tailgate.
Longarm looked at him. He shifted his weight on the seat, putting it forward on the balls of his feet. “Doc, I don’t think you will shoot me. I’ve stayed alive just on these kind of decisions and I don’t think you’ll pull that trigger. Like you said, killing a federal officer is a losing game.”
From the head of the coach Rita said, coolly, “He may not, but I will.”
As he turned his head and looked at her, she pulled back the hammers of the two-shot derringer. He knew they were a hard pull, and he was surprised at the strength in her thumb. She said, “You got about five seconds.”
The doctor said, “Marshal Long, you will be endangering the guard and the driver.” There was an urgency in his voice. “I cannot always control her. I advise you to go and go quickly.”
Longarm looked at the doctor, and then he looked at Rita. He got slowly to his feet, nodding his head. He said quietly, “All right. I’ll get off here.”
As he made his way to the end of the coach the doctor said, “Don’t call out to the driver, Marshal. You know what will happen.”
Longarm climbed over the tailgate, standing on the fender. He looked back into the coach. “Maybe that I’ll see you two again.”
The doctor said, “One other piece of advice, Marshal. I wouldn’t risk my health by running back to the relay station in order to send a telegram on ahead. Won’t do any good. The lines have been cut.”
Longarm nodded. He would like to have said something about Carl Lowe and about what he knew, if for no other reason than to wipe the smug look off their faces. But he knew better than that. The less they knew about what he knew, the better off he was. As it was, things weren’t looking all that well. He said, “I’m much obliged for the advice, Doctor. And I wish you good luck. That she-cat you are running with and you are going to need it.”
With that he dropped off the coach. It was going slow enough that he was able to stay on his feet by lumbering along in a kind of run for a few seconds. Finally he was able to slow to a walk and then stop. He could just barely see the top of the hats of the driver and the guard as they sat on their perch in front of the box. He realized he didn’t know the whole story, but he felt he knew enough that he could still stop it from happening.
But he was once again out in the middle of the Arizona badlands, afoot and with no water.
Chapter 7
For a moment he stared after the stage as if he could stop its progress by sheer will of mind. But the coach kept rolling and there wasn’t much time. If he was going to stop the robbery he was going to have to hurry. He turned and started back toward the south, walking fast. But after a few strides he stopped. Walking wasn’t going to be fast enough. He calculated he was somewhere between two and three miles from Higgins’s relay station. He was going to have to find a way to run. He sat down and pulled off his boots. He didn’t know how many rocks or sharp objects there were between where he was and the station, but he’d just have to try and miss them.
He figured to run along the road made by the broad wheels of the coach. He took off the belt to his jeans, which he really didn’t need anyway, and ran it through the pull-ups on the sides of his boots. He buckled the belt and then put it around his neck, slinging his boots to his back. His gunbelt was heavy, so he unbuckled it and let it fall to the ground. He might get it back later and he might not. He reckoned not was the more likely.
Finally there was nothing to do but strike a trot. He didn’t reckon he’d ever run further than a hundred yards since he’d been a boy, but he was about to find out how much stamina he had.
It seemed the further he ran the hotter the sun got. He could almost feel it getting hotter with every stride. On top of the heat outside, he was making heat inside. The only good part to the whole matter was that the air was so dry he didn’t sweat. That was good. With no water he could ill afford to lose any more body liquid than he had to.
Within ten minutes he saw his Winchester carbine ahead. He scooped it up without stopping, shaking it as he ran, trying to get the sand out of the gun’s action. It probably didn’t matter anyway. His chances of catching up with Doc and Rita and the stage were not very good, he calculated. He figured he had a better chance of dying from heatstroke.
The stations were twenty miles apart. If indeed he was a little over two miles from Higgins’s station, that meant that the stage had seventeen or eighteen miles to go. He didn’t know how long it would take him to reach Higgins’s place, or how much progress the stage would make while he was bursting his lungs and frying his brains. There was that long grade and maybe that would slow the stage down, but he had to figure some way of rigging up some sort of conveyance to carry him on his chase. Maybe, he thought, the three gunmen might have returned. If they had, he could take their horses and set out in hot pursuit. If they hadn’t, or if there wasn’t anyone else there with a horse, he didn’t have the slightest idea what he could do. Maybe they could fix the telegraph wires and wire ahead to warn the next station. But he had a feeling that that station was already in Doc’s control. He had no way of knowing such a thing for certain, but he had the feeling.
Maybe, he thought, he could find some way to hook two mules together and put some sort of wide sling between them that he could sit on. The thought would have made him laugh if he hadn’t needed the breath.
He had to keep switching his rifle from hand to hand. It was too heavy and too cumbersome to carry with any ease. And his boots kept beating a tattoo on his back. He thought of discarding the rifle in hopes that Higgins might have one at the station, but he couldn’t chance it. If he was successful in catching the stage he was going to need the rifle and need it bad.
Fortunately the ground was turning out to be easier going than he’d expected. So long as he kept to the tracks of the stage, all the rocks and other painful things had been mashed down into the soft sand and did him no harm. Even his legs were holding up fairly well.
But it was his breathing that was about to do him in. He couldn’t seem to take in enough air to fill his bursting lungs. And with every stride, he could feel the effects of every cigar he’d ever smoked and every drink he’d ever downed. He vowed, if he lived through the run, to live a pure life from that hour forward.
He ran, his eyes fixed on the horizon, praying for the tops of the station buildings to miraculously appear. But he knew he had a long way to go. Dishearteningly, when he thought he must have covered at least a mile, he came across his revolver. He knew the stage hadn’t covered a mile since he’d thrown it out. He scooped it up without stopping. He dared not stop. If he stopped he wasn’t sure he could start again.
At first he put the revolver in his waistband, but it irritated him and kept trying to slip down. Finally he ended up carrying the rifle in one hand and the revolver in the other. They seemed to balance each other.
