“All right,” he said. “I’ll line up a wagon and figure out a way for us to make a run for it tonight. Maybe by the time that people around here realize we’re gone, we’ll have too big a head start for them to catch up with us.”
“Now you’re talking!” Megan said with a big grin of relief. “So we won’t even be using this room tonight?”
“I guess not.”
“it would be a shame,” Megan said, eyes dancing, “not to at least enjoy ourselves here in this beautiful room.”
“No,” Longarm said flatly. “Absolutely not!”
“Oh,” she pouted. “Are you sure?”
Longarm wasn’t sure of anything when it came to this passionate young woman. So he headed for the door before his body overruled his brain.
“Good-bye,” he said at the door.
“I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to lie here waiting and wondering if you are alive or dead, Custis.”
“I’m afraid,” he told her, “that you have no choice.”
“I’ll be ready,” she called as the door softly closed behind him. “I’ll be ready to run away with you!”
Longarm went to the Kirkwood Livery Stable. Megan trusted Kirkwood, and Longarm figured the man would not betray him.
“So,” Kirkwood said, toeing the earth and looking skeptical as hell, “you’re fixin’ to kidnap Horace Leach and deliver him to justice in Carson City.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Well,” Kirkwood said, spitting a stream of tobacco into the dirt and then wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve, “all I got to say is that you better be both good and lucky.”
“I am pretty good at what I do,” Longarm said. “But I try not to count on luck.”
“You’re going to have to have a lot of luck to pull this one off,” Kirkwood opinioned. “‘Cause, even if you do somehow manage to get Leach out of his house, they’ll come swarmin’ after you like a cloud of hornets. Ain’t no wagon gonna get you far enough ahead of ‘em.”
Longarm frowned. “Maybe I can lose them,” he said. “There’s a lot of wagon tracks on the road to Carson.”
“Yeah,” Kirkwood agreed. “There is. But everyone they meet comin’ south will have seen you. Marshal, you can be damn sure that Leach’s boys and them others that are all tied up together under the saloon owners and union and such are going to be asking a lot of questions of passer-bys. They’ll know how far a lead you got on ‘em and they’ll make it up.”
“You’re saying I’ll definitely be overtaken?”
“Hell, yes! It’s well over a hundred miles to Carson City. Ain’t no way you can get a big enough jump on them boys to reach the capital without being run down and killed.”
Longarm was plenty willing to fend for himself, but the idea of having Megan also overtaken and killed was more than he could bear to think about.
“I got a suggestion,” Kirkwood said.
Longarm’s head snapped up. “I’m all ears.”
“Give me them sorrels that you rode into town on and I’ll hide you, Miss Riley, and old Horace Leach hisself in a supply wagon and deliver you safely to Carson City.”
Hope sprang up in Longarm. “You could do that?”
“I take horses, hay, and supplies to Carson City quite regularly,” the liveryman said. “Wouldn’t be anything out of the ordinary. And I always carry a big double-barreled shotgun for protection. I had to kill a couple highwaymen about two years ago and it wasn’t pretty. People don’t fart around with me when I’m on that wagon with my shotgun.”
“It just might work,” Longarm agreed.
“It will work, Marshal Long. ‘Cause, if it don’t, I’ll be as dead as you and Miss Riley, and I don’t much cotton to that notion.”
“Okay,” Longarm said, “we’ll give it a try.”
“But I want her matched sorrels,” Kirkwood repeated.
“I’m sure that, given the circumstances, Miss Riley will agree to that.”
“You better ask her first.”
“I will,” Longarm said vaguely. He wasn’t about to get into an argument with Megan over the sorrels. She’d be adamantly opposed to giving them over, of course. But they were fair compensation for the price of their lives.
“Then we got a deal. Bring Leach and the girl around tonight and I’ll have everything ready.”
“Won’t they think it odd that you left in the middle of the night?”
“Nope,” Kirkwood said, “‘cause I do it sometimes to escape the heat and all the road traffic. Anyway, I do sell hay and such things as I can peddle along the road, and I can always say that I left this evening in order to make a sale.”
“You’ve got all the answers, haven’t you, Mr. Kirkwood.”
“Not all of ‘em,” the livery man said. “But I damn sure better have ‘em come tomorrow when them Leach
