“Oh, I deputized you as the easiest way to bring you in without having to fight a score or so of your friends, Mister Younger. You might say the nonsense with Mabel Hanks was a ruse. It was you I wanted all the time. Your Honor, may I present the Right Honorable Cotton Younger from Clay County, Missouri, and other parts past mention?”
Just then the door flew open and the two women sailed out, fighting and fussing. Mabel had a firm grip on Kim Stover’s red hair and Kim was holding firm to the corset around her otherwise naked body as they landed in a rolling, spitting heap between Longarm and the man against the door!
Longarm muttered, “Damn!” as Timberline opened the door and crashed backward out of the chambers.
Longarm drew as he leaped over the cat-fight on the rug and came down running. As he left the room, a bullet tore a sliver from the jamb near his head and he fired across the deserted courtroom at the smoke cloud in the far doorway.
He ran the length of the courtroom and dove into the hallway headfirst, landing on his belly and elbows as he slid across the marble floor beneath the first shot fired his way at waist level.
He rolled and fired back at the tall, dark figure outlined by the window at the end of the long hallway. The target jacknifed over its gunbelt and feinted sideways for the stairwell, falling with a.44-40 slug in the guts!
Longarm leaped to his feet and ran to the stairway, hearing a series of bumps and the clatter of metal on the marble steps. The man called Timberline lay on the landing, sprawled like an oversized broken doll. His gun lay beyond, still smoking.
As Longarm went down two steps at a time, a bailiff appeared on the steps, coming up. Longarm snapped, “Go down and bar the doors. He’s got a score of friends outside!”
Federal bailiffs were trained to obey first and think later, so this one did as he was told. Longarm knelt to feel for a pulse. Then he stood up again and began reloading his warm double-action, muttering, “Damn it to hell! Now we’ll never know where Jesse James is hiding!”
It seemed simple enough to Longarm, but Judge Hawkins made him repeat the whole story in front of a court reporter and Kim Stover and a few of the more stable folks from Crooked Lance he’d decided to let in. The hearing was held in the outer courtroom, with Timberline—or rather, Cotton Younger—stretched out under a sheet on the floor. The coroner said it had been the fall down the steps that finished him with a broken neck, though he’d have died within the hour from the bullet wound.
As the court reporter put it down on paper, Longarm explained, “The late Cotton Younger rode into Crooked Lance five or six years ago, wanted dead or alive in lots of places and worn out with running. He took the job offered him at the Rocking H, and discovered he had a good head for cows. They promoted him to foreman and he became a respected member of the valley community. He had a fine lady he was interested in, and maybe, if things had gone better for him, he’d have stayed straight and we’d have never known what happened to him.”
Kim Stover cut in to insist again, “Timberline couldn’t have been Cotton Younger! He doesn’t answer those wanted-poster descriptions at all!”
“That’s true, ma’am. He’s a head taller now than his army records showed. But you see, he ran off from Terry’s Column as a teenager. It sometimes happens that a boy gets a last growing spurt, along about twenty or so. He was tall when he rode into Crooked Lance. Taller than most. The rest of you probably didn’t notice another saddle tramp at first. By the time it was important just how tall he really was, he was five or six inches taller. Must have been some comfort to him, when his real name came up in conversation, but as you see, he still dyed his hair.”
“Where would he get dye like that?”
“It wasn’t easy. He likely used ink. His hair was too black to be real. Not even an Indian has pure black hair. Natural brunettes have a brownish cast to their hair in sunlight. His was blue-black. I noticed that right off. Noticed a couple of slips, too. He knew the old man I found on the mountain had been shot, before I said one word about his being dead. Another time, he referred to Sailor Brown as the old tattooed man. I don’t remember mentioning what I found under his beard to anyone in Crooked Lance, but a boy who’d ridden with him would have known about Brown’s tattoos.”
Judge Hawkins said, “I’ll take your word for it you shot the right man, Deputy Long. Finish the story.”
“All right. Cotton Younger was hankering after the widow Stover, here. Don’t know if he had anything to do with her being a widow, so let’s be charitable. Kim Stover and her friends liked to play vigilante when the cows were out minding themselves on the range. So when they spied the late Raymond Tinker just passing through, they grabbed him, searched him, and found him with a running iron. Cotton Younger was just showing off as usual and there’s no telling what they’d have done with the cow thief if the poor stranger hadn’t answered to the old description of Cotton Younger!”
“That’s the corpse you pawned off on the Mountie, right?”
“Yessir. Had to. Once word was out that a sidekick of Jesse James was being held in Crooked Lance, every lawman in creation converged on the place to claim him for their own. While I was whittling away some of the competition, the other dead man, here, was sweating bullets. You see, he didn’t want lawmen sniffing around. Sooner or later, any one of us might have unmasked him as the real Cotton Younger. He got word by wire that Kincaid and another lawman from Missouri were riding in. He busted up the wire and laid for ‘em. He knew anyone from Missouri might recognize him on sight, and by now, he was trying to pass the cow thief off on us as the real article.”
“What about Sailor Brown? I thought he was a friend of Cotton Younger.”
“He was. Or, that is, he used to be, in another life. Brown rode in with me, pretending to be some crazy old French Canuck, and aiming to get his old pal out. He never got to see the man in jail, but it didn’t matter. When a bunch of us rode over to talk to this lady here about the fool notions her friends had on holding Tinker for the reward money, Sailor Brown took one look at what everybody called Timberline and knew what was up. He was also wanted himself, and the Mountie rattled him some by talking French to him. Brown didn’t savvy more’n the accent. So Brown was riding out, likely laughing about how his young friend had slickered us all when said young friend put a bullet in him.”
“To make certain no one in the outside world would ever learn of his new identity, right?”
