his ground and when the bartender lunged at him, he flipped the last of his bad beer into Fergus’s face and then ducked a wild overhand that stirred the hot air and scattered the droning flies.
Longarm was a big man himself, although now he was outweighed by at least fifty pounds. As he ducked, he drove his fist into the bartender’s flabby gut. Fergus grunted and his mouth flew open. Greenish froth sprayed from his lips and his fist struck the bar, and he tried to hold himself up as Longarm pounded him twice in the kidney.
“Enough!” the bartender cried, knees buckling as he sagged toward the floor, puking in a cuspidor.
Longarm stepped back and eyed the man. “I never saw such an unsociable bartender in my life,” he said, deciding that this fight was over and he might as well start off for the train depot and suffer the heat for a few extra minutes.
Longarm headed outside, where the air scorched him like the heat of a blacksmith’s forge. Tugging the brim of his black Stetson down against the hot glare of the afternoon sun, he marched up Virginia Street.
“Marshal!”
Longarm heard the venom in Fergus’s ragged voice, and knew before he went for his gun that the bartender was going to try and kill him. Even as Longarm’s hand slapped the butt of his Colt he threw himself sideways into Mrs. Baylor’s Millinery Shop. Three shots boomed and Mrs. Baylor and her female clients dove for cover, screaming.
Longarm rolled into a crouch with his gun in his hand. He could hear Fergus’s huge clodhoppers slamming down on the boardwalk as the man raced forward, intent on finishing Longarm off.
“Easy, ladies,” Longarm warned. “Just stay low and remain calm!”
But there was nothing calm about them. They were all screaming as if their throats were being cut. Longarm knew that he could not risk one of these hysterical women getting killed accidentally in a gunfight. Seeing no other option, he crawled back to the doorway and slipped an edge of his body around so that he could get a good view of the onrushing Fergus.
“Drop it!” he shouted when the man was almost upon him.
Instead, Fergus opened fire. His first errant bullet struck a saddle horse almost sixty yards up the street and took off its right ear. The poor horse reared back, screaming with pain, and busted its reins, then raced up the street, almost trampling a boy in the process.
When Fergus kept firing, Longarm had no choice but to kill the crazy fool. The target was so large that it was easy to put a bullet right in the man’s heart, and this Longarm did without hesitation. He supposed he could have winged Fergus, but the man might have managed to get off a couple of more wild bullets and inflict damage on someone, so Longarm just put the ugly, lawman-hating sonofabitch out of his misery.
Fergus was dead before he slid to the boardwalk. His skidding body overturned a big apple barrel in front of the Virginia Street Market. Apples went flying everywhere, and several rolled to a stop beside Fergus’s mouth so that he looked like he’d been about to sample one.
“Easy, ladies,” Longarm said, turning around to look at the assortment of women, most of them old and almost hysterical, but one of them young, blond, and poker-faced. “The shooting is over.”
“Did you kill him?” the young woman asked, stepping outside and then staring at the dead man.
“He gave me no choice,” Longarm explained. “Fergus might have killed an innocent bystander.”
“So I can see,” the young woman said. “Why was he trying to kill you?”
“He drank too much bad beer and he hated lawmen.”
“And you’re a lawman?”
“I am.” He removed his hat. “Custis Long, deputy United States marshal working out of Denver, Colorado, and soon to be on the next train home.”
“Miss Megan Riley,” she told him, staring at the dead Fergus with an air of revulsion. “That was an evil man. You have done the citizens of Reno a service, and I’m sure that my father would be the first one to agree.”
“Are you Marshal Riley’s daughter?”
“I am.”
Longarm was aware that a lot of people were starting to emerge from cover and fill the street. He was also aware that he needed to be acting “official” right now despite the fact that Megan was so lovely he was badly distracted.
“Miss Riley,” he said, “I had been meaning to visit your father. I understand that he is unwell.”
“Very unwell,” Megan said. “But I think that you still should have shown him the courtesy of a visit, even if he is retired from his duties. After all, he did save your life once, did he not?”
“No,” Longarm replied, “I saved his life two years ago.”
“That’s not the way my father tells it.”
“Well,” Longarm said, very much wishing to avoid an argument but also wanting to set the record straight, “that’s the way it happened. I’m sure there were witnesses, if it’s important enough for you to check up on.”
“It isn’t,” Megan said. “But don’t you think you had better attend to business instead of arguing with me?”
The woman was right, though it galled Longarm to admit the fact. He removed his hat and wiped his brow of sweat. He raised his hands up toward the increasingly vocal crowd to motion for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen, we had an unfortunate misunderstanding here, but there is-“
“Unfortunate!” an old woman cried. “You shoot down Fergus MacDonald and you call it unfortunate! Why, you murdered the big, dumb beast!”
The woman looked around at her fellow citizens. “Someone needs to arrest this man for murder! Where is our new marshal when you need him!”
