Longarm and the War Clouds by Tabor Evans Page B

the grulla he’d requisitioned at Fort Dryer in New Mexico, and sat his saddle tensely.
    Longarm, riding to the scout’s left, also drew rein. Magpie stopped her own buckskin behind the two men.
    Longarm glanced at War Cloud and said quietly, “What is it, amigo?”
    â€œDo you feel it?”
    â€œThem long fingernails been raking the back of my neck for the last ten minutes—that what you’re talkin’ about?”
    War Cloud stared straight ahead toward a low, boulder-strewn ridgeline sitting perpendicular to the trail, about fifty yards ahead. The trail had been blasted through the middle of the outcropping, forming a gray notch straight ahead in the moon-washed, purple ridge.
    Longarm looked around, as did War Cloud.
    The night was eerily quiet. The moon was quartering low in the northwest, casting an eerie, pearl light from behind Longarm’s right shoulder and over the scattered boulders, mesquites, saguaros, and greasewood clumps. Stars flickered like distant campfires.
    There was not a breath of breeze stirring the refreshingly cool desert air.
    A lone coyote had been baying for the past fifteen minutes.
    Nearly straight ahead, a pinprick of light flashed.
    â€œAmbush!”
Longarm shouted, reaching forward to yank his Winchester ’73 from the scabbard strapped over the right stirrup of his McClellan saddle.
    As the bullet screeched off a rock about two feet ahead on his left, the rifle’s distant crackle reached his ears. He leaped out of his saddle, as his two trail mates did likewise, and slammed his rifle’s butt against the coyote dun’s left hip, sending the horse galloping off to the right with the others, out of the line of fire.
    Another rifle flashed just right of the first bushwhacker’s gun. As the bullet plumed dust in front of him, Longarm dropped to a knee in the trail, raised his rifle, and squeezed off four quick rounds at the ridge.
    War Cloud, crouched to Longarm’s right, did the same, and when his reports stopped echoing, Longarm ran off the left side of the trail, yelling, “I’m goin’ in!”
    Behind him, he heard War Cloud shout in his Coyotero tongue at Magpie. Longarm knew enough of the language to know he’d told the girl to stay with the horses, so they wouldn’t run far. Then he glimpsed War Cloud dashing through the desert and paralleling Longarm off the trail’s right side, heading for the ridge.
    The bushwhackers opened up with their rifles but they obviously couldn’t see the two men charging toward them, weaving separate courses around the wiry brown brush clumps, cholla cactus patches, and boulders. Their slugs struck wild, spanging wickedly off rocks or snapping branches.
    Running hard, Longarm gained the base of the ridge and didn’t slow his pace much as he lunged up the side, loosing sand and gravel in his wake. One of the rifles flashed ahead and on his right, three bullets kicking up gravel well behind him. The shooter could now hear him, maybe see his shadow, but he couldn’t track him.
    Longarm skipped off several boulders, leaped a low barrel cactus, and skipped off another boulder as he reached the razorback ridge between a one-armed saguaro on his left and a horse-sized and -shaped chunk of rock on his right. He pressed his shoulder to the side of the boulder, thumbing back his rifle hammer.
    Breath raked in and out of his lungs from the hard climb. He steadied his hands on his rifle. An eerie silence had fallen in the wake of the shooting. Longarm could sense the tension in the bushwhackers. They knew they’d been run up on; they just didn’t know where the runners were.
    Longarm consciously slowed his breathing, pricking his ears.
    Gravel crackled somewhere ahead and right, along the crest of the ridge he was on. One of the shooters was moving toward him.
    He crouched low, took one step forward, and looked around behind the boulder. A shadow moved down the slope and