Longarm and the Minute Men

They all anted up and Curly turned over a ten of clubs, to which nobody responded, and then it was Longarm’s turn. He wasn’t ready to deal a good card yet. So he turned over a trey of diamonds and that was that. When the deal went to Fox Bancroft, she turned over the king of clubs and smiled thinly when Curly slapped it and lost.

Longarm wasn’t surprised when it was Deacon’s turn and the card the old pro turned over was neither of the winners he had to know he was holding. Longarm knew Deacon was letting the pot grow before he raked it in. They both knew Curly wasn’t about to turn over a jack or the joker. Then it was Longarm’s turn again, and he wasn’t about to spoil the fun. So he turned over a four of spades and tried not to look pleased when Fox Bancroft dealt a five of hearts.

They anted some more, and Curly passed the deal on to Longarm with a queen of spades nobody slapped because Curly couldn’t and the redhead didn’t because she caught herself just in time. Old Deacon, of course, had known all along it wouldn’t be a jack or the joker.

Then it was Longarm’s turn again, and he decided Fox Bancroft ought to quit while she was ahead. So he moved the card nobody else but old Deacon could read to the center of the table, flipped it over, and snatched back his hand lest the tensed redhead slap him as well as the jack he’d just dealt her.

As she raked in the considerable pot with a more girlish expression than he’d ever noticed on her pretty face before, old Deacon was staring at him thoughtfully. Longarm didn’t want to tell the slicker how he’d been slickered. So he just blew a smoke ring across the table at him.

They could all agree there were three jacks and that joker left to play, with the odds of one turning up better, or so Deacon wanted the other suckers in the game to assume.

Longarm didn’t argue. He still had one winning card at his disposal. He wasn’t sure what he’d wind up with if they dealt fresh again. Deacon had two left. The gal, like Longarm, had one. But if she dealt it, she’d be unable to slap it. So Longarm went along with the Deacon until the pot was getting scary again before he dealt Fox Bancroft another good card to slap before the old pro could come unstuck.

As the redhead gathered her second pot in a row, Longarm suggested they reshuffle and start fresh. Deacon smiled as if he was running for public office and said, “There’s still two jacks and a joker somewhere on the table, friend.”

Longarm tried to sound friendly as he calmly replied, “I know. You have two slappers and Miss Fox has one. But neither Curly nor me have spit. So how’s about being a sport and starting over?”

Deacon Knox got sort of pale, but didn’t stop smiling as he asked in a sober tone, “Are you saying you can read the backs of these cards, friend?”

Longarm smiled back at him and said, “Can’t you?” Then he turned to the goggle-eyed Fox Bancroft, her eyes staring at him jade-green, to say, “If you’ll allow me, ma’am, I’ll be proud to pick out the jack or joker you have in front of YOU.”

She stared down frozen as he turned over a jack. Deacon Knox laughed lightly and said, “Lucky guess,” as he started to restack the cards in front of him. Then he was staring down the muzzle of a Schofield .45 in a work-hardened female hand as Fox Bancroft quietly asked Longarm to put up or shut up.

Longarm reached across the table to turn over the remaining jack and joker as he stared past the ashen Deacon to warn the barkeep, “I thought you said you didn’t want any trouble in here.”

The barkeep straightened up and put both palms flat on the bar in front of him as Fox Bancroft stared soberly at Deacon and quietly purred, “You’ve been playing us false all this time with a marked deck, you poor dead son of a bitch.”

Longarm said, “I wish you wouldn’t kill him, ma’am. Fair is fair and he wasn’t suckering you with a marked deck. What happened was partly your own fault, and how’s he supposed to pay back all he won off you if you blow out his brains and wind up in jail?”

She flashed her jade eyes at Longarm, snapping, “Nobody is about to put this child in jail for shooting skunks out of season. What do you mean it was partly my fault? I wasn’t the one dealing marked cards and … Say, come to think of it, those are my cards! I wasn’t born yesterday, so I bought a fresh sealed deck off that barkeep and …”

Then she was on her feet, six-gun trained on the barkeep as she called out loud enough to mill a stampede, “How did you do that, God damn your eyes? I asked for a sealed deck and you said you were selling me a sealed deck, brand-new, you dirty card-marking rascal!”

Longarm leaned back in his seat, took a drag on his smoke, and calmly said, “It was a fresh sealed deck and nobody marked a single card, Miss Fox. Simmer down and I’ll explain whilst Deacon and yonder barkeep fetch all you paid for all the chips you lost from the till. You were fixing to do that, weren’t you, Deacon?”

The man in white linen rose with a gallant defeated smile to say he’d been about to suggest that very thing. The imperious armed and dangerous redhead sat back down beside Longarm, saying, “This had better be good.”

Longarm picked up two cards and placed them face down in front of her, saying, “This one’s a face card and this other one ain’t. I looked at them before I put them face down, of course. Can’t you see the different way the backs of the two cards read?”

She stared down hard and said, “No. They both have the same dumb flowers stuck in that same flowerpot. Am I missing something in the small lines of the black and white engraving?”

He said, “Nope. The bland line drawings on the backs of the cards are identical, printed from the same plates to show that same vase of flowers no matter what’s on the other side. Don’t you see it yet? Do you brand your fool calves on both sides, or upside down?”

She sniffed, “Don’t be silly, we naturally brand every calf on the near side and … Oh, Good Lord, I feel so stupid!”

“Well, you ought to,” said Longarm, not unkindly, as he explained, “Cards ain’t like calves. It doesn’t show when you turn a jack upside down because each jack has two heads. When professional gamblers buy fresh decks they buy cards with the backs as well as the fronts reversible. This brand, stocked by a place advertising itself as a serious card house, was never meant for anything more serious than kids playing for matches. Ladies who play whist at purely social gatherings have been known to read these so-called one-way cards. Old Deacon never had to mark them. He just had to make sure the jacks and joker alone were turned the opposite way from all the others in the deck. After that, he could tell in advance whether he was fixing to slap at a card or not. I thought it might be fun to pick out a slapper from my pile, reverse it some more, and give you a chance to beat him to the slap when we both caught him napping. I noticed he never tensed up to slap when he didn’t think there was a jack or joker fixing to be turned over.”

She laughed and said, “They were right about you.”

Deacon Knox came back to the table with a big stack of bills. He gravely placed them in front of her and said, “This is all the money Matt took in from the bunch of you this evening. I sure hope we can settle this misunderstanding quietly.”

She said, “It’s up to the Advertiser and Monitor whether they want to print my confession of stupidity or not.” Then she called, “Hey, Slats, get over here and let me give you back your money, you pouty thing!”

Then, as Longarm sat there smoking, Fox Bancroft divided the pile of wilted bills with as much skill and likely more honesty than your average banker might have managed.

As she did so, Deacon Knox was heard to plead, “Don’t put us out of business, Miss Fox! Your education ain’t cost you a thing, and where does it say you have to educate the rest of this wicked world?”

She coldly replied, “The Good Book. Thou shalt not steal or play with one-way decks. I just added that commandment because I doubt old Moses had anyone as sneaky as this lawman advising him about gents like you. I sure wish he’d been here the last time we rode in, you son of a bitch!”

Deacon said, “I want to make it up to you, pretty lady. So I’ll tell you what I’m going to do!”

But Fox Bancroft said, “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to get out of town. That’s all you can do for anyone as pretty and rich as I am. I’m giving you to the end of this month to find a buyer for this place and-“

“But I don’t own this place!” the tinhorn shouted as the barkeep wailed, “Neither do I! We’re working for Mr. Remington Ramsay, the owner of this whole business block!”

Fox Bancroft said, “Good! I’ll settle with that hardware monger later. There’s a northbound combination coming through tomorrow morning. Be on it when it leaves and we’ll say no more about it.”

Deacon Knox protested, “I have no call to travel north, pretty lady. As a matter of fact, I have some old enemies up that way and I’d as soon head for Ogallala and the U.P. Line if it’s all the same with you.”

The hard-eyed redhead rose to her full five-foot-six as she blazed, “It’s not all the same with me. I’ve given you cheating bastards more than enough time to pack your ill-gotten gains. By noon tomorrow I may not be the only one in these parts with a bone to pick with you. Would you rather take your chances with old enemies who may not have any call to expect you, or would you rather be here in Pawnee Junction when the Minute Men get word of your transgressions?”

Deacon said he was just leaving, and the worried-looking cuss on the far side of the bar said the last round of drinks would be on him if they didn’t mind his closing early.

As Longarm rose to stride over to the bar with Fox and all the others, she fixed her jade-green eyes on him to quietly ask when he might be leaving Pawnee Junction.

He locked eyes with her to say as calmly, “Hard to say. I figured on leaving when I was ready. Are you saying I ain’t welcome around your fair city, Miss Fox?”

The redhead leaned casually against the bar, replying, “It ain’t my fair city. I only own and operate the Diamond B and that’s enough to keep me busy, most of the time. To answer your question about the way I feel about you shooting my boss wrangler, I was at the inquest and I never told anyone to shoot up any boardinghouses or slap leather on a lawman with a rep.”

She suddenly smiled up at him, as if the sun had suddenly appeared in a cloudy sky, and added, “I can’t say I was feeling all that friendly towards you until you took my part and saved me so much money just now. It only cost me seventy-five dollars to have Porky buried in a nice box in ground I had to spare. So we’re more than even and you’ve nothing to fear from me or mine.”

Longarm said he wasn’t at feud with the Diamond B either. Then he tried, “Might you be in position to speak for those Minute Men, ma’am?”

The hard question didn’t shake her. Her voice was just as firm when she replied, “I have never run a brand or ridden anywhere with a sack over my head.”

He insisted, “That’s not what I asked, Miss Fox.”

She said, “I know what you’re asking. What my hired help, friends, and neighbors do on their own time is up to them. So when they hear how many of them might have been cheated by this bunch, there’s just no telling what they might decide to do about it. I’m in no position to give orders to anybody I don’t have on my payroll.”

“How many Minute Men do you have on your payroll?” he just couldn’t help from asking.

Fox Bancroft smiled right back at him and said, “I just said you and me were square. I never said I wanted to sell any kith or kin to the law. I told you it ain’t up to this girl whether they ride or not. So why don’t you take my advice in the spirit I sincerely mean it and get out of town before it’s too late?”

Chapter 15

Longarm lit the small lamp by the narrow cot in the cellar of the officially vacant library, and stacked his gun rig and hat atop stacked books before he sat down to light a cheroot and haul off his boots.

It had been a mighty long day, and he wasn’t looking forward to one as tedious. Common sense and likely Billy Vail were telling him there was nothing keeping him in Pawnee Junction. It seemed doubtful there’d be any damned conviction if he did discover more about the Minute Men. He’d have one hell of a time getting any member of that mob to testify truthfully against any pals who might still be alive. Folks who refused to name any members of the mob were already marketing the late Porky Shaw as the leader who’d done all the actual killing. What Billy Vail had said about trying to get the goods on a popular local gang had been all too true. Frank and Jesse were still at large, after all this time, because whole counties of Missouri folks just wouldn’t talk about who they might or might not have seen in church the Sunday last.

Gripping the cheroot in his teeth, Longarm undressed and got under the sheet and one thin quilt. But he stayed propped on one elbow as he smoked the cheroot down. He didn’t want to get too comfortable while he smoked in bed. He knew he shouldn’t be smoking at all. But he just wasn’t tired enough to let go all the way. He spied some books Ellen Brent had set atop the table for her own reclining reading. Longarm reached out and discovered one was a tract by Miss Virginia Woodhull, the exponent of women’s rights to vote and screw around just like men.

The other was an English translation of that Hindu Kama Sutra on the art of screwing. Illustrated. He’d thought little Ellen had seemed sort of flushed and out of breath when she’d taken so long to answer the door that time.

Longarm had read the same publication before. But he naturally thumbed through it to look at the pictures, being a man of normal manly tastes. He smiled fondly as he recalled poring over the Kama Sutra down Mexico way with a pal of the female persuasion who was game to try anything. They’d made dead certain that some of the illustrated positions were just plain impossible, although others had sure been fun.

He knew it would be even tougher to go to sleep if he hit the two pillows with an empty stomach and a hard-on. So he put the dirty books back where he’d found them, snuffed the smoke, and trimmed the lamp. He lay there a million years, staring up at the darkness as his stomach growled. He was otherwise sleepy as hell, and he didn’t know where he’d be able to order a meal in such a small town this late at night. He cursed himself for not thinking about that earlier. Like most men of action, he tended to forget about eating and sleeping when he was up and about. So this wouldn’t be the first time he’d toss and turn a bit before he ever got to sleep.

So he was still wide awake a spell later when he heard somebody walking across the library floor above him. It sounded like somebody trying to walk soft, in high-heeled boots. Longarm slowly sat up to silently grope in the darkness for his .44-40 as, sure enough, those sneaky footsteps faded toward the rear of the main room above. Then he heard the cellar door’s latch click, and so he thumbed the hammer of his six-gun back. The side arm fired double-action with a good hard yank on the trigger, of course, but the trigger was hair-set if you cocked the hammer first, and a man sitting naked in a dark cellar with somebody creaking down the stairs at him just never knew how much time he’d have to work with.

Then a match flared and Longarm almost fired at the sudden glow before Ellen Brent called out, “Hello, Custis, are you there?”

Longarm eased the hammer back down as he called back, “Been here some time, ma’am. I’m in bed without no duds on, before you come any closer.”

She followed her flickering match flame around a high stack of books anyway, saying, “I brought you some sandwiches and a canister of lemon punch from the house, seeing you missed supper with us. We have to talk about poor Mavis and that sneaky hardware man!”

She shook out her burnt-down match, struck another, and sat down to perch her little round bottom on the rail of his cot as she struck another and lit the table lamp, adding, “I thought he’d never leave this evening! That’s why I’m so late. I couldn’t leave poor Mavis at the mercy of that Romeo!”

Longarm put his six-gun away, and reclined on that same elbow as he saw she’d indeed brought a picnic hamper along with her. As she began to pile food and refreshment atop the little table, Longarm asked her with one eyebrow raised, “What were you so worried about? Aside from those grown men boarding there, well within range of a good scream, a widow woman is by definition a lady of some experience with horny men.”

The unwed brunette said knowingly, “Remington Ramsay is too smooth to make a clumsy grab at poor unworldly Mavis. I know what he’s up to. They were up there poking and fussing at the walls and woodwork until he had her giggling like a schoolgirl. He means to take his own sweet time on all that repairing and redecorating, and then he means to come at her with flowers, candy, and a proposal of marriage!”

Longarm laughed out loud and asked, “You figure that’s a dirty way to treat a lady?”

To which she replied, offering him a ham-on-rye sandwich, “It is when that’s not what you’re really after! I told you I was keeping an eye, and an ear, on them. I heard him telling her he could repaper all of your room and the front hall cheap if she’d settle for new paper in some other design. He invited her right out to come over to his hardware store and go through all the pattern books he had to show off. But that was only the half of it! He got to picking at loose wallpaper hither and yon, like it was scabby, and then he marveled out loud that Mavis and her poor dead Martin had started out with all the upstairs walls done in old stocks and bonds.”

As she poured lemon punch in tumblers for the two of them Longarm said, “I commented on it when I saw all those pictures of Confederate officials and railroad engines. To tell the truth I’d worry more about a man without glasses pretending they weren’t there at all. Say, this is sure a swell ham sandwich, ma’am!”

She handed him his drink saying, “Thank you. I made it myself, in the dark, speaking of sneaks. I didn’t think you’d want me telling anyone where you were. Mavis asked if I knew where you were when you didn’t come back after that oily hardware monger left. Can’t you see he’s after her property, like that other wretch who trifled with her affections?”

Longarm washed down some ham and rye with the lemon punch she must have mixed in the dark as well. He grinned and said, “Lord love you, you put just the right amount of lemon juice in this rum, Miss Ellen. As to Remington Ramsay, aside from his bragging book, I now know for a fact that he already owns considerable property here in Pawnee Junction and he never had to marry up with anyone he didn’t like to get it. As a dealer in lumber and hardware who got in on the ground floor, he was naturally set to buy building sites and build on them cheap, for sale or rental. He must be rich enough by now. I haven’t had time to find out what those Credit Mobilier bonds and stock certificates are worth. I told you I’d try. How much time do you figure we have before the minister calls out for us to speak now or forever hold our peace?”

She didn’t smile back. She said, “This is serious, Custis. Mavis must be more hard-up than I thought. She barely knew Remington Ramsay, as a tradesman, and now he has her blushing and gushing as if they were already courting. You mark my word, he’ll be in her bed long before any minister has anything to say about it!”

Then she gasped, blushed darkly in the lamplight, and looked flustered. “Oh, I shouldn’t have spoken so boldly to a man! Whatever must you think of me?”

He said soothingly, “That’s all right. I’ve read what Miss Virginia Woodhull has to say about honesty betwixt the genders, and she makes a lot of sense. Albeit I ain’t sure I go along with her on women smoking in public. Not cigars leastways.”

The perky librarian had just taken a sip of the mighty strong lemon punch—she didn’t seem hungry—when her big sloe eyes took in books she’d left on the table. Longarm had replaced them on the far side of the lamp. The library girl gasped, “Good heavens, what are those books doing there?”

To which Longarm could only reply, “Somebody must have put them there. I know I never did. But to tell the truth, I’ve read them both before.”

She giggled and said, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Or does everyone in a big city such as Denver practice free love in the Oriental manner?”

He washed down the last of his first sandwich and reached for a second as he delicately replied, “Not all the folks in Denver, ma’am, just the high-toned folks on Capitol Hill and the low-lifes down on the flood plain of the South Platte. I read somewhere how prosperous middle-class folks worry more about Queen Victoria’s notions of prim and proper behavior than Queen Victoria seems to. Neither the folks with no education nor the folks with a heap of education seem to worry as much about such matters.”

She poured herself more refreshment as she confided, wide-eyed, how she’d read the same thing, asking in a breathless tone if Longarm thought those rumors about the Widow of Windsor and her burly Scotch butler, Mr. Brown, were true.

Longarm washed down some grub and replied with a shrug that he was in no position to say, adding, “I hardly ever get invited to Windsor Castle, and when I do stay over Her Majesty never invites me into her bedchamber. I figure it’s up to the lady and anyone she might invite to say what goes on behind closed doors.”

Ellen stared thoughtfully at him in the soft light of her secret nest as she mused, “I guess there’s no harm if no harm’s done. Do you think that’s what those sophisticated high-society folks have to say about the wild and wicked things they do?”

He said, “Ain’t sure it’s wicked if you’re smart enough to temper your wildness with sensible precautions. Dumb trashy folks wind up in all sorts of trouble, with no moral code, because it’s dumb to just do anything you want, with anybody, at any time. Ain’t no way a man can get drunk and trifle with his baby sister in a public place without somebody calling the law. On the other hand, as long as Queen Victoria and that brawny Scot wait until they’re all alone, and lock the door, there’s just no saying what they may or may not be getting away with.”

She sighed and said, “It seems unfair to the rest of us. Why are us middle-class girls denied all the fun of either discreet or foolish fun?”

Longarm told her cautiously, “It’s likely on account of the middle-class men you hang around with. There’s a heap to be said for middle-class morality. It keeps life simple and nobody looks foolish if they just behave all the time as if somebody was watching.”

She finished her drink, started to pour another, then reached for the lamp’s trimmer as she demurely asked if Longarm thought anyone was watching.

He replied just as innocently, “Why don’t we put out that lamp so nobody could see what we’re up to in any case?”

So then the cellar was plunged in ink-black darkness and Ellen was all over him in the dark, with nothing on under that thin summer dress she’d left the house in. So in less time than it took her to say she couldn’t understand what had gotten into her, he’d gotten into her and she seemed to want more, despite her small size, in every way, as he pounded her good on that firm army cot.

It sure seemed a caution how women could be so different without having to be ugly. The petite brunette’s smaller but plumper body was not only a swell contrast, but her approach to enjoying the mutual pleasure was nothing like the forceful screwing of Nurse Nancy Calder, bless them both.

Bubbly little Ellen was one of those rare women blessed with a healthy appetite and uncomplicated plumbing. For all her reading of illustrated instruction books, she just liked a fair-size man on top and in her deep, with no cares in the world about tricky angles or difficult chords on her old banjo.

They came close together, the way lovers in romantic tragedies were supposed to. Then they got her sweetly rounded rump on a pillow and he felt sure, as he posted in the old love saddle with her soft thighs around his waist, that he’d never in this world find another gal whose whole body seemed so tailor-made to pleasure his. So when she moaned and begged him to leave it in her forever and never take it out, he found it easy to promise her he wouldn’t.

A man had to watch himself around gals like Ellen Brent. For they were tempting as hell, but naturally, nobody who screwed so swell the first night could avoid giving in quickly to the temptation all of womankind suffered. For reasons only someone like Professor Darwin might savvy, they all felt honor-bound to change a man for the better as soon as they had him wrapped around their fingers, and Ellen Brent was about as wrapping a gal as he’d met up with lately.

Chapter 16

Since Ellen was easy to satisfy as well as warm-natured, Longarm wound up with a good night’s sleep for a change. The free-thinking librarian didn’t want anyone wondering where she was come breakfast time at the boardinghouse, so she got dressed to sneak back there just as Longarm was beginning to notice how crowded an army cot was unless you were both in the middle.

Once she’d locked the front door upstairs behind her, Longarm lay back with a satisfied sigh, and slept like a log until he heard her now-familiar heels overhead again. She’d opened the library just a tad early after breakfast at the boardinghouse to serve Longarm his own breakfast in bed. He’d have never known it was that long after sunrise if he hadn’t had hot buttered toast, black coffee, and some more of her to wake himself up in that windowless dark cellar. once she had him up, in every way, Ellen said she had to open the library officially. So he let her, taking his own time to put on his clothes and mosey upstairs after her. A couple of schoolgals who were jawing with Ellen at her desk looked surprised as all get-out to see a tall stranger wearing a gun appear out of nowhere. So Longarm nodded casually at Ellen, declared, “I put that travel book about India back where it belongs, ma’am,” and sauntered on out the front door as if he was leaving church on the Sabbath.

First things coming first, he went back to the boardinghouse to clean up and change to a fresh shirt and underdrawers, just as glad to meet nobody upstairs or down until he was fixing to leave.

He found his messed-up room about as he’d last seen it. But as he went back downstairs and out the back door, the Widow MacUlric and old Remington Ramsay drove up the side lane on that two-mule buckboard. Mavis MacUlric had on a summer-weight Sunday dress and sunbonnet. The hardware man was wearing bib overalls and a denim work shirt. The wagon bed behind them was lightly laden with nail kegs, bags and buckets of paint, and Lord only knows what-all.

Mavis MacUlric said, “Oh, there you are, Custis. We missed you at breakfast and I was so afraid you’d come home to find your quarters in disarray. Remington here just sold me on a whole new wallpaper pattern, and I may let him redecorate the whole house!”

Longarm locked eyes with the hardware mogul, who seemed to read minds, because he softly said, “On me. As I was just explaining to Miss Mavis, we in the interior-decorating trade often do demonstration jobs gratis to convince other customers we know what we are up to. Miss Mavis has agreed to let me conduct tours of just her parlor and hallways once we finish up here.”

“Once we finish up?” Longarm asked.

“My helpers will be here any minute with a portable steam boiler we use to peel wallpaper,” the big galoot replied without looking away.

The pretty young widow woman Ramsay was being so good to dimpled down from the buckboard seat and explained, “Remington says it’s best to peel down to the plaster and start all over.” The mighty thorough-sounding redecorator swung down to hold out a helping hand to the lady as he told Longarm, “Three layers of paper and wheat paste are begging for bugs to begin with. But as a matter of fact, as I just told Miss Mavis, those old railroad stocks and bonds her late husband pasted up as good for nothing might just be worth something.”

As he helped her down, the young widow woman said, “Oh, Remington, poor Martin may not have been as practical as some men I know, but he was hardly a fool who’d paper our upstairs wall with valuable stocks and bonds.”

Ramsay gravely replied, “I never found your late husband anything but sensible when we were talking business, ma’am. At the same time, we’ll never have a better chance to steam all that Confederate and Credit Mobilier bond paper off, clean it, dry it, and see just what you’ve had hidden up yonder all this time. You and your Martin were likely right about it being worthless. But it never hurts to ask, and it’s certainly not worth anything, even as wallpaper, hidden under the new patterns you just picked out!”

Longarm said something about having to get on over to the Western Union, and left them to hammer that dumb-sounding dispute out. But even as he walked the short distance to the telegraph office, he wondered whether Remington Ramsay was an easygoing innocent cuss with nothing up his sleeve, or one mighty slick confidence man out to skin a poor widow woman. For it worked either way. Marrying up with a gal sounded like a mighty desperate way to get her valuable wallpaper, while a widow woman who had some of the same would tend to trust a man who came right out and helped her cash in on unsuspected wealth to where he might not have to marry up with her to rob her blind.

Striding across the sandy street in the dazzling morning sunlight and noting it was shaping up to be a scorcher, Longarm muttered, “Gals in love with a sweet-talking lover are likely to sign anything, and Ellen says she was nearly taken by such a bastard earlier!”

He caught himself mapping out a plan of action, and warned himself with a cynical laugh, “Forget it! You’d have never heard about all the woes of a somewhat horny and mighty nice-looking widow woman if you hadn’t wound up playing slap and tickle with another gal entirely. Dropping Ellen like a used snot rag to go after Mavis would be mean to the both of them. It ain’t as if you were planning on staying in these parts. So even if you could save Mavis from that hardware monger for a spell, she’d likely wind up going back to him as soon as your back was turned.”

He entered the cooler telegraph office to find no messages there for him, and sent a slew of his own messages in every direction. Then he said he’d be back, and moseyed up the street to the town marshal’s office. He found it far smaller than the sheriff’s office and county jail on the far side of the courthouse. Pronto Cross was seated at a desk in the middle of the twenty-by-forty-foot frame building. The one holding cage they had, empty at the moment, shared the back wall with the crapper and rear exit. Save for a few extra chairs and the gun racks along one wall, the effect was spartan, and made the modest space seem bigger than it really was.

Cross got up from the desk and said, “You just missed Timmy Sears and his mother. She brought him over to talk to you, like I asked last night. Seeing it was so early and you weren’t here yet, they said they’d be back in a spell. She said something about shopping, and he was asking if she’d buy him some marbles.”

By tacit agreement the two of them stepped outside to the shaded plank walk so the Sears woman would see Longarm was there as she and her kid dashed all over the tiny town in the hot sun.

Longarm offered the town law a cheroot, and got them both lit up before Cross told him, “I didn’t question the boy again about the time he spied Bubblehead Burnside fleeing the scene of his crime. His folks weren’t too happy about the boy having to go over it all again. Tim Sears Senior says little Timmy has been pestering them since the killing about what such words as rape might mean. Seems the other kids have been talking to him about what happened to their Sunday school teacher. But that might be the least of our worries.”

Longarm took a thoughtful drag on his own smoke and said he only had a couple of gentle questions to ask little Timmy. Then he asked what other worries Cross might be talking about.

The town law said, “Two strangers in town. Got off the morning train and vanished into thin air. Never stopped anywhere to order a meal or hire any horses. So where are they at? You know there’s no proper hotel here in town, and I have my two roundsmen canvassing everyone with rooms to let.”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Try her this way. Strangers to you might not have been strangers to somebody in town without a sign in their front window. What did these spooky strangers look like?”

Pronto Cross said, “Spooky strangers. I didn’t get too close a look at either. I was standing across from the open platform in the shade when they got off unexpected. I figured they might be with you, no offense, because of the dark suits and six-guns carried cross-draw. I had no sensible-sounding reason to dash across the street and introduce myself, so I never did. I figured they’d settle down somewhere, with or without asking about you, and I could approach them more delicate. So I let ‘em walk on by, blast my sweet nature, and now I don’t know who they were or what they got off here to do!”

Longarm took another thoughtful drag and decided, “They could be no more than innocent visitors. If they’re holed up for the moment with local kith or kin, you’ll see them around town sooner or later.”

“What if I don’t?” asked the town law. “What if they ain’t innocent at all? What if they’re here to rob the bank or something?”

Longarm said, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar. Get word to anyone with a horse to hire that you’d sure like to hear about anyone new in town hiring a horse. There’s no train in or out of here this side of supper time. Can you see bank robbers escaping afoot across open sand-hill range with enough of a load to matter?”

Cross smiled thinly at the picture and said, “I wish the damned sheriff was handy today. He’s rode down to Ogallala, and I can’t tell his deputies what to do without his permission. So how am I supposed to stake out the livery, the bank, and Lord knows what-all with just my own two elves?”

Longarm said, “It’s getting too hot to put the stew on the stove before you know you’ll be serving any, Pronto! All you know for certain is that two gents you don’t know got off that train to do, so far, not a solitary thing. It’s quiet as hell all up and down the street right now. Matter of fact, I don’t see anything going on, and the only living soul in sight would seem to be that tabby cat across the way, licking its fool self in the shade. You say Sheriff Wigan had to go down to the main line at Ogallala?”

Cross nodded, but said, “Don’t ask me why. I don’t tell him when I go to the card house, and that reminds me. What’s this I hear about you telling Deacon Knox to get out of town?”

Longarm answered with a clear conscience, “I advised him it might be good for his health. I caught him dealing slapjack with a one-way deck last night. But I wasn’t the one who ordered him to leave town.”

Cross said dryly, “I know. They tell me Fox Bancroft was out to shut down the whole shebang. She’s always been a willful child. How do you like the owners of the Aces and Eights sending away for some outside help? Deacon Knox is just a two-bit tinhorn, but I happen to know who really owns that joint.”

Longarm said, “So do I. We were just now discussing wallpaper. I didn’t want to discuss more serious business in front of a lady. But since that other lady and her kid seem to be hiding out in some fool ladies’ notions or candy store, what else can you tell me about old Remington Ramsay?”

The town law made a wry face and said, “Aside from the fact that his shit don’t stink? He owns half the town. He says he only rents out space to the highest bidder and has no personal interest in the whoring and gambling that may go on under roofs he tar-papered personal. I’ve wired places he says he’s done business in in the past. As far as I have been told in return, he’s never been charged with anything really serious.”

Longarm soberly asked, “What’s on his yellow sheets that may not sound really serious?”

Pronto Cross shrugged and said, “Put a man in a Chicago hospital with his fists back in ‘76. Busted the arm of a blacksmith down in Ogallala just after he came out our way. In both cases the victims are said to have insulted his late wife. You’ve likely noticed old Ramsay runs to size, and still does a lot of heavy work alongside his hired help. I’d approach him polite if I was going to ask him about the Aces and Eights, pard.”

Longarm shrugged and said, “Ain’t my row to hoe. Up to the township to decide such matters. In the lawful manner, I mean. What have you got here, the usual mayor and board of aldermen handing out business permits for a nominal fee?”

Cross nodded and said that was about the size of it, adding that the county council collected the property taxes. A hot and dusty-looking younger gent was coming their way up the walk now. As he approached he wearily called out, “You must have seen two pistol-packing ghosts, Boss. I’ve been all over this fool town and not another soul seems to have seen hide nor hair of your mysterious strangers!”

Pronto Cross said, “Never mind about them for the moment. Deputy Long here has been waiting a spell on Mrs. Sears and her Timmy. Might you have any notion where they could be right now?”

The roundsman shook his head and said, “Not hardly. Last time I saw ‘em they were here with you.”

Pronto Cross replied, “They went off to buy some ribbon bows or mayhaps some root beers. Try the candy shop down the other way and send Stretch to me if you run across him, will you?”

The already overheated roundsman went off muttering, softly cussing all mothers of small witnesses who couldn’t sit still on hot days.

Longarm and the town law smoked their cheroots down twice, and the tall drink of water called Stretch had joined them to say he had no idea where the fool kid and his mother might be either, by the time it commenced to make Longarm uneasy.

He said, “The only sensible place nobody has looked would be the house they live in. The boy or his mother might have taken to feeling poorly in this heat, or just went home for an early noon dinner.”

But it took Pronto Cross less than a quarter hour to establish little Timmy Sears and his mother were neither at home nor at the saddle shop where Tim Sears Senior worked.

The worried father joined the search, which didn’t take long in a town as small as Pawnee Junction. But search high or search low, nobody they talked to could say, or would say, where in blue blazes the missing mother and son had disappeared to in bright sunlight on what had been described as a short shopping errand.

So Pronto Cross said, “Damn, if only Sheriff Wigan was here, I’d ask him to posse up!”

Longarm said, “You don’t have to wait on him. I’m here, and as a federal lawman I have the authority to convene a posse comitatus. So why don’t we get cracking? It’s barely past noon, and how far could anybody carry a small boy and his mother across wide-open range?”

Chapter 17

It took less than an hour to gather better than fifty willing riders and swear them in as a federal posse. Most of them worked or spent a lot of time in town. None of them showed up with masks on. So there was just no saying how many might have assembled for other riding in these parts in the past. Tim Sears Senior himself showed up with a saddle mule and a Spencer .52 carbine. Remington Ramsay had changed his bib overalls for old cavalry pants and rode a handsome cordovan Morgan, armed with a brace of Navy Colts and his Springfield .45-75. A couple of sheriff’s deputies as well as both of the town marshal’s roundsmen volunteered. Longarm was the one who pointed out that somebody in the law-enforcement trade ought to be watching all the stores as well as their one bank. Pronto Cross laughed sheepishly and allowed he’d forgotten those strangers who’d come in aboard the morning train.

Cross told his own boys they couldn’t tag along, and one sheriff’s deputy agreed to stay behind and make sure nobody carried off the courthouse in broad daylight, as everyone else rode south along the railroad tracks at first.

They split into two parties at that railroad trestle the Minute Men had used more than once as a handy gallows. Cross led one bunch circling to the west. Longarm and his two dozen riders took the east, and they agreed to meet near that impoundment north of town.

The legal definition of a township extended roughly three miles north, south, east, and west of the city hall on Court house Square.

In practice, few cow towns sprawled half that wide when you took in the modest produce, butter, and egg spreads catering to the local market. One of the townsmen riding with him told Longarm they grew mostly garden truck off to the western upwind farms close to town. Longarm didn’t ask why they penned more pigs, chickens, and dairy cows over this way downwind. There sure were a lot of small hardscrabble spreads within sight of First Calvinist’s white spire. When Longarm commented on that, Remington Ramsay volunteered that filing homestead claims within the limits of a township was not allowed. He said you had to beg, borrow, or steal a plot of ground that big before you and your pals incorporated a township on top of it.

Longarm dryly asked if that was how Ramsay had wound up with so much property in town. The big frog of the little puddle sighed and said, “I wish I’d got here first. But I thought you read my history of Pawnee Junction. It was carved out of a railroad grant, sold off in one-hundred-by-two-hundred-foot lots at fair prices when they laid out a water stop hereabouts and decided they might as well drum up some freight and passenger business. I confess with a clear conscience that the lots my late wife and me bought cheap are worth way more now.”

Longarm muttered, “You said in your book how that great-uncle back in the old country cornered the market in imported lumber. I don’t see how anybody could ride through countryside this settled in broad day with an unwilling woman and child, do you?”

Neither the local big frog nor any of the lesser lights within earshot saw fit to argue. Longarm spied two small snot-nosed kids watching them over some snow fencing alongside the wagon trace they were riding. He swung across the roadside weeds to talk to them rather than yell, the little gal already staring big-eyed and ready to bolt.

He reined in his livery bay at conversational range and asked the kids if they’d seen another little boy and his momma passing by since breakfast. The boy of about six or seven said they just come out to play after their noon dinner.

Longarm had no better luck a furlong up the trace, where an old man with a hoe was regarding them all with interest as he stood shin-deep in cabbage sprouts. When Longarm agreed the big prairie grasshoppers could sure be a bother with garden truck, then asked about a grown woman and small boy being bothered by anybody, the old man in the cabbage patch said he hadn’t seen anything more suspicious than these son-of-a-bitching bugs they grew out here in the sand hills. He almost sounded as if he was bragging when he added nobody anywhere had ever suffered plagues of bigger, meaner, hungrier insects. Hence Longarm didn’t tell him what they said about Mormon crickets on the far side of the Rockies.

They rode on encountering the same results as they passed by many a spread and questioned many a nester up and about at this busy time of day. Nobody had seen any other strangers in recent memory.

There was nobody in sight as they rode by the hog farm of Rose Burnside. The pens were empty and there was a “For Sale” sign nailed to the door of the flat-roofed sod house. One of Sheriff Wigan’s deputies volunteered they’d had no trouble spotting her Mongoloid idiot kid brother at a distance. “He was on his hands and knees this side of yonder soddy, playing marbles in the dirt as if he didn’t have a care in the world. When we asked him why he’d been so rough with Mildred Powell, the funny-looking cuss just grinned and said he loved her. Ain’t that a bitch?”

“Let’s have a look inside,” Longarm replied, heeling his mount in that direction. Remington Ramsay started to ask why, then followed, saying, “Right. Miss Rose has been boarding in town whilst she ties up her few loose ends in these parts. So we’re talking about an empty house a lot of folks know of as empty!”

But that was all they found when they dismounted to scout all sides through the grimy glass windows. The discouraged Rose Burnside had apparently already sold off the furniture and stove, leaving just an empty shell that somehow looked sort of spooky.

Empty houses all seemed haunted, even when they didn’t have any ghost stories attached to them. The human eye was used to reading the sign that others left as they occupied their property. It was likely the lack of signs of recent living that made vacant property seem so unlived in and hence creepy. Even critters felt uneasy around their own kind lying ominously still and starting to get dusty and musty.

They rode on, asking everyone they met about the missing mother and child. They passed the colored shantytown, built closer to the tracks by the section hands who kept the north-south spur line in repair. One of the old-timers Longarm had seen earlier in that barbershop opined there was just no way any darkies could kidnap a white woman and her boy in the middle of town in broad daylight without anyone noticing. He added, “We only have a few darkies up this way and they seem to know their place. You never see them along Main Street unless they’ve been sent there on some errand. They have their own general store up the other side of the stockyards. Mrs. Sears would have no call to shop there, of course.”

Longarm was glad Tim Sears Senior was riding with Pronto Cross. He had to allow his informant seemed as fair-minded about colored folks as a man who called them darkies ever got.

They rode on past a good-sized chicken run, and then they saw Pronto and the others who’d circled to the west were already waiting up ahead by the low clay dam of that broad pond to the east of the tracks. So they rode on up to join them.

As Longarm reined in near his fellow lawman, Pronto smiled wearily and declared, “Nobody we passed saw a thing. Before you ask, I just asked those colored boys yonder about whether we ought to drag this pond or not.”

As Longarm spotted the two kids he’d seen the night before under the shady crowns of some poolside boxelder, Remington Ramsay told them, “Don’t have to drag it. I can have my yard hands drain it for you any time you like. It’s only a yard deep in the middle and you can see that dam is just clay.”

Pronto Cross said, “Well, them colored kids say they’ve been here fishing since before we first missed Timmy and his mother. But seeing it would be so easy … What do you think, Longarm?”

The more experienced lawman fished out a smoke and lit it before he said, “I reckon it depends on whose property we’re talking about and whether we charge those two young fishermen with criminal conspiracy. What else can you tell us about this overgrown puddle, Ramsay?”

The hardware and construction king of Pawnee Junction made a wry face at the broad expanse of stagnant water. “You’ve described it about right. The railroad ran that dam across the draw from yonder track bed. They thought they’d wind up with something much grander. I told them what would happen. In the end they had to sink a tube well like the rest of us ignorant peasants. You don’t dam surface streams for fun and profit in the Nebraska Sand Hills.”

Longarm mildly observed, “No offense, but it seems to me they did so, here at least.”

Remington Ramsay snorted in disgust and swept the back of his free hand across the watery view, insisting, “A quarter mile long, a furlong across, and most of it inches deep. All the grassy swells you see around us are stabilized sand dunes, held in place by thick sod, on top of the mud flats of some dried-up inland sea. I dig a lot of cellars and sink a lot of tube wells for others on contract. So I can tell you it’s much the same no matter where you dig down in these parts. You dig or drill through a yard or so of sand, it gets moister as you go, till you hit a layer of soggy black muck over clay hardpan. You drill down through the clay into clean reliable groundwater in a swamping bed of coarse wet sand I’ve yet to drill all the way down through. There’s no need to. You can pump it all day and all night without worry, once you’re down through that clay. This pond you’re looking at lies on top of that clay. It’s fed by the rainwater soaking down through the sand hills all around, and vice versa. That’s why it’s never deeper, and can’t get any deeper, than the seasonal weather warrants. By late summer you’ll see more mud than water north of this dumb dam. I’ve offered to drain their mistake for them in exchange for the recovered bottomland, but you know how some railroad surveyors are about admitting mistakes.”

Longarm dryly muttered, “I’ve noticed you’re interested in railroad construction, Ramsay. But I reckon we’d best leave this big mud puddle alone, seeing none of us own it and those kids don’t recall anyone being thrown in recently.”

He gazed thoughtfully about, cheroot gripped jauntily in his teeth, then said, “Well, neither Timmy nor his mother seem anywhere in the vicinity of town. Anyone riding north around the far side of the tracks from this impoundment would follow the rairoad service road. So I reckon that’s our best bet.”

Pronto Cross said, “Speak for yourself, Longarm. I told you before that Sheriff Wigan and me have a gentlemen’s agreement about jurisdiction. We’re about as far out of town as me and mine usually police.”

Longarm said, “This situation ain’t usual, and we could always tell Sheriff Wigan you were with me.”

But Pronto Cross insisted, “You ride on if you’ve a mind to. I’m going back to watch the store. I’d risk a tiff with Sheriff Wigan if there seemed the slightest call to. But damn it, there’s no evidence that missing woman and her boy were ever this close to the township boundaries, and even if those mysterious strangers did ride off with them, who’s to say they couldn’t have carried them east, west, or to the south just as easy?”

Longarm shrugged and said, “You have to eat an apple one bite at a time. The way north seems less crowded than any of the ways I’ve seen so far. I’m headed up that way till I come up with a grander notion. I’ll see you back in town later, Pronto.”

Longarm heeled his mount toward the west end of the clay dam. When Tim Sears Senior fell in beside him, he wasn’t surprised. But when he saw Remington Ramsay was still with him, he had to ask, “Ain’t we headed in the general direction of the Diamond B and Miss Fox Bancroft, pard?”

The blond giant nodded in a casual way and replied, “Fox grazes her stock west of the tracks for a good many miles. The Rocking Seven owned by Sheriff Wigan’s in-laws, the Newtons, ranges as many miles east of the tracks, by one of those gentlemen’s agreements Pronto just mentioned. Neither the Bancrofts nor the Newtons actually hold legal title to more than a section or so of home spread. But grazing the sand hills as open range is the only sensible way to raise anything on them in any bulk. I just told you about water in these parts. You can grub a few acres of produce where the bottomlands lie flat and the sand’s not too deep. But plow most anywhere else, and the winds will blow your crop away before it can sprout.”

Longarm headed around the banks of the broad shallow pond toward those colored kids with fishing poles as he told Ramsay he knew about the geology of the Sand Hill Country and said, “You did hear about Fox Bancroft being at feud with the entire establishment of the Aces and Eights, didn’t you?”

Ramsay nodded and replied in an unworried tone, “I own that whole business block. It’s not for me to say whether the ribbon bows sold in the notions shop are genuine silk or not. I rent business property to those who care to do business with others on their own. Should you care to open a whorehouse or a gambling den, I require three months’ rent in advance as security. So I haven’t lost any money on an old friend’s daughter running those tinhorns out of town. I’ll have new tenants in there long before three months have passed.”

Longarm muttered, “One big happy family, unless you ride in from somewhere else, eh?”

Then he reined in near the clump of boxelder as the two youths stood up warily, fishing poles drooping. Longarm smiled down at the one he recognized by name and said, “Howdy, Nero. I reckon that other lawman told you we were looking for a little white boy and his momma, didn’t he?”

Nero said, “Sessuh. We never seen he momma but we mind bitty Timmy. He be a nice friendly chile. He play marbles good for anybody bitty as him!”

Tim Sears Senior blurted out, “Damn it, if we told Timmy once we told a hundred times not to play over here by the tracks with these … ah, other children.”

Longarm hushed him with a warning look and said, “Let’s not worry about that right now. I’m trying to find out if these friends of Timmy can help us find him.”

Nero chimed in with the innocence of ignorance and a clear conscience. “Oh, me and Calvin here ain’t that bitty white boy’s friends. They let us play too. But they mostly plays together along the tracks. Bitty Timmy and that bigger white boy he call Howard.”

The kid called Calvin volunteered, “That big boy, Howard, he be mean. Scare my baby sister half to death, shaking his pink dick at her!”

Chapter 18

So Longarm wondered, even as he was riding on, why he was riding on. It was hot and muggy down there along the railroad service road, with the only sound, save for themselves and the sandy cropping of their horse’s hooves, the occasional rattlesnake buzz of a big gray prairie grasshopper. Everything at all connected with the lynching of Dancing Dave Loman pointed to him being a not-so-innocent fellow victim of a mob that seemed to have rough justice on its side.

Unless everyone was lying. Dr. Langdon Down, Nurse Calder, and of course Rose Burnside had been wrong about at least one Mongoloid idiot. For a full-grown but immature-looking man who exposed any sort of erection to little colored girls seemed capable of at least a half-ass try with a pretty white lady he knew better.

On the other hand, whether the late Howard Bubblehead Burnside had deserved to be locked up in an asylum or dangled from a railroad trestle, the fact remained that a material witness to the Mongoloid’s mad actions had just vanished, along with his mother, which couldn’t be called rough justice or even common sense.

Nobody riding with Longarm that afternoon could come up with even a wild notion why anyone would want to kidnap little Timmy, let alone his mother. Tim Sears Senior said, “Nobody had any motive to keep you from questioning our boy, Deputy Long. His mother and me went over it all with him at breakfast, knowing you’d be asking about his encounter with the idiot in the churchyard that day. I know you may know more about asking questions. I heard you talking to those colored boys back yonder. But what’s the worst thing Timmy could have told you about that crazy Bubblehead Burnside that we didn’t all know already?”

Longarm said, “I keep finding out things I never knew before. By asking questions others may not have thought to ask, no offense. For example, two grown women who must have been whistled at in their time were both convinced Howard Burnside was innocent of any feelings in the dick he scared that innocent little colored gal with. Have any of you gents ever thought to delve into the secret lives of unfortunates such as Bubblehead Burnside?”

Remington Ramsay said the thought of that drooling idiot with a hard-on was sort of unsettling. Another rider opined, “It’s no wonder that Sunday school teacher screamed!”

There came a general murmur of agreement. Longarm was the only one in the bunch who couldn’t shake the feeling he was missing something. Something so simple a little boy who could barely read and write might have been able to lead the way … not to what, but to who!

Keeping his thoughts to himself, not knowing who might be listening, Longarm started cutting mental patterns in a whole new way, trying to see who’d fit them best.

Unless they’d run off together to join the circus, Timmy and his mother had been abducted, or worse, before the kid could tell him something. So the question before the house was not what Timmy might have known, but what he could have known.

Someone said the sunflower windmill out ahead was the Diamond B. Longarm wasn’t sure he cared if Remington Ramsay didn’t. He went on cutting patterns as they all rode on. He told himself to forget whether Bubblehead had gotten it into that poor murdered gal or not. Timmy couldn’t have been an authority on such matters. He’d never said he saw his oversized playmate doing shit. It didn’t matter whether that poor Mongoloid had meant to kill their Sunday school teacher or, hell, even if the dirty deed had been done by somebody else! Timmy Sears had pointed Bubblehead out. Bubblehead had been arrested for the crime and then lynched. Neither of those cowhands riding in the other way had seen anybody. But what if Bubblehead had been innocent and the real murderer had been afraid Timmy might say something to give him away?

“That would make more than one village idiot,” Longarm muttered to himself. For a killer who got away clean and had them hang another in his place would have to be dumb as all get-out to risk yet another crime.

On the other hand, the prisons were filled to overflowing with old boys who just hadn’t been able to resist going back for yet another raid on that same fool bank, stage line, or whatever. A man who thought your average Sunday school teacher might welcome his advances was doubtless capable of thinking a little kid was on to him.

They swung west across a cattle guard as what sounded like all those bloodhounds after Uncle Tom’s daughter bayed at them for a short spell, then fell silent when somebody shrilled at them in a female voice. Longarm was still considering other patterns as he spied Fox Bancroft and some of her hands lined up on the veranda of her long sprawling sod mansion. It wasn’t too clear how a murderer more cunning than most with a lot to hide fit the few solid facts they had to go on.

To begin with, abducting a small boy and a grown woman off the main shopping street in broad daylight was pushing clever to impossible, and why might a killer that desperate wait so long?

Longarm recalled with some chagrin how he’d given any killer at the crowded coroner’s inquest plenty of advance notice he was aiming to interview the kid. So the killer or killers had had all night to simply knock on the front door of the Sears house and do the whole family in, under cover of darkness, with nobody able to hazard a tight guess as to the time they did it or which way anyone might have come or gone.

He reined in, distracted, as Remington Ramsay was telling Fox Bancroft and her own riders what they were doing out her way.

Fox said, “It pains me to say it. But I can’t blame it on Deacon Knox or his two sidekicks and one play-pretty. I was gracious enough to give them time to pack, and the four of them left this morning on that northbound combination. I asked.”

As Longarm dismounted to tether his bay to the rail out front, he casually asked just when she and her own riders might have left town that morning.

The redhead answered just as casually, “Never left town this morning. Rode home right after you and me parted friendly after our little game of cards. It costs money to stay overnight in town, and my poor daddy never raised no fools to leave this spread to. Spent the night in my own free bed. Had Curly bed down at the livery and make sure those rascals caught that train the way I’d told ‘em to. You remember Curly, don’t you?”

Longarm gravely replied, “I do. You say Curly was in town this morning?”

She nodded and said, “Got home around ten. He’s over to the corrals, doing Porky Shaw’s old chores. Do you want to talk to him? I mean Curly, not Porky, of course.”

Longarm met her mocking gaze and said, “I thought we’d agreed on Porky Shaw. I’ve no call to pester your new boss wrangler if he left town long before my other witness and his mother disappeared. I mean to work north of your spread and the Rocking Seven across the way to circle far and wide, scouting for sign. You know your own range, Miss Fox. I’m open to suggestions as to our best route through the trackless wilderness clear of the township.”

She said, “You’ll find such tracks as anyone left where they had to cross such sandy draws as there are in these parts. Let me rustle up fresh mounts for everybody and we just might catch the sons of bitches!”

But they didn’t. They rode high and they rode low in a wide weary circle of close to twenty miles before they all wound up back in the Red Rooster in Pawnee Junction, convinced that nobody but a really good Pawnee war party could have carried young Timmy and his mother across all that rolling grass, dissected by ribbons of uncrossed sand. It seemed just as obvious no Indian war party had passed through Pawnee Junction in recent memory.

Once Tim Sears Senior had heard about those mysterious strangers arriving in town that morning, he demanded a house-to-house search of the whole town, insisting, “If they never rid out with my woman and my boy, they have to be holding them somewhere here in town!”

Pronto Cross, who’d naturally joined the bunch in the Red Rooster as soon as they rode in, said soothingly, “That ain’t hardly practical, Tim. To begin with, we don’t know those strangers in dark duds have done anything to anybody. I have my own boys out canvassing. They’d been out asking questions since early this morning. Doc Forbes says he can’t issue any search warrants as the county coroner, and old Kiowa Jack says we need the circuit judge, not him or the J.P., if we want to go poking in anywhere we ain’t invited.”

Fox Bancroft sipped some suds sort of daintily and suggested, “What if we were to just spread out and ask polite, from door to door? Wouldn’t we be able to narrow things down a heap betwixt the ones who invite us in for a look around and the ones acting as if they have something to hide?”

There came a murmur of agreement. Longarm could have pointed out that lots of folks had lots of things to hide, from dirty pictures to a just plain messy house. But he never did. For there was some merit to the redhead’s casual approach to law and order. He knew half the innocent smiles around him were masking the secret thoughts of many a Minute Man. It might be interesting to let them all have some slack and see just who might find out what, doing what, and to whom. So he said he had to visit the Western Union and go home for a bite of supper, agreeing to meet up with everybody there at the Red Rooster after sundown.

He was holding out, of course. He did ride over to the Western Union, where he picked up a few answers to his earlier wires, though none told him to arrest anybody.

Then he rode back to the boardinghouse, stabled the pony he’d borrowed from the Diamond B next door, and let little Ellen Brent and the Widow MacUlric fix him up with cold meat and warmed-over soup as they asked him more questions than he had time to answer.

He told them, “I’ve no idea where Mrs. Sears and her boy wound up. Whilst everyone else hunts under the rugs and compost heaps for them, I mean to search for anyone with a good reason to grab them before I could talk to the boy. Could you by any chance let me into your library after hours, Miss Ellen?”

They both knew he had a spare key on him, but the brunette smiled innocently and allowed she’d be proud to go over yonder and open up for him if he needed to read something.

He said, “I do, ma’am. I need to look over your library copy of the county directory. You do have one, don’t you?”

When she allowed they had copies of most everything ever printed in those parts he said, “I was hoping you might. I didn’t ask about the directories others might have around Courthouse Square because I hate to have folks reading over my shoulder when I ain’t sure which side they might be on.”

Ellen and Mavis MacUlric agreed they felt honored to be on his side. But Ellen was the one who wanted to screw him as soon as she had him alone over at the library after closing time.

He kissed her and fingered her some, but explained he really had wanted to study that directory before sundown. So she stamped a pretty foot and rustled it up for him, demanding, “What do you expect to find, you brute, a signed confession from the kidnapper?”

He sat at her desk, broke his notebook out of a vest pocket, and began to write down names as he quickly moved a fingernail down the many more names of registered voters and property owners listed by the county. He was able to eliminate most right off, of course.

When he said so, Ellen wanted him to take her downstairs and show her some appreciation.

Longarm sighed and said, “There’s nothing I’d rather do tonight in the way of good clean fun, honey. But a mighty dangerous killer is loose in these parts and I have to stop him lest he kill some more. Thanks to you I’ve narrowed my list of possibles down a heap, but not nearly enough.”

He waved his notebook. “When a township starts from the ground up, there’s a tendency for deeply religious folks to build or rent close to the church of their persuasion, whilst folks who ain’t so religious tend to send their kids to the nearest Sunday school of any church that ain’t too unsettling. So I mean to start with white Anglo-Saxon surnames within a spit and a holler of First Calvinist. You can see that leaves me many a door to knock on. I might save some time in the end if I commenced with the principal of your public school. Do you know who that might be?”

She did, but said Mr. Graves was visiting kin back East while his school was closed for the summer. Longarm scowled so blackly she asked, “What did you want to ask him, Custis?”

When he told her, she laughed and said, “Oh, that’s easy. I told you the school and this library were under the same school board here in Pawnee Junction. We naturally keep their old records down in our cellar, having ever so much more room. What did you want to look up? I don’t think that Mongoloid idiot ever attended our public school here in town.”

Longarm was already on his way with her desk lamp, saying, “I know for a fact poor Howard Burnside was never allowed anywhere but that nice gal’s Sunday school. This awkwardly long list includes all the gents with the first name Howard who live an easy walk from First Calvinist. Gents tend to name their oldest boy after themselves. I might narrow things down more if I listed just the possible Howards with poor school records or, better yet, expulsion records. A big dumb white boy looks like a big dumb white boy to colored kids who might be afraid of him.”

She followed him down the stairs, saying, “But I thought that little Timmy said he saw a bigger boy named Howard that awful day at the church and … Oh, good heavens, you’re so clever I could just eat you all up!”

He felt sort of clever himself by the time he’d pawed through a lot of old report cards to narrow his list down to a dozen. So he showed his appreciation for the helpful little gal dog-style on that nearby army cot before he left just at sundown.

There just wasn’t time to let her eat him all up, dad blast it.

Chapter 19

Longarm found young Howard Simmons sitting out front on the porch with his parents in the gloaming as things cooled off and the first wishing star winked on above.

He introduced himself to Howard Simmons Senior, and said he’d like a word alone with the big fourteen-year-old about some other kids who might have been up to some mischief.

The Simmons boy went willingly with Longarm out to the front gate. Longarm smiled down in the gathering dusk and said, “I reckon you know why I’ve come for you, Howard. I’d talked to Nero, Calvin, and that little colored gal you scared that time, just funning with her.”

The kid was either a mighty fine actor who’d flunked the fifth grade, or he meant it when he said, “I don’t know no Nero Calhoun and my folks don’t allow me to play with colored kids.”

Longarm said, “Timmy Sears says he saw you coming out of First Calvinist the day Miss Mildred got hurt. You want to tell me about that?”

The normal-looking but likely slow-witted youth brightened and replied, “Oh, you’re talking about that Sunday school teacher who got stabbed by the Chinee! I heard my elders talking about that. I don’t know why anybody says he saw me at her church. I go to Saint Paul’s Lutheran.”

Longarm led him back to the porch and told his parents the boy had been a great help to him. Then he got out of there before they could ask him how. He checked his list under a street lamp to forge on. But he had much the same luck three more times with other Howards, then at the home of a Howard Masterson who’d named his only son after old John Brown of Kansas.

Then he came to where the widowed Mrs. Howard Tendring lived all alone with her only child, Howard Tendring III. When the poor old widow woman came to her front door by candlelight, she turned out to be a right handsome brunette in her late thirties, with one hell of a set of legs under her, judging by the soft light shining through her thin pongee robe. She looked flustered and said that she hadn’t been expecting gentlemen callers. Longarm ticked the brim of his hat to her and said he was sorry to drop by on a lady after she’d let her hair down for the night, but that he was the law and that he had to talk to her boy, Howard.

She called back over her shoulder to the lad who’d been expelled from school for bullying the smaller kids and threatening his teacher. As they waited she said, “I hope he hasn’t done anything wrong again. I spoke to him sharply about teasing that little colored girl, and he promised me he’d never do it again.”

Longarm never let on her words were news to him. He calmly asked who’d come to her about that accusation. He wasn’t at all surprised when she told him Pronto Cross himself had warned her he’d have to run the boy in if he ever did anything like that again.

When Howard Tendring III loomed in the candlelight behind his far prettier mother, Longarm could see why smaller kids were tense around him. The weak-chinned lout with eyebrows that met in the middle stood over six feet tall on his bare feet and had fists as big as your average blacksmith. He was dressed in jeans and gray undershirt. So Longarm allowed a private chat on the front steps would do.

The sullen-looking kid stepped out, and his mother left their front door open but stepped away from it inside. So Longarm was free to ask the same trick questions. But when he started by saying he’d just come from seeing little Timmy Sears, the sudden flash of candle glow on steel was all that saved him!

Longarm sucked in his gut as he crawfished from a sweeping stab that would have done old Jim Bowie proud. As he felt the end rail of the porch with the cheeks of his ass, he saw the concealed weapon was almost as long and surely as sharp as your average Bowie knife. So he grabbed the big kid’s wrist at the end of the second swing and slapped openhanded, hard, with his free palm.

Howard Tendring III let go of the knife and started running, barefoot, into the night. He crashed through his mother’s picket fence and just kept running, with Longarm close behind.

Longarm had long legs and less worry about where he planted his pounding heels in the dark. But the barefoot boy out ahead was wild with sheer terror and as anxious to get away as Longarm was to catch him. So damned if the distance between them didn’t seem to grow wider as Longarm struggled to get the cuffs off the back of his gun rig on the fly and willed his fool legs to run faster.

Then a female voice cried out through the night, “I’ll hold him and you brand him, Custis!”

So that was about what they did. Fox Bancroft roped damned fine for a woman throwing sideways at a lope in such tricky light. Her loop snapped tight as she slid her pony to a calf-busting squat on its haunches, and Howard Tendring III was flat on his ass in the roadside weeds before he could free himself from her oiled and braided hemp.

Then Longarm was on top of the writhing and cussing young monster, and it was still a near thing, taking such a spiteful kicking spitter without busting his damned skull.

Fox Bancroft helped by keeping her line tight as the throw-rope pinned the youth’s powerful arms to his sides. Longarm came close to singing soprano for a spell when the unruly schoolboy kicked hard, with skill, but only bruised a thigh.

Then Longarm had the mean young shit face-down with his hands cuffed behind him. He grabbed a fistful of dark hair and banged the kid’s face against the ground a couple of times as he told him firmly but not unkindly to cut it out before somebody got hurt.

The nearby mounted redhead asked for her rope back. So Longarm loosened the noose and slipped it off over the kid’s head as he knelt on sweet Howard’s spine. Fox Bancroft was whipping in and recoiling when Mrs. Tendring came shrilling down the path, weeping and wailing about her precious child.

She was still in her thin robe, and she sure smelled nice as she hugged Longarm from behind, her tits rubbing all over the back of his vest while she said there was some mistake and that she’d do anything, anything, if only he’d let her darling boy go.

Then Fox Bancroft had dismounted to join them, saying, “Go home and put some clothes on, Felicia Tendring. This federal lawman never would have come for your foulmouthed brat if he hadn’t done something. What did her foulmouthed brat do, Custis? We’ve been looking all over for you since you never came back to tell us what happened to that other kid and his own mother.”

Longarm rose to his feet with Howard Tendring III, despite the combined efforts of mother and son, as he soberly said, “You have to eat the apple a bite at a time. I don’t reckon this boy knows what happened to that other boy. You don’t know where we might find your young friend Timmy, do you, Howard?”

To which his young prisoner replied with a sob, “Screw Timmy Sears. Screw all of you! You’re all against me! All of you! Everybody hates me and I hate everybody, so there!”

Felicia Tendring gasped, let go of Longarm from behind, and came around his front to slap the kid’s face.

Her son spat, “Don’t you go hitting on me, Mom! I’ll cut you if you hit me like that again!”

His mother covered her face with her hands and began to bawl like a frightened baby. Fox Bancroft softly said, “Go home and put those clothes on. You can talk to your boy later, after things have calmed down. You’re taking him to the town marshal’s now, aren’t you, Deputy Long?”

Longarm had been thinking about that. He said, “The sheriff’s county jail is built more solid and fireproof. I reckon I’ll turn him in to the county and see where they want to go from there. There don’t seem any just cause to charge him with anything federal. We’d have a time proving he had anything to do with the death of Dancing Dave Loman, and the murder of Mildred Powell is a matter for your own grand jury to decide.”

Fox Bancroft gasped, “You’re charging this kid with that crime? I thought Mildred Powell was attacked by Bubblehead Burnside! Didn’t little Timmy Sears say he saw that feeble-minded cuss coming out of the cellar door whilst the dying gal was still screaming inside?”

Longarm said, “No. Not if you read over the transcript of his kid talk carefully. Timmy said he saw Howard at the scene of the crime. So they added two and two to get seven when they asked if he didn’t mean Bubblehead. Timmy was likely telling the simple truth, as he saw it, when he simply told them a generous-hearted young lady had told them never to use the cruel nickname Bubblehead for another Howard entirely!”

Felicia Tendring told her baby she’d get dressed and go see a friend or lawyer called George about his plight. As she turned away she sweetly added, “Don’t sign anything. Don’t tell them anything, honey. Uncle George and I will have you out in no time!”

As she scurried away in her slippers, Longarm turned to Fox and quietly asked, “Uncle George?”

The redhead shrugged and said, “Ask this one. George is a more common name than Howard. How did you figure out that this was the Howard little Timmy really meant, by the way?”

Longarm said, “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you along the way as we march this one over to the county jail.”

So she led her paint pony afoot as the two of them escorted the handcuffed Howard Tendring III the quarter mile or less to the jail. When Longarm got to how he’d had trouble buying a sweet-natured and baby-sexed Mongoloid as a slashing sex maniac who’d exposed himself to a younger gal earlier, Howard Tendring III complained, “I never just supposed nothing. I meant to give ‘em what I knew they both wanted. But they were teasing me, like alley cats in heat, smiling dirty and then trying to twist away at the last minute!”

Fox Bancroft softly gasped, “Oh, my God!”

Longarm told the monster, “Your mother told you to save your tales of woe for your family lawyer, Howard. Old Kiowa Jack or somebody from his office will take down all you have to say for yourself while your mother and your lawyer listen in, see?”

Other folks were coming out to their front gates as Longarm and the well-known local stockwoman passed on foot with the neighborhood bully. Fox Bancroft asked why the little shit couldn’t spill his guts along the way if he was of a mind to.

Longarm said, “Confession is good for the soul, but it can play bob with the prosecution in a delicate case. I don’t mean this here slashing Romeo is delicate. I mean he’s under-age and they’re going to try to sell the jury on his being loco en la cabeza. I never might have come anywhere close to him if he and some other Howards hadn’t been mighty slow and bothersome in your public school.”

She made a wry face and said, “I sure feel sorry for poor Rose Burnside. We thought her kid brother, Bubblehead, was the only village idiot we had to worry about. Can you imagine how she must have felt when they came for him, refusing to believe her when she swore he couldn’t be the one they were after?”

Longarm said, “Nope. Neither can you. Nobody but Miss Rose will ever know what it felt like to have that particular sweet and harmless problem child of voting age on her hands.”

Closer to the center of town, they were joined by Tim Sears Senior and Remington Ramsay. The hardware man said, “We heard you caught up with somebody down this way and, good grief, is that the Tendring boy you seem to have arrested there?”

Longarm replied, “Yep. I had to. The charge is murder most foul and attempted rape. This is the Howard little Timmy meant.”

The missing child’s father shook a fist in the young prisoner’s face and demanded, “What have you done with my wife and child, you murderous simp?”

Howard Tendring III told him to go screw himself. Longarm blocked the outraged father’s backhand swing, and the big strong hardware man pulled Sears away, soothing him the way you calmed a spooked critter.

Longarm said, “I doubt he knows, Tim. Help us get him over to the county jail and we’ll study on who’s holding your wife and your boy.”

As the growing procession moved on, it was Remington Ramsay who asked what Longarm had in mind about the missing mother and son.

Longarm sighed and said, “If I knew anything for certain, I’d be proud to share it with you. By the way, did you know what all that railroad paper on Mavis MacUlric’s walls is worth? I do because I wired a railroad stock slicker about Credit Mobilier earlier.”

The hardware mogul said, “It’s not really that good for papering walls. I offered her par value on the matured bonds. She’s too smart to think a construction company pays dividends to shareholders after it’s been out of business for years.”

Before Longarm could ask why anyone would want to pay anything for any worthless railroad paper, they were joined by Pronto Cross who demanded, “What on earth are you doing with this lad in handcuffs? I know young Howard and his family, Longarm! He may be a tad unruly, but you can’t be serious about him kidnapping Timmy Sears!”

The big kid lowered his face, as if ashamed to be seen by anyone he knew, as Longarm said, “Ain’t holding him on kidnapping. It will be up to your local courts to decide, after I turn him in to them, but I’d say he’s an easy win for murder in the first, whether little Timmy can testify against him or not. If push comes to shove, I can come up with three other kids who stand ready to identify him as the one Timmy meant when he mentioned his overgrown playmate Howard.”

Pronto Cross said, “Oh, Lord, I’d best rustle up more help whilst you get him over to the jail, and bar all the outside doors and windows. For whether you are right or wrong, there’s liable to be hell to pay as soon as the Minute Men learn they might have hung the wrong half-wit the other night!

Chapter 20

Sheriff Wigan’s two deputies were surprised, but willing to hold young Howard Tendring till their boss got back to town to tell them differently. The kid still refused to talk politely to anybody but his momma or his Uncle George. When one of the deputies backhanded him, Longarm said, “Leave him be. His mother and her lawyer, lover, or whatever ought to be along any time now.”

So they locked him up in one of the patent cells and commenced to douse the inside lamps and get set for anyone else who might come to call that evening.

Fox Bancroft asked Longarm which window he wanted her to man. He said, “No offense, but you ain’t a man, and seeing you have that pony out front, I’ve got a better chore for you.”

He ripped two pages out of his notebook and spread them on a windowsill to jot hasty messages by the light of the street lamp outside.

Handing them to the redhead, he explained, “I’d be obliged if you could send these wires for me at the Western Union and not show ‘em to anyone else you meet along the way.”

She started to argue, nodded soberly, and left Longarm, the two sheriff’s deputies, and Remington Ramsay feeling sort of lonesome in the county jail.

Ramsay joined Longarm at the open window near the bolted front door to muse, “Pronto could be wrong. It’s not as if they had anyone all that ambitious egging them on. I’m pretty sure Porky Shaw was the main ringleader last time, and everyone on both sides knows what you did to Porky Shaw.”

Longarm said, “Porky had a pal with a ten-gauge Greener who shot up my room. Nobody on the side of the law has seen fit to tell me who he is. Let’s talk about him, Ramsay.”

The big hardware man said, “The reason I told Mavis MacUlric I’d buy her worthless railroad bonds at par is that I tried to help her when I first heard she was having financial trouble. She acted like I was trying to buy her fair white body, for Chrissake!”

“Weren’t you?” asked Longarm dryly.

Ramsay snapped, “Damn it, my intentions are pure toward Mavis MacUlric. I’ve never had the time or inclination to chase skirts for the hell of it. I was true to my late wife while she lasted, and I was there when Martin MacUlric died of that heart stroke after his own long and happy marriage.”

“That made you hot for his widow?” demanded Longarm, who’d noticed on his own that Mavis MacUlric wasn’t suffering from warts on her nose or a flat chest.

Ramsay said, “Call me hardheaded when it comes to romance. But a man with horse sense can fall for a handsome woman who’s been proven a good wife as easy as he can fall for a spinster schoolmarm or some divorced gal who might well have been the one in the wrong!”

“I’m sure you and Miss Mavis will be very happy,” Longarm replied in a dismissive tone. “I never asked about your love life. I asked for some straight talk about those Minute Men. Before you say you don’t know shit, I read that book you had printed up about the carving of this whole county from a howling wilderness. Are you now trying to say you were never invited to join?”

The still-young old-timer of the Sand Hill Country smiled thinly and confessed, “I might have been doing some of the inviting, if you want to hear about the Cheyenne Scare of ‘78.”

He stared out at the ominously empty and dimly lit courthouse square as he added in a softer tone, “My God, it seems like yesterday. But the county was half as settled and barely incorporated. The state capital at Lincoln seemed so far away and those renegade Cheyenne were said to be so close!”

Longarm firmly stated, “Dull Knife and his breakaway band would have headed for a leper colony before they’d get within a day’s ride of that nearby Pawnee Agency. Aside from that, they weren’t wearing paint and the last thing they were looking for was another fight with our kind.”

He got out two cheroots and handed one to the hardware man as he added morosely, “They got one just the same, when the army caught up with ‘em over to the west. You hardy pioneers organized your own half-ass militia to fight Indians?”

Ramsay waited until Longarm had lit his cheroot for him before he explained, “Just for that one emergency. I’m afraid it was my own idea to call us Minute Men. As a history buff I was thinking of how the real Minute Men had been organized back in the 1700s to deal with an earlier red menace. We disbanded the next spring, of course.”

Longarm blew smoke out his nostrils and demanded, “What was Porky Shaw, a slow reader?”

Ramsay sighed and said, “That’s exactly how you could describe him and some few of the others in these parts. Militia meetings are fun when there’s no war on. I had a serious business to run. Most of the others who’d started the Minute Men with me dropped out for much the same reasons. Sitting around a campfire with jugs seems less attractive to men with serious chores to occupy their hands and minds.”

“Then how come you respectable folk here in Pawnee Junction refuse to tell the law who’s left in the ragged-ass bunch that’s left?”

Ramsay shrugged and replied, “It’s more that you’re an outsider than the fact that you’re a lawman. Everyone in town likely suspects a few friends and neighbors still meet in secret to ride at night. Nobody who’s no longer an active member could say for sure who might be doing what, and to be fair, most of the times the Minute Men have taken the law in their own hands, they’ve gone after someone who had it coming.”

“You don’t have a town marshal or a county sheriff, huh?” Longarm demanded dryly.

The local man said, “You can see what sort of sheriff we have. Old Wigan is a political hack who spends more time down at his local party headquarters in Ogallala than here, when he’s not gold-bricking with his in-laws out to the Rocking Seven.”

“What about Pronto Cross?” asked Longarm, adding, “I understand your board of aldermen paid good money to import a town-tamer with a rep.”

Ramsay said, “We did. I was there and I voted for the motion. Pronto Cross has calmed our Saturday nights in town considerable and nobody has insulted a woman in public for quite a spell. But I hardly have to tell a lawman how many times the statute laws just don’t seem to apply to a total son of a bitch.”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “You’re talking about habitual mean drunks, wife beaters, untidy neighbors in general. This may come as a shock, but neighborhood vigilante gangs always seem to start out as a means of dealing with pests the regular law can’t seem to cope with.”

He blew more smoke out his nostrils and snorted, “They go from whupping wife beaters to burning out suspected stock thieves or lynching unpopular suspects. You ain’t ready to tell me who’s in charge now, right?”

Ramsay said, “Wrong. I just don’t know. I’m only half sure about a few of the lesser lights. I think one of my yard hands is still a member. He said he wasn’t there when they lynched Bubblehead Burnside. I asked. That’s not saying anyone told me the truth.”

Longarm spotted the willowy form of Fox Bancroft striding afoot across the square with two taller figures, both male, one town and one country.

All three were packing repeating carbines at port arms. Longarm unbolted the front door to let them in anyway.

The cowhand backing his redheaded boss was the kid they called Curly. Longarm was just as glad Curly hadn’t chosen the other side. His saddle gun was a seven-shot Spencer .52, and he wore a six-gun on his right hip.

The other man who’d crossed the square with the gal was the skinny printer Preston of the Pawnee Junction Advertiser. He said he’d always wanted to be a newspaper reporter instead of a type sticker, and added that the mob had been gathering in the Red Rooster when Pronto Cross had come in and read them the riot act. Preston couldn’t say where they’d gone after the town marshal dispersed them from the saloon. The newspaperman was packing a Winchester ‘73. The gal had a somewhat older but just as deadly Winchester Yellowboy with brass receiver.

She said she’d sent his wires and ordered yet another loyal hand to ride out to the Diamond B for additional help.

Preston said, “Oh, please, Lord, let me live through this first big scoop as the snowballs start flying. Where do you want me posted, Uncle Sam?”

Longarm told the well-armed newspaperman to watch the next window over, and moved back through the darkness to reorganize their defenses now that he had seven gun muzzles to position. He figured Curly, Sears, and the two sheriff’s deputies could hold the more solid back. Anyone rushing the rear door would have one avenue of approach across the stable yard, thanks to brick walls running back to the stable and carriage house. But it was black as a bitch out yonder until one of the deputies suggested, and Longarm approved, lighting an outside lamp that hung facing them from the stable wall. Nobody on either side would be able to put it out without exposing himself in the open. A marksman could doubtless shoot it out from inside the jail, but it seemed safe from anyone hitting it with a bullet around a corner.

Longarm rejoined the three others up front. There were no side windows through the thick brick walls for anyone to shoot in or out through. Longarm posted Ramsay and the newspaperman on the far side of the front door. He told Fox Bancroft to stay closer to him, and chided her gently for ever coming back.

She said, “I told you I sent for my riders out to the Diamond B, and I have to be with my men when they get here, don’t I?”

Longarm sighed and said, “Those riders who ain’t riding with your local Minute Men, you mean. Ramsay just owned up that he suspects one of his hired hands. The trouble with these secret societies is that they’re so blamed secret. You say you got them wires off for me?”

She said she had, adding, “My boys will be here long before those state troopers or the federal deputies from Ogallala could hope to make it!”

The newspaperman on the far side of the front door, who seemed to be taking notes, opined, “They’d better get here even sooner, for yonder comes our sort of determined-looking neighborhood uplifting society and … Sweet Jesus, I didn’t know we had that many interested in one rotten kid!”

Longarm snubbed out his smoke on the sill as he counted roughly two platoons coming across the square in a line of skirmish, with waving torches as well as hooded masks. Remington Ramsay softly called out, “I knew it. Feed sack or no feed sack, I recognize the patched overalls of that rascal who works for me. I mean, that rascal who used to work for me.”

Longarm called back, “Douse that smoke and let them guess where to aim. Don’t challenge the one you recognize by name unless I ask you to. Mobs are like bananas. They’re yellow and like to hang in a bunch. Once you single a cuss out, he’s inclined to back down or come at you sudden. I want you all to let me do the talking, hear?”

Nobody argued. Longarm’s mouth felt a mite dry too as he watched the ragged line of fifty-odd masked men advancing at a slow but steady pace.

He growled, “Ain’t near a tenth of the grown men in and about your dinky town, Ramsay. Where’s all the rest of ‘em? You reckon they’re scared of our brave little band of big bad bully boys?”

Ramsay answered simply, “Yes. As a history buff I can tell you a heap of history would read different if all the little kids stood up to the bully boys who smoke corn silk and bust windows. The bully breed gets the hex on the rest of us early, because our mommas teach us to be nice before they ever send us to school to meet up with meaner brats.”

“Reminds me of the one we got locked up in the back,” said Longarm. “It’s sort of odd how gents with no respect for law and order seem so anxious to string up outlaws.”

He told everyone to get ready to move out of line with his or her dark window before he cocked his .44-40 and called out, “That’s about close enough, boys. Who’s in charge and what’s this all about?”

A Minute Man standing close to another with a sawed-off, double-barrel ten-gauge aimed politely, called out, “You know what we’re here for, Longarm. We want the murderous half-wit who murdered Mildred Powell. We don’t want no judge saying you can’t hang mean kids!”

To which Longarm replied in a disgusted tone, “Do tell? I thought you boys had already done that. How many times were you planning on hanging a prisoner on the same charge, with no warrant and no trial?”

His words seemed to fall on ears made deaf by hard liquor as well as earlier orations, judging from the angry rumbles up and down the line.

Another voice called, “Hand him over. Now. Unless you was planning on doing the rope dance beside him!”

Longarm called back, “I’ve sent for both state and federal lawmen, speaking of rope dances. If I were you boys I’d quit whilst I was ahead. You’ve already got the blood of a harmless half-wit on your hands. If you can’t see Bubblehead Burnside was innocent, what in blue blazes do you want with young Howard Tendring?”

He could tell from some puzzled murmurs that he’d scored a point. So he drew a bead on that one with the Greener shotgun as he called out cheerfully, “Go home and let the judge and jury decide which one of them it was.”

Then he took a deep breath and called, “All but you, Pronto Cross. I want you to drop that gun and step this way with your hands filled with sky!”

It was just as well he’d yelled that well back and to one side. For the one holding the ten-gauge wasn’t the one who swung a Winchester muzzle up to bore a whole lot of holes through the blackness Longarm was just to one side of. Then Longarm fired back at a clear target illuminated by street lamp and torchlight before the one with the ten-gauge could come unstuck and blast away with both barrels.

By then, of course, Longarm had moved down to the next window to shove Fox Bancroft to the safety of the floor as both Remington Ramsay and Preston fired at the shotgun man, to flop him screaming and kicking across the face-down form of the treacherous bastard Longarm had just killed.

Then things got noisy as all get-out for a spell.

Chapter 21

It got tougher to hit targets that were crawfishing away from you and filling the air between with the gunsmoke of their return fire. So as the redcoats had noticed at Lexington Green (according to old Remington Ramsay later) you could fire right into a raggedy mob and only lay a handful on the ground before they’d retreated clean out of sight.

As the smoke cleared, nine figures and a whole lot of smoldering torches lay strewn across the otherwise empty square. From the way at least four of them were flopping and moaning, they’d likely live.

Longarm was glad. Dead men tell no tales, and he still had a lot of loose ends to wrap up around these parts.

The same natural feelings that kept most from standing up to the scowling and swaggering seemed to encourage the sweeter-natured pups to snap at the heels of a big bad wolf in retreat with its old tail between its legs. So in no time at all the square began to fill up some more with a more jovial crowd.

Longarm said, “Cover me,” and stepped out, .44-40 in hand, to move out as far as the ones they’d dropped closer to the front door. Fox Bancroft tagged along uninvited. He hadn’t ordered her to cover him from the jail, she explained demurely.

He smiled thinly and rolled the one who’d had the ten-gauge off the face-down leader of the mob. He hunkered to remove the mask and expose the face of a total stranger—to him, at least.

Then the redhead who hailed from those parts gasped and said she knew him. He was Swen Bergen, who ran the municipal corral across from Longarm’s boardinghouse.

Longarm allowed that answered more than one question, and reached out to yank the pillowcase off the head and shoulders of the late Pronto Cross. The erstwhile town marshal and mob leader was staring up surprised as hell about being dead.

Longarm wasn’t nearly as surprised as Fox Bancroft. She gasped, “Oh, what a two-faced liar! He only dispersed that crowd from the Red Rooster so he could take command and lead them against us on the sly! He reminds me of a boy I went to school with, only worse! But how did you know, Custis? I heard you call his very name, just as he opened up on you, the dumb thing!”

Longarm said, “When a man keeps telling you things that just don’t seem to make sense, you commence to suspect he must be lying to you. When a man keeps lying to you, you begin to suspect he must be hiding something from you. He didn’t want me paying enough mind to him to get suspicious, so he told me mysterious strangers had got off the train from Ogallala. Had he thought tighter about his made-up menace, he’d have had this other rogue say they’d hired some livery stock. But he must have taken me for simple. He never accounted for them riding off or having any place to stay in such a small town.”

As they strode over toward another downed Minute Man, Longarm added, “Pronto said he’d seen his mysterious strangers getting off the morning train. But you told me you posted your own rider, Curly, to make sure those crooked gamblers got aboard that same northbound train to leave town. So that left me with conflicting stories, unless poor Pronto here or Curly inside needed eyeglasses.”

As he hunkered down to unmask the swamper from the Red Rooster, the redheaded gal gasped, “Remind me never to fib to you! For you surely do pay attention, and as soon as one does, it doesn’t make sense that the town law would notice possible outlaws getting off a train whilst my poor country boy Curly would pay no mind to a couple of sinister total strangers after I’d told him to keep his eyes peeled!”

The swamper was dead too. As Longarm straightened up, he spied Doc Forbes kneeling by a moaning cowhand his redheaded local guide knew as a rider off the Lazy Four to the southeast.

Longarm called out, “I need at least one in shape to talk when my fellow lawmen get off the train, Doc.”

Doc Forbes called back, “I can promise you three. Too early to say about Ned Danfield. One of you spine-shot him serious! Lord knows what an accountant was doing over this way with a fool sack over his head!”

Felicia Tendring, young Howard’s weeping mother, was coming their way, fully dressed, with a pasty-faced cuss in an undertaker’s suit who allowed he was the family lawyer.

The nice-looking mother of the really ugly-natured Howard Tendring III stared wildly about at the results of the short savage gunfight and blazed, “What have you done to my baby, you monster?”

Longarm ticked the brim of his hat to her and said, “Just saved his neck for the time being, ma’am.”

He turned to call out to his pals inside the jail, “Let the monster’s mother and Uncle George talk to him through the bars. I’ll be joining you directly, lest these other monsters demand a rematch!”

As he hunkered to identify another downed Minute Man, this one still breathing but unconscious, Fox Bancroft said, “You told me you’d caught Pronto in more than one big fib, Custis.”

Longarm called out, “Hey, Doc? When you got time I got another live one for you here.”

Then he straightened up and waved his gun muzzle toward the front door of the jail to herd the redhead that way as he explained, “His second unlikely tale was the one he told about little Timmy Sears and his mother. He told me the night of the coroner’s inquest that he’d have the boy over to his office the following morning for me to talk to. He did go to the boy’s house, and like Tim Senior inside says, they did agree to have little Timmy meet up with me at the town marshal’s office.”

As they strode together toward the county jail, Longarm swore under his breath and said, “I had no reason to suspect a known town-tamer with a good rep at the time. But I still wish I’d gone direct to the poor little kid’s home and to blazes with his bedtime. But I had no call to suspect skullduggery before Pronto told me, barefaced, how they’d been waiting for me at his office but stepped out to run some other errands in the middle of town.”

Fox Bancroft nodded soberly and said, “I was there when you all rode out to my spread, searching for the boy and his mother. But try as we might, we never cut sign as we searched for the missing pair and those strangers who’d likely … But Custis, if Curly never saw any sinister strangers getting off any train …”

“That’s about the size of it,” Longarm said grimly. The heavy door ahead gaped open for them as he added, “Unless Pronto’s local and likely innocent deputies were lying about a whole mess of local merchants and shopping folks, who’d have had to be lying instead? Not a living soul but Pronto Cross himself said they’d seen little Timmy and his poor mother leave the town lockup to do spit. Women and children don’t vanish into thin air on the streets of their own hometown in the middle of a workday. So like I said, as I tried in vain to find anyone else who’d back old Pronto’s unlikely stories, I commenced to get suspicious. He cinched it for me earlier this evening when he gave us some feeble excuse to run off some more as I was arresting yet another murderer of a town gal who’d been murdered within his jurisdiction! He didn’t seem to be around here the night the Minute Men came for that poor Burnside boy and, well, I may be slow but I do plod on till I plow up something.”

They stepped inside. Remington Ramsay asked if he thought it was over. Longarm said he thought it might be. But he wanted to hold the place tight until those state and federal lawmen arrived.

He said, “They’ll likely ask the railroad to run them up here from the main line aboard a special. It ain’t as if they have to worry about the tracks ahead, once that southbound I just missed gets down yonder in an hour or so.”

Tim Sears Senior came out from the back, almost sobbing, “That mean Tendring kid just told his mother and her lawyer that my boy had nothing to do with the murder of Mildred Powell. But why was our Timmy hanging about with that full-grown half-wit to begin with?”

Longarm told him gently, “Howard Tendring couldn’t get boys his own age to hang about with him. He and Timmy weren’t as far apart in mental prowess as they might have looked, walking railroad tracks and such. Your boy was naturally more innocent and less interested in why little boys and little gals were built different. I doubt anything you’d have to feel ashamed of took place. The big girl-crazy lout was paying less attention to a tagalong kid than the tagalong kid was paying to him.”

The worried father said, “We should have kept a tighter eye on our Timmy. Have you any idea where that two-faced Pronto Cross had been holding my wife and child, Deputy Long?”

Longarm nodded soberly and softly replied, “I wish there was some nicer way to say it, Tim. But Pronto Cross didn’t want your son to talk to me. So I fear we’re never going to find either your boy or his mother alive.”

Tim Sears Senior staggered as if he’d been punched in the head, and Fox Bancroft grabbed hold of him in a motherly way while she called Longarm an unfeeling brute.

Longarm nodded soberly and replied, “None of us here can feel Tim’s pain. Pronto Cross got off way too easy. But saying it never happened ain’t going to unhappen it, and we still have to find their remains.”

Tim Sears Senior sobbed, “My God, that son of a bitch could have buried them easy anywhere for miles around in those infernal sand hills!”

Longarm shook his head and pointed out, “No, he couldn’t. He’d have had to sneak them out of a busy town in broad day, and I for one would have noticed any buckboard he was driving.”

Turning to Remington Ramsay, he asked, “Is it possible you were the contractor who threw up the marshal’s office along with all the other public buildings, Oh, Pioneer?”

Ramsay nodded easily and said, “Sure, at cost. But before you ask, there are no secret rooms, nor space to sneak in one’s own, over at our modest town lockup.”

Longarm quietly asked, “Might it have a cellar, like your library?”

Ramsay said it did. Tim Sears Senior gasped, “Oh, Dear Lord!” and broke free of Fox Bancroft to dash out the front door. The redhead cried, “Now see what you’ve done, you unfeeling beast!” and tore out across the square after him.

The newspaperman, Preston, dithered, “I don’t know whether to run after them or stay here! I’m afraid I’ll miss out on the big story no matter what I do!”

Longarm smiled wearily and said, “Chase after them, but do me a favor and gather up Doc Forbes along the way. I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m right, an official coroner’s report will sure come in handy.”

As the newspaperman left, Longarm turned to Ramsay and said, “My boss calls that delegating authority. He likes it when I get other lawmen to co-sign my notes. Sometimes they read sort of complicated.”

Then he fished out two more cheroots as he added, “This one ain’t as complicated as some cases I’ve been sent out on. But old Billy Vail will be pleased to have my uncertain spelling backed up by Doc Forbes and less sneaky local lawmen.”

Curly came out from the back to say that the lawyer wanted to talk to him. Longarm said, “Tell him he can talk to me out here. I ain’t trying to be rude. I hope it’s over. But if it ain’t, I’ve already saved young Howard’s guilty neck for him this evening!”

When the cowhand left, Ramsay took a drag on his second free smoke and said, “You were saying you didn’t find all this confusing. I’ll be buttered with axle grease and dipped in shit if I can see what in the devil Pronto Cross was up to! Nobody ever gave him permit to set up and lead any second county militia, and even if he wanted to, why would he have wanted to? He was already the town law, for Chrissake!”

Longarm took a drag on his own cheroot as he morosely stared out at the townsfolk gathering up dead and wounded they knew better than he could hope to. He said, “Pronto Cross was an old hand at taming cow towns and keeping them sedate. Like Sheriff Wigan, he knew that even though they send lawmen like me after the really wild and woolly riders of the Owlhoot Trail, policing a mixed bag of town and country drunks can be dangerous as hell whether you do it too firm or too gentle. If you rule the roost with a firmer hand than called for, you make heaps of enemies and get fired a lot, like poor old proddy James Butler Hickok did before he got back-shot by Cockeyed Jack McCall.”

He blew a smoke ring and continued. “Tame a town just a tad too gentle, the way Marshal Tom Smith tamed Abilene a few years ago, and you can wind up shot by a trash-white like Andy McConnell and killed with an axe by the shiftless Moses Miles. So your Sheriff Wigan and Pronto worked out a gentleman’s agreement. The sheriff would leave the township drunks to Pronto, Pronto would leave the country drunks to the sheriff’s tender mercies, and the Minute Men would deal with anyone really dangerous. No kith or kin was likely to come after a lawman if that particular lawman hadn’t done anything to him. Meanwhile, the taxpayers couldn’t fault a lawman for tolerating a wild man who’d finally been run out of town or worse by unknown vigilantes, see?”

Ramsay sighed and said, “I do now. Are you saying even our lazy old sheriff was party to this devil’s bargain?”

Longarm shrugged and replied, “Well, it’s agreed he seemed sort of lazy when he should have been upholding the law. We’ll find out how deep a part he played in any lynching as soon as we’ve had time to question the surviving Minute Men. I expect they’ll be easier to question, now that they’ve lost their leaders and their masks.”

He blew another smoke ring and added tolerantly, considering what they’d just gone through with the sons of bitches, “I expect we’ll find old Pronto Cross had the final say, before and after I shot it out with that loudmouthed Porky Shaw. Pronto had the best motive for running a tame mob, so he could avoid having to stand up alone to real wild men. But you were right about it being a bargain with the devil. Any lawman who thinks it’s practical to break the law to uphold it is just about as practical as a fool who sets his house on fire to keep warm. But I reckon few such gents have ever read that tale about Dr. Faust and Mr. Mephistopheles. For every time we make a bargain with the devil, it turns out to be a dumb one.”

Chapter 22

That expected special combination rolled in just after midnight with four federal deputies, a detachment of state troopers, and a declaration of martial law.

By that time the pathetic remains of little Timmy Sears and his murdered mother had been recovered from their shallow grave in the clay floor of the cellar of the town marshal’s office. Doc Forbes said they’d both been killed with a small hammer they found in the marshal’s desk upstairs.

So the surviving members of the Pawnee Junction Minute Men were falling over one another to make sworn depositions about all their recent night riding. A lot of what they had to say for themselves was self-serving guff, but some of it was sincere, and all of it was easy enough to check because nobody now had any use for a two-face who’d murder a mother and child to cover his mistake about Bubblehead.

As others came forward to tell tales about the now-discredited and no-longer-feared Minute Men, it developed that Pronto Cross and a handful of close pals had been using and abusing both the Minute Men themselves and a lot of local merchants. It was Longarm who was able to detail the way their protection flimflam worked, because he’d run across it before in New Orleans, where those immigrant gangs they called Black Handers sold the same bill of goods to worried minds.

Some of the recent Minute Men seemed vexed as all get-out to learn they hadn’t been let in on the extorted cash, goods, and services in spite of their being used to scare folks.

Longarm pointed out that the common soldiers who’d won the southwest third of the country from Mexico hadn’t been paid the current going rate of thirteen and beans a month. He was used to getting the short end of the stick.

That was why he never complained as the pushy deputies out of the nearby Ogallala District Court took over the investigation as if they’d been there all the time. Longarm hadn’t planned on growing old and gray in the sand hills of Nebraska, and there was a lot to be said for letting others do the leg-and paperwork as long as you were content to let them hog the glory.

Longarm knew his own home office would have to allow he’d done as much as he’d been sent to do, even more, once his federal prisoner had been left in no shape to stand trial in Denver. And he hadn’t been shoved aside nearly as rudely as the local township and county powers.

Longarm hadn’t had to point out that Pronto Cross couldn’t have been the only local official in cahoots with the highly irregular vigilante riders. The major in charge of the state troopers had only had to hear the Minute Men had been secretly led by the town marshal before he stripped every official in the county of all powers, pro tem, and said everyone could consider their fool selves occupied by the state of Nebraska until further notice.

One of the other federal deputies did ask Longarm whether he thought they ought to wire home for a federal warrant on Sheriff Wigan, just in case he ever came back.

Longarm said, “He’ll be back. He has kin in the cattle business up this way, and it ain’t as if he was telling Pronto Cross and his gang what to do. I’ve hashed that out with his dumb but honest deputies. I reckon Wigan was just going along with a tougher and more violent lawman gone wrong. It’ll be up to the local voters, come this November, whether they want a sheriff who’d rather live and let live with bullies than stare them down. I see no serious reasons to mount a mighty expensive and uncertain federal hearing for a poor old cuss whose only crime is an unhealthy desire for peace and quiet.”

The same calm contempt applied to those other township or county officials who knew more than they’d been letting on about the Minute Men. Many, like Remington Ramsay, hadn’t really known for certain just who might or might not have stuck with an officially disbanded bunch of friends and neighbors.

Leaving it to his fellow lawmen to tidy up, Longarm sent a night letter to Billy Vail in Denver, and headed back to his redecorated front room at the MacUlric boardinghouse to catch up on some well-earned rest. The new wallpaper had sunflowers against two shades of green. Longarm didn’t care. He was sound asleep within seconds of his head hitting the sachet-scented pillow, and he didn’t wake up until the church bells were chiming the noon hour.

He might not have opened his eyes that early had not he had to take a piss. For he had no great call to go anywhere before he’d be boarding that night train south, and that last dream had been sort of promising.

He lay there staring up at the disgustingly cheerful yellow ceiling as he muttered, “Why is it a piss hard-on always wakes you up just as you’re all set to stick it in your dream gal?”

Nobody answered. He threw the covers off, swung his bare feet to the bare planks, and considered the chamber pot under the bed. But he felt silly leaving a pot of piss where a pretty gal he’d never shown his dick to was sure to see it. So he swiftly got dressed and headed on out to do it right.

He met Mavis MacUlric in the hall, with her feather duster. She was about the dustingest landlady he’d had in recent memory. She asked him how he liked his new wallpaper. His back teeth were floating but he had to stand there, shifting from one foot to the other, as she brought him up to date on her dawning interest in that nice Remington Ramsay.

After he’d at last been allowed to empty his bladder and tidy up the rest of him, Longarm ate dinner out back and walked Ellen Brent back to the library to say adios properly. And after she said she was never going to forget him, coming twice downstairs in the dark, she got dressed and went upstairs to open the place officially.

Longarm ambled over to the county jail, where the state troopers were set up. Longarm offered to make himself useful, but the provost sergeant said young Howard Tendring in the back had made a full confession to the attempted rape and frustrated knifing of an older gal he’d admired from afar until he hadn’t been thinking straight.

Longarm said he knew the feeling. He didn’t tell the older noncom who he had in mind. It was nobody’s business that he’d almost managed a wet dream, and had pretended a petite brunette had been a willowy redhead just now. He asked if it was safe to assume the state troopers, since they rode for Nebraska, would see that the young killer got a fair state trial. He was assured he didn’t have to worry about that mean kid any more, and so he left.

The rest of the day went as slow as a constipated cat with no place to shit. He thought more than once about riding out to the Diamond B and begging Fox Bancroft for some infernal understanding. But a gal who got sore at a man unfairly wasn’t worth acting foolish over, and he knew no real gal could ever be built the way he’d pictured her in his head, whether asleep or on top of old Ellen. For being a man, he tended to picture the ones he couldn’t have a bit different from the ones he could. The human mind sure teamed up with the human pecker to confound a poor innocent cuss.

But since all things good and bad must end, it only felt like a million years before Longarm was able to settle up with everyone he owed in Pawnee Junction and board that southbound night train at last.

He rode alone in the smoking car for most of the short ride down to the main line. Ogallala, Nebraska, was a bigger cow town than the one he’d just left. But that wasn’t saying much in high summer when the cows were all grazing the surrounding range and hardly anybody could afford to crowd into the bigger town’s bigger whorehouses, card houses, and saloons, in that order.

Longarm got a room in one of the few hotels in Ogallala instead. The main-line day train that would carry him on to Denver wouldn’t get in before breakfast time, and a man who went looking for action in a strange town late at night was a man who made more money than they paid even a senior deputy.

He carried some magazines upstairs with his light baggage, and got undressed to read himself sleepy in bed. He hadn’t been reading long when there came a gentle rapping on his chamber door. So he got up to wrap a hotel towel around his waist and follow his .44-40 over to the door to see who it might be.

He hadn’t really been expecting a raven. But he was surprised to see Fox Bancroft standing there in all her glory, or at least with no hat, her red hair let down, and the top buttons of her shirt neglected.

She pushed in and shut the door behind her with a boot heel as she softly said, “I don’t want anyone to see me in a strange man’s hotel room like this!”

To which he could only reply, lowering the muzzle of his gun at least, “Aw, I ain’t so strange and to what might I owe this honor?”

She dimpled up at him in the lamplight and confided, “I was aboard the same train out of Pawnee Junction. I couldn’t come forward to your smoking car because Rose Burnside was getting aboard just as I was. I waited until she’d gone to another hotel before I hired a room in this one, just down the hall.”

Longarm asked, “How come? I thought you were sore at me about the way I had to call the shots about little Timmy and his momma.”

She seemed to be herding him backwards toward the bedstead as she said soothingly, “I saw you had no other choice as soon as I got to thinking about it later. Rose Burnside was gushing about you on the train, by the way. She’s sold out and never means to return to Pawnee Junction and its painful memories. But she’s ever so grateful about the way you cleared her brother’s name, and she said you spoke to her gently as well. I understand you never got fresh with Rose, or that pretty Mavis MacUlric you did so much for either.”

“Does Miss Mavis think I’m swell too?” he asked her uncertainly.

The redhead suddenly planted her shapely but work-hardened palms against his bare chest to push him hard and spill him back across the bed as she demurely replied, “The Widow MacUlrich has her own beau. Let me tell you about the hateful man I met when my daddy sent me back East to this fancy school just before he died.”

She braced one hand against his bare chest and reached down to whip the towel from between them as she wormed a knee into his armpit on either side, saying, “He was the leader of the debating team, and he could talk the horns off a billy goat or the pantaloons off a country girl who’d never heard such big words from a man she was in a closed carriage with! The brute seduced me when I was barely seventeen!”

Longarm gulped and said, “I’m sure sorry you got seduced so young by a slick-talking college boy, ma’am.”

She moved a fold of her skirting out of the way as she sighed and said, “I wasn’t. It sure felt better than anything else I’d ever done. But a girl has to be so careful!” He’d already risen to the occasion, and damned if she didn’t seem to be trying to impale her sweet self on his raging erection as he told her he had some French letters in his frock coat across the room.

Then it popped inside her and she hissed in pleasure as she settled down to take it all the way, gasping, “Don’t be silly. I know how to cope with that worry. The real worry for a woman of property and some social standing is her reputation, and the way so many of you men carry on about your conquests! Why do you men have to crow like roosters and tell everyone for miles around that you liked it dog style?”

Longarm reached up to unbutton her denim shirt and expose nicer cupcakes than he’d pictured in his head while he told her women had been known to brag as well. So she swore she’d never tell on him as she whipped her skirt off over her red head.

Then he rolled her shapely form over to spread her pale thighs as wide as they could spread while he parted the red hair between them right. She moaned and begged for more as she clung to his questing shaft with her tight moist innards, and when he came in her he felt it all the way down to his toes.

For the willowy redhead combined the amorous acrobatics of the forceful Nancy from the Indian Agency with the softer submissive passion of little Ellen from that library. So a good time was had by both, and as they drifted back down through a blizzard of rose petals, he heard her murmuring, “Oh, Lord, I’d almost forgotten how swell that can feel! I never could have let myself go that way with you before I knew how considerate you’d been with Felicia Tendring, dear.”

He left it in her as he protested, “Hold on. I never trifled with that murderous kid’s momma! She was only acting that way with Pronto Cross to save her nasty brat! Who told you I was this considerate with her, damn it?”

Fox Bancroft moved her hips sensuously and puffed, “Nobody. I saw for myself how you’d covered her shame for her when somebody else told me her lawyer was named Ralph! You knew all along that Uncle George was really Pronto Cross, didn’t you?”

He thrust back, as any man would have, and replied, “I was naturally on to the recorded first name of a famous town-tamer. But as you said earlier, George is a more common name than Howard. What cinched it for me was Pronto saying young Howard Tendring was a good kid when his own mother had just told me the town marshal had warned her about the way he’d molested that little colored gal. Felicia and her monster called him Pronto Cross in public and Uncle George around the house. I reckon he spent a heap of time around her house, after he found that a widow woman with an awful brat and a warm nature would do most anything for an understanding lawman.”

He began to thrust in time with her sensuous movements as he went on. “There was no call for me to gossip about her and Pronto once we had him in the ground and her kid off to the lunatic asylum. She had enough to fret her heavy heart, and I doubt she or even Pronto knew the full truth before Pronto had taken the time to question little Timmy Sears closer than he let on. Once Pronto figured out what had really happened over at First Calvinist, the rest of the sad story followed as the night the day. He might not have told the real killer’s mother as much as he knew. But either way, she’s stuck with the simple fact that her only child is a degenerate half-wit, whilst her secret lover was a moral monster who’d murder two men, a woman, and a child just to enjoy some times like this on the sly.”

She began to move faster under him as she moaned, “Speak for yourself, dear! I’m not sure I’d be willing to kill for this fine a time on the sly. But I know I’d just die if anyone back in Pawnee Junction knew what I was doing this very minute with the lamp lit!”

He asked her if she wanted him to trim the lamp.

She gasped, “Don’t you dare stop! I only meant I couldn’t be this free with any man I couldn’t trust to keep my secret vices secret! I want to come this way again, and then I want to show you some other secret ways to have fun, you considerate sneaky thing!”

So he let her have her shocking way with him, and they never told a soul in Pawnee Junction or Denver what they’d been up to all that time in Ogallala, with the shades drawn and the lamp lit.