Longarm on the Thunderbird Run

“What’s your name?”

“Donald James Potter,” the prisoner said. His voice was

odd. Almost with a hollow sound to it.

The name meant nothing to Longarm. He was sure he had never seen it on any poster or wanted notices.

“Have you had breakfast, Donald?”

Potter shook his head. “I’m hungry.”

“Me too. The hotel will send something over soon.”

Potter grinned and looked about as happy as a bee in blue clover. Now that he had his pebble back and breakfast was on the way, Potter looked like he hadn’t a care in the world.

Longarm cocked his head to the side and studied the man for a moment. Donald James Potter seemed poor pickings for a desperado.

‘Tell me about yourself, Donald,“ Longarm suggested.

Potter shrugged and continued to admire the cool, pink depths of the quartz. He stroked it again and smiled.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Longarm said softly to himself. Potter ignored him, giving his full concentration to the stone in his hand.

Donald James Potter was simpleminded.

Was this how the leader of the White Hoods had been successful for so very long? By using carefully directed men with mush for brains who hadn’t the wit or initiative to get out of line or give things away? Or for that matter, to demand more than what they were given?

It was a damned interesting thought, Longarm reflected.

But it might be something of a challenge trying to get hard information out of a man like this. Certainly bullying would just make the poor devil sull up like a cranky old steer. Bullying was something Donald James Potter would have had all too often in the past. Likely he would deal with it by simple withdrawal into himself. Perhaps, though, they could have a friendly chat over breakfast.

“Do you need anything, Donald?”

Potter shook his head. His hair was too-long uncut, and greasy from being long unwashed as well. If he had been wearing a hat he must have lost it. He concentrated happily on the pretty stone in his palm

Longarm shrugged and went to sit at the desk that once had belonged to Paul Markham while he waited for the breakfasts to be delivered.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

No man can exist as an invisible entity. Someone had to know something about Donald James Potter. How long he had been in Thunderbird Canyon. What he did here. Who he associated with. Someone had to have seen him, had to have had contact with him. Longarm had to find whoever that might be because unfortunately, poor Potter himself was incapable of giving that information.

Longarm did not believe Potter was lying to him or try­ing to hide anything. It was just that the poor soul had not the mental capacity to remember what he had for his last meal, much less any information that would help lead Longarm to the man or men who had put Potter up to the bombing of the bank, where men of the community had died during the night. Exactly how many men was still in doubt, as no one was yet sure if all the bodies had been recovered, and searchers were still hauling wreckage away from the ruins of the building.

It was something of a wonder, really, that Potter was able to recall anything about the affair, but the explosion had made some impression on the fuzz and fog that was his feeble brain.

He freely told Longarm what little he knew. There had been a loud, loud noise and a marvelous burst of flame. He’d found the bright flame in the night very pretty, appar­ently. Almost as pretty as his pebble. That was probably the reason he was able to recall something about having been there and seen it all. Potter dimly remembered something about a smaller flame too. He may have been the one to light the fuse that set off the explosion. He was not really sure about that, though.

Longarm shuddered when he thought about the dim, dark shadows that were Donald James Potter’s thought processes. But there was nothing he could do to help the man nor, it seemed, to get much more in the way of infor­mation out of him.

He left Potter safely, and quite contentedly now, locked inside the jail cell and went out to see if anyone else in town could add to the little he knew about the White Hood prisoner.

The saloons and whorehouses would be his best bet for information, he suspected. Potter was earthy and direct in his appetites. If he had been in town any length of time at all he surely would have shown up in public somewhere.

“A halfwit named Potter, you say?” The barman shook his head. “No, I don’t remember nobody like that lately. But say, Marshal, surely you ain’t serious about stopping the train from running. I mean, I’m down to my next to last barrel of beer, Marshal, and I just can’t

”

Longarm ignored the complaint and turned away. This was the third saloon he had visited, and so far the propri­etors and employees of the town’s drinking establishments seemed much more concerned about their own affairs than they were about being helpful, damn them.

He went back outside and tried the next place.

“Donald James Potter? Sure I know him. Good worker too, let me tell you, Marshal.”

“You know him?”

“Jeez, I just said that, didn’t I? He swamped for me here off an‘ on for, oh, three, four weeks it’s been now. Showed up here one night all wore out and hungry

I think he walked in on the tracks ’cause he couldn’t afford the price of a ticket

and I gave him a job. Sort of, anyhow. I mean, he didn’t want much. But he’d come in here late ‘most every night, and I’d feed him a dinner of whatever was handy, and after I’d close he’d sweep up an’ empty the cuspidors an‘ like that, and I’d give him some nickels outa the till. Hard worker, Donald is. Had to be showed what was wanted every time, but once he got it straight what he was to do he’d stay at it until I told him to quit. Surely he ain’t in any trouble, Marshal.”

“Considerable trouble, I’m afraid,” Longarm said.

The bartender frowned. “That’s a shame now. I’m sorry t‘ hear it.”

“Yeah. You say he’s been here three or four weeks?”

“Something like that, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“You’ve been a big help.”

“Yeah?” The bartender smiled. “Gee, Marshal, I’m glad.”

“But I’m afraid you’ll have to find a new swamper from now on.”

“Or go back to doing it my own self, damnit. That’s the way it usually works with the mines paying good wages to anybody with a strong back, damnit.”

Longarm bought a half-dollar’s worth of cheroots from the barman and was about to order a beer when Blaisdell came puffing through the door.

“Finally,” the young security guard said. “I been look­ing for you, Marshal.”

“What is it this time, Tim? Find another White Hood suspect?”

“No, sir, but we found Miss Jessie’s body.”

“Body?”

“Yes, sir.” Blaisdell bent over and gulped for air.

“If she’s dead, Tim, I expect she’ll wait while you get your breath back. You want a beer or something?”

“No, sir. I don’t drink.”

The bartender winked at Longarm and uncorked a quart bottle of root beer. “Two?”

“One,” Longarm told him.

The barman poured one root beer and one rootless vari­ety for Longarm. Blaisdell gulped down his soft drink while Longarm sipped at his beer.

“Now tell me,” Longarm said when Blaisdell had his wind back.

“That woman you was looking for, Marshal. One of the boys working in the sorting shack at the Arrabie found her. She was beat to death an‘ thrown on the tailings dump. The guy doing the sorting at the Arrabie seen her when he went to throw out some chunks of no-pay that were too big to go through the crusher. He tossed this one rock out the win­dow, like, and seen it thump inta this woman laying right there on the slope. Shook him up bad, it did.”

“She was already dead, though?”

“Yes, sir. We’re sure about that ‘cause she was cold as a trout when he ran down to see if he’d hurt her. I guess she’d been dead most o’ the night for her to be so cooled off already.”

“Has the body been moved?” Longarm asked.

“Yes, sir. Some of the boys from the Arrabie are bring­ing her down now. I come ahead to see if I could find you.”

“Then I guess we’d better go take a look.” Longarm drained off the last of his beer and paid for both drinks. “I might be back to ask some more about Potter,” he told the barman.

“I’ll be here, Marshal. If I happen to be sleepin‘ it’s just upstairs, and somebody can fetch me down for you.”

“All right, thanks.”

Jessie’s body was already being carried into the sawdust-packed icehouse when Longarm and Blaisdell got there. She was definitely not pretty to look at now. Blaisdell had said she was beaten to death, but Longarm was not pre­pared for the extent of damage that had been done to the once attractive woman. Her face was not recognizable as the woman Longarm had known, and only her hair and jewelry identified her.

She was no longer wearing the gown Longarm had last seen her in either. The fancy but fragile garment had been exchanged for a sturdy but plain riding habit, and she had on a pair of tall, tightly laced logger’s boots that looked to be several sizes too big for her.

“Was anything found with the body?” Longarm asked.

“What do you mean, Marshal?”

“Anything like a blanket roll or backpack. She’s dressed for hiking, like she expected to be hiding out in the moun­tains. I’d think she would have carried some supplies with her and probably some bedding.”

Blaisdell checked with the Arrabie guards who had brought the body down, but they all agreed that the only thing discarded on the tailings dump was Jessie’s body it­self. There had been no pack or bedroll.

Longarm rubbed his eyes and tried to get his fatigue-fogged thoughts in order. “You can go ahead and lay her out,” he said. “Or have her buried, for that matter. I don’t expect I need to see anymore here.”

“You want us to show you where she was found?”

“No, I don’t think that will be necessary. I expect I know who killed her and why.”

Blaisdell and the other guards looked impressed, but Longarm was not in a mood to explain it to them. He would, of course, confirm his suspicions. He headed back up toward the whorehouse Jessie had operated.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Yes.” The girl’s accent made it come out sounding more like “Jess,” but Longarm couldn’t fault her for that. She had a good command of a language that was not her own, and that was more than he could say for himself with his few words and phrases of this or that tongue. “Miss Jessie and Sheriff Paul were here during the night,” Rosalie said. “We were afraid. We hid, but they did not look for us.”

“Do you know what they did when they were here? Where they went in the house?”

“Oh, yes. I show you?”

“Please.”

She led the way past the bloodstains where Walter had died and into the office. The carpet had been ripped loose in a back corner of the room, and a barrel safe set into the floor was standing open. Longarm had not spotted the floor safe when he was here before, although it stood to reason that the madam and whoremaster must have had a place to keep their profits from a business Markham was not able to publicly acknowledge owning. The discovery was no great surprise.

Jessie’s gown of the night before was discarded over a chair, along with her dainty shoes and flimsy, lace-trimmed underthings. There was no indication of what she would have taken for supplies and bedding, but Longarm was sure there would have been something.

So the two of them had grabbed the cash and fled. But Markham would have been figuring that a woman would slow him down, perhaps give him away in the mountains where he planned to hide. And of course the son of a bitch wouldn’t have wanted to share the profits with a woman who was now a distinct liability to Paul Markham’s future well-being.

So the shit would have killed her and kept the money all for himself. The man was a first-class prick. Longarm had to give him credit for that much anyway. When it came to making a son of a bitch of himself, Paul Markham didn’t go in for half measures.

“They won’t be back,” Longarm assured Rosalie. “You and the other girls don’t have anything to fear about that again.”

“You are sure?”

“Yes.”

“We don‘ know where to go now. Wha’ to do.”

“You can stay here, of course. Is there enough food in the place to last you a while?”

“Yes. Some food. Plenty whiskey.”

“Just stay here, then, until I know if I’ll need you to testify in court. After that I’ll see if the government can’t arrange to have you sent home.”

Rosalie blushed. “I cannot go home again. Not after

you know. After the t’ings I have done.” She had begun to cry, making no sound but with fat tears rolling down over her cheeks.

Longarm brushed them away with the ball of his thumb and lightly stroked her dusky cheek. “You didn’t do any­thing bad, Rosalie. Bad things were done to you, but that wasn’t your fault. Nobody back home ever has to know anything about those things. Not if you don’t tell them.” He smiled. “Besides, it isn’t anything you have to decide about right now anyway. Think about it. Talk it over with the other girls. For the time being just keep the front door locked and the men out. They don’t have to know anything either. If you need anything, come to me about it. Okay?”

It took a moment, but he got a smile and a nod out of her.

He left Rosalie and the other victims of Jessie and Markham and found Batson at the Arrabie offices. The man still had not gotten over the shock of Jack Thomas’s death, but he was in much better shape than he had been during the wee hours before dawn.

“I take it you’ve heard about that woman’s body being found on our tailings dump,” Batson said.

“Yes, and I have a job for you and a couple of your people if you’re up to it, Arnold.”

“If it will bring us any closer to finding those men who murdered Jack, I am.”

“Only indirectly,” Longarm admitted. “I need this other business off my back so I can concentrate on the White Hoods. The reason I want your help in particular is that I believe you mentioned having done some hiking and climbing in the area. As a hobby, I think you said.”

“That’s right.”

“Paul Markham is trying a run for it on foot, Batson.”

“No place for him to run to,” the security chief insisted.

“Apparently he thinks there is. Or at least thinks he can hide out long enough for things to cool off down here and allow him to slip out on a train eventually.”

Batson snorted his disbelief about that.

“Markham is the man who murdered that woman. He’s hiding somewhere up there with the money he was sup­posed to split with her from their slave trade. I expect wherever he’s gone to ground, he started out from the whorehouse and climbed up past your tailings dump on his way to it. He stopped to beat his partner to death rather than have her slow him down. By now I’d guess he’s found his hole and crawled into it.”

Batson thought about that for a moment. “From town past the tailings side of our operation and then on up

yeah, I can think of a couple trails he might’ve taken. And some prospect holes and a few natural caves where he might think he could hide out if he’s got supplies with him.”

“He does,” Longarm said.

Batson nodded. “I’ll find the son of a bitch for you, Marshal.”

“If you can take care of that, Arnold, I can handle the White Hoods and the recovery of the payroll money.”

“No problem with my end of it, Marshal. I’ll take a couple of boys with me, and we’ll have him down in two days. Less’n that, maybe.”

“Make sure your people are armed. Even a rabbit will fight if you corner it.”

“I know just who t‘ take with me.”

“Good.” Longarm smiled. “Before you leave you might wanta stop at the jail and pick up a set of Markham’s own handcuffs to haul him back in.”

Batson smiled. “I’ll do just that, Marshal.”

Longarm left the Arrabie and walked down to the train depot where he found a still irate trainmaster and a bored-looking telegrapher in the office shanty.

“No,” he told them, “I haven’t changed my mind about allowing your damn train to run, so don’t ask. But I do want to send a wire to my boss in Denver.”

That news did not arouse any noticeable amount of plea­sure with the railroad employees, but Longarm ignored them and wrote out the message he wanted sent to Billy Vail.

Time was entirely on his side now that the robber gang was bottled up at the head of Thunderbird Canyon, and for a change he had the luxury of calling in reinforcements no matter how long that might take.

Chapter Thirty

Anxiety knotted Henry’s stomach like an acid-drenched fist as he paced the railroad platform at Meade Park.

He pulled his watch out and snapped the cover open once again. He had been doing it every two or three min­utes since midmorning. Not that it did any good, of course. But he had to do something to alleviate the frustration he was feeling.

He wheeled and went back to the railroad office once again. He had been doing that every five or ten minutes, with no greater result than rechecking his watch.

“Try them again,” he said.

“Marshal,” the exasperated telegrapher groaned, “I just tried them ten minutes ago.”

“I know you did. Now try them again.”

“Yes, sir.” The telegrapher rolled his eyes in a gesture of sorely tried patience. But he did as the bespectacled deputy demanded and once again bent to his key.

The man tapped out the transmission code, waited and tried again.

There was no response.

The line remained dead.

“I’m sorry, Marshal. Nothing.”

“Damnit,” Henry snapped.

He went back out onto the platform where the Meade Park town marshal and two deputies were waiting on a bench, obviously not nearly so concerned as Henry was.

“The downrun is half an hour overdue,” Henry said.

“Thirty-four minutes,” the town marshal agreed calmly.

“Something has happened up there, damnit, and I am afraid I know what it is. The White Hoods hit the train yesterday afternoon, and they’ve gotten away somehow.”

“I keep trying to tell you, Marshal,” the local lawman said patiently, “no matter what’s happened up there, there’s no way out except past us.”

“But why is that wire dead? And why hasn’t the train come down this morning? Can you tell me that?”

“Nope.” The local took out a plug of tobacco and gnawed a corner off the disgusting looking thing. “What­ever the reason, though, there’s nobody coming out with­out he goes past us. An‘ whenever that train does come down, we’ll be right here waitin’.”

“We could send a handcar up the tracks,” Henry said for probably the tenth time.

And for probably the tenth time the local marshal ex­plained with weary patience. “That jus’ wouldn’t be a good idear, Marshal. If the Thunderbird Run is comin‘ down when we’re tryin’ to go up, why, there’s places where there ain’t even anywhere to jump to. A man’d get squashed like a bug if he got caught on those tracks in a damn handcar. No sir, the best thing for us t‘ do is set right here an’ wait. Something or somebody’ll come down outa that canyon sooner or later. I figure t‘ be right here when they do.”

“You have to at least send someone to guard the tracks where the narrows widen out and—”

“I already done that, Marshal. I told you that already.”

“Oh. Yes, I suppose you did.” Henry ran a hand over his face, removed his spectacles and wiped them clean, though they were not dirty, and began to pace back and forth along the platform again.

It was just so damnably frustrating having to wait like this and not know anything.

If only Longarm would show up, Henry would feel bet­ter. But apparently the messages sent to Snake Creek had missed him. Now there was no telling where he might be or how long it would take before he bothered reporting in and learned that he was needed here.

Damnit all anyhow, Henry thought unhappily.

He took out his watch and checked the time again. Three and a half minutes since the last time he had looked. He glared up the empty tracks toward Thunderbird Canyon and felt the bile churn inside his stomach.

What could possibly be happening up there?

He turned and strode once again toward the telegraph office. If he couldn’t reach Thunderbird Canyon at least he could still communicate with Denver. Maybe Marshal Vail would have some thoughts about what he should do now. Henry was not honestly very hopeful about that, but the effort itself would give him a sense of purpose now, however temporary.

He did not believe he had ever felt so nervous before.

Chapter Thirty-One

Longarm woke and stretched. Three whole hours of sleep he had gotten. It felt like a considerable luxury, by damn. He was almost human again. Almost. He still had some catching up to do, but there would be time for that later. Right now the afternoon sun was partially obscured by the mountain peaks to the west, and it was time to see that his prisoner had supper.

He dressed quickly and went downstairs to order two dinners sent over to the jail, then snugged his Stetson into place and stepped outside.

The sun had disappeared now, but there would still be several hours of daylight remaining before the cool eve­ning. The air felt good. Up the slopes to either side of the town the mines were in full operation despite the troubles of Thunderbird Canyon. The crushers thumped noisily in­side the close confinement of the narrow canyon, the sound a low, dull, heavy thing that penetrated bone-deep and was felt more than heard.

The mining operations were modern and efficient, pow­ered by steam and gravity, and capable of extracting and processing great quantities of raw silver ore daily. Already there was a stockpile of crushed material at the railroad hoppers. If the train continued to sit idle for very long the ore would be piled too deep, and the mines would likely have to suspend production until Longarm gave permission for the train to move again.

That, of course, was tough, but not something Longarm was going to worry about. He had the White Hoods in a bottle now, and that immobile train was the cork that was keeping them confined.

In another few days—hell, four, five days, it didn’t matter—Smiley and Dutch and the rest of the boys would be in Meade Park. As soon as Longarm got the signal that they were in position he would order a handcar for them, and the roundup could begin. In the meantime, if he was able to get a line on the gang himself, why, that would be all right too.

He was feeling pretty good as he stuck a cheroot be­tween his teeth and ambled down the steep streets toward the courthouse.

He climbed the stairs to the top floor of the building and hung his hat on the rack by the door. Donald James Potter was dozing on his cot. He woke when Longarm came in and sat up blinking. He smiled happily at the tall deputy who had put him behind bars, obviously holding no grudge about it. Longarm suspected that the poor halfwit honestly did not realize the trouble he was in.

“Hullo,” Potter said sleepily.

“Hello, Donald. Hungry?”

Potter spent several moments thinking about the ques­tion and forming an answer to it. Finally he nodded. “Hungry,” he affirmed.

“Our supper will be here in a few minutes,” Longarm said. “If you promise you won’t try to run, Donald, you can come out here to eat.”

Potter looked puzzled. “Run? For my supper?”

“Never mind.” The man had no idea what he was talk­ing about.

Longarm got the cell keys from the desk and unlocked the barred door so Potter could join him at the desk. Longarm tossed the keys back into the drawer and noticed again the few items that had been taken from Potter’s pockets when he was captured. On an impulse Longarm pulled them out and placed them atop the desk. “Do you re­member these, Donald?”

Potter looked at them carefully, then smiled. “My knife. An‘ my money.”

“Who paid you the money, Donald?”

Potter shrugged. “A man.”

“Do you remember his name, Donald?”

Another shrug.

“What about the hood, Donald?”

“Hood?”

“Sure. This.” He pushed the flour-sack hood toward Potter.

“Tha’s just a bit o‘ cloth, y’ know. Hoods are black, Hangmens wear hoods.” He shuddered. “I seen a hanging once. I ‘member that good.” He shuddered again.

Potter frowned for a moment, then his expression cleared as he put the memory of the hanging aside—some­thing that seemed to come easy enough to him—and idly reached forward for the gleaming gold of the five double eagles.

His childlike mind seemed to be attracted to bright, pretty colors, and for several minutes he peered closely at the gold, fondled the coins, played with them. Longarm doubted that they held much value for him beyond their color and shininess, but he liked them well enough.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs beyond the jail door, and Longarm said, “Put those down now, Donald. I think our supper is here.”

Potter smiled and did as he was told. He placed the coins into his palm one by one with slow, deliberate care to form a tiny valuable stack of minted gold. Then he picked up the white hood from the desk, and with infinite attention to what he was doing wrapped the coins inside the cloth and stuffed the small bundle into his pocket.

“Why did you do that, Donald?”

“Do what?”

“Wrap those coins like that.”

Potter shrugged again. “I dunno. Keeps ‘em nice, I guess.”

“Oh.”

Longarm leaned back in his chair and fingered his chin while he stared at the open, perfectly innocent expression of his prisoner. There was something

He shook his head, to himself rather than for Potter’s benefit, and looked up to greet the hotel waiter who had puffed his way to the top of the stairs with a heavy tray in his hands.

The aroma of tallow-fried steak filled the room when the towel was lifted from the plates, and Potter began to grin hugely.

“Me too,” Longarm said.

Both men pitched into their meal with good appetite.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Longarm tossed his napkin onto the greasy plate that was all that remained of an excellent meal and pushed his chair back. Potter had long since finished the last scrap of food available. The prisoner ate with an animallike speed and intensity, making loud slurping noises and using both hands to bring great bites to his face. A pleasant dining companion he was not.

“Time to go back to the cell, Donald.”

Potter accepted the instruction without a trace of regret, pausing only to check once again and make sure there was nothing edible left on the tray. Then he stood and calmly headed for the lockup. He looked quite happy with the whole situation. Longarm got the cell keys from the desk drawer and followed.

“In you go, Donald.”

Longarm reached for the cell door to swing it closed behind the prisoner. To his left there was the brittle sound of glass shattering. A lead slug spanged nastily against one of the steel cell bars, leaving a bright, shiny smear of fresh lead where a moment before there had been only paint, and sending fragments of soft lead whining through the room.

“Down!” Longarm barked.

He dropped to his belly, Colt in hand, as a second gun­shot snapped through the broken window and again rico­cheted dangerously off the cell bars.

Longarm fired blindly back into the new-fallen dark­ness. He had no target to aim at, no hope whatsoever that his slug would find a mark He only wanted to give the sharpshooter pause.

A third incoming bullet tore splinters of wood out of the window frame and thumped into the wall behind Longarm.

“I don’t like this,” Potter complained. He was standing at the cell door with a blank, uncomprehending expression.

“Get down, Donald. Lie in your bunk. Stay there.”

Potter nodded and walked slowly toward his cot. He lay on it and closed his eyes as if for a nap.

Jesus! Longarm thought.

A fourth bullet ripped through the window, higher this time, taking out what was left of the glass and spraying half the room with tiny shards.

Longarm felt one of them slice into his right cheek. Another nicked his ear. If this kept up

He fired through the window into the darkness twice, his shots quickly thrown without aim, then rolled, came to his knees, and leaped toward the wall where the night lamp was burning. He didn’t take time to blow the lamp out, just slashed sideways with the barrel of his Colt, smashing the bulbous globe and extinguishing the flame that was provid­ing the sniper with light for his shooting.

The jail went dark, only a faint glow of light from the staircase landing seeping in through the half-open door now.

“Stay where you are,” Longarm hissed.

There was no answer, and Longarm could not be sure Potter had heard. There was no time to worry about that now.

Another lead slug spanged off the jail bars. But this time Longarm was able to see the muzzle flash of the gun­shot from the hillside facing the back of the courthouse.

Longarm fired twice toward the place where he had seen the flame, then spun away from the window and raced out of the jail and down the stairs, taking the steps two and three at a time and fumbling to reload as he ran.

If the gunman thought he was still trapped inside the jail

He raced out into the night, ignoring a handful of con­fused, loud-talking men who were standing on the street corner pointing up the hill toward the source of the gun­shots.

Elsewhere the men on the street were unalarmed, the noise of the crushers partially drowning the sound of the shots so that there was little commotion.

Longarm ran around to the back of the courthouse and began climbing the steep hillside. Another spear of flames and lead split the night far above him. Good. The gunman did not realize that he had suddenly become the hunted rather than the hunter.

Longarm ran past the pilings that supported the founda­tion of a house suspended over midair from a precariously thin purchase against the hard rock of the hillside. He ran beneath the house, emerged on the far side of it, and began climbing again.

Twice he tripped over loose stones or trash that had been discarded on the hillside. Once he sprawled forward, landing painfully on his chin and chest. He scrambled back onto his knees and drove himself upward, grabbing with his free hand for support whenever he could.

He was only halfway up to the level where the gunman had been, and already he was puffing for breath at the steepness of the climb and the altitude of this canyon head. If only the man was still there

Another shot rang out overhead, and Longarm almost smiled. He was closer now but did not want to tip the ambusher with a shot that might miss. He needed to be closer still. Gulping for breath, his chest aching from the effort of it, he continued to climb as rapidly as he could force himself.

He was close enough to hear now as the gunman turned and began to run. Damnit, Longarm groaned to himself. With a burst of waning strength he threw himself upward the last few feet until he reached a level section of trail or ledge.

The gunman was a dark, dimly-seen shape retreating up the trail to Longarm’s right. The town was beneath them now, its lights bright and its sounds gay in the night. Above, in the direction the trail led. there was only the dark, unlighted bulk of the mountains and the wild, empty lands beyond the mines.

Longarm raised his Colt and made an effort to control his breathing. His chest was heaving and heart pumping, and he knew the conditions were impossibly poor for accu­rate shooting. He aimed as carefully as he could, though, and squeezed gently on the trigger until the big .45 bucked and thundered, and his vision was blurred by the burst of muzzle flash in the night.

The footsteps of the fleeing gunman continued without faltering, and he was sure he had missed.

Doggedly, Longarm holstered the Colt to leave both hands free in case he fell. He set out at the swift, flowing lope of a long-distance runner, chasing not so much the gunman now as the diminishing sound of the man’s foot­falls as he retreated high into the mountains.

“Gotcha, you son of a bitch,” Longarm panted into the darkness before him. Because with Longarm between him and the town, the gunman had nowhere to go now except to hell.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Longarm stopped and leaned against a pillar of cold, jagged rock on the uphill side of the ledge. The ledge dis­appeared around the stone spire at this point as it curved sharply with the contour of the mountain. Beyond the turn­ing would be a perfect place for an ambush.

He breathed deeply—easier now that the pain of exer­tion was subsiding in his chest. He drew the Colt again and replaced the one expended cartridge in the cylinder before, gun held ready, he edged forward once again. Speed was not a factor now. And a mistake could mean death.

He dropped into a crouch and shuffled forward on the ledge. Before him there was nothing but darkness. Behind him was the danger that he might be silhouetted against the glow of lamplight from the bustling mining town. Despite the danger, he kept his eyes down on the slender thread of rock ledge immediately under his feet. In darkness the hunter cannot trust his eyes. A shadow can turn suddenly into an imagined enemy. A rock can seem a charging grizzly so real the hunter would swear he can smell its breath. In darkness the hunter has to reli on his ears alone.

Longarm crept forward.

There was nothing ahead. Nothing at all he could hear except the faint soughing of the breeze winding its way past rocks and through the branches of an occasional juni­per or cedar with its roots clinging to bare stone.

Longarm cursed softly to himself. The gunman had gained ground on him here. But he had had no choice. To go bursting fast and stubbornly around such bends would be perfectly safe every time but one. And that one unsafe time could be fatal. He jammed the Thunderer back into its leather and pressed forward.

The ledge they were following was probably a game trail, but no human had ever improved it. It widened and narrowed without plan or pattern, sloped down toward a dizzying drop here, then leveled out as smooth and wide as a city road not a handful of rods further up.

The gunman had to be somewhere ahead of him on the trail, though. There was nowhere else for him to go. Not unless he was willing to climb up or down, and in the darkness it would not be possible for anyone to do that without dislodging the loose stones on the steep hillside. Longarm would certainly hear if the gunman tried to leave the trail and make his way up the slope or down it.

A sliver of moonglow appeared to the southeast, and Longarm smiled silently to himself. As soon as the moon broke free of the peaks there would be light enough for him to make up lost time on the ambusher. A thought came to him as he moved cautiously through the night.

He hadn’t ever had time to lock Donald James Potter into his cell. The man was free for the moment if he chose to be, and he had the hood and gold coins still in his pocket. For a prisoner, poor Donald could have himself quite a night of it until Longarm got back. Still, the halfwit had nowhere to go. Not any more than the White Hoods did. He could run, but he couldn’t hide. He would be back in custody soon enough. Longarm was not worried about Potter.

For that matter, he realized, he would not have been worried about Potter anyway. The man hadn’t sense enough to think up trouble on his own. If anything, Longarm rather liked the simple fellow—his eating habits aside —and felt regret about having to jail him. Potter was no threat to anyone in Thunderbird Canyon.

The man ahead on this trail was another story entirely. A man who would shoot from ambush out of the night was a menace. Why he would do that was not secret, of course. Longarm was the one who was keeping the train from run­ning. With the federal deputy dead, the mine owners would want the train moving again as quickly as possibly. And there would be a hundred hiding places available once that train moved. So Longarm’s life was in danger until the rest of Billy Vail’s boys got here. Or until the rest of the White Hoods were behind bars. It was as simple as that.

Longarm stopped and cursed under his breath again.

The ledge continued on in the direction it had been fol­lowing, but here a game trail angled off above it.

He was high on the mountain now, well above timberline. Up at this elevation a game trail would have been carved over hundreds of years by bighorn sheep or possibly by the shaggy white goats that somehow made their living high above the levels where the runtiest, hardiest of trees could survive.

The question now was whether the gunman had stayed with the ledge or moved onto the trail. And whether the gunman knew this country well.

Longarm made his decision. A White Hood, come here within the past month or so as Donald Potter seemed to have done, would almost certainly have little or no knowl­edge of the high country surrounding the mining camp. The gunman therefore almost certainly would have followed the trail instead of the ledge. Longarm’s reasoning was simple enough. And he had to assume that the gunman would reach the same conclusion. A natural ledge can peter out without warning at any time, or any whim of nature. A game trail, on the other hand, has to go somewhere. So, Longarm decided, a sensible ambusher trying to get away in unknown country would naturally choose to follow the game trail instead of the ledge.

Longarm’s fingers brushed briefly but reassuringly over the grips of his Colt. Then, slowly, careful of his footing, he began to mount the trail carved here by countless hard hoofs. He had to be closing on the son of a bitch now. Had to be.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“Marshal? Wake up, Marshal, please.”

Henry’s eyes opened, gummy with too much sleep that was not at all restful, and he sat up. He had been sitting at the Meade Park town marshal’s desk when he drifted off, and he had slept badly, with his mouth open so that now it was annoyingly dry. He licked his lips with a tongue that held no moisture and swallowed several times, trying to work up some saliva.

“What is it? The train? Did you get through finally?”

“Whoa, Marshal.” the deputy said patiently. “There’s a message for you, that’s all.”

“A message. Thank goodness.” Henry jumped up, reaching for his derby and adjusting his spectacles, but the deputy stopped him.

“It ain’t a message from Thunderbird,” the man said. “Sorry, but we still haven’t been able to raise anybody up there.”

“But if it isn’t

?”

“It’s from your boss in Denver,” the local deputy said.

“Oh.” The momentary excitement faded, and Henry felt the anxiety return.

Whatever could be happening up there? He was all too fearful already that he knew what was happening—had happened—at the other end of the useless narrow-gauge rails. That was what was worrying him, damnit.

Henry left the small office and turned down the block toward the railroad depot. It was dark. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had been sleeping, but there was a feel in the air of late night. Meade Park seemed to have gone to bed, leaving only a few lights showing in private homes and in the hotel. One of the two saloons in town had even closed for the night. Unlike a mining com­munity, which Meade Park no longer really was, the town closed its doors early.

There were no night lamps burning on the railroad plat­form at this hour, but light showed at the windows of the telegrapher’s office. Henry had prevailed on the man to stay at his post overnight, sleeping on a cot beside his sending key if he had to, so there would be no possibility of a message from Thunderbird Canyon being missed.

Frankly, Henry was having visions of an entire town under siege. Many explanations were possible, of course. Nearly all of them involved mayhem and destruction in one form or another.

He shivered in the cool night air and tugged the lapels of his coat close over his chest.

The telegrapher greeted him pleasantly enough when he entered the office.

“For you, Marshal.” The man handed him a single sheet of paper with the message scratched out in a spidery hand.

WHAT IS STATUS THERE QUERY HAS LONG RE­PORTED YET QUERY AM SENDING REQUEST AD­DITIONAL INFORMATION FROM STONE VIA JOHNSTON COMMA FORT SMITH STOP ALSO DIS­PATCHING ADDITIONAL DEPUTIES YOUR ASSIS­TANCE STOP VAIL

Henry felt relief wash through him at the thought that the regular deputies were on their way. And apparently Billy Vail had gotten through to Longarm also or there would not have been that question about him showing up.

Thank goodness. He would not have to face the White Hoods alone.

“I need to send a reply.” he told the telegraph operator.

“Write it out now if you want to. Marshal, but we gotta relay through Soda Springs to get down to the Union Pa­cific an‘ the Western Union operators. There’s no night man on at Soda Springs now. He signed off twenty, thirty minutes ago. So whatever you send, it won’t go out till tomorra morning when he comes on again. Me, I’d like to go home now too, Marshal.”

“You’ll stay right here,” Henry snapped forcefully. “You shall keep this key open regardless.”

“Yes, sir,” the operator said with a weary sigh.

“And I shall wait until morning to write out my answer. Perhaps by then we will have heard something from Thunderbird Canyon.”

“Yes, sir,” the operator said with absolutely no belief in his voice.

“If anything does come in

”

“I’ll find you.” the operator said in a bored tone.

“Right.” Henry snapped the brim of his derby, spun on his heels, and marched back out onto the street feeling much better now than he had earlier.

Longarm and Smiley and Dutch should be here soon. Already he was feeling less alone.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Longarm shivered and cursed. The damned game trail went somewhere, all right. It led to a rock slide that had swept the whole damned thing away.

There was a gap of thirty or forty feet between the part of the trail he was on and the place where the trail resumed on the other side of the break. The trail was clearly visible in the moonlight. There just was no way to get to it from here. The trail carved by generations of wild sheep and goats had been wiped completely out by the rock slide.

Longarm stood and peered up and down the mountain­side. There was no sight of the gunman he had been chas­ing, and in both directions the mountainside was barren except for loose scree. There was no place the man could have hidden. There was no way he could have gotten across the treacherously loose rock left in the wake of the slide. He was not up here.

With some more muttered cussing, Longarm turned and began retracing his steps along the abandoned game trail. He had been climbing the trail more than an hour, but he had had to move with slow caution then on the assumption that the gunman was somewhere just ahead of him. Now he hurried, trying to get back down to the ledge before the man realized that Longarm was no longer behind him and tried to double back to the safety of the town where he could lose himself in the crowd.

Longarm had never gotten a look at the son of a bitch. The man could stand next to him at a bar and Longarm would never know it. Not if the fellow reached Thunderbird Canyon.

Longarm stretched out his strides, moving as fast as he dared on the narrow trail, now and then dislodging a stone that went tumbling over the lip and clattering down the mountainside. There was no help for that, though. He had to hurry or risk losing the man.

He reached the place where the trail and ledge met in little better than half an hour. Without hesitation he turned onto the ledge in the direction he had originally been fol­lowing. If he had missed the gunman—if the man had already realized that he was free to head back to town— there was nothing Longarm could do about it now.

The only chance Longarm had to catch him was the hope that the gunman was still somewhere ahead of him on the ledge or wherever it led.

Very far ahead of him.

Or free and laughing behind him.

Bitter at the thought of his own miscalculation, Longarm hurried on.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“You sure look like shit this morning, Marshal,” young Frye said. Longarm met him at the courthouse steps as the local deputy was coming outside.

“I’m entitled to look like shit, Charlie. I had quite a night, and I feel like shit too.”

Frye grinned, obviously unaware of the previous night’s excitement. “Say, Marshal, you didn’t bust the window in the jail, did you?”

Longarm glared at him. “No damnit, I did not break your window.”

“I was just asking. Jeez. No need to get touchy about it. I mean, I asked that fella in the cell, but he couldn’t tell me nothing.”

“Potter?”

Frye shrugged. “Yeah, I guess that’s his name. You know, the dummy.”

“He’s still in his cell?”

“Sure. I was just up there. I was going to get his break­fast now. You want me to bring you something too?”

“Please. And, Charlie?”

“Yeah, Marshal.”

“I’m sorry if I snapped at you. It’s just that I’ve been hiking up in the damn mountains all night long, and I ex­pect I’m feeling kinda bearish now.”

Frye gave him an uncomprehending look, and Longarm realized there was no point in pursuing his frustrations with the youngster “Look. I appreciate your offer of that break­fast. I really do. Thanks.”

“Sure thing, Marshal. I’ll have ‘em sent right up. One for you an’ one for the prisoner.” He turned and walked toward the business district.

At least that was one thing that had gone all right. He didn’t have to go hunt for Donald James Potter again.

Longarm felt of his chin. He needed a shave, but tired as he was after hunting through the mountains the entire night he would likely cut his own damn throat if he tried to shave before he got some rest. And it would take a little while before the breakfasts were delivered. While he was waiting he could see if there was any response yet from Billy Vail.

He walked down to the railroad depot. The platform was deserted, but some workmen from the mines were hauling crushed ore down ready for process­ing for shipment. The hoppers were full already after missing only a single day’s shipping schedule. Soon the owners and man­agers at the mines would be squawking about that.

The telegraph operator was at his desk. His work went on regardless of what the mines and the railroad might do, Longarm realized.

“Good morning,” Longarm said in as civil a greeting as he could manage.

“Nothing good about it,” the operator said. He looked like he too had had a rough night, although probably his would have been in the pursuit of pleasure instead of a sneak with a rifle.

“If you say so,” Longarm said with a grin. The tele­graph operator’s eyes were so red and puffy that the sight of the man almost made Longarm feel fresh just from the comparison. On the other hand, Longarm hadn’t had a chance to look in a mirror. Maybe he looked as bad, heaven forbid.

“Something I can do for you, Marshal?”

“I wanted to see if there’s been a reply to the telegram I sent yesterday.”

“Sorry, Marshal. Not a thing for you. Just the usual stuff for the mines.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Longarm turned to leave, but the operator stopped him.

“It probably isn’t my place to be saying anything, Mar­shal, but you might wanta know. The county supervisors are getting plenty unhappy about you not letting the train run. That train is awful important to us.”

“So were those dead men and all that missing money,” Longarm said coldly.

“Like I said, it probably wasn’t my place to speak up anyhow. I just thought you should know.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Longarm left the telegraph office with yet another worry. If the mine-owning county supervisors decided to withdraw their declaration of emergency and their request for federal intervention in Thunderbird Canyon, what the hell would his legal position be?

He honestly was not sure if he could stay on the case after that or not. A judge who had six months to study law on a subject—any subject—and a whole damned army of lawyers telling him what he should rule about it, well, there just was never any way of telling what a ruling would come out to be. A deputy in the field didn’t have that kind of time or expert help either one. All he could do was what he thought was right. And then half the time see his judg­ment shot to pieces after the fact. It was a bitch, Longarm thought, any way you looked at it.

Still, a good meal and a few hours of rest would put a better light on things. Assuming the ambusher from the night before kept to himself for a spell, that is.

Lordy, but he didn’t think he had ever been on a case before that kept him so ass-dragging tired.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Longarm woke in midaftemoon to a rapping on his hotel room door. He didn’t mind. Hell, he was getting used to it. And at least this time he’d gotten several hours of solid sleep. Anything over fifteen minutes was beginning to seem a luxury, and there wasn’t anything wrong with him now that twenty hours or so of uninterrupted sleep couldn’t cure.

“I’m coming.” He pulled on his trousers and crossed the room barefoot—the place had not been swept since he checked in, and the floor was cold and gritty underfoot— to unlock the door.

He did not know the man in the hallway, but he was unarmed and seemed inoffensive enough. Longarm pointed the muzzle of the Colt down toward the floor and let him in.

“Sorry t‘ bother you, Marshal.”

“No problem.”

“I’m a loader at the Arrabie, Marshal. Morris, Jim Morris.” He stood with his hat in his hand and bobbed his head. “Mr. Batson asked me’t‘ run ahead and tell you they’re comin’ in now.”

“They have Markham?”

“Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I’m s’posed’t‘ tell you, sir. Mr. Batson an’ two other fellas. They’re bringin‘ him down now.”

“Alive?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, sir, but I seen that they’re‘ havin’ to carry him. If he ain’t dead he’s at least shot up some.”

“Thank you, Jim. Tell them I’ll meet them at the court­house.”

“Yes, sir.” Morris bobbed his head again and backed toward the door, tugging his hat on and in a hurry to com­plete this chore.

Frankly, Longarm did not particularly give a damn if Paul Markham was brought in living or otherwise. It star­tled him to realize it, and he reflected on it as he dressed.

Markham was a sick, venal, mean, and petty son of a bitch, and the thought of the former sheriff was disgusting to Longarm. But in truth the man’s sins were minor com­pared with the murders of perhaps half a dozen men in the bank explosion, and the loss of more than seventy thousand dollars of uninsured cash. Longarm simply did not care if Markham died here or lived out the rest of his days in a federal prison. The kind of man who would force unwilling girls into short lives of pain and anguish was not deserving of consideration beyond the minimum required by duty and decency.

Longarm finished dressing, felt of his chin and decided not to take time for a shave. He went down to the street and toward the courthouse in time to meet Arnold Batson and two of his men struggling down the steep hillside with a makeshift litter.

Paul Markham was in the litter. Longarm did have to look twice to determine that the one-time sheriff of Thunderbird Canyon was quite thoroughly dead. He had been torn apart by numerous gunshots fired at close range.

“You think you shot him enough, Arnold?” Longarm asked sarcastically. He was beginning to wonder if sending Batson to find the fugitive had been such a good idea after all.

“What? Oh.” Batson frowned.

Now that he was paying attention to the living rather than the dead, Longarm could see that the security man was pale and looked about half sick.

“We

uh

got kinda excited, I guess.” Batson ad­mitted.

“Tell me about it.”

The men carrying the litter with Markham’s body on it set their burden down. All three, Batson and both his helpers, looked haggard and unhappy.

“We cornered him easy enough,” Batson said. “I mean, a man that don’t know this country’s pretty much got no place to go, Marshal, like I told you before. Take a wrong trail, and you won’t get anywhere. For that matter, take the right trails and there ain’t but so far you can go. So we were onto him pretty easy.” He paused. “Say, d’you have a smoke we could share? We run out this morning while we were trying to get him down here.”

“Sure.” Longarm handed cheroots to each of the three and lighted one for himself as well.

“Thanks. Anyway, like I started to tell you, we got onto him real easy. He seen us coming

no way to avoid that up above timberline where we was

and he went to ground in a prospect hole on the north face of Mount Nor­man. Had a good field o‘ fire down the only trail we could use to get to him, and he had a revolver to hold us off with. Didn’t get any of us as you c’n see, but he scared hell outa us a few times and sprayed Johnny there with some rock chips. So we had a kind of standoff for a while.

“Paul knew he was cornered, o’course. There wasn’t any way for us to shag him outa there, but there wasn’t anyplace for him to go neither. I remembered that hole, and it wasn’t but forty, fifty feet deep into the rock. An‘ even if he’d got out of there, the trail he’d been on only went another couple hundred yards up the mountain an’ petered out at another prospect hole.”

Longarm drew on his cheroot and nodded.

“So anyway, after a bit he hollered out that he wanted to talk. Johnny stayed back in the rocks out o‘ sight, and Lew and me walked up to where we could talk.” Batson smiled without humor.

“Turned out the son of a bitch wanted to try and buy his way out. He said he had eleven thousand dollars cash on him, and he’d share it with us if we made out that we couldn’t find him. Not that I know where he thought he’d go if we did turn back, but he gave it a try. Started out offering to give us half an‘ ended up trying to give us all of it if we’d just pretend we never found him.” A grimace showed what Batson thought about that. “As if we could be bought. You know?”

Longarm muttered something and waited for the man to continue.

“Anyway, Marshal, I expect there’s some folks as can be bought and some as can’t. I’m proud to say that these fellas with me are the can’t-be kind. We listened, an‘ then we tried to talk him out of his hole. At one point he even came out in plain sight, right there in front of us, an’ showed us a wad o‘ cash money. Folding stuff, you see. Shoved his pistol down behind his belt and held the money out for us to look at, like that would tempt us more or something.

“Well, it didn’t. And then I guess I did something stu­pid. I mean, prob’ly you would known how to handle it better if you’d been there, but I up and told him that me and my boys weren’t for sale and that we were placing him under arrest.”

It was becoming clear from Batson’s expression and from the beads of sweat that were showing on his forehead that this was a painful recollection for him. “You did the right thing,” Longarm assured the man.

“Thanks.” Batson hemmed and hawed for a moment, staring down toward his scuffed, dusty boots instead of looking Longarm in the eyes now. “Maybe I did wrong, Marshal, but I was concentrating on telling him that we’d not hurt him and that he was under arrest and all like that, and I guess I just didn’t pay close enough attention or something. Anyway, he ups and drops the money. Just opened his hand and turned loose of it. And naturally me and Lew looked at all that wad of money fluttering in the wind. And Markham, he hauls out his pistol and fires. Fired point-blank right into my face he did.”

Batson pushed the hair back from his left temple and displayed an ear that was red and some stubble of hair that had been singed by fire. “Damn close,” Batson said calmly enough, “but I guess he was excited then as we was, and the powder flash got me but the bullet missed. Got my attention, let me tell you. Scared shit outa all of us. But then me and Lew got untracked and grabbed for our guns, and Johnny started shooting and

we just kept shooting. It was awful, Marshal. I mean, none of us ever shot at a human person before, much less ever kilt anybody, and I guess we was scared and nervous, and we kept on shooting even when we didn’t have to anymore.”

Batson looked embarrassed. “I know I emptied my gun at him and then kept on cocking an‘ pulling the trigger even after the thing was empty, until Lew took me by the shoulder and got me to realizing what I was doing. I

I’m sorry about not being able to bring our prisoner in for you, Marshal.”

“You did fine, Arnold,” Longarm said. He meant it, “I couldn’t have done any better myself.”

“I feel awful dumb, though, trying to shoot an empty gun like that and being so scared I hardly knew what was going on or anything.”

Longarm smiled and squeezed the man’s shoulder. “You’re probably too young to’ve been in the war, but I know a lot of soldiers then got so shook up in the fighting that they never fired at all, or if they did just shot into the air. Why, they used to go out on the battlefields when everything was over and recover all the rifles that’d been dropped. They tell that a lot of them, not just a few, but an awful lot of them, would be full to the muzzle with unfired charges. The soldiers would be so excited they’d never remember to pull their triggers. They’d load, throw the guns to their shoulders, then take them down and load again without ever shooting. Or they might shoot off the first round an‘ then never remember to load again during a whole battle. Yet they’d go right on fighting, and if you asked them afterward they’d honestly believe they’d been shooting the whole time. They really never knew different. Believe me, you boys did just fine.”

“You really mean that, Marshal?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Thanks. I guess. But let me tell you, Marshal, this business of shooting people just ain’t for me. I

I got sick afterward. It isn’t something I’d ever want to do again. I just don’t know that I could. For sure not as a regular thing.”

“Killing is ugly, Arnold. Sometimes, though, it’s neces­sary. You boys did the right thing.”

Lordy, how long had it been since he got sick after hav­ing to shoot someone? Too long, that was how long it had been. In a way, that was a damned shame. He didn’t want to take human life lightly, damnit.

But the fact was that seeing men die, and taking lives, became easier with experience. In a manner of speaking, Longarm actually envied Arnold Batson his innocence and his reverence for life. When the time had come, though, Batson had done what he had to do. And perhaps that more than anything else was the measure of a good man.

Batson brightened a little. “We brought the money back, Marshal. I think we got all of it. It counts up to near six­teen thousand.” He smiled a little. “Even when he was trying to bribe us, the son of a bitch was holding back plenty for himself.”

Longarm laughed. Greed was something a man could count on, by damn. It was seldom possible to overestimate the power of greed in a man. Even when he was faced with the end like a rat caught in a corner and was bargaining for his life, Paul Markham stayed greedy.

On the other hand, Arnold Batson and his boys hadn’t been swayed by the offer of a bribe of $11,000, and they wouldn’t have been any more tempted by $16,000, Longarm felt sure. Some men are just plain straight and decent, and that was a good thing to remember.

Batson could have tried to pretend that Markham was empty-handed when he was caught—which Longarm would not have believed, but Batson would not have known that—or could have kept most of the money and turned in a few thousand.

Longarm had no doubt at all, though, that the men were proud to turn over every penny they recovered. What it came down to, he supposed, was that their pride and self worth were more valuable to them than $16,000. And there probably wasn’t one of them who would ever see more than $50 per month pay in their entire lives. There were some real assholes in Thunderbird Canyon. But there were also some mighty fine people here, and Longarm was fac­ing three of them.

“We’d‘ve been back sooner,” Batson was saying, “ex­cept for having to chase down some of that currency from outa the rocks and then having so much trouble getting the litter fixed up and hauling the, uh, the body back down.”

“Nobody could’ve done any better than you did,” Longarm said. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you’d take Markham’s body the rest of the way down to the icehouse, and then you can meet me at the hotel. I think the govern­ment owes you the best steak in town at the least. I’d be proud to set it up for you.”

“Thanks, Marshal, but if it’s all the same t‘ you, sir, what I want more’n anything right now is to go home an’ take a hot bath and a shave an‘ just

be by myself a while. We talked about that some. I think Lew and Johnny feel the same way. We don’t want nothing out o’ this but to try and forget it ever happened. If you wouldn’t mind, sir.”

“Mind? No, I certainly don’t mind. You have my thanks, though, if that’s all you will accept. Maybe later we can get those steaks.”

“Yes, sir,” Batson said politely. Somehow, though, Longarm knew there would not be a later. These boys were heartsick over having killed someone, even a shit like Paul Markham who was trying to kill them, and what they genuinely wanted now was to put the experience behind them and resume lives just as dull and ordinary as possible.

The three of them picked up Markham’s body and struggled off toward the icehouse with it, and Longarm turned away. They were good men, he reflected.

And that was one problem that was off his back now. Paul Markham and Jessie were both dead now, and there would be no case to take before a federal judge on behalf of those Mexican girls waiting uncertain of their own fu­tures at the whorehouse.

It occurred to him that something would have to be done with the money Batson had recovered from Markham. It belonged to no one, really. Longarm smiled and thought again about the captive, unwilling whores. He suspected he would be able to find something to do with that cash. Meanwhile, he still had to do something about the White Hoods.

As he walked back toward the hotel and a belated lunch, though, for some reason he kept thinking about Paul Mark­ham and his capture. There was something in that that was nagging at him, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Oddly enough, he had the impression that it had little or nothing to do with Markham and Jessie. But he just couldn’t quite drag it out to where he could look at it. He chewed on the thought while he walked.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Longarm jerked upright in his chair and slapped his fork down beside his plate.

“Of course, damnit,” he said aloud. “But who?”

He laughed, the sound abrupt and loud in the near si­lence of the restaurant.

Two men having a late lunch at the next table gave him a look that said they thought he was daft, but Longarm didn’t care at all.

That was what had been gnawing at him ever since Ar­nold Batson told him about running Markham to ground.

It all fit now.

The failure of the White Hoods to show on Friday after­noon.

The explosion in the bank.

The fact that no one but poor, half-witted Donald Potter tried to leave town Saturday morning.

Even, by damn, the flour-sack hood found in Potter’s pocket.

Longarm smiled to himself, thinking about the way Pot­ter had had no idea that the flour sack even was a hood. When Longarm handed the article to him, Potter took it and used it to wrap around the coins for safekeeping.

That was the whole bugaboo with this search for the White Hood Gang. There were no White Hoods! Not, at least, in Thunderbird Canyon.

His thoughts were coming together now, and Longarm was becoming excited at the process of discovery.

The ambusher who had tried to kill him the other night

No wonder the man wanted Longarm out of the way. He desperately needed to get the train running again. So he could make his escape with the stolen payroll money. Hell yes, he did. With the train running—whether Longarm was alive or dead—the law would be looking for strangers trying to escape in hiding. But the man who planned the payroll robbery would be a familiar face, right there in plain sight among people who thought he was a decent member of a decent community. The son of a bitch would be able to board the train and wander off to Meade Park in full view of everyone. No one would be inspecting baggage for the stolen money. They would all be looking for the sinister and unfamiliar members of the White Hood Gang.

Longarm almost admired the simplicity of it.

And when Longarm thought the man was trapped on the mountainside following the attack out of the night, he had been right about thinking a stranger to the country would follow a game trail before a ledge.

The thing was, the gunman was no stranger to this country. He had known where the trail and the ledge alike would lead and was shrewd enough to figure Longarm for sensible reasoning on the subject. That was exactly why he was able to stay on the ledge and give the slip to his pur­suit.

Someone local, right here in town the whole time, had set this whole deal up.

The White Hood warning was a complete hoax, start to finish, just to force the authorities—Longarm right along with them—into doing exactly what the thief planned. And that was to keep all the payroll and royalty monies in one juicy lump, ripe for the taking, under guard but all together and available to a thief smart enough and brash enough—and vicious enough—to go after it.

Longarm pushed his plate away. His steak was only half eaten, but all of a sudden he was much too wound up to care about food. He dropped a coin onto the table beside his neglected meal and hurried out into the sunlight.

He knew part of it. He was convinced of that now. But he still needed to fill in the rest of the picture.

He thought he had a pretty fair idea of how to go about that.

ChapterThirty-Nine

His first stop was the obvious one. He took the courthouse stairs two at a time. There was a chance, just the barest chance, that under the proper questioning Donald Potter might remember enough to give Longarm a clue to the identity of the thief and murderer of Thunderbird Canyon.

Because Longarm was convinced now that Potter was guilty of nothing more, really, than having been a tool used by the murderer. Potter was hired as window dressing— paid a hundred dollars and told to try and sneak out of the canyon by way of the railroad tracks.

When the poor man was caught, as he inevitably would be, the hood in his pocket would “prove” that the White Hood Gang was behind the explosion and robbery.

And for a while Longarm had bought it, damnit.

No longer. Now Longarm cussed himself for not notic­ing before that the flour-sack hood taken from Potter’s pocket still had remnants of wheat flour in the seams, but there was no trace of the substance in the man’s hair. Pot­ter had never worn the hood, and in fact had not even known that he was carrying something fashioned into a hood.

If he had noticed that to begin with it would have started the doubts and this train of thought that much earlier, dam­nit. Being dead beat and dragging was scant excuse for that failure, but there was no point in worrying about it now.

The important thing was that now he could talk to Potter not about the White Hoods and a crime that he had had nothing to do with, but about the things that really might have happened that night.

Longarm was wearing a grim smile when he reached the top floor of the courthouse building and hustled into the jail.

The smile was wiped away by what he found there.

The door to Potter’s cell stood open, the keys still dan­gling in the lock. Donald James Potter was there. In the cell. Lying on the hard cot where Longarm had last seen him. The grass-stuffed mattress ticking was a dark and om­inous red from drying blood, and the blood covered most of the upper part of Potter’s body as well.

Longarm cursed bitterly and made sure there was no one else in the place, then entered the cell with regret.

Potter lay on his back with his eyes wide and unseeing. He had been stabbed and slashed repeatedly. One hand was clutching something. Hoping Potter might have grabbed at his attacker and snatched some sort of clue from the killer, Longarm bent to the pale body and pried open the cold, stiff fist.

The only thing Potter had, perhaps the one thing that had given him comfort in his life, was the rose quartz peb­ble the poor fellow had been so fond of touching and stroking and playing with.

Longarm felt anger rise then.

The poor bastard had been harmless. He probably smiled at the man who murdered him, just as he had smiled at the man who put him behind bars. Donald James Potter had not had the brains or the guile to hate or to fear, either one.

Somehow Longarm found this murder even uglier than those of the innocent men who had died in the explosion at the small bank.

The murder meant, though, that the killer was getting worried. Longarm was still alive, the train remained im­mobile on the rails, and time was on the side of the law. The killer wanted out, and he was becoming worried about the delays Longarm caused.

Gently Longarm replaced the pink pebble in Donald Potter’s cold hand, and as gently pulled the dead man’s eyelids closed. There was nothing more Longarm could do for Potter, except to find his killer, and unlike Arnold Batson, Custis Long was no stranger to death.

He turned and went back down the steps, although more slowly this time.

“No, sir, I haven’t noticed anybody going up there,” the county clerk told him. “But then, I mean, I wouldn’t. You know? Guys go up an‘ down all day. I don’t pay them any mind.”

“Thanks.” It was not a surprising response. It was the same one he had gotten from everyone on the lower floors of the courthouse. No one paid attention to anyone else. Particularly to people they would recognize as familiar faces on the streets of Thunderbird Canyon. And it cer­tainly was no stranger Longarm was looking for here.

He tried the last office in the building with a similar lack of success and then moved outside.

He walked to the bank building. The debris left behind by the explosion Friday night had been cleared away now, leaving only the remnants of the ground flooring and a gaping hold down into the cellar.

The last of the workmen had gone, and the rubble of stone and wood that once had been a building was piled to one side. Some of the timbers and most of the shaped stone building blocks would be useful again. Even as Longarm watched, a man pulled a small wagon close to the trash heap and began picking through the stones, selecting some of the smallest and most uniformly shaped and putting them into the wagon for his own purposes.

“You couldn’t tell me where the workmen have gone, could you?” Longarm asked.

“Not really, but I hear that most of the work was done by a crew from the Tyler. You could ask up there.”

“All right, thanks.”

It was a long climb to the Tyler mine, and Longarm was puffing by the time he got there.

The man who had been in charge of the rescue and clearing efforts was a shift foreman named Simmonds. Longarm found him in the small boardinghouse reserved for security and management people. Longarm hoped Simmonds was off duty because by midafternoon he had already been drinking heavily.

Longarm introduced himself and explained what he needed to know. “I was hoping you might have found something that would help,” he said.

Simmonds grunted and reached for a refill, not bother­ing to offer a drink. From the way the foreman was going at it, Longarm suspected Simmonds did not want to let any of that bottle—or possibly the next one either—escape him.

“I’ll tell you wha‘ we foun’,” Simmonds said in a slurred voice. “A stinkin‘ mess is wha’ we found.” He grimaced and took another drink. “Wasn’t nobody lef alive in there. Couldna been.” His face twisted and he looked like he might weep at the memory of the things he had seen in the remains of the bank building.

“How many—” Longarm began, but Simmonds cut him off.

“I don’t know. Jesus God, man, tha’s the thing. We don‘ even know fer sure how many died. They was

they was tore up so awful

we think

we think there’s six dead. But Jesus God, we ain’t even fer sure about that. It could

it could be five. Could be seven. We ain’t even sure about that.” He reached for the bottle again.

“You didn’t find any money, though? There was nothing in the vault when you got to it?”

That was one of the things that was tugging at Longarm’s instincts now. The payroll money, more than $70,000 and all of it in minted gold coin, was one hell of a bulky, weighty haul. It would take either time or a great deal of manpower for someone to move it.

The way this thing looked to be working out so far, the thief or thieves were short on manpower. One man, or any­way, no more than a few. More than that would not be able to keep the plan secret in a small, enclosed community like Thunderbird Canyon. The more people you have to trust to keep any secret, the less likely that secret will be kept. So he had to believe that the spurious “White Hood Gang” of Thunderbird Canyon was at most a handful of men.

Yet it would take time for a few men to move that much gold into hiding. They certainly had not had such an amount of time available to them after the explosion and virtual collapse of the bank.

Besides, the shattering force of the explosion dropped tons and tons of rubble onto the vault. The empty vault. If the explosion had been for the purpose of opening the vault, as Longarm and everyone else had been assuming right along, not stopping to think as Longarm was now, it would not have been possible for the thieves to reach the vault under all that stone and timber.

The gold had to have been stolen before the explosion.

Why in the hell hadn’t he seen that earlier, Longarm moaned silently to himself.

The answer to that one was simple enough, of course. It was because he and everybody else was being led around by the nose in this thing, with the thief or thieves doing the leading.

The bank and vault were blown up and the vault was emptied, and therefore the explosion was to open the vault. That’s what it looked like on the surface, anyway. And never once had anybody gotten around to questioning that obvious but erroneous “fact.”

Well, Longarm was damn sure questioning it now.

That money was stolen before the explosion. Therefore the explosion itself was a ruse. A way of throwing the law off the scent.

Why, then, the deaths of five or six or seven good men?

Obviously, Longarm realized, those men were killed in cold, deliberate blood to keep anyone from discovering the identity of the thieves.

Had the guards all been held under gunpoint while the heavy gold was transferred out of the bank, then placed near the vault and deliberately murdered with a heavy charge of dynamite?

That seemed entirely possible.

The men had to be destroyed to protect their murderer, just as Donald James Potter was destroyed.

Why with dynamite, though, damnit?

Why with all that noise and destruction?

Potter was knifed.

The murderer tried to kill Longarm with a rifle.

So why were the men guarding the bank killed in such a way that the attention of the entire town was immediately and dramatically drawn to the scene of the crime?

That, damnit, made no sense. Not on the surface of things, anyway.

The guards could have been tied and gagged and conve­niently murdered by stabbing or strangulation so that the killers would have had hours to get away from the scene.

That made much more sense than the roaring devasta­tion of a massive explosion powerful enough to rip a whole building apart.

“Was any of those men, those bodies, tied up, Mr. Simmonds? Did you find any ropes on their hands or anything like that?”

“What’re you, some kinda fuckin‘ crazy?” Simmonds took another long swallow of the whiskey, although he looked like it was not giving him anything close to the mind-numbing relief he wanted.

Longarm decided to take the answer as a no. Simmonds or somebody would surely have brought it to his attention if that had been the case, anyway.

“Thanks,” Longarm said. “You’ve been more help than you know.”

Simmonds grunted and reached for his bottle. “There was friends o‘ mine in there, mister. Friends o’ mine. An‘ I hadta pick ’em up in pieces.” The burly mine foreman started to cry over his whiskey. “I reached for a hand, mis­ter, an‘ that’s all there was there. Just the hand. An’ I don’t even know whose it was.”

Longarm left Simmonds to his misery.

Chapter Forty

It was getting on toward late afternoon by the time Longarm got down the mountain to the town again, and the damned train was making steam. He went charging down to the depot ready to have someone’s ass, but the trainmas­ter quickly explained.

“I’m not going anywhere, Marshal. Really. Just having my engineer run a check on the boiler while we got the down time.” The man contrived to look and sound as inno­cent as a newborn. “Honest. We don’t even have the cars filled. Look for yourself.”

Longarm did and grunted an acknowledgment that the man was telling him the truth. “All right then, but see that you don’t turn a wheel until I give you the go-ahead.”

“I won’t.” The trainmaster pulled a plug from his pocket, offered it to Longarm, and bit off a chew for him­self. “While you’re handy, though, Marshal, would you mind telling me if this is gonna take much longer?”

“I don’t think so,” Longarm said. “Maybe you can make your regular run tomorrow morning.”

The man looked relieved. “That’s good news, Marshal. We stay down much longer and I’m afraid the line will start dockin‘ our pay.” He grinned. “Deep as I’m in debt al­ready, I couldn’t afford that.”

“Did I hear you say the train can run again tomorrow?”

Longarm turned. The telegraph operator had come up behind them and asked the question.

“It’s only a possibility. I don’t want you putting that on the wire, though. It all depends.”

The telegrapher looked disappointed.

“While I’m here,” Longarm said, “I’d like my answer from Marshal Vail.”

“What answer?”

“To that message I sent him

when was it

yesterday?”

“Oh.” The telegrapher shrugged. “Hasn’t been no an­swer for you yet, Marshal. When it comes in, you want me to have it sent to the hotel or have somebody look for you personal?”

Longarm frowned, then relaxed. “Just have it sent to the hotel. That will be fine.”

“Soon as it comes in,” the operator said.

Longarm turned as if to leave, then stopped and said, “There’s something I’d like you to do for me. It’s impor­tant.”

The telegrapher’s lips twitched, hovering between a frown and an uncertain smile. “What’s that?”

“I want you to find Deputy Charlie Frye and bring him here.”

“Me, Marshal?”

Longarm’s expression hardened. In a voice of stern command he snapped, “Yes, you, damnit.”

“I’m supposed to be on duty, Marshal, right by my key, and—”

“Now!” Longarm ordered.

The telegrapher took a half step backward, then nodded and turned to hurry off toward the town.

“Kind of hard on him, weren’t you?” the trainmaster observed. He rolled his cud from one cheek to the other and spat, expertly splattering a small spider that was climbing from the roadbed onto the platform.

“Maybe,” Longarm conceded. “Easily ordered around, is he?”

“Who, Carter? I suppose so. Never thought about it be­fore, but I guess you could say that.”

“Yeah, well

” Longarm left the trainmaster and crossed the platform to the empty office. The telegrapher’s key sat idle and quiet on the counter beside his desk.

Longarm glanced out the window to make sure the oper­ator was not yet returning, then sat before the man’s key.

U.S. Marshal Billy Vail had never taken this long to respond to one of his deputies’s requests for assistance be­fore. And Longarm did not believe Billy had gotten sud­denly lazy now.

Longarm flexed his fingers for a moment, then bent to the telegraph key, tapping out a quick dot-and-dash series of letters.

A minute or so later he tried it again.

There was no response from the other end of the wire.

Longarm smiled grimly to himself, left the desk and began to poke around the railroad office.

When the telegrapher returned with Charlie Frye in tow, Longarm was relaxing in a swivel chair with cheroot cocked at a jaunty angle in his jaw.

“I have a job for you that I think the local law should handle, Charlie,” he said.

“Yes, sir?”

Longarm removed the cheroot from between his teeth and aimed it at the telegraph operator’s chest. “What I want you to do, Charlie,” Longarm said pleasantly, “is to place that scummy son of a bitch under arrest on eight counts of murder and”—he grinned—“we’ll add more to it shortly.”

The telegrapher went pale. Charlie Frye blinked in con­fusion.

“Go ahead and try to run for it if you want,” Longarm told the operator calmly. “I won’t shoot you in the back. In the knees, but not the back. And it won’t bother me a lick.”

The telegrapher began to shiver. A dark, damp stain spread over the front of his trousers as he wet himself.

Chapter Forty-One

The telegrapher’s name was Jamison Carter, and he did not give the impression of being a particularly brave individ­ual. Longarm had Frye cuff him and take him up to the jail where Donald Potter’s body still lay untended. Frye got quite a start out of seeing it.

“You can take care of that later,” Longarm told him. “Right now I want you to go downstairs to the next land­ing. I want you to stay on those steps and not let anybody up here. Nobody, you understand me?”

Frye nodded, though he was still staring at the dead man in the cell.

“No matter what you hear from up here, I don’t want you or anybody else coming up those stairs, Deputy. I don’t want any witnesses, you understand, and I’m making you responsible for that.”

“Uh

yessir.” Frye said dubiously. “I won’t let no­body up until you tell me.”

“Not even the county supervisors.” Longarm said. “No­body.”

“No, sir. Nobody.”

“That’s good. Now, do you have any spare handcuffs?”

“We got some in the bottom of that cabinet over there.”

“Good. Take your set and one of those extras and cuff Mr. Carter here to the bars with both hands so that he’s kind of spread-eagled on his feet.”

Frye looked like he could not believe what he was being told to do, but he did it. He got out a set of spare handcuffs and a key for them. “Do you, uh, want him facing out or in, Marshal?”

“I want him facing into the cell so he can look at Potter while

uh

while I’m talking to him.”

Carter looked like he might faint. For that matter, Char­lie Frye did not look very far from it himself.

“And while you’re switching that first set of cuffs from his wrist to the bars, Charlie, have the prisoner take off his shirt, would you, please?”

“Yes, sir.”

Carter was shaking so bad the trembling could be seen from all the way across the room.

Longarm reached for another cheroot and took his time about lighting it.

“Downstairs now, Charlie. And remember, I don’t want anybody coming up here to bother me, no matter what you hear. Anybody wants to complain about the noise, I’ll take it up with them after. All right?”

Charlie Frye looked damned glad to be able to leave the room and rush down the stairs.

Jamison Carter was facing away, pinioned to the steel bars by the handcuffs on his wrists. He could not see Longarm. But he could imagine much. That, in fact, was what Longarm was counting on.

Longarm took a comfortable seat in the chair that had belonged to the now-dead—there seemed to be a lot of that going around Thunderbird Canyon lately—Paul Markham and took a pull on his smoke.

“Want to tell me all about it, Carter?” he asked in a low, mild voice.

“I

I don’t know anything to tell you, Marshal.”

“Uh-huh,” Longarm said. “For instance, you don’t know why the battery for your telegraph wire has been disabled or how it could be that no one in Meade Park has received any traffic from here in several days?”

“I

” Carter shook his head, but with a gesture that was more nervous than stubborn.

“It might interest you to know that I reconnected the battery. We have communication with Meade Park again.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“You don’t know anything either, I suppose, about why the operator in Meade Park never received any of the messages I told you to send. You remember. The ones you told me you did send.”

Carter’s knees sagged.

“Before we get down to the good parts of this interroga­tion, Carter, it’s probably only fair to tell you that I’ve got most of this figured out by now. Including whose orders you’ve been taking. What did he promise you, Carter? Five thousand? Ten?”

“I never killed anybody, Marshal. I swear to God I never,” Carter blubbered.

“He might believe you, Carter, but I damn sure don’t. Your boss in this couldn’t have killed Donald Potter. You’re the one who did that. And you were a part of the bank murders too. It really doesn’t matter who actually lit the fuse, you know. But you don’t have to take my word for that. The judge will tell you the same thing. Before he hangs you.”

“Oh, God, Marshal, I can’t hang. I

I couldn’t stand that.”

“You’ll manage,” Longarm assured him. “Unless some judge is damn fool enough to let you off with just a prison sentence. Like if you were to cooperate and help me find your boss and the money.” Longarm chuckled. “Except that I don’t need your help, Carter. The money is in the bank basement. I can find it all by myself.”

Carter began trying to wrench his hands free of the steel handcuffs, jerking from side to side so that the steer brace­lets bit into his flesh. He began to moan and soiled himself again.

Longarm stood and slipped up behind Carter so he was immediately behind the man’s ear. “Where is he?” he roared.

Carter jumped so hard he fell and for a moment was hanging by his wrists. Longarm took a fistful of hair and hauled him back onto his feet.

“Where?” Longarm demanded.

“He

he’ll kill me if I tell you.”

“A judge will kill you if you don’t. Tell me and I might, just might, keep him separate from you when I haul your ass off to prison. Keep it to yourself, Carter, and when I do find him, man, I’ll tell him it was you who told me where to look.”

“God, Marshal, you can’t do this to me,” Carter wailed.

“Oh, but I can,” Longarm said calmly. “If you don’t mind a suggestion, though, I think it’s a little late to be thinking about God. I expect He’s pretty disappointed in you by now. Now are you going to tell me or not?”

“Yes,” Carter sobbed. “I’ll tell you where to find him.”

Longarm listened patiently while Jamison Carter blub­bered out everything he knew and probably somewhat more. Only then did the angry deputy release the creepy weasel from the handcuffs and shove him into a cell.

“Frye!” Longarm bellowed down the staircase. “Go get Arnold Batson. Tell him to bring some of his people and meet me here on the double.”

Young Frye looked confused again. He had been ex­pecting screams and all he heard was some crying and bab­ble from upstairs. But he did as he was told.

Chapter Forty-Two

Batson motioned for them to stop, then leaned closer to Longarm. “That’s it, Marshal. The Pearly Number Two. You can see from the size of it that they never got far developing it. Low-grade ore and getting worse as they went in, so they quit before they had even more money sunk in it and wasted. There’s probably not more’n a half mile of tunnel in there.”

He made that sound like it wasn’t much, although to Longarm a half mile of digging through solid rock was one hell of a lot. Still, he knew that an active, established mine could have literally miles of tunnels and shafts under­ground.

Longarm frowned and tried to get a better look at the area. It was dark, somewhere past nine o’clock, and the moon was obscured by cloud cover.

The mouth of what once was the Pearly Number two yawned dark against the mountainside. Some regular shapes laid out on the ground would have been where buildings once stood, but their wood had long since been carried away and put to other uses. Now there was only a more or less level clearing in front of the tunnel. And damned few places where a man could take cover if it came to a gunfight. Longarm hoped he could resolve it without that, though.

“If we try and go in now,” Longarm whispered, “we’d only be silhouetted against the sky. A man inside there could pick us off without hardly working up a sweat. I think we’d better lay up nice and easy until three, four o’clock in the morning. He should be asleep then for sure. He’s got no reason to be expecting a visit. So we’ll lay low for now, and when I think it’s safe I’ll go in by myself and see if I can’t have a gun to his head when he wakes up.”

“I think I should be the one to go in, Marshal,” Batson said grimly, and Longarm was reminded anew that Arnold Batson was one decent man. He hated killing, as he proved with Paul Markham, but he was willing to put himself on the line again now when he believed it was his duty to do so.

“No, Arnold, this is my job. I’ll handle it. I want you and your people to stay out here on the ready just in case I trip over a bucket or something and give myself away.”

“I still think—”

“No. And that’s the end of it. Just to be safe, though, I want you to send two of your boys over to that side of the tunnel and put the third man up over the top of it. Car­tridges chambered but keep the rifles uncocked. We don’t want any accidents, and we sure don’t want to alert him that we’re out here waiting for him.”

Batson hesitated for only a moment, then nodded. He crept back to where the Arrabie guards were waiting and whispered to them. One moved silently forward toward the tunnel opening while the other two started across the clear­ing.

Without warning a rifle shot rang out of the tunnel, splitting the darkness with its flame, and one of Batson’s men dropped his Winchester clattering to the ground and fell, grabbing his leg.

The other guard turned, snatched his fallen companion up, and ran with him toward the far side of the clearing as two more shots spat out of the tunnel toward them.

Longarm returned the fire, emptying his Colt into the mouth of the tunnel without aim, but in the hope that a ricochet might find a mark in there.

He reloaded, not at all minding that neither Batson nor any of the three guards had returned the murderer’s fire. It would be damned difficult for them if they had to, and he hoped he would be able to avoid the need for it still.

Batson, though, took a deep breath, aimed in the direc­tion of the dark tunnel mouth, and fired.

“It’s all right, Arnold,” Longarm said, in a normal voice now that they had been discovered. “I’ll do any of that that’s necessary.”

Batson nodded. There was enough light from the sky that Longarm could see the pain that was in his expression. Batson took his Winchester down from his shoulder. “Thanks.”

Longarm moved forward, keeping to the side of the tunnel as well as he was able, and shouted, “Jack. Jack Thomas! You have nowhere to run, Jack. It’s over. Put your gun down and come out now.”

“Is that you, Longarm?” The voice sounded slightly hollow as it emerged from the enclosing rock, but Thomas sounded cheerful enough.

“It’s me, Jack,” Longarm called.

“I’ll be go to hell. How’d you find me?”

“It wasn’t that hard once I got it figured out, Jack.”

There was a slight pause. Longarm suspected the Arrabie security chief was changing position inside the tunnel. “I sure thought I had it covered, Longarm. What’d I do wrong?”

“You stole a bunch of money and killed a bunch of people, Jack.”

“Aw, come on, Longarm. You know what I mean.” The voice did not sound quite so hollow now. Longarm was sure Thomas was moving closer to the mouth.

“Yeah, I know what you mean, Jack. You want me to tell you how clever you are?”

“No. I really want to know how I fucked up. Aside from doing it to begin with, that is.”

Longarm eased down until he was lying on his belly with the Thunderer stuck out in front of him and held ready. “It was the explosion more than anything, Jack,” he shouted.

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t so hard to work out that it had to be some­body local behind it since there weren’t really any White Hoods. Hell, they’re too smart to get themselves bottled up in a canyon with only one way out. So I worked on that some, but I got to admit I had trouble spotting you for the one behind it. After you got yourself killed and all.”

The sound of Thomas’s laughter drifted out of the tun­nel.

“Like I said, Jack, it was really the explosion that tipped me to it. It didn’t make sense. Killing all those people that particular way. And I happen to know how hard it is to really blow a human body into pieces. That’s a damned unusual thing, Jack. Pretty much had to be deliberate. And an awful big charge of dynamite. So I got to thinking about that. Like how even in a mining camp just any-old-body would excite some interest if he wanted to buy that much explosive without any obvious need for it. And how hard it is to steal dynamite from a mine. Then it occurred to me how it was you, Jack, that suggested we keep all the money together so we could guard it overnight and not distribute it until morning.

“Not that I thought anything about that when you were dead, Jack. But then when I got to wondering why any­body would want to blow those men up, Jack, it occurred to me that maybe those two things were connected. And maybe you weren’t quite as dead as everybody thought.

“And of course you didn’t have much support in the guts or brains department in that partner you picked. Carter couldn’t tell me everything fast enough once I got him started.”

“Yeah, that son of a bitch. I needed him, though. Needed him to get that fake telegram sent so everybody’d blame the White Hoods and I could get it to fall into place.” Thomas’s voice sounded quite close to the front now, and Longarm took a fresh grip on his Colt and read­ied himself. He was betting that Thomas would count on his untried guards to hold their fire against a friend—the same friend, of course, who had blown several other friends to bits—and try to take Longarm and make a break for it.

“Actually,” Longarm said, “you could have taken a trip out of the canyon and bribed some other operator to send your phony message.”

There was a pause, then a sound of laughter. “Shit, Longarm, I never thought of that. That would’ve been bet­ter, wouldn’t it?”

“Naw, I’d‘ve nailed your butt anyway, Jack.”

“I don’t know, Longarm,” Thomas called.

“I do,” Longarm said softly to himself.

“I guess we have a standoff here, Longarm.”

“I guess we do, Jack.”

“What say we try and negotiate this, Longarm? I have seventy-two thousand dollars in here with me.”

Longarm could hear Arnold Batson stirring behind him. The second attempt to bribe him in as many days would likely be having him pretty thoroughly pissed off, Longarm suspected. It just could be that Jack Thomas was counting more on a former friendship than Arnold Batson would be willing to deliver.

“Bullshit,” Longarm said. “The money was hidden in the basement of the bank. I figure you had it transferred down there by the same fellas you killed. What’d you do, tell them that would hide it and keep it even safer?”

“Yeah, but

”

“I’m not bluffing you, Jack. You hid it in the steamer trunk behind the file cabinets in the southest corner of the place. It’s already been found, counted, and turned over to the proper owners.”

“You son of a

Never mind that now, Longarm. I still think we can negotia—”

He came out of the tunnel hard and fast, driving forward in a rolling fall, a Winchester held in his hands, its muzzle sweeping at belly level toward the place Longarm’s voice had been coming from.

Thomas’s finger tightened on the trigger, and the Winchester spat lead through the air where Longarm would have been if he had been standing upright.

Longarm took his time for careful aim and was sur­prised to see Jack Thomas’s head jerk backward a fraction of a second before Longarm fired to send a second, but unnecessary, bullet into the man’s brain.

Behind Longarm, Arnold Batson sagged to his knees and began throwing up.

Batson, whose loyalties lay with duty and pride rather than with the turncoat Jack Thomas, had killed again.

Longarm got to his feet and went forward to verify that Thomas was no threat any longer. Then he turned back to Batson.

“Come along, Arnold. We have to get your injured man down the mountain.” He smiled. “By the time we get there, I expect Marshal Vail and Henry will’ve made that handcart ride. If I have anything to say about it, man, the marshal will see to it that you get whatever commendation or rewards or whatever that the government can talk those three mines into.”

Batson wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and shook his head. “I don’t want—”

“I know,” Longarm said. “But you’ve done the right thing, and it will look better to you in the morning. Come on, now.” Longarm had to help Batson upright and half support him back down the trail while the other guards assisted the wounded man.

The End