Longarm and the Horses of a Different Color by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 11

Longarm knew the first rule of such situations was to take cover until you knew what the situation might be. Wandering the streets of a strange town with strangers you couldn’t identify on sight holding the initiative could take fifty years of more off your life.

If that waitress was right they didn’t know where in town he was staying. So that was where he blue-streaked to hole up and study on his other options.

The hotel being neither fancy nor a hovel it provided room service. Longarm bet the bellhop there was no way he could get up to the roof without the whole world knowing about it. After he’d lost that bet he ordered a pitcher of ice right off, with his dinner to be brought up around one P.M. Once things settled down upstairs he got a pair of field glasses out of his saddlebags and carried them up to the flat roof by way of the service stairs the bellhop had shown him.

He was a good quarter mile from that French place to the north but as he hoped, shaded by the hotel water tower, he could make the scene out clearly with the powerful field glasses and, better yet, nobody up that way was likely to make much of him against a distant skyline with naked eyes.

He couldn’t look into the ambitious shed from his vantage point, but the angle would allow him to make out anybody seated out front and he had the time for looking about worked out. So he went back down to make himself a high-ball with washstand water, a hotel tumbler and the snake medicine from the same saddlebags, over plenty of that ice.

So after that it only felt like a million years as he spent most of the rest of the day holed up.

He went easy on the smokes and snake medicine, tried to make his dinner last, and went over all the reports he’d carried along in his saddlebags to read over when he had the time.

The mysterious strangers had surely given him plenty of time. So he got to read them all thrice without any pattern emerging, even though he had all his brass tacks hammered tidy in his mind as he stretched out on the bedding to rest his bones.

It hardly seemed fair. But nature wouldn’t allow you to store up sleep the way you could store up fat and he’d already had a good night’s sleep. But he forced himself to rest to the point of tedious, knowing he might have a long night ahead and hoping muscles kept in a stall all day might respond like a cooped up pony loose at last.

He tried not to leap to conclusions, discovering this was easy as sitting on a stump in the woods and not thinking about a big Russian bear. Had the strangers asking for him been sent from the home office they’d have known where he’d be staying. Had they known his name they’d have mentioned it to that waitress.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.