Longarm and the John Bull Feud

A couple of miles out of town they came to where those track workers of Widow Farnsworth seemed to be following the suggestions of that Encyclopedia Britannica. The posse had to ride around the cluster of carriages drawn up along the wagon trace. The pretty Widow Farnsworth was watching her laborers from a one-horse shay she’d driven down from her mansion herself. Old T.S. Nabors of C.C.H. was holding court at a sullen distance in his own coach and four, as if afraid he’d miss something the competition was up to.

As the posse rode past, Longarm dropped out long enough to tick his hat brim to the well-proportioned brunette and ask how things seemed to be going.

She dimpled up at him from under her sunbonnet and declared, “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you, Custis. It was all so simple as soon as you pointed it out! Half my track workers have never learned to read or write, yet they all seemed to grasp your diagram at a glance!”

Longarm allowed that was why he’d tried to draw it simple. Then he explained they were hunting for killers, ticked his hat brim again, and rode on to catch up with Nate Rothstein as he led his posse down the gentle slope toward the tracks. He naturally did so well clear of the eight-man work crew, all colored, as they sang in time while they all pried a heavy length of Wilkinson rail loose with their long crowbars.

Longarm had to rein in again. He lit a cheroot and watched with admiration as other workers grabbed hold of the loose rail with what looked like ice tongs, lifted it as one, and flipped it over like one hell of a long flapjack to clank smoothly into that long line of small steel cradles as the workers all laughed like kids. Longarm felt mighty pleased with himself as he rode on. The feeling passed by the time he caught up with the posse again. For he didn’t feel half as smart about outlaws in these parts. He didn’t have an educated guess as to what in blue blazes they were up to!

He knew there had to be some around, for they kept shooting at more honest folks. But there was just no saying why. Nobody but cranky old Granny Boggs had reported any missing stock, and even her losses seemed too modest to justify any killing.

As they forded the shallow Mudpuppy Creek, there was no mystery as to where it had come by its name. At this altitude you got trout where the streams ran cold between granite boulders. You got more frogs and mudpuppies, or big fat salamanders that seldom left the water, where the streams flowed sluggishly over muddy bottoms with no shade to keep the sun from warming the water to just too cold for much swimming. The trail picked up on the far side as a narrower pair of wagon ruts. Nobody paid any mind to the fresh horse apples or cow pats they passed. Nate Rothstein had said the trail ran past the Double Seven spread.

That turned out a bigger and handsomer home spread than one expected to find up here where the grass grew greener in far smaller amounts. Someone had left a salt block just outside the cattle guard gate through the six-strand Glidden-wire fence around the main house, outbuildings, horse corral, and such. So a dozen-odd cows of various breeds and original brands lazed around in the nearby grass, as if around the cracker barrel in some bovine general store.

You could raise some of the more tender Eastern beef critters on the greener summer grass and forbs of the front ranges. So it was no great surprise to see more shorthorn stock, and even one brute who could have passed for pure Durham. Nobody had denied that Jed Nolan of the Double Seven had been buying other stock right and left to fatten up and sell as kosher beef in nearby Denver. It hardly seemed possible a big froggy in a little puddle could just help himself to the stock of smaller and likely jealous neighbors without any of them noticing, and so far not even Granny Boggs had accused this outfit of running her brand.

There was a distinct and vital difference between running a brand and changing it lawfully. When a stockman bought a beef critter fair and square, he blotted or crossed out its original brand without any attempt to change it. Then he slapped his own brand on to show who the critter belonged to now. By the time a cow got to the slaughterhouse it often had quite a history inscribed across its hide. That might have been why the Eastern shoe factories paid more for Argentine hides. They didn’t brand beef cattle down Argentine way. Those gaucho riders just cut the balls off anyone they caught messing with their stock.

As the posse reined in out front, the burly but well-dressed Jed Nolan came out on his veranda to call in his hands and ask if anyone wanted coffee and cake.

When Nate Rothstein politely declined and told the local stockman what they had in mind, Nolan tried to sound sincere as he declared, “I’d sure like to ride with you boys. Amos Payne was a good man, and young Keen leaves a widow to mourn for his life. But you see, I’m all gussied up to ride into Denver, where I have to catch me a Chicago train. I hope to be back by the end of the month. But I ain’t coming back before I get a good price on at least one of those fancy refrigerated railroad cars such as Armour ships his butchered and trimmed beef to market in.”

Someone in the posse called out, “Them Chicago ice boxes on wheels are built broad-gauge, Jed! How in thunder do you expect to get one up all them miles of narrow gauge from Golden?”

Nolan smiled smugly and replied, “That’s for me to know and you to find out. We live in changing times and I paid for my education. So I don’t aim to pay for anyone else’s.”

Nate Rothstein laughed and said they’d best ride on. By this time a pouty-looking redhead in a mint-green summer frock had joined Nolan and the others out front. Nobody laughed when the obviously rich son of a bitch introduced the stunning young thing as his woman. Most of the locals already knew her, though not as well as most men would have wanted to. She seemed put out that nobody would come inside and even taste her swell chocolate layer cake. When Rothstein repeated best get going, the older stockman turned to a younger and taller cuss wearing a red shirt and chinked chaps cut off just below the knee, and suggested he gather some of the other hands and ride with the posse.

So he did. As they all made it back to the westbound trail, a single-file rut through the grass by then, Rothstein introduced the red shirt to Longarm as Buck Lewis, the ramrod of the Double Seven.

Longarm filed and forgot the names of the four other cowhands the big boss had sent along. Buck Lewis seemed neither elated nor depressed by what was shaping up to be an all-day ride. When Beavertail showed some interest in a fresh horse apple swarming with bluebottles, the foreman laughed easily and called out, “That’s be Casey or Old Dick, scouting for a lion we heard pestering the stock the other night. I sent them after the son of a bitch with some redbone lion dogs this very morning.”

Longarm asked how far Lewis figured his own hands might ride after a stock-raiding lion. When the ramrod figured no further than the next ridge west, Longarm casually asked whether that mule team bound for Holy Cross had passed by the spread back yonder.

It didn’t make him feel any better when Buck Lewis confirmed a handsome brunette had been riding in the party with a gambling man or that Red Robin had gotten along just swell with everyone save for Miss Amanda, the owner’s young wife. Longarm wasn’t surprised to hear Red Robin hadn’t cottoned to a genuine redhead after all the trouble she’d had to go to with henna dye and bleaching potion.

The trail got steeper and wound over some slickrock. Longarm’s borrowed buckskin made it to the far side, then commenced to limp like hell. So he rained in, dismounted, and lifted what seemed to be the offending hoof between his tweed-clad knees, muttering, “Aw, shit!”

Young Rothstein wheeled his paint to ride back and ask what was the matter.

Longarm explained, “She’s cast a shoe, Lord knows where, and now she’s split her hoof on that son of a bitching slickrock! You’d best ride on. This mare ain’t going nowheres. I’ll lead her back down on foot and they might be able to fix us up at the Double Seven.”

Buck Lewis, who’d ridden back to join them, called out, “Tell ‘em I said to. We got a well-founded forge out back, and our Mexican smith knows his job no matter how he talks.

Longarm thanked the ramrod for the information, and led the hurt pony to one side until all the others had passed by them on the narrow trail.

Once he had the gimpy mare back across the slickrock she was more willing to walk with him. He let her set her own pace and even brouse some aspen leaves along the way. For he knew he’d hate like hell to walk barefoot with the callus split to the quick.

So it took them a spell. But as all things good or bad must end, they got the crippled critter back down to the Double Seven. Once Longarm had asked him politely in Spanish, the skinny old Mexican farrier said he’d be proud to staple her split hoof and reshoe her.

As the older Mexican and his young helper got to work on the mare out back, the redheaded Amanda Nolan called Longarm inside from her back door. It would have been rude to snub the owners as he availed himself of their forge and hired help. So he strode on over and took off his hat as she led him inside for some of that chocolate layer cake.

They had it in the kitchen, served by her Indian cook, of course. He wasn’t surprised to find the cake over-sweet. The lovely but not too bright-looking Amanda seemed surprised when he declined her kind offer of canned milk and lump sugar for his coffee.

Seated across the pine table from him, the redhead said he’d just missed her husband. It appeared Old Jed, as she described him, had ridden into town early to attend some business before catching his train.

When Longarm remarked that the train would be leaving later than usual that day, she said they’d heard, and added, “Business, business, business, morning, noon, and night! That’s all Old Jed is interested in, and I swear he won’t be satisfied until he owns all of Colorado and has me knitting socks in an insane asylum!”

Longarm refused to even nibble at the bait. It sure beat all how pretty young gals turned down honest work or simple young men in favor of rich old farts, and then complained that their husbands were rich old farts.

It wasn’t easy, but he managed not to comment on her big fancy kitchen range and such being bought and paid for by a man who spent more time at business than, say, strumming a guitar or reciting poems to her. He wasn’t totally unsympathetic to her plight. He knew he’d never in this world be rich as J.P. Morgan, or even Old Jed, unless he learned to drive himself with a whip and never waste time wondering about things like why roses were red and violets were blue instead of the other way around. But fair was fair and he couldn’t fault a man who only thought about business, as long as his business was within the limits of federal law.

He washed down some cake and casually asked the scatterbrained redhead if she knew how her husband meant to find a narrow-gauge refrigerated car. He explained, “Most of those mountain railroads are short-line, meant to just carry ore and produce down to where it can be loaded on regular rolling stock. It ain’t for me to say, but I’m sure it would be simpler to ship livestock at least as far down as Golden, slaughter ‘em there, and send the trimmed sides to market in regular refrigerated cars you could buy or, heck, rent off the broad-gauge by the shipment.”

She just looked blank. He explained, “You folks may be big by the local standards, Miss Amanda. But not even your husband could raise enough beef up this way to get that serious. Gents who talk business more than we do call it ‘economy of numbers’ because the way you sell produce changes as you change the amounts.”

She looked stunningly stupified.

He insisted, “You take the Colmans, growing barley up the line a piece. Barley grows good up here where it’s well watered and cooler. Those big breweries down Golden way will likely buy all the barley Colman cares to grow for ‘em, so’s they can turn it into barley malt and mix it with hops someone else grew to make lager beer for the big Denver market. But Colman just can’t grow enough barley on his homestead claim to justify his own processing. He’s better off selling his grain fresh from the combine and letting them worry about all that processing, see?”

He could tell she didn’t. He still said, “The butchertowns over Chicago way, Omaha way, and even Denver process more cows in a day than all you stockfolk up this way could ship ‘em a year! They run ‘em in single file to be sledged, hoisted, bled, and drawn almost as fast as I can say it. The neighboring plants along Butchertown Row process every part of the cow but the moo, from horn, hide, and bonemeal to disgusting leftovers I’d as soon not mention in front of you ladies. You can make a pretty penny processing pure trash, if you have enough of it in one place. But setting up a butchertown up at this end of that narrow-gauge? I just don’t know, Miss Amanda.”

The redhead simpered and said, “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

So their Indian cook murmured, “Miss Amanda!” in a desperately quiet tone.

But her mistress said, “Pooh, he’s a lawman and there’s nothing unlawful about moving this whole shebang up to Wyoming Territory, where the grass grows fair-green on the prairie and you don’t have to wait forever for the damned train!”

The older Indian gal sighed and said, “Just the same, we were told it was to be a family secret until the time came, Miss Amanda.”

The redhead shrugged and smiled as shrewdly as she knew how at Longarm, saying, “You won’t tell anyone like Granny Boggs, will you? I do go on in front of company, and Ute Mary is right. We weren’t to tell anyone.”

Longarm assured them both he only had to report federal offenses he might come across. Then he politely declined a second slice of cake, polished off his black coffee, and excused himself to see how they were doing with his borrowed mare.

The old Mexican and his young helper had done her proud. She barely limped at all when they led her around out in front of the forge. So he thanked the farrier, asked what he might owe, and insisted on leaving at least a fistful of cheroots when the older gent refused any dinero.

He was still riding her at a walk on soft ground when, just west of Mudpuppy Creek, he met up with another town deputy, headed the other way on a lathered bay. The younger lawman said, “It’s awful! How far up this trail might Nate and the others be?”

Longarm said, “No more than two hours ahead of you at the rate you’re riding. What’s so awful, old son?”

The deputy tersely replied, “French Sarah, the stuck-up maid who worked for Widow Farnsworth. They dumped a whole tram of ore atop her in the hopper of the stamping mill before they noticed her frilly white petticoat and naked thigh. She’d have really wound up awful if they’d tossed her in whilst the mill was processing ore! The assistant coroner and undertaking druggist agree she must have been strangled last night and tossed in that ore hopper like a rag doll nobody wanted no more.”

Longarm said, “They could be guessing closer than they really tried. Her boss lady noticed she was missing yesterday afternoon. Before that, she’d been seen in the company of the late Quicksilver Quinn.”

The deputy marveled, “Kee-rist, she was sparking with that gunslick you had it out with at the school?”

Longarm nodded grimly. “The same. I’d say she heard her lover had been killed, went to his pals for consolation or mayhaps a train ticket out of here, and like the dentist and druggist suggested, they had no further use for her!”

The young deputy gulped and said, “She’d have never been found if the mill crew hadn’t spotted her in their hopper before they had a head of steam up in their boiler. I know she was stuck up, but wasn’t that a mighty shitty way to treat any woman?”

Longarm allowed it seemed a shitty way to treat anybody, and the deputy rode on to catch up with the posse as Longarm continued his slower ride back to town.

As he forded Mudpuppy Creek again he stared ahead, and saw that track crew and all those carriages he’d seen on the wagon trace beyond were gone. Hearing one of her help had been murdered had likely unsettled Widow Farnsworth a mite. So he and his gimpy mount had the wagon trace to themselves, or thought they had, as they moved up the grassy slope at a walk, taking little notice of the close-growing and fluttering aspen on the far side.

It was just as well Longarm was a kindly rider. For had not he noticed the far shorter but far steeper berm of the wagon trace and reined in to gracefully and suddenly dismount, that rifle spanging up amid those gray-green aspen trunks might have blown him backwards over the cantle of his borrowed stock saddle.

It had surely been aimed his way!

The pony, unmindful of his intent to lead it up on the roadway on foot, simply spooked at the noise and lit out for the familiar smell and security of its stall in town, dragging its reins and going like blazes despite having to favor its off-front hoof.

By this time Longarm had landed in the grass on one shoulder and rolled as he drew his six-gun, cursing that fool buckskin for running off with that Winchester.

But at least he had plenty of ammunition in one pocket of his tweed outfit. So he cranked off the five he’d been packing in the wheel through the dust thrown up by his bolting mount. Then he flattened behind the berm and rolled some more as somebody returned a heap of shots through the cloud of gunsmoke he’d just offered them as another target.

He reloaded, popped up again, just high enough to blaze away blind as he spied other gunsmoke drifting among the aspens, and then ducked down to crawl in the opposite direction while reloading along the way. Hence his unseen enemy wasn’t expecting to spot him in that direction as Longarm sprang to his long legs and made it across the wagon trace in a half-dozen running strides, crabbing to one side as he got in among the skinny but closely packed trunks before someone got to peel some smooth bark where a more direct approach might have taken Longarm.

So Longarm fired back a lot, and was rewarded by the yipe of a kicked dog, or a terrified man, as his damned .44-40 ran down some more.

Longarm zigzagged the other way as he moved in on the sound, braced for more return fire as he reloaded in the deep shade of the fluttering green and silver leaves of the nearly solid canopy above. But there came no more return fire, and it surely sounded like someone else was plowing off through the grove without half as much comotion.

Longarm kept moving in slow and silent, aware of many a crow bird being taken in by one hunter leaving while another lagged behind.

Then, off in the distance north of the grove, he heard the sound of hoofbeats lighting out as if some rider had just had the shit scared out of him.

Longarm chuckled, but moved on cautiously until he came to a patch of trampled forest duff, a handful of smoked-down cigar stubs, and something else.

He bent over to pick up a cigar ring and the high heel of some frightened soul’s Texas boot. He could see at a glance how a two-hundred-grain .44-40 slug had blown it out from under the cuss with a lucky shot. He had to grin as he pictured the startled expression on the rascal’s face when he’d yelped like that.

Longarm moved on and found another spot where the already spooked rifleman had tried to make a second stand, spilled some spent brass, and lit out running after yet another lucky shot had thunked into an aspen trunk above his fool head.

Longarm pocketed some of the brass. Most everybody loaded saddle guns with the same handy .44-40 rounds, unless they were after bigger game than, say, a deer, a lion, or a man. But not everyone bought the same brand. So now he was looking for a son of a bitch who puffed on Gallo Claro cigars, wore those new Justin brand boots, but favored cheap P&P ammunition.

Chapter 14

Longarm got back to town the hard way, asked around until he made certain that the buckskin and all the other public property had made it safely without him, and went over to the Western Union for some more discussion of recent events with the outside world.

As he’d hoped, there were already some answering wires waiting for him. But as he tore each open he only became more puzzled. Nobody else in the game of catching crooks had been able to connect either Ginger Bancott or Quicksilver Quinn with Bunny McNee’s gang, and more than one seemed surprised as all get-out to learn Bunny McNee had been a gal.

Longarm picked up a pad of yellow telegram forms and proceeded to wire his home office that he’d been wrong the last time he’d wired. For whatever in blue blazes was going on surely had to be federal. He had no idea what they were up to. But anyone moving so sneaky and sly had to be smart enough to know it was serious.

He wasn’t ready to say for certain whether he or the late Gaylord Stanwyk had been Ginger Bancott’s intended victim. But he knew for a fact they’d sent Quicksilver Quinn and somebody else more recently to gun him in particular!

Outside once more, striding along the walk, he spied the sign of a cobbler with an Italian name. He didn’t go in or even glance inside as he passed. He could ask somewhere else whether that was the best, or only, place to have a boot heel replaced. Meanwhile, it was a mite early to worry about that. The rascal he’d spooked back there amid those aspen-had most likely gone to ground here in town, to wait and see how warm his intended target was before coming out to play some more.

At the jailhouse they told him Widow Farnsworth had paid the town druggist-undertaker to tidy up and embalm her dead maid so she could be shipped home to her kin in New Orleans. They were fixing to convene a coroner’s jury just after supper time so it would be all right to seal the swell coffin a generous employer was springing for.

Longarm headed for the Farnsworth mansion up the slope. There had to be some reason they’d killed such a pretty little thing. She’d have had to know something they didn’t want anyone else to know. The secret couldn’t have been that she’d had rotten taste in men. A heap of folks in town had known she’d been playing slap and tickle with the late Quicksilver Quinn. His pals would have had no good reason to worry about her going to the very lawman who’d killed her lover for a nice long chat.

That same snooty butler let him in, took away his hat, and allowed he’d see if Madame was receiving on such short notice.

Constance Farnsworth was. She was wearing a shantung house robe and an unsettled expression as the older colored gent led him in to her smaller sewing room. She wasn’t seated at her fancy Singer machine. She was perched on a nearby window seat, with her feet in satin mules and drawn up on the cushions with her, as if she felt like a child left home alone with darkness coming on.

In point of fact it was barely noon outside. That late train of hers hadn’t left the roundhouse yet. Getting right to the point, he asked her if she could hold off sending it down her line until Nate Rothstein and that posse got back.

She nodded and reached for a bell pull as she soberly asked, “Do you expect the monster who killed poor Sarah to make a run for it aboard my Golden-bound combination?”

He said, “Can’t say yet. What I thought I’d ask your new constable to try might or might not flush some unusual birds.”

That butler came in. She told him to send a footman over to the roundhouse and tell them she’d send further word when and if she ever wanted that Shay locomotive to move again.

When they were alone some more Longarm explained. “I know for a fact that Jed Nolan told his wife he was headed down your line on a serious business trip. Right about now he’ll be starting to pace the floor of your waiting room. There’ll be others with sensible reasons to ride down to Golden on a workday. There might be some who seem to be leaving town unexpected. We can sort them all out once we let the train leave, stop it in open country a mile or so down the park, and see just who might be aboard.”

She said she followed his drift. Then she swung her slippers to the rug, patted the seat cushions where they’d been, and bade him sit down and tell her how he’d ever gotten so smart.

Longarm remained standing as he modestly allowed, “I’ve been at the same puzzle-solving chores for six or eight years now, riding for the law. You get to where some pieces look familiar, since there are only so many ways a crook can move.”

She asked why he didn’t want to sit down beside her.

He said, “It ain’t what I want, ma’am. It’s what there’s time to do in the time I have to work with. I got to move on now. I only stopped here to ask you to hold that train.”

She smiled up wistfully. “Consider it stopped until you send word you want it to move. You will come back and tell me what on earth’s been going on, promise?”

He smiled back as wistfully and said, “I’ll be proud to, as soon as there’s more time and I have the least notion what I’m talking about!”

He left her there and prowled back through her house to the kitchen, where he found that old frog-faced butler seated grandly at a table, having his cake and coffee served by a skinny young gal of a similar complexion.

The butler rose stiffly to say, “It is customary to ring when you desire something from the staff, suh.”

Longarm said, “I ain’t back here as a guest. I’m back here as the law. I heard Miss Constance call you Edward. If you’d rather I call you Mister I’ll need a last name.”

The butler stiffly replied that Edward would do fine, and added he knew nothing about the murder of that sassy Miss Sarah, save that he’d told the pretty Creole gal not to mess with that Texas trash they’d called Quicksilver.

Longarm nodded gravely and declared, “She should have listened. What I wanted to ask of you would be more in the way of an introduction. I’ve noticed more than a dozen colored folk up this way, and it’s been my experience that there’s usually a colored quarter tucked in some corner of a town this size.”

The butler and the colored scullery maid exchanged wary glances. Edward shrugged and said, “There’s no secret about that. Me and the other household help sleep up under the mansard shingles. The mostly colored railroaders are housed in company cottages on the far side of the round house. Some other colored families here in this tight little town have naturally built or hired other quarters next to the railroaders, on railroad property. Miss Constance don’t mind Her husband treated us decent while he was alive, and she’s carried on as a white boss of quality.”

Longarm nodded and said, “I don’t have time to convince you my folks were too poor to keep slaves in days of yore. Your boss lady, her railroad, and a heap of track-working jobs could be in danger. I need your help to mayhaps head some off. Do I have it?”

Edward nodded gravely, but asked, “What can I do? I just work here.”

Longarm included the young scullery maid as he explained, or verified, what they’d likely noticed already.

He said, “You colored folks tend to be either annoying or invisible to a heap of white folks. When you ain’t getting shot by brutes such as Clay Allison for ordering a drink in a white saloon, you tend to be tolerated, and ignored, as faithful darkies waiting on tables, shining shoes, or whatever.”

Edward quietly asked if Longarm was trying to be funny.

Longarm assured him, “Not funny. Factual. I’ve noticed in connection with other federal cases that white bullies tend to go on talking as if they were alone while colored help is quietly serving them. I’ve noticed that next to barbers, nobody gossips more, in low tones, about the scandalous or just plain silly things the white folks in town may be up to than their colored help.”

The scullery maid was grinning ear to ear. Edward sternly warned her not to get uppity, but confided to Longarm, “She caught that New Orleans gal doing it in the woodshed with that Quicksilver man one evening. But we ain’t about to gossip like that about Miss Constance!”

Longarm said, “I ain’t interested in what a lady might do in her own woodshed. I want to talk to someone privy to all the gossip of all you invisible folks. Before you ask me what I want to know, if I knew all that much I wouldn’t have to ask. I have a whole bunch of balls in the air with no basket to put ‘em in. If only I could connect or disconnect my obvious suspects …”

“You want to talk to Mammy Palaver, the Obeah woman,” Edward said. The scullery maid nodded, with a wicked grin.

Longarm smiled less certainly and asked, “Obeah? Ain’t that some like voodoo?”

Edward said, “Voodoo is a religion. Obeah is serious. Even our good Baptist ladies go to Mammy Palaver for goofer dust or just good advice. So she would naturally hear a lot.”

Longarm nodded thankfully, and asked how he might find this witch woman and whether he should say Edward sent him.

The frog-faced but dignified gentleman of color gravely told him to just ask when he got to the colored quarter. Then he added, “You won’t have to tell Mammy Palaver who you are. She’ll know. All of us heard a powerful lawman was coming our way. It was Mammy Palaver who spread the word you were all right. Your point about white gunfighters gunning our boys for no good reason was Well taken. So we watch you all more than you might think.”

Longarm said that was the very point he’d been trying to make, and left by way of the back door.

He’d already been told French Sarah was over at the undertaker’s, and he figured the dentist and druggist who examined more dead folks than he did knew when a gal had been strangled or shot. So he headed up to the mining operation to examine the scene of the crime.

He walked as far as a barbed-wire fence and a posted gate, where a shotgun-toting C.C.H. man told him all the property beyond was his outfit’s private property, damn it.

Longarm flashed his federal badge and explained he’d come friendly for a look around that ore-stamping mill, or else he’d be back directly with a search warrant and an armed mob. So the guard let him through, and even pointed the way to where they’d found that dead gal.

Longarm would have found the stamping mill in any case. It was three stories high, sending up a lot of coal smoke, and making a dreadful racket near the tracks running through the dusty confusion of tippies, sheds, and such between him and the mine adit set in the bare side of a mineral-rich young mountain.

He found a dusty denim-clad work crew running pulverized and high-graded ore into an open gondola car the same gauge as Widow Farnsworth’s little railroad. A lot more worthless spoil was being piled up, and up, between the stamping mill and a head rill of Mudpuppy Creek. If they didn’t want a little lead with their mud, it was tough shit as far as C.C.H. cared. Old T.S. Nabors would likely declare he shipped as much of it as possible to the smelters down in Golden.

Once he’d read Longarm’s identification papers and figured what he wanted, above the ear-splitting thunder of the steam-powered ore-crushing machinery, the straw boss led Longarm to a nearby office shed, where they could hear one another better behind the closed door.

The straw boss poured them a couple of snorts from a bottle filed under B for Bourbon and told the sad tale of French Sarah about the way Longarm had already heard it.

He was able to explain why the killer or killers had been forced to dump her body where it had been found in time after all. Sipping his own whiskey, the mining man said they’d been working short daylight shifts and added, “Nobody could have ever climbed the open stairs with a body if the mill had been manned and running.”

Longarm said he’d already figured that, and asked if a killer with a knack for mining machinery could have started the mill up, with or without permission, once he’d dropped the poor gal in the hopper up above.

The straw boss pursed his lips and decided, “It’d be possible but tough. We naturally leave a banked bed of coals under the boiler all the time. Takes hours to start a steam engine up from stone cold. But I doubt there’d have been enough steam up to run her and that ore she lays on through the mill. Not without poking and stoking the firebox and waiting for a good head of steam, leastways.”

Longarm tried to picture the scene. It was not a pretty picture no matter how you drew it. He said, “They might have been anxious to leave. They could have slipped both ways through that three-strand fence in the dark, whether the gate was guarded or not.”

The straw boss said, “Some other lawmen scouted for sign along that pesky fence. We never needed one when we were mining high-grade for real gents instead of rag-pickers. They found nothing to say how that dead gal came on the property, dead or alive.”

That notion painted a really ugly picture. Longarm reached in a pocket as he said, “We only know of one local gent she’d been seeing and he’d have been dead when she left the Farnsworth mansion to see someone else.”

He produced the boot heel and cigar band, asking, “Can you think of anyone with business on this site who smokes this brand of cigars or stomps around a mining operation in cowboy boots?”

The straw boss shook his head, observing, “I know them claros from Cuba cost more than this child can afford. The big boss, Tough Shit Nabors, smokes Havana Perfectos. I’d say your claro smoker pampers himself a mite, whether he can afford to or not. Claros are mighty mild as well as too expensive for an honest workingman.”

He added he’d never seen anyone mining hardrock in cowboy boots, but that some of the company police thought they were Wild Bill in the flesh. Longarm had been afraid he’d say something like that. It left that ball way in the middle of the air.

He figured asking company police in high-heeled boots whether they’d just been shooting at him in an aspen grove might be a waste of time. So he handed the straw boss a cheroot in exchange for the drink and they parted friendly.

He could see the tin roof of that railroad roundhouse down the slope from the C.C.H. tracks. So he strode down along them, noting in passing how easy it would have been to walk or carry French Sarah up to the stamping mill by that unguarded route.

He found the whitewashed company cottages and some extra tarpaper shanties near the roundhouse, where old Edward had said he might. A couple of colored kids were playing mumbly-peg in the dirt with a jackknife. When he asked the way to Mammy Palaver’s, one ran away, but the other pointed at a slot between two cottages and warned him the Obeah woman might turn him into a horny toad or gopher snake.

Longarm allowed he’d take his chances, and strode over to find the apparent gap between whitewashed cottages was the entrance to a sort of smoke-filled cavern, improvised from scrap lumber and flattened out coal-oil cans. The smoke smelled more like smoldering herbs than firewood. As he hesitated in the low overhang, a cheerful voice called out, “Well, don’t just stand there, child. Come on in and tell Mammy what you want her to make better!”

He went on back to where he could barely make out a once pretty and still friendly-looking colored lady dressed in a white cotton smock, with a purple head cloth and a whole lot of small bones and big beads strung as a triple necklace. She was smoking a long pale cigar. When Longarm started to identify himself she laughed, took the cigar from her lips, and said, “I knew you were coming to John Bull before you got here. I told the chillun how you saved that colored rail-yard man from a mighty ugly bunch of hobo boys that time. I’m telling you now, ain’t none of us colored folk been up to no good in these parts!”

Longarm gravely nodded and declared all the suspects on his list so far seemed to be white folks. He asked if she knew Ute Mary over at the Double Seven, adding he’d just been by there and that the cook had tried to shut her mistress up.

Mammy Palaver said, “Ute Mary been to see me for some love potion. Ain’t no Indian medicine men left in these parts. She ain’t the one who wants to hide her romance with Buck Lewis, the white foreman down that way. He’s the one who’s ashamed to take a full-blood gal to dances in town. I told her she didn’t need no potion for that white boy. He ain’t been fooling with the other gals on that spread, because all but Miss Amanda are true to their husbands, and Miss Amanda thinks she’s too high-toned for raggedy hired help.”

She took a drag on her cigar and added, “She’s right. Ain’t got a peck of brains in her pretty head, but Buck Lewis ain’t good enough for Ute Mary. That stingy old Jed Nolan only pays a foreman top-hand wages and a half. Do they move that beef operation out of here, like some say, Ute Mary won’t have to worry about her Buck Lewis. He’ll be lucky if they take him to Wyoming with them, and Lord knows they’ll never be dragging Indian kitchen help that fu!”

Longarm didn’t ask why. Depending on how full-blooded she might be, Ute Mary was lucky they hadn’t already moved her on out to Utah Territory with the rest of her North Ute kin. The Bureau of Indian Affairs would frown even harder on her winding up on recent Lakota and North Cheyenne range. In their Shining Times the playful young men of those nations had described the North Ute as their favorite enemies. The Ute had counted coup on them many times as well.

Longarm cautiously asked if Mammy Palaver had any notion who Amanda Nolan might be fooling with on the side. The Obeah woman declared she knew for a fact that the redhead had spent a night at the hotel with one of those mining men the last time her husband had been out of town on business. Longarm perked up as he got out his notebook.

But then she had to spoil it all by declaring the redhead’s adulterous stay at the Elk Rack had been well before that confusing Bunny McNee had run that hotel tab up.

As long as he had his pad and pencil out, he questioned Mammy Palaver about all the other slap and tickle she’d heard about up this way.

An Obeah woman who sold love potions heard a lot. The tiny town commenced to sound like Sodom and Gomorrah with Zebourn and Nero’s Rome thrown in. He was more saddened than shocked to hear poor old Constable Payne had been coming from a tryst with a married woman on the night of his death, and he didn’t want to hear about the late Deputy Keen and that colored waitress across the street.

He was a tad disappointed to learn Tough Shit Nabors seemed to be content with his own young wife. They both agreed rich old men seemed to attract the better-looking play-pretties.

Mammy Palaver had kind words to say for Constance Farnsworth as well. She allowed the pretty young widow was either still in mourning for her man or mighty discreet. Then she spoiled that by adding with a shrug, “That uppity Edward would never tell anyone if he caught her in bed with President Hayes and Jesse James at the same time. But listen, have I told you yet about that minister’s spinster daughter who loves her dear daddy more than the Good Book tells her to?”

Longarm shook his head and murmured, “Don’t have any ministers on my list of suspects. Do you mind if I ask where you might have gotten that swell Gallo Claro cigar?”

She calmly allowed a client had bought a box for her, and named the one fancy tobacco shop in town that carried the brand. He asked if her client had been a white cowboy in Justin boots. She found that a droll suggestion, and explained that the colored foreman of that track-working crew had needed some goofer dust to use on a love rival.

Longarm doubted a man of any race would rely on both folk magic and P&P .44-40s to deal with anyone he wanted dead. So he thanked the kindly old witch and went on back to the center of town.

As he approached the jailhouse he saw heaps of pony rumps and assumed that the posse had come back. He learned he was right when he strode in to be told Constable Rothstein had just gone over to the undertakers for a look-see at that dead gal.

Longarm went after the younger lawman, and caught up with him in the cellar of the drugstore, where the druggist ran his sideline as the town’s only and hopefully occasional mortician.

He’d thought French Sarah had been nicely built when she had served him with no more than tea and pastry at the Farnsworth mansion. When one considered what her petite body had been through since then, it was surprising, and distressing, to see how tempting her pale naked flesh looked as it lay on that cold table with the undertaking druggist powderingher dead nose.

Nate Rothstein turned from watching to nod at Longarm and declare, “Small blood flecks in her eyes and only the bruises around her windpipe, despite the drop and a sudden stop on chunks of ore. They tell me we can save the county some bother and her kin some distress if we list the cause of death as strangulation at the hands of a person or persons unknown.”

Longarm nodded soberly and agreed. “She lit out from her job at Widow Farnsworth’s early in the day, as soon as she’d heard her boyfriend had lost a gunfight with yours truly. She might have demanded they send somebody else after me. She might have demanded money to get out of here before anyone could tell me she’d been out in the woodshed with a wanted killer. In either event, the one she went to killed her on the spot, waited until dark, and then carried her up to that stamping mill to get rid of her.”

He stared wistfully down at the dead gal and asked if the posse had found any sign further west. He wasn’t surprised to hear they hadn’t.

Longarm nodded and said, “I have a plan that might tell us more, whether anyone makes a break for it by rail or not.

He explained what he’d worked out with the pretty owner of the narrow-gauge. Rothstein said it sounded good to him. So they went on up and out to the street, where Rothstein yelled for a kid he knew to go tell Widow Farnsworth to let her combination head down to the outside world in, say, half an hour.

Then the two of them legged it back to the jailhouse, gathering posse members from saloons along the way, and then, mounted on yet another borrowed pony, Longarm led them the same way they’d ridden before.

As they rode, Buck Lewis caught up with Longarm to ask where they were headed and why. When Longarm tersely told him they were fixing to stop the train where that westbound trail left the wagon trace, the Double Seven ramrod laughed and allowed he’d meant to be home for his supper in any case. Longarm didn’t ask whether he preferred to have it served by a naked lady in bed. Mammy Palaver had said he was a tad embarrassed about being a squaw man.

A heap of old boys were. Kit Carson and William Bent had married up properly and lived openly with Indian wives. But more often it was hidden as if it was a secret vice. Old boys who thought nothing of being seen coming out of a whorehouse, whooping drunk, would gun you for asking what they’d been up to in that tipi the other night.

He had time to consider that angle as they lined up across the tracks near that shallow stretch of Mudpuppy Creek. But there was just no way anyone with a lick of sense would want to gun a federal deputy to keep a secret widely known by local gossips. It was simply sad but true that a rider drawing even a ramrod’s pay was never going to do much better than a drab white gal or the sort of pretty Ute Mary. it wouldn’t be a federal crime if old Buck could get at his boss man’s prettier wife.

The Shay locomotive came puffing down their way and, since the engine crew had been warned they’d be stopped a few miles out, they braked the combination smooth as silk to an unscheduled stop as Longarm and Constable Rothstein swung aboard from their ponies, guns drawn, to ask some questions.

The handful of startled passengers had questions of their own to ask. Old Jed Nolan was mad as a wet hen, having been delayed in town for hours, only to be stopped again a few minutes after getting on his goddamn way to Chicago!

Longarm soothed him with a few words about the murdered maid. Nolan allowed he and all these other folks had already heard about the goddamn murder and had to be on their goddamn way.

It didn’t take long to determine Nolan was goddamn right. All his fellow passengers could produce tickets bought with no indecent haste, they all had sensible reasons for wanting to run down to Golden or Denver, and not a one of the sons of bitches made a lick of sense as a suspect.

So they let the combination go on its way, with apologies. As it puffed on south, Buck Lewis and the three Double Seven riders with him wanted to know if they were still possed up.

When Longarm and the new constable allowed they were fresh out of ideas, Buck Lewis laughed boyishly and said he’d been planning on an early supper after all that riding.

It wasn’t easy, but Longarm managed not to mutter, “Kiss her once for me!” as the four of them splashed across the creek for home.

Nate Rothstein asked, “What do we do now, Longarm?”

It was a good question.

Chapter 15

That one cobbler back in John Bull agreed with Longarm that he’d surely shot the heel off someone’s Justin boot. You could tell because it was produced by Joseph Justin in Old Spanish Fort, down Texas way, to standard machine-carved patterns.

The old goat-faced cobbler was the one who pointed out how dumb it would be to have a heel replaced by the only cobbler for miles a few minutes after losing it in a shootout with the law. He said if he’d ever done a thing like that, he’d just get rid of the shot-up boots and put on a new pair.

His words made a heap of sense. Levi jeans, Stetson hats, and Justin boots had gotten common as clay, in that order, between the ‘40s and ‘70s, because each product was well made at affordable prices for the average rider. A few pair of boots would be far less expensive, in the end, than getting caught in the older pair by a federal lawman.

Longarm asked the canny cobbler how many places in John Bull might fix a jasper up with new Justins on short notice. The cobbler shrugged and replied, “Aside from myself? There’d be the saddle shop, the general store and a couple of haberdashers who deck a gent out from head to toe. Why does he have to replace his old pair with the same brand? Have you considered he might have had more than one pair at home to begin with?”

Longarm groaned aloud and said, “This is what I get for asking an expert on shoe leather! Can you tell from that heel what size boot the rascal takes at least?”

The cobbler shook his head and answered, “No. That’s one reason Joe Justin can sell fair boots at store-bought prices. He makes no more than a half-dozen sizes with Goodyear welts on lasts of average width. He hangs on a lot of pre-cut standardized parts. I doubt he needs more than three heel sizes. This one’s medium, meaning your mysterious friend wears anything from a man’s size seven to a twelve.”

Longarm muttered, “Well, shit, I figured he was walking about on natural-looking feet. But I thank you just the same.”

He went next to the fancy tobacco shop near the hotel to show them the cigar ring he’d picked up out in the woods. They sold lots of Gallo Claros from down Cuba way by the box or for two bits apiece. They told him everyone who was anybody bought fine cigars to hand out while announcing births, engagements, or a good business deal. Mild claro cigars were safer to hand out than, say, Parodi Brand, which cost almost as much and upset the womenfolk when you lit one up indoors.

Longarm got out his notebook and explained the situation before he read off his list of suspects or, hell, potential witnesses. But he drew another joker from a mighty tedious deck. Nobody he could name had bought Gallo Claros direct, though anyone might have given anyone else a fistful, intentionally or not, at any number of recent social affairs. That was the trouble with changing times. There were all sorts of real-estate closings, new partnerships, and such to be celebrated. Or mourmed. A businessman who got the better of you in a deal had to show he was a sport by offering you a drink or a smoke.

Longarm allowed that as long as he was taking up their time he’d stock up on his own three-for-a-nickel cheroots. They told him they’d throw in a Gallo Claro if he wanted to spring for a dollar’s worth.

It was tempting. That Cuban cigar Mammy Palaver had been smoking had smelled swell. But his far cheaper cheroots were as bad a habit as he could afford on his wages. So he wistfully declined their kind offer.

It got worse as he was leaving with two bits worth of cheroots. They warned him it would cost way more if he changed his mind and bought a Gallo Claro in any saloon.

As he strode away he reflected on that. Having made a habit of buying his tobacco sober, he’d forgotten how most saloons stocked up on high-priced cigars to be sold at a handsome profit to big spenders after a few rounds.

So that meant he was looking for someone he couldn’t describe, in new or spare boots, smoking a brand he could buy, or be given, most anywhere. That was assuming he hadn’t been given or bought another brand since!

Longarm told himself to quit running in circles, and made a beeline for the Western Union. Once there, he found more answering wires that didn’t seem to answer much, along with a to-the-point-indeed message from his home office. Marshal Billy Vail was back, and not at all pleased to hear that Bunny McNee had been a gal or that the team he’d sent to fetch whatever had been had been replaced by whatever Western Union had deleted. The late Mister Ezra Comell had instructed his Western Union crews not to send anything worse than “son of a bitch” over his wires.

Longarm got the impression he was supposed to head on back to Denver as soon as possible. The federal want he’d never been sent to fetch was dead. None of the other tales of blood and slaughter sounded like federal offenses, and nobody from Denver seemed to have any notion what it had all been about in any case.

Longarm had to agree his superior’s fussing made some sense. The great unwashed was always raising hell in places like John Bull. That was why they had their own damned lawmen. The Justice Department simply didn’t have the manpower to tame every tiny town.

He wired his boss that he’d heard and would obey. Then he stepped out on the walk, aware there’d be no train out for well over twelve hours, and wondering what he was going to say if old Peony and Matilda both showed up at his hotel room after dark.

A shorter gent in a stovepipe hat stomped up to him and demanded in an imperious voice what he meant to do about the murder of that maid from the Farnsworth mansion.

Longarm had to think before he recalled the face and name. The imperious grump was Justice of the Peace Silas Hall, and he had to be so grumpy because it was an election year.

As if he’d read Longarm’s mind the J.P. said, “I just came from a sit-down at the Republican Club. Everyone from the mayor to junior alderman agrees we’ll all be out of a job come November if all those blamed murderers remain free among the voters of this township! It was bad enough with the mine changing hands and business going to hell in a hack. So don’t you think it’s about time you made some effort to earn your pay, Deputy Long?”

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “Been trying, above and beyond what they pay me to try, your honor. I see by some wires I sent that you never paid Amos Payne or any of your lawmen half as much as they pay me, and I have to smoke three-for-a-nickel cheroots. If you people don’t think Nate Rothstein is any good, how come you promoted him to constable, aside from getting him so cheap, I mean?”

The J.P. changed the subject by saying he’d been headed up to the town hall for the latest coroner’s hearing. He asked if Longarm meant to appear before the panel again.

Longarm shrugged and replied, “If anyone asks me. I don’t know a thing about the death of French Sarah that most of the folk in these parts haven’t already guessed. Only her killer or killers know any more for certain.”

They walked up to the town hall together anyway. This time the crowd was even bigger. It was as if they were all trying to keep up with a magazine serial by Ned Buntline.

He saw all the folks he’d ridden up with from Golden aboard that train the other day. Pretty young Flora Munro sent her kid brother, Joel, to see if Longarm wanted to sit with them inside. But he said he had to respectfully decline. He didn’t say it was because Widow Farnsworth had just shown up in her one-horse shay. He followed the J.P. inside before they could all get in trouble.

The same dentist was presiding with a somewhat different panel for this one. The dead gal’s body was across town, being packed for shipment to New Orleans. But everyone had already agreed on the cause of death. Who’d caused it was the mystery.

Longarm took a seat near the front and listened with all the interest he could muster as witness after witness was called to confess they had no idea who’d killed French Sarah. None of the servants at the widow’s place had seen her leave. They’d just noticed as the day wore on that she didn’t seem to be there any more.

Widow Farnsworth was asked to take the witness chair and, to his credit, that dentist asked sharp questions. Constance Farnsworth was as sharp, or innocent. She explained she had indeed replaced Sarah on short notice because she’d planned on receiving a guest to a formal supper that evening. Longarm was just as glad they never asked her who.

Another panel member asked what she’d have done if the missing maid had come home to serve supper with a good excuse.

Without batting an eye the lady who ran a railroad and a heap of other stuff replied, “I’d have given her two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice and sent her on her way, of course. There’s no excuse for walking off the job in the middle of the day without telling a soul where or why you’re going.”

There came a murmur of agreement from the crowd. Someone behind Longarm said, “I’ve been told she treats all her help fair and pays her track workers the same as they’d get if they was white.”

The dentist asked her if she had any reasons to suspect her wayward servant had some new swain, since her established lover, the late Quicksilver Quinn, couldn’t have strangled her in some fit of passion.

The young widow sniffed and replied, “Good heavens, we’d only just heard about Mister Quinn! Naturally I’d been told she’d been seeing that ruffian on her own time. But on reflection, I thought it best not to let her know I knew.”

The panel agreed that sounded fair, and dismissed the widow as a witness. As she turned to rise, her eyes met Longarm’s and she smiled wanly and silently mouthed, “Supper at seven?” as she passed him.

He had no way to answer. Then they were asking him to come on over and have a seat in front of them. So he did.

He failed to see why. It only took him a few moments to assure them he’d barely known the late French Sarah and had no idea how she’d wound up strangled in that stamping mill.

The dentist insisted, “We heard someone pegged a shot at you as you rode back from Jed Nolan’s spread this morning.

Longarm shrugged and said, “It was more than one shot, and I’d split off from Constable Rothstein’s posse with a lamed pony. I thought this hearing was to determine who might have strangled a lady, not who pegged a few shots at this child.”

The dentist allowed, not unreasonably, they could be talking about the same person or persons unknown. He asked, “Doesn’t it seem that Englishman, Amos Payne, Tim Keen, and that maid were killed to keep them from talking to you, Deputy Long?”

Longarm shook his head and replied, “All four of ‘em had plenty of chances to talk to me before they were killed. I don’t have one sensible thing to tell myself and they keep trying to kill me, don’t they?”

The dentist insisted, “Mad dogs don’t hire professional killers, and there’s no argument about what both Ginger Bancott and Quicksilver Quinn were. So how do you connect those two?”

Longarm flatly replied, “I can’t. Neither can anyone else, no matter where I wire. Like the late Bunny McNee, Bancott and Quinn had piles of warrants out on ‘em. But never in connection with the same crime. It’s as if a mixed bag of owlhoot riders, hearing things were confusing in a tiny town with a mighty modest law force, showed up separately.

“Only to join forces when they met or somebody hired them,” the dentist proclaimed.

It hadn’t been a question. But Longarm answered it, saying, “If it works out that simple I’ll buy you a good cigar. We know Ginger Bancott was sent to kill that Englishman before he could tell Widow Farnsworth how to run her railroad. Then Amos Payne killed Bancott, and so it couldn’t have been him who killed Payne, Deputy Keen, and a female prisoner who might have been acting as a ringer for the real Bunny McNee. Everywhere I’ve wired has McNee down as sort of a soft boy, not a real gal.”

The dentist nodded and said, “The killings at the jailhouse had to be the work of Quicksilver Quinn. Then he came after you at the school and-“

“Rein in and back up!” Longarm cut in. “How could one killer have shot three victims with two different guns? Or assuming a two-gun man, or one .45 loaded willy-nilly with longs and shorts, why would he then go after me? I hadn’t said I knew who’d killed my federal want along with your town law. I was fixing to leave town. I’d have been gone by this time had they let me. We agreed about this time yesterday that Quicksilver Quinn was never going after anybody again. He was dead before poor little Sarah vanished. I don’t see how he could have tried to drygulch me earlier today either.”

When they went over it all another tedious time, and agreed it seemed impossible to put any of this recent wild behavior together in a sensible pattern, the dentist declared Miss Sarah DuVal, as French Sarah had been more formally known, had met her death when some unknown son of a bitch had choked the life out of her. Then he banged his gavel and allowed it was over for now.

As Longarm lit a fresh smoke outside, he noted the sun was just fixing to go down behind the mountains to the west. Most of the folks in town had naturally had their suppers before heading over to the hearing. So it was getting to be that lazy, all too short time of the day they called gloaming, when the older folks rocked out on the porch swings and the kids played kick the can as the cool shade of evening spread across their play before bedtime.

A female voice from behind him whispered, “You will drop by our place for at least some coffee and cake, won’t you?”

He quietly replied, “Maybe later. I know you fashionable folk eat late. But I ain’t sure I can make it before, say, eight or nine.”

Then he saw he’d been talking like a fool to Flora Munro instead of the older gal who’d already invited him to a late supper.

He stared all about till he saw the back of Constance Farnsworth’s shay driving off. So he couldn’t even tell her he might be tied up in town for a spell.

Young Flora was blushing in the gloaming light as she dimpled up at him and said, “Why, Deputy Long, whatever gave you the notion I’d invited you to supper? Can’t you see it’s after seven o’clock at night? I just thought you might like to drop by on your way home and, well, meet my mom and dad.”

He gulped and managed not to let his horror show as he quietly asked if her folks didn’t milk cows a ways outside of town.

When she said their spread was an easy walk if he didn’t have a pony, Longarm laughed and said that while he’d be proud to walk ten miles to meet such a pretty gal’s mom, he had to help their Constable Rothstein track down the rascals they’d been talking about inside. So the pretty young thing flounced off to where her kid brother was holding their buckboard for her, and Longarm strode on through the gathering shadows. Two little girls were playing jacks on the porch steps as he went by a mustard-colored cottage with a lamp already lit behind lace curtains. It was that hour in the day when a tumbleweed gent got sort of tempted to quit tumbling and put down some roots.

But a couple of houses up some shrew was shrilling at her man through their own lamp-lit curtains about it being time he got off his lazy rump and found a better-paying job. So then Longarm remembered why he’d held off this long on settling down.

It was sad but all too true that they called that first month a honeymoon because that was about as long as the sweetest gal could hope to stay sweet. In his time he’d met many a gal who’d seemed a combination of Cleopatra and Little Bo Peep, only to wake up in bed one morning with the Witch of Endor. When you thought about it, old Cleopatra had nagged Marc Antony into trying for a better job and winding up in an early grave.

He had fonder memories of loving gals, such as good old Roping Sally up Montana way, who’d died before they could get used to his screwing and start wondering why he didn’t hit Billy Vail for a decent raise.

The only gals who never nagged him about the way he carried on were gals who seemed to carry on the same way. Sometimes they served to remind him why other gals might fuss at a man for his natural ways. He knew he had no right in this world to feel miffed about Red Robin heading over to Holy Cross with some other horny son of a bitch he just hated to picture in certain positions with her. But he was honest enough with himself to know that pissed him off. Fair or unfair, there was something bred deep in the bones of men that made them want to hog all the gals in their cave and bash in the heads of any other male brutes who messed with them. He paused in mid-stride to ask a telegraph pole beside the walk, “Say, pole, do you reckon we ought to look into that married woman poor old Amos Payne had been messing with on the side?”

The pole didn’t answer. It still saved Longarm’s life when what sounded like a big metal hornet went buzzing through the space his natural stride would have carried him to if he hadn’t paused in mid-stride that way. The muzzle blast of that first rifle shot caught up with the buzzing as Longarm dove headfirst over a picket fence to wind up in a weed-grown yard on his rump, gun in hand, as he tried to figure where that rifle shot had come from. The echoes off the walls all about would have made it tough enough without all those townsfolk running outside to yell back and forth over their yard fences. The old lady who owned the weeds he was sitting in came out to call Longarm a fool kid, and then something worse when she spied a grown man acting that silly on her property.

One of Rothstein’s kid deputies tore up the walk, gun in hand, to ask what was up. Longarm rose, his own gun down at his side, to tell the old lady he was sorry and tell the local lawman he didn’t know, adding, “Somebody just pegged another shot at me. As you can see, he missed.”

From her porch the old lady wailed, “There ain’t supposed to be no gunfire within the city limits. Come November my man is voting Democrat! There’s been way too much gunfire in John Bull of late!”

As Longarm stepped back out on the walk, they were joined by the new Constable Rothstein himself. Nate had heard enough as he’d come running to declare, “This is getting serious as hell, Longarm. Who do you figure it could have been?”

Longarm looked disgusted and asked, “How would you like that, alphabetical or numerical? I just walked away from a public hearing in your town hall. So just about anyone in or about your fool town could have watched me walk away and noticed what a tempting target my back made!”

He made a sweeping gesture with his gun muzzle as he added, “Here comes half of ‘em now. Whoever fired on me from betwixt or from inside any houses in sight could have hidden his damned rifle and circled around to come over and ask me who I thought it was!”

Rothstein scowled and demanded, “See here, are you accusing anyone I know?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I never said it was you. Albeit I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was some two-faced prick we both know!”

Chapter 16

Old Edward let him in and took his hat, but made him wait alone in the parlor for a long time before Constance Farnsworth came in in a Turkish bathrobe, glowing as if she’d just stepped out of her bath, to tell him he was early and ask him if he minded waiting no more than, say, half an hour for that supper.

As he rose politely to his feet, Longarm told her he couldn’t wait half a minute. He explained, “I just come by because I never got to tell you at the town hall I’d be too busy this evening, ma’am. I got orders to leave for Denver on your morning combination, and meanwhile, someone keeps shooting at me. That makes me dangerous company for any lady to sup with, and I’d sure like to know why. So from here, I aim to talk to another lady about a possible motive for at least one out of five killings. I don’t see how that Englishman, a gal pretending to be a sissy boy, Deputy Keen, or your poor maid Sarah could have shot Amos Payne for fooling with their wives. Neither Stanwyk nor Keen have ever been connected with any married gals in John Bull, and those two dead gals have even better excuses. Old Amos didn’t. So I have to see if I can find out who the married gal he was fooling with might have been.”

The local widow took his sleeve to sit him down beside her as she said, “I can tell you. From time to time I have tea in the kitchen with Mammy Palaver. She gathers mighty fine herbs for some … female complaints, and you’re not the only one who enjoys gossip.”

He grinned sheepishly and replied, “When we do it it’s called investigation. Another nice lady I know once told me I had a swell job to go with my nosy nature and authoritarian disposition.”

Widow Farnsworth arched a brow to ask, “Oh? Just how nice to you was this younger girl who found you so dominant, Custis?”

He didn’t tell her about another widow, a tad older than her, down Denver way. They all seemed sure any other woman in a man’s life had to be younger and prettier.

He said, “We were talking about more important gals. You say you know who the late Constable Payne might have been messing with?”

The pretty young widow shrugged her bare damp shoulders inside her fluffy robe and replied, “There was no might about it, according to the darkies. Prunella Thalman, the druggist’s spoiled wife, carried on with others as well, with her servants serving them refreshments in bed!”

Longarm whistled and asked, “Are we talking about the druggist who runs that undertaking business in his cellar?”

She nodded. “Karl Thalman. He took care of my poor Frank after that sudden heart stroke two years ago. That’s why I was sure poor Sarah was in good hands.”

Longarm grimaced and said, “So was Amos Payne, when his lover gal’s husband got to embalm him the other night! I’d as soon not talk about all that prodding and poking even a friendly undertaker has to do, seeing we’re all going to go through such treatment some day if we’re lucky enough to get buried decent.”

She blushed a mite as she murmured she could imagine what a less friendly undertaker could do with that big suction pump to the lover of his wife.

When he asked if the colored help thought the boss man knew what was going on under his own roof while he was at work, Constance told him she didn’t know. So he said he meant to go find out.

She followed him out to the foyer where his hat still hung. As he reached for it she shyly touched his sleeve again and pleaded with him to come back and tell her as soon as he knew anything.

He smiled wistfully down at her, hat in hand, and said, “There’s no saying how late that might be, if I find out anything. Whether I do or don’t, I hope you understand I have to get it on back to Denver in the morning.”

She sighed. “You told me. That doesn’t give us much time, does it? I’ll be waiting here, Custis, for as long as it takes, or until that damned train leaves in the cruel sunlight of reason!”

So he took her in his arms and kissed her. It seemed the only way to say so long, and she bumped and ground hello as she kissed him back. But he still busted loose and headed back down the slope. For she’d been right in more ways than one when she’d said they didn’t have too much time.

The drugstore was closed and shuttered for the night when Longarm got there. But he saw light from the cellar window to one side. So he circled around for the cellar entrance. They’d told him Thalman had to get that dead gal packed right for her long lonesome journey home.

But when he hunkered down by that barred window, he saw Sarah DuVal was not the body old Karl Thalman was working on with his pants down. The nice coffin Constance Farnsworth had paid for was across the cellar on a pair of sawhorses. The body on the embalming table was alive as well as naked as a jay. She seemed to be a colored gal in her teens who could move like she’d been at it for years.

Longarm stood up, strode on to the cellar entrance and lit a smoke to give them time to settle down a mite. He’d finished his long cheroot and was thinking about some discreet knocking when he heard some laughing from below and stepped clear as the sloping cellar doors popped open and the druggist cum undertaker helped the colored gal up the steps with a grab at her ass that made her giggle some more.

Then they spotted Longarm and froze in place, as if embarrassed, even though they’d both put their duds back on.

Longarm nodded casually and said, “Evening, Mister Thalman. I was just now coming to see if you were through with that French Sarah.”

Thalman tried to look professional as he stiffly replied that he and his assistant, Emma Lou, had just finished.

Longarm knew that was true. He took a deep breath, let half of it out so his voice would sound neither too high or too low, and said, “That’s swell. Is there any way just the two of us could have a few words in private, Mister Thalman? What I wanted to talk to you about ain’t for any young lady’s delicate ears.”

Thalman gulped, told the pretty colored gal to run on home alone, and suggested the saloon catty-corner across the street out front.

As they headed across, the stars were winking on up above, and it was a good thing there was going to be a full moon rising any minute. For there were no street lamps and the light from the few places still open made for mighty tricky lighting. Thalman tried to hold out, but halfway across he stopped to blurt out, “Is it about Constable Payne and my Prunella?”

Longarm glanced around at the shifting inky shadows up and down the dusty street and quietly replied, “We’ll talk about it over in that saloon you suggested. I like to have my back to a wall when I ask delicate questions of any grown man.”

Chapter 17

As seemed usual in the once booming John Bull, business seemed as slow as hell in the dinky hole-in-the-wall establishment the druggist across the street had suggested. One old cuss with a drinker’s nose was holding up the bar with his belly as they entered. But as Longarm and the druggist took a table against the back wall, the oldtimer staggered past them through a beaded curtain, allowing he had to take a leak out back.

The barkeep came around one end of the fake mahogany to greet Karl Thalman as the regular he likely was. Longarm said they’d have the usual. As the barkeep went back to fetch whatever they were fixing to have, Karl Thalman stared soberly at Longarm and said, “They told you my Prunella fucks around. They told you true. Prunella would fuck a snake if somebody would hold its head down for her. I can’t tell you whether she’d been carrying on like that with either of those dead gunslicks. It wouldn’t have surprised me, though. Over the years I’ve caught her with total strangers from, say, fourteen to forty. She doesn’t like ‘em much younger or older than that. She says it takes a grown man’s dong moving with childish passion to satisfy her soul.”

Longarm said he’d read an article by some alienist in Vienna who said gals like that were driven by a desperate itch no mortal man could ever quite satisfy, so they had to keep trying.

Thalman nodded gravely and said, “Certain drugs help. That’s why despite all her wild ways she’s never really wanted to leave me.”

The barkeep came back with two shandies, half lemonade and half beer. Longarm thought that was a waste of either, but he’d said they’d have Thalman’s usual, so he had to be a sport.

As they found themselves speaking in private some more, Longarm asked Thalman, “You mean you don’t want her to leave you, despite what you say she is?”

The skinny middle-aged man sighed and replied, “Did I tell you she was built like a Greek statue, had a pussy as tight as a schoolboy’s ass, and never, ever gets tired of moving it just right? She only fools with other men because she just can’t ever get enough. On the other hand, any man married to a freak like my Prunella gets all he wants and then some, any time he wants it. She never invites any of her lovers to the house after I get off work.”

Longarm could see why Thalman liked lemonade in his beer. Talking about his wayward wife left a nasty taste even when it wasn’t your woman you were talking about that way.

Longarm spied two familiar figures entering the dinky saloon as he asked Thalman soberly, “Then you only had Amos Payne down as one of many?”

Old Oregon John and Buck Lewis, the ramrod from the Double Seven, nodded at Longarm as they bellied up to the bar. Thalman’s back was turned to them as he replied, “Amos and me were pals. He knew I knew. The two of us had shared other pussy in town in our day.”

“Like that, ah, assistant you were with just now?” Longarm had to ask.

Thalman never blinked as he nodded and replied, “Her too. But you should have seen the big Irish gal who left here with her own husband a few weeks ago. Six feet tall with red hair all over and she liked to get on top. As for our colored help, I don’t see why I shouldn’t screw some of them. Prunella sure likes to!”

Longarm said, “I follow your drift about your unusual marriage. Would you like to tell me where you were early this morning and, say, ninety minutes ago when I was coming out of the town hall?”

The older man thought, shrugged, and said, “This morning I was filling prescriptions and applying makeup to that dead girl in my cellar. You have to lay on just a little color at a time and let it dry or they wind up looking like dead dance-hall gals. As for ninety minutes ago … I think you’ll want to talk to Emma Lou Brown about that.”

Longarm said he’d take his word he’d been screwing in his cellar, figuring how long such a session usually took from start to finish.

So Thalman finished his shandy, they shook on it, and he got up to leave. As he did so the younger Buck Lewis invited Longarm to join them at the bar.

Longarm did so, sliding his own shandy across the sheet copper and asking the barkeep if he could have a regular beer. As the barkeep turned to do so, Longarm held off asking what Buck was doing back in town or why he’d exchanged his red shirt for a dark blue one. Longarm’s back teeth were suddenly floating and he said so, adding, “I didn’t know I had to piss this bad before I stood up just now. The crapper’s in the back, right?”

The barkeep said, “Way back. Across the yard. Try not to wet the seat.”

Longarm said he’d watch his aim, and ambled back toward that beaded curtain. Buck Lewis and his older companion exchanged glances and shoved away from the bar as if to tag after him.

It might have worked. But as Longarm approached the bead-veiled exit to darkness a stray current of air wafted the odor of a Gallo Claro cigar his way.

He knew neither he, Karl Thalman, nor the two behind him had lit any sort of cigar in recent memory, so he threw himself to one side and dropped between two empty tables as all hell busted loose.

As the barkeep would say he saw it later, Buck Lewis and Oregon John had just drawn, thrown down on Longarm’s back and opened up when that double-barreled Greener ten-gauge poked through the beaded curtain to blast Buck Lewis and spin him around like a ballet dancer doing a dance of the dying swan, while the second awesome discharge blew old Oregon John clean out on the walk through the stained glass next to the usual exit!

Then Longarm was back on his feet to dash over and kick Buck’s fallen six-gun the length of the brass rail along the bottom of the bar before he dashed the other way, through the swaying strung beads, to throw down on a familiar figure sprawled by his shotgun in a spanking new pair of Justin boots.

It was young Will Posner, who’d said he rode for the Lazy Three and hadn’t wanted Longarm messing with his true love, Flora Munro.

Longarm hunkered down and gingerly opened the front of the love-struck cowboy’s shot-up gray shirt. The kid was still breathing. It was tough to fathom how. Longarm said, not unkindly, “You keep playing with guns and sooner or later someone’s bound to get hurt, sonny. I know that was you in them aspens earlier. Where’s the rifle you had the last time we met down by the town hall?”

Posner croaked, “You bounce around too unsteady for a rifle, you sweet-talking cuss! I heard you talking sweet to my Flora some more this evening. So I figured this old Greener and some number-nine shot was just what it would take to make you quit!”

“Asshole!” Longarm muttered as he made sure the jealous idiot had no other gun and relieved him of his extra ten-gauge shells.

He went back into the tap room to see it filling up with others. One of them being Nate Rothstein, he yelled, “Constable, you’d best send some men out to the Double Seven in force. Tell ‘em to arrest all the help and bring Miss Amanda Nolan into town with them so’s she can wait safely for her husband at the hotel.”

But then the dying man at their feet croaked, “Hold on, boys. I don’t want you arresting Ute Mary or good old a z. They don’t know nothing. Oregon John said he’d never trust a Mex. So we never invited the bunch at the smithee to join, and as for good old Mary, I was only sleeping with her. I was too smart to trust any woman with a serious secret.”

Longarm holstered his .44-40 and hunkered down beside Buck Lewis to remark conversationally, “I heard about them highwaymen getting betrayed by false-hearted women. Irish track workers like to sing songs about ‘em. Oregon John was your Segundo, right?”

Lewis croaked, “He knew all the trails across these mountains as good as most Indians, and we didn’t want to ask Beavertail Bill if he wanted to join the venture.”

The new town constable had drifted over by those beads to look through them and gasp, “My God, you shot Will Posner off the Lazy Three too, Longarm?”

Longarm replied, simply, “I never got the chance. Both sides got one another as they worked at cross-purposes to get me. Now hesh and let me get the details out of this one while there’s time. It won’t matter whether Posner lives or dies. He was just an asshole with nothing important to say.”

Turning back to Buck Lewis, Longarm got out his notebook and pencil stub. “Tell me who was in and who was out, if you don’t want everyone on the Double Seven spread hauled in.”

Nate Rothstein rejoined them, saying “Posner’s gone. That makes it two out of three, and how come this one’s still with us?”

Longarm growled, “They filled Will Posner with slugs whilst he was peppering them with buckshot. It ain’t any bitty ball in particular that does you in. The effects of all them perforations accumulate. Now hesh and pay attention whilst old Buck here gives us some names.”

The internally bleeding ramrod of the Double Seven began to reel off names Rothstein said he knew. Buck Lewis stopped at eight and said that was it. Rothstein said he’d posse up again and get out to the Double Seven after them before they lit out.

But Longarm said, “Let ‘em. The innocent men and women on the spread will be safer once they’re gone. You can beat ‘em to either Golden or Holy Cross by Western Union. They’ll have to make for one or the other without Oregon John to lead them through rougher country.”

Karl Thalman, the druggist, came in and announced, “I heard. Nothing can be done for Oregon John out on the walk. Is that Buck Lewis you shot this time, Longarm?”

The federal man snorted in disgust and said, “Never mind who shot whom. I want him to keep talking while he can. Go over to your drugstore and fetch us some laudanum and strychnine tonic.”

The druggist whistled and asked whether Longarm meant to make old Buck dopey or pep hell out of him.

Longarm replied, “Whatever it takes. Get going.”

Then he turned back to the shot-up Lewis, gently observing, “They say confession is good for the soul. So before your soul has a mighty serious discussion with Saint Peter, be a sport and tell us how Ginger Bancott and Quicksilver Quinn fit in.”

Lewis croaked, “Quicksilver was up our way on the dodge from the law. He was looking for a job to tide him over. So he naturally came to me at the Double Seven for one. I could see right off he was the sort of jasper me and Oregon John were looking for. So I let him in on our plans and the rest you know. I don’t know anything about that Ginger Bancott who shot that Englishman. He wasn’t working for us. Mebbe the other bunch as shot up the jailhouse?”

Rothstein called him a pure rascal and insisted, “Come on. Are you trying to tell us that wasn’t you or someone you sent who killed Constable Payne, poor Tim Keen, and that he-she back in that patent cell?”

Lewis insisted that was about the size of it. His voice was getting weaker. The barkeep came over with a shot glass of brandy. Longarm took it from him, drank the contents in one gulp, and said, “Thanks. I needed that.”

Rothstein insisted, “Make him tell us why they gunned that gal in pants and my pals. Damn his eyes!”

Longarm said, “Hesh. He just now said he didn’t know anything about that.” Then he poked Buck’s bloody blue shirtfront, saying, “We know you killed French Sarah. Which one of you raped her first?”

The dying man blinked owlishly and gasped, “Nobody raped anybody! I had to strangle her when she showed up out by the spread, fussing at me to kill you for killing Quicksilver. I never treated her with no disrespect, though. She’d been Quicksilver’s girl! What sort of a shit-heel would screw a pal’s woman?”

As if he’d been paged, Karl Thalman came back in with a basket of paten medicines and a roll of gauze. As he hunkered down beside them he quietly asked, “Which do you want to give him first? Neither one is going to save him, you know.”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “We’ll just start with soothing laudanum. He don’t seem to be holding out on us and we may as well make him comfortable.”

So Thalman uncorked the opium-alcohol tincture and put it to the ramrod’s now ashen lips. Buck swallowed a good slug, coughed up some bloody slime, and softly said, “No shit, am I really fixing to die?”

Longarm said, “Yep. That cowboy surely cleaned your plow with his old Greener. But if it’s any consolation you nailed him good, even if you were aiming at my back.”

Buck Lewis smiled up innocently and softly asked, “What part of you did you expect this child to aim at after you’d taken Quicksilver Quinn? It wasn’t nothing personal, Longarm. We’d have had no call to gun you if we hadn’t seen you were on to us. How the blue blazes did you ever get on to us anyway?”

Nate Rothstein loudly demanded, “How did who get on to what? Why didn’t you tell the rest of us if you knew what they were up to all the time, dad blast it!”

Longarm said, “I didn’t know shit until just now. This poor misguided youth was a victim of his own guilty conscience. I did tell everyone I’d come up your way to transport Bunny McNee back to the Denver District Court. When I never did any such thing, they added two and two to get twenty-two. I’ve done that myself in my time.”

Rothstein said, “I can see old Buck here was the mastermind. I can see why he wanted you and Constable Payne out of his way. But I still don’t see what he was masterminding!”

Longarm gave the ramrod another sip of laudanum. He’d noticed in war that dying men made less of a fuss about it if you got them doped up and drunk. As he did so he told Rothstein, “The notion of a criminal mastermind is a contradiction in terms. Nobody with a lick of sense takes up crime as his chosen career. You just heard him confess to choking a woman to death. So I’m taking him at his word when he says he never sent Ginger Bancott to gun that Englishman and had nothing to do with the shooting fray at your jailhouse the other night.”

Rothstein groaned, “Oh, shit, thanks for making things seem so simple! Could I at least have a hint as to what on earth this one and his bunch were up to?”

Longarm answered simply, “Stealing stock, of course. What would you expect a ramrod and a gang of top hands to steal, shithouses?”

There came a confused rumble from the others standing all around. Rothstein said, “Nobody at this end of the park has suffered all that many stock losses, no matter what Granny Boggs says!”

A man in the crowd wearing silver-mounted spurs chimed in. “Nate’s right. Where would anyone hide that much stock around here if he did steal it? Are you trying to tell us this dying rascal has a stolen herd up some side canyon, and killed folks to keep his purloined beef a secret?”

Before Longarm could answer, Buck Lewis plucked at the tail of his tweed frock coat and croaked, “I ain’t ready to meet up with Saint Pete, Longarm. Can’t you do something for me? I feel so cold and can’t we have more light in here?”

Rothstein murmured, “Give him some strychnine! He’s fading fast and we haven’t got the half of it out of him yet!”

Longarm shook his head and softly replied, “I reckon he’s told us as much as he knew. Nobody can deny him his lethal intent, but the only one they really murdered was French Sarah. Whether the county can nail anyone but her confessed killer on murder in the first or not ought to depend on how well they try to make friends with your district attorney. But I’m sure he’ll tell them that.”

Buck Lewis murmured, “Whee, this merry-go-round is sure going faster now. They warned us you were good, and it was a pleasure doing business with you, Longarm. No hard feelings?”

Longarm quietly replied, “I reckon not. The two-faced little gal was trying to get us both killed. Say hello to French Sarah when you meet up with her in Hell, old pard.”

Buck Lewis didn’t answer. Longarm reached down to shut his blank eyes as he told the druggist cum undertaker, “He’s all yours now.”

Rothstein stamped a boot heel like a gal waiting overlong for her carriage ride and snapped, “Damn it, Longarm!”

So Longarm got to his feet, saying, “I could use another brandy. Haven’t you figured the whole thing out yet? No offense, but you’re fixing to make a piss-poor lawman if you have to be led step by step by one hand.”

The well-spurred stockman slammed on the bar for a round of hard liquor and said, “I’m forty-eight years old this summer and you can just lead me by one hand all you like, Denver boy! You say all this fussing and feuding was over stolen stock, and I say to you nobody in these parts has had any damned stock stolen!” Longarm explained, “That’s because Buck and his boys hadn’t stolen any yet. Their boss, Jed Nolan, was planning on moving his operation up to Wyoming and expanding it some. I doubt old Jed meant to raise anyone’s wages. he wasn’t paying top dollar, and mayhaps old Buck there didn’t want to work that hard for any wages. So they were waiting for Jed Nolan to leave Buck in charge of his spread and all his stock while he went clean over to Chicago on a long-planned business trip.”

The stockman who’d been saying he was so puzzled suddenly let out a trail whoop and declared, “Great balls of fire! I see it all now! That’s where Oregon John fits in! I know Jed Nolan planned on a two-week business trip. He told me so just the other day. So not a soul would know all them Double Seven cows were on their way over the mountains before their lawful owner got back!”

Someone asked, “What about Miss Amanda, Jed’s wife? Ain’t she still out at their spread and wouldn’t she notice if they commenced to round up and drive off all her man’s stock?”

Another local laughed and asked, “How? That mail-order play-pretty wouldn’t know a cow was being stolen if they ran it through her bedroom whilst she was reading one of her romantic novels from back East.”

Rothstein soberly pointed out, “Buck could have meant to kill her the way he killed that housemaid. We just heard him admit to being rough on women.”

Longarm nodded, but said, “It’s a moot question how many folks he meant to kill as he went into the cattle business for himself. The only deaths that lead direct to his door are those of French Sarah and that fool cowboy in the back. Quicksilver and Oregon John were on his side, and you could almost say Will Posner’s death just now was accidental.”

Rothstein blinked owlishly and replied, “The hell you say! Who do you suspect of killing that Englishman and three others at the jailhouse if it wasn’t that dead rascal or one of his sidekicks?”

Longarm knocked back his second free shot before he declared in a firm way, “It’s beyond suspicion into almost certain. My boss calls it process of eliminating. You peel away suspects who couldn’t have done it, and unlikely ways things could have happened, until you get to where there’s nothing left to peel away and then you look at what you have left.”

Rothstein was shifting from one foot to the other like a kid who had to take a piss as he almost bawled, “Then what have we got left?”

Longarm stared wondrously at the greener lawman and demanded of him, “Lord have mercy, don’t you see it yet?”

Then he spelled it out, swept the curious crowd thoughtfully with his gun-muzzle-gray eyes, and declared, “We’d best let these boys help old Karl get all three bodies over to his cellar whilst you walk me partways up the slope. None of it’s federal. So it’ll be up to you and the township how you want to handle the news. Some of it’s a mite delicate.”

Rothstein made no objections, and delegated some authority to one of the older townsmen in the crowd, and they went out by the back way, stepping wide of the body sprawled on the far side of the bead curtain.

Out back in the dark, Longarm paused to pee in the alley. For he was commencing to feel the way he’d been mixing his drinks on an empty stomach. Rothstein allowed he might as well piss too. As they did so together, the new constable asked where Longarm was headed once he stopped pissing. Longarm chuckled and said, “I told you. Up the slope. I had a supper engagement with another pal that I was afraid there might not be time to keep.”

He shook the dew off the lily and added, “Thanks to Buck Lewis I won’t be as late as I feared. I reckon I owe the backshooting son of a bitch my thanks.”

Chapter 18

Constance Farnsworth answered her front door herself, her long black hair down and dressed in that same house robe as she stood in those satin mules.

As she let him into her dimly lit vestibule she gasped, “Custis! Are you all right? We heard about you shooting it out with a trio of desperados in the Hornsilver Saloon, and I naturally thought I’d seen the last of you tonight!”

Longarm took off his hat and hung it on the usual wall peg as he explained, “I never shot nobody, and as I was just now saying, it’s up to the town fathers how they explain the whole affair to the Rocky Mountain News. So I wasn’t stuck with the usual paperwork, and as you can plainly see, I didn’t get shot. I’m just a mite unsteady on my feet right now because I celebrated my untimely survival with the boys on an empty stomach. I’ll be all right in a minute.”

She gasped, “Oh, you poor thing! Let’s go right upstairs and feed you! When I thought you weren’t coming I dismissed my help for the night, once I’d had a tray brought to my quarters, and as you see, planned on turning in early with a good book.”

He agreed that was about what he’d have done if the shoe had been on the other foot. So she led him up her spiral staircase, and he had to fight the temptation to pinch her nice-looking bottom the way he’d seen that horny undertaker help another gal up some stairs.

Queen Victoria never would have approved, but once they got up to her bedroom suite things didn’t seem all that shocking at first glance. She had this sort of sitting room between the hall door and an archway leading to what seemed a four-poster in the dim lamplight. The front chamber was more brightly lit, and a low table piled with sliced bread, cold cuts, and a tea service stood before a red leather chesterfield sofa. So he wasn’t surprised that that was where they wound up as she questioned him about the gun fray she’d been able to hear clean up her way.

As she built him a hearty ham and cheese on rye sandwich he told her, “I never got to fire my own gun once. Will Posner was aiming a shotgun at me from one direction, and both Oregon John and Buck Lewis were aiming at my back from the other direction, when I ducked and the three of them shot each other.”

She gasped, “Young Will Posner? Well, I never! Why on earth would that fool kid want to shoot anyone?”

Longarm sighed and said, “Because he was a fool kid. He’d somehow took it in his head that we were love rivals. We weren’t. So there’s no need to take another lady’s name in vain.”

She handed him the sandwich and began to pour them both some tea as she said, “I think I know who you mean. But I admire a man who doesn’t kiss and tell.”

He insisted there’d been no kissing to tell of, and bit into the sandwich. To her credit, the young widow didn’t press him to talk with his mouth filled, but she seemed as antsy as Rothstein had been by the time he’d demolished another sandwich and swallowed a whole cup of tea. As she poured him another she demanded, “Tell me why that old mountain man and the foreman of the Double Seven were after you as well, Custis.”

He sighed and said, “It’s a long and complicated story. So I’d best start at the beginning.”

He sipped some tea, leaned back, and began. “Once upon a time a silver boom bottomed out and this place called John Bull slowed down a heap as new hands were dealt, with a would-be cattle baron, a sort of grabby holding company, and a pretty lady with a railroad holding most of the face cards. I’d have never known any of this if Constable Payne hadn’t wired he was holding a federal prisoner and I hadn’t come up here to shake things up.”

He sipped more tea and continued. “I’d have only stayed overnight and headed back to Denver with Bunny McNee if I hadn’t learned just in time that he was a she.”

Constance asked why he couldn’t have taken along a tomboy as easily as a sissy boy.

He explained. “My boss frowns on lone deputies spending that much time alone with female suspects. You see, many a female crook has been known to charge at her trial that she was innocent, and only confessed before she’d seen a good lawyer because that mean lawman threatened to ravage her some more if she didn’t let him put words in her mouth.”

Constance declared, “How awful! What would you ever do if some wicked woman pulled a trick like that on you?”

To which he could only reply, “Tell my boss how sorry I was for being so dumb, I reckon. It’s mortal hard to get a conviction when the defendant has compromised the arresting officer. That’s what they call it when a lawman fools with a suspect. Compromising.”

She set her cup aside, took his away from him, and was suddenly in his lap with both arms around his startled shoulders as she told him in a sultry tone, “Goody! I want to compromise you!”

So he hugged her back and reeled her in so they could kiss and swab one another’s tonsils with their tongues while he slid a free hand inside her house robe to discover that she wasn’t wearing so much as a nightgown under it.

But as he ran his palm up the inside of a creamy thigh to where things felt warm and fuzzy, she pulled her face back just enough to giggle and say, “Not here! In my bed, the right way, you silly!”

So he swept her up in his arms and carried her the short way to one awesome amount of fun. She’d slipped out of her robe and slid a plump pillow under her voluptuous hips by the time he’d shucked his own duds fast. Then she wrapped her naked legs around his bare waist as he entered her with no shilly-shally as if they were old pals, though her innards were sweet, hot, unexplored territory to his raging erection, bless her rollicking rump.

To her credit, and unlike a lot of women, even women who’d come right out and told you they’d been married one time, Constance made no effort to explain how she’d learned to fornicate so swell. Nor did she comment on some positions he suggested, save to say how good they felt. But once they had to pause for their second winds long enough to share a smoke, Constance snuggled closer and said, “Now that I know you never suspected me, what on earth has been going on around here? Those crooks with C.C.H. had poor Gaylord murdered so he would never show us that simple trick with Wilkinson rails, right?”

Longarm placed the cheroot to her lush lips as he shook his head and said, “Forget that holding company entirely. I was just explaining to another curious kid how you start by eliminating everyone who has to be innocent. T.S. Nabors is a tight-fisted bargain hunter, but he’s smart. It would have been dumb to order outsiders such as that Englishman and a federal deputy murdered when he could have had nobody but your own self disappear, at half the cost and a whole lot more discreetly. You saw yourself how easy it was to have your two-faced maid drop out of sight, and the clincher is where her body wound up.”

Constance handed the smoke back, objecting, “Sarah was found on C.C.H. property, dear!”

He set the cheroot aside, saying, “By C.C.H. hired help, in the hopper of a stamping mill, for Pete’s sake. I saw what was left of a body run through such a process up near Deadwood a spell back. I knew who it was beforehand. it was just as well. There’s no way to identify a corpse chewed to bits and sort of blended with a mess of rock dust.”

She shuddered against him—it felt swell—and said, “Brr. I don’t think I’d like to be run through a stamping mill. But you just said C.C.H. owned it, remember?”

He nodded and said, “That’s what lets ‘em off. T.S. Nabors would have had to be way dumber than a mine manager ought to be if he hid a dead body in his own stamp mill and never turned on the steam engine! Think how simple it would have been for the man in charge of the whole shebang to just reduce little Sarah to nothing anyone would ever have noticed.”

She did, but demanded, “Then who, if not them?”

He said, “I was able to eliminate old Jed Nolan, cheap and greedy as he’d be as well. He was trying to hog all the cows in this park. But he hadn’t been stealing them. They were standing there in plain sight, waiting to be stolen. It’s been my experience that not even a range hog steals his own cows.”

She began to toy with the hairs on his belly as she confessed he had her totally confounded.

He took her wrist to move her hand down where it might do them both more good and told her, as she took the matter in hand, to let him start from the beginning again.

She tweaked his limp member playfully and allowed she was all ears. He said he’d get her for that and continued. “Jed Nolan was planning on an even bigger herd on more open range. His foreman, Buck Lewis, was planning on stealing the herd he had and driving ‘em over to another boom to sell ‘em sudden at a handsome price. He’d recruited Oregon John as a guide over the mountains and that drifting badman, Quicksilver Quinn, as a badman.”

“What about that mean Ginger Bancott who shot poor Gaylord?” she asked, moving her hand faster as she felt some response down yonder.

Longarm said, “Forget Ginger for now. He was just another killer on the dodge. The cow thieves never recruited him.”

She started to ask who had. He warned her to hesh and went on. “Set Ginger aside for now and come with me to the Elk Rack Hotel where a wayward gal named Tess Jennings was sleeping on the sly with yet another drifter. We’re still working on whether she’d run off from home, a husband, or a house of ill repute. She had no criminal rec ord.”

“But I thought she was that bandit Bunny McNee!” Constance protested.

He said, “Not so fast if you want me to get to the point in time. She wasn’t Bunny McNee. The real Bunny McNee is a short soft-looking lad who may or may not be a sissy as well as a bandit. As of now, nobody on our side knows where he might really be. The so far unknown saddle tramp Tess Jennings was traveling with had her dress as a man for some reason that might have made more sense to them.”

“I’ll bet she was hiding out from a jealous husband!” the young widow decided. Longarm didn’t bother to say jealous idiots had been known to act scary. They’d already talked about Will Posner.

He said, “Let’s keep on eliminating. The shabby couple must’ve been low on money but expecting some. He might have been a gambling man, hoping his luck would change. At any rate he put her into the hotel as a single, then snuck up the service stairs after dark to steal his half of a double room. You can’t hide every sin from hotel help. So they figured a young sissy boy was entertaining some brutal queer-lover, and who’s going to knock on any door at a time such as that?”

She stopped beating his meat. You had to admire a gal who knew just how to get along with a man in her bed. He knew she wanted to hear the end of his story first. So he said, “Whatever the deal, her traveling companion deserted her. He may have had to skip out on other card sharks. He might have just gotten tired of her. She wasn’t all that statuesque with her shirt open. So the poor thing was stuck there, eating in her room and putting it on the hotel tab she had no way of paying. Then she finally just tried to skip. She boarded your narrow-gauge at the last moment, and might have made it if, through no fault of your own or anyone else, your combination hadn’t been stopped by rocks on the tracks and backed up the grade with her, after the hotel had already spread the alarm. So Constable Payne arrested her on a charge of theft of service, and that would have cost her thirty days in the county jail if that had been the end of it.”

Constance sat up on one elbow to stare down at him with a puzzled smile as she clung to his organ-grinder, asking, “But didn’t you say everyone thought she was Bunny McNee?”

Longarm shook his head and said, “An eager kid deputy called Nate Rothstein thought the prisoner in the back might be the notorious Bunny McNee. The older and wiser Constable Payne knew better, whether he ever got any from her or not. But Nate Rothstein saw a resemblance to an outlaw with considerable paper hanging on him. The real Bunny McNee would be worth over a thousand dollars in various bounties, and I know for a fact that old Amos Payne was drawing less than five hundred dollars a year and had expensive habits.”

She gasped. “You mean he knew, but hoped to collect some reward money before anyone was any the wiser? But Custis how would he get a wayward girl to go along with the charade long enough for him to collect even half that bounty money?”

Longarm dryly answered, “How else? He made a deal with her, of course. He told the desperately broke gal that he’d cut her in on the bounty money if she’d play at being Bunny McNee until he could collect it. The deal was for her to go through the whole charade, as you put it, stoutly maintaining her innocence and denying she was the real Bunny McNee whilst everyone winked, nudged, and paid off on the lying little rascal. But of course, once the bounties had been paid, and before she served any real time …”

“She only had to open her shirt and drop her jeans!” The naked lady in bed with him laughed.

Longarm said, “Yep. That was the plan. Then they heard Billy Vail was sending me instead of the original deputies assigned the chore. I don’t like to brag. But I’ve been in the papers more than Smiley and Dutch from my home office. So Payne panicked. He figured I was chosen because I knew something. Likely something as simple as what the real Bunny McNee looked like. Payne couldn’t confide in his kid deputies. None of them knew what he and the gal in the back had been planning. But he’d somehow met up with Ginger Bancott, who might have been bribing an underpaid lawman not to notice he was up this way. At any rate, he got in touch with the killer and they made yet another deal. I was saved by the simple fact that they only had a description to go by and that English civil engineer you’d hired sort of fit it.”

She gasped, “Oh, Lord, poor Gaylord! Nobody ever shot him to keep him from working for me! They shot him because they thought he was you! But wait a second, dear, didn’t Constable Payne shoot Ginger Bancott for shooting you—I mean Gaylord?”

Longarm nodded curtly and said, “To silence and collect on him! I hope you’ve grasped by now that a man who’d mess with a pal’s wife and put in for bounty money under false pretenses is hardly a paragon of virtue!”

She lay back down and began stroking again as she replied, “I suppose not. He sounds awfully wicked. Who was that married woman you mentioned? Was I right about Prunella Thalman?”

Longarm chuckled and said, “I don’t talk about ladies who’ve done me no harm. The one they had locked up in that patent cell got all spooked after guns commenced to go off all around her. So she wanted out. She likely told old Amos she did before she wrote me a desperate message saying she was ready to talk.”

Constance asked, “Was that when somebody came to break out someone who they took to be Bunny McNee? Wait a moment. That won’t work if her own pals knew she wasn’t him, and the real Bunny McNee’s pals were nowhere around here!”

Longarm hugged her closer and said, “You ought to be their new constable. Nobody was out to bust her out. Amos Payne had to shut her up. But she was locked up for the night, guarded by a kid called Tim Keen. But Amos was his boss. So Tim naturally opened up and went back to the cell block with him when he offered some fool excuse for seeing the prisoner. Once the three of them were alone back there, Amos Payne simply drew his .45 short and shot Tess Jennings and Tim Keen in cold blood. But his twenty eight grains of powder hadn’t done a tough kid all the way in yet. So as Constable Payne turned to dash out into the dark so’s he could come running the other way a few moments later, the boy he’d put on the floor got his own gun out and blazed away with his .45 long. The more powerful fire blew the front door open as well. So the picture we found as the smoke was clearing fit together wrong. I might have been smarter, sooner, if those other crooks hadn’t been throwing their own grit in my eyes. Nobody involved had all that much common sense. But I’ve noticed in the past how two dumb rascals, working at cross-purposes, can make a confounded lawman think he’s up against something really slick, and speaking of slick, you’re fixing to get that hand all slick and wet if you don’t let me put the fool thing where it wants to finish!”

So she let him, and it felt so good he decided he might as well come in her again.

Chapter 19

Sometime later down in Denver, Longarm watched and waited in Billy Vail’s office as the crusty old cuss took forever to read a lot more paper than Longarm had ever handed in. Vail finally lowered it to his cluttered desk, snorted blue smoke at the younger man seated across from him in the oak-paneled back room, and declared, “I am mad as hell and you’d better not never do it again. But fair is fair, and had Smiley and Dutch gone up yonder to transfer that fool female prisoner, we might have wound up looking awfully silly. That crooked lawman never would have ordered them killed, nobody would have felt the need to kill that runaway wife and the kid deputy, and she’d have let us put her on trial and convict her before she just laughed in our faces and bared a pair of tits the real Bunny McNee has never been accused of having!”

Longarm cocked a brow and asked, “We know that much about the late Tess Jennings now?”

Vail nodded his bullet head. “You didn’t. I was the one who finally trailed her back to Arkansas on paper. She ran off on a hog farmer and two bitty kids with a tinhorn gambler who might or might not have been the drifter who stranded her up in John Bull. Forget about her. This wicked world is as well off without the likes of her and that two-faced housemaid who almost got you killed.”

Vail blew more smoke out both nostrils and added, “Thanks to the way some deputies from this office like to duck out on paperwork, that new young Constable Rothstein is taking the credit for solving both their murders in an election year.”

Longarm shrugged and replied, “Hell, I’d have had to go back for the trials of them cattle thieves if I’d been any less generous with old Nate. May I please light my own smoke?”

Vail snapped, “No. I told you that was an order and I meant it. That’ll learn you to spill tobacco ash on my rug and grind it in with a boot heel, as if I wasn’t watching!”

He glared down at the papers on his desk and said, “Where was I? Oh, right, you say in your report to me that you’re only alleging a mess of stuff instead of charging it because none of it seemed to be federal and you didn’t know how the locals wanted to phrase some of it to the newspapers.”

Longarm shrugged. “Like I said, I had no call to get myself embroiled in a stupid shouting match. All the really wicked ones had wound up dead. So justice had been served, in a sort of rough and ready fashion.”

Vail grimaced, blew more smoke, and said, “You could have taken a tad more credit for yourself and this office without causing all that much of a fuss. The powers that be around John Bull have decided on honesty as the best policy in an election year, with justice served, the way you just said. The late Constable Payne’s position ain’t no political issue this coming November, and they thought they owed it to young Tim Keen’s memory to record him as a hero who died at the hands of a total son of a bitch but managed to take his killer with him. Nobody up that way gave a shit about a double-dealing foreman or a windy old mountain man. So they decided that cowboy, Will Posner, might as well get the credit for killing the two of them in another desperate gunfight.”

Longarm blinked, started to object, then said, “Why not? The kid was a love-struck asshole, not a crook. Before I left I heard he had kin in the county, and he’d have been pleased as punch to see a pretty gal called Flora at his funeral in a new hat. She told us later she’d always thought him sort of dumb. But at least she was there.”

Vail grumbled, “We’ll get to all them social functions you seem to have attended up that way in a minute. Having buried them two heroic local boys with honors, and not feeling it worth their while to dig Amos Payne up and replant him where he belongs, in potter’s field, they planted Oregon John there and sent Buck Lewis back to Texas as per request by his kin. The nicest thing about all this blood and slaughter this time is that hardly anyone is sore at you personally. Nobody but that French Sarah seemed to feel it was cruel and unusual of you to win a fair fight with Quicksilver Quinn in a reading room. Everyone else who got killed, fair or foul, got killed by somebody else. What was that about you telling them to send the bounty on Quinn to the John Bull Public School?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “I know you frown on us federal riders putting in for bounty money, but there was a handsome reward posted on Quicksilver, dead or alive. He did die on school property, and I happen to know the school’s strapped for cash. Can I go now? Or at least open the damned window, Boss?”

Vail cackled. “You’re one to talk, smoking them cheap cheroots like a Mexican! I ain’t done with you yet. I’ll allow that all in all things worked out better when you changed places with the deputies I had ordered up to John Bull. All’s well that ends well, and we’ll say no more about your report, save for the simple fact that all the events you reported transpired last week. Not this week. Last week. So how do you account for all them social gatherings and such you’ve been going to on our time for damn near a full week?”

Longarm said, “Damn it, Billy, if you won’t let me light up in self-defense, the least you could do would be to blow that stink the other way!”

Vail took a deep drag, enveloped Longarm in a pungent cloud, and insisted, “I’m waiting!”

Longarm replied with an innocent smile, “I was stuck up in the high country waiting on a train out. Did I mention on paper how that first victim, Stanwyk, had gone up yonder to show them how to fix a mess of narrow-gauge tracks? Well, somebody else told ‘em how to do it, and so the track workers had to just about take the whole railroad apart and put it back together. I told the owner of the line I ought to be getting on back to Denver. But I was told the trains just wouldn’t be running until the owner was good and ready to start ‘em up again. So there I was with no way to get home. But at least you’ll see I never charged for them to my expenses. The owner of the railroad said I could stay up there as a guest of the same, seeing it was their fault.”

Vail sat back, mollified, but muttered, “Must be fun to own your own railroad. You get to order so many folk around and … What’s so funny, you grinning ape?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Nothing, Boss. When you’re right you’re right.”