Longarm and the Lost Patrol by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 11

The delay at the farm meant that it was the middle of the afternoon before they neared Marathon. Longarm recalled hearing that the settlement had gotten its name from a retired sea captain who thought the countryside hereabouts looked like Greece. Never having been there, Longarm couldn’t say whether that was right or not. To him it just looked like West Texas.

“Lot of smoke comin’ up about where the town is,” Uncle Dan pointed out when they were still a couple of miles from the settlement.

“Yeah, I noticed it a ways back,” Longarm said. “Don’t much care for the looks of it, either.”

Harriet asked, “Do you think those outlaws raided the town?”

“Could be. We’ll know soon enough,” Longarm said.

They moved on and soon came within sight of the settlement itself. Just as Longarm feared, the black column of smoke climbing into the blue sky came from one of the buildings. He spurred ahead to find out what had happened. Harriet was right behind him and Tag yapped along at her horse’s heels.

The inside of the building was burned out already, and the roof had collapsed, as had a couple of the walls. The walls that still stood were burning now. The street was crowded with people. They had formed a line from the public well and were passing buckets of water from hand to hand so that the buildings on either side of the burning structure could be saved. The bucket brigade soaked the walls and threw water on the roofs of those buildings.

Not everyone was engaged in passing the buckets. Longarm brought the roan to a stop and asked a couple of by-standers, “What happened here?”

“Outlaws,” one of the men replied. He pointed to the burning building. “That was our bank, damn it! After they’d cleaned it out, they threw a couple of sticks of dynamite inside and blew the hell out of it!”

The other man said, “That set the place on fire and there was nothing we could do. It went up too fast to stop it.”

“But they robbed the bank first, you said?”

“Pistol-whipped old Clarence Wilson, the bank manager,” the first man said bitterly. “And then the bastards left him in there when they blew it up!” He glanced at Harriet. “Pardon my language, ma’am.”

“No need to apologize,” she told him. “Those men obviously are bastards.”

“Got any law hereabouts?” Longarm asked.

“The county sheriff over at Alpine,” the man replied. “And we’ve got a town marshal.”

“Where is he?”

The man turned and pointed to a shape in the street that was covered by a piece of canvas. Longarm saw dark splotches on the canvas that could only be blood.

“Right there,” the citizen said. “He ran out with a scattergun and tried to stop those owlhoots, but they gunned him down.”

“He never had a chance,” the second man said. “There were more than a dozen of those outlaws.”

“Anybody get a good look at them, maybe recognized some of them?”

The first man shook his head. “They were all masked. Say,

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