Longarm and the Kansas Killer

LONGARM AND THE KANSAS KILLER

By Tabor Evans

Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1995 by Jove Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

ISBN: 0-515-11681-5

Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

JOVE and the “J” design are trademarks belonging to Jove Publications, Inc.

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

Printing history Jove edition / August 1995

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

DON’T MISS THESE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SERIES FROM THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him … the Gunsmith. LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice. LONE STAR by Wesley Ellis The blazing adventures of Jessica Starbuck and the martial arts master, Ki. Over eight million copies in print. SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel. McMASTERS by Lee Morgan The blazing new series from the creators of Longarm. When McMasters shoots, he shoots to kill. To his enemies, he is the most dangerous man they have ever known.

Chapter 1

No sober soul with a lick of common sense would have breezed through the entrance of the wildest whorehouse in Denver without a certain wariness. So the gun-muzzle gray eyes of the tall lawman in a tobacco tweed suit stared thoughtfully from under the brim of his dark telescoped Stetson, and the tail of his coat hung clear of the .44-40 riding cross-draw on his left hip as he wondered why things seemed so quiet on a Saturday night in the greenup time in cattle country.

There were no customers at all in the downstairs taproom as he entered it. The soiled doves who’d usually be prancing and dancing moped all about with long faces. Some of them were crying. When a frightened-looking young colored gal in a French maid’s outfit timidly approached to tell him they’d just closed for the night, their tall tanned visitor explained, laconically but not unkindly, “I ain’t here for fun. I’d be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long. I’ve been told your madam, Emma Gould, was after me for some service she’s unable to provide.”

The whorehouse maid tried to take his hat, and when that didn’t work, she scampered out of the taproom as one whore murmured to the one seated next to her, “That’s him, the one they call Longarm! Ain’t he good-looking, though?”

Before the object of this professional appraisal could feel all that silly, the madam herself was waving him into the back with a pint or so of diamonds wrapped around a plump wrist. So he went to join her, looking neither to his right nor left as half-clad gals who should have been ashamed of themselves made rude observations about what they could see of him and crude speculations as to what a strange gent might have concealed under his own private duds.

The madam told him to pay the sassy things no mind, and hauled him into her businesslike office to sit him down as she hauled out a bottle of Maryland Rye. Then she asked if he recalled the time he’d said he owed her.

Longarm smiled up at the once pleasantly plump and now just fat old pal. “I sure do, Madame Emma. For it was not long ago on the slopes of Capitol Hill that you saved my bacon. I was just across Colfax Avenue without a care in the world when your dulcet scream rent the air and that backshooter you’d spotted shot an old shade tree instead.”

“I just wanted you to say you still owed me,” the most prosperous madam in Denver told him. “One of my girls is laying on a cold zinc table in the county morgue, and who’s going to take a colored kid’s word against those of two mining magnates, backing one another up, the murderous high-toned bastards!”

Longarm held up a weary hand and pleaded, “Rein in, back up, and start at the beginning.”

So Emma Gould began. “It commenced about eleven this evening. A couple of mining magnates called Carbonate Ned Cartier and Telluride Tommy Gordon blew in, well oiled, after the management had asked them to leave a fussier establishment. They drank some more out front, and then they naturally went upstairs with a couple of my girls to enjoy some unnatural acts. Neither was sober enough to enjoy a woman the old-fashioned way.”

Longarm reached for a smoke, but held the three-for-a-nickel cheroot aloft for her silent permission or denial. “I was wrong. I didn’t want you to start too far back. Get to how one of your gals wound up in the morgue.”

Emma Gould nodded at the cheap but not too pungent cheroot. “I’m getting to that, dammit. As I said, the only witness was our colored maid, Willow. Frenching Ann and the aging but tidy Telluride Tommy seemed to be getting along all right in her crib. Willow says most of the ugly talk was coming from Baltimore Barbara’s crib as she was trying in vain to pleasure that unpleasant Carbonate Ned. Willow can’t say what the trouble in there might have been. I promised her family when they let her come to work for me that I’d never use their virgin child for such services. How was I to know she’d fill out so tempting? But I’d given my word, and Willow doesn’t know enough about such things to say just what might have gone wrong. She can say, however, she was standing right there in the doorway with the drinks the brute had ordered when he simply rolled off poor Baltimore Barbara and threw her headfirst out a side window as if she’d been a rag doll some vicious child was tired of playing with!”

Longarm finished lighting his cheroot before he grimaced and remarked, “We are talking about a second-story window over an alley, right?”

The madam nodded grimly and explained, “She landed on her head and broke her neck. She looked so innocent—all right, peaceful—lying there with her eyes half open and a dreamy smile on her painted lips. We naturally called the Denver P.D. Lord knows they make us pay the machine enough. So our neighborhood roundsmen took both of the surly drunks in. Sergeant Nolan, on the desk tonight, says they’re good for at least the rest of the night in jail.”

Longarm nodded thoughtfully at the glowing tip of the cheroot in one hand and declared, “I know Sergeant Nolan. He’s a good man. He’ll show them both as hard a time as they deserve. Or as hard a time as he can manage leastways.”

The irate Emma Gould scowled and said, “Nolan suggested I get in touch with you when I allowed I knew you as well. He seems to think you’re good too, Custis.”

Longarm protested, “Hold on! I ride for Marshal Vail and a federal district court, Madame Emma. I don’t have jurisdiction over a local whorehouse killing, no offense. If I did, I fail to see what I could do any better than your local copper badges. They arrested the both of them when only one threw that gal out the window, right?”

Emma Gould sighed and softly replied, “I wish you wouldn’t try to bullshit an old whore who’s been lied to by slick-talking men all her misspent life! Carbonate Ned is backing Gordon’s tale that neither one of them had anything to do with the demise of some drunken doxie. They’re willing to swear in court that they’d both enjoyed the dubious charms of two other drunks and were fixing to leave when, for whatever reason of her own, Baltimore Barbara just decided she was a real dove with the wings to fly her up to the statehouse and once around the dome. When Sergeant Nolan asked Cartier why he didn’t try to stop her, the sarcastic bastard just laughed and said they were all so drunk he’d thought she might make it.”

Longarm snorted smoke out both nostrils and asked what the other white gal recalled of the ugly scene.

Emma Gould shrugged and replied, “Not a thing. Frenching Ann has to get good and drunk before she’ll go down on a man without crying. She says it makes her feel homesick.”

Longarm thought and murmured, “In sum, it’s the word of your young lady of color against that of two upstanding pillars of the boys-will-be-boys community.”

It had been a statement rather than a question. The unhappy Emma Gould still replied, “Exactly. Sergeant Nolan says as soon as he has to let them send for their high-priced and well-connected lawyers come morning, they’ll surely walk out the front door on writs, and if the case ever comes to trial their lawyers will make browned hash out of poor Willow. She’s a smart little thing, and as honest as anyone working in a whorehouse could be expected to be, but just the same, the only witness for the prosecution, should anyone in the district attorney’s office feel that silly, would still strike the jury as a colored girl who works in a whorehouse!”

Longarm rose to his considerable height as he sighed and told the visibly pessimistic old bawd, “You and Nolan are both right. Before we go down to the county jail we’d best pick up another old pal from that flea circus and museum of natural wonders on Larimer Street. He owes me. So I’m sure he’ll be proud to gather up some tools of his trade and tag along to the morgue with us.”

Emma Gould reached for a shawl to wrap around her plump bare shoulders as she looked bewildered. “We’re taking a sideshow man to the county morgue with us? Whatever for, Custis? They say there’s no mystery about poor Baltimore Barbara’s death. Cartier threw her out the window and she broke her neck. Willow saw it happen!”

Longarm nodded and said, “We’re all agreed on what happened. But we need more witnesses to prove it. So we’d best go scout some up.”

Chapter 2

Spending the night in jail gets to be less fun after midnight. So by three A.M. the older, less guilty, and scared-sober Telluride Tommy Gordon was pacing the cement floor at the far end of the cell block. The younger but more grizzled Carbonate Ned Cartier reclined on a hardwood bunk as if he thought he’d been asked to pose for a painting of Queen Cleopatra. Both prisoners, as befitted their new-found fortunes, were dressed in rumpled but still mighty expensive duds, although their diamond studs and such now resided for safekeeping up front.

From the bunk the beetle-browed Cartier growled, “Will you for Pete’s sake simmer down, old son? If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a hundred times that I’ll buy you a swell breakfast at that all-night restaurant at Union Station. There’s just no way you can hold a man with a good lawyer during business hours, and by this time or way earlier tomorrow, we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.”

His more worried companion replied, “The hell you say! You killed that gal dead as a turd in a milk bucket, and I’ve heard tell old Madame Emma has her own fancy lawyers on retainer!”

The bearish mine owner who’d thrown Baltimore Barbara out that window naked as a jay shrugged a massive shoulder. “Was old Emma Gould up yonder with us? The only one in this world who saw me teaching that whore to fly was another whore, and a nigger besides. I’d have never told you what I’d just done if you hadn’t come tearing in before I’d had time to gather my wits. I told you true when I told you I’d been aiming her at the wall across the room, the more fool 1. But by that time the nigger wench had run off screaming, and she never heard us working out a more gentle way to explain that dumb cunt’s suicide.”

“I must have been out of my mind as well as drunk!” moaned Gordon. “I never had to get my ass in this sling to begin with! I could have just said I was messing with another drunk next door and didn’t know nothing. But no, I had to lie like a rug to the police when they showed up, and now I’m in the same fool boat with you!”

“See that you remember that!” Cartier warned as a disturbance down at the far end of the long corridor caught Gordon’s attention.

Most of the usual Saturday night crowd had been bailed out by now. But there were still enough drunks closer to the front to supply some catcalls and whistles as what seemed like a cluster of six or eight newcomers moved slowly along the dimly lit corridor.

By this time Cartier had noticed the changes in the air as well, and rolled off the hard bunk to join Gordon at the bars across the front of their cell. He was the one who suggested that maybe someone had gotten to at least one of their lawyers.

Gordon wasn’t as rosy as he peered through the gloom to make out one taller cuss with his Stetson crushed North Range style, a trio of somewhat shorter men in blue uniforms, and what seemed to be at least three women. It was tough to be certain. One of the skirted figures seemed to be having trouble walking. So the others with her had to bunch close to help her along.

As if impatient, the tall man in the Stetson and low-heeled army boots, separated by a three-piece suit, forged forward with a more familiar, shorter, and huskier-looking Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D.

As the two of them passed a coal oil wall lamp Gordon moaned, “Oh, Jesus, it’s that deputy marshal they keep writing about in the Rocky Mountain News! They call him Longarm and they say he’s good!”

Cartier snorted, “It can’t be him. He’s a federal man and killing whores ain’t no federal offense.”

As the two lawmen drew even nearer, the beetle-browed killer took a deep breath, let half of it out so his voice wouldn’t crack, and softly added, “Even if it’s him, just remember they haven’t got anything on us as long as we stick together, pard!”

“What’s this us shit?” Gordon muttered in a barely audible voice.

But as Longarm and Nolan bellied up to the far side of the bars and Nolan asked if anyone would like to change their story, Gordon shook his head just as hard as his guilty pal did.

Longarm smiled wolfishly through the bars. “It sure warms my heart to get two for the price of one,” he said. “I’ve yet to see a rich man hang. So what the hell. It sounds almost as good to nail both you chumps on attempted murder as just one of you for manslaughter or, in this case, gal-slaughter.”

Cartier snorted, “Dream on, cowboy! We’re both saying she jumped! It’s our word against a nigger whore who tried to shake us down for more than her backing was worth, see?”

Longarm just laughed sort of dirty. Sergeant Nolan half turned to call back down the corridor, “Why don’t you boys just pick the poor gal up and carry her?”

Emma Gould shouted back, “They tried. She says it hurts. I swear I don’t see why you couldn’t leave her in County General where such a dreadfully injured girl belongs!”

As the madam shouted her reply, the bunch with her was passing a wall fixture. So there was no mistaking the pale but gamely smiling face of that one gal on crutches as Madame Emma and Willow, the colored maid, braced her from either side with copper badges front and rear.

Telluride Tommy Gordon sobbed, “Jesus H. Christ! You told me you’d killed her, you loco bastard!”

Cartier snapped, “Shut up! It’s some trick!”

But his older and smaller cellmate whined on. “They’re right about both of us going to state prison if they can prove we’ve been fibbing, and I never laid a hand on the bitch!”

He didn’t get to say more than that as Cartier threw a roundhouse that sat him in a far corner with a fat bloody lip. Nolan shoved a key in the lock with a curse. “You hit that poor old man again and the two of us are going to have it out, me darling bully boy!”

Cartier stayed put, gripping a bar with each fist as he glared through the bars at the approaching procession. “I aimed you at the durned wall, Baltimore Barbara!” he snarled. “You tell em I was only out to jar some sense into you when you took it into your own head to dive out the durned window instead!”

The pallid gal on crutches stopped a few yards off in the gloom, as if to gather strength for a final charge, as meanwhile Longarm jeered, “I’m sure both the judge and the jury will buy a gal you can screw for a dollar diving headfirst out a second-story window as an added thrill. What did she do to get you so riled, laugh at the size of your dick?”

Carbonate Ned Cartier drew himself grandly erect to protest, “Ain’t nothing wrong with this child’s dick! Ask Baltimore Barbara yonder if it wasn’t herself who said I was hung too heroic for her to take me Greek style!”

Nolan quietly asked, “Is that why you got sore at her?”

Cartier shrugged and sheepishly replied, “Wouldn’t you? I’d paid the house three dollars for three ways and she’d only taken me two. When I told her it was hardly fair to charge a man for three ways, then only take him two, she laughed and said there was nothing in any contract calling for either party to accomplish the impossible.”

Longarm noticed the older man in the corner seemed to be trying to get back up while drooling blood. He saw Nolan had noticed the same and finished unlocking the cell door. So all Longarm said was, “Let’s see if we can get this straight. Was it her refusal to do it or her laughing about it that inspired you to toss her out the window?”

Cartier was too smart to answer. But the battered Telluride Tommy blubbered from his far corner, “He said it was the names she called him from the Good Book!”

Cartier snapped, “Shut up, you stupid old fart!”

But the erstwhile pal he’d injured snapped back, “I’ll show you who’s stupid! She was citing Genesis Nineteen, in which the Lord God rains down fire and brimstone on the men of Sodom for trying to corn-hole some angels he’d sent to visit with Abraham and his nephew Lot. Don’t you remember telling me the only thing that riled you more than a cheating whore was a bible-thumping whore, Ned?”

Cartier told him to do a dreadful thing to his poor old mother. Longarm asked Nolan, “You reckon that’ll do it?”

The burly sergeant called back, “Have you got it all on paper for the D.A., Wojensky?”

The police stenographer waved his shorthand pad under a nearby wall lamp and cheerfully called back, “Every word, Sarge.”

So Nolan turned back to the men inside the bars. We won’t bother you gents any more for now, unless either one of you has more to say.”

Telluride Tommy shouted, “Let me out of here and get me away from this mad dog and I’ll have plenty to say! I was only trying to back a pal to begin with, and you just saw how he treats everybody he can git at, the crazy-mean son of a bitch!”

So Nolan hauled him out into the corridor before Cartier could hit him again, then slammed and locked the door again and suggested the remaining prisoner try to get some rest, seeing he’d be facing a long day come sunrise. As Nolan and Longarm walked the bloody but unbowed older man back to the others, Telluride Tommy nodded to the wan-looking figure on crutches and said softly, “You know I had nothing to do with hurting you, and I’m glad you didn’t die after all, Miss Barbara.”

Then he took a second look, stepped closer, and exclaimed, “What in blue blazes?”

So Longarm told him, not unkindly, “That bad-tempered pal you just parted company with was right to begin with. It was all a trick.”

Chapter 3

Everyone needed at least a little sleep. So it was a tad late the next morning when Longarm strode innocently into the office of Marshal William Vail of the Denver District court and was told with a knowing smile by young Henry, the squirt who played the typewriter out front, that this time he was really going to get it.

Longarm shrugged, lit his own cheroot in self-defense, and went on back to the oak-paneled inner office of their boss, the stubby and crusty old Billy Vail. Longarm had skimmed the morning edition of the Denver Post while having ham, eggs, and chili con carne with black coffee and mince pie for breakfast. His occasional drinking companion and occasional nemesis, Reporter Crawford, hadn’t made up any lies about him this time, and whorehouse killings were only reported, if at all, on page three. So what the hell.

As he entered the marshal’s private chambers with his own smoke gripped at a jaunty angle between his grinning teeth, Longarm saw at a glance that the older lawman seated behind a cluttered desk had him beat by miles as a human volcano. The blue haze Longarm had to wade through to the leather guest chair on his side of the desk didn’t hurt his eyes half as much as the smell afflicted his nose. He knew for a fact that his boss paid more for those gnarly black cigars, and old Billy didn’t seem to think it was funny when you asked if he was smoking mummified bats or simply bat shit.

Taking a seat and blowing a bubble of sweeter smoke by far, Longarm nodded at the banjo clock on an oak-paneled wall, allowed he was sorry about arriving later than usual, and asked how soon he could go to lunch.

Vail scowled through the haze and growled, “Had you come to work any later, you’d be fixing to leave for supper! But save me the excuses. I get the morning papers delivered to my very door up on Sherman. Have you ever read about that other total asshole called Don Quixote? He went in for saving the virtue of whores too, now that I study on it!”

Longarm flicked some tobacco ash on the rug, having heard that was hard on carpet mites and seeing no ashtray on his side of the desk, and soberly replied, “Miss Baltimore Barbara wasn’t robbed of her virtue last night, Billy. She was robbed of her life, and speaking of book learning, have you ever read about that other total asshole, the Marquis de Sade? They had to lock him up to keep him from abusing gals like Baltimore Barbara, and that crazy bastard never really killed anybody!”

Vail grimaced, blew an octopus cloud of pungent smoke, and observed, “Carbonate Ned Cartier is not a prissy and long-dead Frenchman. He is a registered voter who votes the right way in Colorado, belongs to the mine owners’ association of the same, and smelts forty ounces of silver from every ton of ore he drills, blasts, and mucks up Leadville way.”

Longarm grimaced right back and replied, “Magnates such as Cartier don’t drill, blast, or muck shit. The little folks do it for them, and they get to treating little folks like shit too. He killed that poor working gal, Billy. Threw her out a window like you’d throw an empty bottle or used condom if you were a real slob!”

Vail shrugged and said, “You got him to admit it, and the D.A. is so pleased with you he’d doubtless bend over and spread his cheeks. So how did you manage that, old son? I know the papers say you confronted Cartier and his fibbing pal with the banged-up Baltimore Barbara, but that ain’t possible. I asked. They tell me at the county coroner’s she died of a busted neck and hasn’t moved from that slab in the morgue since!”

Longarm nodded, blew a playful smoke ring, and asked, “You remember that flea circus and museum of natural wonders on Larimer Street, Boss?”

Vail frowned and said, “I do. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Those fleas ain’t trained. They’re just stuck with glue to bitty toys and they pull them around as they try to get away.”

He scowled harder as he continued. “As for the natural wonders in the back, they ain’t half as natural as the fleas! I know for a fact they got this old drunk who was fired from a more famous wax museum back East. When he ain’t under the table, he whips up all those two-headed critters, mermaid mummies, and such out of beeswax and that mashy paper they use for parade floats and such.”

Longarm nodded. “I know old Abner better. One night I saved his hide from some meaner drunks when he was in no shape to fight a mean six-year-old. So he said he owed me, if ever I needed a mermaid or a two-headed crocodile. I didn’t have any use for either. But last night I recalled how you get two heads that look as if they grew out of the same critter. You make a plaster cast of the one real head, and just mix up some beeswax, tinted the same color.”

“You never!” Billy Vail shouted, grinning like a mean kid in spite of himself. “How could you pass off a death mask as a real live gal, for Pete’s sake?”

Longarm shrugged. “Never had to, up close. Old Abner means well, but he ain’t no Madame Tussaud. He just greased the dead gal’s face as she grinned up from her slab, slathered her with plaster of Paris that sets in minutes, and meanwhile, Emma Gould and her own crew were mixing beeswax with face powder on a stove up front. The morgue attendants wouldn’t let Abner cut any of the cadaver’s real hair off. But once he’d pulled the cast and used it to make a mighty off-color but passible wax mask, old Emma and her maid, Willow, gussied up Frenching Ann with a head scarf sort of hiding where her own hair met the wax edges of her new face. Old Abner naturally had crutches and such on hand as well and, hell, what more do you need, a diagram on the blackboard?”

Vail chuckled but grumbled, “You’re going to need a field mission on the double, lest they serve you that summons before we can get you out of their reach!”

Longarm blinked and asked, “Whose reach? The deal I made with the Denver P.D. was that I’d never be called before any Denver judge. They won’t need my testimony. We tricked the killer into incriminating his fool self constitutionally, with neither the use of force or the threat of force.”

Vail snapped, “Don’t teach your granny to suck eggs or lecture this old lawman on the law! I ain’t worried about you being called to the witness stand by the prosecution. Any lawyer worth his salt would surely call you as a witness for the defense!”

Longarm smiled incredulously. “That’s silly, Billy! I was nowhere near that whorehouse when Cartier killed that whore, and all I heard either him or his cellmate say was that he done it!

Vail shook his bullet head and tried to sound like a high-toned lawyer. “The jury has heard all about your Halloween prank on the defendant, Deputy Long. Now suppose you explain just why you went to so much trouble seeing you had no jurisdiction. Or was it because of your, ah, relationship with Emma Gould, the well-endowed Negress Willow Jones, and Frenching Ann? Why do they call her Frenching Ann, Deputy Long? I mean, seeing you seem to know her well enough to tear through the wee small hours playing Halloween pranks with spooky masks?”

Longarm stared aghast. “Hold on! I never in my life had any such relationship as you’re suggesting with any of them ladies! I was asked to help by Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. Him and me go back a ways, ever since the two of us foiled a burglary at the Tabor mansion up on Capitol Hill.”

Vail sweetly asked in that fancy voice, “Is that why I can produce my own witnesses to the simple fact that you were traipsing up and down Larimer Street with notorious women of the town a good hour or more before you went anywhere near my client in his gloomy prison cell?”

Longarm blew smoke out both nostrils, but didn’t paw the rug with a hoof as he quietly asked, “You said you had this field mission for me, Boss?”

Somewhat mollified, Vail nodded his bullet head and said, “They call him Wolf Ritter. His real name’s Wolfgang von Ritterhoff, and before he come across the main ocean and turned total outlaw, he was one of those Prussian Cavalry johns who rode for Bismarck in that Franco-Prussian War a few years back. As the Austrians, Danes, and French could tell us, no Cheyenne Crooked Lancer could hold a candle to a Prussian trooper coming at you with a saber in one hand, a horse pistol in the other, and the reins gripped in his evil grin. But now that things are a tad calmer in that new Germanic Empire Bismarck carved out a few short years ago, such ferocious fighting men have been ordered to wax their pimp mustaches, click their heels on entering or leaving the ballroom, and in sum behave like officers and gentlemen.”

Longarm nodded thoughtfully. “Some old boys who rode in the war we had earlier have yet to adjust to civilian ways. I take it this Wolf Ritter never took too well to heel-clicking and kissing the ladies on their dainty wrists?”

Vail said, “Ritter hung on to his horse pistol, a LeMatt he took off a dead French officer at Sedan. It was kissing a lady of the Pawnee persuasion all over, against her will, that led to his being listed as a federal want. When the screaming Pawnee maiden’s federal Indian agent tried to make Ritter stop, he wound up with nine rounds of .40-caliber and a modest load of buckshot in his guts. The Pawnee victim says the poor gunshot cuss died slow and got to watch as Ritter finished what he’d set out to do to her. Any questions?”

Longarm quietly asked, “Which way did he go?”

Vail said, “South, to the Smokey Hill range north of Dodge. I had you over yonder on another case a spell back, remember?”

Longarm nodded. “You damn near got me killed. But why in thunder would a total furriner choose that stretch of west Kansas to hide out in? I know you said he likes Indian gals. They’re doubtless a change from Austrian, Danish, or French gals. But the South Cheyenne and Arapaho who used to range the Smokey Hill swells are long gone, and the country’s been thrown open to stockmen and … Oh, I follow your drift!”

To which Vail replied, “I was hoping you might. What do you call them High Dutch-speaking Russians who’ve come west to grow tumbleweeds and that red Russian wheat?”

Longarm said, “Mennonites. They ain’t exactly Russian. Catherine the Great, being a High Dutch princess to begin with, invited some unpopular but mighty good farmers to migrate to Russia with her and see what they could do with her back steps. That’s what they call the prairies in Russia, steps.”

Vail said, “Never mind all that. Is it or ain’t it a fact that a mess of High Dutch Holy Rollers with beards and thick accents have infested the Smokey Hills of Kansas?”

Longarm nodded. “Mennonites ain’t Pentacostals “`inclineci to speak in tongues and thrash about on the floor during services. From what a nice little gal told me a spell back, the main reason they got persecuted in their old countries was that they don’t hold with baptizing their kids. That’s why some call ‘em Anabaptists. That ain’t accurate, though. Their founding prophet, a Hollander named Menno, said babies didn’t know whether they wanted to be Christians, Muslims, or hell, Hopi snake dancers when they grew up. So it was a lot more logical to let kids grow up and then baptize ‘em, after they agreed to be Mennonites. But Mennonites call themselves Brethren when nobody else is around.”

Vail rolled his eyes up and groaned, “Ask the kid what time it might be and he lectures you on how to build a grandfather clock! I know all about those High Dutch Holy Rollers getting chased off those back steps by some other Russian emperor’s cod-sacks, and how they didn’t want to go back to that Germanic Empire because Bismarck had started to draft everybody into his spikey-hatted army. I know most of them settled in the Dakota Territory to pray their own way and raise all that red Russian wheat to their heart’s content. The bunch that came down to Kansas to farm even tougher country are the ones Wolf Ritter seems to be hiding out with.”

Longarm asked, “How come? As I understand it, Mennonites don’t hold with violence, military or otherwise.”

Vail said, “None of the simps would know a renegade Prussian officer if they caught him in bed with their woman, and as I’m sure Ritter was the first to notice, all those sodbusting Holy Rollers favor full beards as well as High Dutch accents!”

He saw that hadn’t gotten through to Longarm and added, “Ritter went to that fancy military school where the students get to carve each other’s faces with sabers when they ain’t studying table manners. So he used to be mighty proud of his scarred-up left cheek. Such a distinctive feature on an otherwise average-looking face can be a bother when you’re riding the owlhoot trail with many a murder warrant out after you.”

Longarm said, “I follow your drift. I’m to look for a clodhopper with chin whiskers and a furrin accent, who’s really a murderous vet of the Franco-Prussian War, among the Smokey Hills of Kansas, which are really rolling prairie carried to an extreme.”

Vail said, “An informant who knows him on sight reported him last in a trail town called Sappa Crossing, a four or five days’ ride north of Dodge City. I’ve already told Henry out front to route you by rail as far as the forks of the Republican River by way of the Burlington line. The ride south will be way shorter, and every time we let you get off in Dodge you seem to get stuck playing draw poker at that infernal Long Branch, or playing slap and tickle with someone like Madame Mustache for at least a week!”

Longarm smiled innocently through the haze and quietly remarked, “I ain’t sure Madame Mustache still has that place in Dodge. Do you reckon Wolf Ritter’s dumb enough to be hanging on to that distinctive old LeMatt revolver?”

Vail shrugged. “Be dumb as hell to take such pains to hide out as a Holy Rolling homesteader without picking up a whole other gun. Either way, he’ll likely be packing a concealed weapon, and the way I hear it, he’s been trained to kill a heap with most any weapon handy!”

Chapter 4

Longarm got off the Burlington eastbound at the cow town of McCook, Nebraska, after he’d barely gotten started with that eastbound blonde in that low-cut summer frock. With nobody from the fussy home office looking, he’d shed his stuffy tweeds for a far more comfortable riding outfit of faded but soft clean denim jacket and jeans over a hickory work shirt. He’d learned on past missions, the hard way, it paid any man more interested in catching men than cows to stick with broken-in stovepipe boots he could ride or run in. His cross-draw .44-40 was a tad more noticeable without a frock coat to hide under, but nobody was likely to worry about a rider packing his hardware sensibly in plain leather wrapping.

Longarm’s Winchester ‘73, chambered for the same .44-40 rounds as his double-action six-gun, naturally rode in a saddle boot attached to his McClellan army saddle, which, like his boots, reflected experience with unexpected experiences. General George McClellan had made a total hash of his Peninsula Campaign in ‘62, but before that he’d introduced one hell of a saddle, based on, but improved over, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry design he’d met up with during some diplomatic time in those parts. Old George’s version rode easy on one’s mount, with an open slit the length of the seat to ventilate the critter’s spine and only grab you by the balls if you wore your riding pants too loose. Better yet, the McClellan saddle had brass eyelets you could hang a heap of shit from. So aside from his saddle gun and canteens, Longarm had that tweed suit, other spare duds, trail grub, and such packed in the two saddlebags riding under the bedroll behind the cantle. It made quite a load as he limped across the dusty street from the train stop with all of it balanced on one hip. He had no need to make the usual courtesy call on the local law, seeing he’d be clean out of the state as well as the county by nightfall. So that might have been why the old boys watching from around the livery corral on the far side added two and two to get half a dozen.

When Longarm draped his heavy saddle over a corral pole and asked them about the hire of a pony, a gray old gent with a hatchet face spat ominously close to Longarm’s dusty boot tips and allowed they had no horses for hire to the likes of him.

There came a murmured growl of agreement from the eight others assembled, all dressed cow and no fancier than himself. So Longarm quietly replied, “Sure you do. That sign on the side of your whitewashed stable allows you hire livery for hauling or riding at two bits a head per them with deposit. After that, I can plainly see at least six or eight head of horseflesh in that corral behind you. So what’s your personal beef with me, old son?”

The hostler said, “It ain’t you personal. it’s your kind in general. I wouldn’t hire to Johnny Ringo, Billy the Kid, or any other wandering gunslick, if that’s any comfort to you.”

Longarm laughed and reached for his wallet as he sheepishly said, “That’ll learn me to pack guns in public without a suit and tie. I thought President Hayes was just being a priss when he ordered all of us to dress like whiskey drummers.”

By this time he had his wallet out to flash his badge and identification for all to see. The hostler gasped. “Great balls of fire! You must be that Deputy Long from Denver they call Longarm. We knew someone like you would be coming along sooner or later! How many horses do you need—on the house, Longarm?”

The denim-clad deputy put his wallet away as he chuckled and said he only needed one to ride and one for packing. Then he added, “I’d be proud to pay your going price. It don’t come out of my pocket. Not directly leastways. We all pay taxes. How come you gents here in McCook seem so proddy about gunslicks? I ain’t heard about any recent gunplay in these parts.”

The hostler took a throw-rope from a nail near a gatepost, swung the gate ajar, and said, “Come on in and point out the ones you want. You ain’t heard about the shooting because the shooting ain’t started so far.”

Longarm pointed with his chin at a wary-eyed but not too spooked gelding and said, “That cut bay neither dances nor drags his hooves in the dust. How come you’re expecting shooting if there ain’t been any?”

The hostler threw with considerable skill, gently caught the bay on the first try, and rolled him in slow but steady as he explained. “The reason me and the boys started out so surly was because you ain’t the first armed and dangerous-looking stranger to get off a train passing through such a normally quiet town. The spring roundup just ended. So our local cow outfits are more likely to be laying off than hiring and, no offense, none of you recent arrivals look like plow jockies, even if our newer homesteaders were busting new sod, which they ain’t.”

As the two of them got the bay gelding against the rails to saddle and bridle him, Longarm betrayed more of his West-by-God-Virginia boyhood than his Colorado-crushed Stetson might be letting on when he said, “You’re right. This late in the greenup all the spring planting’s been done, and it’s too early to reap last fall’s winter wheat. So what’s left?”

One of the other old boys who’d started listening chimed in with, “Nothing. The buff have been shot off in these parts, and we ain’t never had no mines or mills for old boys to work in. The range north and south or east and west is stock and farming country for many a mile. Some say it’s a range war brewing. Ain’t nothing else worth fighting over in these parts. Yet some damned somebody has invited a whole lot of hired guns to get off here!”

Longarm pointed at another steady-looking pony and said, “I like the way all four hooves of that paint mare match. I’ve yet to hear of a war over water rights this close to the Smokey Hills.”

The hostler shook out another loop as he replied, “It can’t be over water. The last month’s been dry, after a wet enough spring. But hell, it’s always dry out here on these prairies in summertime. Otherwise we’d be surrounded by forests. But even when the creeks run dry, a settler with a lick of sense would rather drill for water than fight a neighbor along that same dry creek.”

He threw, and again made an easy, clean catch. As he was getting a tad more resistance from the paint, the old boy leaning over the corral pole at them volunteered, “Water table’s always high in these parts. I can’t see a water fight neither. Ain’t no cows been getting stole or fences being cut. Country ain’t that settled yet. Of course, some of us real Americans can’t abide by them Minuets down the far side of Sappa Creek.”

As the hostler got the paint mare to the rails and Longarm calmed her with a bandana blindfold and a horsehair hackamore or soft hitless bridle, he felt obliged to observe, “Sappa Creek’s a good ride from here, and I understand you call them Mennonites. I know that much because I’m headed for Sappa Crossing, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise. I understand I got more than one to cross betwixt here and yonder.”

The hostler thought and decided, “Mostly bitty draws and, like Lem just said, it’s been dry all month. Only one you’ll likely find with enough flowing water to matter will be Beaver Creek, this side of the somewhat wetter Sappa. You’re right about wells. Most every natural homesteader out this way prays for rain and drills for water. Save for them peculiar Anabaptists south of Sappa Creek.”

As he and the hostler got a hired empty packsaddle on the paint Longarm resisted the impulse to ask what was so peculiar about the Mennonite nesters to the south. The loafer called Lem volunteered. “They do everything bass-ackwards. They wait till their kids are full growed and out of most dangerous stages before they baptize ‘em to insure their souls. And they plow and plant in the fall, when all the sensible folk are reaping. So damned if they don’t pray for snow instead of rain, just as that crazy red wheat is commencing to sprout!”

Longarm knew better. He still said quietly, “That’s how come they call it winter wheat. The Mennonites met up with it on the back steps of Russia where the growing season’s even shorter than out our way. It sprouts before Yuletide, like you said, but as soon as the wolf winds nip, winter wheat dies above ground, goes dormant underground, and the process repeats through all the frosts and thaws until the stuff really gets to growing in the first real thaws in April, when nobody but a fool would try to plow shin-deep prairie muck.”

The hostler cracked the gate open. As they led the two ponies out, a couple of old boys with nothing better to do dropped down off the rails to shoo the other livery stock back with their hats. Country gents weren’t really as mean as they talked when they didn’t know you.

Lem, who hadn’t pitched in to help, spat and said, “It ain’t so smart to bust this sod at any time of the year. Most of the time it’s dried to ‘dobe hard as chalk, and on the rare occasions it’s wet, it turns to gumbo, like you said. There’s barely enough time in a good year to grow a cash crop of barley for piss-poor cash. That’s why I grow cows, like most of the other real Americans in these parts!”

There came a rumble of agreement as Longarm settled up with the hostler, ticked his hat brim to all concerned, and led the two ponies away afoot. He wasn’t ready to ride just yet.

He passed the saloon just up the street, and tethered his livery stock to the hitching rail of a nearby general store. He had a few cans of beans and tomato preserves in one saddlebag. But seeing he had some riding ahead through nester country in tenser times than old Billy Vail had warned him about, he figured some extra private fodder for the ponies might save discussion on possibly disputed range.

As the fatherly old storekeeper and a colored kid filled his order for cracked corn and rolled oats, the kid getting to carry the sacks out and load them aboard the paint, Longarm stocked up on some extra tobacco, canned coffee, and rock candy. You couldn’t just hand out smokes to the menfolk as you rode through farming country.

He settled up with the storekeeper. But the older gent followed him out front, nodded with approval at the stock of Longarm’s saddle gun, and suggested, “Don’t take no guff off them Anabaptist bastards down Kansas way. They act big. But none of ‘em stand ready to fight a grown man or, hell, a tough Christian girl!”

Longarm tipped the kid helper a whole dime to show he wasn’t in a huff as he mounted up and rode out of town to the south. Nobody had told him things were that tense in these parts, and a High Dutch-talking killer made more sense when you considered nobody had much respect for the fighting ability of those High Dutch newcomers. The prophet, Menno, had preached against fighting and advised the Brethren to turn the other cheek. Longarm had heard much the same in his own Sunday School, in times that now seemed long ago and far more peaceful. But he’d noticed, out West, that that was a swell way to get slapped twice.

As he left the last outhouse in McCook behind, he saw newly sprouted corn and what had to be either rye or barley behind the three-strand fencing to either side of the dusty wagon trace. Corn called for a heap of optimism west of Longitude 100’ between the Arkansas and Republican, while spring wheat was just plain impossible. If that old Lem had been right about cows in these parts as well, those three strands weren’t enough. It took at least five strands of barb-wire, stapled to solid posts, to stop a determined cow.

He had no call to tell anybody any of these things, so he kept on riding. He’d been raised country enough to know most country folks got smart about the sort of country they were used to, making them scornful of book learning and resentful of strangers offering advice about their own damned business.

Left to their druthers and doing things their own ways, country folks tended to get along just fine on the folklore handed down and slowly modified when anything wasn’t exactly as the grandfolks had said it ought to be. Old country tales about Cock Robin showing up just before the spring thaw worked just as well if the robins of a new land were a different bird entirely, and it still rained, sooner or later, after you stomped on a spider.

It was throwing together all sorts of country folks from different countries, with different ways, that led to so much feuding and failures in the postwar West. Some, like Longarm, had soon learned the earth would not gape open and swallow them if they listened to odd-sounding advice from folks who’d been out West longer, or even paid attention to a Mexican or full-blown Indian. The old ways your grandfolks taught you could lead to heartbreak or worse in totally different country.

The first pioneers who’d jeered at Indian warnings about what seemed to be wild parsley, free for the taking near camp, had wound up deader than the ones who’d kept more open minds.

Texas stockmen had lost cows left and right to agues and weeds no Anglo had ever met up with before, until some few had been politer to those outlandish Mex vaqueros and learned to be Texas buckaroos almost overnight.

That Homestead Act of old Abe Lincoln had killed far more folks than all the hostile Indians combined, and busted far more folks than it killed. But Longarm had learned in his travels how tough it could be to convince farmers from the wet side of the Mississippi that a hundred sixty acres and pure sweat alone weren’t always going to be enough, that an old hand worried more about grasshoppers than Cheyenne raids and that your stove did better on dry cowshit than almost worthless cottonwood a couple of draws over.

He knew the resentment at the way this new country could treat a willing worker added fuel to the fire when some outlandish stranger sneered at you for doing things the wrong way. it was easier to sneer back or perhaps peg a shot at the bastard than it was to allow you’d been dumb to follow the ways of your elders that had always worked before.

As he lit a cheroot with a passing nod at a scarecrow pointing the way to the nearby state line, Longarm reflected on the many American-born homesteaders who had started switching from regular spring wheat to red Russian or other winter wheats of late. For the Mennonites had been growing wheat west of where wheat was supposed to grow for close to five summers by now. It was the stubborn old-timers who refused to consider changing who could be your most surly neighbors.

Longarm, who’d taken up reading as a secret vice in recent years, had read how country folks in olden times had charged neighbors more prosperous with witchcraft. A poor Ohio Valley sodbuster watching a funny-talking cuss reaping bumper crops of red wheat after he’d tried, and failed, more than once, could almost be forgiven for feeling moody and suspicious, if willful ignorance had been an excuse. It wasn’t, but it still had to hurt like fire to plant the same wheat your ever-so-great grandad had planted, once the prairie was dry enough for spring planting, only to see the dry winds of a high plains summer turn half of it to straw before the early fall frosts finished it off before it was ripe enough to reap.

The wagon trace was taking him gently but firmly skyward as he and the two ponies forged on to the south. So he wasn’t surprised to find ever more open range all around, until they had widely scattered cows on overgrazed short grass for company. Mindful of the grade and his own bigger frame, Longarm dismounted sooner than he might have to lead the ponies aside to crop grass while he swapped saddles. Despite being grazed too heavily, the grass was still growing and fairly green. The dry winds across these rises would soon summer-kill and cure it. A crop down closer to the riverbanks north or south might make it a few weeks further into high summer without irrigation, but not enough to matter, unless it was barley. Corn and rye both needed extra watering out this way. None of them sold for as much as good bread-wheat. Mounting the paint so the bay could pack the lighter load for a spell, Longarm nodded to a chongo-horned cow who’d been watching with interest and told it, “Your owner’s right. If I was stuck with a few sections of this range, I’d leave it to short grass and run your kind on it.”

Then he told himself nobody had stuck him with one acre over in these parts, and got out the onionskins Henry had typed up for him to worry about. He’d read them more than once aboard the Burlington eastbound, but you never knew what you might notice reading the same reports over again. So far, they hadn’t told him a whole lot.

On the face of the odd tale, the fugitive Wolf Ritter had gone to ground among High Dutch-speakers who wore beards along the south bank of Sappa Creek. The only trouble with that was how a Prussian von was supposed to pass for a Mennonite from the back steps of Russia. That friendly Mennonite gal who’d explained the whole sad saga to him a spell back had allowed her folks spoke a sort of Swiss Dutch, before picking up some Russian words in the hundred years or so they’d spent as subjects of various czars. A renegade but highborn Prussian officer might manage the accent well enough to fool anyone but a real Mennonite, the way a Boston boy might try to sound as if he hailed from Dixie. But someone from, say, Mobile was likely to trip him up sooner or later.

“That might account for our informant spotting him,” Longarm told his paint mount as he saw that the informant was a Mennonite by the name of Horst Heger, according to Henry’s typing. Longarm wished the infernal report had more to say about the informant than the son of a bitch he’d informed on. There was no mystery about the disgusting ways of Wolf Ritter, ne von Ritterhoff, since he’d fought one duel too many in his old country and started picking fights as soon as he got off the boat in New York City. Aside from that one federal killing, he was wanted for manslaughter or assault all along a route you could trace through upstate New York and the Midwest and beyond, as if that hot-tempered scar-faced rascal was riding with Mister Death into the sunset, the way some held they’d seen that dark rider on a pale horse after Shiloh, Cold Harbor, and such.

So how had a Mennonite farmer who’d never been in any Prussian army recognized Ritter as Ritter?

The report didn’t say. Longarm’s orders were to get on down to Sappa Crossing, scout up Horst Heger, and ask him to point Ritter out from the other bearded gents.

Without flushing a short-fused owlhoot rider who knew the law had to be out to hang him high!

That was the rub—nothing in these fool onionskins offered a lick of advice on. Oh, sure, Henry had typed plain as day, “SUSPECT IS ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!” as if a body had to be told a killer packing a LeMat with nine in the wheel and a shotgun shell in the center of it was likely to roll over and beg you to scratch his belly.

Snorting smoke out both nostrils, Longarm cursed and told his mount, “That there Horst Heger must have some plan.” Had Wolf Ritter suspected anyone was on to him, Billy never would have got that wire. A killer desperate enough to grow a beard and take up new religious ways would swat anyone he suspected like a fly. Heger had been smart enough to send his fifty-word night letter from the county seat a half-day’s drive away from Sappa Crossing. But fifty words were hardly enough. Henry had typed up a full transcription of the tersely worded message to Marshal Vail. Longarm had read it over before and as he read it again, walking his ponies, he failed to see anything he might have missed riding east on that train.

The informant who’d recognized a Prussian killer hadn’t seen fit to explain why he’d wired Denver instead of the much closer federal court at Fort Dodge. He said the man he knew as von Ritterhoff had come into his shop in Sappa Crossing. He never said what sort of a shop he ran or exactly where it was. So for openers, a stranger who could well be the law had to ask around town for Horst Heger and hope like hell he wasn’t asking Wolf Ritter in disguise!

Longarm had already considered trying to blend in with a bunch of Dutch-Russian Anabaptists, and given up the notion as silly. Mennonites didn’t attach any religious significance to clothes or personal grooming, the way those Pennsylvania Dutch did. But most of them looked sort of outlandish because they were outlandish, more used to dressing like Russian peasants than American homesteaders. Some of the younger ones he’d met had taken to dressing and shaving more naturally. Their elders seemed an easygoing bunch next to, say, the Latter-Day Saints or even the Hard Shell Baptists. So a gent riding in discreetly in faded denim and with his guns out of sight …

“Forget it,” Longarm warned himself with a wry smile. “You talk a lot more Spanish than High Dutch, and you’d never in this world pass for a Mex if you put on a silly hat! As to your side arm, you’ll be up against an experienced duelist who could be packing a nine-shooter when and if you meet, and folks in a small trail town are surely going to spot and speculate on anyone riding in day, night, or sideways!”

So he’d have to make up some excuse for a U.S. deputy marshal being there when he made the expected courtesy call on the town law. An armed and dangerous-looking stranger who went poking about in town as a total mystery was as likely to be backshot by a proddy town deputy as the son of a bitch he was prodding for.

Longarm hummed a few bars of “Farther Along” as he decided he could make up some other outlaw he was after by the time he got to Sappa Crossing. And he could likely find a barber, even in a town where so many favored beards, and just casually ask where old Heger’s shop was. It seemed highly unlikely a trail-town barber would be the one and original Wolf Ritter.

Once he found Heger’s shop, he’d just ask the shopkeeper when and where he’d met up with that mean Prussian. It hardly seemed likely any gent who’d turned Ritter in to the law would hold anything back about him.

Chapter 5

South central Nebraska and northwest Kansas shared the same rolling sea of short grass. So there was just no saying where that wagon trace crossed the state line. Up close, the country was less tedious to look at than it seemed from a train window. As the U.S. Cav had learned the hard way, back when this had been Arapaho and Cheyenne hunting ground, what seemed a view across open prairie to the far and flat horizon was dissected by draws deep enough to hide whole Indian villages, guarded by the best light cavalry on Earth. The winds that swept mostly from the west but constantly from any direction made it a mite tough for anything taller than buffalo and grama grass or widely scattered clumps of soap weed to occupy the rises. But the deeper draws could surprise you with long skinny forests of box elder, cottonwood, willow, and even small red cedars. The buffalo had been shot off this far east, along with the buffalo-hunting Indians, but prairie dogs still cussed at you on high ground, and jackrabbits flushed to spook your ponies most anywhere.

Longarm had left McCook a tad later than an easy day’s ride down to Sappa Crossing called for. So even though he knew it was possible to push on and arrive by moonrise, that would hardly be the way to drift into a tight-knit little trail town without everyone in town hearing about it within the hour.

His government survey map showed a regular American trail town named Cedar Bend, where the wagon trace crossed Beaver Creek a few hours north of his Mennonite destination.

Longarm decided he might kill more than one bird with the same slowpoke stone if he overnighted there and rode on into tenser parts in the morning, when traffic would be busier on the roads.

Horst Heger hadn’t sent that wire from Cedar Bend, so the wanted killer would have no call to be watching for one particular rider in a regular American settlement.

At the same time, the two towns were close enough to one another for any important news to travel back and forth. They’d have surely heard up ahead if there’d been any gunplay in Sappa Crossing since that Burlington eastbound had pulled out of Denver. In a land where your nearest neighbor could be over the horizon, miles could be little more than city blocks to the local gossips.

Putting his map away, Longarm saw he had no call to consult his watch. The sun shone well above the western horizon in a clear cobalt-blue sky, and he knew Cedar Bend lay just over the next serious rise to his south. So he clucked the bay he was riding now into an easy lope, leading the paint at the same pace downslope and across a grassy draw, to rein in and walk both ponies up the long grassy grade ahead.

As he did so, gazing ahead at the crest of the rise they were climbing, Longarm muttered, “What the hell …?” as what seemed like a big old pumpkin peeked over the rise at them and continued skyward at a rate that would have done an eagle-bird proud.

“Why, it’s a swamping balloon!” Longarm assured his mount as he made out the spider-webby line following the big yellow globe skyward. “It’s a captive balloon, being flown like a kite by someone on the ground with a mighty expensive hobby! Those hydrogen-generating wagons cost a heap, and the scrap iron and sulfuric acid you have to fill ‘em up with don’t come all that cheap!”

He heeled his mount into a faster uphill walk as he thought back to all that the pretty Mam-zell Blanchard had taught him about ballooning, and other French notions, at the Omaha State Fair. They’d met up there because it took something as big as a state fair to finance the sort of ballooning stunts he’d learned from her. His survey figures for Cedar Bend didn’t list four hundred permanent residents, and even when you counted cowhands and nesters from all around, the only way anyone could profit from a captive balloon just hanging around up yonder would be to charge each passenger quite a lot per ride.

But as he peered heavenward, Longarm failed to see any passengers or even a sensible passenger basket under that big balloon. He’d just asked his mount’s opinion on what that all meant when they both had the liver and lights scared out of them.

The box dangling from under the mighty high balloon blew up with a blinding flash, followed shortly thereafter by a horrendous bang and rumbling echoes from the rises all around. So it was a good thing Longarm had been aboard a bucking bronc before.

There was no horn on a McClellan saddle to grab onto. So Longarm let go of the lead rope and hung on to the saddle for dear life as the spooked pony crow-hopped all the way back to the bottom of the draw.

By that time the echoes had faded, he had his mount under control again and, as he’d hoped, the paint had not seen fit to carry that packsaddle up out of the draw towards such a noisy sky.

As he swung down to retrieve the lead line, he told both ponies in a soothing tone, “Nobody’s out to bombard us. Some fool pluviculturist is trying to make it rain. I just read in the Scientific American how some jasper called Dan’l Ruggles just patented what happened up yonder.” Neither pony argued about that. As the three of them headed back up the same slope, Longarm saw that same balloon still floating a whole lot higher, and idly wondered if he was fixing to meet the famous Rainmaking Ruggles. His picture in that magazine had doubtless been posed for on a bad day. The poor bewhiskered cuss in the stovepipe hat had looked as if his invention had scared him shitless.

The notion of setting off dynamite in the sky to make it rain had hardly been the basis of the Ruggles patent, of course. Folks as far back as the first Napoleon had noticed that all those cannon going off made for wetter weather than usual. Soldiers even further back had cussed about “General Mudd” slowing down their wars. So a gent by the name of James Espy had decided it was the smoke and heat above a battlefield that made such places so muddy. But his plan to water Penn State by burning big bonfires clean across the state, all at once, hadn’t struck anyone as practical before the war.

Lots of war vets had come home in blue or gray to bitterly remark on all the damned mud they’d had to march through as the drizzle wet their damned powder. So a Texan named Dyrenforth had piled up enough explosives to start the war over and blasted hell out of the dry Texas skies till a dry Texas newspaper reported, “General Dyrenforth attacked front and rear, by the right and left flank. But the blue sky remained clear as the complexion of a Saxon maid!”

Ruggles’s new patent involved getting the explosives up high in the sky where it might matter, without losing an expensive kite or balloon in the process. The scientific pluviculturist dangled his explosives a safe distance below the balloon on a lighter line branching off from the main one. Two copper wires were braided up yonder with three strands of hemp, so a simple charge from a blasting box could detonate the dangling dynamite at will.

So far this afternoon it didn’t seem to be raining. The dark smoke had drifted away on the high breezes, and there didn’t seem to be another whiff of cloud in that mighty arid-looking sky.

“That’s likely why they’re paying to have their summer sky shaken a mite,” Longarm muttered with a thin smile as he forged on up over the rise.

Then he reined in near a fence post beside the wagon trace, regarded the view to the south, and murmured aloud, “Now, ain’t that sort of pretty!”

Some cowboys and most Indians would have disagreed, but Longarm had to admire hard work and the fruits of the same. He saw no cedars where a cluster of frame structures faced him on the far side of a gentle bend in Beaver Creek. For that matter he saw no beavers, and there was hardly enough water running along the braided sandy channel to justify the title of Creek.

They’d built at such a respectful height up the far slope to show that when it was raining in the Smokey Hills to the southwest, you got more of a river than any creek around that bend. There was nothing in the way of a bridge across Beaver Creek. You didn’t need bridges to cross such prairie watercourses in dry weather, and in wet weather any bridge you might build tended to wash out. They still spoke in awe up in Denver about the time a flash flood in Cherry Creek had picked up the Larimer Street Bridge and just wiped away some of Downtown Denver, like the thunderbird had been cleaning a blackboard with a big old eraser.

Some friendly Arapaho had tried to warn the founding fathers of Denver about Cherry Creek. Longarm was inclined to agree with the folks even other Indians called “The Grandfather Nation” that the best way to get along with their Matou or Great Medicine was to ride it with a gentle hand on the reins. The folks of Cedar Bend had been smart enough to build above the high-water mark down yonder. Whether you got rain in the right amount by setting off bombs in the sky was another matter.

They seemed to be reeling that balloon back down toward an ant-pile scurry of distant folks on the far side of the valley. Whether anyone yonder knew his ass from his elbow remained to be seen. It was easier to see why they’d hired somebody to try.

The fenced-in forty acres of barley to his left looked sort of dry, but it was starting to head up and they’d likely fetch a crop on such ground water as the thrifty barley roots could still reach. As he heeled his hired bay downslope he saw other barley and a big patch of rye on the same southward-facing slope. Over yonder, facing north, he saw many more acres planted to flint corn, which was about shoulder high so far.

You planted hardy flint corn this far out on the high plains, even though an Eastern farmer’s first thoughts would be against it. But while it was true the north slopes of prairie rises caught pure frozen hell in wintertime out this way, the warmer and drier south slopes were cruel to corn in summertime. You could barely hope to grow barley or rye where the sun and south winds could hit full blast.

That balloon was about down now and sure enough, he could make out a couple of big red circus-style wagons over yonder. A lot of that corn to his south had been planted low enough for irrigation, if those tall sunflower windmills along the far edge of town meant anything. But as was ever the temptation of mankind, some of that corn and a lot more barley had been drilled in halfway up the far slope. So they had to hope, pray, or pluviculture some rain soon. That mild moist greenup they’d had this year, after the long dry spell after Little Big Horn, had encouraged some nesters to gamble. He could tell from his side of the valley that some homesteaders had planted upslope from that line of windmills and other improvements above the town. Stockmen were inclined to range their critters far beyond any official holdings as well. But while you could always move a thirsty critter to such water as there might be, a corn stalk just stood there until either you got some damned water to it or it withered up and blew away.

“It ain’t our problem,” he told his mount as they got to the mostly sandy bed of Beaver Creek and crossed it, with neither pony wetting a hoof to the fetlock. He didn’t say Billy Vail had sent him to cut the trail of Wolf Ritter. Not out loud. For an old gray geezer wearing an old army shirt with a snuff-colored vest and a Schofield .45-28 in a tie-down holster seemed to be regarding him with bemused interest as he rode up the far bank.

“Welcome to Cedar Bend and let me tell you about our pistol ordinance,” the old-timer began. But Longarm got out his own badge so he could flash it without saying much. This inspired the older lawman to snort, “Keep your durned guns for all I care, Uncle Sam. You had a body worried, scouting a spell up yonder, before you rode down to hit town from this side with everyone else up the other way watching them fool rainmaking gals.”

As Longarm reined and dismounted he put his badge away and introduced himself by name, adding, “Rainmaking gals? Not the one and pure patent holder, Dan’l Ruggles?”

The old-timer replied, “They call me Dad Jergens, and I do believe them rainmaking gals call themselves the Ruggles sisters, now that I think back. If it was up to me I’d run ‘em out of town as pure public pests. But the town council said to give lem a crack at making it rain. We need some rain. But I don’t believe in rainmaking, do you?”

Longarm shrugged and replied, “Haven’t seen it work yet. Spent a tedious seventy-two hours in a Hopi pueblo with rainmakers one time. It hadn’t rained by the time I left, despite all that drumming and a whole lot of snake dancing. Where can I bed down these ponies for the night, Dad? I can tell you on the way why I figure I ought to stay here instead of riding into Sappa Crossing after sundown.”

The old-timer said, “I’ll show you the way to our municipal corral. They don’t charge extra for watering stock, but fodder will run you a dime a head for corn and hay or an extra nickel for oats. I know why you don’t want to hit that Anabaptist town after dark. You just now made me wonder, and I’m a sensible Methodist.”

“You did seem a mite on the prod,” said Longarm as they strode side by side to higher ground along the combined wagon trace and main street. He didn’t have to ask why. The older lawman nodded and said, “Outlaws. Robbery over to the county seat and mayhaps a kidnapping or more down to Sappa Crossing!”

Longarm whistled softly and, taking the bull by the horns, told the other lawman, “I was supposed to look up some Mennonite shopkeeper down yonder. Is it understood this conversation is a private one, betwixt professional lawmen?”

Dad Jergens snorted, “Aw, hell, let me in on some secrets so’s I can mount the pulpit at First Methodist come Sunday and preach ‘em to the world! Have you any notion at all what a lawman worth his salt has to keep to himself in your average election year, old son?”

Longarm nodded and said, “The brother’s name is Horst Heger. All I know about him is that he’s supposed to have some sort of shop down in that Mennonite settlement.”

Dad Jergens shook his head and said, “I know him. He’s all right. I ride over yonder from time to time to do business with Heger. He’s a gunsmith. A good one. Fixed this old cavalry iron of mine to shoot straight as ever after I’d pistol-whupped a chicken thief with more enthusiasm than Major Schofield had in mind when he designed it for shooting Indians. Hold the thought and we’ll talk about Heger some more, in private.”

The figure coming out of the stable next to the municipal corral appeared to be an Indian, baby-faced and walking effeminately until it became more obvious you were staring at a handsome pair of tits under that red shirt and bib overalls. It sure beat all how a face could look so wrong on a young buck and so right on a young squaw with the same long parted and braided hair. Longarm noticed that aside from dressing like a white stable hand, the gal hadn’t painted the part of her hair any medicine color. So he had her down as an assimilate well before Dad Jergens said, “Deputy Long, this here would be Osage Olive and she’s all right, despite her savage appearance.”

The squaw, who’d have doubtless preferred to be called a weya if she spoke Osage, smiled wearily at the old-timer and told Longarm she answered to Olive Red-Dog.

He thought hard and tried, “That’d be Miss Sunka Luta then, right?”

The Indian gal’s sloe eyes betrayed no emotion, but she dimpled some as she replied, “I think I know who you must be. There is this Deputy Long called Longarm by his own people. My people call him the Wasichu Wastey. That means he is one of them who’s all right.”

Longarm dryly asked if that meant he didn’t have to pay extra for oats. Olive Red-Dog laughed as hearty as a boy.

Dad Jergens said, “Well, you kids go on and rub down them ponies or one another for all I care. I got to get on over to that rainmaking operation before real trouble starts in these parts.”

“Hold on, we were talking about gunsmiths!” Longarm called after the spry older lawman as Jergens lit out at a mile-eating pace.

The Indian gal reached for the reins and lead line Longarm was holding as she suggested, “Go after him, if it’s important. Dad’s all right but he’s a tad deaf as well as absentminded.”

When Longarm hesitated, as any thoughtful rider would have, Olive said, “This may come as a surprise to you, Wasichu Wastey, but I make my living tending to horses. You’ll find your saddle and possibles in the tack room when you come back to settle up. It’s those Cheyenne who count coup on robbing you boys. My people were on your side, back when things were wilder in these parts, remember?”

Longarm surrendered his riding stock to her with a smile, saying, “I was counting coup further east, at places such as Shiloh and Cold Harbor. Could you tell me what your town law is so exited about this afternoon, Miss Olive?”

She nodded and replied, “Those rainmaking Wasichu girls. I don’t think they’re going to make it rain. But some have paid good money for some much-needed sky-water, while those wheat farmers down the other side of the Sappa have threatened bodily harm to anyone fixing to dampen their ripening crops with a heavy dew before they can reap it, standing proud in dry fields.”

Longarm rolled his eyes heavenward and tore after the town law, shouting, “Wait for me, you anxious cuss!”

Chapter 6

Longarm caught up with Dad Jergens a furlong up a narrow side street, fell in beside him, and mildly observed, “I seem to be missing a detail or more. First you tell me those turn-the-other-cheek Mennonites support their friendly neighborhood gunsmith, and now Olive Red-Dog has them threatening rainmakers with violence?”

Dad Jergens replied, “Oh, there you are. Thought I’d lost you for a minute there. I asked Horst Heger about selling guns to such a flock of doves when I got him to fix my Schofield. He said they ain’t as set in their ways about guns as them Pennsylvania Dutch, and even some of them hold with hunting for the pot or shooting a weasel in the chicken coop. Mennonites are agin’ marching as to war. Their faith allows for self-defense, within reason.”

Longarm demanded, “Including the assassination of ignorant water witches who think they’re being scientific?”

To which Dad Jergens simply replied, “Some of them Dutch-Rooshin sodbusters are sort of ignorant in their own right. Them Ruggles gals claim they have a U.S. patent on their noisy method, with magazine and newspaper clippings in a big old scrapbook to back their brag.”

Longarm snorted in disgust and said, “That patent, if it’s theirs to begin with, is on a method of setting off explosives carried aloft by a balloon without losing the balloon. There may or may not be something to setting off charges inside a brooding rain cloud. Detonating dynamite in a clear sunny sky, low enough to impress the folks on the ground at lower cost, is what the alienists who study the peculiar call ‘sympathetic magic.’ That’s where you treat snakebite by biting a snake, get your trees to bear more fruit by holding an orgy in the orchard, or curdle an enemy’s milk by pouring vinegar in some of your own, with his name written on the jar.”

Dad Jergens shrugged and said, “I heard beating the trunks of fruit trees works. What’s so sympathetic about setting off bombs in the sky?”

Longarm snorted in disgust and replied, “It sounds like thunder, and everyone but old Ben Franklin used to know how thunder brought on rain. It was wise old Ben, way back when we still had a king and queen, who proved scientifically that first it starts to rain, and then the rain falling through the clouds builds up this electric charge you need for thunder and lightning. Big chemical bangs up yonder are as likely to bring on rain as buying a gal a box of chocolates and eating it yourself is likely to make her fall in love with you!”

They could see the top of that orange balloon above the rooftops ahead now. Hauled down to ground level, it looked big as hell. Dad Jergens said, “I hope you’re right about it being a heap of horseshit. I can handle our own disgruntled Methodists, Baptists, and such. Them rainmaking gals offer a money-back guarantee, and I warned ‘em what I’d do if they tried skipping out with the money along a dusty road. But I ain’t sure each and every Mennonite would listen to me, or anybody, if the Ruggles sisters managed a good gully-washer just as they were fixing to haul their mighty McCormick reapers over firm fields rapidly turning to gumbo.”

Longarm whistled softly. “Lord have mercy, they’ve drilled in enough of that red Russian wheat to rate mechanical reaping?”

The old-timer said, “Turkish red. Some of our boys asked where they got such wondrous seed. They said they’d tried all sorts of winter wheat for their czars, and settled on this one strain the Turks to the south did well with. Some of our boys are of a mind to try it, crazy as it sounds to plow and plant in fall with a blizzard likely to blow in any minute. You’re sure those Ruggles gals ain’t likely to make it rain? The way I hear tell, that red winter wheat down Sappa Crossing way has made a bumper crop this year thanks to that early wet spring and all this dry summer sunshine.”

As if to argue that very point, the big balloon ahead shot skyward again on its braided line, a pasteboard box about right for a pair of new Justins dangling about thirty feet under the gas bag against the eastern sky that was now sort of lavender. As the rays of the low western sun caught the balloon broadside, it seemed to light up like a Japanese paper lantern. Fakes or not, those mysterious Ruggles sisters knew a thing or two about putting on a show.

Dad Jergens seemed to think so too. Striding faster, he moaned aloud, “Damn their sassy hides, they told me they only meant to set off that last blast!”

Picking up his own pace, Longarm said, “It ain’t fixing to rain no matter what they might do! There ain’t enough clouds for a beautiful sunset this evening, and we were talking about bank robberies, kidnappings, and a Mennonite gunsmith named Horst Heger, remember?”

Dad Jergens replied, “Heger ain’t one of them Dutch-Rooshins. His wife and a mess of in-laws are. He told me one time he hailed from Berlin Town, and studied on guns in that Prussian Army under Bismarck. Said them Prussian needle guns sure shot the shit outten the French in that war they had.”

Longarm scowled thoughtfully up at the rapidly rising balloon ahead. “Stranger flimflams have been pulled on this child. So could you tell me whether Horst Heger sports a dueling scar on his left jaw, or a beard that might be hiding it?”

Dad Jergens shook his head. “Wrong both times. Has one of them pointy waxed mustaches Bismarck’s boys go in for, but both cheeks are smooth shaven. All the time. He says he used to be an officer and he’s a bit of a dandy about it.”

Longarm didn’t answer aloud as he told himself an exPrussian officer recognizing a renegade Prussian officer made more sense than a wanted killer wiring in his current whereabouts. But if Heger was still looking like his old self, how come Wolf Ritter hadn’t recognized him? Or had a killer on the dodge been just as slick and kept such thoughts to himself for later?

The two lawmen broke out into the open, east of the last housing, to join a good-sized crowd for such a town as, up above, that orange balloon rose ever higher with the low western sun gilding it brightly against that clear darkening sky. A wishing star had just winked on over to the east. It was easy to guess what most of the corn planters for miles were wishing for.

As Longarm followed the older lawman’s elbowing progress through the crowd, they came to where a single-strand rope barrier held most of the locals at a respectful distance from the big red wagons and a modest-sized circus tent in the center of about a quarter acre of trampled dusty grass. Longarm could see at a glance how what seemed a combination of a Papist nun and a college don was working the reel brake of the big winch between the wagons to let that balloon rise ever higher, but not too fast for its safe return.

Another oddly dressed figure stood nearby with a cluster of six or eight townsmen dressed a mite more imposingly than some. As Dad Jergens strode over with Longarm in tow he called out, “I told you not to blow up no more charges with nightfall coming on, ladies! They’ll have heard that first one for miles in ever’ direction and do those Anabaptists ride, like they said they might, I don’t want ‘em riding after dark!”

A big portly cuss with mutton-chop whiskers got between Jergens and the rainmakers to thunder, “Leave ‘em be and let the National Grange worry about those sun-worshipping Ana baptists! Your mayor and board of aldermen are with the Grange on this. For if we don’t get some rain before the Fourth of July, you’ll hear the corn popping in the fields instead of fireworks!”

A less self-impressed older gent who likely had more to do with running the settlement called out, more gently but firmly, “We told the ladies to try some more higher up, Dad.”

Dad Jergens shrugged and just stood there, cussing under his breath. Up closer, Longarm saw the two female scientists didn’t look near as spooky. They both wore black sunbonnets and poplin dusters over ecru summer frocks of shantung, which was nubby wild silk a mite lighter than plain old tan. Despite the breezes as the shadows lengthened, they both wore their dusters wide open down the front, with those ecru bodices cut mighty low. So it seemed safe to say both gals were shapely just this side of pleasingly plump. The one controlling the balloon tether had light brown hair. The slightly older one sort of supervising was darker. A man would have a chore figuring which was the better looking. Longarm didn’t find either pretty enough to settle down with. On the other hand, he couldn’t see throwing either out of bed just for eating crackers between the sheets.

Dad Jergens introduced Longarm all around as a famous federal lawman. The Ruggles sisters answered to Rowena and Roxanne. Longarm didn’t care which was which. The older one must have read his mind, for as her sister paid out more line and everyone else went back to staring up at their fool balloon, she moved closer to ask if he wanted to examine their government patents or look through their scrapbook of clippings and testimonials.

Longarm smiled thinly down at her. “Selling gold bricks or magic beans to simple folks ain’t federal offenses, ma’am. Whether you’re in violation of Dan’l Ruggles’ government patents or not is between you all and him, in civil court. I can tell you what’s in your scrapbook without putting you to that much bother.”

The darker sister stared up uncertainly. “Have Rowena and me run into you before, Deputy Long? I feel sure we’d have remembered.”

Longarm chuckled wryly and said, “I think you’re pretty too. Last time you were an old gray professor, sending up clouds of sulfur smoke. Before that—you were this goofy-looking young jasper with a swamping kite all studded with tacks. I reckon the grandaddy of you all was this slick caveman with a drum.”

She gasped. “How dare you compare the science of pluviculture with superstitious rainmaking rites! I can show you clipping after clipping attesting to our success in other parts, and written by impartial local reporters who never thought we’d do it either!”

Longarm glanced thoughtfully up at the now-tiny golden dot in a purple sky as he quietly replied, “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars it ain’t going to rain tonight.”

To which she replied with an angry face, “My sister and I are not gamblers! We’re scientific pluviculturists and we don’t ask anyone to risk a dime on our experiments. Feel free to ask anyone in this crowd if they’ve been asked to pay in advance for the rain they so desperately need!”

Longarm didn’t. He said, “I told you I’ve met you before, ma’am. You’ve gotten the Grane, the G.A.R., or mayhaps the First Methodists to ask everyone to chip in, at no risk to themselves if the conditions don’t work out right. If you ladies fail to make it rain, everyone gets their money back and you move on friendly with no posse dogging your trail. On the rare occasions it does rain, after you’ve expended a few dollars’ worth of dynamite, you collect all that money held in escrow for you and … What’s the going rate for a good crop-saving rain these days? Four figures? Five? That gent with the sulfur smoke walked away with close to twenty grand one lucky day.”

He thought she was going to spit at him. She looked as if she wanted to. Then she smiled sweetly up at him and said she had no idea on earth what he was talking about.

He didn’t explain further. She knew. That old boy in that cave with that drum had known better than to ask for a side of mastodon in advance when he offered to stay home and pray for good hunting. Just as he’d known that when and if the others had good hunting, they’d be proud to give him a generous share of meat and more credit than he might deserve.

Longarm stayed put as the one called Roxanne flounced over to her sister and murmured something. Longarm figured she was saying that the balloon was high enough. Then, as expected, the younger one set the winch’s spool and brought out a blaster’s generator box.

It was standard gear you could pick up anywhere they sold dynamite and other blasting supplies. The compact wooden box was lined with permanent bar magnets. There was another one stuck to the moveable plunger. When you shoved the plunger down to move one magnet past a mess of others fast, you got a sudden jolt of twelve-volt current, which was enough to make a swell electric spark most anywhere you wanted to string the attached wires.

Roxanne called out with a voice of authority, “Attention, everyone, fire in the sky!”

Then, sure enough, her sister shoved down hard and the dynamite blew up, a quarter mile above their upturned faces. It made a brighter flash against the darkening sky this time, but the noise was much less impressive and, as far as Longarm could tell, without any other result. So he wasn’t surprised when Roxanne allowed they’d try some more later.

He gazed about for Dad Jergens as the crowd began to break up. He wasn’t interested in any of this rainmaking nonsense. He wanted the local lawman to explain about more serious stuff. But it seemed tough to keep the old scatterbrain on one topic long enough to matter.

“Screw ‘em all but six!” Longarm muttered to nobody in particular as he drifted back towards town with the others. He figured it might make more sense if he just settled up at that corral, gathered his personal stuff, and hired a room somewhere before he tried some saloon gossip. It surely sounded like less trouble, and he doubted the town law here in Cedar Bend would know any more about events in Sappa Crossing than your average nosy local in any case.

By the time he’d made it to the stable next to the corral it was getting darker. Prairie sunsets could be like that when there were no clouds up yonder. He saw Osage Olive had an oil lamp going inside already as he approached the open doorway. She’d doubtless been looking outside to take in the sundown hustle and bustle. For she came to the doorway to greet him. She looked a lot less mannish in the red smock and sash she’d changed to. Those bib overalls had been hiding a shapely pair of ankles above her beaded moccasins.

He hadn’t noticed either his hired bay or the paint out in the open corral next-door. When he said so the gal replied, “I put ‘em inside with fodder and water after a rubdown. Your saddles and harness are in the tack room. Have you eaten yet?”

He shook his head and replied, “I was just about to ask if you knew a good place for a stranger to get some hash around here.”

She said, “I can’t offer you any hash. But if you’d like to try some roast beef with grits and gravy you’ve come to the right place. I was just about to have some when they set off all that dynamite out yonder and a bunch of old boys came by to take their ponies on home to their own suppers.”

Longarm started to say he didn’t want to put her to any trouble. Then he wondered why anyone would want to say a dumb thing like that. Next to a barber, hardly anybody heard more small-town gossip than a hostler helping riders from all about, drunk or sober, get off and on their ponies. So he said he’d be proud to sup with her, as long as he got to pay extra for it.

She said they’d work something out, and led the way back through a tack room, some storage bins, and a narrow hallway into a more brightly lit and sweeter-smelling kitchen. As she seated him at a pine table, she nodded at a curtained doorway across from the small cast-iron range and said that it led to her sleeping quarters.

He hadn’t asked. So he wondered why she’d felt the call to tell a male supper guest.

He didn’t ask how come she’d cooked enough for two as she dished out generous helpings. She wasn’t chubby by white standards. She was downright skinny by those of her own nation. Like most Horse Indians, Osage men prided themselves on providing all the solid grub a wife or more could possibly eat. So a weya over twenty-five or so was often a well-fed butterball.

It would have been rude to ask the lady how old she was, or what she did to stay in such fine shape. So he never did. But as they ate and jawed across the table from one another, he found himself learning a tad more about Olive Red-Dog.

She said she’d taken her Indian name back after some Wasichu kin of a late husband had laughed at the notion of any Widow Swenson being so brunette. The Red-Dog family of the Osage Nation were as respected across the Kansas prairie as any tow-headed immigrants, as she put it.

When Longarm soberly assured her he’d heard tell of the good fights the Osage had fought for the Union against Confederates, Wasichu or Cherokee, she seemed less defensive, and allowed her poor Gonar had been good to her and taught her a lot before he’d come down with a winter ague and died on her a good two years back. She said he’d had the idea to open a livery along the trail between McCook and Dodge. She said she’d been the one the township council approached to add on a municipal corral as well. They gave her a property tax break in return for her boarding stock that belonged to the town law, the aldermen, and all.

He didn’t care. As he let her pour him a second cup of coffee, made Wasichu style instead of with white flour added, he tried to switch the conversation to what Dad Jergens had said about trouble in nearby parts.

Olive didn’t know anything about Horst Heger or, naturally, Wolf Ritter. But she could have written a textbook on northwest Kansas. To begin with she’d been born on this same rolling prairie, though a good three hundred miles to the southeast, before the town of Coffeyville had been there and when the buffalo still roamed. So despite being on the softer side of forty, the good old gal had watched Kansas turn white, through good times and bad. She’d been a toddler barely old enough to understand what her elders were talking about when old John Brown had massacred those slaveocrats on the banks of the Pottawatamie. Her nation hadn’t thought much of the “Peculiar Institution” either.

White folks moving west had met with the friendly buffalo-hunting, tipi-dwelling Osage. So they’d never gotten as famous as their Sioux-Hokan-speaking Lakota or Santee cousins.

Like the Absaroka, Caddo, Ojibway-Crow, Pawnee, and such, the Osage had been sensible enough to change with the times and avoid such destructive habits as shooting up the Seventh Cav, though they’d shown themselves to be ferocious enough against Confederate or Cherokee columns during the war. So Olive, as she had been baptized as a Christian Osage maiden, had married up with the late Gonar Swenson and moved out this way with him while it was still pure cattle country, to watch it fill out a mite as homesteaders of various persuasions edged ever further into dried short-grass prairie.

She told Longarm a bit more about that argument about the weather old Dad Jergens was worried about. She thought it was dumb. Everyone knew it took six medicine men around one big drum, beating it as they chanted in unison, to make it rain.

Like most Horse Indians, as well as the stock raisers who still grazed the higher and drier country all around, Olive was content to let it rain or shine within reason. A rainy day could be a bother. On the other hand, it freshened the short grass and left prairie pools for the stock, saving them longer walks to their regular watering places. You got fatter meat off buffalo, or cows, who hadn’t worked too hard at growing up.

Longarm already knew why nesters who plowed and planted late in an uncertain greenup wanted more summer rain than you usually got out in short-grass country. He suspected it made more sense to drill in some of that winter wheat in autumn and roll with the punches. But nobody had asked him for agricultural advice, and Dad Jergens had started to tell him about bank robberies and kidnappings before he’d gotten so distracted.

Olive said Dad did that a lot, and added, “They didn’t exactly rob the Granger’s Trust over in the county seat. They crept in after-hours to crack the safe. The sheriff told the newspaper reporters the crooks had likely been professionals, who’d used nitrate fertilizer.”

Longarm gently murmured, “I think you mean nitroglycerine. It’s a lot like lamp oil, only it blows up like dynamite cause dynamite is only a mixture of nitroglycerine and clay. Safecrackers pour the sort of dangerous juice along the door cracks of a safe, take a deep breath, and smack the whole shebang with a sledgehammer.”

The Osage gal poured more coffee for them both as she said, “I see why they call it cracking a safe. How come anyone would want to mix such dangerous juice with clay, Custis?”

Longarm explained, “To make it less dangerous. Liquid nitro can go off in your hands if you stare at it too hard. So nobody had near as much use for it before that Swedish chemist, Nobel, got to fooling with it. He tried mixing it with gunpowder and came close to killing his fool self.”

Longarm sipped some of her strong black coffee as he considered a probably dumb notion, dropped it, and continued. “He finally settled on clay, wood flour, or whatever to make paper-wrapped sticks of diluted nitroglycerine that wouldn’t swish and blow up when you handled ‘em. By the way, what old country did you say your late husband hailed from?”

Olive stared back at him in confusion as she thought then told him, “Gonar was born in a place called Iceland before his elders brought him to York State as a baby. What’s that have to do with high explosives?”

Longarm said, “Probably nothing. What might Dad Jergens have meant when he mentioned kidnappings?”

Olive frowned thoughtfully—Longarm found thoughtful gals sort of pretty—and told him, “We don’t talk as much to those Mennonite nesters a fair ride to the south. But I have heard gossip about a wife either running off on her husband or worse. They seemed to be getting along and nobody had noticed her flirting with another man.”

He didn’t press the Cedar Bend gal for details most anyone in Sappa Crossing would know better. He put down his empty cup and said, “You sure brew fine coffee, Miss Olive. But now we’d best settle on what I owe you so’s I can be on my way. For it’s dark out now, and I still don’t know where I mean to spend the night my ownself.”

She glanced over at the one oil lamp in the kitchen, as if deciding whether to turn the wick brighter or dimmer, as she quietly asked him, “Why don’t you stay here? Are you too proud, Wasichu Wastey?”

He blinked in surprise and replied, “Your folks never hung such a friendly name on me for acting snooty. I reckon it would make sense for me to unroll my bedding up in your hayloft and get an early start in the morning, if that’s what you had in mind, ma’am.”

Olive Red-Dog stared pointedly at the curtained doorway leading to her sleeping quarters as she quietly said that hadn’t been exactly what she’d had in mind.

So Longarm got to his feet and as the far smaller Indian gal rose expectantly, he just swept her off her moccasined feet and headed out of the kitchen with her as she clung to him and murmured what sounded like “Oh hinh, iyopte!” which might have meant she was anxious to get going. He’d been wanting to since he’d first seen her ankles in the doorway a hundred hard-up years ago.

But even as he groped their way to her iron bedstead in the dim light of her small clean-smelling sleeping quarters, Longarm felt he owed it to the gal to say, “You do understand I’ll be moving on at sunrise, don’t you, pretty lady?”

She replied softly, “I’d never have invited you in here for the night if I thought you might be here long enough to need a haircut. I hate the way you men brag in barbershops, as if you had anything to say about this sort of thing!”

So he laughed like hell and lowered her to the bedding. But then, as he flopped down beside her and reached for a friendly feel, the apparently rough and ready old gal sobbed, “No! Kiss me first. Treat me like a Wasichu girl who means something to you, before you get up and ride on, you brute.”

He said he’d get up right then and there if she thought he was being brutal to her.

But she pulled him down against her and felt friendly as hell as she confided she liked it sort of brutal once she warmed up.

Chapter 7

It felt like he was waking up in a thunderstorm. But as Longarm gathered his wits together, he saw that that frisky Osage gal had started up again on top, and the way she was bouncing the bed with her brown shapely torso accounted for the way the dawn light through the one little window behind her flickered. The bedsprings creaking under them and the way she kept licking his face like a pup, Indian style, accounted for the impression of rain. He was thrusting his now fully aroused organ-grinder up to meet her downward bouncings when the air outside was rent by another definite roll of thunder.

He didn’t care. He rolled her on her back and hooked a bare elbow under each of her tawny knees to spread her wider and enjoy her deeper as she panted and gasped, “Heya oh toe kaw hey! I am starting to come again!”

That made two of them, and since she’d assured him more than once by then that she admired a man who could let himself go crazy in her, Longarm enjoyed a long thoroughly selfish climax in her quivering wet innards. As she milked the last drops from him with her astoundingly strong vaginal muscles and crooned, “Pee-la me-yeah!” he kissed her collar bone and replied, “Well, thanks your ownself, you hot-as-hell thing. Is it really raining outside this morning?”

Olive said, “It’s dry as a bone. Those Wasichu witko are setting off sky bombs again. But don’t leave yet. I know I promised, before we went to sleep, I wouldn’t cry when this time came. But now that it has, I want you to make me come again before you go.”

He said he was running low on ammunition, but figured he could fire another salvo dog-style. So she coyly rolled on her hands and knees to let him stand behind her with his bare feet on the braided rug as he admired a broad view of her he’d never had before. He could tell she rode astride a lot. Nothing else pounded a gal’s rump to be so firm and sort of mature-looking below such a slender waistline. As she winked her rectal muscles up at him, she giggled and confessed she’d always envied a mare being served by a stud up until now. He’d wondered how she’d learned to arch her spine and pucker like that.

She allowed he’d been taking lessons from horny critters as well by the time they’d managed a protracted mutual orgasm in such an unromantic but practical position.

Then she served him breakfast in bed to show she wasn’t sore when he allowed he had no hard feelings for her. It sure beat all how a widow woman who made love so rough and ready could scramble eggs so delicately. He sensed her ulterior motives in treating him to such a swell breakfast when she got back in bed as he was enjoying his second cup of coffee, knelt between his bare ankles and the foot of the bed, and went down on him with her lucious wet lips.

So it turned out he might be able to lay her one more time, as she entreated, after all. But he sure felt stiff, and had a time walking right when they finally got around to saddling up those ponies so a lawman could carry out his damned duties with the sun now scandalously high.

He didn’t look back as he rode out. Olive had asked him not to. So there was no saying whether she was waving at him, just standing there, or playing with herself, as she’d threatened she might.

That orange balloon was more like a black dot against the sunrise now, as it slowly rose with yet another charge into what sure seemed a cloudless sky that would have done the Mojave or Sonora deserts proud. As he rode south past the last yard fences, he decided the two sisters had to be new at flim-flammery.

The flint cornstalks to either side as he rode between fenced-in forties were still green, but wilted. He spied a sunflower windmill spinning further up the wagon trace. Curious in spite of Billy Vail’s orders, he swung the paint he was riding that morning off to where he could peer over a fence into chocolate-colored streaks between the dustier corn rows. They had the crops under groundwater irrigation this close to the creek bed a few furlongs back. But that one windmill, in such cranky winds as they were getting in early high summer, was barely keeping that hardy flint corn alive. Nobody had ever gotten rich on skinny stock or half-parched cash crops. Barley or rye still had half a chance. But that corn needed rain and a heap of it pronto. A light sprinkle that’d leave the ground firm enough for mule-drawn reapers and steam-powered threshers just wasn’t going to revive the local corn crop, not if a halfways irrigated field already looked so desperate!

The higher country between mapped water courses was cut up by a confusion of shallower, drier, nameless draws and washes, as a nation calling itself Tsitsissah had taught strangers who called it Cheyenne in a serious of nameless but bitter little skirmishes in these same parts a few short summers back. So Longarm was down in a draw, out of sight of town and vice versa, when the Ruggles sisters set off another blast high in a cloudless sky.

“Greenhorns,” he repeated, reining in to light a morning smoke as he considered other quacks he’d met up with in his travels. Even Hopi rain chanters knew enough to wait until rain seemed possible before they offered to try. West of longitude 100’ you got enough overcast days, or even weeks, with nothing falling from those damned stubborn clouds. But at least rain was possible when you saw some sky water up yonder. There was nothing you could do in or about a clear, dry sunny sky but wait for some damned clouds. He wondered idly if those self-styled pluviculturists really believed in their patented method of making noise.

There was no telegraph office in either Cedar Bend or Sappa Crossing. He’d asked. The Grange had been drumming for a rail spur or at least more modern communications north of the Smokey Hill River without much luck so far. But wait, if Horst Heger had sent that wire from the county seat twenty miles east of Sappa Crossing …

“Forget it!” Longarm warned himself aloud. Nobody’d asked him to investigate buxom rainmakers who might or might not be kin to the real Dan’l Ruggles and might or might not believe in what they were up to with all that noise in a cloudless sky. He’d meant it when he’d told that one sister he didn’t have jurisdiction over pesky threats to the local economy. It was a good thing too. For how would it look if a federal deputy showed up every time a Gypsy dealt out tarot cards or Miss Margaret Fox held another spirit-trapping seance by cracking a double-jointed toe under the table? Folk were supposed to know better than to pay good money for harmless pranks. Lawmen had enough to keep them busy chasing the dangerous crooks.

Somewhere out ahead hid a really dangerous furriner, trained to kill by one of the best military machines in the business of killing folks. It didn’t matter whether Ritter still had that monstrous LeMat or not. The rascal’s bloodstained records allowed he could kill with any sort of gun, a cavalry saber, a bowie knife, or in a pinch, his bare hands.

So Longarm rode on, and when those loco sisters set off yet another sky bomb less than an hour later, he didn’t even glance behind him. Old Dad Jergens had said they’d likely hear those blasts clean across the prairie in Sappa Crossing. It was their misfortune and none of his own, as long as nobody got in his damned way.

Chapter 8

The ride would have been no more than a dozen miles on a crow But following a wagon trace across constantly rolling prarie made for a longer row to hoe. So when they topped a rise and Longarm spotted a new-looking windmill, spinning merrily off to the west with blades winking back at the morning sun, he knew somebody had a cattle spread or homestead up here on the higher range. When he spotted a black Cherokee cow with a calf to match, he had a better grasp on that distant pumping machine. Cherokee beef was bred from Texas longhorn and chunky black beef cows from back East, adding up to a critter that could manage to survive on marginal range without butchering out so dry and stringy. The original longhorn the Western beef industry was based on had never been bred for meat on the table. The North African Moors who’d introduced the hardy breed to Spain ate lamb or mutton when they could get any, while everyone knew Spaniards and Mexicans cottoned to pigs and chickens or even goats for eating. So the longhorns down Mexico way had been intended for hides and tallow. Spanish-speaking folks used leather a lot more than most, while their night-owl habits in a sunny climate called for a whole lot of tallow candles.

As he spied more bred-up beef in the draw beyond, Longarm knew why their owner was going to that much trouble. During the long depression of the early ‘70s the folks back East had been as glad to eat any sort of beef as the poor folks of Spain who got the leavings of the bullring. But now that things had picked up under President Hayes and good old Lemonade Lucy, housewives who’d been lucky to serve corned beef and cabbage once a week were demanding filet mignon, or marbled steaks leastways, and turning up their noses at range beef.

He came upon more black longhorns wallowing hock-deep in what a greenhorn might take for wild rye. But Longarm had seen Mex stockmen play that same slick trick. They’d learned it from some of those old-time Moors before they’d chased them back to North Africa.

He’d read somewhere that the desert goatherds of that big Sahara still sowed quick-sprouting seed in those draws they called something like waddies in their own lingo. Most of the time nothing happened, or at best the birds got a free meal out of you. But every now and then your underfilled and labor-free seed set root, and the next time you came by with your stock it was their turn to feast. Longarm was still working on why anyone ought to cast bread on water. But risking a sack of oats or rye you could sow without getting down from your saddle made good sense. He made it close to two dozen critters out there in all that rye getting fatter by the minute.

A distant sky rumble seemed to give the grazing cows pause. More than one gazed his way as if he’d done it. He chuckled and quietly said, “Don’t look at me, ladies. I think it’s silly too.”

He topped another rise to gaze at a bigger and neater version of the trail town and surrounding farms he’d just left. Fields of wind-shimmered golden grain stretched clean to the skyline behind the bigger whitewashed structures of what had to be the Mennonite community of Sappa Crossing. But the way ahead seemed to be a matter of some dispute.

The critter had to be a Cherokee steer. No stockman kept more than one or two bulls if he wanted his cows to get any peace and quiet to fatten on. But sometimes the cutting went a mite awry as the spring roundup crew was turning bull calves to steers, and they called such results queer-steers. Impotent geldings, with enough meat left in their loins to behave like horny bulls who couldn’t get it up.

Longarm could sympathize with such a critter, even when he hadn’t just been used and abused by a horny Osage widow. But he didn’t think much of the way the queer-steer was pawing up dust as it held its horns low and its tail high. So he calmly hauled his Winchester from its saddle boot and levered a round in the chamber as he softly suggested, “Don’t you do it, Cherokee. I’d play tag with you if I had only one mount to worry about. No way I’m fixing to fool around with two to manage as you charge. So don’t charge.”

He’d naturally reined in to show he wasn’t disputing the right of way just yet. But the queer-steer had its tail up stiff as a poker now, and as it gathered all four hooves together, cocked its head to aim, and lowered it again to get going, Longarm muttered, “Aw, shit,” and fired. It was much easier to stop half a ton of madness on the hoof before it could really get moving.

He knew he’d done right when the critter exploded into an all-out rip-snorting charge despite two hundred grains of .44-40 aimed where all the other members of its species were supposed to have their hearts.

As his pony spooked under him, Longarm fired again and gasped, “I reckon you’re right, paint. Anywhere you say!”

So he let go of the lead line, and the two hired ponies took full advantage of his invitation to get the hell off the beaten path as that shot-up queer-steer charged down it like a railroad locomotive on hooves!

It collapsed a furlong on in a cloud of dust, of course. By the time Longarm had chased down the bay and retrieved the lead line, the critter who’d been out to gore the three of them had snorted its last and just lay there, not quite useless yet, damn its valuable hide.

He read the dead critter’s brand as he cussed it, and saw it went with those friendlier black Cherokee they’d just passed. Then he said, “Well, Lazy B, I sure hope the same folks who owned you own that windmill off to the west. For this day ain’t getting any shorter and they never sent me all this way to discuss the price of beef!”

As he headed for those winking blades, he knew he had to track down the queer-steer’s lawful owner and settle up. For shooting stock and leaving it to rot was as bad as stealing it, and there was nothing much lower than a cow thief.

Somebody from that more distant spread must have thought so too. For a trio of riders was coming to meet him as he bee-lined toward that one visible sign of their outfit. They reined in on a rise in a thoughtful manner, likely discussing his unexpectedly honest approach. He’d naturally put his Winchester back in its boot by this time.

As he neared them he saw the one in the middle was a gal, wearing a big white Stetson but seated sidesaddle on her white pony. The two men with her looked more like regular hands. One rode a buckskin and the other a cordovan with white stockings and blaze. All three of them were holding Winchesters across their saddles.

As he got within easy shouting distance, Longarm called out, “I’d be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long and I just now shot a queer-steer branded Lazy B. Might it have been the property of anyone you all might know?”

The gal, somewhat softer-looking up close, called back in a hard enough tone, “That would have been Old Reb. We’ve been trying to catch him through three roundups now. We know what he was and why you done it. But you’d still best come with us and see what my athair has to say about all this.”

He said he had to get on to Sappa Crossing. She said it would still be there after he’d had some coffee and cake—or a running gunfight, should he make that choice. So he allowed coffee and cake sounded swell.

He doubted she’d really meant it as mean as it had sounded. The imperious snip was old enough to know you didn’t gun a federal lawman over a cow. But she was young enough, and pretty enough, to act a tad spoiled. The two hands riding with her shot sidelong glances at her, as if they were trained poodles anxious to please a stern mistress. As they all crested another wave in the sea of grass to spy rooftops and twin silos ahead, he tried once again to ask her what she figured her dead steer had been worth. She told him her athair would likely reward him for getting Old Reb before he killed someone on the wagon trace and got them sued. Then she repeated it was up to her athair and that Himself wouldn’t like it if a stranger snubbed their genuine Arbuckle Brand coffee and the finest pastry west of Saint Lou. She said her athair had taught their Chinese cook to bake cakes like Granny used to make, at the peril of his heathen life.

Longarm asked how much of range all about they owned fee simple.

The stockman’s daughter shrugged and said, “We graze what our cows can eat. I think Athair filed a government homestead claim on the homespread you see up ahead. After that we just let our thousand head or so graze the open range the buffalo and Mister Lo left fallow for us.”

He asked about the farming homesteaders north or south. One of her hands snorted, “That’ll be the day some clodhopper busts one acre of Lazy B sod!”

Then he looked away and swallowed hard as the gal in the white hat shot him a look Longarm couldn’t read. So he waited and, sure enough, the gal said innocently, “We only range this strip betwixt those corn and wheat growers. Say four miles wide by a dozen miles long, or twice the size of that island they’ve built New York City on top of. Even farm folks can see how dumb it would be to drill in crops this high and dry. So we never have any trouble with anyone.” One of her hands suddenly found something in the opposite direction worth a chuckle. So she demurely added, “No trouble worth mention, at any rate. When strangers start driving claim stakes within two miles, then Himself usually invites ‘em to supper and, over after-dinner malt liquor, explains the land claims allowed under Brehonic Law.”

Longarm had to think hard, and it was a good thing he took books on most everything home from the Denver Public Library, because up until then he’d never had much occasion to even say Brehonic Law.

When he did, he said, “No offense, ma’am, but if you’d be citing the ancient Celtic code of Ireland, Scotland, or Wales, American jurisprudence is based on Anglo-Norman Common Law.”

She said, “Everybody knows about that mistake. That’s why the laws made in Washington make so much trouble out our way. Athair says that in the good old days of Brian Boru and that warrior queen of the Picts, Banrigh Sgatha, there was no need to write down deeds or land titles. Land belonged to Himself who first drew water and burned wood on the spread.”

He asked if her daddy might be Scotch or Irish.

She said, “Neither. I’d be Iona MacSorley and my people hail from the Hebrides, where the Donald ruled as a king in his own right until the time of Columbus, when such things mattered less. My sheanairean were forced to leave their misty isles many years ago. But none of us have forsaken the old ways.”

He believed her. He’d met up with her kind before, and knew she’d been taught to speak English without the usual brogue because, where her folks hailed from, English was a whole new lingo that had to be learned entirely. He wasn’t up to arguing squatter’s rights under either Celtic or Anglo-Norman rules with a spoiled beauty. He knew a whole lot of feuding and fussing had resulted in the outlying parts of the British Isles as men of good faith on either side had tried to sort it out fairly. Different notions of right and wrong caused enough trouble this far west.

He couldn’t resist asking innocently whether her dear old daddy had noticed any Indians drawing water or lighting dried buffalo chips a few short seasons back.

She had no sense of humor, or no conscience about such matters. She replied without hesitation, “Clan lands are claimed by first use and held by right of the sword. You can look it up.”

He smiled thinly and quietly replied, “I don’t read Gaelic, but don’t you mean held up by the gun, Miss Iona?”

She shrugged and asked if anyone had pressed federal charges in regard to gunplay or the threat of the same.

He allowed her that point, and concentrated on controlling his two ponies as a yellow cur dog met them in the dooryard to snarl and snap as if he meant it. Iona MacSorley yelled at the mutt but it paid her no mind, driven to distraction by the totally strange stock invading its territory. So the sweet-faced gal simply swung her Winchester and shot it, just like that, without even sighting along the barrel.

It took Longarm longer to get his spooked mount back down from the sky. Once he had, she sweetly apologized for not warning him. She added he should have expected it, seeing the way that cu cuma had defied a kind mistress.

As they rode wide of the dead dog bleeding in the dust, the front door of the main house they were approaching popped open and a gnomish figure with a white beard and fright wig popped out on the veranda to say something mighty scary in Hebredian Gaelic.

Iona replied in her imperious English, “Bleidir was about to bite into the boghan of this guest’s mount, Athair. He’s come to tell you he shot that tarbh tosgach the boys called Reb.”

The gnome laughed and grinned up at Longarm to say, “Ceudfailte agus toirlinn! That poorly cut bull was a devil, and have you eaten your fill this day?”

Longarm allowed he’d barely recovered from breakfast, leaving out the naughty parts, as he dismounted and let their hands take charge of his horseflesh. As he followed the gnome and his daughter inside he saw she was tiny and darker, now that she was on her feet with her hat hanging down her spine on its chin-cord. A redheaded Scotch gal he’d met a spell back had explained how nobody knew where those pockets of small dark elfin folks had come from before recorded history. She’d warned him never to ask any such folks if they were kin to that dark mysterious half-sister of King Arthur, Miss Morgana the Fairy.

The two little people sat him down before a baronial ‘dobe fireplace with a big round leather shield and some handsome cutlery over the timber mantel. Then Iona went to fetch some refreshments, and her father made him repeat his adventure with their queer-steer. Longarm couldn’t resist asking why they hadn’t shot old Reb themselves.

The older man’s English sounded plain enough. He had more music to his voice than his more Americanized daughter, but neither sounded at all like those vaudeville Scots who said things like, “Tis a bragh bricht moonlit nicht tonicht!” and insisted that was Scotch-English.

None of the old-timers he’d met in these parts, save for good old Opal Red-Dog, seemed inclined to make much sense. They all acted as if they had something, or somebody, more important on their minds. Longarm wasn’t of a mind to discuss the price of beef with the owner of the rogue he’d shot. So he asked if it was all right to smoke, and old MacSorley said he’d be proud to have one. So in the end the shooting of that queer-steer ran Longarm two and a half cents as they both lit up his brand.

They’d barely done so when there came a distant rumble, as of thunder, in the clear morning sky.

Old MacSorley said, “Och, mo mala, I wish they wouldn’t do that. It upsets my crodh and if each loses no more than a pound as it runs about, such losses add up!”

Longarm said he didn’t think much of dynamiting clear skies in the hopes of rain either. When he got no argument about that, he casually asked how MacSorley and his fellow beef growers felt about a wetter summer than usual, aside from the noise.

The older stockman shrugged and said, “Is coma learn, and I doubt the other stockmen care that much either, as long as the trails are dry and the crossings low by the fall roundup. We’re on ground too high to worry about flooding, and a wet or dry summer evens out for our crodh. Why do you ask?”

Longarm said, “They pay me to ask nosey questions, sir. I agree with you on that rainmaking operation over to Cedar Bend. But I was told some old boys fixing to harvest their winter wheat any minute have made threats against those Ruggles gals.”

The crusty old Hebredian snorted, “Och, that’ll be the day when an Anabaptist sgagair gathers the comas to raise his hand against a full-grown woman!”

Iona, coming back into the room with a loaded tray, trilled out, “He means they’re gutless sissies, Custis. Which girls do you want beat up, those silly sisters or the runaway wife who’s driven our only good gunsmith to distraction?”

As she put the tray of cake and coffee down on a nearby rosewood table, Longarm blinked uncertainly and decided to risk it. “Might we be talking about a Sappa Crossing gunsmith named Heger, Miss Iona?”

She swung her small shapely derriere around to perch it on a low leather hassock as she calmly replied, “Horst Heger is the only gunsmith in Sappa Crossing and the only good gunsmith this side of the county seat. Do you take canned cow and sugar, Custis?”

He said he preferred his coffee black, and as she served them she elaborated. “I should say he was the best gunsmith in these parts. I don’t know when I’ll ever get back a fowling piece I left with him a good two weeks ago. I’m not the only one who’s noticed how distracted he’s been acting since his child bride ran off on him with some saddle tramp a month or more ago.”

Longarm silently sipped some black coffee. She’d been truthful as to the brand. It was almost impossible to brew a bad cup of Arbuckle, which was why it was so popular in cow camps. But it tasted even better poured by a dainty hand from a coffeepot. He had some of their fine marble cake as well before he decided the risk of asking these outsiders outweighed asking Horst Heger’s High Dutch neighbors, or the distraught gunsmith himself. So he asked Iona MacSorley what else they’d heard about the small-town scandal out here a half-hour from town.

She said she’d never had much truck with Heger’s missing wife, save to notice she seemed shy and sort of pretty in a dishwater-blond way. The Scotch-American gal explained, “She didn’t speak much English. Or at least she never had anything to say to me in any lingo. Since my only truck with those Mennonites is purely business, I can’t give you any exact dates. I never asked my gunsmith where his fool wife might be when I didn’t see her peeking through the door in the back at us. I was over to the ladies’ notions shop, picking up sewing supplies, when I overheard an English-speaking nester woman complaining about her man being low on birdshot shells because that fool of a Dutchman had forgotten to send for them.”

Iona cut another slice of cake for Longarm, without waiting for him to finish the first, as she went on. “I spoke up about the fowling piece he never seemed to get around to fixing, and that was when the Mennonite shopkeeping lady told us we had to be patient with the poor man because his woman had strayed. That’s what religious folks call a wife running off with another man, straying.”

It was her gnomish father who quietly asked why a law man from out Denver way gave toad squat, or something that sounded as bad in the Gaelic, about the domestic tranquility of a local gunsmith.

Longarm decided half truth might be the best policy, and tried to sound as bemused as he washed down some cake to gather his thoughts, then told them both, “I’m following up a report on a wanted man who may have passed this way with an unusual side arm. So my boss suggested I have a word with any gunsmiths such a gunslick might have done business with.”

It didn’t work. Iona had already shown herself more interested in guns than most gals. When she asked what was so unusual about the gun of that wanted man, Longarm thought some more, decided a lie might be riskier than partly revealed truth, and said, “A lethal cap-and-ball antique called a LeMat, Miss Iona. It was invented in France, but heaps of Confederate gunsmiths copied it during the war because it was right popular with their cavalry raiders.”

She nodded and said, “Nine .40-caliber rounds in the wheel and a .66-caliber shotgun barrel thrown in for added conviction.”

Longarm smiled across the table at her. “You’ve seen such a horse pistol, Miss Iona?”

She replied, “In Heger’s window. On sale. I asked about it and you were right, picking up such ammunition would be a chore. The one Heger has for sale is converted to take brass .40-25 rounds now. I never asked about that shotgun backup. I lost interest as soon as they said I had to send so far for the special pistol rounds.”

Longarm was grateful for the chaw of marble cake in his mouth. For by the time he’d rinsed it down he saw there was no call to go into how a small-town gunsmith in remote parts had come by such an unusual gun. Horst Heger would know better than anyone, and it might be just as well if nobody else got to gossiping about it.

He made more small talk about the rising beef prices that year, quietly satisfied himself the Lazy B riders weren’t likely to bother either their wheat-growing or corn-growing neighbors in the immediate future, and allowed he’d love to stay but he had to get it on down the road.

Iona MacSorley announced she was riding into town with him. One got the impression she never asked anyone’s permission to do anything. Her gnomish father seemed to think it was a grand notion. Longarm had no right to forbid a grown woman the use of a public right-of-way to most anywhere she might want to follow it. So in no time at all she’d turned the coffee tray and crumbs over to the household help, and the two of them were cutting across the short grass at an angle because the gal said it would be shorter and she didn’t want to watch anyone skinning out Old Reb in any case. He’d already noticed, mounting up in the dooryard, how that dead dog had sort of evaporated into thin air. You had to sort of keep your eye on things if you expected them to be there the next time you looked.

Chapter 9

The settlement of Sappa Crossing was still about where he’d been expecting it, off to their southeast as they rode over the last of the Lazy B rises. As they angled down the long slope to the nearly dry creek bed, Longarm saw nobody had planted wheat on that sunnier slope facing into the hotter summer winds from the south. But the ever westward trend of the sodbuster was only getting started. So he asked the cow gal riding to his right what her daddy, or athair, meant to do when newcomers filed on his side of Sappa Creek, as was inevitable as death and taxes.

The stockman’s spoiled child seemed sincerely puzzled by such a question. She said, “They can’t. We graze all the open range between the Sappa and the south divide of the Cedar.”

Longarm nodded but said, “On public land, save for the few acres you hold lawful title to. Right now the land office would rather see longhorns than buffalo and buffalo-eating Indians out this way. But the Homestead Act of ‘62 was meant to make the West even more taxpaying. So we’re only talking a question of time.”

She shook her head stubbornly and insisted, “We can’t afford to let anyone crowd us closer. Athair was very understanding about those corn and barley growers to the north, and as you see, those Anabaptists down yonder know better than to plant winter wheat where you might get a warm sunny day in January. Nobody but a grasshopper-loving fool would claim any more of our natural duthas. Anyone can see it’s marginal short-grass range above the high-water mark!”

To which Longarm could only morosely reply, “If fools were not allowed to file homestead claims, you wouldn’t see half as many new wire and windmills out this way. There’s already been ugliness in other parts where folks following different traditions move on to recently vacated Indian lands. My job would be easier if everyone headed out this way from all over creation agreed the laws of These United States were the only ones that counted.”

She repeated, in a more American way, what her father had taught her about water, fire, swords, and such. It seemed tough to argue a lick of sense into anyone who considered Arapaho-Cheyenne home range a Hebredian duthas, to be held against all comers by some sort of half-ass highland clan. Longarm had read enough history books from that library to know how such old boys had made out against Redcoats and cannon under that prissy Prince Charlie just before the way more important French and Indian War on this side of the main ocean. But while he could have told her about all that, he knew she didn’t want to be told, so he didn’t tell her.

As they were fording the shallow braided creek to the west of the town—you could really cross the Sappa most anywhere—Longarm’s mind was naturally on more important matters. So he had to jerk his attention back to the perky little brunette when she suddenly announced she took a bath every Saturday night and rinsed her hair with larkspur lotion once a month whether she’d felt any nits in her hair or not.

Longarm smiled in some confusion, and assured her he hadn’t been about to tell a lady she’d struck him as unwashed or lousy.

Iona pouted. “I don’t think you’ve been thinking about me at all. You’ve been treating me like a bitty nighneag since first we met. I may be small for a woman grown, but I’m womanly enough where such things matter, and why haven’t you sparked at me even once?”

Longarm chuckled gently and truthfully replied, “It never occurred to me, Miss Iona. I don’t mean you ain’t good enough for me to spark with. It’s just that, like I told you before, I have a heap on my mind and you wouldn’t want to get my hopes up, seeing I won’t be around all that long.”

She blazed, “You are talking to me as if I was a little girl! A woman can tell when a man’s not interested in her as a woman, and I can’t say I like your attitude, you snooty thing!”

He said he was sure she was used to being sparked at. It would have been dirty, to both ladies concerned, if he’d told her why he doubted he could get it up again with a block and tackle after that last dry effort in that friendly Indian. So he just repeated what he’d already told her about more serious stuff, and she suddenly reined in and sobbed, “Och, as an sin thu! Go on about your airy-fairy business, and I’m off to buy some ribbon bows and mayhaps spark with some real men!”

Longarm had no call to argue as she cut away at a sharper angle, knowing the back ways of the trail town ahead much better. Being a stranger to Sappa Crossing, Longarm perforce rode on up to the main street. Aside from not wanting to get turned around in some blind alley, he didn’t want anyone spooking the town law with tales of an armed stranger poking around out back.

As he swung on to that wagon trace where it widened out to become the main street of a dinky trail town, he was mildly surprised, as he’d been the last time, by how natural Mennonites looked.

Unlike some Pennsylvania Dutch sects or even the English-speaking Mormons out Utah way, the Anabaptist farm folks from far-away prairie country seemed to belong out on the American prairies, like the new kinds of wheat and that one big species of tumbleweed they’d introduced from those back steps of Russia.

Even Indians who should have known better seemed to feel those big fat Russian tumbleweeds had always been tumbling around out here, though in fact the biggest native American tumbleweed had now been reduced in rank to “witch grass.”

The soberly dressed folks Longarm passed as he rode in could only be distinguished from ordinary Western rustics by straw hats and chin whiskers on most of the men, and perky white half-bonnets on most of the ladies. The signs along the street were in both English and High Dutch. Longarm knew that a sort of big white barn was their meeting house, and he’d been assured nothing as odd as Holy Rolling went on inside. Hardly anyone would have noticed such a natural-acting religious sect if the Mennonites hadn’t been changing the country between the Mississippi and the Rockies far more, in their own quiet way, than the Mormons had on the far side of the Continental Divide. Longarm had recently read how, at the rate things were going, there’d be more white Americans of High Dutch or Irish descent than any other breed by the turn of this century.

Of course, most of the immigrants quietly flocking in from all parts of that Dutch-speaking hodgepodge Bismarck and his kaiser had only recently hammered together as the Germanic Empire were Lutheran or even Papists. But whether they were outnumbered or not, it was the Mennonite Dutch who’d taught everyone else how to make a good living farming what Pike and Fremont had agreed to call the Great American Desert. That Turkish brand of winter wheat the Mennonites had put on the American market wasn’t just a grain you could grow on buffalo range. It was a superior sort of hard wheat that came out of those big steam-powered mills back East as the finest grade of flour. So when anyone bragged on American apple pie, whether they knew it or not, they were bragging on a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe baked in a crust of Russian-Dutch flour.

A plain American-looking gent with a pewter star pinned to the front of his clean white shirt was regarding Longarm from a doorway with some interest as the dustier federal deputy dismounted in front of the town hall. Longarm had pinned his own badge to the lapel of his old denim jacket as he’d ridden in from the Lazy B with that imperious brunette. He’d found in the past he could save local lawmen harsher words than they could gracefully retract if they knew right off who they might be cussing at. A total stranger of the Anglo-Saxon type wasn’t going to ride into a community such as this without anyone of innocent or guilty intent taking note of his arrival. So in this case a frontal attack seemed as safe as any.

That didn’t mean a lawman on the trail of another stranger to the close-knit community couldn’t zigzag a mite in case Wolf Ritter had made more friends so far than he had. So when the Dutch-sounding town marshal said to call him Werner Sattler, they shook on it and Longarm told him the truth halfways as he tethered the two ponies out front. He said he’d heard an owlhoot rider wanted by the federal government had been reported in this corner of Kansas.

The town law nodded soberly and said, “Wolfgang von Riuerhoff. You’ve missed him by a week.”

“You knew who he was, and where he was, and you never saw fit to let the rest of us in on it?” Longarm demanded with a scowl.

The town law replied with what appeared an easy conscience, “He was gone before anyone told me. Come on inside. I don’t have any bread and salt in my office desk, but we keep schnaps filed under S.”

Longarm followed the town law through that side door of the town hall, and confirmed his memory of schnaps as a strong but smooth brandy to be consumed in moderation while on duty. So he nursed the tumbler Sattler had poured him as they sat on either side of the older lawman’s desk to jaw about wayward Prussians with dueling scars.

The town law explained, “That killer trained by the Prussian Army rode in on a market night. So nobody would have paid any attention to him if he hadn’t spoken Hoch Deutch.”

Longarm started to ask a dumb question. Then he nodded and said, “I follow your drift. A stranger talking English with a Boston accent would attract more attention in a Texas saloon than your average Mex. By the way, you do have saloons here in Sappa Crossing, don’t you?”

The Mennonite lawman nodded, raised his glass, and said, “We are good Christians and Our Lord poured wine at the Last Supper. I wish you other Christians would get over the idea we’re some sort of cult.”

Longarm said, “You won’t be as noticeable a generation or so down the road. Your kids are already talking like everyone else out this way. But we were talking about Wolf Ritter, as he’s more often named on many a wanted flyer.”

Sattler finished his schnaps, poured himself another, and explained, “Our saloon, like some of the other establishments serving the wagon-trace traffic, serves a mostly English-speaking crowd, and as you just pointed out, none of our crowd speaks Hoch Deutch in that guttural Junker accent. People from Stettin or Berlin always sound as if they have sore throats.”

Longarm was in no position to agree or disagree. So he just took another sip of schnaps and Sattler continued. “There’s no law against speaking like a Prussian bully. Fred Zimmermann, at the Ganseblumchen, was the one who brought the mysterious beer drinker to our attention. The bartender’s description did match up with a lot of those wanted posters you just mentioned. But by the time I gathered a few of my part-time deputies and got over there, he’d left.”

Longarm knew better than to accept another schnaps before he’d had his noon dinner. So he got out two smokes as the older lawman went on. “That LeMat revolver was the persuader. I never saw it in Horst Heger’s window until the next morning. So I’d almost put the mysterious drifter out of my mind when someone said they’d seen him riding on. Then, later in the morning, passing Heger’s shop, I saw the wicked weapon on sale. I went right inside to ask Heger about it. He said he’d bought it, at a fair price, from a fellow Prussian down on his luck.”

“Horst Heger’s as pure Prussian as Wolf Ritter?” Longarm asked.

The Mennonite shrugged and allowed few Prussians were pure anything, being a mixture of pagan Polish peasants and the Teutonic knights who’d crusaded hell out of ‘em back in those Dark Ages.

The local lawman didn’t say Horst Heger had recognized Wolf Ritter from those wars of conquest a few summers back. So Longarm figured he’d been smart to play his cards close to the vest. He’d ask Horst Heger when he talked to him.

Once he had his tumbler drained and both their cheroots going good, Longarm casually asked just where Horst Heger’s gun shop might be in case that LeMat was still in the window.

The town law said it was upslope, across from the smithy, so a cowhand having his pony reshod might have easy access. On the way back out front, Longarm asked about local liveries, hotels, and such.

The local lawman said there was a municipal corral out back of the town hall. But folks around Sappa Crossing already had enough riding stock to make a livery stable unprofitable. When he mentioned they had a fair livery run by a friendly Indian gal just up the ways in Cedar Bend, Longarm changed the subject to wayside inns.

Sattler said they hadn’t had one in Sappa Crossing since that mail stage had cut its runs back to once a week, only stopping long enough to matter up in Cedar Bend. He said there was a guest hostel out back of the Mennonite meeting house across the way, and suggested they might put a stranger up for the night.

Longarm said he didn’t know how to say grace in High Dutch, and didn’t mind sleeping out under the stars in dry weather if he had to. Meanwhile, he had to find out how long he was likely to be in these parts. Following Sattler’s easy directions, Longarm rode the bay and led the paint the short distance upslope to where, sure enough, he saw a big wooden rifle, painted gold, across from the open front of the smithy, where a bunch of men and boys were watching the blacksmith shoe a monstrous dapple gray drafthorse that just didn’t think it needed new shoes.

Longarm passed by the amusing antics and High Dutch cussing to rein in and dismount across the way, tethering his ponies to the hitching rail near a handy water trough. He took his tempting Winchester from his McClellan, and stepped up on the plank walk to see that there really was a LeMat nine-shooter for sale in the front window.

Someone had written in High Dutch and English on a card propped against the trigger guard of the dramatic weapon. Longarm bent lower to read what the English writing said. That was why the bullet aimed at the nape of his neck just took his hat off for him as it flew on to shatter that plate glass all to flying bits!

Longarm had been taught by a war in his teens that the best way to duck for cover was the way someone aiming a second shot might not be expecting. So he dove headfirst through the now glassless front window of the gunsmith’s shop to roll through the crepe-paper curtain behind the display and land flat on his ass in a pile of busted glass and scattered shooting irons with some woman screaming fit to bust from the gloom beyond.

He yelled at her to shut up and take cover as he rolled over to rise up on one knee, levering a round into the chamber of his saddle gun as he glared out through all that confusion for something to aim it at.

But the street out front was a milling swirl of men, boys, rising dust, and at least three horses screaming bloody murder as they tried to bust loose. So Longarm rose to his full height and turned to the screaming gal behind him to say, “It’s over for now. I never busted your front window with my fool head, ma’am. Someone was shooting at it, or at me, from across the way. As an educated guess, I’d make it from that dark slot betwixt yonder smithy and the feed store next to it.”

“Was kann ich fur Sie tun, mein Herr?” didn’t sound as if she was following his drift.

He asked for Horst Heger. She brightened and gushed, “Ich weiss es noch nicht. I can a little English when you slow speak it. I am Helga Pilger and I haff only here started. Herr Heger has just me hired to watch for him when he somewhere goes.”

Longarm could see why. The big buxom blonde was busting out of the peasant blouse and laced-up bodice above her pleated red calico skirts. It hardly mattered if anything that pretty spoke English in a High Dutch-speaking town, or had the brains of a gnat behind those big blue eyes.

He was still admiring the view when his attention was drawn to the fuss outside, and he turned from the Mennonite maiden to see old Wemer Sattler, the town law, climbing through that busted-in shop window to join them, saying, “Zum Teufel! I thought they might have had you in mind! The men across the street say the shot was fired from the feed store, but the boy in the feed store thinks it came from the Schmiede next door.”

The lawman’s English was so much better than Helga’s that it came as a surprise to hear him grope for less familiar words. Longarm nodded and replied, “I reckon you mean smithy, and I made it that narrow slot betwixt the two. I’m still working on who might have been so sore at me. Will you look at this mess!”

Sattler said, “Whoever it was won’t get far. I’ve sent deputies out in every direction to cover the outskirts of town, and it’s not as if we’re surrounded by Das Schwarzwaid—I mean the Black Forest.”

Longarm said, “I know what you mean. Anyone crawling through ripe grainfields on hands and knees would leave a trail a schoolmarm could follow, and it’s just after high noon outside, so pony dust can be seen. But let me ask you something, no offense. How many folks do you reckon you’d have in town just now, whether resident or just in for some shopping or other fun?”

The town law thought. “About a hundred and ten families of fellow Mennonites, perhaps a dozen of other faiths, and there might be two dozen individuals off the surrounding spreads at any given time. But not many of them would be strangers to my deputies. We’re looking for a stranger. That Wolfgang von Ritterhoff, nein?”

Longarm said, “Nine and a question mark. Sounded like a common old .44-40 round, the most popular caliber for the thinking shootist, and who says it has to be a stranger? That bullet missed me by a whisper, and I got the distinct impression it was aimed my way by someone who knew me on sight from a distance!”

Chapter 10

Longarm got them to stable his stock behind the smithy. He knew he didn’t know who belonged in the township. So he stayed behind to help the bewildered Mennonite maiden tidy up. He gingerly picked up and wiped off the scattered guns as Helga swept up the busted glass. As they worked together she drew him a clearer picture of the situation. Her English seemed to get better, or else he got better at figuring out what she was trying to say. Her old country grammar was something like Olde English had started out. When you thought about how English was strung together in King Arthur or the Good Book, you weren’t half as confounded by someone saying something like, “I have but two weeks been out with this shop helping.”

Her story, in plain English, was that she’d been born on those back steps of Russia, been orphaned up in the Dakotas by that plague going about a few winters back, and sent down here to Kansas by Dakota kin to see if she’d like to marry up with one of the Brethren who’d filed on a hundred and sixty acres and was anxious to file on more in the name of most any wife who’d have him.

Helga had decided she didn’t want him. She said one look had been enough to inspire some doubts before he’d asked her to dig postholes while he cooked supper. She said the clincher had been his forgetting to offer her bread and salt when he met her stage in Cedar Bend.

Longarm had to think back. Then he nodded and said, “I’d forgot that Russian habit your kind picked up living under the czars. But anyone can see it’s an easy way to make a newcomer feel welcome. He could have just felt it was too old-timey for a brand-new American to bother with, though.”

Helga hunkered down to sweep some glass into a uppright dust pan as she protested, “In that case he could have flowers, books, or candy met me with. I have courting cowboys watched. A schnorrer is still a schnorrer no matter how the customs followed are!”

“He snored too?” Longarm asked with a wry grimace.

Helga blanched and protested, “Schnorrer in my zunge is the same as a bum in your own. I never stayed out at his dusty sod Hutte to about him that much learn! I here in town found a job as a putzenfrau—I mean cleaning woman—with a lutherisch family. My poor mother was so wise to leave me to choose what I would be after I had up grown! I am sure I don’t schwesterlich wish mein Taufe. That is in English baptism, nicht?”

Longarm regarded the gaping storefront thoughtfully as he replied without a whole lot of interest, “It’s a free country, Miss Helga. You can pray to the Great Jehovah or Wakan Tonka for all my department will pester you. Might your boss, Horst Heger, have any lumber handy? You were fixing to tell me more about where he’d gone and when you expected him back before we got sidetracked into bread and salt, her?”

She said, “There is in the keller a workbench and some boards, I think. Herr Heger never told me where he was going or when he was to back return. I have not since last week seen him. I no longer to our old services go. But naturalich I did not on Sonntag miss him. I opened Montag Morgen and have since then been the shop trying to run for him. I know little about guns. But most of our trade is ammunition and supplies.”

He told her to stay topside and watch the store while he went down to the cellar to see about that boarding. He struck a match on the steep wooden steps and found an oil lantern hanging handy on a nail. It still took two genuine wax matches from Old Mexico to get the lamp burning right. The ‘dobe-walled and dirt-floored cellar was spider-webby and stinky for that late in summer. The place needed airing out. When he spied a flight of brick steps leading up to what had to be a sloping exit to the backyard, he made a mental note to mention airing to young Helga.

Meanwhile he gathered up some pine planks apparently salvaged from some other building, found a hammer and a mason jar of mixed nails, and hauled it all upstairs.

As he put his hat and jacket aside to get to work up front, he told Helga about that outside cellar door. She said she knew about it, and had noticed how rank the dirt cellar smelled, but that her boss had the only key to the padlock sealing the stink in.

He told her to open the front and back doors upstairs at least, and left the cellar door open as he hammered together a lattice of odd lengths of lumber in hopes of letting in some air while keeping small boys out. He had to make more than one trip. Seeing Helga seemed more comfortable with him now, he took a mite more time in the cellar and found a whole sheaf of wanted flyers and reward posters in an old chest of drawers across from the workbench. Longarm left them where they were for now. They weren’t his, and it stood to reason a gunsmith who’d spotted an owlhoot rider packing an unusual gun had been making a sort of hobby out of collecting wanted papers. A gunsmith too dumb to know outlaws were interested in guns might have never recognized a renegade with a LeMat for sale.

Back upstairs, nailing a diagonal plank with shorter nails than he might have bought from scratch, Longarm told Helga, “That ought to keep casual prowlers out. But all these guns are too valuable to leave out after your regular closing time. Is there some safer place I could help you store them, if you’d like me to come back?”

She said her boss had always put such tempting stock away in a vault in the back. Then she asked where he was going before closing time.

He said he’d know better once he got there, and asked her to show him their vault.

That turned out to be a combination vault, big enough to walk into, if only it had been open. Helga said only her boss had the combination, and she’d been mighty worried about that. She’d found all the stock in the cases out front, just as they’d been when she’d tidied up Saturday noon, when she reported for work the following Monday with her key to the front door. She said she’d felt she’d had no choice but to keep things humming as best she could until her fuzzy-headed but kindly boss got back from wherever on God’s green earth he’d gone. Helga insisted on showing Longarm the modest receipts in the till, as if he had any notion how much money was supposed to be there.

He made the mistake of saying that. So the next thing he knew the strapping blonde had dragged him into the back quarters, where Helga had a small kitchen set up, and made him sit at a table with a pile of business ledgers as she puttered about making them a snack.

Longarm leafed through the dry dusty ledgers with about the same interest he’d have shown to the scrapbook of some touring piano player, Everything was printed in High Dutch. But figures were figures, and ink came red or black in any lingo. So almost despite himself, Longarm found himself paying attention to another man’s business.

Business had been lousy lately. The profit on ammunition and new supplies was less than fifty percent. Longarm had pals in the trade out Denver way, so he knew there was purer profit in repairing and altering guns. But Mennonite farmers and even the local cowhands had placed damned few orders for tailored gun grips, hair triggers, and such. Longarm noticed other entries showing Heger had taken used guns on consignment, meaning the original owner only got paid if and when his gun was sold. Longarm looked back a few pages, in vain, as Helga dished out generous portions of what looked like kitten’s brains mixed with bloody cedar shavings. “There’s something I don’t savvy here,” he said.

She told him they were having Blaukraut mitt Blumerkohl and that everyone drank tea from glasses in her old country.

He said that wasn’t what he was worried about. He explained, “That LeMat on sale in the window for twenty whole dollars ain’t on the books here at any price.”

He had to explain which gun was a LeMat before Helga was able to tell him she wasn’t sure how long it had been in the window or who’d consigned it to them for sale.

The oddly named grub turned out to be pretty good pickled cauliflower and red cabbage. The Russian-Dutch tea helped a heap with its sort of sour aftertaste. She seemed more puzzled as to why he found a gun in the window of a gunsmith shop such a puzzle.

He said, “Whether your boss took it on consignment or paid cash, it should have been listed in the ledgers. And they were asking way too much. Twenty dollars would buy you a spanking-new Colt ‘73, and a factory-fresh Remington would run you less.”

She suggested perhaps the owner had set the price on the gun over Herr Heger’s mild objections. She said with a smile that her boss never seemed to really fuss with anyone.

Longarm washed down some red cabbage and said, “I noticed. Going over his books just now, it’s easy to see why he might have been anxious to make some money on the side. When you say he acted sort of fuzzy, did you mean absentminded fuzzy or drinking fuzzy, Miss Helga?”

She allowed the missing gunsmith could have had either a troubled mind, a drinking problem, or both. She hadn’t even known Heger when his wife ran off on him that spring. She said he’d put a sign in the front window saying he could use some help, and hadn’t put up too much of a fuss when she’d barged in to say she’d rather keep shop than clean house. As Longarm got her to go over it all again, he saw she really didn’t know as much about Horst Heger as he did. The missing gunsmith had never confided in his new hired help about wanted outlaws he could turn in for bounty money. He’d been sort of fuzzy about paying her any wages and owed her for two weeks. To Helga’s credit, or slow wits, she’d been living on the odds and ends of grub back here in the kitchen without dipping into the till.

Longarm tried to help her out in a graceful way by allowing he was in the market for a couple of dollars’ worth of Remington .44-40s and suggesting she had no call to record the sale before her boss came up with her back wages.

But while Helga led him back out front and rustled up the hundred rounds for him, she explained all such sales had to be entered in yet another notebook, although a smaller one, under the till.

He asked to see it as the buxom gal primly put his two cartwheels in the till. He saw at a glance that this extra record only dealt with ammunition. He saw why when he noticed some entries were notations on special orders. Thanks to the many mighty clever or ambitious machinists Who’d noticed the original breech-loading or revolver patents had run out in recent years, there was now a whole lot of makes and models on the market, some of them shooting mighty odd ammunition, such as that special caliber for the czar’s picky cavalry. Longarm looked for some, and sure enough, found more than one order for that .429-23 made for all those Smith & Wesson six-guns specially ordered by the Grand Duke Alexis while he was hunting buffalo with Bill Cody.

The czar’s fool cavalry had never taken delivery on those fool revolvers. So S&W had put them on the American market, cheaper than a matching model that fired regular American brass. You found out after you bought one that you had to send back East, to one factory at three cents a round, to load your bargain side arm.

Longarm guessed, and Helga confirmed, that the Russian S&W was a lot more popular than it should have been in Russian-Dutch Mennonite country. He saw they had more on hand than the average shop of this size would have. But then, try as he might and going back over a month, he failed to find any mention of that queer ammunition you fed a LeMat.

Helga didn’t seem to find that meaningful. So he told her, “Tough to sell an unusual gun at a high price without letting anyone peg a few shots out back. Let’s see if there’s any shells in the thing.”

As she followed him along the other side of the counter to where he’d placed the LeMat from the busted-up front display, Helga shook her blond head and insisted, “Ich glauben nicht. An idiot only would leave a loaded gun in das Fenster!”

But when Longarm examined the massive LeMat more closely, he found the shotgun chamber empty but five live rounds in the nine-shot wheel. He raised the loaded weapon to his mustache and sniffed before he told her, “It ain’t been cleaned since someone fired at least three rounds. One chamber was riding empty under the firing pin, but you can see the spent brass in these other three.”

She gasped, “So. schmutzig! Any gun will outrust when you clean it not after firing, ja?”

Longarm went on emptying the LeMat as he agreed. “That’s about the size of it. I doubt anyone ever intended to sell this antique. Twenty dollars was way too high a price to set, Heger had no ammunition for a big spender who might have wanted the fool thing, and like you just said, leaving a gun to lay about with a fouled barrel ain’t the way you’re going to keep it in mint condition!”

He held up the empty LeMat to squint through it at a chink in those front boards, then whistled and marveled, “I wouldn’t give five dollars for this poor brute with a hundred rounds of that fancy French ammunition thrown in! As your boss has likely told you already, the sulfur and saltpeter traces left in the grooves after hot spinning lead has wiped away every trace of oil can suck moisture from the air way faster than clean steel just left to rust.”

He put the weapon, now less valuable, back on the countertop and mused aloud, mostly to himself, “Try her this way. Ritter’s having as much trouble loading a freak gun, he knows it’s been mentioned on more than one wanted flyer, so he drops by a trail-town gunsmith to trade it in for something less unusual. Heger recognizes him but naturally never says so. He goes along with the deal, more interested in getting the rascal out of his hair than-“

“Bitte, who is this Herr Ritter?” Helga cut in.

Longarm said, “Never mind. If you’ve ever met him since, he was using another name. Heger must have expected him to be in town for a spell. That’s why he put the LeMat in the window. He priced it high so he’d still have it on hand when someone like me showed up.”

She said she didn’t know what he was talking about. He smiled and assured her she wasn’t to worry her pretty little head about it. Then he asked why she was getting all teary-eyed.

She said, “I am not so a stupid cow! Maybe I don’t so good the English speak, but I can read and write and also add and subtract!”

He said he was sure she was running the shop just fine, and promised to come back later with some sensible groceries before he rode on.

Chapter 11

Longarm collected some odd looks as he strode up to the town hall with his Winchester muzzle aimed politely at the planking. he figured it was likely because of his mustache. He’d noticed most of the homesteading Mennonites wore full beards, Abe Lincoln beards, or shave their whole face. Mennonite gals must have disliked whiskery kisses as much as Mexican gals admired them. He noticed it was the younger and more likely single locals who shaved and got regular haircuts. At the rate they were going those total furriners would be passing for real Americans in no time, and folks would think names like Taft, Treumann, or Welk had always gone with these parts.

When he got to Wemer Sattler’s office, a kid deputy told Longarm the town law was still out trying to separate the sheep from the goats. He said they were holding a couple of drifters back in their one patent cell, but doubted either one had pegged a shot at anyone in recent memory.

Longarm said he’d be over at that saloon with the unpronounceable name when and if Sattler wanted him. The kid deputy laughed and said Gansenblumchen just meant Daisy. Longarm was too polite to ask why they had to use such long words for every fool thing.

Once he got there, the Gansenblumchen turned out to be a beer garden as well as a saloon. You drank inside when the sun was blazing down hard at the tables and chairs set up under cottonwoods and paper lanterns out back.

As his eyes adjusted to the sudden shade inside, Longarm saw the taproom was better than half empty. That made sense in mid-afternoon on a working day. He figured the mostly older gents nursing mostly beer were in town with a crop in the fields and a woman interested in some pokey shopping. Many a saloon would have no call to open during business hours if women shopped like men and just got it over with.

As he bellied up to the bar, he took out his pocket watch to check it against the ornate wall clock above the back bar. If they were right he was running a tad slow. When he wore his three-piece suit around the Denver Federal Building, his watch and pocket derringer rode in separate vest pockets on the same gilt chain. Having everything jumbled together in one breast pocket of a charro-length denim jacket couldn’t be doing his old timepiece a whole lot of good.

A well-fed barmaid with her auburn hair pulled up into a considerable bun came down his way with an easygoing smile to ask, “Was willst du, Kuhhirt?”

Longarm smiled uncertainly and replied, “If you’re asking what I want, I’d sure like a stein of beer, ma’am.”

She seemed to think that was funny as hell. But she poured him a pint of cool draft as she said she hadn’t thought he was from around Sappa Crossing. He didn’t say just who he might be or where he might hail from. So as he sipped some suds she decided, “You must be for der Schottisch Viehzuchter, Herr MacSorley, riding. Some of our own have also Kuhhirten, I mean cowboys, become since the price of beef has so high gone.”

Since she’d told him what he was supposed to ask, he felt no call to correct her. Sometimes Longarm was surprised by what he could learn just keeping his mouth shut and his ears open.

As she moved to serve an old cuss at the far end things got back to normal for a lazy afternoon in a taproom. Gents who’d stopped talking to see what a stranger might have to say for himself went back to talking among themselves, mostly in High Dutch. Longarm found the lingo sort of infuriating. Some words sounded almost the same as English, but just as you figured you were following the drift, it lit out like a cutting horse in another direction entirely. He’d leafed through a dictionary one time to confirm that while Hund meant hound, Henne meant hen, and a Kuh was a cow, they up and called a rabbit something that sounded like “hoss,” and you asked a lady if she’d like to fart when you meant to take her for a buggy ride. A lot of their innocent words sounded sort of dirty. He wondered what dirty words in English sounded like in High Dutch. There was no polite way to ask that barmaid. So he didn’t.

Two other gents dressed like Kuhhirten or cowboys were having what sounded like a soft but heated argument at a corner table behind him. They were too far away for Longarm to make out any words. But once you’d spent a few hours listening to furriners, it was surprising how Tennessee an old boy could sound when he twanged just loud enough to hear.

Longarm edged along the bar until he had a better view of them in the back-bar mirror. Neither seemed aware of him as they argued softly but seriously. From gestures and expressions alone, Longarm got an impression one was all for moving on, while the older and cooler-looking cuss was for staying right where they were, as if they were waiting for someone.

Longarm was good at faces. But he couldn’t match either of the nondescript cowhand types with any serious descriptions on file. So he finished his beer, left some small change on the bar, and sauntered out without looking back.

He moved faster out on the walk. He’d almost made it back to the town hall when two other total strangers seemed anxious to have a word with him.

The taller of the two said, “If you’d be Custis Long, Miss Iona MacSorley would like a word with you. I’d be Marty Link, the ramrod of the Lazy B, and this here’s Trooper O’Donnel, our boss wrangler. Miss Iona is waiting for the three of us at that tea-room across from the church.”

Longarm said, “You can tell her I’ll try. But right now I suspect I might have more pressing business. I have to have a look at a couple of strangers the town law picked up. If they’re anyone I know, I might know where some of their friends are right this minute.”

The two Lazy B riders fell in with him as he explained further on the way to the town hall. O’Donnel quietly asked why the three of them didn’t just round up the two in the saloon and march them on up to join their pals.

Longarm sighed and waved the muzzle of his Winchester at the sort of sinister reflection the three of them made in a hat shop window as he asked, “Would you let a sight like that come at you without getting spooked, innocent or guilty?”

Link said he followed Longarm’s drift. The three of them wore sun-faded denim and businesslike gun rigs. The hatchet-faced Martin Link had a ferocious beard, while Trooper O’Donnel’s battered features were framed by mutton-chops the color of rusty bobwire. On top of all that, Longarm explained, he was only guessing about the two still at large. There was no law of nature saying all those in town who weren’t Russian Dutch had to be pals.

The three of them joined that same kid deputy inside. When Longarm explained, Sattler’s young sidekick led them back to where, sure enough, two other gents dressed more cow than sodbuster sat morose as hell in a boiler-plate box painted baby-shit green.

One grinned out sheepishly at Longarm. The more experienced lawman nodded and said, “Afternoon, Fingers. Figured someone like you had a couple of his pals trying to make up their minds about some moves to be made mighty soon.” Turning to the others on his side of the bars, he explained. “This wayfaring stranger swept up unexpectedly would be the one and original Fingers Fawcett, just out of Jefferson Barracks after some hard time over a federal post office safe. Old Fingers can open your average combination lock without half trying and … right, this other poor simp would be Juicy Joe Walters, famous for knowing how to milk nitro out of dynamite without killing his fool self.”

The older Fingers Fawcett shrugged and said, “You ain’t got anything on us, Longarm. Like you said, I just got out, and Joe here ain’t got no dynamite on him.”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “It’s early yet. Let me guess as to just what all four of you came here to set up. The winter wheat harvest is about to commence. All prices are rising this summer. So a heap of Eastern grain buyers have already started sending advance checks on wheat futures.”

He turned to the Mennonite kid and asked, “Are you with me so far?”

The kid said, “Sure. My Uncle Franz just banked the check he got from Chicago.”

Martin Link didn’t seem to grasp the notion. So Longarm explained. “Never mind why some grain dealers pay in advance, hoping the grain will be worth more by the time it’s shipped. Just remember this is a small town with a bitty bank, already commencing to fill up with the just rewards of a whole lot of plowing last autumn.”

Trooper O’Donnel objected. “You said those Eastern buyers only send checks as advances on the harvest.”

Longarm said, “I’ll explain along the way. I have to go arrest a couple more. If you gents would care to be deputized for an hour or so, there’s bounty money on whoever robbed that other bank at the county seat a few days ago.”

The two Lazy B riders exchanged grinning glances, and the young town deputy said he wanted to go with the three of them. But Longarm warned him he might catch Ned if he left those two birds in the hand unguarded. So the kid allowed he’d stay and guard them, but he wouldn’t like it.

Walking back down to the Ganselblumchen, Longarm explained how any grain merchant’s checks would be cashed by mail right off by any bank with a lick of sense.

He said, “It’s sort of sad how many checks bounce when the futures market ain’t going the way the wise-money boys were betting. But when you pay a farmer for his crop in advance, the money is his from the day he takes your check to his own bank.”

Trooper O’Donnel soberly observed, “In other words, that innocent-looking little bank near the schoolhouse is overflowing with cash, even before that harvest these squareheads keep talking about!”

It had been a statement rather than a question. So Longarm replied, “You gents are more familiar faces if they’ve been here any length of time. So what say you two go in the front way whilst I circle around to drift in from that beer garden? That way we’ll have ‘em covered from three directions when I tell ‘em they’re under arrest, see?”

They did, and that was the way it might have gone, had both those rascals been seated at that same corner table when Longarm strode in from out back, Winchester down at his side.

But there was only one, drinking alone. Longarm glanced at Link and O’Donnel, who’d entered from the front and taken up positions at either end of the bar. Link met his eye and shrugged. Longarm shrugged back and turned to bear down on the one left in the corner. Then O’Donnel yelled, “Longarm! Duck!” and Longarm would have, had not the one in the corner been slapping leather on him as he rose, teeth bared and eyes brimming with desperation. So Longarm could only hope that gun going off behind him was aimed somewhere else as he crabbed to one side and whipped his Winchester up, yelling, “Freeze!” and then, when that didn’t work, bounced the cornered desperado off one wall to crash down through his own less effective gunsmoke. He’d missed the toe of Longarm’s left boot by a good three inches.

Longarm turned in the ringing sudden silence to see another form, that of the missing corner conversationalist, oozing blood into the sawdust as he sprawled facedown between Longarm and the bar. Martin Link said, “He must have been in the crapper. It was Trooper here who got him as he was throwing down on your spine!”

Chapter 12

The English-speaking county board was disposed to let a Mennonite community handle as much as it could on its own, and as was often the case in remote parts, big froggies in the little puddle tended to wear extra hats. The only local member of the Kansas Bar Association served as the Sappa Crossing justice of the peace, the vet doubled in brass as deputy coroner, and the town’s only banker could produce an undersheriff’s badge the county had given him if he had to.

It still took almost until supper time to tidy up the shootout at the Gansblumchen.

Close to a dozen witnesses, from Zimmermann the manager to the town drunk, agreed on all but the petty details. They’d seen Longarm come in one back door, followed shortly thereafter from another back door by the older of the two cadavers over at Zuber’s hardware and casket shop. Everyone agreed the one covering Longarm’s back had been the first to slap leather and that Trooper O’Donnel had only shot him in the back as he was fixing to do the same to a federal lawman. They seemed more confused about the details after that. Folks usually were after they’d witnessed a gunfight. For the real thing was usually over a lot sooner than it took to describe it.

Gents who thought slow enough to describe a gunfight usually lost.

But nobody had call to doubt Longarm’s version, since he’d been on that side of all that gunsmoke. They took the word of a well-known lawman and the wanted flyers in Werner Sattler’s office that the dead men had been well known as well. Tiny Tim Breen and Slick Dawson, the one who’d drawn first behind Longarm’s back, had been wanted on bank robbery, murder, and horse-stealing charges in lots of places. So the only mystery was just how they fit in with Fingers Fawcett and old Juicy Joe, who were still alive and well and full of beans.

Brought to the hearing from their patent cell out back, both known safe-and-loft men denied they’d ever laid eyes on either of the dead crooks. Moreover, they could both produce prison release papers, and defied anyone to prove they’d stolen an apple off a cart since they’d served their debts to society and been turned loose.

One of Sattler’s other deputies had meanwhile found the washerwoman down by the creek who’d been providing room, board, and perhaps other services to the two dead men as they waited, they said, for some pals to ride up from Dodge. She stridently denied, in High Dutch, knowing either Fingers or Juicy Joe. She said she hadn’t been paying attention to the ponies her paying guests had quartered out back with her mule. So far, the town law had only found two saddles to go with the four poorly cared-for mounts. Fingers and Juicy Joe were sure they’d last seen their own saddled ponies at the municipal corral, and threatened to sue for their full value if the infernal Dutchmen had lost them.

The mostly Mennonite town council cum coroner’s subpanel were more worried about that than Longarm. The experienced lawman and the one paid-up lawyer in the bunch agreed they could hold the rascals for a full seventy-two hours on suspicion alone without bending the Bill of Rights too badly. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to get someone from the county seat to verify the two survivors had been at least somewhere near that bank over yonder around the time it had been robbed.

Stepping outside with his Winchester cradled in the late afternoon glare from the west, Longarm found himself in the company of Miss Iona MacSorley, who said she’d been waiting and waiting at that stuffy old tea-room.

Longarm assured her, “I wasn’t aiming to be rude. Your hands and me got sidetracked.”

She said, “I know. Athair will be so proud of them. I heard some of it inside once I’d been told what all the fuss up this way was about. What are we to do if nobody can prove those meanies robbed that bank at the county seat a spell back?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Let ‘em go. Nothing else we can do if we can’t prove more than suspicion after seventy-two hours. It happens that way a heap. By definition, a sneaky crook leaves as few signs as he can. The two that were killed this afternoon were known to be gunslicks. They’d likely been recruited as backup. The two we have on ice are experts at opening safes, and nobody was watching when they cracked that bank safe in the dead of night. What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss Iona?”

She said, “I heard somebody took a shot at you earlier. I was going to suggest you come back to the Lazy B with me tonight, where you’d be safer. But I guess you got the ones who were after you, right?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Mebbe.” He had no call to voice all his suspicions to anyone before he had more answers. So he didn’t. He said he meant to sleep out on the prairie after dark, seeing he could eat in town and needed neither a night fire nor more than a ground tarp in such dry summer weather.

Iona glanced at the sky to their west and said, “It’s up to you. But we’re fixing to have a glorious sunset, and I think I heard thunder in the distance earlier.”

He said, “I noticed it’s gotten cloudier. But those few clouds to the west were starting from scratch against sunny blue, and I suspect those Ruggles sisters have been setting off more dynamite to the north. Those corn fields they’ve been paid to rain on ain’t more than a dozen miles by crow, and sound flies as straight across the sky.”

She insisted he had a standing offer covering room and board at her cow spread as she untethered her white pony and let him boost her up to her sidesaddle. She held her head sort of flouncy as she rode off down the street without looking back. He’d noticed she was used to having her own way. He wondered if that was all she found exciting about him.

He cut across the wagon ruts to a corner grocery and bought a bag of staples that would keep until old Helga got around to preparing them. He’d noticed that kitchen was getting sort of sour-smelling since the missing gunsmith’s icebox had gone dry. He knew Dutch folks, high and low, favored sauerkraut and pickled everything else because it tended to keep without ice or smoke. So he hoped she wouldn’t be too disgusted by canned pork and beans, bully beef, sardines, and plain old potatoes and onions in season.

She wasn’t. When he marched in the back door to plant the big bag of vittles on the table she looked like she was fixing to cry. She said she’d be sore as hell if he didn’t have supper with her, and then she did get teary-eyed when she read some of the labels and figured out what they meant in her own lingo.

Then she said something even more cheerful. She told him her own quarters were over Heger’s carriage house out back. He’d let her move in when she’d gone to work for him. Longarm wasn’t as sure it made up for not paying her any wages worth mentioning. Helga’s reason for making supper on the far side of the backyard became clearer once they’d gone that far with the vittles and he’d noticed how much better things smelled.

Helga said her boss had ridden off somewhere with his one pony and two-wheel shay. So it came as no surprise that a certain amount of musty fodder and horseshit lingered in the air downstairs. Up in the converted hayloft it smelled much more like a lady’s well-kept quarters. She’d spread lavender water and fresh-picked wildflowers about, but you could still smell an undercurrent of lye soap and elbow grease. She’d told him she hadn’t much liked her earlier job cleaning house for another gal. But it probably felt different cleaning just as thoroughly for yourself. As she sat him on a cot to bustle with the grub across the spacious single room, he set his hat and Winchester aside and asked if she’d heard the one about Abe Lincoln’s boots.

When she said she hadn’t, he explained how a visitor to the White House had caught the president on the back stairs, putting new blacking on a pair of boots. When the surprised visitor had said, “Surely you don’t black your own boots, Mister President!” old Abe was said to have replied, “Well, sure I black my own boots. Who’s boots do you black?”

She didn’t laugh. It reminded him of that time a real Russian lady had tried to translate a Russian joke into English for him. He felt a slight twitch below the waist as he idly wondered where that sort of warm-natured Russian gal might be right now as the sun declined in the west.

Helga’s cast-iron range ran on coal oil, which she said she was running low on. She said there might be some left in the cellar across the yard. She hadn’t poked about down there because it smelled so bad.

Longarm said, “I noticed. Airing it out only seems to make Heger’s quarters upstairs smell worse. You did say you’d never met that wife of his in the flesh. Do you know anyone in town who might have really seen her leaving with that mysterious stranger?”

Helga shook her blond head with her back turned to him as she replied, “I am nothing knowing about Herr Heger’s troubles mitt seiner Frau. When she in the door walk I would not know her. I don’t think there will be oil enough for coffee also here.”

He got up from the cot, saying he’d go see if there was any to spare in or about the shop. As he was leaving she gave him a key ring and suggested he lock up for the night on his way back.

He said he would and asked about all that stock, only guarded now by some hasty boarding-over. She said she’d left such stock as shells and cleaning fluid to the mercy of any prowlers, but hidden the more valuable guns in a broom closet with her fingers crossed, seeing she had no way to open the vault.

Longarm spied a bucket in the carriage house as he descended the steep steps. So he took it along and filled it with water from the garden pump before he went on over to the back entrance to the shop.

He sniffed uncertainly as he carried the bucket of water and that lantern back down to the cellar. He’d noticed in both the war and some Indian fighting that what folks ate the day they died had a lot to do with how they stunk afterwards. He still recalled the horrid shape a bunch of dead Na-dene had appeared to be in after a shootout down by Apache Pass a spell back. An army surgeon had finally figured out why they’d rotted so strangely. The hungry Indians had been eating desert buckthorn berries, which tasted insipidly sweet and contained a vivid dye that turned your blood vessels the color of black cherries without hurting you otherwise. Those dead Indians had sure looked odd.

Setting the bucket of water down, he rummaged about through cobwebs and old mason jars filled with ominous blackness until, sure enough, he found a square can of that Standard lamp oil of Ohio. He set it on the steps with the lantern before he slowly and thoroughly slopped well water over every inch of the dirt floor. Then he hung the trimmed lantern up, put the oil can in the bucket, and went up to lock the back door and head back to the carriage house.

He left the bucket where he’d found it and carried the lamp oil up to Helga—just in time, she said. He started to warn her to put out her stove burner before she poured more oil. But despite the odd way she talked she was a smart as well as industrious housekeeper.

She served him warm pork and beans and what she called Bratkartoffein at a small table near her dormer window. They tasted like fried spuds to him. They were both hungry enough to let the coffee Catch up with them. As they ate, he didn’t tell her about soaking the dirt floor across the way. It was a trick army looters and Mexican raiders used. But he didn’t think he ought to mention anything buried under a dirt floor while they were eating, and it was going to take a spell in any case. You dug where you still saw a damp patch after the rest had dried. Soil that had been disturbed sucked up and held far more spilled water. But even with the cellar door ajar it would take hours for any such pattern to show down there.

They had coffee with a dessert she improvised from canned tomato preserves, brown sugar, and bread crumbs. It tasted better than her droll recipe. The light inside was getting tricky as, outside her dormer window, the sky to the west was turning ominously lovely.

Helga said the sunset was wunderbar after all the cloudless and sudden sunsets they’d been having. He found himself humming a few bars of an old trail song.

She dimpled across the table and asked him to sing the words to such a schene Melodie.

He smiled sheepishly and said, “It’s just a verse allowing how it’s cloudy in the west and looking like rain, whilst I left my slicker in the wagon again. Such songs go on forever without saying a whole lot. Riders make ‘em up as they just keep riding with no end in sight.”

She commenced to softly sing in High Dutch. It was a haunting old melody, but of course he couldn’t follow a word of it. She sang a spell anyway, and then she explained it was about this soldier boy in her old country who’d warned a fair maid he only meant to love her a short spell. Longarm said he’d heard some soldier boys were like that. Helga said this particular one loved the fair maid just one year, then decided it wouldn’t hurt to love her another year, and before he knew it he’d loved her forever.

Longarm cautiously said he’d heard some fair maids were like that.

Helga wrinkled her pert nose and said the song must have been made up by a man, because it took so many things about maidens fair for granted. She said it would have served that soldier boy right if the gal had sent him packing when they’d made love as long as she’d said he might.

Longarm laughed and marveled, half to himself, “She cooks too!

She didn’t follow his drift. It was odd how some of the folks from her old country could speak English like everyone else while others, try as they might, sounded like vaudeville comics making fun of the poor Dutch greenhorns.

There came a low rumble across the sky. Longarm sighed and said, “If that ain’t the Ruggles sisters, I’m facing a moist midnight out on the lone prairie. I’d best see if I can scout up another hayloft here in town.”

She murmured, “We shall donnerwetter before midnight have, Custis.”

Then she reached across the table to timidly place a hand on his wrist as she added, “Don’t leave. I have fear, even if it wasn’t so wet outside going to be!”

He shot a thoughtful glance at the one cot across the room. Helga followed his glance, fluttered her lashes, and murmured, “There is for me alone more than room enough. So what if both of us in the middle tried to sleep?”

He took her hand more warmly in his own as he said he doubted either would get much sleep that way. Then he felt he just had to say, “About what that soldier boy told that fair maiden in that old song …”

But she was already on her feet, holding his one hand in both of her own, as she tugged him away from the table, gasping, “Forever is for human flesh so short, and one hour is better than never. Why are you teasing me so, Custis? I will better try to understand your jokes if you will better try to understand a woman’s needs!”

So they soon discovered she needed it most the old-fashioned way with a pillow under her already ample padding. He’d noticed she seemed to have a romantic streak before he’d gotten the two of them undressed and ready to get down to brass tacks. But she kept hugging and kissing like they were in a porch swing with her legs crossed instead of wrapped around him tight, as she combined the innocent schoolmarm kissing of a country gal with some bumps and grinds that would have made one of Madame Emma Gould’s gals envious.

He learned not to tongue her when she sobbed she wasn’t that sort of a madel—and damned if he wasn’t starting to follow her High Dutch.

They said that famous British spy Richard Burton could learn a new Hindu dialect over a weekend by going to bed with what he called a “horizontal dictionary.” The queen kept refusing to knight him because he kept saying things like that in mixed company. But old “Nigger Dick,” as his fellow officers called him behind his back, had warned of that Sepoy Mutiny, if only his commanders had listened, because he could pass for a native and often did, carrying on scandalously with all those Hindu dancers who taught him how to talk as dirty as any Hindu.

Helga didn’t smoke in bed, although she seemed to enjoy toying with his old organ-grinder as they cuddled close for their second wind. She’d been right about her cot being sort of snug for two.

He lit a cheroot for himself as he stared up at the slanted ruby red ceiling, mildly surprised it was still so early. He could hear a lot of conversation coming down the sleepy trail at them. for it was way earlier than he usually turned in, and there were limits to what a man could do in bed with a gal, however bouncy, who’d only do it the old-fashioned way.

Blowing a thoughtful smoke ring, Longarm mused aloud, “I can’t go picturing the one left as a bewhiskered cuss with a vaudeville accent. There’s no natural law saying it has to be Wolf Ritter to begin with. And Ritter’s been running loose in this country, doubtless spending his own nights with horizontal dictionaries, and could sound like a natural cuss if he puts his mind to it.”

She murmured, “Bitte?” Which likely meant she was having trouble following his drift again.

He explained. “Neither of those two locked up by the town law could have shot out your shop window earlier. They were rounded up by your Werner Sattler as they were lurking down by the creek. They swear they were fishing. They were likely looking for their pals, Tiny Tim and old Slick. That washerwoman we figure all four were staying with backs up their stubborn story. I wonder why.”

Helga gave his tool a playful quarter turn as she said, “Ach, so smart you are! You at the table said those two in the saloon acted as if they were not you expecting!”

He took another drag on his cheroot and agreed. “The numbers tally to at least five with cause to disapprove of me. First one morose individual pegs a shot at my back, out front of your shop. A few minutes later Sattler’s boys grab two obvious strangers when they see ‘em hanging about down by the creek with no local address they care to give. Their two pals the local deputies failed to spot as suspicious were acting more innocently in that saloon. From what I heard passing through, Tiny Tim was for riding on whilst Slick Dawson was hoping to bail their pals out. Like you said, neither of ‘em spotted me as the law when I was drinking in the same room with ‘em. They only recognized me as trouble when I came back with a Winchester acting more troublesome!”

She kissed him under the ear and said, “The one who does know so much trouble you are was the one who chased you inside to meet me, so freundlich! So it is he who has your Washfrauh too afraid to tell the truth, ja?”

He shrugged a bare shoulder under her unbound blond hair and said, “That washerwoman could be just another hard case with no love for the law. To get such folks to talk, you have to convince ‘em there’s something in it for them. We couldn’t budge her at the hearing this afternoon. There’s not a dime’s worth of bounty posted on the two birds we have in the hand. We can’t tempt her with what was posted on those two more serious killers, now that they’ve been killed. I’ve told Martin Link and Trooper O’Donnel how to put in for the rewards on both those bad apples. My boss doesn’t approve when we do it, and somebody ought to collect on their otherwise worthless hides.”

She began to stroke him faster as she coyly decided there might be some value left in his hide down yonder.

He said, “Let me get rid of this smoke and position you a mite strategically then. It ain’t that I don’t enjoy swapping spit with you, pretty lady. But now and again it inspires a man to new heights when he enters at a new angle.”

She pouted that she liked to be kissed at the same time a lot, and bitched about a mean boy she’d almost married before she found out he had unnatural vices.

As he rolled her on her side with her smooth soft back to him, she gasped, “Nein! I will not in the Greek manner hear of it!”

Then she arched her spine and gasped, “Ach du Lieber!” as they both enjoyed the way his semi-erection slid into her smooth wet womanhood with her behind against his belly. So a good time was had by all as she decided that that seemed to be another proper position, although vulgar enough to feel wickedly exiting, like Gypsy music in church.

In the end he had her on her hands and knees, taking his full thrusts dog style, as she swept the rumpled bedding with her wildly tossed blond hair and moaned and groaned in High Dutch that sounded awesomely dirty. The room was almost dark by then. So he kept catching flashes of sweeping hair and pale bare buttocks as, outside, summer lightning proceeded to flash regularly. Then, as he was pounding her to glory, hail started pounding on the roof right over them. So he was mighty surprised when the buxom blonde suddenly shot forward, spitting him out like a big watermelon seed, and gasped, “Ach! Someone is coming!”

Longarm grunted, “Yep, me,” as he dropped down atop her to ram it back in—he thought. She sobbed, “Not in me there! Can’t you hear it? Someone in the shop is around fucking!”

Longarm was already off her and listening, hauling on his jeans as he decided, “She’s got good ears too. Or mayhaps she’s better at the night creaks of familiar surroundings.”

She groped for him in the gloom, saying, “Don’t go. I have angst and do not now hear anything!”

Longarm said, “That’s because he’s already busted off enough of that window boarding to get in. It’s likely a thief. I was afraid my hasty carpentry would be tempting.”

He strapped on his six-gun and then, since she’d started to cry, he groped in the duds on the floor for his watch c am, hauled out his watch and attached derringer, and placed the wicked little gun in her frightened right fist, saying, “Make sure it’s somebody you’d like to see dead before you even point this bitty thing. For it may seem small, but it packs two awesome punches.”

Then he rose on his bare feet and said, “Hold the thought. I’ll be right back if we’ve been imagining things. Where’s that key ring, honey?”