up right back in Sweet Apple, Texas, which he and Sam had left weeks earlier. He wondered how their friend Marshal Seymour Standish was doing these days. To tell the truth, Matt wouldn’t have minded if Seymour was here in Pancake Flats right about now. For a skinny Easterner, Seymour was pretty tough.
And things weren’t looking too promising at the moment.
“What do you mean a bridge is out?” Marshal Asa Thorpe demanded angrily of the eyeshade-wearing gent on the other side of the ticket window. “I have a prisoner I’ve got to get to Yuma!”
“I understand that, Marshal,” the railroad clerk said nervously, “but I can’t do anything about it. That flash flood last week washed out the trestle over Bowtie Canyon, and it’ll be another couple of days before it’s repaired enough to get a train over it. There’s nothing we can do except wait.”
The wagon with Joshua Shade locked up inside it was parked next to the station. Matt, Sam, and the remaining deputy, a man named Everett, stood around the vehicle with rifles in their hands. Thorpe had stomped up onto the platform and gone over to the window to find out when the next westbound was due.
Now it had become crystal clear that there wouldn’t be a train rolling into Pancake Flats for a couple of days at the very least, maybe longer. Thorpe’s face was dark with anger in the lamplight that spilled through the ticket window onto the platform. He looked like he wanted to reach through the window, grab the unfortunate clerk by the throat, and squeeze a solution to the problem out of him.
But there was no solution to be had, so Thorpe turned away from the window with a disgusted curse. He stopped and looked back.
“You got any law around here?”
“Just a town marshal,” the clerk said. “His office is back up the street, half a block on your left.”
Thorpe grunted. “Obliged,” he said in a surly voice, then stalked along the platform to the steps at the end.
As Thorpe came down the steps, Sam said, “It sounds like we’re stuck here for a while.”
“Stuck is right,” Thorpe snapped. “Sitting ducks, that’s what we are.”
“I reckon we could follow the railroad tracks and keep goin’ in the wagon,” Matt suggested.
Thorpe shook his head. “That’d be even worse. There’s only four of us now. We’ve already beaten the odds in fighting off those outlaws twice. I don’t reckon we could do it again.”
Matt didn’t think they could either, but he would have been willing to give it a try. Still, maybe there was a better way.
“We’ll hole up and wait for the train,” he said. “Find some nice sturdy place with walls thick enough to stop bullets.”
“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Sam added. “Most of the buildings around here are made of adobe. Their walls are probably pretty thick.”
“I saw a livery barn back up the street that looked like it’d stand up to anything short of a cannonball,” Matt said.
Thorpe said, “Let’s talk to the local law first. Maybe he’s got a good jail we can use.”
Sam climbed onto the wagon seat again and untied the reins from the brake lever. He got the mules moving, and followed Thorpe up the street toward the marshal’s office. They hadn’t noticed it as they went past earlier because there was no sign, but one of the citizens now pointed it out to Thorpe.
“You won’t find Marshal Lopez there right now, though,” the man added. “He’ll be havin’ his supper.”
“Whereabouts?” Thorpe asked.
“Over at the cantina.” The man pointed to a building on the other side of the street.
“Stay here and keep your eyes open,” Thorpe growled at Matt, Sam, and Everett. He walked across the road and vanished into the cantina.
Matt licked his lips and said, “My whistle could sure use wettin’.”
“I seem to recall you saying the same thing when we got to Arrowhead,” Sam commented.
“Well, it was true then and it’s true now. Nothin’ works up a man’s thirst like trail dust and gettin’ shot at.”
Thorpe emerged from the cantina a minute later, followed by a short, round man in a shabby black suit and with a high-crowned sombrero. Judging by the federal lawman’s long, angry strides that forced the smaller man to trot in order to keep up, Thorpe wasn’t happy.
“This is Marshal Lopez,” he said as he came up to the wagon, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the other man. “He says we’re welcome to use his office, but he doesn’t have an actual jail.”
Matt looked at Lopez. “Where do you lock up prisoners then?”
The man shrugged and spread his hands. “I try not to have to lock up anybody, Senor. Pancake Flats is a peaceful place. About the worst trouble we get is a cowboy who’s had too much to drink now and then. When that happens, I clout ’em over the head, toss ’em in the barn, and let them sleep it off.”
“That barn?” Sam asked, pointing to the livery stable. It was a low, rambling adobe building with a slate roof.
Lopez bobbed his head.
“We can bar the doors,” Matt said. “Looks like there are only a couple of windows, so we can trade off standin’ watch. As much as we’ve whittled down Shade’s gang, maybe they won’t want to come right into town to try to take him back.”
“It seems to be our best bet, Marshal,” Sam added.
