Longarm and the Banker's Daughter (9781101613375) by Tabor Evans Page B

of something they needed more of.
    Longarm lowered the glasses, rose, and dropped them back into his saddlebags. He swung into the saddle and gigged the grullo back down the slanting mesa to the tableland, then turned the horse right, heading back to the trail.
    As he did, he glanced behind him. He couldn’t see the men trailing him from nearly a mile away, but they were pushing their horses hard. If they kept up that frantic pace, they’d be on Shafter’s group soon. Longarm had to reach them and warn them. With Shafter’s four gunnies, Shafter himself, and Longarm, they should be able to bring down Heck Gunn and Orlando Cruz handily, and then Longarm would not only have captured their deceitful albeit beautiful coconspirator, but he’d have the money they’d stolen from Alexander Sackett’s bank, as well.
    He tapped the heels of his cavalry stovepipes against the grullo’s flanks, and the horse responded by stretching its stride into a sage-chewing gallop straight north along the old Indian trail he and the others had followed. He was starting to feel better, less like a damn sap and more like a lawman again, when he, staring straight ahead over his lunging horse’s head and twitching ears, saw something that created an instant ache in the pit of his belly.
    Someone lying beside the trail near where he and the others had camped the night before.
    He knew right away who it was. Some inner voice told him, and when he’d swung down from the grullo while it was still running, he dropped to a knee beside the man and saw the fringed elk-skin jacket, the red-blond hair curling over the collar.
    Shafter lay on his side. He was still breathing, his shoulders rising and falling quickly. With every breath, he shuddered.
    Longarm rolled him over on his back and winced when he saw the blood over the man’s belly. The fancy Dan had both his gloved hands clamped tight to the wound, but they weren’t stopping the blood and viscera from oozing out of the two or three holes in him. His open eyes were vacant, but they swung toward Longarm, and his mouth opened and closed as he managed to say, “B-bastards . . . took her. Took . . . Lacy.”
    â€œWhy?” But of course Longarm knew why. They wanted some of what they’d heard last night for themselves.
    â€œThey laughed,” Shafter said. “They just kept . . . laughing . . .”
    â€œDo you know where they’re headed?”
    All Captain Richard Shafter said was, “B-bastards  . . .” And then he turned his head to one side, and his shoulders stopped rising and falling. His hands fell away from his belly.
    Longarm cursed and looked down his back trail. The pack of Gunn and Cruz riders were merely a brown splotch from this distance. It was hard to tell, but Longarm thought they were walking their horses.
    He turned back to Shafter, shook his head in frustration. “You stupid son of a bitch, Dickie!” If the man hadn’t been lording the girl over his men, this might not have happened. Now, Longarm had a decision to make. Did he want to try to ambush Gunn and Cruz and retrieve the stolen money or go after Lacy?
    He didn’t have much sympathy for the girl, but it was her he’d go after. He couldn’t let Dickie’s four gunnies rape her and likely kill her and toss her in some ravine. Gunn and Cruz’s men could wait. At least, he’d save them for later if they didn’t catch up to him before he’d caught up to Lacy and her four captors . . .
    Quickly, he dragged the dead Dickie Shafter off the trail and behind a knoll. “Sorry, pal. I’d like to dig you a proper grave, but we’re burnin’ daylight.”
    Longarm merely laid the man out as respectfully as he could—on his back, legs together, wrists crossed on his bloody belly—then jogged back out to where his grullo cropped fescue and buckbrush.