Longarm #399 : Longarm and the Grand Canyon Murders (9781101554401) (8 page)

“Dammit,” Longarm weakly whispered, trying to reach around to his back and feel the bullet hole.

He couldn’t quite reach that far behind, but the back of his shirt was wet with warm blood and he knew that he was in desperate shape and would bleed to death if he didn’t get the wound plugged.

Longarm gazed around him and saw nothing but rock-strewn hills, a few struggling piñon and juniper pines, sage and rabbit brush. While the mare struggled to regain her breath, Longarm sat in his saddle growing weaker
by the moment, as his mind whirled an endless circle trying to figure out what he had to do in order to stay alive.

After several minutes, he glanced back over his shoulder to see if the other rifleman had followed his erratic trail into this wild and barren country. Longarm couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean at least one of the ambushers wasn’t on his trail.

Had he somehow managed to kill Carl Whitfield? Longarm knew that if he had fatally shot the liveryman, it had been out of dumb luck. He’d been under heavy fire and on the back of a racing horse when he’d unloaded his pistol toward Whitfield. But maybe he had really gotten lucky and killed the bastard, and that would make it a little easier if he was about to die out here on this vast and desolate Navajo reservation.

His head was nodding lower and he was gripping the saddle horn with both fists, knowing that if he fell off the mare, he was as good as dead. Suddenly, Longarm heard the ominous sound of a rattlesnake close by. He looked down and saw the viper not six feet away, coiled up in the shade of a rock, ready to strike out at the mare’s leg. The buckskin jumped into the air and hit the ground running. Longarm managed to hang on, but only for a moment, and then his strength was gone and he let go of his saddle horn and went spiraling down into darkness.

Two miles back at the gap, Al Hunt knelt beside his dying cousin. “You’re an unlucky bastard,” Hunt said. “That big federal marshal was hit and shootin’ blind. No way should you be gut-shot like this. You just had some terrible luck is all.”

Carl Whitfield stared up at a blue and cloudless sky,
trying to hold on to life. “I was
never
lucky,” he gasped. “And now I’m going to die out here in this hell.”

“Yeah,” Al Hunt said rather matter-of-factly, “I’m afraid that’s the way it’s going to happen. You’re gut-shot, and there ain’t a thing to be done for it except for you to just up and die.”

Whitfield grabbed his cousin’s wrist and gave it a powerful squeeze. “That marshal couldn’t have gotten very far. He was hit bad and bowed up in his saddle. I saw the blood gushin’ out of his back.”

“I killed him for sure,” Hunt said, feeling very proud of himself. “No doubt about that.”

Carl Whitfield was a big man and he wasn’t dying easy. “Al!”

“Yeah?”

“After I die, take me back to Flagstaff and use my thirty dollars to give me a decent burial.” Wild fear captured his battered face. “Swear that you won’t leave my body out here where the animals will eat me!”

“I’ll take you back,” Al solemnly promised. “And I’ll see you get buried near your brother, only with a better headstone.

“And…” Whitfield was struggling for his last breath and they both knew it. “Al, you gotta do something else for me.”

“Name it.”

“Write on the headstone that…”

Whatever Carl Whitfield wanted on his headstone was lost as his voice and his heavyset body shivered into a deathly stillness.

Al Hunt wasn’t a big man, but he was cunning and deadly. He was also practical, and he was already thinking about
that rich blond woman that he and his rifle had just made a widow. Why couldn’t he still take her? And now there would be no question of who would hump her first.

“Why not?” he asked himself out loud as he stood and surveyed the inhospitable and empty landscape. “But first I’ll have to get rid of Carl’s body. Git rid of his horse and saddle too. Leave no trace of what happened here and head for the stagecoach stop and just wait for the woman to show up. She’s never seen me. I can still have her and her money if I play my cards right.”

A smile formed on his ferretlike face, and he snorted with nearly gleeful anticipation. All his life he’d been the follower, the one that sucked hind tit. Carl had been the smart one who had bought the livery and made a decent living. Now, by gawd, he could have someone write a last will and testament giving
him
the Flagstaff stable and anything valuable that went with it.

“Ha!” Al Hunt laughed, seeing how everything was going to fall into his hands. The rich, blond woman, her money, expensive jewelry, and even his cousin Carl’s Flagstaff stable.

He’d have it
all
!

Al hurried over to the horses. He was a damn good cowboy and had a rope tied to his saddle. He gathered both of the horses up and led his cousin’s bay over to Carl’s body.

“You’re too damn big for me to lift you up and over your horse, so I’ll have to drag you a ways off.”

Al tied one end of the rope to the saddle horn and the other around Carl’s ankles just above his boots. The boots were pretty nice, so Al took a moment to try them on, but they were much too large for his small feet. So he put his own down-at-the-heel boots back on, remounted his
horse, grabbed the reins of Carl’s horse, and looked back at his cousin’s blood-soaked corpse. “Carl, you sure do look like shit,” he said, leading both horses out of the gap in the hills then up through the sagebrush. Twice, Carl’s big body got hung up in brush and Al had to dismount and drag it sideways, grunting and cussing. But eventually, he dragged the corpse for almost two miles, until he found a deep and obscure arroyo.

“This ought to do,” he said to the battered and gray-faced man. “Ain’t quite a nice grave in Flagstaff, but you won’t know the difference and I don’t rightly care. Why waste the money on a dead man that always tried to boss me around?”

Al untied the rope and tethered both horses to a stunted piñon pine tree. He collected his cousin’s six-gun and money then spent an hour covering his body with a heavy mound composed of rocks, sticks, and pieces of deadwood. When he was satisfied that the body would never be found way the hell out on the reservation, he mounted his horse and led Carl’s bay a few miles out into the wilderness, where he reluctantly shot the animal.

Al was tough as rawhide, lean as a desert coyote, and quick as a cat. He rolled a smoke and studied the dead horse, wishing he could have taken it over to that Hopi trading post at Keams Canyon and sold the animal, but that would have tied him to the death not only of his cousin, but also of the missing federal marshal.

“This way, I’m free and clear. Just got to find someone to write me up Carl’s last will and testament and get me some of that blond woman. Ought not to be too hard, I reckon.”

Al Hunt rode back to the gap where they’d waited in ambush. He found a dead limb from a tree and took his time wiping out all evidence of the ambush and the death
of his cousin. Satisfied, he backed up to his horse, wiping out his footprints as he went, and mounted his horse.

“Let’s go,” he said, pushing the animal into an easy gallop. “We got to get to that stagecoach station and have a little fun before the
real
party begins!”

The Navajo shepherd, his sixteen-year-old son, and two thin black-and-white dogs were moving their small flock across the dry and seemingly desolate reservation. The sheep were long-haired and produced excellent wool in addition to being a source of meat to the People…the Dine. It was a warm afternoon, and when they pushed their vocal flock over a rocky ridge, they heard a single rifle shot off in the distance.

Thinking it might have been one of their own people in trouble and in need of help, the father left the son and rode his pony toward the sound of the shot. What he saw next was very troubling. A man on a horse was jamming his rifle into his saddle boot and riding away to the north while a horse on the ground was in the middle of its death throes.

The old man did not understand this, and something told him that there was a great danger if he were seen by the departing horseman. So he rode behind the hill and waited a little while, and then he trotted over to the dead horse, dismounted, and examined the animal. He would, of course, take the good saddle, which was much better
than his own, and the bridle, saddlebags, and the rope. But as he examined the dead horse, he could see nothing wrong with its feet or legs, and he could not understand why anyone would kill such a valuable and healthy saddle horse.

The old man needed help to remove the saddle, the off stirrup of which was pinned under the weight of the dead animal, so he rode back to his son, whose name was Henry, and explained the situation.

Henry listened without interruption and then said, “The dogs will protect the flock. I will come with you and we will get the saddle. This is a good day for us, eh, Father?”

“It might be a good day, but it also might be a very bad day. Something is not right.”

“Did the rider see you?” Henry asked, concerned about his father.

“No.”

Henry was a handsome, confident young man. “Then there is nothing to worry about.”

So the father and the son rode their ponies over to the dead horse, and after a great amount of pulling and scraping away dirt, they removed the saddle. Henry looked up and saw buzzards circling. He rode a short loop around the dead horse.

“Something is not right here. I feel an evil spirit close by.”

“Then we should hurry away!”

But Henry was a curious young man. “You go,” he said. “I will follow the tracks. Maybe we will find another dead horse and a good saddle for me.”

The old man, whose name was Shonto, did not like this idea, but he could not deny the fact that Henry’s saddle was just a few scraps of rotting leather. So he said, “Be careful, my son.”

Henry then galloped off on his small roan pony. He had ridden only a short way when the tracks dipped into a deep arroyo. And it was then that he saw the mound of rocks and brush. A chill passed through his lean and shirtless body. Henry said a quick prayer that he would not be killed or harmed. He knew without any doubt that a dead person was under the mound and that something was very wrong, because white people did not bury their dead in lonely arroyos.

Once more Henry rode around in a circle, and once more he set off to the west, with buzzards coming lower and lower. He came to a gap in the hills. Dismounting, he spent an anxious half hour reading the signs of a fight and seeing dark, clotted blood on the dirt and also where a rider had raced away into the brush.

“I will offer a prayer,” Henry said, feeling even greater evil at this place. “And go back to my father and the flock.”

But after his fervent prayer, Henry could
not
turn back to his flock. He was a very curious Navajo and he was hoping for a fine saddle like his father had just discovered. So he followed the tracks into the brush for two miles, and that is when he spotted the beautiful buckskin mare standing with her head up and her ears pricked forward in his direction.

“This is not a mustang,” Henry said to himself. “This fine horse wears a saddle. But where is its rider?”

Henry had an old black powder pistol stuck in his belt. It was a Navy Colt and he was good with it, although it was prone to misfiring. Drawing his pistol, he rode toward the buckskin, which showed no inclination to gallop away.

And then Henry saw the very big man lying on his back in the rocks and brush. Ants had already begun to
crawl across the white man’s bloodless face. Henry slowly dismounted and returned his pistol back behind his belt. He looked at the buckskin mare, and his heart jumped with happiness because this was an extremely fine horse and saddle.

And now it was all his!

The man twitched, and a big hand slapped weakly at the ants crawling on his face. Henry jumped back and yanked his pistol out, then cocked it and pointed it at the big white man.

“Who are you!” he cried.

The man’s lips moved, and then his hand slipped under his vest, and when it appeared again, there was a shiny United States marshal’s badge.

Henry didn’t know what to do!

He went over to the man and stared down at his face. The man opened his eyes, barely, and whispered, “Help me.”

Henry whirled around and looked to the east. He wished more than anything that Shonto was with him now, because he would have a better idea of what to do next.

“Help…me!”

Henry faced a hard decision, and he took a moment to bow his head and pray for the right answer. He did
not
want to help this man. The white man’s law was very complicated, and if this man lived, bad things could befall not only himself but his family. Maybe the lawman would even decide that he, Henry, had shot him.

“Please” was the urgent whisper.

Henry had a goatskin bag of water. He grabbed it from what passed as a saddle and opened the stopper. “Drink,” he ordered, cradling the man’s head in one hand and pouring water into his mouth.

Longarm drank and drank. The water was bitter, but
it was wet, and he slapped some of it on his sunburned face to revive his senses. “I was shot in the back and need your help.”

Henry did not want to roll the big man over and look at the bullet wound. “You are probably going to die.”

“Maybe not.”

Henry wasn’t sure what to do next. His hogan was at least six miles away over rough ground…his father, about five miles.

“What can I do?”

“A wagon.”

“We do not have a wagon. Only sheep.”

“A travois. Make a travois.”

Henry stood up and walked around in a small, worried circle. He had helped Shoto make a travois once to move his mother to the reservation headquarters, where there was a doctor. He could make one now…but
should
he?

Longarm opened his eyes wider and battled his pain. He wondered if the young Navajo was going to help him, or kill him and steal his belongings.

“If you help me,” Longarm managed to croak, “I will repay you well.”

“With money?”

“Or that buckskin mare.”