other.
“Open that door!” he ordered the agent.
“Not on your life!” the man retorted. He ran out the door and disappeared.
Longarm covered the distance to the barred door in two long strides. He stood aside, aimed carefully, and shattered the padlock with a bullet. The staple through which the lock passed was torn out of the wall, and the bar swung down with a clatter.
For a moment the door resisted Longarm’s tugging. Then it slowly started moving on the rollers that ran in a track above it. Longarm stopped when he’d cracked it wide enough for him to slip out. He peered around the edge. The railroad detective was just coming up to the back of the express office; apparently he’d detoured through the depot to avoid the flames.
Longarm pulled his head back quickly, hoping the man hadn’t seen him. He’d glimpsed the gun his pursuer was carrying in his hand. Shielded by the door, he saw the yard bull go past the slitted opening and head for one corner of the express office. He gave the man a minute or so to get around the corner, then slid through the cracked-open door and started across the open ell between the agency office and the depot. He’d taken only three steps when a harsh command stopped him.
“Hold it! You take another step and I’ll cut you down!”
Longarm stopped. He didn’t want a bullet in the back.
“Now,” the railroad detective commanded. “Keep your hands right where they are and turn around so I can look at you.”
Shuffling his feet, Longarm turned. He faced the railroad detective and didn’t like what he saw. The man was only a dozen feet distant, standing at the corner of the express office. His fingers were wrapped so tightly around the butt of his Remington-Beals.44 single-action that the knuckles were white. His forefinger twitched on the trigger. Longarm felt better when he saw that the gun’s hammer wasn’t drawn back.
Still, Longarm didn’t feel easy about his position. Yard bulls normally did little more police work than chasing hoboes off freights and keeping the railroad yards clear of sneak-thieves and drifters. A few of them were former sheriffs’ deputies or town marshals or one-time Pinkerton men who could no longer pull their weight in regular law-enforcement jobs.
A lot of them were bullies who enjoyed beating up the helpless bums they dragged off freight cars, and some of them had been forced out of regular jobs because they were habitual drunks. The more Longarm thought about railroad detectives, the less inclined he was to surrender to the one holding him at gunpoint and then clear things up by showing his badge.
There were a lot of yard bulls who cooperated with crooks. They got more money than their jobs paid them by tipping off outlaws and boxcar thieves to special shipments that made a robbery profitable. Belle Starr, Longarm thought, would have to be paying off a lot of railroad workers in order to carry out her felonious specialty of selling rustled cattle.
By now the railroad detective had scrutinized Longarm from hat-brim to boot toes. He nodded with satisfaction. “Yep. You’re the one, all right.”
There was only one thing Longarm could see to do: play for time. He suggested, “Suppose you tell me which one you’re talking about, friend, because I damn sure don’t know.”
“Like hell you don’t! You’re the son of a bitch who stuck up the bank in Midland four or five days ago.”
“You’re dead wrong. I’ve never been to Midland.” Longarm moved his left hand a hair’s breadth, and the yard bull drew back the hammer of his pistol. Longarm froze instantly. He hoped the weapon didn’t have a hair trigger.
“I told you not to move!” the man barked. “I’d as soon shoot you as look at you! The reward notice said dead or alive, so you’re worth five hundred dollars to me whether you walk in or I drag you in.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Longarm protested. He was careful to keep his voice to a level, conversational tone. “Four or five days ago I was over in the Cherokee Nation. I don’t even know where that town you mentioned is located.”
“That’s about what I’d expect you to say,” the yard bull said with a nervous nod. “You sound real convincing too, I’ll credit you with that. I might even believe you if I hadn’t seen you with that blonde woman in the depot restaurant. The reward notice described her a lot better than it did you. A man’d have to be blind not to spot her.”
Longarm weighed his alternatives. The cocked revolver held by the yard bull reduced them drastically. He was very sure the railroad dick had sent for help as he detoured through the depot, and even if he hadn’t, somebody must have reported the gunfire out on the station platform. Unless the yard bull had reloaded, which Longarm didn’t think was very likely, he had one round left in his pistol. That was just what remained in Longarm’s Colt.
“Looks like you’ve got me dead to rights,” he told the railroad detective. “But there’s not any reason for you to settle for a little chicken-shit five hundred dollars for taking me in. I’ve got a thousand in my inside coat pocket. It’s worth every dime of it to me if you’ll say I got away from you.”
“A thousand?” the yard bull’s eyes narrowed covetously.
Longarm could almost read the man’s mind. There wasn’t any reason to settle for five hundred or a thousand either. If he shot now, he’d take the thousand off Longarm’s body and then claim another five hundred as his reward. “A thousand,” Longarm repeated. “Here, if you think I’m lying, I’ll show it to you.”
Longarm raised his left hand as though to reach inside his breast pocket. The yard bull’s eyes followed the movement. Longarm brought his Colt up and fired. The railroad dick’s dying reflex triggered his own gun, but Longarm was flat on the ground by the time the hammer fell, and the slug whistled through the air over his head.
Longarm had started to scramble to his feet when a fresh voice barked commandingly, “Stay right there on the ground, mister. You move a finger and you’re a dead man!”
By rolling his eyes, Longarm could see who’d spoken. This time it wasn’t an inexperienced, greedy railroad detective. The man standing at the corner of the depot wore the uniform of the Fort Smith city constable’s force. And the gun he held, with its muzzle pointed at Longarm, wasn’t a revolver, but a sawed-off shotgun.
