“Not on your life,” Walker growled. “You and Frank sure took your time getting here.”
“There’s more help on the way too,” Lane promised. “We’ve got people riding in from Yuba City in Nevada.”
“Is that a fact!” Walker said, grinning.
“It sure is,” Jones replied. “We all got to stick together in times of trouble. Ain’t that right?”
“Yep,” Walker said. “Marshal Custis Long here is a federal officer, but I don’t want you boys to hold that entirely against him.”
“We won’t,” Jones replied.
“Pleased to meet you,” Deputy Lane said. “I wish us local authorities made the money you Feds make.”
“Well,” Longarm said, “I sincerely doubt that any of us are in this line of work with the expectation of getting rich. Now, I’m going to bow to you local lawmen, so how should we handle that mob outside—or do you think we ought to just wait them out until we get even more help?”
“I don’t think we have that much time,” Jones said. “They wouldn’t even have let us in here if they’d been halfway sober and realized what we were up to. The trouble is quickly coming to a head.”
“Then let’s step outside and take charge,” Longarm suggested.
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Deputy Lane, a fresh-faced youth in his early twenties, replied.
“Now wait a damned minute!” Jack shouted from the cell. “What if you heroes go out there and get gunned down! There’s a big damned bunch of hard-drinking and angry folks outside. Marshal Long, you may have forgotten what they did to our friends last night in your city park, but I damn sure haven’t!”
“And neither have I,” Longarm said. “But there was only one lawman standing against all of them last night. Now, there’s four.”
“Five,” Stella reminded him as she raised her shotgun overhead. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“Who is she?” Deputy Lane asked, staring.
“Long story,” Longarm answered, “and one that will have to wait until later. Let’s get those men outside under control and then we can all sit down and sort things out.”
“Let’s do it!” Jones said, drawing his six-gun.
Longarm waited until Marshal Walker was on his feet and moving toward the door with his gun in his fist. Then he stepped out in front of the others with the shotgun and kicked the door open so hard it slammed against the wall.
If some drunken fool opened fire out there, a lot of men were going to go down with him.
Chapter 11
When Longarm, Marshal Walker, and the two lawmen from Placerville opened the door and stepped outside, the crowd fell silent. Longarm waited for Walker to speak, but when he glanced sideways at the man, he knew that it was all the wounded marshal could do just to remain on his feet and that he simply lacked the strength to confront the lynch mob.
“Marshal Long, we want all three of them!” Abe Huffington shouted.
The crowd roared in agreement. Nick Huffington stepped out from the others. “You know that Stella Vacarro murdered my brother, so hand her over! We ain’t afraid to hang a woman same as a man!”
The crowd roared again, and Longarm knew they were working themselves up to attack in force. “Either disperse right now, or I’m putting you all under arrest!” he bellowed, raising his shotgun and pointing it at the lynch mob.
Beside him, the three other lawmen did the same with their pistols, and it must have been pretty intimidating to see four weapons leveled at them because the angry crowd couldn’t retreat fast enough.
“I’m getting a judge here tomorrow!” Abe Huffington blustered. “We’ll have a trial and a verdict this week and then we’ll hang them all!”
“We’ll see about that,” Longarm replied as the crowd began to filter back into the saloons.
“That was close,” Deputy Lane said, expelling a deep sigh of relief. “Marshal Long?”
“Yeah?”
“Would you really have opened fire?”
“Damn right he would have!” Walker wheezed. “We all would have to protect our prisoners.”
“We were sworn to uphold the law,” Longarm said. “I just wouldn’t have had any choice, no matter how much I hated to pull the trigger.”
“Yeah,” Lane said, “I guess you’re right.”
“Being a lawman sometimes calls for some very difficult choices,” Longarm said as he followed the others back inside and closed the door.
He could see that Walker was ready to collapse, so he helped the older man over to his bunk. “Pete, I’m going to send for the doctor.”
“No point in that. He’s already done everything he can to patch me up. I’m on the mend and I ain’t going anywhere until this trouble is over.”
“What if they pay some damned judge to sentence us all to hang!” Jack shouted from inside his jail cell. “They could bribe a judge, couldn’t they? And then what kind of justice would that be?”
“You’re both going to hang anyway,” Marshal Walker wheezed. “It’s Stella that we’re worried about, not you two rotten sonofabitches.”
Now that the question had been raised, Longarm wanted to pursue it a little further. After filling in Marshal Jones and Deputy Lane about the murder of Noah Huffington and the accusation against Stella, Longarm turned back to Walker. “Pete, could they find a crooked judge in this county?” he asked.
“I’m afraid that old Judge Gross would take a bribe,” Pete Walker admitted as he looked to his friends from Placerville. “Ed, what do you think?”
The marshal from Placerville nodded. “Judge Gross has fallen on hard times in his old age. He drinks too much and I hear he’s in rough financial as well as physical shape. There’s no doubt in my mind he’d take a bribe, if it’d keep him in whiskey for a few weeks.”
“I’ll bet you anything that’s who they’ve gone for,” Walker said. “I hear that Judge Gross is living in some run-down shack down in Coloma When he’s sober, which isn’t very often, he’s trying to scratch out a dime novel about being a hanging judge during the Forty-Niner gold rush.”
“How far is Coloma from here?” Longarm asked.
“Ten, fifteen miles at the most,” Walker replied. “They could go fetch the judge and have him back and in a courtroom as early as tomorrow afternoon.”
“He’d hang his mother for a bottle of whiskey,” Deputy Lane said. “They say he’s hanged more than forty men and has always wanted to hang a woman.”
Longarm went over to Stella, who had turned pale. “Listen,” he said, “I know that you didn’t kill Noah and I’m not going to let some besotted old judge send you to the gallows.”
“It sounds to me like there’s not going to be anything you can do,” Stella replied. “If the man is still a judge in the state of California, he can hold court and come to a swift hanging verdict.”
“Not if he can’t find you,” Longarm answered. “I think the only solution is to hide you someplace safe until I can find out who took your stiletto and really murdered Noah. We just need some time.”
“I agree,” Walker said. “Because if Judge Gross shows up tomorrow, he’d have a guilty verdict the next day.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Longarm decided, going over to the window and staring out into the dark street. “We’ll sneak out just as soon as the street is clear.”
“You could take her over to Placerville and hide her there,” Deputy Lane suggested. “Marshal Jones and I have a lot of friends who would help you out.”
But Longarm shook his head. “No, we’ll find someplace for her to hide that is much closer.”
Stella nodded. “I have a good, safe place in mind.”
“When the Huffingtons find out she’s gone, they’ll go crazy,” Walker warned.