gulch.”

He groaned as he hauled himself into the saddle and then extended his hand to Agent Delacroix. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll explain the whole thing on the way. We have to get there ahead of Leyton and Mercado, not to mention Vonda.”

“Vonda?” Haven said again, her voice pitched with the same disbelief as before as she took his hand, thrust a boot into the stirrup he freed for her, and hoisted herself onto the steeldust’s back behind him. “How in the world could that silly wife of Stretch’s have anything to do with robbing a gold shipment ?”

As he rode on along the flooded arroyo and then crossed it where it leveled out and became only a few feet deep, he told Haven about ex-ranger Jack Leyton, Mercado, and Vonda’s alliance. He outlined how Vonda, Mercado’s woman, married Stretch to get closer to the mine company’s secret gold-shipping route as well as to get her hands on the Azraels’ small fortune.

He told her about how Leyton had by then already thrown in with Mercado because if you couldn’t beat the border bandits, why not join them and make some real money?

But then Leyton had learned of the covert gold shipments from the secret mine in Mexico. He shared the information with Mercado and their female partner and former Texas saloon girl, Vonda.

Now, likely knowing there was a whole lot more money to be had on Double D range than what was in Whip Azrael’s office safe and in Stretch’s remuda, Vonda arranged for Stretch to hire several men from her and Mercado’s gang, so they could all keep a sharp eye out for the gold train route without attracting suspicion from the rangers.

“Incredible,” Haven said, riding behind Longarm as they made their way southwest, across the gradually lightening desert.

“Yep.”

Quickly, the sky turned from pink to salmon to yellow. Rocks and desert flora stood out in relief against the rolling buttes and mesas. As the sun climbed, steam snaked along the damp ground.

Longarm followed a flooded wash toward Cochilo Gulch, rising and falling over the broken land, threading his way between rocky slopes and shelving mesa walls.

He kept his eyes and ears open for Leyton’s men, who would be riding in from Holy Defiance in the east though he didn’t know by which route. He cursed to himself, knowing he wasn’t making good time. But he couldn’t push the steeldust overly hard on the wet desert terrain in the intensifying steamy heat, for fear of maiming or killing the beast.

He wished he had a second horse. He’d have left Haven in a shaded arroyo and ridden on ahead himself astraddle her horse and come back for her later, but with Leyton out here, Longarm could very well have been throwing the Pinkerton agent to the wolves.

He couldn’t leave her alone out here on foot.

Mid-morning, he reined up suddenly, turned his head and cocked an ear, listening. Crackling sounded in the distance, straight ahead along the wash they’d started following when the floodwater had gone down. Few guns made a cacophony like the one he was hearing.

It was the Gatling gun opening up on the gold train.

“Oh, shit!” Haven said.

Longarm yelled, “Hi-yahh!” and ground his heels against the steeldust’s loins, putting the horse into a gallop. The horse was already tired, and Longarm couldn’t get much speed out of it. His heart hammered and twisted in his chest as he continued to hear the staccato, seemingly endless belching of the Gatling gun.

When the machine gun fell silent, there were a few cracks and booms of pistol and rifle fire. Men shouted and screamed, horses whinnied. Hooves thudded.

As he put the steeldust up the long, gravel-floored wash that sloped up to a pass dead ahead, Longarm thought he recognized Leyton’s jubilant voice rising above the din.

The steeldust was slowing and shambling uncertainly, blowing hard. Longarm could feel the pounding of the horse’s heart between his knees. It couldn’t go much farther. No point in killing the poor beast in trying to get at the most a dozen more yards out of it.

Longarm stopped the weak-kneed horse, and as he hiked his stiff right leg up over the horn and leaped to the ground, Haven frogged back over the horse’s tail, landing on her boot heels.

Longarm turned to her. “I’m gonna need one of your LeMats.”

She unholstered the pistol in her left-side holster, tossed it to him butt first. He snatched it out of the air, rolled the cylinder across his forearm, and turned to stare up the rocky slope. All of his senses were alive, ushering into the background all of his physical aches and miseries.

On the other side of the pass there was only silence now.

The guns had stopped clattering. The battle was over. After having heard Leyton’s voice, it wasn’t hard for Longarm to decide who the victor was.

He glanced at Haven. “Stay here.”

“Like hell!”

They jogged together up the wash. Only a little water remained, the rest having run down to the flat land or soaked into the wash’s gravelly bottom. There wasn’t much water around here, which meant there probably hadn’t been as much rain in this neck of the mountains as up at Holy Defiance, and the gold train had kept to its schedule.

And Leyton and Mercado and probably Vonda, as well, had been waiting for it.

The slope wasn’t steep but it was long, and the fatigued and badly bruised lawman was breathing hard when he and Haven reached the crest of the pass a half hour later. Bending forward, hands on his knees as he gulped air, he stared down the long slope of the wash before him. Horror clamped down hard on his belly, and he felt his knees weaken.

“We were about an hour too late to warn them,” Haven said, staring down the slope, her face grim beneath the brim of her hat.

Longarm took another deep breath and ran forward down the wash, staring ahead at the dozen or so bodies strewn across the wash’s floor a hundred yards away.

Leyton’s men had hit the gold wagon about halfway up the pass and where the rocky walls rose steeply around it. Here, the driver had no escape. He hadn’t been able to whip his mule team into a run ahead because of the steepness of the grade, and because the canyon wasn’t wide enough to turn what was likely a four- or six-mule hitch, he hadn’t been able to retreat, either.