the most damage.”
“You booted the hell out of him, too,” Randy said.
“A man can break his hands up real easy on someone’s head or even their face. If he breaks knuckles, he’s in trouble because the pain is so bad he can’t use that hand to fight. And if that is his gun hand, he’s in double trouble. So you see, I used a boot not so much to hurt him as to avoid damaging my hands and putting myself at someone else’s mercy.”
“It makes sense,” Randy said. “So you’re saying the key to winning is to hit hard and hit first.”
“That’s right. When you throw that first punch, don’t telegraph it either. Don’t loop the punch and swing from the rafters or your bootstraps.”
Longarm doubled up his fists and demonstrated. He moved closer to Randy and feigned two quick blows to the man’s gut, then brought an uppercut up to the point of the kid’s jaw that traveled less than six inches.
“Quick, hard, and short punches that start from close to the body and not somewhere out in thin air,” he advised.
“And what happens if you get hit and go down?” Randy asked.
“Roll and keep rolling,” Longarm said. “Get under something and try to come out on the other side. And if you’re pretty sure you’re going to lose the fight, either punch for the throat or kick for the groin or grab ahold of a club and start swinging.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything.”
“No, I don’t,” Longarm admitted, “and I never pick fights the way that Dean picked one with me. I always try to avoid them, but if I have to fight, I fight to win and I don’t worry about the Marquis of Queensberry’s rules. In a bar-room fight, anything goes, and I mean anything short of killing your opponent unless he is obviously trying to kill you.”
“My father and Clyde are hard fighters,” the kid said with no small measure of pride. “My father may look real long in the tooth, but he can whip any man in Helldorado with the possible exception of my brother, who’d never fight him.”
“That’s good,” Longarm said. “I’ve seen sons whip their fathers, but it’s a bad thing and there’s never any good can come out of it, unless the father was one of those sonsabitches that just liked to beat his kids.”
“My father never beat me, but he’ll slap Desiree around a little if she gets mouthy.”
“That’d be a shame,” Longarm said, “as pretty as she is.”
They talked for a little while longer, and then Randy told Longarm to pack his gear over to one of the hotels where a room was waiting. “It ain’t much, but the roof isn’t burned out and the rain won’t leak through it even in a bad storm.”
“That’s good enough for me.”
Randy started to leave, but then he said, “You any good with explosives?”
Longarm blinked. “What makes you ask a question like that?”
“Just wondering,” the kid said. “Are you?”
“I’ve handled dynamite before, and I know how to set and light a fuse.”
“Good,” Randy said. “My father will be happy to hear that.”
“Randy?”
The kid turned, and Longarm sauntered over to him. “Is he thinking of a bank, or another train?”
Randy’s jaw dropped. “What do you know about that?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Longarm said, “but it’s easy enough to figure that your father isn’t looking for me to use dynamite in the mines, now is he?”
Randy started to say something, then changed his mind and clamped his mouth shut before he walked away.
Longarm moved into a smaller hotel whose exterior rock walls were scorched and blackened. There were eight rooms on the second floor, and Longarm was given one already occupied by a tall, thin young outlaw named Eddie Tabor. Tabor had a jagged knife scar running diagonally across his face. His lower lip was badly scarred and twisted, making him look as if he’d just eaten something very, very bitter. He had thin brown hair and bad teeth. Even worse, he did not look you directly in the eye when you spoke to him, but sort of shifted his gaze from side to side.
“I hope you’re not Dean’s best friend and are planning on cutting my throat tonight,” Longarm said, only half kidding as he spread his bedroll out and collapsed to take his ease.
“The only one you have to worry about is Dean,” Tabor said. “The man didn’t have a friend. He’d whipped most all of us and he had coming what you did to him.”
“Glad to hear you say that.”
“But he’ll gun for you,” Tabor warned. “I expect he’s hanging out somewhere on a rooftop or in an alley waiting to get you in his gunsights. Best thing for you to do would be to kill him first.”
“You mean just hunt him down?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.”
“I’ll give it some thought,” Longarm said. “In the meantime, what does everyone do around here?”
“What are you driving at?”
“Well,” Longarm said innocently, “I don’t see much going on in the way of people making a living.”
