Longarm and the Maiden Medusa

LONGARM AND THE MAIDEN MEDUSA [066-066-5.0]

By: Tabor Evans

Synopsis:

Longarm doesn’t like getting shot. It hurts. And so far, no one’s been kind enough to kill him. Now he’s got a body full of Number Nine Buckshot, and a score to settle with the shooter: a woman they call Medusa Le Mat. The only thing blacker than her hair is her heart. And the only thing more desirable than her beauty would be a reason not to kill her. 224th novel in the “Longarm” series, 1997.

Jove Books New York Copyright (C) 1997 by Jove Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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

ISBN: 0-515-12132-0

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

The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is HTTP://WWW.BERKLEY.COM

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

A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

Printing history Jove edition / August 1997

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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

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

THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him … the Gunsmith.

LONGARM by Tabor Evans The popular long-running series about U.S. Deputy Marshal Long—his life, his loves, his fight for justice.

SLOCUM by Jake Logan Today’s longest-running action Western. John Slocum rides a deadly trail of hot blood and cold steel.

BUSHWHACKERS by B. J. Lanagan An all-new series by the creators of Longarm! The rousing adventure of the most brutal gang of cutthroats ever assembled—Quantrill’s Raiders.

Chapter 1

The gang hadn’t ridden in for a shootout with Longarm. They’d come to rob the bank. Longarm wasn’t in the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan to foil any robbery. He just needed to cash a check because a flash flood to the east had washed out a quarter mile of U.P. track and the infernal trains wouldn’t be running for a good three days or more.

U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, as it read on the check, had been told more than once he was too good-natured for his own good. He could have marched his federal want back to the local jail and let him live on bread and beans until they were fixing to head on back to Colorado. But his prisoner, the soon-to-be-late Hamilton Ingram, seemed a tolerable cuss when he wasn’t drinking. He’d turned himself in for shooting that Indian agent in Fort Collins once he’d found himself broke and sober in Wyoming Territory.

So, seeing that Longarm had signed all the papers and checked his want out of the Bitter Creek Jail before they’d told him about the fool railroad, the lawman had hired a room for the two of them near the U.P. station, and announced that he’d only cuff his prisoner to one bedstead after they were ready to turn in, subject to Ingram’s continued sobriety and a civil tongue at all times.

A mean drunk, but a man of common sense when sober, Hamp Ingram, as he preferred to be called, had agreed to Longarm’s generous terms, and that was how come they were standing in line at the bank when all hell busted loose.

Longarm hadn’t been expecting hell to bust loose. That was how come he was caught flat-footed with his check in one hand and that sack of fixings he’d spent the last of his ready cash on, to feed both himself and his prisoner, in the other. A pretty little brunette wearing a wool coat and veiled spring bonnet was between the two men and the teller’s cage, but she seemed to grasp the intent of the trio barging through the front entrance before anyone else did. For she threw up both hands, one still enclosed in a rabbit-fur muff, and wailed, “Oh, please don’t hurt us!” before even one of the wild and woolly gents with bandannas over their faces and six-guns in their hands declared their full intent.

When their obvious leader shouted, “Hands up, one and all, or I’ll shoot!” Longarm raised his gun hand, but hung on to his heavy load of fixings as he murmured to Ingram, “Get that lady and yourself into the corner behind me, Hamp.”

But as Ingram tried to herd the scared-looking brunette out of the line of fire, she flinched away and sobbed she was too young to die. Then one of the bank robbers told Longarm to leave her be and get both damned hands up.

Longarm moved toward a nearby vacant banker’s desk, replying in a calm voice of sweet reason that there were eggs in the sack as he got both hands down a piece, as if to balance the load on the desk before he obeyed.

He actually had the grips of the cross-draw Colt .4440 under his tweed frock coat in mind, but the scared and innocent-looking little brunette never gave him time to set his load down and go for his gun. The gun she’d been holding in that innocent-looking muff was a Le Mat Duplex, the only revolver on the market that fired shotgun rounds, and the 20-gauge charge of Number Nine Buck, fired dead level at point-blank range, blew Longarm out from under his dark Stetson to roll ass-over-teakettle across the desk. Then the smoking Le Mat swung to cover the wide-eyed Ingram.

“Hold on, ma’am! I’m a crook my ownself!” the befuddled prisoner of a gunned-down lawman blurted out as the brunette finished him off, yelling, “Do them all! For now they know my pretty face and we don’t want them blabbing about our winning ways!”

So that was the end of the other two customers and three bank employees, two of the victims women, as the three masked men and their petite advance scout made a hasty as well as substantial withdrawal from the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan.

The smoke was still clearing, and Longarm was still numbly wondering who he was and where he might be, as the first townsmen and local lawmen tore in, their own guns drawn, to view the scene of carnage with dismay.

“Jesus H. Christ!” exclaimed a more literate Wyoming rider. “It looks like the last act of Hamlet, save for the blood being real! They gunned Banker Nelson, and ain’t that Miss Rumford from the schoolhouse laying yonder with her skirts up scandalously and half her face blown off?”

Another local peered down through the clearing smoke and exclaimed, “This here looks like that Colorado boy who turned hisself in to us a few days ago. He was supposed to be headed back to Denver to stand trial for shooting some Indian agent. Now somebody has shot him dead as a turd in a milk bucket, and where’s that Colorado rider who took him off our hands this morning?”

Another Bitter Creek lawman responded to some funny noises coming from behind an apparently vacant desk, and called out, “Here he is, alive but not at all well, covered with blood and busted glass from this brown paper bag he must have been packing when they gunned him!”

So the supine Longarm was soon the center of attention as he tried to talk, and found it nigh impossible to breathe for the better part of the next five minutes.

By the time he was able to tell them what had happened and give his description of the killers, the three masked men and their sidesaddle leader had galloped out of town, doubled back along a wooded draw the leader had scouted in advance, and holed up for the moment in the sod house of an old loner they’d buried out back beneath his henhouse.

Out of sight for the moment, but knowing full well they’d hardly be out of mind in the nearby settlement, the quartet changed clothes to go with the fresh mounts they’d left there in the care of a skinny ash blonde called Pinkie. As the man who’d appeared the leader at the bank changed into what might have been a traveling salesman, he confided to the gal they’d left holding the fort, “You should have seen this other sweet little thing blazing away back there! Blowed this one tall drink of water clean off his feet with that bodacious Le Mat!”

The object of his admiration, now dressed more like a homesteading gal than a young lady of fashion, idly hefted the now-reloaded Le Mat and quietly observed, “I had to. I recognized him from the time he was pointed out to me at the Cheyenne Opera House. He was that famous and mighty dangerous Longarm from the Denver District Court.”

Pinkie gasped. “Oh, Dear Lord, you gunned a federal lawman! We’ve got to flee far as can be from these parts before his friends posse up to hunt us all down and hang us high!”

The brunette nodded soberly and replied, “They’ve already possed up by now, and this time there’s no way for us to catch a train out to safer parts. The sod all about is soft after that recent gully-washer. So it won’t take them long to cut our trail, boys and girls.”

One of the men, recalling a gal who’d been staring at him wide-eyed in the bank before he’d blown half her face off, gasped, “This is one hell of a time to tell us we won’t be flagging down that train after all! You should have called off the job when you found out about them blamed railroad tracks. I figured you had some other way out in mind. I never would have gone along with that robbery if I’d thought I was about to get caught, Dad blast it!”

The more talkative one, now dressed up to sell windmills or bob wire, said, “Calm down, Smokey. I’m sure the little lady has another way out of these parts figured. Ain’t that right, pretty lady?”

To which the brunette in rustic riding togs demurely replied, “I sure do. They’ll be looking for four riders. Three men and a girl. I don’t see how anyone in town could know about Pinkie here.”

Men who live by the gun get good at living by the gun, if they’re to live any time at all. So the same, hair-triggered hardcase who’d shot the schoolmarm in the bank put a thoughtful hand to the grips of his six-gun, but never got to ask his next question as the brunette opened up at point-blank range with that massive Le Mat, filling the already dusty interior of the little soddy with the reek of gun smoke and spattered gore while Pinkie wailed for mercy in a far corner.

“Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! I’ll be good!” the terrified ash blonde sobbed as the smoke lifted to reveal three bodies spread like carelessly tossed bearskin rugs across the dirt floor.

The brunette calmly replied, “You’re going to have to change that dress. You’ve shit yourself. You silly kid. I’m not about to hurt you. I need you. That posse will be searching high and low for three men and one girl. After you and me get rid of this dead meat down the outhouse pit, they won’t be able to find anyone but two innocent farm girls, riding east with some pack ponies because they couldn’t catch that train, see?”

Pinkie gasped, “I see it all now! You meant to do those boys dirt from the first moment we picked them up in Cheyenne, didn’t you?”

To which her somewhat older and far more deadly partner could only reply, “Of course. Why, in heavens name, would we want to split the swag five ways when we could simply divide it even-steven?”

Pinkie grinned like a mean little kid and marveled, “You sure have thrifty ways with money. I never liked any of these dirty old men to begin with. Bob and Smokey both kept trying to mess with me, and when I wouldn’t let ‘em they called me a lizzy gal.”

She grinned up at the deadly brunette and added in a dirtier tone, “A lot they knew. About us lizzy gals, that is.”

Reloading the Le Mat, her smaller and darker companion sighed and said, “You’re going to have to see if you can fit into my other outfit, now that you’ve made such a mess of your farm-girl disguise. Go out back, shuck, and wash off at the pump while I see if I can let my coat out at the seams for you.”

When the ash blonde hesitated, she was told, “Just do as I say. Girls your age get in trouble when they try to think for themselves. Anybody who recalls that citified riding outfit I had on at the bank ought to remember little old me in it, you big Swede. It’s your own fault for soiling the disguise we chose for you, and who’s going to be looking for two lady bank robbers to begin with?”

Pinkie went out back, gingerly shucked the summer-weight gingham Mother Hubbard, and used the cleaner bodice as a washrag as she used the yard pump, a lot, from her broad hips down. Then, her socks wet above her tightly laced high-buttons, she strode back inside, naked as a jay from the ankles up, and declared, “I need a nice warm towel to wipe away this wet gooseflesh!”

The brunette set the Le Mat aside to hold up the much more fashionable calico dress and wool coat she’d worn at the bank. “Never mind all that,” she said. “We have to be on our way, and the sun won’t set on you before you’re nice and dry.”

Still naked, and smiling in a mighty worldly way for such a simple soul, Pinkie moved closer, husking, “All this worry and excitement has made me sort of horny. How about you, honey?”

The older and obviously wiser brunette French-kissed her, but drew back to insist, “We don’t have time for that here and now. We have to get our fannies and our bank withdrawal up to South Pass City before we pause for other pleasures. Put on this damned outfit, Pinkie!”

So Pinkie began to, even as she casually asked, “Wouldn’t it make as much sense if we left our coats aside whilst we haul these dead boys out back? How come you’ve already put that riding duster on, honey?”

The brunette replied, “In case anybody rides in before we hide all the evidence, of course. There won’t be much time to put things on or off if we have to shoot our way out of here.”

Pinkie went on dressing, even as she said that she didn’t want to wear such a distinctive spring bonnet.

When the brunette said she wouldn’t have to, Pinkie absently put on the wool coat, finding it mighty snug in spite of the way the seams had been knee-popped across the shoulders.

Then the brunette said, “You look adorable. Let’s saddle the ponies we mean to escape on before we do anything else.”

The ash blonde asked, “Why can’t we just ride? Why do we have to do anything else? I say let the posse find these old things and be damned to them. If I was chasing three old bank robbers and found the three of them had been shot, I’d have no call to search any further for ‘em, would I?”

The brunette smiled indulgently and said, not unkindly, “I tend to forget what a deep thinker you can be, Pinkie. No posse will expect to catch up with three men. Someone in town has surely told them a tale about three men and a girl. If they find them here, without the money or the girl, they’re going to suspect that just about what happened here, happened here, see?”

Pinkie brightened and asked, “You mean they might think the gal they rode off with gunned them, to ride off with the money?”

The brunette nodded soberly and replied, “That’s why I don’t want them to find things exactly this way. I want them to assume they’re looking for a fifth member of the gang who gunned all four of them when they rode in here to change outfits and ponies, see?”

Pinkie looked confused, and started to say there was no female body for any posse to find. Then the Le Mat roared at close range to make an unrecognizable hash of her face.

So when the posse rode in an hour or so later, they read things that way. The bank robbers had been surprised in the act of changing disguises. But clothes they’d worn at the bank, along with their calico bandanna masks, were there for all to see, along with the still shapely but mangled gal in the same wool coat, with that veiled spring hat in one far corner.

Nobody who noticed a distant farm gal riding a paint and leading a gray had any call to chase after her on such a busy afternoon. For just as the treacherous little brunette had planned far in advance, the local lawmen figured the gang had been double-crossed by one or more mighty fast gunslicks of the male persuasion.

It made sense to send a gal in ahead to scout the intended scene of the crime. But such sign as there was to read around their hideout said that no more than one or two had been left there with the spare mounts and changes of clothing. That meant the lawmen had to track down one or two strangers in pants before the U.P. tracks were repaired and most anybody could be long gone with all that money and no description worth mention.

Once holed up in South Pass City, without incident, the very ruthless mastermind, who’d never meant to share a penny with three dumber men and a girl, reflected on yet another job well done. For things had gone slick as a whistle, with the only surprise being that federal lawman on the scene, just long enough to catch a 20-gauge shotgun charge dead center at point-blank range.

Since he had, there was no need to worry about him, or so the hard but innocent-looking little killer thought.

Which only went to show what Mr. Burns had meant in his poem about the best-laid plans of mice and men.

Chapter 2

The young widow of a rich old mining man had given her hired help the night off. So she was alone in her kitchen, frying eggs, when there came a discreet rapping on her back door.

There was nothing to be done about her long brown hair hanging down her back at that hour. But she wrapped her beige pongee kimono more securely about her Junoesque curves as she moved over to peer through a side pane, gasp in surprised delight, and open up to haul Longarm inside for a nice warm kiss before she exclaimed, “Oh, Custis, I’ve been so worried about you! What are you doing out of your sickbed? The Rocky Mountain News said you’d been shot in the breast by a shotgun and weren’t expected to recover!”

To which Longarm modestly replied, “It was only a 20-gauge, half the bore and a quarter the blast of a serious Greener market gun. We were fixing to have them say I’d been killed all the way. But Henry, our fussy file clerk, convinced Marshal Vail and me that the payroll would be thrown all out of joint if a senior deputy died totally and then came back to life.”

Dragging him into the kitchen and seating him at the table, his radiant hostess said, “Just let me take these things off the stove lest they burn. Didn’t it smart to be shot in the breast with any sort of shotgun, darling?”

He explained, “Not half as much as it might have if I hadn’t been planning on some fry cooking of my own. On my way to that bank I’d picked up a big slab of bacon and a bitty frying pan, along with some biscuit flour and a bottle of tomato ketchup. My coat and vest wound up at the dry cleaner, once I got my breath back, but nary a lead shot got through that old frying pan. How come you don’t want to fry with your own pan anymore, honey?”

She moved over to sit in his lap, allowing her kimono to fall wide open as she husked, “I can get fried eggs most any time. How long has it been since last you darkened my door, you brute?”

Longarm replied by rising with her in his arms. They both knew the way to her bedroom. As he carried her out of the kitchen and up the back stairs, she repeated her question, and he said a man lost track of time when he had a mean boss who kept him so busy.

He felt sort of mean himself as he considered where else he’d been since the last time he’d been up here atop Capitol Hill. A man had to consider where he meant to indulge in slap and tickle when he was supposed to be crippled up or dying in the hospital. He didn’t think he ought to say as much to a gal he admired for her brains as well as her warm nature.

But of course, being a gal with brains as well as a warm nature, the Junoesque young widow only let him lay her across the bed and come in her once before she demanded to know what he’d been doing with that other woman up in Bitter Creek to begin with.

Longarm was sitting up to finish undressing all the way and she regarded him from a state of total nudity in her big four-poster. The bedroom lamp was trimmed low. But he met her eyes with a clear conscience and assured her, “That gal who shot me was neither a rival nor half as well built. I’d never seen her before, but the wanted flyers know her of old, and that’s how come we don’t want her to know she never shot me seriously.”

He shucked the last of his disordered duds, and flopped back naked beside her to take her in his arms again and treat her even better. She spread her soft thighs in wide welcome, but protested, “I do this way better when I’m not wondering about other women, Custis.”

Longarm eased his love-slicked organ-grinder in place between the gates of paradise as he said soothingly, “She was just an ornery outlaw gal. We don’t know her real name. But we call her kind a Medusa because of the way they kill everyone who gets a good look at their faces, like that Medusa critter in those old Greek myths. This particular cold-blooded she-monster is called Miss Medusa Le Mat because she’s been turning folks to stone, leastways, hash, with a Le Mat Duplex. That’s this freak revolver with its cylinder of .40-caliber chambers turning on a sawed-off 20-gauge shotgun barrel instead of a regular axis. After she shot me, my prisoner, and others at that Wyoming bank, it seems she wiped out her own gang and rode off with all the swag. She had us all confounded about that at first. She’d left the posse a ringer in the outfit she’d been wearing in the bank. It would have worked a heap better if she’d really left me dead with all the other witnesses.”

He found himself rising once more to the occasion as he kissed the widow’s soft throat and added, “We figure from other cases in other parts that the lady we call Miss Medusa Le Mat doesn’t want her sweet innocent face remembered by any witnesses or associates. I got a good look at her up close, just before she blew me off my feet. So I found her substitute corpse unconvincing when they brought it into Bitter Creek.”

The widow dilated to let him get the head in, then clamped down and sort of rolled the rest of it in as she moaned, “Ooh, nice! But there was nothing in the papers about you identifying any bodies, darling.”

He agreed it felt swell, but moved it nice and easy at first while he explained, “We didn’t want to run Miss Medusa to ground too deep.”

The young widow chuckled fondly, said she liked it as deep as he felt like running it into her, and added that she didn’t follow his drift about that other wicked gal.

So Longarm told her, without stopping, “We put her getaway together after it was too late, comparing notes with mighty uncertain witnesses who vaguely recalled a small nester gal in a drab Mother Hubbard dress and oversized sunbonnet. We figure she changed to yet another outfit as soon as she caught a stagecoach going one way or another out of South Pass City. The two ponies she abandoned there had been stolen over near the Utah line.”

Then they were both too busy loping over the rise of pure pleasure to worry about anyone else for a spell, which they did their best to hold on to.

But since all things good and bad must pass, it came to pass all too soon that they were sharing a three-for-a-nickel cheroot, propped up against the headboard with her head on his bare shoulder while she tried to fill in some gaps in her understanding of that other woman.

Longarm passed the smoke to her as he explained, “We know who the three drifters and one whore she recruited were. All four had long if somewhat pathetic records, albeit none of ‘em had ever done anything so serious before. Smokey Wade was the meanest, and he’d never killed for that much profit before. Bob Shingler had been fired from his job as a Wells Fargo guard when they caught him pilfering from passengers. Nick Parsons was a stock thief who could ride and shoot some. That other gal was a shopworn whore who shoplifted when she couldn’t find a paying customer on the streets of Cheyenne.”

He took back the cheroot for a thoughtful drag, placed the tip back between her lips, and continued. “Miss Medusa Le Mat has played the same dirty game at least five times. Lord only knows how many times she might have pulled it off before anybody noticed certain tedious repetitions. With her natural face hanging out, smiling as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, she recruited the local talent she needed once she’d scouted the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan. I can say for certain she appeared an innocent high-toned lady as she stood in the bank ahead of the rest of us.”

The far-from-innocent young widow asked what that other woman had looked like, aside from being so socially acceptable.

Longarm patted a bare shoulder reassuringly as he replied, “She was out to kill me, not to steal me away from anybody. But like I said, I was standing close enough, in fair light, to recall her face forever more. Getting shot point-blank by a pretty gal has a wondrous way of concentrating a man’s mind.”

“I might have known you’d never forget a pretty face!” the pretty widow sniffed, reaching down to toy with his belly hairs while she brought up that other gal she’d heard about at his Chinese laundry.

Longarm protested he’d never messed with that pretty Chinese, which was true enough. Of course, the pretty widow had never mentioned the gal working at the Golden Dragon Chop Suey Palace.

He said soothingly, “Miss Medusa Le Mat looks all right because there’s nothing wrong with her. But had she not shot me with that trademark Le Mat Duplex, I’d have never paid her all that much mind. We figure that’s what makes her such a Medusa. She knows a change of costume and mayhaps hair color can turn her into yet another gal entirely to anyone who hasn’t been looking at her closely. So every time she plans a robbery, she plans ahead on killing everybody who might have regarded her more than casually. You see, the real Medusa, in those old Greek legends, petrified every man who saw her face. I’ll be switched if I can figure out how any of those old Greek sculptors knew how to carve her face out of stone.”

The naked flesh-and-blood beauty next to him chuckled and told him, “That was just a fairy tale, you big silly. We read about Medusa and that clever Greek who killed her when I was in grammar school. But I doubt you’ll ever kill Medusa’s modern namesake with a magic mirror and a sword, Custis.”

Longarm took a long drag on their cheroot, blew a ponderous smoke ring, and stared through it at their bare toes while he soberly said, “That Greek lawman knew where that earlier Medusa was hiding out. Seeing she was able to turn visitors to stone on sight, she never had to get around as much. Miss Medusa Le Mat, using a Le Mat Duplex instead of magic, has hit as far west as San Diego and far east as Saint Lou. We’re hoping we might be able to get her to come to us. Like you read in both the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post, this child is supposed to be laid up in a private room at County General with a collapsed lung and possible lead poisoning too close to his old heart to operate.”

He blew another smoke ring, reached out to snub the cheroot in an ashtray near the bed lamp, and added, “There’s this dummy in a hospital bed with my name on its medical charts. We’ve naturally got a round-the-clock guard posted across the hall in another empty room. So that leaves the real me free to roam, as long as I stay out of the brighter-lit parts of town. So here I am, and ain’t this more fun than spending a night alone in a hospital bed?”

She gasped, “Powder River and let her buck!” as Longarm rolled over on top of her again to thrust his recovered manhood right where they both wanted it.

They had to work further down in the bed to get in position for a serious gallop. But part of the fun was getting there with an old pal whose body movements meshed with one’s own. So another good time was had by all, until they somehow wound up dog-style.

That position, as any experienced folks can verify, is the most natural position for conversation while fornicating. Longarm liked to talk to women almost as much as he liked to screw them. So when the horny young widow thrust her ample but well-formed behind up to take it just right, with a remark about no dummy ever passing for such a natural man in this position, Longarm sighed and said, “I sure hope she’ll read the same papers and rise to the bait at County General. I’d hate to have her pull the same stunt at another bank in other parts. Bank robbery is only federal when it looks as if state or territorial border-jumping might be involved. We’re hoping she’ll feel a call to eliminate me as a witness once and for all before she plans another bloodbath.”

The more distinctive beauty he was having his way with arched her back to give him more as she said, “I don’t think I’d risk paying you a hospital visit if I was on the run, darling. She did get away clean, and it’s a big country.”

He replied, thrusting it as deep as she let him, “I get to cover a lot of the country riding for the Justice Department. It all depends on whether or not she buys my rep as a lawman who never forgets a face. She might feel confident behind more powder and a wig than I reported. She might feel it’s safe to pull at least one or two more robberies before she comes to visit me. She might be dumb enough to think that would draw our attention away from County General.”

The smart young widow said, “Let me roll over and take it the good old-fashioned way while I’m coming. You’re right about her being sort of dumb. Why do you suppose she can’t see how using that same freakish gun the same way, over and over, is sure to get her caught?”

Longarm waited until they were going at it her way, with her long shapely legs locked around his bare waist, before he suggested that the other wicked lady might not care who knew that the same ill-tempered gal was robbing banks all over creation, as long as nobody knew who she was or exactly what she looked like.

The one in his arms came just ahead of him. He returned her compliment with more interest than she had any right to expect, and that inspired her to slobber all over him and sob, “Oh, Custis, how would I ever get laid right if somebody shot you with a Le Mat Duplex?”

He left it in to soak, but just rested his weight on his elbows and her pelvis as he chuckled and said, “Somebody already has, and as you might have noticed, it hasn’t slowed me down worth mention.”

She sighed, and hugged him tighter with her legs as she wistfully remarked, “I ought to say I’m sorry you didn’t get any of this up in Bitter Creek, but I’m not. How long do you and your boss, Marshal Vail, intend to leave you in that hospital bed?”

Longarm honestly replied, “Can’t say for certain. It’s up to the lady to make her own choices. It wouldn’t be realistic to have me take forever to get better or worse, even if the paymaster would go for it. I reckon we can give her to the end of the month to make some noticeable move.”

The woman, who’d started to move on her own under him again, sighed and said she wished he could stay sick in bed at least as long.

Longarm said, “So do I. Old Billy Vail ain’t taking this case as personally as me.”

She told him that was a sweet thing to say, and started moving her hips faster. So Longarm never told her he was taking the case personally because that other gal had killed a federal prisoner on him before he could bring the cuss in to be hanged.

Chapter 3

Nobody but some pesky newspaper reporters and an old flame with flowers went to see Longarm at County General for the next seven or eight days. The reporters were told Longarm was running a fever from his mortified wounds and was too delirious to see anybody. So Reporter Crawford of the Post ran what amounted to the obituary of his old town-taming pal, and Miss Morgana Floyd of the Arvada Orphan Asylum left the mason jar of blue chickory her orphans had picked for their hero at the front desk.

That widow woman up on Capitol Hill didn’t know about old Morgana Floyd, of course, and it was fun to read one’s own obituary in bed with her. She didn’t get half the jokes because she’d never been there at the times old Crawford had written about. So she got mad when they got to the part about Longarm taking Calamity Jane away from Wild Bill.

He hugged her bare body closer to his own as he assured her nobody with a lick of sense had ever fought over the dubious charms of Miss Martha Jane Canary, known as Calamity ever since she’d been fired from a Dodge City house of ill repute for clapping up her customers.

Holding the Post in one hand and a swell tit in the other, Longarm elaborated. “I’ve met up with both Calamity and Jim Hickok in my travels over the years since I came out here from West-by-God Virginia. Old Calamity would have it known that James Butler Hickok screwed her every chance he got, and she’s invited me to screw her every time we’ve met up. But for the record, Jim Hickok was married and not clapped up when he got shot in the back in the Number Ten Saloon.”

The suspicious-natured but pretty gal in bed with Longarm sniffed and said something about there being fire wherever there was smoke.

Longarm shook his head and insisted, “Not when hopeless drunks are bragging in a saloon to greenhorn newspaper reporters. The last time I met Calamity Jane, she was drinking herself silly up in Deadwood. I heard her say how she’d wept and kissed old Wild Bill’s coffin before they could lower it into the cold, cold ground of the Black Hills. But there’s no solid evidence the two of them ever even met up whilst he was above the ground. Nobody who really drank with Jim Hickok ever called him Wild Bill the way Calamity Jane and Ned Buntline’s Wild West Magazine likes to.”

The Denver gal observed, “Calamity Jane has her own Wild West covers now, doesn’t she?”

Longarm chuckled fondly, and explained, “I told Ned Buntline I’d sue him if he ever did that to me. But according to him and Calamity Jane, she rode for the Pony Express and scouted for Custer before she found true love with Wild Bill, just before he was killed with both her and those aces and eights on his mind.”

He snuggled the young widow’s warm flesh closer and added, “Martha Jane Canary was born this side of the California Gold Rush, making her no older than ten or eleven during those few months Buffalo Bill Cody and some of those other blowhards really rode for the Pony Express. At the time Jim Hickok was killed in Deadwood, just passing through a brand-new boom town, Calamity would have been in her early twenties, and they do say she was married up a spell before she took to whoring and serious drinking.”

Since gals used meaner arithmetic on one another than menfolk, the young widow quickly tallied in her pretty head. “If she was in her early twenties when Wild Bill was shot back in ‘76,” she said, “she only would be in her later twenties this very night! Yet she looks so old and gruff on those magazine covers, Custis!”

Longarm kissed her ear and pointed out, “You younger-looking gals are more careful about your hair and grooming, wear more womanly outfits, and try to avoid drunken brawls with bullwhips. Old Calamity is inclined to boast about wonders and cucumbers that never happened, but she’s still led a hard life and it’s commencing to show. So suffice it to say, I never stole her away from old Jim Hickok. And look here. It says I beat Billy the Kid to the draw down New Mexico way!”

“Didn’t you?” she asked dryly.

He laughed and said, “Not hardly. Me and the Kid were still alive, the last I heard. There’s a heap of bull out about him too. But I have it on good authority that young Henry McCarthy, Bill Bonney, or whoever he might be never goes for his gun unless he really means it.”

She repressed a shiver, and said she followed his drift about it being sort of silly to imply two well-known gunslicks would slap leather at the same time and just stand there.

He said, “A heap of such yarns unravel as soon as you study on the way common sense says they’d have to pan out. Old-timers all over the West have started to cite witnesses to impossible events instead of adding and subtracting the possibles. Human beings can do all sorts of loco things. But they can’t get around time and geography. I know they’d rather have eyewitness testimony for a criminal trial. But speaking from experience, I’ll take circumstantial evidence every time. A rattled barkeep who witnesses a sudden flare-up ain’t half as reliable to me as the victim’s blood all over the killer’s boots.”

She said she followed his drift, and then said she wanted to get on top this time. So he let her, and it was swell, but were the truth to be known, making love to the sweetest gal over and over could become a chore by the fourth or fifth night. So even as she was going up and down like a painted pony on the brass pole of a merry-go-round, Longarm caught himself picturing Miss Morgana Floyd, or even better, that barmaid at the Black Cat who kept saying no, in the same position and state of undress. Even though he wryly recalled the time he’d been going at it dog-style with old Morgana while picturing this one’s broader hips in place of the pretty little orphan herder’s.

He decided, as long as he was screwing a daydream, he might as well imagine Miss Ellen Terry of the wicked stage, seeing that that was as close as he was ever going to get to the high-toned English actress who seemed so pretty in her photographs.

Hence, the next morning when he reported in at Marshal Billy Vail’s private home on Sherman Street instead of going to their office down at the Denver Federal Building, Longarm was more than ready to saddle up and ride most anywhere.

Back alleys and kitchen doors were made for gents who didn’t aim to be recognized out of their hospital bed in the bright morning sunlight. So Longarm caught up with his boss as the somewhat older and far shorter and stouter Billy Vail was having ham and eggs with real Arbuckle coffee.

Longarm had just had breakfast, in bed, so when Vail’s wife seated him at the kitchen table, with a veiled remark about scandalous young widow women, he said he’d just have some black coffee.

He knew Vail’s wife hadn’t heard anything about him over the backyard-fence telegraph, because he’d asked the widow gal to give her hired help a swell spring vacation. That meant Vail and his wife were in the habit of talking shop together. Longarm idly wondered, as he sipped her swell coffee, whether she and old Billy were in the habit of conversational screwing dog-style. It was comical to picture, but when you studied on it, nobody looked all that dignified or even rational from the point of view of your average Peeping Tom, and old Billy Vail still drank and smoked as vigorously as anyone else.

He ate good too. Vail washed down a heroic chaw of ham and eggs with coffee and told Longarm, “First the good news. I got the Attorney General in Washington Town to grade Miss Medusa Le Mat up to a nationwide federal manhunt with you carte-blanched to chase her as far and wide as she might run.”

Longarm asked what the bad news might be.

Vail said, “She seems to have chosen far and wide. She must have read the papers by this time. But she doesn’t seem to care to visit you in the hospital. By the way, did you know that stenographer gal they call Miss Bubbles brought you a potted plant all the gals in the steno pool chipped in for, or so Miss Bubbles says?”

Longarm avoided the stern gaze of Billy Vail’s wife as he felt a slight tingle and recalled the mingled scent of cheap perfume and the leather upholstery of that reception-room sofa.

Vail recalled him to the less romantic here and now by going on to say, “Whether she sensed a trap, or figured she don’t have to worry about you unless or until you get better, I want your educated guess on a more recent robbery down in the Big Thicket country of East Texas.”

Longarm forgot about Miss Bubbles on that leather sofa, and listened tight as Vail brought him up to date on what sure could have been the work of the mystery woman with such wicked ways. But the more such jobs she pulled, the more the details varied.

The report from East Texas had the usual three desperados hit the bank near closing time, masked, armed, and frightening, to light out with over twenty thousand after gunning just one teller. That unfortunate had been waiting on a female customer nobody else could describe in detail. Nobody would have thought about her at all if she’d still been around when the local law came to question all the survivors. One other woman who’d been there allowed the missing witness had been wearing a straw boater atop pinned-up red hair and a long tan travel duster.

Longarm grimaced and said, “Would only take me two minutes to shuck a hat, wig, and duster in a nearby alley. Was that one teller gunned by a Le Mat?”

Vail shook his balding head and replied, “Caliber .36. One of the robbers was waving a Navy Colt Conversion. She never left her disguise in any alley. They looked. I figure she put the hat, wig, and duster in a bag and just strolled over to the railroad depot, looking like some other gal entirely.”

“If she was the one we call Medusa in the first place,” Longarm pointed out. “More than one bank has been held up by a trio of owlhoot riders in this land of opportunity. More than one witness has fled the scene of a crime just because they didn’t want to be a witness. Has anybody tried reading the sign that way?”

Vail said, “Yep. I have. You ought to let your elders finish the damned story before you horn in, old son. The robbery went smooth as silk, like I said, with the crooks Just vanishing into thin air and no clear trail to cut for a good three days.”

Longarm asked what had happened after three days.

Vail said, “The smell was getting awful. The four bodies on a houseboat in a bayou of the big thicket likely stunk a good while before a market-hunting swamprunner got downwind of ‘em and circled in to see what smelled so dead. He knew the old colored lady who’d lived alone on that houseboat. He had to get the Texas Rangers to figure out the other three bodies had been local wayward youths that everyone had always expected bad ends for.”

Longarm asked, “Twenty-gauge?”

Vail said, “Just one of the men. The old colored lady and two of the less dangerous boys had .40-caliber rounds in ‘em. You want more? Another swamprunner came forward later to say he’d spotted a young white gal on the deck of that same houseboat about the time of the robbery.”

Longarm whistled and declared, “The first cadaver wouldn’t have begun to decompose if they pulled the robbery the first day they took over her houseboat on her. Medusa slickered the bunch of them with her move to secure a safe hideout. What she really wanted, every time, was a handy place to gather all her black sheep together and slaughter ‘em in a bunch before riding off with all the loot! That other gal Medusa recruited with a tale of holding the spare ponies back at the hideout was really meant as a substitute corpse in case anybody described one of the bank robbers as female, right?”

Vail said, “That seems about the size of it. Lord knows why Medusa didn’t kill that spare girl right there with all the others, or how a second gal could be persuaded to ride far with such a murderous pal.”

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, “Too many ways to count before we catch up. She could have abducted that other gal at gunpoint, or talked her into going along willingly. You want me to head down to the Big Thicket country of East Texas for a look-see, right?”

Billy Vail said, “Wrong. I want you to head over to the Flint Hills country of West Kansas and find out what in thunder Miss Medusa Le Mat is planning way closer to home.”

Longarm brightened. “How do you know she’s doubled back that close to Denver?”

Vail growled, “I don’t for certain. That’s how come I’m sending you. We know the treacherous gal we have no real name for recruits three men and a gal fairly close to the scene of the next crime she’s planning. Now, a known bank robber just got out of Leavenworth, but never turned up for the homecoming party his kith and kin were planning—under the watchful eye of the local law. A plain but popular soiled dove from the same trail town has dropped out of sight at the height of the spring roundup business. Miss Medusa Le Mat may or may not have had time to recruit two more men and scout a handy hideout no more than a hard lope from the nearest bank worth robbing But I ain’t fixing to teach a fox to suck eggs or a senior deputy how to nip things in the bud. I had Henry type up your travel orders and a full report before I left the office last night. I’ll get it for you directly and you can be on your way. Any questions?”

Longarm said, “Just one. How am I supposed to take such a lethal little lady without gunning her? I can say from experience that she can be unreasonable with a loaded Le Mat Duplex in her hand!”

Chapter 4

Figuring that a lawman who was supposed to be dying in the hospital would look silly following the official dress code of the reform Administration in Washington that made him report to the office wearing a suit, Longarm went over to his furnished digs west of Cherry Creek to get dressed sensibly for work in cattle country.

He changed into clean but faded denim jeans and a denim jacket, swapping his shoestring tie for a calico bandanna, but stayed with the stovepipe boots and coffee-brown Stetson he usually wore. Suspicious eyes were as likely to pick up on a rider’s new boots and hat as they were to recall the description of a well-known lawman’s trimmings. A man could walk softer and run faster on well-broken-in boots in any case.

With those pesky newspaper articles about him in mind, Longarm took his bedroll, saddlebags, and Winchester ‘73 off his usual McClellan so he could lash them to the double-rigged roping saddle he’d borrowed on his way across town. Like his faded denims, the substitute saddle had seen better days and shouldn’t attract attention, even though it was still serviceable, with a well-broken-in grass rope in case anybody looked at it seriously.

Less than a day later the semi-disguised Longarm and his nondescript gear had arrived by train in Florence, Kansas—which sounded no sillier than Rome, New York, when you studied on it.

Getting off the train at Florence too late to ride on, Longarm got a room in a third-class hotel near the railside stockyards, drawing looks that were thoughtful to hostile as he deposited the loaded-up roping saddle on the floor near the desk to sign in.

The nearby Flint Hills were an eighty-mile-wide strip of cow country with serious land-hungry farm folks all around it and sort of resentful, even though no cow folks had been consulted by the Lord in the laying out of Kansas.

Like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, the Hint Hills ran like a wide ribbon of unplowed prairie from northeast Kansas all the way south to the Indian Nation, having resisted the nester and his plow, although for opposite reasons.

You could plow up the sod all too easily in the Nebraska Sand Hills. Then the strong prairie winds would blow the sand dunes of some long-dead seashore right out from under the roots of your plantings. The Kansas Flint Hills looked like a similar rolling sea of grass, but the sod lay right atop solid chalk, with layers of the chert they called flint to bust up any plowshare tough enough to dig into chalk. Hence the cow and the cowboy had hung on in the Flint Hills as the plow and the farmer had leapfrogged west.

Leaving his gear upstairs in his hired room, Longarm strode out to take in the evening action of Florence, Kansas, on a work night. There wasn’t as much along the one main street as the town’s name might seem to call for. Longarm treated himself to a sit-down supper in a Chinese restaurant near his hotel, then considered getting a haircut, but decided he’d best hold the surplus hair in reserve for a barbershop closer to the smaller cow town Billy Vail wanted him to scout.

Small-town saloons were almost as good for gossip as small-town barbershops. So Longarm peered through a few windows near the stock yards until he found a place with more cowhands than farmers on tap. Then he sauntered in to belly up to the bar and order himself a schooner of needled beer. You got more beer more cheaply when you ordered it by the scuttle. But a stranger in town just never knew when he might get the chance to order a round for new-found friends, and it took time to put a scuttle away without feeling it.

Longarm could tell they catered to a tight regular crowd when the barkeep who served him asked, in a friendly voice but loud enough to be heard by one and all, which brand he rode for over in the Flint Hills.

Longarm was glad he hadn’t been taken for a farmer by a bunch who seemed concerned about such matters.

He kept his own voice hearty enough to let everyone hear as he replied he’d just been handed the shovel by the Diamond K in Colorado and heard they might be hiring over this way.

A more obvious cowhand just down the bar told Longarm in a friendly enough manner that he’d have a time getting hired now, seeing the spring beef had about been shipped and they were starting to lay off seasonal help in the Flint Hills. Nobody insulted a man who claimed to be cow by suggesting he apply at any of the more numerous farms around town. When a man who worked on horseback said he’d been handed a shovel, it meant he’d been fired. Cattle spreads got rid of extra top hands by asking them to dig post holes or shovel shit. The same laconic code that made it dangerous to speak rudely to another grown man made it impossible to raise a voice in protest at a politely worded but unreasonable order. When a man went to work for your wages, he knew he was expected to do just as he was told or quit, with no back-lip either way.

So Longarm and everyone else in the dinky saloon knew trouble was in the air when a big burly rider in a tall Texas hat bawled out from his corner table, “I know that Diamond K spread over by Denver. I asked ‘em for a job one time and they told me they wasn’t hiring.”

Longarm found that as easy to figure as the fact that the big cowhand had the whole table to himself. Hard liquor had done as much as the harsh climate of the High Plains to bake his ham-shaped face such an unhealthy shade of red. But even though the hard drinker had made his remark in a rude tone, Longarm tried to sound calm and friendly as he called back, “I just said they handed me a shovel, pard. Diamond K doesn’t keep too many steady hands on their payroll.”

The drunk grumbled, “I figured they had it in for me because I rid for the South over a dozen years ago. Colorado sided with the infernal Union, cuss it all to Hell!”

Longarm didn’t answer. For the Good Book sayeth a soft answer turneth away wrath, and anyone who’s ever argued with a drunk sayeth no answer at all is even safer.

But it didn’t work. The red-faced hulk in the Texas hat suddenly focused on Longarm’s telescoped Stetson and demanded, “Ain’t that a Colorado crush you’re sporting on that sissy hat, pilgrim?”

The barkeep tried, “Take it easy, Waco. Man just said he was a High Plains rider, and we get more wind than heat up this way.”

Another helpful hand, his own hat higher-crowned than Longarm’s, volunteered, “Lots of gents keep their hats snugged closer to their skulls north of the Arkansas, Waco, and like you say, the war was over more than a dozen years ago.”

But Waco lurched to his considerable height and sort of waded through the tobacco smoke toward Longarm, ominously observing as he approached the bar, “You look old enough to have rid in the war, Colorado boy. I was with Hood’s Texas Brigade. Who might you have ridden with?”

Longarm sighed and soothingly replied, “I disremember a lot about a misspent youth, and for the record, I never saw Colorado or anything else west of the Big Muddy before I came out this way once the guns fell silent and the jobs got scarce in the greener hills where I grew up. Can I buy you another, seeing you seem to have swallowed the last of your last one?”

Waco said, “I’m particular who I drink with, you nigger-loving damn Yankee!”

So Longarm hit him hard with a left hook, followed by a roundhouse right it was only safe to throw at a drunk already staggered by your first solid punch.

As Waco collapsed like a half-empty sack of potatoes on the sawdust-covered floor, Longarm drew his .44-40 and quietly said he sure hoped nobody else objected as he hunkered down to relieve the unconscious Texan of the .45 Peacemaker he’d been wearing low in a buscadero side-draw tied down.

Nobody seemed to, but as Longarm straightened back up and handed Waco’s sidearm to the barkeep, another hand wearing a Texas hat morosely remarked that Longarm had cold-cocked old Waco without warning. When he bitched, “A man has the right to know when he’s about to be knocked on his ass!” Longarm calmly replied, “He had plenty of warning from his very own lips, pard. When you come at a grown man with a gun on your hip and commence to cuss him out, what do you expect from him, a kiss on the cheek?”

The barkeep made the .45 vanish as he declared it was his opinion that the stranger had been right kindly to a mortal fool, adding, “Anyone could see Waco was building up to a more serious fight—with the two of them packing guns, for Pete’s sake! I was sure we were fixing to have us a shooting here tonight, when this sweet-natured Colorado rider stopped Mr. Death at the door with as solid a brace of punches as I’ve seen in recent memory!”

Most everyone there seemed to agree, on further reflection and after a round of drinks on the house. But somebody must have slipped out into the gathering darkness to call the law. Old Waco, meanwhile, sat up in the middle of the floor to ask who’d run over him with a beer dray.

Before anyone there could tell him, the bat-wing doors swung wide to admit a lean and hungry-looking individual wearing Abe Lincoln’s whiskers, a brace of Sam Colt’s equalizers, and a German silver star.

Taking in the scene with a look of ill-disguised disgust, the town law declared, “A body would think Waco McCord could get in and out of town more quietly on a workday night. But I reckon he just works to pay off disturbance fines. I’d be obliged if some of your boys would get him on his feet, hand me his hardware, and help me get him over to the jail.”

Longarm moved to do so. But the laconic town law said, “Not you, pilgrim. You’ll be spending the night in our jail with him, and I’d sure like to see that .44-40 double-action a mite closer.”

As two of the regulars disarmed Waco and hauled him erect on now-wobbly legs, Longarm protested, “I ain’t drunk and I never started it, Marshal!”

To which the older lawman replied with no emotion, “I ain’t a marshal. I ain’t a judge neither. I’m the town constable, and you can explain it to Judge Drysdale in the morning, drunk or sober. They call me Hard Pan Parsons for reasons you don’t want to go into, pilgrim. I have discovered in my travels through this vale of woe that whilst there’s no way to make a man do anything he don’t want to, there’s many a way to make him wish to Sweet Jesus that he’d wanted to. So about that fucking gun …”

Longarm handed his six-gun over. He still had his derringer hidden in an inside pocket of his denim jacket, and better yet, he had his own badge and identification in case things got unbearable.

Meanwhile, a night in a small-town jail and the usual modest fine that went with no argument seemed more bearable than announcing who’d just decked their town bully in front of God and everybody.

So Longarm walked meek as a lamb in front of Hard Pan Parsons and the other disturber of Florence’s peace—on an infernal workday night, for Pete’s sake. With any luck he might manage to be on his way in the morning with nobody in these parts the wiser.

But he had no such luck. Hard Pan Parsons was wiser than he let on too. Once they got to the solid-brick jailhouse, the older lawman and his younger deputies searched both prisoners with considerable skill, and Hard Pan muttered, “Shame on you,” when a gleeful deputy dangled Longarm’s double derringer on the end of its gold-washed watch chain.

The constable himself took Longarm’s billfold from another inside pocket, and Longarm was braced for most any reaction than the one old Hard Pan came up with when he cracked open the billfold to see a shiny federal badge and Longarm’s deputy marshal’s warrant.

Without blinking an eye, the Florence lawman snapped the leather shut and dryly remarked, “I’ll hang on to this for safekeeping, seeing you seem to have some serious money here. What did you say your name was, stranger?”

Caught by surprise, Longarm blurted out, “Crawford, Buck Crawford was what they called me the last place I worked, out Colorado way.”

It served Reporter Crawford of the Denver Post right, and it would be even easier to remember because Longarm had often wondered whether he and Doctor Crawford Long, who’d discovered painless surgery, might be kissing cousins. He wasn’t sure he wanted to kiss another grown man. But he sure wanted to shake the hand of the man who’d come up with such a grand notion as general anesthetics in time for the big war back East.

Once he and his fellow saloon brawler had been searched and marched back to the row of boiler-plate and circus barred patent cells, Hard Pan told his turnkey, “Put Waco down that way in the empty cage. I’ll put old Buck here down the other way, lest the two of ‘em kiss and make up, or kill one another, before the judge can decide their fates.”

Nobody argued. Hard Pan led Longarm past a more crowded cell, where a crap game was in progress, on past a lonesome-looking black man playing “My Pretty Quadroon” on a mouth organ, and into an empty cell at the far end. Then he soberly turned and asked, “All right, Deputy Long, what the hell are we trying to get away with here?”

Longarm cautiously asked how big a piece of the action Florence Township was prepared for.

Hard Pan Parsons flatly replied, “We’re both lawmen, sworn to uphold the law of the land. Are you saying your play with Waco McCord is none of my beeswax?”

Longarm shook his head respectfully and explained, “Being a mean drunk ain’t a federal offense, and as far as I know, that’s all I have on old Waco. I hit him because I’d have drawn even more attention to my fool self if I’d gunned him, and it looked as if he was working up the sand to gun me.”

The town law, more familiar with locals like Waco, made a wry face and said, “He’s just an asshole. But I thank you for not killing him, I reckon. It’s only a question of time before some other stranger kills him. I’ve warned Waco about threatening others whilst packing hardware. But like you said, he’s a mean drunk, and seeing it was just one of them things, I reckon you’d as soon be on your way. So let’s go out front before I give you back your belongings.”

But Longarm shook his head again and said, “I got a better notion, seeing you’re so willing to back my play.”

Hard Pan told him to name his game.

Longarm said, “I’d like you to toss me in with your more regular customers. Nights seem long when you’re locked up with a friendly sort of talking man, and I’m here to see if I can get a line on the sort of crook who recruits extra help from the sort of gents who wind up shooting craps in small-town jails, no offense.”

Hard Pan said none was taken, and asked what Longarm wanted him to tell the court clerk come morning.

Longarm said, “Nothing, unless they decide to put me on the chain gang. I’d as soon plead guilty to disturbing the peace, pay the fine, and head on into the Flint Hills as a friendless out-of-work cowhand in the market for most any sort of friends or any sort of work.”

Chapter 5

No well-run jail allowed money or other weapons to its overnight guests. But subject to sensible behavior, Hard Pan let them keep their tobacco, matches, and a pair of dice to win or lose match stems with. Longarm could tell right off that the eight or ten town and country boys in the cell knew one another of old. So he sat on the floor in a corner, lit a cheroot, and waited to see what anybody wanted to make of it.

What somebody wanted to make of it was close to an open threat. A husky cowhand with brows that met in the middle rose from the circle of crap shooters to amble over and say flat out, “I want one of them sissy seegars, pilgrim.”

Longarm replied not unkindly, “Can’t spare none. Don’t know how long they mean to hold me, and I don’t see any cigar store Indians in here with us.”

The crap game got awfully quiet as their obvious bully blinked in surprise and asked, “Are you hard of hearing or something? I never asked you for a smoke, you son of a bitch. I told you I wanted one!”

To which Longarm replied in the same calm tone, “I heard what you said. You heard what I said. Call me that again and one of us is sure going to wish you hadn’t.”

The slightly shorter but far beefier stranger sighed, doubled up a pair of ham-like fists, and said, “That tears it. On your feet and be prepared to swallow some teeth, little darling!”

But before Longarm could rise to the occasion, a skinny young squirt sporting a red shirt and a high-crowned hat big enough for a family of average-sized Indians chimed in urgently with, “Don’t do it, Lash! I heard the turnkeys talking about him when they brung him and old Waco in. They said he put old Waco’s lights out sudden with his bare fists, and as you can plainly see, not a mark on him to show for it!”

The bigger one called Lash got just a tad green around the gills as he and Longarm stared into one another’s eyes. The bully’s eyes were oyster blue and bloodshot. He lowered his gaze from the twin gun muzzles of Longarm’s steel-gray eyes, but being an old hand at his kid games, he tried to crawfish gracefully by asking Longarm why he hadn’t said he’d been run in for punching out Waco McCord.

He added, “Any man who’d punch out that disgrace to the Lone Star State has to be a pal of mine. They call me Lash Flanders, and I rode with General Sibley when he took Santa Fe in ‘62.”

Longarm was too polite to mention the licking Sibley’s Texas raiders took a few days later at Glorieta Pass. He said, “They call me Buck Crawford. I disremember who I rode with. I’ve been riding ever since, with hands from all over, and fighting old wars over again for less than a private trooper’s pay sounds dumb, no offense.”

Lash Flanders hunkered down beside him. “None taken. I read the Colorado crush of that hat. How come Waco and the rest of us met up with you in Kansas, Buck?”

The crap game came back to life as Longarm dryly remarked, “That’s where I am now. Got handed the shovel, and nobody’s hiring where I was known better. Heard some of the outfits over this way might need a few extra hands, seeing the price of beef has riz and your greener grass ain’t been as overgrazed during the dry years we’re just now getting past. Knock wood.”

The younger peacemaker in the flashy shirt and monstrous sombrero hunkered down by Longarm’s right and observed, “I’ve punched me out a boss or two in my day too. Leaving one outfit under a cloud can sure make it hard to hire on anywhere’s near.”

Lash snorted, “Shoot, you’ve yet to punch your way out of a wet paper bag, Silent.”

Then he confided to Longarm, “We call him Silent Knight because he never shuts up. When there ain’t anything sensible to say, old Silent has this habit of stating the obvious. Do you rope dally or tie-down, Buck? Reason I’m asking is that most of the Flint Hill outfits cotton to tie-down topers for the same reasons you wear your hat north-range style. Me and Silent have to admit we’re Texicans because it shows. But we’ve both larnt to rope less overtly rebellious.”

They both seemed to relax more when Longarm allowed he could rope north-or south-range style. Silent Knight opined, “It might be a hard row for a total stranger to hoe, Buck. The last of the spring calves have been branded and marked. Won’t be much for anyone to do but watch ‘em grow until the market roundup come September. What brands did they tell you to try for, Buck?”

Longarm honestly replied he hadn’t heard tell of any particular Flint Hill brands. Then he stretched the truth with: “Heard there was this lady hiring help around Minnipeta Junction, a hard morn’s ride from this railroad stop.”

The two local hands exchanged glances. Silent Knight nodded and told Longarm, “We know the Junction’s a good morning’s ride because that’s where we’ll be headed come morning. But we ain’t heard tell of any lady taking on help.”

Lash Flanders muttered, “What about that widow gal who just bought the old Nesbit place?”

Silent Knight laughed lightly, and replied in a dismissive tone that they were talking about a quarter-section homestead claim, confiding to Longarm, “The Nesbits were greenhorns who tried to drill corn into sod-covered bedrock. The widow gal who bought ‘em out cheap keeps a milk cow, pigs, and chickens like the Nesbits should have. She and her daughter run the bitty spread without no hired help. I don’t see how they could afford no hired help if they wanted any. But you can try-“

Longarm didn’t answer, but he meant to. Two strange women on a small claim near that Minnipeta Drover’s Bank sounded just like a lead Bill Vail would expect him to follow up on.

He was tempted to divide at least one cheroot with them, now that he’d established his right to decide such matters for himself. But the night was young and his resources were limited. So he just nursed his own smoke until, sure enough, they lost interest in trying to butter him up and went back to the crap game. Nobody else came over for a spell. It was surprising how much attention jailbirds paid to what was going on within possible earshot.

A hundred years or so later, the turnkey came to let Lash and Silent out, announcing their foreman was out front with a bail bondsman. You didn’t bail out on a morning hearing in a magistrate’s court when you bedded down a hard morn’s ride from it. So the two Lazy Eight riders had been picked up on some charge calling for a more serious circuit court hearing sometime in the future.

Longarm reflected that the hired foreman of any spread would hardly lay his own money out to bail saddle bums who got in trouble on their very own. He told himself he hadn’t been sent all this way to delve into local brand running or stock stealing. Lots of foremen running a lot of big spreads for absentee owners had side interests they ran for fun and profit with some of the boys. It was up to their own county sheriffs to worry about such local enterprise.

A spell after Knight and Flanders had been bailed out, a more obvious thief was thrown in with them by Hard Pan Parsons in person, who warned one and all not to beat up old Sticky Fingers Sam again. Once Hard Pan had gone out front, the sheepishly grinning sneak thief was told to go sit against the wall and stay there lest he wind up with every damned one of his sticky fingers too swollen to stick in anyone’s pocket for the foreseeable future.

A spell later another local pest who rated circuit court was bailed out. Then two roaring drunks were tossed in, warned to simmer down, and hit alongside their heads a few times to calm them some. Longarm was sorely tempted to go over and give first aid to the one whose scalp seemed to be bleeding so seriously. But it was best to be able to say you’d just never noticed when they asked you how come a cell mate seemed to have died during the night.

And so it went for what would have seemed even longer if Longarm hadn’t been able to console himself with the thought that he could get out any time it got too tedious.

During the long, dreary night he managed to strike up casual conversations with most everyone there. For even roaring drunks commence to make sense after they haven’t had anything to drink for a coon’s age.

Only a few of them were as familiar with the Flint Hill range around Minnipeta Junction as Silent Knight and Lash Flanders had been. But one townsman who said he’d only been out there a time or two on business confided, “There’s hardly nothing there but a general store and post office, a bunch of saloons, and twice as many whorehouses. The state of Kansas just voted itself dry. So neither the saloons nor whorehouses are supposed to be there. But you know what Minnipeta means, don’t you?”

Longarm suspected he did, seeing the Kansa Nation who’d hunted the long-gone buffalo in the Flint Hills were considered “Friendly Sioux” by the War Department. But nobody knew as much as a know-it-all who was trying to show off. So he let the Kansas cuss tell him Minnipeta translated roughly as “Firewater.” The local man explained, “Used to be an Indian trading post there, when there were still Indians. The Kansa came from miles around to trade buffalo hides for trade liquor they called minni peta, see?”

Longarm nodded soberly, even though he suspected some white man with a smattering of the lingo had made it up. Some Indians did call strong drink firewater. The ones who drank seriously were more likely to call it minni wakan or “medicine/power water.”

Longarm had already known the simple history of Minnipeta Junction. But he tried to sound green as he asked if there wasn’t supposed to be a business block with doctors, lawyers, a bank, and such in the cattle country crossroads settlement.

His informant shrugged and said, “I forgot about the bank. It ain’t such a big bank. It’s tied in with that Drover’s Trust you can find all over. But about the only time they’re really busy out to Minnipeta Drover’s is the end of each month, when the hired hands and bills are paid with checks the bank will cash for a modest fee.”

“They run that bank to cash checks?” Longarm asked in a desperately casual tone as he mentally pictured the amount of cash on hand they could be talking about.

The local man shrugged and said, “I reckon. They have to make some profit on saving all them cowhands a ride into Florence to cash checks here. Ain’t a cowhand in a hundred with a bank account allowing him to cash a check gratis. Most outfits pay by check these days, to save worry about keeping large sums on hand around their cows.”

Longarm said he knew how such high finances worked. It was no skin off his nose if the average cowhand worked his ass off for just a dollar a day and grub, only to get skimmed by everybody from those check cashers to the barkeeps who jacked up the price of bar liquor on a payday weekend. Longarm had quit herding cows when he’d noticed how little pleasure there could be in getting screwed. His job with the Justice Department was made more interesting by other embittered cowhands who tried to improve their financial positions with community loops, running irons, or masks over their faces.

Nobody he talked to during that endless night had heard tell of any other females who’d shown up around Minnipeta Junction recently enough to matter. On the other hand, nobody kept track of the comings and goings of crossroads whores, and that widow woman who was only known as a widow woman who’d bought the Nesbit place had done so before Miss Medusa Le Mat had been so naughty down in East Texas.

That didn’t mean most anybody couldn’t buy a modest spread in one state and then go rob a bank in another. Nobody had accused Miss Medusa Le Mat of acting predictably, and nobody he’d talked to could give him a tight enough description of either that widow woman or her full-grown daughter for Longarm to decide either way. In the meanwhile, there was that bank, and along towards three in the morning, one old boy with a dreadful headache recalled, encouraged by half a cheroot, that they had invited him to a coming-home shivaree for a Flint Hills rider called Buster Crabtree, but that Buster had never shown up and they’d had to drink to his freedom without him. The helpful drunk didn’t know what Buster Crabtree had been sent to prison for. It was safe to suppose the drunk turned up most anywhere there were free drinks to be served.

They were served sourdough bisquits and gravy with piss-poor coffee for breakfast, led next door to the courthouse, and allowed to wait a century or more until Judge Hiram Drysdale, a prune-faced old cuss with a beard and black robe that could have used a dusting, came in to hold court and collect some damned money for the township.

Longarm found himself seated too far from Waco McCord to ask how the asshole from the saloon was feeling that morning. But when their case came up, he found himself standing beside the beefy bully in front of the crusty old judge, who got right down to brass tacks by saying he’d read the damned record and they could save themselves the trouble of a tedious trial by just agreeing to shake hands and forking over ten dollars a piece to yonder court clerk.

Longarm said that sounded more than just. But Waco protested he was broke. So the judge said he didn’t have to shake with Longarm, adding, “We got a county road that was just waiting for you, and that’s what you’ll be working on for the next thirty days, young man.”

Waco protested he couldn’t do any thirty days at hard. To which the judge suggested he just do as much of it as he could.

But before they could lead Waco away, Longarm said, “Hold on, Your Honor. If it please the court, I’d be proud to pay old Waco’s fine.”

Chapter 6

Longarm had read somewhere how this cannibal chief had decided to give the missionary’s suggestion about being kind to one’s enemies a try because he figured it would likely drive them crazy.

Judge Drysdale and Waco McCord both regarded him with looks usually reserved for hysterical women and prophets proclaiming the end of the world. But Judge Drysdale gamely asked, “How come you’d like to pay his fine instead of your own, Mr. Crawford? Do you enjoy road work with high summer coming in?”

Longarm explained, “I meant to pay both our fines, Your Honor. That would come to twenty dollars, wouldn’t it?”

Judge Drysdale soberly replied, “It surely would. Are you a man of independent means, Mr. Crawford? They have you down here as an unemployed cowboy.”

Longarm shrugged and said, “I got some back wages saved up, and the fight I had with Waco here was as much my fault as his. I’d hate to have thirty days at hard for anybody on my conscience, no offense, if I’d had anything to say about it.”

The old-timer on the bench shot Longarm a thoughtful look before he decided, “I wouldn’t want McCord and his few friends at feud with me if I was new in these parts either. Case closed and pay the court clerk on your way out.”

Waco McCord never said a word until Hard Pan had them armed and dangerous on the street again. Then the beefy bully looked as if he was fixing to bawl as he blurted out, “God damn your eyes, Buck! I just don’t know what I’m supposed to say! Ain’t nobody ever been nice to me after knocking me cold before!”

Longarm said, “You might try saying thanks. If that’s too big a strain, just don’t start up with me again and we’ll say no more about it. I have to get something more civilized than that jailhouse breakfast in my gut. I found a place last night that wasn’t bad. Let’s go eat.”

Waco sheepishly confessed, “I ain’t got enough on me to grub my gut and get my pony out of the municipal corral. I figured I’d wait till I got back to the Rocking W and have the Chink rustle me up some eggs and onions.”

Longarm insisted, “Come on. I hate to eat alone and I have questions to ask about all the brands in these parts. Might your Rocking W be anywheres near Minnipeta Junction, Waco?”

As they strode side by side in the bright morning sunlight, Waco said, “Just the other side. I come into Florence for serious hell-raising when my Injun blood is up because they told me they’d run me off forever if I ever lost my temper close to the spread again.”

As Longarm pointed out the Chinese place near his hotel, Waco explained there were more north range riders than Texicans around Minnipeta Junction, and they’d established the night before how he usually got on with them.

But as Longarm ordered fried rice and chow nicin for the both of them, Waco cautiously declared, “I reckon I’ll forgive you the way you pancake your fool hat. You’re too open-handed to be a damn Yankee.”

Longarm didn’t rise to the bait. He’d questioned many a suspect in his own time, and he knew how tough it was to keep a false identity consistent when you took to offering any information you didn’t have to about your new self.

Once they were served and Waco dug in, he marveled that the Chinese cook out at the Rocking W never rustled up anything as good. Longarm explained that the many Chinese cooks hired out across the West tended to play it safe. He said, “This Chinese pal I was jawing with told me they don’t even eat chop suey and such back in his old country. When you cook for round-eyed devils who riot against your kind every now and again, you serve ‘em what you hope might soothe their savage breasts. A cook who doled out shark fin soup and black pickled eggs to hungry cowhands could find himself explaining why he’d set out to murder them all. I reckon it’s just as easy for a Son of Han to rustle up biscuits and bacon as it is to serve chop suey, chow mein, and all them other odd dishes he never saw before coming to the Golden Mountain. That’s what they call these United States, the Golden Mountain.”

Then he silently cursed himself when Waco said, “You sure have been all over and seen all the sights for a saddle tramp, Buck, no offense.”

Longarm assured him there was none taken, and felt a tad better about it when Waco slyly added, “I won’t ask which side you rid for or where you served hard time for what no more. It occurred to me as I was sobering up last night with an aching jaw that I had tangled with a serious student of the ferocious arts. I had my eye on your gun hand and that six-gun on your left hip when you threw that left hook my way instead. I was asshole drunk and another asshole might have shot me instead. So … Ah, shit, you know what I mean.”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Assholes lead with their right fists too. I’d have never gotten off with a ten-dollar fine in magistrate’s court if I’d shot anybody last night in a strange town, pard.”

Waco said, “Mebbe not, but I still owe you for not using the excuse to build your rep that way. Folks ain’t as impressed with you for just beating the shit out of somebody, and I’ve often thought it would be keen to kill somebody mean as, say, Lash Flanders instead of just sort of staring him down.”

Longarm didn’t feel it would be wise to say he’d already stared down that other local bully. Another reason Longarm had for feeling disgusted with the breed was the constant childish testing that had to lead, in time, to real trouble when the bully of some dinky town tried his tedious games with some stranger as serious as, say, Clay Allison, John Wesley Hardin, or even the Kid. The graveyards out this way might not be half as crowded if only there hadn’t been as many overgrown bullies.

Longarm let Waco fill in the details of the mythical Buck Crawford to suit his fool self as he changed the subject to Minnipeta Junction and how he was fixing to get there. He explained, “I brung my saddle and possibles from Colorado without no pony. I figured I’d buy me as cheap a trail mount as I could find here in Florence.”

Waco said he was likely to get skinned unless someone they were afraid of went with him. Longarm had been figuring on that and another small but vital detail since he’d been inspired to pay Waco’s fine.

With the help of the local bully and another fifteen dollars, Longarm bought a twelve-year-old paint mare. Waco said it wasn’t far enough to worry about packing trail supplies. By the time Longarm and the livery man had the bill of sale worked out, Waco had fetched his own saddled gelding, a roan, from the nearby municipal corral. So the two of them rode out together before nine.

It was a brisk, sunny morning with the grass still greening up in the rolling Flint Hills range. No flint showed above ground, of course, and the chalk it was imbedded in was rounded smooth as a big old gal’s tits and ass as it was weathered or hoof-stomped. Buffalo, pronghorn, and even prairie elk had grazed the Flint Hills for thousands of years before the first cows, of course. They hadn’t ridden far before Longarm saw the longhorns and black Cherokee stock that had replaced the buffalo and Kansa Nation.

But while the Flint Hills range was stocked more heavily than the short-grass High Plains to the west, they didn’t seem to be harming the big blue stem and switchgrass all around, with wheat grass and side-oat grama growing shorter on the taller wind-swept rises, for grass grew best where wildfire or grazing brutes passed over it fairly regularly. Where you rode across a draw or slope too steep to favor livestock, you saw more woodland growth, from ground cherry and prairie rose up through sumac and dogwood to fair-sized hackberry and blackjack oak, with the giant weed-like cottonwood ever ready to claim an overgrown gully for its shady own. They got enough rain for woodlands this far east, and the woodlands and prairies were at constant war, with mankind and his livestock tipping the scales either way without knowing it. So that was how come you had parks and street trees in the older prairie towns, and saw weeds and brush in vacant city lots instead of the grass that needed regular burning or grazing to thrive.

Grass grew from its roots, like human hair, while the forbs and woody growths that competed with it grew at their tips, and tended to give up once a prairie fire or herd of cows had passed over them a time or more.

He and Waco rested and grazed their mounts now and then, watering them as well at the few running creeks they crossed. But they didn’t cross many, even that early in the year, because the chalky bedrock below the springy sod sucked rainwater up, down, and sideways, the way chalk always tended to. Waco had heard tell of the Nesbits and a few others who’d tried to homestead in the Flint Hills. He said he was glad they’d gone broke before they could prove their claims. Next to damn Yankees, there was nothing Waco hated worse than homesteaders.

Reporters and dime-magazine writers back East were already making much of what they imagined as an age-old grudge between the cattle man, the sheep man, and the farming man. What they tended to miss, being city boys, was that everyone raised country dabbled at most every country way there was to make a living. Like many of his fellow High Plains riders, Longarm had been raised further east on a hardscrabble farm in the hills of West-by-God-Virginia. So he knew a cornfield made the most sense in one place, a herd of sheep in another, and a herd of cows on range such as this. It wasn’t as if cows, sheep, or crops were religious experiences. It just pissed an established outfit off considerably to have an already complicated life upset by strangers barging in with damn-fool notions to shove you out of the way. Farmers rightly got sore as hell when they saw beef cattle out in the middle of their barley crop, and cattle men could get surly when a homesteader tied up a quarter section of range, and Lord only knows how much water needed in a thirsty land, long enough to fail and maybe take some cow outfit with him.

The peculiarly pure American feud between sheep and cattle outfits made no sense to riders from, say, Australia or even Mexico, where sheep, goats, and cows grazed side by side. But that worked best when the same outfit owned all the stock involved. There were some few American outfits who ran mixed herds. But as in the case of the farms that didn’t grow anything but wheat, cotton, tobacco, or whatever, the American stock producer felt more comfortable growing a single cash crop, be it cows, sheep, hogs, or hell, poultry. So he hired like-minded hands who’d share his distaste for anything grazing where his own swell stock had been grazing first.

So as he and Waco rode along, Longarm was just as glad to see the Flint Hills offered few temptations to anything but cows, although back in the Shining Times of the Kansa he suspected the pronghorn and other browsers had kept down the encroaching brush a bit better.

He never said that, when and if he ever had his own cattle spread, he’d run a few goats or even sheep along with his cows to tidy things up in the draws. Waco had barely gotten over his north range Stetson.

A hard morning’s ride got longer when you started out so late in the morning. So it was more like three in the afternoon when, having eaten some canned beans and tomato preserves while their ponies grazed bareback in a watered draw halfway between the two towns, the now-friendlier former foes rode into the crossroads settlement of Minnipeta Junction thirsty as hell.

To his own credit, Waco didn’t have to be reminded that his pony’s needs came first. They left the two jaded mounts at the livery near the one bank, and crossed over to the nearest saloon to wash the trail dust off their teeth with some lager draft. Waco insisted the drinks were on him, if Longarm would lend him a little pocket jingle until the end of the month.

Longarm raised a brow, but did so with a game smile. As their eyes adjusted to the sudden shade, Longarm noticed a furtive figure slip past them, trying too hard not to notice them for Longarm to believe they hadn’t been noticed. So he quietly moved himself and Waco further down the bar, getting his back to a rear wall so he could keep an easy eye on the bat-wing doors.

But the next one who came in from the glare outside was his old cell mate Silent Knight, who came over with a grin to exclaim, “We thought that was you two ducking in here just now. Old Lash is in the barbershop across the way. He’ll be joining us directly, if only to find out why you two lovebirds just rid in together. Did I get your story turned the wrong way in my head last night, Buck?”

Longarm chuckled and replied, “We’ve decided not to fight no more. It’s too expensive. Did you just see a slithery young cuss, dressed cow, sidewind out of those same swinging doors a few minutes before you came through ‘em the other way, Silent?”

Silent Knight turned to stare pensively toward the street as he said, “Might have seen somebody leaving as I was crossing over. I never paid him no mind, albeit now that you mention it, he was sort of slithery. I just thought he was walking that way because he’d started drinking too early in the day. Is he somebody we ought to worry about, Buck?”

Longarm shrugged and said it seemed unlikely. He was wrong, though.

For up near the bank the one who’d slithered out of the saloon was talking to another shifty-eyed innocent who’d slithered out of the barbershop. Both had watched Longarm and Waco ride in and put their ponies away in the nearby livery. For they’d been chosen as lookouts with just such events in mind.

The one who’d been in the saloon and seen Longarm at closer range said, “It could be that long drink of water that we were posted here to watch out for. He didn’t look as if he just got out of no hospital. But the height, the build, mustache, Colorado hat, and .44-40 in that cross-draw rig add up to what could be the one and original Longarm!”

But the one from the barbershop said, “There’s heaps of tall tanned men with similar habits. Meanwhile, even if he wasn’t still in that hospital, he’d hardly ride into town with a local badman. I just heard some other riders from these parts identify them as good old boys they knew from sharing a jail cell with. Does that sound like a deputy U.S. marshal? The one getting his hair cut couldn’t see him as well. The one who just tore across to join him says his name’s Buck Crawford, and they both agrees he enjoys saloon brawls.”

The one who’d just left Longarm in another saloon decided, “Reckon it’s just some cuss who sort of fits the same description. I still say we ought to tell the boss lady, though.”

Chapter 7

By the second time it was Longarm’s turn to spring for a round, it seemed safe to assume the barkeep and most of the regulars there had accepted him as good old Buck Crawford who knew some of the wilder hands off surrounding spreads.

So once the shadows outside began to stretch eastwards, Longarm allowed he had to start planning for the coming night, and nobody argued when he left for the livery.

Once there, he got his borrowed saddle and possibles from the tack room and toted them over to the two-story hotel across from the bank. They hired him a corner room with cross-ventilation and their up-to-date flush crapper just down the hall. So he was set to sneak back out in the tricky light on the nearly deserted streets of supper time.

A visiting lawman was supposed to pay a courtesy call on the town law lest dreadful accidents happen or simply feel left out and pissed off. He figured he could trust Undersheriff Pat Brennan, who’d sent Billy Vail that tip about missing badmen and Miss Medusa Le Mat in the first place. He just didn’t want too many locals to notice good old Buck Crawford, who drank with at least three local toughs, that close to their neighborhood peace officers.

But nobody seemed to be paying him any mind as he pussyfooted the short way to the county branch offices near the Methodist churchyard. He still made sure nobody was watching as he slipped inside and told a portly old gent at the desk who he was, adding, “I’d be much obliged if we could keep that sort of private. By sheer shithouse luck I just rode in aboard a Flint Hills brand in the company of a Flint Hills rider with his own rep as a local pain in the ass.”

The old-timer said, “Heard Waco McCord was in town with somebody even bigger. You’ve no idea how much you just cheered me up. But our undersheriff is out on a manslaughter case right now, and I just can’t say when she’ll be back, Deputy Long.”

Longarm started to ask who’d slaughtered whom, then blinked and said, “I must have wax in my ears. I could swear I just heard you refer to Undersheriff Pat Brennan as a she!”

The older lawman nodded easily and replied, “That’s only on account she is a she. Appointed to serve out her late husband’s term when he died of sugar diabetes last summer.”

Some of what Longarm was thinking must have shown. The older lawman added, “Don’t low-rate our Pat just because she’s a gal. I’ll allow at first I figured the county was just trying to get their money’s worth out of her widow’s pension. But before he died, old Tommy Brennan taught his woman to shoot right fair with a man-sized .45, and for a white gal, she tracks better than your average stock thief in these parts really wants her to.”

Longarm smiled thinly and said, “Sounds fair enough to me, and now that you mention it, I do recall what sounded like distant gunshots as I was fetching my saddle from inside a stable. Would along about five-thirty add up to anything?”

The local lawman answered, “Closer to five-fifteen. The husband got home forty-five minutes early and put five rounds in his wife and the delivery boy from the general store. Two in the boy and three in her. I’d be a tad more vexed at my woman too. Boys will just be boys. But a false-hearted woman can drive men mad.”

As Longarm whistled softly, the older man volunteered, “Pat and the rest of the boys are over yonder to secure the scene and see if anybody else wants to make a statement. I sure hate domestic shootings, don’t you?”

Longarm agreed they could be a bitch, and asked how far away the scene might be.

The man said to look for a spinach-green two-story frame just three streets over.

Longarm wasn’t sure he wanted to head on over, for there was nothing like a dogfight or a killing to bring the neighbors from far and wide with the sun still shining above the rooftops to the west.

On the other hand, it might be easier to murmur a few words to a female undersheriff in a milling crowd without anyone feeling all that curious. For everybody knew the law talked to everybody when the smell of gun smoke still hung in the air. So he thanked the old-timer and ducked out to stride on with the low sun at his back while other men and boys seemed intent on racing his long shadow to the scene of the gunplay.

As he strode, Longarm reflected on the notes Henry had typed up on Minnipeta Junction. Like a lot of such settlements in cattle country, Minnipeta Junction left most of its governing to the more crowded world over the grassy horizon. The one-room post office was federal. The county roads crossing one another at the modest business center were naturally maintained by the county. A part-time justice of the peace and a resident undersheriff, appointed by the elected sheriff of the county, dealt with on-the-spot legal matters and referred them to the county court, district attorney, sheriff, and such if they couldn’t be handled in town.

So Longarm knew before he got there that the female undersheriff Henry hadn’t known about either was more or less in the position of a corporal of the guard on outpost duty, expected to refer more serious crimes to headquarters, and judged by how good she might be at knowing when she ought to pester her superiors or tidy up on her own.

Finding the spinach-green two-story frame would have been easy, even if there hadn’t been a crowd milling around out front and a lean and hungry-looking deputy guarding the opening in the whitewashed picket fence.

As Longarm closed in, he was wondering how he figured to get past the guard at the gate without unmasking himself in full view of that infernal crowd.

But the deputy had just finished telling “Buck Crawford” he wasn’t allowed in when a mannish female voice called out, “That’s all right, Shep. I was about to send for old Buck.”

So Longarm stepped around old Shep with a friendly nod, and mounted the porch steps as a lady with her full figure tucked inside a dark riding habit and cross-draw gun rig regarded him with interest from the veranda. Her gun was a Schofield .45-Short, and her hat was a dark Stetson with a cavalry crush. The badge pinned to the well-filled bodice of her riding habit was a gold-plated eight-pointer. Her regular features fell short of sweet young thing, and there was a frosting of scattered silver to her mostly black hair. It wasn’t really blue-black when you looked close. Her piercing eyes of cornflower blue just made you think that.

She held out a firm tanned hand, and murmured in a lower tone that Hard Pan Parsons had wired ahead about a fellow lawman who called himself Buck.

As they shook hands, she added, “We can talk about that Medusa gal later. Right now I’m up to my hips in bullshit, and I fear the son of a bitch is going to get away with it.”

Longarm said he’d heard about some husband coming home early to catch his wife with another man. To which the local lawlady replied in a tone of disgust, “Sure he did. With the whole afternoon to play slap-and-tickle, they waited that long to get started? Speaking as a former bride who might or might not have had a happy marriage, I just can’t see having the other man over after five when my husband’s expecting to sit down to supper at six!”

She indicated they were to go inside as Longarm soberly agreed he’d feel dumb calling on a married woman in her own home with less than an hour to spare.

Pat Brennan led him past a balding cuss in rusty black who was seated in the parlor with another deputy. The deputy was taking notes as what seemed to be the man of the house sort of whined and mewled in tones of self-pity.

In the hallway beyond, the undersheriff explained, “He said his tale of woe would shock my shell-like ears. But I read the statement he made earlier, and now he’s going over it a third time. The bodies are back this way.”

Longarm followed her into what seemed a study, asking if the bedrooms weren’t usually upstairs in a house laid out like that one.

Pat Brennan sniffed and said, “He says he was surprised to find his wife and her lover going at it atop his very own desk down here, the lying bastard.”

Then she moved her skirts out of the way to give Longarm a clearer view of the two cadavers heaped by the wastebasket near the roll-top desk against one wall.

A youth of about nineteen lay face-down, with his jeans around his ankles, across the spread-eagle cadaver of a no-longer-young but nice-looking redhead with her nightgown up around her chest. She seemed to be grinning sheepishly, eyes half open, as if she felt a tad ashamed of being caught, but was proud of having such a handsome young lover.

Longarm asked if any pictures had been taken of the scene. Pat Brennan said the one photographer in town had just left. So Longarm hunkered down to gingerly roll the dead boy off the woman’s corpse as the lawlady stared soberly down at him and asked if they were supposed to do that.

Longarm said, “It’s a smart bet not to move anything before you’ve frozen things the way you found them in more than one photograph and some field notes, ma’am. After that, you can’t just let things lie endeffinately. Neither of these poor souls figures to smell like roses if you don’t let an undertaker at ‘em. In the meantime, let’s see if they have anything else to say for themselves.”

The two cadavers did. To her credit, if credit was the word Queen Victoria might have chosen, the handsome widow woman cum undersheriff did not look away as Longarm laid the dead boy flat on his back with his limp naked privates fully exposed for all the world to see.

Without hemming or hawing, the Widow Brennan said, “It’s hard to prove whether a man died with an erection in forbidden nooks and crannies or not. The husband—his name’s Fred Mannix—says he didn’t look to see whether they were actually going at it or not when he came home early to catch them by surprise. He’s slick enough to claim it was a sort of blur as she yelled at him to get out and let them finish.”

“So he’d drawn and fired before he’d thought much about it,” Longarm said wearily. “It seems to me I’ve heard this sad story a time or two before. The trouble with it is that you only have to sell it to one juror, and a lot of old boys have pictured themselves in that situation, whether it’s ever happened to them or not.”

The woman who’d been married to a man with a chronic illness gave a hint as to what it might have been like as she sighed and said, “I know. A woman doesn’t have to fool around behind a man’s back when and if he gets to worrying about her doing it. You hear gossip in a town this size. Poor Milly there came to church more than once with black eyes, and if anyone was fooling around it was him, with more than one of our few soiled doves along B Street. But he’s going to get away with it if he sticks to the story I’m sure he made up in advance.”

Longarm hunkered down to arrange the dead woman’s nightgown more modestly as he dryly remarked, “He expects us to believe a woman wears a nightgown until less than an hour before supper time?”

Pat shrugged and said, “My deputy remarked on that. Mannix says she was wearing her housedress when he came home from his notions shop to eat his noon dinner. He suggested she changed into something more, ah, intimate before young Larry there came calling.”

“Would you take off your duds and put on a flannel nightgown if you were planning daylight adultery, Miss Pat, no offense?”

The slightly older woman laughed like a man might have and said, “If I wore anything to greet a lover in, I can promise you it wouldn’t be flannel! But you don’t have to convince me, Custis. I can picture what happened. Mannix just lured young Larry here on some pretext, marched him in here where his wife already lay dead, and then forced Larry to drop his pants before he shot him. All we have to do is prove it. It’s the word of a respected merchant against two dead bodies found in compromising positions. How is the district attorney to prove otherwise to twelve strangers in the county seat who never heard what a louse Fred Mannix was to his long-suffering wife? It’s tough enough to get around that so-called unwritten law when you have witnesses, and we don’t have one witness against the son of a bitch!”

Longarm took the dead wife by one wrist and tried to roll her over.

When the live woman on the scene objected, Longarm said, “I only needed to see the back of that one bare shoulder, ma’am. You got more than one witness here. Miss Milly and young Larry stand ready to make a barefaced liar out of the man who premeditated their murder in cold blood, if you’d like to call him and a witnessing deputy in here now.”

She did quickly. Fred Mannix looked away from the bodies at their feet as he protested he was tired of repeating the same simple story over and over again. He said, “I was an old fool with a young wife and I reckon she felt neglected. I’ve admitted something came over me when I found them making love, and how many times do you want me to allow I shot them both?”

Longarm said, “I’ll run over it once more for you and you just say whether I’ve got things right.”

He tersely summed up the sad short story, and got Mannix to agree that was about the size of it before Longarm shook his head and told the murderous man of the house, “You’re lying and your victims here can prove it. Young Larry lies limp and barely less warm than he was when you shot him less than two hours ago. But the lady you say you caught him making love to is stiff as a plank and cold as them floorboards she’s been laying on all day. They call that rigor mortis. It sets in three to six hours after death, and it takes longer to get as stiff as she was when you caught her with another man. Takes time for the parts of a cadaver pressed to the floor to go purple with lividity, and she ain’t grinning that way because she found it amusing to be shot around sunrise in her nightgown. You forgot the bullet holes in her nightgown when you pulled it up like so, by the way. Then you went over to your notions shop, bold as brass, to lure Larry home with you hours later on some fool’s errand. Did you make him drop his jeans before you shot him, or did you do it for him once you had?”

Fred Mannix looked like he was fixing to puke, but he tried to run instead. So the town deputy between him and the door pistol-whipped him flat, and called him some awful names before Pat made him stop.

Once he had, the undersheriff said, “Run him over to the office and hold him on premeditated murder. I’ll be along in just a little while.”

She was smiling radiantly up at Longarm as she added, “Unless I get lucky this evening.”

Chapter 8

In the end they both got lucky. It might have taken far longer if Longarm hadn’t been trying to work in secret for as long as possible and they hadn’t agreed a saddle tramp who drank with roughnecks made no sense escorting a lady undersheriff to her own home or office.

It took until the sun was setting before the undertaker had taken the bodies away and Pat had deputized a responsible land agent to take charge of the property. Then she and Longarm were free to sneak over to his hotel in the tricky light of gloaming, and slip up the back way to his hired room with some ice. He already had canteen water and a bottle of Maryland rye on hand up yonder.

By this time they’d been jawing about themselves long enough for Longarm to assume her last years of a hitherto happy marriage had been a bit trying. She never low-rated her late husband, but there was no known treatment for sugar diabetes, and Longarm had heard that a lot of men slowly dying from the always fatal ague had trouble getting it up, if they were still up to trying. Pat only said they’d had to amputate a leg before the poor cuss had given up the ghost and left his badge to her. She said she still missed him, or the man he’d once been, but she added, after sipping some rye and canteen water, that she and her man had both been wondering what was keeping Mr. Death so long.

They were sipping in the dark, seated on his hired bedstead, because there was no other furniture and the late spring evening breeze felt fresher with the window blinds open.

They’d barred the door and hung their guns up along with their hats, because that was what you did with guns and hats before you drank sitting down atop bedding. It was her notion to lean back on one elbow, hotel tumbler in her free hand, as she said, “Enough about my troubles. Thanks to you, I’m likely to be reappointed, Lord willing and our party wins the coming election. What about your case, and do I get a piece of it for my party machine if you catch Miss Medusa Le Mat?”

Longarm assured her, “You’ve already got a piece of it whether your tip leads to any arrests or not, Miss Pat. I’d have never come here to the Junction if you hadn’t wired Billy Vail about Buster Crabtree and his odd ways since getting out of prison.”

She sipped from her tumbler and sighed. “I was hoping you might not ask about him. We’ve lost him completely. As I told your boss by Western Union, there was all sorts of gossip when he failed to show up for a coming-home party but got spotted all over these parts by riders who knew him. Riders he seemed anxious to avoid.

Longarm freshened her drink as he asked, “How could they be sure it was Buster if he was avoiding them?”

She raised her drink in a silent toast and explained. “Buster is easier than most riders to recognize at a distance. That’s likely why he spent that time in prison after riding the owlhoot trail with some who got away. He’s taller than you, with flaming red hair and mustache. He rides a cow pony comically, posting in the saddle on short stirrup leathers, like one of those English dudes hunting foxes. Some say he was taught to ride that way by a momma in the old South. Lots of those plantation slavocrats had English airs.”

“You called him a Texican in your night letter to old Billy Vail,” Longarm pointed out with a thoughtful frown.

The lady who’d wired the information explained, “I said he hung out with the Texas crowd. As you likely know, most of the drovers who herded the longhorns up this way as the army cleared off Mister Lo, the Poor Indian, were inclined to crown their hats high and request ‘Dixie’ be played at wakes and weddings. It still makes my job interesting. Lots of Kansas cattlemen and even more of our farm folks hail from north of the Ohio back East.”

He said he’d tried to explain all that to a Wild West writer one time, to no avail. “She said the truth doesn’t pay and she was writing for as wide a market as she could manage. So she just glossed over details about religion, economics, or old grudges left over from the war, and had her Wild Westerners go at it like a bunch of schoolkids packing six-guns.”

Pat perked up. “She, you say? Am I to understand I’m not the first girl you’ve invited in for some drinking in the dark?”

Longarm chuckled and confessed, “I drink with gals in the dark as often as they’ll let me. Somebody ought to take a horsewhip to me, I know. But I’m a natural man with a job that don’t allow for the usual flowers, sweets, and such.”

She sighed and said, “I’ve heard about how dangerous you are to both sexes, you wicked thing. But I fear I know all too well what you mean about your job, and even when there seems to be the time, dreams just don’t come true. Why do you suppose the Lord gives us so many dreams and so little time to dream them, Custis?”

He leaned back on his own elbow, setting the bottle aside, as he soberly replied, “It’s our own free will to dream big, Miss Pat. Our mortal flesh lasts longer than most. A mayfly dreams its dreams and passes on in just one day. A dog or pony is dying of old age by the time a kid grows old enough to pester the opposite sex. I’ve been reading that Professor Darwin’s notions and if he’s right, it’s our own fault for evolving smart enough to figure out why we should feel so blue about our alloted four score and ten. Had we stayed up in the trees, scratching our few itches, we’d have never figured out we were getting older by the minute.”

The gal, who was at least five years older than Longarm, almost sobbed as she confessed, “I’ve tried scratching my own itches and it’s not half as nice as the real thing. Don’t you think I’m at all attractive, you mean thing? I heard about you and that French actress who was at least as old as me!”

There was no better way to answer than to take her tumbler from her unresisting hand, lay her back across the bedding, and kiss her some before he assured her he’d only been assigned to bodyguard Miss Sarah Bernhardt, nothing more.

It was Pat’s notion to move his hand further down her bodice as she demanded, “Is it true she sleeps in a coffin and bathes in a tub of goat’s milk every morn?”

He moved his hand further down on his own, as he kissed her some more and honestly replied, “I never got to sleep or take a bath with the lady. We were aboard this hired train as she toured the West, and I had my own compartment with a regular bunk bed in it.”

The undersheriff hauled up her skirts and took his wrist to guide his questing fingers into her underdrawers in the dark as she moaned, “Please don’t tease me like this, Custis!”

He asked her if she liked to be teased better this way as he found her clit already turgid between wet love-lips and began to rock the boy in the boat for her with two fingers.

She gasped, “Oh, Jesus! Why do your fingers feel so much better than my own! For God’s sake, don’t let me waste these feelings on your fucking hand!”

But he still made certain she was more than halfway there before he risked stopping long enough to shuck some duds. She sat up to haul her riding habit off over her head and slide her underdrawers down, to greet him in her boots, stockings, and chemise, thighs wide in welcome, as he rolled into her love saddle with nothing on but his socks.

It felt sort of flattering to hear an experienced older woman gasp and beg him to take it easy until she got used to more than she’d had any right to expect. After that it just felt good. For as old Ben Franklin had observed in that treatise on older women, women withered from the top, like trees, and many a dear old lady had the pussy of a bride to go with her eternal gratitude for an unexpected gift.

Pat Brennan was far from being a dear old lady, but she acted as grateful as a hog allowed to wallow on a hot summer day as she told him to forget what she’d just said about taking it easy. So he hooked an elbow under either of her knees, and a great time was had by all while she puckered on his shaft and tried to suck his tongue out by the roots.

But later, as they lay cuddled with her head on his shoulder and one thigh across his waist, groping for their second wind as the soft cross-ventilation cooled their overheated flesh, she murmured, “I hope you won’t misunderstand, dear heart, but sometimes I think I miss this part of going to bed with a man most. There’s more to this silly stuff than just scratching our itches, isn’t there.”

He reached out with his free arm for the shirt he’d draped over a bedpost with his gun rig as he murmured, “I follow your drift. I’ve often told myself a man with a tumbleweed job like mine would be smart to develop a taste for sheep, or even whores. But somehow, I’ve never been able to fully enjoy a sudden change of subjects, and seeing we’ve got to where we can level with one another now, I like women whether I’m screwing them or not. I like to talk with a smart woman I can understand rather than a French actress I can’t understand.

She kissed his bare shoulder and asked if he’d heard about the way French gals got it up for a man.

He assured her such common courtesy was not confined to just the French folks of both sexes, but added, “Let’s share a smoke and start fresh after we talk some more about Miss Medusa Le Mat, speaking of gals who behave scandalously.”

He lit a cheroot, took a drag, and offered her a puff as he mentioned her wire to Billy Vail. “You said there was talk about some strange lady in the market for riders, with other gossip about some serious crooked riding after dark in these parts?”

She passed the cheroot back and said, “It’s like the old joke about asking two farmers about the weather and getting three forecasts. As I wired your boss, a known crook from the Flint Hills has been lurking just over the next rise, whilst others tell of a mystery woman and her daughter, maidservant, or whatever off in some other draw. I’ve been trying to pin things tighter. But it’s been mostly tales told by a friend of a friend who heard it in other parts from some stranger at a bar.”

Longarm sighed and said, “I sure ain’t in any position to complain right now, but to tell the truth, we thought there was more to your wire than whispers on the wind.”

She sighed and said, “I’m glad you like this position too. Your boss wanted to know if any other jurisdictions had anything at all to report about the possible whereabouts and future plans of that deadly little lesbian with the big gun. I know scattered bits and pieces may or may not be true. But where else might she and her gang be found than somewhere near a heap of gossip about them?”

Longarm took a thoughtful drag of three-for-a-nickel smoke and said, “I know it’s better scouting a faint trail than no trail at all. What makes you suggest Miss Medusa is a lesbian if you can’t say for certain she’s anywhere near?”

Pat nibbled his collarbone and said, “Doesn’t that seem plain from the few hard facts we have about her so far? Each time she’s struck, she’s recruited three or four local gun waddies and a wayward girl. I know they say a woman left alone at some remote cabin with a change of ponies might attract less attention. I can tell you as a woman that’s not true in cow country. I know they say that two women riding in the distance might attract less attention from a posse after male bank robbers. I know that at least once Medusa tried to leave a dead girl with her butchered gang as a ringer. But consider what those young, pretty, and not overly bright country girls would be attracted to. We know that sooner or later Medusa Le Mat turns on anyone who could possibly pick her out of a crowd. We read. But time after time she’s gotten an ignorant whore or runaway to follow her like a faithful dog, even after she’s gunned the men they were riding with. Then consider how many a soiled dove or discontented gal might feel about mean old men and add it up.”

Longarm did, and said he followed her drift, but wasn’t clear on how many pretty young gals might follow the persuasion of Lesbos.

A gal who might well have given more thought to the matter assured him, “More than most men think. How are two such chums apt to be found out? Do old maids rooming together get knocked up? Is anyone likely to be scandalized by two good friends kissing now and again, seeing the two of them are silly females?”

She took the cheroot away from him and snuffed it out on her side of the bed as she continued. “You were just talking about the practical side of such notions for a man. Consider how even a woman of natural tastes has to worry about nosy neighbors, boastful lovers, and the risks of begetting a bastard child.”

He muttered, “Jesus, you do know how to take care of yourself, I hope!”

She said, “No woman with a lick of sense goes to bed with a man like you unless she does. I was only talking about the reasons many a girl with less education might have for running away with an exciting lesbian lover.”

He decided, “That would sure explain the blind trust she seems to inspire in her female dupes. Her male suckers may just be after money, or for all we know, she’s got a door that swings both ways. I’ve been told lots of folk don’t really care who they go to bed with.”

Pat insisted, “Medusa Le Mat has to be pure lesbian, or she convinces her lesbian lovers she is. They’d never be so devoted to her if they didn’t think she liked them best.”

Longarm nodded and said, “That makes a heap of sense, and we sure make a swell team. For whether or not I’m better read on forensic evidence, you sure know more than me about womankind. So we ought to be able to catch Miss Medusa Le Mat if she’s really within miles of that bank just across the way!”

Pat rolled off to rise from the bed in the dark in just her thin silk chemise. She strode over to the window in her boots to lean her elbows on the sill and peer out into the night, exclaiming, “I knew it! You’d have a clean shot at that bank’s front entrance from here!”

Longarm sat up and replied, “I knew that when I hired this room. You sure make it tough to study on bank robbing when your pretty rump is thrust a man’s way like so, no offense!”

To which she coyly replied with an arch glance over a bare shoulder, “I was hoping you might notice. I’ve never done it hanging half out a window like this, have you?”

He rose, both ways, and moved over to lift the lace hem of her silk chemise from her smooth firm fanny as he soberly assured her he was willing to try anything that didn’t hurt.

Chapter 9

Undersheriff Brennan slipped out from under Longarm and down the back stairs just after midnight. She was walking funny. She got to her office and lockup in time to extract a complete statement from the sleepless Fred Mannix in exchange for coffee, tobacco, and an understanding smile.

Longarm had put it together pretty well. But Mannix had strangled his wife in bed after an all-night argument about another woman. Then he’d dragged her into his study, left her there all day, and lured the innocent delivery boy to the scene of his first crime to commit another. Longarm had been right about a killer who was new at the game arranging their clothes after he’d emptied his revolver into both of them in that one fusillade everyone had heard. Of course, it wouldn’t have been discreet to sneak out of his hotel room with old Pat. So he got close to six hours sleep, and had chop suey for breakfast before he went over to the bank.

He’d timed it just right. A potbellied gent with long skinny arms and legs that made him resemble a daddy long-legs in a snuff-colored suit, was just opening up as Longarm joined him on the walk out front. There were times to work in secret and times you wanted a banker to level with you. So Longarm identified himself, but asked the banker, a Mr. Gordon Guthrie, not to spread it around.

The odd-looking but friendly enough Guthrie invited Longarm in, then locked the front door again before leading him into a back office. Longarm didn’t ask why. He knew everyone working there would have his or her own key, and regular banking hours hadn’t started yet.

Guthrie sat Longarm down at one side of his glass-topped desk, and offered him a handsome Havana Perfecto from a fancy case as he said Undersheriff Brennan had already warned them there could be a robbery in the offing.

Longarm asked Guthrie what they were planning to do about it as the banker lit them both up. Guthrie shook out the match, leaned back in his swivel chair, and blew some expensive smoke up toward the pressed-tin ceiling before he replied, “Nothing right now. We don’t have more than fifteen hundred dollars in cash on the premises this morning.”

Longarm enjoyed a drag of his own and replied, “Do tell? No offense, but it says out front, in gilt letters, that this bank has over eight million dollars in assets.”

Guthrie nodded and said, “Sure we do, in our main vaults in Kansas City. We keep as little portable wealth as possible out here in this country branch, for reasons you and Undersheriff Brennan recently refreshed my mind about.”

He waved the tip of his cigar expansively and elaborated. “We take in savings and cash checks in modest denominations most of the month. The only time money changes hands in large amounts here in Minnipeta Junction would be on or about the end of the month, when folks pay off their help and their bills. We seldom cash a check for more than a hundred dollars, but come the end of the month, we have to keep at least twenty grand on hand here.”

Longarm didn’t need the calendar on one wall to tell him they had about a week’s leeway. He asked how all that working capital moved across the prairie between the Junction and the main branch in the big city.

Guthrie sounded confident as he replied, “By Pinkerton. The Eye That Never Sleeps guards us and all our assets under a yearly retainer. Come next Saturday they’ll start out from K.C. with the strongboxes under heavy guard. They’ll freight them in with one Pink assigned to each strongbox with a ten-gauge and two S&W double-action revolvers. Undersheriff Brennan tells us the gang we’re worried about usually strikes with three men and a girl.”

Longarm nodded soberly and explained. “The gal acts as an advance scout and mastermind. For all we know for certain, she’s already come by to cash a small check and do some scouting. If she decided you were as big a boo for as little profit As you seem, she might have already written off this particular bank. How come you call yourself a Minnipeta bank if you’re only a branch, by the way?”

Guthrie explained, “Country folks like to feel you’re paying attention to them. It costs about the same no matter what the gold leaf on the glass might read. So all our branches are named for the one-horse town they serve. Why do you ask? Do you find that important?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “You already explained why it reads out front that you carry more cash on you than you really do. I don’t care how you run your bank. But I have to consider it from the way it might or might not look to Miss Medusa Le Mat, the advance scout and mastermind I just mentioned. She might have been told one thing by one of your neighborhood crooks, the mysteriously missing Buster Crabtree. She might have scouted what she took to be a prosperous, privately run country bank, found out as much about you as I just did, no offense, and decided to pass you by. That might explain some missing pieces of this puzzle. It’s tough to make ‘em fit any pattern when they ain’t on the table.”

Guthrie accused Longarm of confusing him just for fun. So Longarm said, “I ain’t trying to talk mysteriously. I sometimes forget others might be listening when I’m talking to myself about matters I’ve been over more than once.”

He took a thoughtful drag to gather his words, let it out, and said, “A bank robber who just hits banks willy-nilly is sure to hit the wrong bank sooner or later, as the James-Younger gang found out that time in Northfield. So Miss Medusa Le Mat takes more time than most to make sure she and her recruits know just what they’re up to. She lines up the bank, picks a nearby hideout, and stocks up on plenty of sudden horseflesh before she hits, hard and deadly, as you’ve likely heard from Pat Brennan.”

Guthrie nodded soberly and said, “If they hit us come payday, they may find a warmer reception than usual. The Pinkerton Agency will be sending extra guards with the money this time.”

Longarm said, “Miss Medusa Le Mat may have figured as much. I had me a long conversation last night with … someone who knows these parts better than me. We’re surrounded by miles of nothing much but grass, cows, and scattered spreads. This, ah, local informant I just mentioned figures there’s less than three hundred souls, all told, within a hard lope of this here bank.”

Guthrie asked what his point might be.

Longarm said, “It’s easy to lose track of folks in a crowd even when it ain’t too crowded. But they’re either hiding stick as hell, or they ain’t there. Buster Crabtree and that soiled dove who dropped out of sight last payday were well known, at least by sight, to most of the folks in and about the junction. So where are they at?”

Guthrie said he had no idea.

Longarm said, “I know Miss Medusa Le Mat on sight. She shot me at point-blank range recently. I’ve made up a short list of new gals in these parts. Checking out your town whores ought to be easy. What can you tell me about a widow woman called Rose Cassidy, said to breed and sell cow ponies on a small spread off to the east of the Junction?”

Guthrie said, “She banks with us, of course. She and her grown daughter, Maureen, just moved up here from Texas and bought the old Nesbit place for cash. We held the mortgage. We were glad to unload a hundred sixty acres of foolishness at a fair price. I naturally handled the sale, and I felt obliged to warn her the Nesbits had gone bust trying to plow chalk and flint with a worn-out John Deere moldboard. She said she’d made out better breeding ponies for the cattle trade down Texas way, and meant to do better up this way now that beef prices were up and the Indians were out of the way.”

Longarm asked what the ladies from Texas might look like.

Guthrie confided, “Not bad, neither mother nor daughter. They look more like sisters, Rose Cassidy being well preserved.”

Longarm said, “I wasn’t planning on courting either of ‘em. I asked what they looked like.”

Guthrie smiled sheepishly and replied, “You haven’t seen either of them yet. Both pretty, with nice builds. After that I’d describe them as typical Irish types.”

Longarm asked what typical Irish folks looked like, adding that he’d seen them short, tall, blond, brunette, and redheaded.

Guthrie decided, “Petite brunettes with blue eyes. You know, that typical Irish type.”

Longarm nodded gravely and replied, “You often see them with their typically large or small blond or redheaded pals. But I thank you, and I reckon I’d best ride out and talk to them about some horseflesh.”

Guthrie asked, “You mean they answer the description of somebody you’re after?”

Longarm honestly replied, “You’re describing a heap of women when you say any gal is small, dark, and pretty. But I have an edge on Miss Medusa Le Mat that she seldom allows. I know her on sight. So it won’t cost me more than a short ride out and back to decide whether she’s been trading horses on the side.”

He rose, they shook on it, and he went back to his hotel to strip his borrowed saddle of everything but the rope and Winchester for the short ride out to the old Nesbit place.

He packed the lighter load to the livery, saddled and bridled the old paint mare, then headed out along the eastbound wagon trace around eight A.M. with the dew burnt off the grass all around but the morning air still cool. So the paint was feeling frisky for her years, and he let her lope until she slowed to a less comfortable but mile-eating trot without his reining her in. She was shaping up to be a good old mare, and he was starting to like her.

Hence he was chagrined as well as scared skinny, less than two miles out of town, when something solid hit her just ahead of Longarm’s right knee and she dropped out from under him like a monstrous wet washrag!

He landed on his feet, drawing the Winchester from its saddle boot along the way, and flopped on the north side of the fallen pony, seeing that the gun smoke rising from a brushy draw was doing so to his southeast.

He didn’t prop his saddle gun across the saddle of the fallen pony. He knew that was a mistake you only got to make once. Levering a round of .44-40 in the chamber, he crabbed sideways in the long grass to peer around the dead mare’s big rump.

It smelled worse at the ass end of a heart-shot grain-fed mare. But he knew he’d smell worse directly if he didn’t pay more attention to a more distant annoyance. He held his fire, tempted as he was to lob a round into that clump of hackberry the drygulcher had obviously fired from.

But he knew he’d have to move clear of his own muzzle blast and gun smoke as soon as he fired. And at the moment, he had the edge in that the other side couldn’t say for certain whether he’d been hurt in the fall or even hit in the leg. So it might be best to keep the sneaky son of a bitch guessing. He’d once potted a Shoshoni who couldn’t stay put as long as he could, and Indians were supposed to be more patient than most.

So after a century or so, the little skittering critters hiding in the grass stems all around commenced to chitter and skitter some more as the sun warmed Longarm’s back, which didn’t do a thing to improve the odor of blood and crud oozing out of his horseflesh fortification.

He told himself the rascal was long gone. Then he warned himself that somebody else could be in much this same position, having much these same thoughts, yonder in that stickerbrush. So he’d made up his mind to out-wait the son of a bitch if it took all day when he heard distant hoofbeats, over to the east, more in line with the wagon trace he’d been following.

He rolled the other way to risk a peek over the jawbone of the dead paint. She smelled far better at that end, and he had a clear shot at the gap where the trail crossed the winding brush-filled draw that bastard had been lurking in.

It seemed to take forever. Then he spied two familiar riders on familiar mounts. Lash Flanders and Silent Knight were headed toward him, riding the same cow ponies they’d ridden out on the evening before. They were walking their stock, and slowed down even more when they spotted the downed pony Longarm was hiding behind.

He called out, “Watch your left flanks! Somebody just pegged a shot at me from them hackberries to the south!”

Silent Knight called back, “We heard it. Sounded like a big-fifty buffalo rifle. Is that you, Buck Crawford?”

Longarm allowed Silent was probably right about the rifle. He rose from behind the dead mare, Winchester held politely but still primed and cocked as he strode toward them.

They dismounted and walked their ponies over to the draw with him to scout for sign, or at least that was what Silent Knight said they aimed to do.

He might have been sincere. He was the one who found some scuffed-up leaf litter and a spent big-fifty cartridge under a flowering hackberry. Lash Flanders was first to spy hoof marks further along the draw. Longarm read horse apples and browsed cottonwood shoots as indicating the place where the drygulcher had left his or her own mount tethered to creep closer to the wagon trace with that rifle.

The missing piece of the puzzle hadn’t ridden far along the shady floor of the draw. It was easy to see where he, she, or it had forged up a grassy bank to beeline toward the Junction. The three of them agreed it was a bitch to read sign in springy big blue-stem once the dew had burned off. Later in the summer, the stems no cow had eaten would be dry enough to break off at ground level when a pony loped over them. But right now, as Silent Knight observed, the sneaky rascal could get back to town and fade into the bustle before anyone could cut enough trail to matter.

Longarm agreed, and asked how far he might be from that old Nesbit place.

Silent Knight said, “Not more than a quarter mile. You can see it from the next rise to the east. But why were you headed yonder? Rose Cassidy charges too dear for her horseflesh, and neither she nor her sassy daughter can be had for any price.”

Lash Flanders said, “He knows because he’s tried. Why don’t you let me ride you postern back to town?”

Longarm replied, “I’d be obliged if one of you would drop my saddle and bridle off for me at the livery and tell ‘em I’ll be calling for ‘em later. But I reckon me and this Winchester will just mosey on and see what them female horse traders have to say about all this shit.”

Chapter 10

A man on foot was an unusual sight in cattle country. So country critters tended to act mighty surprised as Longarm trudged on with his Winchester cradled over one forearm, the sun now warmer and the wagon trace dustier than he’d noticed from that saddle.

Small gray grasshoppers with butterfly wings kept popping from the dust ahead of him to buzz like prairie rattlers as they landed a few yards on and waited for him to catch up so they could repeat the process. He flushed more than one jackrabbit from the long grass to either side of the trace, and they lit out and kept going, seeing as he was packing a rifle. He knew any Western schoolkid could tell you jackrabbits only ran about as far as you could throw a ‘dobe if you weren’t packing a gun.

Redwings cussed him from the telegraph wires overhead as he passed weathered pole after pole, at longer intervals than he recalled on horseback. Most of the cows grazing hither and yon in the distance were content to just stop grazing and stare pensively as he passed by. But one frisky yearling lowered its long horns, stuck its tail up, and mock-charged until Longarm got tired of waving his hat and stomping a boot. He let it get close enough to smack across the muzzle with his Winchester muzzle, and when it ran off bawling, he dusted its behind with a shot aimed low to make sure it remembered a man on foot was still a man. Livestock had to be taught their place when they started acting sassy, and some schoolkid cutting across the prairie on foot might not have a rifle next time.

He suspected the sound of his gunshot had carried when he topped the long gentle grade to see that anyone out in the yard of the low soddy ahead had surely ducked inside. But a dozen ponies were regarding him with interest over the sun-silvered rails of the big corral out back.

As he strode down the shorter and steeper slope beyond the crest, the door of the soddy opened a crack and a yellow dog poured out to charge uphill at him, barking and snapping like a rabid coyote with turpentine under its tail.

Longarm didn’t shoot it. Knowing he could any time he really had to put a confidence in his walk, and maybe his smell, that a full-grown yard dog who’d been kicked a few times recognized. So it stopped in the wagon trace a stone’s throw away, but remembered its sworn duties as a yard dog enough to bristle and growl just awful.

Longarm kept the same pace, saying, “Howdy, dog. If you bite me you will never bite another soul. If you treat me right I’ll treat you right. Like the Indian chief said, I have spoken.”

Despite his blunt words, the tone they were said in soothed the snarling dog considerably. So it stopped snarling, and just moved back to keep the same distance between them, wagging its tail uncertainly. Longarm kept talking to it in the same tone as he proceeded toward the unwelcoming soddy, knowing the dog didn’t understand how it was being cussed as long as the tone was firm but gentle.

Anyone who worked livestock learned to talk like that unless he enjoyed getting kicked, gored, or bitten. Few hands who’d ever gentled a bedded herd at night with a chorus of “Lorena” or “Aura Lee” understood why those vaudeville folks with white buckskin chaps sang such wild and woolly “cowboy songs.” For it would only take one serious whoop to start a stampede on a stormy night, and nobody sang to cows as they were whooping them up a loading chute.

He got within pistol-fighting range of the soddy, with the dog now trotting at his side, before the door opened a crack, a shotgun muzzle was poked out from inside, and a worried female voice called out, “Go away! My momma ain’t here and I ain’t allowed to talk to any strangers when my momma ain’t here!”

He’d been told Rose Cassidy had a full-grown daughter. But he’d have taken her for a kid of, say, six or eight if she hadn’t opened wider to peer out at him from the height of, say, five feet two.

He stopped where he was, Winchester aimed at the dust between them, and called back, “I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Maureen. But I only want to see what you look like, and if you ain’t the lady I’m looking for, we’ll say no more about it until your mother gets back.”

Maureen Cassidy, if that was her, demanded in a suspicious little-gal voice, “Are you looking to peek at my titties and play with my ring dang doo, mister? Momma says that now that I’m a woman grown I have to make sure no boys peek at my titties or play with my ring dang do!”

“Your momma’s advice makes a heap of sense,” Longarm replied in a soothing tone, now that he saw he was dealing with either a feebleminded gal or a good actress. He said, “I don’t want to see your private parts, Miss Maureen. Just let me see your face. I hear tell you got a pretty face. Is that the truth?”

The door opened wider. She wasn’t Miss Medusa Le Mat. She was a mighty pretty gal of twenty or more, with the mind of a slow child.

The confused yard dog ducked into the soddy through the partly open door as its mistress stood there barefoot in a flour-sack shift, her wavy black hair unbound and down around her shoulders as she stared like a blue-eyed owl and said, “Don’t you go talking sweet to me now. Momma says that once you let a boy talk sweet to you, there’s just no saying what he’ll want to do next. Have you been messing with that other lady you’re looking for, mister?”

Longarm truthfully replied, “She was the one who acted wicked the last time we met. You say your mother’s off somewhere, Miss Maureen?”

The simpleminded beauty nodded soberly and said, “Trading horses, I reckon. She told me she would be coming back from Florence as soon as she sold some buckers to a Wild West show. Nobody wants to buy a bucker to rope calves, you know.”

Longarm soberly agreed he’d heard as much, and asked when Maureen expected her mother back.

The dim but pretty little thing replied, “I don’t know. Sometimes she comes right back, and sometimes she can be gone so long I start to cry. It’s lonesome out here with just the stock and old Rex. Would you like to stay here with me until Momma comes home, mister?”

Longarm started to say he’d better come back later. Then he had a better notion, and allowed he might stay long enough for some coffee if she had any to spare.

So the next thing he knew he was seated at a table in the kitchen cum dining-and-sitting room of the two-room soddy, sipping a tin cup of fair coffee and enjoying a stale sponge cake as well while Maureen and her yellow dog wagged their tails at him.

He hadn’t wormed his way inside to see how friendly he might be able to get with a cur dog and a half-wit. He’d wanted to make sure she was telling the truth.

It was beginning to look that way, since he could see into the smaller bedchamber, where two bedsteads against opposite sod walls bespoke no more than two souls sleeping there regularly. But there was one jarring note to the otherwise natural atmosphere of a soddy quartering a mother and daughter. Longarm sniffed deeper, and quietly asked if her mother by any chance smoked a pipe.

Maureen innocently replied, “Oh, that’s Uncle Chester’s tobacco you smell. Momma and me don’t smoke, chew, or dip. Momma says women who smoke, chew, or dip are shanty.”

Longarm didn’t ask her any more about her “uncle.” Pat Brennan in town would know more about such goings-on than Rose Cassidy would be likely to explain to her childlike daughter. It was possible Uncle Chester was really kin. But women told their kids overnight guest were uncles because it was natural for real uncles to loiter about the premises, stinking it up with pipe tobacco.

Then Maureen spoiled it all by blurting out, “I’ve been hoping Uncle Chester would come by to keep me company while Momma was away. I like Uncle Chester. But Momma told him never to come by when I was here alone.”

Longarm washed down the last of the cake and cautiously asked how come. He wasn’t too surprised, being a lawman, when the bright-eyed and innocent woman-child said, “We were playing doctor and Momma got mad. I don’t know why. Uncle Chester wasn’t hurting me. It felt nice when he zammed my ring dang doo with his fingers, like a doctor. He said he was trying to find out if I had worms. I don’t think he found any, even though he felt all around in there and zammed his boy-thing with his other hand. Have you ever zanimed a girl, mister?”

Longarm soberly replied, “Not for worms. What might this uncle’s last name be, and do you know what outfit he rides for, Maureen?”

She soberly replied, “His last name is Pitt. He’s my Uncle Chester Pitt, and I don’t know where he lives when he’s not staying here with us. Momma let him sleep in my bed and fixed me a floor pallet out here by the stove when he stayed over. At least, she did before she got mad at him about something. I asked Momma why she was mad at him, but she just hugged me and said I was too young to understand. Momma doesn’t count so good. Sometimes she thinks I’m only six or seven years old, even though I’ve got titties and hair all around my ring dang doo. Do you want to zammen my titties, mister? Momma says I’m not to let anyone look at my ring dang doo.”

Longarm soberly assured the pretty little half-wit that he’d take her word she was a woman grown. Then he thanked her for the cake and coffee, rose to his much greater height, and said he had to get back to town.

As he headed outside, the barefoot woman-child with eyes of blue tagged after him, idly asking where his pony was.

When he said somebody had shot his paint mare on the far side of that draw, she looked as if she was fixing to cry. But then she proved her mother knew what she was up to, leaving a gal like Maureen in charge of a stud farm for days at a time.

The woman-child offered to drive him back to town in their buckboard. When he hesitated, then said that sounded like a grand notion, he barely had to help. For stupid as she was about sexual matters, the pretty kid knew horseflesh and harness, which never changed the rules on a simple soul.

So they soon had a spunky bay hitched up, and Maureen drove with skill as that yellow dog, Rex, tagged behind.

She did bawl some as they passed the remains of his drygulched paint mare. But he assured her he meant to have somebody come out from town for all that hide and dog food. So they drove on in, and he asked her to rein in out front of the undersheriff’s office.

When she did so, Pat Brennan and a couple of her deputies came outside to see what was happening. Longarm dropped off on his side and soothed the suspicious look on the lawlady’s face by murmuring, “Somebody might have told me. I found her out yonder alone. She can’t say where her mother might be, and what do we know about some disgusting saddle tramp called Chester Pitt?”

The undersheriff frowned thoughtfully and said, “Never heard of him, and I’m paid to know every rider in these parts. What’s the charge, ah, Buck?”

Longarm said, “Carnal knowledge of a feebleminded female, if not worse. Her mother chased the rascal off after catching him messing with the kid. Now the kid don’t know where her mother might be. So add it up!”

Pat did, and her suspicious expression changed to motherly concern as she called out, “Come inside and we’ll send for some soda pop, Maureen. I’m Undersheriff Brennan and I’m a friend of your mother’s. So you’ll be staying here in town with me until she gets back, see?”

As Longarm helped the woman-child down and a deputy took charge of the buckboard, Maureen replied uncertainly, “I don’t know about that, ma’am. Are you a Roman Catholic, and who’s going to take care of our livestock if I don’t go right home?”

Pat Brennan replied in mock severity, “You let my boys worry about your ponies, and ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ Ain’t it grand we’re all Irish?”

As the older and taller woman led her inside, Maureen said she wasn’t allowed to play with shanty Irish, and asked if Pat was by any chance lace-curtain Irish, adding that she wasn’t sure what that meant or how a girl could tell.

Pat said she was as lace-curtain as the Gentle Geraldines of the Killdare Hunt and that she could tell the difference.

Going inside with her new-found friends, Maureen confided that they’d moved away from Texas because her momma had been having trouble with some shanty Irish who kept trying to steal her stock and peep in the windows on bath nights.

Pat went over her mother’s probable whereabouts with Maureen a second time, left her sipping soda with a fatherly deputy, and took Longarm aside to murmur, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Longarm said, “It works both ways. She does know more about the running of the spread than you might think just talking to her. If the lover her mother ran off for messing with her did the mother in, how come he never came back to mess with her? She told me she liked her Uncle Chester and enjoyed it when he finger-fucked her.”

Pat sighed and said, “One usually does, and she’s awfully pretty. What if we’re talking about a lovers’ quarrel that got ugly and an Uncle Chester who rode far and wide, Buck?”

Longarm said, “You may as well start calling me by my real name, seeing some damn body in these parts seems to know who I really am. I forgot to tell you about getting a pony shot out from under me as I was headed for the old Nesbit place.”

Pat gasped, and demanded a complete rundown on the incident near the wooded draw. So he tersely brought her up to date, then asked how come Lash Flanders and Silent Knight hadn’t already told her all about it.

The undersheriff soberly replied, “I haven’t seen either one of them today. Are you saying they had any part in ambushing you?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “They said they were on my side. But they sure as hell knew I’d been shot at with a big fifty, and they said they were riding on into town. So I mean to find out if they did, and if so, why they never saw fit to report an attempted murder to the only law they knew of in these parts!”

Chapter 11

His first charitable notion was that Flanders and Knight might have swung around the Junction to ride on to somewhere else. But he found his saddle and bridle waiting in that tack room for him, and they told him the familiar pair had not only been by, but had hired fresh mounts to ride on to Florence.

Leastways, they’d said they were bound for Florence. You had to say you were riding somewhere when you hired a livery mount.

Putting the early risers and wide riders on the back of the stove for the time being, Longarm arranged the hire of another mount of his own, and told the livery crew about that free hide and dog meat they could have for the taking.

Once they’d assured him they’d be proud to dispose of his dead paint, he toted his saddle and bridle back to his hotel and stored them with the rest of his possibles in his hired room.

Then he trudged over to the Western Union to wire Billy Vail a progress report. He had to allow nothing was panning out the way it had been expected to. But had Billy Vail been able to come up with all the answers seated at his Denver desk, he’d never have to send any deputies out on field missions.

So Longarm wired that while he’d seen neither hide nor hair of Miss Medusa Le Mat, the ex-convict Buster Crabtree, or the fallen woman recalled by her many admirers as French Barbara Allan, somebody or other had just pegged a serious shot at him. So it seemed likely he was only fooling innocent folks with his disguise, and he meant to drop it. He started to suggest that Vail wire him by name at his hotel. Then he crossed that out on the yellow form as he reflected that a man just never knew where he might wind up spending the night. He instructed Vail, or their office clerk, Henry, to wire him care of Western Union, Minnipeta Junction.

Once he had, he asked the clerk of the small telegraph office whether they stayed open round the clock.

The clerk, a wispy-haired young cuss with eyeglasses thick as the bottoms of two hotel tumblers, told him, “Surely you jest. We don’t do enough trade here by daylight to justify my modest salary. Western Union only keeps a branch here because our batteries relay the long lines across the Flint Hills and there is some heavy traffic around the end of the month, when beef prices fly back and forth or the hired help wires money orders home. Lots of cowboys seem to hail from Texas or the Ohio Valley. It’s surprising how both breeds are so devoted to their old folks at home, considering how they feel about one another.”

Longarm said he’d noticed riders north and south had different styles, but felt no call to go into that further. He asked instead, “Are you saying you have a heap of cash on hand, guarded only by your ownself, no offense, come payday?”

The Western Union clerk shrugged and said, “Depends on how many send how much. You ain’t the first one to worry along those lines. Mr. Cornell, who strung all this wire out this way to begin with, made it a rule to never keep more money on hand than need be. We empty our safe every evening and run it over to the bank. Incoming money orders have to be cashed there as well, unless they’re for less than a hundred dollars. We used to get held up more often. But by this late in the game the owlhoot riders know they’d get as much just holding up a fashionable dress shop, or better yet, a jewelry store.”

Longarm thanked him and left, cussing silently, as he considered the many places a gang might hit come payday in a cow town. The well-guarded bank would naturally have the most portable wealth on hand. But all the merchants in a crossroads like this would have more cash on hand than usual around the same time.

It was safe to suspect the feed and hardware supply would wind up with more in the till by evening than the barber or tobacco shop. But there were just too many places to cover. If she wasn’t planning on robbing the bank, it seemed just as likely that Miss Medusa Le Mat wasn’t anywhere in these parts planning anything.

Longarm paused near a wooden Indian to light a fresh cheroot as he quietly asked it, “How come somebody just pegged a shot at me this morning if there’s nobody planning nothing, Chief?”

The wooden Indian never answered, and as he shook out the match, Longarm realized he was running low on his brand of cheroots. So he made an unexpected move for the open front door of the cigar store just as a shot rang out behind him and something thunked into his old pal, that wooden Indian, instead of his back!

Longarm dove on inside, getting his own gun out as he hit the floor with one knee, spun on it, and risked a peek outside between the doorjamb and the wooden Indian’s white pine rump.

He spied a haze of gun smoke drifting from an alley mouth he’d passed a few storefronts back. As the cigar store man raised a gray head above the edge of a rear counter to fuss at him, Longarm called, “I’m the law. Stay put whilst I find out who just murdered your wooden Indian!”

That was easier said than done. Swallowing hard, Longarm advanced on that thinning haze of gun smoke, shouting at some fool kids to stay back as he took a deep breath and crabbed around the corner of the last shop, asshole puckered, to throw down on the now-empty alley.

He ran the length of it, feeling dumb as he considered how easy it would have been for that would-be back-shooter to have nailed him from the side just now.

Busting out the far end of the alley on to a residential street, he found three more kids shooting marbles in the nearby dirt. As soon as they saw him, one kid pointed and said, “He ran that way, catty-corner across the street and through Mr. Miller’s yard.”

Longarm considered the direction of his shy friend’s flight, and decided it might be best to have some idea who he was chasing. So he put his .44-40 away as he asked the helpful kids who he’d been chasing.

They varied some in their descriptions, but it seemed safe to say they’d agreed on a “big boy” wearing denims and a black hat crowned Texican.

That description doubtless fit many a hand riding for many an outfit in the Flint Hills. It didn’t sound like either Lash Flanders or Silent Knight. Waco McCord was too big and husky, too, just in case he was two-faced. So Longarm thanked the boys and headed back to see what that wooden Indian could tell him.

The boys picked up their marbles and followed him at a respectful distance. For he seemed more exiting than anything else going on on a warm afternoon on a work day.

He identified himself to the cigar store man, bought a dozen of his three-for-a-nickel brand, and asked permission to dig that spent bullet out of the already somewhat battered chief.

The older man said to go ahead and watched with interest, along with the boys, as Longarm skillfully used his pocket knife to extract the evidence without too much damage to either pine or softer lead.

Once he had, he thanked the older man, gave the kids three pennies to go buy some jaw breakers and found his way to the one and only gunsmith in the junction.

The gunsmith was a wrinkled-up old timer with bushy black hair and eyebrows. He and his small, cluttered but neatly-kept shop smelled of cleaning spirits and gun oil. He didn’t get sore when Longarm flashed his badge and said he wanted a favor instead of repair work or fresh cartridges.

Longarm placed the deformed slug he’d dug out of white pine on the glass counter top between them and explained how he’d come by it.

The gunsmith picked up the slug meant for Longarm’s spine and measured its base with his steel calipers as he muttered, “Forty-one if it’s American. Closer to .40 if it’s metric and … Yep, one of them fancy French .40 calibers. Can’t even guess at the powder charge, though. You say it sounded like a pistol shot, Deputy Long?”

Longarm nodded and said, “Works even better if we could be talking about a Le Mat six-gun, sir.”

The gunsmith said, “The Le Mat loads nine in the wheel to go with that shotgun charge they revolve around. But this could have come out of a Le Mat. Old Doc Le Mat is such a contrary cuss, he chambers his freak revolvers every way but sensible.”

“Still?” asked Longarm. “I heard tell Le Mat had died or gone out of business.”

The gunsmith shook his bushy head and replied, “Semi-retired, but still puttering with medicine and machine tools in New Orleans. Doc Le Mat—Jean Francois Le Mat, if it matters to you—was born in France but came over here to practice medicine and design weapons just before the war. The percusson cap was invented by a minister named Forsyth, speaking of strange hobbies.”

“We were talking about Doc Le Mat,” Longarm murmured politely.

The gunsmith shrugged. “The reason Le Mat’s ten-shooter never caught on like a Colt or Remington was Doc’s tinkering. His basic design was reliable. But he had them made up at a factory in Paris, France, adding shipping and import costs to his product.”

Setting the spent slug back on the glass, the gunsmith continued. “After that he kept fooling with the calibers, favoring .42, .40, or .36 instead of the more popular .45, .44, or .38 and having his damned guns chambered under the infernal French metric system to make for an even less certain fit with cheaper American ammunition.”

Longarm said he’d already heard about how tough it could be to get fresh cartridges for a Le Mat.

The gunsmith said, “The first ones were cap and ball, so it was easier when he got his first patent in ‘56. But the War Department wasn’t interested in firing buckshot at anybody from a pistol. He had better luck with the Confederacy because he was pals with General Pierre Beauregard. J. E. B. Stuart and Patton Anderson packed Le Mats for the South as well. So by the end of the war that French factory was running in some ten-shooters that loaded brass cartridges as well.”

“You said they still do?” Longarm reminded the digressing older man.

The gunsmith nodded and said, “On special order. They make more popular six-guns for their European market nowadays. But some older gunslicks with mean tempers still favor a reliable ten-shooter.”

Longarm said, “That reserve shotgun blast is a pisser, speaking from experience. Do you stock any .40-shorts or those 20-gauge shells?”

The gunsmith thought before he said, “Twenty-gauge for certain. It’s a popular load for women and children, less of a jolt when you fire from the shoulder. I might have some .40-shorts or even rifle rounds buried somewhere amid the debris. We don’t get much call for that load.”

Longarm said that unless he’d sold some to somebody else in recent memory, it hardly mattered.

So the gunsmith said he’d keep an eye peeled for such an unusual customer, and they shook on it.

He met up with Undersheriff Pat Brennan out front. She was wearing a fresh riding habit and a worried expression as she gasped, “I’ve been looking all over for you, Custis! Somebody told me you’d been in another gunfight and …”

“Never got to fight back,” he said, tersely bringing her up to date about a sudden move saving his ass and explaining what he’d been up to with the gunsmith.

She said, “Somebody really has it in for you, dear. That’s twice in one day!”

He shrugged and said, “Lousy shooting. No guts either. Pegged one wild shot this morning with a serious rifle, and another just now with what’s commencing to stack up as that famous Le Mat.”

She protested, “You said Medusa Le Mat was a woman. But those boys saw a man run past.”

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “They saw somebody dressed like a man, and Medusa Le Mat is a mistress of disguise. A strange gal in these parts, passing herself off a far less unusual cowboy, could be the answer to many a simple question. Let’s go eat. It’s past dinner time and that Chinese place ain’t half bad.”

She was willing, and the only Orientals for miles around were honored to serve chop suey to such distinguished trade.

As they ate at a corner table near the back, Pat filled Longarm in on that “Uncle Chester” she’d sworn out a warrant against after some more gal-to-gal talk with the slow but pretty Maureen Cassidy.

Pat told him, “I’ve staked out the old Nesbit place in hopes the man will come by to play doctor some more. It’s a godsend you got to that poor little thing first, Custis! We wired Florence, and wherever Rose Cassidy went after leaving Maureen alone out there, Florence wasn’t it. I’ve put out a search on her, along with a want on Uncle Chester for attempted rape.”

Longarm started to say Maureen had said she’d been willing. But instead he washed down some chop suey with tea, which always tasted a lot better when a Chinaman or Irish woman brewed it, and said, “I’ve been studying on Uncle Chester and your notion that Medusa Le Mat could be a lesbian.”

Pat shook her head and said, “The same thought crossed my mind. It wouldn’t be the first time I made a complicated case out of two simple ones. I took Maureen over to my place and sat her down with some cookies and buttermilk for some private talk. She caught her missing mother going at it with her mystery lover more than once. A half-wit could be confused about half-naked flesh at some distance. But while he was feeling Maureen up those other times, she got a good look at his ring dang doo, as she puts it for some reason.”

Longarm said, “I know the reason. There’s this dirty cowboy song about a dirty gal with a ring dang doo. I reckon Maureen’s heard it more than once. I’ve been told Uncle Chester ain’t the first man who ever noticed she was pretty.”

Pat grimaced and murmured, “Maybe it’s a good thing I let you play with my ring dang doo before you rode out yonder. Sometimes I think you men would screw a snake if only you could get somebody to hold its head.”

He chuckled sheepishly and confessed, “I know the feeling. But I reckon I’d mess with a sheep before I’d abuse a helpless half-wit.”

He chewed some more, then frowned and said, “Now that’s sure odd, as soon as you study on it.”

She asked what was odd. He explained, “That song somebody sang to a half-wit about her ring dang doo. It starts out, ‘When I was young and in my teens, I met this gal from New Orleans. And she was young and pretty too, and had what they call a ring dang doo.’”

Pat sniffed and said, “That’s lovely. What does the girl with a ring dang doo from New Orleans have to do with us, Custis?”

He said, “Mayhaps nothing. Mayhaps something. When last heard tell of, Doc Le Mat was down in New Orleans, inventing guns Miss Medusa seems to favor.”

Chapter 12

They went back to Longarm’s hotel to settle their meals dog-style. They knew nobody would suspect an official visit in broad daylight. For as any whorehouse proprietor could tell you, nobody ever did. Prim and proper folks thought you had to have the lights out to get really depraved.

She commented on a couple of his scars she’d missed the night before as they lazed atop the bedding naked as jays. The afternoon sun was painting tiger stripes of shadow and light through the window shutters while she tried to blow a smoke ring around the dong she was holding fondly.

She said she could spend perhaps an hour up there with him on her investigation, seeing that he’d been shot at twice in the same day. So a good time was had by all, and they even got to talking some more about his main mission after he’d allowed her to try something she’d always wanted to had her late husband been up to it by the time she’d read that book on Oriental notions.

Once they’d tried, and wound up finishing more naturally, she said some Oriental notions on food tended to be more peculiar than really tasty, and asked how folks who’d come up with fried rice and such swell noodles might have invented tasteless bird’s nest soup and that slimy custard that tasted the way library paste smelled.

He massaged a firm nipple between thumb and forefinger, seeing she liked that, as he said he thought shark fin soup tasted like fish glue, come to think of it. He added, “Regular folks eat regular grub meant for regular pallets no matter where you go. Regular folks don’t eat regular enough to lose their appetites for regular grub. The odd luxuries of any style of cooking are meant for the odd appetites of the idle rich, who’ve never known what it feels like to get really hungry.”

He took the cheroot back to blow smoke at her mature but still mighty tempting flesh as he thought back to some odd dishes he’d been served in fancy homes. “Strawberries out of season don’t taste any better. Or even as good as ripe apples right off the tree. But that wouldn’t be showing off. I reckon it costs a heap more to serve your guests shark fins than fresh-plucked chicken or that sweet and sour pork the more common folks eat. I wonder how come Uncle Chester wanted to feel up a half-witted kid when he could have her mother French-style and naked all he wanted.”

The naked undersheriff suggested, “Rose Cassidy’s a handsome woman, as I recall. They do say variety is the spice of life, but Rose and her dim daughter didn’t look all that different.”

She began to stroke his limp virile member thoughtfully as she went on. “At least we know for certain that Uncle Chester has one of these. I’m not about to ask Maureen to judge which one of you has the best to offer. So there goes your notion that a saddle tramp who sings dirty songs about New Orleans has to be Miss Medusa Le Mat. Why would she have to know anything about New Orleans or the real Le Mat to begin with? Can’t you buy one of Doctor Le Mat’s wicked weapons most anywhere in this land of opportunity?”

Longarm put a hand to her wrist to encourage faster stroking as he decided, “You’re likely right. It’s as easy to figure I’ve been seeing tigers in the roses as it is to make any of these scattered bits and pieces fit.”

Since she was interested in law enforcement and aware of her own limitations too, Pat stopped jerking him off to ask him what in blue blazes he was talking about.

She said, “Medusa Le Mat and Uncle Chester are confounding enough! What tigers in what roses are we talking about?”

He rolled her on her back and kissed that nipple before he told her, “Us law folks usually get there long after the fact and have to piece things together from the evidence, which, as you know, comes in all sizes and shapes, scattered hither and yon.”

He ran his free hand down her tiger-striped belly, admiring the play of light as he played with her, saying, “You’ve doubtless noticed how much pure distraction is mixed in with hard facts you’re trying to nail down. If you put fact and fancy together wrong, you can get a convincing wrong picture. Little kids are always seeing tigers, scary faces, and such in the floral patterns of bedroom wallpaper designed by the artist to just look like roses. Some see a man in the moon, and the Indians are just as sure it’s a rabbit, sitting up on its hind end. Nothing ever made those hills and valleys up on the moon with either a face or a rabbit in mind. Folks see them because they can’t just see patterns that make no sense at all.”

She spread her thighs languidly as she purred, “I don’t see why a female bank robber and a finger-fucking saddle tramp have to come from New Orleans either. But keep doing what you’re doing with that finger and we’ll worry about it later, dear!”

He commenced to rock the boy in the boat for her as he calmly went on. “If Miss Medusa Le Mat’s in town, she ain’t wearing her usual dress. Maureen Cassidy ought to be able to point out her Uncle Chester if he don’t watch out. You say she’s at your house right now?”

Pat moaned, “Oooh, that feels so lovely! Yes, I’ve left the kid in the care of my housekeeper, with orders she’s not to receive visitors when I’m not home. I didn’t invite you home with me because my housekeeper’s a self-confessed peeper with a dawning interest in these very pleasures. So would you please mount up and pleasure me again?”

Longarm cocked one leg over to massage her moist clit with the head of his semierection, noticing how soon it began to feel like a chore when the gal started giving the damned orders.

He said, “Silent Knight allowed he might have been by to court the gal often enough to get turned down. What do he and Lash Flanders really do, honey?”

She tried, “They’re top hands, riding for the Lazy Eight, and don’t you intend to put it all the way in, you teasing thing?”

To which he replied, “In a minute. I’m distracted. Call me a sissy if you must. But I find it hard to keep it up for a gal who’s telling me big fibs, Pat.”

She thrust her pelvis up to catch another inch of him by surprise as she sobbed, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I’ve never lied to you about anything! Why should I?”

He rolled dead center and thrust it in as far as he could get it not all the way hard, and just as he’d hoped, she moaned in delight and started moving passionately under him.

But he was a big man, too heavy for her to really bounce in the saddle unless he helped some. So he just lay sort of soggy on top of her, enjoying her efforts a lot, as he calmly told her, “I want you to listen carefully to my proposition before you feed me more white lies.”

She pleaded, “Please, Custis, you have to believe me!”

He kissed her to hush her and insisted, “You ain’t been listening. I savvy machine politics. Neither Denver nor any other town is run on the level. Crooked politician is a redundant term. Honest Abe never got elected without telling many a lie. The voters always have to choose betwixt baby-kissers willing to give them the sort of government you’d expect, and baby kissers who just plain rob them. I know you were appointed undersheriff by the county machine. Nobody else could have offered you the job.”

She said, “Make love to me, damn you! The county board of supervisors are as pure as the driven snow and I’m hot as hell!”

He left it deep and throbbing as he insisted, “I just said I ain’t interested in local graft. I only want to know what Lash Flanders and Silent Knight do for the powers that be.”

Pat gasped, “Don’t tease me like this. They both ride for the Lazy Eight.”

He gave her a few good strokes, then insisted, “No, they don’t. I just met them way off their range on a workday, and Lord knows where they rode from there. When first we met they were clean across their own county line in Florence, arrested on an assault charge. I asked Hard Pan Parsons as I was getting my belongings back. You can hire a top hand for forty a month and found. You don’t have to keep bailing him out of jams he gets into on his own. So who do they get in jams for, Pat?”

She hesitated, then sighed and said, “Cattlemen’s Protective Association, as regulators. Now do it regular, you brute!”

He proceeded to, hotter than he’d been letting on, and when he came in her, they both moaned out loud because her climax started earlier and lasted longer, as if Mother Nature aimed to make up for the more complicated plumbing she’d designed for her daughters.

As he lay limp in her amorous embrace, Longarm muttered, “We have a team like that working out of my home office. We call ‘em Smiley and Dutch instead of Silent and Lash. Deputy Smiley’s smart but inclined to reason with a hair-trigger cuss, whilst Dutch would draw and throw down on his own mother if she stared at him mean. The two of them add up to one good lawman, just as Silent and Lash likely make for a smart but dangerous hired gun.”

Pat kissed him and said, “I said they were regulators, not hired guns, dear. You’re right that one political hand has to wash another, but neither the county council nor me would put up with paid assassins.”

He asked what they did if they weren’t allowed to assassinate anybody for the C.P.A.

She said, “Regulate. They encourage folks to act regular here in the Flint Hills range. There’s statute law and then there’s county custom. You’d have to be a cattleman to understand.”

Longarm had been a cattleman in his time. So he was commencing to understand. There was no law on the books saying a strange rider with no visible means of support but the running iron in his saddlebag could be arrested, or worse. Yet any honest cowhand could tell at a glance a cuss like that was up to no good.

There was nothing in the Constitution or your average state charter saying you owed it to your neighbors to search out the owner of a dogie following one of your own cows with another man’s brand on its fool hide, and you didn’t have to offer coffee and cake to any passing rider who stopped by to ask permission to use your water pump. You just acted regular if you wanted the folks for miles around to take you for regular neighbors.

Longarm finally rolled off the sated undersheriff to light them up a cheroot to share as he opined, “I ain’t too keen on vigilante justice or regulators dropping by to explain the facts of life to a new homesteading family from other parts. It can get out of hand when and if your lawfully appointed peace officers let it.”

She snuggled closer and assured him, “Silent and Lash are all right. Even judicious brutality from a badge-wearer has a way of falling into the pages of the opposition newspapers. But when you call it outraged public opinion, it’s accepted when a petty thief or wife beater gets what he deserved.”

Longarm replied, “I just said I knew what regulators did. What’s the story on that assault charge over to Florence?”

She took a drag on the cheroot before she declared, “It will never come to trial. The jasper Lash assaulted will surely drop the charges by the time he gets better and talks it over with a lawyer. The silly thing’s a traveling-notions peddler, traveling about with his one-horse cart to peddle ribbon bows and such to the women folks out our way. He seemed to have gotten fresh with some of the wives he came across alone in a soddy with neither their man nor older kids to protect them.”

Longarm whistled softly. “A pest like that can be tough to discourage legally. Her word against his and what harm done, Your Honor?”

She demurely replied, “That’s why I told Silent Knight about it when more than one wife came into the Junction to complain. So now the dirty rascal is nursing his own complaints in a sick bed, and by the time he’s able to appear against anybody in court, what harm was done, Your Honor?”

Longarm said, “I follow your drift. So who have you sent them after this time, honey? That Uncle Chester young Maureen told us about?”

Pat blinked innocently and replied, “I never sent anybody after anyone, dear. As I told you before, I haven’t seen them today. They never came by to report that gunplay out by the old Nesbit place.”

Longarm took a drag on the cheroot and decided, “Mayhaps somebody else told them about Uncle Chester. Silent Knight told me he’d tried to court Maureen Cassidy, and Maureen told me about that dirty older man playing doctor with her when first we met.”

Pat repressed a shudder, and snuggled closer as she declared she’d hate to be Uncle Chester when and if those two caught up with him.

She said, “I doubt either of those bullies would trifle with a woman-child they knew to be a half-wit. They both seem to follow Old Testament notions on simple justice. But if you recall your Good Book, some of those notions about an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth make for simple justice indeed.”

He said, “I ain’t got much use for a man who’d molest a half-wit, and I’m sworn to uphold the Constitution. What sort of cruel and unusual punishments do you reckon those bible-reading bullies might have in mind for a dirty dog who’d hand his dick to an innocent young gal?”

Pat grimaced and reached for his as she said she doubted they’d treat his so gently.

Longarm didn’t mind what she was up to down yonder, but he told her, “I’d better see if I can catch up with Uncle Chester first. If neither Lash nor Silent are anywhere in town, they must have figured on finding the rascal somewhere else!”

She said she agreed on that, but failed to see why he really cared what the boys did to a degenerate who trifled with children. She told him, “Maureen is safe at my place. He can’t bother her there.”

Longarm said, “Ain’t worried about Maureen. I want to know what happened to her mother. I’d as soon ask Uncle Chester before they mess him up too much to talk.”

Pat started to stroke him harder as she mused, “We don’t know that saddle tramp did anything to Rose Cassidy, dear. Maureen says she seemed all right when she headed into Florence on business.”

Longarm said, “Florence is a fair ride off, and a heap can happen to a lady on the rolling prairies betwixt hither and yon. I figure Silent and Lash have come to the same conclusion. So I reckon I’ll just ride that way and see what there might be to see.”

She asked if they couldn’t do it one more time before he left. He told her he’d try to come in her twice, seeing he didn’t know when he’d be back. So she forked a naked thigh across him and got on top to take charge this time lest he torture any more political secrets out of a poor helpless girl.

Chapter 13

Longarm knew most country folks were free with cake and coffee and tight with gossip about folks they knew when asked by a nosy cuss they didn’t. So he didn’t stop at any of the few spreads he passed that afternoon, aiming to ride into Florence around nine or ten that evening, when others were less likely to notice.

So he made good time aboard a spunky chestnut Pat Brennan had loaned him, as if to make certain he had to get back to her before he left for good, with his case wrapped up or not.

But just before sundown, miles short of Florence, he crossed a timbered draw to meet up with Silent Knight and Lash Flanders coming the other way with a buckboard and a quartet of colored day laborers.

As he reined in to greet them, Longarm naturally asked how come. Silent Knight pointed at the cottonwoods and hackberry trees behind Longarm to say, “We’re out to solve us a murder. Or to find a murder victim leastways. For we’ve reason to believe Rose Cassidy lies dead and buried somewheres near.”

Lash chimed in. “We got to talking about it betwixt here and town. After we’d chewed it up and spit it out more than once, that draw is the only stretch worth poking about in. These rises all around us are nigh solid chalk under a few inches of sod.”

Longarm nodded and said, “I can see why you’d expect a dead body to be buried in the sandy bottom of a draw, gents. But how come you ever came to such a grim conclusion about Rose Cassidy? Her daughter says she was last seen alive and well riding into Florence on some horse-trading business.”

Silent Knight said, “Nobody in Florence admits to any recent horse-trading with her. And we were asking about her all the way in from Minnipeta Junction. It ain’t been a whole week, and you don’t get that many tolerable-looking women riding this open range alone.”

Longarm said he followed their drift as far as this particular draw. He said that was where they lost him.

Lash Flanders grimly replied, “That was where we lost Rose Cassidy. She stopped to water her bronc at the Edenwald spread, a mile or less to the southwest.”

Silent Knight pointed the other way and said, “She never stopped or even passed the Berger spread when she should have, no more than half an hour later. Jimmy Berger and his boy, Lem, were out by this wagon trace repairing their cattle guard, and she never passed them.”

Lash Flanders was directing their hired shovel crew into the draw at the moment. So Longarm asked Silent if those helpful Bergers had recalled any other riders during the time in question.

The regulator shrugged and said, “Well, sure, they saw other riders, riding both ways along a busy trace in broad-ass daylight! The point is that neither saw a handsome wasp-waisted woman, mounted on a nice-looking cordovan stud with Morgan lines. You’re a lawman. Add it UP.”

Longarm did, wryly noting word had surely gotten around since they’d met up in that Florence jailhouse. He said, “One witness watching a lady riding toward a wooded draw, plus two more who never saw her riding out from it, sure adds up sinister.”

Silent Knight nodded and said, “She was a good-looking woman carrying money aboard a fine horse. So there’s three motives, and now all we have to do is find that there delicate corpse!”

Longarm didn’t feel up to instructing a self-styled regulator on the legal distinctions betwixt a dead corpse and the corpus delicti, or tangible evidence that any sort of crime had been committed. More than one slick crook had hanged because he’d thought the law had to find a body to nail you with murder in the first. Burning your wife to ashes in the kitchen range didn’t help you a lick if witnesses convinced the jury they’d seen you butcher and overcook her.

So as he dismounted back in the draw and tethered his borrowed mount to a box-elder sapling, Longarm knew they only had to produce tangible evidence that something awful might have happened to Rose Cassidy. He mentally emphasized they because he wasn’t sure Billy Vail would want him horning into a local killing.

He said so as he and the two regulators watched the colored help poking with long crowbars, searching for soft spots in the sun-baked watercourse between the tree roots before they wasted time with their shovels.

He said, “Seeing you gents know who I really am, I’m really after bank robbers who’ve followed a similar plan more than once. Leaving out less important moves for the moment, they like to locate and take over a lonesome hideout not too far away before they hit a bank at a hard, fast gallop to and fro. They leave one or more members of their gang at the hideout with a change of mounts and, likely, duds. They rob the bank and use the hideout just long enough to confound pursuit with a change of pony and costume for at least the leaders. They like to leave a real mess for the posse to ponder as they slip innocently off into the mists. Rose Cassidy’s little horse spread fits the usual bill of fare better than any place else I’ve come up with.”

Silent Knight said, “We was told about that Medusa gal when we was told about you. You figure she sent that Uncle Chester to talk sweet and scout old Rose and Maureen?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Uncle Chester could have just been a saddle tramp with a hard-on. He could have been scouting for another lady with bank robbery in mind. I’ve reason to suspect Miss Medusa ain’t interested in the hard-ons of her recruits.”

He fumbled for a cheroot as he wryly added, “We’re sure piling up a shithouse made of guesswork when they do say bricks work better!”

One of the colored hands from Florence gave a yell and said his crowbar had sunk into something soft. Everyone else headed over to join him in the shade of a blackjack oak. The more itchy Lash Flanders grabbed a shovel from the nearest hand and commenced to dig as Silent Knight wrinkled his nose and said, “Oh, Lord, I hate the way folks smell after they’ve been dead a while.”

But even though Longarm could almost smell that fetid odor amid the dusty greenery all around, it was only a woman’s riding boot that Lash came up with before he muttered, “That’s all there is this side of the damned chalk. But why in thunder would anybody bury just the one boot of a missing woman?”

Longarm flatly stated, “Because he aimed to bury other things in other places. This is shaping up to be a long row to hoe, gents. But I have to say your educated guess makes more sense now. Whether that was one boot or two, I can’t picture the lady riding on from here with even one bare foot in the stirrup.”

The others agreed. The hired hands fanned out with more enthusiasm, now that they could see they were really probing for something. But all they found before sundown was a gal’s black cotton chemise. No man but the missing Uncle Chester was in any position to say whether the undergarment belonged to the missing Rose Cassidy. Although they agreed Maureen might know back at the Junction.

It was Silent Knight who first declared it would make more sense to knock off for the day and start over at sunrise to really root up the draw, which was now getting dark.

Lash and Longarm had to agree. The shovel hands moved over to their buckboard to gather gear for a night camp in the draw. But Longarm went to untether his chestnut. When Silent Knight asked how come, Longarm explained, “They never sent me here from Denver to search for Rose Cassidy. The lady I’m after is better known as Miss Medusa Le Mat. She don’t seem to be around the Junction. She might not be over in Florence. But it’s a bigger town, and I’d best make certain.”

The regulator said, “We don’t get many murderous folks of either gender in these parts. How do you cotton to the notion of that bank-robbing gal getting rid of poor old Rose somewheres around here so’s she and her gang could take over the old Nesbit place for a hideout?”

Longarm said, “The thought crossed my mind earlier. But there’s a couple of holes in the notion. You’d expect them to get rid of the pretty half-wit even more young studs find interesting. But they never did, and now the daughter’s safe in town and that homestead’s being watched by the county law.”

Silent pointed out, “All that comes after the mother disappeared sometime back. You might have saved Maureen unexpected.”

But Longarm insisted, “I said there was more than one hole. Thanks to you and Lash tracing the mother at least this far by asking so many questions, it’s safe to assume Rose Cassidy was the only woman riding by that day. Since nobody saw her closer to Florence than this draw, I figure she should have been stopped by one or more nondescript male riders, not another lady with a ten-shooter.”

Lash Flanders had come over in time to catch the last of that. So he was the one who suggested, “What if this Medusa gal rides around wearing men’s duds, seated in the saddle astride? Wouldn’t that sort of explain why nobody in these parts recalls a strange woman with no visible means of support?”

Longarm said, “It could, if you’d like to sell me a handsome young woman passing as a strange saddle tramp nobody would look at twice. I should think regulators paid to watch for such uncertainties in cattle country would have noticed a short baby-faced stranger who doesn’t have to shave as he drifts about.”

The two local bullies exchanged thoughtful glances in the tricky light of the gloaming. Lash asked, “What about that grub-line rider we patted down for running irons a few weeks back? He was in his teens and either not full-growed or doomed to go through life mighty short.”

Silent Knight shook his head and said, “He won’t work as a mystery woman in jeans. We took a leak together as you were sneaking that peek through his saddlebags. He could have used a fresh shave as well, and after that, I’d seen him somewhere in the Flint Hills before, remember?”

Lash shrugged and decided, “I do now. He was just the only rider I could come up with who could have possibly looked so sissy.”

Longarm put his reining hand to his saddlehorn as he mused, half to himself, “Maureen Cassidy recalls that saddle tramp who trifled with both her and her mother as young and pretty. What did the traveling man you beat up the other day look like, Lash?”

The professional tough hesitated, grinned, and modestly confessed, “Too big, old, and ugly to be any mystery woman in disguise. And I kicked him in the balls to teach him to keep his drawers buttoned up around married women. You surely don’t suspect old Greek George as the one that pretty half-wit calls Uncle Chester!”

Longarm swung himself up into the saddle as he replied, “I mean to ask him when I get to Florence. So where might he be found?”

Lash Flanders said, “At the doc’s or resting up at his boardinghouse, I reckon. I went easy on the son of a bitch, considering how sore some husbands were at him. I never broke no bones nor gouged out no eyeballs. And I still say he couldn’t be the one Maureen calls her Uncle Chester.”

Silent Knight said, “Rose Cassidy had better taste than to mess with old Greek George. Like Lash says, he’s old and ugly, and old Rose has turned down many a good-looking young cuss who dropped by to see if she needed anything from town.”

“Like me,” said Lash Flanders modestly, adding, “I like women old enough to know what they’re doing. But do I catch up with that young rascal, I mean to clean his plow. For he has to be a pussy-eater at the very least!”

Silent Knight laughed and said, “Show me the man who don’t eat pussy and I’ll show you how to steal his woman. But it do seem odd a drifter none of us knew could get so lucky with old Rose.”

Longarm didn’t comment on how oversexed a man might have to be to risk molesting a lover’s feebleminded children as well. He figured he’d just ask the jasper his secret after he caught up with him. The traveling peddler who liked to pester gals that way himself might or might not know a rival who’d had better luck with the missing horse-breeder, and possibly some other local gals as well. Longarm knew your average Don Juan was restless enough. A Don Juan who’d make a play for both mother and daughter under the same roof would surely make a play for other gals under other roofs.

Longarm took his leave from the regulators and rode up out of the draw to find the gloaming light left just right for riding at a mile-eating trot. It was rougher on one’s balls aboard a stock saddle, and now he was sorry he’d left his old army McClellan behind. For his half-ass try at working the Flint Hills in disguise wasn’t panning out worth shit, and he was riding uncomfortably for no good reason.

But it had to be done, seeing a comfortable walk would get him into town too late, and loping much of the way would be too rough on his borrowed mount.

He aimed to get there well before bedtime because it would be rude to wake up a witness recovering from a beating. He needed to talk to the womanizing Greek George because it took one such gent to know another and Uncle Chester was shaping up as a serious suspect.

That old Nesbit place, inhabited by no more than two women, neither having kith nor kin worth mention in these parts, made sense as the sort of temporary hideout Miss Medusa Le Mat liked to line up ahead of any bank job. Nobody knew for certain how those other hideouts had been chosen or lined up. So what if they sent some member of the gang ahead to scout it out and lull anyone there into trusting them until it came time to take over?

A handsome young stud buttering up a healthy young widow woman with no regular lover made a heap of sense. Longarm doubted Miss Medusa Le Mat had told him to mess up by fooling with the daughter of the house as well. If the poor simp was still alive, he was oversexed and not too bright. Another womanizer prowling the same range for pussy would have been likely to notice such a specimen more than your average rider might have while searching for strays or coyotes.

What was that Mr. Charles Dickens had put in those Pickwick Papers about the horny coachman who knew all the gals who put out for at least eighty miles?

That was the sort of wandering Don Juan he was looking for. A man who knew more than most about getting laid, or trying to get laid, in these parts. For even if Greek George didn’t know beans about Miss Medusa Le Mat or Uncle Chester, there was no telling when such information about other folks might come in handy.

Chapter 14

Longarm had lost some time back at that draw, and it seemed even later than he thought as he spied the string of twinkles that had to be Florence up ahead. Country folks tended to turn in early, and the few scattered spreads he’d been passing were little more than dark shapeless blobs against the lighter blackness of the rolling grassy swells.

But things brightened up as he rode into town. A beanery near the railroad stop, across from the illuminated Western Union sign, was open for late travelers, while more than one saloon along the lamp-lit main street spilled light and piano music out on the plank walks as if Kansas had never gone dry.

Longarm stabled his borrowed chestnut at the livery near the railroad stop, ambled over to the Western Union, and wired Billy Vail a progress report at night-letter rates. He only put down the bare bones he had on the mission he’d been sent out on. He knew he was inclined to get more interested in local affairs than his home office approved of.

As if to back Billy Vail’s nagging about local lawmen being there to worry about local affairs, Hard Pan Parsons, the chief constable of Florence, hailed Longarm as the younger federal lawman was coming out of the telegraph office.

As they shook hands in the dusty street, Hard Pan said, “They told me at the livery you was in town. What’s this about Rose Cassidy dropping out of sight and Undersheriff Brennan being stuck with her idiot child?”

Longarm countered by asking who might have told him that before he could ride less than a full score of country miles from the junction.

Hard Pan pointed with his chin at the doorway Longarm had just now come from as he easily replied, “Pat Brennan wired us hours ago. She said you were headed our way. I still wired her all the latest we may have on that possible bank robbery in these parts. But let’s not talk out here in the night air with our throats so dry, old son.”