Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Chapter 1

The question was whether Blue Tooth Tanner spoke true or false when he said he wasn't hungry after fifteen hours aboard the westbound Burlington overnight train in the custody of Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long of the Denver Federal District.

Lx)ngarm, as he was better known to friend and foe alike, knew just how he felt about the fair grub and genuine Arbuckle coffee they'd be serving up ahead in the dining car most any time now. For they'd both missed dinner back yonder in Chicago Town the previous evening because of all the paperwork it took to transfer a convicted road agent with homicidal tendencies from one court's jurisdiction to a more serious one. And they both had slept past breakfast aboard the train that morning.

Longarm's pocket watch and the way the autumn sun was glsiring down at the monotonous tawny prairie they were crossing were in total agreement that it was time for someone to be sounding the dining car chimes in the corridor outside their stuffy private compartment. Figuring on most any minute now, Longarm rose to his considerable height, even in low-heeled army boots, to see what he could do about his public image before exposing it to the snooty glances of the mostly greenhorn public a good old boy was likely to encounter on a train to Denver, which was getting

mighty fancy since they'd turned the old Cherry Creek gold fields into an official state capital.

Staring morosely at his lean, tanned self in that full-length mirror mounted on the compartment door, Longarm adjusted his limp shoestring tie. They'd made him wear it with a whole damned suit on official visits like this one ever since President Hayes and his Lemonade Lucy had made it to the White House with all those promises to tidy things up after the hell-for-leather Grant Administration.

The suit, of course, was a rough tobacco brown tweed that an active gent could act up in without it showing much. The free-swinging tails of the frock coat kept the Colt .44-40 he still had to pack, cross-draw, along with handcuffs and such, from disturbing dudes unduly in passing. He naturally kept his federal badge, identification, and back-up derringer completely out of sight until such times as he might have call to show them.

Few greenhorns noticed his spurless stovepipe boots under the cuffs of his snugly tailored pants. This far east, the broad-brimmed snuff-brown Stetson he wore telescoped in the High Plains style drew amused or confused glances now and again. But Longarm didn't care. Government regulations called for a hat and tie on duty in town. It didn't say what sort of hat.

Adjusting his Stetson cavalry-style, as if getting ready for an inspection by Miss Lemonade Lucy Hayes in the flesh, Longarm told his prisoner, "I ain't more anxious than yourself to get stared at in the dining car, old son. But this train won't get us into more discreet surroundings this side of sundown, Lord willing and the trestles all stay up. So there's two ways we can work her. Them handcuffs you have on won't attract too much notice if we put a flannel blanket over 'em from my possibles roll, as if you maybe had the ague and needed a lap robe whilst you eat."

"I ain't about to walk the length of this blamed train chained up like some wild beast!" the prisoner shouted.

raising his cuffed wrists to shake both fists at Longarm. "I'd rather starve!"

To which Longarm firmly replied, although not unkindly, "Speak for yourself. I'm hungry as a bitch wolf, and you were a wild beast when you shot that schoolmarm as you tore out of the Castle Rock Post Office."

Tanner said, "Aw, I was only trying to scare folks. I swear I never aimed at that gal coming outten a shop across the way. First time I noticed she was in my line of fire was when she commenced to flop about on the walk!"

Longarm muttered dryly, "It's a caution how folks do that, once they've been gut-shot with a .45. But as I was saying before you reminded me why I'm taking you back to Colorado, there's two ways. Trail bedding ain't all I carry with me in my possibles roll when I figure to be out in the field overnight."

Stretching some, Longarm reached for the McClellan saddle he'd lashed earlier to the baggage rack above his own seat. "My boss. Marshal Billy Vail, makes me tote cruel and unusual punishments along whether I need to use 'em or not. I told you when I picked you up last night I'd as soon just gun any asshole dumb enough to run from me, next to hauling him about chained hand and foot. But fair is fair and you just said you didn't want to traipse up to the dining car with me of your own free will."

Blue Tooth Tanner eyed the massive, brutal leg-irons warily as Longarm turned to face him with them, explaining, "If I was to fit one of these around each of your ankles, with the chain back behind that steel end-brace of your seat, I'd say it would almost be safe to leave you alone in here for, oh, five minutes?"

The more casually dressed prisoner smiled sheepishly, exposing the bucktooth that had died and turned slate blue to give him his handle as he replied, "Five or even six. Boss. I don't suppose I could get you to bring me back some

bread and butter, once you've finished your noon dinner up forward?"

Longarm almost said something dumb. Then he reflected that his prisoner might not try so hard at first if he thought he had plenty of time. So he simply nodded and said he might even manage a ham on rye if Tanner would promise not to escape before he got back.

Blue Tooth did, for all that meant. So Longarm hunkered down to chain Tanner's booted ankles securely. Then, lest a gent on his way to a federal hanging bruise his fool self in thrashing about, Longarm removed one wrist cuff and snapped it back in place with the chain threaded under the armrest at that same end of the green plush seat. Blue Tooth bitched it was an uncomfortable way to ride. Longarm told him it wasn't half as uncomfortable as it could get in any position by sundown without a bite to eat all day. Then he rose, put a thoughtful hand on the door latch, and studied his securely chained prisoner to see what he might have done wrong.

He couldn't see anything. Besides, Blue Tooth Tanner had been dumb enough during the robbery to disguise his horse face with a small domino mask covering only his nondescript oyster gray eyes. So Longarm figured he didn't have much to worry about. He nodded, said something about being back in less than an hour, and ducked out into the narrow corridor running a third the length of that particular car.

There were close to a dozen other cars, coach or Pullman, this side of the forward diner. Longarm knew his prisoner knew that. So he only moved up to the wider space near the front of their car, where he could still keep an eye on the door to his compartment, as he fished out a three-for-a-nickel cheroot and lit it.

A million years and, say, two dozen drags of smoke later, a young colored gent in a white linen jacket came along the corridor with a forearm's worth of flat chimes, banging them fit to bust as he called out more softly that

they were fixing to start serving up ahead.

Longarm saw he hadn't been the only one aboard with a growling stomach as soon as other doors along the corridor commenced to slide open. A mighty fine young blonde in a tan poplin duster popped out of her own compartment to lead the stampede, passing Longarm before the colored gent with the gongs made it up to him.

Longarm didn't care about the hungry blonde. He stopped the dining car crewman with a friendly smile and bet him four bits a lawman transporting a prisoner couldn't get served back here in a private compartment.

He lost, of course, and decided it was worth it when the easygoing colored gent produced a menu out of thin air and said he'd be back to take their order once he got done donging the others forward to dine the usual way.

There sure were a heap of them, male, female, handsome, not so handsome, and downright ugly. More than one old boy and at least two women who passed Longarm were dressed more ragged-ass than old Blue Tooth inside. None seemed to have any trouble easing by as Longarm stood his ground in that wider but far from spacious end of the corridor. Then a sort of gorilla or grizzly sporting a checked vest, white Texas hat, and Walker .45 conversion strode dead-center down on Longarm to grumble, "You're blocking my way, pilgrim."

Longsirm was already leaning his back against the bulkhead. So he couldn't back up any farther, and said so in as amiable a tone as the situation called for. He'd already decided that while most Texicans wore their hats crowned tall to keep their scalps a shade cooler under their more ferocious sun, this one had his hat crowned even taller to look ferocious, which hardly seemed fair since the asshole stood close to seven feet tall in his high-heeled border boots to begin with.

The big man in the big hat placed a thoughtful palm on the grips of his big gun as he repeated, "I'm trying to get

through here whilst you block egress with that sissy see-gar, sonny."

Longarm blew some smoke in the bully's beefy face before he quietly said, "Don't fuck with me. I mean it."

The big Texican reared back on his high heels to demand, "Who do you think you are and who do you think you're talking to so suicidal, little darling?"

So Longarm had the muzzle of his own .44-40 imbedded deep in the bully's beefy gut by the time he softly replied, "Let's just say I'm as harmless a cuss as you'd let me be, if you had a lick of sense, you loud-talking and slow-drawing bastard!"

The stranger, now sort of ashen-faced, allowed that since Longarm was putting it that way, he'd just as soon mosey on up to the old dining car and see what they were serving for dinner.

Another million years went by while Longarm memorized that menu and searched his memory for the ugly face that went with that handsome ten-gallon hat. By the time the colored dining-car gonger got back to him he'd decided that fried ham and hash browns might be safer than anything off the steam table after fifteen hours out along the rails. He'd also decided that he'd never seen that swaggering Texican before. »

He told the colored gent to just forget the deep-fried greens they offered with the ham, and asked if they could have some extra coffee with their apple pie instead.

The gong-wrangler said that part would be easy, but warned Longarm there might be a wait, since the car up ahead would be full of earlier famine victims and only one of the cooks really had four arms. So Longarm told him to take his own good time because waiting for a meal passed time aboard a train almost as good as eating it slow could.

After they'd parted friendly Longarm settled back against the bulkhead to smoke and stare through the glass across the corridor some more. He knew the passing scenery would be

just as tedious from their compartment windows, and if he waited in there he'd have to unchain his prisoner, lest he seem downright chickenshit.

Putting those leg-irons away again seemed only decent, as long as things up forward went as planned. But he knew that the best-laid plans of mice and men could turn out unexpectedly, and if he had to track down their noon dinners in the sweet by and by, his prisoner would say something mean about him acting nervous with those leg-irons again.

But what the hell, time passed as slow or fast out here in the corridor, and it wasn't as if a man had to rest a good pair of legs after spending the better part of the trip on his ass.

He didn't have to tell himself the true reason he preferred his own company out here was the iota of sympathy he'd caught himself feeling for the poor brainless boob he was transporting back to Denver for that doubtless-overdue rope dance.

It wasn't going to take them long, once old Blue Tooth Tanner had been handed over to the hangman's tender mercies. For the not-too-bright bandito had already stood trial in federal court in Denver for killing that schoolmarm in the process of robbing a U.S. post office. Old Judge Dickerson had naturally sentenced Tanner to death for his misdeeds in Colorado. But then Illinois had asked if they could tidy up their own books by trying him on earlier charges stemming from his salad days in the Chicago stockyards. Judge Dickerson, being a sport, had said it was jake with him as long as somebody hung the son of a bitch.

Illinois had tried. But in the end all they'd nailed Tanner on was armed robbery and bestiality with a lamb that his lawyers had insisted he'd saved from a worser fate. So after some wires back and forth it had been agreed their best bet would be to hang him back in Colorado for the slaughter of that schoolmarm in Castle Rock, and where was that confounded dining-car gonger with the damned old grub?

7

Longarm finished another cheroot in vain, only to see even more famine victims traipsing forward to hog all the grub. Longarm was tempted to just go back inside and wait sitting down. But he doubted it would be more comfortable with a growling gut and a condemned man for company. So he stood pat and waited another million years, staring out at mile after mile of mighty-wide-open nothingness.

The High Plains would begin to roll more interestingly later in the day as they approached the Front Range you could admire from downtown Denver. But this far east the prairie lay as flat and dull as an awesomely big doormat from horizon to horizon, and when it was dry, like today, the sky could get mighty dull to look at as well. They called this stretch the Big Lonely, and the monotonous-looking homestead gals along the way were in the habit of slashing their own throats with monotonous regularity.

He told himself not to study on that homestead gal he'd found all aswarm with blowfly maggots once, not with greasy ham and hash browns due to come his way anytime now.

After riding through a war or more and serving with the Justice Department six or eight years, one might expect a man to pay less heed to the sweet and sour breath of Mister Death. But while not a sentimental sissy when it came to outlaws and other varmints, Longarm seldom enjoyed killing and tended to hold his fire when .it was at all practical.

He knew it wouldn't be practical to spare Blue Tooth Tanner's miserable neck, of course. For whether the simple bastard had killed with malice or by accident, as he claimed, the rest of the human race couldn't afford to let such a dangerous animal live. But it seemed just as well to Longarm, after getting to know the old boy for just one morning, that somebody else would be stuck with the chore of executing him.

Newspaper reporters and other folks who didn't have to tidy up after killers tended to consider hangmen cold unfeeling butchers because they handled their chores with such

swift and sometimes brutal effectiveness. But Longarm had bellied up to many a bar, afterwards, with such notorious hangmen as old George Maledon of Fort Smith, who'd likely hung more poor bastards than anyone. Old George and all the others, save for a few mean-hearted bastards, agreed that the meanest way to hang a man was to draw the process out with mock kindness, urging him to say just a few last words and giving him plenty of time to choke back sobs and piss his pants, instead of just frog-marching him up those thirteen steps to have the halter around his neck and the trap sprung under him before he felt dead certain he was really done for.

Longarm swore at himself for dwelling on matters that he couldn't do enough about to matter. Despite how long it felt just waiting, Longarm was a good enough judge of true time to wonder how that pretty blonde could have ordered and eaten so soon when she suddenly popped back through the front doorway of the car, her face flushed and more than one hair out of place.

He wondered even more when she suddenly swung belly to belly with him, as if she wanted to kiss him, save for the expression of total dismay on her pretty face.

Then Longarm saw the big male paw that had gripped her by one arm of her duster and swung her into such a mutually awkward fix. So as the burly Texican who went with the big fist followed it the rest of the way into view, Longarm quietly asked the lady if she was arm in arm with that other gent of her own free will.

Before the blonde could reply, the cuss in the ten-gallon hat growled, "I'd keep my own nose under the brim of my own High Plains hat if I was you, little darling."

To which Longarm could only reply in dulcet tones, "It may be just as well I ain't you then. I was speaking to this here lady and if I was you, I'd commence by letting go her arm."

The bully did no such thing as he protested, "See here, I just now set across from her polite and offered to pay for her

dining-car meal, friendly as anything. But she just throwed down her fool napkin, sprang skywards as if I'd spilt hot coffee in her lap, and flounced out as if I'd done something wrong. Since then I've followed her the whole length of this whole train demanding some answer to her insulting behavior, and as you see, she still won't talk to either of us'n!"

Longarm said, "Let go her arm and mayhaps I can explain some of the rules of polite train travel, Tex."

When nothing happened he added, an octave lower, "Let go her arm. I mean it."

The bully in the checked vest and Walker Conversion didn't seem to think Longarm meant it. He still hung on— with his gun hand, the asshole—while the bewildered-looking blonde told one or the other of them, "Ich verstehe nicht! Ich spreche kaum Englisch!"

So Longarm simply threw a left cross over her shoulder to sucker-punch the moron holding on to her, and sure enough, he let go of her arm as his head thudded back into a doorpost. He then proceeded to slide slowly down.

The foreign gal was halfway to her own compartment door by the time her molester made it all the way to the flooring. And so Longarm felt no need to kick a man who was down as the maiden who was no longer in distress called something that sounded like donkey chimes before ducking safely inside her own compartment.

The Texican who'd been pestering her had lost his big white hat sliding down the doorpost. As he sat there in one comer, glassy-eyed and bleeding a bit out of one comer of his big mouth, Longarm hunkered down to gather up the fallen hat and brush it with one tweedy elbow as he amiably explained, "Aside from being a lady dining alone, the gal was a foreigner who just couldn't say what she thought of you in any lingo you could follow. I suspicion that was High Dutch she was just spouting."

"You son of a bitch! You cold-cocked me!" the man he'd cold-cocked shouted as his befuddled brain started ticking again.

Longarm held the hat out to him, saying, "Yeah. Like I was just saying, your doubtless-well-meant attentions spooked that sort of high-toned little lady considerably, and I might have done both of you a favor by breaking it up before anyone could get all excited and cable Der Kaiser about international incidents. I recall this time, down Mexico way, when this high-toned lady who spoke neither Anglo nor Mex—"

"You cold-cocked me in front of a woman, and now I'm going to have to kill you total!" the brute he'd belted cut in, trying to get up and go for his own gun at the same time.

So this time Longarm didn't pull his punch, and after a while another passenger came back from the dining car and offered to fetch the conductor when Longarm flashed his badge and sort of explained.

The conductor joined Longarm and his stretched-out victim a few minutes later. He agreed Longarm had done what had only been right, but when Longarm suggested they just roll the surly cuss off at the next water stop, the conductor explained how awkward that could be for a mere senior employee.

The asshole Longarm had just knocked out, twice, was a major holder of Chicago, Burlington & Quincy stock and a mighty mogul of the beef industry. When Longarm pointed out he'd been acting more like a drunken drag rider in a Dodge City whorehouse the conductor agreed he was notorious for that as well.

In the end they decided it might be best to just stuff the big pest in his own compartment, minus his gunbelt, and allow him to come to such senses as he had in his own good time. So that was what the conductor and one of his porters did in the end, with the conductor hanging on to the Walker Conversion for now. When he pointed out he'd have to return the asshole's property as soon as they got to the end of the line, Longarm agreed that would only be right, and suggested a good nap followed by a pounding headache would likely calm the cuss by sundown.

A few more passengers came by. Then that colored ding-donger got back to Longarm's car with plenty of grub and joe on a good-sized tray with skinny fold-down legs one could use to convert it to a piss-poor table. So Longarm tipped him an extra dime just to set it up inside between the facing seats.

After he'd left, Longarm left Blue Tooth Tanner's leg-irons on so he could eat with total ease without handcuffs. For a man who'd said he wasn't hungry, old Blue Tooth sure tore into his ham and hash browns. When Longarm said so, the doomed outlaw sighed and said, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I've been trying like anything to go easy on the grub since they said you was coming to fetch me for the hangman, but to tell the truth I just can't seem to refuse anything worth eating or drinking."

Longarm washed some chewed ham down with Arbuckle and asked how come, adding, "Ain't it a mite late to worry about your figure or even your health, no offense?"

Tanner confided, "I was there when they hung my poor old daddy. Some others who was there laughed when he shit himself so much at the end. Daddy had ordered himself a swell last meal, and you could smell the oysters and fancy fish sauce he'd et the night before as he dangled there in the cold gray light of dawn."

Longarm swallowed ham that had suddenly gone awfully greasy as he refrained from commenting on the results of feeding a whole regiment a swell supper of pork sausages and sauerkraut the evening before a serious battle in a summer rain. It hardly seemed a fine topic to discuss across a dinner table. So when Blue Tooth Tanner wistfully asked whether a hanged man shit himself worth mentioning on an empty stomach, Longarm assured him he'd seen lots of old boys dangle dry and dignified.

It wasn't true, but he didn't see how his prisoner was going to know for sure before it would hardly matter, to him, so what the hell, it seemed the least he could do.

Blue Tooth cast all caution aside as he enjoyed the apple pie and mousetrap cheese with extra sugar in his genuine Arbuckle Brand. He said he felt sure he'd have time to go back on a diet between the time Longarm handed him over in Denver and the time they actually hung him.

Longarm didn't answer. Tanner would learn soon enough that they meant to drop him through the trap on arrival to save the expenses of making up and cleaning out an extra cell at the Federal House of Detention close by the railroad yards. When old Judge Dickerson sentenced a cuss he paid attention to the fine print, and there was seldom if ever any bullshit with appeals and stays of execution, but Longarm had no call to crush a prisoner's hopes. So he never did, unless the cuss had done someone Longarm knew real dirty.

Longarm wouldn't have known that schoolmarm in Castle Rock had he woke up in bed with her, dead or alive, and Blue Tooth had said he hadn't meant it personally. So Longarm just let the poor doomed rascal dream of hanging in the sweet by and by as they rolled ever closer to the waiting gallows with every clickety-clack of the steel wheels under them. So, dull as this run across the sunbaked prairie usually was, it seemed no time at all before that helpful colored gent had cleared away their repast around three or four in the afternoon and returned with the beer schooners Longarm had asked him to fetch for them from the club car.

Blue Tooth Tanner, back in handcuffs but out of his leg-irons again by that time, allowed Longarm was a real sport to serve beer to a prisoner like that. But Longarm just shrugged and told him he was lucky he wasn't an Indian. He didn't trust Blue Tooth enough to confide he often drank with Indians, no matter what Miss Lemonade Lucy had to say about that.

Blue Tooth would have liked it, but Longarm didn't order them any more beer after that colored gent came for the schooners around Longarm's usual quitting time. He told

them they weren't fixing to serve supper at the usual time because the train would be rolling into Denver, at the end of the line, about the time when most of the folks would be starting their main entree. Longarm tipped him another nickel and told him there was no call to worry further about their comforts.

As if even feeble minds could run in the same channels. Tanner suddenly blurted out, "I can't believe we're getting there this soon! I mean they told me it would take till sundown, and I was sort of anxious to savor as much more of the Lord's Good Earth as I could before they shut my eyes on me forever, but there's so much of it left out yonder for a man to see, and this fool train is going so blamed/<35/!"

Longarm lit two cheroots and handed one across to Tanner as he soberly said, "I know. I'm sorry this last trip you'd get to take had to be so sun-bleached and drab, old son, but they weren't holding you for us near Niagara Falls or the Painted Desert."

Tanner almost sobbed, "I'd like to see a lot more of all that swell shortgrass and that clear blue sky out yonder! I swear I'd take it in the ass and swallow the contents of a whole spittoon for just one day, one lousy day, walking free across all that dry and dusty downright beautiful open range!"

Longarm didn't doubt him. It would have been needlessly cruel to point out it had been the fool's own grand design to forsake a life on the open range as a poor but honest rider for the shorter excitement of the owlhoot trail. He knew Tanner had doubtless come to that very same conclusion by now.

So they smoked and jawed some more, with Longarm steering the conversation to such cheerful topics as the poor cuss knew about, until sure enough, as the range outside was starting to roll ever more and turn ever more golden in the gloaming light, they began to pass low-slung home spreads, herds of beef gathered about the tanks of sunflower windmills for their bedtime waterings and so forth. Tanner

said it had always made him feel sort of sad when the sun was setting, even when he had no reason. He said it got fcir worse when a man commenced to count how many sunsets he might ever see. When he asked Longarm how many days it usually took them to hang a man where they were going, Longarm said he didn't know and then, when pressed, made a guess at six weeks or so. They'd told him, growing up in West-by-God-Virginia, that a white lie was seldom entered in Saint Peter's book against a sinner.

So it was almost dark, that tricky twilight Longarm didn't like for gunfighting, when they rolled at last into Denver. He wasn't expecting anyone to be laying for him with a gun at the Union Depot, though. So he just told Blue Tooth to wait a spell as he got down his McClellan, explaining it was less awkward to get a prisoner and heavy-laden saddle off a train after most of the others had gotten off.

Blue Tooth Tanner said he was in no hurry. So they finished a brace of cheroots they'd been smoking before Longarm decided they might as well get cracking.

It worked. There was nobody in the corridor and nobody got in their way as Longarm led Tanner off, handcuffed to his own left wrist with the McClellan braced on his right hip. Longarm wasn't too pleased to see that nobody from his department seemed to be there to meet them. He muttered, "That'll learn me to roll into town at supper time. Let's drift down to the end of this platform and cut the smart way out of here, old son. Every fool in Creation will be out front by the carriage stands, cluttering the walk, and we don't need a ride, as far as we have to go."

Blue Tooth tagged along, gazing about at surroundings he found as unfamiliar as a kid at a county fair, while Longarm peered ahead through the tricky light for the baggage-way through dark brick walls that would shortcut them out to Wynkoop Street. So it was Blue Tooth, not Longarm, who suddenly gasped, "Jesus! Down!" and dragged Longarm after him to the cement as a gun muzzle flamed from the blackness to their left to fill the gloomy train shed with

roaring echoes and spanging lead!

Longarm heaved the heavy saddle between their prone forms and the source of all that gunfire, for all the good even thick saddle leather might do, as he somehow got his own gun out from between his left hip and Tanner's right one. Then he was firing back at a vicious fool who insisted on blazing round after round from the same stand, inky black or not, until, sure enough, they heard the murderous asshole wail, "Oh, Mamma, your boy's been hurt real bad!"

Even fools who fired more than once from the same stand could fib to a foeman. So Longarm lobbed another couple of rounds into that voice, closer to his own level, and heard it wail, "Oh, no! Don't punish me no more and I'll be good!"

A more familiar voice called out behind Longarm, claiming to be Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. and demanding to know what all that noise was about.

Longarm called back, "I wish I knew, Nolan. I'd be Long, out of Justice, pinned down over here with a prisoner I just got off that Burlington train with. I might have hit our surly welcoming committee, but you never know, so keep your head down till we can get us some light on the subject!"

Nolan didn't work for Longarm, so once he'd issued orders of his own he joined the two of them on the cement behind the saddle, saying, "I sent my boys to fetch some bull's-eye lanterns. Do you reckon they were out to free this other bastard here?"

Longarm shook his head and replied, 'Tanner ain't exactly what I'd call a bastard, Sarge. He's a convicted killer, I'll allow, but he just now saved my bacon by spotting an ambush I was too dumb to see."

Nolan said in that case he'd shake with a man who'd just saved the man he owed his own stripes to. Longarm said he'd rather Nolan keep an eye on Tanner as he moved in on that other shootist. So Nolan said he'd be proud to, and

after some belly-down awkwardness Longarm had himself uncuffed. He reloaded and holstered his side arm, and slipped his sixteen-shot Winchester from its saddle boot to do some serious hunting.

He rolled well clear of their meager cover in dead silence, and rose as quietly to cross the tracks and platform beyond in a low running crouch. He saw why nobody was shooting at him when he got to the blurred form sprawled on the cinders of the track bed beyond. There was just enough light to make out the checked vest. The big white hat was upside down a couple of cross-ties away. Longarm dropped down there with him and kicked that Walker Conversion clean out of sight before, his Winchester across his own thighs, he said not unkindly, "I was wondering how come you seemed to be more scared than hurt by those last pistol rounds. Where did I hull you before you dropped, and whatever possessed a grown man to behave so foolish?"

"He shamed me, Mamma," the bully sort of croaked, adding in an even softer gurgle, "The gal was too stuck up to play with me, like that Sally Anne who sneered at us and wouldn't invite me to her birthday doings that time. I was fixing to show her, like I showed that Sally Anne out back in our alley, only this bigger boy homed in and hit me, right in front of Sally Anne!"

Longarm sensed light and movement and got up to see a Denver copper badge coming their way with a bull's-eye lantern. Longarm directed the other lawman to shine the wan beam on the wealthy cattle baron who'd been sent back to what sounded like a sort of deprived childhood. They both saw the poor bastard would never be worried about old age. The copper badge whistled softly and declared, "Smack through his rib cage, twice. Lord only knows how come he's still breathing. Who was he, Longarm?"

The dying man at their feet declared, "My mamma may take in washing since my daddy fell off in that stampede, but someday I'll be big as any of you and then I'll show you!"

Longarm quietly suggested, "The railroad will have his name for us. He was a mucky-muck from out Chicago way traveling in his own private compartment, and like you just heard him say, he was out to show us."

Sergeant Nolan joined them, hauling Longarm's saddle and Tanner along. Longarm told them all, "I had words with him on the train this afternoon and let that be a lesson to us all. I thought we were only arguing about a gal. He seems to have taken it as some sort of mortal insult to his family honor."

The man at their feet groaned, "Please make it stop. Mamma! I paid them back for low-rating your red hands and no proper hat to wear in church. But now I'm feeling mighty poorly and I wish I could have some of that medicine you take all the time for your troubles."

Then they heard a dreadful gasp, followed by an heroic farting, and then nothing at all as Blue Tooth Tanner sighed and said, "I wish he hadn't reminded me. How soon did you say it might take to have me flapping like a fish and shitting like a fool at the end of the hangman's line, Longarm?"

Once he'd nudged the cadaver with a boot tip to make dead sure Longarm soberly replied, "Not as soon as they might have planned. They say this was a cattle baron I just had to gun, sind it's been quite a spell since you could even gun a hobo within the city limits of a state capital without explaining your reasons to a coroner's jury. So aside from feeling much obliged, I'm going to have to call you as my only witness to a shoot-out in self-defense. Mister Tanner."

His prisoner gasped and swayed in weak relief as he asked in a tone of laconic desperation, "Are you saying they might let me off with Life at Hard if you was to tell 'em how I just saved you?"

Longarm just felt sort of sick as he assured Tanner he meant to put that down in writing. It would have been needlessly unkind to hazard even a guess as to how long a stay of execution they might be talking about.

Chapter 2

It was far shorter stay than Longarm had expected, and he was used to the ways of the fair but firm Judge Dickerson. It might have taken longer back in the days of the Pony Express and mail coaches. But thanks to modem wonders of wet-cell electricity and the help of both Western Union and the railroads involved, it was soon established that the late W. R. Callisher of ten-gallon and .45-caliber notoriety had been as noted for his nasty temper as he had for his railroad stock and beef herd.

Even better for Longarm, the railroad wired in depositions from that conductor and more than one of his train crew regarding Callisher's oafish behavior aboard that train as well as the nice way Longarm had tried to deal with him.

The coroner's jury was pleased to take Blue Tooth Tanner's more direct testimony involving events taking place shortly before and after he'd spied a white hat in the gloom of that train shed and instinctively recognized the intent behind its sudden movement as Callisher dropped into a gunfighting crouch. But the real clincher was the deposition from the Prussian Consulate, translated into English and signed by a Frau Erica Von Lowendorf, who praised the actions of the obvious Amerikanisch aristocrat who'd saved her from the unwelcome attentions of an obvious

Amerikanisch peasant as she was on her way to join her husband, the military attache at Fort Bliss, Texas. So Longarm could have had himself decorated by Der Kaiser if he'd wanted to traipse all the way to Berlin Town. Everyone closer to home allowed he'd done 'em proud and only done what was right by a homicidal pest.

So the morning after he got that in writing Longarm made a point of getting to his office in the Denver Federal Building early.

This seemed to shock young Henry, who played the typewriter and warned visitors in the reception room that they needed some sensible reason, if not an appointment, to see the one and original U.S. Marshal William Vail, hiding out in the back.

Longarm didn't need an appointment, since he worked there, but he'd still learned to ask the pasty-faced Henry whether the boss was in alone before he barged back to the office.

When he asked that morning, Henry nodded but asked, "What happened? Were you unlucky at cards or does she hanker for more than the usual flowers, books, and candy? We just got paid last week and we put you in for all three trips you made last month at six to twelve a mile, so—"

"I ain't scouting for sm advance on next month, Henry,'* Longarm cut in, moving on by without elaboration lest the fool kid think him a sentimental fool.

He found their superior, known to his pals as Billy Vail, in a better than average mood in his oak-paneled office, which could have used a good airing. The older, shorter, and far stouter marshal insisted on smoking pungent fat cigars with all the windows closed against the thin crisp autumn air of the Mile High City.

As Longarm sat uninvited in the one decent leather-covered chair on his own side of the older lawman's cluttered desk. Vail shot a glance at the banjo clock on one oak wall. "You can't leave early for that harvest festival at the Grange Hall. I know she's pretty and that you ain't had any

with her yet. My wife tells me all the gossip. But we still give the taxpayers a full day's work in this damned outfit, you homy cuss."

Longarm got out a cheroot of his own in self-defense, smiled sort of sheepishly, and refrained from allowing that the gossip about that particular pretty neighbor was a tad behind the times. For any man who boasted about his screwing would likely brag about his other body functions as well.

After lighting his own smoke, Longarm quietly said, "I was just down the hall talking to Judge Dickerson's clerk. You drink personally with the judge himself, don't you, Billy?"

Vail nodded. "All right, you can knock off at five if you just have to. I already asked. The answer is no. Tanner's been found guilty of Homicide in the First and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead, dead, dead. Period."

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and declared, "Billy, I was walking into it like a big bird with blinkers on. Callisher was after me, not my prisoner. If Blue Tooth had just done nothing at all I'd have likely wound up dead with him still alive and free to help himself to my handcuff key, my money, and my gun."

Vail blew a thicker, more pungent donut and simply replied in a card-dealing tone, "He could have. But he didn't. One's inclined to doubt he'd have gunned that innocent bystander, that schoolmarm down to Castle Rock, if he'd been bom with the ability to plan ahead on short notice. He spotted hostile intent and sounded a waming by instinct, the way a yard dog might have. You don't owe him any more than that, old son."

Longarm nodded soberly but said, "I'd hardly hang a yard dog, even a biter, for waming me just in time there was a weasel in my henhouse."

Vail shmgged. "Neither would I. But Tanner wasn't found guilty of being a mean yard dog by a jury of his peers. He owes a life for a life, and his saving your life

don't cut no ice with Judge Dickerson, or the kith and kin of that innocent young schoolmarm he gut-shot down in Castle Rock for no better reason!"

Longarm started to protest, then sighed and allowed, "I reckon there's no sensible answer to your draconian words of wisdom. But there sure are days I don't enjoy this job. Old Blue Tooth's sent word he'd like for me to come by and visit with him some more in the time he has left. I've already done that more than once. I've brought him tobacco, sweets, and some books before I found out he can't read. I know what he's going to ask me and I know I'm just going to wind up saying I'll try some more."

Billy Vail nodded soberly and said, "I've had to stand by as they hung someone I wasn't really sore at in my time. It can go with this job when the job's done proper and impau--tial. We know you've done all you can for the poor dumb cuss. So if I was you I wouldn't go to see him any more."

Longarm shrugged, flicked ash on the carpet to keep down any carpet mites, and muttered, "You ain't me. Before I had time to think I sent back word I'd come by some more, unless I got called out of town."

Vail shrugged and suggested, "There you go then. Just stay the hell away from the gloomy cuss and let him think you've been sent somewhere else."

To which Longarm replied, ''Bueno. Where are you sending me, to do what?"

Vail blinked, laughed incredulously, and started to tell his senior deputy not to ask such silly questions. But he could see Longarm really meant it. That was one of the problems you could have with a man who took pride in keeping his word.

Vail muttered, 'Thunderation, we don't have any outstanding warrants that could carry you far enough to matter. I take it you'd as soon be out in the field when they swing old Blue Tooth next week?"

Longarm grumbled, "Yep. Damned hangman sure picked a swell time for his damned daughter's wedding. I make

it eight or ten days before I can rest more easy about a shiftless skunk I owe."

Vail hesitated, then began to rummage through the disorganized papers on his desk. "I did have a dumb request from the B.I.A. here somewhere, speaking of shiftless skunks. They asked for you by niune. You'd think by now they'd have all the damned sign-talking scouts they'd ever need, and I was fixing to have Henry type up a letter to turn them down."

Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, "I ain't scouted all that much, and your average Indian agent knows as much or more sign as I do, Billy."

Vail said, "I was just going to have Henry point that out to them. I suspect they only asked for you by name because they know you scouted Shoshoni for the cavalry that time in '78 when Buffalo Horn rose up by the South Pass."

Longarm said, "Buffalo Horn and his young men were more Bannock than true Shoshoni, if you want to put a fine point on it, and as I recall with some dismay, the army shot the shit out of Buffalo Horn's band, including Buffalo Horn, and then shot a mess of mighty surprised Shoshoni for dessert before those of us who knew better could stop 'em."

Vail nodded. 'The B.I.A. noticed. You've got quite a rep for getting along tolerably with Mister Lo, the Poor Indian. So anyway, they wanted to know if they could borrow you some more for some delicate negotiating with the Lemhi Shoshoni over by their Snake River."

Longarm said, "They call themselves Agaidukas if we're talking about the so-called Shoshoni and Bannock under old Chief Pocatello on the Fort Hall Reservation. Lemhi Shoshoni, or Western Snakes, was bestowed on 'em by mountain men. Mormon settlers, and such."

Vail sighed wearily and muttered, "Jesus H. Christ, if I ask the kid what time it might be he tells me how to build a clock! I just now told you the B.I.A. admired your astounding grasp of Indian lore. Do you want to mosey over

to Fort Hall and see what's eating those damned Indians by any name or don't you?"

Longarm said, "I do. Anything beats staying in Denver for that infernal hanging."

Vail shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. Nobody said a thing about hanging you, and they do say Shoshoni squaws like to broil a captive's dick on a stick, with him still connected to it."

Chapter 3

The rest of the morning was more tedious than torturous for a man who was anxious to get out of town. Billy Vail told Henry to get in touch with Interior and make sure they understood Justice was paying no field expenses for such tomfoolery. Then he told Longeirm that even if he wanted to ride with the party headed out west to powwow with Pocatello, it would be best to wait until the dudes got considerably closer.

They'd be expecting to meet Longarm and some Mormon scouts at Ogden, in Utah Territory, where everyone had to switch from rail to mule trains for the rough going up into the Indian country that Little Big Eyes, or Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, aimed to buy from his red children for his white children. The bargain-hunters were likely crossing the Mississippi about now, and anyway, nobody Blue Tooth was likely to send after Longarm with yet another plaintive invite was likely to know where to find him after quitting time.

He read the little Henry had given him about the request from the B.I.A. at the bar of the nearby Parthenon Saloon, and put the carbon copies away when he was joined by Crawford, a reporter for the Denver Post, who quietly observed, "I figured you might be in here. At the risk of spoiling a good story, I feel I have to warn a pal Fm not

the only one looking for you this afternoon. He's about your height and my build, wearing an undertaker's expression as well as an outfit picked out for him by the late Edgar Allan Poe. When last seen inquiring for you over in the Black Cat he had on a black Texas hat and low-slung buscadero gun rig as well. Would you like to make a statement for the Post whilst there's time?"

Longarm washed down the rest of the pickled pig's knuckle he'd been working on with some needled beer before he replied. "Sounds like another lawman or a hired gun. A Texas Ranger new in town might not have heard about my disagreement with that barmaid at the Black Cat. I shot the only Texican really mad at me last week. But like the old song says, farther along we'll know more about it. Anyone who told him I sometimes lunched in the Black Cat would have surely mentioned this place as well."

Crawford moved out of the line of fire between Longarm and the nearby swinging doors as Longarm simply let his loose frock coat hang free of his gun grips while he shifted his beer schooner to his left fist, asking, "Might you have much on Chief Pocatello of the Western Shoshoni in your back files, pard?"

The shorter but thicker-set newspaper man blinked owl-ishly and volunteered, "Bad Injun in his day. He and his Snakes got to count coup on a couple of dozen troopers and Lord knows how many wagon trains during the Civil War. General Connor and his Nevada Volunteers caught up with him and his band on the Overland Trail near the end of the war, and would have hanged 'em the way they hanged all those Santee Sioux about the same time. But then old President Lincoln spoiled the fun with blanket pardons for the treacherous red devils, subject only to modest improvements in their manners."

Longarm grimaced and said, "Old Abe must have been on to something. They do say Pocatello's kept his word after making his mark on the Box Elder Treaty of '63, tempted as he might have been by the famine of '65 and

the big Shoshoni Scare of '78. So what might I be missing about this deal?"

Not knowing what he was talking about, Crawford had no more to offer and said so. Longarm finished his beer, watching that doorway, as he idly wondered whether the back files of Crawford's paper could have such a simplistic view of Mister Lo.

He put his empty beer schooner down, having decided he'd just as soon risk a slap in the face as paper cuts on dusty fingers. He didn't tell Crawford just where he was headed, so the fool reporter wanted to tag along, lest he miss a front-page gunfight.

Longarm laughed sincerely and declared, "A gunfight was the last thing I had in mind, old son. That mysterious cuss with his hat crowned Texas-style is likely from the B.I.A. And he's likely as anxious as me to hear why in thunder even a sissy would need scouts, or even translators, to visit friendlies on a fully staffed agency."

"What if he's not? What if he's looking to fight you?" Crawford demanded hopefully.

Longarm snorted wryly and declared, "I reckon I'll fight him. Like I said, we'll know all about it farther along. Meanwhile, I eat my apples one bite at a time, smd so now I'm off to see if someone who knows more than either of us about Indians can hazard a guess as to why I seem headed for Idaho Territory, Lord willing and the tracks don't wash out."

He got rid of the pesky reporter—it wasn't easy—and ducked through the big bottom floor of the Denver Dry Goods to make sure he wasn't being followed before he legged it on over to the terraced slopes of Capitol Hill.

He cut across the State House lawn, watching out for fresh sheep shit on the close-cropped leaf-littered buffalo grass as he tried to watch out for a possible ambush at the same time.

All the windows of the big stone State House were down, so it seemed safe not to worry about the afternoon sunlight

bouncing back his way from all that damned glass, while the cluster of folks he saw gathered around one of the cannons guarding the capitol steps didn't seem to be loading it up to fire on anyone. Colorado kept those big guns her volunteers had carried west from the war shined bright as gold, and tourists were always admiring hell out of them.

Passing safely by the cannon's mouth and glancing back as he crossed over to the state museum beyond, Longarm saw he didn't have anyone following him wearing any sort of hat. So he swung a tad wide of the regular entrance steps to enter by way of a more humble basement service door. Then he scouted up a side door barred to the general public and saying so, in gilt letters. He opened it and, as he'd hoped he might, caught Doctor Alexandria Henderson with a naked Indian.

The naked Indian on the deal table between them was one of those mummified cliff dwellers prospectors kept bringing back from the other side of Durango, and on second glance, old Sandy was really working on the baked clay pots they'd likely buried the cliff dweller with. Nobody knew why. The folks called Anasazi in Nadene, or Hohokam in Ho, had all been dried like figs before the first white folks, or even modem red ones, had shown up in the canyonlands to the southwest.

Sandy Henderson was a modem redhead with a passion to match on the rare occasions she let a man see her with all that red hair down and the rest of her out of that clean but spotted denim smock. Her lab smelled of fish glue at the moment and before Longarm could ask how come, the pretty little thing flashed her big aquamarine eyes at him wamingly to declare, "Don't you dare come around on this side, and leave that door open behind you, Custis Long! I'm having enough trouble with this new pottery style, and even if I wasn't I'd be awfully cross with you!"

He left the door open, since she'd asked, and if it riled her it would serve her right. He ticked his hat brim at her and tried to sound serious as your average deacon as he

said, "I don't blame you a bit. Miss Sandy. I told you last summer I was a tumbleweed cuss with an uncertain future. I'm here today on a mission for the U.S. Government."

To which she replied with an involuntary blush, 'That's what you said the last time, and by the way it was last springtime, not last summer. You told me you wanted me to examine a Pawnee shield cover and the next thing i knew you were. ., examining me on top of that very shield cover, and ... By the way, was I right about it being Pawnee workmanship?"

He had to smile, although politely, as he nodded and assured her they'd both guessed right that time. So she asked, "What have you got to show me this time, and I swear I'll scream if you take it out with that damned door wide open!"

He shut the door behind him with a boot heel, saying, "Life's too short to spend it arguing with ladies. I didn't bring any Indian stuff with me this time. Miss Sandy. I came to pick your brains about folks who mostly call themselves Ho. I got to go over by the Fort Hall Agency with some B.I.A. gents who seem more worried than the rest of us about the Indians they'll be meeting up with. As I understand it, they got a mixed bag of what Washington describes as Bannock and Shoshoni living at Fort Hall under Chief Pocatello."

Sandy nodded and said, "White Feather. He's all right. Probably smarter than Red Cloud and certainly smarter than Sitting Bull when it comes to dealing with the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

He nodded and said, "Old Washakie, The Rattle, seems to have his Wind River Shoshoni under control, east of the divide. But they say he was mighty vexed when the B.I.A. shoved a whole heap of Northern Arapaho down his throat, or leastways, on his reservation."

Sandy agreed Indian Affairs was in the habit of mixing oil and water. When she asked what events at Fort Washakie might have to do with his mission to Fort Hall,

he explained, "Pocatello seems to have been put in charge of some leftover Bannock as well as his closer kin. I was wondering whether the Bannock know that, and as long as we're on the subject, would someone please tell me how to tell a Bannock from a Shoshoni?"

He risked edging around the dead cliff dweller for a clearer view of her skilled and pretty fingers as he added, 'i mean, I have swapped shots and smoked weeds with both breeds and I'll milk a diamondback bare-handed if I can see any difference. They both hunt and fight on painted ponies. They both speak the same lingo, admire the same spirits, and describe themselves by the same sort of snaky wiggle in sign talk."

Sandy sighed and explained, "It's not them, it's us. The white Easterners who run the Bureau of Indian Affairs split the Western Shoshoni into two nations because some bands boiled their vegetables and some preferred to bake them on hot coals. A bannock is a Scotch bread muffin. No so-called Bannock ever called his mother's grass seed and pine nut piki a bannock, but a lot of the early white fur trappers were Scots, so . . ."

Longarm laughed. "So much for some sinister Bannock conspiracy out to feed us Saltu to old Piamuhmpitz."

She laughed louder, but managed not to disturb the red and black puzzle she was putting together as she said, "You have spent an evening or more among Ho if they've been telling you their ghost stories. But we're Tai Bha Bhon, not Saltu, to the Ho we think of as Shoshoni."

He said, "Do tell? That's odd. I thought it was the Comanche as called us Tai Bha Bhon, or Taibo."

To which she replied with a sigh, "Same difference. I told you we split them and lump them with little rhyme or reason. The name Comanche derives from something like People Who Always Want to Fight. So we applied it to plains bands calling themselves Yamparika, Kutsueka, Nokoni, Tanima, Tenawa, and a dozen other things. The famous Chief Quanah Parker is really a Kwahadi, albeit

he'd agree he liked to fight all the time."

Longarm shrugged and said, "Not any more. Old Quanah's living as white as his white mamma's relations, since he got licked enough to calm him down. I had heard Comanche and Shoshoni started out as one nation in the Shining Times. But I got enough on my plate up Idaho way. So let's forget other breeds of Ho-speakers and I thank you for saving me a likely snipe hunt. Mayhaps those dudes just want an armed escort of old Indian fighters because, as you just said, a dude from back East lumps all of 'em together and couldn't tell a Paiute from a Moduc if his life depended on it, which, come to study on that, it could''

She agreed dudes could be silly, and added, "There, isn't this a lovely grave-gift bowl?" as she put in place the last small shard and wiped her hands on her smock.

He said it sure was, and started moving back around her work table to let himself out. She must have been able to tell he meant it—they always could—for she asked right out where he thought he was going after making up with a girl like that.

He hadn't known he had, but it would have been awfully dumb to say so. So he said, "It's almost quitting time and I doubt they'll be expecting me back at the federal building this late. So I thought I might mosey down to Romano's for some of them Eye-talian noodles they rustle up so tasty."

Sandy blushed, stared down at the grinning horror atop the table between them, and murmured, *That was where we had supper that first night you got so fresh, you fresh thing."

He nodded soberly and declared, "We could try the Golden Dragon a tad closer to Cherry Creek if you're still proddy about Romano's. Or, should push come to shove, I could likely survive dining alone this evening."

She stared up at him the way an experienced mouser regards a new gap in the baseboard while Longarm, in turn, sincerely pictured himself swirling spaghetti and sipping red ink by candlelight all by himself. For it was way easier to

bluff in a poker game. No man with a hard-on had ever been able to bluff any woman who'd ever seen one, and what the hell, the evening would still be young by the time he'd finished his Eye-talian almond cakes on his own.

Alexandria Henderson could see that in his amiable but independent eyes of gun-muzzle gray. For she gaily declared, "Romano's sounds fine, now that I've forgiven you for being so silly that time. But I'll have to go home and change first. Don't tell anyone, but I confess I'm only wearing my unmentionables under this heavy smock."

He agreed the weather had been warm for a Denver autumn, and asked if she'd like him to carry her on home or meet her someplace after she'd had time to gussy up.

She dimpled coyly and allowed it might save time if he escorted her to her nearby digs and waited out front while she hosed down and dressed herself up. He'd been hoping she'd say that. He didn't get upset when she sternly added that he'd better not get ideas, just because she'd been a big silly the last time she'd invited him in for a drink. A woman who wanted it couldn't bluff a grown man worth spit either.

So they never did wind up in any fancy restaurant that evening, because the stem little gal seemed to feel a man who didn't get ideas on his own could use some inspiration.

As he helped her lock up and walked her down to her quarters on Lincoln Street, Sandy somehow steered their conversation, more than once, to the topic of screwing positions.

She called it anthropology because it seemed less sassy when you used scientific-sounding words to describe what less cultivated folk were said to do.

When Longarm allowed he hadn't noticed Indians acting all that unusual, she managed to sound detached as a sawbones peeking at a herd of germs through a microscope as she asked if he was speaking from intimate experience. That was what gals with college degrees called squaw-fucking, intimate experience.

By this time they'd made it to her rooms over the carriage house of a once-grand brownstone mansion, now divided up into less grand furnished digs. Since the fall afternoons were now so short he thumbnailed a match-head alight for the wall lamp just inside her door as he evaded her direct question by suggesting in as scientific a tone, "I meant it only stands to reason your Quill Indian still bedding down on Mother Earth, atop no more than a few thicknesses of hide or blankets, would be sore-put to go at it just the way Queen Victoria and Prince Albert might have deemed proper."

She sounded sincerely shocked as she warned him not to speak so disrespectfully of Her Majesty. So Longarm insisted, "I ain't out to low-rate the Widow of Windsor. I'm only using a high-tone white lady who managed to give birth to nine kids before her man died young as an example of formal fornication aboard fancy furniture. It was your notion to ask, just now, how come ladies sleeping less luxuriously in tipis or even pueblos tend to spare their bones some bruises by, ah, elevating their tailbones off the ground a mite."

She somehow managed to keep her tone stem as she led him into her combined sitting room and bed chamber. 'That was not the proper way to describe even an Indian woman's coccyx. But are you suggesting the notoriously bestial coition of the plains culture might be inspired by no more than a dearth of proper bedding?"

He got rid of his hat but left his gun rig on as the two of them sat down on the trick sofa she could fold out into a double bed if a man played his cards right. For all he knew she'd meant what she'd said, coming down the hill, about changing her duds to dine at Romano's that evening. It was his turn to say something. So as she somehow wound up sitting closer than he'd expected, he told her, "I never met any Indian gals with cocks myself. But I have spent a night or more bedded down in a tipi, and speaking from that experience alone, I can tell you

that prairie sod with a blanket or more spread atop it feels proper enough for sleeping after a hard day's ride. But, well, as soon as two or more sleepers get a mite less sleepy, I reckon the results could get rough on even a white queen's tailbone. So sooner or later she'd likely ask her Prince Albert whether he'd mind too much if they finished up in a less dignified position, see?"

She didn't seem to understand, as it seemed to be getting a mite dark in there to read one another's faces. He unbuckled his gun rig to make himself more to home as he quietly explained how tough it was for a less educated cuss to delve deeper into primitive customs without sounding primitive. When he said he'd be able to show her better if only they had some Indian bedding on hand, she sprang up so suddenly he was sure he'd just shot it with that passionate but proddy little gal.

Then Sandy opened a chest in a far comer to haul out two Hudson Bay blankets and a buffalo robe, asking him how an Arapaho or Shoshoni hostess might arrange them in a tipi.

He got rid of his coat and tie as well as his gun rig on his way to join her on the floor. Kneeling at her side, Longarm showed her how to fashion a fair sleeping pallet, although he put the furry buffalo robe on top, the way white gals seemed to prefer, before he gently rolled her on her back in that denim smock to assure her in a scientific tone he was only aiming to show her what it felt like, to your average Indian lady, in the position most approved of by your average missionary.

She naturally felt obligated to protest she'd never meant to research the mores of the plains culture quite so far. But just as he'd already been told, she wasn't wearing anything but a thin sateen shimmy under that denim smock, and while she'd naturally encased her lower limbs in high-button shoes and barber-pole cotton hose, she'd felt no call to don pantaloons for her stuffy sit-down chores up to the museum. So even as she was telling him she didn't

want to go all the way this time, he had it in so far she sighed and demanded he at least take down those scratchy old pants, and for a short swell spell it felt just fine on the floor with him on top and both of them half dressed. But as soon as she'd come and, like the last time, felt way more at ease and hence way more like busting loose, she suggested he get off long enough for them to get more comfortable.

So he did, and she was out of her duds, save for her high-buttons and striped socks, before he could shuck his boots, the way a poor old boy had to if he meant to take off his pants entirely. So while she was waiting for more, hot as a pistol and naked as a jay, she allowed that her coccyx, as she called her tailbone, had been hammered on the floor about as often as she liked, and then, without Longarm having to tell her how, she rolled over on her hands and knees to arch her back and shyly ask if this was the way an Arapaho hostess might receive a guest.

He assured her she looked even more tempting in that position, and meant it, as he got on his knees behind her to place a tanned hand firmly on either creamy hip. For in this romantic gloom of an autumn gloaming her sweet, shapely behind was clearly visible as a sort of disembodied ass, smiling up at him through the gathering dusk, and as he penetrated her that way with renewed inspiration Sandy gasped and declared, "Heavens! It didn't feel quite as long the other way, and I have to admit that whether this is bestial or not it certainly feels heavenly!"

So it took far less persuasion, after he'd had her dog-style, to get her to playing stoop tag, squatting over him with a high-heeled high-button planted on the buffalo robe to either side of his bare hips. She said she'd make them both some scrambled eggs in time but that in the meantime, she'd kill him if he dared to go soft on her right now! So he didn't.

Patrolman Colgan O'Hanlon of the Denver Police had just noticed something out of place as he was walking his beat

on the less fashionable side of Cherry Creek just after sundown.

A shadowy figure under a tall Texas hat wasn't half as concealed in the inky shade of a cottonwood across from a clean but inexpensive rooming house as he might have thought he was.

So the middle-aged copper badge, who'd survived the Great Hunger and that Great War between the Blue and Gray by moving as fast as need be, but no faster, never broke stride as he spotted whoever was up in that puddle of blackness between him and the next faint street lamp. He just kept twirling his nightstick as if without a care in the world as he swung round the next corner without a second glance at the sinister silhouette he'd have otherwise had to pass right by. For O'Hanlon knew his beat like the palm of his hand, and the yard dog chained in the back of a house on the other side of the block knew O'Hanlon well enough not to bark as the big bluff copper badge eased over its picket fence, softly calling to it, "Keep your gob shut, like the good doggy you are, and one day I might bring you a fresh bone from the Dutchman's shop across the creek."

The yard dog wagged its tail, whether it understood the soothing words or not. So O'Hanlon bent over to scratch it behind the ears before moving on, drawing the blue-steel double-action .36 he'd been issued.

Hence the next thing the somewhat taller man under the cottonwood knew O'Hanlon had the drop on him, and said so casually as he added, from his own side of yet another picket fence, "Anyone can see from your darling hat that you'd not be a Colorado rider, and so now I'd like to hear what you're doing so far from Texas and on my beat, if you take my meaning, good sir."

The stranger didn't sound at all evcisive, or even surprised, as he replied without turning his head or moving either hand, ''Nochd go bragh. Agus I'd be from County Kerry, please God."

To which O'Hanlon could only reply, "I'd be from Monaghan and that's not what I just asked you if the truth be known. Anyone but a Kerry man would know that when a copper badge asks you nicely what you'd be after doing on his beat, he wants you to tell him what you'd be after doing on his darling beatV

The stranger with the Texas hat and Kerry brogue said, "In that case I'd be waiting here for another peace officer who'd be living across the street in that grand rooming house."

O'Hanlon frowned thoughtfully and said, "The only peace officer who dwells anywhere in this neighborhood would be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, the one they'd be after calling Longarm."

The stranger agreed that was who he'd been waiting for. O'Hanlon waited to hear why and, when he didn't, asked.

The stranger turned in a confiding way, allowing O'Hanlon to see more of a shadowy lantern-jawed face as he explained, "I'd be with the Texas Rangers and all and all. So I'm asking you to take the word of a fellow peace officer that the matter is a secret I'd not be at liberty to divulge."

It didn't work. The humble copper badge shrugged and replied he might believe that once he'd seen some sort of identification.

The mysterious stranger on the far side of the fence raised one hand to open his own frock coat, exposing a dim silvery blur pinned to his dark shirtfront as he chuckled fondly and said he hoped a Monaghan man recognized a Ranger badge when he saw it.

O'Hanlon made the mistake of peering closer, even as he said a real ranger would have some other identification to go with a tin star anyone might find in a pawnshop.

He knew just how right he'd been in the few instants of awareness left to him between the moment a .45-55 erupted like a volcano in his chest and when his world, and life,

whirled down and down in a pinwheeling kaleidoscope of ever-darker chaos.

The killer with the Texas hat and Irish brogue was already out of sight before the first windows along the street had popped open and O'Hanlon's body on the grassy side of the pickets had stopped twitching. The man who'd just killed one lawman had been about to give up on Longarm in any case. For they'd told him that unless the target of their annoyance wasn't home by moonrise, it would likely mean he'd gotten lucky at love or some other game of chance in some other part of town.

Longarm didn't seem to worry at all about healthy habits.

It made him awfully hard to kill.

Chapter 4

Longarm's pals on the local force were on the O'Hanlon case before Longarm heard a thing about the killing just across the street from his furnished digs.

Having no call to connect the one with the other, the hard-eyed Denver Detective Squad was reading the sign well but wrong about the time Sandy Henderson was fixing scrambled eggs as Longarm reclined on one elbow, admiring her bare, bruised derriere.

Noting the way O'Hanlon lay sprawled behind that fence in that tree-shaded yard, with his own gun out and the front of his uniform so powder-burned, the detectives assumed the copper badge had been moving in on some prowler he'd spotted in the yard, and either been ambushed by the prowler or walked into a confederate he hadn't expected. The folks who lived in the house O'Hanlon had died so close to had no better suggestions as to just what might have been going on out front as they'd been having supper in the back. They said the first they'd heard of any trouble in the neighborhood was the roar of a man-sized gun. One of the old boys from the meat-wagon crew said it looked as if O'Hanlon had tried to stop at least a .45-55 with his heart. Others from the neighborhood agreed the single shot they'd all heard had sounded about right for a .45 long. Nobody had seen the shootist, of course, so nobody could

say whether it had been a carbine or horse pistol they'd heard. A man could fire a .45-55 from a pistol, if he had mighty good wrists.

The copper badges did the usual canvassing of the neighborhood. Most who lived near Longarm's rooming house, including Longarm, did so because the neighborhood was inexpensive as well as handy to downtown Denver. The few more prosperous neighbors felt a tad reluctant to discuss their sources of income with the Denver P.D., and nobody within blocks seemed to have been robbed or even heard a suspicious sound before the roar of that one fatal shot.

Longarm didn't hear anything about the killing until the next morning, late the next morning, because once he and Sandy had established why Indians liked it dog-style, they'd naturally wound up the good old way in Sandy's bed and sort of overslept.

Both the Post and Rocky Mountain News had the killing headlined on every morning newsstand Longarm passed. He heard a lot more, some of it true, when he dropped by his furnished digs just across from the killing to pack.

Longarm didn't get excited about the location of poor O'Hanlon's demise. He'd heard it was a rough part of town before he'd hired furnished digs on that side of the creek. But he did raise an eyebrow when he heard they'd dug such a serious slug out of a copper badge who must have surprised a burglar and vice versa.

Aside from the neighborhood and the early hour of the killing, a .45-55 seemed a lot of gun for your average residential prowler. The .45-55 carbine round threw a 405-grain slug a good ways with fifty-five grains of powder. Meaning they were talking about a stranger or someone who knew the neighborhood prowling it with a mighty noticeable cavalry carbine. Or, and this was even tougher to buy, they were talking about a petty hit-and-run burglar armed with a bodacious horse pistol indeed.

Longarm himself favored the more practical and most popular AA A O anmiunition a fairly serious shootist could

shove into both his Winchester saddle gun and Colt double-action six-shooter. The .44-40 lobbed two hundred grains of lead with its forty grains of powder, hard enough to stop anything lighter on its feet than, say, a pissed-off grizzly. Many wayfaring riders favored the even lighter and hence cheaper .45-30 rounds for their good-enough Colt single-action Peacemakers. So a rascal gunning copper badges with a .45-55 read more like a hired gun than a burglar to a lawman who'd chased both in his time.

But they didn't pay Longarm to deal with local killings. So he left the killing of O'Hanlon to the Denver P.D. as he toted his saddle and other possibles over to the Burlington yards late in the afternoon. They allowed him six cents a mile traveling alone. So he came out ahead if he traveled free, and that was easier to work out when a good old boy bought a beer now and again for a certain freight dispatcher he usually found a good quarter mile catty-comer from the regular ticket office off the waiting room of the Union Depot.

That was why Longarm left for Cheyenne aboard the caboose of a way freight almost an hour before the passenger train a greenhorn might have to pay his way aboard pulled out. And that was why a hard-eyed gent wearing a new hat but the same .45-55 failed to spot Longarm anywhere amid the folks boarding almost an hour after Longarm had left town.

Way freights, as their name indicated, took their own sweet time as they poked up the line, stopping along the way. So Longarm's free ride was on a siding near Fort Collins, dropping off some bob-wire and ladies' notions, when the passenger train overtook them and roared grandly by. But Longarm didn't care. He'd planned on an overnight stay in Cheyenne with a certain brunette who dwelt alone, and it was smarter to show up with a sack of gumdrops and mayhaps some flowers after supper time.

He felt he was still likely to beat those Eastern dudes to the rail junction at Ogden, west of the Divide, if the

brunette asked him to stay over for the whole weekend. If he was wrong and the party started north into Indian country without him, he'd doubtless catch up with them in a day or so along the trail, knowing a shortcut or more after scouting in the recent Shoshoni Scare.

So once again, without knowing he was doing it, Longarm escaped a swell ambush they'd set up for him in Ogden.

Trisha, the gal he knew in Cheyenne, would have deserved some of the credit, had either of them known what else she was doing for an old pal as she served him home-cooked meals and other delights in bed for a good three nights and two whole days. When he finally boarded his ride to Ogden, walking a mite funny after all that riding, Longarm had no call to suspect someone might be laying for him up ahead. His reasons for dropping off at Huntsville, a few miles east of Ogden, were less devious. After a good tedious rest aboard yet another way freight he was feeling restless, and so, needing to hire some horseflesh in any case, he toted his McClellan and such over to a livery corral within sight of the tracks to see what sort of deal he might make this far from the bright lights of Ogden, with a population as high as two thousand when the herds were in town.

The Mormons who mostly hired horseflesh to other saintly members of their sect didn't cotton to the notion of hiring Longarm any at any price until they tumbled to just who he was. Once they had, they allowed that a dollar a week a head, with no deposit, sounded about right for a gentile lawman in good with the elders of their main temple in Salt Lake. Longarm had dealt firmly but fairly with a wayward Saint or gentile outlaw out this way in the past and, to the relief of many a Mormon, he'd done so without either low-rating their somewhat unusual faith or pretending to believe every word of it. When he allowed that he'd neither smoke inside their city limits nor throw every three-for-a-nickel cheroot away, they allowed that sounded fair, as long as he didn't teach their livestock to chew tobacco or sip tea on the sly.

When he told them where he was headed they agreed he'd make the best time riding one horse and leading a lighter-packed spare. When they suggested a pair of fourteen-hand geldings, one a paint and one a roan, both with obvious cayuse bloodlines, Longarm almost said he could see they knew which end of a pony the shit fell out of. But he never did, because Mormons didn't hold with rough talk either.

He road down Twelve Mile Creek into Ogden aboard the paint and leading the roan, with no trail supplies as yet. He knew that just as it was smarter to hire livestock a ways out of town, it could be dumb to buy trail fodder and canned goods at a country store that paid extra wagon-freight charges from the nearest railroad.

He knew that whether he'd beaten those others to Ogden or vice versa, it made more sense to ask at the Land Office, where he'd been told they'd all wind up. So he naturally rode into town well clear of the railroad depot, and hence had no idea anyone could be waiting for him there with an innocent expression and a brace of Merwin Hulbert horse pistols.

When he strode into the Land Office a snippy young priss pushing pencils for the Bureau of Land Management demanded to know where in thunder he'd been all this time, as if it was any of his business, and said the dudes he'd been detailed to ride with had ridden out the day before, tired of waiting for him and mighty vexed with him as well.

So Longarm left without wasting more time in useless excuses, and stopped at the first general store he came upon to stock up on trail supplies at outrageous cost, lest anyone get more outraged at him. Then he swapped pack and riding saddles and lit out for Fort Hall the rougher but shorter way he recalled of old. So that was how come yet another dry-gulcher, lying in wait for him atop an outcrop overlooking the stage route out of Ogden with a scope-sighted Big Fifty buffalo rifle, got to wait, and wait, and then wait some more. Meanwhile, Longarm rode up the far side of the Bear River, through willows and worse, in a serious effort

to overtake the government party some-damned-where this side of total disaster.

He wasn't expecting any Indian trouble this side of Fort Hall. He knew it would be a total disaster for him if they got as far as Fort Hall without him, and Billy Vail ever found out they had.

Chapter 5

The only stretch of the Bear River Longarm cared about at the moment ran north to south into the Great Salt Lake. He'd forded to the less-settled west side of the Bear before heading upstream, though the stage and freight route north ran east of the river. For the stage and freight route snaked and stopped at countless crossings as it served the northern end of the aptly named Mormon Delta.

The Mormon Delta was more a long green ribbon running north and south along the aprons of the mountains to the east than a D-shaped patch of irrigated crop and pasture land. Starting a day or so after they'd found their Utopia in the sagebrush wasteland between the Rockies and the distant Sierra Nevadas, the Mormons had commenced to dam and ditch like gophers full of locoweed, until one day there wasn't a wasteland anymore between the foothills and a western border formed by the Bear, the Great Salt Lake, and the drier Sevier, Beaver, and such to the south. Hundred of irrigation ditches, wide and narrow, cut the Mormon Delta into a patchwork of firm to soggy fields it wasn't considered neighborly to cut across. But since a rider found few if any such obstacles on the open sage flats west of the river, Longarm could beeline, making far better time, hitting a bend of the Bear no more often than his ponies needed a water break—and that wasn't all that

often, given stock with cayuse blood in sunny but not too sunny riding weather.

He rode all day, swapping mounts every eight or ten miles, and felt tempted to cut back across the Bear by sundown, figuring he should have overtaken the others, despite their lead, by this time. But then he considered they wouldn't have any confounded lead if he hadn't been overconfident up until then. So he forged on through the gathering dusk, through stirrup-deep sage, till his ponies needed a rest whether he did or not.

He made a cold camp in the middle of a sage flat because of the infernal cheat grass.

The ponies didn't care, once he'd watered them from carefully hoarded water bags and filled their nose bags with the real oats he'd bought them back in Ogden. He tethered them to deep-rooted sage clumps and spread his bedding atop cheat, upwind to the east. The night was crisp but not really bitter, and canned beans washed down with tomato preserves didn't require a fire either. He didn't need black coffee to put himself to sleep, and it wasn't a good idea to smoke in these parts either. It wasn't just that the Book of Mormon frowned on smoking and drinking anything stronger than, say, buttermilk. The former theocracy of Deseret, now Utah Territory, had been turned into a tinderbox by the unwelcome advance of an Old World annual after it had found its true vocation as another pernicious weed of the American West.

It was called chess—or cheat grass, because that was what it did. It hogged such scarce rain as the Great Basin got, to explode from the ash-gray soil as lush and green as Kentucky blue after a nice wet spring. But there was more thin sap than substance to cheat, even when it was green, and in no time at all it set too few seeds to matter and died back to tasteless straw that was mostly air and caught on fire every chance it got.

It wouldn't even stay springy under the bones of a weary traveler. So Longarm woke up stiff as well as early. After

that he watered the ponies again, broke camp, and rode on, sucking his own breakfast from the cans, atop the roan.

He was tempted to swing over into the delta and see if anyone else had made it this far north out of Ogden yet. But for all he knew the Easterners were cavalry vets on Tennessee walkers. So Longarm forged on, and on, all day, until he felt sure he'd crossed the Idaho line, and swung east around sundown to chase his own and other purple shadows across the swift but shallow Bear in hopes of beating those other birds into Zion.

He did. Zion was a small but thriving Mormon settlement a tad off the map of Utah Territory. Mormons were like that. They had this calling to make the desert blossom as the rose, and put whole towns in the last places any other white folks might pick. So he'd even met up with Mormons south of the border, raising a bodacious crop of kids and com in the Sonora Desert.

The ones around Zion seemed more interested in wheat, unless that was barley stubble in the harvested fields he saw all around as he rode in by moonrise. The country was too high for profitable com crops. Gentile homesteaders might have held it was too bumpy for any field crops at all. But coming from West-by-God-Virginia, Longarm knew a family could scratch a bushel here and another yonder, as long as they used hand tools instead of a plow where they had a time standing upright without hanging on to something.

Since coming West after the war, Longarm had decided it made a heap more sense grazing stock in country this high and dry. But of course the Latter-day Saints would recmit new converts from such outlandish parts as the British Isles, and most of their elders had started out as Eastern farm boys to begin with.

He saw some beef grazing closer to town as he rode toward the soft, shimmering lamplights ahead. The contented-looking beef were shorter of hom and whiter of face than one saw grazing out on open range in these parts.

But the stockmen around Zion seemed to raise beef on their own irrigated grass, inside bob-wire, so it was likely safe for a short-homed steer to gorge itself so fat if it wasn't likely to stand off any range wolves on its own.

There were still folks up and about as Longarm rode into what they were starting to call the seat of Zion County in the Territory of Idaho, a recent part of the once-enormous Oregon. Longarm knew better than to ask directions to the nearest saloon in a Mormon settlement. But when he asked a kid in bib overalls for directions to the best place to meet other strangers in town, the kid told him to try the stage stop, where they stayed open to all hours and even served coffee, as long as it was only to outsiders just passing through.

Longarm thanked the Mormon kid and rode on without wasting time on livery matters. He knew any place that catered to the stagecoach trade would surely be willing and able to water, fodder, and stall a couple of extra ponies.

He found his way by the lantern lights from the windows of the private homes all about. There wasn't much of a business district for the number of families that lived bee-swarmed together the way farm folks dwelt back in the old countries across the big water. It made a lot of sense in Indian country. White outlaws were even more likely to hit isolated spreads, now that the Indian wars had commenced to wind down. The Mormon folks behind those lamplit lace curtains all around were doubtless more secure and likely felt a lot less edgy late at night with the winds making funny noises in the hills all around.

Somewhere someone had baked an apple pie, and like many another traveling man, Longarm had always felt most wistful about his own lone riding when riding by a lamplit window just around bedtime while sort of wondering who might be going to bed with whom inside.

It didn't really help to tell himself he'd never be really happy settled down in Mormon long underwear with any gal who wore the same to bed and wouldn't even let him

smoke afterwards. It didn't help, if it was true or not, to consider that most gals willing to serve a man coffee and climb into bed with him bare-ass were sort of plain to begin with, and inclined to nag after the first few weeks no matter what they looked like. He was starting to feel homy again, and a stranger could get in trouble with the kith and kin of any small-town gal of any persuasion.

He cheered up a mite when he spied the more imposing sprawl of the layover stop Overland had built in such an out-of-the-way spot. The Overland Line had fallen on hard times since they'd had to compete with the Iron Horse. But in its day they'd had the only means to move mail, freight, or passengers between Salt Lake City and the Montana gold fields. So they'd been well able to build adequately, and since they still carried plenty of light freight and impatient mining men across what was still a shortcut, they made enough to maintain the layout there in Zion.

But Overland didn't do so much business these days that they'd be too proud to overnight a pair of strange ponies. After Longarm had negotiated that, he discovered they'd be willing to water, fodder, and overnight him at a modest price as well. A layover built when the Overland stages had run every day, both ways, was in no position to turn travelers away from its door now that the Concords only came through half empty no more than thrice a week.

Harking back to the heyday of stagecoach travel, this installation, where they'd not only paused to change teams, but had gotten off to enjoy a late supper and an early breakfast with a few hours' sleep between, was as much a wayside inn as a repair shop, smithy, and livery stable, with a stock farm out back. But Longarm was still pleasantly surprised, once he'd checked in and stowed his valuables upstairs. He found they ran their downstairs dining room more in the style of the Montana gold fields to the northeast than the Mormons all about might approve. The willowy ash-blonde who presided over the dining room in a chocolate-brown dress and fresh white apron told him

they served far more Montana mining men than Mormon farmers in there of an evening. He believed her when she not only said he could have all the black coffee he wanted with his sit-down supper, but asked if he liked his coffee laced with bourbon in the high-toned Irish manner.

He said he did. He didn't want her to think him a sissy, and in any case he'd be a bit too keyed up to go to bed alone after sipping black coffee with nothing in it to steady the nerves.

After they got that settled he ordered their special of mule-deer chops and a canned vegetable of his choice as long as it was green peas or wax beans. He told her to forget the rabbit fodder, and asked whether they got their fresher grub from the locals.

She said, "Local Indians. Boss has a deal with some of that old Pocatello's Snakes. You'd be surprised how many sides of venison those Indians will swap for just a keg of firewater."

Longarm almost said he wouldn't. But it was none of his beeswax unless and until the B.I.A. or Revenue Service said so.

He didn't ask what Shoshoni might be doing this far south of their official reservation either. She'd just now told him the Indians seemed to be trading. He waited until the sort of plain gal had come back with his supper before he asked about those other whites he'd hoped to catch up with here.

She wasn't all that plain when she smiled, sort of wistfully, and assured him she'd have remembered any party of six or eight Easterners, or even Westerners, passing through. One got the impression business had been slow at that Overland stop of late. He said they'd told him much the same at the desk out front, but that sometimes riders in a hurry just paused for a bite before riding on, without bedding down in town at all. She said lots of saddle tramps passing through did that a lot, and asked him who all his pals in such a hurry might be.

He washed down some mule deer with black coffee and explained they weren't exactly pals of his. He said, "I've never laid eyes on any of 'em, far as I know. If I ever do, we're all of us headed up to Fort Hall for some sort of powwow with the same old boys you get your groceries from."

For some reason that seemed to fluster her. She spent a long time in the kitchen just to fetch a man's serviceberry pie with mousetrap cheese.

But once she did get back, with a mighty generous helping of dessert, she was smiling fit to bust and admiring the blazes out of him with her big blue eyes while she asked, in a mighty worried tone, if he might be a lawman.

He chuckled fondly and replied, "I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long out of the Denver office, ma'am. I'm sorry I never said so sooner. But to answer what they really wanted you to ask me out in the kitchen, I don't worry all that much about a friendly trading off his agency, with or without the full a approval of his agent. Friendly or hostile are the words I'm interested in, on account I've tangled with hostile Shoshoni in my time and all in all I prefer the other kind."

She gulped and said she'd only spoken in jest about firewater. So he assured her he'd assumed as much, and insisted on her naming a price for all that swell grub no matter what her boss out in the kitchen said about feeling patriotic.

So they settled on seventy-five cents, tip included, and he went out front to sit on the steps a spell, wishing he could smoke and wondering where in thunder those others might be.

When a distant bell tolled ten times Longarm knew that whereever they were, they'd have dismounted for the night by this time. So he got back up, went back inside, and ambled back for more Irish coffee with a smoke, only to find the lamps all trimmed with the chairs stacked upside

down on all the tables. So he went on up to his hired room, early as it still might be.

The willowy ash-blonde from downstairs was waiting for him, already in bed with her long, lank hair unpinned and down around her bare shoulders. She hadn't worn that dining-room outfit or anything else to bed, as far as he could tell from his own side of the cotton sheet and maroon flannel blanket she was holding over her tits. She looked sort of coy as she demurely said, "Whatever kept you down there all this time? It feels as if I've been waiting up here for hours!"

To which Longarm could only reply, "You have. They really must be worried about us pestering them about a little trade liquor if they ordered you up here to compromise me. That's what they call it when a lawman can't testify against folks because he's fucked 'em. Compromising."

She covered her face with her hands and began to bawl. He took off his hat and coat but left his six-gun right where it was as he bolted the door and sat down on the bed beside her, gently telling her, "There was no delicate way to put it, and you must have known what they meant you to do with me when they told you to take off your duds, climb into my bed, and await my pleasure."

She sobbed, "I'm not what you think I am! I'm not! I'm not! I got myself into this dreadful fix by giving away family secrets to a stranger before I knew who he was!"

Longarm placed a soothing palm on one of her shaking naked shoulders, "Don't be so rough on yourself. I know you ain't a real whore, no offense. Gals in the habit of spreading their warm thighs for cold cash lack the ambition to wait tables for honest wages. And as for you blabbing a mite because you have so few chances to talk to anyone down yonder, I'd have found out in any case. Indians full of firewater gossip way worse than any white woman I've ever gossiped with. But like I said before, I got no call to pester Indians that ain't doing anything I'd arrest your average white man for doing."

*Then we're still friends?" she pleaded, letting one nipple pop out into the lamplight in a mighty friendly way as she put a hand to the hand he'd placed on her shoulder to slide it down the front of her all the way.

He'd been right about her not having anything on under those covers. He sighed and balled the hand she was tempting into as firm a fist as he could manage, knowing she'd never get it in down yonder now. Then he quietly but firmly told her, "Friendly is just as friendly as friendly acts, ma'am. I told you I didn't want to be compromised too, remember?"

She began to rub her moist love-slit up and down the knuckles of his manly fist as she pleaded, "Call me Zelda, and now that you've been so nice I don't feel half as awkward about all this, ah, Custis?"

He smiled thinly and replied, "Speak for yourself. Miss Zelda. I got a boner for you that feels awkward as anything. So why don't I just step outside long enough for you to get up, get dressed, and get out of here before we both wind up in an awkward position!"

She started to rub herself with his knuckles harder as she shut her eyes and groaned between gritted teeth, "It wouldn't seem so awkward now that I've gotten used to the idea. What's the matter with you? Don't you want to?"

He soberly replied, "I'd be lying if I said I'd rather stick it in a pail of water. Miss Zelda. But I'll be compromised if I even jack you off all the way, so let go my hand, let me duck outside the way I said, and we'll just say no more about it."

She sobbed, "It's too late! I'm coming!" So he snatched his wet fist from her gushing snatch and sprang to his feet to unlatch the door and slip out into the dark hallway.

He didn't know the big fat cuss standing there in an apron with a shit-eating smile, but he figured who it had to be and told the kitchen boss, "It's a good thing for you I know better than to hit an asshole I might have to testify against in the future. So pay attention, asshole.

I just told your wife, daughter, or whatever I didn't ride for Indian Affairs or Revenue, but I'd be proud to turn such a low-down pimp in for running firewater to wards of the government if I didn't have so many Indian pals and such a live-and-let-live nature."

The fat oaf who'd sent the much younger blonde up to screw him then said, "I don't know what you're fussing at me for, stranger. That sassy Zelda will say most anything to get next to a man. But she was lying if she said anything about serving strong drink to Indians downstairs. We don't serve Indians at all, and even if we did, ain't it against federal law to serve 'em anything strong as beer?"

Longarm snorted in disgust and replied, "We've agreed it's sort of silly. Now quit acting silly with me and listen tight. I'll be sending your Zelda back down to you as pure as ever I found her, if ever I can get her out of my damned bed. You'll note I haven't had the pleasure of slapping you sensible neither. And so, in sum, it didn't work, I'm still free to accuse you in open court of running doubtless-untaxed com squeezings to Lord knows who all in a Mormon-run county, and I mean to if I have any more trouble from you all!"

The worried-looking fat man protested, "Jesus H. Christ, after we offered to feed you for nothing and sent a great lay up to your room, you say we've been trying to give you troubleT

Longarm answered, with a weary sigh, "I did and you have. I don't want to repeat what I just told Miss Zelda about compromising a peace officer with swell presents and pussy. Suffice it to say, my flesh may be weak but my spirit carries a badge. So I want you to vanish forever from my sight, and meanwhile, I'll see why that other pest is taking so long."

Longarm ducked back inside without waiting to see whether his last command to the kitchen boss had been obeyed. He saw right off why Zelda was still there. She'd gotten out of bed but she hadn't put anything on and she

was an ash-blonde all over as she stood there bold as brass and barefoot, defying him to say he didn't want her now.

To which Longarm could only reply, with a weary smile, "I never said I was a celibate monk. Miss Zelda. I said I was a lawman, on duty, who couldn't fuck with a known lawbreaker whether he wanted to or not."

She purred something about it hardly mattering since he'd said he felt no call to turn her in. So he found her duds atop her low-cut work shoes in one comer, and scooped them up in one bundle so he could grab her bare elbow with his other hand and steer her for the doorway while she protested he couldn't shove a naked lady out in the hallway as if she was some sort of trash.

But he could. So he did saying, "Aw, you ain't no lady, even if you are buck-naked, and the trash who sent you to buy off the law with some slap and tickle would know better than me what sort of trash you are."

Then he let go of her, her duds, and her shoes to crawfish back inside and slam the door with a grin as her wild swipe with clawed nails whipped through the empty space he'd just had his face in.

His grin faded as he bolted the door on the inside again while she bawled dreadful things about his manhood on the other side.

He was too proud, or perhaps too ashamed, to yell back he still had an erection Casanova might have been anxious to display as his own at one of his fancy French gatherings. He'd done what a man just had to do, at least with some women, and it was nobody's beeswax how damned stiff his old organ-grinder might be, or what he might be going to do about that now.

Chapter 6

A possibly sane old hermit who'd read the Good Book every night had once assured a much younger Custis Long that the Lord had not slain Onan, son of Judah, just for jacking off that time. The true sin of Onan, as soon as one studied on it, was the way a spiteful son of a bitch had jacked off smack in front of the poor widow woman the Lx)rd had just commanded him to come in.

It stood to reason that a Lord who took plain and simple jacking off hard would have wiped out the whole human race before poor Onan was ever bom, for as some prophet had once written, "Nine out of ten people play with themselves and that tenth one is a liar."

But Longarm managed not to that night, because of other considerations. It was true you didn't have to look your best or promise your hand you'd respect it in the morning, but as another prophet had written, likely in French, "Never jack off in the morning. You never know who you might meet at lunch."

A much younger Longarm had once been sore as hell at himself at a hotel fire, after meeting up after midnight with another guest who'd likely strummed herself to sleep just down the hall, unaware of how surprising life can get. So that night in Zion Longarm just sat on his damned windowsill, smoking in the dark and considering all the

trouble he might have just avoided, till he fell into bed too weary to care and hence woke up the next morning with an even stiffer one.

He just felt silly about that till he went downstairs to see if they'd still serve him some breakfast.

They wouldn't. The chairs were still stacked on the tables in the dining room, and when he stuck his head in the kitchen to ask how come, there was nobody there. He could tell by the cold clammy smell that they'd let the cast-iron range burn itself out entirely and they'd padlocked the far door to the pantry and root cellar.

It was true few if any wayfarers would show up for breakfast at an overnight stop they never stopped at. But Longarm had seen other names in the guest book when he'd signed in the night before, and even if he had been the only overnight guest, it seemed a tad unusual to let a wood-fed kitchen range cool down all the way if they ever meant to cook anything later in the day. For those heavy-duty ranges meant for serious restaurant cooking took their own sweet time to warm up, once you let them cool down to the temperature of Idaho in autumn.

He drifted out to the front desk, lighting a cheroot in hopes of staving off starvation till he could find somewhere else or, failing that, open a can of pork and beans up in his room. The big lobby, which doubled as a waiting room for the stage line, was a tad less clammy, thanks to a thoughtful fire of snapping and hissing pine logs in the big potbellied stove they'd planted smack in the middle of the cavernous space. Four earlier risers were seated around the potbelly. The only one worth looking at twice looked at least as hungry and twice as sore as Longarm. After that she was a high-toned beauty in a sidesaddle riding habit of loden green that made her auburn hair look more so. She wore that upswept, under a perky black derby held in such a precarious position by the veil that covered her cameo features as far down as her perky nose. As he stood there admiring her from the doorway with his morning hard-on,

she favored him with a frosty smile and asked if he worked for Overland. Her accent was hoity-toity British, and her tone was so cold he was glad he could deny the charge.

Once he had, he said, "I'm in the market for a good breakfast as well, ma'am. There ain't nobody in the kitchen, this morning. I ain't tried to jfind the manager yet. So why don't you all sit tight and I'll let you know as soon as I find out what's happened."

Neither the gal in green nor her drabber fellow travelers put up any argument. So Longarm ambled over to the desk by the front entrance, banged on the bell a few times, and when that failed to get results, strode through a far archway, yelling for some damned service. At that the room clerk from the night before stuck a bald head out his door to protest, "What's all this racket? Ain't Zelda minding the damned front as well as the dining room? It ain't as if this place gets all that busy this side of the evening stage, you know."

Noting the poor confused cuss was still wearing his nightshirt in the chill morning air, Longarm explained, "Ain't nobody here but five hungry guests, including me. Am I safe in assuming your missing mess staff might not be on the Overland payroll as regular help?"

The clerk nodded. "You are. I'm the manager here, and I make all the arrangements. Overland is interested in moving mail, freight, and passengers in that order. Feeding the sons of bitches has never been too profitable. So the company would as soon let others worry about that, on concession contracts. What might that have to do with the Robbins family running out on us so unexpected?"

Longarm asked more about the missing bunch, and established they were talking about Zelda, a half-wit they said was her brother, and an aunt and uncle named Robbins. Then he said, "It must have been guilty conscience, compounded by my unexpected willpower most likely. Miss Zelda's brother ain't the only dumb one in the family. But now that I think back, I ain't sure what she told me was

the only federal offense they were worried about. I wonder what I'd have found out if I'd spent a tad more time with that dishwater blonde they tried to tempt me with."

Then he took another drag on his almost-spent cheroot, shrugged, and added, "Be that as it may, they've lit out somewhere and it's past my usual breakfast time. So might there be another restaurant open at this hour in your fair city?"

The Overland man, being another gentile, felt free to laugh and make sneering reference to the odds on that in a close-knit little Mormon settlement. "Up to just a few minutes ago I'd have said this was the only place in Zion you could ask for coffee with your ham and eggs, or smoke afterwards. The local Mormons have their own places to eat all the meals a Mormon would want. They eat at home. Gentiles passing through have always eaten here. So I'll be switched if I can tell you where me and my Lulu are going to have breakfast once we get up."

Longarm asked about the stable help. He wasn't surprised to learn all but one of them were Mormons who doubtless ate at home whenever the spirit moved them. He sent the manager back to bed with his Lulu and went up to his own room to gather some makings before he went back down to the main room, where the original four others had been joined by a confounded-looking breed kid in overalls. Longarm asked the kid if he was a stable hand. When the kid allowed he was and asked where Uncle Pete Robbins had run off to, Longarm smiled and decided, "You'd know better than me whether they left serious by wagon or light on ponies, old son."

The kid said he hadn't seen them leaving. A Mormon hand had been the first to notice, just a few minutes ago, when he'd stopped by the kitchen on his own way to work that morning. The breed kid said the Robbins family lived on the outskirts of town, and that he just didn't know that much about any riding or rolling stock they might have had handy at home.

So Longarm took a battered coffeepot out of the feed sack he'd brought down from his room and handed it to the young breed, saying, "If you'd like to fill this pot from the pump out back, I got some Arbuckle Brand coffee here for one and all."

Even the snooty-looking British gal brightened up as Longarm dug deeper, producing the canned goods he'd brought down as well. When she asked how much he wanted for a "tin," as she put it, Longarm told her, "Nobody gets a whole can of nothing, if we mean to make ends meet, ma'am. I got some tin plates in here somewhere, and if we share out these pork and beans, bully beef, sardines, and tomato preserves . . . What are you waiting on, boy? Don't you want no infernal coffee with your breakfast?"

The kid lit out with the pot as if he'd been stuck with a pin. The auburn-headed beauty laughed knowingly and said, "One can see you must have been an officer in your recent Civil War. My father served in the Sepoy Mutiny with the Queen's Own 79th, and do you really eat sardines mixed with corned beef for breakfast in America?"

He hunkered down to get to work with the can-opener blade of his pocket knife as he replied in as amused a tone, "Only when we can't shoot a muskrat or a yummy wolverine for breakfast, ma'am. On occasions such as this you eat what you can get, unless you'd as soon just listen to your innards growl till you can find some filet mignon with an amusing wine."

She sucked in her breath and her green eyes blazed a mite as he continued dryly. "As for your other questions, that war don't seem so recent to those of us who run off to it, young and foolish. I disremember which side I rode with, but I'm sure I was never no officer. I reckon I got used to giving orders later. I've been a trail boss in my time, and for the last six or eight years I've had to order others about as a federal lawman. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, ma'am."

She said in that case she'd be Dame Flora MacSorley of some glen and some lady-protecting society of some town in Scotland. Then she introduced a homely little sparrow gal sitting farther from the potbelly as her personal maid, and said the middle-aged gent with the muttonchop whiskers and slate-blue Tam o' Shanter hat was named Angus and was a retainer. The old coot ignored Longarm's offer to shake and said something in either Erse or English.

The other middle-aged gent, dressed more sensibly for riding in the high country, was the guide Dame Rora had hired down by Salt Lake. He was a gentile of the Hebrew persuasion called Rhinegold. When Longarm asked if he was any kin to Johnny Ringo, he chuckled and said he'd heard that other Rhinegold might be Jewish but that they'd never met and that he hoped they never would.

The kid came back with the coffeepot. Longarm told him to put it atop the infernal stove if he expected the water to boil. By the time he'd doled out a mixed dish of canned grub tasting just as good, or bad, cold, he had a better notion why Dame Flora hadn't wanted a Mormon guide leading her expedition up to this end of the Mormon Delta.

Glad to learn Longarm was a federal lawman owing no allegiance to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormans called themselves officially, the auburn-haired lady from Scotland confided she was on a mission for her society. Back in Scotland they suspected Mormon harem masters were keeping young Scotch gals as white slaves after luring them out to the Great American Desert with all sorts of big fibs.

Longarm handed out the last tin plate and rose to drop a fistful of ground coffee in the pot atop the stove as he said, "I buy Arbuckle Brand because it's meant for brewing crude along the trail, ma'am. As for Mormons keeping harems of captive white or even red gals out this way, I thought your own famous explorer, Richard Burton of British Intelligence, looked into that for Her Majesty a spell back, whilst Brother Brigham was still alive and living in dubious bliss

with those twenty-seven ladies who'd msirried up with him, willing."

Dame Flora sniffed in a high-toned way and said, "Black Dick Burton is hardly the one I'd trust to investigate dirty old men, after reading his scandalous accounts of Oriental domestic habits. And didn't that twenty-seventh wife escape from the clutches of Brigham Young?"

Longarm shook his head. "Nope. She left him plain and simple with nobody trying to stop her. Then she wrote a book that was scandalous in its own right, and went on the vaudeville stage for a few years, entertaining folks with tales of her mistreatment by a whole mess of dirty old men."

He checked the coffeepot, saw it had to simmer some more, and added, "So much for tales of Brother Brigham sending his Danites or Avenging Angels after anyone who told tales out of school. That twenty-seventh wife was on a regular vaudeville circuit, with handbills and posters distributed well ahead to let everyone know just where she'd be mean-mouthing the Mormons next. Whether they cared or not they never bothered her, and she still lectures on the tedious topic of a dead man's desire for her fair white body now and again. The public ain't as interested as it once was, now that a second generation of Mormons seem to be running Utah Territory with a tad less zeal."

Dame Flora didn't seem at all convinced, and by the time the coffee had been brewed and drunk she'd told a tale that had Longarm a tad worried as well.

Like other churches, the Latter-day Saints sent missionaries out to save the heathens in outlandish parts of the world. But maybe because they were starting from sort of an outlandish part themselves, the Great American Desert, Mormon missionaries did a lot of converting in the British Isles. There the heathens started out with the advantage of already knowing how to read The Book, and a bemused local government was more likely to send Captain Richard

Burton than a whole U.S. Cavalry column to investigate any problems.

Burton had figured he'd done enough with the publication of his City of the Saints, in which he allowed he'd found the Mormons not better nor worse than most bloody Yanks. But Dame Flora had been sent to follow up on more disturbing recent rumors about the final fates of Scotch spinster gals who'd been recruited by mail as Mormon converts and harem beauties.

When Longarm chuckled at the picture. Dame Flora sternly pointed out that she found it more pathetic than silly, since it seemed all too true most of the women involved were either too long in the tooth or simply too plain to get any Scotchman to look at them. The much better-looking Dame Flora said the new converts had been required to pay their own way over sea and land to far-off romantic Deseret, where they'd be claimed as brides by Mormon planters or ranchers too busy with their vast estates to ride into town to meet gals like everyone else did.

Longarm's eyebrows didn't go up high till Dame Flora got to the part about dowries. It seemed these mysterious Mormon moguls weren't ready to marry just any old gal, hard up as they might be. The lonesome spinsters from far-off Aberdeen and Inverness were supposed to show up with substantial dowries, at least a hundred pounds, five hundred bucks as they counted money in Deseret.

Longarm agreed that sounded substantial in a West where a dance-hall gal could usually find a plain-but honest husband if she wanted to, wasn't deformed, and took a bath at least once a week.

He explained, "The Mormons don't convert by mail order, ma'am. I've known some Mormon missionaries both sensible and pesky, so I can tell you they convert in person, on the spot. The Salt Lake Temple sends young elders out in teams, and I know they got a regular mission in London Town. You'd have to ask Salt Lake if they've built one up in Scotland by now."

She said, "We have asked. They informed us they've saved some souls, as they put it, in our industrial area around Glasgow. They deny any knowledge of Mormon missionaries operating in the Highlands and, like you, claim they've never heard of any Mormons sending for mail-order brides, with or without dowries."

So Longarm said, "There you go then, ma'am. Someone's played a cruel hoax on lonesome Scotch gals. Most likely from somewhere way closer to Scotland. Sounds like a college-boy prank to me."

"Not a few envelopes with American stamps and Salt Lake City postmarks have been forwarded to my society by worried relatives of the missing girls," she said, "We're talking about at least two dozen missing girls, as of my leaving for your own country with Angus and Jeannie here. Like yourself and Black Dick Burton before us, we found the Mormon authorities friendly and cooperative, or pretending to be, when we arrived in Salt Lake City a week ago."

"They learned their lesson during the Mormon Wars," the gentile called Rhinegold chimed in. Then he winked and said, "It's like fighting smoke with a club. The main temple claims to keep files on every Mormon and all his ancestors back to Adam, but as soon as Miss Flora here got to asking about Mormons on her list, they dummied up and said they'd never heard of any of 'em!"

Dame Flora nodded firmly. Longarm suggested, "It works as well another way, ma'am. Using the U.S. mails to defraud is a federal offense, and it can't be all that legal under the laws of Utah. So might it not be logical for a rascal out to hoax a lady by mail to write her under an assumed name?"

Dame Flora shrugged. 'The Mormon elders we spoke with in Salt Lake City suggested much the same thing. Our point is that someone out this way answered inquiries from a good many interested and not-so-young ladies, each of whom shipped out for America with at least five hundred

Yankee dollars, never to be seen alive again by anyone we can find."

Longarm whistled thoughtfully and calculated, "Meaning at least six thousand dollars can't be accounted for. I'm sorry to say I follow your drift. But may I ask what you all might be doing up here in Idaho Territory if those missing gals and their modest fortunes were last seen headed for Salt Lake City?"

Rhinegold said, "I can answer that. Seems one of the missing Scotch gals managed to post a letter for help. Sent from Zion County, Idaho Territory, judging from the postmark. She must not have deemed it safe to put a return address on the envelope."

Dame Flora said, "It was a short, frantic note. She wrote it would be dropped in the box at the next stagecoach stop if she got the chance."

Longarm pointed at the empty tin cups and greasy plates with a meaningful glance at the young stable hand he'd just fed for free. Then he mused aloud, "Reckon a gal could scribble a note in the dark in front of other travelers, if she put her mind to it. Could have dropped it most anywhere along the Overland route, long as it had a postage stamp on it, and she wouldn't have had to come this way by stage, as soon as you study on what all of us are doing here in this stage stop this morning."

Dame Flora said she'd already figured that. When she said she and her companions had been trying to find someone up this way who recalled even one other Scotch lady, traveling in any direction way with or without a Mormon husband, Longarm said he wasn't surprised they'd had no luck. "Kidnappers don't allow their victims to jaw all that much with strangers along the trail. If any of those gals had got to jaw a lot with anyone you're likely to find, you'll likely find they ain't been kidnapped. Do you mind it I smoke. Dame Flora?"

When she nodded her permission, Longarm offered cheroots to the other two grown men, the kid having left by

then with the dirty dishes, and lit up to give himself some time to ponder before he went on. "Say a gal in trouble got a chance to drop a note in some mail slot this side of the Utah line but south of, say. Soda Springs. The Overland stage could have carried it out by way of Utah or Montana Territory, depending on which way the stage, not necessarily the gal, was going. That don't leave you many to question about strange white gals in a country where even a handsome Indian gal is worth noting in passing. What did her note say?"

Dame Flora said, "I don't have it with me. But it was simply a few scrawled lines, in broad Scots, to the effect that she'd been betrayed and warning a kinswoman who'd been planning a similar mistake to inform Her Majesty's Government instead."

Longarm admitted he didn't know just what she meant by Broad Scots. So she explained, "Think of it as a dialect neither speakers of the Queen's English nor Scots Gaelic can follow without pain. I suspect she used antiquated crofter terms in case her captors got ahold of her note before she could post it. So you'll have to take my word a 'moss trooper' is a rustic you'd never want your sister to marry, and a Sawny Bean is worse!"

She repressed a shudder and added, "I hope she only meant the band of outlaws who waylaid, robbed, and murdered travelers on a lonely road in Scotland in the sixteen hundreds. I'd hate to think any of those poor girls had actually been dismembered and eaten by a wolf pack of half-witted cannibals!"

Lx)ngarm perked up to say, "Oh, I recall reading about your Sawny Bean and his clan of cave dwellers. They remind me of the Bender family we used to have over in Kansas, albeit I doubt Kate Bender and her kin ever got around to eating any of the travelers they murdered and buried on their remote prairie homestead."

Rhinegold asked if it wasn't true some Snake Indians had been accused of eating white folks now and again.

So Longarm knew just how much Shoshoni scouting he'd likely done, despite his buckskin shirt and beat-up cavalry hat.

Longarm kept it polite, though, as he smiled thinly and told all of them, "The Indian nations come as different from one another cis our own. A Shoshoni has no more in common with, say, a Mohawk than a Swede might have with a Turk. So whilst they do say a nation called Mohawk or Man Eaters might have deserved the compliment, the Shoshoni and all their Ho-speaking kin scare their kids silly with ghost stories about Piamuhmpitz, a big black cannibal owl bird who eats wicked children."

He took a drag on his cheroot and reached for his pocket watch as he continued. "I doubt Indians who ate folks would be so horrified at the notion of even an owl bird doing it, and even if Shoshoni had such disgusting habits, can anyone here see 'em sending all the way to Scotland for mail-order brides?"

The two women smiled. Old Angus never seemed to change his sour expression. Rhinegold shrugged and said, "Well, they do say some of the younger Shoshoni can read and write English, and ain't Pocatello in the flesh a Mormon convert?"

Longarm consulted his watch as he replied, "They say Geronimo is a Roman Papist, if that's supposed to mean anything. The Saints hold the American Indians to be lost tribes of Israel, in case you ever want to discuss such matters with a hostile coming at you. Mister Rhinegold. I'll ask Pocatello whether he sent away for any Mormon gals from Scotland as soon as I get up to Fort Hall, albeit I doubt he'll tell me he has. Meanwhile, I may be able to pick up Zion before that government bunch shows up, if they ever do."

He rose to his feet and headed for the back door to see where that breed kid might be with his damned dinnerware. Dame Flora got up to chase after him, saying she needed trail supplies as well, if he knew of a reasonable place to

purchase any. She explained she and her party had nin out south of the Idaho Hne, and that Angus had refused to let anyone take advantage of her at any of the widespread settlements they'd passed through since.

Longarm was too polite to say he'd been wondering why the four of them had been trying to buy breakfast at a stage stop if none of them had come in by stage. When he asked her where her riding and pack stock might be, she confirmed that, like him, they'd taken advantage of the only livery and wayside inn for a day's ride north or south. She said she wasn't used to sleeping on the ground and he believed her. They then saw that breed kid coming across the yard with Longarm's dinnerware in a fresh burlap sack. So Longarm gave the kid a cheroot, told him to leave the stuff inside by the stove, and asked if there might be a nearby general store that wasn't out to skin strange gentiles alive.

The kid said there was such a store out front and down the main street a ways to the south. He didn't know how they felt about the price of beans this far from the railroad. When Longarm said he'd passed the place riding in, and that there was only one way to find out. Dame Flora said she'd best not tell old Angus where they were headed.

Longarm didn't care. She seemed much better company than gloomy old Angus. As they circled the building wide she took his arm in a natural way, as if to confirm what he'd just told himself.

Chapter 7

The little frame store down the way was crammed to its tin ceiling with everything from straight pins to moldboard plows and penny candy to hundred-pound sacks of com meal. The little dried apple of a gent who ran the place even kept coffee, tobacco, and racy reading material under his counter for passing gentiles bound for the Montana Territory. Dame Flora found their prices outrageous, but Longarm told her the old cuss was being firm but fair, explaining, "All the stuff from the outside world comes in expensive, by packsaddle or freight wagon over many a dusty bump, ma'am. You'll find local produce no more than a few cents higher than in most country stores. Mormons tithe a dime on the dollar to their temple after paying local taxes. So I've seen higher prices out this way."

She said in that case it might be smarter to buy plenty of dry beans, bacon, and such in bulk. But Longarm warned her, "Not if you mean to break camp every morning, ma'am. I know you got servants to cook for you. But you just don't have the time out on the trail."

He could see she wasn't used to doing her own cooking as soon as she asked what he meant. The old storekeeper cackled. "He knows a thing or two about beans, little lady. So listen to him tight."

Longarm chuckled fondly and pointed at the piled sacks

of navy beans as he explained, "First you got to soak 'em in water at least twelve hours before you put 'em on the fire with may haps some sowbelly and molasses to simmer another six or eight, by which time I'd have eaten from cans and moved on at least twice. Folks in any hurry can ride quite a ways in even the time it takes a fresh spud to bake in the coals, come to study on it."

She still seemed undecided. So he asked just how much farther she and her own party meant to ride in search of other Scotch gals. When she frowned thoughtfully and said they'd probably ride on up to Fort Hall with him, Longarm smiled uncertainly and declared, "I ain't sure about that, ma'am. To begin with, it won't be for me to say once that government party catches up with us here. Even if they don't mind, I ain't sure you ought to. I've told you why I doubt those missing gals got lured anywhere by Shoshoni."

The old Mormon who ran the store had been doing his best to keep up with them. So he naturally asked if they were talking about new converts from the British Isles. When Dame Flora informed him they sure were, he told her, "This young jasper's right about that too. The Salt Lake Temple's written us to watch for such goings-on up at this end of the delta. Seems some kith or kin has gotten worried about an ugly young thing who got off the train at Ogden with a heap of cash and a lot of baggage. She'd told one of our own young ladies she'd met on the train about the big cattle baron she was on her way to marry up with. The sister she confided in said she had a lot of mighty queer notions about us Deseret folk."

Dame Flora anxiously questioned the old Mormon further while Longami lifted down a case of canned sardines. He knew they were going to have to bring some pack brutes over to tote all this shit in the end, but meanwhile it made sense to eat the damned apple one bite at a time.

He was only half listening, because he'd known the old Mormon was going to inform Dame Flora that, no, they hadn't seen missing spinster gals here in Zion. A missing

anything was by definition something nobody honest would have seen since it was first missed.

He had his own practical additions to his own supplies piled at one end of the counter by the time Dame Flora figured much the same and switched to buying her own much larger load. Longarm told them both he'd be right back to settle up with his own pack brute. He asked Dame Flora if she wanted him to haul old Angus and, say, a couple of her own pack brutes back with him. She dimpled at him a and said he was being awfully helpful. So he left her jawing about canned grub and lost, strayed, or stolen spinsters with the friendly old Mormon.

It only took him a few steps and a dozen drags on his smoke to make it back to the Overland station. But when he stepped inside to fetch Dame Flora's hired help, he found they'd been replaced near the potbellied stove by Buffalo Bill, Old Mother Hubbard, and maybe Pocahontas— or leastways, three odd-looking strangers dressed up like them.

On second glance the imposing white-haired gent in the white ten-gallon hat and matching fringed and beaded buckskins couldn't be the one and original William F. Cody, who'd only started acting so odd since he'd won. that medal for killing Yellow Hand and taken to giving lectures about his misspent youth on the vaudeville circuit. This version of the Old Frontiersman rose to shake and introduce his foolish-looking self as the original Shoshoni Sam, whom Longarm had doubtless heard of. He introduced the motherly and sensibly dressed woman in the loose duster and poke bonnet as his wife, the famous tightrope-walker and bareback-rider Madame Marvella. The younger sort of gypsy-looking brunette, in a tailored but beaded and fringy outfit of wine red deerskin, was supposed to be a famous Indian princess named Tupombi, Princess Tupombi of that Comanche nation he'd doubtless heard of as well.

Longarm didn't feel up to insulting anyone who hadn't insulted him first. So he allowed he'd naturally heard of all

of them, but that right now he was searching for some others who'd just been by that very stove. So Shoshoni Sam told him a gruff old Scotchman had told some scared little gal to go upstairs and pack something while he and a regular American went out back to see about their stock.

Longarm thanked him, explained that the sack of stuff on the floor was his, and picked it up as he added that old Angus and at least two pack brutes were needed by a lady down the way.

He was more bemused than annoyed when the Wild West apparition tagged along, confiding, "You may be just the man we've been hoping to meet up with. You did say you were a government man just now, did you not?"

Longarm agreed he'd introduced himself as Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long. So Shoshoni Sam said, "You must be the one they call Longarm. Us famous Westerners have to keep track of one another. I heard the government was up to something big with my Shoshoni blood brothers this fall. Might you be on your way up to Fort Hall?"

Longarm smiled crookedly and replied, "I might. Before we get even sillier, old son, hasn't anyone ever told you there's no such thing as a Comanche princess? The closest thing to royalty Indians had north of the Chihuahua Desert would have been the now-extinct Natchez Sun Clans, over by the Mississippi, and like I just said, they're extinct."

Shoshoni Sam said soothingly, "You know that and I know that, but what do the rubes care, and Tupombi really is Comanche. Part Comanche, I mean. Since confession may be good for the soul, I'll confess like a man that we're out here on the make for something big. No doubt you'll have heard of Phineas T. Bamum and his colored freak, Joice Heth, billed as the hundred-and-sixty-year-old wet nurse of George Washington?"

Longarm laughed lightly and said, "I have. She was a fake. The nurse died eight or ten years before I was bom, at about the age of seventy or eighty."

Shoshoni Sam nodded and said, "You're right. But what would you say if I told you we were on the trail of the one and original genuine Sacajawea, the lovely Shoshoni maiden who led Lewis and Clark to glory and the wide Pacific Ocean?"

Longarm laughed less politely and replied, "I'd say you were a gent with a wry sense of humor. I was raised not to call my elders damned fools. For openers, and with all due respect, Sacajawea may have been Shoshoni. But after that she was no maiden. She was a woman grown with a papoose on her back, and we're talking about an expedition that took place a good seventy-five years ago!"

Then he spotted Rhinegold just inside the doorway of the stable ahead, and called out to him, telling Shoshoni Sam he was just too busy with important chores to speculate on circus freaks. When that didn't get rid of the pest, he sighed and said, "I wasn't at the funeral, but they give the year of Miss Sacajawea's death as 1812 on her grave marker over at Fort Union, Montana Territory, if you'd like to look it up. I only remembered because we got into a second war with the English that same year and one of my uncles had to do something about that under Jackson at New Orleans."

Rhinegold came out to meet them, with old Angus glowering out like an ogre from the doorway. So Longarm told the guide about all the supplies to be loaded down the way at the store, and as soon as Rhinegold said he'd see to it, Longarm went on in, with a nod at old Angus, to put a halter and packsaddle on his own roan.

Shoshoni Sam was still waiting out front as Longarm led the pony from the stable. It was commencing to get tedious, and Longarm said so when the buckskin-clad pest fell in step beside him afoot to declare, "I know they say Sacajawea died soon after she led the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But that tombstone at Fort Union is as brazen a hoax as George Washington's old nanny. Fort Union was only built in 1829, and you can look that up. So answer me

how anyone by any name could have died there and been buried there in 1812?"

Longaim spied Dame Flora on the porch of the general store down the way and waved to her, telling Shoshoni Sam, "I don't have to. They've sent me out to hunt many an odd want in my time, but I'm pleased to report Miss Sacajawea ain't wanted nowhere, dead or alive."

As the two of them led the roan to the plank steps of the store Longarm felt obliged to present the freak-hunter to Dame Flora, unable to resist the chance to add, "He's searching for a missing lady as well, ma'am. A Shoshoni called Sacajawea. You might not have heard of her, being from Scotland and all, but should she turn up on the trail ahead try to make allowances for advanced years. I figure she'd be around a hundred or so by now."

Shoshoni Sam sounded serious as he insisted, "Princess Tupombi figures her younger than ninety-five, being she was in her teens as late as 1804, right?"

Dame Flora smiled uncertainly and replied, "If you say so, sir. How old might this FYincess Tupombi be?"

Longarm sighed and said, "No more than twenty-odd, if she's even an Indian, ma'am. I should have mentioned Shoshoni Sam here is a professional showman. Meanwhile, Rhinegold ought to be here any minute with your own stock. So if you'll excuse me, I'd best go in and settle up my own transactions."

He did. The old Mormon sold him some extra coffee and the same brand of cheroots at /wo-for-a-nickel. But when Longarm asked if they had any Maryland Rye under the counter, the older man shot him a stem look and warned him not to press his gentile luck just because they were north of the Utah line.

Then old Angus came in, looking even sterner, to pick up the bags and boxes Dame Flora had already paid for. So getting all of it out that one door and aboard three pack ponies was a bit awkward, although not really tough.

Longarm didn't care if they finished ahead of him. He

wasn't aiming to ride on before those other government men showed up. But he was starting to care about that. He'd have never bulled on this far ahead of them if he'd known they were poking up along the trail in wheelchairs.

There was almost as much confusion getting both his and Dame Flora's fresh supplies under cover again at the Overland stop. A couple more stable hands had come back from breakfasts at home and either helped or added to the bustle, depending on who was fussing at whom.

Longarm was content to leave his recent purchases lashed to his packsaddle in their tack room. All his really expensive possibles were stored with his McClellan saddle under lock and key up in his hired room. His badge, identification, six-gun, money, and smokes he carried with him as usual, where it wouldn't matter whether anyone else had a passkey or not. But old Angus seemed certain there was a Mormon plot to steal every packet of salt and all the waterproof matches Longarm had advised his boss lady to buy. So he had those stable hands hopping as Longarm, already finished and getting tired of watching, got his McClellan and Winchester down from his own room and saddled the paint to do some scouting.

As he was leading it around to the front, afoot, that pesky Shoshoni Sam was standing there, smoking a two-bit claro. Longarm said, "Nice stock you got in there, if that was your matched bays and dapple gray I just admired a couple of stalls down from this scrub paint."

The showy showman cocked a bushy white brow at Longarm's mount to reply, "Oh, I wouldn't call the poor brute a scrub. I'd say it was more a barb and Irish hunter cross with at least one cayuse grandsire. Princess Tupombi would be a better judge of such stock. You can hardly beat a Comanche when it comes to judging horseflesh, you know."

Longarm dryly answered, 'They do say that's the nation as first stole Spanish horseflesh way back when. Your tame Comanche looks a tad Irish too, come to study on it."

He forked himself aboard the paint before he added, "Now that we seem to have that settled, I got to get on down the road to see if I'll be wanting the hire of a room upstairs after the three o'clock check-out time they've posted on the inside of my door."

Shoshoni Sam said he didn't follow his drift. So Longarm hung around just long enough to say, "Back down the road a few hours' ride each way, while there's time. If I don't see any sign of the slowpokes I've been waiting on by noon or a tad later, I'll assume I'll still need that room tonight. Because even if they show up later this afternoon, at the rate they've been creeping, they'll surely want to bed down here for the night. This is about the last chance any of us will have for table meals and a lie-down under a real roof this side of Fort Hall."

Shoshoni Sam asked what sort of accommodations they might expect once they all got up to Fort Hall. Longarm said, "Not as fancy," and rode out. It would have taken too long to relate the history of Fort Hall to a buckskin-clad greenhorn, and in any case they'd all find out for themselves farther along.

So Longarm was inspired to chuckle and began to throw back his head and sing, at an easy trot..,

Farther along, we'll know more about it.

Farther along, we'll understand why.

Cheer up, my brother.

Walk in the sunshine.

We'll understand it all, by and by.

Two young Mormon gals, hanging up washing in their railed-in yard, giggled and joined him in the next chorus without looking his way as he rode by. He knew they likely figured he was a Saint as well. There were times, over here in the delta, he almost wished he was. Both of them were pretty as pictures, and while they'd just started frowning on it at the Salt Lake Temple, a Saint could marry up with

as many pretty gals as he felt up to supporting out in the Mormon countryside, where spoilsports weren't as likely to ruin the chances of Utah Territory becoming a full state of the Union.

He soon found himself singing alone again in the open country south of the modest settlement. For the first three miles, or about as far from his own doorstep as your average farmer wanted even his barley, the dirt road ran sunbaked between open fields and winding irrigation ditches. Irrigation had to accommodate to the lay of the land this close to the Wasatch Range to the east. But the stock pastures and open range further south offered more cover to anyone lurking within rifle range of the road. So Longarm heeled his mount to a thoughtful lope that might make him a tougher target even as it got him by each rocky outcrop or thick clump of new-growth timber sooner.

That was one of the worries left over from the first flush of pioneering. Once the country around a settlement had been scalped for timber and firewood, lots of second-growth weed trees tended to reclaim the parts nobody was using at the moment with thickets of stickerbrush and trashwood better for hiding in than anything else.

Second growth was good for birds, rabbits, and even deer, which inspired country folks who still hunted for the pot to cut back less of the barely useful shit. They'd left lots of aspen, he saw, with a few round autumn leaves still fluttering like gold coins in the least breeze, as if to keep anyone passing from spotting more sinister movement amid their closely packed trunks of greenish gray.

But once he'd put a good ten miles between himself and town, he began to feel better about the aspen and juniper clumps all about him on the open range that was now ungrazed. For despite more cover near the trail than he'd have tolerated had he been managing the Overland Line, the rolling country behind him was open enough for him to assume nobody was following him, and no matter how sore he'd made that whiskey-running bunch back yonder,

he'd only told one greenhorn, an outsider, where he might be headed.

There seemed no way on earth for anyone with a guilty conscience to be laying for the law by the trail ahead, and thus Longarm was as astonished as alarmed when he topped a rise to see a flash of sunlight on metal amid some aspen flutter ahead. He rolled out of his saddle, Winchester and all, just as a high-powered round beat the report of its express rifle through the shallow gap between the cantle and swells of an already battered army saddle.

That rifle round would have surely done more damage to Longarm's left hip than the sunbaked dirt did to his right one when he hit it with his carbine butt as well and rolled away into the shin-deep grass on the west side of the trail.

He did that because the son of a bitch who'd just tried to dry-gulch him was firing some more from those aspen over to the east of the trail.

As his paint turned tail and ran back toward town with its eyes rolling and reins dragging, Longarm saw his unseen enemy hadn't been trying to kill him. He'd simply spooked the pony for a better shot at his intended target. Longarm knew this for certain when that distant rifle spanged again and his poor hat, which he'd parted company with on the way down, soared skyward amid shattered straw and dirt clods to his left. He knew his real position had to be hidden better by the tall dry grass all around. He was already prone with his elbows spread and his Winchester cocked and aimed the right general direction. So he held on to his edge by not even breathing hard enough to stir the springy stems above him.