“Stopped? Hell, no. There was a westbound freight around four and an eastbound crossing closer to six. No reason to stop, though, and both were on time, so they likely didn’t.”
Longarm took out a cheroot, stuck it between his front teeth, and spoke around it as he fished in his pocket for a match. “Some one killed an Indian near your tracks. I wondered if you might have some crewmen who lost kin at Little Big Horn or such.”
The stationmaster shook himself wider awake and thought for a moment. “I know the boys on both crews. I don’t think either of them would be mean enough to shoot at folks as they passed by.”
“This jasper got off to work close up with a knife. How fast do your trains run through there?”
“Hmmm, the eastbound’s coming downgrade a mite, so it’d be crossing the prairie there about forty-odd. Westbound might slow to twenty or thirty on uphill grades. I’m going by the timetables, you understand. So we’re talking about average speeds. Be a mite faster going down a rise than up, but, yeah, I’ll stick with those speeds. You want the names of the engineers?”
“Not yet. Looks like I’m sniffing up the wrong tree. While I’m here, though, do your trains run the same time every day?”
“Not hardly. Depends on what’s being freighted where. We get a wire when a train’s due in or out, but the timetable varies. Why do you ask?”
Longarm took a match from his pocket, igniting it with his thumbnail in the same motion, and touched the flame to his cheroot. “Man figuring to hop a slow freight would have to know when one was coming.”
The stationmaster looked astounded. “Hop a freight on open prairie? We don’t run freights that slow, Deputy. Be a pisser to reach for a grabiron doing more’n ten miles an hour, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I’m likely in the wrong place.”
Longarm left the man to sleep away the rest of his night in peace and went back to the coroner’s.
The coroner couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already. Spotted Beaver had been killed and cut up, down, and crosswise. Except for the head, nothing important was missing. The coroner found nothing to tell him what had killed the headless trunk, though he muttered laconically, “None of that knifework did him a lick of good. If he was shot or bashed, the evidence left with his head.”
“Could you say what was used to rip him up like that, Doc?”
“Something sharp. Wasn’t a butcher’s meat saw or animal teeth. but name anything else from a pen-knife to a busted bottle and I’ll swear to it.”
Longarm asked, “Can I leave him here with you for the night, Doc?”
“Sure. I’ll put him away for you on ice. I know you’re driving a long, lonesome ways, but they don’t bother me all that much.”
“I’m not worried about traveling with a dead man. Done it before in my time. Come morning, though, I aim to ship the remains to Washington for a real going-over at the federal forensic labs. I’ll come back before high noon.”
“I’ll tin his internals in formalin for you, then. What do you figure I missed?”
“Likely not a thing Doc. But it pays to double-check.”
“I don’t have the gear to look for obscure drugs or poisons, but you don’t think he was drugged, do you?”
“Don’t know what to think. Just covering every bet can come up with till I hit a winning hand.”
“Makes sense. How come you’re making such a roundabout night of it, though? You could take a room over at the Railroad Hotel and get an early start, since you’re due back anyway, before noon.”
Longarm kept his true reasons to himself as he said, “I’ve got an appointment at the agency, come sunup. They’re expecting me back tonight.”
He said good night and left, going next to the saloon he’d busted up. The night man on duty didn’t know him but a couple of the men who’d seen him come through the window wanted to buy him a drink. So Longarm let them, then stood a round in turn as he casually swept the crowd with his eyes from under the brim of his hat. Nobody seemed too interested in him. He told the two boys drinking with him part of what had been going on and repeated that he was heading back to the agency alone.
Then, having spread the word as much as he could without being too obvious, he left. He climbed to the buckboard seat and drove out of Switchback at a trot.
It was after two in the morning now, and the moon was low in the west, painting a long, zigzag chalk line of light where the black mass of the distant Rockies met the clear, starry bowl of the sky. It would be darker soon, and though he knew the mule could see well enough by starlight to carry them safely back to the agency, which wasn’t now all that far, he had other plans.
They knew at the agency that he was supposed to be bedded down out here in the nothing-much. He’d told everyone in town who’d listen much the same thing.
He slowed the mule to a walk about three miles out of town and just over the horizon from the top windows of the agency. There was no wind and the night was as quiet as a tomb. Longarm looked up at the Milky Way arching palely against the night sky and muttered, “He-Who-Walks-the-Midnight-Sky, huh? If you’re up there you’d best get cracking, Wendigo, old son. You’re running a mite late of midnight.”
He wheeled off the wagon ruts and reined in fifty yards away on the open prairie. The moon had dropped out of sight behind the Front Range now, and the outlined snow fields were dimming away. Longarm tethered the mule in its traces to a cast-iron street-anchor and put an oat bag over its muzzle, saying, “You’ll have to manage through the bit, old mule. Ain’t sure how long we’re staying hereabouts.”
He threw his bedroll to the ground a few yards from the buckboard and spread it out in the darkness. He pulled up some bunches of dry buffalo grass and stuffed some under the weather tarp to make the bedroll appear occupied. Then he took kindling and some dry cow chips from the wagon bed and built a small night fire eight feet from the bedroll, moving back and keeping himself to the north of the little flickering fire as he moved back to the tethered mule and buckboard. He took his Winchester from the wagon boot, levered a round into the chamber, and hunkered down under the wagon.
