“I guess not.” The man paused, obviously enjoying the dramatics of the moment, then said, “Your prisoner broke out of jail tonight.”
Instantly, Longarm remembered the distant shouting he had heard while he was at the campsite outside of town. He recalled as well the hoofbeats of a galloping horse that had sounded a little later. That could have been Mitch Rainey fleeing Cottonwood Springs on a stolen horse, he thought.
“Where’s Marshal Burley?” he asked tautly.
“Still down at the jail,” the citizen replied with a nod of his head in that direction. “I hear tell Doc Carson’s down there with him. The marshal got hurt somehow.”
Longarm hoped the injury wasn’t serious. He wasn’t overly fond of Mal Burley, but he would never wish ill to a fellow lawman, as long as the star-packer was of the honest persuasion. Longarm thanked the townie for the information, then turned and headed for the jail as fast as his long-legged stride would take him.
Burley was seated behind the desk when Longarm walked into the office. Doc Carson stood beside the local lawman, probing with those delicate fingers at the back of Burley’s head. Burley winced and said, “Hell, Doc, watch what you’re doing. It feels like Rainey just about caved in my skull back there.”
“I think you’ll be fine, Mal,” Carson said. “You’ve got a knot on your head the size of a goose egg, but other than that you seem to be all right. There’s no sign of any brain fever.”
Burley looked up and saw Longarm. A guilty scowl creased his face. “Hello, Long,” he said. “I guess you’ve heard about what happened.”
“Not enough,” snapped Longarm. “How’d Rainey manage to get out of here?” Now that he knew Burley wasn’t badly injured, Longarm wasn’t in much of a mood to be sympathetic.
Burley grimaced again and said bluntly, “He played me for a fool. He started screaming and carrying on about how the Brazos Devil was right outside his window and was trying to get him. I unlocked the door and ran into the cell, thinking I might get a shot at the varmint, and then Rainey jumped me.”
Longarm’s features hardened, and trenches appeared in his cheeks. “You fell for that?”
“I said he played me for a fool, all right?” Burley stood up and came around the desk. He continued angrily, “Rainey put on a good act. He seemed just as crazy scared as you said he was out there by the river.”
Longarm sighed heavily. It looked like he was going to have to give Burley the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe I would have done the same thing you did,” he said—although he knew damned good and well that he probably wouldn’t have. “What happened after Rainey jumped you?”
“He banged my head against the wall and gave me this,” Burley said as he reached up to gingerly touch the lump on the back of his head. “I was knocked out for a minute or two. Not long, but long enough for Rainey to get my gun and lock me in the cell. I started yelling, but it was several more minutes before anybody came along to see what was wrong.”
“And in the meantime, Rainey had stolen a horse and lit a shuck out of town,” Longarm guessed.
Burley nodded. “That’s what happened, all right. He grabbed one of the horses that was tied up in front of the saloon and headed out along the Fort Griffin road.”
So more than likely that had been Rainey he had heard making his getaway, Longarm thought bitterly. If he had just been more alert …
No, under the circumstances, he had done pretty good just to hear the hoofbeats, he told himself more reasonably. The whole blasted world could come to an end and most men wouldn’t notice at all if they were buried up to the roots in Lucy Vermilion’s sweet snatch, the way he had been.
“Moon’ll be down in a little while,” Longarm said, musing half to himself. “Wouldn’t be able to do much tracking tonight …”
“It’d be best to wait until morning,” Burley said. “I don’t think you’d be able to find any trace of him in the dark. You’d just be wasting your time.”
Longarm had to agree with him. It was frustrating, but the smart thing to do was to wait for daylight. “I was supposed to ride tomorrow with Thorp and that Englishman. Reckon you could go out there in the morning and tell ‘em I’m busy with my own work, Marshal?”
Burley nodded. “I can do that. But you’re liable to meet up with them yourself. Rainey’ll probably hide out somewhere along the Brazos, since he knows that part of the country so well. Mr. Thorp and Lord Beechmuir might flush him out before they do the monster.”
That was something to consider, Longarm thought. But in the morning, he would start by trying to track Rainey along the Fort Griffin road. There wasn’t much traffic on that trail these days, and as long as there was no strong wind or rain, he thought he might be able to find the tracks left by Rainey when he fled Cottonwood Springs. It was worth a try, anyway.
“Maybe I’ll run into them,” he said noncommittally, but that was as far as he went.
“Rainey’s a fool,” Burley said. “I’d have taken my chances in jail, rather than going back out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“The only weapon he has is my Colt, with five bullets in the cylinder.” Burley shook his head. “If Rainey meets up with the Brazos Devil, that’s not going to be nearly enough.”
Longarm finally got to sleep that night, much later than he had originally intended, and despite his weariness he was awake and dressed an hour before sunup the next morning. Instead of his tweed suit, today he wore jeans and a denim jacket over a plain butternut work shirt, so that he looked more like a cowboy. His boots, Stetson, and the cross-draw rig that carried his Colt were the same as always. He tucked a handful of cheroots into the pocket of his shirt before he went downstairs for a quick breakfast in the hotel dining room. He was one of the first customers in the place, since most of the hotel’s guests weren’t such early risers.
Longarm wouldn’t have been either if he didn’t have work to do. He washed down a plate of flapjacks, eggs, and steak with several cups of strong black coffee, and he felt alert and fairly human when he went down to the livery stable to saddle up the Appaloosa. The red glow in the eastern sky was growing as dawn approached.
He wondered if Catamount Jack and Lucy were still camped outside of town, but when he rode by the clearing just as the sun was peeking up over the horizon, he saw that the place was empty. Dismounting and bending down to check the ashes of the fire, he found them barely warm. Catamount Jack had said the night before that he wanted to ride out before sunup, and despite the monumental drunk on which the old man had embarked, it appeared he had met his goal this morning. So Longarm returned to the road and scanned it for hoofprints in the growing light.
Only one set of tracks looked fresh enough to have been made the night before. The scare that the Brazos Devil had thrown into the countryside was going to come in handy now. If the Fort Griffin road had been carrying its normal amount of horse and wagon traffic, Longarm wouldn’t have been able to track Rainey at all. This way, at least he had a chance.
He rode west as the sun climbed higher in the sky behind him. The morning was cool, and heavy dew sparkled on the grass alongside the road. Longarm heard a few birds, but other than that, the only sound was the clopping of the Appaloosa’s hooves on the wide trail. Longarm’s eyes were constantly moving, scanning the terrain around him.
For half an hour, he followed the tracks he believed had been left by the fugitive outlaw. Then, the thing that Longarm had worried about happened. The trail swung to the north, leaving the road. Longarm reined in and studied the tracks. It appeared that Rainey was angling toward the river. He probably meant to cross the Brazos and hole up in the even more rugged country on the far side. Longarm sighed. He was a decent tracker, but he knew Rainey’s trail would not be easy to follow.