Longarm recalled the sheriff’s desk from his visit to the office right after his arrival in Del Rio. It was an old, heavy piece of furniture, covered by nicks and scars and burned spots. But obviously, it had provided enough shelter to save the sheriff’s life.
“Blast turned it over ... on me,” Sanderson went on. “Had a devil of a time ... pushin’ it off ... ‘fore the fire got me. Feels like my ... left arm’s busted.”
Longarm glanced at the sheriff’s arm, which was hanging crookedly from the shoulder, and agreed with Sanderson’s diagnosis. But the local lawman was still alive, and that was more than he had any right to expect after having been so close to the blast.
Where were all the townspeople? Longarm asked himself as he looked around the street. El Aguila’s gang was getting further away with every passing second—and Sonia Guiterrez was with them, held prisoner. Longarm needed someone to show up and take care of Sanderson so he could get started after the outlaws. The street was deserted, though. Everybody in town was hiding out until they were sure that the raid was over. Longarm supposed he couldn’t blame them. They were ordinary citizens. Their job wasn’t fighting bloodthirsty desperadoes like El Aguila’s bunch.
But his job was to protect the members of the diplomatic parties who had come to Del Rio to negotiate, and since Sonia was one of them—albeit unofficially—he had failed. Longarm didn’t like to fail.
“Stay right here, Sheriff,” he told Sanderson. “I’m sure somebody’ll be along to tend to you pretty soon.”
“Where else am I ... goin?” Sanderson asked. He looked up at the federal lawman who knelt beside him and blinked blood out of his eyes. “What’s wrong ... Marshal?”
“One of El Aguila’s men grabbed Senorita Guiterrez.”
Sanderson found the strength to exclaim, “Good Lord! How ...”
“She was out in the street and one of those bastards grabbed her up from horseback,” Longarm said. He didn’t explain what Sonia had been doing out of the hotel in the first place.
Sanderson gripped his arm. “You got to ... go after ‘em ... get her back ...”
“That’s just what I intend to do,” Longarm promised him.
“Long!” The shout came from down the street. Longarm turned his head and saw Lazarus Coffin running toward them. The big Texas Ranger had the pearl-handled Remington revolver in his hand, but there were no longer any enemies to shoot at. All the outlaws had galloped out of Del Rio.
“I thought I told you to stay at the hotel,” grated Longarm as Coffin pounded up.
“I tried, but that fella Don Alfredo’s about half crazy out of his mind scared. Seems like his daughter ain’t nowhere to be found, and he ordered me to come look for her.”
Longarm nodded. “One of El Aguila’s men got her.”
“What? You mean she’s dead?”
“Nope. Scooped up and carried off. Kidnapped.”
“Shit!” Coffin said fervently. “This is turnin’ into a bigger mess than I thought.”
Amen to that, Longarm added silently.
“What do we do now?” Coffin went on. “We’re goin’ to chase after those owlhoots, aren’t we?” He gestured at Sanderson. “And what happened to the sheriff here?”
“I damn near got ... blowed up ... you big ox,” said Sanderson. “One of those raiders tossed ... dynamite into the office.”
Longarm got to his feet. “You look after the sheriff,” he told Coffin. “I’m going to find a horse and get started after El Aguila’s gang.”
“You can’t go by yourself,” argued Coffin. “Hell, this is more my job than it is yours, since this is Texas and I’m a Ranger.”
“Somebody want to ... gimme a hand down to the doc’s office?” asked Sanderson, interrupting the argument before it could get started good.
Longarm and Coffin both reached down and carefully lifted the sheriff to his feet. Sanderson slipped his uninjured right arm around Coffin’s waist. “Come on, Lazarus,” he said. “You can catch up to Marshal Long later.”
Coffin grumbled and glowered, but he set up off the street toward the doctor’s office, holding Sanderson upright and steadying the local lawman. Their progress was slow but steady.
Longarm turned and hurried toward his original destination, the closest livery stable. As he trotted through the open double doors, a voice that was quavery with fear called out, “Who’s there? Don’t move, mister, I got a gun on you.”
Longarm hoped that wasn’t true, because the owner of the voice sounded so spooked that he might shoot at anything without any warning or provocation. Holding his hands in plain sight, Longarm said, “I’m a lawman, a deputy United States marshal. I’m not looking for trouble. I just need to borrow a horse so that I can go after those men who just raided the town.”
A short, stocky, balding man with tufts of white hair above each ear raised up from behind several bales of hay that had been stacked to one side of the stable. He didn’t have a gun, as he had indicated earlier, but he was clutching the handle of a pitchfork with wickedly curving tines. They glittered in the light from a lantern that was hung on a nail in the wall nearby.
“A lawman, you say?” The stable man’s voice was still reedy and nervous.
“That’s right,” said Longarm. “I can show you my badge and identification papers if you want.”
The man shook his head. “No, I reckon that’s all right. I’ve seen you around town with Sheriff Sanderson and that big galoot of a Ranger, so I suppose you must be telling the truth. You’re going after those outlaws, you say?”
“That’s right.” Longarm didn’t waste time explaining about how Sonia Guiterrez had been kidnapped. “Do you have a horse I can use?”
The man lowered the pitchfork. “Right over there,” he said, pointing to one of the stalls. “That bay mare’s a good horse. Need a saddle? Got a couple in the tack room.”
Longarm’s own saddle was back in his hotel room, and he didn’t want to take the time to retrieve it. “Thanks,” he grunted. “I’ll take the saddle too.”
“I’ll get the best one I’ve got while you’re putting a blanket on the mare,” the stableman offered.
Within a few minutes, they had the bay mare ready to ride. Longarm swung up into the borrowed saddle, and found it not as comfortable as his own but passable. He nodded to the stable man, said, “Much obliged,” and heeled the bay into a run that carried it out of the livery and into the street. The outlaws had headed south, which came as no surprise to Longarm. He expected that they were fleeing across the border again. If anything had happened to slow them down, however, there was still a chance that he might be able to catch up to them before they reached the Rio Grande. As he galloped out of Del Rio, he could smell the haze of dust still floating in the air. That was an encouraging sign, an indication that he wasn’t too far behind the outlaws. There had been at least a dozen of them, and the tracks their horses had left were visible in the light of the moon and stars floating in the ebony sky overhead. The trail arrowed straight south, as Longarm had expected it would. He rode hard, but with each long stride of the bay, his spirits sank a little. It didn’t take long to reach the river, and along the way he saw nothing except the tracks leading south. “Damn it,” he said aloud as he pulled the horse to a stop on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. The river was fairly wide here and ran between low sandy banks. The tracks leading into the stream were plain to see. Faintly, very faintly, Longarm could hear the pounding of hoofbeats from somewhere across the river. The sound faded away completely as he sat there seething. Every instinct in his body, every fiber of his being, called out for him to ride across there and go after them. Under other circumstances, that was probably exactly what he would have done. But back there a couple of miles in Del Rio, representatives of the U.S. and Mexican governments had been meeting to discuss this very border, and Longarm knew it would look bad for him to so flagrantly violate it as he was considering. If he crossed the Rio Grande, he would be alone over there, with no jurisdiction. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time ... and there was something else to consider—Sonia Guiterrez. She was the daughter of the head of the Mexican delegation. Surely that would carry some weight.