Red Moon Read Online Free Page A

sopping-wet coachmen. “I’m going to need him rested and ready.”
    â€œYou can stall him there at our relay station a day or two,” Long offered.
    â€œHuh-uh,” Sam said. “Soon as we get to Nogales, I’m heading back out.”
    â€œOut in all this?” Long said as if in disbelief.
    â€œYep, that’s my plan,” Sam said. “This can stop any minute. I’m not that far behind. I don’t want to quit his trail.”
    â€œQuit his trail? There’s no trail,” said Dawson. “It wasn’t raining this hard when Moses built his ark.”
    Sam and Long just looked at him.
    â€œMoses?” said Long.
    Dawson’s face reddened in the candlelight.
    â€œI
know
who it was,” he said. “Anyway, this whole stretch of desert is going to be mud soup for the next week, and that’s if this gully washer plays itself out in the next few hours.”
    Without reply, Sam crouched and backed out of the stage door. While the wind lulled, he held his bloodstained hands in front of him and washed them in the cold, falling rainwater.
    Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money for a stagecoach to be carrying, all in one run, he considered to himself. But his thoughts were taken from the matter as he noticed the empty strongbox and valuables crate lying in the mud. Strung out a few feet behind the coach were a women’s carpet travel bag and a larger man’s leather satchel lying half-sunken in a brown puddle of water.
    He walked to the two cases, picked up the woman’s thinly loaded carpetbag and clamped it up under his arm. Picking up the man’s leather satchel, noting a clasp open on one end and the cover flap turned back, he couldn’t help seeing the butt of a bone-handled Colt standing in a holster, the gun belt wrapped around it. He glanced through the rain toward the stagecoach, then reached into the satchel, lifted the Colt from its holster and turned it in his hand.
    The big Colt glinted in the grayness of the storm. Sam noted the clean, well-oiled feel of the gun as he pulled back the hammer and turned the cylinder with the ball of his thumb. He found the gun’s action smooth and firm like that of his own—a well-attended tool of the killing trade. He saw that the gun’s front sight had been expertly removed from its barrel, making for a snag-free draw.
    A drummer, huh?
    He glanced again toward the coach as he slid the gun in and out of its custom low-cut holster, noting how easily the holster gave it up. All right, he reasoned, a drummer might carry such a gun. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d seen a man carry more gun than he needed, especially a man who spent much of his life traveling the frontier on business.
    He slid the gun into its sleek-fitting holster and shoved the whole rig farther down into the satchel. He carried both wet pieces of luggage back to the coach.
    When he opened the coach door and climbed in, Sam pitched the luggage on the floor and looked at Weir and the young dove. Weir sat slumped where Jenny had helped him sit up a little on the seat and leaned him against the backrest. He managed to hold the wet cloth to his forehead.
    â€œI found these in the mud,” he said as the two looked at the dripping luggage, then at him.
    â€œOh! Thank you, Ranger Burrack,” Jenny Lynn said. “I don’t know what I would have done had I left my bag here. It has everything I own in it, modest though that may be.”
    â€œThe thieves must have let them fall from on top when they untied the strongbox,” Sam said. He gazed evenly at Weir as he spoke.
    Weir returned his gaze, the wet cloth cupped against his battered face.
    Finally he said in a strained, halting voice, “Too bad I didn’t have this . . . with me. I have a . . . gun in there.”
    â€œOh?” Sam said flatly.
    â€œYes, a fierce piece of equipment . . . I won it off a fellow a