Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) by Tabor Evans

now, and save your stringy, old hide? Or, how ’bout me an’ Willis and A. W. here burn the Snow Mound Inn right down to the street—you an’ the girl along with it?”
    The gunfire had died suddenly.
    Now, halfway up the saloon’s rough wooden wall, he stopped. Ahead, near a hitchrack, a man knelt behind a rain barrel, two smoking pistols in his brown hands. He was peering over the top of the rain barrel toward the hotel, the front of which Longarm could now see from his position. A man in a gray wool suit lay on the boardwalk fronting the Snow Mound Inn, belly down, one arm hanging off the boardwalk into the street. A bowler hat lay nearby. Blood glistened on the back of his coat.
    Another man stood to the left of the rain barrel, sauntering into the street. He held a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a burning hunk of stove wood in the other. A long strip of cloth dangled from the mouth of his whiskey bottle. He wore two pistols from holsters thonged low on his thighs.
    â€œScobie—you hear me in there, old man?” he shouted, tipping his head back. A felt sombrero dangled from a thong down his back. He laughed and touched the burning stick to the wick dangling from the whiskey bottle.
    Longarm stepped forward, thumbing the Winchester’s hammer back to full cock. “Hold it there, you mushy-nutted dung beetles!”
    The man behind the rain barrel twisted around toward Longarm, bringing both his pearl-gripped pistols to bear and snarling like a frenzied wildcat. Longarm’s rifle barked. The man popped off both his pistols into the dirt between his spread, black boots, and slammed his head back against the rain barrel so hard that Longarm could hear the sharp crack of his skull.
    As the man with the whiskey bottle standing halfway out in the street turned toward Longarm, he dropped the bottle at his feet and slapped his hands to the two big Remingtons bristling on his leather-clad thighs. He must have forgotten that he’d fired the bottle’s wick, however. He hadn’t gotten either pistol clear of its holster before the bottle exploded with a whoosh as loud as a dragon’s belch.
    The bottle shattered, spraying the man from boots to knees with burning whiskey.
    Longarm held fire. No point in wasting a cartridge.
    As the flames leaped up around his legs, the man in the street screamed and dropped his guns and hopped around, brushing at the flames as though to douse them. The wild movement only fanned the hellish fire, however.
    The outlaw’s frantic cries grew louder and shriller. Then, when he saw that his dancing wasn’t working, he suddenly twisted around and started running eastward along the street for no understandable reason than maybe the creek was out there. The cold water was too far away. The man blazed past Longarm like an earthly comet until, a block away, he crumpled to the ground and lay still but for the helpless flopping of his arms and legs.
    Longarm swung his head back toward the front of the saloon, hearing the thuds of running footsteps. He ran up onto the boardwalk fronting the big, glass windows and batwing doors and gained the boardwalk’s other end in time to see the third gunman run around behind a feed barn about seventy yards behind the saloon, near the narrow-gauge rails. Longarm started after him, then stopped. The man reappeared on a big, gray horse, galloping off away from the barn and corral, flopping his arms like wings and glancing warily over his right shoulder.
    Longarm cursed, dropped to a knee, and raised his Winchester. The man was moving too quickly away in herky-jerky fashion for accurate shooting, but Longarm triggered a shot anyway. And watched the slug puff dust far wide and behind the retreating rider galloping toward the far, southern ridge.
    The lawman cursed again and walked back to the front of the saloon. The man he’d shot lay slumped on one shoulder, his eyes half open and glazed in death, blood