“I’ll call him Cyclone,” Longarm decided, reaching for his wallet and counting out twenty dollars. As he handed over the money, he wondered if he’d just made a very bad mistake. After tying his weapons and giving Cyclone a drink of water, he said to Joe Blue, “Were you me, where would you start to find Bass and that poor Hathaway woman?”
“I wouldn’t. No use in making two bad mistakes in the same day,” Blue said, pocketing Longarm’s money.
“I’m serious. Someone has to rescue Miss Hathaway.”
“She’s worth more alive than dead,” Blue reckoned aloud. “Bernard Potter has a bank full of cash and he’ll pay her ransom.”
“Yeah,” Longarm said, “but then they might decide to keep or kill her anyway.”
“Keep her for what?”
“She’s a beautiful woman, or haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Blue said. “And I expect that you are right. As for finding Bass and his boys, I know that they have a cabin southwest of town about thirty miles. There’s a big lightnin’ struck tree by a fork in the road leading up to that cabin. It sits under some high red rocks at the back of a little canyon.”
“I guess that I can find it.”
“Be better if you didn’t, and I can’t say for sure that is where they took the woman. But it makes sense. They wouldn’t have gone back to Mexico without getting a ransom. From what I hear, they got less than a hundred dollars off the banker before they shot him in the gut.”
“I hope he lives,” Longarm said.
“Not me. I owe him two hundred dollars.”
Longarm didn’t have a reply to that remark, so he had Blue hold Cyclone by the bit and then he climbed on, jammed his boots deep in the stirrups, grabbed the saddle horn, and said, “Point him in the right direction and get out of our way.”
The moment that Joe Blue released Cyclone, the pony jumped forward and took off like a bat out of hell. Longarm didn’t release the saddle horn until the pony finally became winded about three miles south of town.
“Well,” Longarm said, pulling the horse down to a trot, “I hope that you’ve run the piss and vinegar out of your system and that we can settle down and be friends. If you help me to save Miss Hathaway, I’ll turn you loose so that you can run free with mustangs.”
Cyclone laid his ears back and Longarm doubted that he understood, but that didn’t matter. He was going to keep the Indian pony moving until he reached Bass’s cabin in the trees and, after that, he wouldn’t need Cyclone anymore anyway.
Chapter 7
Longarm had a lot weighing on his mind as he rode southwest in search of Victoria Hathaway and the Bass gang. He was none too happy about having to ride an outlaw pony and wondered if he would ever get his federal money, which would have been wired and forwarded to Bernard Potter’s now shuttered bank.
Oh, well, he would worry about that later. The main thing now was to locate this cabin, sneak in, and then get the drop on Hank Bass and his bunch of cutthroats. Longarm chided himself for not taking the time to find out more about the Bass gang. For example, it would have been helpful to know how many men had been in on yesterday’s shootings and abduction.
It was almost sundown before he reached a fork in the road and noted a large, lightning-torched tree. Longarm gazed up a narrow, red-rocked canyon. Yes, this was where he ought to find the Bass gang. They were so brazen that they hadn’t even posted a sentry to guard the mouth of the canyon.
Being on the cautious side, Longarm reined the pony into a draw and then dismounted. He tied Cyclone to a tree and then decided to take both the Winchester and the heavy but very intimidating shotgun.
“Cyclone,” he warned, “don’t even think about whinnying or breaking free.”
In answer, Cyclone attempted to take a bite of his shoulder, but Longarm was too quick and managed to jump beyond the range of the pony’s snapping teeth.
“Dammit, I may put you out of your misery when this is over,” Longarm swore. “You just better hope these outlaws plug me before I plug them.”
Longarm felt a little better having given the pony a piece of his mind. He checked his weapons and then began to move toward the canyon, staying low and following a dry wash that would hide his approach. The wash was heavily choked with creosote bushes and sagebrush, and it seemed to lead all the way up into the canyon. Birds flitted through the heavy shrubs, and Longarm almost stepped on a brightly colored Gila monster that opened its big jaws and slowly backed away.
He might not have even seen the guard posted up on the side of the canyon if the man hadn’t lit a cigarette just as dusk fell. Longarm dropped flat and gazed up at the sentry. The man was about two hundred yards away and the fool was clearly bored to death. He was just sitting on a rock, gazing out toward the first colors of the sunset. But it would be a climb to reach him, and Longarm knew that plenty could go wrong. If he dislodged a rock, the guard would probably hear it move and then Longarm would be at a serious disadvantage being downslope and out in the open.
There was really no help for it, though. Longarm sleeved sweat from his brow and settled down to wait for complete darkness to shroud the canyon. He stretched out on a big flat rock, leaned his weapons against a bush, and admired the Arizona sunset, thinking that there were few better than the ones you got to enjoy in this southwestern territory. As for any kind of plan to rescue Miss Hathaway, he didn’t give it much of a thought. Longarm had found over the years that advance planning in cases where you had no idea what to expect was most generally a waste of mental effort.
The first thing to do was to eliminate the guard up on the canyon wall. After that, he would sneak along the rim of the canyon, locate the cabin, and make his way down to it sometime after midnight when the outlaws were almost certain to be asleep. If all went well, he could get the drop on them and that would be the end of this business. However, even if everything went wrong, he had the huge scattergun; the only thing he had to really worry about was not blowing Miss Hathaway to smithereens along with Hank Bass and the rest of his gang.
