vest, and arranged his watch chain in its usual style, draped across from the pocket holding his watch to the opposite pocket, in which his derringer nestled, clipped to the other end of the chain. He took enough time to down a swallow of his own Maryland rye, and walked on outside before lighting his cheroot.
In the east, the sky was beginning to show the gray of false dawn, but it was still dark on the porch except for the patch of light from the open house door.
“Well,” the girl was saying, “I guess I don’t quite know how to start out.”
“You might start out by telling us who you are,” Belle suggested, “and how you came to hook up with Taylor.”
Longarm suddenly realized that things had moved so swiftly since he’d first responded to the girl’s cries that everyone’s attention had been focused so completely on Taylor—that nobody had learned the girl’s name.
She said, “My name-my name’s Dolly Varden.
Belle interrupted her with a laugh, a raucous, sneering chortle. “You’ll have to do better than that, missy. I know where that name comes from. You must think we’re all ignorant around here, but let me tell you something: I went to the Carthage Female Academy, and I learned how to read books. And that name’s right out of a book by an Englishman called Charles Dickens. He made it up a long time ago.”
“Really?” the girl asked. Her eyes widened in surprise. “You mean it’s just a made-up name?”
“That’s what it is,” Belle told her. “Now, suppose you come down off your high horse and tell us your real name.”
“Oh, hell!” the girl sighed. “I didn’t know Dolly Varden wasn’t real—that is, I didn’t know it was made up such a long time back. And I wasn’t trying to fool you. I’ve just called myself that for so long that I’d almost forgotten what my own name is. Until I ran into Lonnie about two weeks ago.” She sighed again and went on, “My real name’s Susanna. Susanna Mudgett. Everybody just called me Sue, back home. But when Lonnie began calling me Sue, I almost didn’t answer him half the time.”
“Come on, Dolly or Sue or whoever you are,” Floyd said impatiently. “We want to hear about Lon Taylor, not about you.”
“Appears to me we’ll have to hear about both of them, if we want to know what happened to Taylor,” Longarm pointed out. He went up the porch steps and sat down on the bench beside Susanna. “You take your time, now. Start wherever you feel like it, and just tell us whatever comes to your mind first. We’ll sort it all out.”
“All right,” she said nodding. “You see, I hadn’t seen Lonnie for a long time—five or six years, I guess. Then he stopped in the place where I was working…” She hesitated, shook her head angrily, and blurted, “Oh, hell! You’ll know sooner or later. I was a saloon girl over in Texarkana, on the Arkansas side of town. Lonnie came in, and I didn’t even recognize him right off. He spotted me, though. And then we got to talking. We-we used to be what we called sweethearts, back home. Of course, that was before we really knew what being sweethearts means.”
Longarm interrupted, “Back home, you say. That’d be up in Kansas?”
“Yes. Up at Yates Center. Then Lonnie left home, and I… well, I did too, later on. And we didn’t see each other again until he came into the saloon, there in Texarkana. Lonnie asked me would I come along with him and be his girl, and I said I would.”
“All right, Susan or Dolly or whichever you want us to call you—what happened with Lon?” Floyd asked impatiently, after the girl had sat silently for several moments.
“Well, Lonnie said he had to come up here into the Cherokee Nation, to meet some men. I guess you’d be one of them?” she asked Longarm.
He shook his head. “No. He was talking about Floyd and Steed.”
“This is Floyd,” Belle told her, pointing. “Steed’s up watching the gully you came through getting here.”
Susanna spoke directly to Floyd now. “He said he was in with you on some kind of job. I didn’t understand what it really was until we got to Dequeen. We stayed there awhile—about a week, I guess. It was while we were there that Lonnie told me how he’d-he’d turned outlaw. And he wouldn’t tell me what he was going to meet you for, Floyd, but it was some kind of robbery or something. Is that right?”
“Never mind,” Floyd said brusquely. “That’s not any of your affair. What else did Lon tell you about me?”
She frowned. “Nothing, really. Oh, he talked about you and the others a lot, but he didn’t really say anything, if you take my meaning. All I ever did know was that he was supposed to meet you at a place called Younger’s Bend. I guess that’s here, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Belle said. “Go on. Get on down to where you ran into the law.”
“How’d you know it was the law that shot Lonnie?”
“Hmph. Couldn’t have been much else,” Belle replied. “I could just about tell your story for you. You got to this place where you stopped—Dequeen?” Susanna nodded, and Belle went on, “Taylor told you he was running short of cash and needed some more, so he went out and came back with a bundle. But there was a posse of some kind chasing him, and you two stayed ahead of them for a while, but they caught up with you. Hell, I know what happened, girl. Am I right?”
“Almost, but not exactly,” Susanna said. “It was in Dequeen that Lonnie began to run short of money. He’d had to buy me a horse and saddle, you see, when I said I’d go with him. I didn’t have those, or any of the kind of clothes I’d need for traveling that way. So when he said he was coming up broke, I gave him what cash I had, which wasn’t much. It was enough for us to travel on a ways, though. We cut over into the Indian Nation, and came to a little place called Poteau. We really did run out of money there. We had enough to buy some groceries, though, so Lonnie took me to a place he knew about from when he’d been there before, a cave out west from Poteau. He left me there and said he was going to go raise some money. I guess I knew what he meant, but I just didn’t let myself think about it.”
“Shit!” Floyd snorted. “Nobody could be that innocent! I think you’re stringing us a pack of lies, girl! Now, you tell us exactly what happened, or you’ll be in trouble!”
“I’m telling you exactly what happened!” Susanna insisted. “I don’t remember things like what Lonnie said
