Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds

The clerk nodded, but proved he was good with facts and figures by submitting, "Wouldn't it be natural for folks to withdraw lots of money during the holiday season, Deputy Long?"

Longarm proved how smart he was by replying, "It would, and we'll say no more about what folks might or might not have done with their own money then as long as they're alive now. But I'd sure like to know if anyone else wound up dead, or missing, just after cleaning out their bank accounts. Wouldn't you?"

The clerk allowed he might, but objected, "That Jasper we've been holding at Oland's couldn't have robbed anybody as early as Christmas or even New Year's, Deputy Long. He only came back to these parts a few weeks ago."

Longarm wasn't sure who they were talking about and said so. The clerk said patiently, "Baptiste Youngwolf, that Chippewa cowhand you shot your ownself. We had him on display on the cellar doors around to the back until some cowhands who'd been riding with him over at the Runeberg spread identified him for certain and naturally told their boss lady what you'd done to one of her boys."

Longarm muttered, "Damn it, he came after me. I never even knew he was in town until he was swinging a shotgun muzzle my way!"

The clerk said, "That's the way the coriner, sheriff, and district attorney see it, Deputy Long. Miss Helga Runeberg still rid into town on a broom last night to arrange for her Uncle Chief, as she called him, to be embalmed and gussied up in a genuine mahogany casket by old Ivar Oland and his crew. We allowed it wouldn't hurt as long as they kept him above ground and on display at their funeral parlor until we closed the books on the dead rascal."

The clerk sounded more annoyed as he continued. "Miss Helga's made arrangements to plant the red heathen in the hallowed ground of our Saint Paul's Lutheran Church, ain't that a bitch?"

Longarm allowed it was up to the church to decide whether a dead Indian had been a good Indian, because he was more interested in how they knew how long the jasper had been in these parts.

The clerk said, "Miss Helga told us, and some of her hired hands back her story. She said she hadn't seen her Uncle Chief for quite a spell, but that she'd naturally signed him on when he showed up less'n a month ago, saying he'd been handed a shovel out Colorado way."

Longarm knew a top hand preferred to say he'd been handed a shovel, or asked to do work afoot, and naturally quit, in place of admitting he'd been fired mounted up. Longarm frowned thoughtfully and told the clerk, "A man on the dodge after a payroll robbery would be way more likely to tell an owner he knew he'd been fired off another spread. But how come this Helga Runeberg called Youngwolf her uncle? Is she a breed?"

"More like pure Swede," the local resident replied with an amused grin. "The Runebergs came from Vastemorriand in their old country, to hear them tell it. I understand Miss Helga and her little sister, Miss Margaret, are pure Hellstrom on their late mamma's side."

He read Longarm's puzzled expression right and explained. "That Chippewa you shot rode with their late daddy against the Sioux back in '62. Before he went bad and deserted with them Galvanized Yankees, he saved Axel Runeberg's bacon in a skirmish up by Yellow Medicine. So over the years he's always had a place on the payroll and at the chuck table with the other Runeberg riders, rain or shine and wanted by the law or not. Miss Helga told us she knew her Uncle Chief was laying low because he'd been accused of something he hadn't done, again. She seems to think that happened to him a lot just because he'd been a mite wild in his younger days."

Longarm rolled his eyes heavenward and snorted, "They say much the same about some old boys named James and Younger down Missouri way."

The clerk nodded and said, "Miss Helga can be stubborn as any old Missouri mule. When the sheriff pointed out that one treasury note from the Fort Collins robbery showing up in these parts about the same time as her daddy's old comrade in arms, she allowed they'd heard and been thundergasted as the rest of us. She said her Uncle Chief had told her how he'd been out Colorado way at the right time and close enough to the right place, but hadn't known beans about that payroll robbery and figured we'd just never tried to understand him."

Longarm thought before he cautiously decided, "We could likely stick her with aiding and abetting if she's admitted right out she knew she was hiding an owlhoot rider wanted by the federal law."

The clerk nodded and said, "The sheriff's already warned her not to go around making war talk about lawmen only doing their damned job. She said she has no idea why her Uncle Chief was tagging after you with her dear old dad's fancy Cleveland twelve-gauge. She said she was still sore at us, and at you in particular, but willing to concede it might've been a tragic misunderstanding. That's what some call it when Indians go bad, a tragic misunderstanding. Only us white boys are allowed to be just no damned good."

Longarm didn't want to get into that. He shrugged and said something about letting Sheriff Tegner deal with his own constituents, and added, "Like I said, I got to ride over to Sleepy Eye. With any luck I ought to be back this afternoon."

The clerk glanced out the nearby grimy window and suggested, "If I were you I'd take the train. It's still raining outside and we're talking about wet hours in the saddle versus minutes by rail."

Longarm shook his head and replied, "No, we ain't. I already looked at the timetable I picked up free off the railroad conductor who brought me here. You'd be right if I was only going one way. There's a westbound stopping here in New Ulm today, around ten, and like you said, the flag stop of Sleepy Eye ain't but a few minutes west by rail. But after that I'd be stuck in Sleepy Eye till after sundown if I missed today's eastbound coming through just short of noon."

The clerk agreed it hardly seemed worth going to Sleepy Eye at all if a man didn't have several hours to visit there.

Longarm didn't know how long he might want to stay in that smaller railroad stop. He felt better about his means of transportation when, just as he was untethering his livery mount out front, the sun broke through and he declared, "I'll be damned if I don't believe it could be fixing to clear up."

Both his jeans and his saddle were still sopping wet, of course, and neither would dry as fast in contact as they might if he let the sun and wind get at them. So instead of mounting up as he'd meant to, he told the mare, "There's a chance we got some answers to wires we sent earlier from here in New Ulm. So why don't we mosey on over afoot and sun-bake that saddle some?"

The buckskin didn't seem to care. Others stared at them from all sides as Longarm led his mount deliberately down the sunny side of the muddy street, although he was sure the more experienced riders they passed knew what he was doing.

A quartet of riders coming the other way deliberately crossed over as if to give him more room than he really needed. Longarm kept the brim of his Stetson low as he kept a wary eye on them from its shade. All four of them were cowhands at first glance, but Indians as soon as one looked closer. Full-bloods. One of them still wore his hair in braids, although none seemed to feel the need for feathers, beads, or other fringes you saw on some old boys living off the blanket. So it was safe to assume they weren't out to advertise their ancestry in a county where many a Wasichu family was still mourning kith or kin who'd gone under in the Great Sioux Scare.

The four full-bloods, who could have been Ojibwa as soon as one studied on it, passed on uneventfully, leaving Longarm to wonder if they could have been the Santee who'd been asking about him personally out at that raft the other night.

Longarm was as puzzled by them asking Mato Takoza in Santee. For the late Baptiste Youngwolf, or Uncle Chief, had either been Ojibwa or one hell of an actor in a part of the country where most everyone knew the enemy nations apart. You didn't have to be fluent in either lingo to tell "Sioux" and "Chippewa" apart. They were as unrelated as, say, Spanish and English, and sounded like they were, whether one could follow the drift or not.

Neither pretty little Mato Takoza nor her mysterious night lit callers had been speaking the Algonquin dialect a "Chippewa scout" known to one and all as Baptiste Youngwolf would have spoken when talking to other...

"Hold on!" Longarm told the buckskin. "An Ojibwa paid to scout the Santee for the army might have learned at least as much Sioux-Hokan as the rest of us, and a man who'd desert any outfit in time of war, in the company of white outlaws, might not take his membership in the nation of his birth too seriously!"

The mare didn't answer, so Longarm explained, "A renegade scout of any nation could be riding with Santee who don't want to be Indians anymore. But damn it, that answer raises more questions than I can hear it answering!"

They trudged on, Longarm's wet duds starting to feel stickier as the sun warmed that rain to the temperature of sweat. He started to feel for a smoke, but decided to wait till his cheroots dried out all the way as well. They were almost to the Western Union near the depot by then, and who might that male and female be, coming out of the telegraph office and pretending so hard not to notice a tall man afoot with a buckskin mare at easy pistol range?

Longarm knew right off the young cuss he'd met the other night, out on the open range, had to be Gus Hansson, who'd bragged he rode for Miss Helga Runeberg. So the slightly older and far meaner-looking gal had to be the same Helga Runeberg who'd told everyone how sore she was at him for gunning her dear old Uncle Chief.

Longarm never broke stride as he just kept going the way he'd been going. So the two of them had to scurry some to mount the two cow ponies they'd tethered out front, still pretending not to notice him as he led the mare catty-corner across the muddy street.

Gus Hansson was blushing like a schoolmarm who'd been invited to elope with a whisky drummer. So Longarm assumed it was the gal who'd given the order to ignore a lawman she detested. Longarm was able to look her over all he liked as she pretended not to notice.

She was dressed for her business, which was raising stock, in an expensively tailored but practical outfit. The split skirts that let her ride astride were the only distinctly female notions to her dark gray outfit. Her dark hair matched her black pony.

Longarm had been expecting lighter features to go with her Swedish name. She wasn't as tall as either Swedish gal he'd met on friendlier terms in New Ulm. But Longarm knew some Swedes were naturally short and dark, just as some Spanish folks were tall and blond. The local folks who knew her better would have said so if she'd been a breed. Her profile was turned to him as they rode past him at a trot, her with her nose in the air, so he decided she just missed being pretty, although her whipcord-skirted rump, as he turned to boldly watch the two of them ride off, bounced shapely enough in her double-rigged roping saddle.

He chuckled, tethered the buckskin to the hitch rail they'd just been using, and moseyed on inside to see if anyone had sent any wires meant for him.

They had. Old Billy Vail had wired from Denver that yet another of those recorded treasury notes had surfaced at a bank back East in Boston, for Pete's sake, and hence old Billy wanted Longarm to come on home. He'd considered Longarm's reports about the member of the gang he'd apparently caught up with, or vice versa. But he still thought Longarm could be chasing his own tail.

For as the older lawman tersely pointed out, it stood to reason a member of the gang with local connections might have headed for New Ulm after they'd divided the proceeds of that payroll robbery before they'd split up in every known direction. Some of the hot paper had shown up around the renegade scout's old stamping grounds for the same reasons he had. But as far as anyone knew, none of those Galvanized Yankees who'd led a young Chippewa astray had been Minnesota boys, and other treasury notes from the same robbery kept turning up all over creation. So what was a senior deputy doing where he'd already run one of the rascals to the grave?

Everything his boss had wired made sense. But so did another wire from the Navajo Agency at Shiprock. The Indian Police had finally spotted the bloated body of that cuss Longarm had sent flying into the San Juan from a couple of railroad transfer points back.

Better yet, they'd matched some scars and a silly tattoo with a couple of wanted posters, state and federal. So the young cuss who'd lost that fight with Longarm as they'd been crossing the white water of the San Juan had been a known road agent called Mermaid Morrison. Or else there'd been two pallid youths with the same bullet scars and a mermaid tattoo who might have felt they had just cause to tangle with a paid-up lawman aboard moving trains.

Longarm got out his notebook to make certain. Then he tore off a telegram blank to wire Vail he might not be finished in New Ulm yet. For another suspect they had down as a possible member of the Tyger gang had sure been anxious to prevent him from ever reaching New Ulm, and come to study on it, why had Youngwolf been trailing him with a shotgun like so if he'd been the only member of the gang for miles?

Longarm wired he'd have never spotted the gang member he'd nailed if the fool Indian hadn't broken such fine cover, as if to prevent him from spotting something else. Then he allowed he'd head home after he'd found out what they both seemed to be missing so far.

CHAPTER 22

Longarm's crotch still sat sticky in the saddle, but the rest of him was dry enough, by the time he'd topped the clay bluffs west of New Ulm to follow the rail line's service road with the morning sun at his back.

The same sun was only commencing to dry the rain-smoothed mud of the service road. So it seemed easy at first to read the sign of the one two-spanned carriage or wagon, most likely, preceding him towards Sleepy Eye after that short but serious shower.

Then he spotted a hoofprint overlapping a wheel rut to the right of the center strip of grass, and knew two horses had been pulling the wheeled vehicle while the other two, although moving stirrup to stirrup as if a team, had been packing two riders. There'd have been better than one set of wheel ruts if he'd been reading two buckboards, and a lone rider leading a pack brute would have left most of the hoofprints of both critters along one or the other dirt-strip.

By this time Longarm's tobacco was dry enough to smoke. So he lit up without reining in as he idly wondered why he gave a hoot about morning traffic along a public right-of-way. A one-span carriage or buckboard had left New Ulm first, followed within a few minutes or a whole heap of minutes by a couple of riders, with all concerned no doubt headed for Sleepy Eye, where the rail line crossed another northwest-to-southeast county road, meant to serve the folks along that side of the higher ground between the Minnesota and Sleepy Eye.

The horse apples he spied on the road ahead from time to time were of more import to the bluebottles and buffalo gnats buzzing over them as he passed. He'd gotten back to pondering more serious puzzles. So he'd almost put the ordinary signs of ordinary travelers out of his mind, but not all the way out of his mind, when he spotted sign that wasn't there.

A less experienced tracker, or even an Indian who didn't give a hang, might not have noticed something that wasn't there. But just the same, before there'd been four steel-rimmed wheels and four sets of steel-shod hooves heading down that same road. Now he only read the sign of four wheels and three critters.

Longarm casually drew his Winchester from its saddle boot as he rode on, sweeping the range ahead with his thoughtful gun-muzzle-gray eyes as he tried to come up with innocent reasons for that one rider to hive off across the gently rolling and grove-speckled prairie all about. The most logical reason involved a shortcut for a nearby homestead after keeping company with that other rider a ways.

Had they in fact been riding side by side to begin with? Wasn't it possible that one-span vehicle had left first, followed by a lone rider headed for Sleepy Eye, followed by yet another who'd cut across yonder grass at an angle after...

"Anything's possible," Longarm said aloud to his own mount. Then he asked the buckskin, "Would you walk more than half-ways to Sleepy Eye along this muddy wagon trace if you were really headed for another place from the beginning?"

When the buckskin failed to answer, Longarm reined her to his left, towards the railroad tracks, as he observed, "I've seldom seen you critters match your strides so tight unless the pal you were striding with was right close. But why are we arguing, when it's so easy for us to just swing clear of any sneaky bullshit?"

The buckskin balked a bit at crossing the loose railroad ballast and snaky steel rails. But Longarm rode with his knees tight and a firm as well as gentle hand on the reins. So they got across with no more than a little crow-hopping, and she settled down as soon as they were on soft ground again and he'd whacked her a couple of times with the barrel of his Winchester.

He rode due south, away from the rails at an angle, till they were better than an easy rifle shot from the tracks. Then he reined to his right some more, explaining, "It's better to be safe than sorry. That mysterious rider who dropped out of our parade couldn't have expected us to do what we just done. So even if he's hunkered off the road up ahead behind some sticker brush, he's going to have a long wait before he bushwhacks this child!"

Thanks to the clearly visible telegraph poles along the railroad right-of-way, it was just as easy to find the railroad flag stop ahead while riding most of the way across wet bluestem and more kinds of wildflowers than you saw on the higher and drier plains further west. When he saw a church steeple and grain elevator out ahead, Longarm had no call to cross the tracks a second time. He just kept riding until, sure enough, he came to that country road serving folks to the south as well as the north of the flag stop.

Sleepy Eye was called a flag stop because cross-country trains only stopped there if someone on board wanted off or the station master at Sleepy Eye flagged down the train because somebody wanted on. Freight and livestock were usually taken aboard on a more formal schedule, maybe once or twice a week.

To someone riding in from any direction, the overall impression of Sleepy Eye was that its name sure fit it, even though it must have been named for the watercourse way off to the southwest on its own tanglewood flood plain. The just as aptly named town was mostly sun-silvered frame, dozing like a big dried-out buffalo chip in the late morning sun as Longarm rode in.

That clerk back in New Ulm had been on the money about the tedious ride, and jam on toast would only carry a man so far. So first things coming first, Longarm asked directions from a couple of kids shooting marbles in a dooryard, and dismounted out front of the only livery in town.

An old geezer wearing overalls and a Swedish accent came out to see if Longarm really wanted anything. Longarm told the hostler he didn't know how long he'd be in town, but that his buckskin pal could doubtless do with a rubdown and some fodder and water while she waited for him to finish his business in town. The old Swede said nobody had ever stolen anything from their tack room. But Longarm held on to his Winchester just the same.

So he was carrying it, muzzle aimed down as peaceably as he knew how, when he strode into the restaurant the old-timer at the livery had recommended. It stood handy to the Western Union and across from the open platform and stock loading ramps of the railroad. Longarm figured he'd fill up on stronger coffee and more solid grub than he'd managed for breakfast.

The drably pretty young waitress who seated him at a round table with a checkered red, white, and gravy-stained cloth didn't seem upset by his faded denims and Winchester '73. But he sure was getting dirty looks from the only other patron at that hour.

That small brunette he suspected of being the hot-tempered Helga Runeberg was seated at another table in a far corner, spitting venom at him with her big blue eyes from under the brim of her dark gray Stetson Carlsbad. Longarm had no call to nod at a lady he'd never been introduced to. He wasn't ready to question her about her Uncle Chief before he found out a bit more about the dead rascal. He'd come in here to settle his gut before he enjoyed the usual duel of wits with a small-town telegraph operator. So he didn't want to argue with the dead Indian's boss before he had a better line on whether Youngwolf had been taking advantage of an old pal's kin or the mean-eyed little gal had been aiding and abetting a cuss she'd known to be a charter member of a serious outlaw gang.

The drably pretty and dishwater-blond waitress said they didn't go by printed menus, but suggested the special for the day might be better for his health than anything their cook would ever whip up as a special order for some fussy eater.

When she added their special, as usual, offered him his choice between fried or mashed potatoes with his roast beef and succotash, he said he'd go with fried and asked if he could have his coffee with his grub.

She looked surprised, and asked how else anyone might ever drink their coffee. So he knew he was in a place that catered mostly to his own sort of country folk. The small brunette in the corner looked a tad stuck up for the place, and likely sipped her damned demitasse with a whiff of creme liquor, with some bittersweet dessert. She looked as if she could smell the crotch of his jeans clean across the room, and thought it unseemly to sweat in the saddle like a human being.

The air was still damp from all that rain as it started to warm up. So Longarm could smell that waitress pretty good as she returned in no time with his order. But he could tell she'd had a bath the night before, if not that morning, and it wasn't her fault she had to sweat a tad at honest work. He decided he liked her far better than the snooty sass in the corner, although the brunette would likely win in a beauty contest, where each feature got measured on its own.

Neither gal was a raving beauty, or even pretty enough to win the third prize, when you got down to brass tacks. But neither the pallid young waitress nor the somewhat older brunette cattle queen would have been thrown back in the sea if they'd washed up on Robinson Crusoe's beach.

Longarm figured he'd rather lay the waitress, although it wasn't going to bust his heart if he never laid either. The waitress seemed just a good old country gal who'd give a man a tolerable ride he might recall for as long as another payday in another trail town. The more finely featured but bitchy-looking brunette would likely scratch and bite, or just lay there like a slab of beef from the icehouse, depending on which way might make a man feel worse. He wondered idly who she kept reminding him of. She didn't look like any gal he'd even considered kissing lately. Yet he was almost certain he'd seen that almost pretty face and that elfin turned-up nose before. Meanwhile, the grub the much sweeter-natured gal had served was good, and the coffee was even better. Arbuckle Brand, if he was any judge, and percolated in one of those high-toned pots as well to taste this good!

Arbuckle Brand was roasted and ground to be sold in the Far West with such complications as high altitudes and primitive brewing in mind. So a mountain man or cow camp cook could make a tolerable mug of Arbuckle Brand in a tin can, over an open fire, a mile or more above sea level with alkali water. The stuff turned to strong black ambrosia that would wake a man up grinning when you made it in a percolator on a real stove. So Longarm put away his first cup pronto, and asked for a second before he'd finished half his grub.

The friendly dishwater blonde got even prettier in Longarm's eyes when she allowed he could have all the coffee he wanted at no extra charge. For she was surely used to serving cowhands, and it was only natural to wonder how fine she might be able to serve them in other country ways.

But he never came right out and flirted with the good old gal. He hadn't ridden all this way to spark a waitress, and even if he had, that other gal was watching and he could tell she thought all men were beasts. Or leastways, he was. But he resisted the temptation to get up and go over to assure he didn't mean to mess with their waitress, and hadn't set out to murder her Uncle Chief back in New Ulm.

Longarm had just finished the last of his special, and was fixing to ask what they had for dessert when he heard considerable galloping out front and glanced through the glass to his right to watch a dozen and a half riders reining in and dismounting by the railroad platform across the way. When he recognized one as Gus Hansson, Longarm smiled thinly and nodded in satisfaction. For now he had a better handle on just how long it took to ride out to the Rocking R and back. It was obvious the snip at that other table had sent the kid to fetch her other riders as she'd ridden on into town.

So he wasn't surprised when Helga Runeberg suddenly rose to her not-too-imposing height and swept grandly past him on her way out the front door. Longarm figured she had an account with the best beanery in town. So he was more surprised when that waitress scurried after her, waving a riding crop.

Then he realized the distracted cattle queen had left her crop at that other table. He'd thought that dishwater blonde looked honest.

He watched her chase the shorter but more imperious gal across the street and hand over the crop. On the way back, the waitress seemed to be in at least as much of a hurry, and her dishwater-gray eyes were wide and worried as they met his own through the glass.

As she came back in, Longarm asked what they had that day for dessert. The waitress asked if anyone had ever called him by the name of Longarm, and when he allowed some had, she looked really upset and said, "If I were you I'd skip dessert and let me show you another way out the back. We don't want trouble, I don't like noise, and even if I did, they just said something about you being a lawman!"

Longarm asked what else they'd said, and when she replied Miss Helga had called him a murderer who deserved to be punished, Longarm, sighed and said, "I reckon I'd best skip dessert at that. But you never want to duck out the back way unless you're certain someone ain't been sent around to the alley with just such an event in mind."

He asked how much he owed them. When she told him not to talk dumb and for heaven's sake get going, Longarm put a silver dollar on the checkered cloth by his empty plate, drank the last of his coffee, and got to his own feet, removing the Winchester from his lap to cradle it over his left arm as he headed for that same front door.

The waitress gasped, "Are you crazy or just deaf? Didn't you hear what I just told you?"

Longarm said, "Every word, ma'am. I know you're curious, but I'd be obliged if you stayed away from all this window glass for the next few minutes. Things are likely to get a mite tense out front for a spell."

Then he opened the door, stepped out in the sunlight, and things did. One of the younger hands across the way softly hollered, "Hot damn! The little darling must want to dance with all of us!"

An older and meaner-looking hand growled at him to shut up. All of them but their boss lady, standing with her boots apart a pace or more closer, were packing six-guns on their hips, and more than one, just like Longarm, had hauled out his saddle gun as well.

They were all a tad out of his way if the Western Union had been his next intended stop after all. He decided a beeline in any other direction but one could have the same effect on the wolf pack as a running deer fawn might have on the four-legged kind. So he strode straight across to where the only female in the bunch seemed intent on standing her ground. Then he stopped, just short of stepping on her booted toes, and softly said, "Allow me to introduce myself, ma'am."

Before he could she snapped, "I know who you are and why have you been following me?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "I ain't been. If I wanted to I reckon I could, lawful enough, on public thoroughfares across open federal range. I wasn't expecting to question you, on your own land or anywhere else I wanted to, before I had more to ask about. For now I choose to take your word you thought Baptiste Youngwolf was a misunderstood comrade in arms of your late father. I don't care just how you take my word it was him or me the other day when he came my way with that Cleveland twelve-gauge."

"Killer!" she snapped. "Cold-blooded killer with a bounty-hunting badge and not a fair bone in your body! Uncle Chief would have won if he'd really been after you with my daddy's shotgun in his capable old hands and a Navy Colt Conversion on his hip!"

Longarm shrugged and quietly asked, "Were you there, ma'am?"

The same young rider who'd sounded off so silly earlier called out, "Just say the word, Miss Helga! Just say the word and stand aside whilst we fix him good for our pal the Chief."

Before anyone could get even sillier, Longarm told their boss lady she'd better explain why such gunplay would hardly be wise.

She stared up at him, sidewinder friendly, and quietly asked why it might be unwise of her to just stand aside and let nature take its course.

He said just as softly, "You ain't that dumb. You're just pretending to be that dumb to scare me. I'm still working on why you feel a need to scare me. But suffice it to say, it ain't working."

Another rider, this one ominously older and more serious, pleaded, "Move clear and let us at him, Miss Helga. If there's one thing I can't stand it's a loudmouth trying to bluff his way out of a fight he brought on himself!"

Longarm waited, saw the gal wasn't going to say it for him, and raised his voice loud enough for all to clearly make out as he declared, "There's one of me and seventeen of you, as I feel sure you've all been feeling swell about. So good as I like to feel I am, I doubt I'd be able to take even half of you with me on my way out of this old world. But what would the survivors do for an encore?"

He let that sink in and continued. "It's possible to gun a federal deputy and make it to Canada or Mexico before Uncle Sam can hang you. But you'd play hell starting over anywhere in these United States with a federal murder warrant hanging over you. John Wesley Hardin was only wanted on a Texas murder charge, and they tracked him all the way back east to Alabama. But let's say at least some of you are smarter than old Hardin must have felt when he took to gunning lawmen. Killing this one would still mean the eternal end of all Miss Helga's late kith and kin ever worked for."

The dangerously smart-looking hand growled thoughtfully, "I fail to see how they could outlaw Miss Helga here for what some others might do with or without her full approval."

There came an ominous rumble of agreement from all along the line, and sixteen men lined up a surprisingly long way, even as they commenced to circle some from both ends. So Longarm quickly pointed out, "They don't have to prove toad squat in any court of law, once you make the boys I ride for sore at you. For openers, my having poked a few cows in my own time, let's talk about grazing fees. Or has the little lady here been paying any for all that federally owned bluestem you've been turning into beef for her?"

Helga Runeberg looked stricken and gasped, "Range fees? Nobody has been asking me for any range fees, you fool!"

Longarm said, "That's my point, and you'll find out who the fool might be if ever my boss, Marshal Billy Vail, takes it into his head not to like you, ma'am. Indians have recently been demanding and getting six cents an acre per month, or two bits per year, just by telling their B.I.A. agents they wanted it off white folks grazing odd corners of their reserve."

He reached for a fresh smoke as he quietly asked, "How much do you reckon a mighty sore white government agent might think an acre of prime long-grass prairie was worth? Oh, I forgot to mention the new fencing regulations up before Congress."

He let the worried murmur die down before he explained. "It ain't been passed yet, but we figure it will be within this decade. Seems a heap of self-styled cattle kings and queens have taken to fencing off public lands as if they owned it their fool selves. The Bureau of Land Management has a whole list of new regulations about drift fences, free access to water, and so on pending before Congress, like I said."

He thumbnailed a matchhead and lit his cheroot before he added, "I suspicion us federal lawmen will enforce such new regulations in accordance to how we feel about particular cattle folk grazing public land we might be most interested in. My particular boss worries more about the green grass closer to our Denver office, unless, of course, somebody in other parts gives him a real reason to send in other deputies, and then other deputies, for as long as it may take to settle the matter to his satisfaction."

Nobody said anything. Longarm let some tobacco smoke run out his nostrils and decided, "I came over this way to pay a call on Western Union's Sleepy Eye office. It's been grand discussing my future with you all, Miss Helga. But now I'd best be on my way. So you go ahead and back-shoot me all you want, if you're really ready to retire from the beef industry."

She must not have wanted to. Longarm heard some ominous muttering, and his spine commenced to itch like hell as he turned around to walk away from the spiteful gal and her surly bunch. So how come the street was suddenly so wide and he was moving so slow through air that felt as thick as glue until, suddenly, he found himself indoors again, breathing natural again as he muttered, "Son of a bitch. I made it!"

CHAPTER 23

As was often the case in such small towns, there was more behind the yellow-on-black Western Union sign out front than the occasional sending or receiving of telegraph messages. The balding old bird who ran things for Western Union in Sleepy Eye doubled in brass as their postmaster and sold feed, seed, and hardware on the side. He was neither Swedish, German, nor breed, and he was starved for gossip and knew Mister Cornell had never meant the law when he'd forbidden Western Union employees from repeating messages sent by paying customers.

That westbound train Longarm had been advised to take to Sleepy Eye came though, without stopping, as he was winding up his main errand there with the agreeable older gent. So Longarm would have been happy about that buckskin waiting for him at their livery even if it had still been raining and that waitress had been prettier.

The telegraph clerk confirmed that, just as Longarm had suspected, the late Baptiste Youngwolf had been using this telegraph office closer to his bunkhouse on the Runeberg spread a lot. The friendly but only part-time telegrapher hadn't kept any telegram blanks, seeing he'd found the Indian's communications with some other redskin out west sort of tedious. He agreed as soon as Longarm pointed it out that dull remarks about kith and kin no outsider could identify worked good enough as a code with nobody else really trying to break it. The telegrapher recalled most of the wires had been sent back and forth between Sleepy Eye and a place called Aurora, Colorado. After that he just couldn't nail things down any tighter. Longarm soothingly explained Aurora was a town about the size of Sleepy Eye an easy ride east of Denver.

He said, "One or more of that gang I told you about could lope out to that Aurora telegraph office and back before anyone in Denver even thought about it. I'd best send a wire to my Denver outfit from here, advising my boss how come he hasn't been intercepting too many wires sent to or from downtown Denver."

The older gent handed him a yellow blank. As Longarm was block-lettering his terse advisory, adding there'd be more from New Ulm in a spell, he asked the older local whether Youngwolf had been the only Indian out at the Runeberg spread.

The Western Union man seemed sincerely annoyed by the suggestion as he replied, "Jess H. Christ, Deputy Long, how many infernal Sioux do you want?"

Longarm suggested Youngwolf had been Ojibwa. The clerk nodded his balding dome and said, "Chippewa are about the onliest Indians still allowed in these parts, and Chippewa are bad enough. We've just agreed that red rascal calling his fool self Baptiste, as if he was some sort of Red River breed, was a wanted outlaw who tried to blow you away with another man's shotgun without asking. You want me to find you more?"

Longarm smiled thinly and explained, "Don't want more Indians. But I need more Indians if I'm to make heads or tails out of the last few days or nights."

He told the helpful old-timer about those other Indians asking about him by name, although in another lingo, out at the Bee Witch's floating shanty. The telegrapher hadn't heard that much about any Bee Witch, proving the eccentric colored beekeeper had been better known up and down the bigger river to the east. They both agreed an Ojibwa who'd fought Santee in his salad days would have to be mighty broad-minded to be working with a bunch of the Santee, even this late in the game. The old-timer knew his Indians well enough to agree it would be impossible to mistake the one lingo for the other, and told Longarm, "You got to remember the Sioux and Chippewa were going at it hammer and tongs before any of us white folks ever got this far west. Being both sides had similar views on religion, whether they prayed to Wakanna or Manitou, they tortured one another way worse than they ever tortured us. You see, there was more to it than personal dislike and-"

"I know about honoring a brave enemy by giving him the chance to die slow and stoic, singing his death song whilst you poke out his eyes and shove glowing embers up his ass," Longarm said, waving aside the theology of another breed of humankind as he suggested they stick to more recent events. "The blue and the gray fought more recent, with considerable enthusiasm, and yet there's been northern and southern malcontents riding the owlhoot trail together for fun and profit. So the real mystery would be where those other redskins have been hiding out all this time, whether they were in cahoots with that dead Ojibwa or not."

The telegrapher suggested he'd heard tell of breeds, full-bloods, and even colored folks filing homestead claims in these parts just as if they were real Americans or dumb Swedes. Dumb Swede was said by non-Scandinavian settlers in these parts as if it was one word, the way Damn Yankee was said down Dixie way.

Longarm shrugged and said, "I know. I've met some colored and Santee settlers over by the Minnesota lately. I can't make Youngwolf fit in with any of them, though. Aside from him hailing from an enemy nation, why would an Indian on the dodge hide out in a white bunkhouse and stick out like a sore thumb if he had even one family of Indians he could blend in with as, say, a real uncle who'd been further west for a spell?"

The telegrapher allowed he'd never hide out with a mess of Mexicans or Swedes if he had a whole bunch of his own kind to hide out among. Then he asked, "What if those other Indians were after you for some other reason entire?"

Longarm grimaced and said, "I was afraid you'd say something that smart. What do I owe you for this telegram to my boss? I want it to be delivered direct to his office with no argument about who had to pay, lest that gang slip another wire past us by way of that Aurora connection!"

The clerk rapidly counted off the words, and allowed a dollar and six bits ought to have the message on old Billy's desk before quitting time that afternoon. So Longarm paid up, and they shook on it and parted friendly.

He found his hired buckskin rested and raring to go when he and his Winchester made it back to that livery. So he settled up, saddled up, and was on his way back to New Ulm under the noonday sun, with enough of a prairie breeze to dance the wildflowers all around and dry their sweat enough to keep them comfortable.

This time Longarm followed the service road north of the tracks, to see whether his warning to Helga Runeberg and her boys had sunk in. He decided it might have, once he was sure nobody, red or white, was following him or laying for him out ahead.

It was tough to either trail or ambush an experienced plainsman on such open range, once he was on the prod and watching for either.

Longarm took advantage of the breeze at his back and gentle slopes ahead of them to make better time going back than he had coming out. So it was still fairly early in the afternoon as he rode into New Ulm again, keeping to the narrower back ways on purpose lest someone ahead get word he was coming before he wanted to advertise he was back to pester them.

He wasn't even thinking about good old Ilsa Pedersson as he cut through a residential block a couple of streets over from her place. But she seemed even more surprised when they almost crashed into one another on horseback, with her riding good old Blaze at a smart trot. The comely widow woman smiled and howdied him, so Longarm had to tick his hat brim to her. But he felt no call to tell her where he'd been or where he might be going.

She must have wanted to know, for she swung her smaller black mount around to fall in place at Longarm's left, gazing archly at him over a calico-clad shoulder with her shapely rump aimed his way while she told him she'd just been over at the river landing on business and that she'd surely missed him at her supper table, once those pies had cooled and things had quieted down along her street.

He knew exactly where she'd really been missing him, after suppertime, because he'd been thinking about females all the way back from Sleepy Eye, although in the line of duty, of course.

He asked old Ilsa how well she really knew Helga Runeberg, both of them being Swedish as well as Brown County gals. The somewhat older but far prettier widow woman made a wry face and demanded, "Have you been sparking her as well? I suppose you think I haven't heard about you and that Vigdis Magnusson at my very own bank!"

Longarm managed a poker face as he quietly replied, "I don't see why they bother printing a newspaper in this gossiping county seat. It's true Miss Magnusson has been helping me out with my investigation. I told you, late one night, how I'd been sent here to look into that hundred-dollar treasury note, and that lady happens to be a material witness. As to Miss Helga Runeberg-"

"What has that silly young Vigdis got that I haven't got?" the visibly upset Ilsa asked.

It would have been needlessly cruel to tell her. So Longarm said, "We were talking about Helga Runeberg, and you have my word she don't like me at all. I just crawfished my way out of a fight with her and a bunch of her riders. They all seemed to feel I should have let an Indian who rode with them pepper my hide with number-nine buck." lisa said she knew all about Longarm's rough ways with both her sex and his own, adding, "It's about time some girl said no to you. You're too smug about your looks by hill!"

Longarm shrugged and just let her fuss a spell as they rode side by side along the cottonwood-shaded back street. When he saw a chance to slip some words in sideways, he said, "I know I ought to be hung as a menace to womankind, Miss Ilsa. Meanwhile, I'm still a lawman, and I keep feeling I've seen that surly little face of Helga Runeberg's at some other time and place, mayhaps on somebody else. Somebody told me she had a kid sister. What about brothers or other immediate kin that might have the same distinctive eyes and nose?"

The older county resident thought, shook her head, and decided he couldn't have ever met Helga's father or real uncle, Jarl, both of whom had died years before. She added, "The last I heard of the younger Runeberg girl, Margaret, she'd run off to Chicago with a cattle buyer. Somebody told us later they'd really gotten married and settled down fairly well off."

Longarm thought, then said, "I've been to Chicago Town more than once. But I reckon I'd recall any Swedish gals married up with either crooked or half-ways honest cattle buyers. There's no such thing as a totally honest cattle buyer."

Thinking of Chicago Town and the meat-packing trade made Longarm think of another widow woman, the younger and even prettier Kim Stover, who'd met up with him there, sort of like this afternoon, after they'd agreed to part friends out Wyoming way. A man could sure raise himself an erection astride a split-seat saddle, thinking about women whether he'd ever split their seat or not.

Then lisa coyly murmured that she had to turn off at the next cross street, but that she'd baked another pie and she could save some for him if he'd like to come calling after dark, well after dark, by way of her alley gate.

It was tempting in more ways than one. If the gossips up that other alley knew about him and old Viggy, it made no never-mind who he called on after dark as far as his own reputation went. After that, seeing he had to disappoint one or the other, this older gal doubtless had more delicate feelings, and it was sort of nice to pillow-talk afterwards with somebody who might really care about what you thought about something besides her.

On the other hand, if breaking up with a gal made a man look sort of dumb, breaking up with the same gal a second time made a man feel downright stupid. He was still pissed off at himself about all those tears and recriminations after that day and night in Chicago with good old Kim Stover, after the both of them had just about gotten over an earlier sweet night of madness and some cold gray empty mornings.

So when they came to Ilsa's corner he said he'd study on it, once he carried out some uncertain chores in town. For there was no need to burn a bridge behind him, and another way to feel dumb as hell was to make double certain you'd have no other gal to turn to if something unexpected got a beautiful blonde sore at you.

He left the buckskin, McClellan, and most of his gear at the livery near the river, and legged it back to the center of town with his Winchester and six-gun on foot.

He stopped first at the New Ulm Western Union. It was a tad early to expect answers to anything he'd sent from Sleepy Eye, but they were holding replies to some earlier wires he'd sent from New Ulm.

He put them away and legged it on over to the courthouse, where he found that clerk in the coroner's office had one, but only one, death certificate of any interest to either of them.

As the county man explained, "None of the others on your list seem to have fallen on greater misfortune than needing money at Christmas time. That one old gent who died after drawing out his life savings won't work as a murder victim either. As you can see from all this paperwork, signed by a town constable and half a dozen witnesses as well as his attending physician, old Jacob Thorsson was run over by a brewery dray in front of God and everybody whilst full of the holiday spirits, which would have been pear brandy in Jake's case."

Longarm studied the papers the helpful clerk had dug out of their files as he softly mused, "Gents have been run over deliberately, and this one had just drawn close to ten thousand dollars at his bank to just about clear his account entirely!"

The clerk nodded and said, "I mentioned your notion to my own boss. He'd like to know what ever became of the money too. But the trail is over six months cold, and as you see, old Jake lived long enough to absolve the brewery dray driver, allowing he'd been drunk as a skunk and not paying attention when he stepped off the curb. His dying words were backed by those witnesses interviewed on the spot by the constable. So how might a murderer get a drunk to stagger so conveniently?"

Longarm didn't answer until he'd finished scanning the neatly handwritten doctor's report. Then he sighed and said, "Poor old coot was cold sober when he died seventy-odd hours later, of internal injuries your own autopsy confirmed. So you're right, a man taking more than three painful days to die, with his kith and kin keeping him company, would have surely mentioned it if someone had pushed him in front of that dray. Running over a man with six draft horses and a load of beer seems an awkward means of assassination as well. But ain't it odd nobody seems to have wondered where all that money might have gone?"

The clerk agreed. "He sure as hell never got to spend it, seeing he drew it out of the bank the same day he got run over. Of course, he had time to spend at least some of it, and must have spent enough on brandy to get that drunk before sundown."

Longarm started to ask what time of the day the old man had been run over. Then he saw the town law had reported it as around six P.m., or about the right time for that brewery driver to be pushing for home after his last deliveries of the afternoon.

Longarm decided such details as whether the dray had been carrying full kegs or empties hardly mattered, since busted innards were busted innards and the dead man's missing withdrawal was more mysterious than what read as his fairly obvious cause of death.

Stuffing the new documentation in a hip pocket with those yellow telegram forms, Longarm thanked the helpful coroner's clerk and got on over to the county sheriff's office. He found Sheriff Tegner seated at his desk talking to a stranger dressed about the way they made Longarm and his fellow deputies dress around the Denver District Court. So it came as no great surprise when Sheriff Tegner said, "We were just talking about you, Longarm. Meet Deputy Marshal O'Brian out of your Saint Paul office."

As they shook, O'Brian allowed his friends called him Sean. He and Longarm were about the same age, with O'Brian about two inches shorter and a good bit broader, with big red fists that reminded Longarm of sugar-cured hams sticking out of black broadcloth sleeves. The man from Saint Paul wore his own.44-40 lower and side-draw under his somber frock coat. There was a lot to be said for that rig, if a lawman worked mostly afoot and wanted that extra edge a side-draw might give in an alley fight.

Longarm naturally assumed O'Brian was there about that recorded treasury note and the death of one known member of the gang who'd ridden out of Fort Collins with it.

O'Brian shook his head and replied, "Not exactly. Those stolen notes of noticeable denomination have been turning up all over this county, and I don't see how I could arrest an outlaw you've already put in the ground for us."

Longarm shot a thoughtful glance at Sheriff Tegner, who nodded and said, "Well, sure we let them bury the dead bastard. There was never any mystery about who he was, was there?"

Longarm allowed he was satisfied if the county was satisfied, and asked O'Brian what else they might be talking about.

The beefy O'Brian said, "You. They sent me to warn you and back your play should a rumor picked up by a reliable informer in Saint Paul pan out. You ever hear of an owlhoot rider called Laughing Larry Lucas, pard?"

Longarm started to say no. Then he nodded thoughtfully and asked, "Homicidal maniac from the copper country along the shores of Lake Superior? Sent away to a lunatic asylum instead of the gallows after he blew up his own kin with dynamite?"

O'Brian nodded grimly and said, "He escaped last fall. Blew a lock with homemade explosives he'd put together from playing-card shavings, matchheads, and such. There's some argument as to just how crazy the man might be. But there's no doubt he's out, and working of late as a paid killer. Cheap, the way I've heard it."

Longarm whistled softly, and seeing the older Sheriff Tegner seemed more confused, explained, "We're talking about a maniac known as Laughing Larry because he thinks he's so damned comical. He likes to leave droll notes when he blows a safe, which he's good at, and play what he calls practical jokes, which he's not so good at, in my view leastways, because his victims tend to wind up dead."

O'Brian volunteered, "He said at his sanity hearing he was only trying to teach some Canadian in-laws about our Fourth of July when he touched off all that sixty-percent Hercules under their outhouse. He said he hadn't expected his brother-in-law to be taking a crap when the dynamite went off."

Longarm grimaced and said, "They'd have hung him if he'd offered a less loco excuse for killing an in-law and business partner after a string of more sensible robberies. But be that as it may, whether he knows he's crazy or thinks he's fooling us, Laughing Larry can be injurious as hell to one's health."

O'Brian said, "We heard he was after you. Nothing personal. Somebody who knows you better must want you dead awfully bad to send for help as dangerous as Laughing Larry Lucas!"

Longarm sighed and said, "That's for damn sure. Did your informant say whether Laughing Larry was out to blow me out of my boots or shoot me down like a dog from behind, since he's been known to do both?"

O'Brian shook his head and said, "We're not even certain of the rumor. You know how they clam up on you as soon as you press them for details about word on the shady side of the street."

Longarm nodded and replied, "I seldom ask 'em how they learned a bank was about to be held up, if I put any trust in them at all. It makes more sense to watch the infernal bank."

O'Brian nodded grimly and said that was why he was there, adding his own office couldn't afford to tie up more deputies unless and until they had more proof Laughing Larry Lucas was anywhere in Minnesota. For as in the case of all that hot paper, tips about escaped lunatics seemed to come in from all over.

Longarm said he thought Lucas was a Scotch-Irish name, and asked if an Irishman named O'Brian might confirm his guess about Calvert Tyger's odd last name.

O'Brian nodded soberly and said, "It's Irish. Sometimes spelled Tiger, like the big striped pussycat itself. But I believe the family name derives from something like McTaggart to begin with. Why do you ask?"

Longarm said, "Tougher to see a first- or second-generation Swede or Santee sending for a killer of uncertain temperament and another breed entirely. Folks ought to know better, considering neither Judas nor Brutus were recent immigrants, but most of 'em still feel safer trusting secret plans to their own kind. Tyger and Flanders both tend to be Irish names, and whilst they did have at least one Indian riding with 'em, they sent a squirt named Morrison after me earlier."

O'Brian nodded thoughtfully and said flatly, "Morrison's another Scotch-Irish name, and I'm beginning to follow your drift!"

Sheriff Tegner, being of Swedish ancestry, said he didn't and that he wished they'd make up their minds whether this discussion was about Scotch or Irish outlaws, damn it.

Longarm smiled and nodded at O'Brian, who explained. "The true Scotch-Irish hail from the Protestant north of Ireland, where they tend to have names of Scotch, Irish, Welsh, or even English origin, since divide and conquer was the name of the game. But now we're all American, so what the hell."

Longarm volunteered, "Folks are funny about feeling less natural when they change their ancestry than when they only change their names. Billy the Kid, as they now call him, started out named McCarthy or McCarty. Then he said his last name was Antrim, and after that he decided he was William H. Bonney. Notice all three last names are Irish, and that H likely stands for Henry, the Kid's real first name."

O'Brian nodded and said, "One doubts Frank and Jesse have been using James as a last name since that narrow escape over at Northfield. But I'd bet money that when we finally do catch up with them neither will be calling himself Gonzalez, Morgenstern, or even Flannery!"

Sheriff Tegner got to his feet and went over to a filing cabinet to break out a tall bottle, muttering, "My breed calls this aquavit. You're not supposed to drink it neat on an empty stomach, and don't let the caraway flavoring fool you. But I just hate long dry conversations, and you two federal boys sure have a lot to talk about this afternoon!"

Longarm and O'Brian both laughed. As the older lawman rustled up some six-ounce tumblers and poured three heroic drinks, the man from Saint Paul suggested he might guess better if he knew just what the deputy from Denver had been up to in these parts.

Longarm brought them both up to date. It took them all more than one aquavit to make it as far as that old cuss being run over just after withdrawing all his savings from the bank. Longarm politely refused a third one, saying, "You were right about them caraway seeds. I'm starting to feel 'em in my legs now, even sitting down like so!"

O'Brian said he'd had enough for now as well, turning back to Longarm to ask, "How do you think the death of this Jake Thorsson ties in with the missing colored lady called the Bee Witch?"

Longarm stared soberly down at the two cheroots he'd apparently taken for three, or had it been five, as he said sort of thickly, "Might not be any connection at all. A mess of folks made withdrawals from the same bank about the same time. The only thing mysterious about that old drunk's death is where his money might have wound up, and I doubt that could be a federal matter."

Sheriff Tegner stared owlishly and demanded, "Don't you boys look at me! I recall old Jake getting run over last Christmas. But nobody never said nothing about any missing money, damn it."

Longarm said soothingly, "I know. I've sent wires about that beekeeper I suspect as a railroad spy to a couple of railroad pals in high and low places. A railroad dick I know, called Whispering Smith along the U.P. right-of-way, might have heard about such a sneaky old gal. I wired an even sneakier railroading man called Jay Gould about sneaky plans to run yet another railroad line through these parts. Old Jay owes me a favor, and the stock-manipulating rascal would have surely heard about anyone planning to lay one damn mile of track most any damn place in this land of opportunity."

O'Brian whistled softly and said, "My boss was right, Longarm. You do know your business, and I'd sure hate to be trying to hide anything as big as a railroad from you. But what on earth could some secret railroad plans have to do with the Tyger and Flanders gang or those missing treasury notes?"

Longarm figured he was seeing straight enough to hand out a pair of cheroots and light one for himself as he was explaining. "Might not be any connection at all. At the rate they've been turning up, those notes from the Fort Collins robbery might not all be missing much longer. I sure wish I knew how they spread so far and wide before being spotted. Meanwhile some local settlers, some of 'em Indians trying to go straight, seem to have been banking on that Bee Witch they admired sending them a railroad line to improve their fortunes. It's possible there was no connection at all betwixt the late Baptiste Youngwolf of the Ojibwa Nation and those Santee or whatever following me about for reasons of their own. Have you ever noticed, in real life, how complicated this job can get next to that of one of Mister Edgar Allan Poe's lawmen?"

The sheriff asked what in blue blazes Edgar Allan Poe had to do with all this flim-flammery.

Longarm said, "In them murders along the Rue Morgue, Mister Poe's lawmen had enough on their plate with this giant ape tear-assing over the rooftops of Paris, France, to kill ladies in a confusing way. But think how confusing it might have been if there'd been even one other monster, or mayhaps just a murderous asshole, killing others in a different way, although in the same part of Paris, France."

Sheriff Tegner snorted, "You think two lousy crooks acting up at the same time are confusing, old son? Shit, you ought to be here at roundup time when the cowhands are flush and the farm boys ain't been paid for the fall harvest yet!"

O'Brian ignored him too, and nodded at Longarm. "Two sets of crooks working at cross-purpose could confuse us all without really trying. I still think some members of that Tyger and Flanders gang had to be worried about you uncovering something about them here."

Longarm shrugged and said, "Hell, I did. His name was Baptiste Youngwolf and they just now buried him."

O'Brian nodded, but said, "Somebody else must be as worried about you catching them at something just as serious, pard. Why would known outlaws who've already tried for you directly send away for a hired killer more famous around here than out yonder where they robbed that payroll office and might still be hiding for all we really know?"

Sheriff Tegner objected, "Youngwolf wasn't hiding out in Colorado when he tried to back-shoot Longarm here. Them two who came after him at Widow Pedersson's place weren't local boys neither."

O'Brian insisted, "Doesn't matter exactly whom a particular gunslick might have been working for, once you see there could be more than one mastermind behind all these attacks. So 'fess up, Longarm, don't you have any ideas at all about someone right here in Brown County having something of their own to hide?"

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and morosely stated, "I have more possible things to suspect than I could shake a stick at. But I don't know a damn thing we could arrest anybody on! I told you I suspect, but only suspect, that old colored lady pretending to be a crazy beekeeper was really running a railroad survey. That wouldn't be a federal crime. Killing her to prevent or delay her work, then dumping her body in a federal waterway, might be. We'd have to know for certain someone had done that before we could arrest 'em, though."

"What about those unusual banking transactions?" O'Brian asked in a thoughtful tone. "Don't you find it unusual that the same bank president who reported that stolen payroll note was the one who paid out all that other money to at least two elderly people who wound up dead or missing within hours of their last withdrawals?"

Sheriff Tegner laughed gleefully and said, "Hot damn, let's all go arrest Banker Plover. He ain't a Swede and it's an election year, dad-blast his murderous eyes!"

Longarm laughed and said, "I ain't sure it's against the law to manage a Minnesota bank without being Swedish, Sheriff. After that, leave us not forget old P.S. Plover would have been awesomely dumb to report a stolen government payroll note in his possession, knowing it had been stolen, if he hadn't come by it honestly. I'm still working on where Wabasha Chambrun got that hot paper in the first place. His Indian sponsors have been sending him, or his Santee wife, innocent checks drawn on an honest Omaha bank. Not all of them have been cashed here in New Ulm. Those cashed Lord knows where may or may not have stuck the Chambruns with that one and only suspicious hundred-dollar note. The damned things have turned up so many places I have to agree with my boss it would be a waste of time, even if we could backtrack that one bill to yet another poor soul with no apparent connection with the robbery."

"Then why are you still here?" asked O'Brian. "Do you suspect Plover of having those two elderly depositors murdered for some other reason?"

Longarm chuckled and said, "You're as cynical as me about bankers. As a matter of fact, I did have something like that in mind when I asked the coroner's office to compare a list of heavy withdrawals with sudden deaths in this fair city. But as we've all been saying, Jake Thorsson seems to have died natural, and nobody knows what happened to that old lady yet."

O'Brian insisted, "That still leaves close to twenty thousand in untraceable bills unaccounted for, right?"

Longarm shook his head and said, "Wrong. We still don't know the depositor calling herself Janice Carpenter at the bank is really missing. She could be anywhere else, with her money in some other bank or, hell, under her mattress. So all we know for certain is that a man called Jacob Thorsson died in front of witnesses, including a doctor, in a manner I'd hate to have to arrange ahead of time. As for his missing money, who's to say it's really missing? You know what a fuss they can make in probate court about money left behind with no will to probate. They charge the kin for letting them have their own money too. So who's to say somebody around the old man's deathbed, maybe the old man himself, never got the grand notion to just avoid all that bother? Had anyone with money coming felt they'd been screwed, they'd have doubtless let the whole world in on it by now."

O'Brian ran a thoughtful thumbnail along the stubble of his fleshy jaw as he mused, half to himself, "That only works if nobody there had any idea the old man had drawn all that money out of the bank."

Longarm nodded, but demanded, "Would you lay there for three days without mentioning you'd been robbed if you'd been robbed?"

When O'Brian said he didn't think he would, Longarm went on to say, "Damned right. But if you'd still had the money on you, or anywhere on or about the premises, somebody would have surely found it as they cleaned up after your demise. You get to clean up a heap after a man spends three days dying of internal injuries."

O'Brian nodded soberly, said he'd been in the war too, and asked how Longarm felt about a maid, or someone from the undertaker's, helping himself or herself to a bundle and never reporting it.

Longarm shrugged and said, "Happens all the time. It ain't nice, but it ain't a federal crime. I doubt the sheriff here would take your suspicion as a gift in an election year, unless there was some complaint by some damned citizen to go with it."

Sheriff Tegner muttered, "Damned right. Gotta have a corpus delicti before you can arrest anybody. Jake Thorsson's corpse wasn't delicti. He was run over by a brewery dray!"

Longarm suggested, "What I think he means is that you have to be able to show the body or substance of a crime to the grand jury."

O'Brian sniffed, "I guess I know what corpus delicti means, and I fear I follow your drift. Whether either of those old folks lost any money after they took it from their own savings accounts, we'd have a time proving anyone at their bank took a dime of it."

Longarm said, "That's about the size of it. I like to arrest as many bankers as I can too. But I don't see how even a banker could know in advance."

"Know what in advance?" asked O'Brian with a puzzled frown.

Longarm replied, "How even an old drunk would be sure to get run over by a dray after, not before, you cleaned out his bank account."

"There must be a way," Sheriff Tegner suddenly decided, spilling almost as much as he was pouring as he insisted, "Never trusted that P.S. Plover. Never will. What sort of a name might Plover be? It sure sounds odd for these parts!"

Longarm gently took the bottle from the befuddled older lawman as he said, "You got to watch them Anglo-Saxon bankers, Sheriff. But I'm a peace officer, not a bank examiner."

O'Brian suggested a bank examiner might be able to figure a way to fiddle the books in order to show withdrawals taking place after rather than before a depositor died.

Longarm shrugged and said, "You gents feel free to examine all the bank ledgers you want. Meanwhile, I'd rather work on suspects, red or white, who've threatened me directly. Marshal Vail never sent me here to investigate Banker Plover, and Plover surely couldn't have been expecting me to. Yet sinister cusses have been trying to stop me ever since I left my home office, and to tell the truth, it's getting tedious as hell."

Sheriff Tegner didn't answer. He put his head down on his desk and commenced to blow small caraway-scented bubbles.

O'Brian grinned at Longarm and murmured, "I thought it was Irishmen who couldn't handle the creature. Where do we go from here, pard?"

Longarm said, "You go anywhere you like. One of us has to stay here until at least one of this old gent's own deputies shows up."

O'Brian seemed sincerely puzzled as he demanded, "How come? Neither of us ride for Brown County, and it was his own grand notion to get drunk on duty."

Longarm sighed and said, "Neither of us are running for re-election this fall, and he was trying to be friendly. What do you have to do that's so all-fired important with the afternoon sun so low?"

O'Brian said, "Send a wire back to my real boss for openers. Now that we've talked I ain't sure whether they want me to stay and back your play or head on home. No offense, and I know you're supposed to be good, but you don't seem to have any play in mind."

Longarm only shrugged. He didn't want another lawman, or any man at all, backing his play with pretty Vigdis Magnusson, now that the bank had closed for the day and most everyone but Viggy would be on their way home before long.

CHAPTER 24

After the man from Saint Paul was gone, Longarm helped himself to some wanted flyers, took another seat, and smoked and read the ugly statistics of wanted men and women until, a million years later, that senior deputy he'd already met came in, nodded morosely at the top of the sheriff's gray head, and muttered, "I see we've been into that old aquavit again. Thanks for holding the fort, Longarm. I can handle it from here, as long as nobody sets fire to the church or robs the bank!"

Longarm rose so they could shake hands and part friendly. Then he picked up his Winchester and headed for the Western Union himself.

He hadn't heard from old Jay Gould as yet. The railroad robber baron was doubtless already dining on fish eggs and green turtle back East, where it would be suppertime by now. But good old Whispering Smith, riding herd on gold shipments out of the Black Hills for the U.P. line, had wired he knew the Bee Witch well. Only her real name was Miss Judith Wright and she'd been a Union spy for old Allan Pinkerton's Secret Service.

But Whispering Smith said she hadn't stayed with Pinkerton when the gruff old Scotsman started his private agency after the war. Smith said the sly old colored gal worked free-lance for both railroad and land-developing outfits, having been taught to make pretty good contour maps when she wasn't pretending to be a laundress, a midwife, or some other sort of harmless dumb coon.

Longarm had already figured what the sly old gal had been up to in these parts. He wired Whispering Smith an urgent request to ask all about and find out whether the dusky old detective gal was alive. He explained he wasn't interested in any other secrets she or her real outfit might want to keep.

After that, knowing in advance how Viggy's notions of supper were doubtless better for her waistline than his own, Longarm stopped at a stand-up beanery to down some Swedish meatballs and potato pancakes with two mugs of black coffee.

Feeling refreshed by his light snack, Longarm consulted his pocket watch and decided it was safe to take his saddle gun to the bank. Viggy let him in, as he'd expected, but giggled at his saddle gun and said, "I surrender, dear. Everyone else has been gone for some time, so where do you want to come, on that same chesterfield in the rear office?"

Longarm chuckled, hauled her in, and kissed her with enthusiasm inspired by chastely thinking of other women all that damned day.

But then he said, "There's no sense having to get dressed over and over when it's this close to sundown to begin with and I got some bank examining to do whilst there's still some daylight."

The beautiful blonde sighed and said, "Pooh, I thought you were only after my body. Didn't you go all through that ledger for last December last night, darling?"

He said, "I did, and I'm pretty sure I made out no more than two styles of handwriting. But I'd like to make certain, so..."

"I can tell you who made each entry, dear." She led the way around to the backs of the teller's cages as she continued. "You just missed them. I thought it was me you were interested in. But we have two more tellers, and we naturally transcribe all our daily transaction in the day book for that month at the end of every working day."

As she hunkered down to rummage for that ledger from the year before, Longarm said, "Hold on. Did you just tell me old P.S. Plover would have never made any entries in his own handwriting?"

She panted, "Here it is. I thought you'd finished with the clumsy old tome. Why would Mister Plover be making entries in deposits and withdrawals, dear? He's the manager."

Longarm started to make a dumb objection. But he could see without asking how the front office would tally all the real cash on hand in person before locking it in the vault overnight.

Viggy rose to full height and flopped the heavy gray ledger atop the long work counter running the length of the teller's hidey-holes. As she opened it for him she idly asked what they were doing. So he brought her up to date on that old drunk and the missing colored lady as he found the entries dealing with the both of them. Then he sighed and muttered, "Thunderation! Neither withdrawal seems to have been tampered with, other entries above and below them confirm the dates for both of them, and worse yet, the two withdrawals on different days were recorded in different scripts!"

Viggy put a polished nail to the paper, saying, "This would have to be Mister Spandau's handwriting. Isn't it pretty? Mister Quinn writes clear enough, I suppose, but he's not as tidy a penman as Mister Spandau."

Longarm said he didn't care, and asked if any one teller got much time alone back there.

Viggy thought and decided with a giggle, "Playing detective is a lot of fun, albeit I'd still rather play house. I see what you suspect one of us sneaks of doing, dear. I suppose it would be possible for one teller to alter the books whilst the other was out of the cage to heed the call of nature or run some other quick errand. But he'd have to be awfully fast as well as awfully clever, don't you agree?"

Longarm swore under his breath and nodded. "I sure wanted to arrest me a banker too. Another lawman I was just jawing with had the same motive for my demise figured out. But old folks do withdraw all their savings and leave town or get run over by a dray."

She asked if he was through back there. He kissed her again and said he was ready to play house instead of bank examiner. So she led the way back to that chesterfield.

But once they got to old Plover's office the sunset was peeking fire-engine red through the drawn blinds. So Longarm repeated what he'd said about just getting undressed once the right way, with her grand old bed to play on once they had.

She dimpled and stopped trying to unbuckle his gun rig as she told him she agreed it was time they got out of this ridiculous vertical position.

They slipped out the back way and moved along a back street in the gloaming. Off in the distance, a train whistle seemed to be mourning the death of another day. But Longarm knew it was that eastbound he'd have had to wait for if he'd taken that clerk's suggestion about modern transportation. When Viggy asked what he'd just chuckled about, he told her, "I'd be crossing the Sleepy Eye trestle aboard that train about now if I hadn't checked today's timetable and met up with a buckskin pony that was more convenient. Don't know whether they'll be stopping at Sleepy Eye or not. Either way, they'd have been letting me off here even later."

As they approached the entrance to her own alley Viggy hesitated and murmured, "I might have felt better leading you and that rifle to my back door after dark, dear. It's not that I'm ashamed of anything exactly, but it's still awfully light out, and..."

"I know about small-town gossip," he said, not wanting to upset her by telling her a widow was talking about them clean across town. But he never argued when she shyly suggested he let her go on ahead and then come on down that alley alone after it got a mite darker.

He said he'd hold up a cottonwood with his back and smoke a couple of cheroots while she went on ahead to turn down the covers.

She glanced about, then stood on her toes to kiss him some more before she turned and scampered off in the gathering dusk like a kid out for mischief on Halloween.

Longarm chuckled as he turned his back to that cottonwood, cradled his Winchester over one arm, and reached for a smoke. But he'd barely lit it, and taken no more than a half dozen drags on it, when the soft gloaming light lit up with a hellish glare and the earth underfoot was shaken by a horrendous blast that just had to be dynamite, a heap of dynamite, going off too close to keep Longarm from wailing, "Aw, shit, don't let it be that, Lord!"

But it was. Shattered wood had been set ablaze down the alley, and he could see the empty smoke-hazed gap where Viggy's carriage house had stood long before he got that far. So he didn't join the crowd of confounded neighborfolk gathering like flies around a cow pat as he spun and tore the other way, with the Winchester '73 at port arms. He levered a round of.44-40 in its chamber as he heard that eastbound train's huffing and puffing off to the west. He beat it into the New Ulm depot with time to spare, though, and was only half surprised to find the so-called Deputy O'Brian alone on the open platform.

O'Brian didn't act surprised to see him. He said, "Howdy, pard. I figured the bastard who set off that bomb would head for here to catch that train too."

Longarm said, "Well, sure you did. How did you know someone just rigged a mess of dynamite to go off when a lady I was escorting home tried to open her damned door?"

O'Brian tried, "I heard the explosion, of course. Just like you, I figured Laughing Larry Lucas had blown some damned something up and that he'd naturally have his getaway planned in advance."

"You're under arrest for the murder of Miss Vigdis Magnusson, a gal who never done no harm, you son of a bitch!" Longarm swung the muzzle of his Winchester to cover the impostor, adding, "Go for that side-draw, please, if you think I'm fooling. Otherwise you'd best give me some answers pronto. Who sent for you and how come?"

Laughing Larry lived up to his nickname by laughing like a fool hyena and demanding, "What if I tell you to just guess?"

Longarm said, "I reckon you'll get gut-shot trying to escape. You don't seem to grasp this situation, you comical cuss. I am mad as hell and I'd rather kill you personally, gruesomely, than let you die quick and painless on the gallows or even talk your way back into another nut house. But I'll still take you in alive if you'd like to say who else I want to arrest for what you just done!"

Laughing Larry looked really loco as the headlight beam of that train pulling into the station etched his grinning features in harsh yellow light and shadows black as sin. But Longarm was still trying to reason with the half-crazed killer when Laughing Larry suddenly spun on one boot heel like an awkward ballet dancer and bolted for the far side of the tracks just as the locomotive's big barn-red cowcatcher was about to plow between them.

Longarm fired, of course, and hit the fugitive felon low in the right hip, to send his holstered six-gun flying as he spun again to land spread-eagled on his back, both boot heels hooked over the far rail as the big locomotive hissed to a stop to block Longarm's view.

So he was tearing around the front end of the train as he heard a voice from the engineer's cabin wailing, "Lord have mercy! I think I just ran over a passenger!"

He was right, Longarm saw, as he moved down the far side of the big steel drivers through clouds of hissing steam. For he found the killer he'd just shot stretched out on the ballast, spurting blood from both severed stumps while he laughed like hell.

Longarm lay his Winchester aside on the ballast and whipped off the dark bandanna he'd been wearing in place of a sissy tie as he told Laughing Larry to lie still. He was knotting the now-bloody calico as tight as he could around the killer's right shin when the amused or more likely hysterical cuss laughed some more and asked if Longarm wanted to race him down to the far end.

Longarm reached for the killer's own shoestring tie as he told him not unkindly, "I feel your foot-racing days are done. But we may be able to stop the bleeding, and weren't you fixing to tell me who else I have to thank for all this tomfoolery?"

Laughing Larry just giggled, lay back, and closed his eyes. Longarm still knotted the tie around his left shin, even though it wasn't bleeding that hard now.

Sheriff Tegner and two deputies came around the front end of the locomotive with lanterns. As they joined Longarm and Laughing Larry, the older lawman said, "Thanks for standing by as I recovered from them caraway seeds. Somebody just blew Vigdis Magnusson to bits all by herself, despite the old biddy across the alley, and how come I see Deputy O'Brian laying there so still? Is he dead?"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I reckon. He wasn't the real Sean O'Brian from our Saint Paul office. He was the one and original hired killer he'd come all this way to warn us about!"

Sheriff Tegner swung the beam of his lantern over the blank face of the figure at their feet, marveling, "That's Laughing Larry Lucas? How come? Why would he go to all that trouble warning you he was in town if, all the time, he meant to blow you up the way he did Miss Vigdis and all them other victims?"

Longarm said, "He wasn't out to tell me. He was out to tell you. Would you have tried to stop a friendly fellow lawman from reporting my murder federal after you'd already said yourself you suspected they were worried about me at the bank a fellow victim worked at?"

Sheriff Tegner allowed he might not have.

Longarm continued. "He'd have come to New Ulm aboard that earlier westbound today. He'd have had plenty of time to scout around and pick up some gossip about the man they'd hired him to kill before he ever paid that false courtesy call on you. When I got in like a big-ass bird with his saddle gun already out, Laughing Larry grabbed the chance to throw me off guard whilst casting suspicion on Banker Plover, see?"

Sheriff Tegner grumbled, "Not really. Them same gossips said that blonde you were sparking had been sparked by her boss in the past. So who's to say he might not have sent away for a tougher cuss because he was jealous but afraid to take you on man to man?"

Longarm shook his head and said, "The hired killer. I was wondering about cigar smoke and how such a sweet little thing wound up in position to outrank and supervise two full-grown bank tellers. But had Plover been that serious about his part-time play-pretty..."

"How do you know they were only playing part of the time?" asked the county deputy Longarm knew best.

Longarm was aware of others drifting in for a closer look now, so he kept his voice down as he replied. "I happen to know she had heaps of playtime of her own. This dead dynamite expert knew it as well. He slipped over to her known place of residence to set up his infernal device with me as the intended target. But there was a chance the other gent you just mentioned could have come calling and been as unpleasantly surprised. So how often does a hired killer either lay suspicion on a true client or blow him all to hell with dynamite?"

The sheriff said that made sense. But his senior deputy pointed out that Laughing Larry had been a homicidal lunatic.

Longarm shrugged and said, "Anything's possible, once you toss out all the remotely sensible reasons to kill folks. It's possible anyone here in Brown County could have sent for a hired killer just to see whether I died with my eyes shut or open. But if it's all the same with you, I'll start with more logical suspects."

Sheriff Tegner blinked and asked, "You mean you got some good as Banker Plover?"

To which Longarm could only reply, in a weary tone, "How would you like me to list 'em, alphabetical or numerical?"

CHAPTER 25

It was just after midnight when Longarm finally made it back up the river to that raft and told Mato Takoza not to flap those raggedy buzzard wings and moan at him like that.

The spunky little breed acted mighty happy to see him, once she knew who'd come calling at that hour. But she'd have likely acted as happy whether she'd meant it or not. So Longarm held a few things back until she was making him happy inside the shanty, bare-ass with her on top. Then he told her he had some other happy surprises for her, and rolled her on her back to open her wide and probe her deep as he told her he'd been scouting her old Bee Witch, as he'd promised her he would.

Long-donging anyone that pretty would have been easy in any case, but she'd been extracting honey all afternoon and smelled like she had, even after an afternoon swim in the chalky river water. She took all the organ-grinding inspired by all those Wasichu gals through a long chaste day as a personal compliment. So when she threw both her arms and legs around him to crush him tight against her tawny tits, he kissed the side of her neck and murmured, "I like you too. Now I have some questions to ask, and before you answer, I want to give you a couple of tokens of good faith."

She demurely asked what he wanted to know, and assured him she would never lie to him, never.

He murmured, "Don't see why not. We lie to you folks all the time."

As she stiffened under him he quickly said soothingly, "Always for your own good, just as your kind tells us things we'd like to hear instead of things that might upset us. Meantime, what's a little lying betwixt friends, and I hope you understand how awkward it would be for me to testify in any court of law against a sweetheart I just shot my wad in."

She started to cry with her legs up around his waist, and it sure felt interesting inside her. So he began to move in her just a mite as he said, "I'm fixing to tell you everything I know about your Santee plot and its likely outcome first."

She said she didn't know what he was talking about, gripping him tighter with her strong brown thighs. But he didn't move any faster as he insisted, "Sure you do. The Chambruns and those other breed homesteaders have only been leaving a little out. Nothing any of you have done is go-to-prison illegal. If it was, a land and railroad speculator I know would have been in jail a long time ago."

She pleaded, "Faster. Do it to me faster, Wasichu Wastey!"

He kept teasing them both with long, measured thrusts as he calmly said, "Someone in your Indian land-development syndicate figured out who the Bee Witch really was and what she was really up to. They sent you to beg her for a job, pretending to be a poor little orphan with no connections with those other Santee moving in up and down the banks she was surveying for her railroad."

She sobbed, "Hear me, I am an orphan! I have nobody. Nobody. Not even a man of my own kind to keep me company on this lonely raft!"

It was starting to feel too good again to talk. But as Longarm started pumping faster she demanded, "Have you ever met any other men out here with me, red or white?"

He kissed her, came, and moaned. "We'll get to that part in just a minute. First I'm telling you right out that the old railroad survey gal got back East all right with all her money and a bonus for a job well done. I got two wires in a row this evening from a railroad dick who'd know about such matters. Neither me nor Whispering Smith have any idea where she got rid of that pony."

Mato Takoza groaned she was coming too now. So Longarm pounded her over the pass to Paradise, and let her get some breath back before he said, "I got a later wire from a Wasichu who delights in scalping other Wasichus, so listen tight."

When he was certain she was, he told her, "A robber baron who pulls such tricks all the time must have thought I was about to invest in a railroad stock manipulation. That's what they call crooking widows, orphans, and wise-ass Indians, railroad stock manipulations."

She proved how dumb and innocent she really was by demanding more details. "Why would anyone survey a railroad right of way if they didn't mean to build a railroad?"

He kissed her some more and replied, "To sucker folks into buying railroad stock, of course. The one and original Jay Gould assures me the whole thing's pie in the sky. They have railroad trestles enough down to New Ulm and up by Franklin. Nobody needs a third line between. So they ain't really fixing to build one."

She wailed, "Oh, hinhey! Now you Wasichu have really done it to us! Even when we play by your own rules you screw us, screw us, screw us!"

Longarm said, "Later, after I get my second wind. Meanwhile, I've told you what's really going on so's you can come out on top for a change. Jay Gould assures me the clever flimflam has some time to go as they sell more watered railroad stock at ever higher prices, thanks to carefully placed secret tips about secret surveys and such. Meanwhile, even homestead claims clouding title to future townsites must be worth something to the greedy speculators who've just started to hear about that swell new railroad line."

She nibbled his earlobe pensively as she pondered a mite before deciding, "But my Ina Tatowiyeh Wachipi's high and rocky claim will be worthless, worthless, once no river crossing is ever developed up her way!"

Longarm said, "Tell your aunt to sell such rights to the claim as they have for whatever they can get. Then tell them to buy stock in that feeder line the Bee Witch was surveying for."

"You said the stock was worthless, worthless!" she shouted.

Longarm hushed her with a kiss on the lips and told her, "You have to learn to pay attention if you're out to flimflam folks as slick-talking as mine. I said that railroad stock was watered pie in the sky. Stock is only worthless when nobody else wants to buy it from a poor ignorant redskin, who bought it earlier, before us wise-money boys heard about that trestle across the Minnesota, cutting hours off the regular railroading east or west."

This time she got it. She laughed incredulously and said, "Hear me, my ina and her friends have a lot of money to invest. What if we bought as much of that railroad stock as we could this month, and sold it for as much as we could get for it next month?"

He said, "Jay Gould tells me he figures to dump his own investment at the end of this month. I wouldn't hold on to any a day longer than that. For what goes up must come down, fast, when it has nothing but hot air lifting it anywheres to begin with."

She said she understood, and loved him so much for being so nice to her and her people that she wanted to give him a French lesson.

He said, "Before you find it tough to talk with your mouth full, I want you to be nice to me in another way. We both know I had to take your word about that conversation you had in Santee the other night."

She nodded and said, "I told you what those strange riders asked about you. Are you suggesting I knew them better than I told you I did, Wasichu Wastey?"

He said, "The thought had crossed my mind. A man tends to get sort of suspicious after he's been trailed by Indians for a spell, no offense. But if I take your word you weren't flim-flamming me about some pals who only wanted to know how you were doing with the sucker, let's try and slice it a couple of other ways. To begin with, that was really Santee the bunch of you were speaking, right?"

She shrugged her bare shoulders, making her tawny breasts move in an interesting manner against his bare chest as she replied, "It was a Nakota dialect at least. I'm not sure it was pure Santee. The stranger I spoke to could have been from some distant band."

"Or an Ojibwa who'd gotten fluent enough in Santee to talk to the folks he was scouting," Longarm decided. Then he asked how sure she was all four or five of them had been any sort of Indian.

She started to tell him she just knew. Then she stopped. "Hear me, it was dark, and while I thought I heard two voices, it could have been one trickster, But why do you think one Indian with Wasichu friends would want me to think them a band of Indians?"

Longarm replied, "You just suggested he was a trickster. Which means that I can account for one assimilated Ojibwa, riding with some cowhands off the same spread, better than I can account for a whole Indian band neither you nor your Santee pals would know about."

He told her as much as he knew about the late Baptiste Youngwolf or Uncle Chief as she made good on her offer to French him hard some more. She couldn't comment all that much with her mouth full, but as soon as they were going at it in a more conversational manner dog-style, Mato Takoza said, "Iyoptey wanagi! I love it this way! But hear me, I don't think you want to ride on to ask that Helga Runeberg more than you already know about her pet Ojibwa."

Longarm clasped the breed's firm tawny hips to aim it up her right as he muttered, "I know I don't want to. But I got to. She allowed she was sore as hell at me, but she never let her boys shoot it out with me over in Sleepy Eye when they had the chance."

Mato Takoza arched her spine and moaned, "Deeper! As deep as you can go! For Wakanna only knows when I'll ever find another man like you after that Wasichuweynh Witko gets another crack at you on her own land, with nobody else there to sing of the way you died!"

CHAPTER 26

Longarm had felt no call to sound foolish or show off, and he was almost certain he'd eliminated Mato Takoza and her Santee pals by the time they kissed for the last time the next morning. On the other hand, he felt no call to lay out all his future plans for her whether she was in cahoots with the ones he was really after or not.

So he was mildly chagrined when Wabasha Chambrun and a son in his teens overtook him on the road near the Bedford homestead to volunteer some backup. The burly breed reminded Longarm he'd ridden with the Ninth Cav in his day. "My wife's niece just told us about you going up alone against all them Runeberg riders. She told us how you took the time to rustle us up them swell stock market tips too. My oldest boy, Kangi Ska here, can hit a prairie dog's head at four hundred yards with that Big Fifty he begged to bring along."

Longarm sighed. "I reckon her heart was in the right place. I wasn't fixing to go up against at least seventeen guns alone, gents. I told your county sheriff and his own boys to meet up with me at Israel Bedford's this morning. Riding in on a sod-walled home spread in the dark can be injurious to one's health, and I wanted to talk to Miss Mato Takoza first, to make double sure my process of eliminating made sense. That's what you call it when you whittle away the less likely suspects, process of eliminating."

Chambrun smiled sheepishly and said, "She told us how you'd wormed so many family secrets out of her. The two of you ought to be ashamed, But how did you figure out who the real criminal mastermind was?"

As the three of them rode on, Longarm made a wry face and made sure Kangi Ska followed his drift as he told the two of them, "Criminal mastermind is a contradiction of terms. Nobody smart enough to be called a mastermind would ever become an out-and-out outlaw. You take that old Jay Gould your wife's niece may have just mentioned to you all. He spends more on fancy food, drink, and diamond shirt studs than the Reno and James-Younger gangs combined ever took from anybody at gunpoint. Old Jay don't bother with robbing trains. He helps himself to whole railroads legally by way of dirty stock-market tricks. So the murderous gang leaders we're after ain't half as slick as they think they are. They've just been confusing the shit out of me with unexpected moves."

He spotted the breakfast smoke from the Bedford place ahead and said, "I'm saddled with a halfway logical mind. So I sometimes catch myself playing chess by the rules, when the game is really checkers with ornery illogical crooks." Then he heeled his livery mount to a trot.

Sheriff Tegner had seen them coming of course. So he and his good-sized posse had mounted up in the dooryard of Israel Bedford, as had Bedford, another ex-cavalry rider himself.

Longarm and the breeds reined in close to him. The older lawman leaned closer to ask if Longarm had any objection to Neighbor Conway and his own kids tagging along.

Longarm was too thoughtful to stare at the three colored riders staring his way as they shyly sat their ponies a tad apart from the others. Longarm said, "It's your posse. It's been my experience a bigger posse packs more firepower than a smaller one."

Sheriff Tegner said, "That's the way I see it, and I already have the Swedish vote sewed up. So let's ride."

They did. Tegner was too smooth a politician to come right out and say the Conways had his kind permission to get shot by Rocking R boys of uncertain temperament. Such mutterings as Longarm picked up on during the fairly long ride across open range seemed to be directed at Chambrun and his Santee breed kid. Hardly anyone had ever lost a scalp to colored folks around New Ulm.

Longarm hoped such neighborly affairs as this one might help the reformed Indians fit in as sort of half-ass Wasichu in times to come. It would likely have reservation life beat. For those still living on the Great White Father's blanket had already started to look sort of sad to a man who remembered the way they'd been living just a short spell back. Some Indians seemed able to stay Indian as wards of the government. Someone like a Hopi could still prove his worth as a man by bringing in his swamping crop of blue corn, while a strong and smart Ojibwa could still show off with his wild rice, and even sell it. But it was tough to live the life of a buffalo-hunting professional horse thief, providing one's wives with household help captured from lesser nations, without getting one's allotment cut off by an old fuss of a B.I.A. agent. So maybe young Kangi Ska would make out better in the end as a prosperous farmer rather than a charity case, pissing and moaning about good old days he didn't really remember.

Posse riders dismounted along the way to carefully flatten and restaple such fences as they had to pass through. They saw more and more beef critters as they approached the road running north out of Sleepy Eye. But they saw none of Helga Runeberg's cowhands before they topped a rise to see her home spread waiting for them, silent as if it was late at night instead of mid-morning.

Sheriff Tegner ordered his men to spread wide, with two of his full-time deputies leading their own bunches to circle the sprawl of buildings and empty corrals as the main party closed in.

As Longarm and the local lawman in official charge rode into her barnyard, Helga Runeberg came out her back door, alone and unarmed in a more feminine outfit of polka-dotted gingham, and stated sarcastically she'd have baked a cake if she'd known so many of them would be by to court her so early in the day.

Sheriff Tegner stared soberly down at her from the saddle. "You know blamed well why we're here, Helga Runeberg. Last night we found Miss Vigdis Magnusson scattered all over creation. Dynamite wired to the other side of her back door blew off all her clothes along with her right arm, her head, and both tits when she went to let herself in after an honest day's work at her bank!"

The smaller, darker, and plainer gal didn't seem too upset as she nodded. "I know. Gus Hansson told me all about it when he got back from New Ulm late last night. Are you suggesting anyone out our way had anything to do with it?"

Longarm asked where Young Hansson might be that morning. She met his gaze boldly as she calmly said, "He and a few of the other boys are out hunting strays. I can't say exactly when they'll be back."

Sheriff Tegner snorted. "I can. Never. We saw all that new drift wire You've strung to the east, and you've had your frontage along the Sleepy Eye road fenced solid for some time. I reckon I'd better arrest you for murder before you decide to go hunt stray snipes or great horned jackrabbits your ownself, Helga Runeberg!"

She went a shade paler, but didn't look too scared. Then Longarm suggested, "Maybe we ought to go in out of this hot sun and have a more confidential conversation with the lady, Sheriff." Longarm was already swinging out of his saddle as he said this. So Sheriff Tegner dismounted as well, even though he grumbled in a lower tone, "Damn it, Longarm, it was you who pointed out this very suspect and that missing Hansson boy availed themselves of Western Union's services in New Ulm when they had a perfectly fine telegraph office way closer in Sleepy Eye."

Helga Runeberg snapped, "So this fancy federal man says. But he's right about how high that sun stands right now. So come on in if you want to make total fools of yourselves with this dumb line of questioning!"

She waited until just the three of them were alone in her kitchen before she poured herself and herself alone a cup of coffee and asked the sheriff, "Did he tell you how he followed me all the way to Sleepy Eye and threatened my poor inexperienced cowboys with a repeating rifle in front of witnesses?"

The sheriff planted his old bony butt on one corner of her kitchen table as he replied, "He did, and how he thinks you put on such a show for witnesses as well!"

Longarm remained standing by her back door as he nodded at her and explained, "Laughing Larry Lucas went through a charade to encourage the sheriff here to look somewhere else once I was dead too. You'd made too much public war talk to take back, right after I gunned your dear old Uncle Chief, and you were too sore to consider he was the only really experienced killer on your payroll. So after you wired for outside help from Saint Paul-"

"That's your word against mine!" she interrupted, eyes blazing.

Sheriff Tegner snapped, "No, it ain't. I questioned the Western Union clerk who served you, and he backs Longarm's tale of seeing you and young Hansson coming out just after. Before you even think of saying it was Gus Hansson sending that wire to that boardinghouse in Saint Paul, the clerk said it was you who wrote the telegram, no doubt in some tricky code, since we know you never had no Cousin Anna, but that don't matter. Tell her about the real deputy marshals over in Saint Paul, Deputy Long!"

Longarm smiled thinly at the defiant little thing, still trying to recall where he'd seen those eyes before, and explained, "It only took my pals in Saint Paul one visit to determine Laughing Larry had been boarding at that same address under the very name you evoked in your telegram, which would still be on file by the way."

She said, "All right, Uncle Chief gave me the name of another old army pal to call on if I needed help and he wasn't around. Uncle Chief traveled a lot. I don't know anything about any code. I was just told to wire Uncle Leroy that Cousin Anna was getting married and let his old army pals take it from there, see?"

Sheriff Tegner stood up, reeling some, as he snarled, "I see you think I'm just a dumb Swede you can brush away from your guilty fresh face like a housefly! But you can't fool me with your slippery answers, Helga Runeberg! I'm arresting you in the name of the people of Brown County for murder in the first degree and-"

Longarm moved with surprising speed to catch the older lawman as he lurched the gal's way, but seemed to be fixing to go another. The tall deputy said soothingly, "I told you to go easy on them caraway seeds. You're too upset to question the witness calmly. So why don't you step outside for some fresh air and let me see what I can find out from Miss Helga, Sheriff?"

The older man muttered, "Hang her, I say! Hang her as high as she blew poor Vigdis Magnusson's pretty blond head!"

But Longarm still managed to ease him outside. Helga Runeberg was frog-belly sweaty and pale as he turned back to her. But she managed a brave enough front as she said, "Drunken old fool! He hasn't a thing on me, and he'd know that if only he'd stay out of the aquavit!"

Longarm smiled knowingly and nodded, but warned, "He is the sheriff, and that gal Laughing Larry killed in my place was mighty popular in New Ulm. I'd hate to face a local jury, stuck with even the circumstantial evidence we have on you. That's what they call it when nobody saw you actually pull the trigger. Circumstantial evidence."

She said, "Damn it, I was right here on my own land, miles away from New Ulm, when that stuck-up blonde was killed!"

Longarm soberly informed her, "Miss Viggy wasn't stuck up. She was blown up. Laughing Larry would have been miles away by now had not I beat his train into the depot. I didn't know it was him before I got there. I ain't that smart. I only figured whoever it was would want to get out of town suddenly, and seeing I did know a train was about to pass through..."

"I don't know who or what you're talking about," she said. "You were there when I told my boys not to gun you down like the dog you were born. Were you there when somebody instructed a killer from out of town who his target might be and with whom he'd be planning to spend the night?"

Longarm sighed and said, "I sure hate small-town gossip. But I do thank you for tying up that loose end, ma'am. You see, I solve these tougher ones by tying up one loose end after another until none seem to be left and I get to make my own arrests. I'm a tad more scientific than Sheriff Tegner."

He let that sink in. Then he told her, "I want you to listen tight and weigh all the words of either of us before you toss more sass my way, Miss Helga. Sheriff Tegner's up for another term in the coming elections, and he needs an arrest and conviction so bad he can taste it."

He let that sink in before saying, "I'm sore about poor Miss Viggy too. Since you seem to have heard some gossip, I have no call to tell another lady why. Suffice it to say I am out for blood. But I can be flexible, not having to produce anyone for a local court. I want the big fish, on federal charges. I want him so bad I may just see my way clear to toss a few smaller fish back."

She hesitated, looked away, and bitterly replied, "Forget it. I have this family spread to think of. We both know I'd have to move far away and change my name forever if I ever turned state's evidence on a man like Calvert Tyger!"

Longarm nodded pleasantly and said, "Pinamiyeh, as your Santee neighbors would say. That's exactly the sort of loose end I like to tie up, and we've been wondering how come Calvert Tyger keeps dying all over this country. Would you like to try for the way those hot hundred-dollar notes got scattered even wider, ma'am?"

She hesitated, then softly murmured, "I have your word I won't have to sign anything or repeat one word of this in front of anyone else in this world?"

He hesitated in turn before cautioning her, "I can only bend the law so far. It's my duty as a potential witness against you to warn you I can't turn my back on a serious felony. But if I'm right about you only aiding and abetting, and you'd like to tell me just what in blue blazes has been going on, I see no reason to drag your name all over the arrest warrants once I know who I really want to arrest."

She poured another cup of coffee, this time for him, as she choked back a sob and confessed, "You were right about my sheltering Uncle Chief and, all right, a couple of other boys who might have been a bit wild. But I swear I've never taken part in any felonies myself, and that was no lie about Uncle Chief knowing nothing about that robbery in Fort Collins."

She waited until he'd sipped some coffee without calling her a liar to her face, and then she added, "He was never after you when you shot him either! I can see now how you might have thought he was. But he and some other boys he rode in with a few weeks ago were only following you about in hopes of finding out who'd sent you after them. Uncle Chief never bought that story about a bank note from that payroll robbery attracting you all the way to New Ulm. He said he'd heard they were turning up all over, and besides, he didn't know about any robbery in Fort Collins. He was afraid someone was trying to frame him and his friends."

Longarm asked where the rest of the poor framed gang might be. She shrugged and said, "Uncle Chief never told us. He did say they'd all agreed to split up and lay low for a while after the last big job they pulled. He never said what that one had been. Just that he found it awfully surprising that you and your own pals were after him for that Fort Collins robbery he knew nothing about, see?"

Longarm must not have looked as convinced as she wanted him to. For the next thing he knew she was standing mightily close as she put both hands on his upper sleeves, smiled timidly up at him, and asked if he thought she was out to give false testimony. She smelled so fine he had to smile back, and up this close she didn't seem quite so plain after all. Her perky nose was sort of cute, and her eyes were downright naughty as he stared down into their smoky blue depths.

Then something clicked in the back of his skull and Longarm put his coffee cup aside to soberly say, "I reckon I can go along with most of what you just said, Miss Helga. I'll see if I can get the sheriff not to arrest you this morning."

She looked so grateful he was afraid he'd never get out of there with his pecker in his pants. But he managed, and catching up with Sheriff Tegner outside, murmured, "It worked. Albeit not the way we planned. She lies like sin, and you're going to need way more evidence before you haul her before any grand jury, pard. But I'll send you what we have once we wrap the fool case up. Meanwhile, I fear arresting her might tip her pals off that I'm on their trail at last!"

Tegner shrugged and said, "I reckon she'll keep here on her own place for now. But what did she tell you if she was lying so much?"

Longarm replied, "Nothing. I took every word she said with a peck of salt. Then I suddenly figured out who she's been reminding me of ever since I first laid eyes on her mean little face!"

CHAPTER 27

Later that week Longarm had an even less friendly conversation in the chambers of Judge Dickerson of the Denver District Court. Then he legged it over to the Tremont House to relieve Deputies Smiley and Dutch, who looked mighty relieved as they lit out a full hour before they'd expected to that afternoon.

As soon as Longarm found himself alone with the voluptuous honey-blonde they had down as a soiled dove known as Elvira Carson, he came right to the point, saying, "I've cleared it with my own office, which was easy enough, but the prosecuting attorney had a fit when I suggested he let you off scot free, Miss Margaret. He seems to think you were going to testify in court against your lover, Frank Keller, of the notorious Keller gang, which only goes to show how much they teach such dudes at Harvard Law."

The buxom half-naked blonde, wearing only a shantung kimono that late of a summer's afternoon, and not bothering to sash it all that modestly, leaned back on her hotel bed to smile up at him dreamy-eyed and puff, "I haven't had any lover in a coon's age, and what was that funny name you just called me, handsome?"

Longarm remained planted in the middle of her bedroom rug as he calmly replied, "Margaret, ma'am, Margaret Runeberg of Brown County, Minnesota, before you went wild. The real Elvira Carson died of the clap mixed with yellow jack over a year ago, and I reckon one of her admirers told you the name was up for grabs, just as the old boy they were expecting you to testify against must have heard about the real Frank Keller getting shot by the Mounties trying to rob the Canadian and Pacific even earlier. I just found out about that myself by including some old boys I know up at Fort MacLeod, even though the current Canadian government is sore at President Hayes, as the bunch of you were banking on."

She stared up at him thunderstruck, the wheels in those familiar blue eyes ticking visibly as he gently continued. "I never would have strained that hard, this not being my case at all, had not I gotten to know your older and uglier sister better back where you both hail from, and suddenly recalled where I'd seen such wickedly innocent eyes before. Once I had the least notion who you might really be out this way, it became a heap plainer what you were up to."

She said, "I don't know what you're talking about. Why would any girl adopt the name of a notorious trail-town whore if she was really some innocent child off a cattle spread in... Minnesota, did you say?"

He smiled thinly and replied, "I did say Minnesota. I never said a thing about no cattle spread. You got to develop a good memory to be a good liar, ma'am. I'd like you to put some duds on now. I'm taking you over to Curtis Street, where I mean to check us into another hotel as man and wife."

She laughed incredulously and declared, "This is so sudden, dear!" as she sat up to calmly shrug out of her thin kimono.

She shrugged mighty temptingly, and Longarm hadn't met anybody half that willing on the long train ride back from New Ulm. But he told her, "Maybe. I'm only human. But first we got to get some more serious matters settled. Like I said, I'm checking into that other hotel with you, and so it won't matter in court whether we did anything else or not. As a lady who's ridden the owlhoot trail as long as you have, you know what a pickle I'd be in, trying to testify against you in court, after you had documented proof I'd slept with you within an easy walk from the courthouse!"

He could see she did as she rose to her feet naked anyway and moved over to a corner wardrobe to start dressing herself with skill and speed to make one suspect she was used to getting in and out of her duds at short notice.

As she sat back down, still mostly unbuttoned, to pull on her high-button shoes, she asked with a puzzled frown, "You say a federal judge and prosecutor wanted you to be so good to me?"

Longarm chuckled and replied, "They wanted to lock you up and throw away the key, should you go back on your promise to testify against the cuss they've been holding as a dead train robber. I convinced them how tough that could be, if you had any sort of lawyer of your own, once you threw the case so comically, with members of the fourth estate in court to describe the hilarity on the front pages of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News in an election year."

She stood up and asked him to button the back of her bodice for her while he told her where he got such wild ideas.

He managed to keep his hands steady, with some effort, as he got her fit to be seen on the streets with, saying, "I've seen a hostile witness throw a case before. It's even happened to me. I could be a hair off as to your exact moves, but as soon as I figured out who you had to be, I saw how easy it was going to be for you to wait until they were trying to swear you in as a woman of ill repute with an arrest record going back to Sodom and Gomorrah. I'd laugh too if I saw a bailiff trying to swear in another lady entirely as a long-dead trail-town hooker. I'd likely wonder how much attention the prosecution had been paying to its other homework."

She said he surely had a vivid imagination, and asked who he thought the prisoner they had down as Frank Keller might be.

He said, "We'll get into that after I get into you, or at least compromise myself forever as a witness. You see, I ain't just doing this because you're concave where I'm convex. I know plenty of gals here in Denver. I'll tell you what I really want as soon as you have me over a barrel. Let's go."

They went. She brought along her purse and carpetbag, saying she could hardly wait to get him over a barrel after she took the usual precautions.

They walked arm in arm in broad daylight to a more affordable but fairly clean hotel on Curtis Street, and she stood there pretending butter wouldn't melt in her mouth as he signed them in as U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long & Spouse. The room clerk, who knew Longarm of old, looked surprised but said nothing as he handed over their key.

Longarm helped her upstairs with her carpetbag, and she said the hot stuffy room needed airing. So he locked the door and opened a window while she naturally bolted for the door.

When he told her, not unkindly, "I locked it with the key, which I hold in my hand," she just shrugged and commenced to get undressed again, murmuring, "Oh, well, I haven't had any for weeks, and it's not as if you're deformed or busting out in boils."

He didn't see any reason to stop her from undressing. For openers it might make a gal think twice about unexpected dashes down the hall outside. He shucked his own hat and frock coat as well, saying, "My first hunch was that we'd picked up the more notorious Calvert Tyger after that less exciting robbery by Keller, and so you meant to surprise us with, say, Canadian newspaper clippings, proving they'd booked him wrong as Frank Keller. But as soon as I studied more on that, I saw it was just plain impossible. The cuss we're holding as Frank Keller, whoever he is, ain't old enough to have ridden in the war on either side. Besides, somebody in a leadership position has to have been issuing a heap of orders, and paying at least something to have them carried out. So an alive and kicking Calvert Tyger still at large works better than Tyger in jail, or the late Brick Flanders, albeit the third in command called Chief might have issued one or more orders before he wound up just as late more recently."

The big blonde gasped, "Brick and the Chief are dead?" Then she recovered and asked who they were talking about as she sat naked on the bed to take off her shoes.

Longarm hung his gun rig on a bedpost, and commenced to unbutton his shirt as he replied, "We've been sitting on both stories up to now. But the evening editions of both the Post and News ought to be reporting the deaths of Brick Flanders, Baptiste Youngwolf, and of course Calvert Tyger--many, many times, in fact. We figure he just meant to go on dying all over this country until he was sure we had him down as dead, and he sure seems a murderous cuss."

She purred she didn't know any of those people he mentioned, and didn't want to talk about such silly boys, alive or dead. So once he finished stripping down himself, Longarm joined her on the bed, on top of the covers, to see if they could get on a more trusting basis.

She parted her big creamy thighs with joyous abandon but as he entered her she stiffened and hissed, "My Lord, you might have warned me! I told you I hadn't been getting any for weeks, you overdeveloped stallion!"

He nibbled her ear as he told her he was sorry he'd thrust home with the first stroke, explaining, "I've been doing without aboard a mess of trains, and you have been acting like a gal who liked it barnyard style."

She raised her knees coyly to brace them against Longarm's bare chest so she had more control over the depth of his thrusts as she grinned up at him like a mean little kid and said, "I do, within the limits of my anatomy. I know I'm a big-boned woman of mature proportions, but I've always been a tad tight down there."

He allowed he'd noticed, in an admiring tone, as he began to move more cautiously in her surprisingly child-like privates. Few if any schoolgals would have gushed that wet or moved so fine while being ravaged by some older boy with a full grown hard-on. So a good time was had by all, and toward the end she'd wrapped her big old legs around him to take it all the way as she sobbed he was killing her and that she loved it. He was afraid they'd heard her down in the lobby when she came in broad daylight at the top of her lungs.

She wanted to come some more, and begged him to let her get on top. So he did, and that felt even tighter, with her bare heels dug into the mattress on either side of his naked hips as she bobbed all that lush meat up and down.

He told her a couple of dirtier jokes as he made her come some more. Then, while they were cooling their loving-flushed naked flesh in a lazy dog-style way, he felt it safe to ask her if she could see how dumb he was going to look in court if he ever repeated anything he heard in such relaxed surroundings.

She arched her spine with her cheek pressed to the covers as she crooned, "Oh, just keep that up, lover man. You've already figured out who I really am. I was going to admit the man you're holding as Frank Keller had to be somebody I'd never seen before, so-"

Longarm faked a dramatic sob. "You women are all alike. You get what you want from us poor weak men and then you feel free to taradiddle us with sweet dumb lies."

She groaned, "Never mind the taradiddles. Just diddle me some more, and could you do that a little faster?"

He could have. He felt like it. But he stopped with it deep inside her, bracing his weight with a palm on each of her broad hips as he said, "Let's see if I can convince you of my good intentions with a bit more of what I've already got, seeing you don't seem convinced by all I've just given you. Mayhaps we'd better lie down and share us a smoke as we see whether we can come to terms."

She gasped, "Don't you dare! I was just about to come again and I'll say anything you want if only you won't take it out too soon!"

Longarm wasn't sure he could have. So he just started thrusting again, with his bare feet spread wide on the rug by the bed to ram it up into her at an angle they both found mighty satisfying.

After he'd satisfied them both Longarm lay side by side with her, propped up on pillows as they shared that cheroot and he told her, "Once upon a time, as you've doubtless heard, there were three big outlaws who'd come West together to stop trains, rob banks, and such. For reasons I'm still working on they must have had a serious falling out. Brick Flanders was murdered by one or more of his old pals, and they tried to make it look as if he'd died in a rooming house fire under the name of Calvert Tyger. I reckon the game ain't as much fun after you've ridden the owlhoot trail a spell. Frank, Jesse, and The Kid are all laying as low as they can this summer."

He took a drag and passed the smoke to her, then continued. "By a series of pure coincidence proving what a small world or small outfit I ride for, I stumbled into Denver P.D.'s investigation of that deliberate rooming house fire. Then to make matters more nervous, a boss with limited manpower sent me first to guard you for a shift, and then assigned me to look into that hot paper turning up around their wartime stamping grounds, where old Youngwolf had just decided to hide out some more with your older sister."

She started to say something. Longarm figured it would be another lie. So he growled, "I ain't finished. I know this sounds like tooting my own horn, but facts are facts, and they must have figured I knew a heap more than I did when I kept stumbling around so close to their trail. So things have been noisy as hell, even with me shooting in the dark and just aiming lucky a few times."

She handed back the smoke and snuggled closer, purring that she really did enjoy bedtime stories when she wasn't half ready to go to sleep just yet.

Longarm swore, got rid of the cheroot, and sat up to shake her by both shoulders as he warned, "Can't you see you're done for, unless we get them before they get you and doubtless your sister Helga as well?"

She stared owlishly up at him. "Why should Cal be after my poor innocent sister, or even me?"

Longarm said, "For openers, in case you ain't noticed, he's a crabby cuss running scared. He's been busting a gut pretending to be dead, and both you and your sister know him on sight!"

She said, "Pooh, it's against the code of the trail to turn in a pal and Cal knows it."

Longarm said, "No, he don't. Whatever the original game was, he's been acting like a homicidal lunatic ever since I dealt myself in. He tried to stop me, but I got through, and how's he supposed to know I got all those pals, including Chief, by beginner's luck? Wouldn't you be worried about someone telling tales out of school if you were the leader of a gang already suffering from some internal struggle and the law kept foiling plan after plan on you?"

He saw those wheels going round in her big blue eyes again. So he said, "I'd be lying if I said I knew for sure whether those two he sent to the Tremont House were out to kill you or get you safely out of our clutches. Either way, I took 'em both so neat and tidy, it must have occurred to their boss that someone had tipped us off. With Flanders dead and Chief hiding out back in Minnesota, if you take my meaning."

She had turned a shade green around the gills before he continued. "It gets worse. Whatever you and your sister had agreed to, I nailed his second in command, Chief, whilst he was supposed to be hiding safe and sound with Miss Helga at your family spread. Then I nailed Laughing Larry, no matter who'd sent for him to do me in, as neatly as if I'd been tipped off he was coming. You want some more? I just left your sister free as a bird, despite an easy chance to nail her on aiding and abetting, if not criminal conspiracy."

The younger and prettier Runeberg sister reached down between them with a Mona Lisa smile as she murmured, "My, you have been busy, and so here we are, alone at last."

He let her fondle his semi-erection. Most men would have. But as she did so, he smiled thinly and said, "Yep. With you screwing the same lawman who seemed so easy on your sister back in Minnesota. You can see, of course, how I'd never be able to hold you as either a prisoner nor hostile witness after getting on such friendly terms with you. So you're free as a bird to leave this little love nest as soon as you can get dressed, unless you'd rather get even friendlier."

He could see she surely did when she rolled over on her plump knees and one hand to lower her blond head to his lap. He didn't try to stop her. Few men would have. But as he grinned down at the bobbing part of her hair he said, "That sure feels friendly. But what I meant was that I could get you out of Colorado in one piece, with no charges pending against you and mayhaps a pocketbook full of bounty money, if you'd only help me make the bad dreams of a bad man come true."

She took her lush lips from his raging erection to impale her tiny twat on it instead as she pleaded, "You're so right about how mean old Cal can be when he thinks he's been crossed. But roll me over and do this to me right before I tell you the whole dumb story!"

CHAPTER 28

The next morning, having hidden the repentant outlaw gal with Madame Emma Gould, a real soiled dove who owed him some favors, Longarm got down to the less amusing chore of seducing a prosecution team and at least one senior judge.

The meeting was held in Judge Dickerson's smoke-filled chambers, with Longarm's superior, Marshal Vail, naturally on hand to back his play unless it sounded wilder than usual.

Once he had everybody sitting down and lit up, Longarm declared, "Before I tell you gents what I want you to do for me, I'd best tell you a bedtime story, as amended for me in bed last night."

Vail growled, "I was just fixing to ask you why you registered at another hotel with that material witness. You told me you were out to get her to tell the truth, not go to bed with you, damn it!"

Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, "Sometimes you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, Boss."

The fair but firm Judge Dickerson snorted, "Never mind how he got what out of a hostile witness and let the man tell us what he got!"

Longarm nodded thankfully and said, "Once upon a time there was this outlaw gang. Much like what we know about the James-Younger ways of pulling similar jobs, the three experienced leaders--Tyger, Flanders, and Youngwolf or Chief--stuck together and made plans, but picked up such extra help as they might need for a particular job from a way wider circle of kith and kin."

A lawyer who'd doubtless read a recent edition of the Denver Post said, "What has any of that got to do with Elvira Carson, or with you letting her go after a night of slap and tickle?"

Longarm said, "We call it giving them enough rope, and I got more'n slaps and tickles out of a gal who's really Margaret Egger nee Runeberg, the common law wife of the Fulton Egger you've been holding for trial as the late Frank Keller. But this would still make more sense to you if you'd just shut up and let me tell it from the beginning."

Judge Dickerson warned everybody to be still and told Longarm to proceed. So Longarm said, "All right, moving closer to our own time, the three old pals hid out from time to time on this cattle spread close to their old stamping grounds, where they'd met as half-ass Indian fighters. The spread was owned and operated by the Runeberg sisters, at least until the younger one, pretty Miss Margaret, fell for the exciting bullshit of a part-time gang member called Fulton Egger and told the neighbors she'd be living in Chicago with somebody not quite as exciting."

"You mean it was the Tyger gang, not the Keller gang, who tried to rob that train and-"

"The judge just told you to be still," Longarm told the lawyer. Then he relented enough to explain. "We all know what a piss-poor train robbery that was. Young Egger got treed by the posse, and threw lots of sand in your eyes by confessing he was the leader, Frank Keller. And then you picked up a reluctant witness, coached in advance to blow the case sky high in court when the defense proved she'd been held as a trail-town whore instead of the innocent Minnesota miss she could be if she wanted. After the jury finished laughing about that, they were fixing to spring the death certificate of the real Frank Keller on the prosecution."

There came a rumble of discontent. But Judge Dickerson, who'd had folks trying to laugh in his court in the past and didn't much approve of it, ignored his own injunction to gravely observe, "It wouldn't have worked. Horseplay in court may or may not amuse the jury. But I've been over the briefs and I'd say the prosecution has young Keller or, very well, Egger, as charged. If giving the arresting officer a false name was enough to get you off, nobody would ever be convicted. Who came up with such a sophomoric scheme to disrupt the majesty of my damned court?"

Longarm said, "Brick Flanders, Your Honor. He was the big spender of the bunch. Tyger and Chief wanted to keep laying low, and told him his proposal to stop that train was dumb. But he tried to do it on his own, or with only his own fraction of the gang, at any rate, and we all know how that turned out."

He saw nobody had any objections and continued. "It got worse. The murderous but somewhat cooler heads heard the gang they'd thought they were leading had robbed that payroll office up to Fort Collins, and that the high-denomination treasury notes were hot as a whore's pillow on payday night because the government had a list of all their serial numbers."

Billy Vail just couldn't help but ask, "Which one of them was fool enough to spend one of those very treasury notes in the very county they'd always felt safe to hide out in, old son?"

Longarm said, "Tyger and Chief were sure it was Brick Flanders. The red-bearded and glass-eyed wonder had been identified by survivors of that robbery. He denied having pulled the robbery. So he naturally had to deny spending the hot paper like a drunken sailor, and this got Tyger and Chief so mad they beat and shot him, not far from that rooming house he was found in well toasted. Margaret Egger couldn't say just how they managed to smuggle his body in and register it as the late Calvert Tyger. But she agrees with me that Tyger might have made a habit of dying in fires because he's an ordinary-looking cuss who feels better off with us not looking for him above ground. Chief ran back to the old Santee country where, being Ojibwa, he didn't have to worry as much about being recognized by anyone who'd known him of old. Nobody from the gang bought any riding stock with a note from that payroll job. So you can imagine how chagrined they felt when I showed up as well."

He let them all chuckle and summed up with, "Like I told the gal who told me so much, I'd just fallen in the dung heap and come up with sweet violets. But if the truth be known, I never caught but one of the three leaders with barnyard luck, and the bad one of the bunch is still at large, twice as smart and not looking half as unusual. That gal who admits to knowing him personal tried to describe him, and it sure adds up bland. I doubt any lawman would look twice at a middle-aged cuss of medium build in a not-too-plain-or-fancy business suit unless he acted unusual. So here's what I want you officers of the court to do for me. I want you to drop the charges against Fulton Egger, alias Frank Keller, for lack of evidence. Anyone who reads the Post or News ought to be able to see how that material witness running off on us leaves us with no case and-"

"The hell you say!" one of the prosecution team declared. "We have the whole posse he surrendered to, along with the train crew they threw down on, and Jesus H. Christ, what sort of a federal prosecutor would throw in the towel over one hostile witness lighting out?"

Longarm said, "A federal prosecutor with bigger fish to fry and an eye for an unethical but simple deal, of course. We can hold Borden and Wagner, the two gunslicks I arrested at the Tremont House, for what--twenty-four hours after we turn loose the material witness they were menacing?"

Judge Dickerson said, "Seventy-two, on suspicion of anything. But you'd better make your other proposal a good one, Deputy Long. Why on earth would this court even consider turning loose a known member of a dangerous outlaw gang?"

Longarm nodded and replied, "Why indeed, Your Honor? What might you think if a bunch of sneaky lawmen turned a member of your gang and his gal loose, whilst still holding other pals they had less to charge with?"

Judge Dickerson smiled wickedly and said, "I like it. Let's try it."

CHAPTER 29

So later that afternoon, as Longarm and young Fulton Egger were coming out of the Federal House of Detention, a shady lawyer they'd both talked to in the past met them on the granite steps, looking a tad upset, to demand of Longarm, "Where are you taking my client now, Deputy Long? I warn you, he's never agreed to waive extradition on that old Kansas state charge!"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "You ain't been keeping up, Lawyer Culhane. I ain't taking this innocent child to Kansas or anywhere else as a prisoner."

Egger stared back at his confounded lawyer, just as confounded, to say, "Don't look at me. I don't know neither. They just now told me they were dropping all charges and I was free to go."

"With one proviso," Longarm explained knowingly. He pointed west along the busy street as he said, "Just because we don't want him on train robbing doesn't mean we want him spitting on the sidewalks of our fair city. So I'm escorting him down to Union Depot, from whence he'll be catching a Burlington Flyer clean out of my court's jurisdiction. His little woman will be waiting for him when he gets there, and I hope this has been a good lesson to the two of them."

Lawyer Culhane stared thoughtfully at his client. "What did you and Margaret have to do in return, Fulton?"

Egger answered truthfully enough, "Nothing. They never asked for anything."

Longarm purred, "What might anyone want to ask a couple of pure innocent kids, Lawyer Culhane? Haven't you ever done anything from the goodness of your heart? Has dealing with the sort of clients you seem to deal with blinded you to the rights of an honest citizen? It says early on in the Bill of Rights that the accused shall be granted a fair and speedy trial. You've pestered me personally with enough writs of habeas corpus to know why we can't hold this pest."

The short and respectable-looking member of the courthouse gang shook his derbied head. "No, I haven't. You have a way of making arrests stick, Longarm. We both know I've never pried a client loose from you for lack of evidence unless you had damned little evidence, or unless you were throwing a little fish back in exchange for..."

"I never! I swear!" Egger shouted with an expression of dawning fear on his simple face.

Longarm said, "Believe the boy. He's telling you the pure truth. He can write to you and settle on what he might owe you, after I get him aboard that flyer and on his way--out of our hair. We'd love to stay and chat some more, but the kid's train will be leaving around sundown, and he'd be better off eating in the depot beanery than aboard that night train. You care to come along and ask more questions? Neither one of us has anything to hide."

Lawyer Culhane said he had some other late errands. They both knew he didn't have to say any more. So Longarm never asked what they were.

As Longarm and Egger headed off down the street without his cheap lawyer, the unsettled outlaw suddenly confided, "Listen, we'd better not go to that depot just now. I follow your drift about my not being welcome here in Denver. I've been run out of town before. So why don't you just let me find my own way over to... You say old Margaret will be waiting for me in Omaha?"

Longarm said, "Mebbe. I told her that would be where you'd be getting off the train I'm putting you on. I'm putting you on that train and no other because I told Judge Dickerson I would when he signed your release papers. I don't think he wants you finding your own way to the city limits, no offense."

As they kept on walking, with Egger spooking at storekeepers sweeping the walk or passing riders dressed cow, the stockyards a few blocks away accounting for such riders innocently enough, Longarm told himself not to start tensing up before that tinhorn lawyer had had time to report to other clients. Then he considered how quickly one could whip around a corner to consult with another client at, say, a shoe-shine stand, and tensed up quickly.

Egger tried to hold his own cards close to his vest. But as the red brick walls of Union Depot loomed just ahead the outlaw pleaded, "I don't want to wait for no train in there. You as much as told Culhane where this child would be during tricky glooming light, and I guess Margaret told you Culhane acts as lawyer for all of us here in Denver, right?"

As a matter of fact, she had. But it would have been dumb, as well as needlessly cruel, to tell a man who'd just lost his woman that she'd even told the law how big his dong got. The big blonde, who could easily satisfy a modestly endowed man but said she'd learned to like a hung one better, could meet old Egger farther along if she wanted to, assuming he lived through what was about to transpire.

When Egger suddenly asked why Longarm was grinning that way, the lawman said, "Just thinking how often I've caught a crook I'd have never known about had he only had the sense to leave me alone."

As they crossed the street through the horse-drawn traffic, Egger started to make a break for it. But Longarm caught him by one elbow and spun him around, saying, "Careful, old son. You don't want to get run over by a coach an' four. I don't want to handcuff you neither, but I can and I will if you try that again!"

Once on the sandstone walk in front of the depot, Egger sputtered, "You bastard! You're using me for bait! You never meant to turn me loose at all. But you figured Tyger would hear you had, suspect we'd made a deal to do him dirty, and come for me, right?"

Longarm said, "Yep." He hauled the frightened man into an archway and hauled out a folded length of linen bond paper, handing it to Egger as he continued. "I told your Miss Margaret I don't play dirtier than I need to. If you want the whole truth, I think you're a useless punk. But she assured me you've never killed nobody or even stolen apples without somebody leading the way. So I can afford to let you run loose, until somebody kills you or you get a little sense. Meanwhile, there's no accounting for taste, and one of the conditions Miss Margaret made was that both of you went free in exchange for Tyger. I never said I wouldn't wire Brown County they could pick up her older sister, so remember that in days to come when and if she says I double-crossed her. For when I make me a deal with the likes of you all, I dot every I and cross every T. After which you are on your own."

Egger hadn't heard that last part. Even as he put his walking papers away he was weakly gasping, "Margaret made a deal to turn Cal in? Oh, Dear Lord, where can we hide?"

Longarm led him inside the crowded depot by one arm, leaving his own gun hand free, as he said gently, "Your gal never told me where he was. She didn't know. Neither of you will have to hide from him if he gets caught. So I want you to keep a sharp eye on the folks all around and let me know if you spot Calvert Tyger, hear?"

Egger moaned they were both going to be shot down like dogs. So Longarm led him into the depot dining hall, and bought them some chili con carne with mince pie and coffee. When Egger said he felt too sick to his stomach to eat, even seated in a corner, Longarm ate both of their orders and drank all the coffee.

Then he consulted his pocket watch, saw it agreed with the wall clock, and said, "Pay attention lest you wind up feeling even worse, Egger. I can only watch so many ways at once, so there's an outside chance you'd get away from me if you made a break for it in the near future. After that it would be a toss-up whether I caught up with you and kicked the shit out of you, or Tyger got to you first and you wound up wishing you were only getting the shit kicked out of you."

The pale-faced crook whimpered, "Cal's got it all wrong. Nobody I was pals with robbed that payroll office behind his back and got him so famous out this way!"

Longarm said, "Tell him that as you lay dying. I hadn't finished your instructions. We'll be going out to the open platform now. It's early. There shouldn't be too many innocent targets in the way. I can watch you or I can watch for more important rascals. So like I said, you could likely make a dash for freedom if you weren't already free and had anywheres safer to dash. Can I bank on you acting sensible?"

Egger said he just wanted to be safely far away with his sweet little Margaret in his arms after all those lonesome nights in a cell.

Longarm didn't comment on how a gal that big-boned and buxom could be described as small, or where she really was just then. He rose to leave some coins on the table and muttered, "Let's move out."

They did, and sure enough, the open platform out back was sunny and unoccupied, with no train expected for a good forty-five minutes and the late afternoon sun glaring uncomfortably hot through the dust and coal smoke of the rail yards to the west. Longarm led Egger to an open stretch near the north end of the platform, and told him he doubted too many passengers would come crowding up this way to get on the Burlington Flyer's cowcatcher once it arrived.

Egger glanced nervously about and protested, "We're easy targets out here, and that dazzle off the boards and bricks will make it even tougher to spot Cal in time!"

Longarm stared soberly at the switchman's booth forming a cul-de-sac to the north as it almost met the sun-washed bricks of the depot's rear wall. "The light will be just as tricky for him. How come you're expecting Calvert Tyger in the singular flesh, Egger? He sent a whole swarm of lesser lights after me and we're still working on some of their true names and addresses."

Egger sighed and said, "You just answered your own fool question. You don't send a boy to do a man's job, and he wants us both bad if he suspects I rode with Brick Flanders against his orders and just now made a deal with the law!"

He glanced down the other way and added, "Aside from that, he must be finding good help tougher to find these days. We were all running low on pocket jingle when Brick took it in his red head to stop that train on his own."

Longarm started to ask how the gang could be throwing around all those hundred-dollar notes if they were so broke. But the punk had told him more than once that Calvert Tyger and his faction hadn't taken part in the Fort Collins job. That had doubtless made Chief sound mighty sincere when he'd told Helga Runeberg he'd been framed for a job he'd never done.

Egger sucked in his breath, and Longarm turned the same way to see a familiar figure, missing his chaps but wearing a six-gun, slowly coming up the platform from the cover of those baggage carts to the south. Egger said, "It's Gus Hansson. He's supposed to be riding for my sister-in-law back in Brown County! What could he be doing way out here in Colorado?"

Longarm said, "Move back and off to one side and I'll ask him."

So the unarmed Egger crawfished back and off to one side indeed as Longarm just stood there, smiling sort of wistfully.

As the Minnesota kid came within pistol range Longarm called out, "That's far enough and don't try it, Gus. Can't you see you're being used as a cat's paw by a sly old mouser who doesn't give a fig for your future?"

Gus Hansson stopped, only to drop into a gunfighter's crouch as he bitched, "We just got word from New Ulm, you son of a bitch! The sheriff just arrested Miss Helga and half of my pals on the Rocking R!"

Longarm nodded amiably and replied, "I know. I wired them earlier and allowed it was about time we commenced wrapping up. Somebody has to pay for hiring Laughing Larry Lucas to blow pretty ladies up, and I'm sure the big boss has told you it wasn't his dumb notion."

Gus Hansson snarled, "Fill your fist by the time I count to three. For that's when I mean to draw, you smirking know-it-all!"

Longarm thoughtfully threw his frock coat open to expose the grips of his cross-draw.44-40, but called out in a calm reasonable tone, "You don't want to try it, Gus. This ain't one of them Wild West yarns in Ned Buntline's magazines. Life is real, life is earnest, and I've got an edge on your skills and experience."

Gus Hansson grimly answered, "One!"

Longarm snorted, "Aw, shit, this is getting silly, Gus!"

To which the determined-looking kid answered, "Two!"

So Longarm, being a grown man instead of a kid who'd read too many dime novels in the bunkhouse, fired the derringer he'd been palming all this time before the fool kid could slap leather as he counted to three.

Then all hell busted loose, and Longarm let the double derringer dangle from his watch chain as he dropped to the platform and rolled over the edge to bob back up with his more serious six-gun in hand as he called out, "Smiley? Dutch?"

"Over here," came a jovial reply from the narrow dark slit between the switchman's booth and depot wall.

A second voice Longarm recognized as that of the more somber cuss called Smiley called out, "It didn't work quite as well as you planned though. We tried to get him to drop his damned gun and grab for the sky as he was fixing to throw down on your back. But he paid us no mind and, well, you know Dutch here."

Everyone who worked with the jolly but murderous Dutch knew how he was when suspects didn't do exactly as he said. But first things coming first, Longarm rose to his full height, brushing his tweed pants with his Stetson as he holstered his unfired six-gun and put the warm double derringer away for now. He moved over to the nearer of the two figures sprawled on the platform. Rolling Gus Hansson over with a boot tip, he could see at a glance the bravely stupid kid had no need for a sawbones. You aimed for the dead center of a man's trunk, when you only had two derringer rounds to work with.

But as he turned on Egger, the pallid punk raised his head from a puddle of puke and sobbed, "Am I still alive? Is it over?"

Longarm muttered, "All but some loose ends," as he saw his boss, Marshal Vail, coming out from the depot waiting room on his stubby legs, his own gun out.

Vail announced, "O'Foyle and Cohen will only be able to keep that crowd inside a few minutes longer. They keep saying they got a train to catch. Who's that lying yonder so dead?"

Longarm said, "His name was Gus Hansson. We met earlier back in Santee country. He was one of 'em. You already know Egger here. So let's see who Smiley and Dutch have yonder."

They moved to the far end of the platform. Despite his height, Longarm found it easier to move through that narrow slit than his shorter and stockier boss did. But they both managed, and sure enough, the tall grim Smiley and short jolly Dutch were standing over another corpse. This one was older, wearing his gun rig under a snuff-colored store-bought suit, and wasn't familiar to either Longarm or his fellow lawmen.

Longarm called Egger through the slot and demanded, "All right, is that the real Calvert Tyger, or has he faked his damned death some more?"

Egger gulped and marveled, "It's Cal. You got him! I didn't think it could be done! He was such a sly old dog!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "I figured he'd be more cautious than a villain in one of Ned Buntline's gentlemanly duels. That's how come we staked out all the handy cover he'd have to work with, after I'd made sure he'd know of a good time and place to nail the two of us."

Billy Vail chuckled fondly and said, "There was never a rider that couldn't be throwed or a slicker who couldn't be snowed. It's sort of sad about his young sidekick. But we got him. So that's about it, right?"

Longarm said, "Wrong. We have an even slicker bastard left, Boss."

CHAPTER 30

Fort Collins, sixty-odd miles north of Denver, had commenced as a military outpost on the Cache La Poudre or Powdercache River. But by this time it had grown into the seat of Larimer County, with a new land-grant college and all. The federal government offices had all closed for the day when Longarm paid his call on Miss Lorena Fenward, the surviving female witness to the horrendous events at the payroll office closer to the center of town.

The stenographer gal roomed with an even more maidenly older lady, who sniffed at Longarm's badge and identification, and allowed he and her roomer gal might be more comfortable out on her front porch as the warm shades of a summer evening crept down from the Front Range to the west.

When she fetched Lorena Fenward, the mousy little thing looked sort of pleased with him. As she offered Longarm her tiny hand, she told him she and Clifford, the other survivor of the robbery, had just read the newspaper reports about the capture of those notorious outlaws.

As they sat down together on the nearby porch swing, with somebody inside doing a piss-poor job of peeking through lace curtains without moving them, Longarm told her, "The three leaders and a heap of their followers are dead, not captured, ma'am, and notorious was just the word I wanted to talk to you about." She seemed to be paying attention. So he explained. "Most outlaws tend to be notorious after the fact, ma'am. I know it don't seem like it now, but hardly anyone had ever heard of Frank and Jesse James before they tried to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, along with the unknown Younger and Miller boys. I was just back yonder in Minnesota, thinking about notorious outlaws in general, and it struck me, lighting a smoke one day, how Frank and Jesse got so famous all at once by riding out of that wild shootout alone, leaving the shot-up survivors of a robbery gone sour to be interviewed by all those reporters and get famous themselves."

She demurely asked if he'd like her permission to smoke. He chuckled and said, "I wasn't hinting, ma'am. I was explaining. That Tyger gang might have gone on robbing hither and yon if they hadn't started to get so notorious within just the past year or so."

She said she hadn't really been following Calvert Tyger's criminal career before he'd burst into that payroll office like a maniac to murder all the men but poor Clifford and scare her half to death.

Longarm had gone over his notes before he'd come calling, so he nodded and said, "That would be Clifford Stern, the bookkeeper who played dead after he'd only been grazed?"

She nodded and said, "You should have seen how bloody his shirt was after that evil Indian they called Chief creased his poor chest with a pistol ball. I was the one who described that Indian member of the gang in some detail. I only caught a glimpse of that other one's red beard amid all the gun-smoke and confusion. Clifford remembered that scary glass eye and gold tooth more vividly because that one--Flanders, wasn't it--was the one who bent over him to say he was done for and not to waste any more time."

Longarm nodded and said, "Riding with a full-blood and a red-haired cuss with such distinctive features did cause folks to remember who might have robbed them, once they made a more serious habit of it. From gang members we've interviewed since, the less distinctive-looking Calvert Tyger was getting broody about reading his name in the papers, albeit we all know it was his wilder-looking sidekicks folks described while laying the blame on his doorstep. So he'd given the others orders not to rob anybody for a spell. It must have really put his nose out of joint when he read in the papers about his gang, or a close facsimile, robbing your office and killing federal employees in the process!"

The mousy Stenographer gal gasped, "My heavens, are you suggesting that wasn't the Tyger gang robbing us in broad day and murdering poor Mister Godwynn and those younger clerks?"

Longarm nodded grimly and replied, "That's about the size of it, ma'am. If it's any comfort, the gang had a furious falling out over it, with Tyger and Chief deciding to get rid of fellow riders they had down as big fibbers. Brick Flanders and his bunch kept saying they had nothing to do with any payroll robbery, and tried to excuse a train robbery that went wrong by complaining they were broke and needed the money. Tyger and Chief, trying to lay low, must have had conniptions when hundred-dollar treasury notes taken from your payroll office kept turning up all over the country as if Santa Claus was on a spending spree. An outlaw who went on spending such hot paper after learning from the papers it was hot would have to be awesomely stupid. We tried to keep the papers from reporting how your boss, the late Paymaster Godwynn, had made that list of serial numbers. But once they'd turned up all over, getting all sorts of folks hauled in to say where in blue blazes they'd come by the money..."

She nodded primly and said, "That was why Mister Godwynn made that list of serial numbers. It must be very difficult to cash a hundred-dollar treasury note recorded as stolen from the government!"

Longarm said, "It sure is. Brick Flanders had his faults, but he'd been riding the owlhoot trail better than a dozen years, and he'd have never tried to spend big bills he knew we had records on. He'd have fenced them for, say, two-bits on the dollar to a money-washer willing to sit on 'em for a couple of years and cash them in once they'd had a chance to cool down. I'm sure Calvert Tyger knew as much as we do about disposing of outlaw loot. He must have felt mighty vexed at his old pard when Flanders naturally kept saying some other red-haired cuss with a glass eye and gold front tooth had held up a government office and gunned a federal paymaster in cold blood for no good reason. Or did they offer some explanation why they shot all the male witnesses and let you live, Miss Lorena?"

She stared owlishly at him in the purple twilight. "How should I know? Clifford and me agreed at the time they'd been awfully mean. As they were leaving the leader did say something about leaving nobody to tell the tale. But mayhaps the last young boy out the door just didn't have it in him to shoot a girl."

Longarm nodded thoughtfully. "That works. So does somebody pretending to be a more famous outlaw, using theatrical makeup or a mighty fine wax mask. Another lady who's gotten to chatting with me about a former beau says Chief, Baptiste Youngwolf, was with his boss in Denver at the time of your robbery up this way. Tyger must have been willing as me to figure one Indian would be recalled much like yet another by a robbery victim. Unfortunately for Flanders, Tyger was way more certain it had to be him pulling jobs on the sly and making an outlaw laying low more famous than he'd ever mean to be."

Longarm shifted his weight in the swing and removed his hat so she could see his grave features more clearly as he placed his hat in his lap. "There's no call to go on with that comedy of errors and coincidence. Suffice to say that gang's no more, and now I want to talk about the money, Miss Lorena. I can promise you won't hang by your pretty little neck, and you'll still be fairly young when you get out if you'd care to turn state's evidence now."

She stared at him thunderstruck. "State's evidence of what? Are you accusing me of being in on the robbery with that gang?"

Longarm said, "Nope. Accusing you of making false accusations. A grievously grazed bookkeeper and miraculously unscathed stenography gal sold everyone but me a titanic taradiddle about an inside job, and now you'd best tell me where the two of you hid the money."

She wailed, "What money? Those outlaws rode off with all the money we had after they'd murdered everyone but Clifford and me! Haven't you been paying attention to the newspapers? Treasury notes with serial numbers recorded by poor Mister Godwynn have been turning up all over creation!"

Longarm nodded pleasantly. "It had that gang confused as well. For which I reckon we ought to thank you. But since I see you still think you can fib your way out of it, here's what I'm fixing to testify at your trial."

He leaned back more comfortably and continued. "Everyone knows how handling large sums of money can tempt our weaker brothers and sisters. So outfits that deal in such temptations set up all sorts of checks and balances to make it nigh impossible to embezzle funds without being detected."

She protested, "You can't mean that! Neither Clifford nor I were ever left alone with the contents of that office safe!"

Longarm replied, "I just said that. Funds coming in or going out have to be noted in the daily ledgers as well. I was recently going over some bank records in New Ulm, and it hit me then how tough a time a thief would have cooking books kept in more than one hand by more than one money-wrangler. So I don't doubt the ledgers of your payroll office would tend to go along with your fairy tale about red-bearded ogres with glass eyes and gold teeth, Miss Lorena. But that other list, kept separate in block lettering but purported to have been the notion of Paymaster Godwynn, is a whole other kettle of fish."

He gave her a chance to comment. When she just went on staring at him bug-eyed, he said, "Your boss had no call to keep such a list. There was no question the money coming in had just been printed for him by the federal mint. There'd have been no point in recording the serial numbers on notes to be paid out within days to honest folks the government owed money to."

She said, "We were asked about that at the time. Neither of us could say why Mister Godwynn had been extra cautious. Perhaps he'd been tipped off about a planned robbery, or..."

"Or perhaps it was one or both of you two survivors who'd made up the list, over a period of days or weeks, by writing down numbers of high-denomination notes being paid out in good faith to honest folks."

She laughed incredulously and demanded, "Why would anyone want to do that, whether they were honest or not?"

He sighed and said, "You sure stick to your guns, considering how far down in the water you are right now. We both know the two of you knew that even if you gunned your boss and fellow workers to leave no witnesses, someone was sure to consider all that money leaving the office safe another way. So you made up that list in advance, to let notes with those serial numbers spread far and wide, before the two of you just smoked up your own office one Friday around closing time. Then you told your whopping fish story to the first lawmen on the scene, and produced that list you said your late boss had made, just to throw suspicion off your ownselves as all that stolen money turned up here, there, and everywhere but around you. So I figure the two of you have been waiting for that impressive but unrecorded money to-"

Then the front door of her rooming house burst open, and it was a good thing Longarm had already drawn his.44-40 and covered it with his Stetson. Because it was still too close for comfort as the dark figure in the doorway threw down on them, but had to watch where he was aiming as his doxie screamed, "Get him! He knows!"

Longarm didn't have to worry about his own fusillade, so he got three rounds of rapid fire off in time to stagger his foeman back against the doorjamb, and put a fourth round in him when he took a full extra second to drop his own six-gun and slide silently down to the doorstep while Lorena Fenward wailed like a banshee and might have scratched Longarm's face off if he hadn't stiff-armed her back on that porch swing.

He was standing over them both, reloading, when that same old landlady joined them, yelling "What is the meaning of all that noise and, oh, my stars and garters, who shot poor Clifford Stern in the breast like that?"

Longarm said, "It was me, ma'am. I told you I was the law. Would you kindly go down to your front gate and wave in any other lawmen as they come running? Miss Lorena and me still have to talk about some money, if she knows what's good for her."

The End