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He bit off the small twist at the pointed end of the cigar and mouthed the wrapper leaf for a moment. There was no hint of sweetness to the tobacco. A definite good sign of quality. Cigar makers try to mask poor grades of tobacco leaf by adding syrups, molasses, honey, rum, brandy, or whatever else they can think of that might disguise the harshness of the smoke produced by burning a lousy leaf.

This tobacco might not be the very best-quality leaf, but at least it was good enough that the maker was letting it stand on its own.

Longarm fired up his cigar and drew the smoke deep into his lungs, enjoying the flavor thoroughly. He was still standing there savoring the night and the smoke and the sprinkling of stars that were bright overhead when inside the barn he heard a sharp crackle of unexpected sound.

The sound was, he thought, suspiciously like that of a .22 pistol being fired. He hoped no one had been hurt in there.

Chapter 27

The dark hay shed was alive with sleepy, querulous conversation when Longarm got in there. Everyone seemed to be trying to speak at once, and most of the voices were all demanding to know the same thing: What happened and who did it?

“Does somebody have a match?” one voice called, overpowering the rest. “I got a candle some-damn-place here but I can’t find my matches.”

Longarm thumbed a lucifer aflame and held it up so he could find the man with the candle. It turned out to be one of the pair of northbound passengers who looked like mining engineers or surveyors, both of them pretty much peas from the same pod with rough but expensive clothing, knee-high lace-up boots, and narrow-brimmed fur felt hats of the very highest quality. Longarm took the few steps to his side and touched his match to the wick of the candle stub the man was holding.

Once they had some light to see each other by, the buzz of disjointed conversations slowed and withered away into a bleary-eyed and glowering silence.

“Does anybody know what happened?” Longarm asked.

“Not me.”

“Huh-uh.”

“I was sound asleep.”

There were five men in addition to Longarm, and each disclaimed any knowledge of what had caused the commotion, although everyone had certainly heard it plainly enough. All had been jolted awake by the abrupt little explosion.

Each man certainly appeared to be telling the truth, Longarm thought.

In addition to himself—and because of the darkness he actually hadn’t known beforehand just who his sleeping companions were—this side of the hay storage was accommodating Tyler Overton, the two engineers, the diminutive northbound gent with the cane, and the salesman Delmer Jelk.

“It sounded like a gunshot. That’s what I think,” Jelk offered.

“It was a gun. Had to be.”

“All right, so who fired the shot? And at what?” Longarm asked. No one answered. “Tyler?”

“Wasn’t me, Long.”

“You, mister?” he asked the man who was holding the candle.

“Not me.”

“You?”

The fellow shook his head.

“Delmer?”

“Nope.”

“You, Sir?”

“Certainly not.”

Longarm shrugged. “Look, could anybody have sort of, I dunno, rolled over an’ touched off a shot. You know, kinda accidental like?”

Again there was a round of denials, although Jelk went to the trouble of pulling a stubby bulldog revolver out of his coat pocket and sniffing the barrel to make sure the gun had not somehow discharged by accident while he slept.

“All right, if it wasn’t a gun goin’ off, what else could it have been?” Longarm inquired.

“It was a gun. Not a big one but a gun for sure,” the candle-holder’s companion asserted. “I’ve heard more than enough guns to know. This here was a gun going off.”

“Fine,” Longarm said. “You’re bedded down kinda in the middle of things. Which side o’ you was the gun fired on. Left? Right? Can you remember?”

The man frowned, lay down on the soft hay, and turned his face first in one direction, then in the other. After a few moments he shook his head. “I been trying to bring it back to mind. You know? But I was sleeping hard. I’m damned if I could say which way the sound came from. I mean, if it’d happened a second time, after I started to come awake, I’m sure I could tell you. But as it is …” He spread his hands wide, palms upward, and shrugged.

“Can anyone else recall?”

No one could.

“How about somebody not in this room? Could somebody else have come in from the other side, or someplace else for that matter, and fired one up Into the roof for a prank or like that?”

“If it was a prank, Marshal, it was a piss-poor one.”

“But could it have been that?”

“Marshal, it coulda been any damn thing except sensible. And it wasn’t me that done it. That’s all I’m sure of,” Delmer Jelk claimed.

“That about covers it as far as I can see,” Overton agreed. “We were all asleep, you know. None of us could testify to anything of a factual nature. At best we can only speculate.”

Longarm frowned. He hated coming up against anything that he did not understand. Still, no harm seemed to have been done.

“The hell with it,” he said, taking advantage of the candlelight to return to his nest of warm, soft hay and pull a mound of the sweet-smelling timothy over him. “G’night, gents,” he said, and rolled over to resume his sleep.

A couple of the men, now that they were awake anyway, took the opportunity to go outside, presumably to relieve their bladders, and the others lay down again. Once everyone was back in their beds, the engineer extinguished his candle and the shed was once more plunged into darkness.

Longarm waited until he was again surrounded by snoring and then, without any particular anxiety but just as a matter of common-sense precaution, shifted the location of his bed by a good five or six feet. Just in case.

After all, that was twice this evening that he’d been damn-all near to a small-caliber gunshot, and one of those had passed within inches of him. Who was to say if the second hadn’t also come his way, or toward the place where he had been sleeping minutes beforehand.

He could see no reason for taking chances regardless of how slight the possibility of danger was. Caution, after all, only hurts when you ignore it.

Chapter 28

Longarm was sitting upright, .44 Colt already in hand, before he had time to consciously register what it was that had snapped him so rudely out of his sleep.

A gunshot. Another damn gunshot. And again of very small caliber, again sounding like the sharp, bitter little bark of a .22 pistol.

And at very close range.

ignoring the hay that filtered maddeningly into his shirt collar, and ignoring as well the sudden hubbub of noise as the other men in the shed sat up in angry consternation, Longarm tried to recall the minuscule details of the sound that had so jarred him.

Sharp and biting, that was obvious on the surface of it. But … left. It had come from his left. He frowned, realizing that of course it had come from his left. He was sleeping at the front of the shed, dammit. Everything else was to his left as he lay with his head toward the end wall and his feet to the passage into the central part of the stage line’s mule barn. No, he thought. The fact that the noise had came from his left was useful after all. It meant the gun was fired by someone among his sleeping companions in this side of the barn. Someone coming in from the other hay shed, say, or from outside somewhere would have fired from the passageway. And that sound would have come from below Longarm’s feet when he lay sleeping. So it was instructive after all to remember that the sound was to his left.

Apart from that … apart from that he couldn’t remember shit. Dammit.

“Who’s got a match?” the engineer’s voice called out.