Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101) Read Online Free Page A

through the broken window and into the hall ceiling over Longarm’s head.
    Foot thuds sounded. Longarm looked out once more to see Laughing Lyle running, limping and holding his right arm close against his side, toward the front of the roadhouse. The outlaw’s thin, straw-colored hair danced around the bald top of his head.
    Longarm threw himself to the left side of the window, and started to raise the Colt in his right hand, but the wounded arm felt as though a rabid cur were tearing into it. He couldn’t get the pistol aimed even chest high. He took the gun in his left hand, but by the time he got it aimed, Laughing Lyle had disappeared around the front of the roadhouse.
    â€œShit!”
    Longarm wheeled and, clutching the Colt in his left hand and letting the wounded right arm hang straight down at his side, ran down the hall. He dropped down the stairs two steps at a time, wincing as each jarring step caused the rabid dog to take another hungry bite out of the wounded wing.
    The half-breed barman and the three waddies were standing around behind the bar, looking like scolded schoolboys. One ducked with a start when he saw Longarm, who yelled, “Stay where you are, fellas!”
    The whore had begun to dress but now lurched back against the fainting couch, holding a corset bustier across her pillowy breasts. “You, too, miss!” Longarm added as he sprinted along the bar.
    â€œWhat in
tarnation!
” shouted one of the punchers.
    Longarm heard hoof thuds in the yard as he approached the closed winter doors. He pulled the doors open and bulled through the batwings in time to see Laughing Lyle galloping westward out of the yard on a white-socked chestnut, bulging saddlebags that contained sixteen thousand dollars in Stoneville loot draped across the horse’s hindquarters.
    The lawman leaped down the porch steps into the yard, cursing at the ache that the move kicked up in his arm, and raised the Colt in his left hand. He eased the tension in his trigger finger, however. Laughing Lyle was a good seventy yards away and galloping fast, horse and rider silhouetted against a colorful western sunset, behind the shadows of sawtooth mountains.
    Boots pounded the porch behind Longarm, who glanced behind to see one of the waddies step cautiously out of the roadhouse, looking toward the dwindling hoof thuds. He swung his gaze to the horses, including Longarm’s gray, prancing around nervously at the hitch rack.
    â€œHey!” the waddie said, pointing toward Laughing Lyle, “he’s run off with your hoss, Merle!”
    As the other two came stomping out of the roadhouse behind the first man, Longarm holstered his Colt and dug a neckerchief out of his coat pocket. Staring toward Laughing Lyle’s quickly diminishing, jouncing figure, frustration biting him now as fiercely as the invisible dog chewing into his arm, Longarm wrapped the cloth around the wound.
    â€œHey!” intoned the waddie called Merle, pointing westward. “He’s makin’ off with my hoss!”
    â€œYeah, well that’s not all he’s got,” Longarm said with a snarl, knotting the neckerchief tightly around his arm, gritting his teeth. He glanced at the waddies. “Don’t even think about goin’ after him,” he warned. “The man’s a killer, and he’ll kill you laughing.”
    While the waddies regarded him dubiously, he walked over to his dusty gray and untied the reins from the polished pine hitch rail. His inclination was to ride after Laughing Lyle and the Stoneville loot, but that could take some time. First, he had to check on Morgan.
    He climbed into the saddle, swung the horse away from the roadhouse and the three waddies milling on the porch, and booted it into a gallop, heading south.
    â€œHey, you’re headin’ the wrong direction!” yelled Merle. “My hoss is west!”
    When he’d first scouted the roadhouse, Longarm had memorized