The three other men, each sporting a hole in his hat, stopped their own horses behind Parsons.
“What's the matter?” asked Miller, still sounding petulant after the hat shooting.
Staring straight ahead through the sunlit meadow of breeze-ruffled wheatgrass, Parsons held up his black-gloved right hand for silence. After a moment, the breeze picked up, rustling the grass and the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river, bringing a sound across the meadow.
At first, Parsons thought it was the faint tinkling of wind chimes. Then, gradually, as the breeze pushed against the young lawman's face, whipping his string tie over his shoulder, each note acquired a human aspect, and he realized it was the sound, muffled by distance and gently obscured by the breeze, of girls laughing and giggling.
They seemed to be down by the river.
“Shit,” said Jan Behunek, sitting his mare off Parsons's dun's right hip. “It's those fucking Magnusson bitches!”
Parsons turned toward him, cocking a brick red brow.
Mike Baron said, his voice pitched with fear, “Just before he died, that soldier talked of being lured to the river by the sounds of girls' laughter.”
“Just a coincidence,” said Ned Miller, chewing the dead quirley in his teeth and staring through the trees along the sun-glistening Diamondback. “Ain't no way Magnusson and his daughters would still be around here, this close to town. Why, they killed those soldiers only another mile or so upstream!”
The sounds had faded for a moment. Now, as the wind stirred the grass and leaves once more, they rose again, sounding for all the world like two young girls frolicking along the river . . .
“Most likely a prospecting family hereabouts,” said Parsons to no one in particular. As he shucked the Winchester from his saddleboot, laying the rifle's barrel across his pommel, he added, “But we'd best check it out.”
As he reined the zebra dun off the left side of the trail, he glanced behind at the others. “You men wait here. If I need you, I'll fire a shot.”
“Fine by me, Mr. Lawman, sir,” growled Baron, holding the reins of his shying horse taut against his chest.
Parsons booted the dun toward the river. Three-quarters of the way to the trees along the bank, he checked the horse down, leaped nimbly from the saddle, dropped the reins, and continued into the trees on foot, holding his rifle high across his chest.
He squatted behind an aspen bole and looked out over the river. The sound of laughter was crisp and clear in the high, dry mountain air. Girls, all right. Two or three having a good old time a little ways downstream. Parsons could make out two heads bobbing in a sunny patch about fifty yards away.
Behind Parsons, his horse whinnied. The lawman turned to see the horse shying and pulling back against its ground-tied reins.
Ignoring the jittery horse, Parsons followed the sounds through the trees and crouched once more behind a tree bole atop the shallow cutbank. As he cast his gaze into the river, he froze, one eye narrowing and twitching slightly at the corner.
Out in the middle of the shallow stream, two girlsâone with long, coal black hair, the other a golden blondeâfrolicked around a four-foot waterfall. Neither wore a stitch, and their smooth skin, one Indian dark, the other Viking-pale, glistened in the waterfall's tumbling spray.
They crawled among the rocks, the water foaming around them. Wrestling like river sprites, they tugged at each other's arms or feet, plucking at toes and nipples, their full, round breasts bouncing against their chests, their plump asses turning this way and that, like ripe cantaloupes jostling in a wheelbarrow, reflecting the westering sun.
At once chilly with apprehension and warmed by desire, Parsons crouched, frozen, riveted.
The Indian-dark girl climbed to the top of the falls and sat down, dangling her long, brown legs over the foaming cascade. The blonde climbed up to where the dark one sat and, laughing, crawled up between the dark girl's legs and spread the other's knees with her hands.
The dark girl squealed and shook her long, soaked hair back from her face. She wrapped her arms around the blond girl's waist as the blonde leaned toward her, and they kissed hungrily, the blonde fondling the dark girl's big, swaying breasts.
The blonde rose higher, and the dark girl closed her mouth over the blonde's left, pink nipple, and together they fell back in the river, coupling amid the rocks and sliding water like lovers who hadn't seen each other in ages.
“
Tarnation!
”
Parsons snapped around, heart pounding, lowering his rifle barrel. Mike Baron stood before him, crouching to see over his shoulder. Miller stood to Baron's left, Behunek to his right. They all held rifles as they stared, transfixed, through the breeze-swept brush and bobbing branches.
“That's them,” Baron exclaimed under his breath and pointing his rifle barrel at the river. “It's gotta be them.” The old Spencer shook in his hands.
“I told you three to stay on the trail,” Parsons said.
Ignoring the young lawman, Behunek hunkered down behind another tree and poked his bullet-torn hat back on his blond head as he stared at the giggling, chattering girls. “Now, wait a minute. I ain't exactly sure . . .”
Miller crouched behind Behunek. He, too, cast his gaze at the river, lower jaw falling slack. After a time, he ran the back of his hand across his mouth. “Christ, those girls are doin' downright . . . dirty things to one another . . . but there.”
“That . . . that ain't natural,” said Baron, who crept forward to hunker down in the brush before Parsons.
“I told you men to stay on the trail!” Parsons repeated, keeping his voice down. “If those are the two girls we're looking for, Magnusson himself is likely hereabouts.”
The young lawman turned his head slowly, sweeping the trees to both sides, then the meadow behind him and the trail beyond, where the townsmen's three horses lowered their heads to forage the needle grass.
A chill ran up the young lawman's spine. “The old bastard could have a bead on us right now.”
“That old killer ain't necessarily nowhere near here,” said Miller in a faraway voice as he stared at the two girls frolicking atop the waterfall. “We can't be sure these two are his daughters. They could be Mel Ramie's girls. He's got him one towhead and one half-breed, too. We're too far away. I can't see 'em clear enough to be sure.”
Parsons turned to the tall liveryman and was instantly distracted by the black-haired girl suddenly throwing the blonde onto her back. The blonde screamed. Laughing, the black-haired girl crawled on top of her and, placing both hands on the blonde's round breasts, began running her tongue down the blonde's belly toward her crotch.
The blonde shook her head from side to side and raised her knees. Her groans rose above the river's gurgle.
Parsons felt his face and loins warm. He didn't like what these girls were doing to him, how they'd captured not only his attention but his imagination, made him not want to think of anything else. As the dark-haired girl dropped her head down even lower on the blonde's belly, Parson raked his eyes toward Miller.
“How many prospectors' daughters cavort like
that
around
here
?” he scoffed, his voice thick in his throat. He jerked his head around, wary of an ambush. “You men stay here and keep an eye out for the old mountain man. I'm gonna head upstream, cross the river, and investigate the other shore.”
When none of them said anything, Parsons turned to them. “Look alive, goddamnit!”
“You got it, Marshal,” said Baron, not turning his head from the river.
“Whatever you do,” Parsons said, “don't leave these trees. And for chrissakes, don't go into the river!”
Miller turned to him, beetling his gray brows. “We're not tinhorns, marshal. We'll keep a sharp eye out for Magnusson. We'll be coverin' ya. Don't you worry.”
Parsons looked at the three men crouched in the brush, all three staring, mesmerized, toward the river. The young lawman shook his head and cursed as he turned and began walking upstream. When he was fifty yards beyond the waterfall, he looked around. Judging that he was alone at this section of the river, he stepped out from the bank and hop-scotched rocks to the other side, once slipping and filling his right boot with water.
On the opposite bank, he took a slow look around, then sat down, set his rifle beside him, pulled off his boot, and poured out the water. When he'd tugged the boot back on, he rose, grabbed his rifle, and followed the girls' caroming laughter downstream while inspecting every boulder and brush snag for their kill-happy father, Magnus Magnusson.
Thirty yards from where the girls were entangled atop the waterfallâengaged in some sort of wrestling hold, it appeared, one yowling with mock painâParsons stopped. From a rocky hollow to his left, where the ground rose gently toward the southern canyon wall, smoke curled skyward.
Parsons adjusted his grip on his Winchester and headed toward the concealed fire, setting each boot down carefully, wincing as the soaked one chirped softly, like a baby bird. He looked back toward the river.
The girls were both sitting up Indian style, facing each other and playing patty-cake, breasts jiggling each time they slapped their hands together. Parsons looked beyond them, at the other side of the stream. No sign of the three townsmen crouched in the weeds.
The young lawman was half-surprised they hadn't descended on the two girls by now, throwing themselves on the pair like wild pack dogs on a crippled fawn.
He stopped four feet from the snag and leaned left, casting his gaze into the hollow. He could see only the tops of two dancing flames. Swallowing, ignoring his pounding heart, he took one step left, then bolted forward, leaping an ancient deadfall and extending the Winchester straight out from his left hip.
“Hold it, Magâ”
He stopped. The hollow was vacant. Only the fire with a coffeepot sitting a few inches from the glowing coals. Three coffee cups were lined up along the far side of the fire ring. A couple of saddles and bridles were piled beneath a cedar, and while Parsons couldn't see them, he heard the crunch of horses chewing grass, probably in the heavier brush at the base of the canyon wall.
The hair at the back of his neck pricked as he moved around the fire, peering into the middle distance.
Behind him, a rifle cracked. Parsons leaped a good foot in the air. His right boot landed awkwardly atop a deadfall, and he fell, dropping his rifle.
On the other side of the river, where he'd left Baron and Behunek, a man screamed.
Parsons extricated his right boot from the deadfall's branches, scrambled onto his hands and knees, grabbed his rifle, and heaved himself to his feet.
Another rifle crack, another scream, then another shot.
Parsons ran back toward the river, leaping rocks and tufts of bunchgrass. He stopped just before he hit the stream. Mike Baron leaped off the opposite bank and into the river, screaming and clutching his right shoulder as he ran, splashing, toward Parsons.
“It's him!” Baron screamed. “Good God, it's hiâ”
The grocer's voice was clipped short by the roar of a rifle. As smoke puffed in the foliage behind Baron, the man's chest opened up, spouting blood. The man's head snapped back as the bullet thrust him forward. He hit the water face-first, arms and legs spread wide as he lolled in the current, dead.
The grocer's splash hadn't settled before Parsons dropped to one knee, snapped the Winchester to his shoulder, aimed at the billowing smoke, and fired three quick shots into the shrubs on the other side of the river. He ejected the spent shell, which clattered on the rocks behind him. As he rammed a fresh cartridge into the rifle's breech, he waded into the river, holding the rifle taut against his shoulder, staring down the barrel at the opposite shore.
He was halfway across the stream, heart sounding like a tom-tom in his ears, before he remembered the girls. He glanced to his left. His breath caught in his throat and his heart did a somersault.
Both girls were crouched behind a thumb of rocks sticking up from the edge of the waterfall. Both had carbines in their hands, and they were aiming the rifles at Parsons. They no longer looked quite as much like girlsâat least, not in the face. Their eyes owned a feral, savage cast, and their lips were turned down grimly. They looked like animals. The wet hair hanging straight down both sides of their faces slid around in the breeze.
“No!” Parsons cried involuntarily, swinging his own rifle toward them.
He'd swung the gun only six inches before the girls triggered their carbines at the same time. The twin smoke puffs tore and dispersed as both bullets took Parsons high on his chest. He twisted around and stumbled sideways, triggering his own Winchester into the river then dropping the gun as he hit the water and lay on his back, the bullets searing him like war lances.
“Oh . . . oh, Jesus . . . !”
Staring straight up at the sky, he felt his blood welling out of him. Christ, he thought, that was a dunderheaded move. Longarm never would have forgotten about the two girls . . .
As if his own thoughts had summoned them, the blonde and the brunette appeared in his field of vision, staring down at him. They held their rifles low across their thighs.
The breeze had dried their naked bodies, which were just as incredible as they'd appeared beforeâthe round-hipped, firm-thighed, full-breasted epitomes of perfect female flesh. It was their eyes that turned Parsons's stomach, drew his balls up into his belly. They were savage, unfeeling, malicious in the most coldly objective way imaginable.