So Harmony Drake, Centerfire Max, and Goldmine Gloria were enjoying a noonday repast served by Spud Travis, the junior member of the bunch, as Longarm let fly with the Big Fifty outside.
The thunderous report gained the undivided attention of all four crooks, an hour’s ride up the Gila Trail from Yuma, just as Longarm had intended.
He had his peep-sight trained on a gun loop cut through the thick ‘dobe wall beside the stout oaken door of the low-slung ranch house as he heard someone shouting, “Who fired that cannon and where are you at?”
Longarm knew that to those in the house he could be most anywhere along a ragged cactus hedge between their dusty dooryard and the dead and dried-out citrus grove behind him. He let them guess just where as he called back not unkindly, “Who’ve you been expecting, your fairy godmother? I’d be the same U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long you left for dead on that ant pile over by Growler Wash. So now you are all under arrest, and I don’t really care whether you want to come quietly or not. You’ve surely neglected the trees and shrubbery around your late husband’s homestead, Miss Gloria. Didn’t anyone ever tell you irrigation ditches don’t work unless you pump water into ‘em now and again?”
Inside the house a sweaty-faced Harmony Drake shot a thunderstruck look at his doxie and snarled, “You dumb cunt! I might have known you had to brag!
You were only supposed to be buttering him up aboard that train!”
Goldmine Gloria, sweating in her own right, brushed a strand of limp blond hair from her flushed forehead as she protested, “I never did! Nobody in town could have told him either. Are we going to fuss about how he found us or are we going to do something about it?”
Drake turned to the outlaw peering through the gun slit to ask, “Can you make any of ‘em out, Centerfire?”
Centerfire Max, so called for the single-cinched Mexican saddle he’d once ridden up Montana way rather than for the serious rifle rounds in his Winchester Yellowboy, eased the barrel of the weapon further out the gun slot as he tersely replied, “Sun’s in my damned eyes. He likely knew it would be when he chose this hour to come calling, the tricky son of a bitch!”
Across the way, Longarm shouted, “The warrant I have on you says dead or alive, and you’ve never done nothing to endear yourself to me, Harmony. If you ain’t coming out, I reckon we’ll have to come in. For it’s really starting to get hot out here.”
He waited a polite count of a hundred times Mississippi while, in the house, Harmony snarled, “Don’t nobody fall for that. He never up and said any of you others ain’t as wanted as this child. He’s trying that divide-and-conquer shit!”
From over near the fireplace, where he’d hunkered to douse the cooking coals, the kid called Spud looked up to ask just what Harmony meant. So Goldmine Gloria said, “Nothing. Stuff a sock in it, Harmony. He’s doing all right without your help.”
At the slot, Centerfire groused, “I told you all the other night we should have killed the big bastard! It ain’t as if he didn’t have a rep for tracking! But no, we had to slicker the best tracker they got by playing Here We Go ‘round the Mulberry Bush across the damned old desert with him.”
Then Longarm had finished counting and let fly with the Big Fifty. Guessing which opening they might be staring out from, and knowing a right-handed gunslick would be peeking out with his right eye, from the lower corner to Longarm’s right, he aimed at the angle formed by sill and jam, to send a fistful of splinters, a bowlful of blood and bone, and all of Centerfire Max flying back from the gun loop as his dead trigger finger fired an even more frightening shot inside the confines of the little ‘dobe!
“Oh, Jesus!” wailed Spud Travis as, spattered with gobs of blood and brain matter, he leaped to his feet and tore out the back way as fast as he could run.
He got halfway to the corral before he noticed someone had been at those ponies that should have been under the shady toldo above the watering trough. Then he made an even worse mistake and lit out afoot across the flat, moving pretty good despite the heat and his high heels and spurs. Longarm didn’t spot him before he’d made it almost two full furlongs from one corner of the house. Then Longarm called out to him, saw that only seemed to speed the kid up, and fired.
He’d already ducked and rolled by the time his heavy buffalo round cart-wheeled the running Spud Travis into a clump of pear, from which he would never rise under his own power. So when Harmony Drake blazed away at the Big Fifty’s smoke through another window, glass and all, Longarm was grinning through another gap in the hedge entirely. He knew nobody with a lick of sense would still be standing behind all that gunsmoke drifting through the shattered window. So he held his own fire for now.
Inside the house, Goldmine Gloria was saying, “He’s as crazy as I heard!
He’s got no other lawmen with him! He aims to take you in alone! Whatever makes the man act so contrary?”
Harmony almost snarled, “What makes womankind ask such totally stupid questions? Can’t you see he wants to take me alone because he refused help the other night and bragged he could handle me without any? Centerfire was right. We should have killed him when we had the chance. I was a fool to let you talk us into doubling back on our own trail like we done. When a body gets away from a lawman like Longarm, he’s got no business playing kid games!”
The brassy blond widow woman who owned the dusted-out farm said, “We’d have never been found out if you hadn’t had to go into Yuma and get caught that time. I told you everyone had me down as the rightful owner of this property, under my married name, not as the Goldmine Gloria of dubious fame along the Owlhoot Trail. I told you boys to let me run grub and snake-medicine out here whilst the law lost interest in us all, but-“
“You’re fixing to make a deal with him, ain’t you,” her paramour and partner in crime demanded.
The brassy blonde sighed wearily and moaned, “Oh, Lord, hang some crepe on your nose. Your brain just died. I’d have turned you in for the bounty weeks ago if that had been my plan when I took you under my wing. How many times do I have to tell you the big job I have planned for up Tombstone way will Pay more than I could get for you, Frank, Jesse, and the Kid? I don’t need any damned bounty money, honey. I need some tough hairpins to back my play when I clean out that bullion shipment next month!”
Harmony moved to another window, six-gun in hand, as he grumbled a lot about recent developments. She said soothingly, “I know we seem to have been too tricky with Longarm for our own good, honey. I’m sorry I got all the boys killed. But we had to keep this homespread to work out of. We still need a place to hole up with that freight wagon of bullion we’ve been planning on. There’s just no way you could freight tons of silver out before they cooled off, and once we get rid of that one pest outside, and recruit a few more gunslicks-“
Then she screamed as Longarm, having caught a glimpse of her nervous pacing when she passed a wall mirror, let fly a buffalo round that shattered both another window pane and the wall mirror, to inspire a dive for the floor and considerable wetness between her already sweat-soaked thighs.
Harmony blazed back at the smoke curling up from the cactus across the way, then ducked and rolled for the other shattered window before Longarm could return his fire.
Crouched below the level of the other sill, reloading, Harmony muttered, “He’s still using that slow but sure buffalo rifle. He must have picked up another six-gun by now. He must be out to rattle us by busting things up with them big slugs.”
Goldmine Gloria moved toward the slot by the door with the Yellow Boy that Centerfire wasn’t using any more as she licked her lips and said, “It seems to be working. He’s got me scared skinny and you seem to be the one he’s after!”