Longarm #427 by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

An hour later, Longarm reined up on a hill overlooking Little Missouri City, which lay half-buried under a thick blanket of heavy snow.

Old Nikolai had been right about the weather changing. Clouds had moved in, sealing off the sky. Pelletlike flakes were now tumbling out of low gray clouds to be whipped this way and that in a brittle breeze. The pale light painted the snow on the ground a murky gray-blue. In contrast, the log and mud-brick buildings of the town nestled in a shallow bowl on the other side of the hill looked especially bleak and dark, poking up like ruins from the blue snow.

The train station lay down the hill to Longarm’s right. He’d paralleled the all-but-buried tracks for the past two miles and could see them stretching away from the shabby little depot station at the north end of the town. The twin rails were ushered along by a single strand of telegraph wire strung between spindly poles. Except the wire had been cut, both cut ends drooping to the ground on the near end of the depot station.

The sight of those cut wires tightened the muscles between Longarm’s shoulder blades. He reached forward on his right to pull his Winchester from its saddleboot. Removing the deerskin mitten from over the glove he wore on his right hand, he cocked the weapon one-handed, then lowered the hammer to half cock and returned the rifle to its scabbard.

He tightened the red muffler Olga had given him. The scarf was wrapped over his head, snug beneath his hat, and knotted beneath his chin. He was grateful for the girl’s post-Christmas gift.

The muffler had likely kept his ears from freezing off.

He stuffed his right-hand mitten into a pocket of his buckskin mackinaw. A mitten prevented a man from triggering a gun. Instantly, he felt the cold penetrating his leather glove, but he’d have to endure the discomfort. Trouble had obviously come to Little Missouri City, as evidenced by the cut telegraph wire. He had no idea if it remained in the town or had moved on.

Only one way to find out.

The ends of his knotted scarf fluttering in the breeze beneath his chin, Longarm touched boot heals to the Percheron’s flanks. The horse moved off down the hill, hooves crunching the snow. He and the stout horse crossed a shallow creek and then made a wide left swing to enter the town between the depot station on the right and a large, boarded-up mercantile on the left. A small barbershop, its windows shuttered, sat beside the mercantile, dwarfed by the much larger but apparently abandoned building.

The wind moaned softly. Fresh flakes a little larger than lice fluttered down from the cold gray sky, scratching along the surface of the snow that lay with a thin, crusted surface upon the broad main street of the town. Each of the Percheron’s hooves punched easily through it, breaking the fine-china surface with crackling crunches.

About twenty feet beyond the barbershop lay a

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