Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) by Tabor Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

relieved his bladder, his pee steaming amongst the pine needles.
    He set his cup on a rock, built up his fire from the dry wood he’d gathered, and pulled his saddle and bedroll up close to the flames. He figured it was down around forty degrees or so. It would get down below freezing by midnight.
    He removed his gun belt, coiled it around his holster, and set the rig within easy reach beside his saddle. He leaned his cocked Winchester nearby, then dug a hole under him for his hip, rolled up in his blankets, enjoying the heat of the snapping, crackling blaze. Folding his arms on his chest and rolling onto one hip, facing away from the fire, he willed himself into a shallow but badly needed sleep.
    He started hearing rifle fire late the next morning, as he climbed a slope through blowdown spruce and aspen, heading toward a sun-splashed saddleback ridge. The pops and cracks were too distant for the shooting to be meant for him, but he reined the roan to a halt, just the same, and slipped his rifle from the saddle boot.
    The shots were muffled by distance and seemed to be rising from the other side of the ridge looming ahead and above him. He cocked the Winchester, set the hammer to half cock, and rested the rifle across his saddlebows as he batted his heels against the roan’s flanks, and the big horse lunged off its rear hooves.
    The sporadic fire continued as Longarm and the stalwart horse climbed the ridge along the narrow trail slanting through stands of stunted spruce and Douglas fir. Near the crest, Longarm dismounted, grabbed his field glasses out of his saddlebags, ground-reined the roan, and tramped to the crest, negotiating a talus slide still patched with dirty winter snow.
    He hunkered down behind a boulder. Up here, the cold wind bit him, threatened to rip his hat from his head. He raised his coat collar, pulled his hat down tighter, and peered down the other side of the ridge.
    Snow Mound sat in a roughly triangular valley below him. It wasn’t much of a town, but he could see several large stores—probably hardware shops or mining suppliers and saloons—and the narrow-gauge railroad crawling into the valley from a canyon mouth to Longarm’s left. Near the tracks were stock pens, a large, wooden water tower on stilts, and several mountains of split firewood.
    The town was set at an angle before him. In the bright, cool sunlight, he could see the smoke puffs of blasting rifles or pistols around one of the large buildings on the other side of the main street from him. Answering shots sounded from a large, three-story, white-frame structure on the side of the street nearest Longarm.
    The cracks and pops of the gunfire reached Longarm’s ears about half a second after each smoke puff. Men’s shouts rose, as well. Aside from the shooters, Longarm saw no other movement anywhere in the town, as though the place were under siege and all citizens were cowering inside their hovels.
    He rose from behind the boulder and ran across the slippery, clacking talus to the roan, gathered up the reins, stepped into the saddle, and urged the horse up and over the ridge and down the side facing the town. Halfway to the bottom of the slope that dropped toward the shaggy northeastern fringe of the village, he swung the roan left, continuing on down the steep hill but now heading toward the settlement’s other side.
    Instinct told him that the instigators of the gun battle were those shooting from the far side of the main street. He intended to work around behind them.
    He was glad he hadn’t misjudged the roan. The horse was as good at moving down a steep slope as it was at climbing one, picking its footing carefully but able to continue moving quickly, leaning deep on its stout forequarters and stumbling little.
    Leaping occasional slash and weaving around stunt pine and shrubs, the horse gained the bottom of the slope, leaped a narrow creek, and galloped around to the town’s southern end, in