Longarm was looking for an outlaw, but the only person here apparently not a passenger was a black porter who sat on a bench on the car’s left side, in a small open space in which a black, bullet-shaped stove hunched with a box heaped with firewood. The porter, a young man with obsidian-dark skin, stared at Longarm with as much wide-eyed fear as the others.
“I’m a U.S. marshal,” the lawman announced, walking slowly down the middle aisle, sliding his rifle barrel from right to left and back again, ready to shoot the first man who poked a gun at him. “Any owlhoots here?”
Aside from the baby’s crying and a woman sobbing, the small crowd was eerily quiet. Several of the standing men’s eyes kept darting toward the rear of the jostling car. When Longarm was ten feet away from the rear door, a thick man in a round-brimmed, black felt hat scrambled up from the floor, holding a young woman in a skimpy, shiny red dress in front of him with one arm. He held a pearl-gripped, black steel Colt against the girl’s head.
The girl was green-eyed and pretty in a hard way, and while she winced against the harshness of the man’s stranglehold on her neck, she didn’t appear overly frightened. She was one of those girls who’d seen it all, and this was just one more thing to see.
The outlaw dragged the girl to the car’s rear door, shouting, “One more step, lawdog, and I’m gonna give this doxie an extra ear!”
“Drop it!”
“Uh-uh.” The hard case grinned and shook his head. He had little pig eyes and a double chin, two holsters hanging low on his hips, one empty. “You drop it. You got three seconds, or I’m gonna blow her head off!”
Running footsteps sounded on the coach roof above Longarm’s head. Two men were up there. They were shouting as they ran from the rear of the car toward the front.
Longarm’s glance only flicked toward the hammered-tin ceiling before leveling on the hard case grinning before him and holding the cocked pistol to the whore’s head. He wore a greasy, mocking smile.
Quickly, Longarm lined up his sights on the man’s left temple. He knew it was a risky shot, and that the hard case would likely drop the hammer on the whore as he died, but it was a shot Longarm had to take to try to save the other passengers.
The hard case must have seen the flinty, flat cast in Longarm’s brown eyes as he arranged the sights on the man’s head, just above his right eye. The hard case’s own eyes snapped wide in horror, and just as he dropped his lower jaw and opened his mouth to scream, Longarm squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.
The rifle’s blast echoed around the inside of the rumbling car like a Fourth of July rocket detonated inside an empty tin rain barrel. The hard case smashed his ruined head back against the door so hard he broke the window, painting the sharp-edged shards with his own blood and white bone and brain matter. At the same time, he triggered his pistol, and somehow the bullet sliced up in front of the girl’s face to plunk harmlessly into the ceiling.
As the dying man released his hold on the girl’s arm, she dropped straight down to the floor on her knees, looking more relieved than terrified, and cast her green-eyed gaze on Longarm. “Thanks,” she said raspily, breathing hard and rubbing her neck.
The double-chinned hard case was slowly sagging to the floor, glass raining down from the door around him, his little pig eyes flat and lightless. His arms jerked as he died.
Longarm ejected his spent shell casing. As the cartridge clattered to the wooden floor and rolled, he wheeled toward the front of the coach, where two figures shone in the door’s small window, one man looking inside. As the outlaw brought a pistol up, all the women in the car gasped in unison, and one of the miners said, “Good Lord!”
Longarm ran toward the front of the car. “Everyone down!”
They all cowered at the same time, and as the outlaw backed up, grinning, and aimed his pistol at the window to shoot into the car, Longarm stopped and fired three quick rounds—boom! boom! boom!—through the door. One bullet blew out the glass still splattered with the Mexican’s blood, while the other two punched through the wood. All three must have ripped into the outlaw with the pistol, because he suddenly flew up and back, bouncing off the rear wall of the next car forward.
His pistol popped into the air above his head. Beneath the rumble of the train, which seemed to be picking up more and more speed and angling slightly downward now, the report sounded little louder than a twig snapping. The baby wailed louder, and the sobbing around Longarm grew more frantic as he ejected the last spent cartridge, levered a fresh one into the breech, and prepared to shoot the second shooter on the platform.
Foot thuds sounded atop the coach. Longarm lowered his Winchester. Apprehension caused the short hairs along the back of his neck to bristle. The man on the roof shouted, “You made a big mistake, lawdog!”
The train robber triggered two rounds through the roof—one hole after another appearing in the middle of the car, just behind Longarm. One bullet plowed into an empty bench while the other kissed the nap from the wool coat of one of the miners, causing the man to curse sharply as he grabbed that arm and lurched toward the side of the car. Heart thudding, knowing he might have a bloodbath involving innocent bystanders on his hands, Longarm fired three rounds into the ceiling, around where the shooter on the roof had fired.
Longarm ejected the last spent casings and stared at the ceiling, pricking his ears. The shooter laughed tauntingly, and fired three more rounds through the ceiling, these three bullets tearing harmlessly into the coach’s floor or thumping into the wood box near the stove, thank God.
Longarm fired three more rounds desperately, gritting his teeth and narrowing his eyes. He lunged to his left, and grabbed the brake chain. A sudden slowing of the train would likely knock the owlhoot off the coach.
He jerked hard on the chain four or five times. The train didn’t slow an iota. He cursed.
“Tried that,” one of the men near him shouted. “They musta rigged the brakes from the engine!”
Longarm triggered the Winchester into the ceiling two more times. His last shot was still echoing around the coach, and he could hear the shooter laughing, when he ran down the center aisle and out the bullet-riddled rear door. He turned sharply right, grabbed the ladder, and climbed, glancing once to his left and cursing.
The train had climbed to the top of the pass and was starting down.
If there’d been an engineer at the controls, he probably would have heard the gunfire and stopped the train. Since they were still moving, and gradually increasing speed on the backside of Horse Thief Pass, the engineer and tender must both be dead. The outlaws had probably shot them when they’d first boarded the train, so they themselves could control the combination, not wanting it stopped until they’d reached wherever they intended to get off and mount fresh horses waiting for them.
Longarm lunged up and over the top of the coach car just as the outlaw leader, Rio Hayes, fired one of the two pistols in his hands through the roof, about two feet from Hayes’s left boot. Longarm brought up the Winchester quickly and squeezed the trigger.
The hammer pinged on an empty chamber.
He tossed the gun aside, and as it dropped onto the vestibule below, he palmed his Colt .44-40 but not before Rio Hayes gave a jeering whoop and triggered both his pistols at Longarm.
One hammered into the coach roof near Longarm’s right knee. The other three sailed wide. The train was moving and pitching so violently now that the shooter couldn’t draw an accurate bead.
Longarm raised the double-action Colt and fired. Hayes was laughing madly and dancing around, making it doubly impossible for Longarm to pink the son of a bitch.