“Jefferson, open the damn door!”
“Oh, my God,” Longarm breathed as, gun clenched in his fist, he rushed toward their locked door. “I think they’ve shot Kane and his deputy.”
Longarm’s guess was right. When he opened the door, he had only to take one quick look at the crowd of faces to see that a shocking thing had taken place in Bodie.
“You put them in that jail cell, didn’t you!” a heavyset Man demanded. “I saw you leave and lock the office door. And then some murderin’ bastard sneaked up to the alley window, stuck his gun through the bars, and riddled em both.”
“We heard ‘em screaming,” another man said, accusation thick in his voice.
“Listen,” Longarm said, “I put them there, but-“
“Goddammit, let’s hang him!” a man shouted.
Longarm knew that the crowd was too shocked and filled with emotion to listen to reason. Ivan Kane and Hec Ward had been feared and even despised by most of the citizens, but they had been gunned down. Shot like fish in a barrel. The people of Bodie were shocked and outraged. Nothing but hanging Longarm would satisfy them in their present state of mind.
The gun was already in Longarm’s fist, and he wasn’t going to hand it over to this lynch mob without taking a few men with him, if need be. He fired a slug into the carpet between them and the mob fell back, some knocking others down in their panic to retreat.
“Listen to me,” he shouted. “I didn’t shoot them! Someone else did, and they’ll get off scot-free unless I get to the bottom of these shootings.”
“You’ve done enough already!” a big man with a red mustache shouted as he surged forward.
Longarm slashed him across the bridge of the nose with his Colt. The man cried out in pain and cupped his face in his big hands, blood pouring from his broken nose. Longarm cocked back the hammer of his gun.
“I’M a federal officer of the law,” he announced loudly. “My name isn’t Thomas Jefferson, it’s Custis Long, and I’m a deputy United States marshal.”
“If you’re a U.S. marshal you got no business here in Bodie!” a man in the back of the crowd yelled.
“I’ve got all the authority I need,” Longarm shouted, using his left hand to dig his badge out of his pocket and hold it up to the crowd. “This town has a federally chartered bank and it’s been robbed. It has federal mail that has been stolen as well. That gives me all the authority that I need.”
The crowd had lost its zeal and blood lust. They were staring at the big man with all the blood running between his fingers and they did not want the same punishment.
“Now then,” Longarm said, closing and locking the door behind him to block the view of Megan. “I want sworn statements from the first people to reach the bodies.”
“I don’t think Marshal Kane is quite dead yet,” one man offered.
Longarm had been about to say something, but now he gaped. “Are you sure!”
“Well, he might be dead by now,” the man said, “but he was still alive when Dr. Blake got to him.”
Longarm didn’t wait to hear any more. He elbowed men aside in his haste to get down the hallway to the stairs. He took the stairs three at a time, and sprinted across the lobby and outside. There was another large crowd blocking the entrance to the marshal’s office, and someone had been forced to hack the door open with an ax.
“Step aside!” Longarm shouted. “Everyone step aside!”
When they were slow to move, Longarm drew his gun and fired two shots into the sky. The crowd parted, and he rushed into the office and saw Dr. Blake in the cell kneeling beside Ivan Kane. When Blake saw Longarm, he said, “Good thing I had a key to this cell or he’d have bled to death before anyone could have reached him.”
“You mean he’s going to live?”
“No,” the doctor said. “He’s taken a bullet through the gut and another through the lung. But he’s still alive. He wants to talk to someone named Marshal Long.”
“That’s me,” Longarm said. He knelt beside the dying lawman and shook his head back and forth, almost overwhelmed with remorse. “I’m sorry, Ivan. I … I’m just sorry as hell.”
Ivan grabbed his wrist. “It’s all right,” he whispered, a wheezing, gurgling sound coming from the bullet hole through his lung. “Maybe better this way.”
“Who did it?”
Ivan’s grip was surprisingly strong and a shout was torn from his blood-frothy lips. “Jack Ramey!”
“I’ll find him,” Longarm promised. “I’ll see him hang for this.”
The marshal’s breathing was shallow and rapid. He was struggling hard but drowning in his own blood. “Hired by … by them.”
“By who?”
Kane’s eyes grew round, and he stared at the fly-specked ceiling as if he finally glimpsed into eternity.
“Oh, by … by God!” he choked.
Kane’s body began to shiver as a mighty convulsion shook him. Longarm grabbed the man by the shoulders and tried to hold him still, but it was hopeless. He had seen too many men die before. Then Kane let out a cry, rattled his boot heels across the floor several times, and died.
Longarm expelled a deep breath. Slowly, he climbed to his feet and said, “You heard him, Doc. He said the man that shot him is named Jack Ramey.”
