Vernon Castle said, “Yeah, what?”
Longarm hitched his chair closer to the cell door. “Well, there’s more ways to kill a cat than to choke him to death with butter. Right now we’ve got a situation that needs some long, hard thought and you are going to have to be willing to cooperate with me.”
Vernon Castle said, “I’m listening, but I doubt there is anything that you can say that would interest me very much.”
Longarm said, “I take it then, sir, that you like it in that jail cell?”
Vernon Castle stared back at him.
Longarm said, “Because I can assure you that, one way or another, I am going to keep you and those two sons of yours in these jail cells until I get to the bottom of this matter. And I’ll tell you the reason for that. You see, I don’t like San Angelo. I don’t like being here, but I can’t leave here until I get this matter settled. So I don’t give a damn how uncomfortable, how undignified, how embarrassed you and your boys are. I’m going to keep you in these damn cells on one pretext or another until you give me some cooperation. Is that understood, Mr. Castle?”
Vernon Castle stared straight back at him. “You think that you’re a mighty big man, don’t you, Long?”
From the other cell, Longarm was amazed to hear Glenn say, “Pa, why don’t you listen to him. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get out of this damn place. My leg is itching. I’m disgusted with this whole affair. You know as well as I do you can’t keep tabs on Virgil every minute, so you don’t know what he’s been up to.”
Vernon Castle said angrily over Longarm’s shoulder, “Shut your mouth, Glenn. Shut your mouth right now.”
There came a rumbling voice. It was Billy Bob. He said, “Pa, maybe Glenn’s right.”
Longarm looked at the elder Castle. He said, “Well, Vernon, are you ready to talk turkey yet—or Injun, I should say? What’ll it be? A little cooperation or a lot of jail time?”
Vernon Castle looked down at the floor. Longarm could see the stubbornness in the bow of his neck. He didn’t think that he was going to give in easy.
He spent a long two hours with Castle. When he left the jail, he didn’t know whether to be angry, puzzled, or amused. What the man had told him simply didn’t sound like the reasoning of a businessman. When Longarm had suggested that there were other methods of getting the garrison to either move or cooperate, Mr. Castle’s answer had been simple: that would have allowed everyone else in on his good thing. His good thing.
That was what Longarm thought about as he walked back to the Cutler House and went to his room. He was tired. He wasn’t a man who liked to get off his schedule as much as he had been off the past five days. He was way short on his sleep, and his eating and drinking habits hadn’t improved either. He decided that he would lie down and have a good rest before going out around midnight and making the circle one last time. He had a lot on his mind, so before he lay down, he poured himself another glass of Maryland whiskey and sat down on the bed and thought.
He wondered if Virgil was truly capable of bushwhacking the soldiers with the type of weaponry that had been involved. True, Longarm, in his reconnaissance of the house, had found plenty of heavy rifles and plenty of ammunition. But he wondered if Virgil in his simplemindedness was capable of that kind of action. Running across the plains and chasing a deer on foot, or skinning a rabbit or cutting a steak off a horse, seemed more in his line of work. But skulking up a butte and lying in wait and then using a fairly complex rifle just didn’t seem to fit in with the boy.
Boy, he thought. Well, he was a boy in many ways, even though as a man he was fully grown.
But there just didn’t seem to be anyone else. At first, he had Red Clell Martin as the prime suspect, but he had a hard time visualizing the crippled-up old man getting about the country that deftly. At least two of those shots had been fired from a higher elevation, and that meant the old man would have had to climb a butte. Longarm wondered if the old man could do that with his hip. And also, one of the soldiers had been killed on the south road, and that was a good ten or twelve miles from Martin’s home. It would have taken some scrambling on his part to have gotten there riding cross-country on a horse or a mule. Longarm assumed that he had a mule, since that was all that he’d seen about the place.
But then, it all sounded crazy to begin with. Martin didn’t even realize that Reconstruction was over with. He had the hatred for the Yankees that many Confederate veterans did, but then there weren’t many Confederate veterans murdering Yankee soldiers. He doubted very seriously that Virgil thought of himself as an avenging Indian. The best idea that he had come up with was that Virgil had overheard his father expressing displeasure with the garrison and had acted out of love and loyalty to his family. That was the only thing that made sense.
Finally Longarm sighed and started to strip down to get a good long nap. It was all too much. He had come very close to striking a bargain with Mr. Castle. In return for Longarm releasing him and Billy Bob and Glenn, Castle had indicated he might be willing to commit Virgil to an insane asylum.
Longarm didn’t know if that would do the trick or not. It could be that Virgil wasn’t really the killer and that the killing would go on. It could be that Virgil really wasn’t dangerous at all, and then it would do him a tremendous disservice to shut him up inside cold concrete walls. Longarm had never seen the inside of an insane asylum, but he had heard stories. He didn’t think that it was the most festive place to spend one’s days.
He finally gave up the whole job of thinking as a bad endeavor. He finished his whiskey, and then shucked off the last of his clothes and lay down on the bed. He was plenty tired. It felt good to close his eyes and relax. Before he knew it, he wasn’t aware of any trouble at all.
He came awake sometime later to the sound of loud pounding at his door. At first, he was groggy and couldn’t locate himself. The room was dark and it was dark outside the window. When he could finally gather his wits, he swung around on his bed and lit the lamp, yawning for a moment, before he called out, “All right! All right! I’m coming! Dammit, I’m coming!” He didn’t know if they could hear him or not, but they were damn sure going to have to wait.
He pulled on his jeans, not bothering with his boots, and with his revolver in his hand went to the door. He said without opening it, “Who is it? What do you want?”
A muffled voice said, “It’s Sergeant McClellan, sir. I’ve come from the fort. I’ve come from the
