bitch was hell for persistent. Dumb too, of course. But persistent.
At this point Longarm would quite cheerfully have put a slug into the idiot. If he’d only known where to fire. As for that …
Help came in the form of a flash of yellow fire barely visible through the blowing snow.
There was a dark, looming presence out in front of Longarm, maybe fifteen or twenty yards off. And somewhere in the middle of that he saw the muzzle flash of a third gunshot.
The bullet slammed loudly into the hardwood siding that sheathed the building Longarm was leaning against. The sound of it was dull and hollow. Longarm hoped the slug hadn’t penetrated the wall and hurt somebody inside.
Longarm snapped a shot of his own in the direction of the muzzle flash and then, while good old George should be busy doing some ducking his own self, scuttled low and fast to his left and then charged straight forward, directly at the spot where the bullets were coming from.
Chapter 26
A solid hit, hard and painful, took Longarm’s right leg out from under him. He fell, rolled, ended up half buried in drifted snow. His leg was more numb than not. He couldn’t see any blood, couldn’t tell if the leg was broken, didn’t have enough feeling above the combined numbness of cold and injury to decide, couldn’t tell how much damage the slug had done or … slug? It occurred to him that he’d neither heard a shot nor seen a muzzle flash. So why the hell not?
He quit staring toward the tall, gray building where the gunman was, and looked back to where he’d been running when he went down.
Shit! He hadn’t been shot. He’d run straight into the side of a water trough lying low to the ground and almost completely buried by the snow. That was what had taken his leg out from under him. All he had wrong with him was a hard whack on the shin. Which didn’t make it hurt any less, but was not altogether bad news, considering.
Longarm rubbed his leg and climbed back onto his feet, heading out again at a brisk limp.
It was a water trough he’d fallen over. And now he was close enough to recognize the profile of the tall building in front of him. Apparently George was holed up inside the Kittstown livery barn. Longarm had passed the place a number of times before, although he’d never had occasion to enter it in the past.
No time like the present, he decided. He dropped to the ground to study the structure in front of him.
There was the usual set of large sliding doors paired at the front of the place to give access into the customary center aisle, where feed wagons could be drawn through and where teams of horses could be harnessed indoors when the weather was bad.
Probably there would be a work area to one side of the entry and an office and/or tack room on the other. Back of those and on either side of the aisle there should be stalls where horses or mules could be kept. And overhead there should be a loft for the storage of hay, and perhaps feed grain in bins as well.
That, however, was guesswork based on what was common and ordinary. Longarm wished to hell he knew for certain sure what the layout of this particular barn would prove to be.
One thing he was sure of, though. He did not intend to waltz up to those double doors and let himself in through them. No, thank you. If George still was anywhere inside, he would have Longarm silhouetted clean against the thin daylight and be able to put a slug into his belly with no trouble at all. Longarm figured he could get along just fine without that sort of welcome. He would just have to find another way in.
Since he happened to be on the ground anyway, he took that as a good suggestion and stayed low, holding the muzzle of his revolver out of the snow and crawling off to the side so as to avoid being seen from the doorway. Or wherever the hell George was hiding.
He reached the rails of one of the corrals and slipped through them. Using the solid wood of a feed bunk to shield him from view—and from bullets if it came to that—he approached the side wall of the tall barn.
Damn a man who would design a building without windows, Longarm thought. Still, there had to be a way in. Better yet, there had to be a safe way in.
With no access at ground level, he figured he would have to try elsewhere. Like through the loft. Normally there were loading doors at the front and rear where block and tackle could be used to lift baled hay or sacked grain into the loft and where hay could be tossed down to ground level for feeding in the corrals. Surely there was such an arrangement here. If he could only get to it.
Longarm made his way to the back of the barn, his leg still hurting like fire but continuing to respond to the demands he made of it. He could see the shutter-like hayloft doors high on the back wall. The back-end barn doors, a matching pair to the big ones up front, were tightly closed, which meant George could neither slip out of them himself without exposing himself to Longarm’s fire, nor see what was going on outdoors. That was to the good. But how the hell was Longarm going to reach a pair of doors at the second-story level when he had no ladder to use.
Where there was a will there was a way, he thought. And all that good crap.
If you don’t have what you want, then use what you have. He went back around the side of the barn and took a firm grip on the hay bunk there. He tugged and pushed at it a few times. And was relieved to feel the contraption rock back and forth on its skids. The bunk was not, thank goodness, frozen to the earth. There’d been plenty of cold, but not enough daytime sun or warming of temperatures to start any melting. The unrelenting bitterness of the cold was what had prevented any slight thaw that would have refrozen and attached the bunk solidly to the earth. Thus, the hay bunk could be moved.
Longarm put a shoulder to it and commenced pushing, bad leg and all. It hurt like hell, but it was a thing that had to be done. Once he overcame the initial resistance and got the hay bunk sliding, it was fairly easy to sled it across the frozen earth and around the corner to the yard at the back of the barn.
There he took a firm grip on one end and lifted, straining. He tipped the hay bunk on end. Immediately beneath the hayloft doors.
Then, quickly, he began to climb. Scaling the side of the upended bunk, he stood on what should have been one end of the feed trough and was able to reach the loft doors. He pulled, hard, and the door swung open on rusted hinges.
