mound of the sweet-smelling timothy over him. “G’night, gents,” he said, and rolled over to resume his sleep.
A couple of the men, now that they were awake anyway, took the opportunity to go outside, presumably to relieve their bladders, and the others lay down again. Once everyone was back in their beds, the engineer extinguished his candle and the shed was once more plunged into darkness.
Longarm waited until he was again surrounded by snoring and then, without any particular anxiety but just as a matter of common-sense precaution, shifted the location of his bed by a good five or six feet. Just in case.
After all, that was twice this evening that he’d been damn-all near to a small-caliber gunshot, and one of those had passed within inches of him. Who was to say if the second hadn’t also come his way, or toward the place where he had been sleeping minutes beforehand.
He could see no reason for taking chances regardless of how slight the possibility of danger was. Caution, after all, only hurts when you ignore it.
Chapter 28
Longarm was sitting upright, .44 Colt already in hand, before he had time to consciously register what it was that had snapped him so rudely out of his sleep.
A gunshot. Another damn gunshot. And again of very small caliber, again sounding like the sharp, bitter little bark of a .22 pistol.
And at very close range.
ignoring the hay that filtered maddeningly into his shirt collar, and ignoring as well the sudden hubbub of noise as the other men in the shed sat up in angry consternation, Longarm tried to recall the minuscule details of the sound that had so jarred him.
Sharp and biting, that was obvious on the surface of it. But … left. It had come from his left. He frowned, realizing that of course it had come from his left. He was sleeping at the front of the shed, dammit. Everything else was to his left as he lay with his head toward the end wall and his feet to the passage into the central part of the stage line’s mule barn. No, he thought. The fact that the noise had came from his left was useful after all. It meant the gun was fired by someone among his sleeping companions in this side of the barn. Someone coming in from the other hay shed, say, or from outside somewhere would have fired from the passageway. And that sound would have come from below Longarm’s feet when he lay sleeping. So it was instructive after all to remember that the sound was to his left.
Apart from that … apart from that he couldn’t remember shit. Dammit.
“Who’s got a match?” the engineer’s voice called out.
Longarm was a good dozen feet away, but someone else responded. The other engineer, it proved to be. The man struck a match and applied the flame to his friend’s candle, bathing the hay shed in dim yellow light.
As far as Longarm could tell, every bastard in the place was lying—or by now for the most part sitting—in exactly the same places they’d been after the previous excitement.
Everyone, that is, except for himself. He had moved half a dozen feet or so toward the end wall after the others went to sleep. He couldn’t help but wonder now …
While the others were asking themselves the same questions over and over again—and coming up with the predictable if uninformed responses—Longarm shoved his Colt into his waistband and knee-walked through the soft hay to the place where he’d been bedded before and where his coat and Stetson still lay.
“Do me a favor, friend, an’ hold that light so’s I can see here, willya?”
The engineer did as he was asked, and Longarm grunted. Not with satisfaction, exactly, but at least now the noises were commencing to make some sense.
He was no believer in the likelihood of coincidence, and three small-caliber reports in the vicinity of one person seemed just a wee bit much to swallow.
And there was the proof of the pudding. There was a set of small holes marring the sides and back of his coat. The coat that, thankfully enough, had been lying folded on the hay and not wrapped tight around him while he slept.
The point, however, was that some son of a mangy bitch tried to shoot him dead.
And tried it, it now would seem, three damn times before the intended victim so much as caught on to the notion that some asshole was shooting at him.
Longarm was feeling a mite peeved over that. The bastard had gone and made three good tries before Longarm even knew he was being shot at.
You could make a case for the sonuvabitch being awfully damn good. Or simply plenty lucky.
Longarm, on the other hand, couldn’t much bring himself to admire the unknown fellow’s efforts.
And that, of course, was the most important question of all now that Longarm had satisfied himself that he knew why these noises kept happening. Oh, finding out the why of it would be nice to learn too. But mostly, yes, mostly by damn, he wanted to find out who!
Well, the list of possibilities was short.
Tyler Overton, Delmer Jelk, the two engineers, and the dandy.
Longarm looked at each of them.
Far as he could read the deal, there was only one who knew him well enough to work up a reason to want him dead.
After all, Jelk seemed a simple enough traveling salesman with no possible motive. And the three northbound passengers not only could not have known they would run into a federal lawman, once they did—even if they had reason to hate and fear federal lawmen in general or Custis Long in particular—the only thing any of them would have had to do to get away from him was to sit down, shut up, and wait. As soon as the mud either dried or froze, Longarm would be on his way south and they would be headed just as quickly to the north.
