As the pistol beneath Longarm cracked once, twice, three more times, Longarm ran toward the front of the car, hearing the bullets pop through the ceiling behind him. He saw movement on the vestibule between his car and the next one. He ran harder as he approached the gap and then launched himself into the air, landing on the roof of the next car and having to throw his rifle out to one side to regain his balance lest the train’s violent swaying throw him into the canyon.
When he had a relatively firm purchase, he wheeled, cocked the Winchester, pressed the brass butt plate against his shoulder, and fired twice quickly. The two outlaws looking up at him from the vestibule, trying to plant their sights on him, were sent spinning and bouncing off the front, blood-splattered wall of the car Longarm had just left.
One desperado flew off the cliff side of the train and disappeared in a cloud of dust beside the rail bed. The other gave a terrified scream as he flew off into the canyon, the scream dwindling quickly as he plunged toward the canyon of the Looking Glass River far, far below.
More shouts and cries from inside the passenger cars. Boots thumped as the remaining outlaws ran around, probably trying to figure out how many lawmen they were dealing with.
Longarm knew he probably shouldn’t have tried taking them all down alone, but he’d learned just a few hours before, from a former gang member, of the gang’s intention to rob this narrow gauge spur line running between mining camps in the San Juans, and there’d been no time to throw a posse together. The Arkansas River Gang, as this bunch was called, was known for cold-blooded murder as well as rape and for kidnapping young women to sell as slaves in Arizona and Old Mexico.
For those reasons, he’d opted to risk his own hide as well as those of the innocent passengers who could get caught in the crossfire, and try to take them all down solo.
Hell, according to their former member, Scratch Gillis, who’d gotten crossways with the gang when its leader shot Gillis’s brother, H. C., when he found H. C. fucking Gillis’s girl in a chicken coop, there were only eight members. Since Longarm had already killed four, that left only four more.
Hell, for a man like Longarm, those were bettin’ odds.
Backing away from the end of the car, Longarm racked a fresh cartridge into his Winchester’s breech. If more men ran out onto the vestibule, so much the better. He’d pick them off one at a time a relatively safe distance from the passengers.
Dropping to his knees, he continued to peer over the edge of the car and onto the blood-splattered wooden platform below. The rushing wind threatened to blow his hat off from behind. Vaguely, because he had more important things on his mind just now, he noted that the train’s speed seemed to be increasing, which meant they were nearing the top of Horse Thief Pass.
A face appeared in the little dirty window in the rear door of the car behind Longarm. It was a round face with little cruel eyes and thin, sandy hair. The gang’s leader, most likely—Rio Hayes. Longarm recognized him from the wanted dodgers that his ugly visage graced throughout the frontier.
When Hayes’s eyes found Longarm, the lawman jerked back behind the roof’s overhang. He heard the gang leader yell, “On the roof, next car forward!”
Longarm didn’t want to shoot Hayes through the glass and risk a ricochet that might strike one of the passengers. Instead, he decided to buy himself some time and took off running forward along the roof of the car he was on, lunging to each side, setting his feet carefully so he wouldn’t get thrown off. He was halfway to the car’s other end when a pistol popped behind him. The bullet screamed past his right ear and plunked into a stovepipe poking up from the roof of the next car.
The pistol popped again.
Then again.
The shooter cursed angrily as the pistol belched once more, the third bullet kissing the right flap of Longarm’s brown tweed frock coat. Longarm wheeled and fired two hasty shots at the shooter crouched atop the car’s rear end. Then Longarm turned forward again and stepped off the edge of the roof.
As he dropped, he twisted around, aiming the Winchester out from his right hip. The man standing there—a beefy Mexican with bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest and holding a Winchester carbine slackly in both his big, brown hands—stared at the lawman in round-eyed, slack-jawed fascination.
The Mexican had a blond girl trapped beneath his right boot. She lay belly down, naked and squirming and sobbing against the Mexican’s weight. The Mexican’s pants were down around his knees. His dong jutted at half-mast from under the ragged tails of his red-and-black calico shirt.
Longarm triggered the Winchester once while he was still in the air and a second time just after he landed on the vestibule, near the naked girl’s small, pink feet. Both shots blew dust from the Mexican’s shirt, punching him back against the rear of the car behind him. He slumped there, gritting his teeth and gasping and trying to raise his carbine.
The girl was screaming and kicking. A quick glance told Longarm she couldn’t have been much over thirteen years old. Longarm looked at the Mex, fury boiling up from deep in his belly, and smashed the rear stock of his rifle against the Mexican’s face. The blow turned the man’s nose sideways. The nose exploded like a ripe tomato blasted off a fence post.
Blood flew in all directions, painting the Mexican’s big face. Several large, thick drops splashed onto the naked girl’s smooth shoulders. Longarm stepped back, raised the rifle again.
“You got no manners at all, amigo,” he said, the mildness in his voice belying the hot fury that had turned the tops of his ears red.
There was a thudding crack as the Winchester’s butt plate met the Mexican’s left temple resoundingly and sent the man hurling off the girl and over the side of the train. There was no longer a canyon to accept him, however. Trees and rocks had pushed up along both sides of the rails. The Mexican hit the ground, bounced, and rolled into the pines and boulders and was gone as the train rushed on.
The girl gained her knees, stared after the Mexican, and then half turned toward Longarm. He glimpsed a pair of perfect, peach-colored breasts with tender pink nipples. Her long, lustrous hair was the dark blond of ripe autumn wheat.
“That bastard stuck his filthy cock in me!” she cried, her face a mask of revulsion.
Vaguely noting from both her physical attributes as well as her command of farm talk that she was probably older than he’d at first thought, Longarm said, “You’re all right now, miss. He’s deader’n hell.”
He edged a look through the glass of the coach door splattered with the Mex’s blood. “Now it’s time for the rest of his ilk to join him.” He glanced at the girl once more where she knelt with her arms crossed on her breasts. “You stay here!”
He jerked the coach door open and bolted inside.
Chapter 2
There were about ten passengers in the car as Longarm ran inside, loudly cocking his Winchester and aiming straight out from his shoulder, staring down the barrel.
Most of the men were on their feet. A middle-aged woman screamed and clutched a towheaded boy to her bosom, pressing her back against the coach wall to Longarm’s right, about midway down the car, squeezing her eyes closed.
Most of the men—stocky and rough-hewn, with drooping mustaches—appeared to be miners. There were a couple of women in frilly dresses revealing more flesh than customary and whom Longarm pegged as whores likely heading for the mining camps to ply their trade through the summer, now that all the passes were finally open after a hard high-country winter. On the left-side grouping of benches thinly upholstered in thin green canvas, a baby was crying in its mother’s arms.