“Let me help you, Mr. Long.” The man’s voice was deep. Longarm had heard it before. He couldn’t recall where or when, but he was sure he had heard this man speak before. “Here.”
The fellow bent down, and a moment later Longarm could hear a grunt of effort. The tough roof poles, burdened by hundreds of pounds of sod, that held him pinned to the ground shifted and began to rise. One inch and then another. Slowly they were lifted clear.
“Hurry, please, sir. I don’t have a good hold here.”
Longarm wriggled and fought against his confinement. He twisted and pushed and managed to drag himself partway out of the mass of fallen material.
The unknown man who was helping him groaned and lost his grip. The poles crashed downward again with a
clatter. But by then Longarm was free to his waist on one side, to mid-thigh on the other. He grunted and kicked, forcing himself out from under the weight of sod and dried wood. “There.” He dragged himself free of the last of it, and felt himself being grasped by the shoulders and helped upright.
Lordy, but it felt good to be standing up again.
“Who the ... ?”
“It’s Parson George, Mr. Long,” the dark figure answered. “I was coming to deliver a message to Miz Able. Seen what was happening. Sorry it took me s’ long to do you any good, but I don’t carry a gun. Never been any good with one of those things for some reason, so I quit carrying any. No point to it. So I had to sneak in close enough to jump that one. Sure hope you don’t mind.”
Longarm figured he could manage to forgive the guy. “You did fine, Parson. Thanks. Help me find my gun, please. And my handcuffs too if you don’t mind. I’ve gone and lost them somewhere. I probably ought to cuff that fellow you put down there.”
“No need for you to cuff him, sir,” Parson said.
“No?”
“Not unless it’s a regulation or something, sir. He’s pretty much dead now. If that’s all right. Sir.” Parson sounded so dolefully apologetic that Longarm couldn’t help wondering what would happen if he said it wasn’t all right for the ambusher to be dead now. He put a rein on his tongue, though. He had the impression that poor ol’ Parson wasn’t much used to being joshed.
“I’m sure that’s fine,” was all that Longarm said on the subject.
It occurred to him that guns had been fired here, a roof had collapsed, and men had died. Yet there was no hint of acknowledgment of any of that from Aggie Able in her cabin. But then she’d already proven herself a timid woman once she was buttoned securely within her walls at night, hadn’t she? “It’s all right, Aggie,” he said loudly enough to be heard inside. “Everything is okay now. Unbar the door
and hand us out a lantern, please.”
Longarm didn’t hear any movement indoors, but Parson must have. The bodyguard—errand boy too, it seemed— went around to the front, and came back moments later with an unlighted lamp. Longarm hadn’t actually specified a light, had he? Just the means for it. He sighed and snapped a match head aflame.
Parson held the lamp while Longarm first found his Colt—it was lying in plain sight not two feet from where he’d been pinned—and then the handcuffs that had been jostled loose when the damned roof fell on him. He felt considerably better with the Colt back in hand, and quickly reloaded the lone chamber that he’d had time to empty. Only then did he and Parson move to the other end of the shed to examine the havoc they’d combined to create there.
“Nice shooting,” Parson observed. “If I could do that I believe I’d carry a gun myself, Mr. Long.”
Longarm’s one bullet, hastily aimed on the basis of instinct and experience, had taken the first assailant square in the chest. His sternum had been crushed inward, no doubt stopping the man’s heart in the middle of a beat. He would have been dead, or as good as, before his knees touched the ground.
Longarm had never seen the man before, he was sure. The fellow was dressed in town clothes, not a laborer’s rough garb. He was nicely groomed, with a fresh shave and neatly trimmed hair. His collar was crisp and his tie carefully formed. Any veneer of civility ended there. A sawed-off shotgun lay partially underneath the body. Longarm examined both the gun and the man carefully. Of the two barrel tubes one remained loaded. The fellow carried no other weapons on him, not a revolver, not even a pocketknife. Odd, Longarm thought. The pockets held a perfectly ordinary collection of coins and tokens and lint. There was nothing to hint that murder for hire would have been a regular line of work, and no great amount of cash to show sudden good fortune. Longarm grunted.
“Let’s take a look at the other one,” he suggested.
Parson carried the lamp outside the remains of the woodshed—the roof at that end remained mostly intact— to the point where his leaping charge into the fray had carried him and his victim.
“Nice work yourself, Parson,” Longarm said.
The bodyguard gave him a look of shy gratitude in response to the compliment. “Thank you, sir.”
No wonder Longarm hadn’t heard much in the way of grunting or scuffling. The man known as Parson had had nothing but a knife, yet had jumped a thug armed with a sawed-off shotgun. In the dark. Operating solely by feel. And had managed to dispatch the fellow so cleanly that the dead man’s hair was barely mussed. The man had died so quickly that there was very little blood seepage around a stab wound that passed through his coat into his back, led carefully between two ribs, and almost certainly had punctured the heart with unerring aim. It had to have found the heart, in fact, or there would have been quarts of blood soaking into the soil for yards around. As it was, there had been no more blood loss than a single handkerchief might wipe away. This one had died almost as quickly as the man Longarm had shot. It was impressively nice knife work, and Longarm had truly meant the compliment he’d given.
Longarm checked this body too, but found nothing exceptional in any of the pockets. The only weapon had been the shotgun—and come to think of it, he realized now, neither ambusher had carried extra buckshot shells with them; their total ammunition supply seemed to be the two charges each carried loaded into their guns. That made no sense to him whatsoever, not if either man knew what he was doing there tonight. Moreover, the clothing and personal possessions were consistent with what any town dweller might have when out for an evening stroll. Damned odd, Longarm thought.
“There’s something on the ground over here, Mr. Long,” Parson said. “I c’n see something shiny over beside the cabin, sir.”
“Let’s have a look.” Longarm got to his feet, the cartilage in his knees popping, and followed Parson and the lamp back underneath the precariously balanced shed roof.
He whistled softly under his breath when he saw what Parson had spotted in the gleam of the lamplight.
“Not real friendly, huh, Mr. Long?”
“Not real friendly,” Longarm agreed.
In addition to their shotguns, the recently deceased had carried a few other items with them when they came to call.