“You will,” he assured her.
Longarm waited for her to stand up. She got to her feet by kneeling first. The loose, unfastened skirt dropped away. She stood up quickly and grabbed for the skirt, which lay on the ground. Draping it around her waist, she fumbled for a button or snap, but whatever had secured the garment had been torn off by the dead man. She settled for holding the skirt with one hand as she took a step toward Longarm. He led her toward the edge of the glade.
“Where are we going?” she asked suspiciously.
“Not far, just a few steps over here. There’s something I want you to see.”
Wordlessly, still puzzled, she followed him as he led the way to the shallow grave. By the light of the burning branch, they could see a short-handled spade sticking in the ground beside the pile of dirt that had been taken from the long, narrow excavation.
“Good God!” she gasped, as the significance of the hole’s shape dawned on her. “You’ve already dug a grave for the man you killed! I suppose you’re getting ready to bury him out here in this wild place, without even a prayer?”
“You’re a little bit wrong in what you’re thinking, ma’am.” Longarm kept his voice to a low-keyed, conversational pitch. Very matter-of-factly, he went on, “You see, it wasn’t me that dug this grave. Those men did, sometime after you got here, after they’d made their plans for you while you were on the trail from Fort Smith. They weren’t planning on letting you go free to testify against them, if they got caught after they’d finished with you.”
“You… you mean, that grave was intended for me?” she asked. Her voice was suddenly subdued, its scolding tone gone, and she spoke almost in a whisper.
“Well, now, you stop and think back a minute,” Longarm suggested. “After you and those four rascals stopped here—they said it was time to stop, didn’t they? Getting too dark to see the trail, or something like that?”
“Yes. Something like that. They said it was getting dark and the horses were tiring. We’d left Fort Smith quite early, so I believed them.”
“And after you’d stopped, one of them chopped up some wood, and another one acted like he was taking care of the horses, and one or two of them went off, maybe to look for water? I suspicion he told you there was a spring off this way close by?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Jasper—that’s the one who’s dead—said it Was too Wet closer to the spring for us to stop,” she shook her head. “He wasn’t gone long enough to dig a hole this big, though.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Longarm pulled the shovel out of the soil and pushed it back in, experimentally. “Real soft dirt. Mostly just a thick layer of old, dried leaves and suchlike. And you can see the hole’s not real deep.” He held the torch so the woman could get a better look at the shallow pit.
“I-maybe I’m mistaken about the time. Perhaps he was gone long enough, now that I think back.”
“And while he was gone, I bet the other three kept you busy with stories and jokes and so forth?” Longarm suggested.
Slowly, she nodded. “Yes. Yes, they did. How did you know that?”
“You ain’t the first woman that’s trusted the wrong kind of men, and maybe dropped out of sight along some lonesome trail. Maybe wound up in a hole like this one, where nobody’s likely to find the body for a dozen years or more. Mostly, the kind of men I’m talking about run in bunches of three or four, and it don’t much matter how they do what they got in mind, or where it happens. They pretty generally follow the same style.”
“From the way you talk, you know a great deal about the way these rapists—and I suppose they’re robbers, too—about the way they operate. How do I know you’re not one yourself?” she challenged.
“I guess you don’t, at that.” Longarm pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to show her his deputy U.S. marshal’s badge. “Maybe this’ll set your mind at ease a mite.”
“You’re an officer of the law? A U.S. marshal?”
“Deputy marshal,” he corrected her.
“And you actually shot that man,” she went on, as though he hadn’t spoken. “Shot him without making any sort of effort to warn him to stop?
Without making an effort to arrest him? You just pulled your pistol out and killed him?”
Longarm’s patience ran out. He snapped. “Now, that’s all I want to hear from you along those lines! I wasn’t close enough to use my six-gun, or they’d all four be dead now, instead of just one! They were four-to-one against me, and all of them packed iron. The way that fellow was going after you, once he shut you up with his fist, he’d have been on you and inside you before I opened my mouth. Warning him wouldn’t have stopped him. All it would have done was to give one of the others time to kill me.”
For a moment, the woman stared at Longarm as though seeing him for the first time. She saw a man taller and wider than most, with gunmetal-blue eyes in a tanned face, which was clean-shaven except for a bold, sweeping mustache. In the flickering torchlight, those gunmetal eyes reflected controlled anger.
He said curtly, “Now, if you’ve seen enough of what those four planned for you, let’s go back to the fire. I’ll drag that body out here later on and cover it up, after I go over it to see if that—Jasper, I recall you said his name was—to see if he had another name or two besides the one he told you.”
“And after that?” she asked.
“After that, we’ll talk about what comes next. Now, come along.”
Subdued and silent, the woman walked with Longarm back to the clearing. He tossed the torch on the fire and added two or three more pieces of wood from the fast-dwindling pile of chopped tree limbs. Night had arrived now, its blackness crowding the rim of the glade, held at bay only by the dancing firelight.
