Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance

Chapter 25

Longarm left the garden through a wooden gate and strolled over to his shack.

He went inside and lit a lamp, throwing a shutter open so that anyone around and watching would see the light. He took a long drink of water from the jug that the housekeeper, Angelina, had provided, and then swept a hand through his hair beneath his hat. He slipped back outside and stole around the front of the shack to the far side, out of sight from the house.

Stepping carefully in the darkness, he walked back past the rear of the shack and kept striding, threading his way through the sage and greasewood. After a time, he arced back toward the main yard and found himself on the south end of it, gazing back toward the yard proper that was bathed in cool, blue starlight.

The house was on the right and about seventy yards away from him. The corrals, barns, and bunkhouse were on the left side of the yard.

Most drovers tended to keep the hours of the animals they tended, retiring and rising early, and these men appeared no exception. The long, L-shaped bunkhouse between one of the barns and the breaking corral was dark. He stood beside a cottonwood for several minutes, listening to all the little night sounds of which besides the breeze and the infrequent rattling of leaves, there were few.

Finally deciding he was alone out here, he decided to relight a half-smoked cigar and sit down against the tree to look around and mull over the situation. He’d just dug the cheroot out of his pocket, when he heard a sound off to his left.

It was a scraping sound mixed with…what? Panting?

He returned the cigar to his coat pocket and, adjusting his Colt high on his left hip, its butt angled across his belly, he strode into the brush and rocks on the yard’s north side. There were a couple of old stone buildings out here—probably a keeper shed for meat and maybe another storage shed of some kind. He walked between them and across a sandy wash.

The sounds he’d heard grew louder. They sounded like an animal digging.

He climbed up the other side of the wash and stopped. Before him, a small shadow jostled. The coyote was kicking up sand around a rock pile. No, not a coyote, he realized now, hearing the ragged breathing and faint, desperate mewling. A dog.

The shepherd-like cur of Mrs. Azrael?

Longarm moved forward, dropped to his haunches, one hand on his pistol butt in case he was wrong and it was really a wolf or a bobcat out here.

“Here, boy,” he whispered.

The dog froze, looked toward him. Starlight shone on its wet tongue hanging down over its lower jaw.

“Here, boy,” Longarm said. “Come on over here. What you doin’, old son?”

The dog whined and dropped to its belly beside the low pile of rocks, staring toward Longarm, panting. The lawman straightened and walked slowly over, keeping his hand on his pistol butt. The dog growled, rose, and backed away several feet, keeping its dark eyes glued to the big man walking toward it.

The rock piles, the lawman saw as he drew within a few feet, were graves. One had a homemade cross flanking it. The other wasn’t quite as large as the other, and it was not marked with a cross. The dog had been lying beside the unmarked grave, but now it slowly backed away from Prophet, mewling and groaning deep in its throat, pointed ears pricked.

It had dug a sizeable hole in the side of the unmarked grave, tossing sand over some of the rocks that had been mounded to keep predators away.

“It’s okay, boy,” Longarm said, dropping to his haunches once more and removing his hand from his Colt’s grips. “You’re only doin’ what dogs do, ain’t ya?”

The dog barked once, twice, three times, jerking its head and snapping its jaws. Longarm gritted his teeth as the barks echoed, cutting the quiet night open.

“Shhh!” he said, holding two fingers to his lips. “Enough o’ that!” he hissed, knowing the barks were likely heard by every pair of ears around the place. He would have left right then, but he wanted to get a better look at the graves—one marked while the other, curiously, was not.

Why wasn’t it?

The shaggy beast appeared ready to bark again, when a man’s voice called from the darkness in the direction of the bunkhouse, “Duff? That you, Duff? Here, boy!”

The dog yipped eagerly and took off running wide around Longarm and then angling toward the wash and the bunkhouse beyond. Longarm stayed hunkered down beside the graves. The dog’s soft foot thuds dwindled into silence. A man’s voice, not loud but clear and sharp in the quiet night, said, “What’re you doin’ over there? Better not be diggin’ up them graves. Git home, you mangy critter!”

The dog whined. There was a faint rustling. The animal had taken off running again. Longarm hoped it was obeying the man and was heading back to the main house.

Longarm stayed hunkered beside the graves, listening. When he heard no one coming over, he looked at the graves. Being fresh, they were most likely the graves of the two men Longarm had hauled onto the ranch headquarters earlier that day. Why was one marked with the traditional cross, the other not?

Which one was the ranger and which the man who’d been about to give Prophet a bellyful of lead?

Men who rode for the same ranch were usually pretty tight. When a man died riding for that brand, he was given a proper burial, which usually included at least a crudely fashioned cross with a properly fortified grave.

Longarm thought he knew who was buried beneath the cross. The answer to that question answered, or at least started to answer, a lot more. And it caused his suspicions about Stretch Azrael and the entire role of the Double D to buffet like red flags in the wind.

He turned and walked back toward the dry wash. When he’d crossed it, men’s voices sounded off to his left. He froze, turned his head toward the bunkhouse, his hand once more closing over his pistol grips. The voices continued—two men conversing in a low tone. They were roughly thirty to fifty yards away.

Longarm pressed up close to a paloverde and peered through its branches. Nothing but cactus and creosote shrubs between him and the rear of the bunkhouse. He brushed past the paloverde and walked toward the bunkhouse until he saw a privy behind it. Two shadows moved behind the privy. Pinpricks of dull orange light shone against the shadows.

The smell of cigarette smoke touched Longarm’s nostrils. The voices were clearer now, from this distance, though the men were speaking in conspiratorial tones.

He stopped behind a mesquite, pressed a shoulder to the trunk, breathing shallowly and pricking his ears, picking out bits of the conversation as the men smoked and talked.

“…Boss don’t like it at all,” one man was saying. “All this snoopin’ around.”

Silence.

A throat was cleared.

“…Wanna do about it?”

“Same as before.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, well, hell—what’re we gonna do?”

There were garbled sentences here as the two men turned their backs on Longarm, looking eastward toward the corrals in which the shadows of horses stood stone-still as the animals slept on their feet.

Slightly louder, one of the men said, “U.S. marshal and a Pinkerton? A woman?”

“Maybe we don’t need to kill the woman.”

“Yeah, she’ll likely light a shuck out of here if that big lawman gets beefed, eh?”

“That’s what I’m thinkin’.”

Just then a couple of coyotes started yipping and howling so loudly and closely that Longarm jerked with a start. It must have scared the two men behind the privy, too, because one said, “Shit!”

The other laughed.

After a few seconds, one of the men said, “Tomorrow mornin’, early, you ride out and tell…”

Just then the coyotes kicked up another racket. A small pack must have been hunting in another wash less than sixty yards behind the bunkhouse.

The men behind the privy tossed their quirleys and stepped out away from the bunkhouse, heading for the wash, speaking too softly now for Longarm to hear. They were probably heading out to scare the coyotes away, in case the predators decided to finish the dog’s job of digging up the fresh graves.

As the two men disappeared in the dark desert, Longarm walked straight west from the mesquite and then retraced his footsteps to the yard’s west edge. The men’s conversation bounced around in his head.

So, their boss wanted him dead. The boss of topic was most likely Stretch Azrael. That Stretch wanted Longarm dead was no big surprise. That alone wasn’t enough to clarify any of the mystery of the stolen gold or the dead lawmen. Longarm still didn’t have enough hard evidence to bring charges against anyone, including Stretch, for anything.

He needed to know why Stretch wanted him dead.

Trouble was, he needed to stay alive long enough to find out the reason. Confronting Stretch would do him no good. Stretch would merely play dumb—which wouldn’t be much of a stretch for ole Stretch…

At least it didn’t sound like the killers would go after Haven. The lawman was glad that he wouldn’t have to worry overmuch about her. He could concentrate on watching his own back and try to find out why it had a target on it.

One thing was sure—he’d watch to see which of the Double D men lit out from the ranch yard tomorrow morning and follow him. If Longarm could find out who that man was, and who he was riding out to pay a visit to, he’d be that much farther ahead of the game.

From them, he might be able to learn the ins and outs of whatever deadly game was being played out here at the Double D. And the location of the gold, if Stretch hadn’t spent it all yet…

“Stretch,” Longarm said under his breath as he wended his way back to his shack behind the main house, “I’m gonna run you to ground, old son. And then you’re gonna tell me a few things I wanna know!”

He slipped back into his shack and quickly turned the wick down on his lantern, so his shadow couldn’t be targeted against the light. The killers hadn’t sounded as though they’d come gunning for him tonight, but you could never predict when a killer would kill. Trying to do so would get you killed.

He stripped down to his balbriggans, leaned his rifle against the stone wall near his cot, and shoved his Colt under his pillow. He sat on the edge of the cot for a time, staring out the shack’s front window at the starlit desert night.

It was as quiet out there as the inside of a dry well on the darkest night of the year.

Just the same, he’d sleep like he usually did when he was on assignment—light as a feather.

He took another drink from the water jug and then rolled up in his blankets, the wooden cot creaking beneath his weight. He’d just drifted into the shallow ditch of a lawman’s slumber when something propelled him back to the surface, and he snapped his eyes open, staring at the shack’s dark ceiling.

Footsteps were growing louder as someone approached the shack. They sounded like butter in a hot skillet. The person was doing little to conceal his approach. Her approach.

Longarm grinned, felt his tense muscles relax.

He’d known she’d come.

Eager, ragged breaths sounded beneath the soft footfalls. A bare foot slapped the wooden floor of the shack’s front stoop. A quick double knock on the door.

“Yay-up,” Longarm said.

The hinges squealed softly as the door opened and a slender shadow moved toward him, closing the door behind her.