Longarm and the Tin Cup Trouble by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Another bullet slammed into the ground where Longarm had been standing before the first shot had torn through his arm and thrown him back inside the cave. Dust and rock shards peppered his face.

Outside, someone whooped and hollered as another rifle boomed and another slug tore slivers from the side of the old timbered door frame.

“You’re dead, lawdog—y’hear?” another man hollered at the top of his lungs. “Dead!”

Cradling his wounded arm and snarling furiously—bushwhacked again!—Longarm rolled to his left as three more bullets, fired almost simultaneously, pelted the door frame and the floor just inside the entrance. Quickly, the lawman ripped off his neckerchief and wrapped it tightly over the wound from which blood pumped redly, soaking his shirt and claw hammer coat.

“You think he’s dead?” one of the shooters asked another.

“He rolled away from the door, so it’s my guess he’s still kickin’,” said another.

A slightly higher-pitched male voice yelled, “That was some heart shot, Willie! Looks to me like you got him in the arm, ye damn fool!”

“Go diddle your mother, Lewis,” someone said with a chuckle, adding, “ ’less you’re gettin’ tired o’ the same ol’, same ol’!”

One of the other men laughed and triggered a rifle, the bullet ricocheting off a rock just outside the mine entrance and buzzing down the yawning blackness of the corridor beyond Longarm, where it struck something with a muffled ping.

Longarm grimaced at the throbbing pain in his arm.

Before he’d rolled away from the door, he’d seen a smoke puff on the canyon’s lip, twelve feet above the canyon floor and slightly to the left, between two granite boulders. All three bushwhackers were likely up there, shooting into the canyon.

When the lawman had knotted the neckerchief tight around his arm, he slipped his double-action .44 from its cross-draw holster and thumbed back the hammer. He crawled to the rock wall just left of the door and, as more shots hammered the front of the mine entrance and the ground in front of it, he climbed to his feet and sidled over toward the door, through which sunlit dust wafted.

Bowing his head slightly beneath the low ceiling and pressing his back to the rock wall, he waited as the shooters continued shooting intermittently and yelling Southern-accented taunts.

One of the bushwhackers yelled, “Hold on, hold on! We’re just wasting ammo!”

A couple more bullets hammered the mine entrance. Then the gunfire stopped, and the echoes fell silent.

In the canyon, the wind soughed. Dust swirled beyond the open front door. Some gravel loosed by the shooters rattled down the canyon wall.

“Hey, lawdog!” one of the bushwhackers shouted.

Longarm winced as another pain spasm hammered up and down his wounded arm. He cleared his throat and turned toward the door with a savage scowl. “What the hell do you want, dead man?”

Silence.

Someone laughed and said just loudly enough for Longarm to hear, “What’s that? What’d he call me?”

Longarm bounded forward and out the doorway, aiming at a head jutting between the two boulders he’d seen before, and fired.

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