Longarm stopped only long enough to scoop up the shotgun in one hand and feel in Martin’s shirt pocket with the other. He found two shells. He jammed them in his pocket and then began running with Sarah toward the back of the house.
They went through the kitchen. A fat Mexican woman was cowering behind a table, looking frightened. Longarm paid her no attention. Holding the shotgun with his left hand, he threw the back door open and dove out to land on the ground beyond the steps. There was no one in sight. He motioned for Sarah to join him. He walked around to the back of the house. Standing there were two horses already saddled. They didn’t look like much. He suspected they were being used by the vaqueros working the cattle. But they were a ticket out of the place.
He turned to Sarah. He said, “Quick! Let’s mount up. We’ve got to get out of here.” He had already untied the horse he was going to ride when he became aware that she was just standing there. “What’s the matter? Hurry, we don’t have much time.” She said, “I can’t ride.”
Chapter 8
For a second he stared at her, dumbfounded. He didn’t believe he had ever heard anyone say that before. He asked, “What do you mean you can’t ride? Are you hurt?”
Looking down at her hands, she said, “No, I’ve just never learned how to ride except one way, and that only a little.”
“What way?”
“Sidesaddle. That’s how ladies ride in Kentucky.” He swore for half a second. Then he said, “Well, then you’re fixing to learn in an awful hurry.”
She said, “How?”
He was already hurrying toward her. “By doing.” As quickly as he could, he pulled the stirrup leather up on each side of the saddle so that the stirrups were pulled up about ten inches to a foot. With her standing beside him, he had become aware of how small she was. He didn’t know why he hadn’t noticed it in the room before, but she couldn’t have been more than five foot two or three.
He threw the reins of the horse she was going to ride back up and then tied them behind the saddle horn. There was a riata, a rope on her saddle. He quickly untied it and made a loop around the horse’s neck and then pitched the rest of the rope across the saddle of the horse he was going to ride. Before she could say anything, he grasped her around the waist and lifted her up into the saddle. Her dress ballooned around her waist. She tried, girlishly shy, to push it back down. She said, “Oh my! Oh my!”
He said, “Ain’t no time to be bashful now, missy.”
“But it’s so high up here.”
“All you’ve got to do is hold on.”
Longarm went around to his own horse and threw the reins over the saddle horn. As he started to mount, he remembered the shotgun that he had leaned against the hitching post. He picked it up with his left hand and stepped up into the saddle, and as he did so, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A man had come around the end of the small barn and was standing there. He looked relatively harmless, a little chubby, but he had a pitchfork in his hand. Longarm wheeled his horse around and started toward the man. The man disappeared quickly back into the barn. Longarm looked around for a long moment, sweeping the horizon. Finally, he took a dally around his saddle horn of the rope that he was going to lead Sarah’s horse with, then turned his own horse out away from the hitching post and began to guide the animal away from the back of the house. He kept the shotgun at the ready. Sarah’s horse came around, leading about four feet behind his mount.
Longarm constantly switched his eyes from the house on his left to the barns and the outbuildings behind him. There was no sign of anyone. As he went by the side of the house he could see the cook’s face in the window. She was the only person he saw. He looked back as they cleared the house. About two hundred yards away, he saw a man walking in from a pasture. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry.
But Longarm was in a hurry. There was a road leading away from the ranch house but he didn’t recall them traveling very far on smooth ground after they had quit the rough country on the way in.
He looked back at Sarah. She was gripping the saddle horn with both hands, looking terrified. He could see with some satisfaction that she had her feet correctly placed in the stirrups and that the stirrups were short enough. He said, “put some of your weight on your feet in the stirrups. That way, you won’t bounce so much. If you keep your weight off the saddle, you won’t feel the horse’s back. We’ve got to move along, now. Do you have any idea where there is a road that leads toward the border?”
She looked vaguely around. She said, her voice breaking a little with the motion of the horse, “I only came out here once before I was exiled by Richard. We came out here in a carriage so I don’t remember it too well. I have a vague memory of a road somewhere, but I don’t know where it is.”
Longarm looked toward the west. The sun was already hanging low in the sky. He figured there was no more than an hour and a half, perhaps two hours, of daylight left. He hated to cross country with no idea of where they were headed, but he felt convinced that if they headed northeast, they would strike the Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo road. He thought that’s what they had done when they had ridden out. The path they were riding on now went due east. He expected that it too would hit the road, but he calculated it was the long way. He said, “Sarah, we have really got to hurry so I’m going to cut across country. You hold on as best as you can. That’s all you have to do. Just hold on to that saddle horn and keep going.”
Sarah gave him a brave smile. “I’ll try.”
Longarm winked at her. “You’re doing fine. By the way, I never did tell you what a good job you did getting me that stuff and then getting Miguel to come to the room. What did you tell him anyway?”
She smiled at Longarm, looking pleased with herself. “I knew he loved to gamble so I told him you had some money and that you were bored and wanted to play cards for money.”
Longarm laughed. He said, “That was good thinking.”
“Oh, but it was frightening.” She shook her head in distress.
“You mean the bomb?” he asked.
She said, “Especially that.” She shuddered. “It was the first time I have ever seen anyone killed.” She looked over at Longarm. “What does it feel like to kill someone?”
He turned his face forward. He said, “It ain’t something you can describe and it really ain’t something that ought to be described. Trust me, there ain’t no pleasure to it, no matter who the hombre is.”
“I think Richard likes it,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because he’s told me about having people killed and he giggles.”
“Giggles?”
“Yes, like a schoolgirl.”
Longarm whistled. He said, “Judge Harding is quite a fellow, isn’t he?”
She said with a tone in her voice he couldn’t quite place, “If you only knew. Oh, how blind I was. He was so handsome, so dashing, so charming.”
“How long did that last?”
“It seemed like one day. As soon as we got to the border, he changed instantly.”
“What did he want with you, then, if he was going to be cruel to you?” asked Longarm.
She smiled bleakly. “I used to be pretty—very pretty. I used to be the belle of the ball. He liked to show me off, but that was all, show me off.”
Longarm said, “I see.” He didn’t say any more.