Free Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) by Tabor Evans Page B

the table told him the town marshal hadn’t left any money for his own food. Had he been in too big of a hurry or was he just the cheap sort?
    â€œAdd it.” Longarm rose, donned his hat, and adjusted the gun on his hip as the old woman reached for his empty plate. “How ’bout if you point me in the direction of the Reverend Todd’s residence? That wouldn’t be too much information, would it?”
    â€œLittle red shack on Third Street, just south of Norvald’s Six-Shooter Saloon,” she said, shuffling toward the kitchen’s swinging door with the empty dishes. “Go with God, Marshal,” she added amusedly as she disappeared into the kitchen. Or, at least, that’s what Longarm thought he’d heard her say beneath the clattering of pans in the kitchen and the hum of various conversations around him.
    Again, he adjusted his pistol on his hip and glanced around him skeptically. Several pairs of eyes quickly turned away from him. Feeling that uneasy stirring of his short hairs again, he headed on out of the hotel and onto the broad front veranda, the cool evening air pushing against him and filling his nose with the smell of burning piñon pine and the cinnamon tang of mountain sage.
    The town’s few saloons were easily identified by the lights in their windows and the horses nosed up to their hitch racks. From one of them to Longarm’s left emanated the muffled tinkling of a piano.
    He’d seen the sign for Third Street earlier, so he looked around carefully, then stepped down off the veranda and began angling west across the main drag, before turning south on Third Street, which was the last of only three cross streets in the little town. It was eerily dark out here, the black shapes of both short and tall buildings and stables hulking around him.
    The darkness was tempered by the crisp light of the stars and, as Longarm continued walking, the lamplight of a distant building on the street’s right side. It was Norvald’s Six-Shooter Saloon, which was a tiny, adobe brick place with a brush roof and crumbling veranda and only two saddle horses tied to the hitch rack.
    Both horses regarded Longarm curiously, angling looks behind them, as he continued south to where the town began to play out. Before it did, a little red shack slumped at the lip of a deep ravine that curved in from the south and then ran west behind the little place, which wasn’t much larger than the Six-Shooter but which had a small second story perched precariously atop the first one.
    There was a picket fence around the front yard, but it was lacking a gate, as well as more than a few pickets. Longarm tramped up the worn path through spindly clumps of sage and buckbrush. A faint amber light burned in an upstairs window over the porch, and there was another, dimmer lamp lit in a large, first-story window to the left of the front door.
    Longarm’s boots squawked on the loose boards of the six-by-six-foot stoop, atop which stood a rusting corrugated tin washtub. An unseen cat gave an indignant meow, and Longarm heard the little, padded feet scampering off across the stoop and the light
thump
as the frightened beast leaped into the yard.
    He drew open the screen door and was about to knock on the inside door when he heard the crunch of a weed and the ratcheting click of a gun hammer to the left. A snarling voice said, “Best say your prayers, you bastard, because you’re about to be blown to
hell!
”

Chapter 9
    Longarm slowly lowered his right hand as he turned his head to the left, where a figure stood in the yard aiming a pistol at him over the porch rail. Starlight shone in long, blond hair and on the gun’s blue barrel.
    â€œI haven’t said a prayer in a month of Sundays,” he said. “Perhaps you could teach me one . . . uh . . . Miss Todd . . . ?”
    The girl was mostly in silhouette, wearing some kind of bulky coat,