Longarm and the Arapaho Hellcats Read Online Free PDF Page B

­long-­striding toward the building from which the outlaws were firing. He thought it was the third one to the west.
    The thought had no sooner swept through his brain than a man stepped out a back door of the very building that Longarm was heading for. Longarm stopped. The other man stopped. He was small and young, wearing a ­broad-­brimmed tan hat. Two pistols were tied low on his hips. The eyes shaded by the hat brim were set close together, and they had a sharp, menacing light in them.
    He was carrying a Henry rifle down low by his side. Now, holding Longarm’s gaze, he slowly began to raise the rifle.
    â€œUh-uh,” Longarm said. “You don’t wanna do that, young fella. I’m a federal lawman.”
    As if to show Longarm how wrong he was, the kid gave an angry, bellowing wail and snapped his rifle up, cocking it. Longarm shot him twice in the chest, lifting him off his feet and throwing him several yards straight back. His body hit the ground, and the rifle clattered down beside him a half a second later.
    Longarm broke into a dead run, quickly covering the ground between him and the building the kid had come out of. The rear door was open. Longarm sidled up to the back of the ­wood-­frame building, stepped up to the door, doffed his hat, and edged a peek inside. He couldn’t see much in the dense shadows, but he could hear men shouting and shooting from the front of the ­place—­a shop of some kind.
    He doffed his hat and hurried into the rear room, slid a curtain aside from a doorway, and peered into what looked like a woman’s dress shop, with wooden mannequins standing here and there, wearing the latest in ladies’ fashions, and bolts of cloth leaning in racks. Long­arm stared past a counter to his left toward the front of the store, where three men were hunkered down by three ­broken-­out windows.
    One was just now shooting two pistols through the window nearest the closed door and shouting, “Best let us on out of here, McIntyre. You don’t, and we’ll burn it down!”
    Near the outlaw, a ­middle-­aged woman in a crisp ­green-­and-­gold-­brocade dress trimmed with white lace lay dead in a pool of her own blood, glassy eyes staring at the ceiling. Broken window glass was scattered over and around the woman.
    The dead woman kindled a fire inside of Longarm. He stepped through the curtained doorway and dropped to a knee at the end of the counter. He could see only one of the shooters ­clearly—­the one who’d just fired and was now sitting on the floor with his back against the front wall, punching fresh cartridges into one of his two pistols.
    Blood oozed from a bullet burn on his right cheek.
    Longarm pressed his Winchester’s stock against his shoulder and drew a bead on the outlaw. He shouted, “Hold it there, you son of a bitch. Custis Long, U.S. mar­shal!”
    He was pleased as punch when the outlaw did not heed his warning but shot a ­fiery-­eyed, startled gaze at him and snapped up one of his pistols. The outlaw didn’t get a single shot off before Longarm’s Winchester roared, punching a .44-caliber slug through the dead center of his forehead and painting the wall behind him with chunks of white brain and gobs of red blood.
    â€œWhat the hell?” one of the other men shouted, whipping around.
    Longarm threw himself to the floor in front of the counter as a rifle cracked three times quickly. The slug chewed through bolts of cloth or thumped into the front of the counter.
    â€œSomeone snuck up on us from behind, Bristol!” shouted the man who’d just fired.
    Longarm rose, rammed his rifle between two bolts of cloth, planted a bead on the chest of a man moving toward him and crouching over an old Spencer carbine. The man saw the rifle barrel and widened his eyes. Before he could snap the carbine up, Longarm drilled three rounds through his chest.
    The man