Longarm and the 400 Blows by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans [Evans, Tabor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101560433
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The artillery horse proved to be a better mount than he had any right to expect since it was the animal the artillery battery back at Fort Marion was most willing to get rid of.

It was deaf as a post of course, probably as a result of having its eardrums pierced. A good many outfits, both cavalry and artillery, did that to insure a horse would not be frightened in the face of gunfire. It was a practice Longarm disapproved because often it only served to make the animal even more spooky since they could not hear what was coming and could be startled by everything. Still, this big brown creature seemed to suffer no such effects.

It was an older horse, wide in the barrel and with a bobbed tail. It stood close to seventeen hands and did not neck-rein, but its trot was smooth and fast and it could hold the gait seemingly without end.

Longarm took the road back to the asshole storekeeper’s village at a steady pace, letting the big horse hold to the trail without much guidance from its rider. But then the horse’s night vision was far better than Longarm’s.

He rode through the darkened settlement without pause. But he did lift a middle finger to the storekeeper as he passed by.

He reached the abandoned buggy and surrey in the wee hours of the morning and stopped there to retrieve a few items from the luggage he had left in the buggy. He hoped he would see the carpetbag and the Gladstone again sometime, but if he did not, there was nothing in them that could not be replaced.

He transferred a box of spare cartridges and his bottle of rye to the army-issue saddlebags behind his McClellan and filled whatever space was left in them with a few extra shirts and underwear. Then he climbed back onto the brown and resumed the road-eating trot.

Daybreak found him on a road leading north, toward—he hoped—Lake City. If there had been any signposts or markers, he missed seeing them in the dark, but this was his best guess.

He did not want to make a false start and have to retrace his steps. But then when he thought about it, Gardner and the woman were already far ahead of him. He needed to think of this chase as a distance event and not a sprint.

And he intended to get to the finish line, however long it took.

“C’mon, y’ old son of a bitch,” he muttered to the brown.

The deaf horse did not so much as twitch an ear at the sound of his voice.

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