"Just what?"
"Go busting in there!"
"Watch me," Longarm said. Pettibone was better on snowshoes than Longarm and managed to get in front of him. "You don't even know which cabin they're at."
"I'll find it. You said it's the north shore of Lake Tahoe. Now kindly step out of my path."
Pettibone shook his head. "Tell me, Deputy Long, have you always been so headstrong and impetuous?"
"I'm not one for planning and jawin' a whole hell of a lot, if that's what you mean."
"That's exactly what I mean."
"Are you coming or not?"
"I'm coming," Pettibone said, "though I'm half afraid that you're bound to make my wife a widow."
"You can stay if you want," Longarm told the man. "I'll not hold it against you."
"That's mighty kind, but I wouldn't miss this roundup for anything."
"How can we get there the quickest?"
"By not taking off these snowshoes."
Longarm nodded. "I've got a rifle back at your depot and if you have a shotgun or something, that might help."
"I do have one."
"Are you any good in a gunfight?"
Pettibone expelled a deep, frosty breath. "I honestly do not know. I'm pretty good with my fists."
"You'll do," Longarm decided, working on intuition and professional judgment. "Now let's find that cabin!"
CHAPTER 17
Longarm had never spent such a miserable afternoon as he did that day trying to keep up with Bruce Pettibone on snowshoes. The railroad detective was inexhaustible, and seemed intent on driving Longarm until he dropped. Fortunately, the air was crisp and the trail already broken and mostly leading downhill. They skirted Bald and Lookout Mountains to the southwest and crossed any number of frozen creeks as they hurried through the heavy pine forests.
When the sun began to slide behind the mountains and Longarm still could not see Lake Tahoe, he shouted, "Hold up there, dammit!"
"What's wrong?" Pettibone asked, his breath coming in short, frosty bursts.
"What's wrong is that you're about to kill me!"
"But this is all downhill!"
"Uphill or downhill, I'm bushed!" Longarm adjusted his Winchester, which he had rigged on a sling and thrown over his shoulder. "I don't figure I want to go much farther today. Pettibone, what do you say we make a camp and get an early start in the morning?"
"You mean sleep in this damned snow?" Pettibone looked appalled.
"We can make a dry camp if we start preparing it before dark. Maybe cut some pine boughs and-"
"Listen," Pettibone said. "Storms up here come fast and frequent in the winter. Now, even if I had enough blankets--which I don't--I wouldn't even consider spending the night out here."
"Then what can we consider, being as how I'm about to collapse from fatigue?"
Pettibone looked up at the dying sun. "I say we have just another three miles to the lake. Their cabin is at Agate Bay and we could be there soon after dark."
"Yeah, but what is the damned hurry?"
Pettibone looked disgusted. "It's just that, since you decided we should do this, I'd like to get it done."
"There's no sense in charging into all those men half-cocked," Longarm said. "In any case, I'm too damned cold and tired to be any good in a fight."
Pettibone swore under his breath. "All right," he finally said. "A friend of mine has a summer cabin just up ahead. We can stay there for the night and leave early in the morning."
"Fine."
Longarm followed the railroad man on down the hill, and they struggled on for about another half hour before they came to the cabin. It wasn't much, and Pettibone had to break a window to get inside. But there was some food and blankets and even chopped firewood.
Much later, fed and warmed by the fire, Longarm smoked a cheroot and said, "I rode with a nice fella up from Reno in the train's mail car."
"That'd be Liam. Did he offer you a drink of that Irish whiskey?"
"He did," Longarm said.
"Then that's why you ran out of steam. Strong spirits rob a man of his vitality, you know."
"Are you a Mormon?"
"No, but I am a teetotaler. I swore off the stuff when I saw what it did to my father. It turned him into a raving maniac. He finally shot himself when I was about sixteen."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Don't be. It was the best thing he could have done for the family. It also taught me never to forget how fast liquor can ruin a good man."
"Do you smoke?" Longarm patted his coat pocket. "I've got a couple more cigars."
"Nope."
Longarm shook his head. "Pettibone, if you don't drink and you don't smoke, then you might as well be a Mormon."
"Listen to you," Pettibone said with amusement. "Why, you were gasping like a locomotive out there on the trail! It's that tobacco that robs your wind and ruins your lungs."
"A man has got to have a few pleasures in life."
Pettibone studied Longarm in the firelight. "I'll bet you have pleasures aplenty with the ladies, isn't that so?"
"I like 'em fine," Longarm replied. "But someday I might settle down and have a family. Like you."
"I don't think so."
Longarm curbed his annoyance. He didn't understand how this man could make such an important assessment, given that they were almost strangers.
"I was a sheriff once," Pettibone said after several minutes of strained silence.
"For a fact?"
"Yes. It was on the Comstock Lode. I was, for a few short and exciting months, the sheriff at Gold Hill."
"Sure, I've been through there dozens of times. Why'd you quit?"
"I killed an innocent man," Pettibone said quietly. "His only crime was that he was drunk."
"Did he go for his gun?"
"A knife. I thought he was passed out and when I reached down to drag him into a chair, he probably thought I was about to steal what little money he had left in his pockets. So he yanked out his knife and stabbed me in the side."
"Then he wasn't innocent if he used a knife against you, Pettibone."
"Oh, yes he was! You see, he didn't know what he was doing. And instead of kicking his boots to wake him up first so that sort of thing didn't happen, I just grabbed him. To make matters worse, when he stabbed me, I instinctively slammed the heel of my hand up into his nose."
Pettibone shook his head, his expression bleak. "It was pure reaction. There were dozens of witnesses and they all said that I was just trying to push him away, not drive nasal bones into the drunken man's brain."
Longarm smoked in silence. He could see how troubled Pettibone was over this unfortunate death, and felt sure that everyone had already said all the consoling words but none of them had counted. In Bruce Pettibone's mind, he was guilty of murder. Not a vicious or premeditated murder, but a murder caused by ignorance.
Pettibone looked up suddenly. "You've killed a lot of men, haven't you?"
It wasn't a question and Longarm didn't reply.
"Doesn't it bother you?"
"Sometimes." Longarm blew a smoke ring at the fire. He could hear the wind through the pines outside and he was very grateful that they weren't camped in the freezing snow.
"Will it bother you tomorrow if we have to kill those train robbers?"
"Not a whit," Longarm growled. "You saw the results of what they did to the train at this end. Well, it was about as bad at Laramie Summit. They killed women and old men. They didn't even know who they killed, and they didn't care that some of them lived for a while in the freezing cold and died in pain."
Longarm looked hard at Bruce Pettibone. "Listen to me," he said, his voice taking on an edge. "If you haven't the stomach for the fight, then you should return to the depot in the morning. I don't need a good family man who hesitates and gets himself killed for nothing."
"Maybe we can get the drop on the whole bunch and take them without firing a single shot."
"Not very damned likely," Longarm said. "The odds are that we will have a gunfight. The odds are that unless we drop two or three in the first volley, we won't live to see spring. So you need to decide if you are ready to fight or not."