“You’re dead right!” Murphy grunted. “If he crossed over the Wasatch into Utah, he’d sure be taking the long way around to Arizona.”
“Exactly.” Longarm clamped a hand on Murphy’s shoulder. “You’ve been a lot of help.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Whiskey Creek,” Longarm replied. “Where else?”
“One last thing,” Murphy said. “If Buck and Clyde overtake that counterfeiting sonofabitch, they won’t leave enough left of him for the coyotes to chew.”
“I know. I’m going to do my level best to overtake and make them understand that this is a federal matter.”
“They won’t listen to you,” Murphy warned. “Buck and Clyde vowed to find and kill the counterfeiter. They’re pretty damn good trackers as well as being first rate with a rifle or pistol.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“Marshal?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you takin’ that pretty woman?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just wanted to know if she was going to decorate Cheyenne long enough for me to ask her out to dinner … or something.”
“Sorry about that,” Longarm said. “But she also lost a lot of money and won’t stay behind.”
“That’s too bad,” Murphy said. “I sure think it’s a mistake to take a woman along. And if Clyde and Buck were to get the advantage on you, Marshal, there’s no telling what they would do other than rape her about a hundred damned times before they killed you both.”
Longarm nodded. “They’d go that far, huh?”
“Listen,” Murphy said, “they are the ones that you ought to be worried about … not Cox! Clyde and Buck have bushwhacked and beaten men to death. I wouldn’t want to be going after what they’re after.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Longarm said.
“Good luck,” Murphy said as he turned and walked away. “‘Cause it sounds like you’re going to need all that you can get.”
“So will you with the Denver mint people,” Longarm said under his breath as he went back to his hotel to get Diana Frank and start out on a muddy and miserable trail to Whiskey Creek.
Chapter 9
“They’re either headin’ for Whiskey Creek or else Redcliff,” Buck Zolliver shouted over the heavy downpour as he squatted in the fork of the muddy road.
“So what are we gonna do!” Clyde bellowed as thunder echoed and growled through the high Colorado mountains. “Dammit, Buck, we can’t go to both places at the same time!”
Buck was the older and smarter of the brothers, but Clyde was the biggest and the meanest. “We should split up,” Buck said. “Which fork do you want to ride?”
“I’ll take the one leading to Whiskey Creek,” Clyde decided. “It’s five or six miles closer.”
“Then I’ll go on to Redcliff,” Buck said, hauling himself into the saddle. “Whichever one of us finds that counterfeitin’ bastard takes him alive and then brings him back here, where we’ll meet tomorrow afternoon.”
“Why here?” Clyde asked.
“Cause it’s nowhere we can be watched,” Buck told his younger brother. “And because there’s some caves just up yonder that we can hole up in while we torture the bastard into tellin’ us where he’s stashed all that counterfeit cash.”
Clyde nodded with slow understanding. Like his brother, he was a huge, lantern-jawed man with a hooked nose and heavy, brutish features. Both brothers wore full beards, dark reddish-brown, thick and coarse as the coat of a grizzly. They were sopping wet despite their oilskin slickers and their long hair hung over their collars fanning across the hump of their broad shoulders.
“If Cox is in Whiskey Creek and I get my hands on him first,” Clyde promised, “I’m gonna bust up his pretty face. I’m gonna use my fists and then a knife so that no woman will ever look at him again without wantin’ to empty their guts.”
“Just use your hands on him, not your knife,” Buck said. “If he bleeds to death, we would be out a lot of money.”
“I know,” Clyde said. “I just wish that fancy bastard had picked some decent weather to run off in. This storm is a real sonofabitch.”
“if it snows, we’ve almost got him boxed in,” Buck said. “The passes will close and he’ll have to ride straight south. Those Thoroughbreds will slow him down. Them horses aren’t up to traveling across this rough, muddy ground in foul weather.”
“Let’s just hope that one or the other of us finds him,” Clyde said. “I’m tired of ridin’ and I want to spend some of that money on those nasty Whiskey Creek women.”
“If you find Cox first, tomorrow, you just bring him back to those caves up yonder,” Buck said. “Remember, we’re in this together.”
“Sure,” Clyde said. “We’re brothers.”
Buck nodded and took the fork toward Redcliff. Clyde watched him disappear into the storm and then he turned his own weary horse toward Whiskey Creek. He was riding his best horse, a big roan gelding that had never quit on him no matter how hard the trail or how many the miles. But even the roan was beginning to fail. It was just plumb played out and in need of some grain and rest. Clyde liked horses and he was sorry that he’d had to push the roan so damned hard. But Whiskey Creek wasn’t very far up this long mountain valley. He’d be there by midnight and he’d find the roan a livery, a stall, and some grain. And after that he’d go hunting for that shyster Nathan Cox.
“If I don’t find him in town though,” Clyde said to himself, “I’ll find a woman and a bottle and hole up until this storm blows over.”
Clyde was sure that Buck would be smart enough to do exactly the same.
The last ten miles to Whiskey Creek were a bitch, and Clyde was shaking with the cold when his exhausted roan finally staggered into town. Clyde’s need for a drink and the warmth that it would bring to his innards caused him to rein up sharply before a saloon. He almost fell when he dismounted and crawled inside to stand before the bar.
“A bottle!” he roared, causing heads to turn.
“Mister,” the bartender said, “you’re as white as a ghost and as wet as the weather!”
“Rain is turning to sleet,” Clyde said, his teeth chattering.
He drank deeply before paying for the bottle. Then he stomped back outside, and when he tried to lift his boot up to his stirrup, he was so stiff with the cold that he just couldn’t cut the mustard. Taking another drink, he untied the roan from the hitching rail and led it up the sloppy street until he came to the only livery in town. The place was dark, but Clyde had dealt with old man Waite a number of times and so he unlatched the barn door and got himself and his horse in out of the freezing rain.
“Hey, Waite!” Clyde shouted, slapping at his pockets in his search for matches. “Wake up, you smelly old sonofabitch, I’m a payin’ customer tonight!”
Near the back of the livery barn, a match flared and then a lantern cast its sickly glow around the inside of the huge, rickety barn. Waite emerged with a shotgun clenched in his hands. “What the hell kind of—that you, Clyde Zolliver?”
“Sure is! I need a stall for my roan horse. He’s in worse shape than I am because he won’t share my whiskey.”
Waite lowered his shotgun. “What the hell are you doin’ out in this weather so far from Cheyenne?”
“Huntin’ someone.”
“Couldn’t it wait until the storm passed?”
“Nope.” Clyde peered around the shadowy barn. “You got a lot of horses put up in here tonight.”
“I’m full UP.”
“Then move one of ‘em outside or double ‘em up,” Clyde ordered. “My roan is shakin’ with the cold and the weariness. He needs grain and—whose tall horses are those?”
Waite shuffled over and raised his lantern near one of the horses. “They’re all Thoroughbreds. Fella brought ‘em in two … no, tomorrow it’ll be three days ago. Paid me a hundred gawddamn dollars! And they’ll be more money comin’ because-“