Longarm and the War Clouds by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans [Evans, Tabor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Westerns
ISBN: 9780515153804
Google: 6TaLmgEACAAJ
Amazon: 051515380X
Barnesnoble: 051515380X
Goodreads: 17572821
Publisher: Jove
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Kilroy seemed to feel genuinely bad about the dustup in Major Belcher’s office. He said it would probably be best if he put the major to bed and gave him time to sober up before they “visited” further. He assured the visitors that the incident in the office was out of character for the normally more restrained camp commander.

The poor man just had his neck up over his missing wife.

Kilroy arranged for Longarm and War Cloud to throw down in a vacant unmarried officers’ quarters, the row of which sat beside the fort sutler’s store that had a small, lean-to saloon attached. Through the major’s adjutant, Corporal Carson, the captain arranged for Magpie to stay with one of the noncommissioned officer’s families, though when War Cloud explained this to Magpie, the girl spat out in her guttural tongue that she’d rather sleep in a dry wash with bobcats.

With a tense smile, War Cloud assured the captain that his daughter was grateful for the amenities. Then he gave his strident young princess a blank, subtly commanding stare. While the girl was led away by the noncom’s merry, full-hipped wife, Longarm and War Cloud followed Corporal Carson over to the row of unmarried officer’s quarters.

War Cloud and Longarm had a quick drink and a short nap. War Cloud was out of sorts. He got up in the early afternoon and headed off to pay a visit to the three other Apache scouts stationed at McHenry.

He wanted to confer with them about Black Twisted Pine and to generally “get the lay of the land around here.” The corporal had informed him that the scouts’ quarters were still back near the barn and stables, at the base of the tabletop mesa rising north of the parade ground.

Longarm himself wanted to consult with the scouts but knew that War Cloud would probably gather more information about the Apaches’ point of view without a white man present. Especially a white federal lawman.

He bit off the end of a cigar and headed on out of the pent-up heat in his room to sit on a bench under the brush-roofed ramada facing the parade ground and smoke his cigar, sip from his bottle of Tom Moore, and gather some wool on the situation at hand.

The fort was quiet in the afternoon. The only sounds were a few soldiers talking in the saloon attached to the sutler’s store to Longarm’s right, the occasional whinny of a horse out in one of the corrals, and the rumble of thunder in a purple storm mass sliding over the northern mesa. The air shepherded along in front of the storm was cool and refreshing as it blew against Longarm’s face.

It smelled of desert sage and rain.

Longarm closed his eyes and let the cool, fragrant wind brush against him as he smoked the cigar and registered beneath the growing rumble of the oncoming storm the thunder of discontent in his own mind.

What in hell were he and War Cloud doing down here,

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