Longarm and the Kansas Killer

She said, “On that table near the door. Don’t leave me here so scared to feel! We can try it in the Greek manner if you will stay here only!”

He groped his way to her key ring, and headed down the steep steps and across the yard through the storm, grateful to the Ruggles gals if this was their doing. For while it had to be playing hell in the wheat fields all around, the widely spaced but seriously thudding hail served to mask any footfalls of a barefoot boy with a key ring in one hand and a six-gun in the other.

He crouched in the storm on the back steps as he slowly turned a key in the backdoor lock, braced for nasty surprises even though he knew that the big vault hadn’t been visible from the kitchen.

As he cracked the door open he heard someone whisper, “What was that?” deeper in the darkness. A louder, more assured voice replied, “Stray draft from somewheres. Told you it was going to rain fire and brimstone tonight. Knew Heger never gave them the money. Got the soap in place. So hand over that dynamite juice and … Careful, you butterfingered … Jesus!”

Longarm threw himself out of line with the doorway and hit the kitchen floor as the darkness was rent by a thunderous blast! His breath was sucked out of him by the shock wave through the air as the whole building bucked on its foundations. Then it got deathly quiet, save for the soft steady dripping of something soggy stuck to a wall somewhere in the smoke-and-nitro-fume-filled darkness.

Longarm gingerly raised his cheek from the waxed floorboards and softly muttered, “He told you to be careful, you poor butterfingered bucket of blood and guts!”

Chapter 13

It wasn’t easy and some buttons were still loose, but Longarm was coming in through the back door again as Wemer Sattler and some of his deputies were climbing through the busted-out front of the shop with more light to shed on the subject.

Longarm joined them, Winchester down at his side, as one of them held a lantern high and retched in the side room just behind the front shop. Longarm swallowed hard. He’d seen worse in the war, but there was little more than two pairs of bloody boots and blood all around to show where at least two men had been standing. The naked and partly skinned cadaver jammed in a far corner, stuck to the walls in a seated position, had apparently been a fat woman with gray hair.

Longarm said, “I heard. Sounded like dynamite, or nitroglycerine. The laundry soap wedged in the door grooves of yonder vault tells a tale of tinhorn safecrackers who didn’t know what they were doing!”

Sattler pointed at the fat cadaver in the corner and said, “That was Brunhilda Maler, the washerwoman those other dead crooks had holed up with down by the creek. I remember when she got that gold tooth in the front.”

The younger deputy holding the lamp gasped, “Lieber Gott! That pair of Texas boots with Mexican stitching I remember Hans Decker away for sending!”

Sattler swore softly under his breath and told another deputy to go check on another deputy named Decker. He added as an afterthought, “See if Josef Lehrer is all right. The last time I saw him today, he was wearing a striped shirt that matches a rag I see stuck to that other wall!”

As the deputy tore out the front Longarm tried the handle of the vault, saying, “Seems undamaged, save for some chipped paint. It’s just as well they blew themselves up instead. They must have had a heap more nitro than professionals would have thought they needed. What’s the sad tale of them fancy Texas boots, Marshal? You say one of your own sent away for ‘em?”

Sattler sighed and replied, “Good help is hard to find. If I was right about that scrap of shirt material, it adds up to malfeasance. All my deputies knew we suspected old Brunhilda of sheltering the safecrackers. They went and made a deal with her. It’s a good thing for us she tagged along to make sure she got her cut. I don’t know how I might have pictured this mess with just my two dead deputies to hint at what might have happened.”

Longarm nodded soberly. “It does add up to wayward youths and a cunning old trash woman biting off more than they knew how to chew. You don’t learn to handle high explosives by just reading about ‘em in the Police Gazette. But what do you reckon they were after in yon vault? Hadn’t we agreed old Fingers and Juicy Joe had come to town to crack your bank vault?”

Sattler hesitated, then said, “Hell, you’re the law too. But I hope you understand this is a sensitive secret.”

Longarm snorted in disgust and allowed he was a part-time reporter for the Denver Post.

The older lawman must not have thought he meant it. He said, “The three of them must have had more faith than some of us. I warned the elders they were dealing with an outsider. But they thought Heger, being popular with some of his customers over in Cedar Bend, could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“You’re talking about those rainmaking Ruggles sisters,” Longarm said flatly.

Sattler nodded. “That short sharp storm’s blown over as suddenly as it began. But it’s the simple truth that those Hexen have not gone away and left our wheat alone.”

Longarm said, “I doubt that summer hail was occasioned by dynamite in the sky or dancing about with snakes. But how was Horst Heger going to drive those weather witches away so sweetly? With money instead of honey?”

Sattler nodded soberly. “Eighteen thousand dollars and change, collected a few dollars here and a few dollars there from all the Brethren homesteaders. We’d heard the corn growers to the north had posted less than that in escrow, hoping for rain. We didn’t want any rain, with our own fields ready to harvest. You see, if the ground-“

“I know about reaping machines getting stuck in mud,” Longarm cut in. “Let’s stick to all that money Horst Heger’s supposed to bribe those Ruggles sisters with!”

Sattler made a sweeping gesture at the battered walls of the tiny shop and asked, “Do you see either Heger or the money here? Do you think those rainmakers would take the hard-earned tithings of this whole Gemeinschaft to stop making rain, and then go on and curse our fields with hail?”

Longarm said, “That storm passed over before it could have done enough damage to ruin anybody, and your wheat growers have sold a heap of futures, meaning they get paid the same for a poor crop as a good one, right?”

Sattler nodded down at the cadaver in the corner as he said, “That’s where the real money would have been tonight. The three of them must have thought Heger would have been dumb enough to skip out on all his bills and leave the money he never gave those Hexen in his deserted shop!”

As if to prove that last statement wrong the shopgal, Helga, came in to join them, bodice laced prim and blue eyes big as saucers as she marveled, “Herr Gott! So Unordnung und wer ist das im Ecke?”

Longarm was surprised how much of that he could follow as Helga stared in horror at the mangled lady in the corner. He told her not to look and suggested she cut some cake out in the kitchen, for it was shaping up to be a busy night.

He didn’t know how truly he’d spoken until that kid deputy tore back in to pant that neither Decker nor Lehrer seemed anywhere to be found. Then he made it worse by adding, “Kurt Morgenstern just gathered a posse over by the creek!”

Sattler gasped, “He can’t do that! Kurt’s a damned blacksmith, not a lawman!”

The Mennonite kid said, “I don’t think Kurt and those others care. They say they’re riding over to Cedar Creek to put those rain Hexen out of business one way or the other! They say they paid for it to stay dry, not to have it hail. So they want their money back too!”

Longarm didn’t ask where they were going as he chased Sattler out the front way. He said, “My hired ponies would be behind that Morgenstern’s smithy, assuming he’s half as honest as he expected Heger to be. You go on and get your own self going and with any luck I’ll catch up with you along the way!”

Sattler didn’t argue. They just ran their separate ways, and so it wasn’t long before Longarm was splashing across Sappa Creek on the paint, alone in the renewed moonlight—and what in blue blazes was the matter with this fool pony?

Horseflesh, like humanflesh, was heir to the same agues and cramps that made it easier to run at some times than at others. It was too late to go back for the other pony by the time he was back on the higher range of the Lazy B and still hadn’t been able to get the paint loosened up to lope right. You could do a heap of damage to a mount if you pushed it too hard with a sprained ligament, swollen frog, or whatever. So he cut off to his left, hoping it wasn’t too late at night, and saw to his relief that all the front windows were lit up as he rode toward the Lazy B home spread.

Iona MacSorley and her ramrod, Martin Link, came out on the veranda as Longarm reined in, saying, “Got to get over to Cedar Bend on the double and this pony’s gone lame. Could you help me out with a fresh mount?”

Iona told Link to see to it, and he lit out across the yards as if she’d snapped his ass with her riding quirt. It seemed possible she had. But she acted as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth as she invited Longarm inside while her hands took care of more mundane chores.

He politely declined and headed after Link afoot, leading the paint by its reins. As she fell in beside him, pouty-lipped, he explained he was on his way to prevent possible harm to Some other gals. Iona asked which one he was sparking.

Longarm laughed and assured her he hadn’t sparked with either of those rainmaking gals, which was the simple truth as soon as you left Helga out of it.

As they got to the stable, Link and Trooper O’Donnel were leading a bigger roan outside on its rope halter. Link said, “Rocket here can carry a man your size to glory. She stands sixteen hands and if you see a fence in your way, she’ll jump it for you.”

“Irish bloodlines,” Trooper O’Donnel chimed in with just a hint of smugness.

Longarm just got cracking to get his saddle and bridle aboard the big roan mare. As they helped him, the two Lazy B riders who’d been such a help in that saloon offered to ride along with him if he wanted to wait up just a few minutes.

He said he doubted there’d be shooting if he got there soon enough. Then he forked himself aboard the bigger pony and lit out to get there soon enough.

They’d been right about the roan’s strength and speed. She’d have been a pleasure to ride nowhere in particular. She tore on across a rolling sea of moonlit grass with her hooves pounding steady on sod rendered just right for pounding by that passing summer storm. Cows and night critters scattered as they tore through the night, but the ride was so steady Longarm was able to think as clearly as if he’d been seated in a rocking chair, mulling over all those odd goings-on. The only trouble was, mull as he might, he couldn’t figure out what in blue blazes could be going on!

Chapter 14

You didn’t have to be Mexican to engage in Mexican standoffs. An even number of prudently hot-tempered men from Sappa Crossing and Cedar Bend had lined up along a prairie rise just south of Cedar Bend to shake fists and brandish weapons. The mostly native-born barley or corn growers who needed rain stood their ground, on foot, in a sort of infantry skirmish line. The mostly Germanic wheat growers had reined in short of the bonfires along the rise to sit their nervous mounts nervously as, out in the middle, a dismounted clump of leaders, whether elected or self-appointed, seemed to be arguing about who the Good Lord and the Thunder Bird should love the most.

As Longarm rode in with his badge pinned on his denim jacket, he called out, “I wish you gents would quit looking daggers and glance up at the starry sky above us! That line squall was a natural fluke that anyone but an Eastern greenhorn or a stubborn Dutchman would expect more than once a summer!”

A Cedar Bend man Longarm recognized as one of old Dad Jergens’s deputies bawled, “Try to tell that to these fool furriners! Such rain as we got with that hail was barely enough to lay the durned dust, and the hail played bob with our poor parched cornstalks!”

Kurt Morgenstern, the usually more friendly smith from Sappa Crossing, growled loudly, “Our quarrel is not with you Yankee homesteaders. If you want to plow at the wrong time for this climate, we agree it’s a free country. But it’s not supposed to rain at this time of the year, and we don’t want it to rain at this time of the year. So we paid those Ruggles sisters to stop trying to make it rain, and it rained, and we want our money back!”

An older Cedar Bend man yelled, “That ain’t the way we heard it! All we got was a mess of busted down corn stalks. So we ain’t paying them that rain bounty the bank was holding in escrow, and neither one of ‘em is down in the valley behind us!

The Cedar Bend deputy declared, “They left earlier this evening, before that hailstorm. For they’d run out of dynamite and none of us would extend ‘em any more credit!”

Morgenstern demanded, “Why won’t you let us pass then?”

Longarm announced, “Same reason you boys from Sappa Crossing would guard your wheat fields from night riders, Kurt! As a paid-up lawman I’d be honor bound to side with anyone being unlawfully and unfairly trespassed until such time as his federal homestead has been proven and deeded fee simple! But the man just told you those rainmaking gals ain’t hiding in any of their corn fields, and I for one believe him. I never would have asked them to scare my stock with dynamite to begin with, and no offense, you’ve all been acting mighty unscientific.”

Morgenstern demanded, “How can you say that? One of my customers showed us the newspaper article saying they had a government patent for their rainmaking balloon!”

Longarm shook his head wearily and explained. “You mean you saw how a bearded wonder who calls himself a scientist patented a method of setting off dynamite under a balloon without losing the balloon. The U.S. Patent Office demands a working model if you’re trying to patent a perpetual-motion machine. But most of the time they’ll issue you a patent on most anything that just might work, whether anyone would ever want one or not.”

He saw he had their attention. So he got out a cheroot and lit it to give them more time to think before he continued. “The drugstores are filled with patent medicines because, next to mixing up a medicine that cures something, nothing beats a patent number on the label as a reason to buy. It’s the mixture in the bottle that you get the patent on. The contents don’t have to do anything. I hope, by now you’ve all seen how much rain you get using Dan’l Ruggles’s patented sky bombs. Whether those two gals were bombing the sky with either his permit or knowledge is moot. Like I told the older one earlier, it ain’t a federal offense to practice quack science.”

“What about Hexerie?” asked an old country wheat grower as if he meant it.

Longarm replied, “If you’re talking about witchcraft, that’s even more impossible. I’ve never understood why grown men and women can’t show the common sense of Miss Esmeralda, that Gypsy gal in the yarn by Mon-Sewer Victor Hugo.”

That made some of them laugh uncertainly, and nobody seemed to follow his drift. So Longarm explained. “They brung this Miss Esmeralda before the king to fess up to being a witch, seeing everybody knew Gypsies had such secret powers.”

Some of the men in the crowd allowed they’d heard as much.

Longarm blew smoke out both nostrils and said, “Miss Esmeralda had more sense. She asked the king, if he had secret powers, if he’d prefer to wander the world homeless and ragged-ass, having poached hedgehogs for supper and swiping apples for dessert. The king didn’t have to study long to follow her drift. He was a smart old bird, for a king. But then this witch hunter who’d been turned down by Miss Esmeralda thought up some more charges. Witch hunters can always come up with more charges, since proving you ain’t a witch is tougher than proving you ain’t never coveted thy neighbor’s ox or ass. But had Miss Esmeralda pled innocent in my court, I reckon I’d have had to agree with her simple defense.”

He heard men on both sides muttering that his words made sense, to the extent they had anything to do with that damned hailstorm.

Then old Wemer Sattler finally caught up with Longarm, not saying where on earth he’d been, as he called out, “You had no right to call a posse together without asking me, Kurt. What are you trying to do, a range war start? Das gefallt mt’r nicht, Dummkoff!”

Longarm saw Martin Link and Trooper O’Donnel along with the six or eight Sappa Crossing riders with Sattler. He didn’t ask whether they’d all met up on the range or whether the Sappa Crossing boys had detoured to recruit some more regular Americans.

Kurt Morgenstern called out, “We’re not here to fight with these spring planters, Marshal. We gave Horst Heger good money to pay those Hexen off and since they didn’t stop, we want our money back!”

Old Wemer snorted in disgust and said, “Es tut mir leid, I you have all been golden bricks sold by that Berlinisch schwindler! He never gave any money to those American girls. He never paid the back wages of poor Helga Pilger or also Katz the Lebensmittel handler for over two months already! He said he would try to pay those Ruggles sisters off with the money your committee collected, Kurt. Then he rode away with it, leaving everyone the bag to hold!”

Another Sappa Crossing man protested, “You mean he abandoned his shop and all those guns?”

Sattler shrugged and said, “He wasn’t selling enough of them to pay his bills. It was not at all wise to let him get his hands on so much cash all at once, nicht wahr?”

Trooper O’Donnel piped up, his English a contrast to the Mennonite version Longarm was getting used to. “I can tell you how pressed he was for cash. I dropped by a week or so back to have him outfit my store-bought S&W with ivory grips. He asked me to pay in advance. He said the factory back East wouldn’t send ‘em C.O.D. any more.”

There came a thoughtful rumble from men on both sides who’d dealt with the missing gunsmith. A Cedar Bend man called out, “He was never the same after his woman run off on him. Did you get them ivory grips, Trooper?”

The Lazy B rider grinned in the moonlight and called back, “I sure did. From Miss Helga when she filled my pre-paid order. You can ask her if you like. My point is that her boss was cutting things close to the bone, and your marshal here tells me you laid more money on him than his business would take in all year if business had been better! No offense, boys, but that was just plain dense!”

Kurt Morgenstern asked the Cedar Bend lawman defensively if they were sure Horst Heger hadn’t paid off those Ruggles sisters.

The deputy shrugged and said, “If he did, they sure spent it all in a hurry. They left here ragged-ass-broke and begging us for eating money as far as the railroad.”

The burly smith wanted to ride on after them anyway.

Longarm raised his voice to announce, “I have some wires to send. I’ll ride after them and see what they have to say in McCook. I don’t want anyone else butting in. So now I’ll be riding on, and anybody following this child by moonlight will be in considerable peril, for like the Indian chief said, I have spoken!”

Chapter 15

The difference between your average livery mount and a good cow pony was the difference between a schoolyard bully and a full-grown prizefighter. The roan mare loped with a mile-eating rotary gait. Her left hoof hit the sod ahead of the right, then her left and right rear hooves landed in the same order so her powerful haunches could launch her forward for another quick round. Rocket was a good name for her.

The late night air was chilled by that brief storm, and the melting hail had left cool clear water puddles almost anywhere man and mount wanted to rein in for a five-minute breather. So they made time that old Pony Express would have been proud of, and got into McCook as the sky was pearling lighter to the east.

To save tedious conversations about other horseflesh at the livery, Longarm stabled old Rocket behind the hotel near the Western Union. Then he hired himself a room near the bath, and went across the way to send a mess of telegrams.

Knowing he wouldn’t have any answers for a spell, he found an all-night beanery near the railroad stop and ordered waffles with plenty of butter and sorghum syrup to go with his ham and eggs.

As he sat at the counter smiling back at the waitress, who’d dressed up as a Harvey Gal but flirted with the customers anyhow, he got her to jawing about current events in the prairie railroad town. Hardly anybody heard as much small-town gossip as a hash slinger in an all-night beanery. She said some railroad yard hands had been jawing about a real looker camped in a Gypsy wagon over on the far side of the water tower, just off railroad property.

Longarm changed the subject to other strangers who might have had a coffee or more while waiting for a train. It was easy to see the sass took considerable interest in such customers. It was a shame she was so flat-chested and had such a silly grin. But even after he identified himself as the law and encouraged her to think harder, she failed to recall anyone answering to his description of either Wolf Ritter or that missing gunsmith, Heger. She wasn’t the first one he’d talked to who’d pointed out that neither description was all that astonishing. Men around forty, of medium height and build, with dishwater-blond or light brown hair maybe going gray, had a coffee or even a glazed donut all the time while passing through town.

He decided he’d have a glazed donut with his second cup of black coffee too. She’d been able to tell him that someone who sounded like a Ruggles sister had made it to town ahead of him. So neither Ritter nor Heger could have ridden in whooping like a Texas badman while shooting at street lamps.

He left a dime tip to show he’d noticed how friendly she’d been, and went back outside in the dawning light to find his way afoot to at least one big red wagon.

It was light enough to make out distant colors by the time he’d waded through trackside weeds past the water tower. So he knew those two bulky wagons farther out than he’d expected had to be the rainmaking expedition.

As he strode in, he found the younger one who seemed to do all the work seated on the fold-down steps of their circus quarters in the lighter of the two. There was no sign of the mules they’d had back near Cedar Bend, and the gal looked as if she’d been crying. Her feet were bare and her light brown hair was unbound as she sat there in a dragon-splattered kimono of fake silk, poking at a dead cookfire with a stick. As she spied him approaching, she looked up with what he read as mixed hope and dread.

She said, “You’re that lawman who was talking to Roxanne down by Cedar Bend. Has she been arrested?”

Longarm ticked the brim of his hat at her and replied, “Not as far as I know, Miss Rowena. You gals made good time across the prairie with these big red wagons. You must have been driving like the devil in the flesh was after you.”

The gal smiled wanly and replied, “When you fail to work up as much as a heavy dew after weeks of corn killing drought, it’s not too safe to loiter about. We were halfway here when that damned line squall blew out of the west last night. I wanted to go back and see if we couldn’t at least parlay that into a few square meals. But I guess Roxanne was right. You quit when you’re ahead when your hydrogen acid runs out and you owe half the merchants in the county. She said when she went off with the little money we had left that she’d bring back at least some coffee and staples. I was half asleep when I agreed to it. Now I can see what she meant by quitting while she was ahead.”

Longarm said soothingly, “Ain’t hardly anything open in town at this hour. I didn’t think you were kin to the real Dan’l Ruggles, but you really are sisters, ain’t you?”

Rowena laughed wryly and replied, “Not exactly. We met as cell mates less than a year ago. I was doing six months for shoplifting. She’d served half her jolt for pulling the old Gypsy switch on the wrong alderman’s wife. But you’ve had time to find out all about us, being as professional in your own way, right?”

Longarm didn’t want her to think he wasn’t omnipotent. So he had no call to ask how two adventurous young gals had come by all this rainmaking flim-flammery. He said, “I told your sister—I mean Miss Roxanne—your confidence game wasn’t covered by federal statute. I want you to keep that in mind as I ask you a more serious question. I ain’t after you on any charge, and such money as you may or may not have betwixt you is none of my beeswax. Do we understand one another so far?”

The disconsolate gal in the thin kimono shrugged her sort of pretty shoulders and asked, “What ‘s to understand about money we don’t have? I told you we were run off as nearly flat-broke failures. We were so sure it just had to rain after weeks and weeks without any.”

He said, “Welcome to the High Plains in summertime. I know about the escrow fund set up for you ladies by the Grange at Cedar Bend. That was the money you never got because it never rained before you ran out of gas for your balloons. Do you have any of that dynamite left, by the way?”

She said, “Only a few sticks. Roxanne thought she might be able to trade them and the mules for food in town. Maybe she did. There was a morning train through here just before dawn. Have you ever listened to a railroad whistle in the wee small hours, wondering who was on it, going where?”

Longarm said, “I heard that same whistle a mile or so out on the prairie, and wondered much the same, only not about Miss Roxanne. To get back to my reasons for pestering you like this, I was told an old boy from Sappa Crossing had been commissioned to pay the two of you good money if it didn’t rain. His name was Horst Heger. Middle-aged Dutchman, albeit not one of them Mennonites. Your turn.”

She shrugged and said, “Do I look like anyone’s just handed me one whole silver dollar? Some of those Dutch homesteaders to the south did ride over to cuss at us when we were sending up our fool balloon. Lord knows why. We thought all farmers wanted rain. But the Cedar Bend boys wouldn’t let them near us. I don’t recall anyone called Horse, for land’s sake. So where’s all this money he was supposed to give us?”

Longarm said, “I’m still working on that. I just sent a mess of wires, hoping for details nobody around here seems able, or willing, to help me out with. I figure I might have a better grasp on some of ‘em before this day is done. Meanwhile, I’ve had a long hard night and a man gets some rest when he gets the chance. So I thank you for clearing at least one of those details up, and I’ll get out of your way now, Miss Rowena.”

She told him he wasn’t in her way as she faced some worries of her own. But he ticked his hat brim again and strode off anyway as, behind him, the young gal in the kimono seemed to be sobbing her lonely heart, or empty stomach, out.

Longarm knew better. It wasn’t as if they paid him all that well, and the young sass doubtless deserved a hard time. But once he was back on McCook’s main street, he sauntered into a grocery he found open and had them fill a paper sack with simple but hearty canned goods and a fair grade of coffee. Nobody but a regular Don Quixote would spring for genuine Arbuckle Brand he’d never get to drink.

When he asked if there were any other groceries open that early, he was told there were none and that he was their first customer of the day. So it seemed it took a Ruggles sister to know a Ruggles sister and there old Roxanne went, with all their money and some dynamite as well! You could hardly blame little Rowena for bawling a mite.

As he strode back along the railroad tracks with his gun hand free, as was his custom, two burly gents in railroad overalls cut him off, one packing a baseball bat while the other backed his play with a sawed-off Greener 12-gauge. So Longarm called out, “Howdy. I ain’t looking for a free train ride. I’m just out to deliver some grub to a lady, and I’m sorry my route takes me across this stretch of your right-of-way.”

The one in the lead with the baseball bat smiled wolfishly and said, “We’ll see how sorry we may have to make you, pilgrim. You say that sack’s for that whore camped down the line with them circus wagons?”

Longarm stopped just out of easy batting range and replied, “She ain’t a whore. She’s a flimflam, and only one of them wagons is a circus wagon. The other one’s a gas generator, only right now it’s empty and easier to move. I would be the law, federal, and both wagons are on federal open range right now, if it’s all the same to you.”

The yard bull growled, “Anyone can say they’re anything. Where’s your badge if you ain’t nothing but a saddle tramp in duds no fancier than our’n?”

Longarm wasn’t about to have both hands full at the same time in such uncertain times. So he hunkered to set the groceries on the path before he rose back to his considerable full height with his billfold open in his left hand to flash badge and identification.

The yard bull peered hard, blinked, and said, “Great day in the morning if you ain’t that one they call Longarm! I surely hope you understand we were only doing our job, Deputy Long!”

Longarm put the billfold away and hunkered down for the groceries again as he said, “Doing 1 right too. I respect any man who takes his job serious, and we’ve agreed this path runs across railroad property.”

He rose again and, as they made way for him, added, “Don’t spread it about, but the ladies camped down the line may be government witnesses at a federal trial in the near future. So I’d be obliged if nobody pestered ‘em before they’re ready to move on.”

The railroaders swore on their mothers’ heads that nobody would go anywhere near those red wagons while they drew breath. So Longarm went on and, finding nobody seated on those fold-down steps this time, strode almost to the back door before he saw the naked lady giving herself a sponge bath at the counter inside.

She saw him at the same time and hunkered down, with her knees and elbows only managing to hide the most private details of her willowy young body.

Longarm moved out of the line of sight, calling out in too cheerful a tone, “I brung you some grub to tide you over till you figure out your next moves, Miss Rowena. I’m sorry I surprised you like that. I didn’t see nothing important and I’ll be on my way now.”

He meant it, but as he turned away she called out to him, and so the next time he saw her she was standing in her doorway with that kimono back on.

She demanded to know the meaning of that sack on her steps. Longarm moved back toward her, explaining, “You ought to be able to sell two wagons for enough to carry you on to fame and fortune in other parts, Miss Rowena. But meanwhile you have to eat, and when a body with something to sell is really hungry, some buyers can tell. I had to sell a good pony for eating money one time, and I sure hate to see a skinflint take advantage of an empty belly.”

She said he was either a saint or out to take advantage of her empty belly, adding in a hangdog tone, “Not that I have much choice, and it’s not as if you’re old and ugly.”

He shook his head and said, “Being a crook has ruined your faith in the rest of mankind, Miss Rowena. It was you who just called me back, as I recall. You paid in advance for barely two dollars’ worth of coffee and staples by clearing up that matter of a missing gunsmith. Leastways, you’ve convinced me he never gave you ladies the money he was Supposed to. You’d have both been long gone by now if you had the small fortune that seems to be missing along with Horst Heger!”

He started to turn away again. She called out that she had no matches to start another cookfire. As he ambled back to give her some, she said she wanted to hear all about that gunsmith she’d never heard of, and asked if he couldn’t at least have some coffee with her.

So Longarm wound up gathering more kindling while Rowena got out her fancy coffee percolator and filled it with canteen water and a cheaper brand than he’d have chosen had he known he’d be invited to drink some of it.

On the prairie you found wind-fallen branches about as often as you found lost silver dollars. But there was plenty of dried sunflower stems, wind-cured tumbleweed, and such to crumple up under well-dried cow pats. But it took such a fire a time to boil water. So it was a good thing Rowena shared his wicked tobacco vice. They got to sit on the steps side by side and share a cheroot for a spell as he brought her up to date on all his tearing back and forth across the prairie of late.

But she was too hungry to hold out for coffee with her beans, and so she opened a can and ate them cold with gusto. Longarm had figured grub you could eat cold from the can might be best. He didn’t tell her what a swell breakfast he’d just had when he declined her kind offer to share her meal.

By the time they were sharing some coffee she was thinking clearer on a fuller stomach, and decided Horst Heger had indeed skipped out on his pals with all that money. She stared morosely at the telegraph poles alongside the nearby railroad as she said she knew the feeling.

He shrugged and said, “I’ve run across such tales of woe a heap in my travels. Folks who never set out to betray a trust just find it too tough to be trustworthy, feeling broke and desperate with temptation winking and pointing down the primrose path.”

She murmured, “That bitch said I was her one and only friend in this cruel world. Those wheat farmers have seen the last of that bribe their pal was supposed to offer Roxanne and me, unless … Oh, no! What if that Dutchman did get through to Roxanne, behind my back, and that was why we left Cedar Bend so suddenly? I never actually heard any of those corn growers telling us to leave!”

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring at the dying fire near their feet before he said, “Works either way. You’ve about convinced me you haven’t been eating regular as your average rich lady. But forget anything they ever told you about honor among thieves. Old thieves tell that whopper to young thieves. You’d know better than me how well you really know your older pal, Miss Roxanne.”

Rowena laughed, in an oddly dirty way, and softly replied, “I’d been led to believe we were more than pals. Adventurous women can’t afford to take too many men into their confidence. But I guess when you get right down to it, anyone with confidence in you is a mark to a confidence woman, but damn it, she told me she really loved me!”

Longarm whistled softly and quietly said, “I’m starting to see why she left you feeling so teary-eyed. I’ve noticed how many shady folk seem to wind up more than friends. I’ve never decided whether you get that way being locked up so long with nobody of the opposite gender, or whether owlhoot riders who can’t afford to be too trusting find the notion more practical.”

He blew another smoke ring and continued. “I recall reading about this Greek general, Alexander, who ordered his army to satisfy one another as best they could at night rather than let barbarian gals wander all about their fortified camps after dark. That Was what the old-time Greeks called these white folks who behaved a mite like our modern Indians, barbarians. But our army gives you a dishonorable discharge if they catch you in the same bunk with another trooper, Indian country or not.”

“I’m not a lesbian,” Rowena pouted. Then she added, “At least I don’t think I’m a lesbian. What do you call a girl who only pleasures herself with another girl when, like you say, they have her locked up or surrounded by stupid hayseeds?”

Longarm shrugged and replied, “Practical? it works both ways, you know. Your erstwhile partner in pluviculture could have been scratching her own itches the same way and, now that you’ve run out of work, lit out with the proceeds. But if it’s any comfort to you, I doubt she’d have been so mean if she’d had all that money from Horst Heger. When I talked to her she struck me as smart, and it would have been dumb to strand you like this if she was running for the hills with real money.”

Rowena was too smart herself to need diagrams on any blackboard. She nodded thoughtfully and said, “Fifty dollars or less would have taken us both far and wide before she ducked out on me, and so you’d never have been having this conversation about her with me.”

Longarm didn’t answer. There was no call to say she was right when they both knew it.

Rowena borrowed the cheroot and took a deep drag on it before she handed it back and said, “Well, thanks to you and the way my brain is starting to tick again, I suppose I’ll just sit tight till I’m sure she’s not coming back. Then I’ll get dressed and go into town to see who’d like to buy all this useless gear and be on my way back East. I was planning on trying my luck as a stage dancer before Roxanne sold me this bill of goods and taught me some other bad habits. Maybe it’s not too late for me and the stage.”

Longarm had finished the cheroot. He ground it out in the dirt with a boot heel and declared, “I’m sure you’ll make a great stage dancer. You’ve sure got the build for it. It’s been nice talking to you, but like I said, I was up all night and I have a hired bed waiting for me at my hotel, so …”

“What’s wrong with catching a few winks here?” Rowena asked, bold as brass. “I mean, we’ve plenty of room inside, with Roxanne gone and all.”

He laughed incredulously and said, “But I thought you were a lesbian!”

To which she demurely replied, “Maybe I am. Why don’t we find out?”

Longarm searched his mind for a reason not to, decided he’d wind up sore at himself in either case, and helped her up those steps by playfully pinching her firm bottom.

The innards of her circus wagon were partitioned into two rooms, with the smaller one in back the bedroom. He saw what she’d meant about the space her missing pal had once taken up. The bed filling most of the chamber was ample for two, and it was the only bed there was.

Rowena was on it, naked and giggling, before he could even shed his hat and gun rig. But he sat down and she helped him shuck the rest in no time, and then they were both in the center of the bed, atop the quilts, and she was starting to cry some more. So he stopped just in time to ask what in blue blazes was wrong now.

She said, “I’m sorry. I’m trying to respond like a sweetheart, but my last man abused me and scared me, and it’s been a while since I’ve done it with any sort of man!”

He didn’t offer to roll off and get dressed. He didn’t like to make promises he couldn’t keep. But he did lay side by side with her in the nude and kiss her, more gently, in the soft rainbow glow from her small stained-glass skylight.

She kissed back, less shyly and with more tongue, as he let her get used to his strange body pressed to her own. She didn’t resist as he ran his free hand down between them to part her pubic hairs with two fingers and softly strum her old banjo. She tried to return the favor and then, finding herself with a delicate hand filled with throbbing cock, marveled, “Oh, you’re already hard and yet so considerate! That other brute made me suck him hard and then he’d shove-“

“I don’t want to hear,” Longarm said, shushing her with a warm wet kiss as he commenced to strum faster in jig time. As he did so Rowena gasped, “Oh, Lord, You’re making me so hot, darling!”

So he just rolled into her welcoming love saddle, and it sure felt swell to sink his raging erection into its overdue reward with his eyes closed and two young gals taking turns up and down his shaft with their tight hungry love maws. But he remembered who he was supposed to be doing it with when Rowena suddenly gasped, “Roxanne! We weren’t expecting you back.”

Longarm didn’t stop. He might have, with a gun to his head, but he was fixing to come as he craned his head to smile sheepishly up at the older and darker gal in the doorway and said, “Morning, ma’am. I would stand up in your presence but, just now, that might be sort of embarrassing to both of us!”

Roxanne laughed harshly.

Rowena wasn’t able to stop moving her hips either, but she was sobbing as she declared, “I wasn’t messing with a mark, darling. I thought you’d run out on me and this one is the law!”

Her older and darker lover demurely replied, “I know who this is. Albeit he had his pants on the last time we spoke. Heavens, will you look at those muscles ripple. How is he hung, honey?”

Rowena gasped, “Gloriously! And I’m comingggg!”

That made two of them. So Longarm wasn’t keeping track of anything but the sweetest tightest pussy in the world as Roxanne was explaining how she’d sold their mules and had a possible buyer for this particular wagon.

As she got in bed with them, naked as a jay, she said, “Nobody I tried seems to have any use for the old signal corps gas generator. Why don’t we go sixty-nine while he takes turns pronging us or, better yet, throws a good old-fashioned long-donging into the survivor?”

Longarm wasn’t too sure he followed their drift. But he made a grab for fresh meat as Roxanne literally rolled him off her younger pal.

The more fleshy and voluptuous Roxanne kissed him back, but then she shoved his hand away from her hairier crotch, purring, don’t be so impatient. That prospective buyer isn’t coming to look this wagon over until this afternoon, and you could obviously use a breather!”

That was the simple truth. So Longarm reclined on one elbow with a bemused smile as Roxanne took his place with Rowena. It was sort of interesting to watch the way lesbian gals went at it when neither had a dick.

At least, they surely acted like lesbian gals. They kissed a heap, and then Roxanne started kissing her way down Rowena’s slender form, dark hair trailing across heaving breasts and excited belly as the older gal cocked one shapely thigh over her partners to settle down in her face like a biddy hen fixing to hatch something.

So a good time was had by both as Longarm watched, feeling ever more inspired as the two of them gave one another some experienced and far from delicate licking.

From the way they were both moaning and groaning as they slurped, it seemed up for grabs who’d be coming first. But as the older gal must have known, and Longarm should have guessed, the less controlled younger one came first, sobbing aloud, “It’s not fair but don’t stop!”

So the smoldering Roxanne gave her a few good licks, and then she rolled off to lay spread-eagled between her two bed partners, saying, “Whee! I’m right on the edge but I won! So let me call you sweetheart, cowboy!”

Longarm’s old organ-grinder was feeling mighty edgy as well by then. So he chortled, “Powder River and let her buck!” as he mounted her and thrust home, hitting bottom, and Roxanne gasped, “Keerist! You might have warned me, Rowena!

But the younger gal was sitting up, pawing at Longarm’s bounding bare butt as she sobbed, “Hurry, hurry, do hurry, and then do it to me some more!”

Longarm couldn’t answer with Roxanne swabbing his tonsils with her tongue as she gyrated her bigger hips in jig time with his long-donging. How had he ever thought anyone else had the best damned pussy in the world when this was obviously it?

Of course, once the three of them had shared an after-orgasmic cheroot and he was dog-styling Rowena while the friendly child ate her older mentoress, she did feel a tad tighter. So then he had to put it in the moaning and groaning Roxanne some more to make sure, and in the end he was damned if he could decide whether he enjoyed hot pulsating wetness or wiggly-smooth tightness more. The grandest thing about women, bless them, was that nine out of ten of them were worth screwing, while that tenth one was worth it as a change of pace.

Chapter 16

No lawman with the brains of a gnat would have let himself fall asleep among thieves, and Roxanne had said that prospective buyer was due to show up any time after noon. So neither gal seemed to feel insulted when Longarm finally hauled ass out of there walking funny.

He made it back to his hotel, forced himself to take the time for a bath down the hall, and flopped bare-ass and alone across his hotel bed to catch forty winks through the hotter half of the day.

He felt way better after close to six hours’ sleep. Longarm arose around sundown to shit and shave, pay his hotel bill, and inhale some steak and mashed potatoes with plenty of black coffee downstairs.

At the Western Union he found answers to some of those earlier wires waiting for him. None of them told him all that much at first glance. He wadded them up and put them in a breast pocket of his jacket to go over again later. For as anyone who’d ever taken out a bank loan could tell you, it was easy to miss serious shit in the small print.

He picked up a sack of feed on his way to get old Rocket. As they helped him saddle and bridle her, Longarm lashed the trail rations to the saddle, balancing the Winchester’s boot on the far side, and told the perky roan, “We ain’t fixing to stop for conversations about your species along the way, Rocket. For I’ve a weak nature around women and we’re in a hurry.”

He led her outside in the gloaming, tipped the young stable hands, and mounted up, saying to old Rocket, “I make her a day’s cavalry ride if we push on through to old Helga and that swell carriage house without stopping anywheres along the way for more than a trail break. I’ll get you back to the Lazy B on my return swing, as I redistribute all you ponies.”

Rocket didn’t argue. Once they were south of the railroad tracks he let her have her head, and she loped as if she’d felt cooped up in that stall all day. She likely had. Mankind and horseflesh got along so well because a healthy horse enjoyed running across firm grasslands as much as most folks liked to ride.

But by the time they were even with her home spread, Longarm was a mite tempted to swing over and see how that paint felt about carrying him the rest of the way. For old Rocket was commencing to show the effects of her sportive gallop the night before.

It was only in Ned Buntline’s Wild West Magazine that true-blue cowboys rode one true-blue steed at least as smart as a math teacher. A well-founded beef outfit kept six or seven mounts for each human on the payroll. That way a man could get a hard day’s work out of a pony without permanent injury. He felt guilty about pushing another man’s pony this hard two long lopes in a row.

On the other hand it was after midnight by then, and Sappa Crossing lay almost within an hour’s ride downhill. So he pressed on, letting old Rocket walk every other furlong, till he had her in Heger’s snug carriage house, with Helga yelling things like “Wer is das?” down the stairs at them until he told her it was him, and then she wanted him to get right up stairs and into bed with her.

He chuckled fondly and told her he had a few less pleasant but more important chores to tend to first.

He tethered Rocket by the trough, unsaddled her, and rubbed her down with some handy sacking as she enjoyed some water and oats, in that important order, lest she bloat her fool self.

Then he picked up a manure shovel from another corner and went across to the gunsmith shop’s back door in the moonlight. He cussed when he recalled Helga’s key ring. But the back door wasn’t locked, bless her loss of interest in a boss who’d never paid her.

He went down to the cellar, lit that same lantern, and regarded the now dried-out dirt floor morosely. Save for a few tiny low spots hither and yon, the infernal floor had dried out evenly. You could smell stale piss and long-lost food scraps better now. But aside from being sort of sloppy as he worked at yon tool bench, the missing Horst Heger hadn’t hidden a dead wife down here after all.

Upstairs, in bed with Helga after the pleasant discovery that neither Rowena nor Roxanne had the best little pussies in the world after all, he told Helga about his experiment in the cellar across the way, and added, “He could have buried her under this carriage house and he could have buried her out back in his yard. But a man with a dirt-floored cellar he could work in with a constitutional right to privacy would be a total fool to bury her anywhere else.”

Helga shrugged a big soft shoulder and said, “I told you she had off with another man abluafen. We have more serious something to talk about, Custis.”

He cautiously asked what seemed more important than at least two missing persons. She said she’d been offered her old job back, and he agreed cleaning house for modest wages, room, and board had waiting here for Horst Heger beat.

He said, “They have a Western Union up in McCook. So by wiring all over I managed to establish that that horse and shay that Heger kept down below was left at a livery over to the county seat by a late-night customer who never came back.”

She asked if that meant her boss had hopped a train from there.

Longarm said, “Nope. They have a Western Union wire strung there, but so far, they’ve just been talking about a railroad spur to pick up all the grain hauled in to the county dealers and freighters. I never asked whether they haul it north or south to the rails from over yonder. Hauling grain more than fifty miles wipes out your profit. But like I said, that ain’t my problem.”

He took a thoughtful drag on the cheroot they were sharing and explained. “My problem is another missing man entirely. I’d be out of line searching for your missing boss if it wasn’t possible the man they sent me after had something to do with his vanishing. I told you why I was so interested in that LeMat revolver Heger was trying to sell at too high a price. What I’d really like you to do for me would be to teach me just a few words of High Dutch.”

Helga laughed incredulously and said, “Ficken mich immer wieder! Or at least let us until dawn do it. kh darf nichts carry on with you this way if I am back to work in a Mennonite home to go!”

He gallantly told her he’d try to be a sport about the need to be more discreet. She said she’d been so afraid he might not understand, and wanted to prove she was still mighty fond of him by getting on top. So he let her, but kept pestering her for easy words and phrases in her own native tongue as she enjoyed a nice steady lope with his old saddlehorn. She thought it was funny as well as fun, and asked him who in the world he was going to use such baby talk on.

He said, “Ain’t aiming to have a conversation. I’ve noticed, using way better Spanish, you can sometimes trick a suspect into an unwitting admission, or betraying guilty knowledge, by casually asking him something in his own mother tongue.”

So after she’d tongued him some while bouncing faster, and he’d returned the favor by rolling on top, Helga managed to teach him a few things that might come in handy if he was ever changing trains in that new Germanic Empire.

She said he tried too hard to gargle and spit, explaining most English speakers seemed to do that, even though nobody but those guttural Prussian Junkers really growled that much in High Dutch or Low.

He chuckled and asked, “You mean I could sound like a Prussian drillmaster if I put my gargles to it?”

She laughed and said he had his ramrod up the wrong way. Then she taught him how to snap “Achtung!” and suggested anyone who’d ever served Der Kaiser might be more inclined to pop to attention than a peaceful Mennonite. She had taught him some really dirty stuff to yell at folks by the time they just had to get some sleep.

He got enough to feel up to less pleasant chores by the time the good old gal had served him his breakfast in bed, and she tried not to cry as he got dressed and strapped on his gun ng. Neither one of them said anything about final good-byes as he kissed her at the head of those steep stairs and went on down them.

He made sure old Rocket had water in her trough, and promised he’d have her back out to the Lazy B as soon as he could. Then he headed up to the town hall.

As he entered Werner Sattler’s office, the older lawman asked what had taken him so blasted long. “We’re running out of time we can hold those safecrackers, Longarm. They’ve both been denying they ever even met that washerwoman or their two dead sidekicks.”

Longarm nodded and said, “We figured them for old cons. I’m sure the Founding Fathers never had real crooks in mind when they carved that Bill of Rights in stone. There’s a lot to be said for making us prove some damned charge or turning the rascals loose. But first things first.”

He got out the wad of telegrams, peeled off the list he’d penciled on the back of one after picking at half a dozen, and explained, “I was so long in getting back because they have a telegraph office up in McCook and I wired high and low. I only know a couple of the old boys I narrowed it down to on sight. I’d like you to go over these names and say who might look anything like your average deserter from that Kaiser’s cavalry. Did you know Junker comes from Jung Herr, or a young gentleman?”

Sattler snorted. “I thought it meant young lady. I know all the men I see on this penciled list. The only ones who’d fit Wolfgang von Ritter’s description can’t be him. Those wanted papers say the Prussian killer has been in this country less than ten years. Our few middle-aged gray-blond homesteaders of average height and wearing beards have all gotten that way by being here longer.”

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and pointed out, “I thought most of you Mennonites left the back steps of Russia around ‘73 or ‘74, at around the same time Wolf Ritter was fighting all those duels and mayhaps fixing to hop the same ship.”

Sattler said, “When I said here longer I meant here longer. Here in Kansas. That Prussian renegade fought other duels, or just shot men, all over this country while the rest of us were civilizing one particular part of Kansas. Nobody on this list is a new arrival. Why have you listed them to begin with?”

Longarm explained, “They’re old boys from around Sappa Crossing with money in the bank at the county seat. Your sheriff was proud to help the federal law with that, whether the county savings and loan was or not.”

Sattler said, “That’s no mystery. A lot of wheat growers buck their crops over there for sale. It’s easier to cash a check in any town you bank in. And you just agreed those two in the back were out to rob our one country bank.”

Longarm said, “I’d likely feel safer banking over to the county seat, across from the sheriff’s department, whether I’d come by the money one way or another. Let’s see if we can get Fingers Fawcett to help us out with Heger’s vault, seeing we can’t hold him much longer in any case.”

Sattler took a key ring from a wall hook and led the way, even as he protested it was a waste of time for them and too big a break for a known safecracker.

He said, “We know Horst Heger was given that money to pay off those rainmakers. You didn’t find it on them, did you?”

Longarm smiled wistfully at the image that conjured up as he said, “They didn’t have nothing on them, last I saw of them. They were fixing to hold a going-out-of-business sale. That means Heger never went near ‘em with that small fortune. Heger’s horse and shay wound up in another town entirely. But he never put toad squat in any bank at the county seat, and he’d have driven to McCook if he’d meant to take it with him aboard any railroad train.”

As Sattler jingled his keys along the corridor he insisted, “It would have been even dumber to leave the money in the vault at his shop and drive off to nowheres. I don’t know how those kid deputies got the notion they’d find money there when they let that ignorant washwoman talk them into using that dinamite juice the professionals had left with her.”

Longarm suggested they both ask. But when they got back to that patent cell and called the two crooks to the bars, neither one would admit he had any idea what they were talking about.

Longarm said, “Let’s try it another way. We need to get into that vault neither one of you knows anything about. it’s not nearly as tough a job as the bank vault you were interested in would have been. So we figure either one of you could crack it with one hand behind his back. Who’d like to spend another night in jail and who’d like to give it a try, with freedom to get way the hell out of these parts by sundown if he succeeds?”

From the way they both jumped at the offer Longarm suspected they could be sincere about never having heard of Heger’s fool vault.

Longarm chose Fingers as the one least likely to bust windows in town. Sattler let him out, locked the cell again, and said he’d catch up as soon as he rustled up a deputy to hold the fort there.

As Longarm and Fingers Fawcett walked the short distance to the missing gunsmith’s shop, the taller and younger deputy took advantage of the old crook’s friendlier attitude to ask his opinion on the grim mistakes those novice safecrackers had made the other night.

Fingers insisted he’d never met the late Brunhilda Maier, but he volunteered that if he was a kid led astray by a wicked older woman who might have somehow got hold of some nitroglycerine, you weren’t supposed to use that much of it, and you never held any loose in any bottle within a good fifty yards from any loud noises. The old con confided, “I’ve never liked to work with juice. If those awful crooks you keep asking me about were in town to bust into the bank, they only had that nitroglycerine along, in a sealed, totally filled bottle on a bed of cotton batting, as a last resort. The smart way is always the easy, least noisy way possible.”

They got to the shop and simply stepped through the front window, seeing some damned kids had pried off half the boards. Once inside the gloomy shop, Finger sniffed and asked, “Jesus, what’s that stink? It reminds me of this job I backed out of back East once I saw what the mastermind wanted me to do.”

Longarm said, “Tell me about it later. The vault’s this way.”

Werner Sattler caught up with them in the blood-spattered chamber as Fingers was gingerly working the combination with one ear pressed to the steel while Longarm held a lantern high for him. When the town law asked what they were doing, Longarm warned, “Hush a minute so he can listen for the tumblers to click inside.”

Sattler nodded and watched silently as the experienced old crook paused, wiping his sweaty fingertips on the front of his shirt, and said, “That’s three. There’s usually four to be fiddled for in this brand of lock. Let me get this old heart settled down. Like I was saying, this reminds me of the time I was recruited to open such a combination lock, leading into a family crypt. Seems they’d just put this old lady to rest with all her diamonds on, but I said no as soon as I literally got wind of what they wanted. You sure this gunsmith who ran off with all that money really ran off, Longarm?”

The lawman who’d recruited him said, “Stop stalling. Let’s open her up and see for ourselves.”

So Fingers got back to work and they did. The stench was incredible as the tight steel door swung open, and old Fingers ran into the kitchen to vomit out the back door. Werner Sattler just covered his mouth with a kerchief and stared goggled-eyed as Longarm raised the lantern higher for a better look at the horror that had been locked away for safekeeping all this time.

He soberly said, “You’d know better than me if that was the suit Heger was wearing the last time anybody saw him alive. I don’t envy your coroner, and if it’s all the same with you, I aim to let the undertaker stuck with moving him find out just how much money he has on him.”

Chapter 1 7

But the local part-time undertaker said he’d never had to deal with a such a verfault cadaver, which was High Dutch for anyone left unembalmed that long in warm weather with no ventilation.

The dead gunsmith had burst his store-bought duds at the seams as he’d swollen up like that over a period of around a week. So it wasn’t too tough to haul his duds out of the vault a yard or so at a time. There was usually a dry end to grab hold of. There wasn’t any money to be found, in his pockets or in the soggy puddle of stinky body fluids left when they finally managed to scoop the half-naked form out on some planking to be covered with a tarp and carried away.

Later on, at the hearing held at the town hall, their part-time deputy coroner showed he was made of sterner stuff by declaring the late Horst Heger had died of gunshot wounds, a heap of gunshot wounds from .40-caliber to number-nine buck.

When it was Helga Pilger’s turn, she said she couldn’t say when all that gunfire had transpired because she’d never heard any shots.

When an old geezer on the panel implied she’d have had to be stone deaf, or in league with the shootist, to miss the dulcet sounds of four pistol shots and a shotgun blast from her quarters above the carriage house, Helga began to cry. So Longarm stood up and called out, “I know it ain’t my turn. But nobody in that part of town heard any gunshots during the seventy-odd hours the deed could have been done!”

Someone asked if he was suggesting that the LeMat had been fitted with something to muffle the sounds of its fusillade.

Longarm shook his head and said, “Inventors keep trying to come up with a muzzle silencer. So far nobody has, and I doubt one would be much help with either a shotgun or revolver in any case. So here’s what I think happened.”

They dismissed Helga and told him to take her place if he felt so smart. After he’d done so, Longarm said, “I can’t say whether Heger did so before or after you-all gave him that money to pay off those so-called Ruggles sisters. But along the way he recognized a wanted killer he’d once met up with in that spike-hatted army of Bismarck or his kaiser. It’s been made to appear that it was when the notorious Wolf Ritter showed up on his doorstep with his notorious LeMat revolver. I ain’t sure that’s what happened. From all we know of Ritter, he’s too slick and too rich to put such a giveaway on the market. I think he found out Heger had recognized him and wired my boss, Marshal Billy Vail, that he was somewhere in these parts, pretending to be somebody less disgusting in these parts.”

A cowhand who’d drifted in for the free show exclaimed, “Hot damn! I see what happened! This Ritter cuss came in late at night with that swamping gun, killed the gunsmith with it, stuffed the body in that vault, and put the murder weapon in the window, like it was on sale, as he just walked off with all that money!”

Longarm said, “No offense, but that don’t work. Remember the real Wolf Ritter, if he’s in these parts at all, wouldn’t want it known he was. After that, not being a Mennonite, he’d have had little call to know a clannish inner circle of wheat growers and town fathers, no offense, had gathered that dry harvest weather fund. I’m the law and I’ve yet to get exact numbers as to just how much Heger may or may not have had on him when a party or parties unknown killed him, not in his shop but somewhere more private. There’s a whole lot of open range all around, and those Ruggles sisters and their sky bombs would have excused any distant shotgun blasts.”

The deputy coroner brightened and exclaimed, “I see it all now! After he’d killed and robbed poor Heger, Wolfgang von Ritterhoff smuggled the body into town, hid his body in the vault, and left the murder weapon in the window so that nobody would find it on him if he was questioned, ja?”

“Nein,” said Longarm. “The real Ritter wouldn’t want to be suspected, whether he’d killed and robbed a soul or not. From his recent moves we know about, he’s not getting any younger and he’d been trying to control his temper and settle down, not advertise. So suppose the late Horst Heger confided in a false friend he trusted, a Mennonite brother who’d know about all the money in that vault. What if he got Heger alone somewheres, an easier chore for a false friend than it might have been for an outlaw Heger had spotted around Sappa Crossing, and forced him to give the combination to his vault before killing him with another LeMat entirely and simply smuggling the body back into town under cover of darkness to rob the vault, hide the body, and leave the LeMat in the window at a price assuring it would stay there until somebody smart enough to make the connection came along.”

The coroner gasped, “Donnerwetter! You mean to say one of our own set out to abgekarteten, I mean frame this other criminal among us?”

Longarm nodded and said, “It worked pretty good, didn’t it? Had me going until I began to notice loose strings I just couldn’t tie to an owlhoot rider only partly accepted by a small farming community. I was asked to buy the late Horst Heger acting sort of peculiar too. Say he must have at least talked about Wolf Ritter and that LeMat to somebody he trusted. Why in blue blazes would he drive all the way to the county seat and send a telegram to my office clean out Denver way? Don’t you have a county sheriff, an undersheriff sitting right in this room, or the town law—Werner Sattler?”

Somebody in the crowd said, “That’s right. How about that, Werner?”

Then somebody else said, “Say, where’s Werner? He was here a moment ago!”

Longarm was already on his feet, headed for the far doorway at a run as he drew his .44-40 with a wolfish grin, growling, “Thank’s a heap, you treacherous dumb bastard! I hadn’t gotten to half the stuff I was fixing to bounce off your guilty conscience!”

Outside, as if he could read minds, a kid in a cap and knickers pointed at some settling dust across the way and yelled, “He rode off that way! On another man’s pony!”

Longarm could see that as he tore across the dusty street to find a cowhand war-dancing around in front of a hitching post, yelling his horse had been stolen.

Longarm asked what sort of pony they were jawing about. When the hand said he’d been riding a bay horse, Longarm ran over to a tethered cordovan and helped himself to it, yelling, “Tell the owner I’m the law and I’ll be back with both ponies, Lord willing and I don’t get shot!”

Then he was after Werner Sattler, lashing his borrowed bronc with the rein ends as they tore between houses and over some fencing until they were out of the small settlement and galloping through ripe red winter wheat and to hell with the damage. For Longarm spotted Sattler out ahead on that purloined bay, going for broke catty-corner, with no regard for any neighbor’s harvest.

Longarm was the bigger man but better rider. There was more to winning a horse race than just sitting there. So Longarm began to gain as he stood in the stirrups with his weight forward as they tore across the rolling wheat fields stirrup-deep in shattered stalks.

Sattler saw who was after him and twisted in the saddle to shoot back at him. Longarm wasn’t ready to return fire at that range. A man firing a Colt .44-40 from a standing position could hit another by shithouse luck at four hundred yards, but only nail him with certainty at fifty. Blazing away at full gallop made it even tougher, and it was a pain in the ass to reload without slowing down.

Old Werner was lucky, or good, as he sent some of his rounds way closer than wild. Longarm knew a wild round could kill you just as dead as a shot fired from a bench rest. On the other hand, if the son of a bitch was out of ammunition when a body caught up, there were still a heap of questions that could be answered.

Chasing him over a rise, Longarm saw they’d commenced to harvest the quarter section ahead. Dozens of men, boys, and a couple of gals in sunbonnets were gathering sheaves left by two mule-drawn reapers and running them over to a mechanical thresher powered by belting from a donkey steam engine set up a safe distance away. Nobody with a lick of sense wanted the firebox of a steam engine close to piles of straw and windblown wheat chaff.

The corrupt lawman and false-hearted friend rode between the two reaper crews and straight at the gap between the steam engine and threshing machine, yelling fit to bust in High Dutch.

So the steam engine operator released his clutch to drop the thick leather belting almost to the ground, and old Werner just tore through to the other side at full gallop.

Then the rascal at the controls snapped the thick power belt up tight, and Longarm nearly spilled as his borrowed cow pony shied to a halt and reared.

As he fought to regain control Longarm yelled, “Let me through, goddamn your eyes! I’m the law and he’s getting away!”

A burly Mennonite elder with bib overalls, full beard, and pitchfork stepped between Longarm and the taut drive-belt to call out. “Einen Augenblick, Mein Herr! Was wunschen Sie mitt unser Marschall?”

Longarm yelled, “If your talking about your marshal, he’s a killer and a crook!”

But now there were more stubborn-looking Mennonites blocking his path despite the gun in his hand, as their obvious leader said, not unkindly but firmly, “kh verstehen Sie nicht. Sprechen Sie kein Deutsch?”

Thanks to Helga, Longarm understood part of the last. So he yelled, “Of course I don’t speak Dutch to ignorant assholes! We’re in the state of Kansas, not the back steps of Russia!”

Before he had to shoot anybody Longarm heard a commotion behind him, and turned in the saddle to see a dozen other riders from town coming to help or hinder him. Before he had to shoot any of them, good old Kurt Morgenstern yelled out in High Dutch and the harvest crew began to get out of the way. Morgenstern yelled, “Werner must have had some reason to bolt like that. But are you sure about all this?”

Longarm called back, “No. That’s how come I want him alive. Tell that asshole at the steam engine clutch to let us through, damn it!”

So Morgenstern did, and they all followed as Longarm heeled the cordovan over the slack belting whether it wanted to go that way or not. But as he topped the higher rise beyond, Werner Sattler was not to be seen in any direction across the rolling wheat or prairie grass all around.

As Longarm reined in to stand taller in the stirrups, Morgenstern joined him there to demand, “Which way did he go?”

It was a good question. Longarm said, “North, east, or south work as well. Thanks to that squall the other night he ain’t raising any dust as he rides slower somewhere out yonder.

He might be dumb enough to ride east to your county seat. He has a bank account yonder. Depends on how much of his ill-gotten gains he banked and whether he values his hide more.”

The fatter and slower-riding banker cum undersheriff, who was supposed to be leading any local posse, caught up with them in time to overhear part of that. He puffed, “Werner has an account with us too. Not nearly as much as Horst Heger should have had on him, though.”

Longarm asked how much was not nearly as much. When the part-time undersheriff and full-time banker estimated a modest four figures, the federal lawman said, “That’s still a healthy bank account for a small-town lawman drawing, say, five hundred dollars per. And I know he has another account, like I just said, at the county seat. But I suspect he split that windfall with some partners in crime. That’s how come I want to take him alive.”

Kurt Morgenstern frowned and said, “I don’t understand. Why would Werner have needed help in murdering poor Heger for that money he was holding for us?”

“That’s too cute. You murder a man to rob him or you murder a man to shut him up. You seldom get to kill that many birds with one stone, and I’ve noticed in my travels that when there’s two separate motives there’s usually two separate crooks.”

The undersheriff said, “I don’t see two separate motives. We all knew that gunsmith had just been given some money to give to those two rainmakers. So Werner killed him for the money and tried to lay the blame on this Wolfgang von Ritterhoff, who may not have ever been anywhere near the scene of the crime!”

“Or vice versa,” Longarm objected. “I’m pretty sure Horst Heger really spotted that other killer. My own office never would have heard about any of this if Heger hadn’t wired us. The only way an honest man who wasn’t familiar with American law would have made such an odd move would have called for some poor advice by someone who was familiar with American law.”

They both proved his point by staring blankly at him. So he put away his six-gun and reached for a smoke as he explained. “Picture a gunsmith in a remote trail town recognizing a wanted killer. Heger had a mess of wanted posters in his cellar and the ones on Ritter may have jogged his memory or … never mind how he did it. He did it. So wouldn’t he naturally go right to the town law with the information before he did anything else?”

Kurt Morgenstern brightened and s aid, “Ach, so! Werner suggested he keep it to himself and contact a more distant federal marshal than he had right here in Kansas because … warum?”

Longarm said, “To give everyone more time than they’d have had if Heger had wired Dodge the way he should have. The money the poor sucker had in his vault was windfall. Sattler could have only had one good reason for slowing down any outside help from arriving. Old Heger really must have been on to something. Wolf Ritter was a pal Sattler was covering up for. I mean to ask him why as soon as I catch him. I only know Sattler had no other reason to delay the search for a federal want. Wiring Denver instead of Dodge or, hell, Kansas City gave them an extra day or better to decide what to do.”

Kurt Morgenstern said, “I vote we ride for the county seat. Even if he’s not going for that other bank account, we can pick up more riders when you tell the sheriff about all this, ja?”

Longarm said, “Nein. You send a rider to tell the county law if you like. Sattler’s just as likely to double back to Sappa Crossing if he means to risk a bank withdrawal at this late date. Besides, they never sent me after him. That sheriff you just mentioned has more jurisdiction over local robberies and killings. Wolf Ritter is the son of a bitch I’m after, and that wasn’t him I was chasing just now!”

As he wheeled his borrowed pony, Morgenstern stayed with him, gasping, “Herr Gott! You mean that killer is still hiding somewhere among us, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Don’t know. Aim to find out. I showed Werner Sattler a list of possible suspects. He naturally vouched for every one of ‘em. He may have been fibbing. So I aim to ask others about the same gents, and this time I might have better luck.”

Chapter 18

He didn’t. Everyone he talked to in Sappa Crossing, from the one barber to the Mennonite preacher, seemed to agree with their fugitive town law about such names as they recognized on Longarm’s list. Few knew all the names. The clannish Mennonites could only vouch for their own brethren. Longarm hadn’t expected a renegade Prussian Lutheran to pass for an all-out Mennonite. But as much as a fifth of the Dutchmen in those parts were from other sects entirely, and there were tradesmen and cattlefolk like the MacSorleys who weren’t any sort of Dutch, High or Low.

Longarm considered more than one apparently plain American that barber recalled as bearded, of average height, with blond hair going to gray. But men who’d answer to that description were hardly as rare as virgins in a whorehouse. The barber said he’d have noticed if anyone ever sat in his chair with dyed hair or beard.

Longarm sighed and said, “I reckon I could tell, close enough to peer close at the roots of dyed hair or whiskers. You ain’t a Dutchman, are you?”

The barber laughed and said, “Bite your tongue. I can manage a few words of the lingo. In this town you have to. But my people were from Welsh Wales, look you, if we want to go back far enough. I consider myself a plain old Ohio boy, if any of this conversation means anything.”

Longarm said, “It might. Nobody on this list described as any breed of Dutchman has left town since my office got that urgent message from the late Horst Heger. But some other bearded faces ain’t been seen at the saloon and such of late. You talk to these squareheads more than most of us, pard. Do you reckon an educated Prussian officer might be able to speak English with no accent if he put his mind to it?”

The barber thought and decided, “Everybody has an accent. I can tell you’re not from Ohio just by listening to you. Neither one of us speaks English like a York Stater. Your sneaky Prussian officer would have to speak anything with some accent, see?”

Longarm did. He nodded gravely and said, “I follow your drift, and I’m glad I was smart enough to come to you for advice. Now that you mention it, I have noticed an educated furriner sounds as if he has to be speaking with an accent, even if you can’t place it, because he speaks with no accent at all, pronouncing every word exactly the way they tell you to in Webster’s Dictionary!”

The barber smiled smugly. “So you could be looking for a bearded blondish man who speaks such perfect English he annoys folks, who left town after you got that telegram from our poor gunsmith.”

Longarm sighed and said, “I would if I could. But there ain’t no such person, as far as anyone I’ve talked to can tell. Can you think of any customer who’d answer the overall vague description jawing at you in a noticeable American accent? I mean a thicker than usual Texas twang, a shut-my-mouth-you-all Dixie accent, or-“

“I know what you mean,” the barber said. “Real folks don’t lay it on the way vaudeville comics might. I can always tell a real Welshman from a teasing Englishman because my late Uncle Dai, from Cardiff you see, never in his life spoke half as Taffy. But I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong barber for help with Prussians pretending to be from Texas or Welsh Wales. I’ve been wracking my brains all the time we’ve been talking, and I just can’t come up with anyone I can fit in that slot with a hammer!”

They shook on it and parted friendly. Longarm got a cool beer, at least, at the Gansblumchen saloon. Nobody there could put him on the trail of Wolf Ritter, and more than one suggested he’d been sent on a wild goose chase. Had anyone but the late Horst Heger ever seen anyone in these parts who answered to the description on those wanted flyers?

It was a good question. All bets were off if the real Wolf Ritter didn’t fit his official description. Such things happened. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts or just guessed at details they didn’t really remember. There was still some argument as to whether Henry McCarty, alias Billy the Kid, was right-handed or left-handed. So what was a few inches either way, or a saber scar on the right or left cheek, to an owlhoot rider wanted for everything but the blue ribbon at the county fair?

Longarm had returned that cordovan cow pony, and said he was sorry as all hell. But he still had some horseflesh to reshuffle, Iona MacSorley had issued a standing invitation, and that paint would still be out at the Lazy B. So he went back to that carriage house, found Helga didn’t live there anymore, and saddled old Rocket, telling her, “Seeing I’ve been left in the lurch by one maiden fair and invited to sup with another, we’d best see about getting you on home.”

He stopped by Morgenstern’s smithy to pick up that gelding as long as he was at it. It was better than even money he was through in Sappa Crossing. It made more sense to ask some more around Cedar Bend.

“You just want to get laid,” he warned himself as he considered how much good old Dad Jergens and pretty Olive Red Dog likely knew about the sons of bitches he was after. It made little sense for Werner Sattler to run for a nearby town where he was known, or for Wolf Ritter to try and blend in with native Americans, red or white. The renegade had only come to this broad land because there was a whole lot of it to run off across.

Longarm didn’t see how one lawman was supposed to track at least a couple of crooks who had all that damned grass to ride across. But it happened that way at times. He didn’t know where Frank, Jesse, or The Kid were planning to spend the coming night either.

He rode into the Lazy B dooryard late that afternoon. Iona MacSorley came out on her veranda to declare it would soon be supper time. Then she yelled until the ramrod, Martin Link, came running to see what she wanted.

She told him to take care of the two ponies, of course. So Longarm felt obliged to say, “I know the way to your stable, Miss Iona. Why don’t you both let me worry about these brutes and then I’ll wash up out back and join you?”

The pretty but pouty Iona said, “Marty’s going to do as I say because he knows I mean what I say, Custis.”

So Longarm dismounted and handed the reins to the foreman as he murmured, “I work for the same sort of boss. Only he ain’t as pretty.”

Link laughed indulgently and muttered, “Go on inside with her before she turns you into a toad. I’ll have O’Donnel handle this chore.”

Longarm nodded and followed what seemed a wise suggestion. Once in the house, Longarm found the imperious young gal and her baronial father seated by that big fireplace, as if to admire the cold hearth and all those swords and daggers over it. Iona said they’d all get their supper within the hour as old MacSorley poured him a dram of malt whiskey from a cut-glass decanter and sat down on the same sofa.

He’d poured one for himself and seemed to want to clink glasses. So Longarm let him, and assumed “Air du shlainte!” meant something a tad nicer than it sounded in that old country. It was hard to tell High Dutch or Highland Scotch apart when you spoke neither lingo. They both had those throat-clearing sounds you never heard in plain American.

It wouldn’t have been polite to tell his host he sounded like a furriner of any sort. So he said the whiskey was good, and admired the cutlery around that shield above the mantel.

Martin Link came back inside as old MacSorley began to lecture Longarm on the warlike display. From the way Link and even the old man’s daughter rolled their eyes, it was easy to see old MacSorley had given the same lecture before.

It was less tedious to a guest who’d never heard about targes, sgean dubhs, and claymores before. Sgean dubhs were those small but wicked daggers Scotchmen stuck in their socks. MacSorley said it was a point of honor to never draw from your sock unless you meant to kill somebody. The basket-hilted broadswords on either side of that round studded targe were what Scotchmen waved to make a point that might or might not be settled peacefully. When Longarm said he’d been led to believe those straight sabers were claymores, the older man pointed at the one old-time sword with a far longer blade and a hilt made for a man’s two hands, saying that that was the true claymore or great sword of the Isles. He said mainland clansmen who spoke almost as much English as their Sasunnack enemies called their broadswords their claymores out of ignorance, or while showing off. He added that the correct Hebredian for any sort of sword was “Claidheamh. Longarm wasn’t rude enough to say he didn’t care.

Trooper O’Donnel came in to announce he’d unsaddled Rocket and draped Longarm’s saddle over a rail to dry while he visited.

Longarm set his glass aside and rose to thank O’Donnel with a shake, adding, “Have a cheroot on me. We were just now talking about old country ways. Do you talk any of that Irish Gaelic, Trooper?”

As Longarm reached for that cheroot O’Donnel replied, “I used to know a few words. But my people spoke mostly English and I grew up on this side of the water.”

Longarm got out the cheroot, saying, “Do tell? I didn’t know the Irish Famine and Great Migration was that far back. But you’d know Irish history better than me. I’ve been smoking this brand a spell and it ain’t all that bad. Haben Sie Streich helzer?”

Trooper O’Donnel was too slick to reply in High Dutch, but he did nod before he’d had time to think, and then he was staring down the cold unwinking eye of a .44-40 as Longarm quietly said, “Don’t neither of you squareheads move a thing but your hands. I want ‘em all up!”

MacSorley and his daughter were staring goggle-eyed as Longarm explained, “That wasn’t exactly Gaelic I threw by surprise just now. I asked him casual, in his true native tongue, whether he had the matches to go with that smoke. Now would one of you be so kind as to relieve these two Dutchmen of their six-guns whilst I cover them?”

But before either could move, a familiar voice told Longarm from behind, “I have a better idea, Longarm. Drop your gun before I blow you in two with this ten-gauge!”

Longarm didn’t have to wonder what that was sticking in his back so firmly. As he tossed his .44-40 on the sofa with a sigh he said, “We were wondering where you rode off to, Sattler. Right now, I sure feel dumb. But I wasn’t sure anyone out this way but the foreman was High Dutch. Must have come in handy for old Wolfgang here. A real Irishman would have had to be a true top hand to be hired on as one.”

Ignoring the lawman he had the drop on, the erstwhile town law of Sappa Crossing asked his grinning confederate, the fake Trooper O’Donnel, “Was sonst noch? Was wunschen Sie?”

Wolf Ritter smiled boyishly as he drew his own gun and said, “I think this will be more fun if we all speak English. As I told you out in the stable when I asked you to cover me, this one was much too clever for anyone’s good, including his own.”

He nodded at Longarm and demanded, “Who told you who I really was? Speak up. Don’t make me resort to cruelty.”

Longarm smiled wryly and replied, “Were you planning on kindness? Nobody had to tell me. You just now said I was clever. It was what we call the process of eliminating. I just kept eliminating and eliminating until here we are. If it’s any comfort, you’re pretty clever too. I reckon you learned to move so tricky under that sneaky Otto von Bismarck. I read how he tricked Louis Napoleon into guessing all wrong about his plans time and time again. A plain old crook would have simply killed Horst Heger. But you didn’t know who he might have gone to aside from your old pal, the town law, here. So you razzle-dazzled that old LeMat you had no further use for to make it appear Heger had recognized a desperate drifter, in the hopes I’d assume you’d drifted on by the time I got here. You knew I’d take my time to get here, once you’d had Heger wire a distant office, or wired for him. I still have some loose ends to tie up.”

Wolf Ritter chuckled fondly and said, “No, you haven’t. I’m trying to decide whether it would be more amusing to let you join us for a last supper and watch as we all have this little slut for dessert, or whether it would be wiser to kill you here and now.”

Over at the far end of the sofa, Iona was huddled with her old Athair, trying in vain not to cry as the full meaning of this scene sank in.

Longarm said, “I might have known you’d be scared of a grown man with only two guns backing your vaudeville villainy. You ain’t really hiding any dueling scars under that dyed mutton-chop down your cheek, are you? Fess up, as long as I’m fixing to die anyways. Ain’t it true you paid a skin doctor to scar you a tad under ether? I was reading how some of you Prussian college boys get your he-man scars the safe and painless way.”

The renegade officer smiled coldly and softly said, “It’s a good thing you are not a worthy swordsman, you oh-so-clever peasant!”

Longarm shrugged and said, “I had me some cavalry drill with the saber one time. Why do you ask? Are you offering me a fair sword fight?”

Wolf Ritter started to say something sneery. Then he frowned, smiled and decided, “Why not? It would be just the thing to work up a good appetite for food and other pleasures of the flesh. Werner, cover the kitchen with that shotgun. Martin, see nobody comes in the other way to disturb us as I give this lout a lesson in manners!”

Sattler protested, “I liked your first idea better!”

But Ritter pointed at the MacSorley sword collection with his own six-gun as he sweetly suggested, “Choose your weapon, my Yankee cavalier!”

So Longarm stepped over, unhooked that big two-handed claymore, and drew the cloth-yard of ancient steel from the cracked leather of its scabbard, saying, “I’ve always wanted to try one of these here crusader swords. Heavier than I expected, but the balance ain’t bad.”

The Prussian saberman laughed incredulously and helped himself to a more saberlike Highland broadsword, hefting it as he agreed the gents who’d made these lethal blades had known what they were doing.

Longarm asked if he meant to duel with a broadsword in one hand and that Schofield in the other.

Wolf Ritter smiled boyishly, holstered his six-gun, and shifted the basket hilt to his other hand, saying, “I naturally parry and thrust right-handed. En garde, you poor clumsy oaf!”

So Longarm, never having fought with a claymore all that much, got into a sort of baseball batting stance with the two-handed weapon as the smaller man with the lighter sword dropped into a more regular saber fighting stance with the tip of his own chosen weapon swaying like a steel cobra between them.

As Longarm stood his ground like a lethal baseball player, the renegade officer nodded thoughtfully and decided, “He’s not quite so dumb as he looks. I am naturally used to dealing with right-handed swordsman. I now have to consider how one takes on a left-handed lumberjack! That clumsy claymore only has to get in one solid blow and you might not stand so solidly afterwards!”

From his post near the front door Link said, “Left, right, im Scheissenhaus already! Shoot him and let’s be done with him! We don’t have time to play games here!”

The sadistic Prussian purred, “But we do! Nobody else can enter without permission of the foreman, and you haven’t quit just yet. How are we doing with that Chinaman in the kitchen, Werner?”

Sattler replied, “He’s cooking supper and keeping his mouth shut if he knows what’s good for him. But I think Martin’s right about our riding!”

Wolf Ritter didn’t answer. He lunged at Longarm instead. Longarm had figured he might. So when the experienced but formal swordsman bored in with a formally flashing feint and slash, Longarm whirled completely around to his left, to come out of his spin with that monstrous Highland sword gripped right-handed for a normal attempt at a home run, just as Ritter’s broadsword whistled through the space Longarm had occupied at the beginning of his diagonal slash.

The startled Prussian saw what had to happen next and tried to recover and parry, just a tad too late to really help, when a bigger man had already launched his own horizontal swing with a heavy three-foot meat chopper!

It felt to Longarm as if he was busting glass and chopping through a head of cabbage as the claymore in his hands snapped Ritter’s blade to send flashing steel in one direction and Ritter’s dyed head in the other!

Iona screamed like a banshee as the headless Prussian stood there spouting gore for almost a full second before the knees buckled. Then everyone was staring slack-jawed at the big bloody claymore Longarm had swirled up to thud into and hang from the ceiling rafters. That gave Longarm another instant to whip out his double derringer and fire it twice. Once was enough to part Werner Sattler from his shotgun. Then Martin Link was screaming loud at Iona, gutshot, flopping about on the floor while Longarm dove headfirst at the sofa, grabbing his six-gun as he rolled over the back and landed back on his feet in better shape to take charge again.

As Longarm covered the gutshot Link, the ramrod wailed, “I give! I give! For God’s sake don’t shoot me again!”

Longarm strode closer to kick Link’s fallen six-gun clear across the room while, over in the kitchen doorway, the Chinese cook seemed to be softening Werner Sattler’s remains with a rolling pin.

Longarm told him to cut that out, and asked old MacSorley if he had any hands who spoke more Gaelic than High Dutch. When the old Scotchman allowed he did, Longarm said he wanted guards posted all about and a rider sent to town to fetch the undersheriff, seeing the town law of Sappa Crossing had turned out so crooked.

MacSorley tore off to carry out Longarm’s orders. Iona demanded, “Why make such a mess in here when you had that gun on you all the time?”

Longarm said, “No way to take out three armed men with two bullets. Can’t you tally bang and bang?”

Then he hunkered down by the gutshot Link and declared, neither cruel nor mushy, “You’re done for, Link. I don’t like your color at all.”

“You don’t like it?” croaked the dying ramrod with such a wan smile that Longarm knew he’d worked his way past agony to numb acceptance.

Shaking the dying man’s shoulder, Longarm said, “I can see they notify your kin and send you home in a lead-lined coffin, or we can feed you to the worms in potter’s field. A lot depends on how much you’d care to clear up for my official report.”

Link sighed and said, “I told them they were being too cute. But Wolfgang had to pile red herring on red herring until it’s a wonder they didn’t send in the U.S. Cavalry!”

Iona came over to complain, “Custis, that head you stood over in that corner—it’s making faces at me, as if it’s still alive!”

Longarm said, “It ain’t. Marty here was fixing to tell us what in blue blazes that sneaky Wolf Ritter thought he was up to. Ain’t that so, Marty?”

The dying man croaked, “Mama, bist du es?” as the girl insisted, “Custis, that head in the corner just winked at me!”

Longarm said, “Maybe it admires you. Get over here and take your dying boy’s hand, Mama. I have to write down every word we can get out of him in English.”

So the dying Martin Link surprised them both a mite as he told his mama how he’d gotten his fool self in this fix. Iona was smart enough, or imperious enough, to reply in English each time he lapsed into the lingo of his childhood. Some of it surprised Longarm a lot. At the end he wound up nodding soberly at that head in the corner and telling it, “You’d have pulled it off if you hadn’t been so greedy and mean. But nobody would have been after you if you hadn’t been greedy and mean to begin with. So I reckon it all came out inevitably in the end.”

Chapter 19

It was a good thing the night was warm and Mennonites drank in moderation. The crowd that rode out from Sappa Crossing had to be assembled in the dooryard, and old MacSorley barely had enough of that malt whiskey to go around.

The deputy coroner presided from the front veranda at a table the Lazy B hands had toted outside. Most everyone else got to stand or hunker wherever they could find the space.

Old MacSorley, his daughter, and the Chinese cook, in that order, had much the same tales to tell and didn’t take long. But when they got to Longarm the deputy coroner declared, “I sure hope you’ll do more for us than the previous witnesses, Deputy Long. For now one can picture the blood and slaughter inside this house this evening, but what led up to such a gory ending?”

Longarm stood before the panel with one foot on a veranda step and a fresh cheroot in hand so he could speak clearly as he began. “Once upon a time there was this hot-tempered Prussian officer I’d as soon call Wolf Ritter because that’s what’s on most of the wanted flyers. He was such a mean cuss he even shocked the Prussian Army, and they were fixing to court-martial him because he couldn’t get it through his head they wanted him to kill Frenchmen, not fellow officers. They don’t lock up officers and gentlemen as they await a court-martial, so Ritter just ran for it. Made it to America and proceeded to pick fights for pleasure and rob folks for eating money.”

Kurt Morgenstern volunteered, “Then Horst Heger recognized him when he came to Sappa Crossing, ja?”

Longarm said, “Nein. Forget about Horst Heger till I get to him, and don’t horn in unless you want this to be even more confusing.”

He took a drag on his cheroot to make sure they were listening to him tight. Then he continued. “Before there was any such trail town as Sappa Crossing, while most of you all were learning the ropes up in Dakota Territory, Wolf Ritter was raising Ned in other parts with two lesser-known partners, a Dutch American kid called Martin Link and a wayward Mennonite you’d later know as Werner Sattler. But Ritter, being so mean and such a show-off, was the only one of the three who wound up wanted by the law by name.”

Almost as if they were singing a duet in harmony, the undersheriff and old MacSorley bayed about the foreman and town marshal being crooks.

Longarm took another drag as, this time, the deputy coroner told them to shut up and let the witness proceed.

Longarm said, “As they doubtless recalled to their chagrin this very evening, pulling off jobs with a partner in crime such as Wolf Ritter tended to be needlessly exciting. And I’ve noticed heaps of owlhoot trail riders weary of the chase after missing many a warm supper or a good night’s sleep in a feather bed without half so many things on one’s mind. So the older Werner Sattler was the first to drop out. Being a Mennonite by birth, if not conviction, he found it easy to drop out of sight up Dakota way as he started to act more law-abiding.”

A church elder with a long gray beard objected, “Einen All genblick, Jungen. Nobody ist by birth a member of the Brethren. He must of his own free will as an adult be baptized!”

Longarm calmly replied, “I stand corrected, but Sattler still found it simple to fade into the Mennonite scene. Then he came on down Kansas way when the rest of you all hived off to form your own wheat-growing community. You made him your town marshal because he asked for it and nobody else of Mennonite persuasion wanted it. If any of you found him a tad worldly for your tastes, at least he was one of your own and he did seem to know how to handle a drunken cowboy when and if he had to. So in sum, for as long as there’d been anybody at Sappa Crossing, good old Werner Sattler had been established as the law, not an outlaw.”

Old MacSorley asked, “But what about my foreman, Martin Link? I asked for references when he came out from town to replace the one who’d left without notice and … Och, mo mala! The town law vouched for him having an honest record, and what do you suppose ever happened to that first foreman I hired!”

Longarm suggested they stick to one mystery at a time and continued. “With one old partner established as the town law, and another doing the hiring and firing here at the Lazy B, Wolf Ritter saw his chance to vanish into thin air as he was being posted dead or alive all over this country. Anyone who’d ever served as a cavalry officer could wrangle cow ponies, and it was up to the foreman who had to be told to do what. So Mister MacSorley here had no call to doubt Martin Link when he was told he was paying those top-hand wages to a boss wrangler. So let’s leave the three old pals getting fat and happy in these parts with nobody suspecting a thing.”

“Until Horst Heger recognized an old comrade in arms, ja?” said that talkative Kurt Morgenstern.

Longarm shook his head and sternly warned, “I asked you not to horn in. Horst Heger had never served in any military unit with the renegade Prussian officer. If they had ever met, an outlaw on the prod should have been the first to recognize anyone. Ritter had been smooth-shaven and scar-faced as well as blond in their old country. Heger likely looked much the same as he ever had. He wasn’t the one growing mutton-chops and likely having his hair trimmed and tinted over at the county seat, or mayhaps McCook. We wrap up such details as we get out final reports. Suffice it to say, there’s no call to assume Horst Heger knew beans about the three wolves in sheep’s clothing. He had his own worries. Business had been slow and his wife had run off with another man. I found her to be alive and well, or at least alive and working in a house of ill repute, out Tombstone way.”

Morgenstern looked as if he was fixing to piss his pants as he wailed, “Then what did our poor gunsmith do to them? What could Heger have done if he didn’t know anything?”

Longarm let the deputy coroner glare for him as he took a drag of his cheroot. Then he said, “Nothing. Ritter, posing as an Irish hand called O’Donnel to hide his slight accent under a slight vaudeville brogue, had Heger order him new grips for his six-gun as a matter of fact. Heger’s misfortune was that, despite his personal problems, you’d all done business with him at one time or another and decided he was an honest man. So once those rainmaking gals came over the horizon to threaten your winter wheat harvest with unseasonable rain, you thought you collected a handsome payoff in hopes of a dry harvest. Some folks say kissing a frog might turn it into a handsome prince too.”

The undersheriff, seated to the right of the deputy coroner, said he’d counted the money, given receipts to the donators, and passed it on to Heger, accompanied by the town law and two armed deputies.

Longarm nodded and said, “Link told Miss Iona and me about that as he lay dying this evening. That was the rub as far as stealing all that money before Heger could pass it on was concerned. Ritter was for killing you as well, sir. But that left those two deputies who’d have to be killed as well, and the two cooler heads talked Ritter out of a total bloodbath that might have led to Sattler’s door in any case. Once the money was missing, the rest of you were bound to ask who’d had it last. But nobody but the actual donors and the few authorized to move the money from the bank so it could eventually get to those so-called Ruggles sisters were supposed to know there’d been that much in Heger’s vault.”

Somebody wanted to know why he didn’t think the Ruggles sisters were the Ruggles sisters.

Longarm said, “I know they ain’t. But forget ‘em. Their Only crime was making noise. They never even managed to take money under false pretenses. They never knew about the collection for a drought this way. The three sneaks never let them hear your offer. Sattler was the one that needed a good alibi. They agreed that had they just killed Heger and taken the money, Sattler would be the most logical suspect. So they needed some razzle-dazzle to make us look under a heap of other shells for the pea.”

He took another drag to compose his thoughts, knowing some of them were already finding his tale hard to follow, and continued. “Ritter was sort of proud of his recorded killings. So he’d kept a bunch of old reward posters on himself and rival killers. He’d long since rid himself of the incriminating LeMat revolver he’d used often enough to have it noted by the law. But it was easy enough to pick up another at a hockshop over to the county seat. I could prove that by a wire from your county sheriff if there was any need to. Seeing there ain’t, just picture the town law he trusted and an Irish cowhand he’d done business with showing up late that same night, along with the foreman of this Lazy B. Heger had quarters above his shop. His one and only assistant, Helga Pilger, was asleep out back over the carriage house. They forced Heger to open his vault and hand over all that money. Then the four of ‘em went out to the carriage shed and hitched up Heger’s shay. When the sleepy gal called down, it was Ritter, not her boss, who allowed he was going somewhere the sleepy-eyed gal had no call to remember all that accurately. When you ask a sleepy question in High Dutch and somebody mutters back at you in High Dutch, you just go back to bed.”

He took another drag, grimaced, and said, “The heroic outlaws took the poor gunsmith far enough out on the prairie for privacy, filled him full of lead, and here’s where they got tricky. Sattler tore back to his office in the town hall to look innocent, being the most likely of the three to look guilty. Link drove the shay over to the county seat under cover of darkness, trailing his cow pony behind it, so’s he could abandon it there and send a Western Union night letter, composed by Wolf Ritter, saying the undersigned, Heger, had spotted such a notorious crook and could use the reward. They sent it to my more distant office to give themselves some working time. Meanwhile, Ritter, who enjoyed that sort of work the most, pony-packed the body back to the shop, locked it in the vault to sort of marinate, and dragged more red herrings across their trail. He left those wanted papers where they’d be found. I did find them, and came to the wrong conclusion. He left the LeMat he’d just used on Heger in Heger’s front window, priced so high nobody would buy it before a sucker such as this child noticed it. When I did, I jumped to some of the conclusions they wanted me to. Taking the telegram from Heger and all those wanted flyers in his work shop at face value, I figured the man I couldn’t find to talk to had spotted a known killer and been killed by the same or run off with all that money after I found out about the money. When I did suspect Werner Sattler of anything, late in the game, I was still mixed up. I was so busy wondering why a lawman would cover up for an outlaw with a handsome bounty on him that I never had time to ask about that money before he more or less confessed he’d done something wrong by bolting from that earlier hearing. But he did, and so let’s forget him and his pals for a minute.”

The deputy coroner demanded, “How do those other outlaws, seven in all, tie into the murder of Horst Heger?”

Longarm said, “They don’t directly. As I told you at that earlier hearing after the shootout in the saloon, Breen, Dawson, Fawcett, and Walters came to town to rob your bank of other money entirely. They had no call to rob a missing gunsmith they’d never laid eyes on. The four of them hid out with that trash washwoman, the late Brunhilda Maler. Which one of them recalled her from her earlier days as a soiled dove ain’t important. They might or might not have cracked the bank vault in Sappa Crossing, like they did the ones in other Kansas towns of late. But then somebody neither sets of crooks had anything to do with sent me crashing through the window of Heger’s shop and inspired Werner Sattler and his boys, acting in good faith against total strangers, to arrest Fingers Fawcett and Juicy Joe as suspicious characters.”

“Then who pegged that shot at you?” someone naturally asked.

Longarm said, “Nobody important to this case. Think of it as a mean kid prank. What’s important is that the confusion worked to the advantage of Ritter and his pals. Tiny Tim Breen and Slick Dawson, rattled by the unexpected arrests of their pals, hung around town long enough for me to get into a saloon shootout with ‘em. Then a pair of worse crooks backed my play, partly to avoid having to look yellow in front of men who knew them and partly because Ritter, as Trooper O’Donnel for Gawd’s sake, liked to kill total strangers. So I was really taken for a buggy ride by what had started out as simple slickery. I might or might not have fallen for the first simple plans to have a federal lawman declare the notorious Wolf Ritter and not a small-town marshal had ridden off with all that money, but once other events conspired to confound me further …”

Kurt Morgenstern asked insistently, “Aber weiso would the real Wolfgang von Ritterhoff want anyone to think he’d ever been anywhere near Sappa Crossing already?”

Longarm explained. “So we’d think he’d gone somewheres else after committing another crime with his famous LeMat, of course. My boss, Marshal Billy Vail, thought a High Dutch-speaking community would be a swell place for High Dutch crooks to hide out in, as soon as he’d had occasion to think about such a place. But Ritter had established himself in these parts as an Irish top hand, and he figured he’d look even less like his real self if we figured he’d pulled another of his crimes just passing through. Let me get back to the way I was thrown off his scent by other skunks.”

He flicked ash from the tip of his cheroot and continued. “With the safecrackers she’d known and cherished dead or locked up, old Brunhilda was stuck with plenty of nitroglycerine and confided that to another occasional caller, who worked as a part-time town deputy when he wasn’t pussyfooting around by the river the way randy young gents are tempted to when they don’t have much money and an old bat don’t charge much. He knew we were searching for a missing gunsmith and a heap of money because he got to hang about the town hall more than most crooks. So he told a pal, and they put two and two together to figure wrong about what was really in Heger’s vault. You all know how that turned out. Most of you were at that other hearing earlier when I finally started to notice how many leads seemed to end where a town marshal vouched unsupported. As I’d been about to say when he bolted, I was having a time figuring out how some parts fit together. I found it tough to buy a wanted outlaw on the run with a gun to be sold on consignment. Yet old Werner kept assuring me all my handy suspects were known to him as a bunch of local boys. I had a little trouble deciding how even a famous outlaw would have known about that secret fund for the Ruggles sisters unless someone in town told him about it. I couldn’t see Horst Heger confiding he had a fortune in his vault to a man he’d just recognized as a holdup man. But you all saw how Sattler bolted, and now he’s in the smokehouse with a bullet in his chest and his head busted in with a rolling pin, so are there any more questions?”

The deputy coroner declared that since earlier witnesses had described the wild gunfight inside this very house, along with what all three crooks had admitted in plain English, he aimed to dismiss this last witness with a commendation for a job well done.

It still took them until almost midnight to break up and get on back to town with the three bodies. So Longarm was yawning as he groped his way out to the stable and started to saddle the bay while telling it they’d have to go easy on its lamed paint pal.

Iona MacSorley joined him there in the warm horsy darkness in what seemed her nightgown. He hoped for her sake she was wearing boots. He howdied her, and explained he meant to get the livery mounts home before the sun rose high enough to sweat them. She murmured, “Athair is fast asleep in his own wing of the house, and nobody comes near my quarters before breakfast time if they know what’s good for them!”

He said, “That’s swell. We’ve all had a rough day and you’ll feel better after a good night’s sleep, Miss Iona.”

She asked, “Why didn’t you tell them it was I who took that shot at you in front of the gunsmith’s window? Just to get you to come back here for the night, of course. I’d have hit you had I been aiming at you.”

He nodded soberly and said, “I saw you nail that yard dog with a hip shot, Miss Iona. I had no call to cause you embarrassment or mix your neighbors up with more details than they needed to get down. So let’s agree no harm was done and say no more about it.

She stepped closer. He saw she really was standing there in a thin nightgown as she putted, “Now that we’ve settled that, let me make it up to you, Custis. Come back to my quarters with me or, for that matter, would you like to climb up in the hayloft with me here and now?”

He ignored the hand she’d placed on his sleeve to shake his head and reply, firmly but not unkindly, “I aim to make it to Cedar Bend around sunrise, Miss Iona. So why don’t you run on to bed and I’ll just be on my way.”

He knew she was wearing boots when she stamped a foot wetly on the stable floor and demanded, “What’s wrong? Why do you slight me so? Don’t you think I’m pretty? Have I done something to offend you?”

Longarm smiled wryly down at her in the dim light and said, “Nobody could be as pretty as you think you are, but you ain’t bad looking, Miss Iona. As for how offensive I find you, I ain’t got time to list ‘em all. Let’s just say I don’t cotton to gals who shoot dogs just for acting like dogs, snap at the hired help just because they ain’t allowed to snap back, and peg shots at me just because I never swooned at the sight of so much loveliness.”

She sobbed, “I told you I was only teasing, darling!”

But he said, “I ain’t your darling. I don’t like you, Miss Iona. I reckon what you done to that dog was what really disgusted me. I ain’t so fussy. In my time I’ve swapped spit with gals I might not want to be seen in public with. I’ve gone farther than that with gals I reckon some lawmen would have arrested. But I’ve never been the darling of anyone as spoiled rotten and mean-natured as you. So I’ll be on my way now , and you’d best stand aside if you don’t want me leading these two ponies across that silk nightgown with stable muck on all eight hooves.”

So she got out of the way, saying dreadful things about his mother and his manhood as he mounted out in the moonlight, ticked the brim of his Stetson to her, and rode off at a trot before she could run in the house and get a gun.

Longarm laughed as he reined in on a distant rise to get his bearings as he lit a smoke. Then he told his mount, “That wagon trace to Cedar Bend is yonder, beyond that clump of soap weed. I know you both think me a fool. Some night, when I’m all alone in some strange hotel with a copy of the Police Gazette and a hard-on, I’m likely to cuss myself for passing up anything that perky and sweet-smelling. But I really didn’t like her and, even if I had, good old Osage Olive will be waiting for us over in Cedar Bend come morning, just in time for breakfast too.”

He carefully doubled the match stem so he wouldn’t set the dry prairie ablaze, and wryly added, “All right, Osage Olive ain’t half as pretty, but it wouldn’t be possible for such a selfish little snot like Iona to move her hips so generously. So Powder River and let her buck!”