He pulled up the horse with a sliding of hooves. Shooting against firelight was tricky, as he’d learned through long experience. He caught the kneeling man in his sights, and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
For a split second, the kneeling man froze, then the impact of the high-velocity.44-40 slug toppled him over. He fell across one of the woman’s pinioned legs. His companions let go of the now-sagging limbs they’d been struggling to hold still, and clawed for their guns.
Longarm reduced the odds with a snapshot at the man at the group’s head. His shot was quick, and the flickering firelight made sighting chancy. His target crumpled, then floundered on the ground. Longarm swung the Winchester, but the other two were on the move even before he’d started shifting his aim. Before he could trigger a third shot, the two remaining rapists were running into the deep shadows among the trees around the vest-pocket clearing.
While Longarm was searching the dappled shadows for a shot at the running desperadoes, the man who’d been his second target struggled to his feet and hobbled, bent double, into the sheltering woods. Longarm was in easy pistol range now. He sheathed the Winchester and dropped the horses reins over its nose. The cavalry-trained animal stood placidly.
Longarm dismounted, drawing his Colt, and struck off to one side of the fire. He had no way of knowing where the three men were, but instinct and experience told him they’d probably not gone far. The odds were that they’d taken shelter among the big bowls of the gumwood trees and thick foliage of the scrub oak that surrounded the little clearing.
Longarm could see them in his mind’s eye, shielded behind a protecting tree trunk while they waited for him to enter the revealing circle of firelight to bend over the body of the woman, who still lay unmoving on the ground beside the blaze. The twilight had slid into darkness during the moments it had taken for him to reach the fire, and the ensuing minutes that had been consumed in his brief surprise attack. Neither moon nor starlight penetrated through the thin gray overcast that had veiled the sky when it had last been visible. Longarm stopped to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, and to listen for sounds of movement.
There was a constant rustling in the wooded area. The wind was still brisk, and it whined softly as an undertone to the shushing it caused among the autumn-hardened leaves, still green and thick, but dry now after the sun of summertime. Bit by bit, his ears grew used to the forest murmur, his eyes to the freshly dark night. Directly in front of him, a twig cracked under the pressure of a booted foot. Slowly, Longarm edged ahead.
He felt his way, lowering each foot slowly as he stepped forward, putting his weight on the foot gradually, ready to pull back if the springiness of the loose leaves that blanketed the ground was interrupted by the hard line of a dry tree limb or twig. His caution saved him a bad fall, for he was still balanced on one foot when the foot he was advancing touched the ground briefly before the earth crumbled away under its pressure. Still, he had to shuffle to keep from pitching forward, and the sudden movement set up a soft rustling in the vegetation underfoot.
A line of fire cut the darkness in front of him, and the sound of the shot and the ugly, high-pitched whistle of lead zipping past, mere inches from his chest, sounded at almost the same instant.
Longarm hit the ground, squeezing off a shot toward the spot where he’d seen the muzzle blast as he fell. Two gunshots cut the night now, a few feet apart, but they were high. When he’d gone to the ground, Longarm had fallen into a shallow ditch. He rolled, measuring it by feel, finding that it was no ditch, but judging from its size and shape, a grave.
For that woman they were about to rape, he thought. Figured to get rid of her after they’d had all they wanted from her.
He lifted himself to his knees, and reached out one hand in front of him, encountered the earth that had been lifted from the grave. It was as good a breastwork as anybody could ask for. Longarm put a shot into the darkness from behind the shelter of the dirt pile.
Two shots replied, and he answered them instantly, shooting to the side of the muzzle blasts. One of his slugs found flesh. A cry of mixed anger and pain sounded from the darkness.
“Son of a bitch winged me!” a man’s voice grated. “Shit on this!
Whoever that is, he’s better than I am at sharpshooting in the dark! I’m getting the hell out of here!”
“Not without me, you ain’t!” a second voice replied. “Come on! Lucky we didn’t unsaddle before we went for the woman!”
There was a loud pounding of feet on dry leaves and the slapping of scrub-oak branches against bodies. The noises faded, then there was an angry exchange of words in tones too low for Longarm to make out what was being said. Finally, the drumbeat of hooves thudded noisily beyond the waning fire, then faded into the distance, telling Longarm that his antagonists had ridden off with more haste than caution.
Longarm waited until the hoofbeats died, to make sure that the three riders weren’t going to regain their courage and circle back before he stepped out of the shallow grave.
Unreplenished, the fire had waned to little more than a bed of red coals from which an occasional flicker of bright flame burst when the heat ate into a sap-pocket. The woman was still unconscious. Longarm studied her with a frown.
She was young, younger than she’d sounded to him, but the noises she’d made had been dragged out of her in fear and rage. He put her age at somewhere in the middle twenties. Her face, in repose, was unlined—a square-shaped face, with a firm jaw under slightly over-full lips. Her nose was upturned and small, with wide nostrils, under full heavy brows. Her cheekbones were high, her brow unlined. She had thick black hair that grew in a half-circle around a narrow forehead, and streamed out loose on the ground under her shoulders.
Her clothing was still disarranged. Her white shirtwaist was rumpled, its collar ripped half off, and the corduroy riding skirt that had been pulled away by her attacker had fallen or been pulled high; it covered her breasts in a rumpled mass that hid their contour. Her body was bare from the waist down. A gently rounded stomach glowed in the firelight. Below a thick black vee of pubic hair, her thighs tapered plumply to calves still covered by high-laced boots, with thick stockings folded over their tops. Her knee-length underpants lay in a tattered wad at one side.
Across one of the woman’s legs, the man whom Longarm’s rifle slug had killed lay sprawled, his arms thrust upward. Blood stained the side and front of his butternut shirt, where the bullet had taken him. His narrow hips and buttocks were bare.
Longarm pulled one of the dead man’s arms aside to get a clear look at his bearded face. It was not one that he recognized, either from a past arrest or from any of the wanted flyers at which he’d looked recently. In death, the face might have belonged to anybody, a storekeeper or a farmer. It had lost whatever villainy it might have possessed while the man was still alive.
