Longarm watched, the man who called himself Catamount Jack reached out, snagged two of the combatants by the shoulders, and rammed their skulls together with enough force to knock out both of them. They slumped to the floor when the big man let go of them. At the same time, Catamount Jack was shrugging off the blows that rained in on him as if he didn’t even feel them.
He wore buckskins and a broad-brimmed, nearly shapeless brown hat. He was thin, appearing almost gaunt because of his height, but when his knobby fists snapped out into the faces of his opponents, there was plenty of power behind the punches. The blows sent men staggering backward or falling on their rumps when they landed.
Longarm saw a man in the silk shin, fancy vest, and cutaway coat of a professional gambler waving a pistol around. “Get out of the way!” the man shouted at the crowd around Catamount Jack. “I’ll plug the old bastard!”
Longarm figured the gambler was the one who had fired the other two shots. The man was already impatiently easing back the hammer for another try. Longarm moved fast, reaching over the gambler’s shoulder with his left hand. His fingers closed around the cylinder of the pistol, preventing it from turning.
“Let go, you son of a bitch!” the gambler yelled as he twisted toward Longarm. Longarm hit him then, a short punch that traveled no more than six inches but still possessed enough power to jerk the gambler’s head to the side. The man’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he unhinged at the knees. Longarm plucked the gun easily from his grip as he fell. After easing down the hammer, Longarm stuck the pistol behind his belt and turned his attention once more to the fracas in the center of the room. There was no way of knowing what had started the battle, but evidently it was everybody else in the room versus Catamount Jack. Jack’s mallet-like fists had already laid out more than half a dozen of his opponents, but he was still outnumbered more than twenty to one.
Make that twenty to two, Longarm thought as he saw a man swinging a whiskey bottle at the back of Catamount Jack’s head, only to have a smaller figure in buckskins dart out of nowhere, kick him in the groin, then clout him over the head with a six-gun when he bent over in agony. Catamount Jack had at least one ally.
Or maybe two, Longarm grudgingly admitted, because no matter what the provocation, no matter who had started it, he didn’t like to see a fight this uneven. Even as he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, he reached out, grabbed the shoulder of one of the men attacking Catamount Jack, and spun the gent around. Longarm slammed a fist into the middle of the man’s surprised face.
He was able to down two more of the brawlers before they realized what was happening. Then some of them turned away from Catamount Jack to deal with this new threat. Longarm buried his fist in the belly of one man and shoved him aside to backhand another. He was starting to absorb some punishment himself now, as some of the flurry of punches got past his guard and rocked him back a step. Somebody grabbed him from the side, and he drove an elbow into the man’s solar plexus. Another man got hold of his coat collar and jerked him off balance.
Longarm knew he couldn’t afford to fall down. Once you were on the floor, it was too easy to get trampled in a melee like this. He had seen men killed that way, stomped to death by other men who didn’t know or care who they were stepping on. He slapped one of his booted feet on the floor to steady himself, spreading his legs wide apart. He couldn’t see Catamount Jack anymore; the press of angry men around him was too thick.
Suddenly some of them fell back, and Longarm caught a glimpse of that smaller, buckskin-clad figure. The man had holstered his pistol and was wielding a broken chair leg now, lashing out around him and dropping his larger opponents left and right. Longarm grinned, grateful for the respite, and punched a gent in the jaw. The figure in buckskins jabbed another man in the belly, then slapped the makeshift club against the side of his head, dropping him. Longarm grabbed one of his opponents, head-butted him, then shoved him into two more men. Their feet and legs got tangled up and all three of them went crashing down. Longarm found himself bumping shoulders with the figure in buckskins.
“Pretty good fight, eh?” Longarm grunted as he blocked a blow and lashed out with a punch of his own.
“Damn right!” came the reply in a voice full of excitement. A woman’s voice.
Longarm’s head snapped around, his eyes widening in surprise, and he found himself staring into blue eyes above a nice little nose that had a scattering of freckles across it. Blond curls were escaping from underneath the hat the woman in buckskins had crammed down on his—her!—head. Longarm opened his mouth to say something else.
Then something cracked across the back of his head before he could speak, and he felt himself tumbling forward. A boot dug into his ribs in a vicious kick as he fell. He heard the woman in buckskins yell, “Hey!” Then she cried out in pain.
Longarm’s shoulder hit the floor first. He rolled over, coming to rest on his back just as a weight landed on top of him, knocking all the air out of his lungs. As consciousness slipped away from him, he realized that for the second time tonight, he had his arms full of firm female flesh.
And if a fella had to get himself knocked out, he supposed, that was as good a way to plummet into blackness as any, and better than most.
Chapter 8
“By all rights, I ought to lock you up back there with the others,” Mal Burley was saying angrily half an hour later. “The only reason I didn’t is because you’re a fellow lawman and I thought I ought to give you the benefit of the doubt. You were trying to break up that fight, weren’t you, Marshal Long? The witnesses I talked to said you were right in the middle of it.”
Longarm took the wet towel off the back of his neck and sighed. “I appreciate the professional courtesy, Marshal,” he said wearily. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure now what I was doing, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Burley snorted. “Well, I know who started the fight at least. That hombre who calls himself Catamount Jack seems damned proud of the fact that he did. He hasn’t stopped talking about it since I threw him and that wildcat daughter of his into a cell.”
Longarm lifted his head and said, “You locked up the girl?”
“She was part of the fight too,” Burley said defensively. “I heard eyewitness accounts of how she knocked out at least three men. She may have even cracked Jordy Higgins’ skull!”
Longarm stood up. His head still hurt, but not as bad as it had when he first woke up on the cot in the jail’s back room where Burley sometimes slept. The marshal of Cottonwood Springs had been standing over him, glaring down at him, and Burley had lost no time in informing Longarm of what had happened. Longarm had been out cold on the floor of the saloon when Burley came in with a shotgun and broke up the brawl by firing one of the weapon’s barrels into the ceiling. Commandeering some “volunteers” from the crowd, Burley had ordered that all the
