Longarm 245: Longarm and the Vanishing Virgin (20 page)

He swung the dun toward the sand hills. This was where he had left them, and this was where he would enter them again. He thought he could find the place where the Wallace gang had been camped. Of course, it was likely the campsite had been moved, and the dunes themselves had had time to shift a little, so he might just get lost and wander around in the dunes until his bones joined all the others bleaching in the Texas sun.

That was a chance he had to take.

Dawn found Longarm riding deep in the sand hills. He could no longer be sure that Carter and the other hired killers were on his trail. He wasn't trying to hide his tracks, though, and anyway, that was almost impossible in the sand. Unless they had gone blind, they should have been able to follow him, even by moonlight.

The dun was played out, and so was Longarm. He wanted to curl up somewhere and sleep for about a month. His stomach growled from hunger. He hadn't realized he would miss Beth's cooking so much. Shoot, right about now he even missed Heck Wallace's cooking.

Wallace had been hiding from the law in these sand hills for months now, and Longarm knew it was sheer gall for him to think that he could find the outlaw camp. But on the other hand, he had been a member of the gang, if only for a little while, and he figured he knew more about how Wallace thought than the other star packers who had been searching for him. He knew that Wallace liked to keep to the low ground between dunes. That was where the shin oaks grew, where water could be found, where a fire could not be seen.

All Longarm had to do was cover about four hundred square miles of sand hills.

Not that much, really, he told himself. He knew that Wallace could be found here deep in the interior of the sand hills; the outlaw leader wouldn't camp near the edges of the dunes. Still, it was pretty close to needle-in-a-haystack time again, just as it had been when he'd first started searching for Nora Canady.

He had found Nora then; he could find her—and the Wallace gang—again now.

With that confidence spurring him on, Longarm rode deeper into the rolling hills. The sky grew brighter as the sun rose, and suddenly, off to his left, Longarm spotted something. It was faint, more of a wavering streak of gray against the lightening blue than a column of smoke, but Longarm recognized it anyway. The shin oak the outlaws used for firewood didn't produce much smoke, but it had to smoke a little.

Longarm hoped that was what he was seeing now. He turned the weary dun in that direction and urged the horse on. A few minutes later, the faint tendril of smoke disappeared. Someone had probably put out the fire. That didn't matter. Longarm already had the place pinpointed in his mind.

Distances were tricky here in the sand hills, though, so he was extra careful each time he topped a dune. He didn't want to ride right into plain sight of the outlaws without meaning to. When his instincts told him he was close to the camp, he dismounted and led the dun on foot. He took to crawling up to the top of each dune, taking off his hat, and sneaking a glance over the top before he went on.

Finally, he was rewarded with what he had wanted to see: a camp much like the one the Wallace gang had been using before, in the bottom of a valley between two large dunes. The same sort of makeshift corral had been fashioned by stringing ropes between shin oaks, and all of the gang's horses were in it. Longarm counted them quickly to make sure of that fact. No outrider was on duty at the moment, probably because Wallace was confident that no one could find them.

He hadn't counted on Longarm.

The big lawman's eyes searched for Nora Canady. He saw her sitting on a bedroll, wearing the same dress she had been wearing a couple of days earlier. Her honey-blond hair was in more disarray now, but she seemed to be all right. As Longarm watched, Dutchy brought her a cup of coffee.

Longarm wondered if Van Horn had gone into Monahans to send that ransom letter to Bryce Canady yet. It didn't really matter one way or the other, he told himself. He planned to have Nora out of the hands of the owlhoots long before her father could pay any ransom for her.

He slid down the dune a little, so that he could no longer see the outlaw camp. Rolling onto his back, he sat up and peered back the way he had come. After a few minutes of looking intently out over the sea of sand, Longarm spotted movement. Probably three quarters of a mile behind him, several riders topped a rise for a second before dropping back down out of sight.

A bleak smile stretched Longarm's cracked lips. That would be Carter and the other hired gunmen, following his trail.

Now all he had to do was wait, but that wasn't as easy as it sounded. The minutes dragged by. The sun was well above the horizon by now, and its heat was growing. Longarm took off his hat, sleeved sweat from his face. The wound in his side alternated between aching like the devil and itching like blazes. He wished he had a drink.

The riders came on behind him. He caught another glimpse of them, then another. At long last, he saw them topping a dune only a couple of hundred yards away.

That ought to be just about close enough, he decided.

He stood up and went to the dun, which had been standing with its head down. The horse was about as tired as he was. But as Longarm swung up into the saddle, the dun lifted its head and gave it a defiant toss, as if saying that he could keep going just as long as Longarm could. Longarm patted the animal on the shoulder and said, “Won't be much longer now, old son. You'll be back in a nice comfortable stall before you know it, with plenty of water and all the grain you can eat.”

Actually, if everything went according to plan, the horse still had a long, hard run in front of it. But the encouraging words made Longarm feel a little better too.

He drew his Colt, then took a deep breath, and dug his heels into the dun's flanks. The horse lunged forward into a gallop that carried it awkwardly over the top of the sand dune. Longarm let out a whoop and fired a couple of shots, aiming well over the heads of the men in the camp below.

That got the reaction he expected. The men who had been lazing around a moment earlier were now galvanized into action. They leaped to their feet, grabbed their guns, ran for their horses. Gunfire began to bang out. The range was pretty far for accurate shooting with a handgun, however. Longarm saw several puffs of sands where bullets plowed into the hill well ahead of him.

He rode only a few yards down the hill before he reined in the dun and wheeled it around in a tight turn. Then he kicked it into a run again that carried horse and rider back over the crest of the dune. Shots still rang out behind him.

Longarm turned the horse sharply to the right and rode hard in that direction, slanting down the slope.

He hoped the outlaws would come after him, hoped as well that Carter and the other hired guns would come rushing on when they heard the shots. That would put the two groups on a collision course. But Longarm couldn't see either bunch at the moment, so hoping was all he could do.

Then, as he reached the bottom of the depression between the two long ridges of sand, all hell broke loose behind him.

Longarm slowed the dun and twisted in the saddle. He saw that the Wallace gang and Carter's bunch had topped the hills opposite each other at almost the same moment. Longarm grinned at how well the timing had worked out. Each group of gunmen, seeing a bunch of strangers coming at them, had acted on instinct and started blazing away at each other. Longarm saw several men go flying from their saddles.

He turned the dun yet again and started climbing back up the sand hill as the battle raged a few hundred yards to his right. He had to move fast, because there was always the possibility that the desperadoes and the hired killers wouldn't wipe each other out. Any survivors might figure out what he had done, and then they would head for the outlaw camp as fast as they could.

The horse reached the top of the slope and surged over it. Longarm veered toward the camp, and as he did, a rifle cracked and a slug whined past his ear. He leaned forward over the neck of the dun and saw that Heck Wallace was still at the camp, guarding Nora. Longarm had hoped that Wallace would join the headlong charge, but the outlaw leader was too wily to be drawn in. Now Longarm had to meet him head-on if he wanted to rescue Nora.

Who, he reminded himself, had not wanted to be rescued before. He hoped
she
didn't start shooting at him too.

He sent the dun zigzagging down the slope toward the camp and threw a shot at Wallace as he did so. The bandit chief fired again, and Longarm felt the dun suddenly stagger. Long years of experience told him that the horse was going down. He kicked his feet free of the stirrups and threw himself out of the saddle as the dun fell and tumbled down the side of the sand hill.

Longarm did some tumbling himself. He tried to keep his gun out of the sand, not wanting the barrel to be fouled. Another bullet from Wallace's rifle kicked up grit that got into his eyes. Longarm blinked furiously to clear his vision as he came back up on his feet. He saw to his surprise that the dun was up as well. He had thought the horse was mortally wounded. Instead, Longarm saw only a long red crease on the animal's flank. The wound had been bad enough to make the horse stumble and fall, but not fatal.

Far from fatal, in fact. The dun put its ears back and galloped straight at Wallace. The outlaw had to leap aside desperately to avoid being trampled.

Longarm was ready by then. He took deliberate aim and squeezed off two shots. The range was still long, but the big lawman's aim was accurate. Both bullets slammed into Wallace's body and threw him backward onto the sand.

Longarm saw movement from the comer of his eye as he hurried toward Wallace's sprawled figure. Nora was running away. Wallace wasn't moving, so Longarm risked postponing checking the outlaw leader to make sure he was dead. Longarm changed direction to intercept Nora instead. Running through the soft sand was difficult for both of them, but Longarm's longer strides enabled him to catch up. He lunged forward, wrapped his left arm around Nora's waist, and bore her to the ground as he fell too.

“Hold it!” he said urgently to her. “Damn it, stop fighting! I know all about Palmer! I know he wants to kill you! Blast it, Miss Canady, I won't take you back to him!”

The words finally got through to her. She sagged back against the hot sand and peered up at Longarm. “You ... you know about Jonas?” she gasped.

“Not all of it, but enough,” he snapped. “Get it through your head, gal, I'm on your side.”

“A-all right.”

“Are you through fighting with me?”

She nodded. Longarm pushed himself to his feet and took her hand to lift her to hers. “Come on,” he said. “We've got to get out of here while we've got the chance.”

Hand in hand, they hurried toward Longarm's horse, which had stopped near the corral. Wallace's mount was still there. Longarm intended for Nora to use it, since Wallace no longer had any need for the animal. Wallace lay on his back, staring sightlessly up at the clear blue West Texas sky. His eyes were already turning glassy. He wouldn't be cooking any more meals.

“Can you ride bareback?” Longarm asked Nora.

She nodded. ‘‘I ... I think so”

He hoped so, because that meant he wouldn't have to take the time to saddle Wallace's horse. He had become aware that there was an ominous silence coming from over the dune where the battle had taken place. That might mean that all the outlaws, as well as Carter and all of his men, were dead.

Or it might not.

Longarm helped Nora onto the horse, then ran to grab the dun's reins. He swung up into the saddle, then rode over to join her. “Let's go,” he told her. “Just kick your feet against the horse's sides to get it moving, and hang on to the mane.”

She looked scared as hell, and he didn't blame her. He was still a mite nervous himself. They rode south, hoping to skirt around anyone who might have been left from the shoot-out in the dunes. As he rode, Longarm thumbed fresh cartridges into the cylinder of the Colt.

They had only gone a couple of hundred yards when, with a slither of sand, a rider topped the hill to their right and fired a rifle at them. The bullet slammed into the sand a few feet in front of Longarm. He figured it was a miss on purpose, to force them to rein in. He did so as the rider came sliding down the slope, keeping them covered with a Spencer carbine.

It was Simeon Carter.

He and Nora had been mighty lucky so far, thought Longarm, but now it looked as if their luck had just run out.

Carter kept the carbine trained on them as he rode down the slope toward them. Something about the way the man was sitting in the saddle struck Longarm as odd, and as Carter approached, Longarm saw a red stain spreading across the middle of his shirt. Carter was gutshot, which meant he was pretty much doomed. He wasn't going to survive this encounter.