Longarm and the Gun Trail by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 10

Longarm buried Lyndecker while the girls made breakfast and chattered festively amongst themselves, as though it were the Fourth of July and they’d be dancing with their beaus that evening.

They even refused to lay the old reprobate to rest until after they’d eaten, washed the dishes, and rolled up their blankets.

Both tried to look appropriately glum—they weren’t good enough actresses to feign anything close to bereavement—but Longarm sensed a definite buoyancy in their demeanors even as Randi read a few words from the old man’s leather-bound Bible over his freshly mounded grave. The brightness in their eyes and barely restrained merriment bespoke a couple of schoolgirls about to start their first day of summer vacation, or two fourteen-year-old Texas cowboys ready to head out on their first cattle drive.

Longarm didn’t begrudge them their covert grins and snorts and the decidedly louder, freer pitch of their conversations even while only discussing whether to throw out the beans or save them for that night’s supper. He doubted either one of them had a gone a day without being castigated by the old bastard, or worse.

While packing up Lyndecker’s possibles as Longarm hitched the horses to the covered wagon, Birt held up the old man’s liniment bottle to Randi, her blond brow arched cunningly. The brunette pursed her lips, lowered her chin shrewdly, and nodded.

Biting her upper lip with concentration, Birt swung the bottle back behind her shoulder, then flung it up the slope and into the forest. The corked brown bottle flashed once in the mid-morning light, then disappeared amongst the branches, setting a squirrel to scolding.

The force of the throw caused Birt’s low-cut summer blouse to drop down off her shoulders, exposing her large, pale breasts. Apparently, she wasn’t given to donning underwear even up this high in the chill mountains. Chuckling with her sister, she gave Longarm a devilish grin.

His face warming in spite of his having known a good dozen Birt Lyndeckers in his eventful life, the lawman abruptly though begrudgingly turned away to resume tightening buckles and adjusting hames.

The Utes’ skewering of their father might have been a fortuitous event for the Lyndecker girls, but it was the opposite of that for Longarm. Determined to finish hauling the mining supplies and sundry dry goods to Cimarron and collect the two hundred dollars for which the freight company in Walsenberg had contracted their father, Randi and Birt turned a deaf ear when the lawman mentioned they might be better off turning the wagon around and heading back to where they’d come from.

“You go on, Lawdog,” Birt had said when she’d climbed into the driver’s boot and unwound the reins from the brake handle. “We’ll be all right.”

Longarm swung up onto his paint’s back, and looked at her. She was grinning under the brim of her man’s over-large felt hat. Sitting beside her in the driver’s boot, her sister smiled, canted her head to one side, and narrowed a pretty brown eye. They were daring him to abandon them to more renegade Utes and to all the other potential trail traps between here and Cimarron.

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