'I find that impossible to believe!'
'I didn't do it!' Eli choked. 'The deputy is just sayin' that so's he can mistreat me!'
Longarm ached to drive his right elbow into Eli's solar plexus hard enough to shut him up for a good long time. The memory of finding that family of murdered sodbusters was going to haunt him for a good long while.
'How long has it been since your prisoner has had anything to eat?' Miss Noble demanded.
Longarm ignored the question. His eyes took in the other accusing faces. 'Listen,' he said, 'I know Eli isn't particularly mean-looking, but neither is a wolf if you happen to catch sight of one playing with its pups.'
Eli started to say something, but Longarm cut him off with a withering glance.
Miss Noble went back to her seat, and on the way said loudly, 'We wouldn't stand to watch an animal chained and mistreated that way, and yet we allow one human being to do it to another.'
Longarm ground his teeth in anger and frustration. He'd met too damn many women like Miss Noble. They were well-intentioned but incredibly naive. He'd bet Miss Noble would also be opposed to demon whiskey and up to her pretty eyebrows in religion. Undoubtedly, she could quote the Bible for hours and was the product of a very sheltered existence. She'd never have seen another human being murdered, and she would find it in her heart to forgive any sin believing that was what God expected.
Longarm hoped that Miss Noble never saw the real savagery that a man like Eli Wheat was capable of exhibiting. One minute Eli could be whining and slightly patheticlooking; the next he could turn more vicious and deadlier than a cornered Apache.
Longarm stared out the window. The first flakes of snow were beginning to swirl in the air. The train was rapidly slowing, and Longarm could see that the wall of flying snow was less than a thousand yards up the mountain.
'It looks bad,' Eli said, his voice a tortured whisper. 'Real bad.'
'It's nothing for this train. Hell, the tracks are clear and even if it is snowing hard up on the summit, the storm is just arriving so the snow can't be very deep. We'll get through without much delay, you can bet on that.'
Eli loudly cleared his bruised throat. 'If I had any money, I'd bet against us reaching Cheyenne in time to catch that southbound train into Denver. That's what I'd bet.'
Longarm stood up and stepped into the aisle. Although he had stretched and walked up and down the aisle several times when they had been taking on coal and water in Laramie, he already felt stiff and restless. He was a big man who wore a brown tweed suit, a blue-gray shirt with a shoestring tie, and comfortably low-heeled army boots of cordovan leather. His brown Stetson was flat-crowned and somewhat the worse for wear, but his clothes were clean. A gold chain connected an Ingersoll watch in one vest pocket to a twin-barreled, .44-caliber derringer in the other.
'Excuse me,' he said as another passenger squeezed past him in the aisle and they bumped because of the rolling motion of the coach. 'It's a little cramped in those seats.'
'Maybe you should also let your prisoner stretch,' Miss Noble snipped.
Longarm ignored the woman's suggestion. Always suspicious that a prisoner might have friends waiting for an unguarded moment to act, he surveyed the coach, eyes skipping over every single passenger. None seemed to be the type that would pose a danger. Unfortunately, this train was packed, every seat filled. And although the wind was finding cracks to seep into the car and cause it to become decidedly chilly, there were so many bodies crammed into the coach that the air was stuffy.
'We're really starting to climb now,' Eli said. 'I don't think this old train is going to make it over the summit in this storm.'
'It'll make it,' Longarm said, knowing that it would be a slow and difficult pull over the 8,600-foot Laramie Summit. If the snow was really heavy, they might even be forced to attack it with snow shovels or plows.
'Even if we do, it'll still be the longest sixty miles you ever rode,' Eli predicted. 'Sixty miles doesn't seem like much, but a lot can happen.'
'Shut up,' Longarm growled, dropping back into his seat, 'or I'll part your hair permanently.'
Eli smiled, but there was no warmth in it. He was a hatchet-faced man, lean and muscular. Dressed in a heavy woolen jacket and baggy pants, and slumped down next to the window, he looked deceptively mild and even vulnerable.
Longarm knew better. Eli was a dead-eye shot. He probably stood about five feet ten and weighed less than 170 pounds, but every pound was bone and muscle, and he was as quick with a gun as any man that Longarm had ever crossed. Facing a gallows in Denver made him capable of any act of murder and desperation.
Miss Noble climbed to her feet. Shooting a look of pure venom at Longarm, she squared her shoulders and rummaged around in a brown paper sack. After a moment, she extracted an apple and a sandwich wrapped in crisp brown paper. Longarm knew at once that it was not a peace offering.
'Deputy,' Miss Noble said, 'perhaps I was a little harsh in my criticism of you. That doesn't mean that, for even a minute, I believe this man is capable of the heinous acts you say he committed, but-'
'He shot the sodbuster in the face with his own scattergun,' Longarm said in a clipped, uncompromising voice. 'Then my prisoner used that same scattergun to brain the oldest son, who was about eighteen.'
'Stop it!' Miss Noble cried, shrinking away in horror.
But Longarm was angry. This woman hadn't been invited to interfere, and she needed to have a lesson in reality so that the next time she saw a lawman and his prisoner, she might be a fairer judge of who deserved her acid tongue.
'After he killed the father and oldest son,' Longarm continued, 'my prisoner went into the house and when the fifteen-year-old son attacked him, my prisoner used his knife. It wasn't much of a fight because Mr. Wheat is very, very good with a bowie. The boy had no chance at all.'
Miss Noble paled. The sandwich tumbled from her grip, and Eli reached out and snatched it up. He stuffed it whole into his mouth and began to engulf it like a snake swallowing a big gopher.
