"Heard the gents who... bushwhacked me... talking about it. Didn't think it was supposed to happen... this soon."
"They struck quickly," Aurora said. "There was no warning. No one was in camp except the men working in the mill and myself." She helped him step into the cabin. One man, probably the most badly wounded of the lot, was lying in the bed Aurora and Longarm had put to such good use, while half a dozen more injured men had been made comfortable on pallets laid out on the floor. "Those cowboys rode in whooping and shooting," Aurora went on, "and when the men in the mill ran out to see what was happening, the raiders just shot them down in cold blood."
Longarm felt a fierce anger welling up inside him. He experienced the same thing every time he encountered violence and murder and all the things that went with one bunch of people thinking they could run roughshod over another bunch. The rage he felt was not enough to counteract the weariness and loss of blood, however, and he felt himself beginning to sag.
"Best get me... into that chair over by the table," he said to Aurora.
She had an arm around his waist now, being careful not to touch his back. Carefully, she helped him sit down straddling the chair. Then she reached for a knife that was lying on the table. "I'm going to cut that shirt off of you," she said. "Then we'll have a look at what happened to you."
"Best tend to... these other fellas," said Longarm.
Aurora shook her head. "I've already done everything I can for them. Mr. Flint sent a rider to Timber City to fetch a doctor."
Longarm nodded. Aurora's deft hands were using the knife to slice through his bloody shirt and lay it back to expose the wound. He heard her catch her breath. It had to be ugly.
"What happened?"
"Bullet creased me. Bastards were waiting for me. I think the slug ... clipped my left shoulder blade... too. But it didn't do worse than ... chip it a little." He rotated his left arm and shoulder, wincing as he did so. "I can still use this wing, so I reckon there's no real damage."
"Sit still. I'll clean this up."
She stepped away from him for a moment, then returned. He was surprised when she came around the chair and lifted a bottle of whiskey to his mouth. "Better swallow some of this," she said as she tilted the bottle. "it won't hurt as much outside if you've got a healthy swallow of it inside."
That was a reasonable attitude, Longarm decided, so he took a long drink of the whiskey. Then Aurora went behind him and doused the stuff on the bullet crease that he had torn up even worse by crawling through the log, and he had to bite his lip to keep from howling in pain. After a moment the burning subsided, and Longarm closed his eyes in relief.
That didn't last long. Aurora began dabbing at the wound with a cloth soaked in whiskey, and the fiery pain came back. Longarm withstood it stoically.
To distract himself, he thought about the attack on the camp. The way those bushwhackers had been talking, the raid had been planned for later in the day. Despite his befuddled state, surely it hadn't taken him that long to reach the camp. No, the boss must have speeded up the schedule for some reason, Longarm decided. Maybe when the bushwhackers hadn't returned right away to report that Longarm was dead, their unknown leader had figured that he couldn't take a chance on the big lawman turning into a wild card that might ruin the play. It was a feasible theory, thought Longarm.
"The doctor may want to sew this up when he gets here," said Aurora.
Longarm shook his head. Something was eating at him, something he had seen outside that was wrong, and as he sat there at the table, he finally figured out what it was. The loggers working higher on the mountain should have heard the gunfire, and they certainly would have seen the smoke. Yet there had been only a relative handful of men fighting the fire outside, and those were probably some of the sawmill workers.
He twisted his head to look up at Aurora. "Where... where are the rest of your men?"
Her lovely face was set in lines of hatred now. "They've gone to put a stop to this once and for all. They're headed for the Diamond K, and when they get there, they're going to burn it to the ground--just like Kinsman's men tried to do to us."
CHAPTER 9
Longarm would have surged up out of the chair had it not been for Aurora's hand on his shoulder pressing him down. "Damn it!" he exclaimed. "They can't do that!"
"Why not?" asked Aurora, her voice a little chilly now. "Surely after this you can't keep on making excuses for Kinsman, Marshal."
Longarm glared up at her. "I'm not making excuses for anybody," he said. "I just don't want innocent folks getting killed."
"There's no one innocent on the Diamond K."
Longarm thought about Molly and Wing and felt a fresh surge of anger at Aurora's attitude. She wouldn't understand that, though, not in her current frame of mind, so he said, "What about your men? You don't think Kinsman and his riders will just let them waltz in there and set fire to the place, do you? I'll tell you what's going to happen. Kinsman will fight back, and a lot of men will wind up dying--on both sides."
A look of concern appeared on Aurora's face. "Maybe you're right," she said grudgingly. "But there was no way I could stop them. Several men were killed in the raid, and the rest of them were out to avenge their friends."
Longarm reached for the bottle of whiskey, which Aurora had placed on the table after soaking the cloth she had used to clean his wound. He took another slug of the fiery stuff, then wiped the back of his other hand across his mouth. "Tear up a petticoat or something and wrap the strips around me to bind up that crease," he said curtly. "Then I want to borrow a shirt if you've got one."
"I can find something for you to wear... but you're not going anywhere, Marshal. Not until the doctor's taken a look at you."
"The hell I'm not," growled Longarm. "I've got to put a stop to this if I can." The anger he felt--and the restorative jolt of the whiskey, to be honest--had given him back some of his strength, buoyed him to the point that he thought he could ride again.
"Surely you don't actually think Kinsman is innocent," Aurora said in a mixture of amazement and indignation.
"I haven't seen a lick of proof that he's guilty," Longarm shot back. "I got a pretty good look at one of the gents who ambushed me today, and he wasn't one of Kinsman's riders. Neither was the man who tried to kill me yesterday. Somebody's spooked, Aurora, and is trying to get me out of the way."
He still liked Ben Callahan for that role. Admittedly, he couldn't be sure that Callahan even knew of his existence, let alone that he was a deputy U.S. marshal, but it was possible, especially if, as Longarm suspected, Callahan had at least one man here in the Mcentire camp who was really on his payroll. Longarm's true identity was common knowledge among the loggers, and if Callahan had an inside man, the information could have been passed along easily to the rival timber company owner.
"Regardless of whether what you say is true or not, you're not going anywhere." Aurora shook her head stubbornly. "You're in no shape to ride."
"The hell with it," Longarm muttered. Roughly, he shook off her hand and stood up. "I'll go like this."
Aurora looked shocked at his vehemence. "Wait a minute," she said quickly. "If you're that determined..."
"We're wasting time," Longarm said grimly.
"I'll do what you asked." Hurriedly, Aurora tore an undergarment into strips to bind up Longarm's wound, then produced a man's shirt from a trunk. "it was one of Angus's," she said. "The sleeves may be a little short."
They were, but Longarm didn't care. Whatever he was going to do, he had to do it before he lost his second wind.
Because once that was gone, he likely wouldn't be able to do anything for a while except collapse.
He left the cabin as he was shrugging into the shirt and fastening a couple of its buttons. While he looked around for the roan, he thumbed fresh cartridges into the Colt, then holstered it. The horse was nearby, standing where Longarm had dropped its reins.