that?”
“Not that young. It was a grasp at a straw in any case. The little rascal I’m after don’t act sane enough to have anyone but another lunatic as a confederate.”
He dug out a dime to tip her, and though she said she was the owner and not a bellhop, she put it away anyhow and asked if he had any other possible desires. She looked disappointed when he told her, “Yep, I have to get out to Fort Halleck, now, and as I recall, it’s a short ride but a long walk. So where would I find me a good livery stable here in town?”
She said there was one just a dozen doors east but then she said, “You’ll have a time hiring a mount right now. Most of the able-bodied men and half the tough boys in town are out looking to cut the trail of that outlaw in the Texas hat. Since few keep horses regular, they’ll have hired all the livery nags.”
He shot a thoughtful glance at his saddle, shrugged, and said, “I’ll leave my gear here and give her a try, anyway. I reckon I could leg it that far if I have to. But I’d feel dumb if I did so only to find out, later, that I didn’t have to.”
She followed him out and made no surly comments as he locked the door, pocketed the key, and wedged a match stem in the jamb. But as she led the way downstairs she told him, over her shoulder, “I ain’t seen nobody use that trick since Black Jack Slade got run out of town.”
He smiled thinly. “I didn’t know my notion was that old. No offense, but you could hardly be old enough to remember the one and original Black Jack Slade, ma’am.”
She dimpled at his gallant lie. “Call me Myrtle. I has to admit I was only a girl-child when my late husband brung me out here just afore the War. He worked for Overland, too. In them days everyone in town did, save for the tinhorns and the pimps trying to take advantage of the more honest folk traveling the trail. I know they say mean things about Black Jack. In fact, he could get a mite surly when he was in his cups. But he did keep the riffraff in their place whilst he was supervisor here.”
Longarm didn’t feel up to an argument on such a hot, dry day. He said, “I did hear tell he run the coach line honest, at least when he was sober, Myrtle.”
“Black Jack took his job serious, drunk or sober. It was that French Canuck, Jules Belle, who was crooking the company. My late husband told me so, and he was in a position to know, because he worked on the books in the office, here.”
“Jules Belle would be the Jules they named the stage stop after, right?”
“As a matter of fact, he named Julesburg after his grasping self. There was nothing here but grass when they laid out the Overland Trail, and Jules Belle was the first supervisor. Belle prospered so good, so fast, that Mr. Ficklin in Council Bluffs, the firm’s general manager, sent Black Jack Slade out here to look into the matter. It didn’t take Jack long to see how sticky-fingered Belle was. Jack hired back some honest men Belle had fired for asking questions, and began to question them himself. It was right down the street Belle shot Black Jack in the back, twice, and pumped him full of number-nine buck as he lay there helpless. I didn’t see the fight, but I heard the shots, and it was me as cradled what I took to be a dying man’s head in my apron as Frenchy Belle laughed, said to bury him and send the bill to him, before he strutted off bold as brass.”
“There was no law about to object to such rude behavior?”
She turned at the bottom of the stairs to grin up at him like the wicked child he suspected she must have been in her day. “Oh, the boys were going to string Belle up. My husband was the one as got the rope. But then Ben Ficklin in the flesh came. He’d read Black Jack’s first reports and had meant to fire Frenchy Belle in any case. The company owned the town. Mr. Ficklin bossed the company. So when he said he didn’t want a lynching on company property, the boys had to listen. Mr. Ficklin told Frenchy Belle to ride fast and hope he’d ridden far enough by the time Black Jack died. So Belle rode, and that was that. I don’t mean to boast, but I was one of the ladies as nursed poor Black Jack back to health, and it wasn’t easy. Nobody but a giant of a man could have soaked up so much lead and lived.”
“Then I take it the original Black Jack was not what one could call a runt?”
She replied, sort of wistfully, “He was tall, dark, and handsome. Almost as big as you, but a lot more dark. That’s why they called him Black Jack. He could have passed for a Sioux, and some said he had Injun blood. Didn’t you know that?”
He said he hadn’t thought about it, since the lunatic who was trying to be Black Jack nowadays was short, pale, and puny. Then he ticked his hatbrim to her and headed for the doorway. As the sun outside slapped him in the face with a hot towel, the middle-aged Myrtle called after him, “Come back here if you can’t hire even a mule. I might be able to fix you up.”
When he got to the livery he discovered that she’d been right about the townees playing posse. The fat old stablehand there told him the only transportation they had left for hire was a pony cart. When Longarm asked if it would be at all possible to hire just the pony, the older man laughed and told him, “Anything’s possible, but a man your size would sure look stupid aboard a Shetland mare. On the other hand, since you’d have both feet on the ground, you could likely get her to move a mite faster. Lord knows she’d need a little help in packing anyone your size. We mostly hire her out to women and children, cart and all.”
Longarm almost let that go by him. Then he asked, “By the grasp of a straw, could you have hired that pony cart to a gent short enough to pass for a kid, say yesterday afternoon?”
The stablehand shook his head. “Nope. The sheriff was ahead of you on that. The cart was out exactly twice yesterday. A grandmother I’ve dealt with before took her grandkids from back East for a morning ride on the prairie. Later in the day, a young gal hired the rig to ride off alone in. I suspect she aimed to meet her fellow outside of town. She got back after sundown, looking sort of rolled in the grass, if you know what I mean. There was mud on the spokes. They likely did their spooning over in the willows along the South Platte.”
Longarm frowned and said, “This is likely another wild guess, but Fort Halleck is along the South Platte. So can we be sure such a mysterious traveler was a woman, and not a short gent dressed silly as hell?”
The older man laughed knowingly. “She was pure she, and built sort of tempting. I helped her out of the cart, and you know how a helping hand might grasp the situation sort of accidental. When I told the sheriff that he said I was a dirty old man. He should talk. Everyone in town except his wife knows about the sheriff and that young schoolmarm.”
Longarm hadn’t come all this way to listen to small-town gossip. “If your sheriff was so interested in that same young gal in that same pony cart, he must have had a reason. Did he say what it was?” he asked.
“Sure he did. He wanted to know if I’d hired any stock to anybody new in town, and when I told him I had,
