Oakley has a lot of friends in these parts and I consider myself to be one of them.”
“Well,” Longarm said, “if you have no better taste in friends than that, it’s your problem and none of my own.”
The whore snorted, turned, and marched off with her butt swinging like a big bucket. Soon the crowd began to drift off, but they kept glancing back over their shoulders and all of them looked as if they hated Longarm’s guts.
“Would you really have opened up with that scattergun and nailed a bunch of ‘em?” Trout asked, wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers. “My God, Marshal, those that were left would have torn us both to pieces!”
“Probably,” Longarm said, eyes shifting back and forth over the crowd in case someone was drunk or stupid enough to go for his gun. “But what else was there to do?”
“Reward or not,” Trout said, “I’d probably have handed Oakley over and hoped to live to arrest him some other day.”
“If that is your attitude,” Longarm said, “then you don’t deserve to be a lawman.”
Trout’s eyes fell to his boots. “I’m no coward,” he whispered, “but I don’t want to die.”
“Then take one of the horses and ride back to Gold Mountain,” Longarm said. “Because from the way things are unfolding, I’d say it’s almost dead certain that bullets are going to fly long before we ever reach Elko.”
“What makes you say that?”
Longarm pushed the shotgun back into the wagon and climbed inside to check Oakley’s pulse. “Good thing he’s still alive,” Longarm said.
“I need that reward money.”
“Otherwise,” Longarm said, “you’d have killed him?”
“Damn right I would!”
“That’s what I figured,” Longarm said as he pushed the brim of his hat back and wondered if he dared to head for a little cafe across the street and order a meal and a big pot of strong, hot coffee.
“Trout?”
“Yes.”
“Go get us some food and some coffee.”
“We got food inside the wagon.”
“Cold food and no coffee,” Longarm said. “Just do as I say. I’m tired, hungry, and out of patience.”
Deputy Trout said, “You got any money for eats?”
“Here,” Longarm replied, dragging out a few dollars. “This ought to do it.”
“What about Oakley?”
Longarm twisted around and gazed into the wagon at the unconscious man. “Are you hungry?”
Then Longarm turned back to the deputy. “I guess he’s not hungry or he would have said so. Now quit jawing and go get something for us to eat.”
Trout just took the money. Then he said, “Damn! You really are one hard-assed sonofabitch!”
Longarm spotted a Winchester rifle in the wagon, and decided that it might prove useful if some fool decided to take a potshot at him from a rooftop. He got the rifle, and only then did he drawl, “So I’ve been told, Trout. So I’ve often been told.”
Chapter 8
Longarm was in a damned poor frame of mind while he waited for Deputy Trout to return with some food and some coffee. It didn’t help things any that people were glaring at him from all up and down the street. It was as if he and not Ford Oakley was the outlaw.
“Bunch of fools is what they are,” Longarm groused.
The blacksmith appeared with his tools. “It’s going to cost you ten dollars before I lift a hand.”
“I still say that’s damn high just for putting on a wheel.”
“Take it or leave it,” the blacksmith said. “I got other things to do if you don’t want to pay in cash.”
Longarm paid the man, who immediately began to jack up the hanging hub of the wagon and then to apply grease. “You ain’t a very popular fella in Lone Pine,” the blacksmith said, looking up from his work.
“If I cared about popularity, I’d never have gone into this work,” Longarm replied. “So why is a good blacksmith like you staying in a hellhole like this?”
“For the money, same as everyone else,” the blacksmith said. “I figure I make more money here in three months than I did in Elko in six months.”
“Boom town, huh?”
“That’s right. There’s a lot of gold and silver in these hills.”
“It won’t last.”
“Never does,” the blacksmith said, grunting as he worked to jack up the axle high enough to slip the wheel over the hub. “But as you can clearly see I’m not a young man anymore. I’ve only got maybe ten years of this hard work left in me at best, and then I’ve got to have enough to retire.”
