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

Colorado sky stretching from horizon to horizon. They were over the bridge. And they were probably not moving over fifteen miles an hour. Maybe less than that. The train was still hiccupping and the brakes were still screeching, but, by damn, they’d done it!
    They’d gotten the train slowed. The bridge should hold.
    “We’re over the middle of the canyon!” the girl cried.
    Longarm kept his hands wrapped around the brake lever. He felt as though his knuckles were about to pop, his arms about to tear loose from their sockets. The girl’s hair in his face was a tonic, however. So, too, was her rump grinding against his balls.
    When he felt the engine grind to a final halt, he looked to both sides. Red, rocky slopes rose around him, stippled with piñon pines and firs. He could smell the pine resin. It was like perfume. The locomotive panted like a dying dinosaur; the fire in its box hadn’t been stoked since the outlaws had killed the fireman. Now that its momentum had been broken, and it was stopped, it wouldn’t be going anywhere until it was fired up again.
    “We made it,” the girl said in a sexy, husky voice, rolling off of Longarm, setting her feet on the floor and looking around with girlish delight. “We made it, mister. You did it. You saved us all!”
    As though on cue, a great, victorious whoop rose from the passengers behind the tender car.
    Longarm gained his feet, straightened. The brake remained now in the locked position. He squeezed his hands together, wincing as the blood oozed back into them, as the damaged tendons and muscles barked their complaints.
    He looked at the girl beaming up at him. “Couldn’t have done it without you, miss,” he said, panting.
    “Call me Matilda.”
    He gave a weary half smile. “Call me Longarm.”
    She leaped up and wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her breasts against his chest, her lips against his mouth.
    “Longarm,” she said, “when we get to Creede, you’re gonna get the biggest thank you that any girl has ever given a man!”

Chapter 4
    Two days later, riding north along a well-traveled stage road, Longarm reached into the pocket of his recently laundered tobacco-tweed frock coat, and pulled out the pink flimsy he’d received at the telegraph office in Creede. The missive had been sent in response to his request to have a few days off before heading back to the lawdog’s grind in Denver.
    REQUEST DENIED STOP AZ RANGERS AND U.S. MARSHALS AMBUSHED IN ARIZONA STOP GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE PRONTO END STOP
    It was signed by Longarm’s persnickety boss, Chief Marshal Billy Vail of Denver’s First District Court.
    Longarm frowned at the flimsy and then stuffed it back into his coat pocket. “Back to the grind,” he muttered, and while he could have used a few more days to frolic with Miss Matilda Nightingale in Creede—he didn’t know whether that was her real name but preferred to believe it was—the news of the deaths of his fellow lawmen graveled him.
    He couldn’t help wondering how many men had been killed and why and by whom, but he’d learn all that oncehe got back to Denver. That’s where he was heading now, by way of Leadville, where he’d pick up the Old Leadville trail and take it up and over Mosquito Pass to the growing, mile-high city sprawled on the plain at the foot of the Front Range.
    It was getting on toward night, however, so he’d spend the night in Leadville and then head east again first thing in the morning. He’d have taken the same narrow-gauge contraption he’d saved from the Arkansas River Gang six days before, but the locomotive’s brakes were getting an overhaul at the Creede roundhouse and wouldn’t be up and running until late next week at the earliest.
    So Longarm had hired a stable boy to ride back along the tracks and fetch the blue roan gelding he’d left when he’d boarded the train. After he and the horse had had a badly needed night of rest, and his clothes had been laundered by a capable