Longarm & the Wyoming Wildwomen

The kids knew more about digging 'dobes with their penknives than the running of their township. Like kids in Denver, Omaha, and other parts of the stoneless high plains, they'd been raised busting windows and dusting heads with clods of dried mud, or adobe, available in such endless supply that high-plains kids had 'dobe fights about as often as they had snowball fights, albeit it smarted worse to get hit with a missile only a tad less dangerous than a solid rock.

Longarm hit pay dirt when he thought to ask them where their jail was. Small-town kids always pointed out jails and whorehouses to new arrivals.

They told him the jail was just beyond the stage terminal across the river. So that was where he rode, finding the North Platte barely fetlock deep this long after the last good rain, and reined in where, sure enough, they'd erected a small brick jailhouse next to a bigger frame building declaring it was the local substation of the county sheriff's department. So he reined in, dismounted, and tethered old Socks to the rail out front before he and his Winchester strode on in.

A teenage deputy dressed as if for Buffalo Bill's road show sat at the center desk in a fringed buckskin shirt, despite the season. He had buck teeth and a weak chin for such a mop of straw-colored hair and whispy mustache. But he didn't sound as stupid as he looked when he allowed they'd been expecting Longarm and added that his boss, Undersheriff Rita Mae Reynolds, would receive him at her town house over by the churchyard.

As he wrote the street number in his notebook, Longarm asked how come they called the lady's house in town a town house, as distinct from any other house in town.

Her kid deputy explained that undersheriffing was only a sideline with Miss Rita Mae, who ran eighteen hundred head of beef a hard ride off to the northeast, on old Sioux Treaty land.

Longarm agreed it made sense to have quarters at both ends of a hard ride. Then he casually asked if their mighty active undersheriff had been running cows or running for office first.

The kid said Miss Rita Mae had been in college, back East, learning about business administration and such, when her uncle Clay Reynolds had up and died childless, leaving her the herd he'd just driven up the Goodnight Trail to the greener grass of Wyoming Territory. The kid said Miss Rita had been asked to accept her appointment as the township's undersheriff by the Cattleman's Protective Association. She being a member, even if she wasn't a man.

Longarm smiled thinly as he listened in to a smoke-filled room in his own head. He'd warned some other ladies they might not be thinking too far ahead with all this clamoring for rights and responsibilities. It was doubtless a bother to be told from birth that gals weren't allowed to play some games. But speaking as a man who'd dodged many an army shit detail and been stuck with the death watch at more than one public hanging, Longarm knew how anxious men in position to "Designate Authority" could be to pass the buck to anybody they could volunteer for a tedious chore.

The Wyoming Cattleman's Protective Association met in the new Cheyenne Social Club and prided itself on being modernistic to the point of that newfangled Arts and Crafts furnishings and the first electric lights west of the Big Muddy. So they'd naturally be slick enough to put one of their own in as sheriff and appoint dimwits or smart but willing gals to lesser positions of responsibility. It was the wave of the future, to hear all those women's suffering gals go on about how awful it was to let men have all the dangerous jobs.

As he went back out front, Longarm saw they had a hotel across the way, doubtless meant for travelers laying over between stage and rail connections, or buyers coming out here to the end of the rails in search of cheaper beef to ship. He saw they had a taproom with one street entrance, and it had been an all-morning dusty ride from Dwyer and that other rail line. But Billy Vail hadn't sent him all this way to drink on duty. So he forked himself and his rifle back across old Socks and rode on.

He shoved the Winchester in the saddle boot provided by his Dwyer pals as he saw how noonday strollers along the main street stared at him. Once you knew the range would be less than thirty yards in either direction, a six-gun fired faster and handier, anyway.

He saw the storefronts to either side looked more prosperous than the ones south of the tracks. Most were frame or even brick, this close to said railroad. For neither the sod walls you saw north of the Arkansas nor the 'dobe one you saw on the high plains south of same stood up to the ferocious weather out this way as well as balloon frame and shiplap sheathing. There didn't seem to be as many saloons as your average trail town would support. But that was their misfortune and none of his own, seeing barbershop gossip was more reliable as a rule.

He spied the imposing address on the far side of a half-empty churchyard and rode along its picket fence, absently reading off family names because he'd found folk with kin under imposing tombstones tended to run things a day's ride out in all directions.

The kid deputy had allowed they'd been expecting him. But Longarm was surprised when a colored boy in serving livery came out front to take charge of his mount as he was still dismounting.

The boy asked Longarm's permit to take Socks around to the back and stall her with fodder and water. Longarm said that was jake with him as long as they made sure the thirsty mare had her fill of water before they fed her anything dry.

The boy had been taught his place. So he never told Longarm such needless instructions were insulting to an old pro of fourteen.

Another servant opened the front door as Longarm mounted the steps of the imposing front porch, framed between two sort of castle towers sheathed in ship-lap and painted sunflower yellow with cream trim.

Longarm was led to a side parlor, where a vision in sky-blue silk with auburn hair piled high and only a little suntan to show for her riding back and forth rose from the spinet she'd been practicing on to greet him with a smile and wave him to a silk upholstered sofa he hesitated to sit down on in denim jeans.

As the servant, a sort of motherly colored mammy instead of the butler she could doubtless afford, headed back to the kitchen to fetch them some refreshments, the glamorous Undersheriff Rita Mae Reynolds, for that was who she really was, asked Longarm why they were still holding her deputy, the murderous little Ida Weaver, in connection with the shooting of Rusty Mansfield in Denver.

They both sat down, with Longarm's hat in his lap, as he told her nobody was holding any Keller's Crossing gals in Denver. He said, "Our law clerk carried her to the Union Station personal and saw her off on the afternoon northbound, day before yesterday, Miss Rita. She should have arrived long before this child, having almost a full day's start."

The swell-looking undersheriff of perhaps twenty-six or -seven summers stared at him with thoughtful amber eyes he felt like drowning in, as if she thought he was hiding something, while she insisted the other pretty girl who'd gunned that outlaw had never come back.

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and truthfully replied, "I wish I'd known that before I left Cheyenne last night. With one thing and then another I wound up all over Cheyenne, talking to all sorts of folk, but I didn't know I was supposed to ask if anybody had seen little Ida Weaver. So I never."

The motherly colored servant came in with a silver salver of tea and shortcake with the serving-trimmings as Longarm was asking the lady of the house what she knew about the late Texas Tom or his pal, Ram Rogers.

Rita Mae thought about it before she shook her glorious head to reply, "I don't have any wants or warrants on either name. Should I?"

She commenced to pour as Longarm said, "They tried to stop me in Cheyenne. As you see, they didn't. They were working with a cardsharp called Deacon Knox. How about him?"

The mighty refined peace officer replied, "We don't allow cardsharps in this township. One lump or two, Deputy Long?"

To which Longarm replied, "I'd as soon take tea straight, and my friends call me Custis, Miss Rita Mae. I saw some shut-down establishments down by the tracks and stock pens. But how you police your own jurisdiction is no never mind of my department. I reckon you know they sent me up your way to investigate this outbreak of desperados being shot down like dogs, all over this country, by Wyoming wildwomen packing warrants and badges from these parts?"

The beautiful undersheriff smiled alluringly at him as she handed him his cup and a wedge of shortbread, saying, "Of course I do. I'm rather proud of coming up with such an easy way to rid the West of so many disgusting old things."

So there it was, as plain and simple as a puddle of dog piss on the rug with her smiling as innocent as a pup who'd never been house broke, and now the question before the house was what they expected him to do about it.

He said, "You'd best start at the beginning, Miss Rita Mae. A heap of other peace officers have been alarmed by your draconian notions on law enforcement. But I try to keep an open mind until I've heard the whole story." She nibbled as much shortcake as a mouse might have, washed it down with her own tea, and began, "My friends just call me Rita, and it all began last March with a shooting in one of the rowdy saloons I hadn't shut down yet. The victim was a young Irish railroad worker. His killer was a brazen bully who'd just been paid off for a cattle drive and got to drinking and bragging as he waited for his train ride back to the Texas Panhandle."

Longarm thought, nodded, and said, "That would be the late Amarillo Cordwain, shot down like a dog by a sweet little thing as he was on his way to another man's funeral in the rain, right?"

The beautiful but mighty unusual peace officer nodded innocently and confessed right out, "I didn't know what I was going to do about our own killing before that Irishman's weeping widow came to me with her aching heart set upon vengeance. As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm not a gunslinger. I hold a postgraduate degree in business administration. I run my substation here in town the way I run the beef operation left to me by a dear old wild and woolly cattleman. I've hired a good crew of experienced cowboys to manage my home spread and herd. They don't give me enough to hire the sort of lawmen I'd choose, myself, for my deputies. I don't have a man over twenty backing my play, as others might put it. None of the nice young boys I have to work with have ever been in a gunfight with a real killer. They can patrol the town and surrounding range for mad dogs and petty thieves. There was no way I could send anyone on my regular payroll all the way to Texas with a murder warrant to serve on a really mad dog like Amarillo Cordwain!"

Longarm said, "We can talk about a murder warrant issued by a local J.P. later, Miss Rita. Tell me how you tracked that first killer all the way to Texas without any experienced man-hunters at your beck and call."

She answered, simply, "That part was easy. The nasty Texas rider made no attempt to cover his tracks. Everyone knew he hailed from the Texas Panhandle, and he was down there bragging on killing a fool Harp up Wyoming way."

"Who's everybody?" Longarm insisted, adding, "I understand how a friend of a friend of a man who works in a barbershop might spread such gossip, but sooner or later you ought to be able to backtrack it to the one who got the ball rolling."

She thought and decided, "I was told by Mr. Tanner, the owner of our own Riverside News. You'd have to ask him who told him. We've gotten such tips from newspaper men, railroading men, and just men riding through. As you just said, a friend of a friend tells a friend, and a man wanted dead or alive shouldn't be walking about bold as brass just because he feels he's safe across a few state lines!"

Longarm sipped tea thoughtfully and decided, "I've heard a heap of gossip about Senator Silver Dollar Tabor, his imposing Miss Augusta, and that mighty sassy Baby Doe married up with another gent entire. I ain't sure just who told me what, now that you've reminded me. So it's easy to see how you could find out where an owlhoot rider had wound up without recalling just who'd told whom. Tell me how come that Irish mourner wound up shooting her man's killer down in Texas, ma'am."

Rita said, "I told her she could. She wept and swore and tore her bodice when I explained how little I could do about a killer so vile and so far away. When she hissed like a serpent that she'd be after shooting the gobbeen herself if she was a man and all and all, it suddenly came to me that there was nothing on the Wyoming statutes preventing a distaff undersheriff from swearing in another woman as a deputy. So I did and you know the rest. Armed with a warrant and a pepperbox.36, Deputy Maureen found it childishly simple to take the train down to Texas, ask about for the handsome devil, Amarillo Cordwain, and simply shove her pepperbox in his smiling face and pull the trigger one time!

Longarm said, "Once as he was standing and five times more as he lay oozing brains at her feet. I told you I read the reports, ma'am. Who told her to serve that warrant on him so direct?"

Rita shrugged and said, "The feeling was mutual. The distraught Maureen O'Boyle gave me the idea when she said she'd shoot Cordwain on sight. I was the one who suggested she hide her feelings until she could work her way as a helpless female within point-blank range."

Longarm whistled softly and said, "They sure taught you how to delegate at that business school. My boss, Marshal Vail, has already said admiring things about your delegated authority getting the drop on unsuspecting hard cases. Let's talk about the others, now."

She seemed willing, not holding anything back as she went on and on about nine such executions in all.

As Longarm and others had surmised, the combination of a remote location and all that cross-country traffic passing through a tighter than usual bottleneck had conspired to attract the attention of more than one dangerous tinhorn or out-and-out road agent. When Longarm told her what Deacon Knox had said about some mastermind inviting crooks from all over the West to a township with a lady undersheriff, Rita sighed and said she and her own pals had suspected as much.

Then she said, "Things have actually started to ease up, after the rash of robberies we had earlier in these parts. I'd like to think my sending girls to do what many consider a man's job had something to do with it. We were out to prove it was just as dangerous to break the law around here as anywhere else. I thought we were winning. That stage holdup pulled by Rusty Mansfield and some others was the last highway robbery in this county, and that was over a month ago."

He asked about the latest Texas killer killed down Texas way since the killing he'd witnessed in Denver.

She explained, "That was an argument over cards. Pecos McBride was another trail drover cut from the same rough cloth as Amarillo Cordwain. I don't know what gets into Texas riders when they're a long way from home. At any rate Pecos McBride shot a young homesteader in the taproom of the Pronghorn Hotel, right across from my substation. He rode out of town at full gallop, after dark, before my helpers and I could posse up, as you bigger boys put it. But, as in the case of Cordwain, the brute had told others here in town where he hailed from. It was Waco, nowhere near the Pecos, by the way. I recruited a girl I met at the homesteader's funeral to run down there and kill him back, the mean thing. She and the boy McBride killed over a penny-ante pot were engaged to be married."

She saw the deep thoughts in Longarm's gun-muzzle eyes and asked him what he found so complicated about what she'd just told him.

He said, "I'm studying on things you told me earlier, Miss Rita. It all sounds so simple until I ask how come your Ida Weaver never came back after I saw her gun Rusty Mansfield in the Parthenon Saloon the other day. The tale she told us jibes with what you've been telling me. But if it's all so simple, how come she's vanished into thin air, and why have other owlhoot riders been trying to prevent this mighty unrewarding meeting we're having this very afternoon?"

She said she wasn't sure she hadn't just been insulted.

Longarm said, "There's nothing wrong with you, your shortcake, or this tea, Miss Rita. But you ain't told me a thing your Deputy Ida couldn't have told us down Denver way if my boss hadn't let her go without pressing her because he's so smart. He thought I might be able to catch you ladies at something more sneaky. He ordered me to mosey up this way, talk to all you Wyoming folk, and tell him what I thought you might be up to.

She looked confused as she replied, "But you just said you found this conversation pointless."

He shook his head and explained, "Not pointless, ma'am. Everything everyone I've talked to tells me points in the same direction. A tad rough-hewn and you'd all be in trouble if you'd been treating regular small-town pests so rough. But they told me in Cheyenne you'd all been warned not to word them arrest warrants so drastic and-"

"I've never written out any arrest warrants!" she cut in, adding, "I told Judge Edith it would look more seemly if she simply wrote she wanted us to bring the accused in for questioning. My temporary man-hunters didn't need written instructions not to take any chances with a dangerous male gunfighter, for heaven's sake!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Whatever. What I meant to say was that I'd have gotten here yesterday, we'd have had this conversation, and I'd have been headed home as bemused as them other federal deputies from the Cheyenne District Court, if somebody other than yourself wasn't trying to convince me he, she, or it was eating cucumbers and performing other wonders."

She said she had no idea what he was talking about.

He said, "The notion of a criminal genius is an affront to common sense. You have to be stupid or warped to want to ride the old Owlhoot Trail to begin with when you're all that energetic and clever. But the crooks chewing the fat in a prison cell or house of ill repute are forever convincing themselves they're masterminds and pestering us until we pay attention to them."

He washed down the rest of the shortcake he'd been handed and went on to say, "Hardly anyone had ever heard tell of Frank and Jesse James while they were robbing close to home and hiding out amid the trash whites of Clay County, Missouri. They had to clever themselves into a raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and wind up shot to pieces with their names in all the newspapers coast to coast. Billy the Kid, down Lincoln County way, could have drifted off an unremembered saddle tramp had he been willing to quit when Governor Lew Wallace put his foot down and declared the Lincoln County War was over or else. Crooks are forever getting distinguished tattoos, wearing odd outfits, or just bragging a heap about how big and bad they are until somebody like me gets the chore of tracking down such shy violets. You've explained how you and your deputy gals were able to track down some of the wildmen who tore through here. Deacon Knox explained how some self-styled mastermind has spread the word there's easy picking up this way, thanks to you being a gal and all, no offense. So how come they didn't just quit, if they were worried about somebody like me riding in to back your play?"

She poured more tea for the both of them as she decided, "I think they think you might know more than you really do. You were there when our missing Ida shot Rusty Mansfield. You and those other Denver lawmen interviewed her right after the shooting. You had the outlaw's cadaver and personal belongings handy to go over as often as you liked. I know you don't know why they must have intercepted Ida before she could get back here to tell us something. But they must have had some reason, and they must fear you and me could figure it out if ever we compared notes like this, see?"

Longarm smiled wearily and replied, "I wish I did. I've gone over that shooting in the Parthenon a hundred times in my head. I've jawed with other lawmen about all your Wyoming wildwomen, no offense, and to tell the truth I'd have given you the same bill of health as the boys from the Cheyenne District Court if those rascals you say you never heard of had only left me alone!"

He sipped enough of that extra cup to be polite and asked directions to where Edith Penn Keller, J.P., might be holding court that afternoon.

The lady undersherrif explained they didn't rate a courthouse in Keller's Crossing. The lady J.P. who rode herd on local legal proceedings from marriage licenses to arrest warrants took care of such matters in the front parlor of her own house off the main street but handier to the river crossing, stage terminal, jail, and such.

Longarm allowed he could likely find the place and started to rise, hat in hand. Then all hell busted loose.

"Down!" he shouted as a bullet shattered the panes of the bay window across from their sofa to thunk into the papered wall above a head of auburn curls!

He let go his hat to draw his.44-40 with one hand and grab Rita by one shoulder to haul her out from behind her coffee table and down to the Persian carpet with him as another round spanged another pane of glass and hit the wall close to where his head had just been!

He hissed, "They're trying to draw us over to that window! We need another one, higher up, and already open if you can think of one!"

She could. Longarm followed her shapely sky-blue rump as she led the way on hands and knees while yet another bullet whizzed over them from outside, just ahead of the echoing gunshot. It sounded like a rifle, over a hundred yards away. He didn't tell Rita. He was sure she had enough on her mind.

Out in the hall, where it was safe to rise, Rita waved back her motherly housekeeper and a bewildered-looking colored man in kitchen whites, yelling, "Get everybody down in the cellar! We seem to be under attack!"

As she headed for the stairs, Longarm called to the other grown man, "I'm the senior law, here, and forget what she just said. Before you herd the rest of the help clean out of this wooden firetrap, I want you to make sure that front door behind me is bolted fast on the inside, hear?"

As the male cook moved forward to carry out his order, Longarm ran up the stairs after the lady of the house. She led him into a third-story sewing room up in one of those round towers he'd admired on the way in. She didn't have to point to the window opened wide to catch the prevailing summer breezes from the northwest. He told her to stay back as he eased closer with his six-gun, wishing like hell it was the rifle he'd left with that fool saddle!

But once he was peering around the edge of what he sure hoped to be a good solid frame, there didn't seem to be anything worth shooting at. He had a clear field of fire out across the churchyard as far as the looming whitewashed church itself. But if anyone had been up in the belfry with that rifle they'd be long gone by now. For half the town seemed to be coming from all directions with their own guns drawn as they shouted back and forth.

He told the pale-faced undersheriff it looked as if the mysterious rascal had just shot and run.

She murmured, "I hope so. I see what you mean, now, about them refusing to just let you be! But didn't you just tell me, down in the parlor, you'd about lost interest up this way?"

To which he could only reply, "That was then. This is now, and I am really starting to get sore!"

CHAPTER 15

Longarm tore down the stairs and out the front door with Rita Mae Reynolds paying no mind to his telling her to stay put in her house. That was the trouble with allowing Women's Suffering.

They found a reedy old cuss in clerical garb arguing with a heavyset gent in a summer weight Madras plaid suit on the front steps of the church across the way. The preacher was yelling at the huskier-looking cuss to do something, right now, about the front-door latch.

Rita introduced them to Longarm as Preacher Shearer from the manse on the far side of the church and Big Jim Tanner, owner and editor of their Riverside News. The minister was bitching and moaning about the way someone had jimmied the front door of his church, closed during working hours on a weekday. It wasn't clear what Preacher Shearer expected a newspaper man to do about this, and Big Jim said so, in the tone one usually reserves for small children and army mules.

Longarm had no call to explain his methods to the older cleric. He elbowed his way between them to just open the damned door and go on in, his .44-40 showing the way with its muzzle.

There was nobody lurking amid the dark varnished pews. He was sort of tense, and he yelled at the auburn-headed undersheriff more than once as she poked around after him with her own.40-caliber Patterson Conversion. He had as much luck getting her to stay downstairs when he worked his way up into the bell tower, ready to throw down on the first damned pigeon who cooed at them.

But all that remained on the top landing was a thick crust of dry pigeon shit, with the kitchen-match smell of gunsmoke lingering to explain why all the birds had flown away. Three spent brass.45-70 shells shone fresh-from-the-box on the shitty floorboards.

"Likely an army issue Springfield. About as easy to trace as a Stetson hat or a pair of Justin boots."

Rita peered past him out the open latticework pigeons could whip in and out through. She said, "I can see what's left of my poor bay window from here. But how could the villain have seen either one of us, inside, from up here?"

Longarm said, "He, she, or it couldn't. The plan was to draw me to yonder bay window where I'd have been in their sights at less than three hundred yards. Anybody watching from up here would have seen me coming to call on you. Anybody with any notion of the way your house is laid out would know that bay window goes with your front parlor. It don't take a college degree to read the little sign the shooter left us, Miss Rita."

She demanded, "How could anybody follow you up the street in broad daylight with a rifle, then break into the front door facing in the street downstairs without being seen?"

Longarm said, "I doubt it was done that way. When they failed to stop me in Cheyenne, they figured I'd get through and they knew I'd have to pay a courtesy call on yourself. So at least one of them got in downstairs before sunrise and waited up here, mayhaps with a good book, a jug of wine and somebody singing beside him, until I came along as expected and all went as planned until I failed to rise to the bait in your bay window.

She frowned thoughtfully and objected, "The shooter had to leave by broad day, didn't he?"

Longarm nodded and replied offhand, "We'd best scout around down below for his or her cheap rifle. Anyone willing to leave one behind only had to step out a side door into the churchyard and join the rest of the rush toward your shot-up bay window."

She gasped. "Then it had to be somebody who wouldn't stand out as a stranger in our township!"

Longarm managed not to sound sarcastic as he replied, "I somehow doubted we were searching for three wise men on camels, ma'am. Deacon Knox told me some local mastermind has been sending for outside help with a view to robbing you all blind. He, she, or it has to be somebody who's been here long enough to know Keller's Crossing and vice versa."

She forgot her ladylike manners enough to mutter, "Shit! That means there's little point in asking Western Union to tell us who wired whom from Cheyenne about you, doubtless in some criminal cypher!"

Longarm said, "It's worth a try. My boss likes me to use what he calls a process of eliminating. I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to use a cypher because that would be easy to spot, next to code."

She said she thought a code and a cypher were the same.

He pocketed up the spent brass and explained the difference while he helped her down the steep steps, saying, "You ain't the only one, Miss Rita. What most everybody calls the Morse Code ain't no code at all. It's cypher, which is a series of individual signs or symbols standing for letters of the alphabet. Don't matter whether you use dots and dashes, numbers or substitute letters. Anyone else can see at a glance the message is encyphered, and that's why crooks hardly ever use cyphers. Anyone as smart can figure your cypher out in time, once he knows he ought to." She didn't seem to be following his drift. He said, "A coded message is tougher to crack because it ain't half as easy to see it's in code. Codes are most often substitute words or sentences agreed upon in advance or written down in code books used by the sender and receivers. If somebody in Cheyenne wanted to tell a pal here in Keller's Crossing somebody like me was coming or not coming, they only have to word innocent-sounding messages a tad different. A message allowing Aunt Rhodie's goose had died in the millpond or from getting hit on the head with a walnut would only seem important to the ones who knew a millpond meant yes and a walnut meant no."

Rita brightened and said, "With Aunt Rhodie's goose meaning you, to them and them alone, right?"

He shrugged and said, "If that was the code they'd agreed on. What will you bet they're using other code words and phrases?"

As he helped down the last step inside the tower, she dimpled up at him to declare, "We can eliminate the majority of folk in these parts who haven't been sending or receiving telegrams at all, right?"

He shook his head and replied, "Wrong. It's a sure bet that most of the folk in these parts have to be innocent. But a real sneak could send a coded message by wiring somebody innocent to do something, with a confederate watching for them to do it. I told you codes could be tougher than cyphers to break."

As they stepped out into the church nave, one of her kid deputies came over to them holding a beat-up old trapdoor Springfield with as pleased an expression as a tabby cat delivering a dead sparrow to its mistress.

He said, "We just found this in the flower bed by the side steps down to the churchyard, Miss Rita. That door bolts from the inside, and guess how we found the barrel latch? Looks like the jasper as shot out your front window got in here by forcing the front latch, then left by that side exit to slither and sneak his way through the tree-shaded tombstones to parts unknown!"

The newspaperman, Big Jim Tanner, joined them to ask who they were looking for in connection with this latest outrage. Before Longarm was able to nudge her, the lady undersheriff said, "Deputy Long, here, is of the opinion we're after a hired gun called Ram Rogers and at least one companion. They were in cahoots with that Texas Tom who tried to ambush Deputy Long in Cheyenne and got shot by Wyoming's own Marshal Casey down yonder!"

Longarm wanted to kick her. But he knew he wasn't even supposed to kiss her before he knew for certain he wasn't going to have to arrest her. She seemed a good old gal, but somebody in those parts had to be as two-faced as that Roman statue, Mr. Janus.

For his own part Longarm told the newspaperman, "I ain't accused nobody of nothing for the record, Big Jim. I understand your desire for all the news that's fit to print. But I'd be much obliged if you just held your fire, for now and, if you will, I'll give you the very first officious statement. Do we have a deal?"

Big Jim frowned thoughtfully and replied, "It sounds like a one-way marriage agreement in which I agree to love, honor, and obey you without any right to kiss you. You are so right about my having a newspaper to put out, and my readers have the right to know a hired gun is running loose in their township like a mad dog off its leash!"

Longarm snorted. "Aw, come on. I only told Miss Rita another shady character named Ram Rogers as a possible suspect. There's no solid evidence it was him and not some other mad dog up in the bell tower just now!"

Rita said she wanted to question this Ram Rogers whatever he was and allowed she was headed over to their J.P. to ask for a writ she could use to run the rascal in on suspicion, if nothing else, for a good seventy-two hours.

Longarm started to warn her not to swear out a felony warrant with no more to back it but the unsupported accusations of a known con man.

Then he wondered why he'd want to say a dumb thing like that. For Billy Vail and the attorney general had asked him to find out what these Wyoming wildwomen were up to and old Rita, for all her dimples and auburn hair, was talking sort of wild right in front of him. So he held his tongue and went along with the rest of them as they all made their way afoot down the main street and around a corner to a mansart-roofed frame house painted puke green with chocolate brown trim.

They all trooped inside to find the formidable Edith Penn Keller, J.P., presiding over her crowded parlor from a big keyhole desk set on a raised and carpet-covered dais at one end, with a gilt plaster goddess of Justice at one end and a stack of law books at the other.

The J.P., herself, was a fat lady of about forty with her dark hair drawn up in a tight bun as she sat there in black poplin judicial robes, reminding Longarm of a big black broody hen setting on a clutch of billiard balls somebody had slipped under her big ass as a joke. She was fining a young cowboy two dollars for disturbing the peace as Longarm followed Rita, two of her kid deputies, and Big Jim from the Riverside News in. It sounded fair to ask two dollars off a kid who'd roped and drug a watering trough the night before. But when J. P. Keller saw who'd come to admire her, or see her, least ways, she ordered everyone else to clear her court. So it wasn't clear how the case of the trough-roping cowboy would ever be resolved.

Her undersheriff introduced Longarm to the bossy older woman and Longarm found it tougher to smile at this one.

Had she been born a man, Edith Penn Keller, J.P., would have been one of those puffed-up bullfrogs who don't want anybody to tell them anything, but want to tell everybody everything.

Having been born a woman, she was one of those puffed-up cow-frogs who didn't want anybody to tell her anything but wanted to tell everybody everything. So Rita had barely explained they wanted to have Ram ne Melvin Rogers brought in for questioning before the blustersome older woman declared, "Consider it done, dear heart. I'll have my law clerk type it up for you before suppertime and run it over to you. Ram Rogers aka Melvin Rogers wanted on suspicion dead or alive!"

Longarm couldn't help himself. He said, "No offense, your honor, but you can't put that on a properly made-out arrest warrant."

Edith P. scowled at him to reply, "Nonsense. I do it all the time. Didn't you just tell us the man was a hired gun who might know something about the disappearance of Deputy Ida Weaver as well as those attempts on your own life?"

Longarm said, "Yes, ma'am. I want to question him, not pay my respects at his funeral. Didn't them other federal and county lawmen tell you it ain't considered seemly to order anybody executed before they'd had a fair trial and been found guilty of a capital offense?"

She allowed she'd gotten some nit-picky letter from the district attorney over to the county seat. Then added she'd been appointed to her township position fair and square and ought to know what she was doing.

Longarm sighed and said, "You don't, if you think you can sentence a man to death on a suspicious writ. All you ladies have been lucky none of the outlaws you've sent girls after drew and fired first. For many a slick lawyer's gotten a client off on self-defense with way less documentary proof."

It was the newspaperman who asked what Longarm meant by that. The J.P. only seemed to think he was joshing.

Longarm said, "Wherever Ida Weaver is, right now, she came into a Denver saloon with the stated purpose of serving the late Rusty Mansfield with a document signed by your J. P., giving her permit to shoot him on the spot. Before that, the ladies had established that same intent by shooting other wanted men, earlier. Had Rusty Mansfield blown little Ida Weaver away, in front of me and everyone, he'd have had a pretty good excuse to present in court, and it only takes one juror to get you off if you can persuade him you had any excuse at all!"

Big Jim Tanner sighed and said, "I fear he makes a valid point, Your Honor. As I've tried to tell you, myself, your girlish deputies would have every right to defend their own lives against known killers by shooting first and asking questions later, serving a more delicately worded legal document."

Rita said, "You'd better just summon Mr. Melvin Rogers to appear before you, and I'll see it's served on him, Edith."

The J.P. asked Longarm if he had the address of the scamp.

Longarm shook his head and said, "If I did I'd wire somebody else to pick him up, Your Honor. I want him alive and talking and there's limitations to Miss Rita's girlish approach to serving writs and warrants, no offense."

CHAPTER 16

Longarm had to escort Rita back to her own place because he was a gent and because he wanted his pony and Winchester back.

Once he had them he retraced his course on horseback to the center of town and dismounted at the Western Union to send a heap of wires in every direction.

As he handed the profitable sheaf of yellow forms over to the dry and dusty-looking clerk he introduced himself and said, "I know all about the company policy laid out by your late Mr. Cornell and I hope you understand he's dead and I'm riding for the federal government, which allows you all to string considerable miles of wire over federal open range."

The clerk said, "You still don't get to read any private messages sent or received at five cents a word by this private company. I had this same conversation a few days ago with some other federal deputies out of Cheyenne."

A skinny kid with a goofy Adam's apple came in with his spurs ringing to ask where they wanted him riding next. any wires for him to deliver. The string-bean in tight but faded denim said he'd be out front where he could admire the ladies shopping if they needed him.

As soon as they were alone again, Longarm told the clerk, "I could get me a court order if I had to, friend."

To which the clerk replied, "You have to, and don't you come at me with any writ from that fat-assed Edith Keller. For we've established how much weight she really carries with the territorial or federal courts in Cheyenne."

The old fuss didn't know he'd already answered a question Longarm had been meaning to ask somebody who knew. He smiled thinly and told the old-timer he'd noticed old Edith could lose a few pounds. But it didn't work. The Western Union man said, "Don't try to butter me up. I'm paid to be firm about company policy, and my company is not at all impressed by crossroads J.P.s of any description. Our customers pay good money for our services, and we mean to serve them right."

Longarm said, "Don't get your bowels in an uproar, old son. All I need is some delivery times and dates. The messages I suspect a local sneak has been sending and receiving are doubtless in code to begin with. But you'd have records of who got a particular wire from a particular town on a particular day, wouldn't you?"

The clerk shrugged and said, "You'd better find a judge with the weight to sway a nationwide corporation with friends in high places while I put your own messages on the wire. I know who you are, Longarm. Other clerks have reported how persuasive you can be when you want to read over their shoulders. Other clerks have gotten in a whole lot of trouble, and I told you I've already had this conversation with other lawmen. So, like the Indian chief said, I have spoken!"

He sounded like he meant it. Longarm didn't want to set his skinny jaw any firmer by arguing with him. So he paid for the wires that he couldn't send collect, and they parted as friendly as the crusty old cuss seemed to get.

Out front, that string-bean was sitting on the edge of the plank walk, ogling a gal across the way that Longarm didn't think as much of. Longarm stepped down off the walk to untether his pony as he told the kid, "I'd be U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long and I'm expecting a heap of answers to the wires I just sent. I'm fixing to check into the hotel across the way, and I'd be obliged if you got them to me as fast as they come in."

The kid said, "They call me Pony Bodie and I hope you understand there's a delivery charge, Deputy Long?"

Longarm nodded and said, "I never ask nobody to work for me free. I can't be traipsing back and forth betwixt the hotel and your office if I'm to get anything else done around here. So you just leave any messages at the hotel desk if I ain't in, and I'll settle up with you on your service charges when I can. I take it you're a sort of private contractor, not on the Western Union payroll?"

Pony Bodie sighed and said, "I always wanted to be a telegrapher, or mayhaps a fireman, when I grew up. But delivering wires for folk who don't want to pick 'em up at the desk inside pays better than weeding yards or beating rugs. So what the hell."

"You get to ride out to the surrounding spreads a lot?" Longarm asked as if he didn't really care.

Pony Bodie shrugged and answered, "Some. Not as often as I have to leg it here in town, though. Stockmen and homesteaders only get wires on rare and important occasions. The merchants and businessmen here at the crossing wire back and forth at a nickel a word like they had money to burn."

Longarm allowed he'd heard it cost money to make money and led old Socks across the main street afoot, not wanting to press the delivery boy too hard, this soon, within earshot of the crusty clerk inside.

At the Pronghorn Hotel across the way they told him not to be silly when he asked if he could hire a room with a bath. But at least the shitter down the hall had a modern flush tank, and they had a water tap you could use to refill the basin that went with the corner washstands in the small but fairly tidy rooms on the second floor.

They charged seventy-five cents a night for travelers laying over without riding stock. Longarm allowed a dollar a day for horse and rider sounded fair. But he followed old Socks around to their stable to make sure they knew what they were doing out back.

They did. The half-dozen other ponies they were boarding were all alive and well with a sunny corral and fresh straw bedding in the stable stalls. He left his borrowed saddle in the tack room and took the Winchester up to his hired room.

He left it leaning in a corner, took a shit down the hall, and headed next for the Riverside News just up the street on foot.

When he went inside he found they had a long counter cutting off the front of the twenty by forty-foot forespace from a typewriter-topped editorial desk, some filing cabinets, and a hand-cranked flatbed press in the back. Ben Franklin might have found the setup newfangled. Longarm had seen fancier.

The only individual on the premises seemed to be a gal about the right age but too pretty for that string-bean down by the Western Union. But that wasn't saying much. She was just a plain young gal with nothing wrong with her, save for a smudge of ink on one cheek. Her mousy brown hair was pinned up in a bun with a pencil shoved through it. You couldn't say much about her figure, either way, because she wore an ink smudge printer's smock of mattress ticking over whatever else she might have on.

She came over to the counter from the composing galley where she'd been sticking type, her type stick or box-like metal holder still held in her ink-stained left hand, and got prettier as she smiled across the counter at him to ask what she could do for him.

Longarm resisted the temptation to tell her that all depended on whether she was married-up or not. She looked sort of country for that sort of teasing. He'd been wearing his badge since he'd ridden in. So he had no call to offer her more than his name before he told her, "I'd sure like to look through your morgue, ma'am."

She looked blank and answered, "Morgue? That would be over at the county seat, Deputy Long. We have a sheriff's substation, but dead bodies are examined by the county coroner and-"

"Newspaper morgue." He cut in, explaining, "That's what they call the files of dead stories worth saving at the Denver Post and other such high-falutin papers. You know what airs folk put on in them bigger cities."

She brightened and said, "Oh, I think I did hear that term when I was working on the school paper back in Iowa. You'd better talk to Big Jim Tanner, my boss, about that. I just work here. I'm Inez Potts. They call me Inky Potts. I'm not sure just what we've been saving in yonder files. I know we don't have room to save complete back issues, and so the boss, not me, cuts out all the advertising and boiler plates."

"Boiler plates?" Longarm asked before he recalled that meant national and world-wide news supplied to small-town papers for a modest fee by the bigger news and features syndicates. They shipped what looked like boiler plates of made-up type, cast in one piece back East.

He was working on how he wanted to talk her into going behind her employer's back when Big Jim came in, puffing a cigar and looking as pleased as punch to find Longarm jawing with his hired help.

Inky went back to work as soon as she'd turned Longarm over to Big Jim, telling her boss the lawman wanted to paw through the morgue.

Big Jim said, "That's easy enough. But about us putting our heads together on a news exclusive-"

"I told you why I can't go along with you on that," Longarm cut in, trying to keep it friendly as he continued, "I don't hold my cards to my vest to cheat nobody, Big Jim. I just don't want nobody cheating me, and I can tell you I'm dealing with a mastermind--unknown because you know he, she, or it has had me shot at from here to Cheyenne. I'll be proud to tell you all the news that's fit to print, as soon as I find out what's been going on and just who I can trust in these parts."

"Meaning you don't trust me?" the burly newspaperman demanded in a tone about as warm as January in the South Pass.

Longarm smiled friendly as ever as he asked, "Is there any reason I shouldn't trust you, Big Jim?"

Tanner grimaced and said, "All right. You're going to find out in any case. I've given Rita Mae Reynolds tips on more than one owlhoot rider she had warrants out on. Before you say only a master criminal would be able to track down swaggering bully boys by Western Union, what does that make you? Newspapermen scattered all over the country have been comparing notes and sometimes scooping official government handouts since before the American Revolution!"

Longarm went on smiling as he said, "I read about old Sam Adams printing Patrick Henry's speeches before the Redcoats in Boston had heard he was speaking. Who told you the late Rusty Mansfield was staying at the Tremont House in Denver before you told Miss Rita?"

Big Jim had his temper back under control as he calmly replied, "Let's just say I have my own confidential sources. You'll no doubt get our pretty undersheriff to tell you I have lots of confidential sources. It goes with my line, which is gathering news. If you want to be one of my confidential sources, I'll be one of your confidential sources. If you intend to treat me like an infernal suspect, see if you can get a court order violating the freedom of the press with us screaming, in headline type, on our extra editions in an election year!"

Longarm shook his head wearily and replied, "I doubt I could manage in the time I have. But what can I tell you? You are a suspect. It's nothing personal. We call it the process of eliminating, and you ain't been eliminated yet."

Big Jim snorted. "Jesus H. Christ, do I look like the ringleader of some vast outlaw conspiracy?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Sheriff Henry Plummer never would have been elected if they'd known he had all them Montana Innocents riding for him. From the little I've been able to suspicion, word has been spread, by way of confidential sources, that there's easy pickings in these parts because of the local law being so... refined."

He saw he'd worded that smarter when Inky Potts shot him a wary glance across the press room. Mentioning skirts around anybody in a skirt could tense things up as tight as shouting "Greaser" in Nuevo Laredo on a Saturday night.

Big Jim Tanner sneered, "All right, I'll confess, I've always wanted to scoop the Wyoming Eagle, and nobody invited me to cover the Northfield Raid that time. So I've been trying to engineer as big a shoot-out in front of the Drover's Trust up the block! Or would you rather accuse me of luring road agents here from far and wide so's I could get them to rob somebody and then double-cross them for the loot?"

Longarm said, "I like that better. But there's one hole in the bucket. Honor among thieves is a myth, and there's been many an old pard back-shot as the robbers were fixing to divvy up the spoils. But a local boy fingering targets for outside road agents would have to gun them sooner and closer, wouldn't he?"

Big Jim nodded and said, "Rusty Mansfield was spending the money from that stage holdup like he feared the ink would fade when... a certain source wired me where he'd turned up."

"How did you know it was Rusty Mansfield as stopped the stage and shot Ida Weaver's uncle? The little I have on that one says the road agents were masked, and Rusty Mansfield was neither well known in these parts or alone."

Big Jim said, "He was the one dumb enough to brag, once he thought he was far enough from these parts. Just like that mean drunk in the Texas Panhandle boasted of gunning that railroad worker. We're not talking about the likes of Frank and Jesse, Longarm. To begin with, they haven't all been what I'd call a professional criminal. Three or four out of the nine, so far, were no more than evil-tempered brutes who killed in anger without taking a dime for their troubles. What profit would I or any other mastermind make from ordering any gunslicks to behave like that?"

Longarm said, "I was hoping you could tell me. I'd agree the whole thing was just a string of wild but unconnected incidents if Deputy Ida Weaver wasn't missing and nobody seemed to be shooting at me, personal. It all started late last winter with Amarillo Cordwain gunning that Irish railroad man, right?"

Big Jim nodded, started to say something, then laughed like hell and called out to his type sticker, "Will you listen to this slick talker, Inky? You just heard me telling him we won't play ball with him unless he's willing to play ball with us, and here I am playing ball with him!"

Then he said, "Get out of here, Longarm. I have a paper to publish, and we work together my way or we don't work together at all!"

CHAPTER 17

The workday was winding down by then. But Longarm had time to do some eliminating that Billy Vail would have applauded. For in a town that small and close-knit it was easy to eliminate like hell with casual questions about who'd been doing what with whom when what was going on.

He'd known right off that neither he, Rita Mae, nor her household help had been smoking up her front parlor with that old army rifle from the bell tower. It hardly made sense that Preacher Shearer would have had to bust his own locked door to get into his own church and the notion of the sniper busting in before dawn when nobody was on the streets of Keller's Crossing eliminated heaps of others.

For everybody with a regular job near the center of town had been at work instead of up in that bell tower and had plenty of others to back their alibi. Alibi came from a Latin term meaning "somewheres else," and it was tough to fathom how anybody could be lying in ambush up among the pigeons and going about their usual chores in front of everybody.

The very few who were too important to be laboring in public, such as that snotty newspaper man, the preacher himself, and most of the public officials of Keller's Crossing had all come running from the wherevers they'd been in response to the gunshots later in the day. So whilst it burned like fire, Longarm had to allow those rifle shots had been fired by somebody who was neither holding a steady job near that church nor a total stranger to those who did. It had to be at least a face they'd seen before. Folk remembered strange faces in small towns, whether they'd done anything or not. Many a horse thief had learned this to his cost when the local vigilance committee rode him down after he thought he'd gotten away clean from a town where nobody was supposed to know he was a horse thief.

As he headed back to his hotel to see if they served supper Longarm reflected that eliminating most everyone he'd met in Keller's Crossing as that sniper didn't mean he, she, or it hadn't been carrying out the orders of somebody more two-faced. He didn't see how he was going to eliminate anyone as the mastermind who'd almost surely done something to that Deputy Ida Weaver and been trying to do something to him ever since he'd talked to the deadly but not-too-bright little gal.

As he approached the hotel, he spied Pony Bodie and another young buckaroo drooling at the passing womenfolk out front of the Western Union. Pony Bodie saw him and got up to lope over, calling out he'd just delivered a wire from Denver to the desk clerk inside.

Longarm reached in his jeans for a silver dollar and handed it over, saying, "Keep the change. How would you like to make a little more on the side?"

Pony Bodie looked wary and said, "Lord knows I could use some. But I ain't one for any queer stuff if that's what we're talking about."

Longarm assured him that wasn't what they were talking about as he tore a sheet out of his notebook that he'd already made some notes on. Handing it to the delivery boy, Longarm said, "I don't need to read any private telegraph messages that are likely in code to begin with. You'll find just some dates and the names of other towns on this page. I need to know who got a wire here in this township on let's say more than three or four of them dates, and from where."

Pony Bodie took the slip of paper but pointed out, "I generally deliver telegrams to all sorts of folk every day in the week."

Longarm said, "You weren't listening. We call it a process of eliminating when one particular address gets more wires than anybody else from particular parts of this vast country, see?"

Pony Bodie grinned and said, "I reckon I do, now. Maybe I'll be a lawman instead of a telegrapher when I grow up. I dasn't poke about in files until Old Wilbur leaves for the night. You just talked to him, and you should have seen what a prune he is. I get along better with the night man, Herb. I fetch sandwiches and suds for him after dark, and in return he's been showing me how to send dots and dashes when things get slow. He's even let me send night letters when nobody else was around. I reckon I can check these dates out for you, later, after I've fetched him them suds."

They shook on it and Longarm went on in to pick up his wire from Billy Vail and ask about supper. They served plain-and-simple off the taproom grill. So he ordered a T-bone with home-fries and forget the damned turnip greens. He read the wire from his boss as he waited to be served. Vail wasn't able to tell him anything he didn't already know. But old Billy agreed that a missing witness and repeated attempts to stop a totally ignorant lawman meant they were likely worried little Ida Weaver might have given something away. Billy agreed that if the gal was still alive, she'd have been able to convince them by this time that she hadn't. He wanted to know if Longarm had the least notion who might be holding Ida Weaver, or her body, where. It was sort of comforting to see that even a paid-up U.S. marshal could ask dumb questions. He topped off his supper with serviceberry pie and went easy on the coffee because he'd had a long hard day, likely face another one, and a man had to sleep now and again, even alone in a strange bed.

He went over to the tobacco shop near the railroad platform to buy some bed-reading and make sure he had the time table on that line right. Then he headed back to his hotel as the sun was setting, sort of glad they'd shut down all the rowdy saloons in town because it was easier to turn in early when everybody else had to.

But when he got upstairs with his new edition of Police Gazette, he spied a match stem on the floor where no match stem was supposed to be unless some sneaky son of a bitch had opened his hired door while he was going about more honest chores!

He had the key to the damned door in his jacket pocket. Before trying it in the lock, he cautiously twisted the knob to see if the door was locked. He found it wasn't. So he flung it open to dive through and roll across the rug with his six-gun drawn and the pink pages of the scattered Police Gazette fluttering in every direction.

He kicked the door shut behind him with a bootheel as he yelled, "Freeze, you mother, and I don't mean mother dear!"

"Custis, is that you?" a surprised familiar voice called back.

Longarm was surprised, too, as he stared up at the womanly outline seated on his bed against the gloaming light from the window to reply, "What in thunder are you doing up this way, Miss Covina? I never sent for young Daisy yet!"

The widow woman said, "Thanks for reminding me I'm not young. I thought you'd want your derringer back, and you can't send for young Daisy. She seems to have been born restless. I'd have worried about a kidnapping if she hadn't cleaned out the till while I thought she was tending shop for me."

Longarm got up and put his gun away with a sheepish grin as he said, "I'll see if I can get my outfit to make up your losses for you, Miss Covina. I knew right off she was a tramp. But I thought she was too smart to bite hands that were feeding her that well, and I needed her help up this way."

He tossed his Stetson on the nearby dresser and began to pick up the scattered pink pages as Covina replied, "Wasn't that just like a man to put all his eggs in such a trashy basket? I thought that I'd better warn you she was gone before you sent for her. So I caught the noon combination, and I've been here a while. I didn't think you'd want me to tell them we were plotting something when I checked in downstairs. Would you care to tell me what we're plotting now?"

He could see her better as he tidied up closer to the window with the light coming over his own shoulder. She was wearing a silk brocade kimono with green and gold dragons crawling all over the black background. It was open enough at the top to prove what Ben Franklin had written about women and trees withering from the top. Her sweet face wasn't all that wrinkled, despite the mop of steel-wire hair.

He said, "I see you left your travel duster and other baggage in your own room. How did you get in here without a key, Miss Covina?"

She demurely replied, "The door wasn't locked. When I knocked and nobody answered, I tried the door and found it opened. So I assumed you'd be back soon, and here I've been sitting for what seems like a mighty long time. Do I get to hear the big secret now?"

Longarm grimaced and moved over to the saddlebags he'd brought up from the tack room. As he went through them, he confided, "The one who picked that lock left me all my spare socks and such. I reckon he, she, or it was after the papers I've been packing on me, personal. Are you sure nobody downstairs knows you're in here with me?"

She said, "I don't see who could have told them. I never mentioned you when I told them I was up this way from Cheyenne on business and couldn't say how long I might be here. How long might I be here, you secretive thing?"

Longarm moved over to the door again and threw the bolt as he told her, "Ain't sure. We're waiting on a tip about another secretive cuss. I'll be mighty surprised if somebody doesn't suddenly tell Undersheriff Reynolds where Ram Rogers has run off to."

Covina Rivers sighed and said, "I saw you and that other man talking to her up the street from my own window, earlier. I asked a chambermaid who that glamorous young thing might be. I can see why you men are so interested in her. What does that female judge look like?"

Longarm knew better than to describe Edith Penn Keller, J.P., as anything worse than fat and opinionated. The old but nicely built shopkeeper sniffed and said, "Poor thing. According to our Daisy, you only seem to go for the young and inexperienced ones."

Longarm laughed incredulously and replied, "I'd hardly call Daisy inexperienced. But if she told you I'd been messing with her, she was a bare-faced liar. I ain't no innocent schoolboy, and I'll allow she was tempting. But I wanted her to help me catch crooks more than I wanted to play slap and tickle with her, bless her devious hide."

Covina leaned back on her elbows, one bare knee peeping out at him through the folds of her silk kimono as she calmly asked, "Does that mean we get to play slap and tickle after I help you catch some crooks?"

Longarm gulped as he considered his options. Then, seeing he was as damned if he didn't as he'd be damned if he did, he decided he'd as soon cuss himself in the morning for acting natural than cuss himself for sending her away mad.

But as he flopped across the pillow beside her, the widow gal, being a gal, gasped, "Custis! Can't you take a little teasing?"

To which he could only reply, taking her tenderly but firmly in his arms, "I reckon we've teased each other long enough. If the two of us are going to work as a team, we'd best get this bullshit out of the way."

"Oh, Custis, you're so romantic!" She giggled as he ran his free hand inside her kimono to discover, as he kissed her, she was built as girlish as that sneaky little Daisy or even Inky Potts at the Riverside News. But picturing little Inky in this same position, with his hand inside a printer's smock instead of a kimono, inspired him to slide said hand down Covina's trembling bare flesh to part the thatch betwixt her thighs without considering how gray it might be while she tried to cross her legs, muttering, "No! Not yet! It's been so long, and I have to get used to the idea and..." But he'd whipped it out and rolled atop her in his duds to let nature take its course, and as it did so Covina sobbed, "Oh, my lands, it is so long and a girl could sure get used to this! But don't you want to take your clothes off, darling?"

He said he sure did. But she had to help him some, and he still had his jeans down around his booted ankles when they came, and then came some more, as only a healthy young man who hadn't had any the night before and a sweet little old lady who hadn't had any for even longer could manage, sobbing in mutual sincere ecstasy.

"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!" the shopkeeper sobbed as he lay limp betwixt her surprisingly springy thighs, letting it soak in her as her warm wet innards pulsed around it.

He began to move his hips experimentally as he got his breath back and said, conversationally, "It ain't that I'd be ashamed to be seen in public with you, Miss Covina. But it's important we keep it a secret that we've met before, see?"

She thrust her pelvis up to him as she replied just as calmly that she'd already assumed that much.

Then she marveled, "Are you really doing what it feels like you're doing down there, you naughty boy? Didn't I satisfy you, just now?"

He kissed her some more and said, "You purely did and I hope you felt that grand a gallop up amongst the stars, Miss Covina. But if it's all the same with you, I'd like to satisfy us both again."

She moaned that nothing would please her more and got to weeping and laughing at the same time when he hooked an elbow under either of her knees to spread her wide for some long-donging as she protested that she'd never taken it that deep before, then begged him not to stop when he eased back enough to keep from hitting bottom with every probing stroke. He suspected he was teaching her what a lot of gals went to their graves without ever learning. Gals tended to be as bossy as their man would let them be. So a heap of otherwise loving couples never got down and dirty because women never admitted they liked it that way. Old Covina swore at him and told him her late husband had never rutted with her half so cruel. But when he growled he didn't want nobody else in bed with them that evening, she giggled and told him her late husband had been a dear, but not near as much of a natural man. Then they were both too busy to talk for a spell.

Later, as they lay still in the gathering darkness, sharing one of his cheroots, Longarm patted her bare shoulder and said, "I reckon I ought to tell you what the plan is now."

But Covina asked, "Can't it wait, darling? I don't know what's gotten into me tonight but I'm still throbbing like a tabby cat in heat and... Would you mind if I sucked you hard again and got on top this time?"

He lay back, legs ajar with the cheroot gripped in his grinning teeth as he told her, "Suit yourself, old pal. But whilst you're at it, here's my plan."

CHAPTER 18

Covina crept back to her own room in the wee small hours lest the hotel help give the show away. Longarm slept later than usual for some reason but finally decided there was no fun lying slugabed when there was no office to report in late to.

So Longarm was having eggs over hash for breakfast in the taproom downstairs when Pony Bodie caught up with him, packing a sheaf of sealed telegrams and a handwritten list on brown paper.

Longarm invited the youth to set and coffee up as he shoved the wires in a hip pocket for later and spread the list on the table beside his own mug.

Pony Bodie said, "I ought to charge you and Western Union overtime. I had to hang around last night until old Herb dozed off in his chair before I snuck into the shithouse with a file drawer. Figuring out what I was doing was a bitch, too. But as I pawed through the delivery slips with your own list in hand, I commenced to see what you meant."

Longarm said they called it a "pattern" in his line of work as he sipped coffee and perused the childish scrawls.

He saw a pattern right off. Pony Bodie had only listed the names of locals getting wires from certain places on certain dates. So most of the names, including Big Jim Tanner, had no more than one or two listings under them. But Preacher Shearer, or at least his manse, had nine that fit like gloves and one left over.

Longarm cocked a brow and observed, "I see you delivered a wire from Pueblo, Colorado, just yesterday."

As the breed waitress put his coffee down in front of him, Pony Bodie said, "Sure I did. You asked me to make up that list long after. I don't know who sent it or what it said because they give me the telegrams sealed. I run it up to the manse early in the day. Way before somebody shot out Miss Rita's bay window. I don't know nothing about that, neither."

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I know. I asked where you were at the time. You and some pals were spitting and whittling across the street when them shots rang out."

Pony Bodie blinked owlishly at him and said, "I'm sure glad I ain't out to steal that handsome buckskin you rode in on. I don't know who might have been up in that bell tower or how come Preacher Shearer got all them wires from all over. Why don't you ask him?"

Longarm said, "I mean to. Soon as I finish my break fast."

The kid wanted to tag along. But Longarm told him not to and added, "I'd be obliged if you refrained from repeating this conversation to anybody else. Anybody else at all. Comprende?"

Pony Bodie gulped and allowed he did, sort of. So they strode out in the morning sunlight together and parted friendly.

You had to pass the Riverside News before you got to the church in any case. So Longarm stepped inside to find little Inky Potts sticking type in the back, alone. Her hips looked a tad less full than he'd pictured them the night before, going dog style with old Covina.

When she came to the counter with a wary smile on her ink-smudged face, Longarm said, "I'll get right to the point, Miss Inky. Your boss and me don't get along as well as I'd like. He may be innocent of any other crime, or you could be working for a killer. I need your help in finding out. You look smart enough to see it's in your own best interests to help me find out, either way. Your turn."

She gasped. "Oh, dear Lord, I knew being paid a man's wages with nobody trying to get up my skirt was too good to be true! If you had any idea what a girl goes through in the newspaper game!"

He said, "I do. Some of my best friends are newspaper gals. But I never asked about Big Jim's employment policies. He won't let me go through your morgue. I'd be able to tell you why, a heap better, if you were to go through it for me and answer the few simple questions I've put down on this one page from my notebook."

She took the tightly lettered list warily and said she couldn't promise anything. He said, "I ain't asking for promises. I just need some answers. Before you go running with this to Big Jim, be advised I've already caught him in one lie. I'm still working on whether that means he's a self-important small-town big shot or a dangerous felon. So, for your own protection, slip the answers to me discreet as you know how as soon as you can manage."

She said she'd try but made no promises. Longarm had noticed the ones who hesitated to promise you the moon were most likely to show up with something.

He left the newspaper just in time. Big Jim in the beefy flesh was coming down the walk. As they met, the newspaperman asked if Longarm had any scoops for him. Longarm replied it was too early to say and started to move on. Big Jim told him the good looking undersheriff was down the other way, in her substation.

Longarm asked what had made the newspaperman think he was on his way to pester Miss Rita. Big Jim laughed and said, "Come on, I got a darkie keeping house for me, too, and you know how they gossip."

"Almost as bad as the rest of us," Longarm conceded in a disgusted tone before he suggested, "Tell your darkie to tell Miss Rita's darkie that the lady of the house received me in her front parlor on officious business with her hair pinned up."

To say they parted friendly would have been a fib. Longarm legged it on up to the church and knocked on the front door of the adjoining manse until he got tired of that and went around to knock on the back door.

Nobody came. There should have been at least a cleaning woman in charge if the preacher was out saving souls or sending sneaky wires.

Longarm started to go around the front to see if the older man was in the church, itself. Then he had a better idea and moved around to the back to find that, sure enough, there was a gap left in the hedge with just such a shortcut in mind.

Longarm followed the visible path in the yard-grass to a cellar door at the rear of the bigger frame church. It wasn't padlocked. A man of the cloth who ran back and forth a lot likely figured nobody else would notice a cellar door in the shady gap between the church and manse. Longarm could see nobody had any way of watching him as he drew his.44-40 and pulled one leaf of the door up with his free hand.

It was dark and musty at the bottom of the brick stairs. Longarm eased down them, reminded of that old song that went:

Oh the deacon went down To the cellar to pray. And he found a little jug, and he stayed all day!

But there was nothing to be seen or smelled except spiderwebs and, over on a far wall, some chalk drawings on the dark damp bricks.

Longarm moved closer and the right realistic drawing looked even dirtier. He whistled under his breath as he perused the pornographic pictures of male figures in some of the damnedest positions. None of them appealed to a man who admired women way more than shapeless men with impossible peckers and seeingly bottomless assholes.

He moved over to another flight of steps on the balls of his feet, wondering who might have drawn such dirty pictures in the cellar of a church without anybody noticing.

He eased up the steps to a closed door that might lead out to anywheres. But as he cracked it open with his own asshole puckered, he saw he seemed to be behind the altar and that made sense for the gents most likely to sneak into church this way.

Longarm moved around the high-back screen of the altar to see who else might be in church at that hour of the morning. He saw a hulking figure kneeling in a pew closer to the front door, facing the other way because he didn't seem to be praying with that pistol of his own trained on said front door!

Longarm braced his right elbow on the corner of the altar to train the muzzle of his own six-gun steady as he stated in a firm but not unkindly tone, "I got the drop on you, Bergman. Before you turn around, I want you to lay that pistol down and-"

The Black Swede spun around to fire a wild shot that was sure to throw the pipe organ out of tune. So Longarm fired before the crazy son of a bitch could figure out what he wanted to shoot at.

The big and doubtless crazy brake bull reeled but crabbed sideways out of that pew, shaking his head like an angry bull in the haze of his own gunsmoke as he screamed awful things in Swedish and fired yet another shot, into the floor between them, as Longarm blazed away to stagger him backward with six hundred grains of hot lead in him.

Gus Bergman crashed against the recently repaired front door and busted it wide open to land face up on the front steps with a peaceful expression on his ugly face at last.

Longarm strode out into the sunlight to stand over him, reloading, as he muttered, "Jesus H. Christ. How are you going to tell me what's been going on now? Didn't they ever tell you confession was good for the soul? With you dead, you son of a bitch, I'm staring at the damnedest run of pure coincidence or a plot that would cross old Machiavelli's eyes!"

By this time the whole town had come running in response to the gunplay, of course. Big Jim Tanner was first on the scene with Rita Mae Reynolds and two of her kid deputies close behind.

Longarm ignored the newspaperman's questions as the undersheriff stared down at the mess at his feet to exclaim, "I know him on sight. He works for the railroad, and we asked them to switch him to another line when he kept getting into fights. I think his name was Bergen."

Longarm said, "Bergman. I've tangled with him more recent. He was working on another spur line, and I'll be switched with snakes if I can see how anyone knew I'd be riding north that way instead of this way. I know they were watching for me around the Cheyenne railyards. But I met up with this homicidal maniac before I ever got to Cheyenne!"

Somebody in the crowd thought to ask if Preacher Shearer was all right. Longarm said he'd been next door, and there didn't seem to be anybody home.

Rita said, "There's always somebody there. Preacher Shearer has an old Indian squaw keeping house for him. We'd better find out why nobody came to the door!"

They did. Longarm said nothing about search warrants as the law that worked there forced the lock of the back door. They found the plump brown corpse of the middle-aged housekeeper face-up on the kitchen floor without a stitch of clothing on. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear. It was the shemale undersheriff who allowed right out that they'd have the county coroner determine what other crimes had been committed on or about her.

Longarm led the way forward through the house that smelled of blood and crud. He found Preacher Shearer's naked body in a front office, facedown amid blood-spattered books and papers, with a corncob shoved up his ass and a pigging-string knotted tight around his wrists. He'd been stabbed, a heap, with what looked like a Malay kris but was likely a paper knife. It was still in him, betwixt the shoulder blades.

Longarm moved quickly to the door and tried to stop Rita from entering as he tersely told her, "You're right. We'd best wait on the coroner's report, Miss Rita."

She tried to walk through him, demanding, "What happened? Why won't you let me see?"

He said, "What happened looks like the last act of Hamlet directed by the Marquis de Sade. I don't want you to see in yonder because you really don't want to see in yonder."

But she insisted and she was the law with two deputies backing her. So Longarm stood aside and braced himself to hear some screaming.

But old Rita took it like a man, or at least a lady undersheriff who took her job serious, and moved in to scout for sign, being as careful as Longarm about where she planted her feet. It was she who noticed the yellow telegram in a far corner and moved over to hunker down and read it.

Once she had, she stared up at Longarm to say, "Somebody signing his or her name Horny sent this message from Pueblo, Colorado, to this poor dead preacher man, of all people! It says plain as day that their mutual friend Ram Rogers just checked in to the Black Diamond Hotel near the depot. I don't understand this at all!"

From the doorway Big Jim Tanner said, "I think I might. I told you we print all the news that's fit to print. When they pay you to be nosy, you hear things you dare not print. Some say the preacher, there, liked young men. A lot. Young men who've spent much time in prison or hiding out together in lonely cabins tend to learn the same bad habits."

Longarm quietly said, "You told me you'd been tipping off Miss Rita to the whereabouts of wanted outlaws by comparing notes with other newspapermen. I happen to know you never got wire one about half a dozen of the rascals."

Big Jim smiled sheepishly and said, "I was coming to that. That poor twisted sister on the floor was my informant. Like a newspaperman, a preacher hears all sorts of gossip, even when he's not, ah, entertaining young saddle tramps and riders of the Owlhoot Trail."

Longarm whistled low and said, "In sum, he was nibbling on bad apples, and you were blackmailing him."

That had been a statement rather than a question. But Big Jim blustered, "The hell you say! Sorry, Miss Rita. Preacher Shearer was the one who approached me. He never said anything about being queer, and I never let on I knew. He only told me he'd heard the law was after such and such a wayward youth and thought he ought to pass on some gossip he'd heard from poor but more honest cowboys."

Rita was the one who decided, "I'm sorry I just felt sorry for the old two-faced sodomite! I see it all now! He wasn't a criminal mastermind double-crossing his followers for the loot! He was offering a hideout to like-minded outlaws passing through, then turning them in to us to shut them up forever about his depraved secret life!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Some of the earlier ones might have liked gals. But he'd have surely noticed, the same as the rest of us, how fatal it could be to be wanted by the law in these parts!"

Rita dimpled up at him to reply, "You heard me tell Edith I meant to take Ram Rogers alive. As a matter of fact, I have just the deputy for the task. She and I were just talking about that very villain at my substation. She came up from Cheyenne to complain he'd run off with her shop girl and the contents of her till. Her name is Covina Rivers, and I'd just told her we didn't know where he was when we heard all that gunplay. Come on. I'll introduce you to her while my boys tidy up around here!"

CHAPTER 19

Miss Sarah Bernhardt could not have been a greater actress, nor the Baron Miinchhausen a bigger liar as Longarm shook with the lady he'd spent most of the night before with in the sheriff's substation near the crossing. The Wyoming widow woman with a grudge against the wanted man who'd robbed her was smart enough just to look dumb when Rita said, a ways into their conversation, "I don't understand how a womanizing rascal who ran off with that young girl who worked for you could have been mixed up with a bunch of swishy boys."

Longarm soothed, "I can. I deal with heaps of crooks who spend as much time behind bars as out pestering women. Most of them tend to part their hair on both sides unless they mean to spend half their lives just admiring themselves, if you follow my drift."

Rita blushed and told him he was awful while Covina pretended not to understand.

She had to catch the early combination south unless she meant to wait all day for the passenger varnish to roll in and back out. Longarm excused himself well ahead of time so's the two of them could enjoy some girlish talk. He'd already instructed Covina how to wire him in code from Cheyenne, using another name, and let him know whether they'd told her to simper up to Ram Rogers and throw down at him to take him thundergasted but alive, or simply shoot him down like a dog.

He went out on the street and headed back toward the church, where most everyone else in town was still gathered.

When he got as far as the newspaper office, he turned in to see how Inky Potts felt about their earlier conversation.

She came right over to the counter, type stick in hand, to sort of whisper, even though they were alone, "I just heard some railroad man murdered Preacher Shearer and his squaw and that you'd shot it out with their killer! Is that true?"

Longarm said, "I ain't sure. I got the distinct impression Bergman was waiting for me in the church next door, with a gun. The preacher and his housekeeper were killed with a big fancy knife. After that I can't figure out how anybody connected with anybody could have known I was going to bum a ride up from Denver aboard a rattler Gus Bergman had already been assigned to police. There was a lady involved as well, and I just can't for the life of me figure out how my meeting up with her could have been ... Hold on! I just remembered something. She wasn't aboard the train when I got on. She came aboard after me! If they had her trailing me... Lord have mercy if a man can't get his brain cells stampeding in every direction if he fails to ride herd on 'em! Have you had time to dig through the morgue for me yet?"

Inky gulped and murmured, "No. I'm paid to work here. But I've been over your list of questions, and they don't look too hard to answer, if you'd care to tell me what sense they make."

He said, "I don't have time to read all the fine print on each and every issue of the Riverside News going all the way back to the last election. So I've asked you to dig out just the columns that might answer what we call key questions. I need them recent obituaries more than anything else, if you're pressed for time."

She hesitated.

He said, "I'm pressed for time, too, Miss Inky. I like to strike when the iron is hot, and the iron could be cooling a heap, even as we talk."

She reached in a pocket of her smock for a note she'd obviously composed ahead of time and gave it to him, murmuring, "Come to this address at high noon. Mr. Tanner has ordered me, directly, not to tell you anything about the way he may choose to run his own newspaper, on pain of instant unemployment. But we are talking about murder, and I guess a girl has the right to see who she wants during her own lunch hour, as long as her boss never finds out!"

So Longarm put the slip of paper away and left looking innocent. He got back to the church to find the crowd even bigger. He saw Pony Bodie and some others there, wearing guns in spite of the city ordinance passed by the ladies who ran the same.

He asked how come and Pony Bodie said, "We're fixing to posse up. Didn't you know somebody murdered the preacher and his old squaw? I just heard you were there. Wasn't that you as shot the railroad man they just carried over to the undertaker's root cellar?"

Longarm said, "You heard right about me. You're the second one who called that fat housekeeper a squaw. She'd have preferred weya if she was Lakota. I take it you all mean squaw in the sense of an unofficious but cozy situation?"

The beanpole snickered and said, "Everybody knew how cozy they was. I mean, sure, nobody ever caught them in the act. But what else would a preacher man with no wife or lady friends be doing with a squaw sharing his bed and board?"

Longarm suggested the poor old gal might have been dusting the furniture and cooking his meals for him when they weren't tearing at each other's duds. Then he went to jaw with more sensible young gents.

Nobody had uncovered any new evidence in the manse. But, by then they'd of course discovered the dirty drawings and some amazing devices made of India rubber in the cellar under the church. Longarm agreed it was sort of shocking to picture prim and proper church-goers singing hymns upstairs whilst double-gaited owlhoot riders were carrying on so wild right under them.

Longarm said he'd read about Canaanites in olden times who'd run a whorehouse smack in their temple, recruiting wives and daughters of their parish to whore with strangers for temple offerings.

The deputy he told this to said he'd always wondered how come the Lord had favored the Children of Israel over them dad-blasted Canaanites.

Longarm consulted his pocket watch as he considered all the mean things folk were capable of around churches. He saw it was going on eleven-thirty and allowed he had other chores to tend.

One involved some straight draft and a ham and cheese on rye before he decided it was safe to slip away from the center of town while so many others were busy eating.

Inky Potts seemed to live above a carriage house in cramped but private quarters up under the shingles. When she let him in, he saw she'd washed her hands and face, albeit there was still printer's ink under her nails, and she'd changed into a calico pinafore or had it on all the time under that shapeless smock.

Her shape was mighty handsome in calico with her waist cinched in like so. He didn't ask why her mousy brown but luxurious hair hung down her back to her shapely derriere. He thought it was just as well she had a job that kept her on her feet more than most women when he saw she meant to serve glazed doughnuts with chocolate milk.

As she carried the tray over, she indicated where he was to sit on the edge of a made-up cot and said, "Take off your jacket and gun, at least, and try to look guilty if anyone bursts in on us. I'd rather have Mr. Tanner think we were secret lovers than have him fire me for going against his orders!"

Longarm asked who was most likely to bust in on them as he shucked his jacket and gun belt to hang them up with his hat.

Inky said, "You wouldn't be here if I really expected to be caught with you. But a girl has to plan ahead if she means to make her way in a man's world."

Longarm told her she reminded him of a hobo gal he'd been talking to about conditions there in Wyoming Territory. As he sat down on the cot beside her, she started going into Women's Suffrage being a snare and a delusion. But he cut her off with, "I could have told you how much fun it is to bring home the bacon, Lord willing and the creeks don't rise. But that ain't what I come for, no offense. Did you get me those obituaries, at least?"

She pressed glazed doughnuts and a tall glass of chocolate milk on him as she replied, "That was easy. We enjoy a healthy climate here in Wyoming Territory, and no more than four local residents have died at all, and only one has been buried in that churchyard across from the undersheriff's house."

She inhaled some doughnut and chocolate milk while he was asking her who they might be talking about.

She said, "Mr. Nathan Hemmings, age seventy-two, with hog farming as his main occupation and pneumonia listed as the cause of death. I know it's been warm since the middle of May, but he caught a case of walking pneumonia last winter and couldn't seem to shake it before it killed him just before the Fourth of July. Is there any point to all this, Deputy Long?"

Longarm said, "Call me Custis, seeing we're secret lovers. The point may be that our hog farmer ain't been in his grave as long as most in yonder churchyard. By dying so recent he missed the spring thaw entire."

She pondered his words, grimaced, and said, "Please, ah, Custis, not while I'm eating! I know they embalmed him and all, but he's been down there long enough to... You don't suspect he's not down there, do you?"

Longarm chuckled and told her, "That's about the only notion I've yet to consider. I'll take your word we're talking about an elderly victim of walking pneumonia who never murdered nobody and vice versa."

She said she'd brought the one tally of election results he'd asked for, adding it had been deep in the files where she doubted anybody else would ever look. He said he'd read it later. Then he took a deep breath and told her, "Miss Inky, you've been a big help and I know you don't owe me more. But I don't know who else to turn to. I know it's asking way more of you than I should. But I don't know any other gal in town I could ask, so-"

Then he noticed her hand was in his lap as she sighed and said, "You men are all alike, thank heavens. I know you've been here overnight with nobody else to turn to, thanks to our reform administration, But, honestly, can't you silly boys go more than a night or so without any? We girls do it all the time!"

Longarm gulped and declared, "That well may be. But I've noticed you shy violets seem to make up for lost time when you do get worked up!"

She giggled and said, "We're always worked up. We just don't get to show it as often or as openly as you fresh things!"

Then she had his dick out, hard, as she slid off the cot to her knees on the rug, adding, "A girl with a reputation and other unwanted results to worry about learns to bide her time. We're stronger than you men. I've been here in Wyoming since last summer, and this is the first chance I've had, thanks to that old fuss I work for!"

Then she lowered her pretty face to his lap to wet her lush lips and proceed to give him a French lesson that would have cost a week's pay in New Orleans!

As he stiffened in pleasure, surprised at how hard she had him after all that time in old Covina's experienced flesh, Longarm moaned, "Let's get undressed and do it right! I don't want to come this way, you pretty little thing!"

She stopped sucking long enough to grin up at him like a mean little kid and said, "Later. After I get off work this evening. Right now we don't have time for a proper orgy. So let's come fast as well as wicked. You'll never guess what I'm doing to myself down here while I'm sucking you off up there!"

Then she couldn't talk with her mouth full, and he didn't much care what was going on in her ring-dang-do if it couldn't be with his old organ-grinder. Then he was coming, and, as always, it was driving him wild with mingled desires to be in every possible position at once as she took it all the way down her throat with her tongue licking the balls she'd pulled out of his jeans.

Then, as abruptly as she'd started, Inky Potts withdrew her smiling face from his lap, saying, "That's enough, for now. I have to get back to my job while I still have one!"

He could only lay there with his dick hanging out as he watched her tidy herself up, cool as if she'd just gotten up after a night alone.

As she brushed and pinned up her long hair, seated beside him on the cot, Longarm saw the red wax candle she'd left on the rug between his boots had been rounded off and molded sort of sassy at the thick end. He took some comfort in the modest dimensions of the candle she seemed to know better than him. He'd read somewhere that both men and women who took to using dildos or substitutes for the real thing tended to work their way up to bigger and bigger insertions until a real dick wasn't nearly enough to satisfy them.

She caught the direction of his interest and flushed slightly to confess, "I told you I've been doing without for months. I'm only a woman, not a saint or the kid sister Mr. Tanner seems to take me for."

Longarm said, "I thought I heard you say a wandering printer gal has to worry about men trying to get under her skirts."

To which she replied, "it all depends on who might be trying to do so, when. You men have the strangest sense of time and place. How would you like it if some girl made a grab for your buttocks when you were bending over to pick up an anvil?"

Longarm chuckled and said, "A heap of anvils would no doubt be dropped on heaps of toes. I'm glad you thought this was the time to grab my dick, Miss Inky. But that wasn't the favor I was about to ask of you."

She said, "I know. I told you you'd have to wait until I came home from work if you wanted to go all the way with me. That is what you really wanted, and I will find you here when I get back, won't I?"

Longarm's dick was soft enough to put away for the time being as he assured her he'd stay right where he was. So she kissed him, said she couldn't wait for closing time, and told him to help himself to anything else she had to offer before she lit out on him.

So Longarm never had to tell her that was what he'd been meaning to ask if he could do. He needed a place to hide out in Keller's Crossing while he let his plot with good old Covina take shape. You didn't have to lie to folks when they didn't see you and might even think you'd left town, satisfied.

So Longarm took off his duds and got into Inky's bed to read the telegrams and news clippings while he waited for her to come back and give him some real satisfaction.

CHAPTER 20

Inky did. It was just as well he'd had a whole afternoon's rest and heaps of sugar and chocolate to keep him going, once Inky had cooked him a fine supper and undressed entire for dessert.

It was purely a marvel, he thought, as he mounted the sweet young thing with two pillows under her firm little ass, how different gals could get and still seem lovely with two pillows under their asses.

For Covina had been a pale-thighed novelty after Lakota Sue, and the frolicksome fullblood had been nothing like the more sedate-looking but just as passionate Portia Parkhurst, attorney-at-law. He decided Inky reminded him more of that young wagon train gal from Poland, save for having different-colored hair, no Polish accent, and, come to study on it, a different way of moving her ass. It was only her ass that reminded him of that other sweet kid from Poland.

She took it dog style more like good old Roping Sally, save for Inky being built way smaller and good old Roping Sally being dead.

Thinking of dead gals reminded him of that Deputy Ida Weaver who'd shot Rusty Mansfield in front of him down in Denver. Looking down at a dead gal in this position would be awful, but he couldn't help wondering what he'd missed by treating her with so much respect. The poor thing might have still been alive, taking it dog style, had not he been ordered to tail her at such a discreet distance.

When Inky got on top with the late sun painting tiger stripes of light and shadow through the blinds on her pale bouncing body, she didn't do it at all like old Covina, and he was glad. He'd be meeting up with old Covina in a day or so, and it would be as bad as being married up if all the gals a man went to bed with screwed the same.

Inky fucked him all the different ways she could think of, and, as the old trail song went, if she'd have had wings she'd have fucked him flying. But they had plenty of time to smoke, talk, and even catch up on their sleep before she was shaking him awake by his dick and demanding he tell her where the night had flown.

He said he didn't know how high up went or how long forever was, either. So they tore off a morning quickie, had bacon and eggs, and she left first, warning him to be discreet, as she put it, when he let himself out.

Longarm tried to be. He waited until nigh nine, when everyone would be at work, and slipped out and along a shady alley, fully dressed, to circle around to the vomit-green house of old Edith Penn Keller, J.P.

He found the black-robed fat lady telling a young boy she couldn't issue him a wedding license no matter how much he loved the little gal next door. When it was Longarm's turn, he said he'd come for a writ of exhumation. He had to explain that was a permit to open a grave. One got the impression their J.P. had never attended Harvard Law.

She said it was jake with her if he wanted to dig a hog farmer up. She rang for her clerk, a little brown sparrow, and told Longarm to just spell out what he needed.

So Longarm did and a few minutes later he was over at the churchyard with a couple of stable hands from the hotel. They'd allowed they had the time, and he'd already noticed they had shovels.

Finding his way to the tombstone of the late Nathan Hemmings as they followed, Longarm pointed down and declared, "Like Brother Brigham said, this is the place. Like I told you, you'll find the 'dobe ain't been soaked and sun baked since they buried him."

One of the stable hands sank his shovel in the bare dirt mounded over the coffin far below and said, "You're right. It feels more like digging bird gravel. Almost as loose packed, least ways."

As the recruits began to get down to business they were naturally joined by others. It seemed you could hardly have a gunfight or dig up a grave in a small town without others coming over to ask what you thought you were doing.

Longarm saw Big Jim Tanner and young Pony Bodie, among others, as things got sort of crowded around the hog farmer's last resting place. So he said, "I wish you'd give us more room and be careful of them other graves, gents. How come so many of you are still packing guns?"

Pony Bodie replied, "I told you. We're on the prod for the persons unknown who cut up poor Preacher Shearer and his squaw."

Big Jim volunteered, "I keep telling the boys you shot the killer right next door. But who listens? Why are we exhuming poor old Nate, Deputy Long?"

Longarm said, "We ain't. I don't expect we'll have to dig down as far as the coffin lid. The killer wouldn't have had time to dig down more than a yard or so at the most."

The newspaperman demanded, "What killer? Gus Bergman? He wasn't in town when we buried the old timer in that grave."

Before Longarm had to answer, one of his stable hands called out, "I've hit something soft and mushy here."

Longarm moved over to stare down at a scrap of floral-print calico visible amid the dusty 'dobe clods and said, "Brush the dirt off her gentle, boys. She'd have wanted it that way."

So they did and soon had one arm, then a shoulder, then half the swollen face of the once-pretty Deputy Ida Weaver exposed to the cruel morning sun. Somebody gasped. "Good Gawd! It's Ida Weaver!" Somebody usually did.

Longarm said, "I wish folk didn't have to turn such funny colors after they were dead. It would be so much tidier if we could just dry up and blow away like faded flowers. But we don't. So pending an autopsy, I'd say they killed her as soon as she got home from Denver near to half a week ago."

"Do you have any idea who killed her?" asked Big Jim Tanner.

Longarm saw Rita Mae Reynolds coming over from her nearby house with her own gun strapped on, now, as he told the newspaperman it was too soon to say.

Rita rolled over the fence in her riding skirts and came over to take one look and gasp. "Oh, no! Not poor Ida! We were such good friends!"

Longarm said, "I'm sorry, ma'am. But that's what comes of sending inexperienced gals to carry out chores many a man would find too big a boo."

"But how could this have happened here in Keller's Crossing?" the auburn-haired bossy gal demanded, adding, "Ida won when she met up with that dangerous killer down in Denver, Custis!"

Longarm said, "Aw, he wasn't all that dangerous, next to some I've tangled with. Like Amarillo Cordwain, Texas Tom, and all them others, he was mostly too lazy to work and too dumb to cheat at cards. The one fairly experienced tinhorn they recruited lit out on them as soon as he saw how dumb they were acting."

Big Jim stared soberly down at the partly exposed cadaver of Ida Weaver to say, "Call them anything you like, as long as you bring them to justice! Why did you just say it was too soon to say? Do you have any idea at all who's behind all this?"

Longarm said, "Sure. But you can't get milk out of a turtle just by trying to milk it, or a conviction out of a judge and jury just by pointing your finger with no proof."

"What more proof do you need?" asked Pony Bodie with a puzzled smile, pointing over at the nearby church as he said, "That preacher played with fire until he got burnt. He was running some sort of home for wayward boys. But he felt he had to turn them in when they left home or robbed other folk or, shucks, he just got tired of them. He'd have been defrocked or worse had word gotten out that he went in for queer parties under his very own church. So, knowing Miss Rita, here, had a firmer way than most for dealing with outlaws, he saw she got tipped off they were outlaws, whether they were or not, and told her where they might be found, so's her deputy gals could finish them off for the old sneak!"

Longarm nodded thoughtfully as more than one in the crowd agreed that all made sense.

Longarm said, "Well, like the old song says, farther along we'll know more about it. Your notion only adds up part way, Pony Bodie. I see how a dirty old man might use the law to aid and abet his fickle nature, or his worries about being blackmailed or exposed. But tell me how you think he got ten discarded lovers in a row to go where he wanted them to go and wait until he could sic the law on them."

Pony Bodie looked confused.

Big Jim said, "I might be able to answer that. You may have it backward. What if those double-gaited owlhoot riders just left him, friendly or unfriendly. He told me he'd gotten wires from others he knew. Not as swishy lads of course. He told me he got to comfort and advise heaps of prairie drifters, good, bad, and indifferent. Couldn't he have simply put the word out on some former pal and waited until another wired him from wherever?"

Rita said, "That works for me. I'd heard Amarillo Cordwain had spent a lot of time in prison, getting known in the Biblical sense by a lot of other shady young men with no visible means of support."

Longarm said, "I've been thinking about that since first I found out about the preacher's other interests, Miss Rita. Not all the nine fugitives you and your wild deputies have accounted for had spent that much time in prison. Not all of them were thieves or robbers. So try her this way. What if somebody who knew about poor old Preacher Shearer and his rough-and-ready pansies was only using that angle to razzle-dazzle us with others?"

She said she didn't know what he was talking about.

He said, "It don't matter. I've been lying to you, too."

In the following silence he could have cut with a knife, Longarm explained, "I knew that once I got past Texas Tom and Ram Rogers, the survivors would be ordered to head somewhere else and await further instructions. I felt sure that once they arrived to be set up like clay pigeons, somebody was going to tell you where they were, so's you could send another wildwoman after them, no offense."

Rita gasped. "You did? Then why did you let me send that Covina Rivers from Cheyenne if you didn't want me to?"

Longarm said, "I wanted you to. That's how come I let you. Miss Covina was working with me. I asked her to. She lied to you herself. She never met Ram Rogers, and that shop gal she told you about was just a petty thief."

Rita looked hurt. "But why, Custis, why? I trusted you and I liked Covina! Why did you both lie to me?"

Longarm said, "I just told you she had orders to lie to you. I had to lie to everybody here, save for those pals from the hotel stable, least ways. I didn't know which one of you was behind all this dumb but deadly razzle-dazzle."

"But you do now?" asked Big Jim warily.

Longarm hesitated, stepped back from the open grave a ways, and declared, "Not for certain, but likely by this afternoon. I'm waiting on a wire that ought to get here well before that last train out for the day. So the one I want ain't going nowheres before I'm ready to do some serious arresting around here!"

Rita asked, "Who's supposed to wire you about what? That Covina Rivers who ran off with one of our badges?"

Longarm smiled thinly and soothed, "I'll see you get your badge back, Miss Rita. I'll bet it's worth at least a dollar. I told Miss Covina just to go back to her notions store in Cheyenne and wait for her own compensations from my outfit. I know you told her to go down to Pueblo and flirt her way close enough to Ram Rogers to get the drop on him. I know you told her not to kill him if it could be avoided. So, to your credit, you and Judge Edith have commenced to behave more sensible."

He reached in his jacket for some matches and a cheroot as he continued, "Miss Covina wouldn't know Ram Rogers if she woke up in bed with him, and, after that, she's a lady who sells notions, not no manhunter. So I gave her a message to wire my own boss when she got to Cheyenne. It's been long sent by this time. My boss will be sending a team we call Smiley and Dutch down to Pueblo by now. Smiley and Dutch will take Ram Rogers alive if he knows what's good for him."

He lit a cheroot without offering in such a crowd and told them all, "Ram Rogers won't be sitting there waiting to be taken alive. The mastermind who's been advising him will have told him to go there and lay low pending further instructions. So he's going to be mighty chagrined when Smiley and Dutch tell him they were tipped off to his whereabouts by the one pal who'd be in any position to know." Rita grinned like a kid who'd just spotted an unguarded apple tree and declared, "Then you've got him! He can't get away, and he's as good as in my jail the moment you hear from your friends in Pueblo!"

Longarm said, "That's about the size of it. Stay put, Miss Rita. I want to keep this private, and I see your words have inspired a certain nervousness over this way."

Then he snapped, "Don't do it, kid!" as Pony Bodie went for his Schofield.45, his weak-chinned face contorted with desperation!

The delivery boy was good, for a delivery boy or anybody else. Longarm would have been hard-pressed to beat the tensed-up killer to the draw if he hadn't been thinking ahead, himself.

But he had been. So he simply had to raise the right hand he'd been palming his derringer in and fire, pointblank, just as Pony Bodie's bigger gun was clearing leather.

The weak-chinned young terror staggered back against another tombstone, back-flipped over it, and landed facedown in the dust, sobbing as he struggled to rise with all that blood running out of his chest while Longarm held his double derringer's second round on him.

Then the treacherous young rascal collapsed limp as a bear rug left outside to air, and someone said, "I think you killed him."

Longarm said, "That was my intent. Like you all heard me tell him, getting a conviction can be a chore, and this way we won't have to air the dirty laundry of a lot of lesser sinners in these parts."

Rita marveled, "You mean you were lying to him, just to trick him?"

Longarm shrugged and answered truthfully, "I won't know until I hear from Smiley and Dutch. All I left out was that Smiley and Dutch can be wild as any Wyoming woman when you send 'em after a want. So I'll be pleasantly surprised if they take Ram Rogers alive. Not that it really matters, now."

CHAPTER 21

Longarm was more than pleasantly surprised by the long wire he got late that afternoon. For once the team of Smiley and Dutch had worked the way Billy Vail had planned when he put them to work together.

Deputy Smiley hardly ever smiled. Smiley was his last name and he was the smart but slower one. Nobody could pronounce the outlandish last name of the one they just called Dutch, but he was the fastest gun on the payroll, albeit about as levelheaded as a scorpion in one's empty boot of a morning. Billy's hope in teaming such an odd pair was that Dutch might keep Smiley alive while Smiley kept Dutch from being indicted for murder.

That hadn't always been easy for either of them. But the wire said they'd busted in on Ram Rogers and his ladylove at that Pueblo hotel to catch them in the act of posing for French postcards without any concealed weapons on them at all.

Smiley had thought to separate the two of them as soon as they were out of bed in their duds and handcuffs. They said Ram Rogers had been as chagrined as promised when they told him he'd been turned in by his Wyoming mastermind. The terrified gal, of course, had sung even louder when they got her to see she could tell all she knew or hope her true love would be waiting when she got out, old and gray.

The separately dictated statements of Ram Rogers and a gal called Rowdy Ruth agreed fairly well and cleared up loose ends Longarm hadn't managed to figure by himself. Billy Vail had ordered him to meet with county officials he hadn't gotten around to. But he didn't think his boss wanted him wasting the time, seeing there was nobody left to arrest and it was up to the voters, come November, whether they wanted the same bunch running things.

He could have caught the last night train out to save himself some time getting back to Cheyenne. But he reflected the railroading he'd want to detail in his officious report, and after that he owed Bronco Bob in Dwyer a borrowed mount and saddle. He figured old Socks would be just as happy out on a moonlit prairie with him as moping in that livery across the street for days. So he left his room key on the bed upstairs and rode out of Keller's Crossing around suppertime, when he didn't have to bother about shaking hands with all creation.

Socks was happy to be loping into the sunset for home, and he let her have her head till they were past that drift fence and sailing over a rolling sea of tawny buffalo grass. But he didn't want to lather his mount with the literally cool shades of a Wyoming evening commencing to spread deep purple in the draws. So when they got to that cottonwood-lined creek, he reined her in and dismounted to water and rest her some, saying "We ain't in that big a hurry, Socks. You get me there by midnight, I'll still have to wait shivering on the platform for that night train to head back from Wendover, see?"

Socks just drank more creekwater. Longarm tethered her to a sapling, pissed on another one, and moved up the grassy slope away from any wood ticks to rest his ass by Standing tall as he lit a cheroot.

Rita Mae Reynolds called out to ask if that was him when she spied his match flare from afar, aboard her own cordovan Morgan. Longarm had to identify himself to an undersheriff packing a pistol. So she loped on over, reined in, and slid gracefully from her sidesaddle to demand, "Why did you leave without saying goodbye? How could you leave me just hanging like that, you brute?"

Longarm said he hadn't known he was leaving her hanging. But when he took her in his arms to kiss her, she laughed wildly and gasped up at him, "I didn't mean you'd left me hanging that way! You were going to tell me all about poor Preacher Shearer and his outlaw gang and why he had Ida Weaver killed and-"

Longarm said, "You got that all wrong, Miss Rita, You were there when I had it out with the mastermind, one of them really dangerous crooks smart enough to let himself be taken for dumb and ornery enough to act harmless. I told you this morning that justice had been done and there was no call to hang a lot of dirty laundry out to dry over the graves of dead folk."

She kissed him, this time, and said, "Come and sit by my side in the grass and tell me all about it from the beginning."

So he did. As they reclined on the grassy slope in the gloaming he told her, "In the beginning God created man, then Woman, then something more mixed up. Poor prim and scrawny Preacher Shearer was one of them mixed-up sorts. The army gives you a prison sentence and dishonorable discharge if they catch you behaving that way. The Indians allow some just can't help wanting to pretend they're gals, and so they let 'em. Indians almost never whip kids, neither. Sometime I get to wondering who's more Christian."

Rita said, "Big Jim told me all about the poor man being a queer. I can't for the life of me see what any man would get out of letting other men use him that way. Can you?"

Longarm said, "I never spent that much time in jail. No man I've ever met has anything I'd be that interested in."

She gasped. "What do you think you're doing with that fresh hand? You told me you were going to tell me all about those queer outlaws!"

He lay her back in the grass and kissed her again but eased off when he felt her stiffen some. He said, "I told you the villain was Pony Bodie. He assured me before I ever asked that he didn't go in for that sort of thing. That wasn't all he was fibbing about. He drifted into town a year or so back, as you may recall, fresh from an Alabama chain gang, which he forgot to tell any of you. He'd picked up bad habits in prison, and in no time at all he'd made friends with the only man in town who'd take the gal's part. He likely learned the preacher was prissy from some other saddle tramp. Poor old Shearer was too shy to ask gents such as Big Jim Tanner or the blacksmith."

Rita giggled at that picture and didn't stiffen the next time he put a friendly hand on one firm breast, noticing she wore nothing at all under her whipcord riding habit. She asked him to go on. So he started to unbutton her bodice as he said, "The preacher got his new-found secret lover a job delivering telegrams all over town for Western Union, with a chance to fiddle with the telegraph set late at night, acting the eager kid but having taken telegraph lessons in the reform school they'd tried on him first."

He kissed her lightly as he ran his hand inside her bodice to find her nipples already turgid. He said, "Remember Preacher Shearer didn't know this. He had no idea what Pony Bodie was up to behind his back, at first. His only crime was that he'd always wanted to be a pretty girl. Did anybody ever tell you how pretty your tits are in the soft light of gloaming, Miss Rita?"

She laughed and said, "Many times. I was married to a man who liked to sneak up on me, too. He had a drinking problem. Do I really need to say more?"

Longarm said, "Nope. Once you say a man or woman has habits they can't control, you've about described them all, including the poor old preacher. That innocent beanpole with the goofy grin had the older man wrapped around his finger. Shearer got him a job, gave him money from the poor box, and begged for more abuse from Pony Bodie and his pals."

She said, "Down, boy, You're moving in on me too fast, and I thought you said there was no gang."

Longarm left his free hand on her inner thigh, having established she wasn't wearing one of those infernal split skirts that could make it awkward as hell as you worked up a gal's inner thigh, and repeated, "Preacher Shearer was never in charge. He didn't know what Pony Bodie was getting him into until a whole mess of disgusting young owlhoot riders had taken to getting into him and hiding out under his church lest you or one of your kid deputies ask them what they were doing in your township."

She asked, "What were they doing? Oh, Custis, what's that you're doing, you naughty thing?"

"Just trying to have a friendly conversation," he replied as he parted her pubic hair wider to cradle her Moist clit between the tips of two fingers, adding, "What they were doing was as much Petty crime as they could get away with with Pony Bodie scouting for them as a delivery boy who traipsed all over, delivering money orders overhearing gossip, and so on. As he started to get border he was still stuck with splitting the spoils or double-crossing pals close to his home base and having real messes to clean up, even if he won."

"Could you tell me the rest after you make me come, dear?" she cut in, coyly admitting, "I guess you know I've been hearing things about you and other lonely widows, grass or veiled."

So he shoved her skirts up out of the way and rolled into the wide welcome of her athletic bare thighs while she unbuckled his gun belt and helped him get his jeans down a piece after he'd entered her. Then she was begging him to take it out while she wrapped her long legs around him, thrusting her pelvis higher. Longarm was too delicate to observe that any poor simp who'd gotten drunk when he had something like this to enjoy had his total sympathy. He just acceded to her request as graciously as he knew how when she got to yelling, "Oh, yesss! Deeper! Harder! I've had to watch out for my reputation, and it's been so long and you're so long and, my God, I've never come this sooooon!"

Longarm had been in bed with sweet little Inky more recently than Rita had been with anybody, judging by the way she was chewing on him with her soft wet innards. So he got her to come thrice in the time it took him to feel the need for a smoke while he caught his second wind.

He'd lost track of that first cheroot he'd lit. It hadn't started a prairie fire under them. So he figured it was safe to light up one more and, while they had the time, strip down to the buff and sprawl friendly atop their duds in the springy but pricklesome dry grass.

As they did so, Longarm remembered his manners and said, "You and your girlish deputies gave Pony Bodie the grand notion how he could get rich. Neither he nor his transient trash had anything to do with them first three wants you had your gals bring back dead instead of alive. They read about it in the Riverside News. Big Jim's only crime was a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. The way more modest Pony Bodie talked, an old boy laying over with Preacher Shearer, while laying him, to hold up that cattle buyer staying at the Pronghorn across the street from the Western Union. After pointing the victim out, Pony Bodie sat there spitting and whittling in front of everybody while the deed was done, gave you all a false description of the masked man fleeing the scene, and met him later under the church. " She said, "That would have been the late Trigger Woods we caught up with in Missouri, right?"

He said, "You thought you caught up with him. Pony Bodie talked his old reform-school pal into leaving the loot with him for safekeeping and wiring for it once he got to a safe hideout."

Rita said, "Good Lord! Were all of them that dumb! Why didn't any of the others tumble to his simple duplicity as soon as we began to get those tips from the rascal they'd wired for their money?"

Longarm passed her the cheroot as he told her, "You never got one tip from Pony Bodie. I don't know what he told Preacher Shearer, but Preacher Shearer would tell Big Jim, and Big Jim would puff out his chest and tell You. I still don't like him. But I don't have any more hard feeling for the Riverside News right now. Counting that serious stage holdup, when Rusty Mansfield scared the whole bunch by gunning Miss Ida Weaver's uncle, they pulled off a half dozen serious crimes and would have been caught sooner if other pests hadn't convinced MY boss and me we were up against a bigger mystery than there really was."

As she moved his hand back where she liked it, Longarm told her, "Everything went according to plan up to where Ida Weaver gunned Rusty Mansfield and the Denver papers reported I was mixed up in it. Bodie wired Rowdy Ruth, a Denver harlot he'd spent some time with for the novelty, and asked her to watch me. When she reported Ida and me had been to the federal building, Bodie put two and two together and came up with three. He hadn't used Ram Rogers up yet. So he ordered Ram to see if he could stop me from getting warm, and Ram recruited the older Texas Tom and Deacon Knox to blur the pattern for me some."

Rita sighed and said, "I feel so bad about poor Ida. You think they killed her because they feared Rusty Mansfield had told her something as he lay dying?"

Longarm nodded and said, "It would have been easy. Bodie could have met her train and offered to walk her up to your place in the dark. He stabbed her and buried her in fresh-dug 'dobe when he had her alone up by the churchyard."

He took the cheroot back for a drag and went on, "Nobody did anything all that clever. They had me thinking I was playing a smarter game because rascals too dumb to beat me at checkers kept showing me independent dumb moves that I kept trying to string together. Making a personal enemy along the way didn't help. That poor crazy Swede was after me and me alone. But after I'd made it past Rogers and company in Cheyenne, Gus Bergman did me an unintended favor when he drew my attention to that church and churchyard by sniping at us from the best really high point handy. Bodie thought I was getting warm on purpose. So he figured it was time to close shop and hide his own tracks. He sent Rogers and Rowdy Ruth to a swell hideout. So he'd know where they were when he had Shearer tell Tanner who'd surely tell you where they were. He hoped you'd send somebody wilder than Smiley and Dutch."

They'd gotten to where they could read each other's body movements without having to jaw about it. So Longarm took her up on her unspoken invite and rolled back in her love saddle as he added, "After that he figured he only had to murder Shearer, who had to have known too much, and that old Indian gal, who might have known all or nothing at all. I see no point in speaking ill of the dead."

Rita wrapped her thighs around him to croon, "I've nothing ill to say about that poor crazy Swede bringing things to a head so soon. I don't see how we'd have ever gotten up the nerve to behave this wild back in town, darling."

To which Longarm replied, moving his rump faster as the stars came out to admire it, "Aw, we'd have thought of something."

The End