Read Online Longarm and the Diamondback Widow by Tabor Evans - Free Book Online

Winchester ’73 from the saddle scabbard. When he’d draped his saddlebags over his shoulder, Ronnie looked away from him quickly and continued leading the bay into the barn.
    Longarm stared after him, scowling. Finally, he hiked the saddlebags higher on his shoulder, set his rifle on the opposite shoulder, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a three-for-a-nickel cheroot. When he was this frustrated, he liked to chew some of it out on a smoke.
    Swinging around and striding toward the main street, he fired a match on his thumbnail and touched the flame to the cheroot. When he had the cigar burning to his satisfaction, he tossed the match into the dirt. He smoked as he walked. The dirt was so hot beneath his boots that he felt as though he were walking through coals.
    But as hot as the sun was, a cold fist had hold of his guts. Something told him that fist was likely to squeeze all the harder before it finally let go.

Chapter 7
    The Dragoon Saloon sat kitty-corner across the street from the jailhouse, about three buildings east of the pink brick hotel.
    Longarm stepped onto the boardwalk out front of the place and under the saloon’s front awning, relieved to finally have the sun off his head. Hearing a loud buzz of commotion emanating from inside, he slowed his pace as he headed for the batwings. He stopped. The buzz continued. The men inside seemed to have a lot to talk about.
    Their tone was owly, befuddled, angry.
    Longarm felt a self-satisfied smile quirk his mouth corners around the burning cheroot in his teeth. That wildfire he’d set earlier had indeed spread as far as the Dragoon Saloon, at least.
    He swung through the batwings and stopped just inside, letting the doors swing manically behind him before they scraped to an abrupt stop. That seemed to be the signal for everyone in the long, heavily shadowed room to swing a head toward him.
    The conversation stopped as abruptly as the doors had closed.
    Five men stood with their backs to the bar. A half dozen or so others sat at three separate tables to the left of the bar. The men at the bar had been joining the conversation—a single conversation, it seemed—of the men sitting at the tables.
    One of those men was none other than Melvin Little himself. He sat perched on a chair back, feet on the chair, leaning forward on his knees, a sheepish look on his face. His sheriff’s badge glinted in the light from the windows. He turned his head slowly away from Longarm, like a cowed dog, and looked down at the table before him.
    Two big men sat at his table, both watching Longarm with grim, belligerent looks on their faces—one bearded, the other with only a mustache. Both men wore dusters, and they were heavily armed. The one with only the mustache nodded his head slightly at the newcomer and stretched his lips back from his teeth in a menacing grin.
    Longarm walked over to the bar, set his rifle and saddlebags on the bartop to his right, and looked at the bartender—a short, thick, muscular man with a bull chest and Indian and Mexican features. His broad, clean-shaven face looked as though it had been used by a blacksmith’s apprentice to practice hammering on. He regarded Longarm blankly, thick, chapped lips pursed.
    â€œI’d like a beer and a shot of Maryland rye,” Longarm said.
    â€œDon’t got none of that stuff,” said the barman.
    â€œThe beer or the rye?”
    The thick bartender just looked at him.
    Longarm smiled and said, “All right, how about a beer and whatever kind of rye you got?”
    Keeping his dark eyes on Longarm, the thick man grabbed a beer schooner from a pyramid atop the bar and a shot glass from another pyramid near the schooners. He splashed whiskey into the shot glass, filled the schooner from a spigot, and set both on the bar in front of Longarm.
    The room had fallen so quiet that the bartender’s movements and even his heavy, raspy breathing sounded inordinately