“Do it!”
Oakley rolled over. Longarm, keeping his gun in his right hand and his knee pressed down hard between Oakley’s shoulder blades, checked the handcuffs to make sure they were secure.
“Shit!” Oakley raged, trying to keep his face out of the water by arching his back like a beached fish.
“Too bad everything has to be the hard way with you, Oakley,” Longarm said. “But from now on, I’m going to keep you tied up tighter than a mouse’s ass. Now stand up and climb back into that wagon.”
Oakley wanted to fight, but he knew that Longarm had reached the very limits of his patience, so he obeyed. When he climbed back inside the medicine wagon, Longarm retied his ankles.
“We’ve got a window up there, and it’s going to be Deputy Trout’s job to keep a close eye on you while I drive. If he sees or even suspects that you’re doing something funny, I’m giving him permission to shoot you. Is that understood?”
When Oakley just gave him a cussing, Longarm slammed the door shut and climbed back onto the driver’s seat. He looked sideways at Trout and said, “You keep your gun in your hand and your eyes on that window. You understand?”
Trout nodded. “I just hope that he does try something, Marshal Long. There’s nothing I’d like better than to drill him like a big rat in a barrel.”
“Good,” Longarm said. “Lone Pine ought to be just ahead. I’ve got a rim about ready to come off a rear wheel, so we’ll have to find a blacksmith.”
“That’s not good.”
“It could be a whole Hell of a lot worse,” Longarm said. “In fact, a couple of times now, it very nearly has been.”
Trout opened his mouth, then clamped it tight and turned toward the window because he knew that Longarm was telling the truth.
Chapter 7
Lone Pine had gotten its name from the fact that there was only one remaining tall pine tree left standing. All the others had quickly been chopped down after gold was discovered in the surrounding hills. And since the gold required digging and tunneling, all the pines that had not been used to build cabins or burned for firewood had been used as timbering.
When Longarm pulled up to the edge of the bustling mining town, he reined his medicine wagon to a stop and read the crudely written sign that greeted strangers: “LONG PINE HAS ONLY ONE STANDING PINE AND WE KEPT IT AS A HANGING TREE. MIND YOUR MANNERS, OR WE’LL HANG YOU DEAD FROM IT. VIGILANTE COMMITTEE.”
“Well,” Longarm said to Deputy Trout, “that states the facts about as plain as they could be. Maybe we should just hand Ford Oakley over to these boys.”
“Not on your life!” Trout protested. “If we did that, I’d never see a cent of that big federal reward.”
“No,” Longarm said, “I don’t suspect you would. Have you ever had the misfortune of being in Lone Pine before?”
“Uh-uh,” Trout admitted, “but I’ve heard it’s a damn tough town.”
“Then maybe you’d better get in back with Oakley,” Longarm told him. “If they see two of us here, they might get suspicious.”
Trout nodded, climbed in the back, and shut the door behind him. Then the wagon moved forward.
Longarm had seen a lot of Western towns in his day. He’d traveled all over the frontier chasing fugitives and outlaws, and he’d gotten so that he could take a quick and accurate read on most any settlement. Mining towns like Lone Pine were almost always the very worst, and as they drove into the settlement, Longarm was not surprised that it lacked churches, schools, or even a jail. What it had more than enough of were saloons, gambling halls, and whorehouses.
“Hey, medicine man!” a woman with long black hair and a tight silk dress called from the front of her crib. “Why don’t you pull that damned creaky wagon over and come join me!”
“Can’t, honey!”
“Aw, come on!” she yelled. “My medicine is a hell of a lot more fun than yours!”
Several other women came outside, and they were generally a rough-looking bunch. Some men called them soiled doves, and it was Longarm’s opinion that they almost always ended up dead by the time they were in their early thirties. They either got the Frenchman’s disease and died half crazed, or they drank themselves to death, or else got shot or stabbed.
“Come on, handsome,” another woman called, waving a pink ostrich plume and lifting her skirts to reveal her creamy thighs. “You need to ride something other than that hard old wagon seat before you get hemorrhoids!”
There was more laughter, and now some of the miners were coming outside to watch and enjoy the girls’hazing.
Longarm just grinned and kept on driving until damned if the wheel to his wagon didn’t roll off and the whole caboodle collapsed, lurching the wagon sideways. It happened so fast and so hard that Longarm was almost thrown into the street. This caused the whores and their customers no end of hilarity. Laughing and hooting, they gathered around as if a wagon losing its wheel and collapsing was the funniest thing ever seen in Lone Pine.
“Hold up there!” a huge, laughing miner bellowed as he staggered out into the street to grab a lead horse’s bit. “Don’t you know that there’s a local ordinance in Lone Pine against three-wheeled medicine wagons!”
More gales of laughter. Longarm glanced back into his wagon. “Have you got things under control in there?”
“Sure, but …”
