overturn.
He heard gunfire from the coach, and wished he could join them, but he had to get the lines dragging on the ground. Longarm jumped down on the tongue of the stage and held on for dear life. The road was rough, and every time he started to make a grab for the lines, he nearly fell, almost being run over by the coach.
Damn! What a mess!
Longarm knew that he wasn’t going to be able to grab the lines, and he doubted that he could leap on the back of the nearest horse and try to pull it to a stop, but there didn’t seem to be any choice but to try.
Here goes, he thought, jumping.
Somehow, he did land on the back of the wheel horse, and then he grabbed the lines and started wrenching on them. The stage began to slow, but not before they careened into that sharp right turn. Longarm decided that the coach was not going to make it. He could feel the coach lean precariously toward the steep drop-off into a canyon, and he bellowed, “It’s going over! Jump!”
And then, because he was a firm believer in taking his own good advice, Longarm also jumped.
Chapter 6
Longarm didn’t remember hitting the steep shale-covered Mountainside. But he did recall being airborne, and then tumbling for what seemed like forever, until he smashed into a pine tree at the bottom of the gorge. He must have lost consciousness for several minutes, because he was awakened by Miranda’s pleas.
“Custis! Wake up, Custis!”
He didn’t want to wake up or even open his eyes. His entire body throbbed with pain. And yet Miranda’s voice was so urgent, he had little choice but to open his eyes and try to gather his wits.
“Custis, Esther is unconscious! She might be dying!”
He roused himself a little. “What … what about her husband?”
“He was knocked out too, but seems to be coming around. The ambushers are searching for us! What are we going to do!”
“Help me up.”
Miranda got her arm around his waist, and she managed to help get him to his feet, where Longarm swayed unsteadily, trying his best to focus. He was about to say something when a rifle bullet clipped a nearby rock and sent both him and Miranda spilling sideways into the deep stream that flowed along the bottom of this gorge.
“They’re going to kill us!” Miranda cried as she and Longarm sought cover among the rocks.
The icy shock of the mountain water did a lot to clear Longarm’s mind and focus his vision. He reached for his side arm, only to discover that it was missing, no doubt lost during his long tumble down the mountainside.
“Miranda, do you have a gun?”
“No, but I saw that old Navy Colt of Trent’s lying on the rocks just up the slope.”
Longarm peered out from behind the rocks. He was beginning to shiver, for the air was cold in the shadowy gorge and they were wet. It was then that he saw the wreckage of the stage about two hundred yards upriver. Two of the four horses were alive and thrashing in their traces. One, a sorrel, kept slamming its head down against the rocks as if trying to commit suicide.
“Are they going to come down and try to finish us off?” Miranda asked.
“I expect so,” Longarm said. “They’ll want to loot the stagecoach, and once they’ve come that far, I figure they’ll decide to come down here and pick over our bodies.”
“But they saw us and know we are alive!”
“They’re going to guess that we’re hurt and not much of a problem,” Longarm said. “What I’ve got to do is to reach that Navy Colt and then see if I can hunt up anything else that will shoot.”
“What about your pocket derringer?”
Longarm reached into his vest pocket. The crystal of his Ingersoll watch was shattered, but there was nothing wrong with his deadly little two-shot derringer. “Yeah,” he said, “this will help, but what I wouldn’t give for a rifle!”
“What are we going to do?”
Longarm watched the outlaws start down the mountainside toward the overturned stagecoach. They sure had rifles, and there was probably one still in the overturned and smashed stagecoach, but that wasn’t going to do him any good because the outlaws would reach it first.
“I’m going to get Trent’s pistol and then hunt for my own,” Longarm decided out loud.
“But they’ll see you and start shooting again!”
“I know, but I must have something better than a derringer in my hand when they come to finish us off.”
“What can I do?”
“Try to wake up Trent,” Longarm told her. “We’re going to need to move downstream and find a good hiding place. There’s no way that we can defend ourselves here.”
“All right. Be careful!”
“I’ll do my level best,” Longarm assured her as he began to creep up through the jumble of rocks toward where Miranda had seen Trent’s Navy Colt.
More shots rang out, but Longarm kept ducking for cover and working his way up the slope. He finally had a little stroke of good luck when he located his own pistol as well as Trent’s Navy Colt. The two were resting less than ten feet apart.
