Free Longarm #399 : Longarm and the Grand Canyon Murders (9781101554401) by Tabor Evans

tied one end of the rope to the saddle horn and the other around Carl’s ankles just above his boots. The boots were pretty nice, so Al took a moment to try them on, but they were much too large for his small feet. So he put his own down-at-the-heel boots back on, remounted hishorse, grabbed the reins of Carl’s horse, and looked back at his cousin’s blood-soaked corpse. “Carl, you sure do look like shit,” he said, leading both horses out of the gap in the hills then up through the sagebrush. Twice, Carl’s big body got hung up in brush and Al had to dismount and drag it sideways, grunting and cussing. But eventually, he dragged the corpse for almost two miles, until he found a deep and obscure arroyo.
    “This ought to do,” he said to the battered and gray-faced man. “Ain’t quite a nice grave in Flagstaff, but you won’t know the difference and I don’t rightly care. Why waste the money on a dead man that always tried to boss me around?”
    Al untied the rope and tethered both horses to a stunted piñon pine tree. He collected his cousin’s six-gun and money then spent an hour covering his body with a heavy mound composed of rocks, sticks, and pieces of deadwood. When he was satisfied that the body would never be found way the hell out on the reservation, he mounted his horse and led Carl’s bay a few miles out into the wilderness, where he reluctantly shot the animal.
    Al was tough as rawhide, lean as a desert coyote, and quick as a cat. He rolled a smoke and studied the dead horse, wishing he could have taken it over to that Hopi trading post at Keams Canyon and sold the animal, but that would have tied him to the death not only of his cousin, but also of the missing federal marshal.
    “This way, I’m free and clear. Just got to find someone to write me up Carl’s last will and testament and get me some of that blond woman. Ought not to be too hard, I reckon.”
    Al Hunt rode back to the gap where they’d waited in ambush. He found a dead limb from a tree and took his time wiping out all evidence of the ambush and the deathof his cousin. Satisfied, he backed up to his horse, wiping out his footprints as he went, and mounted his horse.
    “Let’s go,” he said, pushing the animal into an easy gallop. “We got to get to that stagecoach station and have a little fun before the
real
party begins!”

Chapter 10
    The Navajo shepherd, his sixteen-year-old son, and two thin black-and-white dogs were moving their small flock across the dry and seemingly desolate reservation. The sheep were long-haired and produced excellent wool in addition to being a source of meat to the People…the Dine. It was a warm afternoon, and when they pushed their vocal flock over a rocky ridge, they heard a single rifle shot off in the distance.
    Thinking it might have been one of their own people in trouble and in need of help, the father left the son and rode his pony toward the sound of the shot. What he saw next was very troubling. A man on a horse was jamming his rifle into his saddle boot and riding away to the north while a horse on the ground was in the middle of its death throes.
    The old man did not understand this, and something told him that there was a great danger if he were seen by the departing horseman. So he rode behind the hill and waited a little while, and then he trotted over to the dead horse, dismounted, and examined the animal. He would, of course, take the good saddle, which was much betterthan his own, and the bridle, saddlebags, and the rope. But as he examined the dead horse, he could see nothing wrong with its feet or legs, and he could not understand why anyone would kill such a valuable and healthy saddle horse.
    The old man needed help to remove the saddle, the off stirrup of which was pinned under the weight of the dead animal, so he rode back to his son, whose name was Henry, and explained the situation.
    Henry listened without interruption and then said, “The dogs will protect the flock. I