"Evans, Tabor - Longarm 204 - Longarm and the Arizona Ambush" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Tabor)

minding going into dangerous situations. He went, but it was not always with
a high degree of willingness.

Now he sat his horse and studied the cabin. There was not a sign of
life, but that didn't mean anything. If Jack Shaw was in there, he was
perfectly capable of sitting as still as a stone until he had some reason to
react.

Longarm wanted to see the other side of the cabin. If there was a corral
it would be at the back, and he wanted to see if there were any horses
present. He could, he knew, have safely made a big wide circle to come up
behind the cabin, but he wasn't sure his horses could stand the extra work.
It was June and it was hot. Longarm thought it was as hot as the door handle
on a whorehouse. He could see little waves of heat shimmering off the prairie
in every direction.

He figured the cabin was a line shack. In such poor country, where it
took five hundred acres to feed one head of beef, ranchers erected such
dwellings for their line riders.

Cattle tended to drift toward the south, especially in the spring,
autumn, and winter. It was the line rider's job to throw the cattle back up
toward the north, driving them five or ten miles in that direction and then
turning back to catch another bunch. The cabins were usually situated about
fifteen miles apart down on the southern line of the property owner's land.
More than likely there was another cabin to the west of the one he was looking
at, and another to the east. At this time of year, summer, the cattle would
be on the northern ranges, in the foothills of the mountains, where it was
cooler. If the cabin was occupied now, it wouldn't be by a line rider.

Longarm felt as tired as his horses. His pursuit of the men who had
robbed the train had been as relentless and hurried as the terrain and his
horses would allow. He had slept only when it was forced on him by his body,
and his meals had been snatched and incomplete. He had left the site of the
robbery riding one horse and leading three others. Two he had turned loose as
they had faded and failed, leaving them to make it on their own if they could
in the rough, mountainous country he'd been through. Now he was down to just
these two horses. More like one and a quarter, he thought grimly. He looked
up at the sky, judging by the sun that it was about mid-afternoon, maybe
earlier, maybe somewhere between two and three o'clock. He'd put his watch in
his saddlebags for safekeeping. Some of the country he'd been crossing had
been so rough and jumbled he'd expected the fillings to fall out of his teeth.

He sat, trying to figure out what to do. By his best calculations his
locale was about seventy miles north of the Mexican border. The sign he'd
struck as he'd come out of the last of the mountains had indicated he was
close on to his quarry. If that was the case, then there was an excellent
chance that the game he was hunting would be in the cabin.

But just how many of them there were, he could not say. Which was one of