CHAPTER 1
Even before he opened his eyes, in that instant between sleep and waking, Longarm knew it had snowed during the night. Like the hunter whose senses guide him to prey, like the hunted whose senses keep him from becoming prey, Longarm was attuned to the subtlest changes in his surroundings. The light that struck his closed eyelids wasn’t the usual soft gray that brightens the sky just before dawn. It had the harsh brileance that comes only from the pre-sunrise skyglow being reflected from snow-covered ground.
opening his eyes, Longarm confirmed what he already knew. He didn’t see much point in walking across the room to raise a shade at one of the twin windows. The light seeping around the edges of the opaque shades had that cold, hard quality he’d sensed when he’d snapped awake.
Longarm swore, then grunted. He didn’t believe in cussing the weather or anything else he was powerless to change. He was a man who believed swearing just wasted energy unless it did something besides relieving his own dissatisfaction.
Last night, when he’d swung off the narrow-gauge railroad after a long, slow, swaying trip up from Santa Fe to Denver, he’d noted the nip in the air, but his usually reliable weather sense hadn’t warned him it might snow. It was just too early in the year. It was still fall, with the Rocky Mountains’ winter still a couple of months away. Longarm hadn’t been thinking too much about the weather last night, though. All that had been in his mind was getting to his room, taking a nightcap from the bottle of Maryland rye that stood waiting on his dresser, and falling into bed. On another night, he’d probably have followed his habit of dropping in at the Black Cat or one of the other saloons on his way home, to buck the faro bank for a few cards until he relaxed. He’d started to cut across the freightyard to Colfax instead of taking the easier way along Wynekoop Street. What he’d seen happen in New Mexico Territory had left a sour taste in his mouth that the three or four drinks he’d downed on the train couldn’t wash away.
There was little light in the freightyard. The acetylene flares mounted on high standards here and there created small pools of brightness, but intensified the darkness between them. Longarm was spacing his steps economically as he crossed the maze of tracks, sighting along the wheel-polished surface of the rails to orient himself, when he sensed rather than saw the man off to his left. He couldn’t see much in the gloom, just the interruption of the light reflected on the rail along which he was sighting.
“Casey!?” Longarm called. He didn’t think it was Casey, who was the yard’s night superintendent, and more likely to be in his office, but if it was one of Casey’s yard bulls on patrol, using the boss’s name would tell the man at once that Longarm wasn’t a freightyard thief.
A shot was his answer. A muzzle-flash and the whistle of lead uncomfortably close to his chest. Longarm drew as he was dropping and snap-shot when he rolled, firing at the place where he’d seen the orange blast. He didn’t know whether or not he’d connected. He hadn’t had a target; his shot was the equivalent of the warning buzz a rattlesnake gives when a foot comes too close to its coils.
Faintly, the sound of running footsteps gritting on cinders gave him the answer. Whoever had tried the bushwhacking wasn’t going to hang around and argue.
For several seconds, Longarm lay on the rough, gritty earth, trying to stab through the darkness with his eyes, using his ears to hear some giveaway sound that would spot his target for him. Except for the distant chugging of a yard-mule cutting cars at the shunt, there was nothing to hear.
Longarm didn’t waste time trying to prowl the yard. Being the target of a grudge shot from the dark wasn’t anything new to him, or to any of the other men serving as Deputy U.S. Marshals in the unreconstructed West of the 1880s. Longarm guessed that whoever had been responsible for the drygulching attempt had been sitting in another car of the narrow-gauge on the trip up from New Mexico. God knows, he’d stepped on enough toes during his month there to have become a prime target for any one of a half dozen merciless, powerful men. Any of them could’ve sent a gunslick to waylay him in Denver. The attack had to originate in New Mexico Teritory, he decided, because nobody in Denver had known when he’d be arriving.
Brushing himself off, Longarm had hurried on across the freightyard and on to his room. Bone-tired, he’d hit the sack without lighting a lamp, dropping his clothes as he shed then!
On the dresser, the half full bottle of Maryland rye gleamed in the light that was trickling in from the window. Its invitation was more attractive than the idea of staying in the warm bed. Longarm swung his bare feet to the floor, crossed the worn gray carpet in two long strides and let a trickle of warmth slip down his throat. As he stood there, the tarnished mirror over the dresser showed his tanned skin tightening as the chilly air of the unheated room raised goosebumps.
Crossing the room to its inside corner, Longarm pulled aside a sagging curtain to get to his wardrobe. Garments hung on a pegged board behind the curtain. He grabbed a cleaner shirt than the one he’d taken off, and a pair of britches that weren’t grimed with cinders from his roll in the freightyard last night.
He wasted no time in dressing. The cold air encouraged speed. Longjohns and flannel shirt, britches, woolen socks, and he was ready to stamp into his stovepipe cavalry boots. Another snort from the bottle and he turned to check his tools. From its usual night resting place, hanging by its belt from the bedpost on the left above his pillow, Longarm took his.44-40 Colt double-action out of its open-toed holster. Quickly and methodically, his fingers working with blurring speed, he swung out the Colt’s cylinder, dumped its cartridges on the bed, and strapped on the gunbelt.
He returned the unloaded pistol to the holster and drew three or four times, triggering the revolver with each draw, but always catching the hammer with his thumb instead of letting it snap on an empty chamber, which could break the firing pin. When Longarm had returned the Colt to its holster after each draw, he made the tiny adjustments that were needed to put the waxed, heat-hardened leather at the precise angle and position he wanted, just above his left hip.
Satisfied now, he reloaded the Colt, checking each cartridge before sliding it into the cylinder. Then he checked out the.44 double-barrelled derringer that was soldered to the chain that held his railroad Ingersoll on the other end. He put on his vest, dropping the watch into his left-hand breast pocket, the derringer into the right-hand one. Longarm always anticipated that trouble might look him up, as it had in the freightyard last night. If it did, he intended to be ready.
Longarm’s stomach was growling by now. He quieted it temporarily with a short sip of rye before completing his methodical preparations to leave his room for the day. These were simple and routine, but it was a routine he never varied while in civilized surroundings. Black string tie in place, frock coat settled on his broad shoulders, Stetson at its forward-tilted angle on his close-cropped head, he picked up his necessaries from the top of the bureau and stowed them into their accustomed pockets. Change went in one pants pocket and his jackknife in the other; his wallet with the silver federal badge pinned inside was slid into an inside breast pocket. Extra cartridges went into his right-hand coat pocket, handcuffs and a small bundle of waterproof matches into the pocket on the left.
As he left the room, he kicked the soiled clothing that still lay on the floor out into the hallway ahead of him. He’d leave word for his Chinese laundryman, Ho Quah, to pick it up and have it back that evening. He closed the door and between door and jamb inserted a broken matchstick at about the level of his belt. His landlady wasn’t due to clean up his room until Thursday, and Longarm wanted to know the instant he came home if an uninvited stranger might be waiting inside: for instance, the unknown shadow who’d thrown down on him last night. Anybody who knew his name was Custis Long could find out where Longarm lived.