Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds

LONGARM ON THE SANTEE KILLING GROUNDS

By Tabor Evans

CHAPTER 1

Just as surely as there'd never been a bronco that couldn't be rode, or a rider that couldn't be throwed, there were some gals a man was only wasting flowers, books, and candy on. So that was why Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long was alone in bed when a horse-drawn fire engine thundered past the open window of his furnished room in the wee small hours.

Longarm, as he was better known to friend and foe, struck a match to consult the dollar alarm clock on his bed table while assuring himself the comings and goings of the Denver Fire Department were no business of a federal peace officer. Then he cussed them good when he saw it was almost four A.M. So that damned rooster down the alley wasn't just complaining about the noise.

Longarm punched his pillow thicker in the middle, and lay his head back down to see if he could catch a few more winks before it was time to cuss that alarm clock. It sure seemed to be ticking a whole lot louder than it needed to just to move its hands. And that damned fire seemed to be close, and even worse, upwind.

It sure was odd how almost identical smells could be mouth-watering or gut-wrenching, depending on whether one smelled bacon sizzling over a log fire or humanity going up in smoke along with a frame building. Some gal down the way seemed upset as hell about that as well, judging by all that screaming. So Longarm sat up to swing his bare feet to the threadbare rug as he wiped at his sleep-gummed eyes and muttered, "Sounds as if they could use a hand with that crowd, and it's almost time to go to work in any case."

This was not the whole truth. Longarm wasn't supposed to report in until well after dawn, and he'd seldom arrived on time without a damned good reason in the six or eight years he'd been riding for the Justice Department under Marshal Billy Vail of the Denver District Court.

A few minutes later he had his federal badge pinned to a lapel of his tobacco tweed suit as he legged it along the cinder path toward the ruddy false dawn of that fire. As a rule, he tended to keep his badge, like his vest-pocket derringer, out of the light until such time as he might need to show them to somebody. But he knew there'd be local lawmen moving in on that same fire, and some few members of the Denver P.D. might not know him. So this was just not the time to let strangers wonder why a tall drink of water with a determined stride and a.44-40 riding cross-draw under an opened frock coat was bearing down on them so suddenly.

But as Longarm approached the surprisingly large mob gazing up at that pillar of fire against the sky to the west, he heard a familiar voice call his name. So he broke stride in his low-heeled cavalry boots, spotted Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D., and elbowed on over to join him, saying, "Morning. I know this is none of my own beeswax, Sarge. But ain't that Widow Dugan's rooming house, and how come they seem to be pouring coal oil instead of water on the fire?"

The shorter and stockier Nolan grimaced and said, "You're right about the old gal who ran the place. They think she's still inside. Along with at least half-a-dozen others. Only one who got out was the Mex serving gal. As you can plainly see, they ain't figured out what they're pouring all that water on across the way. A fireman I was just talking to said he suspects the serving gal poured a heap of something that floats on water inside, before she struck a match and tossed it as she was skipping out to give the alarm!"

They both heard that same shrill female scream from somewhere closer to the puffing steam engine. Nolan confirmed all that noise was indeed coming out of a skinny young Mexican gal. "The fire marshal wants her to see the bodies when they bring 'em out. She keeps hollering she's innocent, as you just now heard. But lots of firebugs break down after they see what a mess they've wrought."

Longarm told himself he'd only legged it over here to help them with the crowd. He almost meant it when he told Nolan he'd go see if they needed help around the engine, small boys and smoke-shied fire horses being such an uncertain mixture. But as he worked his way through to the fire engine, stepping over the canvas hoses on the trampled muddy ground, he saw Nolan's copper badges had things so under control he had to argue some to get himself and his own badge through to the group gathered round the tall diamond-stacked steam engine. It was pumping water from nearby Cherry Creek through the air at that raging inferno of stubborn ruins, causing growing mud puddles.

Someone had cuffed the gal by one wrist to a brass fitting of the engine's big red chassis. She was young, but not all that skinny as soon as a man looked closer. Most men would have. Her frilly Mexican blouse was down off one tawny shoulder, and her pretty left tit was all the way out in the ruby light as well. She was bawling too hard to tell whether she was really pretty or not. Longarm glanced down to see she had her Mexican zapatos neatly laced around her trim ankles as well. But most damning of all, her flouncy print fandango skirts had been firmly cinched around her trim waist with a red sateen sash. So Longarm had no call to question the fire marshal's suspicions about a gal smelling smoke, waking up, and tear-assing out to sound the alarm in attire suitable for a church fiesta.

As Longarm joined the group, the fire marshal in command cast an uncertain eye on his federal badge, tried to shrug it off, and then just had to ask how come Uncle Sam seemed so interested in private property burning on the unfashionable southwest side of Cherry Creek.

Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, "I can't afford the fancier rent on the other side, so I room just a couple of streets over. I answer to Custis Long, riding for Marshal Billy Vail, who gets to sleep up on Capitol Hill with the other swells."

The fire marshal smiled knowingly and said, "We know all about you, Longarm." He proved it by never mentioning that other pal of Longarm's up on Capitol Hill, one far prettier than his boss. The back-fence gossip had that pretty young widow woman sore at Longarm because of some new gal in town.

Pointing his chin at the handcuffed Mexican maid, the fire marshal said, "She keeps pretending not to understand us when we ask her what she poured all over the wood inside that had been already varnished. I understand you savvy Spanish, Longarm?"

Longarm shrugged and replied, "Enough to find my way to the railroad station or buy me a tamale instead of a straw hat, I reckon."

He moved closer to the weeping gal, ticked the brim of his dark brown Stetson to her, and introduced himself in Spanish by his formal name and title. But the young suspect stared up at him owl-eyed and gasped hopefully, "Are you not the muy simpatico lawman my own people call El Brazo Largo?"

So since he saw her English was at least as good as his Spanish, Longarm replied in English. "Aw, mush. How are you called? And before you go batting your pretty eyes and fibbing to me, I want you to study harder on why it makes no sense for a young lady to be up and about in her party duds at four A.M. on a workday morning."

The girl murmured, "I am called Rosalinda Lopez y Madero, and now that I have had the time to think about it, I see there is no use in my pretending I have not been wicked."

The fire marshal had naturally been listening. He brightened and said, "Lord love you, Longarm, I was told you can get greasers and Injuns to talk, but how did you just do that?"

Longarm answered dryly, "For openers, I find it helps if you don't call Mex folk greasers. After that, we still ain't let the lady have her say."

The fire marshal snorted, "Shoot, didn't you just now hear her admit she'd been wicked? And wasn't she the very one who turned in the alarm on the far side of the creek? And dressed the way you see her now?"

Longarm turned back to the girl and quietly asked, "What might you be dressed for, Rosalinda?"

She stared down at his belt buckle or lower, either blushing a heap or lit up a deeper shade of red from the fire across the way, as she quietly confessed, "I was supposed to be in bed, in my attic room, because as you just said, the coming dawn will be that of a workday and my patrona had a lot of work in mind for me. Pero there was this baile en el barrio, a how-you-say neighborhood dance? So I slipped down the back stairs for to be a willful child, as my patrona puts it whenever I wish for to have a little fun."

The fire marshal demanded, "Is that why you set fire to the place you worked at? To get out of working so hard for a stricter boss lady than you could abide?"

Before the terrified girl could answer, the fire marshal called out, "Whatever you're doing, keep it up, Jacobs! I could swear you have the Injun sign on that stubborn cuss now!"

One of the slicker-clad and gum-booted figures outlined by the flames called back, "I can't say whether we floated that oil out the back way or whether its just burned its fool self away. You're right about it being stubborn. Never fought so much fire sprouting out of one frame house in all my days with the department!"

The fire marshal, as well as most of those others, moved closer to the smaller but still dangerous fire, leaving Longarm the chance to question the girl more calmly as well as thoroughly. He'd been lied to by experts, some of them even prettier, so he knew he could be fooled. But her story began to hold more water as he made her repeat it more than once, trying in vain to poke holes in it before he smiled down at her and conceded, "If you're fibbing you're mighty good at it. I admire anyone smart enough to tell a simple tale and stick to it. You say you were coming down the street from that forbidden party a quarter mile away, saw the place already afire, and just ran to get help. I hope you can see how easy it will be for la policia to check your story with others who might have been at that same party. While we're at it, how come you told them before the fire woke you up in bed?"

She muttered something about being ashamed of herself for sneaking out to go dancing.

He said, "There's a swell poem you should've read about the tangled webs we weave whilst trying to deceive. But Mister Robert Burns never wrote in Spanish, and in any case I've noticed heaps of Anglo folks make that same mistake. You should have seen right off how tough it would be for a lady to get dressed up in the attic of a burning building and then make her way downstairs safe and sound while everyone else got trapped inside!"

She stared hopelessly down at her handcuffed wrist as she sighed and said, "I knew I should have told the truth as soon as they said I was lying, pero, as you say, we tangle ourselves up with everyone yelling and the air filled with the reek of burning flesh. Now that you know the true story you will tell them for to let me go, no?"

It was a good question. Longarm told her to stay put while he asked some others. Then he headed across the puddles and hoses to see what else might be going on, having to work his eyes harder in the trickier light. For by now the fire had about burned itself out, leaving little more than two brick chimneys and some blackened and smoking timbers standing. So it was by the weaker glow of a nearby street lamp that he was able to fathom the grim task the slicker-clad firemen were performing now. The wet cotton sheeting over the contorted forms they were lining up in the muddy front yard told a man just about what was going on. Longarm wasn't sure he wanted any more details. By the time that frying bacon smell was gone, a body had been literally burnt to a crisp.

The fire marshal and Sergeant Nolan were consulting as they stood in a puddle at the foot of one sheet-covered litter. As Longarm joined them the fire marshal pointed down at what seemed like a sheet-covered pretzel and growled, "That's what's left of Widow Dugan. Remind me I don't aim to get cremated like no Hindu when I go!"

Longarm shrugged as he swept his eyes over the other contorted forms, observing, "Oh, I dunno. A dead body can get mighty disgusting no matter what you do with it before it turns back to dust, like it says it's supposed to in the Good Book. A corpse ain't disgusting quite as long if you leave it in the damned fire instead of wetting it down and hauling it out this soon. They don't twist up that way if they're already dead when the flames get to 'em and ... Now that sure is a peculiar thing to study on, third litter from the end."

The fire marshal and Sergeant Nolan had been to events as grim as this one in the past. But the fire marshal nodded knowingly and said, "Already considered that one. Widow Dugan didn't offer hired rooms to many drifting drunks in her day. If you'd like to be charitable, it's possible he was overcome by smoke in his sober sleep and never woke up like the others."

Longarm cocked a thoughtful brow and demanded, "Let's talk some about them others. I make it half a dozen, and that hired gal back to your engine says that sounds about right. All but the one twisted up like unborn babies, the way folks wind up when they've been burned alive while feeling it considerably."

Nolan swore at Mexicans in general. The fire marshal swallowed hard and said, "Goddammit, we know what the poor old gal and her roomers went through. Until just recent, the front door had been padlocked on the outside. We're saving the lock and latch we salvaged for the Mex gal's trial, and it's a crying shame the only way she'll get to die under our sissy constitution won't pay her back a tooth for a tooth for what she put these poor folks through! We found all but that peaceful-looking one piled up in the vestibule, all tangled as they hammered in vain to get out and just curled up and died, like you said, whilst the flames licked at their flesh and laughed at their screams."

Longarm moved over by the oddly dignified remains as he asked where they'd been found. The fire marshal called out to a nearby member of his department, who called back they'd found that one atop some bedsprings in the stairwell. "He must have been sort of welded to the springs and followed 'em on down when the second story collapsed."

Longarm hunkered down, took a deep breath, and lifted the wet cotton from the figure's head. It was even worse than he'd been set for. He'd expected little more than a blackened skull. The glass eye glaring up at him from one ash-filled eye socket took him by surprise, and together with that one gold tooth somehow made the half-cremated man seem uglier, perhaps because they lent distinctive features to what would have otherwise been a featureless charred skull.

Looming over Longarm for his own first look at this particular victim, Sergeant Nolan proved he rated his stripes when he took a few thoughtful moments and declared, "Faith. I know many a man with one gold tooth up front like that, and there's more than one poor drifter with a glass eye. But would you like to strike a match a bit closer to that handsome face?"

Longarm did it, but he didn't like it much. The heat or perhaps the collapse of the ruins had cracked the glass eye staring wildly up from the charcoal remains, but you could see it was almost jade green.

Nolan nodded. "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be Brick Flanders in the charred flesh. Sure, they'd told us he'd been seen around Denver last month, and Widow Dugan has taken in disreputable roomers before!"

Longarm shook out the waterproof Mexican match and moved the damp sheeting further out of the way as he muttered, "Let's hold our fire till we see if this one's wearing that famous ring."

As Longarm thumbnailed another light further down the charred corpse Nolan confided to the fire marshal, "They say Brick boasted of having taken a family seal ring from a Union officer at Chambersburg. Himself having ridden as a Confederate irregular before he went entirely bad and all and all."

The fire marshal naturally asked who in thunder they could be jawing about. So Nolan explained, "The green-eyed and red bearded cuss was wanted for everything but singing 'The Yellow Rose of Texas.' So how might we be coming with that signet ring, Longarm?"

The federal deputy got rid of that second match as he rose to his full imposing height and replied, "He lost his famous beard in the fire, and it didn't do his cock and balls a lick of good either. But that distinctive ring on one claw, together with the gold tooth and green glass eye, makes me strongly suspect this burnt bastard has to be Brick Flanders or somebody a whole lot like him."

He pointed at the girl still cuffed to the fire engine across the way as he continued. "Pending further evidence to the contrary, gents, I suggest you let Miss Lopez go, with one handsome apology, before she takes it in her head to sue the city, county, and entire state for calling her a suspicious greaser."

The fire marshal protested, "She is a suspicious greaser, and the only suspect we have for setting this mighty suspicious fire!"

Longarm insisted, "I can promise you it wasn't a poor but honest hired gal, without even checking her simple alibi. Rosalinda Lopez may have her faults, but she wasn't wanted by the law until just a few minutes ago. So why would she want to murder a wanted outlaw and set fire to the place she lived and worked in as a cover for no crime at all? Brick Flanders was wanted seriously, dead or alive, by four states and the Pinkertons. The federal government wanted a few words with him about a post office robbery as well."

Nolan nodded thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. No matter what she did to him or how she phrased it, she'd have had no sensible reason for refusing to accept the hearty congratulations and handsome bounty money that would have gone with his demise in any way, shape, or form!"

The fire marshal tried, "Maybe she ain't all that sensible, and a firebug in the hand is worth two in the bush! This mysterious glass-eyed cuss wasn't the only one done to a turn in them flames after a mighty determined arsonist poured something like Greek Fire around inside, padlocked the doors on the outside, and... Let me see. I reckon a lit candle, burning down to some tinder in a corner, would have given her time to traipse all the way over to that Mex dance before anyone noticed, don't you?"

Longarm shook his head and said, "Nope. If they back her about the time she'd have arrived and the time the party busted up after three A.M., your notion just gets too risky. Without jumping to half as many conclusions, I'm betting on the coroner's team telling us this one cadaver was good and dead before the fire started. But the other victims appear to have been awakened by the flames, not too drunk, drugged, or even sleepy to have piled up on the wrong side of that padlocked door. I'd only be guessing about how much money old Brick here had left from that payroll robbery up near Fort Collins. But they rode off with heaps of hundred-dollar treasury notes, and last I heard, only a few of 'em had been cashed."

The fire marshal pointed wearily at the still-glowing embers of the Dugan house. "You can kiss any paper money anyone had in there good-bye then."

Longarm frowned. "I hadn't finished. I vote we turn a mighty upset as well as innocent gal loose. What do you gents need, a diagram on the blackboard? A wanted outlaw, last seen packing a tidy fortune in handy treasury notes, is killed by a person or any number of persons unknown, who then help themselves to his money and set fire to his rooming house to confound us, as they have, on the way off to parts unknown."

Nolan stared soberly at what remained of the front doorjamb, a few yards away, as he made the sign of the cross and marveled out loud, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what sort of a nasty devil would burn other innocent souls alive just to make sure this one body here might pass as another victim?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "I'd say you described such a killer or killers about right, Sarge."

CHAPTER 2

Any lawman worth his salt knew something about tracking down outlaws through dusty file cabinets and desk clutter. But Longarm felt he read sign better in the field, and nobody ordered him to delve deeper into the mysterious fire, once the local law had declared it a serious violation of the Denver Municipal Code and the county coroner had confirmed that the glass-eyed cuss had a.36-caliber bullet in his well-baked brain. For everyone agreed with Longarm's notion that some false-hearted pal had killed an outlaw on the dodge for his money and lit out after that clumsy but downright vicious attempt to cover up.

The same logic Longarm had used to clear Rosalinda Lopez seemed to indicate the killer or killers of an outlaw wanted dead or alive had to be a wanted outlaw or wanted outlaws as well. Grim autopsies of the other bodies hauled from the burnt-out rooming house established the old widow woman, along with a neighborhood loafer she either slept with now and again or hired on and off, had died in the fire with four roomers Rosalinda could name, whether they'd been using their real names or not. One of them, old Brick Flanders, had told everyone to call him Calvert Tyger, which had been not only a mite dramatic, but the name of another owlhoot rider entirely last heard of during his funeral oration down Durango way. The other three roomers with any call to have been upstairs in the wee small hours when the fire was set had all died with Widow Dugan and her lover cum hired hand. Meaning the one hired gal who'd survived had never seen the killer or killers. A good two dozen witnesses, some of them Anglo and none known to be murderous arsonists, verified where the Mexican gal had been both before and after anyone could have set fire to the place she worked and lived in. Longarm had felt it only right to put the homeless gal up until she found herself another place to stay and, as it turned out, another job, which she did in twelve hours or so. Young gals who seemed willing to work that hard for little more than their room and board were sort of tough to come by since the Great Depression of the '70s had commenced to fade from recent memory.

So Longarm was working on another chore entirely a few mornings later, and hardly remembering Rosalinda Lopez, when he found his way across Colfax Avenue suddenly blocked by a one-horse shay pulling out of the morning traffic to stop with one wheel rim threatening his balls if he stepped off the granite curb. He took a step back, and would have said something mighty impolite if he hadn't noticed, just in time, who'd been driving that fool shay.

The young widow of a rich old mining magnate could have shown up in a coach and four with a posse of flunkies. But Longarm had noticed she seemed a tad shy about being seen with him by broad day on the public streets of Denver. A week ago she'd allowed she'd as soon never see him anywhere at all, and this morning he saw she'd draped a heavier veil than usual from the brim of her black velvet hat. So he just ticked his own hat brim to her and waited to see if she meant to pull a gun on him or just drive on.

She did neither. She sighed and said, "Come closer, you silly. I don't want to shout at you in the middle of town at this hour!"

Longarm moved closer and rested one booted foot between the rungs of the curbside wheel as he mildly inquired what she wanted to say to him discreetly.

The widow woman with the light brown hair smiled timidly through her veil, "I'm not going to say I'm sorry. It's your very own fault you have such a dreadful reputation, and I still think I was right about you and that Chinese waitress that time. But, well, I guess I bought some malicious gossip about you and that librarian they said you'd walked home after closing hours."

Longarm shrugged and said, "I did walk the lady home, Her quarters weren't all that far from the library, but it was getting dark and she allowed she was new in Denver. Did your back-fence biddies tell you I walked her home more than once?"

The widow woman nodded soberly and replied, "That's not all they told me you and that henna-rinsed hussy had been up to. And you heard me tell you never to darken my door again."

Longarm shrugged and asked, not unkindly, whether anyone had seen him lurking about her brownstone mansion up on Capitol Hill.

She replied with a strangled sob, "No, and it's starting to hurt around bedtime! So all right, I was wrong about where you spent last Thursday night. My biddies, as you so rightly called them just now, told me you'd been seen taking that librarian home after work, and not coming out of her place again until at least as long as a certain gathering down that same block lasted."

Longarm nodded and answered easily, "We noticed all them old hens sipping tea on that front veranda in the cool shades of the gloaming. We've established I walked that librarian home from her new job more than once. Are you asking whether she likes to get on top like some folks I know?"

The young widow he knew well indeed seemed flustered. "Custis! Don't talk that way in broad daylight! I know you didn't spend the night with her, as I was told. I read all about it in the Rocky Mountain News!"

Longarm laughed incredulously and replied, "The time I left a library gal alone and chaste as ever was in the newspapers? Well, I never. I've told them reporters to quit making up tall tales about me lest they get me killed the way they did poor Jim Hickok. Where did it say I'd made a play for that new gal in town?"

The gal he'd been going to town with longer laughed despite it all and declared, "You big oaf! I meant that front-page story about you investigating the mysterious deaths by fire in your own neighborhood. I mean, if you were helping them put out the fire at four A.M., you could hardly have been where those ever-so-helpful friends of mine told me you were, could you?"

To which Longarm could only modestly reply, "I was asleep in my very own bedding when the fire engines woke me up and I done what I had to. Where did your own pals tell you I was spending my lonesome night?"

She sighed. "They were just jealous of another poor widow woman's good fortune, I suppose. Am I forgiven, Custis?"

He chuckled fondly and said, "Sure. You forgave me for that gal who slings hash at the Golden Dragon, didn't you?"

She started to say something meaner, sighed again, and told him she'd be expecting him that evening for a late supper, after things got sort of quiet up along Sherman Street. Then she snapped her buggy whip coyly, and drove on before he could tell her he wasn't certain he'd be free for the evening.

He figured he would be, unless he got lucky. But it seemed sort of reckless to commit oneself to a late supper before knowing who one might or might not meet at noon for dinner.

He went on to serve the federal warrant his superiors at the Federal Building had wanted him to. There was only a little cussing and no real physical danger involved in hauling a rich mining man into federal court on a claim filed under false pretense. But a man had to think ahead if he didn't aim to be saddled with even less interesting chores, and so, seeing the morning was well worn down by the time he'd caught up with that mining man in his private club, Longarm ambled over to a drinking establishment open to the public. It was handy to his office and famous for the swell free lunches they served with moderately priced drinks.

Like many more respectable saloons in towns even smaller than Denver, the Denver Parthenon had side entrances and private rooms toward the back for more discriminating gents and all womankind. So Longarm wasn't too surprised to be told by a swamper, as he was stuffing his face with beer and pickled pig's knuckles at the main bar, that some lady wanted to see him in one of their Private chambers. That was what they called the cubbyholes stuffed with small tables and firmly padded benches.

Hanging on to his beer schooner, but swallowing all the free lunch in his mouth, Longarm followed the swamper back towards the crappers, tipped a whole dime once he'd been shown the right door, and went on in to find himself staring down in Some confusion at the severely uniformed Miss Morgana Floyd, head matron of the orphan asylum out Arvada way. As if to prove that Mother Nature tended to share her favors fairly, the somewhat younger petite brunette, who'd also told Longarm not to darken her door, was built way smaller across the hips than the Capitol Hill widow woman, and Longarm recalled her breastworks as a tad perkier, if smaller. Though if push came to shove, that widow woman had a prettier face to admire, especially while she was doing all the work on top. But little Morgana was a kissable head-turner in her own right.

Longarm didn't try to kiss her as he straddled a bentwood chair across the table from her. He saw she'd already ordered herself a glass of cider with a straw. He still asked if she'd eaten yet, but the petite brunette shook her head. "I have to get back to the dry-goods store and my buckboard. I only took advantage of this run into town to see if I could catch you here alone for a change."

Longarm sipped some beer suds without answering.

Everyone who knew where he worked had a pretty good notion where he lunched a good part of the time. Morgana sighed and said, "I'm sorry. That was catty of me. But darn it, Custis, a friend I trusted did say you were still seeing that widow lady up on Capitol Hill!"

Longarm resisted the impulse to reach for a smoke as he replied, "if your spies were jawing about a certain widow woman who never done 'em no harm, I ain't been up to her place for quite some time, as a matter of fact."

This was true, as far as it went, and women seemed able to tell when a man was really fibbing. So Morgana nodded and said, "I should have known those other girls were jealous of me. What gave their vicious plot away was the way they overdid the tall tales they told about you. I mean, what would even someone like you be doing with a librarian west of Curtis Street and a wealthy Capitol Hill widow at the same time?"

Longarm couldn't resist answering, "I dunno. Sounds like fun!"

The frisky brunette with her own notions of fun laughed easily and said, "I'll bet you would, if you had the chance. But then I read in the Post how you'd been involved in that rooming house with some Mexican lovely, as your friend Reporter Crawford described her. So I naturally had to wonder how you could have been sparking all those other girls if you were over there in your own neighborhood at four in the morning. You should have seen them trying to squirm out of that when I confronted them with the morning papers!"

Longarm shrugged and said, "I only met Rosalinda Lopez over by that fire. They had no call to say I found her all that lovely as I was questioning her while she was handcuffed to a blamed fire engine!"

Morgana smiled, and reached across the table for his free hand. "I read how you'd cleared her as a suspect in that nasty arson-murder case, darling. Then, as I just said, certain so-called friends went too far. One of them told me you'd checked into the Wazee Hotel with that pretty senorita. I confess I believed her at first, recalling the time you took me there, to save us a long wet ride on that rainy evening, you said."

Longarm was starting to grow weary of the game and so, as gently as he could manage, he said, "Look here, Miss Morgana, whether I was in the Wazee Hotel with you or any gal willing to go there with me is no beeswax of a lady who told me better than ten days ago not to darken her door again. But for the sake of another lady I have no call to leave open to gossip, I checked Rosalinda Lopez into a hotel I could get a good rate from because the poor little gal had been burnt out and had no place else to go. If your pals had been watching closer, they could have told you I never even went up to her new quarters with her. You're commencing to steam me with some squat about a kid I've never even swapped spit with!"

Morgana, who'd exchanged more than that with Longarm, squeezed his big paw harder and assured him she'd already figured that much out for herself. "I know you'll think it was awful of me, Custis. But when I found out where that Rosalinda Lopez was working, I made it my business to make friends with her by sort of bumping into her a few times at the market down the street. Once we got to talking, it was easy enough to-"

"You're right, I don't like it," Longarm said. "Did you get her to tell you how I'd had her name tattooed on my chest, along with two lovebirds and a floral wreath around the whole shebang?"

Morgana stared soberly across the table. "She seems to think you're some sort of saint she calls a brass lark or something as outlandish, dear. She told me how you talked them out of arresting her and staked her to a fresh start, with no strings attached, and she confided she might have let you have a little, if you'd behaved like anything but a perfect gentleman to a frightened but not too inexperienced young girl."

Longarm smiled thinly and sighed. "Why do we always find out at least ten minutes after the steamboat leaves us standing on the dock like the fools we are? What are you suggesting I do now, go hang around that same market till she comes by for some fresher provisions?"

Morgana said firmly, "Don't you dare. You're taking me to that Sunday-Go-to-Meeting-on-the-Green over in Eastern Park this weekend."

Then she squeezed harder as she coyly purred, "We'll get fresh later, after you've melted my resolve with plenty of spiked punch and potato salad, the way you did that last time. I'll slip into the same summer-weight frock, and we'll spread our own blanket in that same grove of weeping willows a little apart from the picnic grounds, and then, as the sun goes down, who knows what I might let you do to me in the cool shades of evening?"

He couldn't think of anything they hadn't wound up trying already. But a good place to take one pretty gal was as good a place to take another pretty gal, and he knew that if they'd told this gal from way out to the west of town about another Sunday-Go in Eastern Park, a gal who lived in East Denver was twice as likely to have heard about it, and made plans of her own involving willow trees in the cool shades of evening.

So all Longarm could say to this other gal was that he'd sure be proud to take her out yonder if he possibly could. For he had almost three full days to figure out why it would be impossible.

CHAPTER 3

After he got back to the office after lunch, Longarm asked Henry, the pasty-faced clerk who played the typewriter and kept the files, whether they had any field work pending, say, over in the Indian Nation or at least a day's ride from the Denver city limits. But Henry said their boss, Marshal Vail, had said nothing about field work on his way to a meeting with Judge Dickerson down the hall.

Henry added that meanwhile Longarm was due to relieve old Deputy Weaver, riding herd on a government witness at a nearby hotel. So Longarm dug a folder on the late Brick Flanders out of the file to give himself some reading on the job and maybe, with any luck, a weekend that would otherwise be awkward down in the southwest corner of the state.

The train robber's doxie who'd agreed to turn state's evidence had been installed in a first-class suite of a second-rate hotel facing Tremont, near the Overland Terminal. Tom Weaver didn't seem too sorry to have Longarm take his place, despite the witness for the prosecution being a junoesque natural blonde who said she'd answer to Honey whenever they got tired of calling her Miss Elvira. She behaved well enough as they were introduced. But as soon as Weaver left, the buxom bawd unpinned her honey-colored hair and commenced to unbutton her calico bodice with a remark about the weather that sounded sort of dirty. She spoke a bit plainer about his stuffy-looking pants as she threw her bare self down on the sofa in the suite's parlor. "I'm glad now your fellow deputy was a sissy. For you're so much younger as well as tall and handsome. So tell me something, handsome, are you tall in every way?"

Longarm hung up his hat and coat, since she was right about the afternoon heat in downtown Denver, but helped himself to a chair on the far side of the room, closer to the door, and reached for one of his three-for-a-nickel cheroots as he chuckled fondly and told her, "It ain't going to work, Miss Elvira. I know what them other ladies told you about compromising the arresting officer. I do wish outlaws would quit trying to practice law on the fly, but you see, in this case neither Weaver nor me had anything to do with arresting you and your former lover. So even if you tempted us into greenhorn horny behavior on duty, you or your lawyer couldn't use it in court for all that much. It's established you eloped with the Keller gang from a house of ill repute, and you'll never get the jury to buy one of your mere guards forcing a confession out of you at dick-point."

The big naked blonde sat up, her firm ivory tits at an even more tempting angle as she brazenly laughed. "Couldn't you just point your dick at a lonely gal as a favor, damn it? I don't need to be advised of my constitutional rights again. I need me a good stiff dicking. For I haven't been screwed since your posse tracked us down near Trapper's Rock a good two weeks ago, and I'd have never been working in that Grand Junction whorehouse to begin with if I hadn't been born with a romantic streak."

Longarm resisted the impulse to ask if she meant that streak of pink almost parting the blond fuzz and staring boldly across the room at him from behind her carelessly bared thighs. He lit the cheroot instead, shook out the waterproof Mexican match and suggested they'd both feel cooler if she'd like to stretch out on the bedstead in the next room in her birthday suit. When she coyly asked if he'd like to come along and stretch out with her, Longarm smiled wistfully and confessed, "I got a romantic streak of my own that's never going to forgive me for this afternoon, Miss Elvira. But as tempting as your pretty face and handsome form might be, I still have to look at my own face in the mirror whenever I shave, and I like it better when I still see a professional lawman staring back at me."

She rose to her full height in nothing but her high-button shoes, and Longarm's crotch tingled about as much as they both would have expected because, two-faced whore or not, all that perfectly shaped naked flesh would have tempted a more saintly cuss. Then she slithered in his direction and puffed, "How would you like just a quick come, with me sort of sitting in your lap?"

Longarm knew how much he'd like it. So he got to his own feet before she could straddle his weak nature and replied firmly, "How would you like me to handcuff you to a bedpost in the other room, Miss Elvira? My orders are to protect you from anyone who might not want you to testify in court, whilst making sure you'll be in court to testify. I ain't getting paid to take no shit off a prick-tease, and whilst we prefer to keep you material witnesses comfortable as well as safe, there's nothing in the department rules preventing us from holding you across town in our Federal House of Detention, locked up with nobody to sass but a tough old matron who's seen and heard it all."

The big blonde stopped crowding him, although he could smell her warm body odors. Damn it, she'd just had a bath and taken a vinegar douche down yonder. As he tried not to inhale, the mighty warm-natured witness sighed and said, "You must not like girls. Are you one of those boy-buggers they whisper about, Deputy Long?"

Longarm sighed. "I don't bugger nobody on duty, But if it's any comfort to you, I'd likely be tempted even more if I was stuck with sleeping alone later tonight. But I ain't, praise that other gal's romantic streak, so why don't you go have a lie-down, if you feel more comfortable bare-ass, whilst I catch up on some reading from my office files?"

She called him a son of a bitch, went back to the same sofa, and flopped down to start playing with her fool twat right in front of him, complaining that no true gentleman would let a poor weak woman be abused that way. It got even harder, and so did his old organ-grinder, once she commenced to moan and groan about wanting it in her as she was coming all alone.

By this time Longarm had taken the file from a side pocket of his frock coat, and even managed to read the first few pages without understanding a full paragraph. It seemed the one called Calvert Tyger had been the leader of the five-man gang who'd pulled that big payroll robbery. All the while old Elvira was sobbing, "Jesus, don't let me waste this passion on my fucking fingers!"

The late Brick Flanders had been second in command. Another outlaw had answered to Chief, and was thought to be of Indian blood. The others were more casually described, and might have been saddle tramps picked up for the occasion to hold the horses, act as lookouts, and such. At that point Elvira gasped, "My God, I really came and now I feel even hotter for some reason!"

Longarm knew her reason. Everyone imagined sex was even better than it really felt when they could only feel it with their frantic paws. He went back to the file. One of those purloined treasury notes had been cashed in Durango just before Calvert Tyger had died in yet another rooming house fire, and that seemed sort of suspicious as soon as you read the same line over. It was easy to read the same line over, then over some more, with a naked lady jerking herself off in the same room with him.

Longarm sighed and said, "I wish you'd do that in the bedroom, Miss Elvira. This other case I'm reading about is serious."

She left her hand in place between her naked thighs as she told him she was serious too. But he went on reading, so she tried it another way, demurely observing, "I'll bet that lady you're meeting later has to be the bee's knees in bed. Is she pretty? Does she let you shove it up her ass for a change now and then?"

Longarm read on about how the three known ringleaders, Tyger, Flanders, and the mysterious Chief, had all deserted General Pope's column during that Santee rising back around '63. But that wasn't what Uncle Sam wanted them on. Sibley's Sixth Minnesota had already broken the back of Little Crow's ill-advised attempt to turn the clock back by the time Pope finished organizing his bigger force of limited-service Union vets and paroled Confederate prisoners. Some said Pope had mopped up after Sibley so thoroughly because of the piss-poor showing he'd made at Bull Run.

"Does she suck it hard for you when you get tired?" the material witness demanded as Longarm read on about the two Galvanized Yankees, or rebs released from Fort Sandusky to fight the Sioux, who had lit out in the company of an Indian scout and three officers' thoroughbreds in the summer of '64. They'd headed West with the war still raging in the East, then lost out on the general Postwar amnesty by stealing yet more army mounts and hitting both a post office and a federal payroll shipment between spates of more local rampaging.

"I'm wild and wanton and I'm not ashamed to say so!" yelled the buxom blonde as she threw herself naked on the rug near his feet, bracing her heels to either side of his own so she could thrust up and down at him with her raging crotch as Longarm mildly observed, "So were the three young rascals I'm trying to read about in this folder, till more recently least ways. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since we were all young and foolish enough to think them banners and bugle calls were really going to make this world a better place. It says here the ones we know best as Tyger and Flanders took to pulling better-planned jobs for a lot more money at a time, with the times spread ever wider apart."

She sobbed, "I can't spread my thighs any wider. You're either made of iron or they cut off your balls in that war you're so fond of bragging about!"

He sighed. "I never did much in the war worth bragging about. I feel sort of foolish now about some of the chances I took as a fool kid. I wonder if Tyger and Flanders were starting to wise up at the last. Nothing here to indicate whatever happened to Chief or lesser members of their gang."

She rolled over on her hands and knees to wiggle her bare and shapely rump at him. "Nobody takes it brown as good as me. If you're not man enough to stick your dick up my ass, I'd be proud to show you how I can puff on a smoke if you'd like to stick the end of that cheroot in me."

He chuckled and replied, "Lord love you, I pay more for these here cheroots than I can afford on my salary, Miss Elvira."

He had to look away as he softly added, "This afternoon I seem out to earn every penny Uncle Sam pays me!" For while her winking rosebud rectum was only interesting, the bawdy bitch had a downright pretty pussy, and she must have known how rare that was, judging by the way she was winking that at him as well, in alternate contractions of her obviously well-trained love muscles.

He lowered his eyes back to the file in his lap, but it was tough to make much sense as he sat there reading with a raging erection while Elvira begged him to let her take care of it for him.

Then somebody knocked on the door and the big blonde was running into the bedroom, snatching up her summer frock as she tore past the arm of that sofa. So Longarm rose to answer the knock on the hall door as she slammed the door behind him.

It turned out to be Smiley and Dutch from his own outfit. Deputy Smiley never smiled. Smiley was the family name of the otherwise morose breed.

Nobody could pronounce the High Dutch name that went with Smiley's shorter, more cheerful-looking, but deadly sidekick. So everyone called him Dutch, and he didn't seem upset about that. Longarm knew Marshal Vail always sent them out as a team to get the work of one well-balanced deputy out of them. Smiley was a good tracker who tended to walk into traps with his eyes on the trail, while Dutch, who could have doubtless shot his way out of the Alamo back in '36, seemed to need the guidance of an older and less ferocious pard to keep him from gunning the wrong folks.

Longarm allowed he was a mite surprised to see them so soon in his own tour of guard duty. Smiley said, "The boss has something else for you to do back at the Federal Building. He said you're not to stop off at the Parthenon on your way back."

Longarm said, "I won't. Did old Billy say what he wanted me for?"

Smiley shook his head. "Nope. He gets pissed when you question his orders. He just told us to take Over for you here and send you back to him on the double. Is there anything me and Dutch ought to know about this witness gal we're supposed to be riding herd on?"

Longarm started to say she was just a whore with unusually wild ways. Then he frowned thoughtfully and said, "I'll tell you better in a minute. After I present you to the lady."

It wasn't that easy. Longarm had to knock more than once before the big buxom blonde came out, fully dressed with her hair piled more primly atop her head, and demurely howdied Smiley and Dutch in turn. She sat back on that sofa and behaved as if butter wouldn't have melted in her mouth as Longarm explained the change in plans.

Then Longarm grabbed his hat and coat and signaled Smiley to step out in the hall with him as he was putting them on. He warned the hatchet-faced breed, "Something's up. She was just now offering me all three ways for free. Yet now she's gone all ladylike, or at least like a whore who ain't about to give nothing away just to be friendly."

Smiley shrugged and grumbled, "It's no secret you're more of a ladies' man than me, or even Dutch."

Longarm modestly but sensibly insisted, "I ain't that pretty. I just told you she's On record as a trail-town whore, and I repeat she was offering to take me on a heap for nothing. Meaning she had something in mind. You know why I don't expect her to make you two gents the same kind offer?"

"You don't have to rub it in," Smiley said.

"It ain't that the two of you are too ugly for a trail-town whore. It's because there's two of you!"

Smiley looked doubtful and remarked, "Oh, I dunno. They say Silver Heels used to take on a dozen or more men a night, and Silver Heels was more refined than your average whore."

Longarm nodded. "She ain't reluctant to take on the two of you because it would be undignified. She'd likely feel it would be a waste of frigid effort because there's no way to get the drop on two separate gunfighters screwing one gal in turn."

Smiley scowled and demanded, "Who in thunder do you suspect of having that sort of sneaky stunt in mind, pard?"

Longarm shrugged. "She never told me. But try her this way. Say she made that deal with the prosecution just to get her own sassy ass out of the sling. Say that now that she's had time to calm down and size up the situation, she's decided she'd as soon not bother with appearing in court against her pals. So say she and some other pals we never caught are planning for her to leave the prosecution one less witness?"

Smiley thought. "Make as much sense for them to just kill her. Where in these United States could a striking blonde like that one duck a serious federal warrant?"

"After dying her striking hair? How would you like me to list 'em, alphabetic or numerical? For all we know they plan on killing her, albeit I'm sure they only suggested a train trip of a hundred miles or more."

He left his frock coat open as he consulted his pocket watch. "I'd best get going. You boys are in charge of her now. But if it was still me on duty here, I'd be keeping my eyes peeled for some slickery."

Smiley stepped back inside. Longarm headed for the same stairs he'd come up only a short spell back. Then he reconsidered and ambled back to the rear stairwell, more for practice than anything else. He'd checked into this particular hotel before, although later in the evening and in more of a hurry, lest the gal cool off while he signed them in. So he'd never taken the time to explore all the ways in or out, and a man just never could be sure there might not be some future time when an alternate escape route might save him from another guest smoking in bed or an irate husband prowling the halls in the dark.

He didn't find the back stairs all that astounding as he followed them down to the ground floor. Once there, he found himself in the service hallway leading from an alley entrance to the lobby out the other way. He tried the alley door. He saw anyone could leave at any time, but had to knock if he aimed to enter. He shrugged and headed for the lobby to leave the more dignified way. As a paid-up man-hunter Longarm was hardly aware of his actions as he paused in the shadows of the archway out to the lobby to determine just who else might be on the premises at the moment.

He saw that aside from the clerk there were three gents lolling in the lobby. Two of them were seedy older men who looked as if they were just waiting around for the rest of their lives to unravel. The third man was far younger and seemed as proddy as a schoolmarm on her wedding night.

The squirming cuss in that far corner chair was wearing high-heeled riding boots, a telescoped black Stetson, and a shoulder holster along with his seersucker summer suit. There was no federal law against squirming in one's chair, or even packing a concealed weapon. But Longarm still got out his badge and pinned it to his lapel as he considered how he wanted to approach a total stranger whose only known crime was the way he made the hairs on the back of a lawman's neck tingle.

That shoulder rig would give the squirt in the seersucker suit a pretty good edge in a contest against a cross-draw man. But nobody outside of Ned Buntline Western novels got paid to indulge in quick-drawing contests, with the loser never getting the chance for a rematch. So Longarm drew his.44-40 in the shadows of the archway, and held it pointed politely at the floor. It was handier than any holstered side arm in any sort of rig. But before Longarm could step out into the lobby, a fourth man came into view at the bottom of the front stairwell. This one was dressed more like an undertaker who punched cows on occasion, and Longarm crawfished deeper into the shadows when he saw the one who'd just been upstairs was headed to join the one in that far corner. The one in black wore his own gun cross-draw under his coattails. Meaning that, like Longarm, he'd taken time to study on the various conditions and positions in which a man might be called upon to get his damned gun out quickly.

Longarm already had his gun out. He reached under his own coat for the handcuffs clipped to the back of his gun rig as he tried to read lips at that range. The way they moved their hands told as much as Longarm needed to know. Knowing he could be wrong, he took a deep breath, stepped out in the light, and threw down on the two of them as he crossed the lobby, announcing in a firm, friendly voice that he'd sure hate to gun the first dumb bastard who failed to raise both hands empty and just hold 'em that way for now.

His words were not taken lightly. The one in black groaned at his rising pal in seersucker, "Aw, hell, you told me Longarm had been relieved, you asshole!"

Longarm said, "He told you true. I reckon I could tell you what you just heard upstairs with your ear to the door and me not as helpless with my pants down as you all planned. But why go into all that bullshit here when it's just as easy to cuff the two of you together and run you over to the Federal Building to tell it to the judge?"

CHAPTER 4

There was bullshit to spare as Longarm's two suspects got to test their own versions, in separate rooms, on various suspicious lawyers and lawmen interested in the case. It was Longarm who suggested, out in the hall, that the prosecution might explain the facts of life to Miss Elvira Carson, the beautiful dumb blonde. The prosecutor snorted, "Don't teach your granny to knit socks, Longarm. It's obvious the friends of the lover she agreed to testify against never recruited that professional gunslick to ride off in any golden sunset with her. They flim-flammed her with some bull about getting her out of town once she tricked her guard into taking off his gunbelt behind closed doors. But what'll you bet they'd have gunned the both of you on the spot if she'd been able to seduce you?"

Longarm sighed. "She tried to seduce Tom Weaver first. I just talked to him down to the crapper. Tom confessed he was as tempted as the rest of us. But lucky for us all, he's happily wed to a frisky younger gal, even if he hadn't been an old pro. I just now gave Tom a mild cussing for not warning me about her in fuller detail."

The government lawyer chuckled. "Deputy Weaver no doubt had you down as an old pro too. It's just as well they took enough rope for us to hang the whole bunch, with or without that whore's reluctant help. Wait till you've questioned a hired gun who finds his fool self involved in a train robbery only the assholes who hired him took part in!"

Longarm smiled thinly and resisted the impulse to show off with a remark about federal jurisdiction. A government lawyer doubtless knew they could let a killer who hadn't killed anybody off, if he wanted to be helpful as all get-out.

Leaving the rest of the mess to those who seemed to want it, Longarm ambled down the hall to his own office to see why they'd sent for him a good two hours before.

As he entered the reception area young Henry looked up from his typewriter with a knowing grin. "You sure do like to live dangerously. Marshal Vail was just out here asking about you, all red in the face with steam shooting out his ears."

Longarm explained he'd been detained, and headed back for Billy Vail's office. But Henry said, "He's not there. He went out after cussing you a lot, like I said."

Longarm shrugged and headed on back in any case, lest he and old Billy wind up tear-assing through various doors in search of one another, the way the actors did in that comical French farce at the Apollo Hall.

It seemed smarter to just go on in and enjoy a sit-down smoke as he waited for old Billy to get back from wherever he'd gone.

Longarm knew it was rude, but he still swept his eyes over the clutter atop the marshal's desk in hopes of guessing what all the fuss was about. There were wanted flyers and yellow telegrams all over the green blotter. A familiar letterhead told Longarm they'd gotten another letter from Reverend John Dyer, that snow-shoeing itinerant missionary who'd have been proclaimed a saint by this time if the Methodists went in for that notion. For it took more simple goodness than most could manage to spend more than one's own yearly salary on savage cowboys and drunken Indians. And how many mortal fathers had ever forgiven a saddle tramp for murdering his only son, Judge Elias Dyer, saying he knew the killer had only been the weak-willed tool of crooked Colorado politicians?

Longarm hadn't been raised rude enough to read the mail of a gent who wasn't in trouble with the law. So he sat down and lit up, casting a thoughtful eye at the banjo clock on one oak-paneled wall. He could see Billy Vail was due back any minute, if only to close up for the day. He wondered what in thunder might old Reverend Dyer have to say in that confounded upside-down handwritten letter?

Longarm had heard the saintly old missionary had come out to the Rockies after the war from the Great Lakes country, where he'd been first a mining man and then a preacher to the already Christian Chippewa, as most white folks called the Ojibwa. So the kindly old preacher's tips on Indian matters tended to be more accurate than some the government liked better. Dyer had fought hard to save the west-slope hunting grounds of the Ute, and both the B.I.A. and U.S. Army could have saved themselves some scalps if they'd paid more attention to Dyer's warnings about misunderstandings before the Meeker Massacre and the Milk River Ambush.

Dyer's earlier Indian followers, the Ojibwa back around Lake Superior, had been sworn enemies of the Santee and their kin. French folks had shortened and adopted the Ojibwa words for a son-of-bitching enemy. So later English-speaking settlers had felt no call to change the spelling from "Sioux." The Santee branch of the far-flung folks who preferred to call themselves Nakota, Dakota, or Lakota as one moved east to west, could be swell pals or vicious enemies, as the spirits moved them. Old Dyer, as well as Tyger, Flanders, and their mysterious pal called Chief, would have all been back yonder in Santee Country around the same time, whether preaching to Indians or swapping Confederate Gray for Union Blue to get out of a prisoner-of-war camp and strike a blow for the white race in general.

Longarm still managed not to read Billy Vail's mail before the older, shorter, and far stockier marshal grumped in on his restless stubby legs, smoking a shorter, stockier, and more pungent cigar, grabbed his own seat on the official side of the desk with his back to the window, and growled, "I heard. You made us look good and so I can't say I'm downright cross with you. But I swear I'm sometimes sure that if I asked you for a light you'd set the building afire! I sent you to guard that material witness for the prosecutor, not solve his case for him, and who told you to run off with the files on that more serious payroll robbery? I needed 'em to read more'n you needed 'em to wipe your ass with, damn it!"

Longarm smiled sheepishly. "Sorry, Boss. I didn't know you were working that case, and I was reading too. I'll buy that toasted cadaver hauled out of the Dugan rooming house as the real Brick Flanders, if you'll let me run over to Durango with a federal writ allowing me to open the so-called grave of the late Calvert Tyger."

Vail shook his bullet head. "I got a better place for you to head. But next week will do. My old woman told me all about that Sunday-Go in Eastern Park. For she's on the same entertainment committee as a certain young widow woman you've asked me not to mention by name."

"I don't mind missing that shindig as long as it's in the line of duty," Longarm said.

Vail chuckled. "What's in the line of duty, the Sunday-Go or a mighty long train ride back to southwest Minnesota?"

Longarm blinked. "That's far enough to get me out of a hair-pulling contest, I reckon. But whatever for? I told you when I got back from that last wild-goose chase to Rice County that neither Frank nor Jesse had been anywhere near Northfield since that big bank robbery and shootout back in the autumn of '76, and this more recent as well as more profitable robbery is hot! I mean that literally. For I somehow doubt all that paper money burned away in not one but two roominghouse fires."

He looked about in vain for an ashtray on his side of the desk, flicked ashes from his cheroot on the rug, and observed, "They say it's good for carpet mites. I'll believe the real leader of that gang died from smoking in bed after I see who's buried in his grave. It don't add up, Billy. Five or more outlaws light out with a government payroll, most of it in high-denomination treasury notes with their serial numbers on file. Then the only two gang members we know by name go up in smoke, bang, bang, and we know for a fact that last fire was deliberate!"

Vail sighed. "I wish you children wouldn't interrupt your elders. I don't want you wasting time over Durango way because it ain't as important who got buried, or even how he died, not only yonder but many a day ago. You track where the trail's still warm, old son, and one of those very treasury notes you mentioned turned up more recently at the Granger's Savings and Loans in New Ulm, not Northfield, Minnesota."

Vail leaned back in his seat and picked up Reverend Dyer's letter to wave at Longarm as he continued. "I don't think Frank or Jesse cashed it either. Even if New Ulm wasn't closer to the Dakota line, the son of a bitch who paid for his seed corn and a mess of hardware with a hundred-dollar treasury note has his local name and address on file with that merchant who broke such a whopping wonder of paper money for him. You can't bite a hundred-dollar note to test it, you know. So it's a wise notion to write down who came in with it, and he did."

Longarm nodded soberly. "I had to break a twenty-dollar silver certificate in a Chinese restaurant one time. It sure got noisy, and it was just as well I was packing my badge and identification."

Vail said, "It was a bank teller who spotted the serial number and told his superior, who naturally made some noise at the merchant who'd deposited it, until said merchant got out his books and could produce the homesteader and homestead claim number of the jasper I want you to move in on in your own discreet way. Both the townsmen who spotted the note and the sheriff's department of Brown County have been slicker than usual, contacting us instead of blundering in, thanks to that cautiously worded flyer we'd listed all of them serial numbers on. The homesteader who spent that stolen treasury note filed his claim under the name of Israel or Izzie Bedford. Claims to be a New Englander who rode with General Pope against Little Crow's Santee."

Longarm grimaced. "I caught him in a lie already. Long Trader Sibley, as the Indians called him, had already whipped the Santee good with his Minnesota Volunteers by the time Pope arrived with his limited-service regulars and paroled prisoners to mop up."

Vail shrugged. "Be that as it may, this letter from a preacher who was there at the time confirms there was indeed a New England shave-tail called Israel Bedford mopping up Indians in the dubious company of Galvanized Yankee noncoms called Calvert Tyger and Brick Flanders. Dyer can't say who the one called Chief might have been, if he was with them at the time or not. He says he still remembers Tyger because of the unusual name, and Brick Flanders came to mind as soon as he read my questions about red beards and glass eyes."

Longarm asked, "How come he remembers Lieutenant Bedford after all this time?"

Vail glanced down at the letter, but didn't quote directly from it as he explained. "It appears Dyer was doing some missionary work at Fort Ridgely, trying to save the souls of captured Santee. Some of the officers gave him a hard time, saying he was wasting salvation on already damned souls the army was fixing to hang. But whenever Lieutenant Bedford was the officer of the day, he let Dyer into the stockade to help the condemned Santee pray for forgiveness."

Longarm smiled thinly. "Must have worked for some of 'em. I understand they had close to four hundred Santee on charges of murder, rape, and worse. Abe Lincoln spoiled a heap of fun when he pardoned all but thirty-eight of 'em. Indians I know say at least thirty-seven of 'em were mean as hell by Indian standards."

He flicked more ash, ignoring Vail's warning frown as he went on. "This Israel Bedford sounds like a charitable cuss, and would a paid-up Union officer want all that much truck with Confederate renegades who stole Union officers' mounts to head out west along the owlhoot trail?"

Vail suggested, "That's one of the notions you might want to ask him about. I ain't ordering you to huff and puff his soddy down and haul him all the way back in irons. I only want you to ask him, in your usual sneaky way, where he got that purloined treasury note. It's possible he sold something in good faith to an old army pal or a new neighbor, who'd be the next one you'd want to question, discreet but on your toes, lest you wind up in a mysterious fire as well. Henry's got your travel orders out front, if you're in such a hurry to miss that Sunday-Go. So what are you waiting for, a fatherly pat on the head or a boot in the ass?"

Longarm felt no call to argue with anyone as stubborn as Billy Vail. So knowing old Henry could play that typewriter faster than most could write by hand, he went out front and asked, "Would you do me a favor, Henry? The boss don't seem to cotton to my carrying office files all the way to Minnesota. So I was wondering if you'd like to type up a thumbnail sketch of that payroll robbery and a list of names we might be interested in whilst I run home to pack, send my regrets about that Sunday-Go to a couple of pals, and pick me up a fresh railroad timetable at the Union Depot?"

Henry handed him a bulky envelope and smugly replied, "I wish you wouldn't tell me how to do my job. You'll find everything you need in here, along with your travel orders, and I naturally looked up the times and places you'll have to transfer between here and New Ulm if you're leaving on the eastbound night flyer, as I'd say you ought to."

Longarm didn't argue with Henry either. He allowed he'd be back when he finished the field job, strode out of the office and over to his hired digs, then hauled his possibles to the Union Depot and bought a round-trip ticket to Durango on his own.

CHAPTER 5

Longarm wasn't being disrespectful of Billy Vail's ability to read sign. He knew nobody tracked better on paper than his pudgy paper-pushing boss. But sometimes sign read different in the cold gray light of reality, and old Billy had just said there wasn't a great hurry to head for New Ulm. For a suspect working to prove a homestead claim would be there if he wasn't worried about the law, and long gone if he was.

Meanwhile Durango, Colorado, was far closer than New Ulm, Minnesota, even though it got sort of hard to tell along the last leg of the tricky route across the very spine of the Rockies.

In the end, it only felt like a million miles of hairpin turns above sheer drops to ribbons of white water in the canyons way down below. It was still short of midnight when Longarm stiffly climbed off the train in Durango with his heavily laden saddle. He checked the McClellan with its bedroll riding across stuffed saddlebags in the depot baggage room, hanging on to his Winchester '73 saddle gun lest it prove too tempting, and went straight to the Durango office of the railroad dicks. Pending more official incorporation as a township in the southwest corner of the fairly new state, the settlement was being policed by the railroad that had opened it to settlement once the Ute had been run off to less desirable water, timber, and range. The railroad didn't brag about it, but Longarm knew the silver smelters near the rail yards refined ore from up the valley a fair haul by freight wagon. So there wasn't much mystery about a gang that went in for payroll robberies drifting through Durango. They hadn't been out to buy any land-grant property off the D&RGW. Unless and until they laid the last of those narrow-gauge tracks up to Silverton, Durango would remain the transfer point where the three dollars a day of many a hardrock miner would be sent on by stage, in the handy form of treasury notes, over many a bumpy mile of lonesome mountain scenery.

But there hadn't been any recent stage robberies out this way. The purported leader of the gang, Calvert Tyger, was supposed to have died in an accidental fire, which would be easier to buy if yet another gang member, under the same name, hadn't been done to a turn much the same way in Denver, and if a bill from that earlier payroll robbery hadn't surfaced later more than thrice that far from whatever in blue blazes they'd been up to in Durango.

The railroad dicks, like telegraphers and such, stayed open around the clock because that was the way you ran a railroad. Longarm had met the older gent on duty that night as watch commander. He knew the old-timer had been a full-fledged U.S. marshal down Texas way at a time when good men and true had been forced to make their minds up on the double. Unlike a Ranger captain named Billy Vail, old Ross Gilchrist of West Texas had surrendered his U.S. marshal's badge to accept a commission with Hood's Texas Brigade, C.S.A. A railroad had been more forgiving later than the winning side.

Gilchrist seemed sincerely glad to see Longarm again. Things did get tedious late at night on a weeknight in Durango. But while he broke out a pint of what he swore to be real Scotch liquor, and offered Longarm a Havana Claro from the humidor on his roll-top desk, the old-timer allowed he'd been there when that roominghouse had burned down less than two furlongs to the west, but couldn't seem to tell Longarm anything that Henry hadn't already typed up on onionskin for him.

Gilchrist said there'd been no autopsy ordered for a drunk who'd died screaming like a banshee behind a wall of flames the volunteer firemen hadn't managed to break through in time. When Longarm mentioned there was no record of the late Calvert Tyger having a drinking problem, assuming he was really all that late, Gilchrist shrugged and said, "I've read his yellow sheets, old son. There's no record of him signing the pledge neither. But leaving aside whether he burnt to death drunk or sober, he sure as shit burnt to death. You could hear him bitching about it for quite a ways and longer than I'd care to die that particular way."

Longarm asked Gilchrist if he'd seen the body afterwards.

Gilchrist grimaced. "What was left of it. Had he baked a mite longer we could have saved the expense of planting him over in Potter's Field."

Then, as if he'd foreseen the next obvious question, the war vet and experienced lawman volunteered, "He wound up on his side with his arms and legs drawn up the way most of us do when we're dying miserable. Used to see old boys like that in the hills of Tennessee. You could tell when a soldier boy had been killed instant or sobbing for his momma by the way he lay. Like I said, they should have let Tyger burn a mite longer and let the wind have his clean ashes. This way, his remains wound up the worst of a couple of ways. Halfway cremated and then left to molder in the wormy clay of Potter's Field. Ain't that a bitch?"

Longarm grimaced and sipped some more Scotch liquor. It was almost as good as Maryland Rye, save for a smoky aftertaste that he didn't really need right now, picturing what likely lay in the pauper's grave of a stranger charred beyond recognition. "I was wondering how I meant to get an exhumation order without a heap of tedious explanations. I'll take your word a cuss checked into that roominghouse as Calvert Tyger and died in that fire as a result of that fire. But as long as we're on the subject of my need to report this side trip to Durango, I'd as soon not bother. I get to file enough in triplicate as it is."

Gilchrist leaned forward to light the cigar for Longarm as he chuckled and allowed he knew the feeling. "I ain't about to write up this social visit for the Denver & Rio Grande Western, if that's what you were hinting at, old son."

Longarm put down the empty shot glass and helped himself to a mouthful of less smoky-tasting smoke before he confessed he'd had such a shortcut in mind. Then he blew a thoughtful smoke ring and added, "I mean to ask around town, seeing I'm here, but might your company files hold anything on the other riders said to have been with Calvert Tyger when he somehow got the call to check into a mighty seedy roominghouse alone?"

Gilchrist shook his head. "I'd have said so if we'd noticed. Nobody working for the railroad knew any of 'em were here in Durango till that fire broke out a couple of weeks back. Since we do such police work as need be, we naturally took some interest as soon as we saw what we took for a handful of part-time laborers and full-time drunks had gone up in smoke. We'd planted 'em all in Potter's Field, like I said, before anyone put the name of one victim together with that of a wanted outlaw."

Longarm blew another thoughtful smoke ring. "My short and sweet notes on the case do mention other unfortunates who died in both mysterious fires, now that you mention it. So how come we know so much about that one particular screamer, seeing he was a stranger in town?"

Gilchrist poured another shot in the glass at Longarm's elbow as he answered easily. "Because he was a stranger, of course. Most of the drifters who'd checked into that roominghouse naturally got out in time. At sunrise they and some townsmen who'd hired various old boys for a few hours' work now and again were able to identify all but the one cadaver. Nobody came forward for him. But the night clerk at the rooming house had saved their books, and like I said, once someone noticed Tyger was wanted so often in so many places ..."

"Get back to the part about him screaming so much before they found him in that fetal position," Longarm urged. "Didn't anyone else object to being burnt alive in there?"

Gilchrist shook his head. "The ones sober enough to yell got out sudden when the room clerk sounded the alarm. The same old clerk recalled Tyger as having paid two bits extra for a separate room, or cubicle, with a door you could bolt on the inside. All the others who failed to wake up in time were trapped further toward the back wall. The volunteers figured the bewildered cuss in that locked cubicle woke up in a strange place, blinded by smoke, and died trying to escape by way of the wardrobe against the back wall instead of the one real door at the other end. They found him in the ruins near what would have been the back of his bitty private cell had the plank walls still been standing. The poor bastard could've kicked his way out any way but through the stout oak wardrobe he was trying to escape through."

Longarm grimaced as he pictured it, and worse yet, sort of felt the bewilderment the trapped man must have felt when, flinging open what he thought to be the door of his cubicle, he'd stepped into that tall oak wardrobe against the wrong wall!

He started to ask another dumb question. He didn't, because it was obvious the volunteer firemen or railroad dicks would have made mention of any large sum of paper money they'd found miraculously preserved among the ashes of a burned-down and water-drenched frame structure. He swallowed the last of the liquor instead and got back to his feet, saying, "We both know why no pals of a wanted man came forward to identify his body, if that was his body. We're more certain that was the real Brick Flanders butchered and baked over in Denver more recently."

Gilchrist rose to walk him out front. "Glass eyes and gold teeth do say more about a well-done cadaver. How do you like a second in command using the name of his dead boss to confound us all further?"

Longarm didn't like it that much. But he never said so, lest he waste more time with a cuss, however agreeable, who didn't know one thing more about that fire in Denver or the note cashed in Minnesota than anyone else on the side of the law.

He allowed he'd see if the boys in the back rooms up the way knew anything about other strangers, the one called Chief in particular, who'd passed through Durango about the same time as the late Calvert Tyger. Then he asked when he could catch a train out. But Gilchrist said there wouldn't be another train in or out this side of sunrise, explaining, "The engineers are sort of unsure about the tracks ahead. So we have no call to cross the Divide by the dark of the moon."

To which Longarm could only answer, "Shit, I'll just have to study on finding me a room for the night then. Is it safe to say most new folks in town will have already booked their own rooms for the rest of the night by this late?"

Gilchrist agreed that seemed just about the size of it. So they parted friendly and Longarm ambled over to the one main street in no great hurry. For there was more than one primitive but brand-new hotel in the brand-new mushroom town, and if they couldn't fix him up at one he could always ask at another, or in a pinch, sleep sitting up in a lobby chair for the usual dime tip.

There was little going on in any of the four saloons and the one pool hall he dropped into long enough for a short beer and such few words as he could get out of anybody. It was the wrong night of the week and too far from payday for a town that tiny to show that much action along a public thoroughfare. It was tough for a new cuss in any town to find the high-stakes gambling and serious sinning the money folks indulged in behind closed doors and drawn curtains. So nobody he could get into a conversation with could recall much about that rooming house fire, even if they'd been in Durango a whole fortnight.

Longarm had a light supper of elk venison steak smothered in chili con carne under two fried eggs, washed that and the service-berry pie down with buttermilk instead of the usual black coffee--lest he find it tough to fall asleep sitting up--and headed for the nearest hotel with no baggage but his Winchester cradled in the crook of his right elbow with his thumb through the trigger guard.

It was easy to shift the saddle gun so its muzzle and fifteen-round magazine preceded him along the shadowy planking of the partly covered sidewalk as he walked with some interest in the direction of a gal complaining low and a male cussing loud in a drunken tone.

As Longarm drifted closer, unseen by anyone involved in the late night dispute, he saw the gal was in more trouble than he'd first expected. For the cowhand holding on to one arm of the gal in a dark velveteen riding habit was loudly calling her an infernally stuck-up whore. The two riders with him were just ogling her like hungry coyotes closing in on a newly yeaned calf with its momma off somewhere else.

Longarm told himself gang rapes were more unusual than lots of asshole remarks to an unescorted gal along Saloon Row, even in the town of Durango. Then he told himself that even if they were serious, the gal was likely partly to blame and Durango, dammit, had a half-ass company police force that was supposed to watch out for such rowdy behavior. Then he told himself that he was the only peace officer in sight and that the gal seemed really worried as she tried to get free, protesting, "Unhand me, sir! I'm not the sort of girl you seem to take me for, and I'll tell my husband if you get fresh with me!"

One of the ones just standing by, as if for his turn, laughed dirty and jeered, "You ain't wearing no ring for the same reasons you ain't got no man of your own, Amarillo Annie. You must really take us for tenderfeet if you hope to fool us with such a high and mighty act, you two-bit cunt!"

Longarm had heard enough. He stepped out of the shadows, saddle gun aimed politely at the planking between them, as he called out in a conversational tone, "Evening, Miss Annie. They told me you'd lit out just before I arrived to escort you... wherever it was you aimed to go."

The gal didn't answer. She was no fool. But the one who had her by one arm sneered, "She aims to go with us and you'd be well advised to stay out of this, pilgrim."

Longarm smiled pleasantly enough, considering how tricky the light was, but let an edge of steel creep into his voice when he softly but firmly replied, "I can see by the way all three of you wear your guns that you could be headed into a situation much like the one in that sad old song about the eastbound herd bull and the westbound train. I don't want to brag, but I am not a cowhand in town with a skinful, and even if I was, I got more rounds in the tube of this one Winchester than you could possibly have in the wheels of the two guns you seem to be packing betwixt the three of you. So don't tell this child whether he ought to stay in or out of anything, and Miss Annie just told you to let go her arm, amigo mio!"

The other one, who seemed more sure of the gal's social status, tried not to sound worried as he cautioned, "You don't want to get in a fight with three grown men over Amarillo Annie, pard. Don't you know what she is?"

To which Longarm could only reply in a dead-level way, "I do. She's the lady you all just heard me offer to escort on to wherever she may want to go. I'd sure hate to hear anyone call any lady I'm escorting anything less than a lady. For that would make me a sort of fool, in your eyes leastways, and that would mean I'd have to make you look even more foolish, wouldn't it?"

The one still holding the gal's arm, although not as firmly, tried a nervous horse laugh and blustered, "Hell, I see one of him and three of us, too spread out for him to get more than one of us as we both draw, Slim."

What the skinny one with the other six-gun might have answered remained a mystery. The gal they'd been tormenting wrenched her arm free and declared, "Now stop it this instant! Don't you silly kids know you're trying to scare the one and original Longarm, and him with the drop on you?"

The one who'd been about to grab for her arm some more crawfished back as if he'd just noticed a diamondback he'd been fixing to tread on barefoot. The skinny one with the other six-gun worn too high for a side-draw gulped and protested, "Nobody here never said nothing about scaring nobody, Miss Annie. Can't you take a little joke?"

The gal didn't answer. So he tried the same question on Longarm, who shrugged and quietly asked, "How about you, Miss Annie? Do we take all this as kid stuff and let 'em live, or would you like the three of them stuffed and mounted?"

By the time she'd grudgingly decided to let it go this one time, she and Longarm seemed to be alone on the walk. But he offered her a free elbow and suggested softly, "We'd best duck into this slot and let me carry you on from the far side of the block, ma'am. It's been my sad experience that some sore losers are inclined to wait up ahead in the shadows after you think you've backed 'em down."

The gal in dark velveteen slipped a gloved hand through the crook of his left elbow, and there was just room for the two of them to go side by side through some mighty dark shadows, dog-legging along that alleyway in line with the street out front, and then slip through yet another slot to the street beyond as he told her to hush every time she started to say something to him.

Once they'd crossed to the far side of the residential street he'd led her to, Longarm told her, softly, "We can talk now, long as we talk soft and walk no louder. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, as you seem to have guessed, and you still have the advantage on me, ma'am."

She sighed. "I might have known you didn't remember me, Custis. You really were just being your gallant self, to a gal in trouble who was really what they said she was for all you knew."

She hugged his arm to her nicely padded bodice and added, "They said you were like that, when you and me and the world were younger over in Dodge."

There were no street lamps, and the moon was only a thin fingernail paring of light in the starry sky above. So Longarm had to stare at her upturned face a while, noting she was sort of pretty or at least not downright deformed, as he replied uncertainly, "Are we speaking of you and me in Dodge before or after I started packing a badge six or eight years ago, Miss Annie?"

"Annie Newton, back in '72," she replied wistfully, and went on. "You were still punching cows and I was a skinny chambermaid at the Drover's Rest that afternoon you saved my virtue from yet another trail herder who'd come back to the hotel early to catch me alone upstairs, he thought."

She laughed girlishly. "I can still see him flopping like a rag doll down those stairs you sent him, and I guess you did do it because you thought it was only right. For you never got fresh with me yourself, even after I'd called you my hero and got up on my tippy-toes to kiss you smack on the mouth!"

Longarm broke stride to spin her around and bend closer as he marveled, "You're that bitty orphan child that drunk from my old outfit was scaring that time? Well, I never, and Lord have mercy if you ain't growed some since that day in Dodge, Miss Annie."

She softly murmured, "I feel even older. For I've been scared a lot since. But they call me Amarillo Annie because I was working there until recent. I was dealing blackjack, just in case that matters to you, Custis. I deal cards these days at that Pronghorn Saloon up the street a ways. Sometimes I have the sort of trouble you just got me out of with idiots who think a gal willing to lie down with them for money would stay on her feet like that, hour after hour, for the commission the house pays a dealer."

Longarm nodded. "I figured they were idjets too. So where would you like me to carry you from here, Miss Annie?"

She said she lived up the slope and a couple of corners to the south. So that was the way they walked in the faint moonlight, with her doing most of the talking as she caught up on the more recent career of a handsome cowhand she'd once had a young girl's dreams about. It was her idea to confide that he could have had her virginity, once she'd kissed a grown man for the very first time and noticed how exciting it felt. He wasn't cruel enough to tell her he'd paid little attention to the shy lips of a little orphan gal. But as if she could read his mind, as they got to the gate of her hillside cottage, she confided, "I've followed your fame as a lawman in the papers, Custis. I was so surprised to read about you in that shootout shortly after you'd been so sweet to me in Dodge. But then I read where you'd been in the war even earlier, and so I suppose that to you I was just a silly little kid, even kissing you as grown-up as I knew how, right?"

"Wrong," he lied gallantly, moving the Winchester out of their way to kiss her some more in her front yard the way he figured she'd want to be kissed good night, these days.

Then he suspected, from the way she was kissing back, good night was not what she had in mind just yet. For this time, while she still had to stand on her toes to get at him right, her kissing was nothing at all like he dimly recalled from that awkward day in Dodge. He was sure glad he smoked instead of chewed as her nosy tongue seemed intent on exploring his surprised mouth. She sucked his tongue deep too when he tried to return the favor, and it was just as well she seemed to be hauling him inside her unlit cottage, once he considered where she'd grabbed hold of him to haul.

It was black as a bitch indoors, but when he tried to strike a light she blew it out, gasping, "No. Don't spoil it with the cruel teeth of time, Custis. Take me as if we were still a young cowhand and a maiden of fifteen!"

He allowed he'd be more than willing, if she'd lead him to some less vertical position. So she did, and they wound up across a bed in the blackness with her clutching at his duds and vice versa till he was in her, both of them still half dressed, and going at it with more enthusiasm than he'd thought he'd saved up aboard that train from Denver. She moved in a way no fifteen-year-old would have ever moved in, biting down hard with her vaginal muscles as she slid up and down his erection in time with his thrusts, gasping downright embarrassing love words as she pleaded with him to make a woman of her at last, after all these years. So he did his best, and managed to get them both entirely undressed by the time he'd come in her a second time. It was her fourth, according to her. When she shyly repeated she'd known it would be grand with him, although not this grand, he was too polite to observe she'd sure as shooting done it with somebody a lot to get that good at losing her virginity.

He finally got her to let him stop long enough to smoke at least one cheroot and maybe get his second wind. But when he thumbnailed a light with their naked bodies together across the rumpled sheets, she turned her head away, as if not wanting him to see more than the way her jet-black hair came out of the base of her skull mousy brown. He looked the other way, spied a candlestick on the bed table, and lit the candle along with his cheroot.

When she softly protested, Longarm got rid of the match and gently reached across her swell tits to take her small chin in hand and turn her face toward the light.

She sobbed, "Oh, Custis, you don't look like I remembered, and I've gotten so old and plain since then!"

He blinked in bemused delight. "I see what you mean about us both screwing somebody else just now. But it wasn't that long ago you were too young for me, and to tell the truth, I find you just about right and even prettier than I thought whilst I was coming with some other image just a moment or so ago."

She archly suggested they come some more by candlelight, and asked how long he'd be in town. Like most men, Longarm had found gals tended to freeze up on a man or demand a honeymoon's worth of humping when he told them they'd likely part by the cold gray light of dawn. So he answered, truthfully enough when you studied on it, "Ain't sure. My boss never sent me to Durango to begin with, and now that I'm here I ain't sure just what I was expecting to find."

She grasped his semi-erection firmly and forked a shapely and now full-grown leg across his naked flesh to impale herself on his suddenly inspired shaft, demurely demanding to know if he was disappointed in what he'd found in Durango so far.

Longarm laughed up at her sweet face and bouncing candle-lit bosom. "I like surprises more than I can say. So I'll just have to show you. But no offense, Miss Annie, you wasn't exactly what I was expecting to investigate in Durango."

She allowed no offense was taken as he rolled her on her back to treat her right in a softer, more romantic way. They took turns puffing on the cheroot with half his weight on one elbow. He was pleased to learn she knew how nice it could be that way too, despite all her virginity bullshit. For once a man and woman got past the mad dash for eternal orgasm, it could be mighty nice to just drift together down the currents of togetherness with calmer but lingering pleasures.

She followed his drift, dilating and tightening her innards in time with his languid thrusts as they shared a smoke and conversed like pals over coffee and dessert. He told her more about his own reasons for being in Durango, and added, "Seeing a lady dealing blackjack sees more of life than, say, a schoolmarm, I don't suppose you'd have noticed if anyone had been flashing hundred-dollar treasury notes where the lights are brighter late at night?"

She shook her head, putting the cheroot back between his lips as she replied, "Betting a twenty in paper raises an eyebrow and calls for the floor manager, Custis. Most of the miners and railroad men out our way are paid in silver cartwheels. A top hardrock man draws a double eagle in gold. The boys don't cotton much to paper, and the house likes it even less."

She thrust her hips for a better grip on him as she calmly went on. "Trying to cash a hundred dollars in paper would cause way more excitement in Durango than a Chinaman trying to marry that schoolmarm you just mentioned. What made you ask such a question to begin with?"

He got rid of the cheroot so he could roll her higher atop that pillow under her bare behind, and got deeper in the saddle with her soft thighs hugging his hips while he nuzzled her naked collarbone and explained, "Like I told you, that gang led by a cuss who seems to keep dying in one rooming house fire after another grabbed a heap of hundred-dollar treasury notes up Fort Collins way."

She seemed to be paying less attention as he continued. "Cashing hundred-dollar treasury notes attracts raised eyebrows no matter who tries to cash one, anywhere outside a bank, and you'd play the fool trying to cash a stolen hundred-dollar note in any bank worth its charter."

She murmured, "If you say so, darling. Could you move in in me a little faster?"

He could, and did, but whether she really cared or not he said, or panted, "I asked about somebody trying to cash such paper in a gambling house because I was on another case a spell back, on this same side of the Divide, where outlaws were trying to account for their ill-gotten gains by passing it off as gaming house winnings. But riding off to a remote mining town with the proceeds of that payroll robbery sounds even dumber when nobody seems to have cashed any of the proceeds and... Never mind, spread them sweet legs and come with Pappa!"

She did. It felt so good it almost hurt him, and seemed to cause her considerable agony, judging by the way she was moaning and groaning and carrying on till they somehow wound up with him pounding her even harder dog-style. She called him a brute for abusing her in such a beastly way and threatened to strangle him with her bare hands if he dared to take it out with her right on the razor's edge of infinite pleasure that would last for all eternity.

Then she came and said, "Shit. I was trying to make it last too. What was that about dying in one rooming house fire after another? I've heard of going back for second helpings of this hot stuff, Custis, but wouldn't one rooming house fire be enough for anybody?"

He planted his bare feet wider on the rug, and got a friendly grip on either of her hipbones so he could keep it in half soft as he explained. "I don't buy the same Calvert Tyger burning to death more than once, if he ever burned to death at all. We know for a fact who one of the victims was. I ain't sure it matters who they buried here in Durango by the same name. The real mystery, as soon as you study on it, was why in thunder anybody would check into any rooming house as Calvert Tyger to begin with."

Amarillo Annie arched her spine to encourage his questing moist glans as she shrugged her bare shoulders and suggested, "Isn't it likely somebody checking into a place on the sneak would give them a false name, darling?"

To which he could only reply, with a friendly thrust indeed, "I just said that was the mysterious part. Why in thunder would even a wanted outlaw check into anywhere under the name of another wanted outlaw? Calvert Tyger was wanted more seriously than the late Brick Flanders. I'm still working on who the cuss here in Durango might have been. But no matter who he was or what he was hiding, would it make sense for him to register under a name appearing on all those federal wanted flyers?"

She thrust her bare bottom upwards and backwards to encourage him as she insisted, "Whoever they were, and whyever they did it, they did it, didn't they? Maybe they thought this Calvert cuss wasn't wanted as badly as they were. Wouldn't that explain it?"

He muttered, "Not hardly. The bounty on Jesse James is double that of the one on Billy the Kid. But could you see Jesse checking into some hotel as Billy the Kid, so the local law wouldn't check up on who might be bedded down upstairs?"

She agreed that sounded dumb, and asked if she could get on top again if he was going to take so infernally long while he chewed a poor girl's ear off. So he let her, and he was glad he had, once she'd braced a bare heel to either side of his naked hip and literally jerked him off with her shapely bounding body. For it was true what some kindly philosopher, likely French, had said about a man's mind never being clearer than right after a good lay.

He felt sane as hell as he lay there in the cozy candlelight with a pretty gal snuggled close and telling him how smart he was. His completely satisfied flesh let his brain drift any way it wanted to as it tried to make sense out of the little he really knew.

The only trouble was, thinking clear and detached as he was, he still couldn't make a lick of sense of anything he'd been able to find out so far.

CHAPTER 6

The Durango Free Press was set up across from the Western Union office near the depot. Longarm found a little gray gnome sticking type behind the counter blocking access to the presses and such in back of him. Longarm introduced himself, and the gnome looked sort of wistful and went on about his two-fisted chore as he asked what he could do for a cuss who didn't want to place an advertisement or even buy a damned paper.

Longarm said, "I've already read your swell paper over breakfast with a pal this morning. Read some back issues on the premises as well. I know you never run no photo-engravings of that jasper who went up in smoke as Calvert Tyger a spell back, but in the unlikely event you took any pictures of the dismal scene..."

"We never did," the gnome said. "We can't afford that newfangled Ben Day process, and if we could we'd have never wanted to run no picture of that mess they hauled outten that burnt-down rooming house across the tracks. I heard you was in town and considering an exhumation order. Take my advice and leave the well-done remains in the ground. His own mother wouldn't have recognized him as they were lowering him down, and the worms have had their way with him by this time."

Longarm nodded soberly. "A tad over six feet tall and weighing around one-eighty, the last anyone on our side saw of him alive and raw. Might have been harder to judge as they dug him out of the ashes curled up in a ball and baked like a potato, though."

The older man grimaced. "You'd do well to rake your spuds out of the coals before they bake that black. I was there and it could have been most any cuss, or critter, you'd like it to be. But your description of Calvert Tyger don't fit the Calvert Tyger we had here in Durango for a week or more before that fire."

Longarm said, "Neither did the glass-eyed cuss who died down in Denver under the same name. What did your Calvert Tyger look like, and how come you recall him at all, seeing he was here such a short time?"

The newspaper man wrinkled his nose. "You'd be as apt to recall a dapper dresser who favored a velvet frock coat and a lavender brocaded vest, and who lit up one of them violet-scented French cigarettes he smoked. After that he was just a tad taller than me but way under six feet, and couldn't have tipped the scales at one-fifty with his boots on. Some say he won at draw poker more often than such a sissy might find safe in towns as raw as Durango. So to tell the truth, I was set to publish his epitaph a good three days before he died in a more unusual way than I'd been expecting."

Longarm reached absently for two cheroots as he mused half to himself, "Tinhorns living dangerously have been known to use the name and rep of somebody more dangerous. But it's odd that you had him down as a gambling man from down this way when a certain blackjack dealer up the street couldn't tell me anything at all about such a spectacular sport."

The newspaper man accepted the offered smoke with a nod of thanks. "No mystery there. Tyger or whoever he was was a professional to begin with, and a sissy boy after that. He'd have never been interested in betting against them pretty gals at the sucker palace up the street. His game was draw poker, like I said, played in the back room of the Strand Saloon most often."

Longarm thumbed a matchhead aflame and lit them both before he suggested, "Run that part about him being a sissy boy past me some more. Were you talking about the way he dressed or the way he liked to make love?"

The older man took a drag, grinned dirty, and said, "Both. He dressed like a sissy, walked like a sissy, and while I never got to watch, he was seen more often in the company of young boys than any kind of gals. Some say he haunted the gin mills and rooming houses on the wrong side of the tracks because of the young drifters who've got less choice about such matters than a half-way lucky tinhorn."

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and cautiously observed, "A pal of mine who writes for the Denver Post keeps telling me a newspaper reporter hears lots of things and has lots of suspicions it's best not to print, lest somebody proves you wrong or sues your ass off."

The cruder version of the Post's more polished Reporter Crawford nodded. "That's true. There was heaps of gossip, vicious to common sense, when that sissy went up in flames. Are you asking me official or like a pal just smoking and bullshitting with you?"

Longarm agreed they were only bullshitting. So the newspaper man said, "I'll swear I never said this if you try to use it in court as my say-so. But try her this way. There was a handsome young cowboy and queer whore, according to some, who dropped out of sight the same time. I've never said this to a soul before, but we all like to play detective like Mister Poe, even when we don't write stories for a living. So what if a rich sissy took a poor sissy to his own bitty room and they had a lovers' quarrel?"

Longarm considered and replied, "Any serious wrestling in a small space lit by a candle or an oil lamp could get mighty heated, and an upset stranger would be more likely to charge into a wardrobe than somebody who knew his way out through the smoke."

The older man cackled. "I always figured I'd have made a good detective if I hadn't won that old hand press in a card game on my way West. Would you agree your average sissy boy who'd just about cremated a queer whore with friends in town would have felt any call to linger here in Durango?"

Longarm shook his head. "Most gents in such a fix would be as worried about the local law, whether the victim had friends or not."

Then he blew another smoke ring and quietly added, "That's not to say a queer whore who beat, robbed, and roasted a customer had any call to hang around either. You'd better give me the name and some description of that wayward youth, pard."

The newspaper man did, as Longarm got out his notebook to take down the probably fake name of Jake Brown and the banal description: a slender youth, dressed cow and having nothing to set him apart from your average run-of-the-mill white cowhand or saddle tramp pretending to be a cowhand as he scouted for easier money in a land of opportunity.

Longarm put the notes away as he shrugged and opined, "It's sure starting to look like I've been chasing down a false lead. I wish we didn't have to do that so often. But the only way you can tell is by trying. So I thank you for your help in eliminating the late Calvert Tyger of Durango as any likely lead to the whereabouts of the outlaws I had in mind."

As he started to turn away, the newspaper man said, "Hold on, old son! Don't you care whether it was that boy-lover or the boy he was out to love who left the other to die in that fire and is still running wild?"

Longarm shook his head. "Not hardly. I'm packing a federal badge, and heated lovers' quarrels in local rooming houses ain't federal, praise the Lord. I got enough on my plate with those more serious outlaws who rode off with a federal payroll. As I put what you just told me together, it seems like a tinhorn who didn't even know how to dress sensible adopted the name of a more ferocious gunslick in the hopes of not having any gunfights at all. He got himself in a whole other mess entire. If he was the one who got out alive, like I said, it's a local matter. If it was that kid called Brown, it's still a local matter. I ain't packing no federal wants on a squirt called Jake Brown. I'll allow he describes like heaps of cow-town drifters, but there was nothing about queers in any of the yellow sheets we have on the real gang led by the one and original Calvert Tyger. So it's been nice talking to you, but if I don't get it on down the road my boss told me to take, I'm likely to get my own ass fried to a crisp!"

So they shook on it and parted friendly. Longarm would have felt even dumber as he boarded the train that morning if Amarillo Annie hadn't fried him up those swell scrambled eggs without crisping them at all.

CHAPTER 7

There was no way to run a railroad through the Rockies that didn't involve a certain amount of exciting scenery. So the two young gals seated behind Longarm were squeaking like mice by the time the eastbound D&RG combination was two hours out of Durango.

Longarm was tempted to turn and tell them the few hairpin turns and nine-degree grades on this line were kid stuff next to that new narrow-gauge they were running north to Silverton out of Durango. But he never did. The gals were kid stuff as well, neither was all that pretty, and it was a caution how expensive it could get to soda-and-sandwich three passengers on this infernal line.

He decided to read instead. His saddlebags and most of his possibles were riding up forward in the baggage car, but he had a recent issue of the Police Gazette and the onionskins of that payroll robbery to peruse as the train commenced to scare the wits out of those two young squaws with the mountains to the east getting a mite more dramatic. He failed to see why they insisted on staring out the downhill windows if they found the view so frightening. It was tempting to point out there was nothing to look at but walls of dynamited rock if they'd only move across the aisle and stare that damned way. But starting up with squeaky young gals was a lot like dipping into a cracker barrel. Once you got started, it was a chore to stop. So he just let them squeak as he read in the Police Gazette how some London society gal had been dropped by the old Prince of Wales and his set for getting too familiar with his nibs. That was what they called putting ice cream down the back of an old drunk's stuffed shirt, getting too familiar. The gal sounded like a mite more fun to Longarm than the prince's usual play-pretties. But on the other hand Longarm wasn't as old, stuffy, and married up. Fair was fair, and Longarm had to allow a prince might have a chore explaining all that ice cream in his underwear to his handsome but humorless princess once he got home.

Longarm didn't really care who got to drink with the Prince of Wales these days, and he failed to see what all that fuss about Miss Sarah Bernhardt was about. He'd met the Divine Sarah that time they'd asked him to bodyguard her on her Western tour, and she'd made no mystery of the simple fact she'd been born Jewish but partly raised by Catholic nuns and hence felt as comfortable, or uncomfortable, praying either way. The current dispute seemed to have something to do with Miss Sarah's unconventional ways with men and other pets she liked to lead about on leashes. Longarm had found her a good old gal who'd only kissed him like a sister that time he'd saved her life. But it seemed the French Jews and Catholics were having a serious row over her now, with the Catholics insisting she was Jewish and the outraged Jews insisting she'd been baptized by those nuns and so the Catholic Church was more than welcome to such a flashy thing.

Longarm didn't bother to finish the dumb news item. He found it mighty tedious that grown men could really care what an actress did or didn't do just to work up some curiosity about her show. Longarm had been too polite to ask, but the Divine Sarah had told him to his face she'd never slept in a coffin or kept a live crocodile in her bathtub like some said. But those Jew-baiters he'd had to save her from out Virginia City way must have believed even worse tales about her judging from the wild way they'd carried on.

This old world seemed filled with folks who carried on wild as all hell over nothing much. It was one of the reasons he was packing his badge and guns. He'd found some of the wildest bastards convinced of their own God-given right to raise hell in the name of some half-ass excuse, such as Frank and Jesse's conviction they were riding for a Confederate Army they'd never been enlisted in to protect kith and kin from the cruel advances of the Missouri Pacific, which ran way the hell over on the far side of their state but deserved to be robbed in any case, according to them.

Calvert Tyger's gang of Galvanized Yankees seemed to have worn their own fight for the Lost Cause a mite thin, to Longarm's way of thinking. The James boys, at least, could be said not to know any better, since their only military experience had been with half-assed guerrilla bands who'd never surrendered for the simple reason nobody had ever asked them to. But Tyger had enlisted in the real rebel army, been captured fair and square, and enlisted in the Union Army so he could get out of Sandusky Prison and fight the Santee.

That romantic bull about two flags waving at Little Crow side by side, as boys in blue and gray civilized him with butt stock and bayonet, was postwar twaddle. Calvert Tyger and his pals had foresworn the Confederacy a good spell before Lee's surrender, and would have been free to head home the same as any other Union vets had they not deserted both armies in time of war.

One of the young gals behind Longarm squeaked "I can't look! Tell me when it's over!"

Longarm glanced out his own window as he set the Police Gazette to one side and dug out the sheaf of typed-up onionskins Henry had given him. The tracks wound gently alongside the brawling San Juan through the South Ute Reserve near the New Mexico line, and what the hell, most everyone aboard figured to live if this old car jumped the tracks and rolled no more than three or four times down that forty-five-degree slope. He wondered what those gals were fixing to squeak when they got to the really high hairpins further up the line. His own asshole had puckered some the first time he'd been over that series of sheer-drop zigzags along the Pinos on the far side of the Divide, where the ranges rose more steep and craggy.

He'd read Henry's terse but thorough rundown on the Tyger bunch and their recent robberies a dozen times since leaving Denver on what seemed to have been a wild-goose chase. He read them again, with the breeze through the open window fluttering the corners of the thin pages as he searched once more for some pattern that made a lick of sense.

The double turncoat and his half-dozen followers had shot up that federal paymaster's office at Fort Collins as gleefully and senselessly as a wolverine raiding a box full of kittens. A stenographer gal they'd spared after some mock gallantry had given the same description as the one wounded clerk who'd not been hit as bad as he'd let on. The other four men on the premises had been gunned down like dogs after they'd opened the damned safe and given up the damned money. The paymaster in charge, who'd told the others not to put up a fight, had doubtless seen how tough a time they were going to have with those high-denomination treasury notes, intended to pay government expenses rather than salaries at that time of the year. The gal said Tyger had cussed her boss about those hundred-dollar notes before gunning him, as if it had been the poor paymaster's fault. Tyger had never been accused of deep thinking. Longarm was hardly the first lawman who'd wondered why a nondescript outlaw who was said to be fairly well educated insisted on being so famous.

Frank and Jesse, the Youngers, and that stubborn young rascal they called Billy the Kid down Lincoln County way tended to get named a lot because they perforce hung out in the same parts, where lots of admiring folks knew them and tended to gossip about them even as they were helping them hide out.

But nobody riding with Tyger, Flanders, and that more mysterious Chief had ever gone home after the war. They seemed to roam all over the Far West with no particular base the law had any line on. So why would even a mad-dog killer take such pains to let the law know just who they were after? Anyone you were robbing at gunpoint was just as likely to turn over the money whether you said your name was Smith or Jones, and the law would take far longer as they tried to figure out who'd done it.

"Oh, Dear Lord!" wailed the fatter of the two gals behind him as they rounded a turn at a speed even Longarm considered a tad sudden for a sheer drop of a good two hundred yards.

"Road company picking up extra actors!" Longarm suddenly said aloud as he rose from his seat and put the onionskins away so as to spare his ears what was coming next.

What was coming next involved a shaky trestle over a headwaters branch of an ominous river valley. Screaming gals had a way of distracting a man even when he was interested in them, and he was on to something he hadn't considered before as he strode on out to the forward platform where a man could smoke and think in peace.

As he cupped his big hands around a match to get a cheroot going in the cross winds of the platform, he thought back to that time on the road with the Divine Sarah's road company. He'd seen right off how they saved a heap of fancy salaries for French actors by just keeping the key players on the payroll as they traveled from town to town. Once they got to where they meant to put on another show, they could easily hire local talent, or even unemployed cowhands, to put on a costume and just stand around carrying a spear or waving a fan while the few professionals did all the real acting. Those Mormon gals in Ogden had made fairly convincing Egyptian slaves for Miss Cleopatra, or would have had not they insisted on wearing their special Mormon underwear along with their otherwise revealing stage costumes.

But getting part-time help to act convincing hadn't been Longarm's chore, and everyone agreed the Tyger bunch had been acting far more vicious than smart. So say no more than those three original deserters wandered from place to place, picking up extra help as needed amongst the drifting riffraff you found most everywhere. A down-on-his-luck drifter without the balls to pull robberies on his own would need some encouragement to join up for even one job. But a gang leader with a rep would have less trouble picking up a part-time gang. That accounted for the bragging, and it wasn't too tough to buy a tinhorn sissy boy trying to cash in on some real or fancied resemblance to a tougher gunfighter in the hopes of staying out of gunfights. But in that case, why in blue blazes had the late Brick Flanders been using the name of Calvert Tyger in that other rooming house?

Another passenger came out between cars. He was dressed cow, and both shorter and younger-looking than Longarm. As they nodded and Longarm made room for the other man to pass, he wondered idly where the young cowhand thought he was going. He was fairly sure why another male passenger would want to head forward as those two young gals commented on the scenery shrilly, but the next car forward was the baggage car, with the mail and then freight cars beyond. Maybe the jasper was after something in his own saddlebags. He hadn't been anyone the law was after.

Or had he?

Longarm turned just in time. It was still a good thing he had a good grip on a boarding grab-iron as the total stranger hit him stiff-armed, with all his weight, to send Longarm over the side, or try to. Then the bigger deputy grabbed a fistful of shirt with his free hand and raised a long leg to knee the wild-eyed cuss clean off his feet.

His attacker swung wildly, even as he howled in agony. But Longarm caught most of the blow with a suddenly shrugged shoulder, as he hauled the lighter man in and butted him in the face with his forehead. Then Longarm's hat was gone, and so was the total stranger, who'd tried to shove him off the train as it rumbled across that high trestle those gals were doubtless screaming about in the car behind.

The stranger screamed too, all the way down to the narrow ribbon of white water, which blossomed pink for a moment before his shattered body and all that bloody foam were whipped downstream by the ferocious current.

The train hissed to a stop on the far side of the trestle, and Longarm had just recovered his hat from a far corner of the platform when the conductor came out to yell, "Some female passenger says she saw a man falling off back yonder, and another asshole pulled the emergency cord. I don't suppose you'd know who we're talking about, cowboy?"

Longarm shrugged and replied, "Can't say anyone I'd ever seen before fell off any train." He was in a hurry, and it was likely to take days or weeks before that body hung up on some damned something way downstream. And because what he'd just said was the simple truth as soon as you studied every word.

CHAPTER 8

The next nine hundred miles or more were tedious as hell. For while a flirty gal got on at Trinidad, and an even prettier flirt came aboard at K.C. to sit across the aisle as innocent as a mink in season, Longarm was as considerate a lover as other gals allowed he was, and it wouldn't have been considerate to risk either gal's innocent ass getting peppered with lead just because they both looked so tempting. That jasper who'd swan dove off the trestle had seemed mighty determined, and since Longarm was sure he'd never done a thing to a total stranger, it was even-money he'd been sent by somebody else with a personal hard-on for a lawman who simply didn't know who he, she, or it might be!

He had no way of knowing whether his unknown enemy or enemies knew how poorly their errand boy had done. So there was a good chance he had nothing to worry about but his virtue as he kept avoiding those arch glances shot his way by two very pretty gals. He could tell they were aware of one another by now, and there was nothing like a rival flirt to turn a gal prick-teasing for practice into an all-out and go-for-broke nymphomaniac. Gals that worked up over a gent had been known to go for a three-in-a-bed orgy, with each trying to out-screw the other, rather than let a pretty rival win the whole game. So a man of some experience in such matters was inclined to tingle in his crotch a mite as he tried in vain not to picture a saucy little redhead and a statuesque brunette fighting over him without all those high-buttoned bodices and flouncy skirts confining their movements or his view. Lord, that bigger one's ass swung like it was a saloon door on payday every time she went forward to the water cooler at the end of their car.

But Longarm concentrated on the far less interesting gloom outside as the small redhead almost cartwheeled up to that cooler as if to make certain he hadn't missed the way she filled out that bodice of summer-weight calico. So by bedtime both gals were sore as hell, and there was no sensible way he could assure two pretty strangers he was out to save their lives by not hauling them both into a sleeping compartment and making mad Gypsy love till somebody made another try for him.

Having ridden this line before, and having let the conductor win a few hands of penny-ante in the wee small hours after the club car was officially closed, Longarm was able to fort up in one of those fancy sleeping compartments without paying extra. His conductor pal allowed he hated noise too, and agreed a passenger who might have somebody gunning for him would be safer out of sight. Longarm hoped he'd be out of mind as well. For he'd spent more than one night in a coach car, sitting up and trying not to think about a piece of ass he'd just missed out on.

It was tough enough lying down in a comfortable bunk, trying to concentrate on payroll robberies instead of redheads, brunettes, and such who'd doubtless find the bunk mighty cozy.

He never found out where either got off. Having forted up so fine, Longarm sent out for coffee, sandwiches, and reading matter all the way to Minnesota. The name was supposed to stand for Sky Blue Water in Santee, if you wanted to be poetic. An Indian Longarm had asked the last time he was this far east had allowed it meant more like chalky or dishwater-gray water. The Indian hadn't known why either name might apply. They had all sorts of water, as well as some mighty arid range, in such a fair-sized state.

Lots of folks considered Minnesota an eastern state, since it had been a state before the war and had so many farms and farm folks. But in fact, lots of it lay west of the Mississippi. The Santee country Longarm had been sent to lay in the drier southwest corner, just a spit and a holler east of the Dakotas.

He had to stay aboard till they stopped at New Ulm, the seat of Brown County, where the tracks crossed the Minnesota River. So he got to see quite a few miles of the Santee hunting ground, and it sure was a caution how much pure hell the folks called Sioux by most everyone but themselves could raise in such natural cavalry country.

Whether the gently rolling swells out yonder were covered with a blue-stem prairie dotted with groves of hardwood, or a forest with a lot of open glades all through it, depended on who you asked or just what stretch you were both talking about. The sub-tropical term "savannah" was used to describe such park-like mixtures of grassland and groves, although nobody who'd ever seen how it snowed up here in the winter would describe the place as sub-tropical.

The bluestem was still blue-green, going to tawny on the windier rises, thanks to all the rain they'd had across the West that last greenup. The trees were mostly oak atop the rises, with crack willow, box elder, and such along the bottoms of the draws. Longarm spied a heap of cows and no buffalo at all as they rolled on through lands the white man had stolen, according to the Santee, or bought fair and square off Indian-givers, according to Washington.

Such matters were not for Longarm to adjudicate. He hadn't been riding for the law when Little Crow, or at least his young men, had brought a long simmer to a boil by killing three white men and two white women, the prize for this shootout being less than a full dozen eggs from the homestead they'd hit.

Some said, whites included, that old Tshe-ton Wa-ka-wa Ma-ni, as he said his name in Santee, had tried to head off what he knew was coming, warning his followers they just didn't know what they were getting into. But of course, being a Santee, he had to lead them when they insisted on an all-out war with the Wasichu, lest they get their fool selves killed even faster.

They'd gotten killed soon enough, once an outraged Great White Father showed he wasn't too distracted by the war in the East to do nothing about the blood and slaughter along the Minnesota Valley. Sibley's Minnesota militia were gleefully exterminating Santee, having gained the upper hand after some earlier and mighty frightening reverses, by the time old Pope had made it west with his Union regulars and columns of Galvanized Yankees in time to mop up.

The onionskins failed to say whether Calvert Tyger and his reb pals had lit out before or after Abe Lincoln told the army to take it easy and pardoned all but a tenth of the bunch the army had been fixing to hang. According to the little they had on Israel Bedford, the Union vet and local homesteader who'd cashed that one treasury note in these parts didn't seem connected in any way with Galvanized Yankees, whether they'd deserted in time of war or served with honor and just gone on home to brag on being a vet of both sides.

But Bedford had cashed that bill, not long after a mess of federal employees had been gunned for such ill-gotten gains. So Bedford would be the first one up ahead to scout for sign, discreetly as possible, just in case he turned out to be the one who'd sent that kid to shove a lawman off a train.

It had been Longarm's experience that jaspers with guilty secrets to hide tended to want lawmen headed off before they got close enough to uncover the secrets.

Longarm had no idea, after all this time to study on it, if there was some secret connection between a mad-dog outlaw gang and a sober settler everyone seemed to have down as honest and upright. But that was how come they called such connections secret.

Longarm knew the baggage-smashers he'd tipped in advance would run his McClellan and possibles over to the baggage room of the New Ulm depot for him once they got there. In case his unknown enemies had other secrets planned for him, he ambled back to the rear observation platform and swung over the rail to hit the cross-ties running when the train slowed down on the outskirts of town. He still came close to killing his own fool self for any sons of bitches laying for him around the depot. But he landed in a patch of sunflower and rolled lightly back to his feet, Winchester at port arms, after tripping over a switch point while the train was running fifteen miles an hour.

As long as he was still moving quickly, Longarm sprang across a trackside ditch, crossed the dusty service road on the far side at a dead run, and hunkered down in the shady angle provided by a box elder growing against the plank fence of somebody's backyard.

He wasn't planning on hunkering there any longer than it took to catch his breath and gather his wits a bit. The odds on the smartest crooks in the world knowing where he'd drop off so they could set up an ambush more than a mile from the depot seemed mighty slim. So he doubted the lady staring over the fence at him from under a polka-dot sun-bonnet could have murder in mind. But she did sound determined as she scolded, "Get out of my tulips and explain yourself this very instant, young man!"

Longarm glanced down to confirm he had in fact flattened out a patch of cropped vegetation that might have sprouted as tulips a spell back. He grinned up sheepishly. "I doubt I damaged the bulbs along this fence, ma'am. But I'd be proud to buy you some new ones if you'd name your price. I'm U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, on a government mission and allowed to charge anything within reason to my expense account."

The woman on the far side of the sun-bleached planks sounded doubtful as she replied, "You're likely right about underground bulbs surviving your silly behavior. But would you like to show me some identification? You look like a hobo in need of a shave, I just saw you drop off that passing train, and I could say I was Queen Victoria if nobody asked me to prove it!"

Longarm got to his feet, holding the Winchester muzzle down in his free hand as he got out his billfold and flipped it open with a practiced motion to display his federal badge and personal identification. He gallantly suggested, "Nobody would ever buy a lady as young as yourself for the Widow of Windsor, ma'am."

He hadn't lied. He doubted she could be past fifty, and he could see she'd been a real beauty in her day. She still had most of her teeth, and if the hair peeking out from under that sun-bonnet was a mite streaked with gray, it was still thick and healthy-looking. Gals who shaded their features with sun-bonnets didn't prune up as fast in prairie country. So she looked downright comely when she smiled across the fence at him and said, "Well, I never. You come around to the front and let me coffee and cake you whilst you tell me all about it! Were you chasing somebody when I saw you leap from that speeding train, Custis? I didn't see anyone but you bearing down on me at breakneck speed, but then, I was cultivating my cabbages with this high fence between US."

"I wasn't chasing nobody, ma'am," he said, only hesitating a moment before he added, "I'll surely take you up on your kind offer. For anybody out to chase me round the depot figures to get discouraged when I don't get off that train and they don't see me anywhere downtown for a spell."

That would have roused most anyone's curiosity, and it turned out she was a woman who'd had few men to talk to since she'd wound up a widow three summers back. So he told her more or less why he was on the outskirts of her town, leaving out a few details. It was best to leave a certain amount of guilty knowledge to guilty folk, and far as Longarm knew, nobody in New Ulm was supposed to know about serial numbers one could backtrack to a payroll robbery but the bankers and the local lawmen who'd contacted Billy Vail about that treasury note. With any luck, the crooks who'd run off with them still didn't know the dead paymaster had listed the numbers on those larger notes. For nobody but a total asshole, or an innocent man, would try to spend any paper as hot as that.

His widowed hostess had shucked her sun-bonnet in the shade of her kitchen as she'd sat Longarm at a pine table and rustled some coffee and cake for the both of them. Her comfortably lived-in face looked softer once out of the harsher sunlight, and light brown hair streaked with gray looked sort of nice pinned up atop her fine-boned skull that way. She said the raisin cake she'd baked herself was an old Swedish recipe, and he wasn't surprised, since her name was Ilsa Pedersson nee Syse. She and her late husband had come to America from the Norwegian province of Sweden as kids, before Lincoln's Homestead Act cluttered up these parts with land-hungry Scandinavian folk. So that likely accounted for her natural English, although she confessed she could still talk her own sort of Swedish if push came to shove. She said most of the new American landowners were proud to be American now, and only talked their native languages during old-country festivals and such. She seemed surprised he already knew about Swedish children expecting a lady in a long white nightgown, with candles lit atop her head at Christmas instead of Santa Claus. Ilsa said it had to be fascinating to ride all over the country, meeting all sorts of folks and being allowed to question them without being called a nosy snoop.

He chuckled down at his coffee mug and confided, "I do get to ask about most anything I find interesting, Miss Ilsa. But seeing you know more folks around here than me, and couldn't be expected in advance to lie to the law, I've good reasons for asking if you've ever heard anything about a local homesteader called Israel Bedford."

The friendly old Swedish lady nodded, smiling. "Of course I recall Captain Bedford from that dreadful Sioux uprising during the war! You may have seen that famous photograph they took of all us women and children huddled together on a prairie rise, with the army guarding us, after Little Crow burned most of New Ulm and killed so many!"

Longarm nodded. "I've seen it. Some of you ladies looked sort of pretty despite your windblown and dusty appearances. But you all look sort of worried as well, and there's one pretty gal near the front, staring into the camera in sheer terror, as if it was a ghost."

The graying brown-haired woman across the table nodded gravely and said, "She might have been seeing ghosts. I know the face in the photograph you mean, albeit I've forgotten her name and exactly who in her family they killed. I was more fortunate. My man was riding with Sibley's Volunteers and we had no children. But the Sioux did some dreadful things to the young boy we had working in our dry-goods store at the time. They say they shoved wads of straw down the throat of one trading-post employee to swell his stomach like a balloon until it burst!"

Longarm nodded gravely and explained, "Trader named Andrew Myrick, in charge of the trading post at Redwood. It was Indians as told me about it. Seems that during a hungry stretch before the fighting got started, some starving Santee begged Myrick for food and he suggested they eat all the grass they liked."

He finished his coffee and dryly added, "Indians are inclined to possess sardonic notions of humor, as well as long memories."

She refilled his mug from her pot. "Pooh, neither me nor mine around New Ulm ever did anything to harm those Sioux. So why did they ride right through town, howling like wolves as they murdered, burned, and looted!"

Longarm suggested, "They were vexed with the Wasichu, ma'am. That's what they call us white folk, Wasichu. The Third Colorado figured a Cheyenne was a Cheyenne too, when they rode through that Indian camp along Sand Creek, howling like wolves as they murdered, looted, and burned. It's a mistake to consider such clashes to be melodrama, ma'am. Our relations with Mister Lo, The Poor Indian, make more sense as tragedy, with neither side all right or wrong, and we were talking about Israel Bedford, right?"

She shrugged her shoulders, perking up the small firm breasts he could just make out under her pleated calico in a surprising girlish way, as she told him flatly, "Captain Bedford was a kindly as well as gallant officer during the war. There was more to assisting hungry and homeless survivors than just chasing Indians away. I think he was in charge of the spare horses. I know he was in a position to issue supplies without the usual fuss and feathers others put us through."

She served him another slice of cake, unasked, as she went on to say, "My late husband and I were at the dance they staged to welcome the captain and his bride when they came back to Brown County about eight or ten years after the war. Life in the peacetime army hadn't agreed with an ambitious man and a farm-bred wife. So nobody was surprised when they bought the Bergen homestead and commenced to raise barley, ponies, and kids. Two girls and a boy, the last I heard, with another one on the way."

"Back up a ways and let's go over them buying a homestead claim, ma'am?"

She shrugged again, just as perky, and explained. "With money he'd saved up as a soldier, I suppose, Old Lars Bergen had proven his original claim and so the land was his to farm, let, or sell. They say the old man lost interest in his quarter section after losing one son in the war, another to prairie lightning, and then his wife coming down with the cholera and dying on him so nasty."

She grimaced, made a brushing motion, and continued in a brighter tone. "Suffice it to say the old Bergen place is a lot more cheerful these days. The Bedfords are good neighbors, even if they didn't come from the same old country. I still do business in town, so I can tell you their credit is good. Captain Bedford pays all his bills when due."

"That's what I heard," said Longarm thoughtfully. He had no call to tell her what he meant to ask at the bank. But she'd said at the start he looked sort of travel-stained, and he'd scare most bankers by striding in with a Winchester as well as a strange face. So he told her, "I sure could use some place to store my saddle gun for a spell, and you say you still have that dry-goods store in town, ma'am?"

She shook her head. "You can leave that rifle here with me if you like. We never rebuilt the place the Indians burned out. Since the railroad crossed the river I've done better taking orders for barbed wire, patent windmills, and such from this very house."

He allowed in that case he'd be proud to bring her anything she might need from town when he came back for his Winchester. When she asked when that might be he told her truthfully, "Can't say yet. I got some wires to send, some other errands to tend, and some calls to make around Courthouse Square. Then I got to find me a place to stay, hire me a pony to ride, and-"

"I've more than one spare room and two horses out back," she told him. "One of them draws my sulky, and I ride the other when I have to make time cross-country. So I can tell you it's a pretty good jumper, with my weight at least."

Longarm started to protest, he didn't want to put her to that much trouble. Then he considered how tough it might be for a hired gun to find out which hotel a stranger in town had registered at if he was holed up in a private home a good quarter mile away instead. So he nodded soberly and said, "I can easily get away with putting down a dollar a day for room and board, and most liveries hire mounts at two bits a day plus deposit, ma'am."

She said she dealt in hardware, not room and board, and suggested they argue about it after he came home for supper. So, the day not getting any younger as they sat there staring thoughtfully at each other, he allowed that sounded fair, and they shook on it before he headed on into town on foot.

It only took Longarm a few minutes to cover the five or six city blocks to the area around the depot he was more familiar with. That Western Union was still where it had been the time he'd stopped here in New Ulm on his way to Northfield, where the James and Younger gang had robbed that bank. When he strode in and identified himself to the older gent behind the counter, he was told they'd been expecting him because more than one wire had been sent to him in care of the New Ulm Western Union.

One was from Billy Vail, informing him that yet another of those hundred-dollar treasury notes had turned up at a Cheyenne bank, but that he was to go on with his investigation at New Ulm in any case, that you didn't investigate by running in circles, and that nobody in Cheyenne could say who'd broken that big bill in a local saloon on a Saturday night to begin with.

Another wire was from Pagosa Junction in the South Ute reserve, in answer to the earlier wire he'd sent them while changing trains at K.C. The Indian Police said they'd dragged a few likely stretches of the San Juan in vain and relayed his request to the Navajo Agency downstream. So he knew he didn't have to wire the Navajo Police after all. They'd find the body of that murdering young jasper for him or they wouldn't, and in either case it wasn't too likely anyone out to assassinate federal lawmen would be packing identification papers made out to his true name. But aliases turned up on the yellow sheets as well, if an owlhoot rider kept flashing the library card, voter's registration, or whatever he'd stuffed in his wallet.

Longarm hummed a few bars of "Farther Along" as he tore open the last wire from an old pal in Denver who screwed like a mink and rode herd over a library of war records, including Confederate, collected by a rich eccentric who, having avoided service in either army, seemed to have enjoyed the hell out of the war on paper.

The good old gal he'd wired for more details about Tyger, Flanders, and others who deserted about that same time, such as that scout he only had down as "Chief," had wired back she needed more time. For most of the Confederate records in that private library in Denver dealt with western rebs, such as Hood's Texas Brigade. But she said she'd keep digging and that she was looking forward to a personal visit as soon as he got back to Denver. Longarm grinned as he put all the telegrams away, for after all those pure hours aboard those trains, even the memory of a sort of homely old gal could make a man feel sort of horny. He remembered how hard she tried to please with a rollicking rump despite her plain appearance.

Recalling what Ilsa Pedersson had just said about him looking like a hobo, Longarm scouted up a barbershop that served hot baths in the back as well. He borrowed a whisk broom and did what he could about the fly ash and dust on his duds as the tub slowly filled with only slightly rusty water. He had a fresh shirt and a change of underwear in his saddlebags, of course, but he didn't want to traipse all over New Ulm to get them. The dirt on his light blue work shirt wasn't all that awful anyway, once he'd washed his hide good with naptha soap and had the barber sprinkle him with plenty of bay rum after his shave out front.

The barber's business had been slow that afternoon, but a lawman who knew the ropes of a small town didn't press his luck by bringing up the subject of Israel Bedford. Old Ilsa had already told him the suspect enjoyed a good local rep, and there was no way in hell to ask about folks in a town this size without someone being sure to let them know there was a stranger in town asking about them.

There were only so many hours in a day to work with, but a strange lawman who didn't let the local lawmen know who he was ahead of time could sure have silly conversations about the six-gun someone had just noticed he was packing with no other visible means of support.

Billy Vail's opposite number in these parts worked out of the bigger twin cities further east, where the Minnesota joined the Mississippi. So the ranking law in New Ulm was the county sheriff, and fortunately the sheriff himself was out raising campaign funds for the coming fall elections. So Longarm only had to tell a senior deputy what he was doing in Brown County in a dirty shirt and with a.44-40.

The deputy said they'd been expecting him, and added that the boys from the Saint Paul Federal Court had already questioned everyone at all involved, without finding out too much.

When Longarm groaned inwardly and asked whether other deputies had called on Israel Bedford, lest he not know those serial numbers had been recorded, the sheriff's deputy said cheerfully, "Hell, you can't hardly ask a man where he got a treasury note without explaining why you're asking, can you?"

Longarm grimaced and growled, "Sometimes it don't pay to be quite so direct. I don't suppose anybody wondered what a suspect might do with other listed treasury notes he'd been fixing to spend once they told him how they'd spotted the first ones?"

The local lawman shrugged. "There was no need to pussyfoot. Everyone knows Captain Bedford is as honest as the day is long, and your federal pals left content with his story."

"Which was?" Longarm asked.

The deputy sheriff answered, "Livestock transaction. Bedford has some of the finest riding stock in the county for sale. Serves his mixed mares with a pure Morgan stud these days. Told us he'd sold a saddle-broke filly and a promising colt for that hundred-dollar note. Said the buyer was an Indian, or mayhaps one of them Metis, or Red River breeds. Anyways, others out his way say they'd seen a whole family of dusky wanderers around the right time. The one who paid cash for Bedford's stock was dressed like a white man. Had a more Indian-looking squaw and a mess of raggedy kids tagging along, from toddlers to kids in their teens. Us county riders tried to help your federal deputies cut the trail of the prosperous savages, but the sod's as thick and springy as it gets out yonder, and they were traveling with neither a cart nor travois so... What the hell, it ain't as if Captain Bedford is famous for robbing folks and wasn't there something about an Indian riding with that gang when they shot up that government office at Fort Collins?"

Longarm shrugged. "We can't ever get everyone to agree on how many there were in the gang. One witness figures five all told. Another counted six or eight as he bled on the floor. He may have just been excited. Nobody on the streets of Fort Collins seems to have counted shit as the gang left cool as cucumbers and slow as innocent churchgoers. But Tyger and Flanders did have at least one associate called Chief. I'm still working on his full name. The army sure kept casual records as they were chasing Little Crow with such informally recruited columns."

The somewhat older Minnesota man nodded. "Don't I know it. I rode with Sibley's Volunteers, and we had to laugh at those ragtag Galvanized Yankees when they rode tear-ass all over after Sioux we'd already shot the liver and lights out of."

He got up to stride over to a file cabinet as he continued. "We thought some of the regulars were all right, though. Captain Bedford was in charge of his column's remount and quartermaster detail. Not as picky as some West Pointers when it came to sharing supplies in the field with comrades in arms. Made hisself a heap of friends out this way."

Longarm nodded and said he'd heard as much. Then, since the son of a bitch was helping himself to a swig from that jug without offering to share, Longarm allowed he had other fish to fry, and got back out to the square before he found himself saying something unprofessional. It wasn't easy, knowing half-ass federal men and selfish county men who openly favored his prime suspect had totally fucked up his original plan of action.

CHAPTER 9

The Granger's Savings & Loans was just off the square, and a handsome young gal peering out through the bars of the teller's cage didn't look scared of strangers as Longarm came in just as they were fixing to shut down for the afternoon. When he flashed his badge and told her what he'd come for, she vanished for a moment, and then unbolted an oaken door from the inside to run him back to the branch manager's private office.

The bank was run by a P.S. Plover, a portly white-haired cuss who rose behind his acre or so of desk in a neighborly way to wave Longarm to another padded chair and offer a cigar from his big brass humidor. "That was quick," he said. "I just posted my letter yesterday and I didn't expect Saint Paul to send anyone this side of Monday."

Longarm accepted the Havana claro with a nod of thanks, and took his seat before he replied. "I ain't from the marshal in Saint Paul, Mister Plover. I ride for Marshal Vail out of Denver, and I'm here in response to that purloined treasury note you all detected. You say you've written more since?"

As he lit his fancy smoke the banker explained. "I'm pretty sure I can name that breed who bought stock off Israel Bedford with one of those hot treasury notes, Marshal Long."

Longarm modestly replied, "I'm just a deputy marshal, but lots of folk make that same mistake. Just let me get out my notebook before you name the mysterious Indian for us, hear?"

As Longarm gripped the cigar with his teeth to break out his notebook and a pencil stub, the banker said, "He's not pure Sioux. Looks like a full-blood, if you ask me, but he claims to be white on his daddy's side and hence eligible to own land, sign contracts without a white sponsor, and in sum, make a perfect pest of himself with his full-blood squaw and platoon of trashy breed brats."

Longarm poised his pencil and cocked a quizzical brow, so the banker said, "His name's Chambrun, Wabasha Chambrun, for God's sake. Claims to be the spawn of a French-Canadian mountain man and a squaw of the Osage persuasion."

Longarm wrote down the name, mildly observing, "Squaw means woman in most Algonquin dialects. Osage, Santee, and other such Sioux-Hokan speakers say something like Wee-yah for women in general. Meanwhile, whilst they talk much the same lingo, real Osage range farther south than you'd have expected your average Canadian trapper to range in the Shining Times."

The banker shrugged. "I have them down as Santee Sioux too. But try to prove it, and even if you could at this late date, who but the Land Office has any say in the matter of their homestead claim?"

He took a drag on his own cigar before adding, "In any case, the rascal who stuck Israel Bedford with that hot treasury note came in here bold as brass just yesterday to open a savings and checking account with us."

Longarm grinned wolfishly with the cigar at a jaunty angle and asked, "With yet more of those treasury notes from the Fort Collins robbery?"

The older man splashed cold water on that. "Well, not in so many words. He presented four hundred and thirty-seven dollars to Magnusson out front, in bills of smaller denomination, but I had told all my tellers to watch out for prosperous Indians, and so they naturally asked him, in a cool and casual way, if he was by any chance the same Mister Chambrun who'd bought that nice riding stock off Israel Bedford. So guess what he admitted bold as brass!"

Longarm whistled thoughtfully. "Stupid as hell too, if he knew where that bigger bill came from. Could we have your smart Dealer join in with the rest of this conversation, lest we drop even one detail in the cracks?"

The banker nodded and banged a desk chime near the humidor as he agreed, "Good thinking. I should have asked her to stay to begin with. She was the one who brought that hundred-dollar treasury note to MY attention when a shopkeeper got it off another depositor last week."

The willowy-hipped but top-heavy blonde came in to join them with a puzzled smile. Her boss waved her to another seat and explained, "I want you to tell Deputy Long just what you know about both the Bedford and Chambrun accounts, Vigdis."

Longarm jotted down "Vigdis Magnusson," figuring that might not get you teased as much by the other kids in your school if they'd been stuck with Swedish names as well.

The beautiful blonde explained in her educated but lilting English how they'd already known about the respectable Captain Bedford paying for seed and supplies with that paper a dark sinister stranger had stuck him with. She said she couldn't rightly say why a Polite breed or assimilate had struck her as sinister when he'd come dressed white and with a batch Of innocent paper and Specie.

She said the sinister stranger had given his name as one Wabasha Chambrun, had allowed he and his family were settled in and trying to Prove their own homestead claim up the river a ways, and had said that he'd heard it was safer to keep his money in a bank and pay his bigger bills by check.

The big blonde sounded a mite puzzled as she confided to Longarm, "I'm not sure why such a simple story from such a Polite homesteader simply asking to open an account with us made me feel all tingly and sneaky. But it did, and so I found myself asking if he was the same Mister Chambrun who'd bought that adorable colt Off Captain Bedford. He admitted he was, with neither shame nor hesitation!"

P.S. Plover nodded sagely. "There You have it, young Sir. I naturally reported what Vigdis told me, in writing, that very afternoon. When are you Planning to arrest the thieving redskin?"

Longarm put the notebook away so he could take the cigar out of his mouth as he explained. "I ain't planning to arrest nobody right off. It ain't that I'm lazy. It's just that I've found it tough to start a fire with wet matches or keep a cuss in jail on weak evidence. And by the way, who's holding that treasury note at the moment?"

Plover blinked in surprise and said, "Why, we are, of course. In its own sealed and marked envelope, in our vault, lest we mix it up with innocent bills. I offered it as evidence to the sheriff as soon as I saw its serial number was on that list. But the sheriff told me I'd best hold on to it for the time being because he'd be reporting what seemed a purely federal matter to you federal officers."

Longarm nodded and said, "He did good. Put a man with a lawyer in a county jail on an interstate federal charge, and he'll be out on a writ and likely long gone before anyone like me is likely to be in town. I'd just have to find some safe place to store the evidence for now if I was to ask you to turn it over, so I won't."

The smart buxom blonde asked who'd get stuck in the end, knowing there was no way to exchange a counterfeit note for the real thing, once you'd been dumb enough to get stuck with it.

Longarm told her, "We're not jawing about queer money, ma'am. We're talking about stolen goods. Once that bill in your safe ain't evidence any more, the Fort Collins paymaster who replaced the murdered one will likely reclaim it."

She protested that it hardly sounded fair to stick her bank for funds stolen clear out Colorado way. So he said, "I hadn't finished. Didn't that merchant get the note from Bedford to begin with? And didn't he get that money from this Wabasha Chambrun?"

She clapped her hands like a delighted girl-child and exclaimed, "That's right! We can ask Captain Bedford to make good on the note, and then he can ask Wabasha Chambrun to make good on the note, and... where does it all end in the end?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "On the gallows, once we backtrack to the gang member as commenced such complicated cash transactions. The Point is that this bank won't be stuck in the end for that hundred dollars. So I'd sure like it to stay where it is for now."

P.S. Plover scowled across his desk and complained, "I'm not sure I like your tone, young Sir! Are you Suggesting we might try to pass that treasury note on? Have you forgotten it was I who brought it to the law's attention in the first place When I could have just pretended to Overlook it and passe it on?"

Long shook his head. "Nope. If I had you down as a party to that payroll robbery, I wouldn't be asking you to hold on to that evidence for us."

He leaned forward to flick cigar ash in a tray On Plover's desk as he continued. "I need more evidence before I go arresting anybody. I mean to talk to both Bedford and Chambrun as smooth as Miss Vigdis here might have. I ain't sure what I'll do after Bedford says he got that paper Off Chambrun and Chambrun tells me he came by it just as innocently."

Plover asked what made Longarm so certain the mysterious newcomer to Brown County would be able to offer such a good excuse.

Longarm said, "He'll have to. Would You just admit you robbed and gunned a federal Paymaster even if you had?"

CHAPTER 10

Somebody in these parts had to be lying. Until he was sure who it was, Longarm felt it best to play his own cards closer to his vest than usual. So once he'd checked out his saddle and other possibles at the depot he refrained from heading for a livery as he otherwise might have. He just braced the awkward load on his left hip, leaving his gun hand free as he headed back to the Pedersson place, with his eyes peeled and hugging the sunny side of the street because that was the side you met the fewest on when the afternoons got this hot.

Ilsa Pedersson looked a tad older than before, after all that eye-to-eye smiling at Pretty young Vigdis Magnusson, but she'd tidied up her grayer hair and changed into a fancier gingham print and fresh apron by the time Longarm got back as if to remind him how stale his own shirt must look despite his bath and a store-bought shave with bay rum. But she allowed he looked way more civilized than when he had hunkered down in her tulip bed, and said she'd show him right up to his room so he could store that army saddle and such before she served him another snack out back.

He said he'd rather just tote his riding gear on back to her carriage house if she'd meant what she'd said about hiring him one of her ponies.

She said he'd be riding her jumper, Blaze, but Pointed out that it would soon be suppertime, To which he could Only reply with a wistful smile, "I can smell what you got in your oven from here, ma'am. But they sent me here to put in a day's work for a day's pay, and I've just about time for a couple more calls before sundown if I start right now."

She didn't argue. But as she led the way around to the back she naturally wanted to know where he'd be riding, and seeing he'd be riding there on her stock, he felt obliged to tell her.

She gasped. "The Bedfords dwell a good six miles north of town, and you say these mysterious breeds are homesteading nine miles out beyond them?"

Longarm said soothingly, "We won't be jumping no fences loping either way, ma'am. I don't see how we'll get back before sundown either, but it's a county road and the moon will rise full tonight with no clouds worth mention."

So she sighed and said she'd put the ham she was baking in the warming oven up above, so it could cook much slower, but warned him his supper would be ruined if he didn't get back by seven or eight. He doubted he could, but he never said so as he followed her inside, agreed the black gelding with a white blaze she introduced him to was a handsome brute, and went along with her suggestion he use her bridle instead of his own because old Blaze was more used to the feel of the bit. He wasn't about to ride fifteen miles each way in her sidesaddle.

Seated astride an old McClellan, with his own Winchester back in its saddle boot, Longarm rode out the north side of town a little before four, and asking directions only twice along the way, rode into the Bedford dooryard around five.

The spread was a tad more imposing than he'd expected, even knowing Israel Bedford had bought a proven claim with a dozen years' worth of improvements on it before he and his younger family started work on their own. The main house and outbuildings, while sod-walled, were tin-roofed with all the wood-trim whitewashed. Handsome glass windows let in the light and kept out the winter winds. Less prosperous settlers tended to have glass bottles driven through the sod walls instead.

There were two pole corrals and a good-sized training paddock out back, with a patent sunflower windmill watering the whole shebang. It was too early in the season to say, from where he sat old Blaze, whether those acres of grain to the north of those new apple saplings were barley like some said, or the oats Longarm would have drilled in if he'd been raising that many ponies. That deputy sheriff had been right about Bedford's stock Morgan bloodlines, and it made a man feel swell just to look at those dozen or so pretty ponies staring back curiously from that one corral.

A dog was barking from inside the house. The Bedfords had doubtless called their kids inside when first they spied a stranger riding in. For Israel Bedford stepped out a side door alone, a Greener ten-gauge in hand as he smiled uncertainly and called out, "You'd be just in time for supper if you're out this way on friendly business, stranger."

Longarm flashed his badge before he dismounted in order to talk softer as he introduced himself. "I don't mean to slight that swell chicken soup I can smell from all the way out here. But I got many a mile of riding ahead of me. So I'll get right to my business with you, Captain Bedford."

The retired army man, a wirey individual in his late thirties wearing bib overalls, walked along as Longarm led his mount to the veranda steps and tethered it loosely to the cottonwood railing. Longarm broke out two cheroots and got them both lit up before he tersely brought Bedford up to date on his investigation.

Bedford had naturally figured some Of it Out already, thanks to earlier unskilled questioning by the local sheriff. He said he knew that Chambrun bunch better now than he had the day he'd sold Wabasha Chambrun a filly and a colt for that recorded treasury note. He said they'd met on the road Out front a time Or more and had some friendly talk about the weather, their crops and such. He had no idea where the breed or assimilated full-blood had come by the money because, he said, he hadn't asked.

When Longarm had asked whether an old soldier might by any chance recall his Sioux-Hokan-speaking neighbor from that big Santee uprising of '62, the retired Indian fighter shook his head as if he knew and replied, "If we ever swapped shots he'd have been just a painted kid loping past, and to be honest, most of such wild and woolly fun had ended by the time us regulars got across the Mississippi to tidy up."

He stared off across the range, now more peaceful, rolling gold and lavender in the late afternoon sunlight, as he added in a soft, bemused tone, "There wasn't much to tidy up after irregulars hit Mister Lo with everything but the kitchen sink and then shoved his head in the sink. But I have to allow Indians tend to stay down when they've been put down by others just as savage. You saw what the old Seventh Cav got for sparing so many women and children on the Washita. Old Hank Sibley and his fourteen hundred militiamen of the Sixth Minnesota didn't bother with such niceties as separating the sheep from the goats. Sibley had been an Indian trader, spoke Sioux, and just kept running down and butchering Sioux till they begged him to stop and agreed to peace on harsher terms than us regulars might have offered."

Longarm wrinkled his nose and muttered, "I'd have been scared of Long Trader Sibley if I'd been an Indian too. I understand he wound up with close to a hundred and fifty thousand in Indian funds in his own pocket before the Santee rose. But that's not what I was sent to look into. I'll take your word you didn't recall Wabasha Chambrun from your Indian-fighting days, Captain. But wasn't Wabasha the name of an important sub-chief under Little Crow?"

Bedford nodded. "I met that Wabasha. He was a rival as well as an earlier follower of Little Crow. They'd argued strategy from the beginning, and once they'd suffered some reverses Wabasha came over to our side as a sort of peacemaker."

"Or a sort of Benedict Arnold, to hear the Indians tell it," said Longarm thoughtfully.

Then he said, "I'll just ask this other Wabasha how come he took the name of a famous fork-tongue. Quill Indians are allowed to make up their own names with the aid of visions and such. But the son of a Christian, raised to wear Wasichu duds, might have been given his name without him having any say-so in the matter." He blew a thoughtful smoke ring and mused, half to himself, "Any way you slice it, though, a man named after a famous Santee chief and living on what used to be Santee hunting ground sure ain't all that convincing as a French-Canadian and Osage anything!"

CHAPTER 11

A good pony could carry a man thirty or forty miles overnight if he liked it, and over a hundred if he hated it. But old Blaze was not his to abuse, and Longarm figured spells of trotting and walking would cover the nine more miles to the Chambrun place in less than three hours.

The walking was easier on the ass of any man seated in a McClellan saddle. The old army ball-breaker had been designed with the endurance of the mount rather than the comfort of the rider in mind. But things could have felt worse. Longarm was smart enough to ride in tight pants and snug underdrawers, so his balls never got wedged in that open slit down the center of a McClellan that was designed to prevent chaffing or overheating the pony's spine no matter what new cavalry recruits wrote home about it.

The day was dying gently with a poetical sunset off to the west as the horned larks and redwings sang their harsh but not unpleasant evening serenades from either side of the dusty road. He could tell it more or less followed the trend of the river, not because he could see that much sky blue or chalky water through the denser cover to his right, but because there was so much of the cover. You never saw willows or cottonwoods that high unless they grew close to all-summer water. The scattered oak and thorn apple off to his left was reaching way deeper for groundwater on that side of the county road. But either way, the sunset made them all look as if they'd sprouted leaves made out of amber, butterscotch, and such, while sunset-gilded bees still foraged the wildflowers peeking up at him from amid the taller bluestem and needle grass. The grass didn't seem to have been grazed so much out this way, although those bees by themselves would have told an Indian, or warned him, there were white folks in these parts.

Indians admired honey as much as anybody, and so, as they had with the white man's tall-dogs, or horses, the Indians had adapted to what they called the white man's flies, or honey bees, despite the fact there'd never been any before white settlers brought them from the old country, along with other novelties, good and bad, from steel tools to smallpox.

Along about dusk, Longarm passed a homestead neither Bedford nor anyone else had mentioned to him. He wondered at first sight whether they'd gotten the distance wrong and he'd already made it to Wabasha Chambrun's. Then he saw that the folks waving at him from the front of their sod-roofed sod house seemed to be plain colored folks, not breeds or Indians. He reined in, waved back, and called out, "Ain't got time to stop and set a spell, no offense. I'd be the law and I'm looking for the Chambrun spread."

The colored homesteader rose from his barrel seat and pointed up the road as he called back, "About an hour's ride, at the rate you've been riding, Cap'n. What have them Sioux folks done?"

To which Longarm called back, "Ain't sure. Just want a few words with 'em for now. What makes you so sure they ain't French-Canadian and Osage breeds, like Chambrun says in town?"

The African-American called back, "Can't say for sure what Neighbor Chambrun might be. He never stops to talk as he rides by on his pony. But some of our kids have met up with his kids along the river friendly enough, and they say their mamma is one of them Santee Sioux you white folks had so much trouble with back when I was raising crops for somebody else, God bless Mister Lincoln and all his soldiers blue!"

Longarm didn't even want to refight the Indian Wars, so he thanked the thankful freedman and rode on through the gathering dusk.

The cloudless sky went from salmon pink and purple to star-spangled black velvet with little ceremony, as skies tended to when they had no clouds up yonder to catch any lingering rays. Longarm knew a full moon would be rising most any time now. But in the meanwhile it was a good thing horses saw better in the dark than humans. For Longarm had to take it on trust that Blaze wasn't trotting over the edge of an awesome drop as they forged on.

He told his mount, "You're doing fine. Just keep picking em up and cropping 'em down and there ought to be some sort of light in a window up ahead this early in the evening."

He failed to see any, and he'd spent enough nights with Quill Indians to know they turned in early and rose with the sun, like a lot of country folks save for Mexicans.

He had to chuckle as he recalled that pretty Comanche down on the Staked Plains who'd said if there was one thing her kind and his had ever agreed on, it had to be that Mexicans were natural night owls next to real Americans, red or white. She'd screwed agreeably, too, now that he thought back. But why in thunder was a man thinking back to Texas when he was riding towards... what, Minnesota?

As the moon rose at last, pumpkin yellow above the tree tops to the east, there was still no sign of lamplight ahead, and Longarm told his mount, "I ain't jerk-off hard. I'm piss hard. I usually get over horny dreaming as soon as I get up and piss too. So why am I just telling you all this when I got all this open country to just piss all over?"

The black pony didn't argue as Longarm reined to a halt and dismounted to suit actions to his words. But as he stood there unbuttoning with the reins in one hand, he detected distant hoofbeats and confided, "It's a good thing we stopped for a piss call, Blaze. For I doubt I'd have heard them, or vice versa, at this range with your big feet distracting my delicate ears."

He started to lead his mount off to the west through the tall grass afoot as he told the gelding, "They're doubtless on innocent business, such as making it home in time for their own suppers. But they sure are coming this way hell-for-election, and mayhaps we ought to just get out of their way and see what happens next."

He led his mount into the deeper shade of some thorn apple clustered around a blown-down or lightning-struck oak, and then took that leak, with a sigh of contentment, before he loosely tethered Blaze to an oak branch and broke out his saddle gun.

But even as he levered a round of.44-40 into the chamber of his Winchester '73 he muttered aloud, "Billy Vail would surely frown on my drygulching innocent travelers. On the other hand, it's a big boo to challenge strangers in uncertain light when they sound that excited about something!"

So he just stood there, a silent shadowy form amid bigger shadows, as the mystery riders--there were four of them--tore past at a horse-killing flat run, not pausing to tell him where they were headed or even to glance his way. But as they thundered on, Longarm told his own mount, "They want to be there sudden, but they can't be headed all that far. So the Chambrun place sounds about right."

When Blaze failed to answer, Longarm continued. "The question I'd like you to answer is whether they have such urgent business with old Wabasha Chambrun or... somebody else. So how many knew you and me were on our way to question him about that payroll robbery?"

The pony didn't answer. Longarm hadn't expected it to. Talking to yourself or other dumb brutes could organize your thoughts. But they said you were in trouble when you started to hear answers. So he undid his hasty half hitch and remounted, leaving his saddle gun thoughtfully primed and cocked across his thighs, as he walked Blaze back to the road, paused there a moment in thought, and then decided, "As old George Armstrong Custer found out in broad daylight, it ain't smart to charge into a place you don't know, where you may be way outnumbered, whilst pussyfooting can get you killed even quicker."

He swung the pony's head southeast, and heeled it back the way he'd just ridden, explaining, "It's neither polite nor smart to drop in uninvited when you just don't know who might be there. We can't shoot first, the way Hickok did that time he gunned his own deputy like a trigger-happy asshole. But it can take fifty years off your life to shoot last when it ain't a pal after all. So why don't we skin this cat another way entire?"

He felt no call to explain further to a pal who couldn't answer and might not care. So he just rode back to that homestead, where a worried-looking colored kid was just heading out to the road aboard a mule. When he spotted Longarm about the same time he called out, "My pap just told me to ride for town and tell the sheriff you might be dead, Cap'n! There was a bunch of hardcase white boys here just now, asking for you by name if you'd be Deputy Long!"

Longarm said, "You'd best thank your pap for me and let me deal with 'em. Did they say what they wanted of me, or where they might be headed from here?"

The kid replied, "Not in so many words, Cap'n. But they called you a mother, and Pap says he doubts they meant Mother Dear. When he allowed you'd just rode by, before they called you a mother, that is, one of 'em said they'd be able to get you as you came out of the Chambrun place if they hurried."

Longarm asked if it had sounded as if they were pals of Wabasha Chambrun, enemies of Wabasha Chambrun, or just using him and his spread as a point of reference.

When the kid said he didn't know, Longarm told him to get back to his own kith and kin and, if possible, forget this whole conversation. When the kid said he followed his drift, Longarm added, "I don't ask any man to burn himself trying to get my chestnuts out of the fire. You've done me a real service by telling me as much as you just did. If those others are smart enough to lean on any of you about the way I just backtracked, go on and tell them anything you need to tell them to keep from getting hurt, savvy?"

The kid nodded gravely, eyes wide in the moonlight, and said he surely did and assumed Longarm meant to ride in and tell the sheriff about all this himself.

Longarm didn't say yes or no. He wasn't sure as he thanked the helpful young cuss and rode on. He didn't see what the local law could do about some riders who, so far, hadn't done a thing to anybody. Meanwhile, it might be interesting to see who might know about any of this bullshit without being told.

CHAPTER 12

Night riders aiming to ambush a lawman along one stretch of the moonlit county road could be set up just as sneaky along another. So Longarm cut off across the moonlit grass as soon as he'd cleared the southeast corner of that fenced-in colored homestead. He let old Blaze have his head, since horses saw better in the dark than humans and Blaze likely knew the way to the stall he seemed so intent on reaching at an easy lope. But they were both saved by tumbleweeds, piled up in the moonlight against an otherwise invisible drift fence some son-of-a-bitching cattle outfit, most likely, had strung parallel to the road a quarter mile west, doubtless taking advantage of the wide-apart homestead fencing as well as their own. Drift fences were designed to prevent just what they were named after. A cow ranging wide from the water tanks and salt blocks of its home spread could wind up attracted by somebody else's, and road traffic tended to spook cows into drifting further.

Longarm consulted his mental map of Brown County as he dismounted to break out his small claw hammer from a saddlebag. The country hereabouts was getting crowded for free-ranging beef if they'd spent money on this much bobwire. For while the Minnesota shared Brown County with other streams such as the Sleepy Eye and Cottonwood, there had to be at least ten miles of high and dry grazing off to the west, meaning some other cattle outfit had laid claim, and likely had its own wire strung between here and the Sleepy Eye creek and wagon trace.

Tethering Blaze for the time being to a panel of four-strand he meant to leave intact, Longarm got to work with his claw hammer as he quietly explained, "It ain't neighborly to cut a man's fence if you don't have to. Since they were considerate enough to staple this murderous shit to cedar posts, we don't have to."

He used the claw of his hammer to pull staples like tin teeth, palming each one as he did so, until nothing but its own mild tension was holding the wire off the moonlit grass. Then he untethered his borrowed mount, lowered the loose wire far enough with a hand to hook the instep of a boot over it, and flattened it in the grass underfoot so he could simply lead the pony over to the far side.

Once he had, he was considerate enough to retether Blaze, get back on the eastern side, and restaple the wire back the way he'd found it with the business end of the hammer. No four strands of bob were able to stop a man afoot who knew how to duck through it, of course.

He put the claw hammer away, untethered Blaze from the fence, and swung back in the saddle to ride on, knowing he'd be skirting the back forties of the Bedford place. He knew Israel Bedford wouldn't tell him anything he could be certain of, no matter what. He'd said he'd gotten that treasury note from Wabasha Chambrun. Everyone in town seemed to feel Bedford was less likely to fib than his new breed or full-blood neighbors. On the other hand, if those colored folks had heard those other sneaks right, they didn't seem to be in cahoots with Chambrun.

"Mebbe," Longarm muttered aloud as he held Blaze to a silent walk as they moved along the far side of the fencing. A white man with a tolerable rep could alibi himself easy as pie just by claiming he'd gotten a recorded treasury note off any number of neighbors. On the other hand, a newcomer of at least mixed blood would have enough on his plate without his pals gunning a federal deputy right on his own homestead claim. So innocent or guilty, he'd want to tell the local law he'd never laid eyes on any rascals gunning folks after dark along a public right of way.

"Chambrun can't be a full-blood," Longarm muttered to his mount as he reached absently for a smoke, warned himself against a dumb move, knowing a match flare could be spotted from three miles off on open prairie, and decided, "Not a registered full-blood leastways. Abe Lincoln's Homestead Act of 1862 was designed to fill this part of the country up with white folks. The government figured there were already enough Indians out this way."

Some said, even some white folks, that the Homestead Act, passed as it was in the early half of the War Between the States, had been the spark that lit Little Crow's fuse. The Santee Sioux, as Washington called them, had already moved west to get out of the way of progress more than once. So they'd doubtless felt sort of squeezed, west of the big chalky water and with their Dakota cousins to the west, when all those Swedes, less successful Midwestern farm folks and draft dodgers crowded across the Minnesota to raise cash crops and kids where the Indians had just put down fresh roots.

There was a lot of guff, from partisans of both sides, as to the exact details leading up to what could be described as a hen-house raid or a massacre, depending. But there was no doubt old Little Crow had known what the Wasichu would do to his people once Wasichu blood had been spilled, and he'd been enough of a general to hit first, hard as hell, even though they said he'd led his young men chanting his death song, cursing the killers from the Shakopee band as he promised them they'd all have the shit kicked out of them by wintertime, and promising true.

Longarm had been busy killing other young men at the time further east, but troopers who'd been out this way said the Santee had fought like wildcats, more often on foot than their Dakota kinsmen, and more inclined to wear flowers than feathers in their hair as they came whooping and hollering, or, more often and more scary, creeping on their bellies through the bluestem like murderous animated pots of prairie posies. Likely cornflowers that time of the year. The fighting had broken out in early August. By late September a whole lot of red and white folks had died and the Santee were in one hell of a mess. It's tough to call off a war with pissed-off white men when they're winning. Most of the real fighters had lit out for Canada or the Dakotas, along with all their fighting chiefs. The seventeen hundred rounded up by Sibley and Pope, mostly women, children, and sissies, got marched to Fort Snelling, pelted along the way with stones, horse apples, and worse, to join their white admirers in watching the mass execution of the Santee. Lincoln just couldn't let off. Then they were moved to their swell new reservation at Crow Creek in the Dakota Territory. The few who'd drifted back to these parts over the years, such as old Little Crow himself, had been gunned down on sight as "wild" Indians. So that meant Wabasha Chambrun, even named as he was after a Santee who'd gone over to the whites, couldn't be a full-blood. No full-blood of any nation would have been issued a homestead claim by the Bureau of Land Management, which meant...

"Where is it engraved on stone that any cuss named Chambrun has been issued doodly-shit by anybody?" Longarm asked his mount conversationally.

When the pony failed to answer he explained. "You ain't supposed to fence in and improve no quarter section of public land without you file a homestead claim, wait for its approval, and pay the modest filing fee. But if you've never filed, who'd be likely to notice you ain't paid the fee on a claim you never really filed, right?"

The pony might have opined that sounded sort of raw, if ponies had any say in such matters. But Longarm had arrested folks for far more casual views on property rights, and folks were forever gutting a mountain, logging a forest, or raising cash crops without getting arrested, paying taxes, or even being noticed by Land Management.

A couple of dark masses off to the right jumped up to run off, cussing Longarm and his mount in cow. Longarm nodded and thought about cattle barons, filing or not bothering to file on a taxable quarter-section home spread so they could graze and often fence the surrounding range as far as they could see from high up.

He started to rein in, thought better of it, and rode on, muttering, "Let's eat this cake a bite at a time, and look at some records by the cold light of logic, before we go asking a man late at night whether he holds lawful title to his spread or not."

A man who'd lie about one thing would likely lie about others, and if the late Jacob Weber of Switzerland could claim a whole section of prime bottom land free as his private paradise, after proclaiming himself and his family The Father, The Son, and the Holy Ghost, it only stood to reason a squatter with Indian blood might say most anything.

A heap of such folks had started to. Squatter-traders such as William Bent of Bent's Fort and mountain men like Kit Carson had married up with all sorts of Indian ladies from all sorts of nations, friendly or not, to produce all sorts of kids who tended to live red, white, or however the spirit moved them. So it was tough to say what the civil rights of, say, the Bent kids ought to be, with one grown son scouting for the army, a second living purely Quill in a tipi with the Cheyenne, and the one daughter married to a French-Canadian trader living white, even though he was said to be part Creek.

Longarm decided the confusing ancestry of Quanah Parker was most relevant to whether Wabasha Chambrun might or might not hold a valid homestead claim. Old Quanah, born to a white captive woman and her Comanche husband, who'd done the right thing by the pretty little thing, had started out as a holy-terror Comanche war chief, scared the shit out of his white kin, and then, after they'd scared the shit out of him a few times, recalled he was half white after all and joined the winning side. This appeared to give old Quanah the right to a government allotment as a tame Comanche, and at the same time to wheel and deal in Texas real estate as a white or at least part-white Texican business man. Longarm figured that was as fair as the law letting the pure white Belle Shirley Starr live Cherokee at Younger's Bend in the Indian Nation, just because she screwed Indian moonshiners as well as white horse thieves.

One of those spooked cows came tearing along the fence line at him, bawling fit to bust. Longarm swung Blaze out of the way as the full-grown steer tore past, spooked by something at least as terrifying up ahead.

That was something to study on in light as tricky as this.

That ink blot a pistol shot away in the moonlight appeared to be a clump of coppice, or second-growth saplings sprouting from the stumps of more serious cottonwoods cut a few years back, for corral poles or other such use most likely. Cottonwood wasn't worth much as firewood or construction timber. Longarm swung his mount out to his right, meaning to circle wide. As he heard the brush of metal against springy twigs he rolled out of his saddle, Winchester and all, to flatten in the tall grass as Blaze loped on a ways, and then stopped as if to ask how come those reins were dragging on the grass like so.

Blaze could wait. Longarm addressed the inky shadows ahead in a firm but friendly voice, calling out, "Evening. I'd be Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, out this way on government business with fifteen rounds in the tube of this saddle gun I can aim as polite or as rude as your answer might call for."

There was a long silence. Then a youthful voice with just a whiff of that Swedish singsong in it called back, "Well, I'd be Gus Hansson, riding for the Rocking R, which you've been riding across, and Miss Helga figured you might be over this way."

Longarm stayed put, keeping his guard up and his saddle gun trained as he called back, "Who might this Miss Helga be, and how come she figured anything about me, since we've never been introduced?"

The kid who'd been hunkered in the coppice broke cover, turning out to be in his teens with batwing chaps and a hat big enough to house at least a small Indian family. "My boss lady is Miss Helga Runeberg, who's owned the Rocking R since her daddy's pony hit a prairie-dog hole at full gallop a couple of roundups back. Her home spread fronts on the Sleepy Eye trace six or eight miles to the southwest."

Longarm started to comment on all the grass the mysterious lady seemed to think she held rights to, if this was her drift fence, but that was between her and Land Management. So he kept his mouth shut and his ears open, and sure enough, the kid explained. "Earlier this evening Some strange riders came by, allowing they was federal deputies looking to ride with you, since they'd heard you'd ridden out to the northwest of New Ulm."

That meant at least the Bedfords and those colored folks were off the hook, if what this kid said was true. Longarm got to his own feet, gun muzzle trained politely but still ready for anything. He heard young Hansson say, "After we told 'em we hadn't seen any sign of you and they'd rid on, Miss Helga told us to fan out far and fan out wide, so's to tell you they were looking for you and telling whoppers about being on the same side."

Longarm answered cautiously, "As a matter of fact, some lawmen from Saint Paul could be headed this way. How come your boss lady cast such doubts on their reasonable-sounding tale, Gus?"

The young cowhand shrugged and said, "Miss Helga's smart, I reckon, or mayhaps she recognized one or more of 'em from somewheres else. She can be sneaky too, when she's giving a hand enough rope to hang hisself. But why not ask her your ownself, Deputy Long? Miss Helga said the rider as caught up with you was to carry you on back to the big house so's you could tell her what you wanted us to do next about the big fibbers."

Longarm thought before he decided. "It's a tempting invite. But I'm already invited to supper with another lady in New Ulm, and I'd as soon go over some records at the county courthouse before I say what I want to do next with, to, or about anybody."

Young Hansson was close enough now so they could converse in quieter tones as he shrugged and said, "Suit yourself, but don't you never say I didn't relay her invite after warning you about them odd riders. I swear I didn't know who you were when first I spied you way out here in the middle of nowheres. How come you ain't on the county road where I expected to meet up with you, Deputy Long?"

Longarm explained, "I was afraid somebody less friendly might be expecting me to head back to town that way. You ain't the first who's told me or warned me I have so many admirers out searching for me by the light of the silvery moon, Gus. You know those colored folks a mile or so up facing that other road?"

The local rider calmly asked, "Which darkies, the Conway family or the Bee Witch?"

Longarm blinked uncertainly and replied, "The folk I talked with looked more like a family than any sort of bees, or even witches. I heard some riders had been asking about me ugly from a colored boy about your age. Your turn."

Hansson said with certainty, "That sounds like one of the Conway boys. They're all right. We've told all the nesters along the bigger river we don't object to no quarter-section claims along the county road. For as long as they don't string bobwire more than a half mile southwest of the road, it helps our own drift wire hold Rocking R stock back from that dangerous river and spooky road travel."

Longarm dryly replied, "I'm sure your new neighbors find that a generous offer. I thought those Conways had to be on my side when they warned me some rascals were talking mean about me. Try that Bee Witch on me some more."

The white cow hand explained. "That's what they call this crazy old colored lady who dwells on a house raft and ranges her honey bees all along the banks of the river. When they ain't out foraging flowers they live in these white boxes, right on the raft with the Bee Witch herself. Ain't that a bitch?"

Longarm shrugged and said, "Takes all kinds to work this land of ours, I reckon. Is this floating beekeeper supposed to be dangerous?"

The cowhand shook his big hat. "Not to grown folk. I hear she threatens to hex kids who pester her or her bees. That's how come they call her the Bee Witch. They say she can threaten kids sort of scary with chicken claws, African goofer dust, and such. What might you want with an old crazy lady who keeps bees, Deputy Long?"

"They likely sell her honey for her in town at some food shop," Longarm decided. "Wabasha Chambrun is the one I'd sort of like to talk to, without those mystery riders noticing. I reckon I might get straighter answers once I go over some courthouse papers in the morning. But seeing as you seem to know so much about nesters over on this side of your considerable range, what can you tell me about that bunch?"

Gus Hansson said, "They're Sioux, part Sioux anyways, no matter what they say. I was still a toddler when Little Crow and his cruel Santee rose against us that time, but I was big enough to see what they'd done to the Atterbom twins and poor Ann Margaret Toligren, left all bloody and dead with her skirts up around her waist, and damn their two-faced lies, I remember what a damn Sioux smells like, dead or alive, and that lying Chambrun and all his lying kids smell the same way, no matter what he says about being mostly white with a part-Osage woman!"

Longarm said soberly, "Indians allow they smell us as something different too. I ain't sure my own nose is educated enough to pick out a Santee from a distant Osage cousin, but like I said, I mean to go over some records before I call any man a liar."

Gus Hansson asked, "What do you do when you prove a man's a liar?"

To which Longarm could only reply, "Depends on what he's lied to me about, of course."

CHAPTER 13

Since first things had to come first, Longarm was rubbing down the widow woman's saddle brute in her stable when she caught up with them, lantern in hand, to say, "Oh, I was hoping it was you I heard out here. I'd about given up on you for the night. You said you'd be right back. I sure hope you like cold ham, Custis."

Longarm smiled sheepishly in the lantern light, and explained how he'd gotten sidetracked without ever getting a chance to interview Wabasha Chambrun at all. When she said she could fetch her part-time stable hand, an old Finn who lived just down the alley, Longarm told her, "I'm better than half-ways done here, and there's no need to pester anyone else. You can see I've run some well water in this trough, but where might you be keeping your oats, Miss Ilsa?"

She set the light on a keg and hauled a feed sack from another stall as she said, "Barley and cracked corn. Minnesota oats command a premium price back East, and I wasn't planning on entering the Kentucky Derby with either of these ponies."

Longarm allowed barley and cracked corn made for a fair balance as he poured some feed in with the twists of hay he'd already shoved in Blaze's feed box. It wasn't until his hostess moved to pick up her lantern again that he noticed her informal costume. She hadn't been whistling Dixie when she said she'd about given up on him getting in any time tonight. But it would have been rude to tell a lady he could see so much of her through a nightdress with a lantern on the far side of it, so he never did. But she sure had swell legs for a gal with that much gray in her hair. Her gathered-at-the-neck outfit of ivory cotton flannel looked more modest as soon as she was holding her wan lantern between them again. Old gals living alone doubtless got so used to flouncing about the house informally that they tended to forget they looked half undressed to late-night visitors.

She told him he was unusually kind to riding stock as he finished rubbing old Blaze down with some sacking while the pony put away some fodder after being watered first. Longarm went on rubbing as he just shrugged and said, "I ain't all that kindly. I'm just more country than some townsmen who don't ride as serious, ma'am. Me and old Blaze here warmed up pretty good with some cross-country lopings in chill night air, and I'd like to borrow him some more tomorrow."

She naturally said Blaze was his to ride as often as he liked. So he naturally replied, "That's how come I don't want him lamed up with poorly tempered sinews, ma'am. Ride a Sunday horse serious, and let him rest up without a good rubdown, and he'll wind up the next day the way we do when we're out of shape and cut a cord of stove wood or do a couple of loads of laundry in our first rush of enthusiasm."

She laughed and said she knew what he meant, although she couldn't picture him doing even one load of laundry. Then she said something about heating up the coffee, and left the lantern for him as she headed back to her kitchen.

He draped his saddle blanket over one of the rails of one stall and his McClellan over another. He hung on to his saddle gun as he picked up that lantern and followed after old lisa.

She'd been wrong about the ham turning cold. It was at least lukewarm, thanks to her warming oven, and the fried potatoes she served with it hadn't gone greasy yet. As he dug in at her kitchen table he wasn't sure he wanted too much of that reheated but strong-smelling coffee. For he had a busy day ahead, his head was still buzzing with events of the day just ended, and it was going to be tough to fall asleep in a strange bed under the same roof as such a sweet smelling female in any case.

He could tell, even as she sat across from him with her matronly curves covered modestly enough by soft ivory folds, that she'd just had a hot bath and doused herself with plenty of lilac water after using some white vinegar to get her hair, or something, clean enough to eat off. But she wasn't acting flirty as she demanded he bring her up to date on his moonlight ride. When he told her he meant to check Wabasha Chambrun's homestead claim before giving the cuss enough rope, she looked puzzled and said, "I know for a fact he bought enough Glidden wire and staples to fence a full quarter section, Custis. Wouldn't even an Indian have to be awesomely stupid to think he could get away with simply squatting along a well-traveled county road?"

Longarm washed down some chewed-up ham and potatoes with her fine coffee before he replied. "How often might you ask to see the title deed of a homestead you're riding past on a visit to somewhere else? I'll ask at the courthouse come morning whether Minnesota follows common law on squatter's rights. A lot of states still do, and we're only talking about two years' difference if your luck holds out."

She said she had no idea what he was talking about. She'd said her folk had hailed from a different old country. So Longarm had to explain. "Back when Ben Franklin and the boys were inventing a whole new country, they still felt the need for some law and order. So they decreed that until such time as they passed new laws that might read different, the courts could go along with the precedents of old English common law. That's what you call what some judge and jury have already said a time or more, a precedent. If you refuse to buy ignorance of the law as an excuse, you got to let folks sort of know what to expect if they do the same things the courts have decided on in the past, see?"