“And you chose to be a lawman.”
“Seemed logical. I was always a pretty fair hand with a pistol, and when a gunman named Red Beamon shot up the town, I went out and tried to get him to drop his weapons. He wouldn’t, so we started shooting at each other right in the middle of the street. He was drunk, I was sober, and I’m sure you can figure the outcome.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Damn right! I shot him deader than a skunk because I knew, when he sobered up and posted bail, he would come gunning for me and probably have the edge. He was faster.”
“But you were steadier and smarter,” Longarm said, drawing his horse up so that Walker could ride alongside. “I was also wondering why a veteran like you ever hired a fool like Deputy Quaid.”
Walker smiled thinly. “You didn’t have much use for him, did you.”
“No. He was arrogant and hotheaded. A kid like that has no business putting on a badge. I can’t imagine why you hired him in the first place.”
“Actually, he was my sister’s illegitimate son. When she died a few years ago, she asked me to take care of Mark. Try to straighten him out. So I taught him how to handle a gun, but when he got good at it he became … well, it just went to his damned head.”
“You didn’t shed any tears when you saw his body.”
“He was bound to get killed,” Walker said. “The only question I ever had was if he’d take a few with him.”
“He didn’t,” Longarm said. “He just charged into those rocks and one of the outlaws put a knife into his back and that was the end of him.”
Walker heaved a deep sigh. “I’m just glad that my sister died before her son. Mark was always a problem, and I figured it was because he had no father. I tried to be his father, but that never worked. Mark was always angry, mostly at himself.”
Longarm nodded with understanding for he’d known a lot of men who had died young and angry. They were most all driven by a fierce need to prove themselves braver and tougher than anyone else. Sometimes they just got into a lot of fist-fights until someone stomped the living hell out of them and they either wised up or got hurt so badly they couldn’t ever fight again. Either way, they usually ended up bitter and broken. It was a rare one indeed that shaped up to become a good, hardworking citizen. “You been a United States marshal for a long time?” Pete Walker asked.
“Quite a while.”
“Well,” Walker said, “you’re in charge now. I’m past my prime and I don’t often do this kind of thing. So you just tell me what to do and it’ll work better that way.”
“Thanks,” Longarm said. “It’s a wise man who knows his limitations.”
“You killed three men up in those rocks. That’s more men than I’ve killed in all the years that I’ve been Auburn’s only town marshal. That tells me that you’re a better man at this sort of thing than I am.”
Longarm came to an opening in the trees, and then he whirled his horse around and drove it back into cover with Walker close behind.
“You saw them?”
“I saw a ghost town with some visitors,” Longarm replied as he tied his horse and yanked his rifle from its saddle boot.
“Well, how do you know it isn’t just some cowboys or travelers passing through?”
“I recognized a pair of strawberry roans,” Longarm answered. “They’re not the kind you forget once you’ve laid eyes on them. These are definitely our train robbers, rapists, and murderers, Pete.”
After tying their horses where they would not be seen, Longarm and Walker crept back to the edge of the forest and flattened on the pine needles to study the old mining town.
“You ever been here before?” Longarm asked.
“Nope.”
“Well,” Longarm said, “it looks about like every other mining town that I’ve ever seen that went boom and then bust. Just a few main stores falling down because they weren’t ever built to last more than a couple of years. Some old mining equipment scattered along that streambed, and that’s it.
“I expect that you’ll want to wait for dark before we go in after them?”
“Be a good idea,” Longarm replied. “But we have to remember that they’re expecting Slim and them other two to show up pretty soon.”
“I forgot about that.”
Longarm scrubbed his jaw. “Pete, I’m thinking maybe we can just ride in after dark and they’ll mistake us for the pair I shot back in the rocks.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“Then we have ourselves a shooting match, only we’ll be sober and they’ll have been celebrating and be at least half drunk.” Longarm glanced sideways at the older man. “Do you have any better ideas?”
“Can’t say as I do.”
“Then let’s sit tight until it gets good and dark before we ride in.”
“How many do you think are left?”
“I count seven horses in the street there, so that’s what I’m figuring on,” Longarm said. “Can you hear the music?”
“Yep. A fiddle and a guitar.”
Longarm stretched out and gazed up at the sky. “I wonder if they’ve got women.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Walker said. “Do you know how much money was on that train they just robbed?”
“No.”
“In addition to what they took from the passengers, just over fifteen thousand dollars. A full month’s payroll for one of our biggest local mining companies. And if I don’t recover it, a hell of a lot of hardworking Auburn families are going to suffer. The loss could put the Sierra Mining Company out of business.”
“We’ll get the payroll back,” Longarm promised. “They couldn’t have had the time to spend it yet.”
“That’s another reason that I knew we couldn’t wait to get this gang,” Walker said. “Once these boys hit the big towns like Sacramento, Reno, or even San Francisco, we can kiss that mining payroll goodbye.”
“Why don’t we take a little nap so that we’ll be fresh when we go in tonight,” Longarm suggested.
Walker chuckled. “You’re sure a cool one. I’m afraid to take a nap. At my age, I might not wake up until tomorrow morning.”
“Don’t worry,” Longarm told him. “I’ll wake You up a couple of hours after dark.”
“Well, in that case,” Walker said, removing his hat and stretching out full length on a soft bed of pine needles, “why not?”
When Longarm awoke, he peered up through the pines and figured it was a little before midnight. They’d slept a good six hours, and he knew the outlaws would have been drinking and carousing during all that time. It would give him and Walker a crucial edge.
“Time to wake up, Pete,” he said, nudging the lawman.
Walker sat up, scrubbed his eyes, and yawned. “I was dreaming that I was home in bed instead of out here in the forest waiting to go in and shoot it out with those train robbers.”
“Maybe we won’t have to do all that much shooting,” Longarm told the man. “Maybe we can get the drop on most of them and get the rest to surrender.”
“Not much chance of that,” Walker pointed out, “considering that they’ve raped and murdered. There’s no question in anyone’s mind that they’ll hang.”
“I see your point,” Longarm said, nodding in agreement.
They both went to their horses, tightened their cinches, and prepared to ride into the town. If anything the music and laughter had grown louder through the evening, and that was fine with Longarm. He wanted the outlaws to be drunk and sloppy.
“Don’t you think that they’ll at least have guards posted?”
“I doubt it. These boys have pulled a lot of holdups and never had a problem before tonight.”