Longarm and the Maiden Medusa

Longarm didn’t argue. It was up to a Kansas lawman to say whether a Kansas saloon served needled beer or not. He ordered his own with a shot of Maryland rye as they took a corner table for some private rag-chewing.

He got out his notebook when Hard Pan declared, “We was already wondering why a known gunslick called Buster Crabtree never showed up at his coming-home party. Another local graduate of Jefferson Barracks has been glimpsed hither and yon in these parts, but seems to be trying to avoid kith and kin, as if he never got out.”

Longarm asked who they were talking about, and wrote down the name of Matt Currier. He nodded and said, “I’ve seen that name on a federal want.”

Hard Pan shrugged and said, “If you did, it was an old one. Currier just served five at hard for armed robbery. But you was right about it being federal. Held up a dinky post office for less than a hundred in hard cash, the poor simp. Now write down Corky Landon, who just got out of Canyon City, and add ‘em up.” Longarm did as Hard Pan prodded him, “Didn’t you say this Medusa gal recruits around three men and a gal to help her rob them banks?”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I make that Buster Crabtree, Matt Currier, Corky Landon, and French Barbara Allan, the same as you did. Might any of those gunslicks describe as short and baby-faced?”

Hard Pan shook his head and said, “Nope. All of them sit tall in the saddle and look mean, the way you’d want a bank robber to look if you was scouting ahead and giving them the high sign to move in. How might this shit about Rose Cassidy tie in?”

Longarm sipped thoughtfully and replied, “My first suspicion was that the more sinister lady was lining up a hideout just outside of the Junction. I’m having trouble fitting a baby-faced cuss the half-witted Maureen Cassidy recalls as Uncle Chester. He don’t answer to tall and mean-looking. Have you ever caught yourself planning a chess move when the name of the game was checkers?”

The older lawman smiled sheepishly and said, “All the time. We know the simple answer is usually the simple answer. But it feels so good to think you’re smart. Are you suggesting this Romeo old Rose was mixed up with had something to do with her vanishing so mysterious?”

Longarm sighed and said, “It gets less mysterious if you let Uncle Chester ride alone. Say old Rose caught him messing with her beautiful but dumb daughter after he’d been messing with her. Then say she handed him the shovel and told him never to darken her door again.”

Hard Pan put down his beer scuttle and asked, “You mean we could be talking about a lover scorned?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Who’s to say what a saddle tramp who’d want to play musical beds with a mother and literal child might wind up doing? Most of us mortal men hold secret hard-ons in reserve for the ones who got away. Maureen didn’t act as if she’d have been a tough conquest for any man when I talked to her. Uncle Chester could have had a grand notion about coming back to the old Nesbit place when old Rose wasn’t there to run him off, see?”

Hard Pan whistled softly and asked, “Where do you reckon he done Rose dirty? She ain’t been in to Florence recent. I asked around as soon as I got Pat’s wire this afternoon.”

Longarm told him about the grim investigations of Silent Knight and Lash Flanders around that wooded draw. He was only doing so to respect his elders. So he was surprised but not upset when the bright small-town lawman said, “Well, I never. That sure explains that cordovan stud we’re still holding over to the municipal pound.”

Longarm blinked and said, “Rose Cassidy was riding a cordovan stud the last time anybody saw her alive and well. You say it wound up in your stray corral?”

Hard Pan nodded and said, “Had to. Some son of a bitch tethered it near the railroad stop all day without fodder or water. Now that you’ve recalled Rose Cassidy to me, somebody at the time made mention of the abandoned pony looking something like the favorite mount of that widow woman over by Minnipeta Junction. I paid less mind at the time because I hadn’t heard old Rose or her cordovan stud were missing. Besides, the critter was saddled mannish with a center-fire dally-roper.”

Longarm broke out a couple of cheroots as he silently tried to put odd pieces together.

Hard Pan suggested, “Mayhaps he hid that sidesaddle and left the gal’s pony tethered by the railroad stop so’s we’d assume he took the train clean out of here whilst we was having this very conversation.”

Longarm nodded and said, “Works as well more ways than one. There’s nigh as much dark as light along the trails at this time of the year. I noticed, riding in, how easy it would be to ride most anywhere on anything with nobody but the owl birds really looking you over. So all we know for certain is that somebody met up with a sidesaddled stud in that wooded draw, then abandoned it here in Florence with a beat-up Texican saddle you could likely pick up cheap at many a hockshop. How many hockshops are we talking about here in Florence, pard?”

Hard Pan thought and decided, “Four, counting the saddle shop as loans out money to cowhands with their saddles as security. Ain’t none of ‘em open at this hour, though.”

Longarm thumbed a match head alight for the two of them as he said anyone who’d remember that center-fire roper at the moment would likely recall it as well in the morning.

He got his cheroot going, sipped more suds, and allowed he was more interested in talking to Greek George, the peddling man, at that hour.

Hard Pan said, “You won’t find him here in town at any hour now. I understand that once he recovered from that beating Lash Flanders gave him the other night, he limped home to his true love, Osage Opal. She’d be the breed widow woman of a hog farmer over on the other side of Cottonwood Creek. Osage Opal stayed on after old Bill Ziegel up and died from a heart stroke slopping hogs. Greek George has been staying with Osage Opal ever since, when he ain’t out peddling and pestering gals in other parts. The place ain’t hard to find, by day or night. Just follow the Marion post road until you smell hogs, a heap of hogs. I’ve never fathomed how critters that taste so good can smell so disgusting.”

Longarm chuckled dryly and said, “You remind me of a devoted cunt-licker who often made similar comments. I reckon my visit to that hog spread can wait until morning too.”

Hard Pan Parsons agreed it was getting late, and asked Longarm where he’d been planning to bed down, adding an invitation to his own place just up the way.

Longarm thanked him and allowed he’d made other plans. So the two lawmen shook and parted friendly, with Hard Pan headed back to his office and Longarm drifting on toward the distant but familiar sounds of an out-of-tune piano being tortured beyond endurance.

As he paused outside in the darkness to peer over the top of the bat-wing doors, Longarm saw he’d been right about that rendition of “Aura Lee” that could have just as easily been “Lenora.” For the pianist seated at an upright against the rear wall with her back to Longarm could have only been the one and original Miss Red Robin from Chicago by way of Texas.

Nobody else with such a fine figure played piano that badly in a flaming red velveteen dress that almost matched the dyed hair pinned up to expose the ivory nape of her neck. Longarm knew for a fact she was a natural brunette. Sort of. Red Robin shaved between her shapely soft thighs as well as under both arms—to keep from picking up nits as she bummed around from one boom town to another, she’d told Longarm the last time he’d asked.

It was Red Robin’s sixth sense for boom times that inspired Longarm to part the swinging doors and mosey over to her end of the bar, or so he tried to tell himself. Undersheriff Brennan, just up the road a piece, was communicating by wire regularly with the town law of Florence, and a stranger in town just never knew how many local deputies might be keeping an eye on him.

But what good old Pat didn’t know for certain about good old Red Robin wasn’t likely to hurt either gal, and Longarm really had a good reason to question Red Robin about her sudden appearance in a dinky cow town between roundups.

She went on playing, or trying to, as Longarm quietly ordered plain beer and admired a cameo profile for the moment. They’d met a spell back down Texas way, and screwed one another silly in many a boom town since. For Red Robin followed the clinking of glasses and the jingle of money, playing piano with much the same smoothness but still getting handsome tips for her efforts, considering her reluctance to put out for born suckers.

As he sipped his own beer schooner, Longarm saw Red Robin had placed an empty one at one end of the piano. It was a quarter full of coins, with a couple of silver certificates dropped in by big spenders.

Longarm waited for Red Robin to pause, and then he waded through all the applause to circle round and drop a silver cartwheel of his own in her glass.

As he’d hoped, Red Robin caught the sound of silver on glass with considerable skill for a tone-deaf gal, and smiled sweetly up to thank him. Then she saw who it was and grinned like a mean little kid, adding, “I’ll get you for that!”

Longarm moved back to the bar on her far side as Red Robin forged ahead, trying in vain to play “Peggy Gordon” as per a shouted request from the crowd.

Longarm tried to get her back on the tracks by moving closer to sing softly but correctly:

Oh, Peggy Gordon, thou art my true love. Come sit diee down upon my knee. Come tell to me the very reason, Why I’ve been slighted so by thee.

Then a gent in an undertaker’s suit and brocaded red vest stomped over to shove his red face closer than polite as he snarled, “I don’t want your rendition of ‘Peggy Gordon,’ you son of a bitch!”

Red Robin stopped playing as if someone had slammed the keyboard cover shut, and quietly but urgently said, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew, Johnny. You just now called the one and original Longarm a son of a bitch.”

Then she sweetly added, “Custis, I’d like you to meet Johnny Behind the Deuce, and please don’t kill him. I know he’s an asshole, but I owe him money and how would it look if an old flame gunned him before this child had made good on her word of honor?”

Longarm smiled thinly at the tinhorn, who seemed to have gone pale as a frog’s belly for some reason. Longarm held out a hand. When the tinhorn didn’t take it, Longarm quietly said, “In that case you’d be well advised to be out of my sight before Miss Red Robin and me finish our duet.”

Johnny Behind the Deuce started to bluster, then quietly turned for the door as Red Robin murmured, “Damn it, Custis. He just loaned me a double eagle!”

Longarm fumbled in his jeans, got out a twenty-dollar piece, and let her see it before he dropped it in her beer schooner, saying, “Pay him back if you’ve a mind to. I offered to be friendly until he’d acted the sore loser twice. Might you know what was eating him?”

Red Robin sighed and said, “You just called him a sore loser. I got here from Holy Cross broke, and had to borrow room-and-board money off the first cuss in town I knew.”

She struck a chord as if to make sure the keys were still there, and added, “I told him I’d pay him back as soon as I got that beer glass going. I suspect he had some other payoff in mind, from the way he’s been discouraging any sing-alongs.”

Longarm said, “Before we gather the boys around, you said that tinhorn was the first one you met up with here?”

Red Robin said, “Joker Joyce and the Faro Kid just blew in, along with Deacon Ellison and Pop Kenton. But we can talk about them high rollers later. I get off just after midnight and we got a lot of things to talk about, lover man!”

So Longarm finished his beer and ordered another, knowing it was going to feel like a million years, standing there watching a mighty nice sure lay with the answers to a whole new bag of questions.

For it was only a little after ten, he already had a hard-on, and what in thunder could all those professional gamblers have in mind at this time of the year in cattle country, for Pete’s sake?

Chapter 15

It sure beat all how two gals could be so different without one of them being uglier or a lousy lay. For old Pat, back in Minnipeta Junction, had been bigger and wider across the hips, but much firmer all over, than the paler and marshmallow-soft Red Robin, who moved as great, but differently, as Longarm parted the hairless lips of her smooth-shaven ring dang doo with his old organ-grinder.

Old Pat’s full bush had parted about as pleasingly, and hadn’t she been as warm and wet inside? It was hard to be certain as the sheer novelty of strange pussy enveloped a fresh erection. That was the nice thing about strange pussy, even though, in truth, he’d done this more to Red Robin, in more positions, than he and that undersheriff had gotten around to yet.

He thought about that, with a fond smile, when Red Robin locked her ankles around the nape of his neck with two pillows under her round white rump in the privacy of her hired hotel room. He’d had her in that position before, although never in the exact same surroundings, and not all that recently. As he considered teaching Pat to screw the same way with her longer, more muscular legs, his erection grew stiffer in Red Robin, inspired by the mental image of another gal as it slid in and out of the one at hand. For that was the way rutting flesh seemed to work.

As if she’d been thinking dirty underneath him, Red Robin suddenly said, “I suppose you think I owe you some explanation about that other man back in Colorado. I didn’t want to hurt either of you, Custis. But as I told you at the time, we’d made plans to ride over the Front Range together before you blew into town.”

Longarm thrust all the way in, ground it around teasingly, the way he knew she liked it, and calmly replied, “I told you at the time I understood the spot you were in, honey. I thought we agreed down in Texas, the first time we ever did this, that it didn’t mean the two of us were engaged.”

She hugged him down closer with all four limbs as she told him he was the most understanding man she’d ever met who could treat a gal so right. She said, “I was so afraid you’d never forgive me, seeing I left you all alone up there in the mountains like that.”

He chuckled, kissed her throat, and murmured “I’d tell you who I wound up with right after you lit out with that other jasper. But I ain’t one to brag.”

She laughed and sighed in mock anger. “I might have known you’d never be faithful to me, you brute. Could she do this with her pussy, Custis?”

He started moving in her faster, as any man would have with her smooth innards literally sucking on his shaft with hot wet contractions. He didn’t answer because, bless every one of them, it was always tough to decide between pussies when one enjoyed them all at different times. He could tell she was coming. He held back as long as he could, and then he made her moan like a paw-trapped she-bear when he really let fly with a grand gallop over the moon through swirling stars.

As they slowly drifted back to sanity, Red Robin crooned, “That was lovely. Can we do it some more?”

He allowed he needed some time and maybe a smoke to catch his second wind. So she said she’d as soon get on top as he relaxed just a bit.

It felt swell to lie there, propped up with pillows as he smoked a cheroot and let Red Robin sort of suck him off with her whole hourglass body, her round marshmallow tits gently bobbing in time with her posting on the saddlehorn. But by then they’d both gotten over the first frantic passion and he knew that, not unlike himself, Red Robin liked to chat with old pals as she screwed them.

So he asked her once more about those high rollers crowding into a dinky railroad stop, and she said the railroad stop was the key to the whole mystery.

He demanded, “How come? The spring veal has been shipped. The stock meant for the fall market has been marked, branded, and run out on the open range to graze far and wide for now. None of the outfits would be hiring, and a heap of them would be firing, or laying hands off for the summer leastways. So where would all this gaming for high stakes be likely?”

She answered simply, “I just told you. Here in Florence, where all those laid-off cowhands have to catch a train out to greener pastures if not home-sweet-home.”

Longarm started to make a dumb objection. Then he blew a thoughtful smoke ring at one of her tits, and as he watched it encircle the turgid nipple in the soft lamplight he said, “I follow your drift. When a hand’s been a good worker and you have to lay him off, it ain’t sporting to send him packing without some bonus money on top of his last month’s pay.”

He thought harder and added, “Everyone ought to be flush around the end of the month, but a laid-off hand with just enough to get home on is the kind of sucker Mr. Barnum crowed about.”

Red Robin moved her bare heels up under her center of balance to bounce even better as she casually remarked, “I’m glad my conscience will be clear when the last of those poor cowboys hops a freight out. I think it’s cruel to fleece a poor kid who’s worked hard as anything for no better than forty a month, don’t you?”

Longarm said, “Let me get on top again. Healthy men like to work hard, and there’s no federal law against gambling.”

As he snuffed out the smoke and they rolled over together in a pleasant flurry of limbs, he could have told her there was no way any law could prevent a sucker from being parted with his money once he thought he could beat the game. But he was too busy humping her luscious pale flesh to talk sensibly. He could only answer her baby talk with soft nothings and hard thrusts until they were back among the stars some more. Red Robin screwed far better than she played piano.

She listened good too, considering she seemed to be tone-deaf. One of the nice things about going to bed with Red Robin was her intelligent conversations. She only talked like a flighty female when she was fixing to come. The rest of the time she made more sense than most men. A tumbleweed gal who’d lived by her wits all over the West could tell most men a thing or two. She’d not only met, but been to bed with, more than one famous gunfighter in her time, and Longarm was hardly the first such man to share a few thoughts on the subject with her.

After they’d screwed enough to talk calmly, she naturally wanted to hear more about his mission, and he just as naturally told her, leaving out such details as the fact that Undersheriff Brennan over in the next county had more hair on her snatch, but not hiding half as much as he’d have to at a time such as this with some other old pals. Red Robin didn’t have a jealous bone in her voluptuous body, and if a man couldn’t take her own love of adventure, it was just tough as far as Red Robin was concerned.

She prided herself on having good taste, and didn’t consider it professional to screw where she’d been hired to play piano. But Longarm knew she was just as bad as he was when it came to a discreet crack at something pretty.

It was sort of annoying when you found yourself holding the short end of that particular stick. Knowing Red Robin, in the biblical sense, could be an educating experience if you didn’t lose your temper.

By the time he’d brought her up to date on the confusing pictures in his own head, Red Robin had agreed nothing made more sense for a naughty gal called Miss Medusa Le Mat but the one bank in Minnipeta Junction.

Longarm snuggled her closer and rolled one of her nipples between thumb and forefinger thoughtfully as he said, “The bank’s been alerted. Any bank on the prod would be too big a boo for three men and a gal. Let’s talk some more about high times for big money here where the trains home stop.”

She took his free hand by the wrist and removed it from her pale marshmallow breast as she snuggled closer and replied, “If you think robbing one bank would be a hard row to hoe for her usual crew, study on holding up crap and card games all over a bigger town, with most of the players at least half drunk and fully armed!”

Longarm grimaced at the picture, then smiled as he saw where she seemed to be leading his free hand. He’d thought she’d been finding it distracting to converse while being felt up. But she placed his unresisting hand firmly in her warm lap, and spread her hairless love-lips so he could rock the boy in the boat for her as she continued talking. “With the roundup over, hands being laid off with extra pay, and the Eastern brokers bidding for veal on the hoof, those cattle barons over in the Flint Hills will be cashing money orders and writing checks a mile a minute. Those laid-off hands will want to cash their generous severance checks close as possible to the rascals who sign them too. So that country bank in Minnipeta Junction had better have a heap of hard cash on hand at the end of the month and … Just a little faster, lover. I don’t like to come while I’m talking, but I’m not ready to go to sleep down there either.”

He strummed a faster banjo jig on her half-swollen clit as he shook his head and insisted, “They’re expecting trouble as well as a heap of business in a crowded, really crowded little bank. They told me they have the extra cash they’ll need coming down from Kansas City under a heavy guard. By rail as far as Emporia, up the line from here, and by armored wagon, escorted by flank riders, down to the Junction.”

She spread her thighs absently as she dreamily remarked that many a train and many a galvanized prairie schooner had been held up at gunpoint in the past.

He found his own half-sated flesh responding to her rekindled lust as he objected, “Miss Medusa Le Mat ain’t leading a bunch like Frank and Jesse, and even they ran into more than they could handle when they rode into a town that was on the prod for trouble. The bitch we only know by her nickname has always hit easy targets with a pick-up crew of aspiring outlaws Frank and Jesse would likely turn away. The wicked lady who’s been recruiting ‘em has done more killing than the whole bunch combined.”

Then, since Red Robin was moving her hips and breathing sort of funny, Longarm rolled her over on her pretty face and shapely tits. He rose from the mattress as he hooked a hip-bone with either hand to lift her handsome hind-end high while she, following his drift, moved into a less awkward position athwart the bed.

She gasped with pleasure as he let his freshly inspired erection find its way home between the marshmallow buttocks and braced white thighs she thrust up at him.

As he slid it in deep to lubricate it for the casual, steady thrusts he knew they both wanted, Red Robin sighed and said, “I swear that if they put a gun to my head and told me I had to settle on just one man for the rest of my days, it would likely be you I’d choose, you mind-reading long-donging darling!”

To which he modestly replied, “I have to make the third or fourth one last. I must be getting old. There was a time I could come thrice in a row without stopping.”

She arched her back and reassured him, “Kids love to show off. But that’s why I prefer a grown man at times like this. It’s better when you make it last as long as you can hold your love juice back, and we were talking about that other woman’s lethal ways with a Le Mat ten-shooter.”

Longarm admired the sight of his wet shaft sliding in and out of her in the mellow lamplight as he shrugged his bare shoulders and said, “I wired my boss—you remember Billy Vail—the gang might have been sniffing around but then probably gave up. I just told you why. What I’m having trouble with is just turning the picture to the wall. If Miss Medusa Le Mat is anywhere in these parts, I sure haven’t been able to cut her trail. Yet there’s other signs aplenty. Three known local toughs at large but not accounted for, along with that missing whore they called French Barbara.”

Red Robin wagged her ample hips thoughtfully and suggested, “You couldn’t have covered every possible hideout in the Flint Hills and as horny as you are, Lord love you, you couldn’t have possibly seen every woman in these parts. Didn’t you just tell me you’d be able to recognize that murderous Miss Medusa on sight, honey?”

He thrust in and out faster, as most men would have by then, and told her, “I’ve been following what Billy Vail calls the process of eliminating. I figure we don’t have to concern ourselves with hideouts more than one dead run out of town, and you’d be surprised how few such spots there are on rolling but mostly open prairie.”

She gasped that she wanted to turn over and finish romantically. So he let her and they did, wondering what else in the world could possibly be half that interesting as her warm wet innards pulsed lovingly around his throbbing shaft.

Then Red Robin asked in a surprisingly conversational voice, “If and when you do meet up with her, Custis, do you think you’ll be man enough to do it to her?”

Longarm blinked, kissed her soft ivory throat, and assured her this was the last thing he intended to do to Miss Medusa Le Mat.

Red Robin chuckled and said, “From what you’ve told me, she hardly deserves this! I was talking about you doing her in with your six-gun, Custis. You told me the last time you met she got the drop on you and blew you over a desk with buckshot.”

He sighed sheepishly and confessed, “I wasn’t expecting a pretty lady to shoot anything at me.”

Red Robin insisted, “But she did and, like you say, she was pretty and, worse yet, a woman. So do you think you’ll be able to do it to her, Custis? Do you think you’ll be able to throw down on a pretty girl in summer-weight skirts in the time she’s likely to give you?”

He didn’t answer.

Red Robin held him closer and almost sobbed as she told him, from having been there more than once, “Time, and knowing how to use it, is all that separates the winners from the losers in most gunfights, as if anyone had to tell you!”

He quietly said, “I’ve been in a few gunfights, Miss Robin.”

She said, “With other men, who gave you little time to spare from the first shock of realization to that one well-aimed shot that sets the final score. The only edge you’ll have over all those other men she’s gunned is that you’ll know, next time, who you’re facing and how much time you have to kill or be killed, without hesitation, on sight!”

Longarm soberly replied, “I’ve already figured that more than once.” He could only hope, when he had to do it, he’d be man enough to gun a sweet-faced pretty lady.

Chapter 16

Since she worked from supper time to midnight, Red Robin liked to laze slugabed well after sunrise, and Longarm, being a natural man, was not about to leave a friend in that predicament alone. But it did a lot for his conscience around noon when one of Hard Pan Parson’s junior deputies caught up with him near the livery to report they’d scouted all the likely outlets in Florence for word on a sidesaddle being traded in recently for a center-fire roper.

The deputy suggested the missing Rose Cassidy might have been on her way in to Florence astride. Longarm said he’d considered that, and added, “Those who saw her ride as far as that wooded draw described her as wearing her usual riding habit. Nobody seems to have said right out she was riding sidesaddle, but folks notice when a gal in skirts rides astride. There’s no way to do that without showing an unseemly amount of unmentionable extremities in broad-ass daylight.”

The deputy agreed that her mount being abandoned under a man’s roping saddle was a poser. Longarm said, “If Miss Medusa Le Mat and her pals didn’t roil the waters with unusual events, we’d have doubtless caught up with ‘em by this time. Let’s put that cordovan stud on the back of the stove for now, and worry about it after we make sure Medusa Le Mat had something to do with Rose Cassidy’s disappearance.”

The kid deputy looked uncertain, and asked who might have abducted that lady horse breeder from the junction if it hadn’t been those odd-acting bank robbers.

To which Longarm bleakly replied, “Someone else acting odd. Pat Brennan just arrested a cuss called Mannix for doing away with his wife and an innocent delivery boy out her way without a lick of help or even inspiration from Miss Medusa Le Mat. A heap of bandits are running free today because it was too easy to blame it all on Frank and Jesse instead of scouting seriously for sign.”

The deputy stared owl-eyed and demanded, “Are you trying to tell me there could be more than one killer running loose in these parts?”

Longarm shook his head and answered not unkindly, “I ain’t trying. I’m telling. Only the Good Lord and Old Nick know the evil that lurks in the hearts of men, and women, as soon as you study on it. We don’t know for certain that anybody killed Rose Cassidy. If somebody has, we have more motives than you could shake a stick at. Somebody might have been out to lay her half-witted daughter, or ride her handsome horse, or hell, she could have run across mean saddle tramps who just robbed and raped an unescorted female because she was riding unescorted. Like the old hymn goes, farther along we’ll know more about it. Silent Knight and Lash Flanders are searching for old Rose with a willing crew of shovel hands. I feel certain they’ll let us know the minute they find out anything.”

The deputy couldn’t argue with that brutal logic. So they shook on it, and Longarm went into the livery to saddle up that chestnut and do some scouting of his own.

He crossed the tracks, forded the shallow Cottonwood Creek, and followed the post road as directed until sure enough, he smelled a whole lot of hogs being raised for market on the garbage of Florence.

The chestnut didn’t want to turn in there, and Longarm wore no spurs on his army boots, lest they get in the way of his footwork or jingle when a man wanted to tread sort of softly.

But Longarm had strong wrists and more willpower than any critter. So they rode in across the dooryard with a tied-up bulldog cussing at them all the way until a hefty but not bad-looking breed gal opened the door of her soddy to cuss the bulldog silent and inform Longarm she wasn’t in the market for anything he could possibly be out to sell her.

Longarm rode closer and flashed his badge before he reined in to dismount and tell her he wanted a word with Greek George.

She started to say she didn’t know who he was talking about, read the fair but firm expression in his gun-muzzle-gray eyes correctly, and proved how sensible her Osage Nation had always been about the federal government.

For while the Cherokee had sided with the Confederacy, and the Lakota just lifted horses and hair wherever they could get at them, Osage Opal had Greek George out front to greet their federal visitor in no time.

Greek George still looked as if he’d been dragged through a keyhole backwards, with some of the swelling giving way to purple bruises all over a face that might have been pretty a good many years and more than one good beating ago. The two of them sat on boxes along the shady north wall of the soddy as Osage Opal brought out coffee and cake to them. Greek George said to tell his old pal Lash that he’d decided not to press charges when the circuit court convened in a week or so.

The peddler said, “It was all a misunderstanding, inspired by the malice of a woman scorned. I know what they say about me and the way I may comfort some of the ladies along my route. But that Miss Portia Sloan who told her menfolk I’d felt her up is suffering from delusions of attractiveness. I swear, a corncob would cringe at the thought of being shoved up her stinky old cunt.”

“Never mind how you learned how that gal’s twat smells,” Longarm said, cutting in. “Rose Cassidy was on your route. Rose Cassidy seems to be missing. We suspect she met with foul play in that wooded draw just this side of the Bar Circle Six. Your turn.”

The self-confessed womanizing peddler, who didn’t seem to talk all that Greek, asked when Rose Cassidy might have vanished. When Longarm said it was hard to say for certain, given the memories of a feeble mind and other witnesses who hadn’t been taking notes, Greek George moaned aloud and said, “I swear I don’t know shit about that stuck-up Black Irish gal or her idiot child. You’re right about my stopping at the old Nesbit place a time or two, right after they moved in. But whether a man’s selling notions or trying to get laid, he has to be able to tell when he’s wasting his time. There are only so many hours to a day, or even a man’s life, once you study on how little time they give us on the dance floor. The girl wasn’t as unfriendly. I didn’t know she was a half-wit until I gave her some free samples and her mother came at me with a manure fork.”

The sardonic peddler thought back, sighed, and said, “I tried just one more time, knowing from experience that a housewife who puts the dogs on you might buy a teapot or sit on your lap when you show up at another time of the month. But that Rose Cassidy stayed cold-eyed as a copperhead no matter how a man smiled at her. I suspect she was one of them lizzy gals who don’t like men any time of the month.”

Longarm didn’t follow up on that. Men who tried and failed were always accusing women of lesbian leanings. He asked, “How come you called her Black Irish? Was she darker than her daughter, Maureen?”

Greek George shook his battered head and said, “Black Irish doesn’t have anything to do with anyone’s complexion. It’s the way the Irish themselves separate Irish Catholics from the Protestant ones they call Scotch Irish, see?”

Longarm nodded sheepishly and said, “I should have remembered that. I’ve been to more than one Irish wake, black or orange. I don’t see how the missing woman’s religious persuasion might account for her vanishing like that without a church of any description for miles.”

Greek George placed a finger alongside his swollen nose and winked knowingly as he replied, “I was raised Baptist because my elders just couldn’t find any Eastern Rites church where they wound up in Alabam’. But they was furriners. I’ve noticed English-speaking settlers tend to settle near their own sorts of churches, unless they don’t hold with churchgoing, or maybe want to keep to themselves.”

Longarm sipped some of Osage Opal’s good strong coffee as he tried to recall how many folks with Irish names he’d met in these parts.

Greek George said, “there ain’t no Papist church a day’s ride from that old Nesbit place Rose Cassidy bought a few months ago. So neither she nor her dumb daughter had any call to spend much time in town, or receive visitors from any congregation they belonged to. Ain’t that sort of care-free behavior for a woman trying to keep men away from herself and her pretty daughter?”

Longarm made a wry face and replied, “Undersheriff Pat Brennan has a Black Irish name, albeit, now that you mention it, she don’t act like a religious fanatic. A widow with a small nest egg looking for a new spread in cattle country might be more interested in price and location than the nearest church. As far as that goes, you don’t even have to believe in the Lord to want your feebleminded children left the hell alone. All we know for certain is that the two of them kept to themselves a short ride out of town.”

“Doing what?” demanded Greek George.

Before Longarm could say what they did, the peddler, who was more interested in the ways of local womankind, told him, “They weren’t running a regular stud farm over by the Junction. I know they had that prize cordovan stud with Morgan lines. But they posted no breeding papers on him, if he had any. Or if they really owned him. I’ll allow they kept a fair-sized remuda of riding stock, some of it nice-looking, if you can name me more than a half-dozen Flint Hills riders who ever bought a mount off that mysterious widow woman.”

Longarm thought about that, and decided folks in Minnipeta Junction would be able to tell him how many sales had been made. But anyone starting out to raise stock would be inclined to hold off on sales and build up their breeding stock as much as they could.

Longarm drained his mug and got to his feet, thanking Greek George for the little he’d had on new gals along his Flint Hills peddling route. The assaulted and battered peddler rose to follow him around to where his borrowed chestnut had been tethered near the watering trough. As Longarm remounted, Greek George insisted, “Them two Black Irish women and the old Nesbit place work better than any others if you’re searching for a hideout. Who’s to say for certain Rose or Maureen couldn’t be that mysterious woman everyone’s been asking us after?”

Longarm settled in the saddle and gathered his reins as he calmly replied, “Me. I locked eyes with Miss Medusa Le Mat one time, and poor young Maureen ain’t her. I’ve been told her mother favors Maureen, and the bank-robbing gal I met up with wasn’t old enough to have a grown child. After that, the timing gets too tight. I know they say Rose Cassidy hails from Texas, and it’s true the gang I’m after robbed a bank down yonder recently. But they did it after Rose Cassidy bought that old Nesbit place.”

“Then you did at least consider them recent arrivals in the Flint Hills?” asked Greek George.

Longarm nodded soberly and replied, “I’m paid to consider far and wide. Neither you nor Miss Osage Opal fits the descriptions of anyone wanted for a recent bank robbery, no offense. I can’t get anyone else I’ve met up with in these parts to work as the notorious Medusa Le Mat, but whilst we’re on the subject, you say somebody else has been out this way asking about a mysterious woman?”

Greek George nodded and said, “Young jasper who said he was riding for Hard Pan Parsons. Told me all about that gal with the ten-shooter and asked if we’d been approached by any strangers, seeing this place is about as far out of town as a getaway pony could run without any trail breaks.”

Longarm nodded understandingly, ticked his hat brim to the hefty Osage Opal in the open doorway behind Greek George, and headed back to Florence.

The afternoon was about shot, but there was time for him to read through back issues of the local papers at the public library. Bills of sale for land or livestock in another county would be recorded in that other county’s seat, not there by the railroad stop, damn it.

He ate an early supper near the livery, sourdough biscuits and gravy over fried hash, reminding him of his own days herding cows.

Cow camp fare stuck to the ribs and didn’t seem as tedious when you hadn’t had any for a spell.

After he’d eaten, he mosied over to the Florence jail to see what old Hard Pan Parsons had to say about the deputy he’d sent out to question Greek George.

Hard Pan said he hadn’t sent anybody, adding, “Are you suggesting that gang could be planning something here in Florence, with a run for that hog spread across the creek in mind?”

Longarm soberly replied, “You were the one who said most of the local riders avoid the place. No matter what the original plan was, Miss Medusa Le Mat could have scouted that bank at the Junction the same as me and came to the same conclusions about a crew of Pinkerton men on the prod.”

Hard Pan grimaced and said, “Oh, Lord, as if we didn’t have half enough on our plate with all them tinhorns and whores drifting in to put the boys aboard their trains for home as they get laid off with severance pay!”

Longarm nodded and asked, “I take it nobody has seen that one whore who seems to be missing along with Rose Cassidy?”

Hard Pan nodded and said, “We figure French Barbara climbed aboard a train with somebody who enjoys a blow job as he watched the scenery pass by. She ain’t anywheres around here. She was too popular to stay out of sight long. I want to tell you about Johnny Behind the Deuce O’Rourke. He’s here in Florence, spoiling for a fight.”

Longarm smiled thinly and said, “I know Johnny Behind the Deuce. We met last night at the Sunflower Saloon that ain’t open for business in these parts officially.”

Hard Pan grumbled, “Look here, I’m paid to keep the peace here in Florence, and that’s all I’m paid to worry about!”

Longarm said, “Nobody sporting a badge has seen fit to shut down the Alhambra or Long Branch in Dodge either. I understand your sort of delicate position here in Kansas cattle country, pard.”

Hard Pan looked relieved, and said, “I was hoping you might. I don’t want you going back to the Sunflower this evening. Johnny Behind the Deuce has been drinking heavy and talking big all afternoon, and like I just said, they pay me to keep the peace.”

Longarm just looked disgusted.

The older lawman insisted, “They say he’s got a rep. I know you have a rep. But I don’t have no rep and what am I supposed to do if Johnny Behind the Deuce can take you?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Get six sturdy gamblers to carry my coffin. For I’ll deserve it if someone like Johnny Behind the Deuce can take me, and his sporting pals might enjoy the chore.”

Chapter 17

The sun was setting as Longarm dropped by the Western Union to see if they were holding any day letters for him. Day letters, like night letters, were slick notions of the late Ezra Cornell, who’d developed the Morse telegraph into the coast-to-coast Western Union Company. He’d noticed most wires were sent during peak business hours, when a nickel a word could save or make far more. But business slacked off to next to nothing during a slow day or most any night. So old Ezra had come up with a cheaper rate for those who didn’t mind getting their messages through a few hours slower, although still much faster than they could by way of the U.S. mails. All you had to do was ask them to send your wire by day-or night-letter rates and Western Union would do the rest, at a much cheaper rate. Your message would go out, sometimes a few words at a time, whenever the cross-country lines weren’t busy and the telegraphers had no nickel-a-word stuff to tap out.

So there was no saying when Billy Vail had composed his day letter from Denver admitting they might be barking up the wrong tree. Billy agreed a bank robbery around Minnipeta Junction seemed a mighty big boo for a sneaky gal who’d shown herself to be hysterical about being captured or even remembered. Billy suggested that if Miss Medusa Le Mat had been setting up a big payday bank robbery with the old Nesbit place as her quick-change hideout, the bank and Undersheriff Brennan being warned ahead of time should have discouraged the gang considerably.

Billy Vail pointed out that it would make more sense for the sneaky she-devil and her latest bunch of recruits to hit most any other bank.

Longarm couldn’t argue with old Billy’s logic. He wired a night letter to Denver, explaining he meant to poke about and see if he could cut any outlaw trails leading away from the old Nesbit place. The mysterious disappearance of Rose Cassidy could mean nobody who could identify Miss Medusa on sight would be in any position to identify her on sight. He had no call to elaborate. Billy Vail already knew Miss Medusa Le Mat seemed to move in on folks with a handy hideout, feed them some line as yet unrecorded, then leave them in no shape to record it.

Longarm sent some other wires to other lawmen and county recorders. Then he moseyed up to the Sunflower Saloon to see if Red Robin still liked him. He’d done about all there was to be done in Florence. But one more night in Red Robin’s soft arms and legs had to have a long night ride back to the Junction beat.

Being it was so early in the evening, there was only a modest crowd in the Sunflower. But Johnny Behind the Deuce O’Rourke was not only at one end of the bar, but well on his way to dead drunk despite the hour.

O’Rourke seemed to be drinking with two younger drifters dressed for a friendly little game of cards. Longarm knew the dapper little squirt with a waxed pimp’s mustache from somewhere. But he wasn’t sure where. The taller and huskier galoot to O’Rourke’s left, as the three of them held up the bar with their spines, looked uncomfortable in such a spiffy frock coat and brocaded vest. His big hands were too roughed up to deal cards slickly. He was likely a bodyguard. Tinhorns such as Johnny Behind the Deuce needed more guarding than sensible drinkers.

Longarm stopped near their end of the bar to smile pleasantly and ask Johnny Behind the Deuce what sort of a game he might have in mind. O’Rourke stared through Longarm and muttered, “I hear Deacon Ellison’s bucking the Faro Kid in the back room. I ain’t made up my mind whether it’s time to set up my own game.”

Longarm went on smiling as he softly said, “Do tell? Seems to me I heard some talk about you and me drawing for the ace spades. Any time you’re ready, O’Rourke.”

Johnny Behind the Deuce raised his hands to open his frock coat all the way, muttering defensively, “I ain’t armed this evening, Longarm. I don’t know who told you different. But I sure wish troublemakers would let others decide such matters, damn their lies!”

Longarm didn’t mention the derringer he knew Johnny Behind the Deuce was packing in that fancy vest. He just nodded politely, got his own belly gun out, and palmed it in his big right fist as he ambled on back to where Red Robin was trying in vain to play a sad old ballad.

She dimpled up at him when he swung his back to the wall and hooked his right elbow over the top of the battered upright, with his left thumb hooked through the front of his gun belt, ahead of the forward-facing grips of his cross-draw .44-40.

Red Robin missed a note, although it was hard to tell, when she spied the brass muzzles of his almost invisible double derringer. Then she gamely tried to play on, and was even worse.

Longarm was less worried. He knew Johnny Behind the Deuce was sort of inclined to speak in haste. They still told the tale about O’Rourke assuring one and all he meant to gun Johnny Ringo the next time he saw him. But somehow Johnny Ringo had wound up drinking alone that night when he rode into town to take O’Rourke up on his invitation.

Just the same, Longarm thought it prudent to step farther from the piano, and Red Robin’s soft spine, as he tried to help both her and old Johnny Behind the Deuce remember the damned tune by bursting into song with:

In Scarlett Town, where I was bound, There was a fair maid dwelling, And all the lads cried “Well away!” Her name was Barbara Allan.

But though Longarm was braced for a rejection of his singing, it was a damned good thing he was well braced. For it wasn’t Johnny behind The Deuce who moved like greased lightning. It was the squirt with the pimp mustache who was whipping a Colt .45 out from under his own frock coat!

Longarm got off the first two shots, of course, and let go of his spent derringer, crabbing away from the piano to snatch his own six-gun out as Johnny Behind the Duece screamed like a gal and dove for the sawdust-covered floor.

As they both flattened face-down on the floor, Longarm peered through the gun smoke to see that the bigger one with rough hands was slapping leather close to the front window. So Longarm yelled, “Freeze!” and when the oafish galoot kept right on drawing, Longarm blew him through the glass and out on the boardwalk with two hundred grains of mushrooming lead in his heart.

It got awfully quiet as the brimstone-scented haze lifted. Red Robin had rolled off her piano stool and ducked behind her end of the bar as the first shots rang out.

Nobody else in the place moved a muscle as Longarm called out to explain, “I’m the law, federal. I’m still working on why two total strangers just tried for me.”

The door to the back room opened and a cold-looking gent wearing a green eye shade stuck his head out, declared “Oh, shit!” and slammed the door shut again.

It didn’t take long, but it seemed as if it had when Hard Pan Parsons and two deputies charged in through the bat-wings, their own guns drawn.

Taking in the scene with the wisdom born of experience in saloon fights, Hard Pan asked the only man on his feet with a gun—and in this case a badge—to tell the sad tale.

Longarm hunkered down to get his derringer out of the sawdust as he told the local law he wasn’t certain. As he rose back to full height, Longarm pointed to Johnny Behind the Deuce, who was sheepishly brushing himself off with his hat, and said, “I wasn’t expecting trouble with that young cuss on the floor or the one you may have noticed out on the walk. I did think I’d seen the younger cuss somewhere before. He must have had a better memory and a resentful nature. He just plain went for his gun as I was just winding up to sing ‘Barbara Allan.’”

Hard Pan rolled the dead youth over with a boot tip, stared soberly down, and decided, “I’ve seen him somewhere before too. Why was you singing to him about that soiled dove who dropped out of sight a while back? How did you know he knew French Barbara Allan?”

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and replied, “I didn’t. He must have thought I did. I reckon your own French Barbara must have chosen a last name from that famous song about another wicked gal they knew as Barbara Allan.”

He began to reload as he pointed his chin at Red Robin, staring at them over the top of the bar, and explained, “I never picked the song of fickle Barbara Allan. Miss Red Robin was playing it and I just sort of sung along, see?”

Red Robin scowled at them and declared, “That’ll be the day, Custis Long! You know very well I was playing ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands,’ or at least that was the request I was aiming for.”

Longarm laughed and said, “I stand corrected. Maybe those alienists who study dreams and such over in Vienna Town are on to something when they say our memories play funny tricks on us. Nobody in these parts seems to be missing no heart in no highlands. It’s a wonder I didn’t come up with ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’”

One of the townsmen who’d seemed to be holding a lot in since witnessing the whole thing came forward to address the local lawmen. “I’ve seen that one at your feet around town before,” he said. “Him and the taller one who went through the window just now hung around the railroad stop and Western Union a lot.”

One of the deputies had gone outside for a closer look at the big one sprawled amid busted glass on the sun-bleached plank walk. He came back in to report, “I think I recognize the one out front. Rode for one of the Flint Hills spreads over by Minnipeta Junction. Went into business for himself and wound up in Leavenworth for running the brands on some army stock. But it looks like he’s dyed his natural red hair brown!”

Longarm exchanged thoughtful glances with Hard Pan Parsons and asked if the name Buster Crabtree meant anything.

The local deputy said he wasn’t sure. Another concerned citizen of Florence swallowed, sighed, and rose from his seat at a corner table to declare, “His name was Melvin, and they called him Buster if they knew what was good for them. Old Jed is right about him hanging around the telegraph office the last few days. Him and that younger jasper. They seemed to be pals, and anxious about something. I can’t say I ever heard Buster Crabtree mention his young pal by name. But I remember that one riding into town, about a week ago, dressed more like a cowhand and coming from the southeast aboard a spent pony.”

“What sort of a pony?” asked Longarm, soberly.

The man replied, “Cordovan stud. Nice-looking mount with Morgan lines. But from the way he’d been pushing it, I don’t think he cared.”

Longarm and the town constable exchanged glances again. Hard Pan Parsons dryly remarked, “We’d about agreed the one who waylaid Rose Cassidy out on the open range rode her pony into town and abandoned it. But where’s the pony he was riding when he headed poor Rose off at that draw?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Let’s eat this apple one bite at a time. Musical saddles is less of a puzzle than who did what to whom for what reason. I know this is your town. But if I was in full charge I’d want both bodies over to your deputy coroner for some serious examining. You do have a deputy coroner here in Florence, don’t you?”

Hard Pan said, “Sure. The boss coroner’s up to the county seat at Marion, but Doc Hobart, our undertaker and cabinetmaker, does a fair job with death certificates. Are you worried about what killed these poor boys, Deputy Long?”

Longarm said, “I’d like to know them both better. It’s surprising how laundry marks, old scars, tattoos, and such can tell you more than anything an outlaw might be packing in a wallet for public consumption.”

Red Robin’s boss, the night manager, horned in to suggest they all take their dead pals somewhere else so the Sunflower could get back to its more usual business.

Hard Pan Parsons deputized some locals, whether they wanted to help or not, and it wasn’t long before Red Robin was playing a Stephen Foster tune Stephen Foster might not have recognized while the losers, one winner, and one survivor were on their way to Doc Hobart’s cabinet shop cum undertaking parlor.

Longarm made Johnny Behind the Deuce tag along so he could keep an eye on him, despite his protests that he’d never laid eyes on the dead men until shortly before they’d died.

Johnny Behind the Deuce confided to Hard Pan Parsons, “You should have been there. One minute the short one says something about my old pal Longarm knowing something. The next minute the two of them lay dead as doornails. Don’t never mess with my pal Longarm!”

Doc Hobart had been sanding pine shelving just before they showed up with other business for him. So he looked like a sawdust-covered Santa Claus in a hickory shirt and bib overalls. He said he felt no call to change outfits just to work on meat instead of wood. So they carried the bodies down to his cool cellar and laid them side by side on planking across sawhorses under a coal-oil lamp with a big white reflecting shade.

Doc Hobart handed the dead men’s duds over for inspection as he cut the bodies out of them with a murderous-looking pair of pinking shears.

Longarm didn’t ask why the deputy coroner wanted all the cuts he’d made himself to have distinctive zigzag edges. There were no stab or slash cuts in the blood-and crud-stained duds. The soft lead slugs had stayed in the bodies after making small round bullet holes about where Longarm had been aiming. Both billfolds recovered held modest amounts of cash and the usual library cards, voter registrations, and such that an owlhoot rider tended to accumulate along the way. Since everyone there knew the bigger corpse was that of Buster Crabtree instead of Buster Jones, it hardly seemed likely the shrimp stretched out naked next to him could have been John Brown.

The small dapper stranger with the pimp mustache looked even smaller with his duds off. He could have passed for a boy in his teens if he hadn’t had so much body hair to go with his sort of manly privates.

Doc Hobart declared it was his professed opinion that both men had died of gunshot wounds to the upper body, and added that the embalming would be easier if they just took his word on that.

Before anyone could answer, Red Robin barged down the cellar stairs, asking for Longarm in a worried tone. Longarm said, “Don’t come any closer, Miss Red Robin! These dead boys ain’t got any pants on!” Red Robin said she didn’t care, and added, “Waco McCord is over in the Sunflower armed, drunk, and dangerous, looking for the man who gunned his old pal Buster Crabtree. When some fool told him it was you, Waco said mean things about your mother and allowed he knew your face and meant to shoot you on sight!”

Chapter 18

Hard Pan Parsons said the best way to capture Waco McCord alive involved one deputy distracting him and another circling behind him with a throw rope, after Waco had been given time to get good and drunk.

Longarm had a better idea. Smiling fondly at his old pal Johnny Behind the Deuce, Longarm said, “It’s been my experience that men who like to talk about a fight ahead of time are sort of hoping to be talked out of it. In any case, I didn’t know Waco was in that tight with old Buster Crabtree yonder, and I’d rather talk to him whilst he ain’t totally out of his head.”

The others there tried to talk him out of it. But Longarm soothed the town law by allowing it would be all right to arrest old Waco if he insisted on a fight and won.

Johnny Behind the Deuce said he had a five spot saying an unusual event such as that wasn’t about to take place. So in the end Longarm was alone when he stepped through the bat-wings of the Sunflower and calmly told the one man standing with his back to the whole vacated bar, “You owe me ten dollars, Waco.”

Waco McCord stared owlishly at Longarm, gun hand hovering near the grips of his own six-gun, and replied in a voice of confusion, “Don’t you go changing the subject, Longarm! They say you just gunned my old pal Buster Crabtree, and I mean to clean your plow! So fill your fist and let’s get to it!”

“That’s a mighty low way to avoid a debt of honor,” Longarm insisted, raising his voice lest anyone still there miss a word as he went on. “A man who’d let a pal pay his fine, then gun him so he wouldn’t ever have to pay him back, would likely sell you his wife’s ass for drinking money!”

Waco wailed, “I ain’t got no wife and you’re trying to change the subject! Did you or did you not blow a pal I used to ride with through that gaping hole in the front of this very building?”

Longarm said, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little .44-40 because he was slapping leather at me. Had you been standing in my boots by yonder piano and he’d been drawing on you, you’d have done the same. Leastways, I hope you’d have done the same. You don’t look like a damned fool with suicidal tendencies.”

A voice of reason from across the taproom called out, “He’s saying it like it was, Waco. There was two of them and that lawman didn’t start it. They was the ones as started it. Two to one without a word of warning!”

Waco sighed wearily and muttered, “God damn it, I told old Buster that woman was fixing to get him killed!”

Longarm moved closer to the bar and picked up an abandoned bottle, since the barkeep was nowhere to be seen, as he quietly observed, “I just shot it out with Buster and another gent. You say there was some gal egging him on to get himself killed?”

As Longarm refilled Waco’s shot glass, the burly Texan nodded and explained in as reasonable a tone as a man in his condition could manage, “Buster called her the Spider Lady. I never met her myself. But I could see she wanted us to take all the risk whilst she wound up with equal shares.”

“Us?” asked Longarm, setting the rotgut aside as he used the same left hand to fish out a smoke, his gun hand being occupied all this while with that double derringer.

Waco numbly replied, “I never said I’d ride with them. Buster was trying to recruit some extra hands for the Spider Lady, and he knew I was at least as tough as he was. But I told Buster I’d risk stealing stock before I’d stick up a bank with a bunch of total strangers!”

Longarm told him, “You were smarter than you could have known, old son. If Crabtree’s Spider Lady was the crazy-mean gal we know by yet another name, she wasn’t about to settle for shares. We call her Miss Medusa Le Mat because a Medusa is a monster who kills everyone who sees her face, in this case with a Le Mat ten-shooter.”

Waco blinked at Longarm, shook his head as if to clear it, and demanded, “Are you saying that if you hadn’t just gunned old Buster, that Spider Lady was fixing to gun him later?”

Longarm nodded soberly. “That’s about the size of it. How come you call her the Spider Lady, Waco?”

The Texas rider picked up the refilled glass and replied in an offhand tone, “Buster called her the Spider Lady. He said she’d wove a clever web for catching money and tangling the feet of the law. He said she said she’d heard about him from another old boy from Texas he’d known in prison.”

Longarm asked if by any chance this other old boy could have been baby-faced and inclined to daily-rope from a center-fire saddle.

Waco hoisted his glass and declared, “Here’s to lips. Here’s to gums. Watch out, belly, here she comes!”

Waco downed the cheap but potent red-eye with one gulp, gasped, and wheezed, “I told you I never met none of the bunch. Hold on. Buster did say French Barbara Allan from the Junction had throwed in with the Spider Lady for fun and profit. Buster said the Spider Lady didn’t put out for her pals on the trail, but French Barbara would be more than willing to service three or four a night just to keep in practice. I don’t know what could have gotten into French Barbara, aside from old Buster, I mean. She had a good steady job at that trail-town whorehouse. It ain’t smart to risk your neck for a fifth or less of a bank robbery when you can make good money steady with your honest efforts.”

“Is that why you turned down the deal?” asked Longarm knowingly.

Waco growled, “Damned right! I can hire on most anywheres as a top hand who ain’t afraid to back my boss in a bounty, brand, or water dispute. I ain’t about to back the play of some smooth-talking she-crook who’s not willing to talk to me face to face!”

Longarm poured another drink for Waco as he murmured, “I just said you seemed smarter than you look. Let’s see if I have it straight in my head about this mysterious she-crook your pal called the Spider Lady. He was acting as her go-between, trying to muster a somewhat bigger gang than usual for her? You’re sure he was dealing with her directly, and not through some other Texican with a pimp mustache and a Schofield .45?”

Waco picked up the shot glass, threw back the heroic slug of one-hundred-proof, and declared, “Never met nobody with a pimp mustache. Never met no Spider Lady, and I took it on faith old French Barbara was with Buster instead of off to join some circus as a sword swallower. She swallowed me one payday for an extra two bits, all the way to my balls, and I ain’t built delicate.”

Longarm grimaced and poured another drink as he insisted they’d been talking about a gal who sounded more dangerous. He said, “French Barbara and those other two riders, Currier and Landon, could be in serious even as we speak. There’s no saying what Miss Medusa Le Mat will decide on as soon as she hears Buster and another party to her plot have been gunned down this evening.”

Waco drained the shot glass, slammed it back down awkwardly, and said, “That’s right. I was fixing to call you on that shooting, you rascal! Have you been trying to talk me out of that?”

Longarm poured yet another drink as he quietly replied, “We can’t shoot it out before you pay me that ten dollars you owe me. Meanwhile, this gal none of us know by her right name has spun the same sorts of webs before. She meant to use your pal Buster, and all the pals he recruited for her, to pull a big holdup around payoff day, which is only a few days off.”

Waco said that was what Buster had told him.

Longarm said, “I ain’t finished. She was planning to double-cross them as soon as they rejoined her after the robbery. She aimed to gun the menfolk, and either escape with the gal as two-little-maids-from-school-are-we, or swap duds with her female dupe and leave her behind as a red herring, or as a dead gal who could be taken for any gal anyone recalled from around the bank. What does this whore French Barbara look like, by the way?”

Waco shook his head again, stood taller, and decided, “Innocent, for a trail-town whore with such scandalous ways with cowboys. She’s around thirty, give or take a few beatings, with soft brown hair like that gal in Mister Foster’s romantical song. She likes the song about that other Barbara Allan too. Says she’s always dreamed of having a good-looking cuss like Sweet William die for the love of her. I wish she was here right now. I’d tell her I loved her and then I’d make her suck me off. Is that why you’re so interested in her, Longarm?”

The much more sober lawman smiled thinly and explained, “I’ve got more than one gal I’ve never seen on my plate. Do you know Rose Cassidy, bought the old Nesbit place near Minnipeta Junction a spell back?”

Waco said, “As well as any man can say he knows such a mean-eyed gal. They say she’s a widow. She must have screwed at least one man in her day, since she has a grown-up daughter nobody can get close to neither. Old Rose must not have enjoyed the experience. She acts as if all men were shit on the walk with her wearing Sunday shoes!”

Longarm said, “I’m sorry her marriage didn’t work out. I’m more interested in what she looks like. Her daughter’s one of them blue-eyed brunettes with Irish features. Would it be safe to say Maureen Cassidy favors her mother’s side of the family?”

Waco reached for the shot glass, knocked it over instead, and said, “Mother and daughter are both Irish-eyed brunettes, only the kid’s way more friendly. You have been trying to get me drunk, you sneaky rascal! You’re trying to make me forget you gunned my pal and I took a solemn oath to shoot you down like a dog. Ask anyone in here if I didn’t promise to avenge old Buster Crabtree’s untimely death!”

Longarm said, “Later. After you pay me that ten dollars and help me figure out what’s been going on.”

Waco protested, “I ain’t got your infernal ten dollars. I’ll just have to owe it to you whilst we have it out man to man!”

Longarm firmly insisted, “I can’t let you take advantage of me that way, Waco. You pay up like a man or I flat out refuse to fight you. How would it look if everyone said I shot you over a lousy ten-dollar debt?”

Waco stepped clear of the bar as he replied in the formal tone only the dead drunk can muster, “You presume a lot when you presume you can beat this child in a man-to-man confiscation … constitution … whatever.”

Longarm said, “I’ll drink to that. I know what Miss Medusa Le Mat looks like from our personal confrontation. Neither of the gals we seem to be missing looks too much like her, from the way they both describe. Let’s start at the beginning, with her local recruiting officer out to rustle up more help than she usually feels the need of. She might have heard, the same as me, that the big payoff coming up at the end of the month will be heavily guarded.”

Waco said, “I said I wanted to fight you now, damn it.”

Longarm went on, half to himself, “Buster and her other gunslick were spooked as stock on loco weed this evening. It looks as if they got spooked about Rose Cassidy before it came time to take over her place and leave French Barbara there with spare mounts.”

“I’m fixing to count to ten,” said Waco McCord, swaying like a tree in the wind. “When I get to ten I mean to go for my gun, and you can go for your own or go to hell for all I care!”

Longarm said, “Putting myself in the high-button shoes of that murderously cautious gal with the ten-shooter, I might well be on my way for parts unknown by now. She has to know she didn’t really kill me that time. So she has to know I’ll recognize her on sight, right after nailing at least one of her top guns. If I ain’t clear on that other jasper, Miss Medusa Le Mat has no way of knowing how much either one of them could have told me this evening, as a dying statement or some indiscreet letter or laundry mark on either of ‘em.”

“I’m starting to count now,” declared Waco McCord.

Longarm said, “Go ahead. But what time does that last train come through here after sundown?”

Waco said, “Four, five, ten. The train comes through at ten, I mean, and where was I before you throwed me off my tally?”

Longarm sighed and suggested, “Why not start all over? I’ve plenty of time to meet that night train at the stop just down the way. You don’t mean to pay me back first, eh?”

Waco said, “I’d be proud to, if I had the money. But I don’t, and you see how it has to be, don’t you, Longarm?”

Longarm nodded soberly and stepped clear of the bar, shifting his derringer to his left hand so he could pocket it without tying up his gun hand.

The move was not wasted on Waco, who said, “That was mighty white of you, old son. You had the drop on me all the while, but you’re man enough to fight me fair and for that I do salute you.”

Longarm muttered, “Least I could do, seeing how drunk and foolish you’ve been acting. Ain’t there nothing I can say to change your mulish mind, Tex?”

Waco shook his head, but didn’t answer as he almost got himself killed. But Longarm didn’t go for his .4440 as Waco McCord just closed his eyes to fall asleep, standing up, and fell backwards as straight as a sawed-through pine, hitting the sawdust behind him with an awesome thump and just lying there, out like a snuffed candle.

As Longarm stared down, bemused, there were stirrings of life all around in the Sunflower Saloon.

An old-timer murmured, “Somebody go get the law. I sure thought we were about to see more bloodshed here this evening.”

The barkeep rose from where he’d been hiding all that time to peer over the bar at the unconscious Waco and marvel, “You could have had him, Marshal. You could have blown him away and added an easy notch to your pistol grips!”

To which Longarm replied in a disgusted tone, “I’m only a deputy marshal, and why would any grown man want to whittle on his tailored pistol grips, for Gawd’s sake?”

Chapter 19

Longarm had posted himself behind a lumber pile near the railroad stop with his Winchester. So that was where one of Hard Pan Parsons’s deputies caught up with him.

The deputy said, “Undersheriff Brennan just wired us from Minnipeta Junction. Silent Knight and Lash Flanders drove in around sundown with the dismembered remains of Rose Cassidy. Miss Pat says the killers really made a mess of her with a shotgun and a sharp shovel. Meat buried in damp sand in warm weather don’t keep too well neither.”

Longarm replied, “I’ve noticed. Miss Pat was sure of the identification?”

The deputy said, “I don’t know if she was. Rose Cassidy’s half-wit daughter identified the remains. Carried on some afterwards, according to Miss Pat’s wire. We got the wire over to the jail if you’d like to go over it.”

Longarm said, “It can wait. You were the one who just pointed out Maureen Cassidy carries on sort of silly. But neither she nor that dead woman are going anywhere tonight. I ain’t so sure about the ten-fourteen eastbound that’ll be stopping here to jerk water from your Cottonwood Creek before long.” The deputy volunteered to back Longarm’s play. Longarm let him. It could get tedious, staked out with nobody to talk to after dark.

They talked about this, that, and the other until the night train rolled in from the west to pause with its engine on the trestle across the creek and its rear cars lined up with the platform at one end of the main street.

Nobody got on or off as the engine crew dropped buckets on long ropes off the tender and into the swirling inky current downstream. It took longer than usual to top the tender’s tanks that way. Longarm warned the deputy someone might make a last-minute run for the rear platform as the train was pulling out.

But that never happened. The deputy suggested they’d wiped the gang out or driven them into hiding. That was too obvious to jaw about. So Longarm took his Winchester back to Red Robin’s, waited for Red Robin to get off, and spent a good part of the night saying farewell to a pal who screwed like a mink.

Red Robin didn’t cry, or wake up all the way, when Longarm rolled out of bed early the next morning. He knew that she knew they’d meet again someday, or else they wouldn’t. Red Robin was a vice that was best taken on occasion, if not in moderation.

After a hearty breakfast of fried eggs and hash, Longarm saddled and bridled that borrowed chestnut to head back to the Junction.

It was a crisp sunny morning and the chestnut was feeling its oats after all that rest in the livery corral. So they made good time, and got into the Junction just about the time the pony was getting harder to move and Longarm’s stomach was growling.

Longarm tethered the spent pony in front of the bank, but ducked across the street for a bowl of chili and a slab of mince pie, washed down with two mugs of black coffee.

Then, feeling better, he went into the bank to ask Banker Guthrie some questions he hadn’t known he wanted to last time.

Banker Guthrie said he’d be proud to have his secretary type up a digested list of all the small holdings the bank held mortgages on for a day’s ride all around. He naturally asked Longarm why.

Longarm explained, “Sometimes we get in trouble searching for too complicated a pattern. Sometimes we get in just as much trouble by assuming too simple a pattern.

Getting back to his feet, he continued. “Every time we’ve tried to reconstruct one of Miss Medusa Le Mat’s robberies, we’ve assumed heaps of things we don’t really know for certain. For example, when we’ve found members of her gang shot up, along with the hermits and such who owned some lonesome spread, we’ve assumed that that was all there was to it. They met at an agreed-upon rallying point, their murderous mastermind gunned them, and rode off with the loot, sometimes with and sometimes without a last sucker to fetch, carry, and blur the trail.”

Banker Guthrie nodded knowingly, and followed Longarm out front as he pontificated. “That’s the way the Pinkertons have it pictured too. We’ve all assumed the plan called for them to rob us around payday and dash out of town as far as that old Nesbit place, where the posse would sooner or later come upon the two Cassidy women and most of the gang dead.”

Longarm paused on the bank steps and demanded, “Then what? Ain’t no railroad tracks this side of Florence. I just spent all morning and change riding that far, without having to double on my trail or watch out for other riders chasing me. Country folks have come forward to report glimpses of one or two gals riding sidesaddle in the distance after a holdup. But where did they really go?”

Banker Guthrie was paid to be smart. He nodded soberly and said, “I see why you want a more complete list of local small holdings. A cold-blooded killer who could take over one isolated spread at gunpoint could take over more than one, to just lie low until things calmed down all around!”

Longarm allowed that was close enough, untethered his borrowed mount, and rode it back to the pal he’d borrowed it from.

Undersheriff Brennan seemed mighty glad to see them both. She had one of her deputies take the pony around the back while she took Longarm down the street to their own deputy coroner’s place.

As they strode close together, although not arm in arm in public, Pat told Longarm young Maureen had run off somewhere in tears after viewing what they were about to see.

Longarm was tempted to run off in tears when the Minnipeta Junction sawbones struck a match to light up what could have been taken at first glance as the meat counter in a messy butcher shop.

They’d dusted the chopped up and soggy remains with quicklime to cut the smell and discourage flies. It didn’t help enough to matter.

As Longarm regarded the mess under the coal oil’s glare, he saw someone had used the sharp edge of a shovel to sever the lower limbs at the knee and elbow joints. One forearm and the left hand were missing. The brunette head sat upright on the stump of its neck at that end of the bloated torso. They’d all told him Rose Cassidy had been a good-looking woman in her late thirties or early forties. Longarm had to take their word for that. The mottled and bloated face had been torn up considerably with buckshot. The larger but more widely spaced blue holes in the headless torso’s chest had been made by bullets—.40-caliber seemed about right.

Longarm grimaced and said, “Well, I’ll have to take your word she was Rose Cassidy. I can see she wasn’t the gal who blew me off my feet that time with what could have been the same Le Mat Duplex.”

Pat Brennan softly asked, “Are you certain of that? Her own gang turning on Miss Medusa makes more sense than her killing Rose Cassidy for no reason!”

Longarm shrugged and declared, “Oh, she had a reason. As soon as I figure it out, I’ll have a better notion where to look next! Let’s get out of here. This poor gal’s told us all she can, considering the shape she’s in.”

The deputy coroner, another local merchant who doubled as the undertaker, asked how long he was likely to be stuck with all this spoiled meat.

Pat Brennan looked at Longarm, who said it was up to her, and told the undertaker, “Do the best you can by her, and I’ll see if they’ll let the township bury her over at First Methodist.”

The deputy coroner quietly pointed out, “It was my understanding she was Roman Catholic, ma’am.”

Pat Brennan shrugged and replied lightly, “That makes two of us. But faith and Bejasus, there’s no decent Roman church for a day’s ride, and at least it’s not in Lutheran ground we’ll be after burying her and all and all.”

The only undertaker in town allowed it was jake by him if they didn’t care over at First Methodist.

So Pat and Longarm walked the short distance to the only church in town, where the Reverend Seares agreed any Christian burial in hallowed ground seemed better than a lonely grave out on the prairie.

As they shook on it, the minister added, “As an army chaplain during the war, I was called upon to bury many poor boys of many faiths. So I usually settled for an Old Testament psalm and the Lord’s Prayer.”

Pat agreed a dead Roman Catholic should have no objection to either, and they parted friendly for the moment. Pat allowed, and Longarm had to agree, they were skating on thin ice to bury a Papist in a Protestant churchyard without family permit.

But they had other things to talk about. So they went over to the hotel. He hired the same room as a single, and Pat came up to question him some more with her on top.

She said she’d been waiting for him all this time as hot as hell. He believed her once she’d impaled herself on his shaft so they could take their duds off at a slower pace than she was bouncing.

He’d noticed up in Florence that this old pal was built nothing at all like Red Robin. He’d been sneaking dirty thoughts about a tall tan undersheriff a good part of the time he’d been humping away at a pale and softer piano player. Once he had Pat stark naked, he rolled her on her back to stare down between their passionate bellies as he parted the thatch between her lean thighs with his old organ-grinder. It made her look even leaner and hairier down yonder as he thought about Red Robin’s smooth-shaven crotch while admiring one so different. He never asked Pat who she liked to think about while she moaned and groaned sweet lies about nobody else on earth having such a glorious battering ram and all.

They shared a smoke, did it some more dog-style, and somehow wound up on the rug, half under the bed, before Pat said she had to get back to her desk before somebody got to wondering where on earth she really was.

They got cleaned up and dressed, to leave a few minutes apart and meet up again at her office. It was easy to manage in such a small town. It was up for grabs whether they were fooling anybody.

There was no argument where Maureen Cassidy had been when a couple of Pat’s deputies brought her back to town, crying, in a buckboard.

She’d run back out to the old Nesbit place on foot, looking for her momma, according to the firm but gentle deputies who’d brought her back to town.

Pat took the sobbing kid in her arms to tell her in a motherly tone of her own that they were fixing to bury her momma in a nice place if that was all right with her. Pat had to rephrase it a few times before Maureen seemed to savvy they were planting old Rose for keeps. But by the time they cleaned Maureen up at Pat’s house and got her into a fresh summer frock, Longarm handing her the nosegay of flowers he’d picked up while she bathed, Maureen seemed anxious to get on with a funeral. Longarm had to do some legwork before they had everybody lined up. Rose Cassidy hadn’t known too many folks in Minnipeta Junction, being new to the township as well as a Papist who kept to herself. But there was a respectable crowd gathered around the newly opened grave out in front of First Methodist near yet another sundown. Some of the cowboys old Rose had chased away with that manure fork were good sports about carrying her pine coffin over to the grave for her.

As all the men present removed their hats, the Methodist minister tried to do right by an unfortunate Catholic lady by reciting the psalm about the Lord being their shepherd. Some of the assembled crowd said the Lord’s Prayer aloud with him at the end. Some of the women looked like they had something in their eyes when young Maureen prayed along, loud, in that singsong childish voice.

They’d just finished, and the minister was holding out a spoon full of dirt to the dead woman’s daughter, when things got more exciting.

Longarm saw young Maureen didn’t seem to follow the minister’s drift with that ceremonial dirt. So Longarm moved toward them to help the childish grown woman out. His sudden unexpected shift inspired the bullet aimed at the center of his back to just pluck at one sleeve in passing. It scared the liver and lights out of a couple across the grave-site as it buzzed between them and spanged off a gravestone just behind them!

Then Longarm had spun to draw and throw down on the cloud of gun smoke peeking around the far corner of First Methodist at them. He ran that way as fast as his long legs and low-heeled cavalry boots would carry him. He swung wide around the corner, the muzzle of his .44-40 peering in every direction. But all there was to see was the fresh-mown strip of grass between the side wall of the church and a five-foot picket fence.

It looked as if the back-shooting rascal had run all the way down to the far end, or jumped the picket fence into the weedy yard of the house next door. Or had he? Longarm jogged down to the cellar door sloping out from the foundation bricks of the big frame church as Pat Brennan got to the corner he’d just rounded and yelled, “Be careful! Jim Tobin says he was a skinny cowboy in chinked chaps and a Texas hat!”

Longarm called back, “I think I got him boxed. Come down this way and cover these doors whilst I go inside to head him off at the head of those other stairs!”

Pat ran over to him, her own S&W double-action drawn as Longarm put a free finger to his lips to shush her. He’d noticed in bed how good a team they made. Old Pat just nodded and flattened out on one side of the outside cellar entrance, her back to the whitewashed siding, while Longarm took up a similar position across from her.

A million years went by. Then, as Longarm had hoped, the gunslick trapped in the church cellar chose what he thought might be the lesser of two grim choices and came up out of the cellar shooting at one woman alone, he sure was praying!

Longarm shot him in the back as he was still bolting forward in a haze of his own gun smoke. It seemed only just. Pat put a bullet in the cuss as he went down. Longarm yelled, “Hold your fire! I’d like to see if he has anything else to tell us!”

But this was not to be. Longarm knew as he rolled the back-shot back-shooter face-up in the grass that he and Pat, between them, had killed the skinny cuss deader than a turd in a milk bucket.

Longarm sighed and said, “Well, he ain’t Miss Medusa Le Mat either. So who in blue blazes do you reckon we just nailed, pard?”

The local undersheriff replied without hesitation, “That’s Corky Landon. Used to ride for the Rocking Seven before he went bad. Didn’t Hard Pan Parsons tell us he’d got out of prison just recent?”

To which Longarm grimly replied, “Yep, and Waco McCord says Buster Crabtree recruited him to ride for Miss Medusa Le Mat. So that’s another down, and Lord knows how many more of the gang to go.”

Then he dryly added, “If they don’t get me first. They sure seem to be as anxious to get me as I am to get them!

Chapter 20

Later that evening, after things had quieted down and Longarm had dined late with Pat and Maureen, he went back to his hotel to find a Miss Wojensky from the bank waiting for him in the lobby.

Longarm invited her upstairs. Most men would have. For it was sort of gloomy in the musty lobby, and Miss Wojensky was a pretty little thing with big blue eyes and honey-blond hair piled under a perky straw boater with fake birds nesting on its brim.

She said he could call her Lucy and she’d brought the listings of small holdings along with her. She was the one who allowed it might be best for her to stay while he went over the papers, lest he have any questions she’d be proud to answer.

He didn’t ask any personal questions, tempted as he was by such an interesting contrast to both of the gals he’d been kissing recently. There were times a man grabbed for the few gold rings to be grabbed on the only ride he was likely to get. There were times when such grabbings could lead to more trouble than any gal could be worth. For Romeo, oh, Romeo had been a poor young sap when you studied on the chances he’d taken for a fourteen-year-old sass. Most young gents had learned better by the time they were old enough to vote, if they hadn’t died over some gal by then.

Old Pat had said she wasn’t coming by after dark, lest somebody see her sneaking into his hotel and draw the right conclusions. But on the other hand, nobody would ever get caught in bed with anybody else if everybody did what they said they’d be doing all the time.

But it was a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and if Lucy Wojensky was as easy a lay as he suspected, old Pat would suspect that too. So Longarm sat the tempting blonde on the bedstead and read the papers standing up, near the wall lamp.

After he’d read more than one mortgage agreement, compressed into a few simple lines by a secretary who knew her business, whatever her rep for after-hours slap and tickle, Longarm smiled down at her and said, “Let me see if I have this straight. Most of these small holders have borrowed money on homesteads they’ve proven out, or bought off others who’ve won free title to the land?”

She nodded primly, seeing he was acting so prim, and explained that the bank couldn’t grab an unproven homestead for bad debt. Longarm cut her explanation short with: “I work for the federal government, Miss Lucy. I know you can’t post federal property as security for a personal loan. I arrest folks who’ve tried all the time. The homestead Act of 1862 says you don’t get full title to your quarter section until you’ve improved it some and lived on it for at least five years. So where’s that Nesbit place and … Oh, here it is. Filed on, fenced, and proven by the Nesbits, who gained free title only to lose the hardscrabble claim to your bank. I wonder what made them think they could drill spring wheat into flinty chalk?”

She said she’d never asked the poor nesters.

He read on to note Rose Cassidy had bought the place off the bank for a quarter down, pending the sale of her old spread down Texas way. Lucy Wojensky brightened and said, “Our Texas associates sent us an estimate on that spread. Mr. Guthrie approved the purchase on time for the Nesbit place, with her Texas property held in escrow until the Nesbit place was paid for in full. Why are we talking about the entailed property of a dead woman, Deputy Long?”

Longarm asked, “Doesn’t her daughter, Maureen, own one or the other spread now?”

The banking gal shook her head and replied, “I may have left out a few lines of details. We’re not in business to go broke in a world filled with fevers and wild Indians. The contract in full forbids the sale or transfer of either place before the owner’s loan with us has been repaid in full. There’s an insurance clause I didn’t think you’d need to concern yourself with. It provides that upon the unexpected death of anyone owing money to us, we get everything they ever owned.”

Longarm grimaced, and said that sounded sort of raw to him.

Lucy Wojensky shrugged and said it sounded raw to her as well. But she only worked for the bank. She had no say in such matters.

Longarm read on, noting one widely scattered homestead claim after another in range that was best left to grass and cows. He could almost picture the poor ragged greenhorns, struggling to make do on land they never should have even claimed for barley. He knew you could grow some greens and truck on an ash dump or mine tip, if you wanted to bust your hump with a hoe and more damned fertilizer than the crop would ever be worth. He saw that most who seemed to be hanging on were folks such as the late Rose Cassidy, who’d switched to livestock. You could pen lots of high-yield livestock on a quarter section, hauling in feed to help the critters get by. It took far more grass and forbs to graze stock on prairie the way you found it. Most cattle outfits figured at least five acres a cow, which didn’t allow for much of a herd on any homestead’s hundred and sixty acres.

As he shuffled on, dismissing one spread after another as too well occupied for Miss Medusa’s assumed skullduggery, Longarm came upon a proven claim, mortgaged for fencing and well drilling, owned and occupied by one Iktoweya Nash. He asked, and Lucy said, “I know her. Pleasant enough Osage squaw, the widow of an Indian trader who filed on a spring in a timbered draw when the Indians were resettled down to the south and old Jake Nash wasn’t up to moving again.”

“What do you raise in a timbered draw six miles from your bank?” Longarm asked thoughtfully.

The gal who worked for the bank said she had no idea, and asked why anyone should care what an old squaw did in any sort of draw as long as she made her mortgage payments.

Longarm said, “I ain’t sure how close Osage is to Lakota, but that name, Iktoweya, translates roughly as Spider Woman.”

Lucy asked why any white people should care what Indians wanted to name their daughters. Longarm didn’t have time to go into Waco McCord and his confusion about the Spider Woman. He politely but firmly escorted a now-confused Lucy Wojensky downstairs, and legged it over to the town livery as soon as he’d gotten shed of her. He didn’t have time to explain to Undersheriff Brennan either. He borrowed a Winchester yellowboy and fresh saddle to go with the blue roan gelding he hired for the night. Then he rode out across the rolling moonlit prairie to pay his respects to Spider Woman.

They were both surprised when Longarm opened the door of her soddy among the hackberry and cottonwood trees without knocking. For she surely hadn’t been expecting anybody as she hunkered bare-ass in her big copper bathtub near the fireplace, and he’d been expecting an old gal more like Osage Opal.

As the much younger and much prettier breed gal covered her soapy tits with her hands and called him names in her momma’s lingo, Longarm smiled reassuringly and said, “No, I ain’t. I’m what your duskier kin call a ceska maza. The metal I wear on my chest is federal. I don’t ride for the state of Kansas. So we’ll say no more about that copper still out in the trees if you’d like to answer some less personal questions.”

The beautiful breed reached for a towel, exposing one perky nipple as she demurely said she had no idea what he meant by a still.

As she rose from the suds like Venus from the foam, wrapping her tawny young charms in a Turkish towel too small by half, Longarm shut the door behind him and said, “Have it your way. Somebody else has been brewing and distilling minni peta just up the draw. I can see why they needed a deep-bore well once Kansas went dry. That new copper still must service many a thirsty cowboy, now that there’s no Indians for your late father to trade with.”

She stepped out of the tub defiantly, insisting, “Hear me, my parents are both dead. I am called Iktola. I am a Christian. I have done nothing, nothing the metal-wearers would be interested in.”

“Little Spider, eh?” He nodded. “You’ve no idea how little known you and this place seem to be in town. Have you been selling jars to Buster Crabtree, Corky Landon, or mayhaps another lady about your own age and with the same respect for the law?”

Little Spider moved over to the fireplace to hunker down and test a coffeepot on the coals as she shrugged her bare shoulders and said she knew lots of cowboys.

When she saw the way he was grinning down at her, she quickly added, “I only sell jars, the way my daddy always did. I knew Buster Crabtree. He just got killed in a gunfight over in Florence. I don’t remember any of those other names. I don’t have anything to do with Wasichu women. They think they are better than me. They are full of shit.”

Longarm asked, “Who told you Buster had been killed? It only happened last night a good ways off.”

She said, “A cowboy came by to buy a jar. I don’t know his name. He said Buster and another rider had gotten into it with a famous gunfighter and lost.”

Longarm moved closer, saying, “I know you don’t know me as well as you know your usual customers. But hear me, I am called Wasichu Wastey by many Lakota, and the great chief Mahpiua Luta calls me his takoza. We have to talk straight with one another. It is very important. You may be in great danger if you don’t go along with me!”

The beautiful gal sighed, said “Nunway,” and let her towel drop as she rose, stark naked, and moved over to take him by his free hand.

Longarm started to explain he hadn’t meant it that way. But as she led him toward a bunk bed in a far corner, he wondered why on earth a natural man would want to say anything as dumb as that.

So he didn’t say anything until he’d shucked his own duds to join her atop her bedding, and neither one of them was in a conversational mood for a spell. But once they’d come and she was pouring coffee for them, kneeling naked by the fire, Longarm propped himself up on one elbow to declare, “I mean somebody else was apt to treat you with a lot less consideration, Little Spider. I better start at the beginning about another gal we call Medusa Le Mat.”

It took them two mugs of coffee and a shared cheroot before he was certain his new-found friend followed his drift. She seemed mighty put out that Buster Crabtree might have set her up for a lonely death in her remote wooded draw. For she’d been the one who’d been hiding the rascal after he got out of prison.

She quickly added, “Hear me, I was not this friendly with him. He was paying cash and getting nothing but food and shelter. He tried to fuck me. When I said no, he bragged about a Wasichu girl who sucked.” Longarm nodded soberly and said, “French Barbara. He tried to gun me when he thought I was taking her name in vain. He never brought her or any other gals out this way?”

Little Spider said she’d already told him that. As she got back on the bunk with him, she said, “There are now at least one man and two women left. Do you think they are coming here to kill us tonight?”

Longarm snuggled her closer and assured her, “I’m taking you back to town with me. You’ll be safe in my hotel at government expense as a material witness until we get a better handle on Miss Medusa Le Mat and her gang.”

Little Spider snuggled closer and said, “Wastey! Can we do this some more at your hotel?”

He repressed a shudder and said, “Not too openly. We don’t want anybody else knowing we’re working together like this. I’d tell that lady undersheriff if it wasn’t for your firewater business. But all in all, what Kansas law don’t know can’t hurt you, ohan?”

Little Spider agreed she didn’t want to brag about screwing white boys either. So they screwed some more and rode back to the Junction in the wee small hours.

Longarm registered the breed gal as a material witness, swearing the room clerk to total secrecy, and only screwed her once in her new quarters before he had to get cleaned up and join Pat Brennan at her place for breakfast.

They were served alone in the kitchen by Pat’s older housekeeper. As they had ham and eggs, Pat wanted to know where he’d been all night. Glancing awkwardly at her housekeeper, Pat said she’d dropped by his hotel to … ask him about something.

Longarm chose his own words carefully as he replied, “I was out most of the night asking questions of my own. That old Nesbit place hasn’t been such a promising hideout for some time. I figured Miss Medusa Le Mat and her gang might have scouted some other hideout by now.”

Pat asked if he’d found any likely alternatives. Longarm washed down some ham and eggs with coffee and replied, “Found more than one possible. None for certain. Where’s your houseguest from the Nesbit place this morning, Pat?”

The undersheriff shrugged and said she hadn’t seen Maureen that morning. She asked her housekeeper if the feebleminded kid was lying slugabed upstairs.

The housekeeper said Maureen had left for an early Mass with some young swain.

Longarm and Pat exchanged thoughtful glances. It was Pat who asked, “Mass? With the only church in town Protestant? Well, we’ve all agreed the poor thing’s not too bright.”

Longarm said, “Never mind her. Let’s talk about him!”

He asked the housekeeper what the jasper who’d taken Maureen to a Papist Mass at First Methodist might look like.

The motherly but not as worldly housekeeper thought before she said, “Nice well-spoken cowboy. Had on one of those tall Texas hats. I think he said his name was Martin.”

Longarm soberly replied, “It was Matt, Matt Currier. He called on another lady recently to tell her about my gunfight with Corky Crabtree and that other jasper!”

Pat half rose from her seat across the table, saying, “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Maureen just went off somewhere with a member of the gang that murdered her mother!”

To which Longarm could only reply, “It sure looks that way, and I ought to be whipped with snakes for not seeing things clearer, sooner. But that’s what happens when you buy just one big fib. The other side can build one big fib atop the other, like a house of cards, until you wind up staring at what looks like whole castles in the air!” Pat asked him what on earth he was talking about. Longarm said, “Monumental edifices, built of lies instead of cards. Pull one lie out near the bottom and it all collapses, see?”

She said she didn’t.

Longarm got up from the table, asking to be excused as he assured both puzzled women, “That’s all right. I see, and like I said, I ought to be whipped with snakes for taking this long to see it!”

Chapter 21

Most Indians, many lawmen, and not a few outlaws could tell you there was more than one way to cut a trail. Wolves, bloodhounds, and other such hunters snuffled around until they found a scent, and then they followed it as if they were on railroad tracks as the prey they were after doubled back and forth, splashed through running water, and so on since everyone knew how wolves and bloodhounds trailed you.

It could save a lot of time, as human hunters had figured out in Stone Age times, if you just tried to figure out where your prey was headed and got there first. You figured deer would bed down in thick aspen, while lions would wind up amid rimrocks no matter how merry a chase they led you around Robin Hood’s barn.

So Longarm didn’t ride out of Minnipeta Junction at a gallop with a pack of fox hounds. He strode over to the Western Union and sent a whole mess of telegrams. Then he went back to the banks and brought old Gordon Guthrie up to date on what he knew for certain, up to the sudden disappearance of Maureen Cassidy that morning.

Guthrie got both the Havana Claros he’d fished out of his cigar case going for them before he said, “I’M missing something here. You say you don’t think Little Spider Nash is guilty of anything but a family business. But at least two members of the gang were pussyfooting around her daddy’s whiskey still, and she and she alone can identify Matt Currier on sight?”

Longarm said, “Pat Brennan’s housekeeper saw him when he came by to carry Maureen off. She describes him the same as Little Spider. I doubt he cares. Once he shucks a deliberately distinctive Texas hat, we’re just talking about a clean-cut young cowboy who’s out of the county by now.”

Guthrie chewed his cigar like a bone and pointed out, “With a half-wit hardly anybody pays attention to? Leaving two smarter women who could point him out in a crowd?”

Longarm took a thoughtful drag on his own smoke and replied, “They ain’t worried about anybody local spotting Matt Currier. He’s only an underling, recruited to rob this bank. You and the Pinkerton Agency have foiled their plans. I might have helped some by turning over a few wet rocks and gunning at least three of ‘em. We’re talking about a hasty cover-up, lest they all wind up exposed to the cruel light of day. I figure they mean to go to ground and lay low for longer than usual this time.”

“Who might they be?” the banker demanded.

Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, “I was hoping nobody would ask that just yet. I ain’t certain of some details. But offhand, we have the mastermind, that one known gunslick, and at least two other gals, Maureen and French Barbara, unaccounted for.”

Then he said, “I ain’t about to account for shit until I catch me some outlaws. That’s why I’ve come back to you for more help with the real-estate business you know better.”

Banker Guthrie leaned back expansively and declared, “You’re more than welcome to any help we can give you. You’re too modest about a lot of money you may have saved this bank. But I sent Lucy Wojensky over with that list of small holdings, and didn’t you just say those outlaws could be out of the county by this time?”

To which Longarm replied, “I’m working on where they might have run off to. Miss Medusa Le Mat has never yet holed up in thick aspen or rimrocks. We’ve always tracked her to at least one isolated spread, houseboat, or whatever, picked out well in advance.”

Guthrie nodded uncertainly, and said, “You just made mention of the old Nesbit place. Little Spider’s soddy up that wooded draw and so on, but

…”

“That’s the first time we’ve come across two such handy hideouts an unbroken gallop from the intended robbery,” Longarm declared, taking a long drag on his cigar before he went on. “Leastways, this would be the first time we’ve noticed more than one likely hideout.”

Guthrie volunteered, “I think I can answer that. You’ve been saying all along that this Medusa Le Mat is cautious to a fault. Doesn’t it stand to reason that she’d pick more than one good hideout, use the best in the end, and leave no trace of her intent for the alternate one? They killed Rose Cassidy. They left Little Spider Nash alive and unharmed. Nobody would have guessed they’d been sniffing around out her way if you hadn’t been so smart.”

Longarm shrugged modestly and said, “That’s what I need help with. I aim to backtrack Miss Medusa Le Mat to where she might have come from. It’s been my experience that scared or wounded critters tend to break for familiar safe surroundings. The army would never catch deserters if the poor homesick fools didn’t head right for the address they put on their enlistment papers.”

Banker Guthrie blinked and asked, “You’re expecting to find Medusa Le Matt’s original home address?”

Longarm said, “A place she felt safer, not too far from this part of the West, would work better. If she’s headed home to Paris, France, we’re out of luck.”

He got out the sheaf of papers Lucy Wojensky had already typed up and explained, “I’ve got the shadow of a sensible pattern figured out so far. I’ve wired county clerks high and low for other recorded deeds. I’m only interested in property held free and clear within a half-dozen miles of known locations. They’ve never picked an unproven homestead or a cattle spread. I reckon they were trying to leave us federal peace officers out of it as long as possible, and anyone can see it takes more than three or four gunslicks to wipe out a bunkhouse full of hands, even with half of them in town or out hunting strays.”

The banker repeated his offer to do anything he could for Longarm, who said, “I may need help with my figures as answers to my wires come in. Like I said, I’m starting to see patterns, but I ain’t no expert on mortgages, transfers of property, and such.”

Guthrie reached for a bell on his desk and clanked it until Lucy Wojensky came in. When she did, looking pleased to see Longarm, her boss told her to take the rest of the day off and stick with Deputy Long until he had no further use for her services.

She allowed she was more than willing. So they went first back to the Western Union and then to her place. Lucy had her own quarters above a carriage house near the bank.

It was just as well. Things were getting sort of crowded around his hotel, and she had a table they could share by a dormer window. They were going over records from her bank and wires from Western Union when Pat Brennan barged in without knocking to catch the two of them in such an innocent position.

Longarm looked up more annoyed than the pretty secretary, knowing the U.S. Bill of Rights better. Pat looked embarrassed, and said some of her deputies had been poking around out at the old Nesbit place.

She said, “They found a wad of money that would choke a horse and a box of French .40-caliber rounds, out back amid some hay bales.”

Longarm asked if they’d found that notorious Le Mat Duplex ten-shooter. When Pat sheepishly admitted they hadn’t, Longarm told her he and Miss Lucy were trying to pin down some dates and places tighter. He said, “I met up with this stage magician gal one time. She was able to show me how a medicine man was impressing the Lakota all out of proportion. Most magic is simple, once you know how it’s done. Folks who don’t believe in magic are as easy to trick because they tend to look for trapdoors and invisible wires a good magician don’t need. I suspect the misdirection Miss Medusa Le Mat’s been using is a version of what they call One Ahead in stage magic.”

Pat smiled awkwardly, and said she had to get on out to the old Nesbit place. She asked if he was coming. When he told her he was a mite busy with his own chores, she stomped out, slamming the door behind her.

Lucy Wojensky laughed lightly, rose, and went over to bar the door with her throw-bolt, demurely observing, “I don’t like it when people barge in without knocking. You know what she was expecting us to be up to, don’t you?”

Longarm murmured, “One Ahead is used by mind readers, pretending to read written messages handed to them from the audience before they open the envelope.”

Lucy insisted, “I heard she was sweet on you, the poor old thing. When some gossip told her we were up here together alone …”

“The stage magician ain’t reading the message in the envelope he’s holding up sealed. He’s repeating what was in the envelope he opened ahead of it. Everyone who’s submitted a message knows what he or she wrote down. So of course they think the magician must be the bee’s knees when they hear their message being read, never considering the rascal just opened another envelope right in front of ‘em!”

Lucy said, “I can see how that silly stage trick works. What are we going to do about Undersheriff Brennan? I mean, we’re going to have to be very discreet if she already suspects us!”

Longarm nodded and told her, not unkindly, “Sometimes your best bet is to keep life simple. Those French bedroom farces are only funny on stage. In real life nobody laughs. I like this proven claim up in the Nebraska cattle country. It ain’t so far. I could likely get there faster by rail, even allowing for some tricky transfers. For trains move so much faster than you can beeline aboard a bronc.”

As he rose to his feet, Lucy almost wailed, “What are you talking about? What about us, Custis?”

As she plastered her shapely self against the front of him, Longarm kissed the part in her hair and wistfully told her, “I ain’t got the time if I had the nerve. I hope you won’t think me a sissy, ma’am. I have been known to carry on scandalously with plainer gals when things didn’t add up as risky.”

She clung to his shirt, sobbing, “What risk? I’m not afraid of that skinny Pat Brennan! What can she do to us, Custis?”

He quietly answered, “She might cry. It wouldn’t be fair to either of you, Miss Lucy. I ain’t got time here in Minnipeta Junction to do right by any lady, see?”

She must not have, judging from the china cup she hurled against her door as he shut it after him on his way out.

Some gals were like that when they didn’t get their way.

So, a little over seventy-two hours later, as Longarm reined in his fresh livery mount on the lee side of a Nebraska swell and got down to do some crawling, he moved in on another lady with his loaded and locked Winchester cradled across his elbows.

He removed his Stetson near the skyline and peered over the rise between two clumps of soap weed. The modest spread in the draw ahead looked deserted, save for faint smoke rising from the stovepipe poked through a sod roof and the one red pony lazing in the pole corral behind the shithouse.

Longarm told a lady bug creeping up a soap-weed spine, “One of ‘em keeping the fire burning. Everyone else and their mounts must be over to that railroad stop four miles south.”

The lady bug spread her tiny wings and flew away to see if her house was on fire and her children were fixing to burn. Longarm chewed a grass stem for a million years. Then Maureen Cassidy came out of the soddy with a catalogue, headed for the shithouse out back.

As everyone knows, it takes some concentration as well as time to do what needs to be done in a shithouse with a catalogue. So after Maureen had done it, dropped her skirts back down, and ambled back to the house, she found Longarm seated inside at the kitchen table, with his .44-40 resting beside his Winchester ‘73, as he smiled up at her pleasantly to say, “Morning, Miss Maureen. You’ve no idea what a time I just had finding you.”

The pretty little thing gasped, “Oh, praise the Lord! I was afraid nobody would ever find me! That mean old Matt has been messing with my ring dang doo ever since he made me ride off with him! Why do you men like to mess with girls like that? He says I’m supposed to come with him, and when I tell him I’ve already come all this way with him, he gets mad and hits me!”

Longarm quietly assured her, “I won’t let Matt Currier hit you, Miss Maureen. Where might he be right now, and how many pals might he have with him by now?”

She looked as if the arithmetic was tough on her as she said Matt had ridden into town alone on some mysterious errand.

Longarm didn’t ask, but she volunteered, “I was studying on running away. But his pony is faster and I ain’t sure where this place is. Matt says we’re in Nebraska. I don’t know where Kansas might be from here.”

Longarm rose to his feet, picking up his six-gun, as he told her they were only a few days ride from Minnipeta Junction, adding, “Texas is farther. But there is more time for that move. Would you come over here by the front door, Miss Maureen?”

She did, almost skipping, and asked him if they were planning a hot reception for that mean old Matt when he got back from town.

Longarm said, “We ain’t. I am, Miss Maureen.”

Then he spun her against the wall and handcuffed her wrists behind her back as she cussed and pleaded in her half-witted way.

He marched her over to the one bed, shoved her down across it without ceremony, then got his Winchester from the table as he told her, “You can drop the feebleminded act now. Just be still and we’ll talk about your future later. I think I hear hoofbeats outside.”

He was sure he did a few minutes later. He cracked open the window sash by the front door and dropped to one knee to cover the dooryard with his Winchester.

A few moments later a lean young jasper on a spunky paint pony rode into view, calling out to his honey that he was home.

Then Maureen was on her feet at another window, yelling fit to bust as the rider who had to be Matt Currier reined in, slapped leather, and spun his mount to ride off as he pegged a blind shot at the soddy.

Then Longarm had emptied his saddle with a more carefully aimed shot, and you could see from the rag-doll way the youth landed in the dust that he’d never known what hit him.

“You bastard!” wailed the pretty young brunette in a tone of common-sense despair.

Longarm levered another round in the chamber as he quietly told her it had been her fault as much as his own. Then he added, “Just let me tidy up out yonder and I’ll tell you what else you done wrong.”

Chapter 22

That was easier said than done. The spunky paint had run off a piece, and wouldn’t respond to Longarm’s gentle calls. The tall deputy had been through a war one time. So he’d gotten used to killing total strangers. But it was odd how he’d pictured Matt Currier with a different face entirely.

He made sure the handsome but sort of silly-looking jasper was dead, told him not to go anywhere, then forged over the rise to get his own livery pony and the throw rope that went with the hired saddle.

Catching the spooked paint was easier after that. He got both mounts in the corral out back with the gal’s red pony, and went back in the house to catch the gal he knew as Maureen trying to get her cuffed hands around to her front by thrusting her shapely behind through her spread elbows as she writhed on the bed.

He grabbed a bent-wood chair, swung it around to sit astraddle facing the bed, and said, “Cut that out. I want you to listen tight before you tell me any more fibs, Miss Maureen. Whether you get out of prison whilst you’re still fairly pretty, or wind up an old gray lady in a cell, depends a heap on how much help you’d like to give us with a few loose ends.”

She protested, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I admit I liked Matt more than I might have let on. I knew he was wanted by the law, but I liked the way he strummed on my ring dang doo.”

Longarm said, “If I tell them you were willing to turn state’s evidence, they may let you off with no more than ten at hard, and they don’t work women all that hard in any federal prison.”

She whimpered, “You can’t send me to prison. What are you trying to say I’ve done wrong?”

He smiled down fondly and replied, “We can start with the Lord’s Prayer. Like yourself, I’ve heard it said so often I know it by heart. So it only came to me later that you’d recited it wrong at that funeral we held for your poor momma.”

She asked what he meant. He told her to recite the Lord’s Prayer again and she did, all the way through.

He shook his head and said, “I thought I remembered you ending it with, ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. ’”

She nodded, and asked what was wrong with that.

He said, “Nothing, if you’ve learned it listening to Protestants. The Roman Catholic version goes the same way up until you get near the end. Then it goes, ‘Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.’ Nothing about kingdoms, powers, or glories. Once I got to wondering why an Irish Catholic gal would pray Protestant, I naturally got to wondering if she was a feebleminded gal named Maureen Cassidy or somebody else entirely. Once I got to wondering that, like I told Pat Brennan down Kansas way, the whole house of cards commenced to tumble down.”

She whined, “I don’t remember who taught me my prayers. I’ve never had any book learning, mister.”

Longarm went on relentlessly. “Once I had cause to suspect you and your momma might not be Rose Cassidy and her slow-witted child, it was easy enough to start backtracking from Kansas to Texas, Texas to New Mexico, and so forth, all the way to this very first homestead proven by one Sean Cassidy and still up for sale.”

She said she didn’t know what he was talking about. She’d never seen the place before Matt Currier brought her there just days ago.

He heaved a weary sigh and said, “Stage magicians call the trick One Ahead. The two of you took the chance with the unchanging name because that seemed less risky than appearing out of nowhere and heading off the same way within days of a bank robbery.”

She protested that she hadn’t robbed any banks.

He nodded soberly and said, “We know why you all gave up on the one at Minnipeta Junction. But we may be able to use that in your favor when it comes time for you to be sentenced. Each time you moved close to a bank you bought one place openly, citing the last place you hailed from with an innocent rep. Sometimes you sold your old spread at a profit. Sometimes you kept it on the market by asking too high a price. The flim-flam called for you to have wide-scattered spreads you could hole up at as lawful owners registered by the county clerk. You never used any of your own property for scenes of blood and gore. Knowing the neighborhood, scouting the neighborhood, you lined up some lonesome neighbor’s handy place as a hideout.”

She insisted he had her all wrong.

He insisted, “You never told Buster Crabtree and his recruits to rally at the old Nesbit place after the robbery. Come payoff day and a good haul, everyone but half-witted Maureen Cassidy was to meet at Little Spider’s whiskey still in that handy wooded draw. Then your brother aimed to gun everyone but French Barbara. Where did you two kill French Barbara by the way?”

She just stared at him, eyes big as saucers and pink lips all wet and twitching, until he nodded soberly and said, “You heard what I just said. I told you I only need help with a few loose ends. I have enough to put you away for a long, long time, no matter who you really turn out to be. On the other hand, I don’t have proof you ever killed anybody. Aiding and abetting can be sentenced gently when the crooks you’ve aided and abetted are close kin.”

“How … how did you ever figure that out?” she asked in a defeated tone.

He said, “Family resemblance and what we call a process of eliminating. I’m sorry I had to shoot your brother. But he shot me first. So what’s it going to be? I can take you in kicking and stubborn, or I can say you were willing to sing for your supper.”

She cursed him, said she was never going to forgive him, and then proceeded to sing for her supper.

And so in less than forty-eight more hours, Longarm had Miss Janet Armstrong, as she’d been sprinkled back East, stored for safekeeping in the women’s wing of the Federal House of Detention back in Denver.

They kept a court stenographer handy for confessions there. A lot of first offenders were inclined to make clean breasts of it their first night behind bars.

Longarm introduced his prisoner to a sisterly stenographer with pencils in her bun and a conspiring expression when she talked about men to a sister in trouble. But he’d already made Jane Armstrong go over the whole story more than once aboard the train from Nebraska after a long sleepless night in the local jail. So he had her saga of murder and incest down on paper, although unwitnessed, as he headed over to the Federal Building.

He got there just after four, and Henry looked up from his typewriter to say their boss was down the hall in conference with Judge Dickerson.

Henry said Marshal Vail would surely be back before the office shut down for the day. But Longarm handed over the handwritten field notes he’d been keeping and said, “Old Billy will want these typed up in triplicate. We’ll likely have a confirmation from the House of Detention come tomorrow morn. I’ll go down the hall and see if I can catch old Billy before he leaves for the day.”

As he stepped out in the hall, he heard Henry wailing that he’d just said Marshal Vail would be back to turn them all loose for the day. But Longarm didn’t answer. He just shut the damned door, knowing Vail wouldn’t turn him loose until after five if he was dumb enough to tarry.

He might have heard somebody calling after him as he moved down the granite steps of the Denver Federal Building. So he ducked around a moving beer wagon, dodged a lumber dray moving the other way, then decided not to head for the Parthenon Saloon, where he was known, after all. He’d been saving up spit for some of the pickled pig’s knuckles they served with suds at the Parthenon. But he really didn’t need to talk to old Billy until they had that signed confession to go with a sort of wild story.

So Longarm strode up to the corner of Colfax and Broadway, cut across the Capitol grounds catty-corner, and legged it uphill to a certain address on Sherman with the afternoon sun still showing above the Front Range off to the west of the Mile High City.

His pal, the young widow woman with light brown hair, didn’t seem as glad to see him as he’d expected. When her colored maid showed him in and took his hat, the lady of the house came out of her parlor and trilled, “Why, Custis Long, whatever brings you here this afternoon?”

Longarm smiled awkwardly and replied, “I told you I’d come back and tell you all about Miss Medusa Le Mat if she didn’t shoot me no more.”

Some other faces were peering out into the hall at them by this time. So the widow woman who owned the blamed parlor had to lead him inside and introduce him to the eight other ladies she’d invited to high tea, for Gawd’s sake.

Longarm was introduced to the ladies as the famous lawman they’d surely read about in the Rocky Mountain News. Nobody there made any comments about anything else they’d heard about Longarm. Their hostess served a swell high tea, and knew where many a social body was buried.

They sat Longarm on a chaise between two perfumed society ladies to feed him Napoleon pastries with his tea so he could tell them all about the murderous Medusa Le Mat.

He told them, “Once upon a time there were two trashy kids, orphaned too old to be sent to an asylum. But not old enough to be on their own. So they were sent to live with kin out West. They found themselves on a hardscrabble homestead, treated more like servants than kin, or so the surviving sister says.”

He sipped more tea and quietly went on. “The older of the two used a Le Mat Duplex revolver their uncle had carried in the war to wipe out the whole bunch of them.”

As they all stared owl-eyed, their hostess nodded knowingly and said, “That older sister would have been the one you knew as a Miss Medusa Le Mat, right?”

He said, “Wrong. He was the older brother, Phil Armstrong. But he was still too young to shave and never did grow very manly. He and his kid sister had already been rounded up as young strays. So after they disposed of their aunt, uncle, and feebleminded cousin out back, young Phil put on his aunt’s Mother Hubbard dress and sunbonnet to tell anyone who came by that he was Rose Cassidy, the mother of dim-witted Maureen, who was really his sister, Jane.”

The widow woman pouring the tea said, “Just a minute. You told us those dreadful children were named Armstrong and … Oh, I see. Their own Aunt Rose had married a man named Cassidy, right?”

Longarm nodded, and said, “Their Irish uncle by marriage was this Catholic who’d started out riding for the South and wound up one of General Pope’s Galvanized Yankees, sent west to fight Indians to get out of Union war prisons. That gave him the right to file a homestead claim in Nebraska. It didn’t make him too popular with his true-blue Protestant neighbors. So nobody pestered his Catholic widow and half-witted daughter for details about his dying, running off with another woman, or whatever. When anyone did come by, Phil pretended to be a bitter, reclusive widow protective of her innocent and vulnerable daughter. Jane found it easier to lie without getting caught when she acted like her murdered cousin.”

A fat lady across from him gasped, “Oh, what horrid children! But what about, ah, other children to play with? I mean, as they … grew more mature …”

Longarm shrugged and said, “I just assured Jane Armstrong incest was not a federal crime. So we never went into that much. She seemed surprised we considered murder more serious too.”

Their hostess asked what came next. So Longarm said, “They had a fine time sleeping late and eating all the jam and bread, for as long as it lasted. But as the kid sister confessed, neither cottoned much to honest chores, and you have to work long and hard to wrest a living from the Nebraska Sand Hills. So they took to crime. As mother and daughter, that was easier to get away with than drifters in their teens might have found it.”

He sipped more tea and continued. “Miss Jane says they tried to razzle-dazzle the law by buying and selling modest properties along the way so they’d have a nearby legal address and apparent means. The sister would keep the home going as her feebleminded cousin. The brother would scout about as either Rose Cassidy or some honest young cowboy looking for her, should anyone ask. Once he had a bank lined up he’d recruit some local trash, they’d hit, run to another hideout Phil had lined up in advance, and then he’d double-cross his tools, run home to a nearby legal address, and hide out in plain sight. So it was lucky for me they hung on to some of their property along the way in case they ever wanted to lie really low.”

One of the ladies opined that they sounded mighty sneaky.

Longarm said, “It gets worse. The sister just told me young Phil was fixing to retire Rose Cassidy by having her murdered by a person or persons unknown. He knew I’d survived after seeing him as Rose, and he was having to shave his face all the time in any case. So he got a soiled dove called … Miss Barbara to dye her hair so he could kill her instead of his own mean self. Then he rode sidesaddle in a dress past some witnesses, then astride in jeans for others. His kid sister identified the body as that of her poor mother. I bought that for a time because I’d never seen Barbara Allan alive and only had to see she wasn’t the Little Bo Peep who’d shot me up Wyoming way.”

Longarm modestly confessed, “I spoiled it all by getting into a gunfight with Phil and his pal Buster when they thought I was on to them. I wasn’t. I never suspected the apparent half-wit of trying to drygulch me either, before I caught her praying as a Scotch-Irish Armstrong instead of a Black Irish Cassidy. Like I told her, once you catch a suspect in one fib, you start to catch them in others. But seeing her brother and boyfriend paid Dame Justice off with their lives, we can overlook some of her lesser sins in exchange for a full deposition.”

The other ladies seemed to feel Longarm was mighty compassionate as well as smart. It took their gracious hostess another round of tea-pouring before she managed to get him aside and suggest that she would manage to get rid of her guests and give her help the night off, if he could manage to be faithful to her until after dark.

He assured her he’d try, and he managed. But he sure found it odd, a few hours later, to be picturing that Miss Wojensky from Minnipeta Junction in this very same position he was enjoying so much in Denver.