LONGARM AND THE DESERT DAMSEL
By Tabor Evans
Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1996 by Jove Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 0-515-11807-9
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A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
Printing history Jove edition / February 1996
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him … the Gunsmith.
LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.
SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.
McMASTERS by Lee Morgan The blazing new series from the creators of Longarm. When McMasters shoots, he shoots to kill. To his enemies, he is the most dangerous man they have ever known.
Chapter 1
It had taken him two days to walk from where he’d lost his horse to the stage relay station somewhere between Gila Bend and Buckeye in the western part of the Arizona Territory. It was June and it was hot and it was the desert. He had made the walk on half a bottle of whiskey and a two-quart canteen of water. Besides that, and two cans of stewed tomatoes, he’d had nothing else to sustain him. He’d walked mostly at night, when it was cool enough to be called cold, and laid up as best he could in the featureless country during the day. There wasn’t a tree or a bush or even a good rise in the ground to shelter him from the relentless sun. So there had been nothing for it except to sling his saddle over one shoulder and his saddlebags over the other and keep footing along, putting one boot in front of the other.
It hadn’t been the sun so much, or his hunger and thirst. Mainly it had been his feet. He’d never willingly walked over a hundred yards in his life, and to walk as far as he was being forced to in boots had been torture. By the second day he’d developed blisters. He’d tried to toughen and cure his feet by washing them in whiskey but it hadn’t done a lot of good except to make him laugh that he’d ever have used his precious, special brand of Maryland whiskey to wash his feet in. But there’d been no choice. Water was too precious. He hadn’t run upon many such occasions in his life when water took precedence over good whiskey, but he’d finally found one when there was no debate.
The land was rough: sandy and rocky with little patches of bunch-grass. Its only redeeming feature was that it was flat. The ground was flat and endless and the air was crystal clear and dry. He reckoned a man could see a hundred miles in any direction. In fact, he had spotted the stage relay station a full six hours before he was able to walk to it. The last of those six hours it had seemed like the little cluster of buildings and corrals was receding rather than getting closer. By the time he had staggered into the main building he was limping badly on sore and blistered feet.
His name was Custis Long and he was a deputy U.S. marshal operating out of the southwest district in Denver, Colorado. He had been a deputy marshal for longer than he cared to remember, but it was difficult to tell how old he was. His weathered and tanned face said forty years or better, but the lithe movements of his muscled, well-proportioned body said closer to thirty. He was a little over six feet tall, and even after a week in the Arizona desert still weighed about 190 pounds, because he didn’t carry around much fat to lose. He was called Longarm by his friends in a good-natured way, and the same by the men he hunted and brought to law for a different reason. His last name was Long, but he was the long arm of the law because he would cross the continent to catch you if you were his quarry. Some said he would cross the ocean, but that theory had never been put to the test. But the word among the bandit community about Custis Long was that it wasn’t a question of would he get you once he set in on your trail. The only question was how long before you found him in your pocket with your gun in his hand and his gun aimed right at you.
But as he entered the main building of the little stage station his badge was in his pocket, and it would stay there unless it was needed. He didn’t advertise himself as a peace officer unless he was on a job and it was necessary. He’d found that people acted differently around you when they found you were a law officer, especially a federal officer. So unless it came up for a good reason, none of the people at the stage stop would know what he did for a living.
Right at the moment he walked into the blessed shade of the way station he considered himself off duty. He had just spent a week, in cooperation with the Arizona Rangers, chasing six convicts who had escaped from the territorial prison at Yuma. They had killed and captured five of them, and Longarm had been in lone pursuit of the last one when his horse had come a cropper. If nothing else was to be gotten out of the incident, he’d learned, in a way that would never leave him, why the slender bone in the front foreleg of a horse was called the cannon bone. He had been running his horse over the flat prairie, trying to come within rifle shot of the fleeing convict, when he’d heard a sound like a gunshot. For a second, as his horse had started going down by its head and he’d made plans to try to jump clear, he’d thought his animal had been shot. But then, after he’d rolled across the sandy prairie and gotten up and dusted himself off, he’d seen his mount trying to get up. It was then he’d seen the sickening sight of the poor animal’s right foreleg and the grotesque way it was bent where there was no joint. He had hastened to the animal, soothing him with one hand as he’d pulled his revolver with the other. One shot and it had been over. The animal had been just a cavalry mount he’d requisitioned at the Yuma territorial prison from the army post stationed there. Still, he hated to see any animal hurt like that. But that was the chance you took when you ran a horse hard over country that you didn’t know. The western desert of Arizona was smooth to the casual eye, but it was pitted with many a hazard that could cause a horse, running at top speed, to throw himself off just enough to cause injury. Longarm had long marveled that, as big and strong as horses were, they didn’t hurt themselves more considering the delicacy of their joints and some of their bones.
But after that there’d been nothing to do except to go looking for the nearest shelter. He’d had a map of the country that he’d gotten from the army, and as near as he could tell, his best hope had been to hike it for the stage station that looked on the map to be about twenty miles north of Gila Bend. He felt fortunate it was there since there was so little else in the country. Which, of course, was one of the reasons for locating the territorial prison in Yuma. As someone had once observed, Yuma was closer to Hell than to the United States. Nobody was expected to try to escape from Yuma for the simple reason that, without the resources, a man wouldn’t last two days in such country. Yuma was in the extreme southwest corner of Arizona, very near an intersection with California and Mexico. You were in bad country at the prison, but it was a garden spot next to what you’d run into if you tried to flee in any direction. For that reason very few men ever successfully escaped. Oh, sometimes they got away from the prison itself, but the prison of heat and the wide-open empty spaces eventually executed them in a far more painful way than was ever used at the prison.