15 Longarm and the Unwritten Law

LONGARM AND THE UNWRITTEN LAW

By Tabor Evans

CHAPTER 1

Along about midnight a naked man ran screaming down the hotel corridor amidst a blaze of gunfire. He'd been shot on the stairs leading down from the floor above, and hit twice more along the way. Yet he somehow made it as far as the stairs leading down to the floor below before two hundred grains of hot spinning lead caved in the back of his skull and somersaulted his flailing bare flesh all the way down to the next landing.

So there he lay, oozing blood and grinning up blankly, while the somewhat older man who'd gunned him stood over him in a dusty black suit and a haze of gun smoke, clicking the hammers of two six-guns on spent brass until a firm but not unkindly voice called down. "You've emptied both your guns into him, which may be just as well for the both of us. So why don't you drop the both of them and tell me what this was all about. I ain't just being nosy. I'm Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long of the Denver District Court, and they pay me to pester folks like this."

The middle-aged killer without a live round to his name turned and smiled sheepishly up at the taller barefoot figure wearing only tobacco-tweed pants and a cross-draw gun rig. The.44-40 that normally rode its owner's left hip was staring down through the clearing gunsmoke as alertly as the steel gray eyes of the bare-chested lawman aiming it. So the older man dropped his own hardware to the rug, licked his lips, and said, "I know who you are. You'd be the one they call Longarm, and they say you can be fair as well as firm. I'd be L.J. Maxwell. I own and operate the Tumbling M, a day's ride down the South Platte."

He kicked the naked body at his feet just hard enough to rate a warning look from Longarm. "This piece of shit used to be my segundo, Sunny Jim Stanhope. He took my pay and he et my bread, and then he shagged my Edna Mae whilst I was away from our spread at the stock show!"

Longarm grimaced and said, "I take it your Edna Mae is the lady I just heard wailing like a banshee when I tore past that open doorway next to my own?"

Maxwell nodded, stared morosely down at the younger man he'd just killed, and replied, "It is. She said she was leaving me for this two-faced hound because he had a bigger dick. But I ask you, man to man, does this dead bastard's dick look unusually large to you?"

Longarm could only reply, "Not at the moment. I don't know why no spiteful woman has ever told her man that her lover's old organ-grinder was smaller than his."

Before Maxwell could answer, Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. was at the bottom of the stairs with a brace of copper badges. Nolan and Longarm were on good terms. So the burly local lawman got out his notebook and asked, "Would this case be federal, state, or municipal, pard?"

To which Longarm was pleased to reply, "It's your misfortune and none of my own. Mister Maxwell here claims the bare-ass cadaver's one Sunny Jim Stanhope, and there's no argument about who just shot him deader than a turd in a milk bucket. Mister Maxwell alleges Stanhope was committing adultery with his lawfully married-up Edna Mae. So what'll you bet he's fixing to evoke the unwritten law?"

Sergeant Nolan stared up the stairs in dismay and declared, "It hardly seems fair that it's municipal. We just got here. You saw him first, Longarm!"

Longarm put his own gun away as he shrugged his broad bare shoulders and replied, "I never saw him do it. His woman's right upstairs, if you'd like to take her statement. Gunning your wife's lover smack in the middle of Denver has to violate some municipal ordinance. But it don't strike me as a federal offense. So like I said, it's your case to keep and cherish and I'm catching me a chill in this cold hallway."

He turned away to remount the stairs, ignoring all the noise that seemed to be coming from the Denver P.D. and other patrons of the Viceroy Hotel. Being just a few streets over from the stockyards, the place didn't cater to a very quiet crowd, and gunshots in the night were as good as fire bells when it came to getting folks up and half dressed. A Denver lawman passed him near the open doorway where all the shooting had started. So Longarm felt no call to go in and talk to the big fat naked gal thrashing about on the bed as she pleaded for mercy. Longarm left it to the Denver P.D. to assure her she hadn't been murdered and get a statement out of her, once she'd calmed down just a hundred percent. He gently rapped a certain way on the door of his own hired room, and another naked lady let him in. She was one hell of an improvement over Edna Mae Maxwell.

Lina Marie Logan, just in from Omaha and anxious to see all the wonders of the Mile High City, was hardly a waif, and way too pretty to be shy about the lamplight as the two of them got back in bed together. Longarm had to hang up his six-gun and slide out of his pants first. So that gave him plenty of time to explain all that noise outside to the buxom blonde who'd been on top when the gunfire had commenced.

She said she didn't care and that she'd been about to start again without him, damn it. So this time he got on top, hooked one of his elbows under each of her soft knee joints, and spread her smooth pale thighs wide enough to make her beg for mercy as he hit bottom every other stroke. So a good time was had by all, and then, alas, it came time to climb back down out of the stars and share a smoke while they fought to regain some firmer grasp on their gasping. As he calmed her some with a three-for-a-nickel cheroot, she became more aware of the thumpings, bumpings, and occasional outbursts of conversation all around. She snuggled closer and made as if to cover the two of them with some bedding. He said soothingly, "The door's bolted good and I told you Nolan was a pal of mine. Every copper badge in this precinct wants to see his own name on the final report. But they won't want us to join their crowd. The Denver P.D. would never forgive them for sharing this manslaughter complaint with another outfit."

She still pulled a single sheet waist high as she sighed and asked what he thought might become of that poor neglected wife, now that her lover had been shot and her husband was in for some time at hard, if not a hanging.

Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders, cuddled her closer, and told her, "Judging by the many times I've heard this sad story in the past, she'll go back to him and he, like a fool, will buy her teary-eyed promises to turn over a new leaf. From what I just saw of what she has to offer, not too many other men are apt to give her much choice. A jolly easygoing fat gal is one thing. A jolly easygoing fat gal with a man who comes after you with a brace of Army Schofields is another thing entire!"

Lina Marie chuckled, her unbound blond hair spread across one of his shoulders and half his bare chest, and proceeded to toy with the damp hairs on Longarm's belly as she mused aloud, "At least she might not feel so neglected. But I seem to be missing something. Didn't you just say you'd handed her jealous husband over to the local police, darling?"

Longarm nodded and explained. "He'll spend at least the rest of the night in jail. But any stockman who can afford his own lawyer ought to be out on bail by noon."

"But, Custis, he just killed an unarmed man in cold blood!" she protested.

To which Longarm replied, with a weary sigh, "That ain't the way his lawyer's going to present it to the grand jury. Maxwell's best bet is to remain silent whilst his lawyer paints the picture of a tormented soul, trying to save his marriage from the machinations of a false-hearted employee who'd led his poor corn-fed Edna Mae down the primrose path with buttered words and doubtless some of them French preeversions."

Lina Marie reached a tad lower to fondle his limp love tool as she purred, "Show me what you mean by perverse, you wicked French thing!"

He laughed softly. "We got all night and there's a whole nickel's worth of tobacco left here. I wasn't offering to go down on you just yet. I was telling you how Maxwell's likely to get off, as provided by the Unwritten Law, or the principal of equity, as it reads in most law books."

She said neither term made sense to her, and added, "I thought a law had to be put down on paper and passed by some legislative body before it could be enforced."

He nodded. "That's how come they call such fuzzy legal notions unwritten. You see, the laws we have today are based on a swamping heap of earlier ones, going all the way back to Moses by way of ancient Rome. Roman laws were all writ down in Latin, which can still be read by high-priced lawyers, and they tell me Augustus Caesar and his Roman crew wrote mighty sensible and consistent for such olden times. But their punishments were a mite harsh, and since they held Miss Justice had to be blind, there was no way to let any felon off. The law was the law, and if you didn't aim to end up nailed to a cross or worse, you damned well obeyed the law!"

She began to stroke what was no longer quite so limp as he took a deep drag on the cheroot and said, "You didn't want to hear about equity in any case, right?"

She protested, "I'm interested in that too. Just let me work this sweet thing up again for the both of us as you tell me why I ought to care about ancient Romans being mean to people."

He smiled thinly and said, "There might be time. I want it all the way up, you tight little doll. The blind justice of Roman courts could lead to results so mean that even the Romans were shocked enough to write them down in Latin. That's how later law clerks, trying to work out common law for the Middle Ages, found out about things like poor old crazy ladies or bitty kids getting crucified for showing disrespect to some statue of a naked cuss sporting a fireman's helmet. The tale I find most disgusting was when they came to arrest a Roman politician for abusing his authority. There was no doubt he was guilty, and our own politics might be less corrupt if we got to hang such rascals. But under Roman law they got to execute both him and his whole family. I reckon they figured it would be tough to be a serious crook without your kinfolk knowing about it."

She was interested enough to slow down, which hardly seemed fair, as she said, "Well, the Pinkertons did point out the time that they lobbed that bomb through Frank and Jesse's window. But I still think it was mean to kill that half-wit boy and cripple old Mrs. Samuel."

Longarm said, "When the Roman lawmen came to arrest this official called Sejanus, they were stuck with the fact that Roman law forbade them to execute a virgin. So they had to rape the man's little girl in public before they could make her pay for her dear old dad's crimes against the state."

Lina Marie gasped and said, "That was horrid of them, and I don't care how blind Justice is supposed to be!"

Longarm nodded. "Law clerks the Romans had down as dumb barbarians agreed with you on that. So they slipped in the sort of fuzzy notion of equity, which had nothing to do with equal justice but held that sometimes Miss Justice had to show some merciful common sense. Mortal folks can be driven over the line by native customs or a notion that they're obeying some older, higher law."

She nodded in sudden understanding. "You mean that old-time code of honor calling for a gentleman to defend his womankind and other property to the death?"

He said, "Something like that. I told you it was fuzzy and never written down on paper. They dasn't make it lawful to gun a man for fooling with your woman, or allow you to pistol-whip every gent who implies you might be fibbing. But just the same, they reduce charges of simple assault to aggravated assault if you can prove the victim called you a son of a bitch before you swung at him. And as for killing a man you just caught in the act with your woman, how many prosecuting attorneys with a lick of sense are likely to haul a poor heartbroken wretch before a judge and jury when they know that should one juror figure the dead Casanova had it coming to him..."

She began to stroke his much firmer erection faster as she said, "I see why outraged husbands seem to get away with it so often. And speaking of coming, I want to get on top again."

He snuffed out the cheroot as she cast the bedding aside with a giggle of glee and cocked a lush thigh across him to impale her pretty self on his now fully restored virility.

It felt swell, and he was content to let her do some of the work for a change. He had a job to go to in the cold gray dawn, and at the rate they were going, he doubted he'd catch much sleep before it came time to rise and shine.

He still felt obliged to roll her over and finish in her firm but voluptuous flesh. She took it as a compliment, and said she'd evoke that Unwritten Law and scratch any other gal in town bald-headed if she ever caught her flirting with her long-donging darling.

Longarm had to grin as he pictured Lina Marie fighting it out bare-ass with a certain equally well-proportioned widow woman up on Capitol Hill, or another somewhat more muscular blonde down Texas way. No man with a lick of sense was going to mention marriage certificates at a time like this. So he only said, "A body can get in trouble counting on unwritten law. There's nothing written down to say they can't punish you for busting a real law. It's up to the lawyers to figure out the fuzzy logic. Many an old boy, or gal, who tried to follow unwritten law wound up in real trouble from the law written down in ink!"

She wrapped her legs around his waist to keep him from rolling off as they let it soak in her some more. Not feeling up to more than that just yet, she allowed that the Unwritten Law sounded almost as mean in its own way as the draconian no-excuses laws it was meant to save poor sinners from.

Longarm moved gently in her to keep their friendship firm as he replied, "Slick talkers or slow thinkers can ruin the intent of the law no matter how it's been written. Them Romans should have seen it was just dumb to blindfold Miss Justice and leave her armed and dangerous, whilst common sense decrees that ninety-nine times out of a hundred a body who kills another body deserves to die for it. Not as much for doing it as lest somebody else feel the same call. If folks were made to feel you couldn't kill nobody without getting hung, a heap of killings might never take place."

She asked, "Don't you think that poor Mister Maxwell had call to kill his wife's lover tonight?"

Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders, making her purr and wriggle back, as he said, "Nope. They're going to let him off. For all any of us know, the dead man had it coming. But Maxwell never would have gunned him if he hadn't been brought up to feel a real man didn't have any other choice, or all that much to fear, once he'd caught a fool like the late Sunny Jim in such a ridiculous position!"

She murmured, "This position feels just grand to me. What other positions do you suggest for the couple next door, dear?"

Longarm started moving faster in her as he replied in a conversational tone, "It wasn't the physical pose Sunny Jim was in that left him no way to come out ahead. It was more like who he was posing with nude when her husband barged in on them this evening."

She gripped him tighter with her thighs and coyly asked what he might do if some other man kicked in their door.

He told her, "I'd stand a better chance than poor old Sunny Jim. For I've hung my own gun handy and it would be a fair fight, unless you fibbed about being new in town and unspoken for leastways."

She began to grind her pelvis teasingly in time with his thrusts as she assured him she was single and casually asked why the lover caught in this same act earlier couldn't have fought back.

Longarm said, "He could have. Had he won, he'd have been looking forward to his hanging along about now. The unwritten law allows the injured husband to gun his woman's lover. There's nothing writ or unwrit that allows a jasper to bust up a man's home and then put a bullet in him. I wasn't just being nosey when I asked you all them personal questions over supper at Romano's earlier. I've seen too many old boys buried young to mess with any other gent's woman!"

At the time he really thought that was all a man had to worry about as far as the Unwritten Law was concerned.

CHAPTER 2

The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News enjoyed a field day with what they described as the Sordid Love Triangle at the Viceroy Hotel. But after a couple of days on the front pages of both papers, things commenced to go about the way Longarm had expected.

Maxwell's slick Denver lawyers knew better than to enter a plea of justifiable homicide. Cockeyed Jack McCall had tried that in a Colorado court after backshooting James Butler Hickok up Dakota way, and everyone remembered the possibly unconstitutional but certainly fatal verdict. Colorado folks considered a homicide a homicide, and figured even a horse thief deserved to die by rope-dancing. So the old stockman's lawyers got the case postponed while their client had his head examined at a fancy private sanitarium down by Pike's Peak. That was the last of the case as far as any front pages went. Longarm had no idea where Maxwell's fat wife wound up. But a copper badge at the Parthenon Saloon did tell him Sunny Jim Stanhope had been buried out by the clay pits, neatly wrapped in mattress ticking, at no cost to the taxpayers and damned little to Maxwell's law firm.

By this time Longarm could see he should have asked more questions at that spaghetti joint the night he'd first wound up in bed with old Lina Marie. For while it was true she'd had no male friends out Denver way, she'd left out the part about wanting to find one in particular and settle down. It was a notion he'd run across before, womankind being less adventurous than himself. So he knew that once they got to saying they felt unfulfilled selling dry goods where they worked, or cramped for space in the furnished room that you'd found for them, it was only a matter of monthlies before you got that old ultimatum. But in this case the ploy was another gent, at work, who seemed anxious to make an honest woman of her, if only she'd forget that taller cuss with more hair who was only using and abusing her.

Longarm didn't invoke the Unwritten Law to go gunning for the son of a bitch. He just wistfully allowed there was no way he could top such a fine offer, and was sorry that he wasn't there to escort her to supper after each hard day's work, since that other gent, if he existed, seemed so set on making her feel so blamed fulfilled.

He didn't know why the pretty young widow woman he'd been planning to invite to supper instead slammed the door in his face when he showed up at her place on Capitol Hill with store-bought violets. He felt sure that whether Methuselah had really lived nine hundred years or not, he'd gone to his grave without understanding the unfair sex.

Fortunately, the head matron at the Arvada Orphan Asylum hadn't heard about him having spaghetti at Romano's with any blond hussy, and so Longarm got to work a tad later than usual the next morning with a crick in his back. He'd forgotten how athletic little Morgana could be after she hadn't been getting any for a time.

As he entered the marshal's office in the Denver Federal Building, young Henry, the clerk who played the typewriter out front, told him their boss, Marshal Billy Vail, had Attila the Hun in the back.

Longarm doubted that, but said nothing as he sat down on a bench and picked up a back-dated copy of Godey's Lady's Book, the marshal's wife saving her subscription periodicals for the office. Longarm had no call to sew a hem or bake a cake. But some of the pictures were interesting.

He looked up to exchange glances with Henry when they both heard loud cussing coming from Billy Vail's office. When mention was made of blowing someone's balls off, Longarm rose to his considerable height and ambled back to see who the visitor had in mind, his own.44-40 drawn but pointed down along the seam of his pants.

As he entered Billy Vail's oak-paneled inner office without knocking, he saw his stocky, bulldog-faced superior's visitor was a wiry gnome wearing a summer-weight seersucker suit with a brace of six-guns under his unbuttoned jacket. As they both turned to regard him, old Billy Vail called out from behind his cluttered desk, "Morning, Deputy Smiley! Has that slug-a-bed Deputy Long shown up yet? Mr. Homagy here has some serious charges he means to make to the rascal's face!"

Longarm knew how little he resembled the hatchet-faced quarter-Pawnee Deputy Smiley. So he figured his boss had to be as drunk as a lord or trying to slicker the scowling Homagy. So he just went on aiming at the rug in the uncertain light as he calmly replied, "Long was having breakfast in that chili parlor near the corner just a few minutes ago."

This was true. As soon as you studied on it. The wild-eyed cuss in the seersucker suit and six-guns didn't take much time to study on it. He said he knew the place and was already on his way, with a set jaw and a glare of grim determination as Longarm stepped aside to let him stride through the door as well as he was able.

Turning back to Vail with a bemused smile, Longarm asked what on earth might be going on. Vail was already up from behind his desk, and stumped over on his own short legs to snap, "Tell you along the way!" as he grabbed Longarm's left elbow to steer him out of the office and through the maze of connecting rooms and passages, adding, "That was Attila Homagy. Don't laugh. He's one of them Bohunk coal miners from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they must teach history different."

Longarm mildly replied, "Henry said Attila the Hun had come to call on us. I thought he was joshing. You said the jasper wanted to bring some sort of charges against this child, Boss?"

Vail soberly replied, "I just said that to keep the conversation polite. His exact words were that he means to blow your balls off, stomp your head flat, and then kill you."

Longarm whistled softly as they came to a last side door out to the softly lit marble corridor. Vail told Longarm to let him scout ahead. So Longarm stood there trying in vain to remember that funny-looking older man with the distinctive name until Vail said, "Coast seems clear. But it won't take him long to get up to that chili parlor and back. So let's move it on out. I want you to use those janitorial stairs at the far end to slip down and out the basement entrance. He might know about your hired rooms on the far side of Cherry Creek. So you'd best go on up to my house and tell my old woman to hide you out till I get there."

They were moving in step along the otherwise deserted corridor as Vail issued these grotesque instructions. But Longarm shook his head and said, "You're not making any sense, no offense. I had the drop on that bragging banty rooster just now, and you just saw that despite all his bragging he failed to recognize me on sight. So why am I supposed to act as if he was the one and original Attila at the head of all his Huns?"

Vail popped open what might have seemed a broom closet to the visiting eye, and hauled Longarm into the grimy cement stairwell before he explained, "You can't fight him. You'd lose no matter who won. Homagy claims that during the merry month of May, whilst he was attending a convention of the Knights of Labor, you were down in the Trinity coal camp playing slap and tickle with his young bride, name of Magda Homagy nee Kadar. She's from the same old country too. But none of that's as important as the spot it puts you in with a jealous husband out to avenge his honor as per the unwritten law!"

Longarm scowled in the gloom and growled, "There seems to be a lot of that going around this summer. I was nowhere near Trinidad in any part of this year's greenup. Don't you remember putting me on court duty right after I came in with that prisoner in the first week of May?"

Vail grumbled, "Of course I do. I told him that, just now. That was when he raised his voice to me. He said it was natural for a man's pals to lie for him. But that his Madga had confessed to him, in Bohunk, that she'd been led down the primrose path by a slicker with a badge who'd implied they'd all wind up back in that empire they never wanted to see again if she didn't surrender her reluctant ass to him. She says you made her suck it at the point of a gun when she allowed she'd as soon be deported. I suspicion that's the part he feels most upset about."

Longarm allowed himself to be moved down the stairs, but as they descended he still said, "You mean so he says. Billy it's established I was never anywhere near his informative Magda. Meanwhile, have you ever considered how many enemies I may have made packing this badge and my guns for you, or how convenient it might be to offer such a dramatic excuse to a grand jury, should one not make it out of town after gunning a lawman for fun and profit?"

Vail said, "Don't try to teach your granny how to suck eggs. I'll naturally send a heap of wires about two-gun Bohunks as soon as I can make sure you can't gun one another. But there's a hole in the plan you just presented. At the risk of turning your pretty head, you do enjoy a rep for winning gunfights. So one would think a man hired to gun you might not want to warn you in advance that he's out to gun you."

Longarm shook his head. "A hired gun, by definition, is a cuss who thinks he can take all comers, one way or another. His main concern, like I just said, is a good excuse to justify his actions to the folks he ain't been paid to kill. I found a runt in a seersucker suit called Attila amusing too. But who's to say who was bullshitting whom just now?"

Vail said he failed to follow Longarm's drift. So his tall deputy explained. "He might have just been pretending you'd fooled him with that sly introduction. You'd think a man would know who he was gunning for if he rode the D&RG northbound all the way from Trinidad to gun him. So let's say he roared in like a lion, expecting you to get him to leave like a lamb, after stating his intent to demand satisfaction."

"What for?" asked Vail with a puzzled scowl. "Seems to me a man would only make himself look more foolish if he ran all over threatening to kill someone and then... Oh, I do follow your drift!"

Longarm nodded grimly and said, "I'd be as easy to backshoot over in the Parthenon as Hickock was that time in the Number Ten. What got McCall in so much trouble then was that he just up and surprised hell out of everyone in Deadwood. Had he told all the boys in advance how old Wild Bill had been mean to him..."

They were at the bottom of the stairs now. Vail said, "I'll meet you later at my place up on Sherman. By then I'll have had time to wire some old pals in Trinidad and vice versa. Should our mysterious stranger turn out to be a stranger down yonder as well, I can have some of the other boys he can't possibly know pick him up, for some serious conversation. Should he really turn out to be Attila the Hungarian with a ruined marriage to avenge, we got an even more serious situation to converse about. In either case, I want you off the streets and out of sight whilst Henry and me get a better grip on things."

Longarm allowed he'd do as he was told for now. So they parted friendly and Longarm slipped out the basement entrance to the east as Vail climbed back up to his second-story office, muttering about gents who couldn't handle their fool wives.

It wasn't high noon yet, and Longarm knew he'd wind up beating rugs or splitting stove wood if he showed up at the Vail house too early on a workday. The motherly-looking but house-proud old biddy Billy Vail was married up with knew he worked for her man, and held that the devil found work for idle hands. She'd been like that ever since she'd found out about him and that young widow woman down the street from her.

It was too early to eat more chili, and he'd promised he'd get off the downtown streets of Denver. So he ambled on over to that rooming house he'd rustled up for old Lina Marie. He had his own key and the buxom blonde, for all her faults, would be at work until after five.

Meanwhile, he'd never gotten to read those magazines or smoke half the tobacco he'd carried up her stairs, along with the usual flowers, booze, and candy. So this unexpected afternoon off would offer the opportunity to kick off his boots and catch up on some casual smoking and reading, with nobody grabbing at his privates just as he was getting to the end of an article or the solution of a detective story. He liked those English detective stories a lot, even though those fancy English crooks seemed to use more imagination on paper than plain old American crooks did in real life.

A colored maid was dusting in the hallway as he let himself in the unlocked front door. She looked unsettled to see him there at that hour. But he knew she knew who he was and his connection with a paid-up roomer on the top floor. So he just nodded at her and went on up to Lina Marie's garret quarters under the mansard roof.

The hall door was naturally locked. Or so it seemed. He didn't know exactly why Lina Marie had locked it until he unlocked it and stepped inside, expecting to find himself alone up yonder.

He wasn't. The buxom blonde and a total stranger who could have used more fresh air and sunshine were going at it hot and heavy on the brass bedstead against the far wall, naked as a couple jaybirds in a love nest. The jasper on top froze in mid-stroke to stare goggle-eyed as Lina Marie grinned sickly at Longarm and gasped, "Honey! I wasn't expecting you this early!"

Longarm resisted the impulse to dryly observe that seemed mighty obvious. Some kindly old philosopher had once declared, doubtless in French, that nothing a man could say as he made a last exit would be more sophisticated than simply closing the door softly after himself as he left. Gals counted coup on each cussing or slamming from a man.

But Longarm was cussing to himself as he stomped down the stairs and out of the rooming house with that colored maid staring at him.

Striding up the shady side of the street he found himself muttering aloud, "That pasty-faced and pimple-assed son of a bitch must be the boss at work she told us about. Nobody else would be screwing her so freely on company time, and damn it, that was my pussy he was screwing so brassy, in the very quarters I helped her find!"

He paused under a cottonwood to light a cheroot as he told himself to calm down, muttering, "Don't get your bowels in an uproar over old Lina Marie, you idjet! You were looking for a graceful way out of the tedious fix, remember?"

He strode on, puffing smoke like a locomotive hauling its heavy load up a nine-degree grade as he growled, "Whether I wanted old Lina Marie or not is not the point. That pale soft slug couldn't lick old Henry from the office, and there he was on top of the gal I saw first, as if he thought I had nothing to say about it!"

Longarm suddenly laughed in a more boyish tone as his common sense told him, "Asshole! He wasn't thinking about you at all. He was just a poor mortal with a hard-on, and you know you laid Lina Marie the first night you treated her to spaghetti and meatballs with spiked wine!"

But as he strode east toward the somewhat cooler and clearer high ground of Capitol Hill, he found himself grumbling, "Hold on. I asked early on if she was spoken for. She says she told that priss at work she was shacked up with me!"

He decided that was the part that galled him the most. The soft pale shopkeeper should have known you don't help yourself to another man's tobacco or liquor without his permission either, unless you're sure he's too big a sissy to do anything about it. So where had an infernal dry-goods pusher come up with the notion a bigger man in any better shape wouldn't do anything about it?

Longarm suddenly laughed in a world-weary tone as his common sense told him, "From Lina Marie, of course. She'd have likely told him we were through before he carried her home from work early to console her. Forget the poor hard-up cuss. He never spent ten seconds thinking about you or any other man as he lusted after that brassy blonde!"

So Longarm strode on in restored good humor as he considered how everything was working out. But the unexpected ending of his half-ass love affair had given him added insight into what might be eating Attila the Hungarian. For Longarm could see that if he'd had a mite less regard for the written law, or a mite more regard for old Lina Marie, somebody could have been in a whole lot of trouble back there!

By the time he walked to Broadway and Colfax at the foot of the long gentle rise to the flat top of Capitol Hill, a street clock told him he'd at least burned up some time with all that nonsense. So he cut north along Broadway to where a man could part some swinging doors and see what sort of free lunch they were offering over this way.

There was no such thing as a free lunch, of course, but he still saw they'd set out some devilish eggs and pickled pig's feet, both a mite salty. So he ordered a scuttle of their draft to wash some of their free lunch down.

The nibbles weren't quite as good, but the beer was cheaper than it cost at the Parthenon Saloon near the Federal Building. Longarm had remembered that when he'd paused down the way to consider how to put off beating rugs for Mrs. Vail. He knew better than to show up really late, or walking funny, so he was nursing his beer with salty grub when a blue-uniformed Denver copper badge passed by the swinging doors of the entrance, broke stride, and came inside with a weary shake of his peaked cap, wistfully declaring, "I know I can't order another lawman, Deputy Long. But I purely wish you'd take it off my particular beat!"

Longarm smiled uncertainly and asked, "Take what off your beat, Roundsman Callahan? I was under the impression I was just in here killing time with some suds and these salty nibbles."

Callahan sighed and said, "Judge not, lest ye be judged, and I've been in a strange town with a hard-on as well. But that Bohunk gal in Trinidad was married up with a mighty wild-eyed cuss! He's been asking all over town for you. We run him in this morning as a cataclysm fixing to occur. But the desk said threats against his wife's lover don't count unless he's within pistol range."

Longarm swore softly and declared, "I wouldn't know the fool's wife from Mother Eve if I did wake up in bed with her! Lord knows how Homagy ever got the notion I'd been anywhere near her!"

Callahan shrugged and replied, "That's easy. She told him it was you, according to him, and I don't think I want you trying to deny it on my beat to a crazy Bohunk packing two Schofield.45s! He's already been told how many professional gunslicks you've beaten to the draw. But he just don't seem to be a man you can talk sense to."

Callahan glanced out the doorway, as if expecting trouble at any time, as he added, "I don't want to tidy up after either one of you. We both know what a pain in the ass it is to write up all them reports in triplicate and then have the district attorney cuss you for sticking him with a can of worms. There's no way in hell we'd ever convict him, whilst charging a lawman with murder makes us all look bad!"

Longarm sighed and said, "I wish I could at least try for a plea of self-defense, should push really come to shove."

To which Callahan replied in a surprisingly cheerful tone, "You can't. But I'd sure hate to get stuck with the chore of arresting a man with your rep. So I sure wish you'd fight him somewheres else!"

CHAPTER 3

Longarm dawdled up Colfax Avenue to the statehouse, went inside and sat up in the visitors' gallery, and listened to some grouchy old birds argue about the gold-to-silver ratio until he decided he might as well go on over to the Vail house and split cordwood out back.

But even though he got there before mid-afternoon, he didn't wind up doing any of Billy Vail's chores. For the marshal was there in the flesh, dancing about on his dusty brown lawn like a Cheyenne with a vision, or a kid with worms, until Longarm got within hearing range so Billy could shout, "Where in thunder have you been? I sent Smiley and Dutch over to your quarters to gather up your Winchester and McClellan for you. I hope you've got the usual change of socks and some iron rations in your saddlebags."

As Longarm joined his shorter superior on the summer-dry stubble, he replied with an uncertain frown, "Always keep my gear handy for a sudden leap into the great unknown. But where might I be leaping in such a hurry? Did we get another tip on Frank, Jesse, or The Kid?"

Vail glanced uneasily up and down the tree-lined street atop the rise and told Longarm, "We'll talk about it inside. I had Henry type up some travel orders before I left the office just now. But I reckon I'd best fill you in a mite, and your next train out don't leave this side of four-thirty."

Longarm had left the Denver Union Depot often enough to consult his mental timetable and decide, "That would be the UP eastbound you'd want me to catch. Who are we after in Kansas, Boss?"

As Vail led him around to the kitchen entrance Longarm was told, "You're getting off at Kansas City to cut backwards to Fort Sill, betwixt the Washita and Red River of the South."

Longarm blinked and said, "I know where Fort Sill is. But getting there by way of K.C. makes no sense. What's wrong with my catching the D&RG down to Amarillo and changing to most any eastbound for a way shorter ride?"

Vail snapped, "Trinidad. Henry was the one who pointed out there's no sensible way to get to Amarillo without passing through Trinidad, and if there's one place other than Denver I don't want you for the next few days, Trinidad, Colorado, has to be it!"

By this time they'd made it into a kitchen reeking of apple pie and Arbuckle Brand coffee. As Vail waved Longarm to a seat at their big pine table, his motherly old woman told Longarm she'd heard about the mean bully after him. From the way she said it Longarm surmised her husband had convinced her he hadn't really messed with that Magda Homagy down Trinidad way.

Vail sat across from him and said, "Henry got off the usual wires to the law down yonder. Fortunately Denver P.D. had already wired a heap of questions about Attila Homagy and the Trinidad law had their earlier answers handy. So they got back to us within the hour."

As his wife served their pie and coffee Vail continued. "First the bad news. Attila Homagy seems to be who he says he is. He's the straw boss of a drilling and blasting crew at the Black Diamond Mine. They mine bituminous coal, not real diamonds of any color. He's never been locked up more than ninety days as a result of his disposition, but they report they weren't too surprised to hear he was after someone with a gun. Homagy was brought to Penn State as a tyke by his Bohunk coal-mining kin, which is how come he talks English plain. But they seem to have reared him by a proddy Bohunk code of honor that seems to call for an eye for an eye and then some. So he's been known to wreck a saloon for serving him watered whiskey, and it appears nobody from the Austro-Hungarian Empire will ever find a Bohunk too timid to totally kill any man who even insults his woman!"

Longarm washed down some pie, and was fixing to insist he'd never laid eyes on Magda Homagy when Vail continued. "Trinidad says Attila the Hungarian's wife is tougher to talk sense to than he is. She just got here and barely knows enough English to shop in a Bohunk neighborhood. Attila sent home for her. Reckon he thought he could trust any gal who couldn't tell what cowhands were saying to her."

Longarm nodded absently, brightened, and said, "Hold on, Billy! Don't that prove me innocent? I don't speak Hungarian at all. So if she don't savvy our lingo, how in blue blazes was I supposed to act up with her whilst her old man was off to that union convention?"

Vail grumbled, "I told you earlier that you didn't have to sell me on where you spent the merry month of May. It's her husband who's after you with two Schofields."

Vail sipped some coffee himself before he added,"She must talk at least some English. Trinidad says an Irish neighbor woman backs up her story about some tall handsome stranger moving in with Attila's woman over a weekend and not leaving until just before all the menfolk got back from that May Day meeting. Old Magda didn't get to tell the other wives the whole story until the handsome stranger lit out. So up until then half the gals on the hillside had her down as just a brazen adulterer."

Longarm nodded thoughtfully and pointed out, "If other ladies in Trinidad actually laid eyes on old Magda's houseguest, it don't matter to us whether she made up some details after her brass cooled down or not. Why don't I just head for Trinidad instead of Fort Sill and see if old Magda's neighbor ladies think I look like that other handsome stranger?"

Vail growled, "Because you're going to Fort Sill instead. If I thought sweet reason would work on Attila Homagy, he'd be sitting here having apple pie with us right now whilst the three of us tried to figure out what really happened last May. I told you I told him I had you right down the hall on court duty at the very time he has you wrecking his happy home nearly two hundred miles away. He wouldn't have it. He's quit his job to track down the man who hung all them magnificent horns on him, and if you ain't the one, who in blue blazes is he supposed to shoot?"

Billy's wife refilled their cups with a weary smiles as she said, "Men! I swear you all just get more mule-headed as you get older! I don't see how that crazy coal miner is supposed to support his young wife without a job, no matter how they work out their difficulties."

Vail said, "I don't either. I figure that whether they bust up or stick together, he's still going to need another job soon as he's run his fool self broke tearing all over like this. Trinidad says he cleaned out his modest bank account the day he quit at the mine. Since we ain't talking four figures to begin with, he can't keep at it more than a month at the rate he's been steaming. Worrying about where on earth your next meal or another job might be coming from has a grand way of concentrating a man's mind. So the timing of your trip over to Fort Sill and back works out about right."

Longarm washed down the last bite of pie and leaned back in his bentwood chair to ask how come they wanted him to run over to Fort Sill in the Indian Nation.

Billy Vail leaned back in his own chair and got out one of his more expensive but far smellier smokes as he pontificated, "Indian Territory since the war. If you want self-rule, like the Civilized Tribes were granted back in Jackson's day, don't ever side with the Confederacy and then brag on not surrendering for six months after Lee!"

Vail struck a match and lit his pungent cigar, ignoring the sad sigh of his wife as he continued. "Fort Reno and Fort Sill went up west of the original Indian Nation grants in any case. Indians had no self-rule in those parts to begin with. Those western outposts were built to police far wilder nations such as Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa-Apache."

Longarm had known all that. It was more important he catch the eye of the lady of the house, lest he find himself with no defense against Bill Vail's cigar. Once he did so, patting the cheroots in a breast pocket, she nodded, but headed for another part of the house with a remark about opening more windows.

Vail gazed fondly after her and remarked, "She knew I smoked this brand the day we married up. Women and children are a lot like the Indians when it comes to counting on dreams of the future. But that gets us back to your mission to Fort Sill. The recently shot-up and calmed-down Comanche and their Kiowa allies have been moved off their old reservation in the Texas Panhandle and resettled around Fort Sill."

"On what?" Longarm dryly asked as he got out a cheaper but much less vile smoke. "I know Fort Reno, to the north, better. But I've passed through Fort Sill often enough to opine such timber and game as there might have once been has been cut down and shot off a heap."

Vail let fly a thunderhead of swirling blue smoke and replied in a philosophical tone, "Don't never ask the Bureau of Indian Affairs for nicer hunting grounds if you mean to lift white hair and then brag about it. The trouble only got serious after that Kiowa chief came in for a government handout and gloated to Agent Tatum that he'd wiped out a wagon train."

Longarm hung some of his own tobacco smoke between them as he thought back, nodded, and said, "I never figured out why poor old Satanta did that. Indians I know tell me that raid was led by his rival, Mamanti."

Vail shrugged and declared, "Don't matter. The war that resulted was the end of both of them, and we ain't got time for ancient history. Now that everyone's agreed on Quanah Parker as the heap big chief of the Comanche and spokesman for his orphaned Kiowa children, things have commenced to get more progressive. The Comanche have actually taken to drilling in corn crops and raising pony herds instead of raiding for 'em. The Kiowa and that half-ass bunch of stray Apache they've adopted are still trying to live their old free ways. That's what you call it when you sponge off employed neighbors and the self-supporting taxpayer, the old free ways."

Longarm asked dubiously if any of the new developments around Fort Sill had anything to do with him and his trouble with Attila Homagy.

Vail said, "It wouldn't have, if that fool Bohunk had kept a tighter rein on his wayward bride. But a few days back I got me this request from the B.I.A. Seems Chief Quanah Parker asked for you by name and-"

"Hold on!" Longarm cut in. "I barely know Quanah Parker to howdy, and I've never messed with even one of his eight wives!"

Vail got to his feet with a weary smile. "You got it ass backwards. Right now you're likely safer surrounded by Quill Indian husbands than the other kind. They asked to borrow you for a spell to help 'em smooth the rough spots of their new Indian Police out of Fort Sill. The army ain't so interested in training Indians for anything but scouting since Indian Affairs got transferred from the War to Interior Department. I was about to write back that our Justice Department has enough on its plate when that Attila jasper showed up with the avowed intent of blowing your balls off."

Vail picked up a bulky manila envelope from the sideboard and turned back to Longarm. "You'll find more about it in here, along with your travel orders and such. I had Henry type up copies of the shit from Fort Sill. Meanwhile, I sent Smiley and Dutch over to your hired quarters on the far side of the creek to fetch your Winchester, McClellan, and saddlebags packed for the field--if you know what's good for you. You'll find your stuff in the baggage room at Union Depot. Your claim check and train tickets are in this envelope."

As he handed it to Longarm he continued. "I've already told you I'm sending someone else to scout the cheating wives of Trinidad. I want you totally out of our hair at Fort Sill whilst we find out just what happened and do something about it. So what are you waiting for, a kiss good-bye?"

Longarm muttered he wasn't that sort of cuss, and so they settled for shaking hands and parting more or less friendly. Longarm was still a mite riled as he ambled back to Colfax to catch a horse-drawn streetcar. The notion of running off to join the Comanche Nation to avoid a fight with a mighty silly pest just didn't sit right, even though his common sense told him nobody important to him was fixing to call him a coward or even laugh at him. The pure fact that Attila Homagy was probably green as hell with a gun and surely misinformed about his wife's love life made him impossible to reason with and stupid for any real gunfighter to tangle with.

The streetcar carried him the mile and a quarter to Union Depot a tad sooner and not as sweaty as if he'd legged it all the way at that pace. As he entered the cavernous depths of the sooty red brick edifice, it took a short spell for his eyes to adjust from the bright sunlight out front. So he froze in mid stride and came close to going for his gun when an all-too-familiar voice near the tobacco stand let fly with, "You didn't think I'd be slick enough to head anyone off here, did you, Deputy Smiley?"

Those last two words saved Attila Homagy from a pistol-whipping at the very least as Longarm stared thoughtfully down at the older man and paused to hear him out.

Homagy nodded at the envelope in Longarm's left hand. "Some last-minute instructions from Marshal Vail, eh? I guess all of you had me down as just another dumb greenhorn. But I'll have everyone know that whether I was born in the Carpathians or not, I graduated from the eighth grade in Penn State!"

Longarm cautiously said, "Anyone can see you're as smart as your average cuss, Mister Homagy."

The mining man with the wayward wife said, "Damned right. I found out where Longarm lived, and got there just in time to learn that you and another deputy had just left with his traveling gear, Deputy Smiley. I knew he'd be leaving town from here or that Overland Stage from in front of the Tremont House. So I came here first, telling them over at yonder baggage window that I was a pal of Deputy Long's, and what do you think I just found out?"

Longarm managed not to grin as he soberly replied, "It's a sin to tell a lie, and they shouldn't have given out such privileged information. But I've worked that dodge and they usually do."

Homagy looked so smug it would have been cruel to tell him he was full of it. So Longarm didn't as the older man crowed, "They told me he means to catch that train to Kansas City in an hour or so. So guess who'll be here to see him off. the home-wrecking son of a bitch!"

Longarm sighed and said, "Bragging right out that you mean to gun another man could be taken as criminal intent, Mister Homagy."

The avowed assassin replied with a sly grin, "Who said exactly what I'm going to do when I catch up with the man who made my poor little Magda bus him against her will? Go ahead and arrest me, if you think you can hold a man with simple justice on his side. Your Denver Police arrested me earlier, and had to let me go."

Longarm was about to ask if bus was the Bohunk for what he surmised it had to be. But then they were joined by a Spanish-speaking streetwalker called Consuela, who sidled up to Longarm and said right out, "Buentardes, El Brazo Largo. jA 'onde va?"

So it was safe to assume Attila Homagy spoke no Spanish. For the soiled dove's words would have translated as, "Afternoon, Longarm. Where you headed?"

Before she could say anything worse in English, Longarm had her by one elbow and they were rushing for the platform doors as if they had a train to catch.

The young whore laughed and gasped, "Madre de Dios, you must really need some! But that's what we're here for and I'll try anything that doesn't hurt too much!"

He got her out of Homagy's sight as he tersely told her in his own version of Spanish that he was working under an assumed name and didn't want that suspect in the seersucker suit back yonder to know just who he might really be.

Consuela laughed incredulously and replied, "Pero El Brazo Largo, everyone inside the depot knows who you are!"

She'd made a good point, and damn it, that southbound Billy Vail had advised against was already pulling out a platform over!

So Longarm was running, a lot, as the southbound D&RG cleared the end of its boarding area, picking up speed. He skimmed his envelope through the space ahead of him, and dove headfirst for a grab at the brass rail of the last car's observation deck. A strong small hand grabbed the wrist of his as it was slipping, and he was grateful as hell as he hooked a booted ankle over the same rail. Then the brunette in blue who'd risen from her wicker seat just in time helped him roll aboard, even as she chided, "Didn't anyone ever tell you that's a very dangerous way to board a train?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "Not half as dangerous as my staying where I was might have been, ma'am."

She allowed her handle was Cora Brewster as he bought her some sasparilla soda inside the club car. It seemed the least a gent could do, and she didn't seem to mind when he ordered a schooner of needled beer for himself. They took a corner table near the rear windows, and after that things sort of went to hell in a hack.

She was getting off at Trinidad, for openers, which inspired him to introduce himself as Deputy Gus Crawford. When she remarked they had another such Crawford writing for the Denver Post, he said he'd noticed that and made a mental note she was sharp as well as pretty. Then she said that she and her husband had started the first dairy herd down Trinidad way.

Billy Vail had warned him not to even pass through Trinidad, and he figured he could use some practice at behaving himself around a pretty lady with a firm grip and those trim hips a gal got from a heap of horseback riding. So he never even asked if she minded him smoking. He'd been meaning to cut down in any case, and that helped him, some. It was easier to keep his thoughts about her clean as he sat there dying for a smoke.

The conductor finally came back to their end of the train. Cora naturally had her ticket handy. Longarm started to ex plain how he'd boarded at the last minute without having had the time to pay at the depot. But the conductor said, "Don't give it a thought, Longarm. It won't break this line to carry you free as far as Trinidad, and as a matter of fact, it feels much safer having you aboard as we pass Castle Rock."

The intelligent brunette waited until the conductor had punched her ticket and headed back the other way before she asked him with a puzzled frown why that conductor had just called him Longarm.

Before Longarm could reluctantly confess the truth, she added in a knowing tone, "You don't look anything like that notorious Longarm, Mister Crawford."

It was Longarm's turn to sound puzzled as he replied, "Do tell? I didn't know you'd met the notorious cuss they keep writing fibs about in the Post and Rocky Mountain News."

She said, "I was never introduced to him when he passed through our town last May--leaving quite a wake, I might add. I only had him pointed out to me a time or two as he passed by, each time with still another immigrant girl. You'd never know it from those stories about him in the newspapers, but Colorado's answer to Wild Bill would seem to be some sort of foreigner."

He asked who'd ever told her a thing like that.

She replied without hesitation, "Nobody had to tell me. I heard him speaking Hungarian to a pretty little greenhorn from Bohunk Hill as I was standing in the open doorway of a notions shop across from the Papist church in Trinidad. Hungarians are Papists, like most of the Irish mining folk. They call Hungarian something else, it sounds like Mad Gear. But once you've heard folks talking it you know it has to be Hungarian. It sounds nothing like the Spanish, High Dutch, or Welsh you hear in coal-mining country."

He said he'd take her word for some cuss talking Bohunk in the merry month of May to the pretty immigrant gals of Trinidad. Then, choosing his words carefully, he said, "That conductor just now seemed to fancy I was this Longarm jasper. So ain't it likely there could be some resemblance betwixt me and this cuss we're talking about?"

Cora Brewster turned on her club car stool to peer across their small round table more intently as Longarm fought to keep a poker face. The intelligent and apparently sharp-eyed brunette took her time and sounded convinced as she flatly stated, "No resemblance at all. You're both tall and sort of rangy. At the risk of turning your head, you're both good-looking and you both wear guns and mustaches of heavy caliber. After that you look nothing like one another. I don't see how that conductor could have taken you for that nasty Longarm.

The real Longarm replied, "He must need new specs. Did this tall drink of water down Trinidad way say right out he was Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, or might it have been someone else's decision, Miss Cora?"

She started to say something without thinking, caught herself, and gained even more respect from Longarm when she decided, "As a matter of fact, the first townswoman who pointed him out to me gave an outlandish Hungarian-sounding name I don't recall. She was a shop girl from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. But you'd have to ask her if you wanted to know exactly where. She said he was a notorious womanizer and a big bully who took advantage of his fellow greenhorns, knowing his way around the American West better."

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "That sure sounds like the West-by-God-Virginia rascal I keep reading about in the Denver Post. But how did his fellow Bohunks uncover his true identity if he started out as one of their own badmen?"

She sipped more soda through her love-grass straw as if to allow herself time to choose her words before she confided, "It all came out in the Homagy scandal. Trinidad's not half as big as Denver, so a scandal as juicy as that one gets told and retold until everyone has every detail whether they wanted them or not."

Longarm sighed and said, "I know this young widow woman back in Denver who'd agree with you on back-fence sass in any size town. I swear that if you drop a jar of olives on Lincoln Street, it'll grow to a wagon load of watermelons by the time the gossip gets all the way to Sherman, a block up the slope. So ain't it possible to mistake one tall cuss with a mustache with another?"

Cora Brewster sipped more soda and demurely decided, "I've never confessed adultery to a husband after midnight. So I can only try to imagine the scene inside the Homagy cabin when she told him she'd been seduced by a blackmailer who'd threatened to have the two of them deported. I remember how surprised we were at the notions shop to hear it had been an American government official instead of the immigrant bully we'd thought we'd noticed pestering the immigrant girls of Bohunk Hill while their men were down in the mines or out of town to those anarchist meetings immigrants go in for."

Longarm frowned thoughtfully out the grimy glass at the passing grassy swells. "Hold on," he said. "I'm missing something. Just who come down off the slopes of Bohunk Hill to tell the rest of the world Attila Homagy had caught his woman with the one and original Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, ma'am?"

She shook her pretty head and replied, "Nobody. Had the poor man actually found an intruder under his roof, dressed as suspiciously as in his shirtsleeves with his vest unbuttoned, the code of any gentleman, foreign or domestic, would have called for the spilling of blood on the spot!"

Longarm soberly said, "I know how that fool code's supposed to work, ma'am. I told you I was a lawman. Is it safe to say Homagy beat his wife and announced his even grimmer intentions about a famous American lover after she told him that was who he was after?"

Cora Brewster demurely replied, "I told you I wasn't there. But I suppose she must have, since her husband never actually caught her with anyone!"

Longarm took a deeper pull on his beer than he'd meant to as he mulled one gal's suspicions about another over and over in his own head. Then he said, "There's no better way it works. Homagy was out of town a spell on union business. When he came back he must have heard his woman and some other pretty Bohunk gals had been seen carrying on with a handsome stranger. It was you, not me, who allowed everyone but at least one jealous husband was pretty. A gal trying to cover up for a handsome Bohunk boyfriend might grab at an American name off a newspaper she'd just wrapped the garbage in. It might be as tough for a Bohunk to come up with an American name on short notice as it would be for a scared American to recall some Bohunks are called Attila!"

He scowled down into his beer stein and added, "There was a front page or more covering some court proceedings last May too. So how do you like a false-hearted woman betraying her husband with another man, and then betraying a federal deputy she'd never laid eyes on to her husband's vengeance, by naming him as the one to be struck down on the field of honor?"

Cora Brewster wrinkled her pert nose. "If what you say could be true, Magda Homagy carried casual adultery on to premeditated murder! The only question left would be just whom she had in mind. They say this Longarm is fast on the draw and quick on the trigger, while poor little Attila Homagy is at best a handy man with a star drill and dynamite!"

Before Longarm could get into the unwritten law and the edge it gave even a mediocre fighting man, the Trinidad gal added, "I heard a lot of the Hungarian folks down our way have tried to persuade poor Mister Homagy to forget it. They seem to feel there's no shame to accepting things in their new land as they just have to be. They've told both the husband and wife it was more like a natural disaster than an affair of honor. They feel it's hopeless to resist the iron whim of any government official, and they've warned Attila Homagy the Americans will surely hang him if he kills such a famous American lawman, even though he'd be in the right with simple justice on his side!"

Longarm didn't answer right off. There was more than one way to shovel any stall, and he didn't want to pile on any more lies he might want to take back in a hurry. He knew he'd doubtless be able to convince this bright young Trinidad gal he couldn't be the jasper she'd had pointed out as himself earlier. She'd just told him he looked nothing like the man she'd been told was Longarm. She knew lots of other Trinidad gals. Including more than one who'd be as willing to depose in writing that they'd seen yet another handsome stranger messing with those sassy Bohunk gals while their menfolk hadn't been looking.

But Billy Vail had issued direct orders forbidding him to go anywhere near Trinidad. Meanwhile, it was going to take them at least another four hours to get there at this speed, Lord willing and no trestles were down. So Longarm let her rattle on about treacherous young wives stuck with musty old men as he sipped away the rest of his beer and asked her if she'd like some sandwiches to go with her next soda.

She hesitated, then calmly replied, "It's been hours since last I ate back in Denver, and I fear we'll be pulling into Trinidad past my usual supper-time. But I think we'd better go Dutch treat, Deputy Crawford. It wouldn't be right for me to lead a strange man on, and it's not as if I can't afford some ham on rye. I forgot to tell you I was just up to Denver on business, and we made out right handy on some yellow cheese we've started to make at our dairy."

Longarm felt no call to press it. The pretty gal's husband or a hand who worked for them figured to be waiting for her when they both had to get off at Trinidad. He wasn't looking forward to the overly hearty handshakes and cautious smiles such occasions seemed to call for. But when a man had to change trains he had to change trains, and at least it would be old Cora, not himself, who got to explain how innocent it had all been, for as many times as it took to sink in.

He caught the eye of a colored club car attendant, and once they were fixed to order he made sure they'd be getting separate tabs.

Cora Brewster had been serious about that ham and rye.

She made Longarm feel a mite prissy by ordering a scuttle of beer to wash it down.

He allowed he'd have his next beer by the scuttle instead of the far smaller schooner, seeing it saved trips back and forth from the bar, and ordered Swiss and salami on pumpernickel.

He could tell she'd been raised almost as country as himself, and as a rule country folks got right down to business with their grub so they could get on with any chores that needed tending. But as Longarm and Cora found themselves with nothing better to do than talk as they chugged on south with the foothills of the Front Range to their right and the rolling swells of the High Plains going from tawny to golden in the late afternoon sunlight, they just nibbled, sipped, and speculated about that tearful Bohunk gal confessing she'd been untrue with a lawman called Longarm when her husband hadn't really caught her in the act with anyone.

Meanwhile, back in Denver, the somewhat confused streetwalker called Consuela meant no harm to El Brazo Largo, known to be more friendly to her own people than many of his kind. It was loyalty to her own social class as well as La Raza that inspired Consuela's hiss of warning as she spied two Mexican street urchins stalking a little old gringo in a seersucker suit, over by the baggage windows of the crowded Union Depot.

The bigger boy, who usually held the mark from behind as his wiry compadre grabbed for his watch chain and wallet, drifted over to the slightly older whore, a violet-scented cigarette rolled in black paper dangling from his pouty lip as he quietly observed, "We know he wears a gunbelt under his jacket. For to use a gun on anyone one must be able to get at it, no?"

Consuela warned, "He looks like a ham-Jess viejo to me as well, Hernando. Just the same, if I were you, I'd choose someone safer for to go after. That one is muy peligrosa, muchacho mio."

The young thug shot a more thoughtful glance across the waiting room, turned back to Consuela, and demanded, "That old gringo? You can't be serious! Little Pancho here could take him in a fair fight if he did not have those guns and nobody else interfered! What do they call this big bad gringo we are supposed to be afraid of, eh?"

Consuela said, "I do not know. I have never seen him around here before. But he has been here long enough for one who reads the ways of men on the street to suspect he is stalking someone with the guns he wears partly concealed. You have heard, of course, of El Brazo Largo?"

Hernando nodded thoughtfully and said, "The one his own people call Longarm? I know him on sight. They say he's muy toro. What about him?"

Consuela said, "That one just ran El Brazo Largo out of town! I saw it happen less than an hour ago. They were talking--in a tense way, I could see. Then suddenly, the smaller one said something and El Brazo Largo grabbed me by one arm and dragged me out to the loading platforms, begging me not to tell anyone who he really was!"

Hernando whistled as he gazed across the hazy waiting room with a lot more respect, marveling, "Hey, they say El Brazo Largo faced down both Thompson Brothers in Texas! You say he asked you not to tell that older man who he was?"

She answered, "Si. Then I told him there were a lot of people around this depot who knew who he was, and the next thing I knew he was running for the next train out!"

Hernando gasped, "Madre de Dios, we owe you for warning us! The hombre malo who could run Longarm out of town is nobody Pancho and me wish for to dance with!"

That would have been the end of it if Hernando hadn't spotted a hard-faced Anglo that Consuela wouldn't have wanted to speak to a few minutes later. The rangy hardcase, dressed like a cowhand on his way to a funeral, was as mean as he looked. So naturally Hernando and Pancho admired him. But as they approached, the black-clad rider leaning against a sooty brick wall scowled at them and said, "Beat it, you greaser faggots. I'm down here at the depot to meet somebody. I don't want no nickel cocksucker!"

Hernando persisted with, "I can't fix you up with no cock-sucker. I don't know your sister. Pero, quien sabe? Maybe I got something much better for you. What if I could point out the hombre who just ran the famous Longarm out of town? The hombre malo who took such a pistolero would be famous as Wild Bill, no?"

Blacky Foyle, the terror of many a West Denver saloon, raised a thoughtful brow and replied, "I ain't sure I'm ready to be famous as Wild Bill, albeit they do say he has a fine fence around his gravesite up Deadwood way. The man who'd go up agin a man Longarm was afraid of would have to take such affairs more serious than a sunny child like me. But why don't you point this dangerous jasper out to me, and mayhaps I won't call you a cocksucker no more, Hernando."

CHAPTER 4

Trinidad, Colorado, had sprouted from where the original Santa Fe Trail had crossed the Purgatoire by way of a handy ford. Later, by the time they'd shortened the freight wagon route by way of the Cimarron Cutoff, they'd found soft coal seams in the foothills to the west and given Trinidad a better reason for being there. The steel rails laid west to replace the old wagon ruts were more interested in firebox coal and boiler water than the shorter but more barren cutoff. So now the seat of Las Animas County enjoyed its own trade with the outside world in coal, cows, and farm truck.

By the time their train was passing the outlying spreads of the prosperous transportation hub, Longarm and Cora Brewster had moved on back to the observation platform again and he'd learned more about the butter and egg business of Trinidad than he'd ever thought he'd need to know.

But there were worse ways to while away the hours aboard a train than jawing with a pretty lady, and the malicious gossip involving him and a Trinidad gal he'd never met made a heap of otherwise tedious facts about the transfer point seem far more interesting.

As the sun sank ever lower and the spreads off to either side got smaller and more closely spaced, Cora was rambling on about how much more even an immigrant coal miner's family spent on fresh eggs and dairy products next to, say, your average single cowhand. Longarm had been getting paid as a single cowhand when he'd decided he'd rather sign on as a junior deputy six or eight years back. So he politely repressed a yawn and said, "I've got a pretty good picture of domestic doings up on Bohunk Hill, Miss Cora. What I really need a married woman's advice on is that mighty odd but apparently voluntary confession by Magda Homagy. Setting aside who in thunder she'd been sparking whilst her husband was out of town, why would she tell him all she'd done, in dirty detail, with any other man by any other name?"

Cora wrinkled her pert nose and replied, "I wasn't there. But I imagine a woman would confess to added details if her husband beat them out of her, or if she really wanted to rub it in. I could answer more surely if I knew whether they were still together or not."

Longarm stared soberly at the lamp-lit window in a cozy soddy they were passing as he mused aloud, "I don't know. Attila Homagy never brought her up to Denver with him. Maybe she's waiting for him down the line with a candle lit in the window for him. Maybe she run off with that other cuss. The one she said was... somebody else."

Cora agreed a cheating wife or more had been known to lie to save a lover. But after that she pointed out, "That swaggering lothario I only saw in passing, but more than once, didn't strike me as the sort of man who'd treat a girl to a ride to the next town, let alone more than a few nights' food and lodging. If she was dumb enough to run off with him, she'd have been home with her tail between her legs by the time her husband returned from that union gathering."

Longarm stared back up the receding tracks, noting you could no longer make out the point they came together on the horizon in this tricky twilight. He said, "Maybe she did. I sure wish I had time to nose about on Bohunk Hill and find out exactly where she is and exactly what she has to say about this mysterious cuss her husband has down as a federal deputy. But the night train I'll be riding east won't give me a full half hour in Trinidad."

She said, "I could find out anything you could, seeing I live just on the edge of town and know most of the tradeswomen. Why don't you give me a list of questions to ask? Then I could post them to your Denver office and you'd find them waiting for you there when you got back from your mission to Fort Sill."

Then she spoiled it all by adding, "You never did get around to telling me why they're sending you to Fort Sill, Deputy Crawford."

He muttered. "Just delivering some instructions."

Knowing that any nosey lady trying to write to a Deputy Crawford in care of Fort Sill would eventually have her letter returned unopened, he said, "They're sending some others from my home office down to nose about the scene of whatever transpired. I'm more interested in the other man than a wayward wife who'll either be at home or somewhere else. There's no telling which way he went after he turned the head of old Attila's wife. But he must have left town, or that jealous Bohunk wouldn't be searching high and low for him in Denver."

Cora must have spotted a familiar landmark in the passing softly lit scenery. For she bent forward to pick up the carpetbag she'd had resting on the decking near her high-button shoes as she asked how Longarm knew that other Longarm hadn't just been hiding out in some other part of Denver.

It was a good question. Longarm replied, "I just said he could be most anywhere. Tall drinks of water who look like Americans of the Western persuasion ain't all that rare. But him being some sort of furriner might make it easier to pick him out of a crowd."

She said they were almost there, and rose to her feet with her modest baggage as she added, "A lot of hardcase wanderers of our West seem to be foreign born. I mean, aside from the Canadian Masterson brothers, we have the Italian Renos, the Alteri boys, and the much nicer but probably more dangerous Charlie Siringo. Then there's Johnny Ringo, born a German Jew as Rhinegold, and isn't that fast-drawing Chris Madsen supposed to be a Swede?"

By this time Longarm had risen to take her carpetbag from her as he replied with a bemused smile, "Deputy Madsen's from Denmark, ma'am. But you were right about his famous quick draw. Where did a boss milkmaid, no offense, learn so much about our current crop of Western gunslicks?"

She said collecting newspaper accounts of wilder Western folks had been her husband's hobby, and that he'd often said someday a lot of folks would likely pay good money for the true facts behind all those wild tales. She said she'd helped her husband keep that scrapbook up to date, and that she still sometimes leafed through it, thinking back to when she'd pasted something in.

Longarm said, "This jasper sparking the Bohunk gals of Trinidad spoke neither Eye-talian, Yiddish, nor Danish to the immigrant gals he was pestering. So that narrows it down a heap."

Then something else she'd just said sank in and he demanded with a puzzled look, "Did you say your man used to keep up with such hombres, meaning he ain't around to do so anymore? It's no beeswax of mine, but that ain't a black dress you have on this evening, Miss Cora."

The train was slowing to a stop as the sun was setting. So it was hard to read her eyes as she quietly replied, "I put my widow's weeds away two years ago. Jim was killed over a year before that. A Jersey bull Jim was trying to medicate tossed him and then trampled what was left of him."

Longarm didn't answer. It might have sounded smug to observe that the milking breeds were thrice as dangerous as any beef critter. As the train braked to a steamy stop, they saw their observation platform was just even with the north end of the plank loading platform. Longarm gripped his own envelope with the same arm holding her carpetbag, and opened the side gate of the platform with his free hand. They both knew he wasn't supposed to do that. So maybe that was why she was grinning like an apple-swiping kid as he helped her off their train. He asked if she'd have anyone picking her up, and if she did, where.

She said she'd left her trotter and shay at the livery across the way, and quietly added, "I could drive you over to Bohunk Hill and introduce you to some of the more respectable miners' wives, if you have the time."

He asked how far from the center of town they were talking about. When she said about halfway to the coal seams up the river a few miles, he sighed and said he didn't.

When he added the eastbound he meant to transfer to would be pulling out within half an hour, she softly replied, "There will always be another train on that same track, and I'd be proud to put you up for the night out at our place later."

He was so tempted it hurt. But he somehow managed to decline her tempting offer, and so they shook hands and parted friendly on the walk out front. As he turned back inside Longarm grumbled, "Next time Billy Vail accuses me of placing pleasure before duty, I'll have a wistful answer for him indeed. But of course, nobody would ever believe I just spoiled such a lovely evening for all concerned without anyone holding a gun to my head!"

CHAPTER 5

Old Billy Vail had known what he was picking when he'd picked Fort Sill as an out-of-the-way place to send a rider. It was after midnight when Longarm had to get off the one train and board another running closer to due east along the Saint Lou line. He had enough time between trains to send a wire to his home office at night rates. So he did, knowing Billy Vail was still going to have a fit, but that as soon as he calmed down to take a breath, he'd see the deputy who'd disregarded his orders to avoid Trinidad had made it on to Amarillo without incident and would have made it to Fort Sill, his own way, by the time Western Union got around to delivering a night letter.

Only the fancier varnish express trains passing through the Texas Panhandle sported those new Pullman dining cars, and no such on-board facilities would be open after midnight in any case. But Mister Fred Harvey, Lord love him, had opened one of his round-the-clock depot restaurants at Amarillo. So after Longarm had sent his night letter, he saw he had just enough time for a hasty but warm and rib-sticking late-night snack.

He sat at the counter, along with the few others grabbing a bite at that hour. The fellow traveler to his left was a trim-waisted gal in a tan whipcord travel duster and big veiled summer boater. It was tougher to judge a woman's age under a travel-dusted veil. But she had a handsome profile for a gal of any age. The Harvey gal who came to take orders down at their end was more certainly around eighteen.

She was pleasantly plain, with her chestnut hair pulled up in a neat bun and the white linen apron over her coffee-brown uniform as starched as if she'd been on the day shift.

Longarm naturally waited till the lady to his left ordered herself a Spanish omelet with a mug of hot chocolate. Longarm asked for chili con carne with black coffee. You didn't have to say you wanted your black coffee strong at a Harvey. He knew they made their chili right too. The Harvey gal was back in no time with everything piping hot.

Too hot, Longarm feared, if he was supposed to catch that other train at the top of the hour. He mushed more oyster crackers into his chili than he'd really wanted. He resisted the temptation to pour coffee into the saucer and blow on it, knowing how country the gal seated next to him might consider that.

As he was stirring like hell and she was pouring extra cream from the counter into her hot chocolate, a somewhat more country boy under a dove-gray Texas hat took the last seat at their end of the counter, to the left of the gal in the tan duster. It was none of Longarm's business until the rustic asked the lady if she'd like him to saucer and blow her hot chocolate.

The lady naturally didn't answer. Longarm put away some warm grub and washed it down with scalding java before the pest asked her how come she was so stuck up. The lady had already paid for her order on delivery, that being the Harvey way in a world where folks had a heap of trains to catch. So she only had to rise from the counter, pick up her overnight bag, and head for the door without even looking at the fool kid.

Longarm still didn't care. But then the pest jumped up to follow after her, asking if she needed help with her bag. It wasn't until he made a grab for it, causing the lady to trip and almost fall, that Longarm swung off his own stool to his considerable height and firmly announced, "That's enough, cowboy. You've rode past flirty into scary, and I want you to leave that lady be."

The Harvey gal behind him moaned, "Oh, Lordy!" and went to get someone bigger from the kitchen as the lout in the big hat kept clinging to the traveling gal's baggage, growling, "If I was you I'd be down on my knees in my sissy suit, praying for my life right now. For they call me Pronto, and the name is well deserved. You see what I'm packing in this tie-down holster, hero?"

Longarm regarded the other man's six-gun with detachment as he quietly replied, "Looks like a single-action John Adams. I've always admired well-preserved antiques."

Then he nodded at the lady in the tan travel duster and added, "You just go on and catch your train, ma'am. Ain't nothing but some schoolyard bluster likely to take place around here. Let go her bag, cowboy. I mean it."

The well-armed cuss let go of the overnight bag, but not as if it was because he'd been asked to. He dropped into a gunfighter's crouch as the lady lugged her baggage for the door. She was unable to keep from asking in a jeering tone, "Do you boys stage this scene for all the girls, or just the ones from out of town?"

Then she was sweeping out the doorway, nose in the air, and only Longarm laughed. The would-be Texas badman who still seemed willing to fight over her asked uncertainly, "What's she jawing about? Are we supposed to be up to something I never knew we were up to?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Yep. She thought we took turns insulting gals in railroad depots so's we could take turns rescuing 'em. I can see how that might be a good way to meet women, once you study on it."

The younger and obviously less -experienced cuss scowled at Longarm and insisted, "Hold on! I never agreed to let you rescue her from me. I don't even know you. I thought I was out to rescue her from you!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Either way, she's gone and I got my own train to catch. So it's been nice talking to you, but like I said..."

"What about our showdown?" the depot desperado asked in a plaintive tone.

Longarm said, "I'm sure you could find plenty of other young gents willing to shoot it out with you at this hour for no good reason. But the only quarrel betwixt us just dismissed us both as a pair of unskilled country boys, if we ever had a quarrel to begin with. Fighting over a woman is sort of dumb. Fighting over a woman who doesn't like you is just plain stupid."

Longarm didn't wait to hear any counterargument. The depot loiterer wasn't crouched as tensely now, and while Longarm kept an eye on everyone as he circled for that same doorway, he was really more worried about the older-looking cuss who'd come from the kitchen in a cook's apron carrying a foot of carving knife.

Nobody drew or threw as he got out of range in the steamy light of the big depot. He'd only polished off a third of his chili and maybe half his coffee. But sure enough, his Saint Lou night train was fixing to pull out as he hurried along Track Number Four in the tricky light. Way down the platform, he saw that pretty but sort of snotty gal in the tan duster boarding one of the Pullman sleeping cars and staring his way, as if worried he was fixing to lope after her all the way to Saint Lou. He had no call to go on down and assure her he'd be getting off in the wee small hours. So he never did. He boarded a coach car carrying no more than that bulky manila envelope, and took a seat under an oil lamp to catch up on all those onionskins Henry had typed up for him not a full twelve hours earlier. Time sure could drag when you weren't having any fun.

As his train pulled out of the depot the Harvey night manager, who'd been watching through a door crack, came out from the back and said, "That was close. I thought we had your word you'd start no more trouble if we let you have free coffee, Pronto."

The kid with a hat and gun a mite big for him returned to the counter with a smirk, saying, "I wasn't looking for trouble. I was courting a lady fair when that jasper in the sissy suit horned in."

The night manager said, "That was no jasper in a sissy suit, you romantic young cuss. He's passed this way before. So I'm sure it was that deputy marshal they call Longarm!"

Pronto grinned and said, "I backed him down, no matter who he thought he was. Polly here heard him say he didn't want to fight me and saw him go around me!"

The Harvey girl just looked confused. The manager said, "I saw it all from the kitchen too. You're lucky to be alive, Pronto. Had he been anxious as some to run up his score, you'd have never stood a chance. For they say Longarm's taken on some of the fastest guns in both the East and West, and won easy!"

Pronto sneered, "Don't care what anyone says about him. All I know is that I made him crawfish! Wait till I tell all the boys I backed down the famous Longarm in the flesh! Mayhaps then I'll get me some respect around Amarillo!"

The cook headed back for his kitchen with a snort of disgust. The night manager sighed and said, "I wish you wouldn't brag too loud, Pronto. We try to run a decent place here, and gunfire can play bob with a customer's appetite!"

While they were talking, a brakeman off a night freight came in to take a seat at the far end of the counter. Pronto had that effect on the regulars around the Amarillo depot. The burly brakeman was a decent tipper who never got too fresh. So Polly moved quickly up the counter to serve him.

The newcomer naturally asked the Harvey gal what the argument at the far end might be about. Polly told him, "Pronto's filled with himself just now because he thinks he backed down the famous lawman Longarm. You know how Pronto likes to glare at smoother-shaven gents. His victim was as likely a whiskey drummer as a famous gunfighter."

The brakeman frowned thoughtfully and muttered "Longarm, you say it might have been? That's funny. Someone on that night rattler crew from the north was just jawing about some little squirt in seersucker chasing that same Longarm out of the Denver depot at a dead run!"

Polly looked unconcerned as she replied, "We all have to grow up sometime. What if the famous Longarm has just gotten tired of silly showdowns?"

The brakeman flatly stated, "Then he's as good as dead. Once a man has established a rep as a gunfighter, he can't afford to lose his nerve."

Polly said, "The customer Pronto just had words with didn't seem all that terrified. He just walked away from a silly fight with a silly kid, if you want to know what it looked like to me."

The brakeman shook his head and explained, "Nobody's likely to ask what it looked like to you, Miss Polly. Your point's well taken that a serious gunfighter may take pity on an occasional squirt. But should word get about that a man of Longarm's rep backed down within the same twenty-tour hours from not one but two untested nobodies... well, do I have to go on?"

He did, because Polly said she didn't understand what on earth he was talking about. So the brakeman said, "They all seem to lose that edge it takes after they've been through enough gunfights. That's all greener gunfighters, who still feel immortal, have to hear. The most famous but far from the only example would be Wild Bill Hickok up in Deadwood. He'd taken to drinking more and practicing with his pistols less, and Cockeyed Jack McCall wasn't the only one who'd noticed. So if McCall hadn't gunned Wild Bill in the Number Ten Saloon, it would have been some other gun waddy in some other saloon." He paused. "I reckon I'll have ham and eggs," he said casually.

CHAPTER 6

Longarm had been studying his railroad timetables, and so he'd seen that if he rode on down the line to Cruces, he'd be better than forty miles further from Fort Sill and there wouldn't be a northbound for the next two days.

On the other hand, a body getting off at Spanish Flats in the chill before dawn might hire a livery mount and make it on up to Fort Sill by the time that weekly combination serving the Indian Territory ever left Cruces.

So as the moon still hung high, Longarm got off at Spanish Flats, due south of Fort Sill, thankful to be packing so little baggage for a change. Since he hadn't been planning on getting off there before he'd consulted his timetable after midnight, Longarm felt no call to worry about the few other passengers getting off at the same stop in the tricky light. He could still taste his midnight snack back in Amarillo, and he knew he'd sleep lighter if he quit while he was ahead. He knew they'd expect him to pay in advance at that hotel across the way whether he arrived with his usual McClellan and saddlebags or just this fool envelope. So he did, and in no time at all he was sound asleep in his small but tidy hired room.

It felt as if he'd slept less than an hour, but the sun was up outside as somebody commenced to pound on his locked door with a heap of authority and what sounded like a pistol barrel.

Longarm rolled out of bed in his underdrawers and grabbed for the.44-40 slung from a handy bedpost as he rose and called out, "I hear you, damn it. Who is it and what do you want?"

The pounding was replaced by: "Clovis Mason of the Texas Rangers, and we've had a complaint about you, stranger. Where did you get off signing the register downstairs as a federal deputy, by the way?"

Longarm held his own weapon politely pointed at the floor as he cracked the door, nodded at the badge on the other gent's freshly laundered white shirt, and opened wider, saying, "I signed in under my right name because that's who I am and I have nothing to hide. I am Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, and I'm bound for the Indian Agency up at Fort Sill on government beeswax. I've barely talked to a soul here in Spanish Flats, and you say someone's made a complaint about that?"

The Ranger, somewhat shorter and stouter than Longarm, stepped in to regard the half-naked hotel guest dubiously and replied, "A lady says you've been following her all the way from Amarillo after you conspired with another gent to try and move in on her. I hope you have some identification before we go on with this bullshit?"

Longarm hung on to his own pistol as he moved over to fish his wallet from the duds he'd draped over a chair. The Ranger hadn't drawn his own .45-30--rangers were like that--but he'd been eyeing Longarm through narrowed lids until he spied the federal badge and identification. As his poker face got more human he said, "I'll be switched with snakes if I don't buy you're being the one and original Longarm! But why in thunder did that newspaper gal just come over to our company to charge you with mashing and menacing her all through the night?"

Longarm put his wallet and gun away and got out a couple of his cheroots and some waterproof Mexican matches as he calmly replied, "I didn't know I was. I recall her accusing me of some diabolical plot when I told a cowboy to leave her alone back in Amarillo a few hours ago. I did see her boarding the same eastbound later. If she got off here in Spanish Flats, I can see why a pretty gal who thinks she's even prettier might think I followed her all this way to gaze upon her beauty some more. But you'd think she'd give a man half a chance to get fresh with her before she pressed charges. You say she claims to be a newspaperwoman?"

Mason said, "Our captain made her prove it. Her own identification shows she's a Miss Godiva Weaver, writing for the New England Sentinel. I can't say I've ever heard of it."

Longarm handed the Ranger a smoke and struck a light for the both of them as he wearily replied, "I have. It's one of them expose weeklies that accuses our tee-totaler first lady, Lemonade Lucy Hayes, of being a secret drinker. It's no wonder a female reporting for the rag suspects me of lusting after her fair white body."

He got his own cheroot going and asked, "Did she say what she was doing out our way, aside from being stalked by drooling maniacs?"

The Ranger took a drag on his own cheroot and replied with a thin smile, "Says she was headed home with one scoop when she got a tip on another up to the Kiowa Comanche Reserve. That's what you call a latrine rumor, a scoop. When we told her we'd heard of no Indian trouble up yonder, she handed us the usual shit about big bad palefaces screwing the buffalo and shooting the women of poor old Mister Lo, the Poor Indian."

Longarm put on his shirt as he made a wry face and said, "I told you I'd read her rag. Lord knows there are rascals on both sides a just Lord would fry in Hell forever, but that New England Sentinel only knows about bad palefaces. That's doubtless why they said those three women the Ute rode off with from the White River Agency a spell back were either treated with the utmost respect or, failing that, deserved to be raped by one and all."

Mason said, "You don't have to instruct this child. I've fought Mister Lo. But fair is fair and we haven't had any trouble with the rascals since old Quanah Parker saw the light, remembered he was half white, and brung his bands in to eat more regular off the taxpaying Taibo. That's what they call us, Taibo."

Longarm sat on the bed to haul on his pants as he resisted the temptation to explain the distinctions between the Comanche words for white folks. He didn't savvy more than a few dozen words of the Uto-Aztec dialect the Comanche spoke himself. So he neither knew nor cared exactly why they called you Saltu if they were willing to parley with you and Taibo if they were out to lift your hair. He'd never figured out exactly why a Paddy got so upset if you called him a Mick, come to study on it.

Mason didn't know anything more about the news tip inspiring a mighty suspicious newspaper gal to leap off a train out West and accuse Longarm of attempted rape. The Ranger had smoked enough of the cheroot to excuse himself by saying he had to get on back and report why he hadn't arrested or shot anybody that morning. As he let himself out, Longarm reached for his own stovepipes, saying, "Hold on. I got me at least two days on the open range to Fort Sill and as you can see, I ain't even dressed right for that much riding. Where would I go if I want blue denim, a Winchester, and a couple of ponies with the gear and grub to get me there and back?"

Mason asked if he was buying or hiring. When Longarm allowed he meant to just hire the riding stock and their harness, along with a Texas toper and packsaddle, the Ranger suggested a general store down the street to the north, with a livery that wouldn't cheat him directly across the way. So Longarm rose, they shook on it, and the Ranger left him to his own devices.

Longarm strapped on his six-gun and went down the hall in his shirtsleeves to take a good leak and wash the sleep gum from his eyes. He needed a shave, but his soap and razor were still up in that Denver baggage room, if he was lucky. So he let that go for now, went back to his room to put on the rest of his outfit, and went downstairs for a late breakfast.

As he consumed it in the back booth of a nearly deserted chili joint, he read Henry's typed-up onionskins casually a third time. Then he dropped them in a trash barrel out front as he was leaving. There'd been nothing all that secretive or hard to remember, and it was getting tedious to tote that dumb manila envelope all over.

He found the livery Clovis Mason had suggested, and evoked the Ranger's name to see if they'd treat him as a customer who might know which end of a pony the shit fell out of.

The old weatherbeaten geezer who led him out back to the corral acted sensibly enough until they'd agreed on a couple of aging but still serviceable cow ponies, a paint and a bay, both mares, and got down to brass tacks about money.

The old hostler wanted four bits a day for the hire of both the mares and the riding and packing gear Longarm would need to get him up to Fort Sill and back. That sounded reasonable. So did the old-timer's asking for a deposit against the loss of anything he hired out. But Longarm didn't think he was reasonable when he asked for a deposit of the full market price, and then some, for, say, two fine cutting horses and a spanking-new roping saddle silver-mounted.

Longarm snorted in disgust and said, "I was only aiming to ride them old plugs a week or so. Nobody said nothing about my proposing either should take my name and bear my children. I'll deposit, say, a hundred in cash for the whole shebang, and that's only on account I doubt I'll have to forfeit any of it."

The hostler naturally protested that the bridles and saddles alone would cost better than a hundred dollars to replace, and so it went until they'd settled on a deposit both found outrageous and Longarm was free to walk the two mares across to that general store, with the stock saddle cinched atop the paint and the bay stuck, for now, with packing.

He went inside to discover that, sure enough, they sold almost anything a man or beast might require out on the open range in the late summer months.

He bought some vulcanized water bags and a sack of oats for the ponies, knowing there'd be plenty of sun-cured but fairly nourishing grama to graze along the way.

He bought extra smokes and a few days' worth of canned grub for himself. It hurt to spring for a new Winchester when he knew he had an almost new one strapped to his McClellan in that baggage room up Denver way. So he bought a couple of boxes of Remington.44-40 that fit his revolver as well, and let the saddle gun go for the time being. He bought some new denim jeans, along with a razor, soap, and such. His hickory shirt and tweed vest would get him by after sundown this far south in summertime. But he figured he'd better pick up a vulcanized poncho along with the minimal bedding he might need for a night or so in the middle of nowhere much.

Once he and the shop clerk had loaded all his purchases aboard the two horses, Longarm led them on up the street until, as he'd hoped, he spied a pawnshop.

He was coming out of it a few minutes later with an older but well-kept Winchester Yellowboy, the original model with its receiver cast brass instead of machined steel. Most Indians and some cowboys still favored the Yellowboy over newer models because its rust-proof receiver made up for its loading a tad slower in a setting where a gun might be tougher to strip, clean, and oil very often. The Yellowboy, like the Henry all Winchesters were based on, would shoot as fast as any other saddle gun when fast shooting was called for.

Longarm was lashing the antique weapon to his hired saddle by its stock-ring when a familiar figure in a tan travel duster and veiled hat paused on the nearby walk and declared in a self-possessed tone that she believed that she owed him an apology.

Longarm finished what he'd been doing, tipped his hat to the lady, and told her he was pleased to see she' been talking to Ranger Mason, but that no apology was called for. As he joined her in the shade on the walk, he decided that her hair was a dark shade of honey under that veil and her eyes were hazel. He said, "I can see how it must have looked to a lady on her own late at night, Miss Weaver."

She smiled under her veil and replied, "I see I wasn't the only one talking to Ranger Mason this morning. I really do feel foolish, and grateful, now that I know you really did save me from the pest back in Amarillo. Ranger Mason tells me you're on government business, bound for the Kiowa Comanche Reservation just to the north."

Longarm nodded, since it wasn't a secret mission, but explained, "I ain't sure you could say it was just to the north, ma'am. I know the reserve of which we speak starts officially at the Red River, a fairly easy ride from here. But whilst the Red River forms a south boundary to the lands set aside for all those Indian nations, the ones I'm out to visit will be way closer to Fort Sill, a good forty miles or a hard day in the saddle north of the river."

She said, "That's what everyone keeps telling me. I have to see old Chief Quanah of the Kiowa Comanche. Will you take me with you?"

Longarm laughed incredulously. It wouldn't have been polite to ask a reporter for a pesky paper why anyone with a lick of sense might want to. He just said, "Quanah ain't much older than me. Folks take him for older because he's sort of weatherbeaten and he started so young it seems he's been whooping it up for ages. He ain't the chief of the Kiowa or even all the Comanche. He led the Kwahadi or one division Of the Comanche Army during the Buffalo War. He seems to speak for more of them now because he's half white and speaks good English."

She said she'd heard as much, and had a lot of questions to ask the big chief. So he gently told her, "He might not be up at Fort Sill right now, Miss Weaver. I just read some B.I.A. dispatches. They say Quanah's on a sort of inspection trip of the older nations that were sort of civilized somewhat sooner. It reminds me of those trips Peter the Great took to other parts of Europe when he set out to civilize Russia."

She started to say something about wanting to talk to some other Indian chiefs in that case. He started to tell her it was out of the question for her to come along. But then she headed him off with: "I have to find out if there's any truth to those rumors of corruption in the newly organized tribal police. I haven't been able to get a line on whether the ring-leaders are white or red or whether there's nothing to it at all."

He said, "Well, seeing you're bound and determined, and seeing we both seem interested in the Indian Police, we'd best see about hiring some riding stock for you, Miss Weaver."

She said she already had her own horse and saddle awaiting her pleasure at her own hotel. So he told her to go fetch them while he went back to that general store for a few more trail supplies.

So she did, and they were riding north for the Red River of the South within the hour, which was between nine and ten A.M. Longarm was too polite to comment on her sitting her hired roan sidesaddle. Folks rode best the way they'd first been taught, and if she sat a mite forward, as Eastern folks were prone to, it wasn't as if he expected her to circle any stampedes between hither and yon. Lord willing and the creeks didn't rise, they'd make Fort Sill in a hard day's ride, and her livery nag would bear up better with her modest weight carried SO.

He saw she'd lashed her own bedding across her saddlebags. She doubtless hadn't been told it was best to wrap the blankets inside a waterproof canvas ground-cloth. Folks who insisted on calling the Western grasslands the Great American Desert seemed to think rain never happened out this way.

He had to ask if she knew how to use the Spencer repeater she'd slung from the off side of her girlish saddle. She said her father had let her practice on tin cans back East when she was little. He shrugged and refrained from pointing out a.51caliber Spencer was hardly meant for a kid's backyard plunking. He doubted they'd have any call to shoot at anything between here and the river, and once they were on the Kiowa Comanche hunting ground beyond, shooting was reserved for hunters of the Indian persuasion.

As they followed the dirt wagon trace north across overgrazed and unfenced range, even a gal from back East could see a considerable herd of beef had eased in from their right to avoid the town but make for the same river crossing up ahead. He didn't tell her how he figured the trail drive was only an hour or so ahead. She could read how suddenly cowshit dried as the sun rose high.

He found it more interesting that some outfit was still driving beef north this far east. As settlement spread westward, so the cattle trails kept shifting. All but the most westerly counties of Kansas had been closed to cattle drives by now, and most cows were following that new Ogallala Trail further west these days.

Godiva Weaver broke into his train of thought by asking him out of the blue if he could answer a question about cowboys that nobody else had been able to. He said he'd try.

She said, "I know everyone seems to feel you Westerners ride at least twice as good as the Queen's Household Guard, but it seems to me you all ride with your stirrups too long and seated too far back for your poor mount's comfort."

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I hope you told the others you talked to you were a reporting gal. I've seen some riders act mean because someone asked them their right name."

He stared up the trail to see that there did seem a haze of dust on the northern horizon as he continued. "I've never ridden with Queen Victoria's outfit. I know professional jockeys get more speed out of a racehorse by leaning their weight forward on a flat straight course. For just like a human being carrying a pack on his back, a horse can run a tad easier with the weight across his shoulders."

She said that was what she'd meant.

He said, "There's more to riding a pony than tearing sudden and straight, Miss Weaver. To begin with, you want to stay in the saddle. That's way easier if you're balanced over the critter's center of gravity when it spins to the left or right, sometimes without your permission. Cowhands ain't the only ones who ride back a ways with a boot planted firm down either side. Cavalry troopers, polo players, and others inclined to ride more zigzaggy than some tend to sit their mounts in the same unfashionable way. It's true your mount would no doubt like to carry your weight further forward. But you see, a man who makes his living riding a horse ain't as likely to fret more about horses than his own neck."

She sniffed and said, "I've seen the way you all treat cattle out this way as well."

He wrinkled his nose and found himself saying, "I don't have to treat cows one way or another, ma'am. Now that I've a better-paying job I only eat them, the same as you and all your kith and kin. Next to a slaughterhouse crew, your average cowhand could be said to pet and pamper the cows he's paid to tend to. Have you ever tried to befriend a free-ranging beef critter, Miss Weaver?"

When she laughed despite herself and confessed the thought had never occurred to her, Longarm said, "Don't. Mex bullfighters just plain refuse to face a Texas longhorn in the ring, even for extra prize money. When and if we catch up with that herd out ahead of us, don't dismount for any reason within at least a couple of furlongs. They seem to feel anyone they catch afoot was designed for them to gore and trample. I don't know what you've seen cowhands doing to such delicate critters, Miss Weaver. Some old boys will rope and throw an already cut and branded yearling just to prove it can be done. On the other hand, cows kill folks a lot just for practice. So 1I reckon it evens out. You said something before about the Indian Police up ahead acting ornery too. No offense, but to tell it true, I'm more concerned about lawmen abusing their authority than a fool cowhand abusing livestock."

They could see the river ahead of them now, with the dust from that trail herd hanging mustard yellow just above the far shore, as she said, "I told you back in town I had to get Chief Quanah's version before I decided who's behind it all. Our informant only told me big money has been changing hands, with somebody being paid a lot to look the other way. I'm sure we'll find out that the tribal leaders are innocent dupes of some crooked white men, of course."

Longarm rose in his stirrups to stare thoughtfully up the trail ahead and say, "I can't tell why from here, but that herd out in front of us seems to be milling in place on the far bank of that regular crossing. It's been dry a spell and the water ought to be low enough up the river a ways. Do you know for a fact that white men have been leading some Indians astray, or might you share the opinion of so many that Mister Lo is simpleminded as well as poor?"

As she followed him off the beaten path at an angle, Godiva Weaver protested, "My paper and I have always shown the greatest sympathy for the poor Indians, Deputy Long. We know the poor Comanche only wanted to lead peaceful lives in communion with the natural world, until selfish white men drove them to acts of desperation."

Longarm snorted in disgust and said, "That may be sympathy, but it sure ain't much respect. The Comanche up ahead learned to ride a generation ahead of most other Horse Indians by watching the early Spanish do so, helping themselves to some horses, and teaching themselves to ride better. In no time at all they were the terror of the Staked Plains, and pound for pound they've killed off more of the rest of us, red or white, than all the other Horse Indians combined. They'd be mighty hurt to be dismissed as posey-picking poets back in the days they still recall as their Shining Times."

He made for the silvery surface of the Red River, more clearly visible through the streamside cottonwood and willows now, as the newspaper gal said, "Everyone knows they were great warriors if forced to fight."

To which Longarm could only reply with a laugh, "Nobody ever had to force a Comanche, a Kiowa, an Arapaho, or South Cheyenne to fight down this way. All the plains nations, and the Comanche in particular, gloried in blood, slaughter, and horse thievery. I know they were more in the right than usual when they rose up against the buffalo hunters a few summers ago. The Indians had been cut down enough by cannon fire to go along with Washington on West Texas hunting grounds no bigger than a state or so back East. So those greedy hunters should have left them and what was left of the south herd alone. But the Indians could have saved themselves a heap of casualties in the end if they'd dealt with the trespassers less gruesomely."

He waved his free hand expansively to the north and added, "So that's why we've set up Indian Police wherever the Indians are halfways willing to enforce the B.I.A. regulations more constitutionally. It costs way less salary and resentment to swear in tribal members as uniformed federal lawmen than it might to post white military police at every agency. I've been asked to see just how well they've done so up around Fort Sill. You were saying they ain't been doing it so well?"

She nodded primly and replied, "We were tipped off to brazen bribe demands by the Comanche Police. Apparently they can be paid to look the other way no matter what a white crook wants to do on Indian land, if the price is right. Or contrariwise, they might arrest you for singing improperly, just to shake you down!"

They were closer to the river now. Longarm pointed at the water just ahead and observed, "The river runs too deep for our fording yonder. Let's ease upstream a ways. Indian Police don't have authority to arrest white men. They can prevent a felony in progress and turn white crooks over to the nearest white lawman. Otherwise, their orders are to report non-tribal evil-doers to their agent or somebody like me."

She suggested, "Maybe the whites they intercept on or about their reservation don't know that. Anyone with a badge and a gun can stick out his chest and bluff, whether he has the legal authority to act that way or not, right?"

Longarm spied a stretch of water that seemed to be simmering to a boil a furlong upstream and said, "That stretch looks no more than stirrup deep. But let me go first anyways. Poorly trained or greedy lawmen of all complexions have been known to abuse their authority. Bluffing a paid-up Texican white man out of a bribe might not be as easy for an Indian. But like the old church song says, farther along we'll know more about it."

He led the way cautiously down the crumbling bank. The paint he was riding entered the water gingerly, but didn't put up half the fuss the bay did until he'd dragged it into the shallow water a ways.

Godiva Weaver's roan was either better-natured or else it was smart enough to see the two ponies ahead of it weren't drowning. So they were all soon across the medium-wide and mighty shallow Red River of the South in no time.

As they rode up through the timber along the far bank, Godiva asked how far ahead the Kiowa Comanche reserve was, and when he told her they were on it, she allowed she'd expected a fence or at least some signs posted.

Longarm said, "A lot of folks seem to. An Indian reserve ain't a prison camp, no matter how some Indians act. It's a tract of land set aside by the government for said Indians to live on, undisturbed and not disturbing nobody. It's usually the smaller reserves you'll find posted like private property. Everybody knows Texas is supposed to start just south of the Red River, and like I said, most Indians served by the Fort Sill agency would want to camp closer."

She asked, "Then what are those wigwams doing down that way?"

Longarm reined and stood up to stare soberly eastward along the riverside tree line. He could see all those cows still milling amid billows of trail dust, and atop a slight rise beyond the trail, there was surely a ring of the conical tents the Eastern gal had just misnamed.

He said, "That's a tipi ring, Miss Weaver. A wigwam is the same thing made out of bark and mentioned by someone speaking Algonquin. Tipi seems to be a Sioux-Hokan word for lodge or dwelling, but all the plains nations who live in 'em seem to use tipi or something close. The question before the house ain't what they are but what they might be doing yonder. You just heard me say why I'd hardly expect a Kiowa or Comanche camp this far south."

He unfastened his recently purchased and fully loaded Yellowboy and heeled his mount into a thoughtful walk as he mused aloud, "The trail hands in charge of that herd seem perplexed too, seeing they don't seem able to move their cows past them Indians."

As she gingerly followed, Godiva hauled her own saddle gun up to brace it across her upraised right thigh as she asked if this was really any of their business.

Longarm soberly replied, "Ain't none of your beeswax, ma'am. I'm paid to be sort of nosey. So why don't you rein in here and leave it all to me?"

She said she was paid to be nosey too. But at least she hung back a couple of lengths as Longarm handed her the lead line of the pack pony and forged ahead.

He hadn't forged far when he made out about twenty riders, nine in literally half-ass blue uniforms with their bare tawny legs exposed, and eleven white men dressed more cow-camp. The bunch of them seemed to be arguing about something between a drawn-up chuck wagon and the tipi ring dominating the trail ahead from its rise. Far less formally dressed Indians were watching from up yonder. As Longarm rode in, he got out his badge and pinned it to the front of his vest.

As he'd hoped, that seemed to keep either side from shooting at him. As he got within easy shouting range, the gray-bearded trail boss seated on a buckskin pointed at a sort of haughty Indian Police rider and wailed, "Praise the Lord the B.I.A. sent you to talk sense to these savages, Marshal! This fool Comanche thinks we have to pay him a dollar-a-head trail toll, and I got better than nine hundred head here!"

As Longarm joined them, the sergeant in charge of the longhaired but cav-hatted Indians looked downright surly until Longarm said, "Quanah Parker and the combined tribal councils have set the price at a dollar for passage with grazing, and two bits an acre a season for just grazing. Lots of big cattle spreads charge more, and they have full permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. So I'm sorry as hell, but that's just the way it seems to be."

The Indian sergeant beamed and said, "I know who you are. We were told you were coming to talk to us about our blue shirts. I am Tuka Wa Pombi. I did not see why we needed a Taibo to tell us anything. But my heart soars to see they have not sent us a fool."

The grizzled trail boss protested, "The two of you are surely talking foolish about this herd me and the boys are supposed to deliver up to Fort Sill! I ain't packing anything like nine hundred dollars, and even if I was I wouldn't owe it to no blamed Comanche! The Comanche or at least their blamed agency already owns all these cows! They've been bought and paid for off our Running X spread in Baylor County, for purely Indian consumption, and whoever heard of the jasper delivering the goods having to pay a blamed delivery fee?"

By this time Godiva Weaver had reined in just a few paces away, looking as if she expected to be introduced to everybody. Longarm could only hope she'd understand his apparent rudeness. The trail boss nodded and ticked his hat brim to the lady. None of the Indians seemed to see anyone there. He knew they weren't trying to be hard-ass. Like most warrior breeds, Comanche weren't supposed to start up with a stranger's woman unless they were fixing to offer plenty of ponies, a good fight, or both for her. Allowing you'd noticed a woman but didn't mean to bid on her was an easy way to get into a fight whether her man had wanted to trade her or not. The notion a stranger would sit still for another man just sort of looking was a deadly insult to all concerned.

Longarm turned to Tuka Wa Pombi and asked if he knew what an I.O.U. was. The Indian said he did but made Longarm explain it twice lest he miss any of the details. Once he'd grasped that the Taibos were ready to part with some of their paper medicine that could somehow be turned into solid silver, he agreed an I.O.U. was better than an all day standoff.

The Running X trail boss insisted, "I ain't good for any nine hundred dollars worth of credit! I don't make that much in a year, and if I did I wouldn't be able to save it all, the way prices has riz since the war."

Longarm said, "Make it out in the name of the original owner of this beef and oblige him to settle up with the new owner, Chief Quanah Parker of the Comanche Nation. Then let the two of them work it out." The trail boss started to object, blinked, went poker-faced, and then got out a tally pad and a pencil stub as he said, "I follow your drift."

So a few minutes later the chuck wagon crew was leading out to the north, followed by the wranglers herding the remuda of spare ponies. Then, a ways back, came the madrina or judas cow, trained to lead the way and naturally followed by the herd, six or eight critters abreast, with the flank and drag riders yipping softly but constantly to keep them moving.

Longarm and the newspaper gal watched a spell, and then Longarm suggested they circle wide and head on up the trail ahead and alone. Godiva had no call to argue. She'd already heard cows moved between eight to sixteen miles a day, and she knew she could get further than twenty miles a day on foot in dry weather and good shoes.

Longarm set a somewhat faster pace, trotting their ponies a few furlongs, walking them about a mile, and letting them water, graze, and rest a good twenty minutes every time the trail crossed a wet draw. There were more of those than usual this far east. Despite all the belly-aching on the part of Mister Lo and the opposition newspapers, the rolling grasslands and timbered watercourses the government had reserved for this patchwork quilt of Indian nations was far from the sterile desert some held it to be. When Godiva commented on some late-blooming wildflowers along the trail, Longarm said, "The grass grows taller and thicker than out where the buffalo roam much more numerously even in these trying times. After all that blood and war paint wasted a few summers back to save the south herd, and despite all the Kiowa or Comanche dreams of a last big reservation jump, there ain't enough buffalo left to support that many Indians."

He stared off to the east across the miles of open range as he added, almost to himself, "Funny how fast the buffalo thinned out. Back home in West-by-God-Virginia the elders told tales of buffalo running wild through the woods and even smashing down log cabins on occasion. The Eastern herds were gone well before my time, of course. But you could still hunt buffalo along the banks of the Mississippi just after the war."

She laughed in a superior way and declared, "There's no mystery as to who's hunted the buffalo almost to extinction in the few years since the invention of the repeating rifle! The supply of buffalo robes and bone meal might have lasted indefinitely if white men hadn't been so selfish! Why didn't they just buy them from Indians?"

Longarm got out a fresh cheroot and, seeing she didn't smoke, lit up before he muttered, "I used to see things that clear and simple. Poets reporting Indians never killed more buffalo than they needed never hunted buffalo with Indians. A pack of contesting riders running a buffalo herd downed every buffalo they could and, wherever possible, ran the whole herd off a cliff. Then they held one swamping supper and stuffed themselves with grease running down their chins till they all got sick. But more than half the meat still spoiled, even after the dogs had eaten a heap. I've heard all those sad stories of white hide skinners leaving buffalo carcasses scattered across the prairies to rot. They're true. A man making as much off one buffalo hide as them cowhands back yonder make after two days in the saddle ain't inclined to conserve wild game."

He blew smoke out his nostrils and continued. "Professional hide hunters seldom used repeating rifles, by the way. The tools of their trade were the single-shot Big Fifty with a telescope sight."

The Eastern girl grimaced and said, "I stand corrected. The game hogs shot off all those buffalo one at a time. What about the rights of the Indians to their traditional game?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Nobody back East had any use for a buffalo hide skinned the traditional Horse Indian way. They sat the dead critter up on its belly, like a big old hound by the fire, and skinned it by cutting along the backbone. They either didn't know how or didn't want to preserve the fur for a lap robe. They held that a rawhide skin, preserved their greasier way with brains and tallow, should have the softer belly skin in the center. For all I know they were right. But no white folks back East would pay any three dollars and fifty cents for such a hide. They wanted 'em dried flat, untreated, with the thickest back fur down the middle. After that, it depends on who you ask about the Horse Indian's traditions."

He reined in and stood in the stirrups to stare back the way they'd just come as he continued. "What the Indians call their Shining Times was one of those golden boom times, like the beaver trade or the New England whaling industry before Drake's oil wells back in Penn State. Mister Lo got the horse and fanned out across these plains as a wondrous new species after the white man and the horse got to these shores and multiplied some. They figure 1700 as the earliest date you'd have noticed any substantial numbers of Indians on horseback, and the buffalo were already in trouble. They were butchering 'em fast as they knew how before they had the horse, let alone the guns they admire just as much as we do."

She insisted, "There are still far more white men and they have killed far more buffalo."

He nodded soberly and said, "That's the way things work. If it was the other way, or if just Mister Lo and his horse and gun had been left to shoot the buffalo off, he'd have managed. Or it would have looked as if he'd managed. A spell back I was riding herd on these ancient bone professors up around the headwaters of the Green River. They told me these swamping giant lizards called dinosaurs had roamed out this way long before either us or any buffalo. And yet there they all lay, dead for a coon's age. So what do you reckon wiped them out?"

Godiva laughed incredulously and demanded, "How should I know? Some ancient species of animals have simply gone extinct. Everybody knows that."

Longarm settled back in his saddle as he replied, "I know mankind has been trying to wipe out the coyote, the rat, and even the bitty housefly for as long as anyone remembers. So there must be more to this extinguishing business than meets the eye. The coyote and more'n one breed of deer have been holding up swell under the same hunting pressure. So it might be something else we've been doing. Both red and white old-timers have told me the buffalo used to migrate like geese, north or south from the Canadian Peace River to the Rio Grande, as the grazing got better or worse. But now there's a north herd and a south herd, both dwindling, staying north or south of the Union Pacific's main line east and west. Must make it tough for a buffalo momma to raise her calf when it gets too cold, or too dry, on what still looks like a sea of grass to us."

Then he casually handed her the pack pony's lead and told her, "I'd like you to ride ahead for a spell. The trail ahead is plain as day. So you can't lead us too far astray."

She took the lead from him, but naturally asked how come. He told her, "May not be nothing, but I'd best bring up the rear with this old Yellowboy for now. Can't tell whether it's a kid from that tipi ring, an innocent traveler on the same trail, or something worse. But he, she, or it is raising just enough dust to make out from here, and every time we change pace, that dust does the same."

Godiva gasped, "Good Lord, you think we're being followed?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "That's about the size of it."

CHAPTER 7

The old sod house seemed to be melting like chocolate under the afternoon sun as it stood knee-deep in tawny grass atop a rise to the west of the trail. Before Godiva could ask, Longarm swung the bay he was now riding around her and softly called out, "Stay here whilst I scout it. If I'm riding into anything, drop that lead andride back to those Texas trail herders fast."

Then he moved on up the grassy slope to within easy pistol range of the apparently deserted soddy, covering its gaping doorway and unglazed window spaces with his Yellowboy. He reined in and dismounted near a rusted-out but handy seed-spreader moldering in the weeds and grass of many a summer. He tethered the bay mare to the rusty draw-bar and moved in zigzag on foot to dive through a window space instead of the doorway, roll upright on the grass growing in the roofless interior, and allow at a glance he had the one-room ten-by-twenty-foot interior to himself.

He went back outside the easier way and waved Godiva and the other two ponies in as he strode down to retrieve that bay. By the time he had, the newspaper gal had joined him. So he said, "There's nobody here but us chickens yet. We'd better hole up inside them bullet-proof walls until we see just who might be following us."

That made sense to her. As they got all three ponies inside the hollow shell, Godiva asked if he had any idea what it was doing there.

He'd had time to think about that. So he told her, "Any tell-tale trim or hardware was carried off by salvagers a spell back. These sod walls don't look halfways old enough for Spanish times. Without roof eaves to call their own, the only thing shedding the winter wet would be that thatch of dandelions and such topside. Indians pitch their tipi rings atop rises such as this one when the weather's hot and even a south breeze is better than nothing. But they camp down in timbered draws out of the wind in wintertime. Those Indians who live in houses nowadays usually pick a southeast slope, halfways down. The only folks who'd have perched a prairie home smack atop a rise like this would be white folks who had plenty of winter fuel to burn."

As he was watering the three ponies in one far corner, Godiva said she'd understood all the land around for miles to be an Indian reservation.

Longarm explained, "That's likely why the folks who squatted or homesteaded here moved on. We're well west of the original Indian Nation. This government-owned land was ceded to the Comanche and such after Quanah Parker brought 'em in and surrendered in the bitter spring of 1875. He and his raggedy little army of Comanche, Kiowa, Arapaho, and South Cheyenne had scared the army almost as much as the army had scared them with field artillery at Palo Duro Canyon. So once the cold and hungry but still armed and dangerous Indians had agreed to behave their fool selves betwixt the Washita and the Red River, the government would have cleared anyone else out."

Standing closer to the doorway, with her Spencer repeater held at port arms, Godiva quietly said, "Deputy Long, there seem to be some Indians coming."

Longarm made sure the three ponies were securely tethered as well as unsaddled, with plenty of watery oats in their nose bags, before he moved over to join her, thoughtfully levering a round into the chamber of his own saddle gun.

The quartet of Quill Indians sitting their ponies across the trail were bare-chested and had feathers and paint along with their braided hair and rawhide war shields. All but one had his legs encased in dark-fringed leggings. Longarm told the worried white girl beside him, "Kiowa. Black Leggings Society. That's something like the Lakota Dog Soldiers you may have heard tell of."

She hadn't. Lots of folks who gushed over noble savages didn't seem to know much about them. He said, "Suffice it to say the Black Leggings boys take whatever they may be up to sort of seriously. I'd like you to move across to a back window and let me know if you see anyone moving in on us from the far side. We'll know in a minute whether the ones already exposing their position mean to parley or charge across that trail at us. They're likely still trying to decide."

He was pleased to see how briskly she took up her position at one of the two rear windows, with her trim tailored duster and veiled hat somehow adding to her almost military bearing. But as she propped her elbow in an angle of the dry sod to train her old Spencer across the draw behind the abandoned homestead, she asked him in a puzzled tone, "Aren't the Kiowa supposed to be settled peacefully on this big reservation? Why on earth would they want to charge anybody?"

He held his Yellowboy more politely, muzzle down, as he stood exposed in the doorway, saying, "You just heard me tell you they looked undecided, ma'am. More than half the Indian trouble you've ever heard of was the result of one blamed side or the other making some thoughtless move the other side misunderstood. Them old boys across the way may be as confounded by the sight of us as we are by the odd way they're acting. This is the Kiowa Comanche Reserve, after all, and they may just be wondering what us Saltu are doing on it."

Then he smiled thinly and added, "At least, I hope they have us down as nothing worse than Saltu. See anybody out back?"

She replied, facing the other way, Lord love her, "Not a soul for at least a quarter of a mile, with no timber on the next ridge over. How long are we supposed to just stand here like this?"

Longarm answered, "As long as they seem to have us pent up in here with the odds on our side. They can see we're behind stout cover with repeating rifles. Whether they were there or not, they'll have heard of a place called Adobe Walls, an old trading post over to the Texas Panhandle, where charging white guns firing at you from cover turned out to be a bad move. Twice."

She said, "I read about those fights at Adobe Walls. In the first one Kit Carson and those army troopers had some cannon with them. In the second fight for Adobe Walls, the place was being held by a big party of professional hunters armed with scope-sighted rifles!"

Longarm said, "Same deal. The Indians outnumbered them way more than we're outnumbered, unless we haven't seen all them Black Leggings yet. There's no way four riders could make it down off yonder rise and as far as this doorway with me lobbing sixteen rifle rounds and five from my pistol at lem."

She showed how keen a reporter she was by demanding, "Don't you carry six bullets in that six-shooter, Deputy Long?"

He replied, "Not if you value your own toes, ma'am. It's best to grab for a double-action aimed down along your own leg with the hammer riding on an empty chamber. I got a double-shot derringer in my vest pocket, by the way. Would you like to borrow it till we see how this turns out?"

She said, "I don't see why. I've seven shots in this rifle."

Then she did see why, and soberly added, "I guess a hand pistol would be surer at the end. Is it true the best way is to suck on the barrel like a lollipop and just pull the trigger?"

He said, "I wouldn't know. I've never committed suicide yet." Then he got out his derringer, unhooked it from his watch chain, and tossed it in the grass near the hem of her travel duster as he added, "Don't blow your brains out just yet, ma'am. Seeing the boys across the way seem stuck for ideas, I'd best try to commence the parley. I have to lay this old Winchester aside to talk with both hands. So keep a sharp watch out back."

She didn't turn, but had to ask, "Talk with both hands?"

He leaned the Yellowboy against the inside sods as he explained. "Sign talk. Hardly anyone speaks Kiowa. It ain't close to any other Horse Indian dialect. So it was the Kiowa themselves who invented the now universal sign lingo of the plains."

He stepped just outside the doorway, raising his right hand with trigger and middle finger pointed at the sky to signal friendly notions. Then he pivoted his upraised palm to say he had a question, pointed at them, and made the sign for calling before he cupped a hand to his ear, adding up to, "Question, you are called? I want to hear." Which was about as tight as sign lingo worked.

Behind him, Godiva Weaver called, "What's going on out there?"

To which he could only reply, "Nothing. They're staring smack at me but they don't seem to want to answer."

She suggested, "Maybe they're not Kiowa after all."

He shrugged and said, "Wouldn't matter if they was Arapaho, Caddo, or Shoshoni. All of 'em use the same sign lingo no matter how they talk. That's why sign lingo was invented to begin with. Think of how a nod, a head shake, or a stuck-out tongue meant the same things by different names to an Anglo, a Mex, or a Dutchman. Then lard on a mess of other such signals until... Kee-rist!"

Then he threw himself backward through the doorway as a rifle spanged in the distance to send a buffalo round humming like an enraged lead hornet through the space he'd just occupied.

Longarm rolled sideways to grab for his propped up Yellowboy as, behind him, Godiva Weaver cut loose a lot with that Spencer.

He didn't ask what she was firing at. He warned her not to waste any as he popped up in the corner of a front window space to prop his own rifle over the soggy sod sill.

He found no targets for his overloaded Yellowboy. The far side of the trail had been hastily vacated by the sons of bitches who'd replied so rudely to his request for a parley.

He moved over to the newspaper gal's position, saying, "Change places with me. You've only got two rounds in that Spencer now. So see if you can reload as you guard the empty slope."

Then he saw what she'd been aiming at out back, and whistled in sheer admiration as he made out the three bodies scattered in the tall dry grass. He didn't see anybody moving out yonder now. He still trained his own rifle on the view to the west as he told her flatly, "Three stopped with five rounds is what I'd call downright swell marksmanship, Miss Weaver. Where in thunder did you learn to shoot so fine?"

She answered simply, "I grew up on an army post. My father was stationed at Fort Marion after the Seminole had calmed down. It was awfully hot for most sports. So we spent a lot of time on the rifle range."

Longarm watched the scattered brown forms out back as he slowly concluded, "You surely must have. You either killed the three of 'em totally or scared 'em so bad they're afraid to draw breath now. Were they charging mounted or afoot?"

She demurely replied, "On horseback, of course. There were five of them. I'd have gotten them all if they'd been coming slower!"

He said he believed her, and asked how they were doing out front. She said, "Not a sign of life. They must have thought their main body could move in past a mere girl as they kept you distracted from that other side. But I guess they've learned their lesson, and I'll just bet that's the last we'll ever see of them!"

He said, "Don't bet next month's salary or your favorite hat on that, Miss Weaver. They're still out there. The leader who got 'em in this mess would never be able to show his face at a dance if he just cut and run. They have to stick around until dark, if only to see if they can recover their dead

He started to say something else. But he figured she had more than enough to worry about. So he held the thought.

It didn't work. A gal paid by a newspaper to think on her own two feet had gotten good at it. In a desperately casual tone she asked, "Is it true Plains Indians never attack at night, Deputy Long?"

To which he could only reply, "Never is an overconfident word, and my friends call me Custis, Miss Weaver."

She said, "In that case you'd better call me Godiva. For anyone can see you're the only friend I have for miles right now! What if we made a break for it just after dusk? I don't see how just the two of us could defend this hollow shell against an all-out attack in total darkness, do you?"

Longarm said, "Nope. But it's barely high noon, and that leaves us nigh eight hours to figure something out."

She brightened and said, "You mean you do see a way out for us, other than a running gunfight against odds or digging in to be dug out like cornered clams?"

He chuckled at the droll picture and replied, "Nope. I only said I had around eight hours to study on it. I agree with you on the only two choices we seem to have, Miss Godiva."

CHAPTER 8

By late afternoon the interior of their roofless shell was an oven, and Godiva had removed her travel duster to reveal a sweat-stained frock of brown paisley cotton. She'd set her veiled hat aside as well, but left her hair pinned up to let her neck sweat all it wanted. Longarm had been right about her hair being a dark shade of honey, and if she looked a mite more mature without that veil, she was still on the brighter side of thirty. Some kindly old philosopher had once remarked, doubtless in French, that a woman was ripest just before she commenced to wrinkle.

He didn't see what good that was likely to do either of them as he stood at a window space in his shirtsleeves, sweating like a pig as he soberly stared through the shimmering heat waves at nothing much.

They'd long since told one another the stories of their lives, and he was starting to feel testy every time she asked him if he'd come up with any answers yet.

When it came, like most good answers, the answer was childishly simple. They heard a distant mouth organ wailing a plaintive tune about pretty quadroons, and Godiva gasped, "Good heavens, you don't think that's some Kiowa playing like that, do you?"

Longarm drew his six-gun and fired all five shots in the wheel at the cloudless sky above. So her ears were still ringing as he explained, "Time, tide, and trail herds wait no man. But at least that Running X outfit won't ride into any ambush."

Godiva clapped her hands and said she'd forgotten about that trail drive they'd forged on ahead from. Longarm went on reloading as he replied, "I hadn't. But I never expected them to make such good time."

The mouth organ music had faded away. Longarm climbed up on a sod sill to stick his head over the top of the south wall. Sure enough, he could just make out the gray canvas top of that chuck wagon against a settling haze of trail dust. So he called down to Godiva, "They've paused to consider their options about half a mile back along the trail."

He dropped down beside her to add, "No sense offering my head up yonder for target practice, now that I have everybody placed."

She glanced at the three sweaty but saddle-free ponies across the one grassy room as she asked whether he thought they ought to try running a blue streak for those nice Texican cowboys.

Longarm shook his head and replied, "Just said I didn't want to present them with tempting targets. I don't know about the younger riders with him, but that trail boss is an old-timer who knows he's on Kiowa Comanche range. Having heard way more shots than any jackrabbit hunter would let fly, he'll likely bunch his cows in that cottonwood we passed through just before we spied this soddy. Then he'll have his best riders scout ahead until they spot this soddy. By that time those Indians will have made up their minds whether they want to stand and fight or slip away discreetly. Don't ask me which choice is more likely. Next to Kiowa, Comanche and even South Cheyenne can be paragons of sweet reason. That buffalo war that got so many Comanche killed was started by Kiowa taking the bit in their teeth and challenging the whole U.S. Army to a stand-up fight on open prairie."

Godiva started to say she'd heard the poor Indians had been provoked into that suicidal uprising of the early 1870s by nasty white men. But recent events had given her a new perspective on at least some Indians. So she held the thought for now.

A million years went by. Then, through the rising heat shimmers, Longarm spied a Texan on foot with his own saddle gun at port atop that same rise the Black Leggings riders had been on earlier. So he let fly a cattle call and stepped out in the open, waving his hat until the cowhand spotted him and waved back.

Nobody ever figured out how those three dead bodies out back had managed to vanish in broad daylight. But by the time they had it all scouted safe around the soddy, the only Indian sign for miles seemed to be one feather and a whole lot of horse apples. The trail boss had to agree with Longarm that sometimes birds just flying over had been known to drop a feather that signified nothing much.

By now the sun was getting low, and old Harry Carver, as the trail boss introduced himself more formally, decided the timbered banks of Cache Creek, just to the east, were as handy a night campsite as he was likely to find. So Longarm and Godiva saddled their ponies and rode there with Carver and the four riders he'd chosen to scout ahead with.

That chuck wagon had crawfished down off the skyline along with the cows, of course. They'd wound up in the brushy draw that ran north and south in line with the drier trail. By this time the cook and his helper had rustled up a supper of sourdough bisquits, mesquite-smoked ham, and black-eyed peas.

Everyone had time to tend their riding stock first, and to her credit and despite her prissy sidesaddle, Godiva Weaver knew how to settle her mount in for the night, although she borrowed some oats from Longarm to do so. She said she hadn't been planning on the way to Fort Sill being so far.

Longarm didn't tell her you always had to figure on an easy ride stretching out some. For he could see she'd already learned that.

As the sun went down and the crickets started chirping in the trees and brush all around, they were seated side by side on an old fallen log, eating from tin plates and sipping coffee from clay mugs while, somewhere in the gathering dusk, that plaintive mouth organ began to moan about Aura Lee. Longarm nodded at the tailgate of the chuck wagon across the clearing and observed, "They're about to serve the last of the coffee, Miss Godiva. I'd be proud to fetch you another mug, if you'd like."

She shook her hatless head and replied, "I'm afraid I'll be too wound up to sleep tonight as it is. So much has happened all in one day, and I'm just now starting to relax. You did say it was safe to relax now, didn't you? It's so peaceful down here with all this company, and I've always loved this twilight time of the day."

Longarm glanced up at the gloaming sky through the cottonwood branches and replied, "Everybody seems to. This English traveling man who'd spent time in East India told me one time the Hindu folks call this time of day the Hour of Cow Dust, and I had to agree that sounds sort of poetical too, albeit I don't see why it ought to."

She nodded and said, "I do, now that all those longhorns have settled down amid the trees after a long hot day on the trail. The dust has just about settled now. But you can still smell just a hint of it as the cool shades of evening creep in all around us. Where am I supposed to sleep tonight, by the way?"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "In those blankets lashed to your saddle, of course. I'd invite you to climb into my bedroll if I wanted my face slapped. Harry Carver ain't asked, but I'll have to offer to stand my own turn as night picket. Finish your grub and we'll see about finding some soft ground upslope to spread out our bedding."

She didn't argue, although she seemed a tad uneasy a few minutes later as Longarm indicated a shallow hollow between two trees as her best bet to get a sort of rugged night's rest. He noted her dubious look and said, "Forget anything you might have heard about piles of leaves. Dry leaves are dusty, don't really pad a hip bone worth mention, and they can keep you awake all night as they rustle every time you twitch. A couple of thicknesses of wool over bare dirt work way better."

She asked about the still-green leaves above that were ripe for easy plucking. He shook his head and told her, "Not as much padding as you'd think. Also, they draw bugs and stain your bedding. Half the trick of sleeping on the ground is sleeping on one side or the other with your knees drawn up. It's only where you grind a bone against the firm mattress that you wind up sore."

She dimpled and replied, "Thank you for not implying I was just a trifle mature across the hips. Where will you be reclining, on one side or the other, all this time?"

His own bedroll still across the arm that cradled his Yellowboy, Longarm pointed with his chin at another clear space a few paces off and said, "I was figuring on unrolling her yonder, past that clump of rabbit bush, unless you're worried it's too close for your own comfort, Miss Godiva."

She shook her head and softly replied, "It's a little far, as a matter of fact, should anything go boomp in the night around here. Isn't it funny how glades that appear so pretty in the glow of sunset can look sort of ominous after dark?"

He said, "The almanac says we'll get at least a half- moon later tonight. I'd best spread my own bedding before I go see when Harry wants me to stand guard."

It only took him a few seconds to unroll his own bedding at an angle on the wooded slope. But once he had, Godiva was already down atop her own blankets, moving her trim but soft-looking hips in an experimental way as she decided, "I see what you meant about bones."

Longarm just strode off down the slope, wishing woman wouldn't do that. He'd met that well-read and so-called sophisticated type of spinster gal before. You'd think independent single women who'd learned to talk like that suffragette leader Virginia Woodhull would know better than to talk bolder than they really meant to be around men. Miss Virginia Woodhull was always raving and ranting about the way men hurt women's feelings, as if men didn't have feelings themselves.

He found the trail boss jawing with some others around the small night fire near the chuck wagon. Carver seemed to think it was swell of a deputy marshal to bear his own share, like a dollar-a-day rider. When Longarm pointed out that he and Miss Weaver had been coffeed and beaned after their rescue from wild Indians, Carver allowed he could stand the first watch--along with three others, of course. So that was the way he spent the next four hours with his Yellowboy as the darkness fell and kept on falling. Neither the stars nor that moon the almanac had promised showed at all that night. For an overcast moved in from the west as the sun went down, and just kept coming, till the night air was downright clammy and Longarm was starting to worry about getting soaked to the skin before he could get to that vulcanized poncho atop his bedding.

But there was neither thunder nor enough back-wind to matter when, around a quarter to midnight, a gentle rain commenced to patter all around as he ghosted through the trees along his quarter of the far-flung picket. Carver had suggested, and they'd all agreed, it made the most sense for the dismounted picket guards to circle wider than the night riders holding the herd down in the draw. Any Indians out to lift stock, or hair, would be more inclined to creep in on the sounds of the mounted hand further down the slopes, whether they knew what he was making all that noise about or not.

Young Waco, the kid who played that mouth organ, had been replaced by a tenor of the Mexican persuasion who kept singing to the cows about a cielito lindo, or pretty little patch of sky, despite the way the real sky was acting.

The cows didn't care. You sang softly to a herd at night to keep them from spooking at more sinister night noises. It was only on a vaudeville stage, or maybe in town on a Saturday night, that anyone ever sang those whooping and hollering Wild West songs, lest they see the last of their herd stampeding over the far horizon.

The rain had soaked Longarm's shoulders downright uncomfortably by the time someone called his name and he was relieved by a cowhand smart enough to start out with a rain slicker. So he was peeling out of his wet shirt and vest as he moved downslope to his bedding with a rude remark about the weather. He tossed his wet hat atop the rainproof poncho, but hung on to his wet duds as he proceeded to slide into his roll.

Then he said, "What the blue blazes?" as Godiva Weaver gasped, "Oh, it's you. You startled me!"

Longarm said, "That makes two of us," as he slid on in beside her, noting how warm and damp it all felt at the same time. It was his bedding the two of them were under. So he felt no call to ask her permission.

She said, her breath warm on his wet face, "When it started to rain, I remembered you were smart enough to bring along a rainproof bedroll. I've stuffed both my own blankets and my silly self in here, and it still feels just a bit too firm under my poor tailbone, thank you very much."

Longarm could only mutter, "I noticed it was mighty warm in here. A mite crowded too. The only way the two of us are going to fit comfortably will call for you to let me stretch this one arm under you so's you can rest your head in the hollow of my shoulder."

She cooperated in the contortions it took to settle them, his peeled-off wet duds, and his shooting irons into a more or less comfortable position as the wind and rain picked up.

He said he was sure glad he'd made it back just in time to save himself from the cold shower he deserved.

Snuggled against him with the edge of the poncho pulled over both their heads, Godiva shyly confided, "Maybe we could both use a cold shower right now. I don't mean to pry, but where did you ever get all these muscles I can feel now that you've shed your clothes above the waist?"

Longarm shrugged the bare shoulder her head was resting on and replied, "Pure misfortune, I reckon. I'd have never worked half as hard growing up if I'd been born into wealth instead of a hard-scrabble patch of West-by-God-Virginia. Had I wound up alone in here, I'd have slid these damp jeans off my muscular hind end as well."

She laughed girlishly and demurely said, "Well, don't let me stop you, you big damp silly."

He considered her words before he soberly replied, "Unless you mean that sort of naughty, this is pushing past flirty into cruelty to animals, Miss Godiva."

She answered simply, "I'm never cruel to animals I'm fond of, Custis. What's the matter? I know I'm almost thirty, and I told you how that mean thing broke off our engagement. But he said it was because I wouldn't quit my job at the Sentinel, not because he found me disgusting in bed!"

So Longarm had to prove he didn't find her disgusting by kicking off his boots and jeans, moving her thin cotton frock up above her trim waist, and just rolling his own naked body between her welcoming thighs.

He didn't ask her how come she'd removed all her underthings to crawl into a male traveling companion's bedding. But she confessed she'd been gushing for him since before sundown as she finished the chore of shucking her frock over her head while he proceeded to put it to her.

It was a good thing she was as wet as she'd said inside. For she was tight as a girl in her teens despite her mature curves, and when Longarm tried to hold most of his weight off her, in consideration of the packed earth under her friendly tailbone, Godiva bounced her soft rump even friendlier and told him not to hold back, but to crush her, crush her, crush her. Gals who read a lot tended to talk like that when they were screwing.

After she'd been crushed enough to come more than once, Godiva wanted to get on top. So he let her, and didn't object when such a frisky little thing said it was awfully stuffy under all that vulcanized canvas and threw the poncho down to straddle him bare-ass in the gentle rain. For it felt swell to lie there, kissing both her cool nipples in turn as the rain ran off them while, below the waist, the two of them felt warm and wet as hasty pudding.

By the time Godiva bounced herself to climax and collapsed atop him, her bare back had gooseflesh and he had to roll her over on her back, haul up the covers, and warm her up some more. Then he rummaged around near the bottom of the bedroll till he found a dry feed-sack he'd packed away as a towel, hardly expecting to use it for such delightful drying.

He figured they'd just doze and cuddle with the rain gently tapping on their vulcanized cover. But Godiva seemed to be crying as she rested her damp head on his bare shoulder.

Longarm didn't ask why. No man who'd slept with more than one woman in his life would be dumb enough to do that. So just as he expected, Godiva finally volunteered that she just didn't understand what had just gotten into her.

He said, "Aw, come on, I ain't built that unusual, honey."

She giggled through her tears and replied, "Yes, you are. But I've no complaints about that. I'm just so ashamed of practically begging for it. Whatever must you think of me, Custis?"

He patted her bare shoulder and said, "That you wanted some almost as badly as I did? What just happened was natural as falling off a bronco. I'd be more concerned for the both of us if we'd just fallen asleep like babes in the wood, assuming said babes were way the hell younger than either of us."

She sighed and said, "It's true I'm a more experienced woman than I like to admit. I guess you could tell there's been more than one man in my unusual life."

He said, "Why, no, I figured you learned to screw so fine from reading romantic books. Have you read that new novel by Mister Zola about that frisky French gal Nana? I'll bet you hundreds of young gals are trying out those wild positions Nana and her frisky female roommate got into in that one chapter right this very minute!"

He chuckled and added, "Gives a man a hard-on just to picture those two pretty frustrated things trying to screw one another without a pecker to their name!"

Godiva reached down between them to gently take the matter in hand as she sniffed and said, "At least we don't have that problem. I'm not sure I want to be compared to Emile Zola's fallen women of the Paris underworld."

As she started to jack it up for him, she added, "I'll have you know I don't do this with every man I meet!"

"Nor I with every gal," Longarm primly replied as he found himself rising to the occasion. Then he moved his own free hand down her smooth belly to part her damp pubic hair with skilled fingers as he murmured in a more serious tone, "Don't give away all the magic by telling me all your secrets. You don't really want to know who taught me to strum your old banjo like this, do you?"

She sobbed, "Jesus, that feels good! Just keep that up until I'm almost there, and finish me off with this lovely thing I have in my own hand! I promise, I won't say a word about anyone else!"

CHAPTER 9

So a good time was had by the both of them, all the way up to Fort Sill. A good time at night anyway. Days on the trail with a herd of cows could get tedious.

It could have been worse. The Running X had contracted to be paid by the head, half in advance and half on delivery. So Harry Carver was only worried about getting them up the trail alive. With Quill Indians still skulking out yonder, for all they knew, that made for a faster pace than most market herds were driven. But less than a dozen drovers could only get cows to move so fast, and so the one day's hard ride on horseback stretched out to almost another seventy-two hours on the trail, meaning two more nights bedded down to one side after dark. Godiva could really get acrobatic on a clear cool prairie night with no covers in the way and nobody but Longarm to watch her wriggle and jiggle.

He wriggled and jiggled a heap himself, of course, but by the third night he was tempted to ask her to quit showing off and just enjoy it with him. For, not unlike that Nana gal in Mister Zola's sassy novel, she seemed to be working harder to pleasure him than to please herself, and while he was getting it all free and had no call to compare her with the hookers in that book, he recalled with some discomfort how they only relaxed and let themselves go all the way with old pals they felt more comfortable with.

He tried to make her feel more comfortable with him. During the sunlit hours on the trail he let her ride along beside him as he rode flank for old Harry Carver, and despite riding sidesaddle, the newspaper gal and erstwhile army brat got to where she could head off a straying yearling pretty fairly. When complimented, she sniffed and said it was no great wonder they called gents who did this as a full-time occupation cowboys. Longarm was too polite to start a stampede and show her how a top hand was occasionally called upon to earn his forty a month and beans.

It was after dark, with her duds off, when Godiva reverted from high-toned Eastern gal to dirty past the line of duty. Longarm had to draw the line their last night on the trail together when she sucked it hard again for him.

He demurred, "We're bedded down on a grassy rise with that water down in the creek too crowded for a midnight dip, honey."

She insisted, "I don't care. I've never had anyone built like you in me before, and I want to say you came again and again."

She said, "Let me get on my hands and knees, like a puppy dog, while you ravage me!"

So he did.

But when they finally rode into Fort Sill late the next day, he could sense a certain coolness in her manner, even before she broke free of the outfit to gallop on alone toward the cluster of frame barracks and outbuildings clustered around a flagstaff in the distance.

Longarm didn't chase after her. Aside from knowing how dumb a man looked chasing skirts at full gallop, he knew Harry Carver and his Running X riders could use all the help they could get right now. For like cowboys, although for different reasons, cows tended to get excited in the vicinity of any settlement. So you had to work harder to keep a herd together as you drove them on in.

But just as the cows were really commencing to act up, as was only to be expected, a dozen-odd riders came down the trail to head them off. As they rode closer, most of 'em seemed to be Indians or breeds, dressed like fringy cowhands. But their straw boss was a white civilian working for the B.I.A.

As he reined in by Harry Carver he explained they weren't supposed to drive the fool herd into the Fort Sill Parade, but downwind, to some corrals Chief Quanah had just flung up for the stock.

When Harry pointed out how he understood the beef to be meant for Kiowa consumption as well, the B.I.A. rider nodded but said, "It sure is. But try getting a damned Kiowa to feed himself like any grown child. Chief Quanah has his Comanche meeting us halfway. He ain't but half Indian, you know. His momma was a white gal, carried off and raped by hostiles whilst on her way to California with a wagon train."

This was not true. But Longarm only cut in to introduce himself and ask where Chief Quanah might be at the moment.

When the B.I.A. man suggested Quanah Parker might be visiting with his white uncle, Judge Isaac Parker, at Fort Smith, over beyond the Cherokee Nation, Longarm knew he didn't know. As any lawman had to keep in mind, witnesses who didn't know all the facts tended to fill in the blanks with guesswork.

Instead of saying this to a man who worked at Quanah Parker's own agency, Longarm asked the way to that agency. The B.I.A. man explained their main base was up in Anadarko, with a liaison post at Fort Sill and then substations further out in all directions on the sprawling Kiowa Comanche Reserve. So Longarm allowed he'd start at the fort, seeing how the army would want a report on that shootout in any case.

He shook hands with Harry Carver, rode back to pick up his hired paint and packsaddle, and rode on as the Running X riders drifted the herd around to where they wanted it.

Like Fort Cobb to the northwest or Fort Reno due north, Fort Sill had been built more as a small town for lots of soldiers than what Eastern folks pictured when they thought of a frontier outpost. Laid out in haste to enforce the treaty of Medicine Lodge with field artillery and the Tenth (Colored) Cavalry, Fort Sill had been neatly built on a dead-flat stretch of prairie where the grass grew stirrup-deep as well as emerald green well into summer.

This, as any plainsman, red or white, could have told you, was because the big grassy flat was a seasonal marsh, with the parade a boot sucking quagmire in wet weather.

A rare engineering officer of color, with the unlikely name of Henry Flipper, Second Lieutenant, U.S.A. Army, had salvaged the impractical site with ingenious drainage works, including the famous channel now called "Flipper's Impossible Ditch" because an optical illusion made it seem as if water was running uphill after a heavy rain.

These moat-like ditches, along with enough fencing to keep man or beast from falling in, made up such perimeter defenses as they thought such a big garrison, backed by cannon and Gatling guns, was likely to need against sane Indians. Most of the really crazy Kiowa and Comanche had gone under in that last big buffalo war.

Longarm rode through the official "Hog Farms," the tolerated shantytown you usually found outside such an outpost's gates. A sleepy white trooper posted by the gate to give directions, it being an open post, waved Longarm on to the nearby guardhouse, where he could report in to the Officer of the Day. The cheerful young O.D. said the Tenth Cav had just left for the border to stalk Apache, and that neither he nor any of the other recent replacements from the East had heard a thing about Longarm's mission. He had a clerk take down Longarm's account of that brush with apparent hostiles and said that they'd file it, but that he suspected some young bucks had just been drinking.

The O.D. said they'd take care of Longarm's riding stock, and ordered one of his enlisted men to show their guest to the hostel set up for such surprises. It was across the dusty parade, between the sutler's store and officers' mess. The enlisted clerk inside showed Longarm to a tidy spartan room, handed him the key, and said they were already serving supper. So Longarm tossed his saddlebags and rifle on the bed, dug out his razor and a cake of naptha soap, and then got to work at civilizing himself.

It wasn't true they had running water in every guest room, but they did have indoor plumbing, with separate facilities for ladies and gents, out in the hall. So Longarm treated himself to a warm tub bath and shaved his jaws cleaner than he'd been able to manage along the trail, even in mixed company. Then he put on a fresh shirt and that somewhat rumpled but far more prissy tweed suit, with a shoestring tie. He had to tell the desk clerk who he was when next he appeared in the lobby.

They had no hotel dining room because civilian guests were such rare events. The clerk explained tidy white civilians got to grub at the officers' mess next door, and that he'd best get cracking if he expected his mashed potatoes warm.

He thanked the enlisted man for the suggestion and got right over to the officers' mess. An orderly by the door took his name down, and said the meal would cost him eighteen cents.

Longarm paid without arguing. He knew that despite the way some raw recruits bitched about rank and privilege in the army of a fool republic, the officers paid for their finer food and fancier beer all out of their own pockets. So eighteen cents was a bargain for the fine steak, mashed spuds, chokecherry pie, and extra coffee he wound up with.

He asked an orderly how come he seemed to be eating alone at such an early hour. He was told everyone had headed up the line to the officers' club, another proposition entirely.

Every officer arriving on a post was assigned to a place in the officers' mess and had his meals docked from his pay. But their club amounted to a private lodge. There was a noncommissioned officers' club on most big posts as well. Nobody had to join up and pay dues at either, if he didn't give a shit about promotion in this man's army. Lower-ranking enlisted men and thrifty sergeants got to drink non-alcohol beer or soft cider at the sutler's store. Commissioned officers got hell or worse for hanging out there with their troopers.

Longarm glanced into the sutler's as he passed the saloon-like swinging doors. He spotted some visitors dressed cowboy or Indian at the tables inside. But none of the Rocking X riders had made it in from wherever they'd gone with those cows.

Longarm found the officers' club at the far end of the line, set on a corner angle to catch such summer breezes from the south as the fickle weather out this way allowed. As he mounted the steps to the wrap-around veranda he heard music. It sounded like a banjo, fiddle, and pennywhistle doing an Irish jig through Georgia. But when he got inside, the big dance floor was bare. The Irish-sounding trio in U.S. Army blue was jigging away in a far corner. Officers in dress blues and ladies in frilly summer dresses were seated at tables along the walls or clustered around the punch bowl and toy sandwich tray on a trestle table closer to the front. Longarm caught a couple of haughty looks as he handed his hat to a trooper by the door and approached the refreshment stand. Some of the gals looked surprised to see him too. But none of them managed to stare as snottily as your average second lieutenant. The army of a democratic republic made up for its low pay and slow promotions by allowing its officers to act like little tin gods, fooling with one another's goddesses as often as possible. Before any shavetail could ask him who he thought he was, Longarm spotted Godiva Weaver holding court at another table in the company of a saturnine civilian in a fringed white elkskin jacket, a florid gray-haired officer with the silver eagles of a bird colonel on his epaulets, and a once-pretty redhead who'd gone to fat and didn't seem too happy about the attention the younger beauty seemed to accept as her due. Godiva didn't greet Longarm as if he was the lover she'd begged to corn-hole her the other night. But she looked as if butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth as she introduced Longarm all around. The lean civilian was a liaison man from the main B.I.A. agency a day's ride to the north. His name was Fred Ryan. The colonel and his lady were the Howards of Ohio. Longarm was too polite to ask what had become of Colonel Ranald Mackenzie, who'd won the buffalo war, or Brigadier Ben Grierson, who'd accepted the Indians' surrender here at Fort Sill and had to feed them. Colonel Howard pointed to the one empty chair at the table and told Longarm to sit a spell, adding, "We're waiting for the cool shades of evening before we risk any polkas in wool pants. Miss Weaver here just told us about you nailing those Kiowa down near the Red River."

The B.I.A. man said, "I'm not surprised this is the first we've heard of it. Had they lifted your hair, they'd have never been able to keep from bragging about it, and we do have some few informants among both nations. I reckon the inspired leader who led them into such a dumb fix doesn't want to talk about his spirit dreams now." Longarm said, "I reckon not. I understand the Comanche beat that old medicine man with whips after Adobe Walls, and would have killed him if Quanah hadn't stopped them. The medicine man's vision had assured him that nobody in that big party of professional hunters could hit the broad side of a barn with a Big Fifty scope-sighted out to a mile. Might you know a Comanche police sergeant called Tuka Wa Pombi, by the way?"

Fred Ryan frowned thoughtfully and replied, "Can't say I do. The breed who keeps the roll for Quanah's new police force over at their sub-agency would be the one for you to talk to.

When Longarm asked where he might find Chief Quanah himself, he lost a bit of respect for those fancy fringes and Comanche beadwork, even though it was Godiva who gushed, "You were right about Chief Quanah touring the other agencies to see how the more established tribal governments work, Custis. Mister Ryan here thinks the best place to head him off would be Fort Smith, just the other side of the Cherokee Nation. He has a great-uncle holding court there."

Longarm cocked a brow at Ryan and demanded, "Quanah Parker has a great-uncle working at the Fort Smith federal courthouse?"

Ryan nodded confidently and asked, "Who did you think old Judge Isaac Parker was, his great-aunt? It's a well-known fact that after the Texas Rangers rescued Quanah's white mother from the Indians, her uncle, Isaac Parker of Texas, took her in despite her shame."

Longarm laughed incredulously and said, "I've seen that in print too. But it's a fine example of what we in the outlaw-hunting profession call leaping to conclusions from disconnected evidence. I can't say whether Cynthia Ann Parker had an uncle named Isaac or not. But Judge Isaac Parker of the Fort Smith federal court is only in his early forties as we speak, and comes from Missouri, not Texas. So it don't add up as soon as you put all the figures down."

He resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke in the already damp and stuffy surroundings as he added, "I ain't as certain as the Texas Rangers that they rescued anybody, speaking of leaping to conclusions. Would anyone here care for a glass of punch? I don't know about you all, but them cool shades of evening had better get cracking."

Both gals at the table agreed they could go for some refreshing. But when he rose to go fetch three glasses, the colonel's lady, the plump Elvira Howard as she was called, got up to come along, saying he'd have trouble managing three glasses and that she'd been looking for an excuse to stretch her poor limbs.

Longarm didn't care. They walked over to the refreshment stand, and he ignored the toy sandwiches since he'd just had supper. But as he'd hoped, the ruby-red punch smelled of rum. For while enlisted men were forbidden hard liquor on post by the Hayes Administration, rank had its privileges and rum punch was one of them.

As he filled a glass and handed it to Elvira, she declared, for no good reason Longarm could see, "if I were kidnapped by Indians I'd kill myself before I'd let myself be ravaged and be forced to bear halfbreed babies like that white-trash Cynthia Ann Parker!"

He filled two more glasses as he quietly observed, "The Parkers of North Texas were considered quality, Miss Elvira. They owned land and didn't owe back taxes. As for letting herself be ravaged, that ain't exactly the way Miss Cynthia Ann might have seen it. She'd been captured as a little girl and adopted by a Comanche lady who liked children. She'd spent eight or nine years growing up amongst 'em, and it was only after she'd been initiated as a full-grown Comanche woman that the distinguished war chief Peta Nocona courted her fair and proper, playing his nose flute at her and reciting all the wondrous coups he counted. It sounds like bragging to us, but Horse Indians seldom lie about their deeds or fiches."

He put the ladle back in the punch bowl and picked up both glasses as he added, "Cynthia Ann could have said no. But I reckon she figured Peta Nocona was a good catch, considering. He married up with her as honorably as an Indian knows how. and by all accounts he never treated her mean. The couple had two sons, Quanah had a younger brother they usually call Pecos or Puma because his real name would be improper to say in mixed white company. Back around '60, just as the War Between the States was starting, the Rangers raided the Comanche for a change, and took back Cynthia Ann and a baby daughter called Topsannah. Her white kinfolks were happier about all this than she was. In less than five years little Topsannah had died, and the lonesome white captive who'd spent a quarter of a century as an Indian died soon after. Some say on purpose whilst others say she just pined away."

As they headed back to the table Elvira quietly declared, "At least she had some fun out of life before time's cruel teeth caught up with her! I can't see Myself marrying even a handsome Indian, but I guess a Comanche camp would be more diverting than... My God, why can't the entertainment committee come up with something new once in a while!"

Longarm didn't have to answer. They were already within earshot of the table. Longarm handed Godiva her punch and he and Elvira both sat down. As they did so they saw the conversation had drifted back to that shootout at the abandoned ruins. Ryan seemed to hold that his Kiowa had doubtless been out to make some point. He agreed they were harder to figure than the more progressive Comanche, but to his credit as an Indian agent, he held few Indians ever attacked for no reason at all.

Colonel Howard, who sounded as if he'd been at some rum without the fruit juice and such, snorted, "Oh, no? What about that ornery old Kiowa devil called Satan? He was the one who stirred up all the troubles starting in '70, wasn't he?"

Ryan gained more ground in Longarm's eyes by gently pointing out, "Big Satanta and crazy old Satank might have translated their names as White Bear and Sitting Bear. Neither one invited those white buffalo hunters to collect hides on hunting grounds ceded to the Indians in the Medicine Lodge Treaty of '67."

But Longarm knew old broken treaties were as tedious to hash over as whether Adam or Eve had sinned the most. So he sipped some punch, finding it strong enough but way too sweet, and opined, "I've been ambushed on my way to an assigned chore before. I don't mean to boast, or imply Miss Godiva here ain't prettier than me, but somebody here at Fort Sill sent for me to smooth out some wrinkles in your Kiowa Comanche Police and-"

"We don't have any Kiowa on the force," Ryan said quickly. "Under Quanah, the Comanche have drilled in corn and agreed to give beef instead of buffalo a try. But we haven't been able to recruit many Kiowa. They sneer and call other nations woman-hearted if they meet the bureau halfway. Then they cry like babies and demand government supplies because they won't give farming a chance and, big as it is, this reservation simply isn't big enough to feed substantial numbers on hunting and gathering alone!"

Longarm nodded soberly and replied, "I just said that. I've been on other reserves where hold-outs begged for increased allotments and complained the Great Father was trying to murder them because their agent wanted to vaccinate their kids and teach them how to read and write. The old-timers ain't just stupid. They're afraid they'll lose their hold on their tribesfolk if they don't keep control of the older medicine, the traditional chants, and where the next meal might be coming from."

Ryan nodded and said, "Quanah and the other Comanche leaders have managed to hold on to their authority and still get their kids vaccinated against the pox. Quanah's improved his own English, learned to read and write, and they say some of his white relations down Texas way have started to brag on him."

Godiva Weaver said, "I can't wait to meet him now that I know he's neither as old nor as stern as he looks in those published tintypes." Then she caught Longarm's amused expression and quickly added with flushed cheeks, "To interview for my paper, I mean. Maybe he can tell us why those Kiowa attacked us."

Longarm shrugged and said, "I thought I'd go ask the Kiowa at their own agency tomorrow."

Ryan laughed incredulously and said, "You won't even get them to speak English to you, even though a lot of them know how!"

Colonel Howard looked confused and declared, "You can't ride out to the Kiowa alone after they just tried to kill you. We can give you a cavalry escort, if you really think you can get anything out of the treacherous devils!"

Longarm shook his head politely and replied, "Thanks all the same, Colonel, but it's been my experience you get even less out of sullen Indians when you make 'em feel proddy. We all know the elders are either in control of their young men or they ain't. If any Kiowa who's at all high on the totem pole gave orders to have me stopped before I got here, he'll know I got here. Sometimes silence can be golden when a lawman knows how to question a suspect."

He took a sip of punch and added, "Any old-timer who's lost control of his young men might be way more willing to complain about it. Didn't General Sherman and Agent Haworth get a Kiowa chief to bear witness against Satanta and that medicine man, Mamanti, at the end of the buffalo war?"

Ryan nodded soberly and said, "The chief was Kicking Bird, and he pointed out two dozen heap-bad Injuns to save the rest of his band at the end. Then Mamanti cast heap-big medicine, likely arsenic, and Kicking Bird kicked the bucket. The Kiowa are one of the few Horse Indian nations who go in for political assassination."

Colonel Howard muttered, "Mean as hell. Sorry, ladies. Nobody can hold a candle to Comanche when it comes to blood and slaughter. They were a bigger nation, ranged further out from the mountains, and got into fights with Texicans first. So they perforce soon learned to fight more scientifically than anyone but, possibly, Cheyenne. Cheyenne got to digging trenches and reloading their own spent cartridges in the end. But before he saw the light, Quanah Parker led his boys as cleverly as if he'd gone to West Point. The Kiowa never progressed past dirty. Quick, sneaky raids and, as Mister Ryan just said, resorting to poison like red versions of the Borgias!"

By this time it didn't feel any cooler, but it had gotten darker outside. So Elvira Howard interrupted the discussion of Indian warfare to gently but firmly tell her husband, "If the dancing is ever to get under way this evening, don't you think the colonel and his lady had better take the floor?"

Colonel Howard didn't argue, but from the way he lurched to his own feet as his plump wife rose, he was one of those gents who held his rum better while sitting down.

As the older couple moved out on the empty dance floor, Ryan said something to Godiva Weaver, and the next thing Longarm knew he was seated at the table alone. But he didn't care. Like most men, the tall deputy mostly danced as an excuse to grab on to a gal for the first time. He found it perfectly logical that few men really liked to dance with ladies they'd already slept with or never meant to. As the dance floor filled with swirling couples, he figured any gal left over along the walls would be somebody's wife, somebody's daughter, or mighty ugly. So, having finished the sickly punch and wanting a smoke, he got up and headed out to the downwind veranda.

Nobody else seemed to care, and it was cooler and more peaceful out there in the semi-darkness as he smoked a cheroot and that louder dance music played in one ear while, off in the distance, someone was playing "Cotton-Eyed Joe" on a mouth organ. It sounded like that Running X rider who'd been serenading them along the trail north out of Texas. Harry Carver and his boys were likely sipping non-alcohol beer or soft cider down at the sutler's. Although as in the case of the rum punch inside, hard liquor could always find its way onto a post no matter what Lemonade Lucy Hayes got her husband, the President, to say.

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring as he pondered that notion. He knew how the Reed-Starr bunch over by Fort Smith ran stolen stock and moonshine in and out of the Cherokee Nation. But that shabby clan of trash whites and Cherokee breeds didn't act like Quill Indians, and went out of their way to be nice to the Indian Police.

On the other hand, if Quanah Parker's Comanche Police were less willing to be bought off, and someone was worried about an experienced white lawman teaching them more than they already knew... That worked, up to a point. The point where things got tough to picture was where, in any direction, a Black Legging rider sporting feathers and paint loaded up on rotgut. Anyone running substantial amounts of liquor would be running it in for the troops. There were close to a thousand soldiers out here, all drawing at least thirteen dollars a month, and while Indians like to drink at least as much, they wouldn't have as much money to spend on such forbidden pleasures.

Longarm blew another smoke ring and muttered, "Then what edge would anyone acting sullen in buckskin have over a friendly Indian, mayhaps with a job on the post, when it came to peddling moonshine to the thirsty peacetime army?"

He became aware the dance music had stopped inside when some others came out on the veranda, not to join him but to cool off. He saw Godiva and old Ryan, speaking of buckskins, but they were down a ways and he had no call to pester them. Old Ryan was acting mighty attentive, and he'd likely told the newspaper gal already that he'd have his own quarters close at hand, doubtless more luxurious than a spartan room at that guest hostel.

Godiva must have told the B.I.A. man she wanted some of that swell rum punch. For she was suddenly alone as Ryan ducked inside again.

Longarm stayed where he was, and sure enough, the newspaper gal moved down along the railing to join him, saying, "Fred Ryan has just offered to wrangle me a seat on the B.I.A. mail ambulance bound for Fort Smith tomorrow morning."

Longarm nodded and replied, "You told me down in Spanish Flats you were out to interview Quanah Parker. I reckon it's possible for you to catch up with him in Fort Smith. He's got to be out there in some direction. Meanwhile he's expected back here some time or the other."

She sighed and said, "Fred told me You'd probably say something like that. I naturally didn't tell him about... our getting sort of silly on the trail. But he seemed to take it for granted that I was sort of... under your influence."

"You no doubt straightened him out on that," said Longarm with a thin smile. It had been a statement rather than a question, but the honey blonde sighed and said, "It's not as if we'd made a lot of promises, Custis. We all say silly things when we're... excited. But we never agreed our... friendly feelings meant anything permanent, did we?"

Longarm saw Fred Ryan down the veranda, looking confused with a glass of punch in each hand. He told Godiva, "Your ride to Fort Smith is looking for you. Do us both a favor and move it on down to meet him, honey. I follow your drift, and you have to be an elderly English fop to carry off those sophisticated scenes you womenfolk seem to get more out of."

She started to say something else. Then she laughed, like a mean little kid, and turned away without another word. As he watched her flounce down the veranda to get her rum punch, and Lord only knows what else before the night was over, Longarm had to laugh at himself. For while one part of him was just as glad it had ended so carefree, another part of him couldn't help feeling a mite used and abused, the way a lot of gals had felt, no doubt, when the shoe had been on the other foot. As Longarm turned the other way, he spied the plump Elvira Howard just down the veranda rail, fanning herself fit to bust. As their eyes met he just nodded in passing. It would have been rude to ask a lady how much of that conversation she'd grasped. There wasn't a speck of doubt she'd been listening. Making his way around to the main entrance, Longarm went back in just long enough to get his hat. For as the dancers swirled inside the poorly ventilated club, the mingled smells of sweaty army blue wool and cloying perfume would have been a bitch if he'd anybody of his own to dance with. He knew any gal he started up with in the shantytown just off the post was as likely to get him in trouble as some officer's wife or daughter at the fool dance he'd just left. So he decided it might not kill him, just this once, to get on back to his hired room and turn in early alone, the way they kept telling him he ought to.

CHAPTER 10

Neither non-alcoholic beer nor soft cider was any more tempting than rum punch. But that familiar mouth organ slowed Longarm down as he might have passed the sutler's.

Glancing through the swinging doors, he saw Harry Carver and some other Running X riders, mixed in with about as many troopers, quietly admiring the kid who was playing "La Palmona" now by the cold stove in the center of the combined shop and canteen.

He went inside to join them, partly because it was still a bit short of his usual bedtime, but mostly because Billy Vail paid him to be nosey and everyone passing by an army post usually spent more than a few words of gossip at the sutler's.

Nodding to Harry and the others he knew, Longarm strode on to the rear counter and asked the old geezer behind it for a fistful of his usual smokes and some waterproof matches, if they had them.

The sutler was able to fill both orders and still give him change for his silver cartwheel. It would have been rude to ask right out if they sold anything harder than the soft drinks approved by Miss Lemonade Lucy. He figured he'd just order a beer, bitch about the way it tasted, and see what happened.

He suspected it might not work when, pouring a tin cup of the suds that was not yet fermented and hence still sweet, the sutler asked him if he was by any chance that famous federal lawman everyone had been talking about earlier.

Shooting a morose glance at the riders who'd likely been gossiping about him, Longarm allowed he was Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long.

The beer tasted sort of tangy, as if there might have been a hint of alcohol somewhere among the suds, as the sutler nodded and said, "Just as well young Quirt McQueen and some soldiers blue went on out to Shanty Town for some real liquor, I reckon. I know the kid's all talk, but sometimes he don't know when to stop and-"

"The little shit said he was after you, Longarm!" Harry Carver shouted as he rose to join them. "I told him you might be by to say adios. That's doubtless what inspired him to tear-ass off across the parade to scare folks in Shanty Town."

Longarm frowned uncertainly as he sipped sweet suds and ran the handle through his brains in vain. When he said he had no memory of any feud with anyone called Quirt McQueen, the sutler explained, "He rides shotgun messenger aboard the mail ambulance as it runs from the Anadarko Agency to Fort Smith by way of here. He would have it known he killed a man in Dodge, whether anyone remembers him in Dodge or not."

Longarm cocked a brow and softly remarked, "Dodge ain't all that far from Anadarko now that you mention it."

The sutler snorted, "That's what I meant. Quirt's staying here overnight, to ride on with the B.I.A. dispatches along with the mail in the morning. Somebody told them about that Indian trouble you-all had down to the south. Quirt said you'd likely thrown down on innocent Kiowa because he knew for a fact you were a four-flushing show-off."

Harry Carver nodded and said, "He told us you'd bullied him and made him lick spit over in Dodge one time because he'd been a lot younger and everyone had told him you did wonders and ate cucumbers."

Longarm put the rest of the insipid non-alcohol beer aside as he insisted, "I don't know anyone called Quirt McQueen or, hell, Quirt anything that makes a lick of sense."

He lit one of his new cheroots to get rid of the sweet taste, and then he stated firmly, "It's not my habit to make anyone lick spit for no good reason. You say this sworn enemy I can't seem to recall is spending the night here at Fort Sill?"

The sutler nodded, and made Longarm feel better by explaining the two-man ambulance crew would be bedding down across the way at the B.I.A. installation, assuming young Quirt didn't get lucky in Shanty Town. He made a wry face and added, "All but a few of the higher-priced whores on the far side of Flipper's Ditch were servicing the Tenth Cav until just a few weeks ago. But Quirt's a breed and he likely thinks any white gal is a step up from his sisters."

Longarm dryly observed, "I take it you are neither an admirer nor afraid of this Quirt McQueen, Mister..."

"Vernon, Ed Vernon, and you take it right." The sutler replied as he reached under the counter, adding, "I can't abide big-mouth gun waddies who never shoot off anything but their mouths! If I've told that kid once I've told him a dozen times not to make war talk around here if he's only looking for innocent merriment!"

He brought up a bottle of thick brown glass and quietly began to fill three shot glasses as he grumbled on. "I've seen dumb bragging matches shift from bluff to bloodshed in the wink of an eye, and a couple of times stray rounds came perilously close to these tired old eyes. The last time Quirt got into one of his swaggering snits, I thought we were going to have us a dead breed and a couple of hung darkies on this post. It was all I could do to talk a couple of Tenth Cav into overlooking the babbling of a bratty kid. Fortunately, they liked grown-up liquor too."

Longarm gingerly tasted the amber liquor he'd been offered and had no doubt in his mind as he gravely pronounced, "Maryland rye. The real stuff. No moonshiner born of mortal woman ever sold you anything as fine as this, Ed."

The sutler smiled innocently and replied, "I never said any such cuss ever did. Do I look like the sort of fool who'd serve moonshine on a military reservation to a federal lawman? You'll note I've only served you gents, from my own private stock. I'd have to call any man who said I'd sold him hard liquor a liar."

Harry Carver looked puzzled and allowed he failed to see all that much difference, since Miss Lemonade Lucy had declared Fort Sill a dry post.

It was Longarm who explained. "She did and it is. The administrative order signed by her husband forbids the trafficking in or possession of strong drink by the surrounding Indians or the troops posted here to make 'em behave. Neither commissioned officers nor us way less disciplined civilians are required by federal law to follow the stern Articles of War nor tedious Army Rules and Regulations to the letter."

One of the closer cavalry troopers, possessed of a keen nose, got up to drift over, grinning, as he quietly asked, "Do I smell the aroma of rye whiskey coming from this corner, Mr. vernon?"

The bottle had already vanished. But Ed Vernon made no attempt to hide or polish off his own glass as he gravely replied, "If you did it was your misfortune and none of our own, Trooper Baily. We can serve you our beer or we can serve you soft cider. It was your own grand notion to sign up for a hitch, not mine.

The cavalryman told Vernon to do something that didn't even sound like fun, and went back to hear some more mouth-organ music. Ed Vernon chuckled and said, "It's the few native-born Americans we have the most trouble with. Most of the new recruits are German or Irish greenhorns who never read the U.S. Constitution or heard that a trail hand starting out can make twice as much as any soldier blue and drink like a grown man whilst he's at it."

Longarm didn't care. He told the sutler in a friendly but firm way, "I'm paid to ask questions, and so I'm asking you politely where you get this rye whiskey and how much you keep on hand here."

Vernon smiled easily and replied, "I have no secrets from my dear old Uncle Sam. I just told you I ain't been selling, and I only keep enough for my ownself and my pals. As to where it comes from, I send back East for it and have my hired help pick it up with other wares at the railroad freight dock at Atoka, about a hundred and sixty miles to the east and about as close as the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Line ever gets to this dusty swamp."

Longarm half closed his eyes to draw maps in his mind as he sipped the fine whiskey. He had no call to ask why Vernon sent away for such private stock. He nodded thoughtfully and said, "That railroad stop at Atoka would be in Chocktaw country on the far side of the Chickasaw reserve. What happens when your whiskey comes to a reservation line?"

Vernon looked blank, then replied, "It crosses it. Ain't no exact lines drawn across the buffalo grass betwixt here and Atoka. You just ride or drive 'till you're on or off any fool reserve. How come you ask? Ain't no way to get lost on an established wagon trace."

Longarm waved his empty shot glass at the trail boss beside him as he explained. "Harry and his cows got stopped by your Indian Police at the reservation line to the south the other day. They said they'd been told to collect a toll on such wealth on the hoof. Yet you say a man can drive in from the east with a wagon-load of valuables and those blue shirt riders don't say boo?"

Vernon shrugged and replied in an easy tone, "You have to meet up with riders before you can say what they might have to say. I can't recall me or my boys meeting up with any of them Indian Police on the trail save to say howdy. They ain't allowed to pester white folks."