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

loud.
    Outside, a hot wind blew. Dust ticked against the front of the place and billowed across the scarred puncheon floor beneath the batwings. A horseback rider passed, hooves thumping slowly, tack squawking, the horse’s bridle rattling when the mount shook its head.
    The barman said, “Nickel for the beer. Twelve cents for the whiskey.”
    Longarm reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out some gold and silver, and tossed three coins onto the bar top. They rattled around until the bartender slapped his hand down hard on top of them and then scraped them off the bar and into a coin box.
    Longarm took a long pull from the beer. It was warm and sudsy and the yeast tickled his throat, but it cut the trail dust. He set the beer down. He’d lowered the level a good four inches. He raised it an inch by pouring the whiskey into the beer, causing it to foam.
    Sometimes the venomous tangleleg in these backwater settlements was best diluted by beer.
    Longarm sipped the drink, glancing into the mirror behind the bartender, who had gotten busy mixing flour and some other things into a mixing bowl to Longarm’s left. The bull-chested man kept glancing owlishly at the stranger as Longarm kept an eye on the back-bar mirror, knowing that something would happen sooner or later.
    He wasn’t sure what that would be, but judging by the pregnant, ominous silence and the dead stares being cast his way, he wouldn’t doubt if one or more of the Dragoon Saloon’s clientele were to try to back-shoot him.
    At least, he had to be ready for it.
    He’d let them make their move, if one was forthcoming. And then maybe he could get down to the business of finding out what had happened to Sheriff Des Rainey.
    He didn’t have to wait long. He’d taken one more sip of the whiskey-spiced beer and was sucking the foam from his mustache, when he saw one of the two, big, nasty-looking hombres—the bearded one—rise from his chair. The chair made a loud, raucous sound as the man slid it back from the table. He straightened like a bull in a pasture finding that one of the neighbor’s bulls had wandered into his territory.
    He’d no sooner stood than the other big-ugly, with the mustache, rose from his own chair, making even more noise than the first one.
    The bearded one walked around the table that he and the other big man and Melvin Little had been sitting at, a half a glass of frothy beer in his fist. He had a big belly pushing out his striped shirt. Sweat was a giant dark tongue staining his shirt from his neck to his bulging belly.
    As the man approached, kicking out his legs like he was warming up for a dance, his stench wafted against Longarm, who winced against the sour, rancid odor of a man who hadn’t bathed in a month of Sundays and likely slept with wolves in a too-small burrow. He wore two pistols on his hips, as did the other man, with the mustache, who also had a shotgun slung over his shoulder by a thick leather lanyard. An old Spencer .56 carbine leaned against the table he’d left.
    Altogether, the two were outfitted well enough to be shotgun messengers or bodyguards of a sort.
    The bearded man took a too-casual sip of his beer, smacked his lips, and said to Longarm’s left shoulder, “Hey, you.”
    Longarm, leaning forward against the bar, had been watching the men in the mirror. Now he looked at the bearded gent over his left shoulder. “Me?”
    â€œYeah, you.” This from the mustached man, who had coal-black hair and gray eyes and was a little shorter and broader than the bearded gent. He stood just behind and to one side of his friend.
    Longarm took another sip of his drink and straightened, sucking the foam from his mustache. “Okay, let’s have it,” he said in a droll, patient tone. He’d been in the situation of the unwanted stranger so many times before that it was beginning to be old hat.
    â€œWe heard from Melvin yonder that you