Longarm was a good dozen feet away, but someone else responded. The other engineer, it proved to be. The man struck a match and applied the flame to his friend’s candle, bathing the hay shed in dim yellow light.
As far as Longarm could tell, every bastard in the place was lying—or by now for the most part sitting—in exactly the same places they’d been after the previous excitement.
Everyone, that is, except for himself. He had moved half a dozen feet or so toward the end wall after the others went to sleep. He couldn’t help but wonder now …
While the others were asking themselves the same questions over and over again—and coming up with the predictable if uninformed responses—Longarm shoved his Colt into his waistband and knee-walked through the soft hay to the place where he’d been bedded before and where his coat and Stetson still lay.
“Do me a favor, friend, an’ hold that light so’s I can see here, willya?”
The engineer did as he was asked, and Longarm grunted. Not with satisfaction, exactly, but at least now the noises were commencing to make some sense.
He was no believer in the likelihood of coincidence, and three small-caliber reports in the vicinity of one person seemed just a wee bit much to swallow.
And there was the proof of the pudding. There was a set of small holes marring the sides and back of his coat. The coat that, thankfully enough, had been lying folded on the hay and not wrapped tight around him while he slept.
The point, however, was that some son of a mangy bitch tried to shoot him dead.
And tried it, it now would seem, three damn times before the intended victim so much as caught on to the notion that some asshole was shooting at him.
Longarm was feeling a mite peeved over that. The bastard had gone and made three good tries before Longarm even knew he was being shot at.
You could make a case for the sonuvabitch being awfully damn good. Or simply plenty lucky.
Longarm, on the other hand, couldn’t much bring himself to admire the unknown fellow’s efforts.
And that, of course, was the most important question of all now that Longarm had satisfied himself that he knew why these noises kept happening. Oh, finding out the why of it would be nice to learn too. But mostly, yes, mostly by damn, he wanted to find out who!
Well, the list of possibilities was short.
Tyler Overton, Delmer Jelk, the two engineers, and the dandy.
Longarm looked at each of them.
Far as he could read the deal, there was only one who knew him well enough to work up a reason to want him dead.
After all, Jelk seemed a simple enough traveling salesman with no possible motive. And the three northbound passengers not only could not have known they would run into a federal lawman, once they did—even if they had reason to hate and fear federal lawmen in general or Custis Long in particular—the only thing any of them would have had to do to get away from him was to sit down, shut up, and wait. As soon as the mud either dried or froze, Longarm would be on his way south and they would be headed just as quickly to the north.
Tyler Overton on the other hand …
Shit, Longarm didn’t know of any motive the lawyer might have to stop him from possibly helping Gary Lee Bell escape the hangman’s noose.
But he could think of a fair number of possibilities if he wanted to. Maybe none of them true. But who the hell could say?
For instance, Gary and Madelyn Bell were convinced her father’s mine at Talking Water was pretty well worthless. But what if their lawyer knew something about the mine that they didn’t? And wanted Bell dead and Maddy up to her pretty ears in debt to ensure that the mine would become Overton’s property by and by.
Or to run out another possible motive, maybe Overton and the pregnant soon-to-be widow were putting on a big act about wanting Gary Lee Bell saved but really wanted him dead, by the law’s cold hand and not theirs, so Overton could dump his mousy wife and take up permanent residence in Maddy’s overheated bed.
Or it could be that the tipster from the Medicine Bows was right and Windy Williams was down there alive and well and full of piss. It could be that Overton was being paid something under the counter by Williams so the old curmudgeon—which he damn sure was—could rid his daughter of a husband Windy did not approve of.
Or … or, hell, there could be a hundred other “or” possibilities.
And maybe not a one of them that Longarm could think of was true, but then maybe there was some other explanation, crazy to everyone else but perfectly logical and inescapable in the mind of Attorney Tyler Overton, that was in hiding needing only to be identified.
Longarm sighed. He could fret about the “why” of it all at leisure some other time.
Right now he was mostly interested in seeing to the “who” of it—which he sure as shit figured he had—and making damn sure there was no fourth, and perhaps successful, attempt on his life. Damn it anyway, though … “Tyler?”
“Yes, Long?”
“I’d be obliged if you would hold your hands kinda out t’ the side where I can keep an eye on ‘em. An’ you, mister. Hold that candle nice an’ steady. It wouldn’t much do for anybody t’ get confused and excited just now.”
“What the …”
Longarm ignored the engineer, his attention closely focused on Overton instead.
The lawyer, he had to admit, acted innocent as a duck in the henhouse. Which didn’t mean a damn thing.
“Keep ‘em right where I can see them, Tyler, while I shake your tree an’ see what kind of shooting irons fall out.”
Chapter 29
“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Longarm complained.
“I think I am beginning to agree with you,” the engineer with the candle—the one who used to have a candle, that is, for the stub had long since burned away and the search had continued by the growing daylight—put in. “Are you going to finish soon so we can go have breakfast?”
“You’ll go when I say you can go, goddammit,” Longarm snapped.
But then his sleep had been twice interrupted too. And for a much more personal reason than any of these others.
The engineer saw the tight-kept fury lingering at the back of Longarm’s glare and shut his mouth.
The problem was that after stripping Tyler Overton buckass naked and searching every stitch of thread the man had been wearing, Longarm had not been able to locate so much as a sniff of the pistol that had been fired at him.
After searching Overton himself Longarm had searched through the hay in the vicinity of Overton’s makeshift bed.
At that point Longarm had figured he could fully appreciate the implications of the old saying about looking for needles in haystacks.
Which had not, of course, kept him from continuing the search.
He’d inspected first the man, then the bedding, and finally all the loose hay, the nooks and crannies, every possible place where a pistol could be tossed in the darkness by a man lying where Tyler Overton had chosen to make his bed.
He had not found shit. Yet.
“All right, dammit, someone has it. Let’s see about the rest of you. Delmer? Strip.”
“What?”
“You heard me. I want your clothes.”
“But …”
“Look, either I inspect your clothes after you hand ‘em to me or I do it while you’re wearing ‘em. An’ if you make me go over there an’ play with your balls, Delmer, I’m gonna be even more pissed off than I already am. I might not be real gentle about it. You see what I mean?”
“Uh, yeah, I think I do.” Jelk began hastily pulling off his shirt and trousers.
After a few moments the others did too.
In light of Longarm’s cold anger the others did not object. Not even the dandy.
As before, though, there was no sign of any small-caliber handgun.
Jelk had his English .455 bulldog. One of the engineers was carrying a pocket-model Colt, one of the short-barreled guard models with no sights and no ram for shell ejection, but a full .45 caliber in spite of its small size. And the little fellow with the cane had a positively wicked folding penknife with gold handles and a rusting blade. Those were the only weapons Longarm could find in the crowd.