Longarm and the War Clouds Read Online Free PDF Page B

to remove a stain. He wasn’t making a very good show of it. He kept rolling his cunning gaze toward Longarm’s table.
    Longarm looked at Magpie. She’d finished her sandwich nearly as quickly as her father did. Now she sniffed and swiped the back of her left hand across her mouth and nose and tossed one of her braids back behind her shoulder.
    She kept her right hand beneath the table. She had not touched her beer, but now she picked up her water glass between her thumb and index finger, curiously extending her pinky, and took two swallows. She rolled a fleeting glance at Longarm.
    Longarm was afraid for the girl. The last thing he wanted to do was get War Cloud’s daughter killed because three curly wolves had recognized him as a lawdog who’d done them wrong sometime in the past. It wasn’t an unusual situation. Longarm had been in the man-hunting business long enough to have piss-burned quite a few men.
    The third man, to Longarm’s left, set his right boot down on the floor with a grunt and said casually, “All right, fellas—I’m ready now!”
    â€œSounds good to me, Buford,” said the man behind War Cloud, turning from the bar that he’d been facing as though perusing the bottles lined up on the back bar shelves.
    Just then, Longarm recognized his bearded face with its too-close eyes and scarred lower lip. Chet Fordham grinned at the man behind Longarm and said in a voice that echoed around the cavernous drinking hall, “You ready, Willie?”
    â€œEverybody down!” Longarm shouted as Fordham swept up two long-barreled Smith & Wessons and squinted down both barrels at Longarm.
    As the bushwhacker shouted, “Die, you son of a bitch, die!” Longarm threw himself left out of his chair, noting in the periphery of his vision that the other customers in the room, having sensed trouble, flung themselves to the floor.
    Fordham’s Smith & Wessons roared, lapping flames toward Longarm’s now-empty chair. At the same time, the man behind Longarm fired his own pistols at the chair that had just been vacated by War Cloud.
    Longarm hit the floor behind a table and rolled up off his left shoulder, rising to a crouch and extending his double-action Colt Frontier .44 at Fordham. Grimacing, he cut loose with three quick shots.
    He watched through his own geysering orange flames and puffing powder smoke the outlaw he’d once put away in the Wyoming Territorial Prison for selling poison whiskey to the Arapahos, screaming and stumbling back against the bar, shooting his matched Smithies into the pressed-tin ceiling over Longarm’s table.
    Longarm shot him again. The cutthroat screamed again, dropped his shooting irons, turned to grab the edge of the bar, couldn’t hold himself, and collapsed to the floor with a thud.
    Longarm wheeled in time to see the second shooter dancing back against the naked lady he’d been ogling, triggering both of his own pistols into the floor. He dropped to his knees, loosed a bellow at the ceiling, blood pumping from the two holes over his heart, and fell face forward without even cushioning his fall with his hands.
    Two cutthroats were down.
    Longarm wheeled to face the third man, aiming his cocked revolver straight out from his shoulder. The man stood near the table at which all three had been sitting. Longarm didn’t think the man had gotten off a shot. At least, Longarm hadn’t heard a report from the third man’s direction.
    Longarm eased the tension in his trigger finger. The man was slowly loosening his hold on the Colt .45 in his right hand. He was blinking rapidly and crossing his eyes slightly as he stared up, aghast, at the horn handle of the thick bowie knife protruding from the dead middle of his forehead. Blood oozed from the deep cut made by the knife blade driven into his skull and shone darkly in the morning light pushing through the saloon’s front windows.
    He fell straight back as