lunch counter and three healthy shots of biting-good whiskey—prepared Longarm for an hour’s soaking in a hot tub, followed by a shave and a trim in the barbershop. Then he had only another couple of hours to kill at the saloon, with all the ingredients at hand to make the killing of time a pleasant occupation.
When he led his horse off the ferryboat the next morning, Longarm felt fairly chipper. He mounted the animal for the short ride up Front Street to the old army headquarters building that had been turned into offices for the Arkansas Federal District. It was too early for Andy Gower, the chief marshal, to be in his office, so Longarm backtracked to a restaurant he’d noticed on the way to the federal building, where he dawdled over a leisurely breakfast and a succession of cups of chicory-laced coffee until he judged the hour was late enough. This time, he found Gower in his office, at a desk piled almost as high with paperwork as Billy Vail’s always seemed to be.
Gower was a thin, rangy man with long eyebrows that hung down over chilly gray eyes set in a weatherbeaten face ending in a long lantern jaw. In defiance of the current style, he was clean-shaven. He wore a black-and-white checkered shirt with a puffed-out black cravat in which a diamond stickpin gleamed. A black Prince Albert coat, the mate to Longarm’s, hung on a coat tree in one corner of the office, with a pistol belt looped over the hanger that supported the coat.
“You’re Long, I suppose,” Gower snapped before Longarm could introduce himself. “My clerk said you’d been here earlier, looking for me.”
“That’s right. It was a little bit early, I guess.”
“Early, hell! You were supposed to be here yesterday. I guess you got in during the evening and spent the night tom-catting around the saloons and whorehouses instead of reporting in.”
“Matter of fact, I got to the river too late to get on the last ferryboat. And I was too damn tired to report last night, even if I’d made it into town.”
“All right, sit down.” Gower pushed aside the papers he’d been working on. “Now that you’re finally here, I suppose you’re ready to go to work?”
Longarm traded stares with his temporary boss. Right at that moment, he’d decided that this case wasn’t going to be one he’d enjoy working on. If the greeting he’d gotten from his temporary superior was a fair sample, Gower was a man he was prepared to dislike.
“I came to work,” Longarm replied at last. He kept his voice level and expressionless. “Billy Vail didn’t give me a lot to go on. Only thing he said was that the grapevine’s put Jesse James at some kind of outlaw hangout over in the Cherokee Nation.”
“That’s about all we’ve got,” Gower affirmed. “I’ve been getting reports that there’s a lot more activity than usual going on at Belle Starr’s place. I guess you’ve heard about Belle? Calls herself the Bandit Queen?”
“I’ve heard her name, that’s about all,” Longarm answered. “And I know she operates in the Nation. But if you’ve got the time to pass on whatever I’d need to know about her and whoever she runs with, I’d sure like for you to.”
Honey, old son, Longarm kept telling himself as he looked at Gower. Honey catches more flies than vinegar.
Gower had taken out a pouch of Bull Durham and papers, and was rolling himself a cigarette. He took his time, jogging the flakes of tobacco evenly, wrapping the paper tight, licking the seam, twisting the ends of the completed cylinder. Then he touched a match to the finished smoke. Longarm thought most of the men he’d ever seen smoking cigarettes looked sissified; he noted with mild surprise that Gower did not. Just the opposite, in fact.
Longarm countered by extracting a cheroot from his vest pocket and lighting it. The blue smoke from the cigar and the white, acrid smoke from the cigarette began to fume up the office, and, after a few moments, Gower started talking.
“There’s a chance you might have heard about Belle Starr by another name. Belle’s had so damn many names since she started out that I don’t think she remembers all of them herself. You ever heard of a woman bandit that called herself Belle Reed? Or Belle Shirley? Or maybe even Belle Younger?”
Longarm shook his head. “I must’ve missed all them names. It’s the same Belle, though, I take it?”
“Same Belle,” Gower nodded. He took a final drag on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of thin smoke, then tossed the butt into a cuspidor that stood handy at the corner of his desk. “Since you’re new to this district, I suppose the first thing to do is to go back to the beginning.”
“Might be, at that.” Longarm settled himself back to listen.
“As far as my boys and I have been able to find out,” the chief marshal began, “Belle’s real name is Myra Belle Shirley. At least, that’s how she started life. Her folks were from Missouri, up somewhere around Carthage, which would make them neighbors to the Jameses and the Youngers. Matter of fact, there’s some kind of connection between the Shirleys and the Youngers—second cousins twice removed, or something—one of those vague family things that goes back God knows how many years since there was any close kinship. But the Youngers stayed in Missouri when the Shirleys moved to Texas, sometime back in the late sixties or early seventies. Belle’s folks still live up in North Texas, somewhere around Fort Worth or Dallas.”
“That’d explain how Belle got tied up with Cole Younger, then?” Longarm asked when Gower paused to start rolling another cigarette. “And you and Billy happened onto the connection when you went to talk to Cole Younger in the pen at Stillwater?”
“Damn it, Long, don’t start guessing!” Gower snapped. “I knew about the connection before we talked to Cole Younger. Belle claims she was married to Cole when she was just a young girl, and she makes no bones about telling everybody Cole’s the daddy of her daughter Pearl. Pearl’s about eleven or twelve years old now. I guess you know that Cole was one of Jesse James’s bunch before he got caught and landed in the pen.”
“I don’t have to guess about that,” Longarm said shortly. “Everybody knows it.”
“I suppose so. Well,” Gower went on, “Belle had a whole string of husbands—or men she said were her husbands—after Cole pulled out of Texas and went back with the James gang. The thing is, Belle can’t seem to get Cole Younger out of her craw. Maybe that’s because, as far as we can tell, he’s the first man that ever got to her. It happened that time when Cole and Jesse were visiting with the part of the Younger family that had moved to Texas and were living close to Belle’s folks.”
