Longarm and the Wolf Women (15 page)

A wolf's howl . . .

Longarm woke with a start and looked around, his heart thudding. Milky dawn light silhouetted the eastern ridges.

He chuckled at himself.

No wolves or wolf women or crazy mountain men. Just him and John's snores and the cold seeping through his pants and balbriggans and into his legs and butt.

He rose, stretched the stiffness from his limbs, and tramped over to the camp where Comanche John was curled up in his soogan beside the long-dead fire. Longarm prodded the man's hip with his boot toe. “Wake up, John. We're burnin' daylight.”

The old man jerked up suddenly, eyes wide and wild. He reached for his rifle and tried to lift it, but Longarm had clamped his left boot over the breech, cementing the gun to the ground.

The old man's crazy eyes found Longarm. They lost their snaky, sleep-soaked glaze, and he grinned, showing the gap where he'd lost a tooth in the previous day's fandango.

“I sure hope those girls don't get you, Longarm,” John grated. “I done growed right fond of you.”

“That makes two of us, John.”

They fixed a hasty breakfast of jerky, biscuits, and coffee, then hit the trail well before sunrise, their breath still puffing before them, the horses well rested and light-footed.

They hadn't ridden far before Longarm, studying the dusty two-track trail beneath the sorrel's hooves, said, “Looks like your poker partners are still headed west, John.”

“Maybe they're looking for a digging,” John said.

“It'd be just my luck, them shootin' me when you're the one who fleeced 'em at cards.”

John winced, his face a mask of cuts, purple bruises, and swollen lips. “Ah, shit, Longarm, I done told you I was sorry about all that. I don't normally go around cheatin' at stud, but I didn't have two coins to rub together, and they plainly weren't rubes. I'd never cheat a rube. I say if you can cheat a seasoned stud player, then, by god, he deserves to be cheated!”

Longarm laughed. “John, I think you'd make a case to St. Pete on behalf of Old Scratch.”

John chuckled sheepishly, and then he and Longarm continued in silence, by turns trotting and loping their mounts, trying to make up time for last night's early stop.

They followed the tracks of the threes shod horses up to the roadhouse nestled in the hollow on the right side of the trail, read the note pinned to the door, then continued on past the roadhouse a few more yards before Longarm drew rein once more.

He frowned down at the trail.

“Well, shit,” John said, stretching his big torso out away from his saddle as he peered at the ground. “Two unshod ponies.”

“They came up out of the riverbank there.” Following the unshod hoof tracks with his gaze, Longarm spurred the sorrel forward, then checked it down to a fast walk when he saw where the three shod horses overlaid the tracks of the two unshod ones.

“Think they're ridin' together?” Comanche John asked.

“I'm payin' you for trackin',” Longarm pointed out, keeping one eye skinned on the trail, the other on the brush and rocks and fir-carpeted slopes around them, wary of an ambush.

“All five of 'em had a little powwow back there,” John said, lifting his voice above the clomps of their own four mounts. “Now, I'd say the three are hound-doggin' the two, and the two are splittin' ass!” They rode a little farther, John still studying the trail. “They seem to be foggin' at roughly the same pace, judging by the horses' strides.”

A few minutes later, the canyon opened out, and then all five sets of tracks swerved off the trail, heading into a side canyon. Longarm and Comanche John had followed the tracks for nearly fifteen minutes, heading past several tapped out mines and abandoned placer diggings, when John reined up suddenly, his dun pitching slightly and giving a frustrated whinny.

“By yupiter, there's wolf prints!”

Longarm had ridden several yards ahead. Now he reined around and booted the sorrel back to John, who was studying a patch of green grass growing among black, mica-flecked rocks.

“Around that spring,” John said, nodding his head. “See in the mud there? Wolf tracks. Two of 'em. Plain as a whore in church!” He removed his hat to scrub his forehead with his buckskin sleeve, then pointed with the hat. “See that bent grass comin' out of the aspens yonder? Someone done rode out of them woods and joined the trail right”—John swung his head this way and that, raking his lone eye across the area, then pointed with his hat again—“
there!
”

“Another barefoot horse,” Longarm said.

“Shit!” John exclaimed, cackling with delight as he whipped his ratty sombrero against his thigh. “I think those three privy rats who cost me my purty smile are about to git fleeced again . . . if they ain't already!”

Longarm reined the sorrel on a dime and booted it up trail, jerking the pack animal along behind. The prospect of putting an end to the evil doings of Magnus Magnusson and his crazy daughters thrilled him. Besides, if he could wrap this case up today, he could be back in Denver by the weekend, before Miss Cynthia Larimer left for points east again on Monday!

Following the trail, which now included three unshod horses, three shod ones, and the occasional prints of a large wolf—a
male
wolf, John proudly insisted—they put nearly one entire watershed behind them before they cleaved a narrow, winding canyon. They followed the game trail along the canyon and a narrow stream for a hundred yards before a pine-stippled scarp slid away to the right and a clearing appeared along the right side of the stream.

The clearing was flanked by a rimrock, cedars and stunt junipers growing from fissures along the steep, stony slope. A lone cottonwood stood at the far right side of the clearing, its lime green leaves glinting in the brassy noon sunlight. Unseen magpies screeched.

The riders moved their mounts forward, both running their gazes along the sandy ground by the creek, deep-gouged with milling horse prints, and along the thin, brown grass stretching from the edge of the sand to the rimrock.

Longarm gigged his horse up toward the ridge. Thirty yards from the creek was a large fire ring mounded with gray ashes, chunks of fire-blackened logs, and bits of rabbit fur. The grass around the fire ring looked as though brown paint had been splashed in it. In several places, thick, liver-brown gobbets of blood glistened, semi-wet, in the sunlight.

Longarm wrinkled his nose at the coppery stench, holding tight to the reins of his shying horse.

Twenty yards nearer the stone wall, matted grass formed a circle. Small holes had been dug into the ground along the hole's periphery.

“Teepee,” said Jack. “Judging by the grass, I'd say it was here about a week. Razed a few hours ago.”

Longarm sat up straight in his saddle, casting his gaze back and forth across the clearing, noting the freshly cropped grass where several horses had been staked near the creek; then along the fissured, crenelated stretch of rimrock. At the cottonwood tree in which several magpies perched, crying raucously, his gaze held.

He squinted through breeze-brushed weed tips, his eyes picking out several strange objects lined up at the base of the tree.

He booted the sorrel forward. As he approached, a magpie gave an indignant screech then winged up from the ground—its metallic blue and tar black feathers flashing, a chunk of fresh, red viscera hanging from its beak—and lighted on a stout branch.

Longarm stopped near the tree and peered down, his lips stretching slightly.

Comanche John rode up beside him. The mountain man gave a surprised grunt but didn't say anything. Like Longarm, he just stared at the three men sitting side by side against the cottonwood's bole.

All three were naked except for the one on the far right, who wore a smashed opera hat. Their skin looked obscenely white in the sunshine, the blood from their wounds nearly black in contrast.

The Mexican had had his head nearly ripped off his shoulders when someone or something had torn out his throat. The skinny man had been gutted. The big man with the opera hat appeared to have had his skull crushed. The blood had dribbled down his face in streaks from beneath the battered hat, forming vertical bars down his bearded, heavy-lidded face.

For a bizarre joke, someone had draped the Mexican's left arm around the skinny gent's shoulders, and tipped their heads together. The man with the opera hat had a corncob pipe drooping from the right corner of his mouth. His stiffening arms were crossed on his chest, his head tipped back slightly, as though he were putting his face to the sun.

All three sat there as if posing for a photograph.

“Those three—they can't win for losin',” John said without mirth.

Longarm spat to one side, then reined the sorrel around, drawing a deep breath to rid his nose of the death smell.

“Ain't we gonna bury 'em?” John called behind him.

“No time.” Longarm rode back out toward the creek and began sweeping the ground with his gaze, trying to pick up Magnusson's trail.

He didn't like leaving the dead—even three dead bushwacking sons of bitches—to the magpies and coyotes, but there would be more dead prospectors if Magnusson and his kill-crazy daughters weren't stopped.

Comanche John remained staring down at the three dead men. He looked up at the birds perched in the branches above, waiting. John returned his gaze to the dead men and shook his head.

“I don't know what Magnusson done to those girls,” John said to no one. “But if they did this—and who else woulda done it?—they're eighteen-carrot demons, sure enough.”

 
Longarm and Comanche John followed the tracks of six horses and a wolf up creek from the bivouac, before losing the trail at the rocky confluence of three broad streams. They continued riding straight west through a fold in the pine-carpeted ridges.

Comanche John recollected Magnusson having at least two cabins about ten miles on. He and his daughters were no doubt headed for one or the other.

At around three-thirty that afternoon, the two trackers stopped their horses at the base of a sloping ridge. John uncorked his canteen. “Now we got a decision to make.” He took a long drink then slammed the cork back into the canteen with the heel of his hand. “One cabin's that way, the other's that way.”

Longarm looked in the directions John had indicated. “Which cabin you think they're most likely headed for?”

“I'd say the one to the southwest, at the mouth of Neversummer Creek. It's the newer one, and Magnus has a digging there.”

Longarm chewed his cold cigar, then reached back into his saddlebags. He withdrew a folded wanted dodger and a pencil stub, and handed them across to John. “Draw me a map. I reckon it's time to split up.”

When John had sketched the map of the mountains and watersheds and all primary landmarks in a ten-square-mile area, Longarm studied it, folded it, and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“We'll meet at the base of Ute Peak in two days, with or without news of Magnusson.”

John nodded and took another pull from the canteen while his horse dropped its head to crop needle grass.

“If you stumble across them before I do, don't engage 'em, John. Fetch me. I'd hate to have to haul your big carcass all the way to Diamondback.”

John laughed. “Don't worry. When it comes to eighteen-carat she-devils and old mountain men shootin' with only half a load, I'm just plumb yalla!”

“These girls are supposedly purty as little red heifer twins in a flowerbed,” Longarm said, reining the sorrel left and booting it south along the base of the sloping ridge. “Sure you can resist the temptation?”

“Shit, I don't like to have my haunches spurred by no
normal
gal!” John yelled behind him. “You think I'd let them loco ringtails have a crack at me?”

An hour later, as the sun dipped behind the western peaks, Longarm jerked back on the sorrel's reins and stared up the steep, pine-carpeted mountain on his left.

He curled his gloved fingers around his Winchester's stock, jutting up from beneath his right thigh, and froze as the sound came again. A low, snorting accompanied by the thrashing of grass and brush.

About fifty yards up the densely forested mountain.

Longarm shucked the Winchester. He swung his right leg over the saddle horn and slipped straight down to the ground. Keeping an eye skinned up slope, feeling as though he were wearing a target over his heart, he quickly tied the sorrel's reins around pine roots curling out of the cutbank at the base of the slope, then looped the pack mule's reins over his saddle horn.

Holding the Winchester in his right hand, he climbed the cutbank and started up the slope, crouching, sweeping the mountain with his eyes. He saw little but the sentinel-straight, deep green pines and the needle-carpeted floor from which they jutted, their crowns nearly blocking out the darkening sky.

The wolflike snorts continued, as did the crunch of grass and brush.

He'd seen only a few tracks in the past couple of miles, mostly of shod mounts and wheel tracks he'd attributed to prospectors. If Magnusson had come this way, he'd done a good job of hiding his sign.

Thirty yards up the mountain, Longarm stopped and stared through scaley red pine columns. About twenty yards ahead and right the pines thinned out, giving way to a snag of rocks and shrubs. The shrub branches were moving as though something were thrashing around on their other side.

Longarm quietly jacked a round into his rifle's breech and moved forward. The snorts and thrashing grew louder. He smelled a wild, gamey scent amid the perfuming pine resin. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.