Another hour passed and he thought they should be close, very close. The moon was higher now and casting a good glow. It would be very difficult to get near them without being seen, so he forced himself to maintain a pace a little slower than theirs. A little more than two hours after he had begun to follow them across the countryside, he got one last glimpse and then they seemed to disappear. He rode on ahead, picking up the pace. He had grown used to the movement ahead, the sudden flashes of the buggy as it stood in contrast to the brush it was going through along the road. Now, there was nothing ahead. No movement. In a kind of panic, Longarm urged his horse into a slow lope, conscious of the sound the horse’s hooves were making. He could not let them get too big of a lead on him. Just as he was beginning to worry that he might have lost them, he saw a trail lead off to his left toward the river. In the moonlight, he could see the wagon tracks. They looked very fresh in the loose dirt. He pulled his horse up and leaned out of the saddle to study them and then looked toward the river. By squinting his eyes, he could make a small structure separate itself from the treeline. The trees appeared higher down near the river, which, of course, would be the nature of things. He looked back to his right where the road continued. There were no signs of fresh wagon tracks. He had to believe, based on time and distance, that Harding and his cohorts had reached the turnoff to his hunting lodge.
Longarm turned his animal left, holding him to a slow walk. He went perhaps half a mile. Now the outline of the small building was becoming distinct in the night. He guessed it to be no more than a quarter of a mile away, but night distances could sometimes be misleading. He rode on for a couple of hundred yards more and then stopped his horse. He dismounted and led the animal back into the bushes, tying him to a post oak tree that reared up amongst a grove of mesquite. The horse wouldn’t have anything to eat or drink, but Longarm didn’t expect to be long.
He began to work his way through the bushes toward the cabin. After about ten minutes, he reached the river’s edge and he saw why Sarah thought the cabin was on an island. It was actually on a spit of land that ran out into the river like a peninsula. Once toward the center of the river, the patch of land widened out until it was about an acre in size. Set in the middle of that was a one-story lumber and adobe cabin. Its roof was almost flat as were so many in that part of the country. It appeared to be shingled with tar paper. A stovepipe stuck up from the back corner, but there was no chimney for a fireplace. Laredo was not a town where people used fireplaces for warmth, since it seldom got below seventy at any time of the year.
He could see the peninsula that ran out to the big parcel was lower, and he could imagine when the river was up, it would be under water, making the cabin virtually an island. As if to confirm this, a rowboat was tied up at the bank and he could quite easily see the tracks of the buckboard where the wheels had sunk into the soft ground as they had driven the hundred yards to the cabin.
He spent a few moments studying the situation. The door was shut and there were two windows at the front but they were small and high up. It would be difficult for anyone to see him out of those windows. Nevertheless, he didn’t want to take the chance of being seen by heading directly for the house. He took his boots off, and holding them in one hand and carrying his revolver in the other, he stepped down into the river water, first up to his knees and then up to his hips. Bending low, he worked his way slowly to the higher ground that the cabin was sitting on. He came up out of the water on the side of the cabin. There was one window that was set like a normal window with a sash, but there was a curtain over it that made it difficult to see inside. He snuck past that and got around to the back of the cabin. There was nothing there except a blank wall.
Behind the cabin was a corral where the two buggy horses had been turned in. There was a small toolshed or feedshed, he didn’t know which. The buckboard was sitting close to the back of the cabin. He thought if he could move the buckboard over some five or ten feet, he could use it to get up on the roof, which appeared to be only about ten feet high.
Straining and being as quiet as he could, he picked up the rear of the buckboard and shifted it over until it was almost against the corner of the cabin.
Longarm got up in the buckboard and stood up on one of its sides, but he couldn’t quite reach the edge of the roof. He had put his boots back on. He looked around. He walked over and carefully opened the door of the little shed. Inside, he found a busted ladder-back chair. He took it, positioned it in the buggy against the wall of the cabin, and then carefully climbed up its flimsy structure. He was able to get his arms and his shoulders onto the roof, and working slowly, inch by inch, he managed to drag himself up onto the building’s top. Once there, he lay flat, his ear pressed to the tarpaper shingles. He could hear a low murmur of voices and now and then a yelp, but he couldn’t make out anything distinctly. A thought occurred to him and he went over to the stovepipe that stuck out of the roof. He touched it first and then put his ear to it and found he could distinctly hear what was being said inside.
The first words he heard clearly were in the carefully modulated voice of Judge Richard Harding. He said in a pleasant voice, “Now, Earl. We’ve been rather easy on you so far. Now, if you don’t tell us where the money is, I’m going to have to let these two gentlemen have their way.”
Longarm heard the voice of Earl Combs say, “I don’t know where the money is, don’t you understand? I had a partner. He took the money.”
Harding said, “You’re lying, Earl”-there was a sound of a sigh-“and I’m getting very tired of it. Jack, you and Morris go ahead.”
Longarm heard the faint sounds of a brief struggle. He heard one of the men swearing. A voice said, “Damn it, Morris. Hold his damn hand still. I can’t bend that finger back the way I want to with him thrashing about.”
Another voice said, “Why in the hell don’t we just hit him on top of the head and slow him down some.”
Richard Harding’s dry voice said, “Yes, Morris. That would be intelligent. Knock him out so he can’t feel the pain. I’m sure that he’d tell us then.”
There was silence for a moment and then a sudden scream rose and rose until it went into a shriek. Longarm clenched his teeth. He hated what was going on in the cabin, but he knew that they would get the information about where the money was faster than he could. He would wait as long as he could stand it.
There was a sound of someone sobbing and saying, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
Harding’s voice said, “Do you see what I mean, Earl? You’re just hurting yourself for no good reason. You are going to tell us where the money is. Go ahead, Jack.”
There came a dim mumble of words, a loud oath, a loud exclamation, and then another scream.
A voice said, “I swear! I don’t know where the money is. I swear it.” Longarm could hear a sob in the voice. He could actually hear the man sound as if he was crying.
Richard Harding said, “Let’s make it a little tougher. Let’s start breaking them in two places.”
Now the screams came swiftly and violently. They went on for something like two or three minutes. The sounds almost made Longarm sick to his stomach. One thing they did, which was something he didn’t think possible, was to make him despise Richard Harding even more.
Finally a voice said, “Judge, this son of a bitch is a harder nut to crack than I thought. Let’s say we fire that kitchen stove up and see how he likes petting red-hot cast iron.”