Longarm felt a wave of disgust that the situation had gotten out of hand, along with a pain in his ear where Cy had clouted him. All he had wanted to accomplish by coming back here was to see if Leon Mercer had been right about Cy. It appeared that Mercer had been, in spades.
Reaching behind him, Longarm got hold of Cy’s coat. He bent at the waist and heaved at the same time, and Cy flew over his head with a startled yelp. The jockey sailed through the air for a few feet, then crashed into a pile of baggage.
“Get him!” yelled someone from behind Longarm.
He turned quickly and saw one of the other jockeys launching a punch at him. Longarm reached out, put his hand on the fella’s head, and shoved him away, holding him at arm’s length. The man flailed punches at him, none of them reaching their intended target. “Stop it!” Longarm snapped. “I don’t want to fight you!”
Something hit the back of his knees, and his legs folded up. As he twisted around, he saw it was Cy who had tackled him. Cy had recovered from being thrown into the pile of baggage quicker than Longarm had expected him to. A hard punch connected with Longarm’s jaw, and a second later a kick caught him in the side.
These jockeys might be small, but they were strong and tough. Just as he had expected, he had his hands full with Cy and the other two. Luckily, the rest of the group was hanging back, watching the scuffle with keen interest but showing no signs of joining in. Longarm drove an elbow into the belly of one man, then backhanded another as he came up onto his knees. Lurching to his feet, Longarm set himself just as Cy drove in again. Longarm met him with a straight right that sent him spinning off his feet. When he checked on the other two, he saw that the fight had gone out of them.
Cy was stunned, but as he blinked up at Longarm, his eyes cleared a little and he said spitefully, “Makes you feel good, don’t it, beating up on somebody smaller than you?”
Longarm spat on the floor. “Shit! You want it both ways, don’t you? You act like a jackass and start a fight, then figure I ought to feel guilty for winning just because I’m bigger’n you!” He picked up his hat, pushed the crown back into its normal shape, and clapped it on his head. “I’m done here.”
One of the other jockeys chuckled. “Maybe you ought to pick your fights better, Cy. This one doesn’t seem to have worked out very well.”
“Yeah, yeah,” muttered Cy as he sat up and rubbed his aching jaw. Longarm cast a hard look in his direction and turned to walk out of the baggage car.
This time nobody jumped him.
His blood had stopped pumping so hard and his anger had died down a little by the time he reached the platform where he and Julie had had their passionate interlude a while earlier. He was still a little sore at Cy, though, so he paused to take a couple of deep breaths and think about what he had learned. He put both hands on the railing and leaned forward.
The train had come down from the pass and was approaching the high trestle that spanned the canyon of the Rio Grande. The tracks would cross over to the eastern side of the river and stay there until they reached El Paso.
Cy liked to drink, and from the sound of what had been going on when Longarm entered the baggage car, he was quite a gambler too. That didn’t have to mean a damned thing; plenty of men liked to play cards and take a little nip now and then. But Cy was evidently filled with a lot of anger and resentment too, and that whole combination could be explosive. Such a man could be ripe for exploitation by someone with deeper, darker motives.
That thought was going through Longarm’s mind when he heard a door open behind him. He didn’t have time to turn and see who had come onto the platform, nor from which car they had emerged. All he had time for was to hear the sudden rush of air as something came toward his head.
Then what felt like a two-by-four slammed into his skull, driving him forward against the railing around the platform. He was barely conscious of the hard shove that lifted his feet into the air and sent him flipping over the rail into nothingness.
Chapter 6
He might have passed out for a second or two; Longarm was never really sure about that. But the feeling of empty air all around him woke him up in a hurry, and instinct made him reach out desperately. Both hands closed around the top of the iron railing around the platform. With a jerk that nearly wrenched his shoulders from their sockets and brought a cry of pain from his mouth, his weight hit his arms. Somehow he managed to hang on.
His hat was gone, and the wind of the train’s passage caught his thick brown hair and whipped it into his eyes. He could see well enough as he looked up, though, to spot the shadowy figure of a man on the platform. The hombre had some sort of club in his upraised hands. Longarm’s thinking was more than a little addled by the unexpected attack and the impact of the blow to his head, but the part of his brain responsible for survival was screaming at the rest of him that the man was about to bring that club down on his clutching fingers.
Longarm’s feet dangled loosely. They would have anyway, since the platform was high enough that his feet wouldn’t touch the ground while he was hanging from the railing like this. But the echoing clatter of the train’s progress told him that they were on the trestle now. There was nothing between him and the Rio Grande far below except a lot of empty space.
The club whipped down, and Longarm jerked the fingers of his right hand away just in time to avoid the blow. But that put all his weight on his left hand, and the muscles and bones in the fingers of that hand cried out in agony. The attacker lifted the club again.
Longarm’s right hand closed over his watch chain and jerked the derringer from the pocket of his vest. He grabbed the little gun and lifted it, cocking it as he did so. The derringer cracked spitefully. Over the roar and clatter of the train’s wheels, Longarm heard a whine that told him the bullet had missed and had ricocheted off into the night from the iron of the platform.
The crack and flash of the shot was enough to spook his assailant, however. The man turned and plunged back through the door of the car, leaving Longarm hanging alone from the railing. Thankful for small favors, the marshal dropped the derringer and let it dangle at the end of the watch chain. He slapped that hand against the railing again and hung on tightly. Slowly but surely, the muscles in his shoulders bunching and rippling, he began to pull himself up.
He kept his eyes open, in case the attacker showed up again and made another try at knocking him off the train, but no one came onto the platform. Longarm kicked a leg up and managed to get a foothold. He lifted himself
