hunter or someone hunted to learn. Animals understood patience. Indians did too. But a white man … well, very few other than the old mountain men possessed any patience. Longarm liked to think of himself as one of the few notable exceptions.
“Come on,” Longarm urged the leader, who was still hiding somewhere below.
The leader was not only cautious, he was uncommonly patient. Had Longarm not been able to have a clear view upstream and know that the man was not going after Miranda and Trent, he would have felt compelled to climb down from the rock. But he did have a clear view, and so he sat still and waited.
Finally, he heard the sound of pebbles and loose rocks being dislodged, and knew that the leader was coming up to get him. Longarm smiled coldly. His teeth were chattering again. He wished for a smoke and a warming fire. But he would have neither until this business was completed.
Now he could hear the grunts and gasping of the climber, punctuated by stretches of silence as the man waited and listened for danger.
Come on, just a little farther.
The leader finally appeared. He had been forced to holster his gun because he needed both hands to climb. Longarm inched up to the edge of the rock, pointed his gun directly down into the leader’s face, and said, “Surprise!”
The leader started to reach for his gun, and Longarm shot him in the hand. The man screamed as blood pumped from the wound. Then he cried, “Don’t kill me!”
“Then unholster your gun by reaching for it with your left hand.”
“If I do, I’ll fall!”
“If you don’t, I’ll shoot.”
The outlaw wedged himself into the fissure as tight as possible, then removed and dropped his gun.
“All right,” Longarm said, “you can start down slowly just the same way you came up.”
“I don’t think I can make it. Not with one hand out of commission.”
“Give it your best effort,” Longarm said without a trace of sympathy. “Either way, it makes no difference to me.”
The leader started backing down, and Longarm noted that, bullet-riddled hand or not, the man was going to do everything in his power to safely reach the streambed below. Longarm figured he’d probably make it, and then when he did, he’d make a grab for his fallen pistol and try to shoot Longarm.
It made a lot of sense. Longarm would then be the one at a big disadvantage. I ought to just shoot him and be done with it. After all, he gave Charley no warning. He and his outlaw friends shot Charley from ambush knowing that the coach would go over the side of the mountain and probably kill everyone inside. Go ahead and kill him, Custis!
But Longarm couldn’t. He’d never executed anyone. He’d taken an oath to uphold the law, not live by his own law. So he stopped his own descent and slowly turned with his gun pointed down at the leader. And sure enough, when the man jumped to the streambed below, the very first thing he did was grab his fallen pistol, roll over onto his back, and look up with every intent to blow Longarm off the rock.
Longarm drilled the man twice. Then, holstering his own gun, he very carefully descended the slippery fissure until his feet were again on solid ground.
All the outlaws were dead except for the one with a bullet in his hip, and he was dying from internal bleeding.
To hell with him, Longarm thought, remembering Esther’s dead, staring eyes as he hurried upstream. To hell with them all.
Chapter 7
Longarm found Miranda and Trent holed up under some boulders less than a quarter of a mile downstream. Like himself, they were shaking from the cold.
“What happened?” Miranda asked.
“They won’t be bothering us anymore,” Longarm answered, not wanting to elaborate.
“You killed all of them?” Trent asked with an expression of disbelief written on his pale, bruised face.
“I had the advantage of surprise and luck was with me,” Longarm explained. “But our troubles are far from over. We’ve got to figure out our next move. We need food as well as warm, dry clothes.”
“It seems obvious to me that we have to go back to the stagecoach,” Miranda said. “We need to get our bags and extra dry clothes. There’s also some food, if it wasn’t thrown out on the way down the Mountainside.”
“I agree.” Longarm looked up at the sky. “It will be dark soon. We can camp beside the stage and build a roaring good fire. Maybe someone traveling the road above will see our fire or smell the smoke and look over the side. We definitely need help.”
“I won’t leave Esther alone again,” Trent vowed, his voice as dead as his wife. “I won’t do it.”
“Of course not,” Longarm replied, worried about the man’s mental state. “We’ll carry her body out and see that she gets a proper burial in Durango.”
“Maybe she’d want to be sent back to her hometown,” Trent protested.
“No,” Longarm told the grieving man, “she’d rather be buried in Colorado near where you are staying.”
Trent didn’t agree, but he didn’t disagree either. Longarm helped them both out of their hiding place, and they walked back upstream, skirting the giant boulder and seeing the dead outlaw leader lying on his back with two crimson stains on his shirtfront.
“Are we just going to leave him like this?” Trent asked.
