“Them is kind words, Jack. And you ain’t that easy to trail. Of course you did slow yourself down by taking time out to kill off your gang. That must have been some slick doings, Jack, getting rid of the whole bunch.”
“What makes you think I did? How you know they ain’t two or three of us in here?”
Longarm eased an eye up over the edge of the wash, trying to figure out if the voice was coming from one of the windows or the open front door.
He said, “Jack, I can still hear the sound of your rifle in my head. You know as well as I do that every gun has its own sound. If there’d been more than you in there, there would have been more than one gun shooting at me, and I didn’t hear but the one.”
“You reachin’ for that one, Custis.”
“Aw, Jack, don’t come that on me. Ain’t you ever been in a blind fight and figured out who was who and who was where by the sound of their individual weapons?”
“Yeah, but I thought I was the only one could do it. I hate to hear it’s all that common.”
“Oh, it ain’t, Jack. You’ve gone and forgot you once explained that to me when you was the sheriff at Eagle Pass. I thought it was a bunch of whiskey talk until I taught myself to listen. Has come in right handy through the years. Like now.”
Shaw laughed. “Well, I’ll be damned. Just shows a man ought to know when to keep his mouth shut.” There was a pause. “Yeah, me and you go back a pretty good ways. I reckon we’ve drank more than a little whiskey together.”
“That we have, Jack. That we have.” Longarm eased his head around and located his canteen. The strap was near his hand, and he pulled it to him and felt the two-quart flask. It was less than half full. He unscrewed the top and took just a little in his mouth to relieve the dry parching. A dry mouth made it hard to talk, and he didn’t want Shaw catching on to how thirsty he was any sooner than necessary. He craned his head back a little further. His dead horse lay some fifteen yards away. It might as well have been fifteen miles. There was a big two-gallon canteen tied on the back of his saddle, and there was food and smokes and whiskey in his saddlebags. He saw no way in the world to get to it with any certainty of living through the experience.
The packhorse had stopped a few hundred yards away and was standing, all four legs braced, his head down and the lead rope hanging to the ground. The horse really wasn’t a pack animal. He was just one of the horses that Longarm had brought along that had been pressed into service for that purpose. On one side he was carrying a big sack of corn, feed for the horses, and on the other a twenty-gallon tin of water that Longarm had intended to use to water the horses as they’d entered the badlands. Unfortunately, the tin had bumped up against a rock and sprung a leak. It had emptied before Longarm had noticed. But it wouldn’t have mattered. All the feed and water in the world wouldn’t have saved the horses the way he’d been driving them.
Shaw said, “So you say you come across some unfortunate fetters fell upon a hardship?”
Longarm said, “Yeah, if your middle name is hardship, Jack. That must have been pretty slick the way you done them boys in one at a time without the rest of them getting wise along the way.”
“Is that how you figure there’s only me in here, by the count you took?”
“Well, they was eight of you to start with. One man got killed at the robbery by a foolhardy passenger. That left seven. I found two shot in the back a little less then a mile after ya’ll rode into the Mescal Mountains when you was first getting away.”
“Why you want to figure that was me? What makes you think we didn’t draw some fire getting away from that train?”
Longarm said, “Aw, hell, Jack, now you are cutting up cute. Them two members of your gang was at least three quarters of a mile from the train, and there was uneven ground between them and the site of the robbery. Hell, Buffalo Bill, standing on top of one of them train cars, couldn’t have made that shot with a Sharps .50-caliber on the best day he ever saw and the wind dead calm. Besides, both of them men was shot with a revolver. One of them was shot so close the muzzle blast damn near set his shirt afire.”
Longarm could hear Shaw chuckle. “Well, I got to hand it to you, Custis. You are a hard man to fool. I ever tell you I used to admire you? Still do.”
“Yeah, I used to admire you too, Jack.”
“But not no more?”
Longarm thought a moment. “Well, we went in different directions. But it ain’t so much that. Used to be you played pretty fair. But I can’t say much for several cold-blooded murders back there. That clerk on the postal car. That was a shade on the mean side. Shot him to pieces little by little.”
Shaw’s voice came back, heated with indignation. “Now just a damn minute. That was Original Greaser Bob’s work. That clerk wouldn’t open the safe for us. I was plannin’ on twisting his arm or something that hurt pretty good, but next thing I knew Greaser Bob commenced to shooting the poor bastard in the elbow and the leg and the belly. I hated to see it and I wouldn’t never have done it, but I got to say it impressed the hell out of the other clerk. Didn’t take him no time to decide to open up that safe.”
“Was more than one killed there, Jack.”
“I killed the passenger and I killed the fireman. And I wounded the engineer. But that was different. They was armed and was attempting to kill me. Hell, Custis, you know me pretty good.”
“I admit it didn’t look like your style, Jack, but you never know—folks change.”
“I ain’t changed that much and you can bet your last pair of boots on it.”
Longarm made a dry chuckle. “Way the situation looks I may be wearin’ them.” Shaw said, “Well, hell, ain’t no use being strangers about this matter. I’m settin’ here in the shade drinkin’ whiskey. Whyn’t you come on UP and help me put a dent in this jug?”
Longarm said, “Guess you didn’t hear, Jack. I quit drinkin’. Give it up.”
“Joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, have you?”
“Took the veil.” Back in his saddlebags, unless they’d been broken when his horse had fallen, were two quarts of the finest Maryland rye whiskey. It almost physically hurt Longarm to think how close they were and yet so far away. But he knew, as low as he was on water, it was no time to be drinking whiskey. Whiskey dried you out, made you more thirsty than you’d normally be. The whiskey would have to wait.
But then his overall situation wasn’t of the best, at least not to his way of thinking. He pulled his rifle near him and looked to see if there was dirt in the barrel or the slide chamber. The carbine was a Winchester .44-caliber lever-action model that was accurate up to about five hundred yards. It fired the same caliber cartridge as his revolver, which was a Colt with a six-inch barrel. He had an extra handgun of the same make and caliber, but with a nine-inch barrel. Unfortunately, it was in his saddlebags. It seemed that everything he could put to good use was in his saddlebags, including his extra ammunition. He knew he had six shells in his carbine and six in his revolver, and he knew, because it was his habit, that he had some extra cartridges in his shirt pocket, his right-hand pocket, the one he didn’t carry his cigars and his matches in. Moving carefully, he reached his hand up and dug down in the pocket, hoping he’d been extra generous with himself. He tilted his chest forward and let the shells drop out in his palm. There were seven. He had a grand total of nineteen cartridges, and no way to get any more without getting shot about five times in the attempt.
He ran his tongue around his dry mouth and peered through the greasewood at the cabin. There was no movement of any kind, not even a shadow. Half reluctantly he took a brutal inventory of his situation.