Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister Read Online Free PDF Page B

fashionable side of Cherry Creek before midnight with his notebook filled with the little anyone knew for certain about Devil Dave and his home range along the lower Pecos.
    The odds were fair that Deveruex and his pals would steer clear of the Deveruex-Lopez Grant long enough to make certain nobody was hot on their trail. So Longarm headed for West Texas the next morning, armed with a blanket, a federal warrant, and a tall story to go with his simple but time-tested disguise.
    Outlaw eyes grew keen along the owlhoot trail, and nobody but stage actors at some distance from the front row could hope to fool anybody who was really looking with fake beards or putty noses. But, thanks to the pestiferous dress code of the Hayes Reform Administration, Longarm had been sitting in court near the late Elsbeth Flagg clean shaven, save for his permitted mustache, in that three-piece tobacco tweed suit and shoestring tie, with his dark telescoped Stetson mostly on that table, and the tailored grips of his cross-drawn Colt ’78 hidden from the view of anybody casing the courtroom ahead of that fusillade.
    A gunfighter accustomed to a double-action sixgun and a Winchester ’73 loading the same .44-40 S&W rounds had no call packing any other brands of sidearm or saddle gun, and the double derringer Longarm had clipped to one end of his watch chain was nobody’s business but his own.
    He aimed to keep wearing his sixgun cross-draw. The lower slung buscadero side-draw favored by some quick-draw artists really did offer a split second edge in a face-to-face showdown, standing tall. After that, a sixgun in a side-draw holster was much more awkward to get at sitting down or on horseback, if it didn’t fall out of the holster whilst you mounted up in a hurry. So Longarm stuck with the safer and surer style of gun toting proven in action by the likes of Hickok and the less famous but way deadlier young new-comer from Tennessee, Commodore Perry Owens. Longarm settled for a used but fancy tooled leather cross-draw rig he picked up in a hock shop along Larimer Street. He already had a faded denim outfit, and the notion of wearing some broke stranger’s boots had little appeal to him. But a pair of pawned spurs, fancied up Border Style with coin-silver, inlaid against a gunmetal-blue ground, made his broken-in and unpolished army stovepipes seem more cow. Meanwhile a man could get around faster on foot with low heels, and Longarm was so tall that he didn’t seem to be walking lower than most riders.
    On most field missions Longarm brought his personal army saddle and bridle along, with his Winchester and possibles lashed to the same. But General McClellan hadn’t included a roping horn when he’d designed that popular cavalry seat. So Longarm had his Winchester and usual saddle bags lashed to the double-rig and tie-down stock-saddle riding on the baggage rack in the private Pullman compartment he’d hired for the long round-about train ride to West Texas.
    He hadn’t asked to ride so fancy. Marshal Billy Vail had ordered it. The duck-soup simple plan his boss had reluctantly gone along with hinged on nobody suspecting Longarm’s assumed name and occupation. A stranger drifting in from the west as a cow hand thrown out of work in the wake of the recent Lincoln County War was likely to have some awkward questions to answer if somebody else remembered riding a train down from Denver with the suspicious cuss.
    So he stayed in his compartment and had his meals delivered at some extra cost, cussing Billy Vail and his own luck whenever he spied a well-turned ankle getting on at more than one stop. But all things good and bad must end, and he got off at last in El Paso to hole up at once in a posada he knew there run by friendly Mexicans.
    He knew gals in El Paso of all complexions and persuasions. But the kindly old philosopher who’d warned a woman’s tongue could wag more than a dog’s tail had likely