LONGARM AND THE BANDIT QUEEN
By Tabor Evans
Synopsis:
Notorious Belle Star is holed up with a nest of desperadoes. And it looks like some crooked marshals are in cahoots with her. For a price, the law won’t touch the robbers. ‘Till longarm rides into the fugitive camp, posing as one of them. Longarm has to cross the law to round up the raiders and their velvet queen. 17th novel in the “Longarm” series, 1980.
The icy bite of the twilight wind cut through Longarm’s clothes and crept down inside the leather tops of his stovepipe cavalry boots, curling his toes and numbing them. He wondered if they might not be turning blue. His hands, on which he wore thin leather gloves—the only pair he’d found when rummaging in his saddlebags—felt like they were blue, too. Longarm wasn’t about to pull the gloves off to find out. His fingers were so chilled that he was afraid one or two might come off with the gloves.
A stray gust sent an icy thread trickling down his collar to rustle the hair on his chest. Damn me for a double-dyed jackass! he thought as he pulled the lapels of his long, black Prince Albert coat closer together. If I’d thought it’d be this cold so far south along the Arkansas in September, I’d have brought my sheepskin instead of leaving it hang in Denver where it ain’t doing nobody any good.
Letting go the reins of his Texas-bitted cavalry mount, Longarm slapped his palms together to bring back some feeling. They flexed enough, with a little beating, to let him slide one hand inside his tight-pulled coat lapels and fish a cheroot out of his vest pocket. He chomped his strong teeth over the tip of the cheroot, clamping the thin cigar in his mouth while he fumbled a match from his coat pocket.
He made two tries at flicking the match into flame with a thumbnail before remembering that he had on gloves. For all they’re keeping your hands warm, old son, he told himself, you might as well not be wearing them.
Lifting a foot out of the stirrup, he hoisted his leg upward high enough to bend it, and struck the match on his bootheel. The puff of blue smoke that he loosed to mingle with the chill air, almost as visibly blue as the smoke itself in the fading light, made him feel a little bit better.
But not enough to mention, his thoughts ran on. Billy Vail’s just too damn tight with voucher money lately, telling me to get a remount at Ft. Gibson instead of letting me stay on the train all the way to Ft. Smith and renting a livery horse there.
By now, the fragrant smoke from the cigar was beginning to soothe Longarm’s spirits somewhat.
But I guess it ain’t all Billy’s fault. It’s them damn pencil-pushers back in Washington. They set on their padded swivel chairs all day and figure how to cut off a penny here and whittle away a nickel there, and I wind up freezing my butt for fifty or sixty miles on a cavalry nag traipsing across the ass-end of the Cherokee Nation, when I still ought to be at least halfway warm in a coach seat on the damn train.
Which don’t mean it ain’t Billy’s fault that I’m here in the first place. I got about as much business being down here between the Creek and Cherokee Nations, trying to pick up a smell of Jesse James’s trail, as a butchering-sized hog has trying to fly. Seems like every day that goes by and the James boys stay hid out, the hotter everybody gets about finding them. Hell, I’ll stand by what I told Billy when he put me on this case. I’ll put up a mint-new double eagle against his plugged two-bit piece that Jesse’s right close to where he calls home, over east in Missouri. And he ain’t going to be found until those neighbors of his start flapping their jaws. Trouble is, nobody’s listening when I try to tell them what only seems like good sense to me.
Ahead of him, Longarm caught the glint of a campfire’s light flickering among the trunks of the big sweet gum and blackjack oak trees that grew thickly on both sides of the river trail. The trail meandered more or less parallel to the banks of the Arkansas River as it flowed sluggishly southeast toward the line between the Indian Nation and the state of Arkansas.
He picked up the reins and twitched them to send his mount in the direction of the promised warmth. There was still a good distance between him and the fire. He nudged his horse with a spurless bootheel to speed it up a bit, anxious, now that he’d seen the blaze, to stop and settle down beside it, and share its warmth with whoever had built it.
He’d covered most of the distance to the flickering spot Of light, zigzagging between the trees and skirting the heavy brush, when a scream Split the darkening night. For a moment, Longarm couldn’t be sure there was a CONNECTION between the scream and the fire. He was still too far away to see anything but a suggestion of dark shapes silhouetted against the glow that spread around the fire. There were three or four figures moving around, but he couldn’t tell whether they were those of men or women. Just to be on the safe side, though, he slipped his Winchester out of its saddle scabbard and flicked off the safety. Then he dug both heels hard into his horse’s flanks, and the animal spurted forward.
Twenty seconds and two or three screams later, Longarm was close enough to get an idea as to what was going on around the campfire, as the diminishing distance sharpened the blurred edges of the shapes of four men and a woman. As the distance continued to lessen, he saw that the men had been chasing their companion, and as he watched them, the men wrestled the woman to the ground. Three of them held her—one holding each of her legs, the third Stretching her arms above her head. The fourth ripped away her skirt and underclothes, and fumbled at his belt.
By now, Longarm was close enough to see more than silhouettes. The men became defined as bearded, butternut-jean-clad individuals, but the woman was only a stretch of bare flesh, tinted deep pink by the lurid firelight. Dark pubic hair broke the sweep of her skin between waist and legs. The man who’d begun fumbling with his belt had let his jeans drop now, and Longarm could see his protruding erection as he dropped to his knees between the writhing woman’s widespread legs.
Her screams increased when she felt him probing to enter her. She twisted as best she could, trying to avoid his eager efforts, and her body arched against the strain her captors were putting on her arms and legs. The kneeling man struck her with his fist, and the woman’s screams stopped abruptly, as did her struggles. One of the men said something. Longarm was too far away to make out the words, but he heard the raucous laughter that followed the remark.
That was enough for him. Rape was rape under any circumstances, and rape wasn’t something that Longarm’s personal code would countenance. It was also against the law, and he was the law.
