“Listen to me well,” Kane said. “You’re in way over your head. Hec and me were barely treading water, trying to figure out who is out to put us down under and is shaking down some of the merchants.”
Longarm laughed coldly. “I know who that is and it’s you,” he said.
When Kane looked away suddenly, Longarm turned his back on the pair and went to the front door. Before opening it, he said, “I’m taking the jail cell keys with me, and if you don’t make a big fuss, no one will find out what happened in here.”
“You can’t keep this a secret!” Ward swore. “Goddamn you, Long, the word will be out in ten minutes and we’ll be dead in fifteen.”
Longarm noted the panic in Ward’s voice right alongside the anger and outrage. And as he closed the door behind him, he made sure that it was locked and he had the key. Satisfied that no one could get into the marshal’s office, Longarm hurried back to the U.S. Hotel to check on Megan, hoping that he hadn’t made a big, big mistake.
Megan opened her eyes after listening to Longarm describe how he had jailed Kane and Ward. She took a deep breath and said, “You’ve got to get some help.”
“I know that.” Longarm reached into his vest pocket and produced a piece of paper. “I’m going to give this to one of the passengers who are boarding the stage this afternoon and ask him to take it to the telegraph office in Carson City. They’ll send the message to Denver and I’ll get help.”
“Yes, but how long will that take?” Megan reached out and took Longarm’s hand. She looked extremely worried. “Custis, it might take a week before your boss can get some help over here. You could be dead by then.”
“I’m not easy to kill.”
Megan sighed. Her color was so much better and she looked as if she might be able to get up and start walking around in a day or two. The doctor had said that the wound in her shoulder would leave an unsightly scar, but that she should again have full use of her arm and shoulder.
“Why don’t you load me up in a buggy or even a buckboard and take me back home to Reno. My father-“
“Is half blind and he’d be half crazy when he saw what I’d let happen to you. Megan, I got enough troubles right now without also worrying about your father trying to carry out his threat to shoot my balls off. Do you remember that pleasant little warning?”
“I remember. All right, so what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Longarm confessed. “I’m concerned about you, but also about Marshal Kane. He says that someone will surely try and kill him and his deputy if I leave them unprotected in their jail cell.”
“He’s just trying to get you to let him go so he can shoot you, Custis. I’m sure of it.”
“I dunno anymore,” Longarm said. “Over the years, I’ve become a pretty good judge of when someone is lying to me and when they’re being honest. And I can tell you right now that Kane is genuinely scared that someone is going to poke a gun through that jail cell window and gun him and the deputy down.”
“Maybe you’d better go to the stage station and send that telegram,” Megan suggested. “It sounds to me like we’ve got a wildcat by the tail.”
“We do,” Longarm said. “Megan, I’m really sorry about you getting shot on my account. The surgeon who took a slug out of you said that you were extremely lucky that no major artery was severed. Even so, you almost bled to death. And you’re going to have a scar.”
“That’s not so important, is it?” she asked softly, her eyes misting a little. “I mean, you’ll still think I’m … well, nice to make love to. Won’t you?”
Longarm nodded. “Any man would.”
“It’s not any man that I care about,” she said. “It’s just you and my father.”
“We’ll be all right,” Longarm said, stretching out on the bed beside her. “I need to think things out a few minutes, and then I’ll go on over to the stage line and find someone to carry that telegraph message to the operator in Carson City.”
“Sure,” Megan said. Longarm stretched out beside the young woman.
Does it hurt pretty bad?”
“I’ve been kicked and stepped on, and once I had a stallion take a big bite out of my butt,” Megan told him. “That hurt a lot worse than this.”
“You almost bled to death.”
“Shhh!”
Longarm closed his eyes. Things had been moving so fast that he really did need to think his next move out. He needed to turn everything over a couple of times in his head to make sure that sending a telegraph off was the right thing to do. At the moment it seemed the only thing to do, but Longarm had learned from hard experience that a man had to hold something up and examine it from all angles just to make sure that he wasn’t making some major mistake.
He must have fallen asleep.
“Custis!”
His eyes popped open. Megan was staring at him, wide-eyed. “Custis,” she repeated. “There’s a terrible commotion going on downstairs.”
She was right. Longarm heard shouts and then the sound of boots pounding on the staircase. He heard them thunder up the hallway and stop at his door. “Open up, Jefferson!” Longarm rolled off the bed. “How long was I asleep?”
“No more than thirty minutes. I was going to wake you in-“
