“Can’t complain. Pretty hot, I’d reckon.”
“Well, it’s that time of the year. What can you expect.”
A bullet suddenly whipped through the greasewood, coming within a foot of Longarm’s face. He dropped instantly flat against the dirt. Out of the side of his mouth he said, “Jack, I ain’t gonna talk to you if you’re gonna shoot at the sound of my voice.”
He could hear a laugh. “Hell, Custis, you can’t blame me. I don’t reckon you’ve come for a social visit. I tell you, though, you can’t trace sound up here the way you can on lower ground. I bet I missed you a yard or better.”
“What you want to bet I ain’t going to answer that.”
Jack Shaw laughed again. “I’m right sorry about your horse, Longarm. I hate to kill a horse.”
“You done that one a favor. He was about to founder under me. He’d already gone to trembling.”
“Well, it’s the way them damn heat waves shimmer. Throw your aim off. I meant to take a shot at you, but you kept getting closer and closer and I couldn’t chance it in case I missed. You might have made you a one-man cavalry charge right at the cabin. But I had to stop you. You can understand that.”
“You by yourself?” Shaw said, “Well, I guess, like you said, I’ll let you make a bet on that one.”
“Can’t see how there’d be many of you left.” Shaw said, “I see you tracked along right in my prints. That was a pretty handy piece of work. You know what’s funny about this?”
“Naw.”
“Wasn’t a week ago I was talking about you. Right before we was gettin’ set to do this job I told the boys, I said, I hope to hell Longarm is off somewhere else tending to something. He knows this here territory, and that hombre is the last man you want on your trail. Sonofabitch don’t give up.”
“Them is kind words, Jack. And you ain’t that easy to trail. Of course you did slow yourself down by taking time out to kill off your gang. That must have been some slick doings, Jack, getting rid of the whole bunch.”
“What makes you think I did? How you know they ain’t two or three of us in here?”
Longarm eased an eye up over the edge of the wash, trying to figure out if the voice was coming from one of the windows or the open front door.
He said, “Jack, I can still hear the sound of your rifle in my head. You know as well as I do that every gun has its own sound. If there’d been more than you in there, there would have been more than one gun shooting at me, and I didn’t hear but the one.”
“You reachin’ for that one, Custis.”
“Aw, Jack, don’t come that on me. Ain’t you ever been in a blind fight and figured out who was who and who was where by the sound of their individual weapons?”
“Yeah, but I thought I was the only one could do it. I hate to hear it’s all that common.”
“Oh, it ain’t, Jack. You’ve gone and forgot you once explained that to me when you was the sheriff at Eagle Pass. I thought it was a bunch of whiskey talk until I taught myself to listen. Has come in right handy through the years. Like now.”
Shaw laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned. Just shows a man ought to know when to keep his mouth shut.” There was a pause. “Yeah, me and you go back a pretty good ways. I reckon we’ve drank more than a little whiskey together.”
“That we have, Jack. That we have.” Longarm eased his head around and located his canteen. The strap was near his hand, and he pulled it to him and felt the two-quart flask. It was less than half full. He unscrewed the top and took just a little in his mouth to relieve the dry parching. A dry mouth made it hard to talk, and he didn’t want Shaw catching on to how thirsty he was any sooner than necessary. He craned his head back a little further. His dead horse lay some fifteen yards away. It might as well have been fifteen miles. There was a big two-gallon canteen tied on the back of his saddle, and there was food and smokes and whiskey in his saddlebags. He saw no way in the world to get to it with any certainty of living through the experience.
The packhorse had stopped a few hundred yards away and was standing, all four legs braced, his head down and the lead rope hanging to the ground. The horse really wasn’t a pack animal. He was just one of the horses that Longarm had brought along that had been pressed into service for that purpose. On one side he was carrying a big sack of corn, feed for the horses, and on the other a twenty-gallon tin of water that Longarm had intended to use to water the horses as they’d entered the badlands. Unfortunately, the tin had bumped up against a rock and sprung a leak. It had emptied before Longarm had noticed. But it wouldn’t have mattered. All the feed and water in the world wouldn’t have saved the horses the way he’d been driving them.
Shaw said, “So you say you come across some unfortunate fetters fell upon a hardship?”
Longarm said, “Yeah, if your middle name is hardship, Jack. That must have been pretty slick the way you done them boys in one at a time without the rest of them getting wise along the way.”
“Is that how you figure there’s only me in here, by the count you took?”
“Well, they was eight of you to start with. One man got killed at the robbery by a foolhardy passenger. That left seven. I found two shot in the back a little less then a mile after ya’ll rode into the Mescal Mountains when you was first getting away.”
“Why you want to figure that was me? What makes you think we didn’t draw some fire getting away from that train?”
Longarm said, “Aw, hell, Jack, now you are cutting up cute. Them two members of your gang was at least three quarters of a mile from the train, and there was uneven ground between them and the site of the robbery. Hell, Buffalo Bill, standing on top of one of them train cars, couldn’t have made that shot with a Sharps .50-caliber on the best day he ever saw and the wind dead calm. Besides, both of them men was shot with a revolver. One of them was shot so close the muzzle blast damn near set his shirt afire.”
Longarm could hear Shaw chuckle. “Well, I got to hand it to you, Custis. You are a hard man to fool. I ever tell you I used to admire you? Still do.”
