Longarm grabbed the corpse by its limp wrists, and dragged it away from the woman. Then he eased her skirt down to cover her thighs before he took stock of his Surroundings.
At the edge of the clearing, two horses were tethered to a bush. Both were still saddled. Behind them, a mule was also tied up; it bore a lightly loaded packsaddle. There was nothing in the clearing, except the dying fire and a small stack of chopped tree limbs at one side of it, to give any sign that the group had intended to make camp there for the night. There were no bedrolls, no cooking utensils, not even a water bucket.
Longarm brought his own horse up and tethered it where the others stood, then he threw a few of the pieces of cut wood on the coals, hunkered down, and stripped off his gloves. In the flurry of action he’d set off, he’d forgotten about the cold wind. In the clearing, the trees cut the force of the breeze, though its presence was still indicated by the waving of the treetops. Thoughtfully, Longarm took out a fresh cheroot and lighted it while he continued to study the little glade.
From the evidence, it was impossible to tell whether the woman had been traveling with the four men, or had encountered them on the trail and been forced to accompany them to the secluded spot. Longarm gave up on the puzzle. When the woman woke up, he’d get the answers to his questions.
He did not have long to wait. The young woman sighed, and her arms moved fitfully. Then her eyes snapped open. A scream started from her lips when she saw Longarm squatting beside the fire, but she choked it off before it had gained enough volume to emerge from her mouth as anything louder than a surprised gasp.
“You startled me,” she said, struggling into a sitting Position.
Longarm let a small frown gather on his brow, though it was hidden by the wide brim of his flat-topped Stetson, as he tried to put a location to the odd intonation in her voice. It was not from the South, nor was it one that carried the casual overtones of the West, or the flatness of New York. Rather, it was a nasal voice, produced in her head rather than flowing easily from her throat. Longarm had heard words inflected that way before, but not very often; the predominant regional accent of the West reflected the soft, elongated vowel sounds of Southern speech.
She went on, “Something happened that I don’t remember. I don’t remember you at all-“
“No reason Why you should, ma’am. Far as I know, you never did lay eyes on me before, any more than I’ve seen you before now.”
Her brows knitted thoughtfully as she struggled to remember. “Then, what happened to me?”
“You got hit. Real hard, judging from the length of time you’ve been out. You don’t need to worry about anything, though. Nobody laid a hand on you while you were unconscious. You’re all right.”
Longarm studied her while she was looking around the clearing. She was a bit older than he’d first judged her to be—in her early thirties, perhaps. Her eyes, which he was seeing for the first time, were dark brown. Her gaze, darting around the little glade, fell on the dead man who lay on the ground at one edge of the clearing.
“My God!” she gasped. “He was—he was the one-“
“He was the one that hit you,” Longarm filled in when her voice trailed off.
“More than that.” She began to tremble as memory came rushing back. “He was one of the guides I hired at Fort Smith. He-they-there were four of them. And they were going to rape me.”
Longarm nodded. “That’s about the size of it. I watched it all, from the time they commenced chasing you around until I got busy and changed their ideas.”
“Is that a polite way of telling me that you killed him?”
“Well, now, I wasn’t trying to be polite, ma’am. No more than I usually am, to a lady. But now that you remember what was going on, it won’t bring back more bad memories than you’ve already got. The reason you don’t know how all of it come about is that you’d been knocked cold just before I dropped that fellow there.”
“My God! What kind of place am I in? You’re saying you shot that man in cold blood?”
“No, I wouldn’t exactly say it was cold-blooded. I was mad as hell, if you don’t object to me swearing a mite. I don’t like to see four men ganging up on anybody, let alone a woman, trying to hurt her.”
“Hurting’s one thing. Killing’s another. I’ve never been raped, and I don’t suppose it would be a very nice experience, but at least I’d still have been alive when they finished. That man lying there is dead?”
“Yep. Just about as dead as anybody’ll ever be.”
“You killed him deliberately, with a gun, instead of just stopping him from-from what he wanted to do.”
Longarm was losing his patience. He looked into the woman’s angry eyes for a moment before he replied, “If you’ll recall, ma’am, there were four of them. And they weren’t the kind I’d want to walk up to and try to reason with, seeing as how all of them were wearing guns.”
“He should have been tried in court, not summarily executed! Even the most disgusting criminal deserves a trial before a judge and jury. You deprived him of his life without giving him a chance to defend himself!”
Her eyes were fixed scornfully on Longarm’s apparently emotionless face.
“Oh, he defended himself. Him and his three friends all had a few shots at me before I winged two of them and they lit out.”
“But they didn’t.”
Longarm’s temper finally let go. “Now, you just be good enough to keep quiet a minute, ma’am.”
She looked at him questioningly, and started to say something, but Longarm was already standing up, his back to her. He went to the fire and selected a branch, choosing one that had a good flame at one end and was long enough to serve as a torch.
“you follow along with me, if you feel able to,” he told the woman.
“Follow?” she shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
