Longarm and the Wolf Women (17 page)

They'd stopped here to snack and blow their horses. Then they'd mounted up and continued walking their mounts northwestward along the runout spring.

John mounted up and followed the tracks for only twenty minutes before the night closed down, obliterating the sign. He'd stop for the night, pick up the trail again in the morning. He hoped it would lead him to Magnusson's dugout. When he was sure of the hovel's location, and that the old reprobate and his crazy daughters were there, he'd fetch Longarm.

After seeing the carcasses laid out against the cottonwood tree, John would sooner have danced with a bobcat in the box of a prairie schooner than tangle with Magnusson and his wolf women. Besides, throwing a hitch rope over those three wildcats was Longarm's job.

Leaving the canyon, John set up camp in a narrow ravine at the base of a high, chalky butte. He built a small fire, ate a meager supper, then sat up smoking his pipe, his Spencer repeater leaning against him. Probing the fresh gap in his teeth with his tongue, he smoked and listened to a night chorus of coyotes and hoot owls echoing across the bluffs.

He fell asleep early and was on the trail again at first light, following the trail out of the canyon, over a short prairie then down into a valley nestled in sage-flocked buttes. He followed the horse tracks around a butte shoulder. Wood smoke lazed over the trail ahead, and sucking a startled breath, he drew back suddenly on the dun's reins. Gritting his teeth, he backed the saddle horse and the mule behind the bluff.

In the shade, he tied the animals to cedars protruding from the slope, then shucked his Spencer and plodded, breathing hard, to the top of the bluff. He knelt down behind a domino-shaped, sun-bleached boulder and doffed his hat. He edged a peek around the left side of the boulder, staring into the valley in which a cabin sat, built into the side of another, fawn-colored butte.

A corral of unpeeled pine logs lay between John and the cabin. Inside the corral, several horses and mules milled frenetically, shaking and kicking up dust. One horse was tied to the corral's upper post, and a big, bulky figure in a high-crowned hat was running a curry comb over the horse's right shoulder.

Before the corral, several sets of saddlebags lay amid a dozen or so objects scattered across the ground as though dropped from the sky. John could make out what looked like a couple of coffeepots, a Dutch oven, and hardware including rifles, pistols, and sheathed knives.

Booty from the three unlucky gamblers, no doubt.

A blond woman in a hide dress squatted in the dust and sage amid the bounty, poking and prodding at the articles as if taking inventory.

Even from this distance, John could tell she had quite a figure.

Meanwhile, another woman—Magnusson's Indian princess, with long, jet black hair—was hauling a water bucket up from the gully that ran along the west end of the yard, at the base of brush-covered hills. She wore a man's plaid shirt—the shirt John remembered Natcho had been wearing—and dusty pantaloons reaching to just below her knees. A red bandanna was wrapped around her forehead, contrasting her raven hair. She was angling toward a bonfire burning in a stone ring before the cabin, an iron frame hanging over it.

Magnusson was bellowing as he worked, though John couldn't make out what he was saying. He seemed to be talking to the blonde, but she continued to poke around the plunder without looking up at him, her tangle of gold blond hair glistening in the sun's glow.

John's eyes roamed the area for the wolf. It took him nearly a minute to figure out that the fur stretched atop the cabin's brush roof was the big, gray beast itself lying on its side, its head half-hanging over the lip of the roof, just above the cabin door—sunning itself while it no doubt kept its ears and nose pricked for interlopers.

John lowered his gaze. The black-haired girl was filling a corrugated tin tub near the fire with steaming water from a wooden bucket. Her man's shirt had fallen down one shoulder, exposing half of one full, brick red breast. John had been about to pull back behind the hill's brow, but now he lifted his head slightly higher and slitted his eye.

He should have been fogging the trail after Longarm, but this could get right interesting . . . as long as he was downwind of the wolf.

As the girl set the bucket down and began unbuttoning her shirt, John squinted to see better, but his vision wasn't as keen as it used to be.

As the girl worked at the shirt's last buttons, John crawled back below the hill's brow, then rose and scampered down the bluff to the horse and the mule. Chuckling, he produced his spyglass from his saddlebags, then retraced his steps back to the hill's crest, hunkered down behind the boulder, and raised the glass in the wedge of shade cast by the stone.

The girl had taken off the shirt. She stood sideways to John's position.

Her silhouette was delectable as she sat on the ground to remove the pantaloons, her long, raven hair swaying across her dark, slender shoulders, a thick lock tumbling over the breast nearest John.

He swallowed, shaping his grin in his curly, gray beard.

The girl kicked out of the underwear and stood—dusky skin glistening in the sunlight—and stepped into the tub. Her brown-tipped breasts bounced slightly.

She picked up a sponge and dribbled water over her body, then began soaping herself with what looked like a small wedge of lye. When the soap bubbled across every inch of her, like a sheer white gown clinging to her dark, curvaceous frame—she sat down in the tub and drew her knees up.

She sat there for a long time, soaking, her hair hanging straight down the back of the tub, her breasts riding high above the soapy water.

John whistled to himself and tried to swallow the hard knot in his throat.

He was about to lower the spyglass—time to hightail it—when a high-pitched, keening howl rose. Comanche John jerked with a start, then steadied the spyglass and slid it toward the cabin.

On the roof, the wolf was up on all fours, staring toward the shoulder of the low bluff west of the yard, just beyond the gully. The animal's ears and tail were up, its hackles raised.

The girl in the tub glanced at the wolf, then followed its gaze with her own. As the wolf descended the bluff into which the cabin had been carved, Magnus Magnusson ducked through the corral slats and picked up a heavy rifle that had been leaning against an upright post.

At the same time, the blonde scooped a long-barreled revolver from the plunder spread before her and, holding the weapon in both hands, turned westward.

Magnusson walked out toward the trail running along the south edge of the yard. The wolf ran out to join him.

Comanche John could hear the wolf growling and whimpering, its tail cocked.

Comanche John turned the spyglass on the shoulder of the western bluff. After nearly a minute, a rider appeared—a tall man on a cream horse. He wore a high-crowned hat, long, black duster, and stockman's spurred boots. A green neckerchief flopped down his chest. Through the spyglass, he had a long, narrow, sun-scorched face.

His eyes were deep-set, and a brown spade beard hung slack from his chin. An old-model carbine jutted from his saddle boot.

John scowled through the glass, puzzled. Was the visitor someone who knew Magnus, or just a drifter?

If the man didn't know what he was riding into, may the Lord have mercy on his soul . . .

With both hands, his heart quickening, John held the spyglass on the trio at the edge of the yard—Magnusson, the blonde, and the newcomer on the cream horse. The wolf stood between Magnusson and the blonde. The newcomer, facing John and moving his mouth, his voice a low, unintelligible hum from this distance, kept a wary eye on the growling beast.

He cast several interested glances toward the black-haired girl lounging in the tub near the fire. She'd done nothing to cover herself. In fact, she'd sat up a little straighter, exposing her breasts.

The conversation went on for several minutes, Magnusson wrapping a brawny arm around the blonde while the wolf tramped a wide circle around the newcomer, the man's cream mare nickering nervously as it eyed the beast. Finally, the newcomer tipped his hat back off his forehead and leaned on his saddle horn, sliding his gaze between the blonde before him and the black-haired girl who had stretched her long legs over the sides of the tub, letting her toes trail in the dust.

“Shit, don't do it, friend,” John growled as he stared through the spyglass.

He'd no sooner said it, however, than the newcomer chuckled, shrugged, lifted his right leg over the saddle horn, and slid straight down to the ground. The duster's skirt dropped around him like bat wings. He flipped Magnusson a couple coins.

Smiling shyly, the blonde moved toward him. While Magnusson took the mare's reins, the newcomer stared appreciatively down at the blonde as he removed his gauntleted gloves and tucked them behind his cartridge belt.

“I'll feed and water your horse,” John heard Magnusson say as the burly mountain man led the horse toward the corral. “You can stay for vittles, if you've a mind!”

If the man replied, John couldn't hear what he said. One arm wrapped around the blonde's shoulders, he turned toward the cabin.

John didn't wait to see what happened after that. He lowered the glass, scuttled back down behind the bluff, stood, and fairly ran, slipping and sliding and grabbing small cedars to slow his descent.

He didn't know the newcomer, but what kind of a man could stand by and watch another man walk into an ambush without lifting a hand to help? That son of a bitch Magnusson deserved a bullet between his crazy eyes. If John could put their dear old pa out of commission, how much trouble could the girls be?

Their pretty bodies wouldn't stop lead.

John returned his spyglass to his saddlebags, then mounted the dun. Trailing the pack mule, he rode back the way he'd come for a good two hundred yards, well out of sight and hearing of the cabin, then swung wide of the trail. He cleaved a crease in the hogbacks, riding south then west.

When he figured he was a good hundred or so yards away from the cabin yard, he tied the horse and the mule at the base of a rocky-topped butte. The smell of wood smoke told him he was where he'd hoped he was—due south of the cabin yard.

He climbed the butte and hunkered down behind the granite dike jutting from its crest. He found a notch in the low rock wall, then doffed his hat, and peered through the notch.

The cabin stood ahead and a little left—about a hundred and twenty yards away. The Spencer was good up to three hundred yards.

John peered around the cabin. The girls and the newcomer were nowhere in sight. Evidently, they'd gone into the dugout.

Magnusson had turned the cream horse into the corral and was unsaddling the mount. John could hear the man's low, self-satisfied whistles. The wolf sat outside the corral gate, head bent back to lick its butt.

Comanche John set the Spencer's sight for a hundred yards, then rammed a shell into the breech and poked the barrel through the notch. He used a small shelf along the left side of the notch for a gun rest and swung the barrel toward the corral and Magnusson's jostling, leather-hatted head behind the unpeeled pine poles.

Drilling a round through Magnusson's head would bring the girls out of the cabin, maybe saving the poor son of a bitch inside.

John steadied the rifle and waited for the man to stand still. When Magnusson had removed the newcomer's saddlebags from the mare's rear, he carried them over to the corral's front fence. As he draped the pouched over the fence, John tightened the slack in his trigger finger.

An enraged shout sounded from the dugout.

Magnusson swung his head toward the shack.

Comanche John's Spencer thundered. The slug slammed into a snubbing post behind Magnusson, blowing up splinters and dust and setting the horses to nickering and a single mule, who'd been standing with its nose to the post, to braying and pitching crazily.

Magnusson jerked his head toward Comanche John, around whose head powder smoke wafted.

John's own gaze was on the cabin as the door opened. A man's hatless head appeared, jerked back inside. The door closed, then jerked open again, and the newcomer bolted outside—naked, shoulders forward, head back. His right arm was bent behind him.

“You fuckin' bitches!” the man bellowed in a pain-taut voice, swinging his head around as if looking for his horse. “You fuckin' cocksuckin' bitches—what'd you do with my
fucking horse
!”

The black-haired girl ran out behind him, holding a knife in one hand. She was wearing her pantaloons, breasts jostling as she slowed to a walk, lips stretched back from her teeth, grinning.

The blonde appeared in the doorway behind her. She leaned against the door frame, naked as the day she was born—a full-breasted, round-hipped, long-legged Viking savage. She had a cigar in her mouth. Blood was splashed across her chest.

“Oh-oh!” the blonde yelled. “Don't let him get
away
!”

The echo of the girl's voice hadn't yet died before the newcomer ran into the trail, heading for the very butte John was perched upon, then stumbled and fell facedown in the dirt.

A second later, the wolf was on him, tearing and snarling.

A bullet pounded the rocks left of the notch John still had his gun angled through. Rock shards sprayed around the opening, several peppering John's face, one crawling down behind his eye patch.

The rifle's roar reached his ears a half second later.

John looked into the yard. Magnusson stood, his open buffalo coat draping his bulky frame, his hat shading his forehead, a big Sharps rifle in his hands. The man lowered the rifle and was thumbing a fresh shell into the chamber when John quickly cocked the Spencer and tried to plant a bead on the crazy mountain man's broad chest.