Longarm and the Horse Thief's Daughter by Tabor Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

demanded.
    â€œBecause those cartridges are explosives, and explosives cause concussion, and concussion like that can start a cave-in. There’s four men in there . . . no make that five if you want to count Henry . . . that I’d just as soon
not
see die in a damn cave-in. And that’s to say nothing of the month or so it might take to dig it all back out again. So bottom line is, if you want to go in after Henry, be my guest. But you aren’t taking that gun in there with you.”
    Longarm frowned. But he removed his gunbelt and laid it beside Henry’s rifle. “Satisfied?” he asked.
    â€œYup,” the miner said. “Oh, one more thing. You don’t know this place. You might want to take one of those carbide lamps.” He grunted. “That’s if you want to see past the end of your nose once you get more than a few paces in.”
    There was a pile of the small but amazingly powerful little lamps inside a shack beside the mine entrance. They were worn on the head like caps. The miners generally strapped them around soft caps. Longarm picked one up and examined the thing.
    â€œHere, let me light it for you,” the helpful fellow—Longarm assumed he was the foreman—said, taking the lamp and striking a match.
    In broad daylight the lamp seemed to give off no light at all, but Longarm knew that once he was in darkness he would appreciate the bright glow. “Thanks, mister.”
    â€œMind a piece of advice?”
    â€œAs long as I don’t have t’ promise to take it.”
    â€œOur Henry is a brawler. Nobody likes him, but nobody can whip him either. If you find him, take him fast and take him dirty, because that’s what he’ll try to do with you. Here.” The fellow bent down and picked up a chunk of wood that was about three inches thick and three feet long. “If you can find him, use this.”
    Longarm whistled. “You boys play rough, don’t you?”
    â€œNeighbor, our Henry won’t be playing. If you go in there, he’ll try and kill you.”
    â€œHe’s been doing that already, damn him,” Longarm snapped. “I’m tired of it. It stops here.”
    â€œGood luck to you then.” The foreman stepped back and touched the brim of his soft cap.
    Longarm took a deep breath. And entered the world of the miners.

Chapter 21
    The adit—it was not a tunnel; tunnels go all the way through something—was roughly square in shape, four-and-a-half feet tall and approximately four feet wide. Longarm had to crouch to pass through.
    He crabbed his way forward. After fifty feet or so the light from the adit mouth disappeared and he had to rely on the headlamp to see his way. The beauty of the simple lamp was that it pointed wherever he looked, allowing him to see another twenty or thirty feet ahead. If he turned his head to the side, the light turned with him.
    The bent-over posture he was required to adopt was hard to maintain. He discovered that every few minutes he had to stop and hunker down on his heels in order to rest his thigh muscles. Then, refreshed, he could go on again, using the chunk of pine like a cane to ease a little of the strain on his back.
    The adit had walls, ceiling, and floor of roughhewn rock, chipped painfully out of the live rock by men with chisels and hammers. Longarm could scarcely imagine the effort that had been required to complete that work for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of feet into the mountain. It had all been done, of course, to follow a vein of valuable ore of some mineral or metal.
    He still did not know what they were mining here. Probably silver, but it could have been for any number of other minerals instead.
    Right now his chore was to mine one asshole named Henry, who was hiding somewhere underground. One murderous asshole, he reminded himself. The man had already tried several times to kill him. It was a habit Longarm wanted to break