15 Longarm and the Unwritten Law

Then the main agency wired that they'd been getting other scattered reports, or complaints, after putting out their own wires about those mysterious riders.

Few had been hurt or seriously shaken down, but now that they all thought back, there had been some Indian Police chasing a bunch of Kiowa stock thieves, and as a matter of fact the Indian Police had been given food, fodder, and some travel expenses they said Quanah would repay, in his own good time, as they wandered the big reserve.

A more recent report from an Indian settlement along Beaver Creek, east of Fort Sill, said about a score of riders, dressed more like Saltu cowhands than either police or a warrior society, had skirted to the north a sunset back, despite the wind and rain they'd been riding through with night coming on.

Longarm grinned up at the Cherokee breed as he took the last of that down and said, "They're running for it. They knew the army had caught up with me and thought I knew more than I really do."

Hino-Usdi batted his lashes like an admiring schoolgal and asked what all that really meant.

Longarm replied, "From my very first words with that Sergeant Black Sheep they've been out to clean my plow, as if they suspected I suspected something the moment I laid eyes on them."

The Cherokee breed suggested, "What if that one who speaks such American English could be wanted by the law? Wouldn't he be afraid you might have recognized him? You did tell him you were a federal lawman, didn't you?"

Longarm nodded thoughtfully and said, "That only works partway. If we'd ever met before, I'd have really recognized him. That Ben Day process that allows you to print photographs on paper is too new for older wanted posters to enter the equation. And he'd know better than to front for the outfit if he was on any recent ones."

Rogers shrugged and said, "You did say they went right to war with you, didn't you?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "Damn it, kid, I just now said I didn't know why they were so scared of me. Suffice it to say, they were. They tried more than once to gun me out on the range. When that didn't work they just ran for it. Hold on. I want to wire some other Indian Police I know in Atoka."

As he started to, Rogers said, "That's way off this reserve."

Longarm said, "I know. Ed Vernon picks up his private liquor there. That's the best place for sneaks with Indian features, no offense, to board a railroad train. They'll expect me to wire Spanish Flats, but hardly another Indian agency by a handy railroad."

Rogers marveled, "It's no wonder they were afraid of you! They'll take ever so long to ride all those miles between here and Atoka, and your Choctaw friends will have plenty of time to set up an ambush!"

Longarm said, "Not if I don't wire them sometime today. I might as well get word to Fort Washita, halfways there, whilst I'm at it. Lord knows Colonel Howard wouldn't be able to head 'em off now, even if I could tell him which way they seemed to be headed!"

He got to work on the key, the cheroot gripped between his bared teeth as he glared unconsciously at the wall beyond. For no matter how surely he worded his messages, he still had no idea what he'd done to scare them clean off the Kiowa Comanche reserve!

He sent a few more messages to agencies along the 160mile route of the fugitives, assuming they weren't headed another way entirely. By the time he'd finished and lit another cheroot, Western Union was sending Billy Vail's reply to his earlier report. Their telegram delivery boy had made good time.

Vail told him Smiley and Dutch had been down to Trinidad and back with little additional light to shed on old Attila Homagy's domestic problems. Some neighbors said the pretty young Magda Homagy had run off with that same tall, dark, and handsome stranger. Vail had a dozen good guesses as to how Homagy could have learned, or guessed, which way his own chosen home-wrecker had flown. Longarm could think up more, starting with, "Say, did you see my pal Longarm passing through here just the other day?"

Vail agreed Fort Sill wasn't working out so well as a hideout, and flatly forbade a ride up to Anadarko. Sitting at his Denver desk, the sly old marshal had come to the same conclusions about Homagy and a buckboard on muddy lonesome roads. He ordered Longarm to give Quanah Parker another day to get back and state just what in thunder he'd had in mind before he wandered clean off the damned reservation. Vail said it sounded as if the army and B.I.A. had as good a grip on those fake police as any one man was likely to manage. So Longarm was to spread the word and do what he could, as long as he was there. Then, about the time Attila Homagy could possibly hear he'd just missed him yet again, and go tear-assing down to Spanish Flats, Vail wanted Longarm to return those first ponies near the depot,ride a train one stop east, and head for, say, Waco aboard another. Vail said they either had to find Homagy's runaway wife for him or Shoot him. He added he was working on a report about a tall tinhorn and a brassy blonde with a mighty thick accent up around Fort Collins.

Longarm wired back that he'd possibly cut the mystery rider's trail the easy way, and agreed to do the rest of it old Billy's way. Then he leaned back, heaved a smoky sigh, and said, "That's just about all of your battery zinc I need to use up on you for now. Looks like I'll be staying here at least overnight. So I reckon I ought to start considering where."

The baby-faced breed blushed a dusky rose, but sounded downright bold as he suggested, "I could put you up, if you've no place better to bed down. Our quarters are right out back, off and since Agent Ryan won't be staying here tonight..."

"Can't use another gent's bed behind his back," said Longarm, getting to his feet with a suddenly uneasy feeling about that flat-chested but mighty girlish young jasper.

Hino-Usdi Rogers insisted, "Uncle Fred won't mind. But if you're bashful, why don't we just go back right now and have a little fun in my little bed?"

Longarm found himself backing away from the fluttery but brazen advances of the eager young squirt. He laughed awkwardly, and said, "I hate to be the one who has to tell you this, but I'm incurably queer for women, if that was the fun you had in mind."

The breed licked his pouty lips and puffed, "I can do anything for you any woman can. Better! Don't be bashful. Nobody else need ever know, and you can't tell me you've never been even a little weeny bit curious about the joys that dare not speak their names!"

Longarm laughed, too loudly for the way he felt, and confessed, "I've always wondered what the main entree at a cannibal feast might taste like too. That don't mean I'm ever fixing to eat anybody!"

The breed flicked his pink tongue like a snake's, and told him not to refuse a friend just a little taste of his own flesh raw. Longarm had to shove past to get closer to the door. So he did, saying, "I don't hold with hitting other gents just because I don't agree with their, ah, tastes. But don't start no wrestling match if you ain't ready to land flat on your ass, old son."

The breed kid wrapped both arms around Longarm and buried his head in the taller man's tweed vest, sobbing, "Don't humiliate me this way! You said you and Uncle Fred were pals. How was I to know you were one of those blue-lipped Holy Rollers who can't admit their own passions?"

Longarm gently but firmly disengaged himself from the confounded clerk as he observed, "I doubt you've been to many gatherings of the Pentecostal Movement if you don't find them capable of passion. But through no fault of anyone, everyone feels passionate in different ways. I'm sorry I ain't like you and your Uncle Fred. But that's just the way things are and... Hold on, am I to understand that Fred Ryan is a, you know...?"

"Queer is the word you were groping for," said Rogers, striking a haughty pose. "We prefer to call ourselves free to love as we please and... what's so funny, damn you?"

Longarm sheepishly confessed, "Wasn't laughing at you. Laughing at me. I thought old Fred stick-talked a gal away from me the other night. I reckon she did too. But he must have just wanted company on that long ride east, unless he was one of them free thinkers who like everybody a heap. You call gents like that bicycles, right?"

Rogers laughed despite himself and said, "The only way Uncle Fred would screw a woman would be if she was willing really to take him through her back door. Sodomy seems to make him feel romantic!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Lucky for you. Most Indians I know are tolerant of your kind, but no more inclined than the rest of us to take you up on your kind offers."

Then he brightened and said, "That's it! I was wondering what old Fred had to offer that newspaper gal that I couldn't match. She was one of them adventurous gals who wanted to try everything. But somehow, I don't feel as jealous about the two of 'em now."

Hino-Usdi blanched and demanded, "Are you suggesting Uncle Fred is cheating on me, with a woman?"

To which Longarm could only reply gently, "Why not? You just now tried to cheat on him with a man."

Then he was out the door, smiling wearily but not sure who might be the biggest fool of them all. Life would surely be less confounding if folks got to screw like flowers, just letting the bees worry about who got to couple with whom.

By this time it was pushing noon and he hadn't had a warm meal in recent memory. So Longarm went over to that officers' mess and treated himself to eighteen cents worth of corned beef and fried spuds. He washed down his raisin pie dessert with two cups of black coffee, and then, feeling human again, he strode on up to the sutler's store to replenish his tobacco supply.

Ed Vernon seemed surprised as well as glad to see him. The sutler said, "We figured you'd ride north with Colonel Howard. Wasn't you the one sending up them smoke signals yesterday?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Told Lieutenant Standish why too. Never told him those mystery riders were headed north for certain. I reckon they were in too great a hurry to wait for me this morning. I had to carry two ladies home to Comanche Town. I could use another dozen of these same cheroots."

Vernon reached under the counter for them as he said, "Maybe just as well. Quirt McQueen just said he was riding after the column to have some words with you. I don't know if we talked him out of it or not."

As Longarm reached in his jeans to pay for the smokes he muttered, "That makes no sense, if we're talking about that silly kid who rides shotgun for the mail ambulance. There's no way in hell they could have driven all the way to Fort Smith and back by this morning."

Vernon handed over the fistful of cheroots and accepted Longarm's quarter as he casually explained, "Quirt says they fired him at the Mud Creek relay stop. Seems to think you had something to do with it. I told him if he wasn't working for the government no more I couldn't let him wait here on a military post to clean your plow. Last anyone I know seen of Quirt, he was getting liquored up over in Shanty Town, allowing he meant to kill you on sight and asking if anyone would lend him a pony."

The sutler handed Longarm his nickel in change as he added in a cheerful tone, considering, "By now someone's sure to have put him on a pony, if only to get rid of him. Quirt can be obnoxious as all get-out when he's drunk."

Longarm put his tobacco and change away as he thoughtfully said, "He ain't all that pleasant sober. But there's no way I could have wired mean things about him to Mud Creek. I didn't know he was there, and even if I had, I'd have been out on the range with more serious things on my mind at the time."

He lit one of the smokes he'd just bought as he considered all his options. Then he said, "Reckon I'll have to track the kid down, if he's still over yonder, and just ask him what this is all about."

The sutler blinked and replied in a worried tone, "You don't want to meet up with him before he's had time to cool down and sober up a mite, Longarm. Quirt is one mean drunk, and he's sworn he means to slap leather at the sight of you!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "You told me that. Now I'm going to go find the little shit and ask him what makes him so mean."

CHAPTER 18

Having just sort of growed, like Topsy, the haphazard collection of canvas and frame structures on the far side of Flipper's Impossible Ditch would have been an unsolvable maze if it had been much bigger. But Longarm asked directions, and heard the tinkling piano playing in Spike's Parisian Pavilion. Once he found it, it looked a lot more like an old threadbare army mess tent. It likely was. He shut one eyelid to let his right pupil unwind from the noonday sunlight as he strode for the opening facing the muddy lane out front. So when he stepped inside and slid sideways along a canvas wall, he only had to open his shooting eye to see well enough in the sudden shade.

A third of the big tent, toward the far end, was walled off with painted canvas. The piano stood against that, played by a skinny young squirt in his shirtsleeves and derby. A long bar had been improvised by laying planks across piled shipping crates. The floor was a squishy expanse of trampled muddy sod. Longarm wasn't sure whether the open sale of hard liquor or the painted gals in scandalous satin outfits lounging around the piano and bar would have upset Lemonade Lucy Hayes, the President's lady, the most.

A Philadelphia lawyer could likely make a case for the joint sort of squatting on an Indian or military reservation. You weren't supposed to sell hard liquor on either under current regulations out of Washington. But they were a long way from Washington, and that was between old Spike, whoever he was, and the nearest provost marshal, whatever he got to look the other way. Longarm didn't ride for the War Department, and was only on loan to the Indian Police, who had no jurisdiction over white business permits.

Longarm was far more interested in the familiar sullen figure at one end of the bar, drinking alone as he tried to attract attention to himself by sort of singing along with the piano. Saloon gals had no call to flirt with saddle tramps who drank alone, and the few male customers at this hour seemed more uneasy than amused.

Nobody seemed to feel any easier when Longarm strode to within spitting range of Quirt McQueen and announced in a tone that could be heard clean through the music, "I understand you've been looking for this child, McQueen."

The piano stopped halfway through a bar, and the professor slid off his stool to join the painted gals in a sort of crawfish stampede around the far end of that canvas partition. Those few customers who didn't simply duck outside moved back as far as they could from the bar as the gent who'd been serving drinks behind it ducked down out of sight.

Quirt McQueen looked as if he was fixing to throw up. He gulped hard and said, "Howdy, Longarm. I heard you was on your way up to Anadarko with that cavalry column!"

Longarm curtly replied, "You said you were aiming to chase after me too. But I don't see you doing it, Squirt."

The kid protested, "They call me Quirt, not Squirt, if you don't mind. Could I buy you a drink, pard?"

Longarm shook his head and snapped, "I don't drink with mean little kids, Squirt. How did you get back from Mud Creek if you don't have a pony to ride, and what's all this shit about me getting you fired?"

Quirt swallowed some more and said, "I never said it was you in the flesh. Your B.I.A. pal and that newspaper lady said something to the jehu, and he must have said something to the station manager at Mud Creek. How was I to know they were your pals? They both sort of laughed at you when we all passed by you on the prairie that time. I told them how you'd refused to fight me over to the fort and-"

"Bullshit! Fill your fist!" Longarm declared.

Then he had to smile as the kid started pissing down one leg of his pants, whimpering, "Jesus H. Christ, can't anybody take a joke out this way? You know I never meant it, pard!"

Longarm said, "I knew it. Let's talk about why your war talk got Fred Ryan and Godiva Weaver so het up. Are you saying they rode on from Mud Creek with nobody at all riding shotgun messenger?"

McQueen shook his head and said, "There was this hardcase Indian Ryan knew, working as a stable hand at Mud Creek. Ryan said he'd feel safer with a more experienced gun waddy seated up front. But I ask you, was that fair?"

Longarm nodded and said, "Sounds fair to me. Fred Ryan has his own odd notions. But he is an experienced Indian agent and, no offense, you don't make a very convincing bad man."

Longarm pointed at the doorway with his thumb as he added, "I can see why Ryan didn't want you guarding him and Miss Weaver all the way to Fort Smith with nothing but your mouth. Squirts like you make me a mite nervous too. So now I want you to go find the pony you rode back on and justride it, anywhere's you like, as long as I don't see you around me no more."

McQueen protested, "What are you talking about? You can't run me out of town! What if I just refuse to go?"

Longarm answered pleasantly enough, "That's your right, under the U.S. Constitution. I know I can't make you go. But I can surely make you sorry as hell you stayed."

He saw the kid was too drunk, or too ignorant, to grasp his full meaning. So he quietly but firmly explained, "Asshole. You've told as many witnesses as I'd ever need that you meant to gun me on sight. So here I stand in full sight, and would any court in this land expect me to hold my fire until you'd killed me?"

McQueen tried, "Aw, shit, I told you I was only joshing."

Longarm shook his head and said, "That ain't what you told Ed Vernon and some others who don't like you any better. You'd best leave now, or make good on your brag, you yellow-livered little shit, because I am fixing to take you up on it within a number of seconds I'd as soon count off silently."

Longarm wasn't really counting under his breath. He'd seen more than one man die counting aloud toward ten and getting shot around seven or eight. But the four-flushing McQueen must have thought he was counting. For he was suddenly running for the doorway as if the Hounds of Hell were in hot pursuit.

Longarm leaned over the bar and quietly said, "War's over and I'd like rye with a beer chaser, barkeep."

The ashen-faced barkeep was filling his order when one of the saloon gals came over to tell Longarm that his drink was on the house and that Spike would like a word with him in the back. So he drained the shot glass, picked up his beer schooner, and followed the drab back behind that canvas wall.

On the far side it smelled even mustier, and he saw they'd divided that part of the big tent into a maze of tiny partitions. He had a fair grasp on what went on in some of them. The drab led him into a sort of canvas-walled office, where an older but prettier gal with funeral-black hair was seated behind a couple of planks laid across two flour barrels. She declared her friends called her Spike, Then she waved him to a stool on his side of the improvised desk. The younger gal with far more face paint ducked out without being ordered to leave. Longarm sipped some beer and waited for the lady to have the first say.

Spike said, "You had us worried. Quirt McQueen had a rep until a minute ago. He was a pest and bad for business as well. So to whom might we owe the honor?"

Longarm introduced himself. She didn't ask to see his badge. She laughed and said, "I'd have left town too. My help told me the kid was talking big about a lawman with a rep. I frankly never expected anyone famous as you to show up!"

Longarm modestly replied, "I doubt Quirt McQueen was either. I come across punks like him all the time. It's safer to threaten grown lawmen than some total stranger with a less certain reaction to your brag."

The lady known as Spike chuckled and recalled, "I saw the amusing outcome of such an encounter in Coffeyville, just before they cleaned it up and ran me out. There was this quiet little gent drinking alone at the bar. Looked like a windmill salesman, had anybody paid enough attention to speculate."

She reached in a box in front of her and took out two Havana Claros as she continued. "Anyhow, this big rough mule skinner packing a.45 on one hip comes through the door, already in his cups and doubtless feeling even bigger, to declare it's a Saturday night, that his Indian blood is up, and that he can lick any son of a bitch on the premises."

She handed Longarm one of the cigars and added, "Naturally the little lone drinker just drew and drilled him directly through the heart without a word. He declared as he was leaving that he had never let anyone talk about his dear momma like that."

Longarm broke out some matches to light them both up as he said, "The mule skinner would have been safer daring the town law to fight him. I'm surprised he didn't. Most mean drunks learn how much safer that is by the time they've been beaten up a few times. I've had some professional boxers tell me they have the same trouble. It's a lot safer to challenge someone like John L. Sullivan to a bare-knuckles brawl than some blacksmith or even a bootblack who'd be more likely to take you up on it."

She placed cool manicured fingers against his hand to steady it as he lit her cigar. He wondered whether they were flirting or not. She hadn't said what she really wanted of him yet.

He said, "There's no mystery about Quirt McQueen. He Somehow got the notion he could bluff me beyond reason. But now he knows better."

She leaned back, blew a sort of octopus cloud of blue smoke at him, and quietly asked, "Why did they send such a famous lawman here to the Indian Territory, Custis?"

So now he knew what was worrying her. He smiled through the smoke at her and said, "Nobody in Denver or Washington, most likely, has ever heard of Spike's Parisian Pavilion. I'd be lying if I said the War or Interior Departments approved of your doubtless well-meant services to lonely troops a long ways from home. On the other hand, a heap of old army men and even Indian agents are more worldly than Queen Victoria or Lemonade Lucy Hayes. They know, or say they know, a soldier blue with some place to let off steam close to his post is less likely to go over the hill or, worse yet, molest some handier Indian gal. I had to chase a cuss clean to Mexico after he'd been charged with the murderous mistreatment of an Indian laundress one time."

Spike blew more smoke at him and quietly asked, "Then why did they send you?"

He finished the last of his beer, rested one elbow on her desk as he leaned closer, and just told her.

It naturally took a spell, even when he left out the dirty parts. So Spike rang a bell on her desk when he was halfway back from that Kiowa camp, and another drab came in with a pitcher of beer and two tumblers on a tray.

She set it on the desk and backed out. As Spike poured she said some troopers had told her why they had to ride up to Anadarko. She said it was going to be lousy for business. But she was glad nobody had double-crossed her.

Longarm waved his cigar warningly and said, "Stop right there, ma'am. Any deals you've made with white folks are betwixt you and white folks. Like I told you, I was sent here to give Chief Quanah a hand with his new Indian Police and as things turned out, Quanah ain't here. My orders are to give him another twenty-four hours to get back and explain his fool self. Unless he has something to say that ain't on record, I'm as good as gone. From all the files I've had a look at and all the folks I've questioned, there's nothing all that wrong with the way the Indian Police have been set up in these parts."

She asked, "What about those fake Indian Police, working with a band of fake wild Indians?"

He shrugged and said, "Quanah set up his own police force to deal with such crooks on his own reserve. Him and the B.I.A. have the army to back their play. They don't need one more white lawman all that much, and like I told you, I suspect I've somehow managed to scare the gang back to wherever they came from. I sure wish I knew how."

Spike laughed and said, "That's no mystery. I was watching through the canvas when the piano professor told me Quirt McQueen had met up with that jasper he was fixing to fight. You're scary when you're on the prod, Custis. I could see by your gun-muzzle eyes, clear across the saloon, it was time for that boy to slap leather or start running!"

Longarm shrugged modestly and said, "I don't usually start out as annoyed. I never locked eyeballs with that Sergeant Black Sheep. He just took it upon himself to go to war with me. If I knew what the fuss was about I might know how I won!"

She agreed it was a puzzle, and then, since they'd finished the two drinks she'd poured and she wasn't pouring more, Longarm said he had to figure out where he was going to spend the coming night.

He could see why they called her Spike. She had no suggestions to offer. She didn't even walk him out front when he rose to leave. He wondered who she was paying off at the nearby fort, with what. But it wasn't any of his beeswax. An army provost marshal seldom heeded and never appreciated helpful hints from the Justice Department.

As he ambled back to the fort afoot, he laughed at himself for concerning himself with the business dealings and dubious charms of a gal too old for him. He decided it was likely because a nice-looking gal of any age was such an improvement on the offer that Hino-Usdi Rogers had made him. He decided to keep the hard-eyed but decidedly female Miss Spike in mind when he turned in alone at the hostel that night. A man would feel silly as hell having wet dreams about Cherokee breeds who only thought they were gals.

Crossing the parade, he noticed the mud was sun-baking back to 'dobe again. 'Dobe was what you called clay soil with lots of lime in it out here whether anyone molded it into bricks or not. Kids in Denver molded it into bitty balls to have 'dobe fights after it set solid as plaster. Those mystery riders wouldn't be leaving hoofprints much longer as they rode across thick sod rooted in drying 'dobe.

Colonel Howard and his column were headed the wrong direction in any case. If the gang was smart enough to split up and drift into the rail stop at Atoka in scattered twos and threes, they might even get by the Choctaw Police, dad blast their sneaky ways!

Longarm went back to the stable to get his saddlebags and Yellowboy from the army tack room. Then he toted them to that hostel to ask for the same room if they had it.

They did. So he put his personal baggage away after shaving and such down the hall, and this time he wedged a match stem under the bottom hinge as he shut and locked his hired door. He was just about sure he'd seen the last of Quirt McQueen, but it could pay to take the routine precautions.

He was standing on the veranda, lighting another smoke while he pondered whether he had enough questions left to pester the signal corps, when a familiar figure on a paint pony reined in a few yards away to hail him.

It was Sergeant Tikano of the Indian Police. The moonfaced Comanche said, "They told me you might be here. Quanah just rode in. He was bringing another beef herd up from Texas when he heard about all the trouble you've been having and rode on ahead. Do you want me to bring him here or will you ride with me?"

Longarm said he was in a hurry to compare notes too. So as the Indian trotted his mount beside the walk, Longarm hurried back to the stable and saddled the bay he'd hired in Spanish Flats, and they loped out together for that Comanche sub-agency just over the horizon.

Along the way, Longarm brought the Indian police sergeant up to date on his early chores with a telegraph key. Tikano agreed the rail stop at Atoka, on the Choctaw reserve, made heaps of sense for the mystery riders, if they were really running for it. He said they'd have ridden smack into Quanah and two dozen real Indians if they'd taken the Cache Creek Trail for the depot at Spanish Flats. Longarm asked how Quanah had found out enough to worry him at all, and Tikano explained, "He's been buying more beef down in Texas all this time. He likes to act more like his Saltu relations when dealing with the Saltu. That is why nobody else knew where he was all this time. He met your friends from the Running X as they were riding home to Texas. The trail boss called Carver told him about those police who were not police and others who might or might not have been Black Leggings. So now Quanah and Agent Conway are drinking much black coffee, trying to figure out what to say when they ask Agent Ryan's clerk to wire the main agency at Anadarko."

Longarm allowed he had to study on that too. As they topped a rise and saw that church steeple ahead, Longarm casually asked the Comanche if he'd ever heard any gossip about young Hino-Usdi.

Tikano replied simply, "We call him Ta Soon Da Hipey. Every now and then a boy is born who grows up that way. It is wrong to use such a young man as a woman. But it is wrong to hurt him or even mock him as one might mock a real man who missed a shot or fell off his pony. Nobody asks for such boys to happen. Eyototo, the chief of the spirits, must have some reasons for making some people awkward, crippled, crazy, or just different. They are the ones to be pitied. Sometimes, if you give the pitied ones a chance, they turn out all right. One of the greatest war chiefs of the Arapaho did everything with his left hand. But the blue sleeves couldn't kill him at Sand Creek, even though they hit him with many bullets, many. The Cheyenne had a chief called Left Hand too."

Longarm said, "I noticed that the time Dull Knife lit out from Fort Reno just north of here. My point about that Cherokee kid, and the agent he works for, was that few if any Indians would think to blackmail such gents, whilst Spanish-speaking Christians might."

Tikano asked what Mexican outlaws might blackmail Fred Ryan or his clerk into doing for them.

Longarm answered, "Don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe heaps. I'd best compare notes with Quanah before I send any more wires."

So he did. When they rode in they found Agent Conway and the taller Quanah Parker, dressed like a Texas trail herder with long braids, out on the front porch as if they'd been watching from a window.

Once Longarm had dismounted and shook hands all around, already knowing the stern-faced but agreeable chief to talk to, Longarm wasted no time in bringing everyone up to date, including the little he'd just found out by wire.

Quanah nodded soberly and said, "Our friend Harry Carver told me much of what you just said. When my young men and I got to where you Saltu met those police who were not police, we found nobody there to demand money from me in my name. But we scouted for sign and found where they had planted tipi poles crazy. Some with four main poles, as our women plant, but others based on a three-pole tripod, the way Arapaho put up a lodge. They had no idea at all how a tipi should be facing."

Longarm nodded and replied, "I just said I thought they might be Mex bandits with a mighty unusual approach."

Quanah said, "I had not finished. When we came to where Harry said you and that girl shot it out with Black Leggings, we scouted around those sod walls carefully. The rain that had just fallen gave away a lot of sign they may have thought they'd covered. The reason you and those cowboys never found those dead Indians is that they were buried in a draw a good ride to the west. We might not have found this out if the rainwater hadn't found the softer earth under the replaced sod easier to wash down the draw."

Longarm resisted the impulse to declare he'd never thought those rascals had been treated to any Horse Indian sky burial. It was tough to remember that despite a lot of white manners, Quanah Parker still followed Indian manners when it came to conversation. Indians broke in while others were speaking about as often as white folks belched or farted at such times.

Quanah said, "People do not rot as fast buried in 'dobe. So we knew they were not anyone we knew. They were wearing black leggings, but their war paint was silly. We who paint ourselves don't just daub it on like Saltu children going to a Halloween party. Paint is worn for puha, or to warn your enemies what kind of a fighter they face."

The erstwhile war leader wiped two fingers down a hollow bronzed cheek and sneered, "One had yellow lightning bolts running down green cheeks like tears. That is the paint of a great warrior lodge, but neither Kiowa nor Comanche. Only the Arapaho Black Hearts, not Kiowa Black Leggings, paint their faces that way."

The experienced war paint enthusiast put his fingers to his hairline as he grinned in a surprisingly boyish manner and said, "Another had a red half-moon down his forehead from his hair, with both cheeks solid red. That looked Kiowa. A Kiowa woman paints her face that way when her man rides off to war and she wants him to come back alive."

After they'd all chuckled at the picture, Longarm said, "They must have copied designs from some picture book. We've about agreed no Horse Indian ever called water agua."

Agent Conway cocked a brow and asked, "You sure you don't mean mauga, pard?"

Longarm thought back before he decided, "Might have been mauga as easily as agua. Why do you ask?"

Conway sounded sure as he replied, "Mauga means dead in Pawnee. I rode with Pawnee Bill and his Pawnee Scouts one summer, during the Sioux wars. Every time they nailed a Sioux, or vice versa, them Pawnee said the one on the ground was mauga."

Longarm and the two Comanche speakers exchanged glances. Quanah suggested, "They say the Wichita and Caddo are related to Pawnee, but would even a Caddo be dumb enough to paint himself like a Kiowa girl?"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "I know a Cherokee who might. Were any of them mysterious cadavers tattood Wichita-style, Chief?"

Quanah Parker said, "I don't think so. You have to understand the bodies were muddy and starting to turn funny colors under all the mud and war paint. I don't think the younger Wichita have tattood their bodies as much since they rode northeast to join the Pawnee. People laugh at you when you act different on purpose."

Agent Conway suggested they all go inside and have a sit-down over coffee and cake. But Quanah said he had to get back to those cows his boys were herding up the Cache Creek Trail.

Longarm said, "Hold on, Chief. I got places to go as well. So why don't you tell me why you sent for me by name in the first place?"

Quanah grinned like a mean little kid and said, "I think you have already done what I was going to ask you how to do. We were having the same trouble as they've had up around Fort Reno, with some few Arapaho willing to be Indian Police while the Cheyenne call them woman-hearts or worse. I haven't been asking my father's people to put up with this civilization shit because I've forgotten the old ways. They have to learn new ways because the old ways keep getting them killed. I tell them they can all be blown away by field artillery, live as animals in a zoo while they tell themselves they are still proud warriors, or learn how it is that even your twelve-year-old boys can leave home and support themselves with no B.I.A. to feed and clothe them."

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I expect gents like you to get the vote before most white women or colored men. But I know what you mean about some unreconstructed Hors Indians holding out. I talked to your Kiowa pals about acting more progressive. I doubt I made any impression, though."

Quanah Parker said, "You're wrong. Some of Hawzitah's young men have said they would like to hear more about becoming Indian Police. If we get any Kiowa into those neat blue uniforms, with extra money to spend at the trading posts..."

"I get the picture," Longarm said. "If that's all you wanted from me, like I said, I got my own row to hoe. Got to get my ass somewhere's else before that column comes back from Anadarko. You gents know as much as me about those mystery riders, who could be long gone for all I know. So let me ride back to the fort for my saddlebags, and I'll ride down the Cache Creek Trail with you, Chief."

But Quanah said, "If I wait that long there won't be much riding for me. By now that herd should be just over the horizon to the south. I want to rejoin my drovers and make sure they have the beef bedded down well east of here before sundown. It makes a mess when I try to distribute beef too close to this settlement. Some people would rather just shoot a cow and cut it up on the spot than drive it home."

Longarm allowed he'd been there when B.I.A. beef on the hoof had been divided up. He squinted up at the sun and added, "No sense in me sleeping along the trail when I don't have to. I've hired a bed under a roof at the fort. Riding alone from an early start I could likely make it to another before nightfall by loping some. Got me a mess of wires back and forth to consider in any case."

So they all shook on it, and Longarm said he'd let them know if he got any helpful answers to some of the questions he'd sent earlier about those mysterious riders.

He loped back to Fort Sill, considered reining in out front of the B.I.A. liaison office, and had a better idea. He dismounted in front of the army Signal Corps installation, went inside, and asked for the gent in charge.

When the skinny gray sergeant in the front office said that was him, Longarm introduced himself and explained his problem.

The army man chuckled, said he'd heard that Cherokee clerk just down the walk was a sissy, and agreed to contact anyone Longarm was waiting to hear from, provided he'd write it all down.

Longarm accepted the yellow writing tablet and block-printed each address and query on a separate sheet. He lettered a longer progress report for Billy Vail, but didn't say when he'd be leaving. Vail would know his own travel instructions and nobody else needed to. Asking a total stranger not to show these sheets of foolscap to a Homagy who might offer money to see them would be stretching one's luck.

He offered to send the considerable dots and dashes himself. But the sergeant said his own telegraphers could use the practice. So Longarm blocked out a few more queries as long as he was at it, and said he'd be back after supper-time to pick up any replies.

He led the spent pony on a shortcut to the stable across the now dry and solid parade. A stable hand who met him just outside to take the reins handed him a small white envelope, saying, "Compliments of the colonel's lady. They told her at the hostel you'd ridden off post, sir."

Longarm took the envelope with a nod of thanks and said, I ain't no damn officer you have to salute and sir, pard."

He tore open the envelope to discover he'd been invited to supper on officers' row. So, checking the sun against his pocket watch, he saw he just had time to make himself more presentable.

He took a bath at the hostel while he was at it, and showed UP at the Howard house before sundown, as he'd been invited, with a clean shirt and shoestring tie, his rumpled tobacco brown tweed suit, and a good splashing of bay rum. He'd picked the prairie primroses out back of the stable. Fortunately, the kind with white blossoms grew later in the summer than the pink evening primrose.

The plump Elvira Howard opened the door to him herself, wearing a paisley print dress a size too skinny for her, along with a heap of jasmine scent and, he suspected, a fresh henna rinse.

She took his hat and the flowers with a happy coo, as if she'd never seen a vacant lot overgrown with prairie primrose, and led him in to the dining room, where two places had been set at their damask-covered table. She cooed some more when he helped her into her seat. Being the colonel's lady, she was likely surprised by good manners. Then she rang a small brass bell as Longarm was sitting his own self down, and a young corporal in a fresh-pressed blue uniform came out of the kitchen and hit a brace as if he expected her to make him recite all twelve general orders.

She told him serve the first course instead.

This turned out to be cold potato and onion soup that she called a "vicious wash." He had to agree that no matter what you called it, it seemed just right for such a warm summer evening.

After the cold soup was cleared away, they had cooled-down roast chicken in a nest of iced salad greens. Then they got down to business with steak and mashed potatoes. Elvira said she hoped he'd forgive her for such a simple meal, but she had this weight problem and the regimental surgeon had suggested she and the colonel cut down.

Longarm gravely replied two servings of spuds seemed enough for one supper, and so she had them served a modest dessert of strawberry shortcake under whipped cream.

After that his hefty hostess suggested they have their demitasses with Napoleon in the drawing room. So that's where they went. Nobody named Napoleon was waiting there to drink with them. They called the fancy brandy that went with the fancy coffee Napoleon.

She told him it was jake with her if he smoked while he was at it. But he allowed the coffee and brandy would do him as he waited for her to get down to brass tacks.

It took her a spell. They had to jaw about her husband and that cavalry column off to the north, and he told her about his conversation with Quanah Parker while the shadows lengthened and nobody came in to light any lamps. He was about to offer to do it when the plump redhead took a deep breath and suddenly blurted out, "What were you doing over there with Spike Wilson's place, Custis?"

He blinked in surprise, then told her honestly enough, "I went to Shanty Town to have it out with young Quirt McQueen. That's where they told me I'd find him. I did. But he was more willing to fight with me behind my back than face to face. So I just told him to get off this reservation, and I reckon he has by now."

Elvira Howard insisted, "You wound up in Spike's back room with her, for some time."

Longarm shrugged and explained, "She was curious about me too. She said she'd been expecting more of the notorious Quirt McQueen. I never asked her who she paid off over here at the fort. So she never told me, if that's what this is all about."

The plump Elvira paled enough to notice, despite the tricky light, but said, "I don't know what you're talking about. Are you suggesting those white trash on the far side of Flipper's Ditch pay someone here at this post to look the other way?"

Longarm sighed and said, "I ain't suggesting nothing, ma'am. I just told you I never asked Miss Spike about purely War Department beeswax. I was sent here to help the B.I.A. and Quanah Parker set up the Indian Police a tad better. Running into those mystery riders your husband is out hunting was extra cheese on my pie plate. I ain't interested in anything else that might be going on in these parts, and as a matter of fact, I'll be on my way before your husband or any other officer Miss Spike might know could possibly get back. I'm only booked into that hostel down the way for one more night, and thanks to you, I'm ahead of the game at the officers' mess. I'll be riding on just after they serve breakfast in the morning."

She placed a thoughtful hand on his tweed pants and softly asked if he'd like to have breakfast there with her.

Longarm stared at her incredulously in the gathering dusk, gulped, and said, "it ain't nice to treat animals cruelly, Miss Elvira. You've no idea how tempting that offer sounds, but..."

"Our enlisted help will be leaving for their barracks any minute," she said, moving her hand up his thigh as she crooned, "Nobody else need ever know, and we have so much to talk about, Custis."

He grabbed her soft wrist, wryly aware how it felt when a gal stopped him that way, as he protested, "I'd know, ma'am, and as fair of face and form as I find you, I don't hold with adulterating married ladies."

She chuckled and softly sang:

Some folk say I am a knave. Some folk say I can't behave. Now I jack off on her grave, With my old organ-grinder!

Longarm told her flatly, "I never sang that song to you the other night, Miss Elvira."

To which she demurely replied, "I know who you did sing it to. She said you were hung like a horse and energetic but gentle. It's been some time since a man like that rode off on me to get shot off his horse in the hills of Tennessee."

Longarm could barely see her now as he quietly replied, "I was at a Tennessee crossroads called Shiloh one time. I'm sorry about your beau getting killed in the war, ma'am. But you did wind up with Colonel Howard, and like I said, I don't mess with married ladies."

She snapped, "Who did you think you were with the other night just after the dance at the club, Little Red Riding Hood? She was the wife of the regimental Romeo who got caught with yet another wife just down the hall!"

Longarm had to total the score in his head before he laughed and said, "You mean that was the poor innocent victim you talked the colonel into posting to Fort Douglas with her rogue of a husband?"

Elvira Howard sniffed, "My Morgan runs his regiment. I run everything else around here. But Spike told you all this, didn't she?"

Longarm laughed and insisted, "Honest Injun, she never did. Can't you get it through your pretty head I just don't care about that, ma'am?"

She sniffed, "I know how pretty my head is. There was a time, before boredom and the sands of time weighed me down a bit. Or might it simply be that you can't afford to be compromised by a woman you may have to testify against in federal court? Our mutual friend on her way west to Fort Douglas said you were hardly this prim with her the other night!"

Longarm started to explain the obvious as he felt himself getting hard in spite of himself. Anyone with a lick of sense could see what a difference it made when you knew for certain a gal was married up with a gent you knew to howdy. She was likely just out to make sure he'd be in no position to bear witness against her, the wicked old thing.

Then she had her hand on it and marveled, "Oh, my, is all this for little old me?"

So he decided he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't as he reeled her in for a friendly howdy, seeing she was already hauling his raging erection out into the cool shades of evening.

She kissed back with a passion suggesting she might not just be gripping his shaft that tight to prevent his arresting her. When they came up for air and he asked if she was sure they were alone in the house now, she gasped, "I told the boys to leave the dishes in the sink, but I don't care! I want you now. Right there on the rug, the way we used to do it when I was eighteen and we could have eloped if you hadn't ridden off with your damned regiment, darling!"

So they wound up on the rug with half their duds off, screwing the hell out of other folks long ago and far away.

Longarm didn't know who her darling was, once she'd wrapped plump but surprisingly limber legs around his waist. He decided she reminded him of good old Roping Sally, up Montana way, who'd had such a well-rounded rump they'd never needed any padding under it. Although, as this one thrust her twat in time with his thrusts, it felt different. He was glad they all seemed to feel a mite different. For if all of them felt exactly as swell, a man would have no call to ride on, and then where would he be?

An hour later they were in a small bed in what she described as their guest room. It didn't make him feel as dirty as it might have in a bed she shared with the colonel. He didn't want to hear how many "guests" she'd been this nice to.

Her shorter, plumper body didn't seem at all like Roping Sally's as they came again in the nude on top of the bedding. But he didn't care. Old Elvira had a lot to offer, once a man persuaded himself he was sacrificing himself in the cause of investigation.

Sharing a smoke with her as they cuddled in the dark like old pals, Longarm had little trouble worming the petty details of a familiar arrangement out of the no-longer-worried colonel's lady.

She had the colonel sincerely convinced it was better for their enlisted men to let off steam in Shanty Town than, say, some Indian settlement a short ride further out, where they'd be harder to keep an eye on.

In return for this reasonable attitude, Miss Spike and the other trash whites just outside the gates gave "presents" to a lady with appetites her husband couldn't afford on his army salary. Longarm was paid by the same government. So he had to agree President Hayes seemed mighty tightfisted.

He didn't go into the mostly civilian government officials he'd had to arrest for augmenting their modest civil service salaries with the graft almost built into the system. He didn't want to remind her how Washington gave petty officials almost god-like powers over richer folks and then paid them three-or four-figure salaries to get by on. He'd often thought it was dumb to pay a bank teller barely enough to eat on and then trust him with the combination to the vault too.

Once he'd convinced her they hadn't sent him all this way to see where the troops at Fort Sill got laid, Elvira seemed more interested in the case he was really on.

He snubbed out the cheroot and got his bonier hips between her plump thighs again, to slide it back in sideways half erect, as he repeated there were only a few details to clear up and that he was leaving them to the army and the Indians.

She thrust her own hips languidly as she said, "Oh, yes, this is a nice friendly way if the man's, ah, man enough. But why were those mysterious riders act so mysterious to begin with, dear?"

He shrugged a bare shoulder, thrust a stiffer erection, and told her, "When the cat's away the mice will play, as if I had to tell you that. Somebody heard Quanah's Indian Police were resented and not too well understood by the folks around here.

Meanwhile, Quanah was away on his own mysterious business, and this gave them the chance to move in and try the Black Hand flimflam from New Orleans."

She said, "I thought you said they were Mexican, or maybe Pawnee. Could you move a little faster, honey?"

He could. He rolled atop her as he explained in the same conversational tone, "They read about war paint in books. I ain't saying the mastermind is Indian or Mex. He adds up as some sneaky white. But as soon as any of 'em are caught, they'll doubtless talk. So like I said, I can't hang around forever to pull routine police chores."

She moaned, "oh, Lord, don't you dare leave before you make me come again! I'd forgotten how grand it can feel and... Jesus, Teddy, why did you have to get yourself killed like a mere human being in that bloody mess at Lookout Mountain?"

He started to tell her a lot of Confederate widows doubtless shared her distaste for that particular battle. But he never did. He knew Elvira was thinner and younger and coming with her Teddy right now. So he just thrust it in and out of her moaning flesh until they'd both gone to Heaven again. Then all hell Seemed to be busting loose outside in the night, and he pulled out of her as she gasped, "My God! We're under attack! That was gunfire just now!"

He sat up, reaching for his duds at the foot of the bed as he said, "Two six-guns, fired fast as possible but empty by now, with nobody shooting back. Stay here and I'll find out what's going on out yonder."

She didn't argue, but groped for her own clothes as he quickly got dressed, buckled on his own six-gun, and grabbed his hat on the way out. Nobody was looking his way as they all converged on the post's guest hostel down the parade.

Longarm had time to break out his badge and pin it to the lapel of his frock coat before he got to where he'd booked a room for the night. It was just as well he had. Two military policemen were blocking the front door to the simply curious. They let Longarm through. Inside, four uniformed figures were poking about with confused expressions. One wore the arm brassard of the Officer of the Day. Another had the gilt oak leaves you'd expect on a post provost marshal. Before they could ask Longarm anything, or vice versa, another officer and two enlisted military policemen came down the stairs, confused in their own right.

The shavetail in charge said, "We found the room clerk upstairs, Major. Shot in the back in one of the rooms. There was nobody else with him. But the bed had been shot up worse! Feathers all over the place!"

Longarm asked if they were talking about the corner room numbered 206. When the shavetail allowed they surely were, Longarm said, "It was me they were after. I'd booked that room for the night and hung on to the key. The killer or killers came in down here asking for me. The clerk must have thought I was upstairs when he didn't see my key in its pigeonhole. They made him lead them upstairs and open my door with his passkey. Then they just started shooting until they emptied their wheels or noticed I wasn't there. So what are we all standing here for? Whether it was the Quirt McQueen you all know or some other son of a bitch entire, he can't have more than a few minutes lead on you, and it's open prairie all around if he's not holed up in Shanty Town!"

The provost marshal roared, "You heard the man! I want four squads assembled on the double, fully armed! I want one to sweep this post inside the perimeter, just in case. I want that squatters' settlement turned over like a wet rock, and meanwhile, I want one squad riding north and the other south!

The O.D. asked what about east and west. The major said, "We are to his west. I don't think anyone but Indians would head for that Indian agency to the east."

He shot a questioning glance at Longarm, who suggested, "If Indians passed through your gates this evening, your sentries should have seen 'em, right?"

The major smiled thinly and said, "They told us you were good. Do you think that was why someone was out to kill you just now?"

Longarm started to say Quirt McQueen hadn't struck him as that deep a thinker. Then he remembered those other more persistent attacks, and contented himself with answering, "Don't know, Major. I sent me some questions by wire earlier. Reckon I'll head over to the Signal Corps and see if anything came in. Your wire is manned round the clock, ain't it?"

The provost marshal nodded and said it had to be. Longarm elbowed his way out and started across the parade in the tricky light, his mind in a whirl. For no matter how he kept collecting facts around here, he hadn't been able to fit any together worth beans!

He knew he was overloaded with more information than he needed. It had been simple to figure the less tangled motives Of, say, Spike Wilson, the colonel's lady, and even that cheating army wife who told tales out of school. He reviewed his simple transactions with all three of them. Old Spike was just selling sin at a price enlisted men could afford. That lady in the dark who'd wound up on her way out to Fort Douglas had just been getting back at her cheating husband, and old Elvira...? She was just getting fat as she pined for the impossible, a young love now dead and buried after falling in the vicious Battle of Chickamauga in the hills of Tennessee.

Longarm took another full step before he gasped, "Jesus H. Christ! That's it!" and swerved a tad to bear down on the B.I.A. liaison office instead. There was no light inside at this hour. But Longarm knocked anyway. And it was a good thing he was standing to one side as a whole fusillade of bullets tore through frosted glass and paneling from inside!

Longarm called back, "Give it up, old son! That's another time you missed me, and I got it all figured out. After that, you're smack on an army post and they've already called out the guard on you!"

As if to prove his point, that young O.D. and a quartet of his interior guard, with bayoneted rifles, were running his way until he waved his own drawn.44-40 and yelled, "Don't line up with this doorway! We got us a sore loser inside!"

As if to prove the point another shot rang out inside, and then a familiar but unexpected voice called out, "Don't shoot. I got him! What's going on around here, for Pete's sake?"

Longarm yelled, "Open up, Ryan."

So Fred Ryan did, wearing no more than his pants, a sleepy-eyed expression, and a smoking Walker Conversion as he said, "I was asleep in the back when I heard young Rogers blazing away out here. When I asked him what was going on and who he'd been shooting at, he turned on me with his two guns and I had to shoot him!"

Longarm mildly asked, "How come? I counted twelve shots just now." Ryan said as calmly, "That's doubtless why I'm still alive. He had the drop on me and I was half asleep when I fired my own gun. Come on in. You can see for yourselves how it was."

As they all filed into the smoke-filled office after him, Ryan turned up a lamp someone had trimmed to a blue flicker earlier. As it flared to display the Cherokee clerk on the floor behind the counter, facedown and bare-ass with a pistol in each dead hand, Longarm followed Ryan through the gap in the counter, observing, "You made good time to Fort Smith and back, Fred. We weren't expecting you this soon."

Ryan said, "I just got in this evening. That's why I went right to bed without making a speech about it. I never went all the way east to Fort Smith. That newspaper gal did, looking to interview Quanah Parker for her readers. I only had to pick up some mail-order stuff of a... personal nature at the freight depot in Akota."

Longarm said, "I could keep asking questions and you could keep slithering slimy as an eel all night. But it's over, Fred. I got to arrest you for all sorts of things now, starting with the murder of this Indian ward of the government on the floor."

Longarm hardly expected any sane man to throw down on the law and three armed soldiers blue. But Fred Ryan didn't look too sane as he said dreadful things about Longarm's mother and started to swing the drawn gun in his hand into position.

He never managed it, of course. Longarm sent him spinning across the office with a round of.44-40, and then as Ryan bounced off the far wall, he was hit in the face with a.45-70 rifle ball that really messed him up.

The O.D. was fussing at the trooper who'd fired without orders by the time the Indian agent stopped twitching on the blood-slicked floor. So Longarm said, "No harm done, and I'm writing you boys up for an assist in my official report. The son of a bitch we just shot used to work at the Cherokee Agency in Tahlequah, two thirds of the way to Fort Smith. He knew all about ordering police uniforms and such from Saint Lou. He'd done so earlier for the Cherokee Police, and whether he stole some or ordered more after he'd transferred out is a matter we can work out later. Them mystery riders he had pretending to be Comanche Police or Kiowa raiders were Cherokee crooks. The Five Civilized Tribes that were out here earlier have had plenty of time to pick up white habits. They never learned to set up a proper tipi ring or savvy the sign lingo and paint of Horse Indians because the Cherokee were never Horse Indians when they lived in the wooded hills of Tennessee."

The O.D. asked, "Who told you all this, Deputy Long? No offense, but you didn't seem to know that much earlier."

Longarm said, "I'd forgot some things I knew. I jumped to hasty conclusions, trying to fit Mex bandits into a pattern that wouldn't work. I didn't even get it when Agent Conway persuaded me I'd heard an Indian say someone was dead, not that he needed water. Wichita or Pawnee raiders made a tad more sense than Mexicans. But not much, and it only came to me a few minutes ago that Tennessee used to be Cherokee country and that I'd been told, marching through it, how Chickamauga, where we fought that battle, meant Dead River in Cherokee!"

He pointed his warm pistol barrel at the naked Cherokee cadaver as he said, "Cherokee is related to Iroquois and Pawnee the way Comanche is related to Shoshoni, Aztec, and such. A lawman would play hell trying to account for Shoshoni building cities down Mexico way. But at least Pawnee were possible around here."

He pointed at the dead Indian agent to add, "It worked even better as soon as I suspected we were dealing with Cherokee and a white mastermind who literally liked to screw the Cherokee."

One of the troopers said he'd heard young Rogers was like that.

Longarm said, "We might have been able to charge him with crimes against nature on federal property. I doubt he even knew Fred Ryan tried to gun me twice tonight. It looks as if Ryan killed his lover boy for the same reason he gunned that clerk across the way. To shut them both up. So's he could play innocent."

The provost marshal barged in with more troops, demanding answers. Longarm pointed to the O.D. and said, "The lieutenant knows as much as me so far. I got to get up to your Signal Corps installation and see if anyone I wired earlier can tell me anything more."

He pushed his way out as the O.D. started explaining the mess in the B.I.A. office. The provost marshal must not have been satisfied. He caught up with Longarm up the line, just as the tall deputy read the last of the few telegrams waiting there for him.

Waving a penciled transcription at the older army man, Longarm said, "It sure beats all how things fall in place once you figure the overall pattern of the puzzle. Mud Creek identifies a shotgun messenger who replaced young Quirt McQueen, for no good reason, as a Lester Tenkiller, Tenkiller being a common Cherokee name. Quirt was fired and left to fend for his fool self because Ryan didn't want a witness coming back this way to tell me, in particular, how Ryan had never gone on to Fort Smith with a lady we both knew."

Longarm picked up another message to make sure of his details as he continued. "Ryan was whipping back and forth betwixt here and the railroad stop at Atoka. That seems to have been his home plate. He met his Cherokee pals there, picked up mail-order duds for 'em, and-"

"Atoka's one hell of a ride," the provost marshal said.

Longarm nodded and said, "Handy to the railroad, though. After that, it's a fair-sized settlement where none of his recruits were apt to meet up with either Comanche Police from this reserve or the Cherokee Police from their own. I just wired the Choctaw Police to be on the lookout for the Lester Tenkiller who comes through there fairly often. I'm letting the three Indian police forces work out the probable suspects Ryan would have recruited around Tahlequah. It'll be good training for all concerned, and we've accounted for the really bad apple in the bunch. Old Ryan must have figured I'd been sent to catch him personal. He was the only one up to anything crooked, involving any Indian Police. As a liaison man he was naturally privy to all the messages sent back and forth. But he must have been afraid he'd missed something."

Longarm picked up another message and said, "It's too bad he never read this wire from Denver, ordering me home before I'd recalled the meaning of Chickamauga. That enlisted clerk and the Cherokee breed might have still been alive if old Fred had let sleeping dogs lie. I might have missed his petty extortions entirely if he hadn't scared the shit out of me with his wilder-acting Indians. Or burned my ass when he ran off with a wild newspaper gal he was only interested in getting rid of before she followed up on some gossip about his operation!"

CHAPTER 19

A few days later, along about supper-time at the Brewster Dairy outside Trinidad, the pretty young widow was crossing her barnyard toward the main house when she spied a familiar figure on a chestnut gelding.

Longarm had hired it, along with its stock saddle, at a livery near the depot. He could only hope his own saddle and original baggage was still waiting for him at the Union Depot in Denver. He was wearing his suit and tie again, seeing he was calling on a lady.

As he reined in near her front steps, Cora Brewster hurried to greet him there, saying, "I was just thinking of you, Deputy Crawford! I wired you in care of Fort Sill, and they wired back that they'd never heard of you!"

Longarm dismounted and started to tether his hired mount to her hitching rail as he awkwardly replied, "Good help is hard to find these days. I just got back from Fort Sill, after some tedious train transfers. But to tell the truth I spent most of my time with some Indian pals, and I reckon they lost track of me at the fort. You say you were trying to get in touch with me, Miss Cora?"

The young but fully developed brunette in blue calico that matched her eyes dimpled up at him and explained, "That horrid Longarm's back in Trinidad. They said he'd run off with Magda Homagy, the brute. But he's been sparking another Bohunk girl too young for him by half and the immigrant ladies are all atwitter!"

Longarm nodded gravely and said, "That accounts for another blond lady who talks funny up Fort Collins way. I've been in touch with my home office by wire, and they just now told me the couple in question produced papers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the law paid a call on their rooming house. He used to be some sort of cavalryman they call a Hula Hula Lancer, and his wife had permission to leave as well."

Cora Brewster said, "I told you Longarm deserted that other blonde somewhere. Why are you tethering your mount to that post? You surely mean to sup and visit with me a while, don't you?"

He allowed he hadn't made any better plans for that evening. So she led the way back across her barnyard, explaining along the way how she'd just given her two hired men and house-girl the payday evening off. Longarm knew enough about cows to assume her dairy stock had been led into their stalls and milked for the last time that day no later than four in the afternoon. She didn't invite him to stable a pony with her cows. The chestnut gelding wound up in the stable with its own kind to gossip with. He noted with approval she fed them all timothy hay and medium-grade oats.

On the way back to the house Cora explained she'd been planning a light, simple supper for herself alone. He said he'd been stuffing his face with peanuts and such aboard many a train for the past few days. She laughed when she thought back to those few hours they'd done the same in that D&RG club car.

She said, "It seems so long ago, and as if our time together lasted longer. Isn't it funny how well you seem to get to know a stranger on a train, Deputy Crawford?"

He said it sure was, and added, "This jasper everyone keeps calling Deputy Custis Long, Miss Cora, you've seen the skirt-chasing cuss in the flesh your ownself? I mean, you'd know him if he rode in to join us for supper this evening?"

She indicated the way to her back steps as she sniffed and told him, "That'll be the day! You're so right about him chasing skirts! I swear I think he'd have his wicked way with a snake if he could get some other rogue to hold its head for him! He'd get my broom across his wicked face if ever he darkened my door at supper-time or any other time!" Longarm naturally opened the back door for her. As she marched through, chin at an indignant angle, she continued. "That snip of a dishwater blonde he's involved with now can't be a day over fifteen, and even a rogue with Longarm's rep ought to know better than to mess with bitty virgin girls!"

As he followed her into her neatly kept kitchen, he smelled fresh-baked bread and something sweeter. He said, "Leaving the virtue of the maiden to her own conscience, fifteen does seem a tad young. She ain't reached the age of consent under Colorado law. He'd have to get her legal guardian's permission to even come courting."

Cora took his hat and sat him at a scrubbed pine table near the window as she asked, "What's poor Bela Nagy supposed to do, challenge a notorious gunfighter with a badge to a duel? That wicked child's poor father is a coal miner who barely speaks English and wouldn't want trouble in any American court in the unlikely event he won!"

Longarm murmured, "I've noticed ignorant folks can be easy to cow with even a mail-order badge. I just got done exposing some fake lawmen over in the Indian Territory. According to a wire I got just the other day, the real Indian Police have rounded up a bunch of 'em and have 'em singing their little hearts out about home addresses in the Cherokee Nation. It's easy to round up fake lawmen once you notice they're fake."

She placed a bowl of stew she'd had warming on her stove in front of him, along with a pound of butter and some of that fresh bread he'd been smelling, as she sighed and said, "I hope you'll forgive me this once for offering so little. I'll make it up to you with a proper dinner tomorrow, if you aim to be in town that long. Why did you just suggest Longarm is a fake lawman, Deputy Crawford? For all the dreadful things they say about his way with the ladies, nobody I know has ever suggested he's not a real federal lawman like you."

The real Longarm said, "I'm going to have to catch up with him to be dead certain. But I'm fixing to be surprised as well as chagrined if the bully pestering Bohunk miners' wives and daughters turns out to be the real thing, Miss Cora."

The young widow sat down with her own serving across from him and insisted, "I'm sure Longarm is a real lawman. It was only a few weeks ago we were reading in the Rocky Mountain News about the way he'd been in yet another gunfight and won!"

Longarm said, "I read that edition too. Those newspaper reporters go on a heap. I just read a copy of the New England Sentinel on the train this afternoon. So I know for a fact that a reporter gal who couldn't have interviewed the one and original Quanah Parker in Fort Smith, Arkansas, just published a long interview with some fool Indian. You got to take Miss Weaver's word about him being a big chief."

Cora asked, "Are you suggesting Longarm was never really interviewed by that reporter from the Rocky Mountain News? Why aren't you eating your stew? Is it too salty?"

He said, "That reporter interviewed the survivor of that gunfight, ma'am. I was raised with better manners than to slurp my stew without a proper invitation."

She started to ask a dumb question, fluttered her lashes, and dug into her own serving as she confessed, "I'd forgotten what the etiquette books say about the hostess taking the first taste. I guess you think I'm mighty countrified."

He dug into his own grub, saying, "Nobody was ever raised more country than me. I had to read that in a book myself. There ain't no shame in just not knowing. But once you learn there's a right way and a dumb way to act around ladies of quality, it would just be rude not to bone up on 'em."

She blushed becomingly and murmured, "Go on, I'm nowhere near a lady of quality. I'm just a farm girl who's made out all right in butter and eggs."

"By hard work," he insisted. "I got an eye for whitewash and clean sweeping, Miss Cora. Takes a tidy eye and honest sweat to keep a spread this size this neat, even with help, and a lady who'd give her help an evening off before sundown is a lady of quality in my book."

She insisted, "You're making me blush. I swear you're as big a flirt as that dreadful Longarm, albeit I don't feel as frightened as I would if it was him across this very table from me!"

The man of whom she was speaking said, "I'm sure going to have to meet up with this womanizing wonder. You say he can be found in the company of some fifteen-year-old kid from Bohunk Hill?"

Cora said, "Eva Nagy, and we're not certain she's that old. I doubt you'd find Longarm anywhere near her parents' humble home after dark, though. They say he drives off into the hills in a curtained buggy, with all the greenhorn girls he can get to go with him."

She got up to fetch the fresh-perked coffee from her stove as she added, "Accuse me of having a dirty mind, if you like, but I am a widow woman who's not entirely ignorant of human anatomy and that child he's been molesting can't be... fully developed yet."

Longarm could only glance out the window at the lengthening shadows as he murmured, "Well, they say some gents like their olives green because it makes 'em feel... more manly."

She poured mugs of coffee for both of them as she exclaimed without thinking, "They say Longarm's hung like a horse, and she's such a tiny thing!"

Then she realized what she'd said, blushed beet red, and sat down to cover her face with her apron, sobbing, "Oh, Lord, I must really be going mad from living alone, the way I read in that book about the lady who lived in a tower in olden times!"

Longarm said, "That yam about the Lady of Astolat was only a fairy tale, Miss Cora. Even if it was true, she never went loco en la cabeza from living alone up in her tower. She was hankering for Sir Launcelot in particular. Only he never knew it because she couldn't just call out an invitation to come up and stay a spell whenever he rode by in his tin suit. They did things the hard way in those days. Sir Launcelot never knew the Lady of Astolat hankered for him whilst he, in turn, was hankering for King Arthur's wife."

Cora laughed despite herself and said, "That sounds a lot like Colorado these days. That adultery at King Arthur's court led to a really nasty brawl in the end, didn't it?"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "It often does. The unwritten law calls for blood and slaughter all out of proportion to the fun anyone could have had. Poor old Arthur threw away his kingdom and his life, Attila Homagy is wandering the world like that Frankenstein monster seeking revenge, and a certain colonel I know has just transferred junior officers to miserable postings because of a few minutes' slap and tickle."

He sipped some coffee and wearily added, "Lord knows what he'll ever do if he finds out about his own lady's views on hospitality. But my point is that there's likely nothing wrong with you, Miss Cora. It's little Eva Nagy, not yourself, up in the hills in that covered buggy as the sun goes down, right?"

She looked away and murmured, "Praise the Lord for small favors. I'd die before I let a brute like Longarm touch me, but I don't know how I'd feel about a buggy ride with somebody nicer."

He said it was too bad he hadn't driven out from town in a hired buggy. She called him a big silly, and got up to serve the peach cobbler dessert from her oven.

He waited until they were on her front veranda, admiring the sunset from her porch swing, before he got out his note book to ask directions to the cabin of that coal miner with the wayward daughter.

Cora said, "Heavens, I don't know my way around Bohunk Hill! I only know it as a cluster of shacks atop a low hill, man-made or natural, near the mine adits to the west. I've ridden past it, along the Purgatoire Trail. I've never been up in that cinder-paved maze of crooked lanes. I'm only repeating gossip I heard in town."

He put the notebook away, saying, "Reckon I'll just ride on over and ask directions then. If ladies in Trinidad are gossiping about the Nagy gal, folks who live closer ought to know where her folks can be found."

Cora protested, "You'd never make it before total darkness now. There are no street lamps on Bohunk Hill, and they say Longarm can be dangerous in broad daylight. If he should hear that even another lawman is looking for him on a morals charge..."

"I got to find the jasper and ask him where Magda Homagy can be found. What's going on betwixt him and that younger sass is betwixt them and her father. Attila Homagy is only after him because of his own flirty little thing. For all we know for sure, the cuss he's so sure she ran off with could be innocent as me. I know I never messed with Magda Homagy and I'm finding this whole affair mighty tedious."

Cora smiled at him uncertainly in the tricky light and asked what he was talking about. She said, "Surely nobody has ever accused you of adultery with that coal miner's wife, Deputy Crawford?"

He smiled sheepishly and said, "Yes they have. Before I go on, are you sure you've seen that cuss they call Longarm down here in these parts?"

She nodded soberly and said, "Plain as day. More than once. He even smiled at me outside the milliner's one day."

Longarm said, "It's agreed he has an eye for pretty ladies. But you Trinidad ladies have his handle wrong. I had a good reason for telling you I was Gus Crawford when we first met. I knew Attila Homagy was gunning for Deputy Custis Long because I'd just ducked out of a fight with him in the Union Depot. I've yet to lay eyes on this Longarm he's after, but I'd be the only deputy out of our Colorado office that's ever been called Longarm!"

The pretty young widow stared goggled-eyed at him in the fading light. "You claim to be Longarm, Deputy Crawford?"

He said, "Deputy Custis Long at your service, ma'am. There ain't no Deputy Crawford riding out of our Denver District Court. I told you I just made that up. I didn't want Homagy to find out which way I'd lit out. We were hoping to find his woman and calm him down whilst I took care of easier problems around Fort Sill. But as of now she's still missing, her man is still looking to track me down and gun me for running off with her, and so I'd best tidy up around here before I head back to Denver. What are you crying about, Miss Cora?"

She sobbed into the apron she was holding to her face again as he placed a gentle hand on a heaving calico-clad shoulder to repeat the question.

She blurted out, "I feel like such a fool! It was mean of you to trick me into those observations about your anatomy if you were the real Longarm all this time!"

He chuckled and observed, "I just got done teaching some Indian Police how unsupported hearsay and possibly inaccurate mental pictures can lead one astray. The crooks we were dealing with had barely sense to steal with. But we gave them an edge by leaping to conclusions. I hope you've learned your lesson about me at least. No matter how I might be hung, I've never messed with either that miner's daughter or Attila Homagy's wife."

She laughed like hell and called him a dirty dog. But as she felt him shift his weight to rise, she asked where he thought he was going at this hour.

He settled his weight back in the swing, to be polite, as he told her, "Looking for the man I owe all this trouble to. I got a pony to ride me anywheres he could take a gal in a buggy. Someone over yonder ought to be able to tell me which way that would be. There's this rise called Cherry Hill, just outside Denver, where heaps of swains park their buggies a spell by moonlight. You can tell, come morning, because of all the... sign along the wagon trace."

She said, "Don't ride up into the hills after him. Whoever he really is, he has all the other men afraid of him, and coal miners are hardly sissies."

Longarm said, "Got to find him before Attila Homagy does then. Homagy ain't afraid of him. That gives a man a natural bully might under-rate an edge. It gets even stickier for law and order in these parts if the womanizing bully wins. He'll doubtless know he'll be charged with murder, and once he runs, we may never know what really happened."

Cora said, "Well, I, for one, can't really work up much sympathy for anyone now that I know even the injured husband has been acting like a drooling idiot!"

Longarm observed the law protected drooling idiots as well as the more refined, but once again she said, "Don't go. if you have to have it out with that imposter pretending to be you, he's staying at the Dexter Hotel near the Trinidad Depot when he's not out chasing young girls!"

Longarm frowned and muttered, "You mean this home wrecker has a home address and Attila Homagy was looking for him up in Denver?"

She shrugged and said, "I don't know how long he's been there, or the name he's registered under. I only heard he took yet another and somewhat older Trinidad woman there in broad daylight, the devil!"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I know the Dexter Hotel near the depot, and I wasn't looking forward to pestering clannish immigrant coal miners after dark. A man with a hotel room who takes an under-aged gal for a buggy ride must have more respect for the town law than her immigrant kith and kin. There's a heap of hills for a buggy ride out yonder too. So when do you reckon my alter ego would have had enough... buggy riding?"

Cora demurely suggested, "It would depend on how good a ride he was having, wouldn't it?"

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "Only way to know would be to find out. I got to find my own place to stay whilst I'm down this way looking for myself. The Dexter ain't a bad hotel, for Trinidad."

Cora said, "Don't be silly. We've plenty of room inside, and we can get you started earlier for the mining settlements in the morning!"

He said, "Don't want to talk to wayward coal miner's daughters just yet. Want to talk to this jasper who's been fooling with all sorts of women in my name. My odds on catching up with him at his hotel in town are better. So that's where I'm headed now, if you'd be kind enough to let me have my hat back."

She was, but as she led him inside to fetch his hat she heaved a great sigh and said, "You're right about jumping to conclusions. You're not at all like the Longarm I've heard so much about."

CHAPTER 20

Longarm had been on some moonlight buggy rides in his day. So he took his time returning his hired mount and stock saddle to the nearby livery and lugging his Yellowboy and saddlebags over to the Dexter Hotel. He hired a room and tipped generously to have his light baggage carried up the one flight. Then he came back down, wearing just his.44-40 under his frock coat, and offered the room clerk a smoke as he flashed his badge and got down to brass tacks.

The clerk said he was always proud to uphold law and order, and after some explanations he understood why a lawman might feel it best to register under a false name. But then he said they didn't have any other guests signed in as Custis Long, or as any sort of lawman.

Longarm got both their smokes going as he considered this. Then he suggested, "Someone may have added two and two to get five. A jasper who sort of looked like me wouldn't have to say he was me to have at least one feeble mind spread the word around town he was me."

The clerk took a thoughtful drag on the cheroot, shook his head, and said, "I follow your drift. But the only guest we have about your age and build, with a mustache, just won't work. You'd need a feeble mind indeed to confound Mr. Zoltan Kun with an American in any line of work!" Longarm said flatly, "Zoltan Kun sounds sort of furrin." The clerk said, "So does Zoltan Kun. Has an accent you can barely savvy when he's talking slow. He's one of them mining men from the Carpathian Mountains or wherever the Emperor Franz Josef gets his damn coal."

Longarm said he wouldn't know about that, and said, "He's a coal miner staying in a hotel this far from the mines?"

The clerk shook his head and explained. "Mr. Kun don't dig in any mine for coal. I suspect he used to. But now he deals in the stuff. You'd have to ask him exactly how he makes out so well these days. Like I said, I can barely follow his English."

Longarm said, "I mean to do just that, as soon as he gets in. I see you have one of them tin-titty bells here to page your bellboy. What if you were to ding it three times suddenly the next time this Zoltan Kun comes in?"

The clerk allowed he could manage that. So Longarm went around the corner to a newsstand, picked up the Rocky Mountain News and a couple of magazines, and returned to the hotel to camp in a corner under a reading lamp and some potted paper palms.

A long time went by. He finished the paper and as much of the Scientific American as he could grasp. Like many self-educated men, Longarm pushed his ever-expanding store of information to the limits by reading stuff by more learned gents.

The third and last magazine was a Street & Smith Adventure pulp, with the stories set in tropical climes Longarm had never been to. He'd found their tales of the American West a mite silly in the past. But for all a man who'd never been there knew, there really might be a man-eating plant in Madagascar.

According to the woodcut illustrating the story, the ferocious vegetable looked like a giant artichoke, and had a half-dressed colored gal stuck in it up to her waist. The cannibal folks who lived there in Madagascar had to feed that man-eating plant from time to time, likely to keep it from pulling itself up by the roots and coming after 'em.

The desk bell chimed three times. So Longarm never found out how that gal being eaten alive by the artichoke made out. He tossed the magazine aside and rose to his own considerable height as a tall dark drink of water in an undertaking outfit and pearl Stetson was making for the stairwell.

Longarm called out, "Mr. Kun?" and the stranger stopped to turn and face him. Longarm didn't feel at all flattered as he got a better view of the cuss who'd been mistaken for himself.

There was no resemblance at all. Zoltan Kun was handsome enough, in a hollow-cheeked oily way. His infernal mustache was not only much smaller, but waxed, for Pete's sake, the way the young Kaiser and his fancy Prussian officers gussied UP.

Longarm said, "I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, sometimes known as Longarm in the papers. I don't suppose you've ever heard of me?"

The clerk had been right about Kun's accent, but Longarm was able to follow as the Hungarian nodded gravely and replied, "Why don't we go up to my room? We seem to have much to talk about, and I have a bottle of kognak you might find amusing."

Longarm allowed he was game. On the way up the stairs the tall Hungarian said, "I don't know who started the rumor I was really an American lawman pretending to be a Magyar labor contractor. I never told anyone I was you. Sometimes I have to agree with the Austrians that my people are a little strange."

As he followed the polite-enough cuss along the hall Longarm said, "Hold on, old son. Are you mixed up in that Knights of Labor outfit, the same as old Attila Homagy?"

Kun shook his head and said, "I'm afraid the KOL would have me on their black list. I recruit greenhorns to work in the mines, as non-union labor. I make no apologies for this. If the miners feel they have the right to organize and demand more pay, the mine owners have the right to recruit greenhorns and pay them less."

He unlocked a door and struck a match. Longarm waited until he'd lit the wall sconce inside before he entered. The room was poshly furnished for these parts. The bed hadn't been slept in recently. Zoltan Kun said easily, "You find me coming in so late because most of this evening was spent with a friend. A gentleman does not say more than that, and I assure you she has no connection to the tiresome Attila Homagy and his insane wife."

Kun waved Longarm to a seat on the bed. Longarm grabbed a bentwood chair instead, and turned it around to sit it astride as he asked, "You admit you do know Attila and Magda Homagy?"

Kun hung his hat on a wall peg, not shy about his baldness, and turned to a brandy decanter and some cut-crystal glasses on his chest-high cabinet as he easily replied, "I know her better, if only in the Biblical sense. I know it's wrong to boast of one's conquests, but who conquered whom is debatable, and you are a federal lawman and this is an official investigation, is it not?"

Longarm tipped his Stetson back and accepted the fancy glass of Austrian Kognak as he said, "I reckon. I was hoping you could tell me what I'm investigating. They say you like the gals, and it seems you don't worry yourself too much about what their menfolk might have to say about your, ah, hobby."

The almost handsome Hungarian sat on the bed with his own drink as he nodded and replied, "You would have to be Magyar, I mean Hungarian, to understand. Most of these peasant coal miners were born into a much lower class than mine. Also, as you see, I am not a small man or a poor man."

Longarm sipped some kognak--it was good stuff--and said, "In other words you have the Indian fellow sign on your immigrants. I noticed a similar situation over in New Orleans, when I was looking into that Black Hand shit amongst the newly arrived Sicilian folks. There was a white-suited wonder they called their Artichoke King because he got a rake-off on all the fancy vegetables peddled in the produce market by furriners. Plain old Americans, black or white, might not have taken him so serious, without a fight."

Zoltan Kun nodded easily and said, "That's why I never try to push my luck with your kind, or your women. I don't enjoy a fight when the odds might not be in my favor."

Longarm growled, "I said I followed your drift. Can we get back to Attila Homagy and his safer wife to fool with now?"

The Hungarian looked pained and said, "Magda Homagy was one of those exceptions that proves a rule. Attila was even crazier to pay her way from the old country with no more than a tintype to tell him what he was getting. She got a man old enough to be her father and, according to her, not much of a man to begin with."

He got up to pour another round of strong kognak as he continued in a thoughtful tone. "That may not be fair to the poor fool. I like women as much as you say, and the one I just took home had no complaints about our buggy ride. But a night in bed with Magda Homagy leaves any man squeezed dry, like a lemon. I've never met anyone as mad for a man's juices before or since. I had to break off with her before she ruined my health."

Longarm grimaced, allowed he wasn't there to discuss anyone's health, and demanded, "Are you sure you didn't tell her you were a famous American lawman who could have her and her man deported if she didn't give you a French lesson?"

Kun laughed incredulously and said, "She knew who I was. I never said I was anyone else, and nobody would have to threaten that wild little blonde with anything to get her to suck him off! Magda volunteers to take it all three ways, and yes, I had her all three ways, more than once, while her husband was away on union business. But I never told anyone I was you, and I can't tell you how anyone got us confused. I'm well known in the Magyar community over by the coal mines."

Longarm refused a third drink with a silent shake of his head and said, "You ain't as well known here in town. American gossip only has you down as a skirt-chasing simp, no offense. So, assuming old Attila told someone he was going to clean my plow for screwing his young wife, and others had seen you with the flashy young sass..."

"Why would even a fool like Homagy say I was you?" the Hungarian demanded.

Longarm said, "He must have been confused. He was out of town and never saw his wife with either one of us. His story is that she told him I'd screwed her against her will whilst he'd been out organizing for the eight-hour day. My first notion was that she'd confessed to cover up for you, after he'd heard she fooled around on the side. But you say you busted up with her?"

The Hungarian Romeo shrugged and said, "Not in too bitter a way. She said she understood when I confessed I simply couldn't get it up again without some celibate rest. She might have been trying to protect her husband, you know."

"By send ing him out to fight with me?" Longarm asked without any false modesty.

Kun shrugged and declared, "I have my own reputation, and I was much closer. Magda might not have expected her fatherly husband to quit his job at the Black Diamond and go all the way up to Denver after a man he'd never met. You would have to be Magyar, but it is not the same if a total stranger seduces your wife or daughter."

Longarm smiled thinly and said, "Hill folk where I grew up see it about the same. But Homagy did traipse up to Denver, and right now he's stalking me through the Indian Territory, I hope. I don't want to fight over a gal I've never met. So I'd like to meet her and ask what got into her. I don't have to get her to name you, as long as I can get her to admit she never laid me, see?"

Zoltan Kun nodded gravely, but said, "I can't lead you to her. She's not out there now. I rode out to ask my own questions when I heard crazy gossip about you and me. Her neighbors told me she'd left like a thief in the night with some other man. I say other man because some of the fools thought she'd left in a buggy like mine with me!"

Longarm slitted his eyes to picture a curtained buggy winding down a cinder lane on a dark night, and said, "All right. Let's assume she ran off with yet another lemon she aimed to squeeze. Knowing she wasn't with you, Homagy would have no call to doubt her confession naming me. I hate to have to tell you this, old son, but it looks as if she wasn't out to protect either of us."

"The scoundrel was a total stranger to everyone but Magda!" the Hungarian gasped in an injured tone.

Longarm said, "I wasn't finished. The cuss she rode off with in that covered buggy must have been known on Bohunk Hill. She'd have had no call to say he was me if he was a total stranger, right?"

Kun stared at Longarm with more respect and said, "You're good at what you do. I'm glad I don't have anything to hide from the law!" Longarm couldn't resist bringing up an under-aged miner's daughter. The Hungarian shrugged and said, "I understand such a charge would have to be made by the girl's legal guardian, no?"

Longarm grimaced and declared, "That's the way they wrote the state laws. Fortunately for you, I have no jurisdiction unless you screw her on an Indian or military reservation. How does her father feel about them buggy rides, since you brought up your own sterling character?"

Kun shrugged and quietly said he'd had no complaints from any of the greenhorns around Trinidad.

Longarm said, "That Artichoke King in New Orleans had everybody scared skinny too, until some of 'em had had enough and started to whisper to the law. If I was you I'd keep it in mind that little Eva Nagy could cost you some time in the Las Animas County Jail if her dad could get up the balls to press charges."

Zoltan Kun shrugged smugly and said, "He won't. In the old country it was understood that my kind did his kind a great honor by breaking in their maidens for them."

Longarm swore under his breath, and rose to leave before he gave in to temptation. He'd never laid eyes on any of the Bohunk gals this greasy lothario had trifled with. So he knew it might not be fair to pistol-whip the oily asshole without anyone asking. He handed back the sissy cut-crystal glass, saying they had nothing more to cover, and headed for his own lonely room feeling frustrated more ways than one.

CHAPTER 21

The next morning Longarm hired a different pony and the same saddle to ride out to the scene of his own supposed crimes.

You got to the coal mining country west of Trinidad by following the one narrower trail along the Purgatoire River, named after the Purgatory English speakers didn't want to go to, by the same Spanish-speaking folks from New Mexico who'd spelled Trinity as Trinidad. The original wagon trace had been widened and cinder-paved, while a spur line of the Santa Fe ran along the north bank as far as the coal tipples forty miles up the valley. The railroads hauled way more coal than they used. Colorado's coking coal was just right for steel-making and commanded top prices, which was just as well when anyone considered how tough it was to get it out from under the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado coal seams were skimpy and bent out of shape, next to the coal beds east of the Mississippi. So the coal-mining communities of the West were smaller and more scattered than back East in Penn State or West-by-God-Virginia. Mining for anything in the crumpled up bedrock of the Rockies left countless try-holes and played-out mines all along the backbone of the continent, with coal, stone quarries, and such in the foothills and metals from gold to lead at higher elevations, where the bedrock was really from deeper down. The Indians said Real Bear had made the Shining Mountains by ripping the earth's belly all out of shape with his mighty claws. Something had surely turned a heap of bedrock inside out up this way.

Longarm found his way to the immigrant settlement known as Bohunk Hill to real Americans of, say, High Dutch or Irish extraction. When he tried to ask some kids poking at a dead cat where the Homagy house might be, they stuck their tongues out at him and ran away.

He had somewhat better luck with an older woman, dressed sort of like a Gypsy fortune-teller but shelling peas instead of reading tea leaves on her front steps.

She allowed she spoke English, sort of, and knew where the Homagy house had been. Then she said, "Other peoples live there now. Attila Homagy quit at Black Diamond to go look for wife, Magda."

The crone made an even uglier face and added, "Magda no good. Her man fool for worrying about she. People moving into house after they gone named Gero. They just get here. No speak English. Never knew Attila Homagy or crazy Magda."

Longarm dismounted anyway, saying, "I'd best lead this pony up the narrow lanes on foot. I'll take your word there's no sense looking for folks in a house they've both moved away from. I understand Miss Magda ran off with some American cuss in a covered buggy?"

The neighborhood gossip cracked open another pea pod as she shook her head and said, "Nobody knows who she ran away with. Some said it was important Magyar she'd been flirting with. But he is still around, flirting with little girl he should leave alone. Is not right to bus children no matter what their fathers say!"

Longarm said, "I was just about to ask the way to the Nagy place, ma'am. If I can't talk to Zoltan Kun's older sweetheart, I might be able to get something out of his new gal."

The old woman looked stricken, muttered to herself in Magyar, and said, "You never heard any of those names from me. You can't talk to either of the Nagy women in English. Neither one of them speaks one word of it. Bela Nagy would be over at the Black Diamond at this time of day. He is in charge of the coal-tram crew. You will have to wait until he gets off, after sunset, if you want to talk to him in English."

Longarm thanked her for the information, led his livery mount in a tight circle, and remounted to ride out of the hillside cluster.

He circled it, asking more directions from more sensible kids, and it only took him a few minutes to make it to the tipples, shacks, and adit of the Black Diamond Mine.

He dismounted out front of their office shack. A burly gent in a clean blue work shirt came out as he was tethering the pony to an iron-pipe hitching rail. Longarm flashed his badge and identification as he said he was there for just a word with Bela Nagy if it was jake with them.

The shift foreman replied in an American accent, "I'll send for him. You just come on inside and have a seat, Deputy Long."

Longarm allowed he'd been down in coal mines before. But the shift foreman shook his gray head and said, "We've even had our own help get lost in there. We're producing bituminous that bursts into flame if you just ask polite. But some of the damned seams are less than a yard thick and the whole formation's crumpled like tinfoil. Take one wrong turn and you can wind up lost forever."

He cupped a hand to his mouth and called out to a kid near the tracks leading into the gaping adit. When the kid headed their way, the foreman told him to go down Drift Nine and fetch old Bela Nagy.

As the kid strode away along the tracks, Longarm followed the easygoing foreman inside. They both sat down and before Longarm could even start to offer, the mining man broke open a box of Tampa Coronas. So Longarm had to settle for lighting them both up.

As he did so he asked about Attila Homagy in a desperately non-caring way. The foreman didn't sound any more excited as he calmly replied, "Good blaster. Couldn't manage his young wife. We were sorry to see him go. Told him there'd always be a job for him here if he ever got tired of tilting at windmills."

The American mining man took a drag on his cigar and added, "Old Attila moved coal like a sculptor carving marble. You have to know how to set your charges if you aim to shatter the coal face without bringing down the shale ceiling. Homagy has that rare touch. I swear he could carve his initials with dynamite and dust off the furniture in your parlor without busting a window!"

Longarm quietly asked if their blasting wonder had a rep as a gunfighter.

The foreman looked blank and decided, "Never heard tell of old Attila fighting anyone with any weapon. We don't put up with horseplay around this operation. Digging coal is dangerous enough without the crews acting like assholes. Most trouble I ever heard of poor old Attila having was with his wife. I never met her myself. She was here from the old country just long enough to run off with some other man. But from what some of the younger bucks say, she was wilder than Leadville on payday. You had to ask for it in Bohunk, I heard, but after that you just gave your poor soul to Jesus because your body belonged to her!"

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring, and said the Hungarian he'd been drinking with had told him much the same story. He grinned wickedly and added, "Ain't it a pain how you always seem to get there just after all the fun has ended? I mean, I got to Dodge just as the cattle shipping was starting and it looked wild enough to me, until the old-timers told me I should have been there during the buffalohide boom."

The mining man chuckled and said, "Reminds me of my first gold rush. The last of the gold and the best lay for a hundred miles had just vanished forever. Took me only four more gold rushes to decide my true calling was coal. You ain't after Bela Nagy's bitty daughter, Eva, are you?"

Longarm laughed incredulously and replied, "Hell, no, I'm a lawman, not a baby-raper. But I see you've heard about that wild gal as well?"

The mining man looked relieved and said, "You can't boss a whole herd of gossiping greenhorns without hearing gossip. I have met Eva Nagy, at a company picnic this spring. You're so right in calling her a baby. If she was any kin to me I'd invite that Kun to a showdown. But I know better than to butt into Bohunk beeswax, and they do say that Hunky never busted any cherry there."

Longarm casually observed, "I understand Zoltan Kun recruits and rides herd on disorganized labor for your outfit?"

The company man nodded with no trace of shame and said, "All the coal companies in this valley. We don't put up with any of that Molly Maguire or Knights of Labor shit."

Longarm blew more smoke and murmured, "Do tell? I heard old Attila Homagy was off at some union convention when his wife betrayed him with Lord knows whom. I have to confess I ain't half as sure as her husband seems to be right now."

The foreman said, "We don't mind if someone wants to listen to union bullshit on their own time, off company property. Our management takes a progressive attitude towards labor organizers. They can yell and wave their red banners all they want, outside Las Animas County. If they come any closer, well, the county sheriff and his deputies know who pays their wages."

Longarm agreed that sounded about as progressive as most county establishments dealt with such matters, and asked a few more questions about the way they ran this particular mine, seeing so many men he knew of were connected to it.

The American straw boss didn't act as if he had anything to hide. He seemed proud of the way they were winning expensive coking coal with cheap labor.

Longarm had figured they worked the mine around the clock with two twelve-hour shifts. But lots of mines followed the common practice of working their help only half of Saturday and letting them take the Sabbath off. The foreman said greenhorns just got in trouble if you didn't keep them busy. He waved his cigar at the view outside and said, "Anyone out yonder who can't put in a full day today is free to leave. He just won't have a job here come Monday morning."

Longarm smiled thinly, and allowed it was mighty progressive to give such undeserving Papists the Sabbath off at least.

The straw boss grinned and replied, "Hell, it's not so much that we give the greenhorns the Sabbath off. But us real Americans have to go to church, don't we?"

Before Longarm could answer, a short gnomish man, black with coal dust, came in with his hat in hand, having blown its candle out, of course. Longarm wasn't surprised to learn this was Bela Nagy. He'd figured the kid's dad had to be far smaller than Zoltan Kun.

When Longarm was introduced to him as an American lawman, the wiry little Hungarian protested, "I no press charges! I no make troubles for nobody! My Eva is bad girl, but I spend most of my life in mine and her mother is not strong enough to make her stay in house if she wants to go out!"

Longarm said nothing. Old Bela was doing just fine without any prompting.

A tear ran down through the black grime of the older man's cheek as he stammered, "What you want me to do? In this country everyone is free to tell parents to go bus themselves, no? I know Hodiak woman says I should go to the law about my Eva and her buggy rides. But what good will it do us to have child put in reform school? American law will do nothing to big man who thinks our Eva is just right size for him!"

Longarm quietly said, "That may not be true, Mr. Nagy. Fooling with little kids against their parents' wishes is against the law in this state. You could even be in trouble yourselves if you could be shown to be giving your permission to such goings on. Colorado courts can be easy on gents fixing to marry up with a young gal, with the permission of her family. But a father knowingly pimping for a daughter of any age could wind up making little paving stones out of bigger ones."

The gnomish Hungarian blanched under his coal dust and protested, "Who you calling pimp? Pimp is American for lazy no-good who lives off women, no?"

Longarm nodded and said, "You'd best work it out with a lawyer if you can't control your kid. I'm a federal lawman. I have no say on Zoltan Kun's skirt-chasing unless I can prove he's done something a tad more serious. We don't worry about jurisdiction when we stumble across something downright serious, albeit I might have to turn the case over to Las Animas County and the State of Colorado unless I can show someone hauled a body across the nearby state line."

Nagy just looked confounded. The American straw boss asked if they were talking about Magda Homagy.

Longarm nodded gravely but said, "Don't know. On the face of it I have no evidence she met with more than the good stiff dicking she likely hankered for. But I can't make all I've heard fit a sensible pattern."

He took a drag on the swell cigar and asked Nagy what he'd heard about Magda Homagy's warm nature.

As if glad to gossip about someone he wasn't related to, the coal-blackened gnome said his wife had told him she was a dedicated slut who was sure to get caught, whether her husband worked the night shift or not. Nagy verified that some of the gossips had said they'd seen her carrying on in town with the feared but handsome Zoltan Kun.

Longarm silenced the little miner with a wave of his cigar and said, "Hold it right there and let's backtrack over a mighty odd pattern. American ladies in town say they'd seen Magda and Zoltan together, sipping soda water and such around his hotel, just before she ran off with someone they also had down as me. I don't look at all like Zoltan Kun, praise the Lord, and he told me he'd broken off with her friendly before she could have confessed to her husband about anybody."

Bela Nagy said, "I didn't see it. After twelve hours in a mine a man needs his sleep. But both Hodiak woman and Ilona Kovaks say they saw Magda leaving forever around midnight, when her man was in mine."

Longarm glanced at the American straw boss as he mused, "A gent in charge of a blasting crew would be missed if he nipped out to murder a wayward wife, wouldn't he?"

The American mining man said he'd just been about to say that.

Longarm said, "I wish he didn't have an alibi. This whole puzzle would have a simple answer. I could say he was lying. It just makes no sense for a cheating wife to cover up for a lover who's called her a sex maniac and turned away from her."

The mining man suggested, "She might have been thinking of poor old Attila. Old Zoltan ain't just mean to women. He's got their men scared shitless of him. Ask Bela here."

Bela Nagy whimpered, "Hey, I no afraid to stick up for my Eva. I told you she wants to go out with him, and he says maybe, someday, he will make honest woman of our Eva. He say she's still too young for him."

Longarm grimaced and said, "At least he's being truthful about that. He says he's not the man Magda rode off with in that buggy at midnight. Even if he had been, where in thunder might she be now? I know for a fact she ain't staying with him at the Dexter Hotel. Could anyone here tell me whether his labor recruiting takes him a heap of other places?"

The straw boss nodded and said, "He takes the train east from time to time to round up stray greenhorns on the New York waterfront. But now that you mention it, he ain't done that since Magda Homagy ran off with somebody. Do you remember the exact date, Bela?"

Nagy thought, shook his head, and said, "More than two weeks but less than six. Who looks at calendar when women gossip?"

Longarm said, "Never mind. I can ask at the Santa Fe ticket window in town whether your well-known labor contractor paid one or mayhaps two train fares east in recent memory."

He took a thoughtful drag on his smoke and added, "I doubt he has. Kun struck me as a slick talker. His kind don't tell fibs that are easy as that to check. The picture looks a tad less confounding if we take his word, for now, and buy Magda Homagy leaving home with some other gent entirely."

The straw boss brightened and suggested, "That's who she might have been trying to protect, instead of Zoltan Kun!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Sounds a little more sensible. When her man confronted her about gossip he'd heard, it wouldn't have done her much good to name another gent she'd been screwing. Her grasp on English, and Colorado, was skimpy as all get-out. But she could have been slick, and mean enough, to grab the name of a better-known American off the pages of some handy newsprint."

Longarm blew a smoke ring, peered through it at a dusty gob pile outside, and continued. "On the other hand, she might have been out to get a man she hated killed. Everyone agrees she had a spiteful nature, and Homagy did say she taunted him with the size of a younger man's dick."

The two other men in the shack exchanged glances. The straw boss agreed, "She must have hated old Attila. That's a cruel thing to say when you know it's true, and you say she just picked out a rival from a newspaper?"

Longarm nodded soberly and said, "I mean to chide her for that, if ever I catch up with the hard-hearted gal."

CHAPTER 22

Longarm didn't want to keep taking his hired mount in and out of the livery, So he tethered it outside his hotel as he went in to see if any telegrams had been delivered there to a Gus Crawford.

None had been. Things seemed to be simmering down over in the Indian Territory. But the room clerk confided, "You had you a caller whilst you was out, Deputy Long. He asked if we had us anyone named Custis Long registered here, and seeing we don't exactly, I felt it best to say no and just ask him how this pal of his could get in touch, should he ever show up."

Longarm handed the helpful clerk a cheroot as he told him he'd always admired a man who could think on his feet. He asked the clerk if he could name or describe the mysterious visitor, and muttered in mighty dirty Spanish when the clerk said it had been Attila Homagy in that same summer seersucker.

The clerk added, "Said he was staying with friends just outside of town. Said he'd drop by later, after the night train from Amarillo pulls in. Seemed anxious to catch up with you, Deputy Long."

Longarm muttered, "That makes two of us. I've had just about enough of this shit, and by now even a fool greenhorn ought to be able to see I have witnesses on my witnesses if he keeps pushing his luck with me!"

The clerk gulped and said, "I figured he didn't have your continued good health in mind. In this business you get to where you can tell when a couple is really married too. Don't ask me how."

Longarm lit his cheroot for him and observed, "I just now said I thought you were smart. I'll be waiting out front for him when the train from Amarillo rolls in around midnight."

The clerk allowed that might be easier on their potted paper palm trees. Longarm didn't want him going to the local law, so he said, "I doubt it'll come to more than just talk. The Bohunk had me down as somebody else for a spell. I'm sure he's seen the error of his ways after trailing me all around Robin Hood's Barn and doubtless talking to other folks about me."

He glanced at the wall clock and added, "I was wondering how come I felt so empty. It's after noon and I only had ham and eggs with one coffee for breakfast."

He headed for the front entrance, aiming to go round to the cheap restaurant he'd had his breakfast in. But Cora Brewster came through the door breathless, dressed in a riding habit with her dark hair pinned up under a straw boater. The moment the young widow laid eyes on him, she gasped, "Custis! That Attila Homagy is back in town hunting high and low for you! They just told me at the notions shop! He knows you're somewhere in town!"

Longarm smiled down at her and said, "No, he don't. He was just asking. He thinks I might be coming in at midnight aboard a train from Texas. He must have somehow learned I'd headed there from Fort Sill. I sure wish folks wouldn't gossip when you ask 'em not to."

She said, "Nobody can gossip about you out at my place. I just let my help off for the afternoon and all day tomorrow."

As they walked outside together, Longarm mused, "That's right. This is Saturday afternoon. So my boss wouldn't be in the office to read a progress report if I wired him one, the nosey old cuss."

He saw her paint pony and sidesaddle tethered next to his livery mount out front as she repeated her offer to hide him out.

He asked who was going to milk her dairy herd that afternoon and all day Sunday if she treated her hired help that nice. When she said she was only milking forty head and egging a flock of two hundred, he allowed he could help her that afternoon at any rate.

So they rode out of town together, with Cora trying to talk him out of coming back to have it out with Attila Homagy at midnight.

He repeated what he'd told the clerk, and added, "The poor simp is likely way more anxious to catch up with his wayward wife, for reasons it wouldn't be delicate to go into. Suffice it to say, I have it on good authority that she's the bee's knees in bed and he'd sent all the way to the old country for her before he could have known that for certain."

She demurely asked if such a loss might not drive a lonely older man to distraction, quietly adding she'd heard being alone, after at least a happy honeymoon, could leave anyone feeling upset.

Longarm replied, "I just said he might have good cause to miss the wayward sass. My point is that he's been chasing me for many a day, and he must have noticed by now that I just don't have her!"

As they rode on he brought her more completely up to date from the beginning in Denver, not wanting to confuse her with details about other women.

She still wanted to know if he'd messed with that young Indian gal, and he was glad he didn't have to fib. It was funny how easy it was to leap to conclusions when you weren't there watching. When you said newspaper reporter, schoolmarm, or army wife, it didn't sound half as suggestive as a Kiowa halfbreed in her teens packing her own gun.

By this time they'd turned into her farm, and they were too busy to worry about Attila Homagy for a spell as they stabled their mounts, went into the main house, and let her rustle him up the noon dinner he was overdue.

While he put away the steak and fried spuds, she said something about slipping into something more comfortable. But when next she appeared she was wearing a sun bonnet and one of those blue denim smocks artists and farm folks wore when they had messy chores to tend to. He'd forgotten those cows that had to be milked no later than, say, three or four.

She allowed they still had plenty of time as she sat down to have coffee and marble cake with him. He didn't have to say anything about his own tweed suit. She told him one of her hand's fresh-laundered bib overalls would likely fit him and that, seeing they were all alone that afternoon, it wouldn't hurt if he milked cows with no shirt on.

He said that made two folks he'd met that day who could think on their feet. She naturally wanted to know what he meant, and it seemed to upset her when he mentioned old Attila some more.

He assured her he didn't mean to reason with the cuss or shoot him before midnight, and asked to see those overalls.

She led him to her laundry shed out back, and got out the faded but soft clean overalls her tallest hired hand worked in. She left while he stripped naked and slipped the bib overalls on, a denim strap over each bare shoulder. He considered putting his gun rig back on. He decided it looked silly. He unhooked his double derringer from one end of his watch chain and stuck it in the right hip pocket of the overalls. Then, in no more than that and his stovepipe boots, he rejoined Cora in her kitchen.

For some reason her breath caught in her throat at the sight of his muscular bare shoulders. She gulped and said, "My, you do seem as manly as described, don't you? The cows haven't started to drift in for their milking yet. But we can gather some eggs if you like."

Nobody liked gathering eggs after the first couple of times. But it had to be done and it did beat forking manure. So he toted some of the baskets for her as they crossed the yard to enter her henhouse.

It was easy to forget the full meaning of the old army term "chicken-shit," or why so many farm youths ran off to become cowboys, when you hadn't tried breathing in a henhouse for a spell. Longarm was just as glad his strange hand made her leghorns spook when she suggested he just hold the baskets and let her feel for the fool eggs. For two hundred leghorns laid one hell of a lot of eggs, and shit a lot besides. They both washed up to their elbows with naptha soap at her yard pump after they'd stored the eggs in the damp cellar under their candling shack. Cora said the good ones would be carted into town by her hired help, come Monday.

Unlike beef cattle, dairy cows were only vicious to human beings when they needed to be freshened by a bull. Cows with full udders and no calves to suckle soon learned to seek out human hands at least twice a day for relief. So as early as three, Cora's cows began to come home to the barn and march into their stalls as if driven by invisible prods. The closest thing to that in the beef industry was the Judas cow that lead young and innocent steers up the slaughterhouse ramp. Cows were a lot like humans when it came to easy assumptions.

Longarm hadn't slaughtered or milked a cow recently, and so it brought back memories, pleasant and not so pleasant, as he helped the young widow woman out by milking close to a score of her cows. Cora milked a few more than he did, the experienced little thing. But she still said he milked pretty good for a lawman.

He only told her some of his reasons for coming West after the war as they poured the buckets into the galvanized coolers and got it on ice for the Sabbath. She said they sold mostly raw milk in town of a Monday, with folks wanting more butter later in the week. She asked him if it still bothered him to think about those neighbor boys killed in the war, and what it felt like to kill boys on the other side.

He wrestled the last of the milk into place in the chill darkness as he shrugged his bare shoulders and said, "It don't feel as bad, or as good, as some would have it. I reckon it would bother me to have a cold-blooded murder on my conscience. But so far, I've never had to gun anyone I could have avoided gunning. The sorry souls who get a thrill out of killing are tougher to fathom. I just don't see what the thrill might be."

She locked the milk away as she quietly said, "We had my husband's body on display in an open casket for two days and this is the first time I've ever told anyone. I didn't feel anything for that stranger in that box. I mean it looked like my darling, and I missed my darling, but I knew my darling was gone and I just wanted to get rid of that... thing before it started to go bad. I think a lot of the others were putting on a big act there too. I don't think any normal person is thrilled or excited by death."

They headed back to the house as Longarm quietly observed he'd been on some battlefields he'd found more depressing than thrilling. He said, "The only thing you feel that some might find comforting is how tall you seem with all those others spread out flat. Mayhaps the mad-dog killers amongst us kill to feel taller. A cuss growing up with a low opinion of himself might feel he could make a higher place for himself by shooting everyone else down. They are wrong, of course, but sometimes it takes a man with a badge and his own gun to convince 'em."

She was suddenly all over him, sobbing, "No, Custis, don't go in to meet that crazy man at midnight! I couldn't stand to see you in a casket like a thing, with everyone saying you just looked as if you were asleep."

He had to hang on to her lest they wind up falling down her back steps together. He gently moved her so her denim-clad rump was braced on the edge of the kitchen table as he said, "I wasn't aiming to wind up dead at midnight, Miss Cora. There was this younger pest over by Fort Sill, saying he was fixing to shoot it out with me on sight. Only, somehow he never got around to it when I offered. I just told you Attila Homagy has to know it wasn't me or even Zoltan Kun his wife ran off with, and..."

She wasn't listening. She was clinging to him like a limpet from the waist up while she moved everything below her waist with a skill few happily married women or determined whores could have matched. She'd intimated she hadn't had any for a spell, and as she felt him rising to the occasion through the faded denim between their fevered groins, she husked, "Don't tease me like this, Custis. Do it! Do it here and now!"

So he rolled her back across the table, and since he saw when she raised both knees she wore nothing under that loose smock but her natural fuzz, he just shucked out of the shoulder straps to let his bib overalls fall around his booted ankles as he spread her thighs wide with his hands and stepped right up to join her. She gasped, "Oh, Kee-rist!" as he literally walked his aroused old organ-grinder through the moist part in her black pubic hair.

He paused halfway out to assure her he meant no harm. That was when she locked her own booted ankles in the small of his bare back to haul him in farther than he'd meant to go at first.

She gasped, "Yes! I want you to hit bottom with every stroke, and please don't go back to town tonight, darling!"

He just kept thrusting until he'd made her come, she said, for the first time in years. Like most folks, she likely didn't count jerking off. He could tell she'd been keeping that swell plumbing in working order some fool way, for just such a time as this.

CHAPTER 23

It was even nicer, once they'd wound up in her four-poster bed with Cora on top, literally sucking it for him with her warm, wet, love-hungry crotch. He never wanted to stop either, but by sundown they were too spent to do much more than cuddle and smoke as, from time to time, she'd grab his limp dong again and beg him not to get it killed on her.

He promised nothing either way. He knew he had to be there when Attila Homagy came in out of the dark. But sometimes well-screwed ladies fell sound asleep after going this crazy with a man, and he'd cross that bridge when he got to it.

The crickets were starting up outside now. It sounded nice until they suddenly stopped in mid-chirp, along about nine-thirty.

Cora asked what was wrong as Longarm rolled his bare feet to her bedroom rug and reached for the six-gun he'd brought in from that laundry after their first fun in the kitchen.

He said, "There's something spooking them bugs outside. I wish you had a yard dog, honey. Dogs are more certain about intruders than old crickets."

She sighed and said, "We just lost a good old redbone hound to coyotes. He busted his chain, the poor thing, to go chasing off into the dark after a coyote bitch in heat."

Longarm eased over to the front window, gun in hand, as he nodded and said, "Lots of dogs get killed that way out here. Nobody knows for certain whether it's assassination or a crime of passion. Anything canine will flirt with anything canine of the opposite sex. But any dog that meets up with a pack of coyotes on the prairie is in a whole heap of trouble!"

He could make out moving shapes across the road, thanks to the full moon. But he waited until the moonlight bounced his way from a pair of spooky eyes before he decided, "Your hound's old sweetheart seems to be looking for him tonight with her big brothers. I make it four, no, five coyotes all told."

From the bed, Cora said, "Damn. I told Leroy to make certain he planted that calf deep!"

She went on to explain how they disposed of stillborn calves on a dairy farm. There seemed to be a small bovine graveyard across the way. She sold off her live veal, of course, once giving birth had the cow letting down her milk again.

Longarm observed coyotes had been known to dig up dead folks from graves dug too shallow. As he came back to bed he said, "That's how come they say six feet down. Albeit coyotes will seldom dig more than four. Takes a good sniffer to smell dead meat through even a yard of dirt."

She said she didn't want to think about death, and so he put the gun aside and they got lively as hell for a short sweet spell.

He had her coming dog-style when a distant rumble tingled the air all around them and she murmured, "Goody! It's fixing to rain again, and you won't find anyone waiting for you on the streets of Trinidad at midnight after all!"

He started to point out that the moon still shone outside from a cloudless sky. He decided it might be smarter to just screw her to sleep. So he did. He almost knocked himself out in the process, but unlike Cora, he knew he had something more important to do before the clock struck twelve.

He had her snoring softly with a contented smile on her moonlit face before eleven. She only murmured another man's name in her sleep as he rolled out of bed, gathered everything up, and got dressed in the kitchen to sneak out across the barnyard.

He might or might not have heard a woman wailing after him on the night winds as he loped into town, anxious to get set up before that Amarillo night train pulled in.

As he rode down the main street of Trinidad, things ahead were lit up as if it was way earlier on Saturday night. Longarm reined in and dismounted on the edge of the big crowd gathered in the street between the livery and his hotel. He saw firemen in leather helmets up on the roof of the Dexter, wading around through considerable smoke. He asked a townsman what was going on. The Trinidad man replied, "Big explosion across the way. Dynamite. Blowed a hotel guest through the roof and set off a fair-sized fire."

As Longarm whistled soundlessly, another townsman volunteered, "They got the crazy Bohunk anarchist who done it. Confessed of his own free will. Said he was after another Bohunk who'd been fornicating his old lady, ain't that a bitch?"

Longarm said it sure was, and elbowed his way through the crowd to break out his badge and pin it on before making his way across the tangle of fire hoses in the muddy street.

A county deputy sporting a pewter badge started to tell Longarm he had to stay back. Then he recognized Longarm's federal shield and they shook on it.

When asked, the Las Animas lawman allowed the victim had been the late Zoltan Kun, now only fit for a closed-casket service. The killer they had over in the county jail, the crazy dynamiting bastard, was one Attila Homagy, recently a blaster at the Black Diamond Mine.

The county lawman said, "He must have really wanted that other cuss dead. Laid for him upstairs till he got in tonight, and heaved eight sticks of forty-percent Hercules in after him. The coroner's boys say it rolled under the brass bedstead, and still went off with enough force to send what was left of old Zoltan Kun through the roof!"

Longarm said, "He told me he wanted the man who diddled his woman dead. I know Attila Homagy. You say they're holding him over at your county jail? That'd be ahind your courthouse, right?"

The county man nodded and moved off to shoo some kids. So Longarm got back to his tethered livery pony, mounted up, and circled to the nearby Courthouse Square. He'd been warning others not to leap to easy conclusions. So he paid his first visit to the county morgue. A cheerful coroner's helper assured him they had Zoltan Kun on ice, but suggested Longarm shouldn't look at him unless he really had to.

Longarm said he had to. So they slid the remains out of their glorified icebox, and the morgue man had been right. A man got torn up considerably when you blew him through a roof.

The morgue man explained, "The blast damaged the rooms below and to either side, even though the roof was built lighter. It was lucky the dynamite went off fairly early on a Saturday night after payday. None of the other guests were in when the lath and plaster went to flying."

Longarm stared down thoughtfully at the naked, shredded cadaver. He finally decided, "That much body hair usually goes with receding hairlines and a bald spot. Hair's the right color too, and you can still see he was bigger than average. You say they're holding the man who did this to him?"

The morgue man nodded and said, "Jail's right across the square. Little Bohunk in a seersucker suit came in before they found this body on the roof. Said he'd blown the cuss up for screwing his wife. Ain't that a bitch?"

They shook on it and Longarm crossed over to the jail behind the courthouse, where another small crowd had gathered out front. Longarm bulled through with the help of his badge.

Inside, he found a portly gray gent with a gilt sheriffs badge jawing with the desk deputy. Longarm identified himself and told the sheriff what he wanted. The older lawman shrugged and said, "Come on back if you want to talk to him. I don't see it as a federal crime, no offense, and I doubt we'll be able to hold him past Monday."

As they moved back toward the patent cells Longarm said, "I just heard he was pleading the unwritten law. But don't damaging property still count?"

The sheriff said, "The hotel can sue him, for all our prosecuting attorney is going to care. It's an election year, some of the Bohunks are commencing to vote, and the late Zoltan Kun was popular as smallpox. I have it on good authority that Magda Homagy wasn't the only greenhorn gal the bully had his own way with." They found Attila Homagy alone in his cell reading the Good Book. He rose with a sheepish little smile to come over to the bars, saying, "I'm sorry about accusing your fellow deputy Longarm."

Longarm said, "I wish you'd quit shitting me, Homagy. You never chased me all over the far away Indian Territory without finding out who I was. You tracked me all the way back here. Told a room clerk how you meant to meet my train, and then blew up Zoltan Kun instead. What makes you act so odd, Attila?"

The older man said simply, "I found out I'd been fooled by a false-hearted woman. My Madga told me the man she'd been seen with while I was out of town was a famous American lawman. You know how I felt about that. I'm glad I never killed you before I learned the truth."

Longarm said, "So am I. I know Zoltan Kun screwed your wife. He bragged he had, to me. How did you find out?"

Homagy looked pained and replied, "The same way. I was not fooled by the false name you registered under. I took a room later, meaning to kill you when you got in. I met Zoltan Kun at sunset as he was going out, through the lobby. He recognized me. He asked if I was after him. He laughed when I said I was after the man who stole my Magda. He said he didn't know who she'd run away with, but agreed she'd been a grand bus. He said this with neither shame nor worry, as if I was not man enough to do anything about it."

The erstwhile blaster smiled smugly and added, "I did something about it. He came back earlier than I'd expected. I didn't have time to pick his lock and plant my charges as I'd planned to put them in your room, Longarm. But as you all see, a bundle of forty-percent Hercules will do the job if it goes off anywhere near a home-wrecking bastard!"

Longarm asked where he'd bought the dynamite. Homagy said he'd stolen it from the mine and packed it all over creation with him.

The sheriff sighed and said, "He's admitting premeditation. That ain't the problem. Getting a jury of his peers to convict him is the problem. Zoltan Kun had a revolting rep, even amongst our own kind. One of my boys tells me he's been screwing a little twelve-year-old out to Bohunk Hill!"

Longarm grimaced and said, "Fifteen-year-old, but he was still a shit and nobody can deny this world was well rid of him."

The two lawmen headed back for the front as the sheriff decided, "There you go then. There's no sense putting the county to the time and expense of a murder trial when the accused is likely to be acclaimed a public benefactor!"

Longarm nodded soberly and replied, "That's doubtless why he don't look worried. But have you ever had the feeling someone was trying to bullshit you beyond endurance?"

The sheriff said, "All the time. It goes with the job. What do you suggest we do about it, pard?"

So Longarm told him. The sheriff grinned like a mean little kid and said, "Worth a try. I sure admire a lawman who can think crooked as you, Longarm!"

CHAPTER 24

The Sabbath dawn was breaking over a mine site quiet as a tomb when Longarm dismounted near the empty foreman's shack and tethered a blue roan livery mount, He saw he'd beaten everyone else out to the Black Diamond. So he was sitting on the steps, smoking a cheroot, as a dray pulled into the site, stopped and discharged three county deputies with a half-dozen leashed bloodhounds.

Longarm told his fellow lawmen the suspect's buggy hadn't shown up yet. The dog handler protested, "You should have let me search Homagy's hotel room like I asked last night. Must have been at least some dirty sock for my dogs to sniff."

Longarm shook his head wearily and said, "I told you then, the suspect worked in yonder mine. Bloodhounds would naturally be able to pick out his scent from others after no more than a few weeks. But Homagy had license to wander all through the diggings, and I was assured that mountain's been riddled like Swiss cheese."

The four of them heard a distant yell. Longarm got to his feet to reach inside his frock coat as a sleepy-eyed but husky-looking cuss with a Greener Ten-Gauge came across the wide dusty expanse to tell them they were on company property, damn their souls.

Longarm got out the search warrant signed by a J.P. in town the night before and said, "We're the law. This here's our hunting permit, and how come it took you so long to notice we might be trespassers?"

The watchman looked sheepish and replied, "Who'd expect kids or lumber thieves at this ungodly hour? It gets mighty calm out here once the last Saturday shift knocks off around sundown. But I heard you messing about over here after a while, didn't I?"

Longarm said, "You surely did, and if you'd care to help us conduct a murder investigation, I'd be proud to write you up in my official report."

The watchman said he'd do anything sensible to help them, and asked who'd been murdered.

Before Longarm had to explain, a dusty black buggy drove in behind a span of mules. As the deputy driving it braked to a stop nearby he called out, "They assured me at the livery that this is the suspect's very own buggy. He had it shipped by flatcar with him from Texas and stored it right off in their carriage house. But there's nothing hidden in it, Longarm. We searched it high and we searched it low for evidence of anything. But Homagy had all the baggage in the back carried over to that hotel he blew up."

Longarm nodded, turned to the dog handler, and suggested, "She'd have wound up on the floor mats up front or in back, whether bleeding or just oozing the way they do."

The dog handler asked him not to teach his granny to suck eggs. He picked up his bloodhounds in turn to let them slobber and sniff around in the dusty buggy. Then he put them back on the ground and said, "If they have her scent they have her scent. Where do we try for her trail?"

Longarm pointed at the mine adit with his stubbled jaw, saying, "All roads lead to Rome. He carried her in through that one rabbit hole if she's in there at all."

She was. The hounds hesitated at first, confounded by the many scents of both the day and night shifts. Then, when Longarm suggested one side drift, and that didn't work, the dog handler paused near a partly boarded-over opening, posted with a warning to keep out, and the bloodhounds tried to drag him in there on his face.

They didn't, of course. But as he leaned back against the leashes with his heels dug into the black grit, he chortled, "They're on her trail. Ain't seen 'em this sure since a Mex full of mescal and chili busted away from the road gang on us!"

it was more complicated than that. The played-out drift they were following ran a furlong into the mountain to end in a sooty slope of shattered shale. The bloodhounds seemed as confounded by this as the rest of them. Longarm turned to the mine watchman, who'd followed along, to ask if it was possible a longer tunnel had been partly caved in.

The coal-mining man shone his carbide lamp on the rock ceiling and said, "Never caved in. Someone brought it down. See them sort of belly buttons in the shale, there, there, and yonder? That's what you see in the new facing after a blast's been mucked away. Somebody with a star drill stuck just enough dynamite in that ceiling to bring some of it down!"

Once that much had been explained, you didn't have to be a mining engineer to see about how much shale there was to dig through. So they rustled up some loose boards, the mining tools having been put away for the Sabbath, and got to work.

The bloodhounds started going loco before the duller human noses with them noticed. Then one of the deputies working closer gagged and said, "Oh, Lord, something's died around here!"

Longarm sniffed and said, "Not something, somebody. Once you've been through a war, you never forget that lovely aroma. I doubt anyone died here in the mine. Neighbors saw a covered buggy leaving Homagy's house around midnight of a Saturday. He's likely got rid of the snap-on leather covers since. Folks who knew Magda Homagy's rep naturally never expected her to sneak out in the dead of night with her husband. I doubt she'd have gone with him on such a peculiar ride of her own free will. So let's say he knocked her out or killed her right in the house, snuck her out to his parked buggy, and sort of eloped with his own wife in the dark. I keep warning others not to leap to conclusions but I keep doing it myself. So you can't blame the neighborhood gossips all that much."

The same deputy gagged again and said, "We're through. I sure wish we weren't. Kee-rist, that smells awful!"

Longarm borrowed the carbide lamp as he hunkered down to shine the beam through, saying, "Bohunks eat all that paprika goulash, and she seems to be laying in a mud puddle, naked as a jay, save for her high-button shoes. Them shoes and that blond hair are all the coroner's jury will have going for 'em now. She's in what the undertakers call a state of full decay. Mostly bones and mush held together by skin as dark and wrinkled as prunes."

One of the other county lawmen grimaced and observed, "Going to be a bitch to say how she ever died then. Don't you have to prove someone was murdered to charge even her husband with murdering her?"

Longarm sighed and said, "Yep, and old Attila is a liar above and beyond the call to duty too. I'd best go have another word with him. If I were you gents, I'd let the coroner worry about how they'll get her out of there and over to the morgue in one piece!"

He didn't have to argue with them to get them out of that fetid drift. As all but the watchman headed back to town, Longarm split off at a cinder path leading up through the warren of Bohunk Hill.

This time he insisted on sensible directions, and seeing it was the Sabbath, he found Bela Nagy and his family at home in their tar-paper shack.

The gnomish Nagy looked more like a white man on his one day off. He introduced Longarm, sort of, to his bigger and fatter wife. She didn't speak English. Longarm had to take her husband's word she was honored, wanted to feed him some grape pie, and knew he hadn't been the American who'd messed with that horrid Magda Homagy up the way.

Nagy said their daughter, Eva, was in the back, feeling poorly because she'd just heard a friend had died.

Longarm gently but firmly declared, "I'd like to meet your Eva, Mister Nagy."

Nagy protested. "She is not dressed. Even if she was, she no speak English. Why you want to see Magyar girl who can only weep right now?"

Longarm said, "You can trot her out here or I can come back with a search warrant. It's up to you.

So Nagy swore in his own lingo, went in the back, and returned with a willowy young blonde wearing a flannel chemise and a black eye. Nagy said defiantly, "Here she is. You still think we did something bad to her?"

Longarm smiled thinly and decided "Nothing she might not have had coming. You all heard about Zoltan Kun, eh?"

Eva Nagy savvied enough English to cover her face with her hands and bawl. Her mother smacked her again and chased her into the back.

Longarm smiled thinly and asked, "Did you put your foot down before or after you heard about her balding admirer getting blown through the roof?"

Bela Nagy scowled and said, "Last night I was here, home from mine, when Zoltan come to take out Eva for buggy ride. I tell him what you tell me about father who lets daughter get dirty with older men. He laugh and say he maybe needs night off himself. Zoltan Kun was not a nice man!"

Longarm said he wouldn't argue the contrary, asked Nagy to tell his wife he couldn't stay for grape pie, and left while the womenfolk were still fighting in the back.

He rode on back to town, left the mount at the livery so it could be cared for better as he traipsed around town, and headed over to the county jail to have a more serious talk with Attila Homagy.

His man wasn't there. The desk deputy agreed it was a ridiculous mix-up, but a county politico looking for the immigrant vote had just bailed old Attila out.

They'd convinced the easygoing J.P. who'd issued that search warrant that a man who'd come forward of his own accord after killing a man in accord with the unwritten law hardly deserved to spend the Sabbath locked up like a common criminal.

Longarm swore, and tore across the square for another word with that same J.P. His Arapaho housegirl said he'd gone visiting. She couldn't or wouldn't say where.

Longarm managed to thank her instead of cuss her. He doubted anyone sneaky as Attila Homagy would hang around town until the proper county court opened on Monday. Longarm tried to think himself into the older man's boots as he strode back toward the livery near the depot. He decided he'd be too smart to buy a train ticket or ask for his old buggy back, whether he knew the law had impounded it or not.

A coal-mining man who knew his way around by rail might know a bum could ride for many a mile without a ticket aboard an open coal gondola. They were easier to get into than the average box car. But while Trinidad shipped a heap of coking coal to all points east, it was the Sabbath and no freight would be moving out of the Trinidad yards... or would it?

Railroads, shipping lines, telegraph outfits, and such paid way more attention to round-the-clock profits than the Good Book. The freight dispatcher over at the yards would know more about his own timetable. So that was where Longarm headed next.

After a short, interesting conversation Longarm was a quarter-mile up a quiet siding, spooking big butterfly-winged prairie grasshoppers as he eased along what might have passed for a string of gondolas just waiting for Monday, if that dispatcher hadn't said a switcher would be moving them over to the main line in a few minutes.

As any railroad bull could tell you, a man hidden in a car with a gun had the edge, if you went about rousting him wrong.

Longarm moved to the far end of the string, drew his.44-40, and took his time climbing the steel-runged ladder over the coupler, holding on with his left hand.

He peered over the top rim. The gondola was almost filled to the brim with coal. He rolled atop it and worked forward, crunching some in spite of himself.

The next gondola held only coal as Longarm leaped the gap between, crunching the coal much louder. As he tried to ease onward more silently, he heard a not-too-distant puffing, and glanced up to spy locomotive smoke puffing his way. It was that switch engine, coming to pick up the string.

Longarm didn't care. He kept going until, another car forward, he spotted movement and called out, "I see you, Homagy. Stop right there if you don't want a bullet up the ass!"

The shorter and older Hungarian paused and turned his way atop the coal in the next gondola. He'd gotten rid of his seersucker and had on darker and more practical denim work duds. Longarm didn't worry about his own tobacco brown tweed pants as he leaped into the same gondola with his man, but they were both staggered when that switch engine banged into the far end and jerked the whole string into motion with a crunch of steel knuckles.

Moving forward again, Longarm told Homagy, "I see you noticed we found your wife where you'd left her, you poor heartbroken cuss. Would you like me to tell you how the rest of your charade was supposed to read?"

Homagy must not have wanted him to. He stared wild-eyed, decided not to go for his own hardware after all, and spun around to try for a dash to Lord only knows where on the swaying, crunchy coal.

Longarm bawled, "Don't do that, damn it! There's no place you can run to and you're fixing to fall down betwixt the cars."

But Homagy just kept going as Longarm fired a warning shot over him. Then the wily killer vanished from view as Longarm ran forward, stared soberly down at the empty void between cars, and muttered, "I told you you'd fall betwixt the cars, you asshole!"

He holstered his six-gun and swung himself down a ladder to leap clear and land running. It felt as if he had to run a mile before he was able to stop, spin about, and run the other way.

He found most of Attila Homagy between the rails, bleeding all over the cross-ties. Homagy had lost a right forearm and left foot to the steel wheels. Being dragged across the ballast a good ways hadn't done him a whole lot of good either, but to Longarm's surprise the coal-blasting man was still conscious.

Longarm knelt to whip off his own shoestring tie as the older man croaked, "I should have killed you that first day up in Denver."

Longarm decided the severed ankle was bleeding the most. So he tied that off first, muttering, "You never had the balls to kill anyone wearing pants. You heard your woman was fooling around. You beat the truth out of her right off. But Zoltan Kun was too big a boo for you. He was mean and cocky with good reason. He knew you were scared skinny of him. But the unwritten law called for a man to do something about the man his wife had betrayed him with. So you got rid of her before she could say anything different. Then you told everyone a well-known American, not a Bohunk bully, was the man on your shit list."

Longarm heard shouting, and looked up to see a railroad yard bull running across the yards at them with a baseball bat. Longarm called out, "I'm the law and we need us a doctor here! So stop waving that fool club and go get one!"

The yard bull must have thought Longarm meant it. He turned to run the other way. Longarm got out a pocket kerchief and went to work on the stump of the sobbing Homagy's gun arm as he continued in a conversational tone, "You knew full well that had you demanded satisfaction from Zoltan Kun, he'd have laughed in your face, if you were lucky. Had you taken a swing at him he'd have kicked the shit out of you. Had you even hinted you meant to draw on him, he'd have killed you easy. I know it ain't fair, old son, but in real life bullies who've grown to manhood without getting it slapped out of them are tough sons of bitches."

He knotted the bloody kerchief tight around the unresisting man's stump. It seemed to help, unless the poor bastard had just lost too much blood to spurt worth mentioning.

Longarm said, "You knew everyone in town was waiting to see what you aimed to do about your wayward wife. So after you shut her up forever it was you, not her, who grabbed my name and rep as a fighting man off a newspaper laying around your house and declared it was me, not the Zoltan Kun everyone suspected, who'd been strumming on her old banjo."

He shook the mangled man and demanded, "How did you kill Magda? We know you done it because we found her body where you hid it, you sneaky cuss!"

Homagy croaked something in his own odd lingo.

Longarm swore and said, "Talk English and let's see if we can get a clearer picture. I figure you killed her at the time or not too long after she confessed to screwing Zoltan Kun whilst you were out of town. He might or might not have had to threaten her. We both know he was a dedicated bastard. But you didn't have the balls to kill both of them. You could have left your dead wife for a day or more behind your locked doors. Few if any of the neighbor women had ever seen the buggy a well-known labor organizer kept in a Trinidad carriage house. There was no place for either you or Zoltan Kun to park atop Bohunk Hill." Homagy could have been confessing or cursing for all he could tell.

Longarm shook him some more and insisted, "Come on, own up to what you done. You drove up to your own house in an unfamiliar buggy that you kept in the carriage house, with new curtains snapped to the top. It was after midnight, on an early Sabbath morn with the mine site shut down. Nobody really saw Magda getting in to go for such a mysterious ride. Nobody had to. We all go through life with a literal blind spot in each eye. But we never notice, because our brain fills in the bitty gaps with imaginary blue sky or even wallpaper. When a buggy stops out front and the lady of the house ain't there no more, she naturally drove off in the wee small hours with some buggy driver. How were they to know you meant to carry her to a casually guarded coal mine and hide her in an abandoned drift?"

Longarm saw that yard bull was coming back with a whole crowd of other gents. He told Homagy, "Hang on and we'll get you to a hospital in time to save your worthless life. You'd have likely been better off dropping all that shale atop the body instead of in front of it. I don't envy the coroner, but there are ways to tell whether a victim was strangled or stabbed. No matter how you killed her, you wanted to distract anyone from looking for her. You made your neighbors think she'd run off with her lover because you knew she wasn't with Zoltan Kun. That gave you the excuse not to challenge him about your missing wife. Nobody in Trinidad knew shit about me. So when you said she'd run off with me, they had no call to look anywhere else for her."

A man in the oncoming crowd shouted, "I'm a doctor. How bad does he seem to be hurt?"

Longarm called back, "Bad. He's lost a bucket of blood and may have a concussion as well. Fell a good ways betwixt them coal gondolas a mile or so down yonder now."

As the chunky M.D. in black serge hunkered down on the far side of Homagy, whistled, and popped open his oilcloth bag, Longarm told the mangled Hungarian, "Your bullshit with me was just razzle-dazzle from the beginning. Like another four-flusher I met up with at Fort Sill, you knew the safest man to challenge to a gunfight would be a paid-up lawman with no call to fight a total asshole. We have to account for ourselves when we shoot kid shotgun messengers or old coal blasters with no warrants out on 'em. You both hoped your pals would be more impressed by your bravery than a grown man might be. You couldn't have expected my boss, Marshal Vail, to play right into your hands by taking your threat seriously. Billy Vail's been married up a spell, and he'd likely get upset as hell if his old wife told him she'd been giving French lessons to some blackmailer. How's he doing, Doc?"

The doctor the yard bull had fetched shook his head and murmured, "You were right about that concussion. Is there any point to all this conversation with him?"

Longarm nodded and said, "There is. If you can save him he'll likely hang for murder. The unwritten law only lets you kill your wife and plead passion if you kill her lover at the same time and don't hide any bodies."

As the doctor put some smelling salts to Homagy's nostrils, the tall deputy said, "You slickered us all pretty good by chasing me so persistently, demanding I pay for stealing your wife. But you overdid it by pestering me and pestering me, until it occurred to me you couldn't be serious about wanting to fight me."

Homagy blew some bubbles and groaned, "I told you why I didn't want to kill you after all. I wish I had now."

Longarm grimaced and said, "Yeah, let's talk about that sloppy blasting at the Dexter Hotel. Your foreman assured me you could dust a room with dynamite and never bust a window. Yet Zoltan Kun wound up on the roof and there was structural damage down to the basement. How come you used so much dynamite unscientifically, old son?"

Homagy didn't answer. The doctor said, "He's gone." Longarm asked, "What's he trying to say if he's dead then?"

The doctor said, "Nothing. That's called the death rattle because you have to be dead to make that funny sound. It's a change in the acid balance in the throat tissues. It'll stop in a moment."

Longarm stared down at the dead man's glassy eyes and muttered, "You sneaky old son of a bitch. You knew I'd never be able to prove my case against you unless I could get you to confess. So you up and croaked on me without confessing!"

Then he smiled ruefully and added, "What the hell, mayhaps it's just as well this way. It's not as important how you murdered your wife, now that you've saved the taxpayers the expense of trying, convicting, and hanging you for it!"

CHAPTER 25

Some time later, Longarm was washing down some of the fine free lunch served by Denver's Parthenon Saloon when his boss, Billy Vail, grumped in with a manila file folder in hand. Longarm had hoped that might not happen. The file looked thicker today than it had when he'd had young Henry type up his official report.

Vail joined Longarm at the free lunch counter, grabbed a ham-on-rye sandwich with his other hand, and said, "We got to talk. Let's go back to one of the side rooms."

They did. Like most first-class saloons, the Parthenon provided a maze of semi-private chambers, great and small, for the discreet get-togethers of patrons too delicate-natured for the main taproom up front.

Along the way, Longarm caught the eye of a barmaid carrying a tray of beer schooners, and pointed his own half-consumed beer at the doorway they were headed for.

Billy Vail led the way in and plunked his stubby form down on one side of the table, taking up a good part of the space in there. Longarm left the sliding frosted-glass door slightly ajar as he took his own seat across from his boss, placing his beer schooner on the table between them.

Vail said, "You'd best shut that door all the way. This is private."

Longarm said, "Trixie will be coming to take our orders. You'll be glad I was so thoughtful when it sinks in how salty that ham you chose really tastes. What's so infernally delicate about the report I just filed for you, Boss?"

He was bluffing, of course. Billy Vail tracked as good across a report as a Digger Indian across fresh snowfall. But Longarm hadn't been dumb enough to write down any lies.

Vail said, "Most of it's just swell. Considering I was only out to keep you from getting shot as a skirt-chaser, you done us proud in the Indian Territory. The War Department is pleased with you, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is pleased with you, and even the Indians are glad you showed up when you did."

Trixie came in with a flounce of her Dolly Varden skirts to ask what they were drinking back there. Longarm suggested a pitcher of draft and an extra glass. When Vail didn't argue, he asked Trixie if she could throw in some of those devilish eggs and mayhaps some good old pickled pig's feet.

Trixie said she knew how to serve a growing boy, and flounced out. Vail cocked a thoughtful eyebrow and said, "I'd ask, if I thought I'd get a straight answer."

Longarm shook his head and said, "Don't talk dumb. I like this place too much to trifle with the hired help. I told you in the very report you're holding how Fred Ryan was augmenting his four-figure salary as a junior Indian agent. Catching him was no big deal."

Vail said, "Chief Quanah seems to think it was. Thanks to the prestige the Comanche Police gained at the expense of those crooked Cherokee, your Sergeant Tikano is turning away Kiowa and even Kiowa-Apache volunteers!"

Longarm said that was why he'd let the Indians tidy up the loose ends themselves.

Vail said, "Let's talk about loose ends. Are you sure you really put down everything about them crazy doings around Trinidad at the last, old son?"

Longarm met Vail's thoughtful gaze--it wasn't easy--and managed to reply, "Like I wrote, me and Las Animas County agreed Attila Homagy broke no federal laws when he lost his temper with his wife. Coroner in Trinidad says he strangled her. Despite the condition of her body, there's this small ring of bone wrapped halfway round your windpipe, and when it's busted-"

"You're shitting me," Vail cut in. "I know Homagy killed his wife when she confessed her affair with Zoltan Kun. I see why the desperate cuss put us through that charade to avoid a showdown with a meaner Bohunk who had the Indian sign on him. But after Homagy chased you to the Indian Territory and back, I'm supposed to believe he all of a sudden found the nerve to kill his big boo after all, clumsy as hell for any professional dynamite man?"

Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, "I wish you weren't so smart. Are we talking off the record, Billy? I've good reason for asking, and I told you that case wasn't federal."

Vail frowned thoughtfully and decided, "Tell me the whole story and I'll decide whether it was federal or not, damn it!"

Longarm sighed and said, "You got to understand Zoltan Kun was a human wolverine who got what he had coming, Billy."

Vail nodded and said, "You put down how the shitty labor recruiter plucked immigrant gals like flowers from his private garden, whether they were spoken for by lesser men or not. You explained how Homagy was terrified of him but had to do or say something to somebody when his neighbors saw him as a pathetic excuse for a Hungarian husband. Now explain that unprofessional dynamiting at the Dexter!"

Longarm took a deep breath and said, "Homagy never done it. He never went near Zolton Kun. He'd come back from Trinidad, figuring he'd chased his missing wife and her lover far enough for his honor. He'd learned I was in town and, knowing I'd be leaving on my own in any case, made more war talk so he could say he ran me out of Trinidad."

Longarm took a sip of suds and continued. "Meanwhile, Zoltan Kun had started up with a younger greenhorn gal with an even shorter father. His name was Bela Nagy. There was no need for him to appear on paper. So he don't."

Vail softly asked, "You mean he was the one who lobbed that sloppy dynamite through Zoltan Kun's door?"

Longarm nodded and said, "He thought he had to. He was smaller than Attila Homagy. But he put his foot down, locked his wild child in her room, and told Kun she wasn't going on any more buggyrides with him. Kun laughed it off and jeered he'd try again some other time. So Nagy followed Kun home with more than enough dynamite from his mine, and the rest is unofficial history. After Nagy ran off, old Homagy saw the chance to be the hero he'd never had nerve to be. He came forward to take the blame, and the credit. He'd have almost no doubt been asked to take a bow and run for public office if we hadn't found his wife's body. I never would have searched for it if the lying bastard had left me alone!"

Vail chuckled and said, "I like your official version better. But there's one question more. All you just said happened over two weeks ago. So where in blue blazes were you after that, old son?"

Longarm explained he'd had to help the county coroner tidy up, and then he'd spent some time consoling a poor local widow.

When Vail protested he saw no widow connected with the case, Longarm shrugged and asked, "Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say a widow has to be connected with a case to require some consolation?"

The End