Longarm explained, “Sister Anders here knows a retired surgeon there.”
The prisoner melting ice on the bunk with his warm belly moaned, “I don’t want no retired sawbones touching my fair white body! I want to go to that hospital in Deming you were talking about before. Then I want another doctor to look at me before anyone cuts into me. For I have heard it said that opening up a man’s belly can be perilous as all get-out!”
Longarm didn’t answer. He read enough to know Drake was only repeating common medical opinion. Thanks to modern painless surgery, opening up the skull, chest, or abdominal cavity was now more possible. But it was improbable that the patient would recover from the almost sure-to-fester incisions and sutures. It would have been unkind to tell a convicted killer what the exact odds were. So he simply let the nurse assure Drake nobody was about to cut him open if there was any other way to keep his fool appendix from busting inside him like an overstuffed sausage. Longarm had read how some docs held it was best to open and clean out the ruptured guts as a last resort, while some few others were in favor of going in ahead of time, removing the swollen appendix in one piece before it burst, and hoping plenty of phenol and prayer as you backed out of the exposed innards would offer a better hope against infection.
Sister Ilsa allowed strong liquor wasn’t likely to put Drake in any more peril than he seemed to be in. So Longarm had that dining car attendant fetch them a bottle of Maryland Rye. The conductor only stayed for one swig before he had to move on with his ticket puncher, assuring them he’d let them off at Growler Wash unless they changed their minds. So Harmony Drake got to swallow most of the pint, with Longarm and the gal helping, as the train crawled on through a desert night with plenty of stars but no moon worth mentioning.
Longarm knew the flag stop the nurse had mentioned lay about half way between Yuma and Gila Bend. So he wasn’t surprised less than two hours later to feel the train was slowing down. He was on his own feet and had his prisoner dressed more modestly, uncuffed from the bunk bed, when the conductor came back to say they were fixing to stop and to ask about their baggage.
The gal said her one overnight bag had been checked through to Deming and that she figured she might as well pick it up from their depot once she got there.
Longarm said his prisoner had no baggage, and allowed he’d trust the same railroad with his own light baggage, seeing they’d all be going to the end of the line shortly if Doc Wolfram could do something for Harmony Drake’s indisposition. He felt no call to discuss funeral arrangements in front of any man before he was sure they’d be needed.
So with Drake allowing that he was starting to feel better, thanks to all that ice, or Maryland Rye, they got him out on the car platform by the time their train rattled across a trestle spanning a wide dry wash and hissed to a stop on the far side, with a handful of window lights watching them from the low starlit adobes of the desert hamlet.
Some dirtily lit figures commenced to drift toward them as Longarm and the gal helped the gimpy Harmony Drake down the steps to the trackside gravel. Sister Ilsa called out for help in getting a mighty sick man over to Doctor Wolfram’s place. After some buzzing back and forth, one of the hands allowed in a friendly tone that he knew who they were talking about. So it seemed as if they all wanted to help as the conductor up on the platform yanked his bell cord and the night train proceeded onward up the line.
Longarm asked which way they were trying to herd his sick prisoner, seeing they seemed to be milling nowhere in particular, even with the tracks cleared and nothing blocking progress in any fool direction.
Then somebody drove another night train right against the back of Longarm’s skull, and he just had time to gasp, “Gee, Doc, I thought she was a nice gal,” before this inkwell opened wide and swallowed him lock, stock, and barrel.
Chapter 2
After he’d been at it a spell, Longarm got to wondering why he was soaring through the night like an owl-bird with a headache, high above the stars. Then it came to him that he was looking up, not down, at the starry desert sky and that his only resemblance to any species of bird was that he seemed to be lying spread-eagle on his back as naked as a jay.
He naturally tried to do something about that, and decided to stop and think some more when somebody drove a red hot hat pin into his bare back. For the sons of bitches had staked him by his wrists and ankles aboard an ant pile, and this was no time to wake a million or more red harvesters from their evening repose!
The night air all around was goose-pimple cold by now. It wouldn’t warm enough to really stir the multitudes just under him before the sun rose a bit. But once you’sorted all those stars into constellations, they read that it was well past midnight. That meant he had four to six hours to bust loose, without busting more of the crust he lay upon. They’d left him a swell choice. He could relax and just wait to be eaten alive after sunrise, or invite thousands of tiny venomous jaws to enjoy him as a late-night snack by straining at his bonds!
As he lay there considering his grim options, he became aware of a dark figure standing over what would be the head of his grave if the bastards had had the common courtesy to just gun a man and bury him. After a spell, Longarm croaked, “Howdy, you son of a bitch. I hope you’ll forgive my not rising.”
There came no answer. Longarm called his mysterious tormentor a mighty silly son of a bitch, adding, “Shoot and be damned, you asshole. The show you’re waiting to see don’t start until well after sunrise, and I hope they bite you too!”
Then, as he gingerly craned his neck for a better look, he saw that the Milky Way sort of outlined one of the figure’s shoulders, if it had had a real shoulder. Then the pattern fell in place and Longarm marveled, “Now why would they have wanted to strip me bare-ass, then hang my duds on cross sticks like they were building a damned old scarecrow?”
His head still throbbed, but it was working better now, so before long he decided, “Right. It’s far more noticeable from a passing train. Billy Vail sent me all the way to Arizona to transport a paid assassin with an escape-artist rep. So Drake and his pals knew full well that as soon as I didn’t come back to Denver with him, Denver would come looking for me and him.”
His duds didn’t even flutter in the chill night air.
Longarm almost shrugged before he remembered all those tiny jaws under him. “They slickered me in a way that makes Samson in the Good Book look like a suspicious banker,” he continued out loud. “At least he got to lay Miss Delilah before she made a chump out of him. So they had to know I worked for a smarter lawman, and we all heard that conductor commenting on the three of us getting off here.”
An August meteor shot across the Milky Way on high. So Longarm made the only sensible wish a man in his position could think of, and added aloud, “The all-points Billy Vail sends out by wire will trace the three of us this far. That conductor warned us about Victorio’s band being off the reservation this summer. Victorio ain’t about to lead his bronco bunch west betwixt the Fourth Cav at Fort Apache and the Sixth Cav at Fort Huachuca, even in cooler weather. But how many white eyes know this, and what are they likely to say when they find yours truly eaten alive on an ant pile Apache style, with my prisoner and a pretty white gal missing? Would you want to trail bronco Apache across this desert in high summer when everyone but the army agrees it’s a proper chore for the damned old army?”
He reflected nobody who’d seen him getting off that train with what seemed a sick prisoner and a nursing sister would be in any position to describe anyone else. But that line of reasoning only worked if Drake’s pals had wiped out even the modest population of a small flag stop.