Longarm Giant #30: Longarm and the Ambush at Holy Defiance Read Online Free

on out the tunnel’s other side and into the blindingly bright daylight, Longarm saw what appeared a ragged, bloody bag of bones jouncing along a roof several cars back. It skidded off to the car’s south side and slithered down over the roof and out of sight, leaving a wide smear of dark red blood behind it.
    “Gone but not forgotten, Rio,” Longarm muttered through a grunt, heaving himself to his feet, “you son of a bitch.”
    He stared forward, past the wood tender heaped with split pine and oak, to the black iron engine with its diamond-shaped stack spewing gray smoke that billowed in ghostly snakes behind. Beyond the smokestack, the rail bed was a thin swath of iron and rock leading arrow-straight through dark green walls of forest. It dropped perilously toward a distant, gray-blue fold in the dark ridges—a fold in which the broad, deep Horse Thief Gorge lay.
    Longarm knew from having taken this line before that the grade soon got even steeper before bottoming out at the bridge over the gorge. Usually through here theengineer was clamping the brake shoes taut against all wheels, just creeping along, because he knew the bridge could only withstand a speed of less than twenty miles an hour. Any more than that, the force and pressure and vibration of the locomotive and trailing cars would rattle the whole thing apart.
    As Longarm dropped quickly down the ladder to the vestibule, he judged they were traveling at least thirty miles an hour and were probably picking up an extra mile an hour with every few passing seconds. The wind rush over the train was enormous, blowing the lawman’s close-cropped, dark brown hair flat against his skull.
    “How come we’re going so fast?” It was the girl the Mexican had been having his way with.
    She was still naked and sitting with her back to the bloody front wall of the coach car, one arm crossed on her breasts. Having seen the other doxies inside the coach car, Longarm now realized this girl was likely with them. With her other hand, she was holding her blowing hair back from her face. She looked concerned but not horrified.
    “That’s what I’m gonna find out!” Longarm yelled above the screeching and clattering of the wheels over the rail seams and the incessant whooshing of the wind.
    He climbed up into the tender car and crawled over the neatly stacked wood, wincing at the sharp edges of the wood digging into his bare hands and scraping his knees. Ahead, he saw the fireman and the engineer both slumped inside the locomotive. The fireman lay on the floor across from the firebox that heated the boiler. The engineer was half standing, as though he were suspended by something.
    Longarm continued crawling, glancing at the engineer and then out beyond the train to the gorge that he could see opening now before him, the bridge stretching a thin, silver-brown line across it. It was a mile away but it was coming up fast. The lawman knew enough about trains to know that even this narrow-gauge affair needed at least a hundred yards to stop after the brakes were fully applied, maybemore than that considering how fast the combination was barreling down a steep pass.
    Longarm dropped over the bulkhead and into the locomotive, stepped over the stout boots of the overall-clad fireman, blood gushing out the side of the man’s head. He stepped over to the engineer, who had a similar hole as the fireman, in the same side of his head.
    He saw now what had happened. The gang had shot the engineer and the brakemen before Hayes’s men had leaped onto the train…probably from a perch similar to Longarm’s.
    They’d figured they could stop the train whenever they wanted by pulling the brake through chain from anywhere behind, in any of the cars. Only, they hadn’t counted on the engineer falling over the dead-release lever that disengaged the through chain, rendering it impossible to brake the train from anywhere but in the locomotive itself.
    Longarm pulled the engineer off the lever