Longarm 397 : Longarm and the Doomed Beauty (9781101545973) Read Online Free PDF

colossal undertaking had been met with a couple thousand tons of dynamite, not to mention that amount of weight in brass balls and human ingenuity, the southern dip down to Pueblo and the slow, western plunge through the Royal Gorge would be the only way to Colorado’s central Rockies and on to Utah and beyond.
    The proposed tunnel, he’d heard, would cut the 340-mile trip down to 180.
    No one would have welcomed that cutoff more than Longarm as, two days later, he stood on the same rear platform, smoking and watching the sun-bathed, little town of Dotsero slide into view along the east side of the tracks. The town had been constructed at the confluence of the Colorado and Eagle rivers, and it nestled on a sage-stippled flat amidst high, snow-mantled peaks.
    The winter hadn’t been gone long from this high-altitude oasis surrounded by gold and silver mines, and most of the ridges wore their ermine, ragged-hemmed gowns halfway down their bulky, granite slopes. The white powder hadn’t been gone from these lower plateaus, either, for the sage and cedars were green as polished jade, with several creeks that fed the town still flashing cobalt blue. Most likely, they were tooth-crackingly cold.
    His traveling gear mounted upon his shoulders, clutching his trusty Winchester ’73 in his right hand, Longarm leaped down from the coach car even as it screeched and rattled to a halt before the rickety plank-board depot, plowed through rabbit brush and willows, and tramped down into the bed of a creek cutting up close to the gravel-paved railbed.
    Longarm set his gear down.
    It had been three days since he’d had a drink of fresh water. To numb himself against Hansel Anderson’s innocuous conversation, he’d drunk too much rye, and his mouth tasted as though something dead had been putrefying in his throat for several weeks. Intending to rectify the situation straightaway, he got down on both knees, doffed his hat, and lowered his face to the sparkling snowmelt stream.
    The water was so cold that it instantly numbed his lips and tongue as, doglike, he lapped up the delicious brew that tasted refreshingly of snow and minerals.
    â€œHey, mister!” a man’s voice called from behind him.
    Longarm turned his head, water dripping from the ends of his longhorn mustache. He squinted up at a young man dressed in mismatched wool and wearing a soft, leather holster down low on his right thigh. The brim of his sun-faded bowler hat looked as though a whole passel of mice had been chomping on it. The kid stood atop the creek bank, feet spread a little more than shoulder width apart, thumbs hooked behind his cartridge belt, which glistened with fresh brass.
    â€œWho’s askin’?”
    The kid spread a devious grin. “That’s a good enough answer fer me!”
    He’d just slapped leather and was about to bring up his long-barreled, walnut-handled Remington .44, when a boom as loud as detonated dynamite sounded nearby. For a split second, the blast seemed to suck all the air out of the world.
    At the same time, the kid’s head blew apart like a tomato obliterated from a fencepost by both bores of a double-barreled, ten-gauge shotgun.

Chapter 4
    â€œYou blew the demon’s head clear off, Dad!” a woman trilled in jubilation from somewhere up along the tracks.
    Longarm was still crouched beside the creek, staring in awe at the headless corpse standing before him, atop the creek bank. He’d been a lawman for a long time, and he’d fought in the war before that, but he’d never seen a sight as grisly as the one he witnessed now—the young man standing there before him, blood geysering up from his ragged neck to ooze down over the shoulders of his ratty, brown wool coat.
    He stood sort of quivering, and for a moment Longarm thought he was going to break into a dance. His head had been vaporized by what Longarm assumed had been two barrels of large-caliber buckshot,