Longarm and the Bandit Queen

LONGARM AND THE BANDIT QUEEN

By Tabor Evans

Synopsis:

Notorious Belle Star is holed up with a nest of desperadoes. And it looks like some crooked marshals are in cahoots with her. For a price, the law won’t touch the robbers. ‘Till longarm rides into the fugitive camp, posing as one of them. Longarm has to cross the law to round up the raiders and their velvet queen. 17th novel in the “Longarm” series, 1980.

CHAPTER 1

The icy bite of the twilight wind cut through Longarm’s clothes and crept down inside the leather tops of his stovepipe cavalry boots, curling his toes and numbing them. He wondered if they might not be turning blue. His hands, on which he wore thin leather gloves—the only pair he’d found when rummaging in his saddlebags—felt like they were blue, too. Longarm wasn’t about to pull the gloves off to find out. His fingers were so chilled that he was afraid one or two might come off with the gloves.

A stray gust sent an icy thread trickling down his collar to rustle the hair on his chest. Damn me for a double-dyed jackass! he thought as he pulled the lapels of his long, black Prince Albert coat closer together. If I’d thought it’d be this cold so far south along the Arkansas in September, I’d have brought my sheepskin instead of leaving it hang in Denver where it ain’t doing nobody any good.

Letting go the reins of his Texas-bitted cavalry mount, Longarm slapped his palms together to bring back some feeling. They flexed enough, with a little beating, to let him slide one hand inside his tight-pulled coat lapels and fish a cheroot out of his vest pocket. He chomped his strong teeth over the tip of the cheroot, clamping the thin cigar in his mouth while he fumbled a match from his coat pocket.

He made two tries at flicking the match into flame with a thumbnail before remembering that he had on gloves. For all they’re keeping your hands warm, old son, he told himself, you might as well not be wearing them.

Lifting a foot out of the stirrup, he hoisted his leg upward high enough to bend it, and struck the match on his bootheel. The puff of blue smoke that he loosed to mingle with the chill air, almost as visibly blue as the smoke itself in the fading light, made him feel a little bit better.

But not enough to mention, his thoughts ran on. Billy Vail’s just too damn tight with voucher money lately, telling me to get a remount at Ft. Gibson instead of letting me stay on the train all the way to Ft. Smith and renting a livery horse there.

By now, the fragrant smoke from the cigar was beginning to soothe Longarm’s spirits somewhat.

But I guess it ain’t all Billy’s fault. It’s them damn pencil-pushers back in Washington. They set on their padded swivel chairs all day and figure how to cut off a penny here and whittle away a nickel there, and I wind up freezing my butt for fifty or sixty miles on a cavalry nag traipsing across the ass-end of the Cherokee Nation, when I still ought to be at least halfway warm in a coach seat on the damn train.

Which don’t mean it ain’t Billy’s fault that I’m here in the first place. I got about as much business being down here between the Creek and Cherokee Nations, trying to pick up a smell of Jesse James’s trail, as a butchering-sized hog has trying to fly. Seems like every day that goes by and the James boys stay hid out, the hotter everybody gets about finding them. Hell, I’ll stand by what I told Billy when he put me on this case. I’ll put up a mint-new double eagle against his plugged two-bit piece that Jesse’s right close to where he calls home, over east in Missouri. And he ain’t going to be found until those neighbors of his start flapping their jaws. Trouble is, nobody’s listening when I try to tell them what only seems like good sense to me.

Ahead of him, Longarm caught the glint of a campfire’s light flickering among the trunks of the big sweet gum and blackjack oak trees that grew thickly on both sides of the river trail. The trail meandered more or less parallel to the banks of the Arkansas River as it flowed sluggishly southeast toward the line between the Indian Nation and the state of Arkansas.

He picked up the reins and twitched them to send his mount in the direction of the promised warmth. There was still a good distance between him and the fire. He nudged his horse with a spurless bootheel to speed it up a bit, anxious, now that he’d seen the blaze, to stop and settle down beside it, and share its warmth with whoever had built it.

He’d covered most of the distance to the flickering spot Of light, zigzagging between the trees and skirting the heavy brush, when a scream Split the darkening night. For a moment, Longarm couldn’t be sure there was a CONNECTION between the scream and the fire. He was still too far away to see anything but a suggestion of dark shapes silhouetted against the glow that spread around the fire. There were three or four figures moving around, but he couldn’t tell whether they were those of men or women. Just to be on the safe side, though, he slipped his Winchester out of its saddle scabbard and flicked off the safety. Then he dug both heels hard into his horse’s flanks, and the animal spurted forward.

Twenty seconds and two or three screams later, Longarm was close enough to get an idea as to what was going on around the campfire, as the diminishing distance sharpened the blurred edges of the shapes of four men and a woman. As the distance continued to lessen, he saw that the men had been chasing their companion, and as he watched them, the men wrestled the woman to the ground. Three of them held her—one holding each of her legs, the third Stretching her arms above her head. The fourth ripped away her skirt and underclothes, and fumbled at his belt.

By now, Longarm was close enough to see more than silhouettes. The men became defined as bearded, butternut-jean-clad individuals, but the woman was only a stretch of bare flesh, tinted deep pink by the lurid firelight. Dark pubic hair broke the sweep of her skin between waist and legs. The man who’d begun fumbling with his belt had let his jeans drop now, and Longarm could see his protruding erection as he dropped to his knees between the writhing woman’s widespread legs.

Her screams increased when she felt him probing to enter her. She twisted as best she could, trying to avoid his eager efforts, and her body arched against the strain her captors were putting on her arms and legs. The kneeling man struck her with his fist, and the woman’s screams stopped abruptly, as did her struggles. One of the men said something. Longarm was too far away to make out the words, but he heard the raucous laughter that followed the remark.

That was enough for him. Rape was rape under any circumstances, and rape wasn’t something that Longarm’s personal code would countenance. It was also against the law, and he was the law.

He pulled up the horse with a sliding of hooves. Shooting against firelight was tricky, as he’d learned through long experience. He caught the kneeling man in his sights, and squeezed the Winchester’s trigger.

For a split second, the kneeling man froze, then the impact of the high-velocity.44-40 slug toppled him over. He fell across one of the woman’s pinioned legs. His companions let go of the now-sagging limbs they’d been struggling to hold still, and clawed for their guns.

Longarm reduced the odds with a snapshot at the man at the group’s head. His shot was quick, and the flickering firelight made sighting chancy. His target crumpled, then floundered on the ground. Longarm swung the Winchester, but the other two were on the move even before he’d started shifting his aim. Before he could trigger a third shot, the two remaining rapists were running into the deep shadows among the trees around the vest-pocket clearing.

While Longarm was searching the dappled shadows for a shot at the running desperadoes, the man who’d been his second target struggled to his feet and hobbled, bent double, into the sheltering woods. Longarm was in easy pistol range now. He sheathed the Winchester and dropped the horses reins over its nose. The cavalry-trained animal stood placidly.

Longarm dismounted, drawing his Colt, and struck off to one side of the fire. He had no way of knowing where the three men were, but instinct and experience told him they’d probably not gone far. The odds were that they’d taken shelter among the big bowls of the gumwood trees and thick foliage of the scrub oak that surrounded the little clearing.

Longarm could see them in his mind’s eye, shielded behind a protecting tree trunk while they waited for him to enter the revealing circle of firelight to bend over the body of the woman, who still lay unmoving on the ground beside the blaze. The twilight had slid into darkness during the moments it had taken for him to reach the fire, and the ensuing minutes that had been consumed in his brief surprise attack. Neither moon nor starlight penetrated through the thin gray overcast that had veiled the sky when it had last been visible. Longarm stopped to let his eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, and to listen for sounds of movement.

There was a constant rustling in the wooded area. The wind was still brisk, and it whined softly as an undertone to the shushing it caused among the autumn-hardened leaves, still green and thick, but dry now after the sun of summertime. Bit by bit, his ears grew used to the forest murmur, his eyes to the freshly dark night. Directly in front of him, a twig cracked under the pressure of a booted foot. Slowly, Longarm edged ahead.

He felt his way, lowering each foot slowly as he stepped forward, putting his weight on the foot gradually, ready to pull back if the springiness of the loose leaves that blanketed the ground was interrupted by the hard line of a dry tree limb or twig. His caution saved him a bad fall, for he was still balanced on one foot when the foot he was advancing touched the ground briefly before the earth crumbled away under its pressure. Still, he had to shuffle to keep from pitching forward, and the sudden movement set up a soft rustling in the vegetation underfoot.

A line of fire cut the darkness in front of him, and the sound of the shot and the ugly, high-pitched whistle of lead zipping past, mere inches from his chest, sounded at almost the same instant.

Longarm hit the ground, squeezing off a shot toward the spot where he’d seen the muzzle blast as he fell. Two gunshots cut the night now, a few feet apart, but they were high. When he’d gone to the ground, Longarm had fallen into a shallow ditch. He rolled, measuring it by feel, finding that it was no ditch, but judging from its size and shape, a grave.

For that woman they were about to rape, he thought. Figured to get rid of her after they’d had all they wanted from her.

He lifted himself to his knees, and reached out one hand in front of him, encountered the earth that had been lifted from the grave. It was as good a breastwork as anybody could ask for. Longarm put a shot into the darkness from behind the shelter of the dirt pile.

Two shots replied, and he answered them instantly, shooting to the side of the muzzle blasts. One of his slugs found flesh. A cry of mixed anger and pain sounded from the darkness.

“Son of a bitch winged me!” a man’s voice grated. “Shit on this!

Whoever that is, he’s better than I am at sharpshooting in the dark! I’m getting the hell out of here!”

“Not without me, you ain’t!” a second voice replied. “Come on! Lucky we didn’t unsaddle before we went for the woman!”

There was a loud pounding of feet on dry leaves and the slapping of scrub-oak branches against bodies. The noises faded, then there was an angry exchange of words in tones too low for Longarm to make out what was being said. Finally, the drumbeat of hooves thudded noisily beyond the waning fire, then faded into the distance, telling Longarm that his antagonists had ridden off with more haste than caution.

Longarm waited until the hoofbeats died, to make sure that the three riders weren’t going to regain their courage and circle back before he stepped out of the shallow grave.

Unreplenished, the fire had waned to little more than a bed of red coals from which an occasional flicker of bright flame burst when the heat ate into a sap-pocket. The woman was still unconscious. Longarm studied her with a frown.

She was young, younger than she’d sounded to him, but the noises she’d made had been dragged out of her in fear and rage. He put her age at somewhere in the middle twenties. Her face, in repose, was unlined—a square-shaped face, with a firm jaw under slightly over-full lips. Her nose was upturned and small, with wide nostrils, under full heavy brows. Her cheekbones were high, her brow unlined. She had thick black hair that grew in a half-circle around a narrow forehead, and streamed out loose on the ground under her shoulders.

Her clothing was still disarranged. Her white shirtwaist was rumpled, its collar ripped half off, and the corduroy riding skirt that had been pulled away by her attacker had fallen or been pulled high; it covered her breasts in a rumpled mass that hid their contour. Her body was bare from the waist down. A gently rounded stomach glowed in the firelight. Below a thick black vee of pubic hair, her thighs tapered plumply to calves still covered by high-laced boots, with thick stockings folded over their tops. Her knee-length underpants lay in a tattered wad at one side.

Across one of the woman’s legs, the man whom Longarm’s rifle slug had killed lay sprawled, his arms thrust upward. Blood stained the side and front of his butternut shirt, where the bullet had taken him. His narrow hips and buttocks were bare.

Longarm pulled one of the dead man’s arms aside to get a clear look at his bearded face. It was not one that he recognized, either from a past arrest or from any of the wanted flyers at which he’d looked recently. In death, the face might have belonged to anybody, a storekeeper or a farmer. It had lost whatever villainy it might have possessed while the man was still alive.

Longarm grabbed the corpse by its limp wrists, and dragged it away from the woman. Then he eased her skirt down to cover her thighs before he took stock of his Surroundings.

At the edge of the clearing, two horses were tethered to a bush. Both were still saddled. Behind them, a mule was also tied up; it bore a lightly loaded packsaddle. There was nothing in the clearing, except the dying fire and a small stack of chopped tree limbs at one side of it, to give any sign that the group had intended to make camp there for the night. There were no bedrolls, no cooking utensils, not even a water bucket.

Longarm brought his own horse up and tethered it where the others stood, then he threw a few of the pieces of cut wood on the coals, hunkered down, and stripped off his gloves. In the flurry of action he’d set off, he’d forgotten about the cold wind. In the clearing, the trees cut the force of the breeze, though its presence was still indicated by the waving of the treetops. Thoughtfully, Longarm took out a fresh cheroot and lighted it while he continued to study the little glade.

From the evidence, it was impossible to tell whether the woman had been traveling with the four men, or had encountered them on the trail and been forced to accompany them to the secluded spot. Longarm gave up on the puzzle. When the woman woke up, he’d get the answers to his questions.

He did not have long to wait. The young woman sighed, and her arms moved fitfully. Then her eyes snapped open. A scream started from her lips when she saw Longarm squatting beside the fire, but she choked it off before it had gained enough volume to emerge from her mouth as anything louder than a surprised gasp.

“You startled me,” she said, struggling into a sitting Position.

Longarm let a small frown gather on his brow, though it was hidden by the wide brim of his flat-topped Stetson, as he tried to put a location to the odd intonation in her voice. It was not from the South, nor was it one that carried the casual overtones of the West, or the flatness of New York. Rather, it was a nasal voice, produced in her head rather than flowing easily from her throat. Longarm had heard words inflected that way before, but not very often; the predominant regional accent of the West reflected the soft, elongated vowel sounds of Southern speech.

She went on, “Something happened that I don’t remember. I don’t remember you at all-“

“No reason Why you should, ma’am. Far as I know, you never did lay eyes on me before, any more than I’ve seen you before now.”

Her brows knitted thoughtfully as she struggled to remember. “Then, what happened to me?”

“You got hit. Real hard, judging from the length of time you’ve been out. You don’t need to worry about anything, though. Nobody laid a hand on you while you were unconscious. You’re all right.”

Longarm studied her while she was looking around the clearing. She was a bit older than he’d first judged her to be—in her early thirties, perhaps. Her eyes, which he was seeing for the first time, were dark brown. Her gaze, darting around the little glade, fell on the dead man who lay on the ground at one edge of the clearing.

“My God!” she gasped. “He was—he was the one-“

“He was the one that hit you,” Longarm filled in when her voice trailed off.

“More than that.” She began to tremble as memory came rushing back. “He was one of the guides I hired at Fort Smith. He-they-there were four of them. And they were going to rape me.”

Longarm nodded. “That’s about the size of it. I watched it all, from the time they commenced chasing you around until I got busy and changed their ideas.”

“Is that a polite way of telling me that you killed him?”

“Well, now, I wasn’t trying to be polite, ma’am. No more than I usually am, to a lady. But now that you remember what was going on, it won’t bring back more bad memories than you’ve already got. The reason you don’t know how all of it come about is that you’d been knocked cold just before I dropped that fellow there.”

“My God! What kind of place am I in? You’re saying you shot that man in cold blood?”

“No, I wouldn’t exactly say it was cold-blooded. I was mad as hell, if you don’t object to me swearing a mite. I don’t like to see four men ganging up on anybody, let alone a woman, trying to hurt her.”

“Hurting’s one thing. Killing’s another. I’ve never been raped, and I don’t suppose it would be a very nice experience, but at least I’d still have been alive when they finished. That man lying there is dead?”

“Yep. Just about as dead as anybody’ll ever be.”

“You killed him deliberately, with a gun, instead of just stopping him from-from what he wanted to do.”

Longarm was losing his patience. He looked into the woman’s angry eyes for a moment before he replied, “If you’ll recall, ma’am, there were four of them. And they weren’t the kind I’d want to walk up to and try to reason with, seeing as how all of them were wearing guns.”

“He should have been tried in court, not summarily executed! Even the most disgusting criminal deserves a trial before a judge and jury. You deprived him of his life without giving him a chance to defend himself!”

Her eyes were fixed scornfully on Longarm’s apparently emotionless face.

“Oh, he defended himself. Him and his three friends all had a few shots at me before I winged two of them and they lit out.”

“But they didn’t.”

Longarm’s temper finally let go. “Now, you just be good enough to keep quiet a minute, ma’am.”

She looked at him questioningly, and started to say something, but Longarm was already standing up, his back to her. He went to the fire and selected a branch, choosing one that had a good flame at one end and was long enough to serve as a torch.

“you follow along with me, if you feel able to,” he told the woman.

“Follow?” she shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” he assured her.

Longarm waited for her to stand up. She got to her feet by kneeling first. The loose, unfastened skirt dropped away. She stood up quickly and grabbed for the skirt, which lay on the ground. Draping it around her waist, she fumbled for a button or snap, but whatever had secured the garment had been torn off by the dead man. She settled for holding the skirt with one hand as she took a step toward Longarm. He led her toward the edge of the glade.

“Where are we going?” she asked suspiciously.

“Not far, just a few steps over here. There’s something I want you to see.”

Wordlessly, still puzzled, she followed him as he led the way to the shallow grave. By the light of the burning branch, they could see a short-handled spade sticking in the ground beside the pile of dirt that had been taken from the long, narrow excavation.

“Good God!” she gasped, as the significance of the hole’s shape dawned on her. “You’ve already dug a grave for the man you killed! I suppose you’re getting ready to bury him out here in this wild place, without even a prayer?”

“You’re a little bit wrong in what you’re thinking, ma’am.” Longarm kept his voice to a low-keyed, conversational pitch. Very matter-of-factly, he went on, “You see, it wasn’t me that dug this grave. Those men did, sometime after you got here, after they’d made their plans for you while you were on the trail from Fort Smith. They weren’t planning on letting you go free to testify against them, if they got caught after they’d finished with you.”

“You… you mean, that grave was intended for me?” she asked. Her voice was suddenly subdued, its scolding tone gone, and she spoke almost in a whisper.

“Well, now, you stop and think back a minute,” Longarm suggested. “After you and those four rascals stopped here—they said it was time to stop, didn’t they? Getting too dark to see the trail, or something like that?”

“Yes. Something like that. They said it was getting dark and the horses were tiring. We’d left Fort Smith quite early, so I believed them.”

“And after you’d stopped, one of them chopped up some wood, and another one acted like he was taking care of the horses, and one or two of them went off, maybe to look for water? I suspicion he told you there was a spring off this way close by?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Jasper—that’s the one who’s dead—said it Was too Wet closer to the spring for us to stop,” she shook her head. “He wasn’t gone long enough to dig a hole this big, though.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Longarm pulled the shovel out of the soil and pushed it back in, experimentally. “Real soft dirt. Mostly just a thick layer of old, dried leaves and suchlike. And you can see the hole’s not real deep.” He held the torch so the woman could get a better look at the shallow pit.

“I-maybe I’m mistaken about the time. Perhaps he was gone long enough, now that I think back.”

“And while he was gone, I bet the other three kept you busy with stories and jokes and so forth?” Longarm suggested.

Slowly, she nodded. “Yes. Yes, they did. How did you know that?”

“You ain’t the first woman that’s trusted the wrong kind of men, and maybe dropped out of sight along some lonesome trail. Maybe wound up in a hole like this one, where nobody’s likely to find the body for a dozen years or more. Mostly, the kind of men I’m talking about run in bunches of three or four, and it don’t much matter how they do what they got in mind, or where it happens. They pretty generally follow the same style.”

“From the way you talk, you know a great deal about the way these rapists—and I suppose they’re robbers, too—about the way they operate. How do I know you’re not one yourself?” she challenged.

“I guess you don’t, at that.” Longarm pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to show her his deputy U.S. marshal’s badge. “Maybe this’ll set your mind at ease a mite.”

“You’re an officer of the law? A U.S. marshal?”

“Deputy marshal,” he corrected her.

“And you actually shot that man,” she went on, as though he hadn’t spoken. “Shot him without making any sort of effort to warn him to stop?

Without making an effort to arrest him? You just pulled your pistol out and killed him?”

Longarm’s patience ran out. He snapped. “Now, that’s all I want to hear from you along those lines! I wasn’t close enough to use my six-gun, or they’d all four be dead now, instead of just one! They were four-to-one against me, and all of them packed iron. The way that fellow was going after you, once he shut you up with his fist, he’d have been on you and inside you before I opened my mouth. Warning him wouldn’t have stopped him. All it would have done was to give one of the others time to kill me.”

For a moment, the woman stared at Longarm as though seeing him for the first time. She saw a man taller and wider than most, with gunmetal-blue eyes in a tanned face, which was clean-shaven except for a bold, sweeping mustache. In the flickering torchlight, those gunmetal eyes reflected controlled anger.

He said curtly, “Now, if you’ve seen enough of what those four planned for you, let’s go back to the fire. I’ll drag that body out here later on and cover it up, after I go over it to see if that—Jasper, I recall you said his name was—to see if he had another name or two besides the one he told you.”

“And after that?” she asked.

“After that, we’ll talk about what comes next. Now, come along.”

CHAPTER 2

Subdued and silent, the woman walked with Longarm back to the clearing. He tossed the torch on the fire and added two or three more pieces of wood from the fast-dwindling pile of chopped tree limbs. Night had arrived now, its blackness crowding the rim of the glade, held at bay only by the dancing firelight.

Longarm was still angry. He made no effort at conversation, but circled the glade at the perimeter of firelight until he found the deadfall log from which the firewood had been cut. Am axe was still buried in the log. He used it as a lever to roll the deadfall up close to the fire, and quickly cleared the log of its remaining branches. He motioned to the cleared log.

“Might as well sit down,” he told the woman. “We’ve got to talk a mite. I’ll cook up some supper and make coffee after a while. I guess you’ve got some grub and your bedding on that pack mule tethered over yonder?”

“Yes.” She sat down on the log. “I gave those men twenty dollars to buy supplies. They told me they’d buy me a slicker, whatever that is, and a set of blankets. I suppose you’ll find them with the supplies.”

“Time enough for that,” Longarm said.

He hoped there might be a bottle of Maryland rye among the supplies, but he knew the best he could hope for, if there was any whiskey at all, was a bottle of questionable origin, probably the watered-down product of one of the illegal stills in the Indian Nation that supplied half the liquor drunk in the towns along its borders.

“You’ve got a name, I guess,” he told his companion. “Mine’s Long. You’ve already seen my badge, so you know what my business is.”

“I’m Maidia Harkness,” she replied. Then, somewhat tartly, she went on, “If you’d explained to me what sort of pressures you were under in stopping those men, I wouldn’t have been so critical, Marshal. But where I come from, the police don’t act as judge and jury. They arrest criminals and take them to jail, and let the courts decide whether they’re innocent or guilty.”

Longarm decided to let that pass without comment. Instead he asked, “Just where do you come from, Miss Harkness? Or is it Mrs. Harkness?”

“It’s miss. And my home’s in Boston.”

“I knew it was one of them big towns in the East,” Longarm said, nodding. “And this is your first trip to the West?”

“Yes. And I must say, my first impressions of it aren’t very favorable.”

“They’d have been a lot worse if I hadn’t come along when I did,” he reminded her. “That is, if you’d stayed alive to get any kind of impression.”

Maidia shuddered. “Yes. I’m still having trouble believing all this is happening to me, though. I keep waiting to wake up and find myself at home in bed. It’s been something of a nightmare.”

“And pretty much your own fault,” Longarm couldn’t keep himself from replying. “But I can understand why you acted like you did. Back where you come from, there’s people underfoot everyplace you turn, all of them living in the pocket of the fellow standing next to them. And a policeman on every corner to look after them and keep them safe.”

“It’s not quite that simplistic,” Maidia said. For the first time since Longarm had seen her, she smiled. Her face changed completely.

She went on, “Perhaps we have come to depend too much on others for protection, though. We’ve gotten to look on it as automatic, something we buy and take for granted, instead of looking out for ourselves.”

“Why’d you come out here, Miss Harkness?”

Longarm was frankly curious. He’d seen all kinds of people during the years he’d been trying to bring civilized behavior to the raw, untamed West, but the Harkness woman didn’t fit any of the compartments others had filled.

She seemed surprised. “Why, to help, of course.”

“Help who?”

“Those who need help the most. The Indians.”

“I see.” Longarm made a business of blowing the ash off his cheroot. “Did they ask you to come help them?”

“No, of course not. But other social workers have told me about their needs, and I decided that I’d be of more service to them than to the people I’ve been trying to help back home.”

Longarm was puzzled. “I reckon you lost me around that last bend, Miss Harkness. Is that what you do for a living? Just go around helping people?”

“I suppose you could call it that. I’m a social worker, you see.”

“That’s just it,” he frowned. “I don’t see. Now, I guess my business is helping folks by keeping robbers and killers and such behind bars, but from the way you were talking a while ago, you’re just as concerned about helping them as you are about trying to do something for the folks they take advantage of.”

“Everybody has rights in life. Marshal Long, even the ones you call robbers and killers. After all, they’re human beings too.”

Longarm grinned wryly. “After some of the things I’ve run into, I might put up a pretty argument that a lot of them ain’t what you’d call good examples of human beings.”

“Nonsense. Why, you must remember the beautiful words Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence: ‘… that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights.’”

“Oh, I know about the Declaration, sure. Only I disremember its saying anything about a body having a right to rob and maim and kill.”

“You’re evading the issue, Marshal,” she said severely. “Take the Indians. We’ve deprived a great many of them of their lives, and now we’re depriving all of them of their liberty, by shutting them up on reservations like the ones here in the Indian Nation.”

“Well, now I’ve been pretty much all over the reservations here in the Nation. I don’t recall seeing any Indians shut up, except a few that’s turned to thieving from their own people, and killing, and things like that.”

“That’s an old, feeble argument, Marshal. I’ve heard it before, many times. And I expect I’ll hear it again and again, now that I’m out here in the West. Why, this country belonged to the Indians, and we took it away from them by force.”

“I reckon there’s something in what you say. We crowded the Indians so close together that we made whole armies where there were only small raiding parties before. George Custer wouldn’t have found himself in such a pickle if it hadn’t been for that. And there’s plenty who have lied to them and stolen from them and sold them guns and whiskey and gotten filthy rich in the process, and ruined such lives as they had in what they’re pleased to call the Shining Times. I’ve traded shots with Indians, white men, Mexicans, and even Chinese, and I’ve had some of them help me out when I was in a few tight spots, too. There’s some Indians just as greedy and ornery as white folks can be, which is how they lost some of what they had. They took a lot of scalps and tortured a lot of their own people, way back when, over sharing what they’d staked out as their territory.”

“Oh, I’ve heard that, too. Why should they share? The land was theirs.”

“Land’s not worth much to people unless it’s used, ma’am.”

Maidia was getting angry. “We spoil the land! We dig up the soil and cut down the trees and dam up the rivers and kill the animals. The Indians never did things like that!”

Longarm grinned. “You ever see a Comanche buffalo drive? Or a Ponca village after a Pawnee raid?” He hesitated, then added, “I never did see that last myself, but I talked to men who did.”

“I’m not saying the Indians are perfect,” Maidia retorted angrily. “But they certainly didn’t despoil the land and destroy the forests the way we’ve done in the East, and the way people are beginning to do here in the West.”

Longarm sat thoughtfully for a moment, then got up and walked over to the fire. He picked up one of the few remaining long branches that hadn’t been reduced to firewood length, and began to pull the burning sticks out of the fire and stamp them under his boots, driving them into the dirt and extinguishing them.

Maidia watched him for a moment, her face showing her perplexity. Then she began to feel the bite of the night wind that the fire had kept her from noticing before.

“What on earth are you doing?” she asked. “You’re putting out our fire, and I’m getting cold!” Longarm said with great seriousness, “Why, seeing as you’re so dead set against the trees being cut up for firewood, Miss Harkness, I didn’t want you to be embarrassed by sharing any of the heat we been getting from that tree.”

“But we need the fire to be comfortable!” she protested. “If we didn’t”—she stopped short and smiled. The smile became a laugh. She said, “All right, Marshal, you’ve made your point. But I think you exaggerated a little bit, just as I was doing.”

Squatting down, Longarm began rebuilding the blaze. Over his shoulder, he said to her as he worked, “The world might be a prettier place if folks were all considerate to each other, but they ain’t, and that’s why I’ve got this here job of mine. I can’t afford to ponder too much on the way things ought to be—I’ve got to enforce the law, which is about the way things are. And I do my best to enforce the hell out of it. Now, I don’t know anything about you, except you’re a nice-looking young lady, but I’d guess you went to school a lot, and didn’t do much rubbing up against real people. And you sure don’t know much about Indians. Or men, either.”

“I’ll admit I deserved the lesson,” she replied soberly. “I made a very serious mistake in not going to somebody in Fort Smith and asking about those four men I hired. But the man at the livery stable where I went to find out about getting here to the Cherokee Nation seemed to know them, so I just assumed they were all right.”

“Which wasn’t a real smart thing to do,” Longarm pointed out. He added hastily, “Meaning no offense, ma’am. But I’ll see you safe back to Fort Smith, and you can catch a train there to take you back to Boston.”

“I have no intention of going back to Boston,” Maidia said firmly. “I came out here to work with the Indians, and that’s what I intend to do. I appreciate your offer, Marshal Long, but I’ll manage quite well on my own, I’m sure.”

“You know I can’t just ride off and leave you to look out for yourself,” Longarm told her sternly. “Now, I’ll tell you what. You backtrack with me a little ways tomorrow morning. There’s a little place on the river called Webbers Falls, only eight or maybe ten miles from here. I’ll find somebody dependable there to ride with you to wherever you’re going.”

“I have a letter of introduction to a Reverend Miller in some place called Choteau. I found it on the map; it’s quite a distance north. There’s an Indian school there, and I’m hoping to find a place teaching, to begin with.”

“A while back, you said something about being a social worker,” Longarm said. “Guess I don’t rightly know just what that is.”

“Generally, it’s just being helpful to poor people and those who don’t have an education. I’m qualified as a teacher, though, among other things.”

“As long as you got a place waiting, that’ll make me feel better. But how about my proposition, Miss Harkness? Will you go along to Webbers Falls with me, and let me pick out somebody to ride with you and see that you get to Choteau safe and sound?”

“Of course I will. I think it’s very thoughtful of you to offer to help me.” Maidia hesitated for a moment. “I’m afraid I owe you an apology, Marshal. I misjudged your actions earlier—not that I approve of them, you understand—but I’m beginning to see that the standards I’ve been judging things by can’t always be applied to this part of the country.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Longarm assured her. “And meaning no offense again, you sound a lot smarter now than you did when you were ripping me up one side and down the other for what I done. But that’s put behind us, I guess?”

“Yes, I guess it is,” she agreed.

“Good. Now, if we’re going to be comfortable tonight, I’ve got to look after some camp chores. The first one’s to get rid of him.” Longarm nodded at the corpse. “And then I’ll see what I can rustle up in the way of some supper.” Keeping her eyes off the body, Maidia said, “You do what’s necessary. I don’t know much about cooking over a campfire, but I’ll help you as much as I can in getting dinner ready.”

Longarm dragged the late Jasper to the grave that had been intended for Maidia Harkness. He went through the man’s pockets before covering the grave, but found nothing in them that would help identify him, just a few dollars in silver, some crumpled currency, and the usual oddments: a jackknife, a sack of Bull Durham tobacco and cigarette papers, matches, a dollar discount token from a Fort Smith whorehouse, and a gold tooth that he speculated must have come from some past victim. He took off the dead man’s gunbelt and carried it back to the fire.

“You generally carry a bandbox or something like that, don’t you?”

Longarm asked Maidia.

“Of course.”

Longarm handed her the pistol. “Here. Put this someplace handy when you get around to it. Later on, you can swap it for something a little more a lady’s size.”

Maidia pulled back. “A pistol? Oh, not-Why, I couldn’t carry a weapon, Marshal. Even if I felt that I could bring myself to carry one, I don’t know how to shoot it.”

“You can learn. I can teach you all you need to know in ten minutes. The rest is just practicing.”

“No, Marshal Long. I’m sure your intentions are good-“

“Now, you listen to me, Miss Harkness. It’s like you said yourself a minute ago. What you’re used to from back East don’t cut the mustard out here. You ain’t going to find a policeman on every streetcorner that you can look to for help When you need it. Coming right down to cases, you’re apt to be in places where there’s not even any streetcorners for a policeman to stand on. Now, you do what I tell you. Take this Colt and learn which end the bullets come out of.”

Gingerly, Maidia extended her hand and took the weapon. She almost dropped it when Longarm let go of the gunbelt. “My goodness! It’s a lot heavier than I thought it would be.”

“Part of that’s the belt and cartridges. But a gun’s going to be heavy, got to be. I’ll show you a little bit about it later on. Right now, we better get some grub together before both of us starve.”

“I know there’s supposed to be some food on the pack mule,” Maidia said. “But I’m not sure what kind of food. I told you I’m not very good at camp cooking, but I’ll do What I can to help you.”

Rummaging in the packsaddle together, they found a large chunk of beef loin, a half-side of bacon, a dozen or so potatoes, and several big white onions. In small cloth bags, they discovered flour, sugar, black-eyed peas, ground coffee, salt and pepper. There were also a few cans of tomatoes and peaches, a battered frying pan, and a large tin coffeepot. A cylinder of tattered rags had at its core an unlabeled bottle. Longarm pulled the cork and sniffed.

“Whiskey,” he told Maidia. “Either keg stuff, or out of a still on one of the whiskey ranches hereabout. Might be all right, might not be fit to drink. Well take it along and find out.”

“At least we won’t go to bed hungry,” Maidia said, looking at the food they’d found. “If we can get it cooked.”

“Oh, I can fix it so it’s almost fit to eat,” Longarm assured her. “Just don’t look for anything fancy.”

“I’m so hungry I could almost eat it raw,” she replied. “But there ought to be some plates and cups.”

“I got some tin plates in my saddlebag,” he said, “but I only carry one cup. Can’t seem to make room for two. But we’ll get along all right. And there’s water enough for coffee in my canteen. I’d bet there’s a spring close by, but I don’t aim to go looking for it in the dark. We might as well start supper. While it’s cooking, I’ll spread our bedrolls and rustle up a little wood for a breakfast fire.”

Working together—peeling and slicing potatoes, cutting steaks off the piece of beef loin, fixing them on split branches Longarm cut from a sweet gum tree to broil while the potatoes were fried, passing a casual remark about the food, the amount of coffee and water that would make a drinkable brew—brought a relaxation of the tension that until then had prevailed between Longarm and Maidia Harkness. She proved herself a reasonably adept cook, well able to hold up her end of the work.

In a surprisingly short time, they had the steaks over a bed of glowing coals, with the coffeepot sitting on one side of the coals, and potatoes sizzling in the frying pan on the other side. Longarm picked up the bottle of whiskey and held it to the firelight. The liquor showed a deep reddish brown through the clear glass of the bottle. He shook it hard several times, and nodded with satisfaction when no bubbles formed at the surface of the liquid.

“Whoever made it filtered out the fusel oil,” he told Maidia. “At least that’s how it looks. But we’ll just make sure before we try tasting it.”

He pulled the cork and trickled a few drops of liquor into the palm of one hand, set the bottle down, and rubbed the whiskey into the skin of his calloused palm with his fingertips. When he inspected his palm and sniffed at it, he nodded once again.

“It might burn our gullets,” he said, “but it won’t make us sick.”

How can you tell?”

“Wasn’t any oily scum left on my hand,” he explained. “These bootleg stills on the whiskey ranches don’t always have copper worms. If they don’t, and if they don’t get the fire hot enough and keep it going steady, the liquor’ll come out full of fusel oil, and that stuff just turns your stomach inside out. This ain’t what you’d get at a good saloon, but it’s safe enough to drink.”

He took a small swallow. The liquor was still raw, but it wasn’t as bad as he’d been afraid it might be. He held the bottle out to Maidia, and she surprised him by accepting it. She poured a healthy drink into the tin cup they’d taken from Longarm’s saddlebags. Maidia could see by Longarm’s expression that he’d expected her to refuse. She smiled at him.

“I’m not a blue-nosed reformer, Marshal, even if I am a social worker. I enjoy a drink before dinner at home. There’s no reason why one won’t taste as good here in the woods.”

“I’ll take mine right out of the bottle, unless you object,” he said. “I ain’t too fond of the way corn whiskey smells when I drink it out of a cup. I’m a rye drinker, myself.”

“I don’t object, Marshal. And I like rye better than bourbon, too.”

She took a swallow of the liquor and shook her head. “Oh, my! That’s very potent!”

“Pretty strong stuff, all right.” Longarm looked critically at the steaks, and went on, “It’ll be a few minutes before they’re done. I’ll go get our bedrolls and tend to the animals, if you’ll stir the potatoes to keep them from burning.”

During supper, the pair of them found a rising number of things to talk about. Longarm was appalled at Maidia’s conception of the way the Indians in the Nation lived, and the relationships between them and the whites. Like most post-Civil War Easterners, she saw the Indians of the Nation as a new kind of slave to be liberated from the white man’s yoke.

“You don’t really mean the Indians have their own police force?” she asked him at one point, when Longarm mentioned the Indian police.

“y, sure they do, with uniforms and everything. There just ain’t enough of them to cover the whole Nation, that’s all. And the Indian police don’t let sheriffs or town marshals from Texas or Arkansas or Kansas come into their territory, either.”

“But you can, because you’re a federal officer,” Maidia concluded.

“That’s right. U.S. marshals and the army, that’s all the outside lawmen allowed by the Indians into the Nation.”

“But the army keeps the Indians penned up here!” she objected.

“That ain’t quite all the army does, ma’am. Mostly, it keeps the Indian Wars from starting up again. Not against us white folks,” he said hastily, as Maidia was about to break in. “Indians have been fighting each other since way back before history began. But it’s getting to the point now where the Osages will talk to the Cherokees, and a Kiowa won’t try to kill a Cheyenne on sight. Give them a little time, and they’ll settle down like us, to a war every ten or fifteen years instead of just one war that goes on all the time.”

Maidia studied Longarm’s face for a moment, trying to decide whether he was joking or serious. Finally she said, “You really mean that, don’t you, Marshal?”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s the truth.”

“You make the Indians sound so bloodthirsty.”

“I wouldn’t call them that, Miss Harkness. They just don’t put on a lot of false fronts, the way we do.”

“But I’ve always been taught-“

Longarm interrupted her, “I know what you were taught. Most of it was wrong. You’ll see that, after you’ve been in the Nation awhile. No, ma’am, on the whole, there’s not any better people than the Indians. Or smarter, or more truthful. An Indian gives you his word, he won’t go back on it unless you go back on yours first.”

“You’re giving me new ideas, Marshal. I’ll try to remember what you’ve said.”

“You do that. But I reckon I’ve just about talked your ear off. If we’re going to get started at daybreak, we better turn in.”

Longarm busied himself with the fire, banking it for the night, to give Maidia a chance to go off into the bushes without her feeling that he was watching her. He heard her retreating footsteps and heard her returning, and quickly whirled back to the fire, bending to light a cheroot from a twig he picked up from its edge. He held the whiskey bottle out to her.

“I was just about to have my nightcap. You might as well take one, too. You’ll sleep better if you do.”

Obediently, she took a swallow of the liquor. Longarm smiled inwardly when he saw her drinking from the bottle, as he had, instead of looking for a cup. He drank his own good-night tot, and proceeded to make his bedtime arrangements: boots laid flat and covered with his folded coat; his Ingersoll watch and chain, with the mean little derringer attached to the other end of the chain, tacked into a boot. He spread his vest flat by his left shoulder, laid his unholstered Colt on it, and covered the pistol with his hat to shield it from the damp night air. He became aware that Maidia, already in her own bedroll, was watching his methodical preparations with a great deal of interest.

She said, “From the way you’re arranging your things, Marshal, I get the idea you think those men might come back while We’re asleep.”

“They won’t be coming back,” he assured her. “One of them is dead, and two of the others have got bullet holes in them. But if they do show up, or if anybody else does, I’ll be ready.”

“So I see. That will make me sleep a lot better. Good-night, Marshal Long.”

“Good-night, Miss Harkness.”

Longarm watched through slitted eyes until he saw Maidia give up trying to gaze through the darkness. She looked in one direction, then in another, before she finally settled down to sleep. When her face settled into repose and her breathing became deep and even, Longarm closed his own eyes and relaxed. In no time at all, he was also asleep.

CHAPTER 3

Longarm might have been sleeping two minutes or two hours when Maidia’s stifled, startled cry aroused him. He rolled out of his blankets, to his knees, in one swift motion, sweeping aside the hat that covered his Colt. In an instant, the revolver was in his hand. The banked fire gave off the very faintest glow. There was barely enough light for him to see Maidia. She was sitting up in her bedding. Her head was cocked, swiveling slowly from side to side as she peered into the darkness that surrounded them.

“What’s the matter?” Longarm asked her.

“I heard something. A woman screaming somewhere, I think.”

“Funny, I didn’t hear it. And I count myself a light sleeper.”

“Listen!” she said urgently.

He heard the sound then, from far off, a thin wail like the cry of a woman in agony. He said, “That’s just a panther calling. It’s too far off to smell us out.”

“A panther? Isn’t that a kind of lion?”

“They’re cats,” he replied. “Big cats. But they’ll mostly let people alone unless they’re starving, or unless somebody walks up on one unexpected.”

Maidia shuddered. “It sounds so terrible! I’ve broken out in gooseflesh.” She started to stand up, but changed her mind. “Where’s the whiskey bottle, Marshal? I think I need some Dutch courage before I can go back to sleep.”

“I’ll hand it to you,” Longarm said. “I’m already out of MY bedroll.”

He walked gingerly on bare feet to the log where the bottle was sitting, and handed it to Maidia. She drank, gulped, waited a moment, and drank again. Then she handed the bottle to Longarm.

“I’m sorry I woke you up. I guess I’m just nervous, she told him apologetically. “I think I’ll be all right now, though.”

“Sure you will. You’ll drop right off back to sleep.” Longarm went to his own bedroll, rearranged the blankets, replaced the Colt on his vest, and covered it again with his hat. The wind had died as the night deepened and it was no longer so cold. Just the same, he tossed a few sticks of wood on the fire, thinking the light might add to Maidia’s peace of mind. Then he crawled back between the blankets. He’d hardly had time to settle down when Maidia called him again.

“Marshal?”

“I’m right here. What’s troubling you?”

“Would you”—she hesitated for a moment—“Would you think I was being terrible if I asked to come over there with you?”

It was the last question Longarm had expected someone like Maidia Harkness to ask. He took his time in answering.

“If you’re sure that’s what you want to do,” he told her.

“I’m sure. I know what I’m saying. I’m not a child.”

“Come on over and welcome, then.”

Maidia slipped out of her bedroll and pattered across the few feet that separated them. By the light of the freshened fire, Longarm could see that she’d left her skirt in her own blankets. She had on only a blouse that fell to her waist. Her molded thighs gleamed pink-white. She stood briefly beside his bedroll, and Longarm lifted the corner of his blanket. Maidia eased under it beside him.

“I don’t need to apologize for asking to join you, do I? You’re not the kind of man who’d expect that,” she whispered.

“You don’t need to apologize or explain or anything else,” he told her. “Anybody’s likely to feel nerved up the first time or two they try to sleep outdoors.”

“I was all right until that panther yowled. I was dreaming—well, I won’t tell you what—I was dreaming.”

“Like I said, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

Longarm was very conscious of the warmth that was reaching him from Maidia’s nearly naked body. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but made no move to do so. He didn’t want to do or say anything until he was sure what she had in mind. “It was the dream as much as the panther that Maybe woke me up,” she said softly. “But—if it hadn’t been for the panther, I might not have awakened and realized that I didn’t have to be satisfied with just a dream.”

Her hand crept out of the covers to caress Longarm’s cheek. She ran her palm across his chin, his day-old beard rasping gently as she pressed harder. Then her fingers strayed up to explore the sweep of his mustache.

Not until Maidia’s lips replaced her fingers did Longarm move to touch her in return. He brought one of his hands up from her knee, along the satin skin of her thigh and over her hip, and slid it under the edge of her loose blouse. His fingers brushed across her breast and found a nipple, hardening now, unfolding slowly until it stood firm and solid under his gently pinching fingertips.

“Oh, yes,” she whispered. “Do that. And then, some more.” She rolled closer to him, and Longarm felt the weight of her thigh resting on his.

Maidia’s tongue was pushing Longarm’s lips apart, and he joined his tongue to hers. He was springing erect quickly. Her hand had left his face now, and was stroking his groin, feeling him grow hard under its grasp. Longarm released Maidia’s breast long enough to thumb open the buttons of his fly and let her hand find his bare, throbbing flesh. She closed her hand around him, and he felt her body ripple in a small, satisfied shudder.

“I like what I’ve got in my hand,” she said softly. “That’s what I was dreaming about, you know.”

“And then you woke up.”

“Yes. But I know how the dream would have ended. And I’m glad I woke up when I did.” Maidia squeezed him, not too gently. “This feels a lot better to me than any dream could.”

“There’s a way to make it feel better than it does now.”

Longarm slid his hand between Maidia’s thighs and fingered the warm wetness that was waiting for him there.

“Don’t hurry me, Marshal. I’m enjoying hefting you right this minute, and the longer I wait, the more I’m going to like it when it gets to where it belongs.” She shifted her head a bit and began nibbling on Longarm’s earlobe.

“You take your time, Miss Harkness.”

Maidia’s laughter exploded in Longarm’s ear. Between chortles, she said, “That sounds so funny, I can’t help myself. Here we are, with me holding onto this beautiful thing for dear life, and you with your fingers in me, and I’m calling you Marshal Long and you’re calling me Miss Harkness. Don’t you think we ought to be a little bit more informal before we really get serious? You could call me Maidia, you know.”

“I was waiting for you to tell me I could, Maidia.”

“And you must have a first name?” Maidia was tonguing Longarm’s ear and squeezing him at the same time.

“It’s Custis. But I don’t answer to it much. Mostly, my friends call me Longarm.”

“Not just of the law, either,” she whispered. “Long something else, too, or my fingers are lying to me.”

“You think you’re about ready to find out if they are?”

“Yes.” She positioned him. “Go ahead. Show me.”

Longarm showed her, deliberately and slowly, pressing into her with neither haste nor hesitation, feeling her breath come faster as he penetrated more deeply until they were fully joined.

“Mmm,” Maidia murmured in his ear. “No dream could ever equal what I feel now.” She moved her hips from side to side. “Just lie still for a minute or two. I want to do it myself first. You won’t get anxious, will you?”

“Not a bit. You do what you feel like doing. I can wait.”

“I can’t, though. I need to”—Maidia twisted more violently as she spoke—“I need to get my edge off so I can enjoy it more later.” She was beginning to work her hips back and forth. “Then, when you get on me, I can-I can”—she shook in a long, shuddering convulsion—“I can hold on longer.”

Her voice faded in a sighing murmur, and the tenseness of her muscles melted away. Longarm felt her wetness trickling down his groin. He lay quietly for a few moments until Maidia sighed contentedly and stirred, then he rocked his own hips gently. She shifted her body to let him roll on top of her, and raised her thighs, locking her legs around his hips.

“You read my mind,” she said. “Now make the dream I didn’t finish come to life.”

Longarm was in no hurry. He moved slowly, staying in her deeply until her inner muscles began throbbing against him. Then he began to thrust, withdrawing slowly and returning fast. Maidia gasped the first time she felt him pounding into her, but as the moments passed and Longarm showed no signs of slowing his pace, her excitement grew. She brought her hips up to meet his thrusts, her body heaving and turning under his, until the pace grew too much for her to maintain. She sank back under his weight and let her legs fall, spreading them wide to receive his strokes, her head pressed hard into the ground, her neck arched, her chin high in the air.

Longarm stopped thrusting. “You want to rest awhile?”

“I’m resting,” she said gustily. “You go on. This is the dream I don’t want to wake up from a man on top of me, making love to me like he’ll never stop. Oh, I do love it, Longarm! But it’s usually over so quickly that I miss the best part, just feeling a man big and hard in me while I lie back and enjoy it. You go on as long as you can. And you’ll know when something wonderful’s going to happen to me. Don’t worry about that.”

Longarm went on. As he continued, pounding deeply into her wet, hot depths, the very relaxation of Maidia’s unresponsive body began to excite him. He felt himself building, and slowed to hold back. Maidia caught the change in his tempo.

“You’re getting tired,” she said. “Go on a little longer, if you can. I’m getting ready to come back to life.”

Now Longarm no longer tried to keep from letting himself build. He was reaching the stage where he was about to lose control, when Maidia jerked under his pounding as though she had just awakened from a faint. She began to tremble. Her legs tensed and locked around his hips again. She rode with him as the pressure inside him mounted and reached the bursting point. Longarm gave a few last, fierce plunges while Maidia screamed as the panther had screamed earlier. She shook, her hips heaving, her body writhing, as Longarm stiffened and fell forward with a sigh.

Neither Longarm nor Maidia spoke for several moments. Then she said, “I’m glad I spoke up, Longarm. I almost didn’t but if I hadn’t, have, would you?”

“Not after the bad time you had earlier, with that fellow trying to rape you.”

“Well, that wasn’t very good, of course. I don’t like to be treated like a thing, and that’s what he was doing. And I’m sorry I tore into you the way I did. It was stupid, but I didn’t know what had really happened. But you must have forgiven me, or you’d have said no when I asked if I could come into bed with you.”

“You’re wrong, Maidia. I figured, at the first, you just needed to be with somebody for comforting. After all, a lady like you-“

“There aren’t any ladies,” Maidia interrupted. “Just women. And we’ve all got that tickle between our legs, just like you men have. Only most of you are honest about it. Most women aren’t.” She yawned. “I guess I’m ready to go back to sleep now. It’s all right if I stay, isn’t it?”

“Why, I ain’t about to let go of you,” Longarm said with a wide grin. “I want to be where you can reach me easy if that panther wakes you up again.”

Maidia went to sleep quickly, her head resting on Longarm’s sturdy shoulder. He lay awake for a while, wondering if the panther might scream again, and trying to figure out how he was going to manage to get to Fort Smith on time after promising Maidia he’d see that she found a guide to get her safely to Choteau. He gave that up, deciding to leave it to chance. Then his mind turned to the case he was on.

You got a real pig in a poke here, old son, he told himself for the tenth time since Vail had explained his assignment to him. Just how in hell Billy expects me to come up with what him and his Arkansas District friend wants is way past anything I can see. I’ve got a sneaking hunch that Arkansas’s chief marshal’s just looking for somebody to blame when this business all goes up in smoke.

Vail had been unusually vague when he’d explained to Longarm why it was so important that he go to the Indian Nation. All he’d said was that there was a chance that whoever had been trying to spring Cole Younger from the federal pen in the Indian Nation had to be somebody close to the James gang, and might even be Jesse himself. Then, when Longarm had suggested that the Arkansas chief marshal had plenty of deputies who knew a lot more about the Nation than Longarm did, Vail had pulled rank and snapped, “Damn it, this is a case I’m putting you on, and I expect you to take it without any back-talk, just like any other case! Now, is that plain enough to suit you?”

“It couldn’t be much plainer, Billy,” Longarm had replied. “I still feel like it’s something for the locals to handle, but if you want me to go to the Nation, that’s where I’m heading.”

“Fine. It’s all settled, then,” Vail had said curtly.

And that was that, Longarm thought. Not like the way Billy’s been before, when I could talk things out with him friendly. But there’s something to this that he ain’t told me yet. I’ll just have to keep eating the old apple a bite at a time, and maybe I’ll find out what it is when I get down to the core.

He lay awake for a while after that, but the panther didn’t scream again. After a while, Longarm went to sleep.

Sunrise found Longarm and Maidia Harkness halfway to Webbers Falls. They’d ridden, for the most part, in silence. Maidia was still tired from the harrowing events of the day before; she hadn’t liked getting up in the dark and riding breakfastless except for a few bites of hard jerky. Longarm wasn’t too happy, either. He faced losing a half-day of travel time in order to keep his promise to Maidia. That meant he’d have to push hard to make it up in getting on to Fort Smith. There, he knew, the chief marshal had already been notified, by a telegram from Vail, to expect him.

If it wasn’t for that damn wire, he thought, looking at Maidia’s sleepy face as she bobbed along on the horse beside him, I’d be right tempted to turn around and go up to Choteau with her. Let the Arkansas deputies waste their time nosing around trying to get a smell of Jesse James’s trail.

Even while the thought was passing through his mind, Longarm knew he’d pull no such fool stunt. He’d never turned his back on his duty, and he wasn’t about to start now, no matter how much of a fool’s errand he figured an assignment to be.

Webbers Falls nestled on the west bank of the Arkansas, but a flat-bottomed ferryboat that plied between the two banks of the river got them safely across. On the ferry, Maidia asked Longarm, “What are you going to do about the mule and the two horses we seem to have acquired?

They don’t belong to US.”

“They didn’t, but it looks like they do now. Only not to us, Maidia. To you. You were the one paying the freight for the outlaws that ganged up on you. I’d say you’re entitled to keep them, as sort of compensation for what they put you through.”

“Would that be honest, Longarm?”

“I don’t see why not. If you’d found a silver dollar in the road and there wasn’t any way to prove it belonged to anybody, and you didn’t know who’d passed that way, wouldn’t you keep it?”

“Yes, I suppose I would.”

“all right, then. Keep the horses and the mule. If you don’t want them after you get where you’re going, sell them off, or trade them. If you’re real anxious to get shed of them, chances are I can fix up a swap with somebody in the town there to guide you where you’re going and take one of the critters for his pay.”

“You don’t think I ought to turn them in to the police, then?”

“What police? You might see an Indian policeman in Choteau, but chances are that’s the only law you’ll run into between here and there.”

“Go ahead and trade, then. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’m going to need a horse for myself. And I suppose the mule wouldn’t be much trouble to keep, in this kind of country.”

“Not if you’re going to be working at an Indian school, it wouldn’t. Well, we’ll have to see what I can dicker out for you when we get ashore. But I don’t suspicion there’ll be much trouble.”

Longarm’s prediction turned out to be correct. Webbers Falls didn’t offer much except a general store and a small sawmill powered by a waterwheel; the rest of the town consisted of a couple of dozen houses, mostly those of the families of men working at the sawmill. Longarm showed his badge to the proprietor of the store and described the kind of man he was looking for, and the job that needed to be done. The proprietor scratched his head for a moment.

“Guess Jared Phillips is the man you better talk to before you try anybody else. Jared traps up and down the rivers, so he’d know the land and the trails. And he’s old enough so you wouldn’t need to worry about him being flighty.”

Jared Phillips wasn’t just old, Longarm discovered; he was ancient—one of those wizened little men who seems to have an inexhaustible supply of energy, and appears destined to live forever. He was spry enough, though, and interested in taking on the job of guiding Maidia to Choteau in return for the spare horse.

“Yessir, Marshal, I’d be right glad to make a swap like that,” he chirruped. “Trapping ain’t much right now and a horse’d sure be a help to me in winter, when I go to set out my lines. And I get along just fine with the Cherokee people. My last wife was Cherokee, which makes me sorta kin to ‘em, I guess they figure. So I’ll take on the job, if you and the lady agree.”

Shortly after noon, having seen Maidia and her new escort safely on their way to Choteau, Longarm was ready to resume his own interrupted trip. He’d planned, when leaving Fort Gibson, on being able to get to Fort Smith in two full days of travel. He was running about a half-day behind. Still, he now thought he might be able to make up most of the lost time. By pushing on a little bit harder than he’d planned, he had a chance of pulling into Fort Smith around midnight.

Unfortunately, his calculations didn’t take ferry schedules into consideration. The last boat leaving the slip at Little Juarez on the west side of the Arkansas River pulled out at midnight, and he missed it by a full half-hour. He soon found that his luck wasn’t altogether bad, though. There were always a few travelers who got to the slip just a little bit too late to catch the last ferry, and taking care of their needs between midnight and dawn had created a major industry in the settlement called Little Juarez, which had grown up around the landing.

Longarm found a saloon that not only had a good stock of prime Maryland rye, but a passable free lunch. There was a livery stable where he left his horse, and a barbershop that stayed open all night and offered hot baths in addition to the usual tonsorial services. A short stay at the saloon—just long enough to get a snack at the free lunch counter and three healthy shots of biting-good whiskey—prepared Longarm for an hour’s soaking in a hot tub, followed by a shave and a trim in the barbershop. Then he had only another couple of hours to kill at the saloon, with all the ingredients at hand to make the killing of time a pleasant occupation.

When he led his horse off the ferryboat the next morning, Longarm felt fairly chipper. He mounted the animal for the short ride up Front Street to the old army headquarters building that had been turned into offices for the Arkansas Federal District. It was too early for Andy Gower, the chief marshal, to be in his office, so Longarm backtracked to a restaurant he’d noticed on the way to the federal building, where he dawdled over a leisurely breakfast and a succession of cups of chicory-laced coffee until he judged the hour was late enough. This time, he found Gower in his office, at a desk piled almost as high with paperwork as Billy Vail’s always seemed to be.

Gower was a thin, rangy man with long eyebrows that hung down over chilly gray eyes set in a weatherbeaten face ending in a long lantern jaw. In defiance of the current style, he was clean-shaven. He wore a black-and-white checkered shirt with a puffed-out black cravat in which a diamond stickpin gleamed. A black Prince Albert coat, the mate to Longarm’s, hung on a coat tree in one corner of the office, with a pistol belt looped over the hanger that supported the coat.

“You’re Long, I suppose,” Gower snapped before Longarm could introduce himself. “My clerk said you’d been here earlier, looking for me.”

“That’s right. It was a little bit early, I guess.”

“Early, hell! You were supposed to be here yesterday. I guess you got in during the evening and spent the night tom-catting around the saloons and whorehouses instead of reporting in.”

“Matter of fact, I got to the river too late to get on the last ferryboat. And I was too damn tired to report last night, even if I’d made it into town.”

“All right, sit down.” Gower pushed aside the papers he’d been working on. “Now that you’re finally here, I suppose you’re ready to go to work?”

Longarm traded stares with his temporary boss. Right at that moment, he’d decided that this case wasn’t going to be one he’d enjoy working on. If the greeting he’d gotten from his temporary superior was a fair sample, Gower was a man he was prepared to dislike.

CHAPTER 4

“I came to work,” Longarm replied at last. He kept his voice level and expressionless. “Billy Vail didn’t give me a lot to go on. Only thing he said was that the grapevine’s put Jesse James at some kind of outlaw hangout over in the Cherokee Nation.”

“That’s about all we’ve got,” Gower affirmed. “I’ve been getting reports that there’s a lot more activity than usual going on at Belle Starr’s place. I guess you’ve heard about Belle? Calls herself the Bandit Queen?”

“I’ve heard her name, that’s about all,” Longarm answered. “And I know she operates in the Nation. But if you’ve got the time to pass on whatever I’d need to know about her and whoever she runs with, I’d sure like for you to.”

Honey, old son, Longarm kept telling himself as he looked at Gower. Honey catches more flies than vinegar.

Gower had taken out a pouch of Bull Durham and papers, and was rolling himself a cigarette. He took his time, jogging the flakes of tobacco evenly, wrapping the paper tight, licking the seam, twisting the ends of the completed cylinder. Then he touched a match to the finished smoke. Longarm thought most of the men he’d ever seen smoking cigarettes looked sissified; he noted with mild surprise that Gower did not. Just the opposite, in fact.

Longarm countered by extracting a cheroot from his vest pocket and lighting it. The blue smoke from the cigar and the white, acrid smoke from the cigarette began to fume up the office, and, after a few moments, Gower started talking.

“There’s a chance you might have heard about Belle Starr by another name. Belle’s had so damn many names since she started out that I don’t think she remembers all of them herself. You ever heard of a woman bandit that called herself Belle Reed? Or Belle Shirley? Or maybe even Belle Younger?”

Longarm shook his head. “I must’ve missed all them names. It’s the same Belle, though, I take it?”

“Same Belle,” Gower nodded. He took a final drag on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of thin smoke, then tossed the butt into a cuspidor that stood handy at the corner of his desk. “Since you’re new to this district, I suppose the first thing to do is to go back to the beginning.”

“Might be, at that.” Longarm settled himself back to listen.

“As far as my boys and I have been able to find out,” the chief marshal began, “Belle’s real name is Myra Belle Shirley. At least, that’s how she started life. Her folks were from Missouri, up somewhere around Carthage, which would make them neighbors to the Jameses and the Youngers. Matter of fact, there’s some kind of connection between the Shirleys and the Youngers—second cousins twice removed, or something—one of those vague family things that goes back God knows how many years since there was any close kinship. But the Youngers stayed in Missouri when the Shirleys moved to Texas, sometime back in the late sixties or early seventies. Belle’s folks still live up in North Texas, somewhere around Fort Worth or Dallas.”

“That’d explain how Belle got tied up with Cole Younger, then?” Longarm asked when Gower paused to start rolling another cigarette. “And you and Billy happened onto the connection when you went to talk to Cole Younger in the pen at Stillwater?”

“Damn it, Long, don’t start guessing!” Gower snapped. “I knew about the connection before we talked to Cole Younger. Belle claims she was married to Cole when she was just a young girl, and she makes no bones about telling everybody Cole’s the daddy of her daughter Pearl. Pearl’s about eleven or twelve years old now. I guess you know that Cole was one of Jesse James’s bunch before he got caught and landed in the pen.”

“I don’t have to guess about that,” Longarm said shortly. “Everybody knows it.”

“I suppose so. Well,” Gower went on, “Belle had a whole string of husbands—or men she said were her husbands—after Cole pulled out of Texas and went back with the James gang. The thing is, Belle can’t seem to get Cole Younger out of her craw. Maybe that’s because, as far as we can tell, he’s the first man that ever got to her. It happened that time when Cole and Jesse were visiting with the part of the Younger family that had moved to Texas and were living close to Belle’s folks.”

“Billy Vail told me somebody’s been trying real hard to get Cole sprung out of the pen,” Longarm said. “I got the idea that’s one reason you two went to talk to him. You were afraid he might get out and join up with Jesse again.”

“No, damn it, no! We went to offer to let Younger out if he’d lead us to where Jesse and Frank are hiding right now. You know the prison grapevine, Long. I’m dead sure Younger could lead us to the James boys’ hideout. But he won’t. Said so, flat out. But you are right about one thing. It is Belle Starr who’s been trying to get Cole sprung. She’s been working at that ever since he got locked up. Even while she was married to Jim Reed and Blue Duck and whoever else she was really married to before she hitched up with Sam Starr. And she’s still trying, right this minute.”

“Blue Duck would be one of Belle’s husbands, I guess? Sounds to me like he’s an Indian.”

“Was Indian. Cherokee. So was her first husband—not counting Cole Younger, that is. Right after Cole left Texas, she married this breed, Jim Reed. And Starr’s part Cherokee, too.”

“I’d say Belle’s got a soft spot for Indian studs,” Longarm observed with a smile.

“She’s got a soft spot—and it’s right between her legs—for any man with a hard to poke in it,” Gower said.

“You think Jesse James ever poked into it?”

“He probably did, if she got him off alone with her,” Gower replied. Then he added, “When you come right down to it, Long, the only time we’re sure Belle ever saw Jesse was when Cole Younger took him to Texas on that visit he made to his family. And since it was that time when Cole and Belle first met, I doubt that Jesse had a look-in. There’s a rumor that Jesse hid out for a while at Belle’s place over in the Nation when she first moved there, but that’s the kind of rumor you come to look for when you’re dealing with the James boys. Shit! It wouldn’t surprise me if somebody started a rumor that Jesse’s disguised himself and got a job as one of my deputies!”

“I guess folks are willing to believe almost anything about the Jameses,” Longarm commented.

“Looks that way,” Gower agreed. “To get back to what I was telling you, Jim Reed got killed in a shootout down in Texas, and Blue Duck married Belle the other way around—and a little while after that, Blue Duck got bushwhacked and killed. Then Belle took up with a bad one by the name of Jack Spaniard, but he made some mistakes that put him on the wrong end of a hangman’s rope. Her last one before Sam Starr was a burglar, Jim French, but he got shot while he was trying to break into a store. That brings us up to when Belle married Sam Starr.”

Longarm’s whistle when Gower paused was low and long-drawn. “I’d say the lady really has bad luck with the men she picks out. If she was to wag her butt my way, I’d pass her by.”

“If you had any sense, you’d do that after you took one look at her,” Gower told him. “Now, Sam Starr’s part Cherokee, as I mentioned. He’s got a land allotment from the tribe down at the south end of the Cherokee Strip, on the Canadian, close to a little town called Eufaula. That’s where he and Belle make their headquarters now. They call it Younger’s Bend.”

“Named for Cole Younger, I take it?”

“Oh, I’m sure Belle picked out the name. I told you, she’s still got a soft spot for Cole. They’ve built a house there, and a few cabins. Our trouble is, the lay of the land makes it just about impossible for us to watch the place. The river’s on one side, with high bluffs running down to the water, the house on top of the bluffs, and a little narrow valley the only way to get to the place. Maybe you’ll be better than my boys at figuring out a way to scout the place when you get there.” Longarm said mildly, “I didn’t know I was going there.”

“You do now,” Gower retorted.

“It’s all the same to me, where I go,” Longarm said levelly. “Or who I bring in. What’s this Belle Starr wanted for?”

Gower snorted, “Hell! I don’t want Belle. She’s a nobody, and so is Sam. They’re out now on bail on a cattle-rustling charge. If I wanted them, I’d just have them picked up. That’s the biggest charge I could hold them on, though. No, Long, it’s that bunch of crooks who use the Starr place as a hideout that I’m after. Half the men on my wanted list right now work out of Younger’s Bend. About all Belle does is give them a safe place to hide out and help them get rid of what they steal.”

“She’s a fence, then, instead of a bandit queen?”

“Of course. If I wanted Belle, I could have her picked up any time she rides into Fort Smith on that big black horse she fancies. Oh, Belle puts on a real show! Dolls herself up in a long velvet dress, wears a pair of ivory-handled, silver-plated Smith & Wessons. But it’s all blow and no go with Belle, except when it comes to getting rid of the loot her boarders bring in.”

“It’d help if I knew what kind of loot she deals in,” Longarm suggested.

“Cattle, mostly,” Gower replied. “Some jewelry and trinkets from burglaries and stagecoach stickups. Except for the cattle, Belle doesn’t handle much but penny-ante stuff. The owlhoots that use Younger’s Bend as a hideout—well, that’s another matter. They’re waist-deep in damn near everything. Bank robberies, train holdups, stagecoach stickups, rustling, you name it. Belle’s only dangerous because she provides them with a place to hole up between jobs, and helps them get rid of what they’ve stolen.”

“If the place is as bad as you say, it looks to me like your best bet would be just to go in with a good force and clean it out,” Longarm suggested. “After all, it’s in your jurisdiction.”

“I didn’t ask you for advice, Long. Apparently you don’t know much about our jurisdictional problem in this district. You ought to, damn it. Billy told me you’d had some assignments in the Nation.”

“Two or three. Sure, I know the Indian police force has got the primary jurisdiction, and they don’t like outside lawmen coming in, even when they’re federals, like we are. I’ve run into that in the cases I’ve handled there. I know that about the only time we can go into the Indian Nation without being invited is when we’re on a chase after some owlhoot who’s just committed a crime covered in federal statutes.”

“That’s the shifty part of it!” Gower growled. “So far, we haven’t had a chance to go after any of the Younger’s Bend bunch in a hot-pursuit situation. But there’s more to the Younger’s Bend mess than that. Sam Starr or Belle—and I guess it was Belle’s idea, because she’s got most of the brains—worked out some kind of deal with the Cherokee Tribal Council. Belle calls it a treaty, which would put Younger’s Bend on a level with the U.S. as an independent nation. The treaty says that the Younger’s Bend bunch won’t pull off anything in the Cherokee Strip if the Indian Police will leave them alone. Hell, Long, I’ll never get an invitation from the police over there to come in, as long as that agreement stands!”

For the first time, Longarm felt a flicker of sympathy for Gower. He said thoughtfully, “I see the kind of bind you’re in, but I sure hope you’re not looking to me to work it out for you.”

“If I can’t work it out as chief marshal, I don’t see how you could as a deputy on temporary assignment here,” Gower replied impatiently. “That’s not why I asked Billy to send me his top man, Long. I’ve talked to you enough now so I feel safe in telling you the real reason you’re here.”

“Thanks. I’d sort of like to hear it.”

Gower went to the door of his office, opened it, and looked both ways along the corridor. He came back and sat down. Leaning over his desk, he dropped his voice and said, “That bunch at Younger’s Bend is in so many things and gets away with so much that I’ve got a suspicion a bunch of local marshals and sheriffs are in cahoots with them.”

“You mean they’re being paid off?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Belle’s like any other fence, Long. She’s got to have room to work in. The only way a fence can buy that kind of room is by paying off somebody to look the other way when she’s making her deals. And once a man on our side of the law begins taking payoffs, it’s not long before he’s taking money to be out of town when a gang rides in to rob a bank. It starts with the fence, but it’s not long in spreading.”

“I ain’t aiming to embarrass you, Marshal Gower,” Longarm said carefully. “But I’d be interested in knowing how far it’s spread.”

Gower stared at Longarm, his face set grimly. He dropped his voice as he answered. “Yes, you’re right, Long. You do need to know how far it’s gone. Well, I’ve got a suspicion, without a damned shred of evidence to back it up, that some of my own deputies have sold out to Belle Starr and her gang.”

Longarm studied Gower’s face for a moment, trying to find some expression in the chief marshal’s pale eyes. There was none, but Gower’s face had undergone a subtle change. His long chin was no longer out-thrust pugnaciously, and his bushy brows were not pulled together in a scowl now.

Before Longarm could say anything, Gower went on, “That’s what I want you to find out, Long. If my suspicions are right, I’ve got to clean up my own office here before I can do anything about that running sore over in the Nation. And I had to find out whether you could keep yourself in hand when the going gets rough before I was sure you were the man to help me do the job.”

“But you’ve made up your mind now?” Longarm asked.

“Yes. I’m sorry for the bad time I gave you when we first began talking. But you’ll understand, I had to know what kind of man you are before I could open up and tell you the whole story.”

For several minutes Longarm said nothing. He was digesting the fact that the rough reception he’d gotten had been Gower’s way of testing him out, making sure he’d be able to put a curb on his tongue and a rein on his temper when he was taking a rawhiding.

Finally he said, “No offense taken, Marshal Gower. I guess it was about the only way you had to check me out.”

“It was the only way I could see. Now the air’s cleared between us. How do you feel about it?”

“Better than I did for a while there. I’m just trying to figure out where my starting place is. You don’t know if all your men are straight, or who the sell-outs might be, if there are any. So what I’ve got on my plate is to find out who the rotten apples are.”

“I wish I didn’t have to agree with you, Long, but I do. I’ve watched my men for the past four or five months, since things first started going sour. Prisoners escaping, evidence not brought in, witnesses dropping out of sight. It smells, but I can’t get down to the source of the stink. You know how easy it is for an honest mistake of a deputy to cause a case to go sour.”

Longarm answered. “I guess I ought to. I’ve made some mistakes like that, now and again.”

“Well, that’s not what Billy tells me, but we won’t go into that. The point is that I can’t accuse one of my own deputies of being paid off by Belle unless I’ve got absolute, ironclad proof. I’m in pretty much the same spot when it comes to accusing a town marshal or a sheriff or sheriff’s deputy. If I’m not sure, I can’t do anything but keep quiet, no matter what I might suspect.”

“Sure. I can see that. It’s about the only fair way a man in your position could act. From what Billy’s told me, you’ve got some pretty good men on your force here.”

“Of course I have. And it looks like I’ve got a few bad ones, too,” Gower said. He hesitated before adding, “Look here, Long, I know this is a hell of a job for me to ask you to take on. You’ll see why I can’t turn any of my boys loose on it, though. I’ve been tempted to, but there’s always the chance that I might pick out the wrong one and blow the whole deal to hell.”

“That’s as good a reason as I can see for holding off,” Longarm concurred.

“Billy Vail’s the only one I’ve talked to about it. I used that rumor about Jesse James trying to buy Cole Younger’s way out of the pen to give me a reason for meeting Billy in Stillwater, where we could talk without worrying about somebody overhearing,” Gower said. “I was surprised, though. Billy took my Jesse James story seriously.”

“I can tell you why that was,” Longarm said. “Billy found out that Jesse and Frank James and three of their men hid out right under his nose, not fifty miles from Denver, over around Leadville, a while back. He never has got over missing that chance to take them.”

“Funny,” Gower frowned. “I never heard about that.”

“Billy damn sure wouldn’t mention it,” Longarm said. “There wasn’t any way he could’ve known the Jameses were in his territory, of course. They didn’t pull any jobs, and nobody’d ever have known who they were if some old friend of theirs from Missouri hadn’t spotted them. But he kept quiet until they’d been gone three or four months.”

“I’ll sure have to josh Billy about that, the next time I see him,” Gower said. He smiled for the first time. “I can see how it’d rankle on him, of course, knowing he had Jesse in reach and missing him.”

“Hell, it rankles on me a little bit, too,” Longarm told Gower. “But I guess anybody on the right side of the law would relish a chance to meet up with James and his gang.”

“Well, I don’t expect you to find Jesse James at Younger’s Bend, Long. Still, if the old story’s true and Jesse actually did use Belle’s place as a hideout once, there’s the outside chance that he might come back there.”

“I won’t count on it. Fact of the matter is, I don’t see that I can count on much of anything. The only thing I’m hoping is that I don’t run into some owlhoot I’ve brought in someplace else, somebody who might recognize me.”

“I’ve thought about that, too. That’s one of the things that can get your neck into a noose on any orders or instructions, Long. From what Billy’s told me, you’ve got your own way of handling your cases, and I wouldn’t want to cramp your style. I don’t expect you to report to me until the case is closed, but you know that if you get into a bind, I’ll do whatever I can to get you out of it.”

Longarm lighted another cheroot before replying. Puffing out a cloud of smoke, he said thoughtfully, “I guess the only way to start eating an apple is to take the first bite, and that’s to see how the land lays at Younger’s Bend. You say it’s right on the Canadian River?”

Gower nodded. “Just to the southeast of a little town called Eufaula. It’s a long day’s ride from here, but if you get an early start-“

“Now, I sure don’t aim to set out today. I had a bellyful of horseback travel getting here from Fort Gibson, and all the sleep I got last night was in a bathtub at that little place by the ferryboat landing across the river.”

Gower pulled open a drawer of his desk and took out a drawstring pouch made of buckskin. He tossed it across the desk. The pouch landed in front of Longarm with a metallic clunk.

“I told Billy I’d be responsible for your expenses while you’re on this case. Too damn much red tape, routing requisitions through the Denver office, and you can’t be running in here every week or so to fill out vouchers. There’s five hundred in gold in that bag.” Longarm’s eyebrows rose as Gower continued, “Bring back what you don’t use and write one voucher on what you’ve spent when the case is closed. I won’t argue about how big the voucher is.”

“Thanks.” Longarm nodded. “I’ll make sure you get good value.”

“I know you will,” Gower replied. “Now, anything else you need?”

“Oh, I picked up an ordnance map before I took off from Fort Gibson. It’s old, but it shows the hills and streams, and that’s all I need to get me by.” Longarm stood up. “I’ll be moving, then, Marshal Gower. You’ll hear from me when you hear from me, I guess, but don’t look for it to be anytime soon.”

“Whenever you get a chance to send word,” Gower said. “And good luck, Long.” Somewhat grimly, he added, “I’m pretty sure you’ll need it.”

On the boardwalk outside the federal building, Longarm stood for a moment, taking stock. All he really needed was sleep. He mounted and started to look for a hotel. As he headed down Front Street, an idea struck him. His business in Fort Smith was finished, and if he wanted to get an early start for Younger’s Bend tomorrow, he’d have to take the last ferry across the Arkansas before midnight, or delay his start until the first boat made the crossing, and that wouldn’t be until six the next morning.

There ain’t any reason for me to waste the best part of a day, he told himself. That little town over across the river in the Nation’s got all I need and the saloon there Pours as good a Maryland rye as any I’m likely to find here in Arkansas.

Instead of continuing toward the buildings of Fort Smith, he reined the horse around in the middle of the deserted street and headed back in the direction of the ferry landing.

That river’s got to be crossed sooner or later, old son, he thought as his army mount clattered over the brick-paved street, And it won’t be one inch narrower tomorrow morning than it is right now.

CHAPTER 5

Longarm’s mental alarm clock jerked him into wakefulness. It was still pitch dark, and the room in the small hotel he’d found in Little Juarez was totally silent. There was no sound beyond the door leading to the hallway, no rumbling of wagon wheels or clumping of hooves was audible through the half-open window.

Reaching for his vest, draped over the back of a chair pulled close to the bed, Longarm fingered his watch from its pocket and snapped open the case before lighting one of the matches he’d laid beside the base of the lamp that stood in the seat of the chair. The watch confirmed the message his mind had sent him. it was four o’clock—time to be up and on the trail. By the time he’d dressed, had a quick breakfast, and picked up the horse he’d rented at the livery stable around the corner from the hotel, dawn would be slitting the eastern sky.

He lifted the lamp chimney and touched the match to the wick before the flame got to his fingertips. Light bathed the room. He sat on the edge of the bed, stretching, then reached for the bottle of Maryland rye he’d bought at the saloon before turning in the night before. A full day of sleep the preceding day, and a long, restful night on top of that, had erased the dragged-out feeling he’d had after his talk with Andrew Gower, and the healthy swig Of rye he swallowed swept the last vestiges of cobwebs from his brain.

Longarm’s gray flannel shirt hung on the right-hand headpost of the bed, his covert-cloth trousers under it. His holstered Colt dangled on the bedpost opposite, where it would be handy if he was forced to reach for it while in bed.

He fastened the top buttons of his balbriggans, slid his arms into his shirt and buttoned it, shoe-horned himself into his skin-tight trousers, then stomped into his stovepipe cavalry boots before standing up.

Before going out to supper last night, Longarm had cleaned his guns—Winchester, Colt, and derringer—and reloaded them with fresh ammunition, but he took a bit of extra time in getting the set of his cross-draw gunbelt completely right. In Longarm’s book, a gun was useless baggage if a man had to fumble for it when he needed it in a hurry. Satisfied after a few practice draws, he donned his vest and coat, picked up his Winchester and saddlebags, and went out into the dark morning.

The saloon, restaurant, barber shop, and general store were lighted and taking care of trade. Longarm ignored the saloon. He had the partly finished bottle of rye in his saddlebag, as well as an unopened bottle he’d bought to take along.

A half-dozen vehicles were lined up along the street in front of the cafe: wagons, a buggy, a buckboard, and a surrey. He could see the tarpaulin-covered forms of sleepers in two of the wagon beds, and on one of the surrey’s seats, a blanket-wrapped figure wriggled restlessly as Longarm’s booted heels thudded on the board sidewalk on his way to the restaurant.

With breakfast behind him, Longarm headed for the livery stable. The attendant recognized him from the day before, and hurried out to the still-dark corral to get the hammerhead bay that Longarm had picked out the day before. The cavalry mount, with its giveaway brand, would be waiting when he got back from Younger’s Bend. Having put his saddlebags, bedroll, and rifle in their places, Longarm set his hat a bit more firmly on his head and started west along the riverbank. The first line of dawn brightened the sky just enough to show the well-beaten trail as he set out.

Steadily the light grew brighter as the sky behind Longarm went from gray to baby-pink to sunrise scarlet, and then, in one swift burst, became molten gold. The sunrise warmed his back as the hammerhead bay, fresh from the corral, high-stepped briskly through the dew-wet grasses, not yet turned brown by the first winds of autumn, that bordered the rutted trace. Summer had apparently returned, if only for a brief visit, after the day of gray skies and cold warning winds that he’d ridden through on his way from Fort Gibson. The air warmed steadily as the sun crept up the sky, and when the trail parted from the river an hour after sunrise Longarm reined in to shed his coat and roll it up in his bedroll.

He took advantage of the stop to study the Ordnance map again. It was easy to see where he was at the moment. The dotted line that marked the trace went almost due east, while the Arkansas swept in an arc to the south a few miles from the mouth Of the Canadian. There, river and road came together again. The road stayed with the Arkansas for a short distance, then it forked at a ford. The north road followed the Arkansas, and the eastern fork crossed the river and ran on a course roughly parallel to the snake-like bed of the Canadian. Longarm wondered which of the loops in the snake’s belly was Younger’s Bend.

Shortly before noon he came to the juncture of the rivers. He reined in, wondering if he’d save time by swimming the bay across the river here and picking up the eastern road where it curved along the Canadian, but a long, calculating look at the roiled green surface of the stream convinced him that the risk wasn’t worth the little time he’d save.

Besides which, he thought, there ain’t all that much need to hurry. I’ll get there when I get there, and Belle Starr sure ain’t going to wait supper for me. He poked the bay with his boot toe, and the animal moved ahead to the ford.

A mile or so above the river fork he came to the ford. It was marked only by the wheel ruts which showed where wagons had pulled off the trace and turned toward the river. When he got to the stream, he saw pairs of stakes driven into the shore on both sides to mark the location of the submerged crossing. Between the stakes, on both sides, the ocher earth was cut up by grooves and packed with the half-moons of hooves everywhere he looked between the markers. The hammerhead bay took to the water easily, feeling its way with surprising daintiness through the murky green water along an invisible bottom.

Beyond the ford, the trace bore the signs of fewer wagons and more horses, but was still easy to follow. It meandered through the groves of towering cottonwood and broad-trunked sweet gum, through patches of scrub Oak that came barely to Longarm’s waist as he sat in the saddle. Here and there, the bright green clumping of crackwillows marked a spring, a brooklet, or a patch of moist ground. A few of the brooks trickled across the road; none of them was wider than a man could step across, or deeper than a few inches, but the soft tinkle of running water making its way to the Canadian River broke the silence of the early afternoon.

Longarm ate in the saddle, chewing bits of jerky shaved off as he rode, moistened with a mouthful of water. He alternated the jerky with a few kernels of parched corn, and topped off his snack with a few dried prunes before lighting a cheroot and settling down for the long afternoon that lay ahead.

On two occasions, he turned off the trace where hooves had beaten a fainter trace toward the Canadian. He had no idea where Younger’s Bend was located, except that it bordered the riverbank. The two trails he followed led to fords, not houses. He stopped at each of the crossings to breathe his horse and get the stiffness out of his own thigh muscles by dismounting and walking along the riverbank. He walked with a purpose other than exercise, though. There were so many bends in the Canadian that the high bluffs predominating along its northern bank could be seen far upstream—a series of humps diminishing in size with distance, but visible enough to show signs of settlement where any such signs existed.

He wasn’t sure he’d come far enough east to reach Younger’s Bend yet, but so far he’d passed no towns or settlements, or even a farm or ranch house where he could stop and ask. There had been a few threads of smoke visible on the south side of the Canadian at each of the two places where he’d ridden from the trace down to the river, but even on the more level, gently rolling land south of the stream, he hadn’t gotten a clear view of any houses close enough to justify a visit. Each time, he’d ridden back to the main trace and continued east.

When he reached the third trail that forked south toward the river, Longarm reined in and sat in the saddle, studying the trail for several minutes. This one seemed a bit more distinct than the two he’d explored earlier. The forking was clearer, the ground around it beaten almost bare by hoofprints, the grass beside the trace shorter, as though more horses had grazed on it. Absently, moving his hands by habit rather than consciously, Longarm lighted a cheroot while he studied the trail. It led to a thick stand of scrub oak, and he could not see past the thicket. Still not committed in his mind to following the new trail to the river, Longarm twitched the reins to the left and the hammerhead bay walked slowly along the narrow path.

Beyond the stand of oaks, the trail remained clearly marked. Longarm’s interest increased. He rode on, following the hoof-trodden line as it wound between cottonwood and sweet gum, skirted a rock outcrop, crossed an old burn almost bare of vegetation, and plunged again into a thicket of oaks dotted with still more gum trees and cottonwood. He was on rising ground now. The undergrowth thinned to isolated trees as the upward pitch of the slope grew sharper. The trail zigzagged up the rise and dipped on the other side into a narrow valley where it turned to follow its floor.

Here there was barely room for two riders to go abreast and the trail thinned and became more sharply defined. Longarm reined in at a wide spot and dismounted. To his experienced eyes, the trail had the marks of the kind of approach he’d been looking for, one that was both easy and difficult, a trail that passed through cover for defenders, if the need arose to stand off intruders. Above all, in its passage through the narrow valley, the trail seemed planned to string out any group of men and horses in a way that would allow a relatively small group to bar their passage.

Old son, he told himself, this is the likeliest spot you’ve hit. Somebody planned this trail, it didn’t just grow up accidental. And even if there ain’t no guarantee you’re going to hit pay dirt at the end of it, You better strip down and be ready, just in case you do.

When he’d shed his coat, Longarm had transferred his wallet, with his marshal’s badge Pinned inside, to his hip pocket. He fished the wallet out now, and dropped his trousers. By letting them down almost to the tops of his closely fitting cavalry boots, he managed to slip the wallet down inside a trouser leg and below the level of the boot top. Pulling UP his Pants, he inspected the leg. There was no bulge, and the edge Of the wallet wouldn’t be felt by anybody searching him for a sheath knife or a small-caliber concealed pistol.

He climbed back in the Saddle and continued along the trail. It turned south at a cleft in the valley wall. Like the valley through which Longarm had ridden earlier, the opening was wide enough for only a single horseman. When Longarm entered the steep fissure, he saw unmistakable signs on both of its bare dirt sides that bushes and saplings had been uprooted from it in the recent past. The small amount of new growth that struggled to survive on the Steep walls was thin and spindly. Nowhere was there enough vegetation to give a man Protective cover. It Was planned, all right, Longarm assured himself, noting the barren walls of the defile as he rode deeper into it.

Three or four men Posted with rifles UP there on the crests could stand off a good-sized army. I don’t wonder that Gower’s been shying away from bringing in a posse to clean this place up, if it’s the place I’m looking for. It’s sure beginning to look like it is.

The narrow defile ended abruptly. Longarm reined in at its mouth and studied the scene that now lay revealed. A clearing stretched in front of him. It was roughly oval-shape and something more than a half-mile across at its widest point, which was several hundred yards from the cleft through which Longarm had just passed; the ravine Split the low, steep hills that concealed this stretch of level ground. The rise swept in an arc behind him, to both left and right. Somewhere ahead, the level land ended abruptly. Longarm couldn’t see the actual ending, but it looked to him as though the flat clear area stopped at the rim of a sheer cliff, and he guessed that cliff must drop down to the Canadian River.

Trees dotted the clearing; they were widely spaced at its center and more distant edges, thicker as the ground began to rise in the slope that enclosed the place. Among the trees were stumps that had been left when the land was cleared. Centered in the level area, a house stood in the middle of about an acre of ground that had been completely cleared of stumps and trees. The house was neither large nor fancy. It stood on a low fieldstone foundation, and was built from squared timbers chinked with clay. If it had any windows, they were on the other side of the house. The side facing Longarm was unbroken by windows or a door. A fieldstone chimney rose at one end, and at the other, a pole barn—no more than a roof with widely spaced boards nailed to the supporting posts—nestled close to the house.

Longarm nodded when he saw the arrangement. He told himself, Old son, you hit the right place. Farmers and ranchers always put their animals away from the house, where the flies won’t bother folks inside. Outlaws want their barn close, so they can get to their horses in a hurry in case of trouble.

Between the house and the slope behind it, stripped saplings had been driven into the ground between the living trees to form two irregular enclosures. One was sizable, and Longarm judged it to be a corral, though it was big enough to pen up a small herd of cattle. The second enclosure, much smaller, held half a dozen hogs. Here and there chickens wandered, scratching the dirt.

Behind one corner of the house he could see the low rise of a well curb. Still farther away stood an outhouse, and at an even greater distance, between the house and the edge where the land dropped away, there were three small cabins. Like the house, they were built from squared timbers and chinked with clay, and, like the house, they appeared to be windowless. All the wood of all the buildings—house, cabins, outhouse, barn—was raw; none of it had ever been painted. All the structures had weathered to a uniform gray, and irregular streaks of red clay chinking glowed in narrow swatches against the gray wood.

There was no one in sight in the clearing though a plume Of gray smoke rose from the chimney of the house, Smaller threads of gray came from the tin stovepipes that Protruded from the sides of two of the cabins and dog-legged up above their cedar-shake roofs. As Longarm studied the clearing, his sharp eyes picked up still another line of smoke rising from an area deep in the trees, beyond the staked enclosures, toward the hills. Whatever the source of that smoke might be, it was hidden from Longarm by the trees, which had not been thinned like the stands around the house.

Having fixed locations and directions in his mind, Longarm toed the bay into motion and headed for the house. The horse had taken only a few slow steps when a man Came through the trees. He was bent over with the weight of his load; in each hand he carried a large wooden bucket by its bail. He did not see Longarm, but moved at an angle away from him, toward the hogpen. Longarm Changed course and started for the same destination. He’d Covered half the distance between them before the other looked up and noticed him.

Longarm was close enough now to get a clear view of the stranger. He was an old man, wearing a fringe of white beard, and now it was obvious that age as much as his load was causing his forward-bending posture. He set the buckets down and waited for Longarm to rein in. Even before Longarm got close enough to Pull the bay to a halt, his nose twitched at the sour smell of corn mash coming from the buckets.

Pulling up a Yard from the oldster, Longarm said, “I guess I’ve found the right place. Is this Younger’s Bend?”

“Yep.” The old man was squinting through bloodshot blue eyes, trying to make out Longarm’s features. He swayed as he lifted his head, leaned back, and threw out his arms to keep from falling. It was obvious that he was more than a little bit drunk. He asked, “Looking for somebody, are you?”

“If this is YOUNGER’s Bend, I am.”

“Told you it is. Now, who You looking for?”

“Depends on who’s at home.”

“I’m here, for one. You can see that. Ain’t expecting callers, though. Mind telling me who you come to see?”

“Yes.” When Longarm said no more, the Oldtimer continued, “Yes, meaning you mind?”

Again Longarm made no reply.

“Well, then,” the man suggested, “tell me who in hell you are and if anybody’s expecting you.”

“Not now.”

Shaking his head as though to clear it, the oldster took a step toward Longarm. One Of his feet hit the bucket closest to him and he almost fell down. Only reaching to grab at Longarm’s leg saved him. He swayed uncertainly for a moment, then looked up at Longarm. “Damned if I don’t recall your face from someplace,” he said, frowning. “Black Hills Country, maybe?”

Longarm shook his head.

“Alder Gulch, then.”

Again Longarm shook his head.

“Prascosa?” This time the old fellow didn’t wait for a negative headshake before asking, “Mariposa?”

“No.”

“Damned if you ain’t the closest-mouthed son of a bitch I ever run into!” the gaffer exploded in angry frustration. “I guess I was Wrong about seeing you afore. I’d sure remember anybody that said nothing at all! Like a fellow I knew up on the Platte. He never talked much, either. We called him Windy. You ain’t him, though.”

“No. But Windy’ll do, for now.”

Longarm spoke abstractly. He didn’t remember having seen the old booze-hound before, but he’d brought in a lot of men, and this one would probably look different if he was younger, shaved, and sober.

“They call me Yazoo,” the old fellow said. “And there’s nobody at the house right now but Sam. Steed and Mckee have rode into town with Belle, but they oughta be getting back pretty quick—its close to suppertime. Bobby and Floyd’s down in the cabin, if it’s one of them you’re looking for.”

“I’ll wait for Belle,” Longarm said.

“Figured you would. If you’ll wait till I pour this mash in the hog trough, I’ll walk over to the house with you.”

Longarm swung out of his saddle. “I’ll give you a hand. That’s a pretty good load.”

Slopping hogs wasn’t Longarm’s idea of a job fit for a grown man, but he wanted to take the closest possible look at Yazoo. He picked up one of the buckets and walked beside the old man to the hogpen. He stood back while Yazoo poured the mash into the trough, though. The smell that had filled his nose while he carried the mash was enough to last him for a while.

“I guess it wouldn’t do no good to ask where you rode in from?” Yazoo prodded him as they walked toward the house.

“No.” Longarm was leading the bay, but giving Yazoo a good eyeballing in an unobtrusive way.

“Damn it, Windy, you’re with friends here. You don’t have to be so close-mouthed.” When Longarm made no answer, Yazoo shook his head. “I’m still sure I’ve run across you someplace, only I can’t locate you in my mind. Maybe it’ll come to me later on. Where else you been, Windy?”

“Here and there.”

“All right, damn it!” Yazoo snorted. “Don’t open up! It ain’t no skin off my ass. Belle’s going to want to know, though. She’s right particular about who she lets stay here.”

“Then maybe I won’t stay.”

“You’ll stay,” Yazoo said positively. “Else you never would’ve come here.”

They reached the house and rounded its corner. There were windows on this side, glassless, but with wooden shutters. A narrow porch with a shed roof extended along the front of the house, and through the open door Longarm could see someone moving around inside. With the sun at his back now, he could also see into the barn, where three or four horses and several mules paced around in the dimness under the high roof. Longarm saw no hitch rail, so he led the bay over to the barn and looped the reins around one of the supporting posts. When he turned back to face the house, there was a man standing on the porch, covering him with a rifle. Longarm noticed that brass-headed tacks had been driven into its stock to form a star.

Longarm spread his arms wide, his hands at shoulder level. “I reckon you’d be Sam Starr,” he said mildly.

“I reckon. And just who in hell are you?”

“Aw, this is Windy,” Yazoo said. “You don’t need to worry about him, Sam. He’s all right. I recognize him from someplace, leastwise I think I do. We been chinning it up by the hogpen.”

“You didn’t ask him here, did you?” Starr asked Yazoo.

“A’course not. He’s looking for Belle.”

“So are a lot of people.” Starr turned to Longarm. “Is Yazoo telling it straight? You know him?”

“He says I do. I’m like him, though. His face looks familiar, but I disremember where I saw him last.”

Slowly Starr lowered the gun. “Windy? Is that your name?”

“It’s good enough for me to travel under,” Longarm replied. He didn’t ask Starr’s permission to lower his arms, he just let them settle down slowly. When Starr made no objection, Longarm asked, “You mind if I wait for Mrs. Starr?”

“What’s your business with Belle?”

“I hear you and her take in paying guests now and then.”

“Damn it, Sam, Windy’s looking for a place to hole up for a while, can’t you see that?” Yazoo said.

Starr finally made up his mind. “I guess it’s all right,” he told Longarm. “Come on in and sit down. Belle ought to be here any minute, she just had some business to do in town.”

“That’s what Yazoo told me,” Longarm said, following Starr into the house.

He looked at the dim interior. It was no more attractive than the outside. A partition had been thrown across one end, and through its door he could see a tousled double bed. In the main room, which took up two-thirds of the dwelling, there were several chairs, a table, and a wood-burning stove that shared the chimney with a fireplace, now standing empty. Pots were on the stove, and the smells of cooking food mingled unidentifiably in the air.

Starr Went to the stove, lifted the lid of one of the pots, and stirred the contents. “I told Belle I’d have supper ready when she and the others got back,” he explained. “Well, sit down, Windy. You want a drink?

I’ll guarantee it; we make it right here on the place.”

“Pour me one while you’re at it, Sam,” Yazoo put in.

Longarm said, “I’ll join you in a little nip, sure.”

Starr pulled a bottle out of a wooden KC Baking Powder box, one of several nailed to the wall at one side of the stove to form a rough sort of kitchen cabinet. He found glasses, Put them on the table, and filled them.

Longarm tasted the liquor. It was raw at the edges, and corn whiskey wasn’t much to his fancy, but he downed it and said, “Real good stuff, Starr. You do the distilling?”

“Mostly, me and Yazoo. Belle’s busy with other things.”

Yazoo had finished his drink while Longarm was still tasting. He filled his glass again and held the bottle out to Longarm, who shook his head.

Yazoo urged, “Come on, Windy. One more never hurt a man.”

“After awhile.” Longarm said, then turned to Starr. “Quite a place you got here. Good and private.”

“That’s what everybody says. Good for business, you know.”

Longarm was studying Starr as the Bandit Queen’s husband moved around the stove, lifting a Pot lid, shoving in a fresh stick of wood. Starr was a slight man, and on the short side. Except for his movements, which were swift and sure, and his toed-in walk, he showed no signs of his Cherokee ancestry. Longarm judged that the Indian blood Starr had was pretty well diluted after a hundred years or so of his tribe’s intermarriages with whites, blacks, Spaniards—racial discrimination wasn’t a Cherokee trait.

Starr’s features were regular, his nose a bit broad at the nostrils, his lips full. His face was long rather than square, his chin small and slightly receding. He was clean-shaven, but wore his hair long, brushed straight back to fall just above his shoulders. The hair was not Indian-black, but had a slight auburn tinge. It was perfectly straight, though, and somewhat coarse. Yazoo was Pouring himself another drink. He extended the bottle to Longarm again. “You better keep up, Windy. About all a man-” He stopped short and cocked his head to one side, listening.

Longarm listened too. The thrumming of hooves was coming in through the open door. Three or four horses, as closely as Longarm could tell. The hoofbeats grew steadily louder.”

“Must be Belle and the boys coming back,” Starr volunteered.

Voices trickled in from outside. Longarm swiveled his chair around to face the door more squarely.

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was tall, her height emphasized by the long green velvet dress she wore; the dress was full-skirted, and its hem swept the floor. She had on a man’s Stetson, cream-colored, uncreased; one side of the brim was pulled up and pinned to the crown with a plume of ostrich feathers dyed green to match the dress. What drew Longarm’s attention was the pair of silver-plated, pearl-handled pistols that she wore high around her waist.

She looked at Longarm with obsidian-black eyes and asked, “Who in hell are you?”

“It’s all right, Belle,” Sam said quickly. “His name is Windy, and he’s looking for a place to stay. Yazoo knows him, he spoke up for him.”

“Yazoo. Is that right, Yazoo? Do you know this dude?”

“From someplace, Belle. He’s one of our kind of folks.” The old man’s speech was growing blurred.

Behind Belle, a young man stood in the doorway, his arms filled with twine-wrapped bundles. He pushed his way past her and moved toward the stove. “Here’s the flour and stuff you wanted, Sam,” he said, beginning to deposit the packages on the floor.

Another man appeared in the doorway. Belle had come into the house by now, and Longarm had a good view of the newcomer. He recognized him just as the man saw him sitting there. His name was Mckee, and Longarm had brought him in for a bank holdup almost two years ago. Now Longarm saw recognition springing into Mckee’s face.

“Why, damn you!” Mckee blurted. He was clawing for his gun as he spoke. “You dirty son of a bitch! I told you I’d get-“

Longarm’s Colt blasted a split second before Mckee had his revolver leveled. A dime-sized hole appeared in the outlaw’s forehead. He grimaced as he began crumpling to the floor. He was dead before he finished falling.

CHAPTER 6

Longarm completed the turn he’d started when he leaped from his chair to draw on Mckee. The move brought Belle Starr and Sam under the menace of the colt’s still-smoking muzzle. Belle had her right-hand pistol halfway out of its holster and Sam was starting toward the wall, where his rifle rested on pegs, when Longarm spoke.

“Everybody just stand still. I got no grudges against anybody else around here. Me and Mckee had a score to settle, you heard him say so. Turned out it was settled my way. Now it’s over and done with, and I don’t aim to pull the trigger again unless one of you makes me do it.”

Silence greeted his announcement. Out of the corner of his eye, Longarm could see Yazoo sitting at the end of the table, his whiskey-glazed eyes not really taking in what had happened. Sam Starr had obeyed the command to freeze, and so had the young man who’d brought in the packages. And so, for that matter, had Belle Starr, but she still had a hand on her revolver’s grips. Longarm fixed her with his stony gaze and she opened her hand, letting the pistol slide back into its holster.

Belle said, “Regardless of what your argument was with Mckee, I don’t like to have strangers showing up here and killing my boarders. Yazoo said your name’s Windy. Suppose you tell us the rest of it, and explain what you’re doing here.”

“Windy’s all the name I need, right now,” Longarm replied. “it was something personal between Mckee and me. Goes back quite a while. You heard what he said and you saw him draw. I was just sitting there, not going for my gun, when he grabbed.”

“So I noticed,” Belle said dryly. “Whoever you are, Windy, You’ve got a quick hand. What was your argument with Mckee about?”

“Now that he’s dead, I don’t see where it matters much,” Longarm replied. “Or which one of us was in the right. Looks to me like all that signifies is that I’m standing here and Mckee’s dead.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Belle said. “But just the same, I’d like to know.”

“It was private between him and me,” Longarm told her in a tone designed to let her see that he wasn’t going to say more.

Belle shrugged. “If that’s the way you want it.” She looked at Longarm narrowly, frowning. “I don’t think I’ve heard your name, but maybe I’ve seen you before, when I rode with Jesse James.”

“Not likely, ma’am. I haven’t had the honor of meeting Mr. James. Not that I wouldn’t like to reach out and take his hand,” Longarm said. That, he thought, was the truth. Nothing required him to say that if he took Jesse James’s hand, it would only be to hold it still while he snapped the cuffs on the outlaw.

Belle’s eyes narrowed as she thought aloud. “You’re not from the Nation or Texas. I’d have heard about you if you’d been busy in either place. Or Arkansas or Kansas or Missouri. You must come from further west?”

“You could say that without being too far wrong,” Longarm agreed.

Yazoo broke in long enough to say, “Save your questions, Belle. I tried ‘em all on old Windy, and he ain’t answering.” His words were slurred, his eyes obviously unfocused.

“You’re drunk, Yazoo,” Belle said. There was no accusation or anger in her voice; she was simply stating the fact.

“Sure. I try to be, Belle. Mostly I do it, too.” He fell forward across the table, his arms dangling down beside his chair.

Belle ignored Yazoo’s collapse. She turned to her husband. “How’s supper coming along, Sam? I’m getting hungry.”

“It’ll be a few minutes, Belle.” Sam Starr’s voice was apologetic. “I didn’t know exactly when you’d get back, or I’d have had it on the table.”

“It’s all right. I suppose you can leave the stove for a minute, long enough to carry Mckee out to the grove? You can bury him after we eat; there’ll be plenty of time before dark.”

Starr nodded. “Sure, Belle, plenty of time.”

“Get Bobby to give you a hand,” Belle went on. “And on the way back, the two of you can unsaddle the horses and put them in the barn.”

“All right.” Starr turned to the young man. “Come on, Bobby.” Longarm said, “I killed Mckee. Only right for me to help you put him away.”

“No,” Belle said sharply. “You stay right here, Windy. I want to talk to you.” She added, “You can holster your gun now. I never did like Mckee much, and that’s the truth of it. It’s no skin off my ass if you two settled a private fuss.”

“That’s right considerate of you ma’am,” Longarm said as he restored his Colt to its holster.

Sam and Bobby started off on their unpleasant errand. They picked Mckee’s body up—Sam grabbed the dead man’s wrists, Bobby taking hold of the ankles—and disappeared with the slain outlaw swinging between them.

“Sit down, Windy,” Belle told Longarm. “I won’t press for your name, real or otherwise. Yazoo’s word’s good enough for me.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, ma’am.” Longarm settled down in the chair he’d been occupying when Mckee came in.

“Call me Belle, for God’s sake!” Belle was taking off her hat. She hung it on a peg by the door, unbuckled her gunbelt and hung it on the peg next to the hat. “I told you a minute ago, and I’ll say it again for the last time. I don’t allow my guests to fight while they’re at Younger’s Bend. I’m excusing you because you didn’t know my rules. Mckee did. He broke them, and he’s paid. That’s over and settled. Just see you don’t break them again.”

“I’ll sure try, Belle.”

Belle came and sat down across the table from Longarm, and he got a close look at her for the first time. She looked like anything but the title she’d given herself, he decided. The self-appointed Bandit Queen was a tall woman, beginning to show the spreading hips of middle age. Her waist was still slender, but her hips and buttocks flared out visibly, even under the loose-fitting full skirt of her green velvet dress. Her breasts were small; they made scarcely a bulge under the embroidered bodice of her dress. The flesh of her chin and neck was beginning to sag loosely above the scarf that was tucked into the dress and wrapped high on Belle’s throat.

Her chin was small, almost receding, and her lips were a short, straight line. Her nose was an uptilted button between high cheekbones on which a layer of fat was beginning to form.

Belle’s eyes were the best thing about her, Longarm decided. Now they were soft and liquid, but he remembered how they’d darkened and snapped with anger during the moments just after Mckee’s death. Her hair was dark, almost black, and pulled back into a knot at the nape of her neck. Thick bangs, brushed forward at an angle across her forehead, failed to hide the fact that her forehead was unusually high.

She wasn’t, Longarm decided, the kind of woman he’d fall all over himself trying to get acquainted with. Remembering Andrew Gower’s listing of Belle’s husbands and lovers, he wondered what so many men had seen in her.

While Longarm was evaluating Belle, she’d been studying him as closely as he was examining her. She said, “Well, Windy? Like what you’re looking at? Because I think I do.”

Longarm thought he’d better stretch a point. It was against his nature to lie outright, even to a woman he might be romancing. He didn’t have any ideas about romancing Belle Starr, but Longarm thought that, under the circumstances, a little bit of evasion wouldn’t do him any harm.

“You look real nice, Belle,” he said. “If you didn’t have a husband, I’d sure be interested in you.”

And that’s the straight-line truth, old son, he thought, even if she don’t take what I said exactly like I meant it. I’d be interested in her the same as I am in anybody that lives on the wrong side of the law.

“I’ve got a rule never to let a husband stop me from doing what I feel like doing, when I like a man,” she told him. “No man alive owns Belle Starr, the Bandit Queen. You think that over, Windy.”

“Oh, I will. I sure will.”

“Now that we’ve got that out of the way, suppose you tell me who showed you how to find Younger’s Bend,” she said.

“Nobody.”

“Don’t lie, Windy. Somebody had to tell you.”

“Now, Belle, you know how word gets around. Hell, this place is getting as well-known as the Hole in the Wall, Buzzard’s Roost, and Brown’s Hole.” Longarm named only three of the eight or nine places he knew of, from Wyoming and Utah down to the Big Bend of Texas, where men on the run could drop out of sight of the law. It was a regular network of bolt-holes; none of them were actually unknown to lawmen, but most of the hideouts were natural fortresses that would have taken an army with artillery to penetrate.

“Is that the truth?” Belle seemed pleased and flattered.

“Don’t have any reason to lie to you. I disremember who it was told me about Younger’s Bend, or where I was when I heard about it, but it’s a place I’ve had in the back of my mind for quite a while.”

“And you finally got here. Where are you wanted, Windy?”

“Hold on. You’ve got your rules, Belle, and I got mine. One of them is that I don’t talk about myself.”

“Yazoo said you were real close-mouthed. I guess he was right.”

“He ought to know,” Longarm said with a smile.

“Well, I’m going to let you stay,” Belle said. “Ten dollars gold a day for your room and meals. If you’re short, I’ll take a one-third cut of whatever you bring in from the next job you pull. If you haven’t got anything planned, I can work out a deal for you with Floyd and Steed, I suppose.”

Longarm took time to fish out a cheroot and light it. When the cigar was drawing well, he asked, “Who are Floyd and Steed?”

“Two of the fellows staying here. They’ll be in for supper pretty soon. They’ve been here quite a while, they’ll tell you how easy things are. You know the U.S. law can’t touch you here, I guess? Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Colorado—don’t have to worry about any sheriffs from anyplace. Or from the U.S. marshal’s office, either.”

“That’s one of the reasons I’m here,” Longarm said truthfully, again letting Belle put her own interpretation on his words.

“I’ve got a treaty with the Cherokee Nation, you see,” Belle went on. Longarm looked up at the word “treaty”; it was the same one that had riled Gower so badly. Belle went on, “The only way the law can come into the Nation is by an invitation from the Indian police, or if they’re chasing somebody they’ve caught on a job.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I was pretty sure you had. But I’m telling you this because I want you to understand how it is here. As long as one of my guests doesn’t pull any kind of job in the Nation, my treaty holds. So if you’ve got any ideas about operating out of here, just be sure it’s across one of the state lines.”

“I’ve been moving so fast I ain’t had time to look around for any setups for a job,” Longarm said.

“Well, when you get ready, you let me know. I can fix up something for you with the fellows I told you about.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Longarm promised.

Sam Starr and Bobby came in. “I fed and watered your horse, Windy,” Sam said. “Didn’t bother your saddle gear, though. Wasn’t sure whether you’d be staying or riding on.”

“Windy’s staying awhile,” Belle announced. “Now, you’d better see to supper, Sam. Floyd and Steed will be showing up any minute, yelling how hungry they are. And be sure you set a place for Windy.”

Almost before Belle had finished speaking, loud voices outside announced the arrival of the other two outlaws. They burst into the house, still arguing. One of them said to Belle, “Tell this damn fool he’s seeing things, Belle. Steed says he seen Sam and Bobby hauling Mckee’s body up to the grove a few minutes ago.”

“He wasn’t seeing things, Floyd,” Belle replied. “Mckee’s dead. Sam’s going to bury him right after supper.”

“See! I was right!” Steed said.

Steed was the blustering type. He was in his mid-twenties, high-colored, husky, broad-shouldered, heavy of leg and thigh. His hands looked like small hams, and his neck was as thick as a steer’s. He had a pistol stuck into his belt; Longarm wondered if he made a habit of carrying a gun that way. More than one careless gun-handler who took up the habit of toting an unholstered gun stuck between belly and belt had checked out with a set of bullet-riddled guts.

Floyd was Steed’s antithesis. He was pale, his eyes a watery blue, his hair the shade of unbleached tow. His hands were small, almost delicate. His face was thin, and somehow managed to look mournful even when he was smiling. In repose, he appeared to be suffering from either chronic melancholy or a stomach-ache. Floyd carried his revolver in a cross-draw holster, high on his left side. Longarm marked him as being the one to keep an eye on.

While Belle confirmed Mckee’s death, Floyd’s lips compressed into an even thinner line than they were normally. He asked Belle, “What happened to him?”

“You’ll have to ask Windy.” Belle pointed to Longarm, who hadn’t moved when the two men came in. “There was some sort of old grudge between him and Mckee, and he settled it!”

Floyd wheeled to face Longarm. “You shot Mckee?”

“Yes. He drew on me.”

“Why?”

“That was between Mckee and me. It’s no business of yours.”

Longarm’s voice was level, emotionless.

Floyd frowned. “Maybe I choose to make it my business.”

“Suit yourself,” Longarm said with a laconic shrug.

Belle intervened. “Hold on, Floyd. I saw what happened. So did Sam, so did Bobby and Yazoo, if he could see anything at all, drunk as he was by then.”

“Stay out of this, Belle,” Floyd told the Bandit Queen. His voice was a sad whisper. He faced Longarm again. “Mckee was a friend of mine.”

“Too bad. He was no friend of mine.”

“Why’d you kill him?”

“He’d have killed me if I hadn’t,” Longarm said quietly.

“That’s right, Floyd,” Sam Starr put in. “All of us saw what happened, Belle, me, Bobby, and Yazoo. Mckee saw Windy, started cussing him, and went for his gun. Windy got his Out first. That’s the way it happened. Windy didn’t make the first move.” Floyd appeared not to have heard what Sam said. He was looking Longarm up and down. Finally he snarled, “Windy! That’s no name! Who in hell are you?”

“Your eyesight’s bad, Floyd. You can see who I am,” Longarm replied. He kept his voice even. He didn’t want a showdown with Floyd, but he couldn’t let the outlaw back him down, either.

“Where’d You come from?” Floyd demanded.

“Outside.”

“God damn it, that’s no answer!” Floyd was whipping up his anger. When Longarm said nothing, Floyd turned to Belle. “You know him, Belle?”

“No. Yazoo does, though. He said he was all right.”

“What the hell does that old whiskeypot know about anything?” Floyd demanded of no one in particular.

Belle said sharply, “You listen to me, Floyd Sharpless! This is my place you’re on. I told Windy he was welcome here, just like I’ve told you. But You won’t be welcome if you keep trying to stir up trouble, do You understand me?”

“I understand You,” Floyd shot back hotly. “That don’t mean I’m going to leave off until I find out about this Windy here.”

“Let me tell you something else,” Belle said. “Mckee had his hand on his gun before Windy went for his. Windy had a bullet through Mckee before he could get his gun up and let off a shot. And Mckee was quicker than you are.”

“Quit trying to scare me, Belle.”

“I’m not trying to scare you, I’m just trying to hammer some sense into your head. Now I’ll tell you flat out, Floyd, give up on Mckee and why he had a shootout with Windy—it’s not your affair. It happened before you and Mckee hooked up. And if you’re not careful, all those big plans you’ve been making are going right out to the hogpen, because if you break my rule against fighting here, I’m going to invite you to leave Younger’s Bend.”

“How the hell is my plan going to work without Mckee?” Floyd demanded. “You know I was depending on him, Belle.”

“There’ll be somebody else along to fill his place,” she said.

Steed had been quiet, standing at one side of the room while Floyd and Belle argued. Now he said, “Belle’s right, Floyd. We still got Bobby. And Taylor’s due to blow in pretty soon.”

“That’s still only four,” Floyd pointed out. “All of us agreed we need at least five, and six would be better.”

Longarm’s interest had been growing ever since the subject of plans had come up. In Floyd’s terms, that could only mean a major job of outlawry, especially if it required a half-dozen men to carry it out. He said nothing, though, letting Belle and Floyd settle the dispute he’d caused between them.

Belle said, “Let’s get this settled once and for all, Floyd. I had as much to do with that plan as you did. I want to see you go through with it. Now, take my word, I’ll find somebody to fill in for Mckee.”

Floyd’s anger had been deflected from Longarm by his dispute with Belle. He said bitterly, “Sure. Who’s it going to be? Yazoo?”

“Who wants me?” Yazoo stirred and sat up. He looked around the room with bleary eyes.

“Nobody wants you, old man,” Floyd replied. “Go on back to sleep and sober up.”

“Stay awake, Yazoo,” Belle commanded.

Yazoo looked from Belle to Floyd and said, “I wish you two’d make up your mind.” He reached for the whiskey bottle on the table.

Belle turned back to Floyd and said, “You’d better have a drink with him, Floyd, and take that edge off your nerves. Sit down now, and don’t stir up any more trouble with Windy.”

Floyd glared at her angrily, but obeyed. He took a chair and placed it as far from Longarm as the size of the table permitted.

“Sam, get the food dished up,” Belle told her husband.

Starr had been standing indecisively at one side of the room, close to Bobby, during the argument between Belle and Floyd. He took a stack of plates out of one of the KC Baking Powder boxes nailed to the wall, and distributed them around the table. Steed and Bobby moved up to sit down, Belle watched them for a moment before joining them, then chose a place next to Longarm.

“Things aren’t like this every day,” she told him.

“I guess the ruckus is mostly my fault,” Longarm said. “Sorry I stirred things up, Belle. But like you told Floyd a minute ago, you saw how it all happened.”

“I know it wasn’t your fault, Windy. Nobody’s blaming you for anything.” Belle seemed pleased that Longarm had made the gesture of apologizing. She went on, “I like my guests to get along together, but You men do disagree now and then.”

Sam began dishing up. He walked around the table, ladling out stew onto the plates. Longarm looked at his serving. There were chunks of meat and pieces of carrot, Onion, and potato in a thin gravy. Next to him, Yazoo was already eating hungrily.

Belle noticed Longarm’s hesitation. “Sam’s a better cook than you might think, Windy. Eat up. You’ll like it.” Longarm said, “I bet I will, at that.” He took a sample bite, found the stew edible, and continued to eat.

Sam brought a pan of biscuits from the stove and put it in the middle of the table. Longarm and Floyd reached at the same time, and their hands met over the biscuit pan.

“Help yourself, Floyd,” Longarm invited. “I ain’t in all that big a hurry.”

Floyd grunted and seemed about to speak, but changed his mind. He took a biscuit and went back to his food. Apparently he’d decided to leave matters as they were, at least for the moment.

Sam saw that the biscuit pan was empty, and brought a full one to replace it. Then he went back to the stove, pulled a chair up to it, and began to eat his own meal off the warming shelf. Since no one commented on this, or invited Starr to join the group at the table, Longarm got a pretty clear idea of the status Belle’s husband held at Younger’s Bend.

Supper was a generally silent meal. Yazoo and Belle were the only ones at the table who had much to say, and when their efforts to start a conversation met with no response from Floyd, Steed, or Longarm, they subsided. Sam Starr kept an eye on the table, and when a plate was emptied, he brought the stew pot from the stove to replenish it. Longarm took a second helping, as did everyone except Belle. The stew was surprisingly tasty, though privately Longarm thought that no stew would ever be a substitute for a good steak served up with a heap of fried potatoes on the platter with it.

“You’d better let the dishes go until later, Sam,” Belle said when it was apparent that everyone had finished. “I’d like to see Mckee buried before it gets too dark, and you’ve still got the grave to dig.”

Floyd spoke up, “You never mind about burying Mckee, Sam. Me and Steed will take care of that.”

“I don’t recall offering to take on the job,” Steed said.

“Shut up, Steed,” Floyd snapped. “Mckee was our partner. It’s only right to see he’s put away proper.”

Bobby had been as silent as everyone else during the meal; he’d let his eyes follow every move made by Floyd and Steed, and was obviously doing his best to follow whatever example they set. Now the young outlaw asked Floyd, “How come you didn’t say anything about me? If I’m in with you and Steed, I guess I can do my share too.”

“Of course you can, Bobby,” Steed assured him. He stood up and began preparing the dishpan. Yazoo took another drink.

Belle turned to Longarm and said, “There’s a cabin vacant, the one on the far end, past Steed and Bobby’s and the one where Mckee was staying with Floyd. I guess you can have it, provided you don’t mind sharing it with Taylor when he gets here.”

“I’d be better off there than sharing with Floyd,” Longarm said, straight-faced.

“I can fix you up a shakedown here in the house, if you’d rather,” Belle suggested. “It’d just be a pallet over against the wall there, though.”

“Be glad to have you bunk with me up at the stillhouse, Windy,” Yazoo offered. His voice was slurred and he had trouble focusing his eyes. “We could talk about old times.”

“Now, Windy doesn’t want to stay up there,” Belle told Yazoo. “The smell of that mash would keep him from sleeping.” She smiled at Longarm as she spoke.

“I’ll settle for the cabin,” Longarm said. He’d decided it was time to establish the fact that he hadn’t come looking for charity. He took out the drawstring pouch Gower had given him, and spilled some of the coins from it to the tabletop. Belle’s eyes widened, and so did Yazoo’s, at the sight of the gold pieces.

Longarm went on, “You said your going rate’s five dollars a day, Belle. I don’t know how long I’m going to be around, so suppose I just pay you for two or three days. If I stay longer, I’ll pony up with it when this has been used up.” He shoved an eagle and a half eagle along the table to Belle, and gathered the remaining coins into the pouch.

“You didn’t need to pay anything at all right now, Windy,” Belle said. She picked up the gold pieces, however. “Your credit’s good here.”

Longarm stood up. “I don’t reckon you set a night guard, do you?”

“Why should I?” Belle asked. “Oh, if we’re looking for trouble, we’ll keep watch at night. But there’s no reason to, otherwise.”

“Good,” he said. “Well, I’ll mosey on down and settle in, then, before it gets too dark to see.”

“There’s a lamp in the cabin,” Starr volunteered. “And a water bucket. You’ve seen where the well is, I guess.”

“Sure. I’ll get along fine, Sam. I’m used to looking out for myself.” Longarm started for the door. “I’ll see you at breakfast, I guess. Right now, a bed’s going to look pretty good. I rode a long ways, these last few days.”

He went on outside and started for the barn, where his horse was still hitched to the pole. Before he’d gotten well off the porch, Belle called to him. She came up to him when he stopped and turned around.

“Don’t be too quick with your gun if you hear somebody walking around after dark. I usually take a little stroll before I go to bed, walk down to the bluff and look at the river in the moonlight, or just go around making sure everything’s all right.”

“I see.” Longarm saw only too well. “All right, Belle. I’D be careful.”

“You do that. Because if you hear anybody, it’ll just be me. I always like to be sure my guests are comfortable.” She paused and added in a suggestive whisper, “Comfortable, and well-cared-for, too. I’ll see you later, then.”

Longarm stood looking at Belle’s back as she walked to the house.

CHAPTER 7

In the fading light that trickled through the paneless window and the open door, Longarm surveyed the interior of the cabin. It was tiny, but its very bareness made it look larger than it was.

A pair of narrow bunks were attached to opposite walls at one end; they were bare except for thin mattresses, and the straw with which the mattresses were stuffed protruded here and there through holes in the ticking. The bunks had no Pillows. At the other end of the bleak, uninviting room stood the inevitable monkey stove, a low sheet-iron oval fed through a door in one end, with a single pothole on its top for cooking. A table and two chairs completed the furnishings, An oil lamp stood on the table, and the water bucket Sam Starr had mentioned was behind the stove.

Longarm studied the window. It had no outside shutters, and its location, high in the end wall between the two bunks, made both of them vulnerable. Anybody tall enough to stick a gun through the window could rain bullets on either bunk while the thick timber walls protected him from return fire.

You better sit down and do a little bit of thinking about this mess you walked into, old son, Longarm told himself.

He lighted the lamp, just in case anybody in the house glanced down that way, took the partly full bottle of Maryland rye and his gun-cleaning kit from his saddlebags, and went back into the cabin. As an afterthought, he went back out and fixed in his mind the locations of the cabins occupied by Floyd, Steed, and Bobby. Neither of them was more than a dozen yards away. Back in the cabin, he leaned back in the sturdier of its two straight chairs, lighted a cheroot, and let a swallow of rye trickle down his throat.

If I aim to sleep on one of them bunks tonight, he thought, chances are I just might not wake up tomorrow morning. Not with Floyd doing everything but coming right out and saying he figures to cut me down first chance he gets.

He took another conservative sip of the whiskey, and began to clean his Colt. And then there’s Belle, his thoughts ran on. She’s made it right plain she’s got plans to drop in during the night, and that’s one lady I got to be one hell of a lot hornier than I am right now to give stud service to. Except, if I aim to stay here until I dig out what Floyd’s cooking up, I can’t afford to make her mad and have her hand me my walking papers.

Before considering the alternatives to a night in the cabin, Longarm had another swallow of the rye. After the corn squeezings he’d had before supper, he needed the sharp bite of the rye to clear his throat. Then he carefully reloaded his revolver and holstered it.

Now, I could go sleep up at the stillhouse, but it’s a toss-up which smells worse, Yazoo or the barrels of corn mash he’s bound to have fermenting up there.

There’s the main house, but if Belle’s taken a notion to come crawl in with me, she’d be likely to do it there, even with Sam asleep in the next room.

The thing for you to do, old son, is bunk in the barn. Good clean hay’s going to smell better than either one of them mattresses. If anybody comes prowling, chances are one of the horses’ll nicker. If Belle don’t find me here, she’ll likely figure I decided to sleep out in case Floyd might take a notion to pay me back during the night for shooting Mckee.

Having made up his mind, Longarm saw no need to hurry. He sat quietly until he’d finished his cigar; there’d be no smoking during the night in the barn, with the hay he’d glimpsed piled high along one wall ready to go up in flames if touched by a match or an unextinguished cigar butt. It was fully dark when he blew out the lamp and led his horse back to the barn. Moving quietly, he led the hammerhead bay into the barn and tethered it, then went to stand at one corner of the house. There was no need to get very close, or strain his ears, to hear the conversation going on inside. Floyd was saying, “God damn it, Yazoo, think harder! You got to remember where you seen this Windy fellow before!”

“I’ve tried all I got the power to.” Yazoo’s voice was tired and his words slurred. “I told you twenty times, it could’ve been just about anyplace. I tossed the names of a lot of places at him, but he didn’t remember, either.”

“Now listen, Yazoo,” Steed began, but Yazoo had apparently had enough questioning.

“No, Steed. I ain’t flogging my brain for you men another minute. Not tonight, at least. I got a batch of mash cooking, and I’m going up and stir it good, and then I’m going to bed.”

Longarm stepped back into the shadow of the barn while Yazoo staggered across the narrow porch, managed to navigate the steps without falling down them, and started weaving toward the grove of trees in which the illegal still stood.

Belle’s voice broke the silence next. “Why are you so set on finding out about Windy, Floyd? He seems all right to me. And I’m like Yazoo; I’ve got a feeling I’ve seen him before. Maybe when I was riding with Jim Reed down in Texas, or somewhere else.”

Steed grumbled, “He’s with us now, Belle, and if we’re his own kind, how come he don’t open up more?”

“Because he’s careful!” Belle snapped.

“Just the same, he ought to open up a little bit more. Hell, he could be anybody, for all we know!” Floyd grumbled.

“Yeah.” This was Bobby’s light voice. “How do we know he’s all right, Belle?”

“Because I’ve got a feeling he is!” Belle said curtly.

“That ain’t good enough for me,” Floyd retorted. “I want him to give us names and tell us about places.” Belle said, “Now, Floyd, if you were on the prod, you wouldn’t be going around telling everybody you’re Floyd Sharpless, and there’s reward money posted for you in St. Joe and Springville and wherever else you’ve been tagged with a job.”

“I guess not,” Floyd admitted reluctantly. “But I knew Mckee better than anybody else. We never did hold back a thing from each other, after we commenced traveling together, And I never heard him say a word about having a standing grudge with a man that fits Windy’s looks.”

Steed’s tough voice rumbled, “That don’t signify, Floyd. Mckee might’ve kept quiet about something like that, especially if he tangled with Windy and come off sucking a hind tit.”

“He might have,” Floyd agreed, with doubt in his voice.

“Not likely, though, Steed. Well, I’m going to set myself to find out. And maybe I won’t even wait to find out before I even my score with him.”

“I don’t see you’ve got a score to even with him, Floyd,” Sam Starr said. “It was Mckee’s grudge, not yours.”

“I got a right to make it mine if I feel like it,” Floyd replied.

“Sure, but I’d watch myself if I was you,” Starr said. “Belle and me saw that ruckus, remember. Mckee had his gun half out before Windy drew. And then Windy moved faster than any man I ever saw. He shot straight, too; you saw where the slug went.”

“I can take care of myself,” Floyd retorted. “All of you just remember, stand aside if trouble starts between me and Windy.”

“From the way Windy was holding back, if trouble starts between you and him it will be your idea,” Belle said. “Remember, Floyd, I don’t allow my guests to fight each other—fists, knives, or guns.”

“All right, Belle, I’ll try not to push,” Floyd promised. “But if anything does get going, I’ll damn sure finish it.”

There was a scraping of chair legs on the bare wooden floor of the house. Once again, Longarm stepped back into the blackness under the barn’s overhanging roof. He couldn’t see Floyd, Steed, and Bobby until they’d gotten a few steps from the house, but he could hear them.

Floyd said, “All that digging’s made my back ache. I was sort of figuring we could all set down and figure out how we could handle everything without Mckee, but I don’t feel like it.”

“I just as soon put it off till Taylor gets here,” Steed replied. “All I want to do right now is go drop in my bunk.”

“Yeah. Me too,” Bobby said.

Longarm shook his head at the youth’s echoing of Steed. He’d seen the likes of Bobby before—a youngster taken in by the stories of glamorous outlaw lives. He’d seen such youngsters try to capture some of the glamor by joining forces with older, more experienced men, and come up against hard reality. Out of every ten, five gave up and went straight. Out of the other five, one or two survived.

A few more steps took the trio out of earshot. Longarm went into the barn. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness now, and he could see what he was doing. The horses and mules were standing quietly. Two or three of the horses nickered, but that was all. He spotted the low loft that filled about a third of the end of the barn farthest from the house. Cleat steps, on one of the posts supporting the rooftree, led up to the loft. Longarm climbed up and found that the loft had just about enough hay in it to make the foundation for a bed. He scraped the hay into a rectangle and spread his bedroll on it. After folding his coat for a pillow and arranging his vest as a pad for his Colt, Longarm stretched out and relaxed as well as he could without taking off his boots. Tonight he thought he’d be better off wearing them than shedding them.

It had been a long day and, in spite of his booted feet, sleep came to him quickly.

Longarm wasn’t sure which roused him, the broken rhythm of hooves or the faint call for help. He heard both at the same time and snapped awake, slid his Colt out of its holster, and sat up in bed in the same easy movement.

He listened consciously as soon as he recognized the source of the noises that had awakened him. Neither the irregular hoofbeats nor the cries were close at hand. He stood up and put on his gunbelt, climbed down the cleat steps to the barn floor, and stepped outside. Here the sounds were louder. They seemed to be coming from behind the house.

Longarm walked fast, following the noises to their source. There was no moon, just starglow in a cloudless sky. He strained his vision through the darkness when he’d cleared the corner of the house. Perhaps a hundred yards away he could make out movement. He walked toward the shapeless black form, and slowly it took shape: a horse and rider. There was something wrong with the configuration of the rider, and the horse had gone lame in its off-hind foot.

As the distance between him and the approaching horse diminished, Longarm could understand why he’d been puzzled. There wasn’t one rider on the animal, but two. One of them was curled forward in the saddle, and the second rider was holding the limp figure of the first in place. The horse was moving slowly, much slower than Longarm was walking. Several moments passed before the laden beast came close enough for Longarm to see that the rider who was erect was a woman. She must be old, he thought fleetingly; he could see long white hair streaming across her shoulders, and her cries were in the hoarse, high-pitched voice that often comes with age.

She did not see Longarm until he’d gotten to within a few yards of her. Then she croaked in a thin whisper, “Oh, thank God! Help me, please help me! I’m afraid he’s hurt real bad!”

“How’d he get hurt?” Longarm asked. He grabbed the reins and pulled the limping horse to a stop. “Horse throw him?”

“No. He-he got shot.”

“I see.” Longarm decided he’d better stop asking questions and give the woman the help she was pleading for. “You’re all right, ma’am? Not hurt or anything?”

“No, I’m not hurt,” she whispered, her voice high and rasping. “But my throat. I’ve called and cried so much…”

“You don’t have to yell or cry anymore,” he told her.

Longarm released the reins, hoping the horse would stand. It did, and he sidled along its neck until he reached the limp figure of the man.

“Please, can you hold him up?” the woman gasped. “I’ve held him so long that I don’t have much strength left.”

“You can let go. I won’t let him fall.”

With a relieved sigh, she took her arms away from the slumped waist of the unconscious man. She reeled and almost toppled from the saddle herself, but Longarm held up a hand, which she grasped, steadying herself.

“I’m all right now,” she said thinly. “I just lost my balance for a minute. Please, look at Lonnie. I know he’s in bad shape, but I think he’s still alive.”

Longarm pressed a hand to the wounded rider’s chest. He felt a heartbeat, slow and irregular, but a beat, just the same.

“He’s alive,” he told the old woman. “But we got to get him to where he can stretch out, and where there’s light so we can see how bad he’s hit.” He was feeling for the man’s wounds as he spoke, but the unconscious rider’s shirt was so stiff and thick with dried blood that he could not locate them.

“How long ago was he shot?” he asked.

“Last night. About midnight, I guess. Please, can’t you just take care of him now and wait until later for me to tell you how it all happened?”

“I ain’t trying to waste time, ma’am. I just need to know how old that wound is, so I can take care of him right.”

“Oh. I guess I didn’t understand that. But do something for him now, please! I’ll help you lift him off the horse.”

“No. There ain’t enough light even to see by out here, let alone to try and bandage up a bullet wound by. Best thing we can do is get him to the Starrs’ house. It’s just a little ways from here. Then we can tend to him proper.”

“All right.” The woman swayed again and reached out a hand, seeking support. Longarm reached up and grasped the hand and steadied her.

He asked, “You think you can walk a little piece, ma’am? I can’t hold you and your friend in the saddle and walk the horse too.”

“Yes. I can walk. If you’ll hold him, I’ll get off.”

Longarm balanced the limp, unwieldly form of the unconscious man while she pulled her skirt free and dismounted. She was unsteady on her feet. Longarm put an arm out and she leaned against him. He stifled the exclamation that rose to his throat. What he’d mistaken for an old woman with a creaking voice and long white hair was a young woman with long blonde hair and a voice made hoarse by calling for help and crying. He decided questions could wait.

“you get on the other side,” he told the woman. “Just walk by the horse and steady Lonnie as much as you can. I’ll hold him up on this side and guide the nag.”

Their progress toward the dim shape of the house was painfully slow. The lame horse, with the wounded man balanced precariously on its back, forced them to creep along. They reached the house at last, and Longarm guided the horse around it to the front door.

“Sam! Belle!” he called. “Make a light inside there! I got a man out here who’s been hurt real bad. He needs to be looked after right away!”

“Windy?” Sam Starr’s sleepy voice called from the blackness of the house. “What’s going on?”

“You and Belle get up, Sam!” Longarm called back. “There’s a man shot out here, and he needs help!”

A match flickered in the house, then the steadier glow of a lamp replaced it. Sam Starr came out onto the porch carrying the lamp. He was sleepy-eyed and slack-jawed, and wore only his long cotton undersuit. He held up the lamp and peered, blinking, at Longarm, the girl, and the wounded man on the horse.

“Who is he?” Sam asked. “Who shot him?”

“I don’t know yet. All I know is he’s in real bad shape,” Longarm replied.

“Please,” the woman said to Starr. “Please, can’t you take him inside? Help him? Bandage him up?”

“Sure.” Starr came down the steps. He winced when his bare feet met the rough-packed earth, but came on to where Longarm stood beside the horse, supporting the wounded stranger. He looked at the man sagging forward in the saddle, his shirt encrusted with dry blood.

“We better get him inside,” Starr said. He handed the lamp to the woman. “Here, you carry this. I’ll help Windy.”

Between them, Longarm and Sam got the stranger’s limp, unwieldy body off the horse. They worked as gently as they could, but, as they started with him into the house, fresh blood began dripping from the unconscious man’s back. The drops left a trail, black in the lamplight, up the steps, across the floor, and into the main room.

“Where you want to put him?” Longarm asked.

Starr looked around. “The table’s the best place, I guess.” He spoke to the girl. “Lady, set that lamp down on a chair and clear that stuff off the table.”

There were an almost empty bottle of whiskey and a scattering of dirty glasses on the table. The girl moved quickly, placing the lamp in one of the chairs and setting the glasses and bottle beside it. Longarm and Starr lifted the wounded man to the table. He was too tall for its length, so his legs dangled off one end.

“Put a chair under his feet,” Starr told the girl. “We want to get him stretched out as straight as we can.”

She’d been hovering around, trying to help. Longarm, seeing her for the first time in the light, wondered how he could have made the mistake of thinking she was old. Her face was smooth and unwrinkled, her lips firm and full, her eyes clear, though their lids were puffed from tears and the night wind. What had fooled him, Longarm decided, was her hair. It was ash-blonde, almost white, and she wore it long and loose, caught up only by a small pin that gathered it at the back of her neck. He squinted at her hairline in the lamplight; there was no telltale sign of dyeing.

Starr tried to move around the table and bumped into the girl. He said, “You get up on one of them chairs and light that ceiling lamp, miss. We’re going to need to see what we’re doing.”

A reflector-type kerosene lamp hung above the table. The girl moved a chair to stand on, and touched the match Starr had given her to the wick. The room grew brighter as she adjusted the flame to stop its smoking.

Longarm got his first good look at the unconscious man. The stranger was young, probably in his mid-twenties, as closely as Longarm could tell through the smudges of grime and trail dust that covered his face. The man was clean-shaven, though now his cheeks and jaws bore the dark stubble of a three or four days beard. His lips were full but bloodless, so that his face appeared almost to be lacking a mouth. Waxen white lines showed at his nostrils under the coating of dirt. The man was hatless, and a shock of thick brown hair was tousled around his ears.

Looking at the blood that was beginning to pool on the table under the stranger’s body and trickle in a slow drip-drip-drip to the floor, Longarm shook his head.

“He’s really hurt bad, isn’t he?” the girl asked. Her voice was still hoarse, and she spoke in a cracked whisper.

“He don’t look very good,” Longarm affirmed.

Starr had gone into the bedroom. He came out carrying a handful of white cloth. “One of Belle’s old petticoats,” he told Longarm, handing him the wadded cloth. “I’ll see if I can’t find some more in a minute. Looks like we’re going to need them.”

Longarm frowned. “Where’s Belle?”

“I don’t know,” Sam replied. “She’s a restless sleeper, you know. A lot of nights she’ll get up and walk down to the river, or up to the groves on the hill. I didn’t wake up when she slipped out of bed.”

Longarm was busy unbuttoning the man’s shirt. He pulled the front open and looked at the raw flesh just below the unconscious stranger’s ribcage. It was an exit wound, and the slug had torn out flesh and skin to leave a deep wound almost as big around as the palm of a man’s hand. There was a second bullet hole on the other side, but it was a mere scratch compared to the big wound, from which blood seeped steadily.

Longarm ripped pieces of cloth from the petticoat and made a wad to go into the bigger of the two wounds. He tore a wide strip from the hem of the garment and handed it to Starr.

“Slide this under him when I lift up his shoulders,” he said.

He lifted the limp form, and Starr slid the bandage under the man’s back. Longarm wrapped the improvised bandage as tightly as he could around the man’s chest, and tied the ends of the cloth. The man stirred and twitched, and his lips moved for the first time.

“He’s trying to say something,” the girl whispered. “Do you think he’s coming around?”

“Might be,” Longarm replied. He handed the girl a piece of the petticoat. “Here. Wet this and sponge off his face.”

“There’s water in the bucket back of the stove,” Starr told her.

High heels beat a tattoo across the porch and Belle Starr walked into the room. “What’s going on here, Sam?” she asked as she came through the door. Inside, she saw the unconscious form of the stranger on the table. “Who is he?” she asked nobody in particular.

“I don’t know,” Sam replied. “I haven’t had time to find out. Windy brought him down to the house.” He squinted through the lamplight at his wife. “Where the hell you been, Belle?”

“Down by the river. I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk.” Belle turned to Longarm. “You know who he is, Windy?”

“Nope. I heard a horse and what sounded like a woman’s voice, so I went out to look. Found this fellow on a lame nag, with this girl here holding him up. I got them down here and yelled for you and Sam.”

“I wondered where you were,” Belle said. “I stopped at your cabin.”

She saw Sam looking at her and added quickly, “To see if you were comfortable. Then I walked on down to the river.”

Booted feet grated over the dirt outside and clumped across the porch. Floyd came in. He had on boots and trousers and his gunbelt, but was shiftless. He blinked in the sudden light.

“What’s the trouble, Belle?” he asked. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he saw the stranger lying on the table with the girl bathing his face and Longarm adjusting the bandage, which was now stained with blood.

Floyd’s eyes slitted and the corners of his mouth pulled down in an angry snarl as he said, “Goddamn! That’s Lon Taylor! Me and Steed been looking for him to get here.”

“He’s the fellow who was going to help you with-” Belle began.

Floyd cut her off. “That’s him. Who the hell shot him up? Is this some more of your goddamn work, Windy?”

CHAPTER 8

Before Longarm could say anything, Belle cut Floyd short. “shut up, Floyd! Windy didn’t have anything to do with Taylor being shot. All he’s doing is trying to help him.”

“That’s right,” the girl seconded, “if this big man here is the one you call Windy. If it hadn’t been for him hearing me calling for help, and if he hadn’t come to see what was wrong, I don’t know whether we’d have made it to the house.” Floyd was slowly subsiding. He said, “All right, if that’s the way of it.”

“That’s the way of it,” Belle assured him. “Now, if YOU don’t want to help, stay out of the way and we’ll see what we can do for your friend.”

She went to help Longarm. As she bent over Taylor, she asked, “Where were you a while ago, Windy? I went but you weren’t in the cabin-“

“I was like you, Belle—I couldn’t sleep, so I moved over to the barn.”

“Why the barn? You’d have been welcome in the house.”

“Never mind that now,” longarm said impatiently. “Let’s see if we can’t stop that blood from coming up through the bandage I put on this poor devil.”

Belle looked at the bloodstained bandage. “You need lint under it to stop the blood. Wait a minute, I’ve got some cloth I Can shred UP.” She hurried into the bedroom.

“Is Lonnie going to be all right?” the girl asked Longarm.

“Too soon to say, ma’am. He’s in real bad shape. Lost a lot of blood, I’d judge.” Floyd asked the girl, “Who in hell are you, lady? And how’d you get connected up with Lon?”

“I’ve known Lonnie for years, mister. Ever since we were in school together, back in Kansas.” She frowned, her eyes widening. “Why, you must be Floyd. Are you?”

“That’s me.”

“Lonnie was coming here to meet you. If he hadn’t stayed conscious long enough to show me how to go, though, I never would’ve found this place.”

“How’d he get shot?” Floyd asked.

“Do I have to talk about that now? Can’t it all wait until we see how Lonnie’s going to do?”

“Sure. I was just asking,” Floyd told her. He looked at Taylor on the table. “Old Lon sure don’t look too good right now, though. I hope he pulls through.”

Belle came in carrying a handful of shredded rags. “Here,” she said to Longarm. “We’ll untie that bandage enough to get to where he’s wounded, and put these over the place. Maybe that’ll stop him from bleeding so much.”

For the next few minutes, Longarm and Belle worked over Taylor. When the lint had been packed in the gaping wound and the bandage retied, Belle said, “Well, that’s all I can think to do for him right now. If he comes to, we’ll try to get a little whiskey down him; that’ll help his circulation. But all we can do right now is wait and see.” She turned to her husband. “Sam, is there any coffee left from supper? I guess we could all use some. Or a drink, or both.”

“It’s heating, Belle,” Sam replied. “And I’ve got water hottening on the stove, too.”

A thudding of boots on the porch announced the arrival of Steed and Bobby. Steed growled, “What’s all the fuss up here? Bobby woke up and seen the lights, and we figured something was wrong.”

“Taylor just rode in,” Floyd said. “He got himself shot up somewheres. I don’t know where or how.”

“Who done it?” Steed asked.

“How bad is he hurt?” Bobby asked at almost the same moment.

Floyd answered them both at the same time. “I don’t know who got him. And we won’t know for a while how bad it is.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “The way he looks, he ain’t going to make it.”

“Goddamn! That blows our job for sure!” Steed exclaimed.

“We’ll wait and see,” Floyd replied.

“But with Mckee dead, and now maybe Taylor, how could we pull it off?” Bobby asked. “You said there had to be five of us at least.”

“Shut up, Bobby!” Belle commanded. “Floyd, you and Steed cut it out, too. We’ll see what happens to your friend, then we can make a new plan, if we have to. There’s others we can bring in besides Mckee and Taylor.”

Longarm overheard the conversation; they were standing directly behind him. Apparently, in their excitement, they’d forgotten about him. Or, he thought, they might have accepted him as one of their kind by now.

Taylor groaned and his body twitched. His eyes opened, but weren’t focused; he shook his head to try to see clearly.

Longarm said over his shoulder, not caring who responded, “Pour a little bit of that whiskey in a glass. Let’s try to get a drink down him.”

It was the girl who reacted first. She splashed some of the corn liquor into the first glass she picked up from the chair. Longarm raised Taylor’s shoulders; the wounded man was still trying to focus his eyes. The girl put the glass to Taylor’s lips. He accepted the liquor in his mouth, but gagged when he tried to swallow it. Most of it trickled back out and dripped off his chin onto his bloodstained chest.

“Try again,” Longarm urged her.

This time, Taylor managed to get a good swallow of the whiskey down his throat. Holding him by the shoulders, Longarm could feel the muscles of his back beginning to flex.

“Go on,” he urged Taylor. “Swallow it on down.”

Taylor finally managed to get his vision under control. He looked up at Longarm. “Who’re you?” he asked. His voice was thin, almost inaudible.

“He’s the man who helped us get here,” the girl answered before Longarm could speak.

Taylor turned his eyes to look at her. “Susie. You got me here, didn’t you?”

“Yes. But you’re hurt real bad, Lonnie. You just lay back now and try to rest. You’ll be all right, I know you will!”

“Hey! He’s come around!” Floyd exclaimed. He stepped up to the table, followed by Steed and Bobby. They jostled against Longarm, and he stepped away to give them room.

“Said-I’d-be-here,” Taylor said in a series of gasping whispers.

“Lonnie! Don’t talk now. Save your strength!” the girl urged.

Belle drew Longarm away from the table. “I don’t know about him. That bullet took him in a bad place.”

“I know,” Longarm agreed. “I’ve seen men hit high in the belly there before. Mostly, they hang on and you think they’re going to get over it, but then they just fade off.”

“Why’d you decide to sleep in the barn?” Belle asked.

“I didn’t like those windows up above the bunks in that cabin. Not with Floyd just a little ways off.”

“Don’t worry about Floyd. He’ll do what I tell him to,” she assured him.

“Well, we’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out.”

Sam Starr came up frowning, carrying steaming coffee cups. “I don’t like this a bit, Belle. Somebody might have been trailing that fellow. He could have led a posse right up to our door.”

“I’d have heard them, if there was anybody behind him,” Longarm told Sam. “There wasn’t.”

“How in hell do you know, Windy?” Starr asked. His voice was somewhat uncertain, despite the bluster in his words. “They might be tracking him, five or ten miles behind.”

“That’s the most sensible thing you’ve said in a long time, Sam,” Belle told her husband. She called. “Steed! Bobby! Come here!”

When the two outlaws got to her side, Belle said, “Get your rifles and stand watch up at the gully. We don’t know there isn’t a posse tracking your friend. It damned sure wasn’t any friends of his who shot him.”

“They’d have got here by now, if they was after him,” Steed objected.

“Not if they were waiting for daylight to pick up his tracks,” Belle said. She gave Sam no credit for having been the first to come up with the idea. “Now, you stay at the gully until about noon. I’ll get Yazoo to bring you some breakfast after while.”

Steed looked as though he wanted to object still further, but Belle’s black look kept him silent. He shrugged and said, “Come on, Bobby. Belle just might have an idea there.”

Longarm went back to the table to look at Taylor. Floyd was still standing there. The girl, too, still stood on the other side of the wounded man. Taylor’s eyes were closed, and his chest was rising and falling irregularly.

Floyd asked Longarm, “How’s he look to you?”

“I’ve seen shot men who looked better. He had to wait too long to get those holes plugged up.”

“How many holes has he got in him, for Christ’s sake?” Floyd asked.

“I saw two, but I didn’t go over him too good. I was too busy getting that real bad one stopped up.”

“We’d better look him over, then,” Belle said. She’d come up to the table, following Longarm.

They searched Taylor’s prone form, and did find a third wound, a shallow graze, high on one side, almost in his armpit. It was no more than a scratch, raw but not bleeding now. They agreed that it would be better to leave it alone rather than to disturb Taylor by moving him to get a bandage on it.

“Whoever it was chasing him, they sure did intend to stop him,” Floyd commented. He looked at the girl, who hadn’t moved while they were making their examination. “You feel like telling us what happened, lady? There’s not a hell of a lot we can do for Taylor right now. Not until he gets better—or worse.”

“You’re right, Floyd,” Belle agreed. She raised her voice. “Sam!

Come watch Taylor while the rest of us go out on the porch. We need a breath of fresh air. You can start breakfast when we get back.”

“Sure, Belle.” Sam moved obediently to the table, pulled up a chair, and sat down. “If he comes around again, I’ll call you.”

“We’d better take care of Taylor’s horse,” Belle said when she saw the animal still standing in front of the house. “I’ll get Sam to take care of it as soon as he has time.”

“Never mind, Belle. I’ll lead it into the barn and unsaddle it,” Longarm told her. “I need to get my vest, anyhow. It’s got my cigars in the pocket.”

He led the animal into the barn, took off its saddlebags and tossed them in a corner, then loosened the cinch and lifted the saddle off. He set it beside the saddlebags, then he went up to the loft, slid his arms into his vest, and arranged his watch chain in its usual style, draped across from the pocket holding his watch to the opposite pocket, in which his derringer nestled, clipped to the other end of the chain. He took enough time to down a swallow of his own Maryland rye, and walked on outside before lighting his cheroot.

In the east, the sky was beginning to show the gray of false dawn, but it was still dark on the porch except for the patch of light from the open house door.

“Well,” the girl was saying, “I guess I don’t quite know how to start out.”

“You might start out by telling us who you are,” Belle suggested, “and how you came to hook up with Taylor.”

Longarm suddenly realized that things had moved so swiftly since he’d first responded to the girl’s cries that everyone’s attention had been focused so completely on Taylor—that nobody had learned the girl’s name.

She said, “My name-my name’s Dolly Varden.

Belle interrupted her with a laugh, a raucous, sneering chortle. “You’ll have to do better than that, missy. I know where that name comes from. You must think we’re all ignorant around here, but let me tell you something: I went to the Carthage Female Academy, and I learned how to read books. And that name’s right out of a book by an Englishman called Charles Dickens. He made it up a long time ago.”

“Really?” the girl asked. Her eyes widened in surprise. “You mean it’s just a made-up name?”

“That’s what it is,” Belle told her. “Now, suppose you come down off your high horse and tell us your real name.”

“Oh, hell!” the girl sighed. “I didn’t know Dolly Varden wasn’t real—that is, I didn’t know it was made up such a long time back. And I wasn’t trying to fool you. I’ve just called myself that for so long that I’d almost forgotten what my own name is. Until I ran into Lonnie about two weeks ago.” She sighed again and went on, “My real name’s Susanna. Susanna Mudgett. Everybody just called me Sue, back home. But when Lonnie began calling me Sue, I almost didn’t answer him half the time.”

“Come on, Dolly or Sue or whoever you are,” Floyd said impatiently. “We want to hear about Lon Taylor, not about you.”

“Appears to me we’ll have to hear about both of them, if we want to know what happened to Taylor,” Longarm pointed out. He went up the porch steps and sat down on the bench beside Susanna. “You take your time, now. Start wherever you feel like it, and just tell us whatever comes to your mind first. We’ll sort it all out.”

“All right,” she said nodding. “You see, I hadn’t seen Lonnie for a long time—five or six years, I guess. Then he stopped in the place where I was working…” She hesitated, shook her head angrily, and blurted, “Oh, hell! You’ll know sooner or later. I was a saloon girl over in Texarkana, on the Arkansas side of town. Lonnie came in, and I didn’t even recognize him right off. He spotted me, though. And then we got to talking. We-we used to be what we called sweethearts, back home. Of course, that was before we really knew what being sweethearts means.”

Longarm interrupted, “Back home, you say. That’d be up in Kansas?”

“Yes. Up at Yates Center. Then Lonnie left home, and I… well, I did too, later on. And we didn’t see each other again until he came into the saloon, there in Texarkana. Lonnie asked me would I come along with him and be his girl, and I said I would.”

“All right, Susan or Dolly or whichever you want us to call you—what happened with Lon?” Floyd asked impatiently, after the girl had sat silently for several moments.

“Well, Lonnie said he had to come up here into the Cherokee Nation, to meet some men. I guess you’d be one of them?” she asked Longarm.

He shook his head. “No. He was talking about Floyd and Steed.”

“This is Floyd,” Belle told her, pointing. “Steed’s up watching the gully you came through getting here.”

Susanna spoke directly to Floyd now. “He said he was in with you on some kind of job. I didn’t understand what it really was until we got to Dequeen. We stayed there awhile—about a week, I guess. It was while we were there that Lonnie told me how he’d-he’d turned outlaw. And he wouldn’t tell me what he was going to meet you for, Floyd, but it was some kind of robbery or something. Is that right?”

“Never mind,” Floyd said brusquely. “That’s not any of your affair. What else did Lon tell you about me?”

She frowned. “Nothing, really. Oh, he talked about you and the others a lot, but he didn’t really say anything, if you take my meaning. All I ever did know was that he was supposed to meet you at a place called Younger’s Bend. I guess that’s here, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Belle said. “Go on. Get on down to where you ran into the law.”

“How’d you know it was the law that shot Lonnie?”

“Hmph. Couldn’t have been much else,” Belle replied. “I could just about tell your story for you. You got to this place where you stopped—Dequeen?” Susanna nodded, and Belle went on, “Taylor told you he was running short of cash and needed some more, so he went out and came back with a bundle. But there was a posse of some kind chasing him, and you two stayed ahead of them for a while, but they caught up with you. Hell, I know what happened, girl. Am I right?”

“Almost, but not exactly,” Susanna said. “It was in Dequeen that Lonnie began to run short of money. He’d had to buy me a horse and saddle, you see, when I said I’d go with him. I didn’t have those, or any of the kind of clothes I’d need for traveling that way. So when he said he was coming up broke, I gave him what cash I had, which wasn’t much. It was enough for us to travel on a ways, though. We cut over into the Indian Nation, and came to a little place called Poteau. We really did run out of money there. We had enough to buy some groceries, though, so Lonnie took me to a place he knew about from when he’d been there before, a cave out west from Poteau. He left me there and said he was going to go raise some money. I guess I knew what he meant, but I just didn’t let myself think about it.”

“Shit!” Floyd snorted. “Nobody could be that innocent! I think you’re stringing us a pack of lies, girl! Now, you tell us exactly what happened, or you’ll be in trouble!”

“I’m telling you exactly what happened!” Susanna insisted. “I don’t remember things like what Lonnie said to me or I said to him, but it’s all true, what I’ve said so far!”

“Let her tell things her own way, Floyd,” Longarm told the outlaw. “We can sort it out after we’ve heard all of it.”

“You keep out of this, Windy!” Floyd shot back. “This ain’t your affair!”

“Both of you roosters keep quiet and let the girl finish!” Belle commanded.

Longarm patted Susanna’s hand. “Go on, tell us what happened next. Tell it just the way it was, though.”

“Ah, right, Windy, I’ll do the best I can, but everything that started then was—well, it all happened so fast, I might get mixed up.” She frowned, trying to remember where she’d left off, then continued, “I stayed in the cave, let’s see—the first night, with Lonnie, then he rode off the next morning and said he’d be gone a day, two days at the most. He didn’t come back that night, but he rode up the next morning, real early. He said we had to hurry and get out of there, that they were after him.”

“Who was after him?” Floyd asked.

“y, the sheriff and his deputies,” Susanna replied. “I didn’t find that out until later on, though. Not until they caught up with us late that afternoon. We’d been pushing our horses real hard, riding around whatever towns we saw ahead of us. I guess that slowed us down a little bit. Anyhow, they got close to us and started shooting. They killed my horse, the one Lonnie’d just bought for me. And he took me up in front of him. But then we couldn’t go as fast, of course. That’s when they shot Lonnie.”

Susanna stopped and pressed her hands over her face. Even Floyd stayed quiet until she was able to go on with her story. “It was lucky that Lonnie knew the country better than the posse did. He rode up a little creekbed and over a hill and doubled back and went over two or three more hills, zigzagging all the time. And I didn’t see the men who were chasing us again. Lonnie’d been hurt right bad, though. But you know that. So we changed places. I got back of him in the saddle so I could hold him on, and he told me which way to go. He’d told me where we were heading for, right after we shook off the posse. And then I turned in at the place he’d said to look for, and then Windy came up just when the horse was about to give out. And that’s really how it all happened.”

“Where was this place that Lon went for money?” Floyd asked.

Susanna shook her head. “I don’t really know, Floyd. Lonnie didn’t tell me where he’d been, or what happened. Oh, I knew he’d done something that was against the law. I knew what was in his mind when he set out from the cave, even if he didn’t tell me. And when he came back, I was sure. He never did say where he’d been or what he’d done, though.”

“It was likely a stagecoach or a bank job,” Belle said thoughtfully. “I know that cave west of Poteau. He could’ve gone into Poteau, but if he was smart, he’d have gone all the way back to Arkansas. It’s not too far, just an hour of hard riding. There are two or three towns there he could’ve hit, Hartford or Greenwood or Waldon. I don’t see that it makes any difference, though. Your job’s north of there.”

“We’ll find out from Lon when he comes around,” Floyd said. “He didn’t know too much about what we’ve been figuring to do. All I said when I sent word to him was to get here to Younger’s Bend as fast as he could ride. Told him who he’d be riding with, of course. He’d known Mckee and Steed from earlier. He didn’t know Bobby, but that wouldn’t have worried him. Lon trusts me.”

“He was on his way here, of course. You’d told him how to find the place, judging from what he told Susanna,” Belle said thoughtfully.

“You remember, though, Belle, he didn’t even tell Susanna until he’d been shot, and he knew she’d need to be able to find her way here,” Floyd pointed out.

“Hell, Floyd, I never have made any secret of where Younger’s Bend is. There isn’t any need to, as long as my treaty with the Cherokees holds good.”

Starr called from inside the house, “Belle! Taylor’s coming around!

He keeps calling for some girl, Sue’s her name. Would that be th-“

Susanna hurried inside, followed by the others. Taylor’s eyes were open and he was looking around the room. He saw Susanna and tried to sit up, but lacked the strength. She hurried to the table and took his hand.

“I guess you got me here in time,” he whispered. His voice was weak and raspy in his throat. “I feel pretty good right now.”

“That’s fine, Lonnie. You’ll be looked after. Everybody’s going to help,” she said.

Taylor saw Floyd, who’d come up to the table. “I’ll be riding with you on that job, Floyd. Just don’t plan on starting it until I feel a little stronger.”

“Don’t worry, Lon. I’ll wait till you heal up,” Floyd assured him.

Taylor smiled weakly. “That-that’s good.”

Floyd saw the whiskey bottle sitting in the chair. He said, “We’ll just have a drink on that, by God!” and walked around the table, picked up the bottle, and selected two glasses.

“I’m sure glad you feel better, Lonnie,” Susanna said.

Taylor looked at her and smiled. He started to say something, but the words that formed in his mouth failed to come out. His throat pulsed convulsively for a moment, then his eyes rolled upward, the pupils going out of sight even though the eyelids remained wide open. His head fell back and his body seemed to shrink a tiny amount as it went limp.

Susanna stared at him, realization growing in her eyes. “Oh, God!” she gasped. “I-I think he’s dead!”

CHAPTER 9

“Dead?” Floyd whirled around, still holding the two shots of whiskey he’d poured. “How in hell could he be? He just said he was feeling a lot better!”