Tabor Evans (13 page)

"That's me."

"Lonnie was coming here to meet you. If he hadn't stayed conscious long enough to show me how to go, though, I never would've found this place."

"How'd he get shot?" Floyd asked.

"Do I have to talk about that now? Can't it all wait until we see how Lonnie's going to do?"

"Sure. I was just asking," Floyd told her. He looked at Taylor on the table. "Old Lon sure don't look too good right now, though. I hope he pulls through."

Belle came in carrying a handful of shredded rags. "Here," she said to Longarm. "We'll untie that bandage enough to get to where he's wounded, and put these over the place. Maybe that'll stop him from bleeding so much."

For the next few minutes, Longarm and Belle worked over Taylor. When the lint had been packed in the gaping wound and the bandage retied, Belle said, "Well, that's all I can think to do for him right now. If he comes to, we'll try to get a little whiskey down him; that'll help his circulation. But all we can do right now is wait and see." She turned to her husband. "Sam, is there any coffee left from supper? I guess we could all use some. Or a drink, or both."

"It's heating, Belle," Sam replied. "And I've got water hottening on the stove, too."

A thudding of boots on the porch announced the arrival of Steed and Bobby. Steed growled, "What's all the fuss up here? Bobby woke up and seen the lights, and we figured something was wrong."

"Taylor just rode in," Floyd said. "He got himself shot up somewheres. I don't know where or how."

"Who done it?" Steed asked.

"How bad is he hurt?" Bobby asked at almost the same moment.

Floyd answered them both at the same time. "I don't know who got him. And we won't know for a while how bad it is." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "The way he looks, he ain't going to make it."

"Goddamn! That blows our job for sure!" Steed exclaimed.

"We'll wait and see," Floyd replied.

"But with Mckee dead, and now maybe Taylor, how could we pull it off?" Bobby asked. "You said there had to be five of us at least."

"Shut up, Bobby!" Belle commanded. "Floyd, you and Steed cut it out, too. We'll see what happens to your friend, then we can make a new plan, if we have to. There's others we can bring in besides Mckee and Taylor."

Longarm overheard the conversation; they were standing directly behind him. Apparently, in their excitement, they'd forgotten about him. Or, he thought, they might have accepted him as one of their kind by now.

Taylor groaned and his body twitched. His eyes opened, but weren't focused; he shook his head to try to see clearly.

Longarm said over his shoulder, not caring who responded, "Pour a little bit of that whiskey in a glass. Let's try to get a drink down him."

It was the girl who reacted first. She splashed some of the corn liquor into the first glass she picked up from the chair. Longarm raised Taylor's shoulders; the wounded man was still trying to focus his eyes. The girl put the glass to Taylor's lips. He accepted the liquor in his mouth, but gagged when he tried to swallow it. Most of it trickled back out and dripped off his chin onto his bloodstained chest.

"Try again," Longarm urged her.

This time, Taylor managed to get a good swallow of the whiskey down his throat. Holding him by the shoulders, Longarm could feel the muscles of his back beginning to flex.

"Go on," he urged Taylor. "Swallow it on down."

Taylor finally managed to get his vision under control. He looked up at Longarm. "Who're you?" he asked. His voice was thin, almost inaudible.

"He's the man who helped us get here," the girl answered before Longarm could speak.

Taylor turned his eyes to look at her. "Susie. You got me here, didn't you?"

"Yes. But you're hurt real bad, Lonnie. You just lay back now and try to rest. You'll be all right, I know you will!"

"Hey! He's come around!" Floyd exclaimed. He stepped up to the table, followed by Steed and Bobby. They jostled against Longarm, and he stepped away to give them room.

"Said-I'd-be-here," Taylor said in a series of gasping whispers.

"Lonnie! Don't talk now. Save your strength!" the girl urged.

Belle drew Longarm away from the table. "I don't know about him. That bullet took him in a bad place."

"I know," Longarm agreed. "I've seen men hit high in the belly there before. Mostly, they hang on and you think they're going to get over it, but then they just fade off."

"Why'd you decide to sleep in the barn?" Belle asked.

"I didn't like those windows up above the bunks in that cabin. Not with Floyd just a little ways off."

"Don't worry about Floyd. He'll do what I tell him to," she assured him.

"Well, we'll just have to wait and see how things turn out."

Sam Starr came up frowning, carrying steaming coffee cups. "I don't like this a bit, Belle. Somebody might have been trailing that fellow. He could have led a posse right up to our door."

"I'd have heard them, if there was anybody behind him," Longarm told Sam. "There wasn't."

"How in hell do you know, Windy?" Starr asked. His voice was somewhat uncertain, despite the bluster in his words. "They might be tracking him, five or ten miles behind."

"That's the most sensible thing you've said in a long time, Sam," Belle told her husband. She called. "Steed! Bobby! Come here!"

When the two outlaws got to her side, Belle said, "Get your rifles and stand watch up at the gully. We don't know there isn't a posse tracking your friend. It damned sure wasn't any friends of his who shot him."

"They'd have got here by now, if they was after him," Steed objected.

"Not if they were waiting for daylight to pick up his tracks," Belle said. She gave Sam no credit for having been the first to come up with the idea. "Now, you stay at the gully until about noon. I'll get Yazoo to bring you some breakfast after while."

Steed looked as though he wanted to object still further, but Belle's black look kept him silent. He shrugged and said, "Come on, Bobby. Belle just might have an idea there."

Longarm went back to the table to look at Taylor. Floyd was still standing there. The girl, too, still stood on the other side of the wounded man. Taylor's eyes were closed, and his chest was rising and falling irregularly.

Floyd asked Longarm, "How's he look to you?"

"I've seen shot men who looked better. He had to wait too long to get those holes plugged up."

"How many holes has he got in him, for Christ's sake?" Floyd asked.

"I saw two, but I didn't go over him too good. I was too busy getting that real bad one stopped up."

"We'd better look him over, then," Belle said. She'd come up to the table, following Longarm.

They searched Taylor's prone form, and did find a third wound, a shallow graze, high on one side, almost in his armpit. It was no more than a scratch, raw but not bleeding now. They agreed that it would be better to leave it alone rather than to disturb Taylor by moving him to get a bandage on it.

"Whoever it was chasing him, they sure did intend to stop him," Floyd commented. He looked at the girl, who hadn't moved while they were making their examination. "You feel like telling us what happened, lady? There's not a hell of a lot we can do for Taylor right now. Not until he gets better--or worse."

"You're right, Floyd," Belle agreed. She raised her voice. "Sam!

Come watch Taylor while the rest of us go out on the porch. We need a breath of fresh air. You can start breakfast when we get back."

"Sure, Belle." Sam moved obediently to the table, pulled up a chair, and sat down. "If he comes around again, I'll call you."

"We'd better take care of Taylor's horse," Belle said when she saw the animal still standing in front of the house. "I'll get Sam to take care of it as soon as he has time."

"Never mind, Belle. I'll lead it into the barn and unsaddle it," Longarm told her. "I need to get my vest, anyhow. It's got my cigars in the pocket."

He led the animal into the barn, took off its saddlebags and tossed them in a corner, then loosened the cinch and lifted the saddle off. He set it beside the saddlebags, then he went up to the loft, slid his arms into his vest, and arranged his watch chain in its usual style, draped across from the pocket holding his watch to the opposite pocket, in which his derringer nestled, clipped to the other end of the chain. He took enough time to down a swallow of his own Maryland rye, and walked on outside before lighting his cheroot.

In the east, the sky was beginning to show the gray of false dawn, but it was still dark on the porch except for the patch of light from the open house door.

"Well," the girl was saying, "I guess I don't quite know how to start out."

"You might start out by telling us who you are," Belle suggested, "and how you came to hook up with Taylor."

Longarm suddenly realized that things had moved so swiftly since he'd first responded to the girl's cries that everyone's attention had been focused so completely on Taylor--that nobody had learned the girl's name.

She said, "My name-my name's Dolly Varden.

Belle interrupted her with a laugh, a raucous, sneering chortle. "You'll have to do better than that, missy. I know where that name comes from. You must think we're all ignorant around here, but let me tell you something: I went to the Carthage Female Academy, and I learned how to read books. And that name's right out of a book by an Englishman called Charles Dickens. He made it up a long time ago."

"Really?" the girl asked. Her eyes widened in surprise. "You mean it's just a made-up name?"

"That's what it is," Belle told her. "Now, suppose you come down off your high horse and tell us your real name."

"Oh, hell!" the girl sighed. "I didn't know Dolly Varden wasn't real--that is, I didn't know it was made up such a long time back. And I wasn't trying to fool you. I've just called myself that for so long that I'd almost forgotten what my own name is. Until I ran into Lonnie about two weeks ago." She sighed again and went on, "My real name's Susanna. Susanna Mudgett. Everybody just called me Sue, back home. But when Lonnie began calling me Sue, I almost didn't answer him half the time."

"Come on, Dolly or Sue or whoever you are," Floyd said impatiently. "We want to hear about Lon Taylor, not about you."

"Appears to me we'll have to hear about both of them, if we want to know what happened to Taylor," Longarm pointed out. He went up the porch steps and sat down on the bench beside Susanna. "You take your time, now. Start wherever you feel like it, and just tell us whatever comes to your mind first. We'll sort it all out."

"All right," she said nodding. "You see, I hadn't seen Lonnie for a long time--five or six years, I guess. Then he stopped in the place where I was working..." She hesitated, shook her head angrily, and blurted, "Oh, hell! You'll know sooner or later. I was a saloon girl over in Texarkana, on the Arkansas side of town. Lonnie came in, and I didn't even recognize him right off. He spotted me, though. And then we got to talking. We-we used to be what we called sweethearts, back home. Of course, that was before we really knew what being sweethearts means."

Longarm interrupted, "Back home, you say. That'd be up in Kansas?"

"Yes. Up at Yates Center. Then Lonnie left home, and I... well, I did too, later on. And we didn't see each other again until he came into the saloon, there in Texarkana. Lonnie asked me would I come along with him and be his girl, and I said I would."

"All right, Susan or Dolly or whichever you want us to call you--what happened with Lon?" Floyd asked impatiently, after the girl had sat silently for several moments.

"Well, Lonnie said he had to come up here into the Cherokee Nation, to meet some men. I guess you'd be one of them?" she asked Longarm.

He shook his head. "No. He was talking about Floyd and Steed."

"This is Floyd," Belle told her, pointing. "Steed's up watching the gully you came through getting here."

Susanna spoke directly to Floyd now. "He said he was in with you on some kind of job. I didn't understand what it really was until we got to Dequeen. We stayed there awhile--about a week, I guess. It was while we were there that Lonnie told me how he'd-he'd turned outlaw. And he wouldn't tell me what he was going to meet you for, Floyd, but it was some kind of robbery or something. Is that right?"

"Never mind," Floyd said brusquely. "That's not any of your affair. What else did Lon tell you about me?"

She frowned. "Nothing, really. Oh, he talked about you and the others a lot, but he didn't really say anything, if you take my meaning. All I ever did know was that he was supposed to meet you at a place called Younger's Bend. I guess that's here, isn't it?"

"It is," Belle said. "Go on. Get on down to where you ran into the law."

"How'd you know it was the law that shot Lonnie?"

"Hmph. Couldn't have been much else," Belle replied. "I could just about tell your story for you. You got to this place where you stopped--Dequeen?" Susanna nodded, and Belle went on, "Taylor told you he was running short of cash and needed some more, so he went out and came back with a bundle. But there was a posse of some kind chasing him, and you two stayed ahead of them for a while, but they caught up with you. Hell, I know what happened, girl. Am I right?"