The blond barmaid was headed their way with a couple of beer schooners. Longarm managed to catch her eye as she put them down for a couple of gents who’d been there first. She nodded at Longarm but turned away to fill other orders. He sighed. “I can see why that damn fool left. A man could die of thirst in here even if he didn’t get shot by kids dressed up in winter chaps in August.”
The stockman was still interested in the diminutive desperado, for some reason. He asked, “Wasn’t it Julesburg where Black Jack Slade carved so many notches on his gun grips?”
Longarm grimaced, reached for a smoke, and said, “Ned Buntline made that up for his Wild West Magazine. The first thing you do after you gun a man is to deny it was you as gunned him. You don’t keep a record for the law to use against you. They do say the real Black Jack Slade kept the ear of one man he gunned as a watch fob. But, like I say, it was before my time.”
“He must have been mean as hell,” the stockman opined.
“Well, sure he was mean as hell,” said Longarm, lighting his three-for-a-nickel cheroot. “That’s how come they lynched him. He was a mean drunk who’d tortured men to death. Would you want a cuss like that for a neighbor?”
The barmaid at last stopped in front of Longarm, smiled wearily, and asked what she could do for him. He was too polite to ask for more than shots and chasers for him and his thirsty pal. As she spun around to dash off again, the stockman said he took his red-eye neat and Longarm said, “That’s all right. I’ll nurse both the beers. Lord knows when that poor little gal will ever get time to serve drinks one at a time. You wouldn’t know her name, would you?”
The stockman didn’t. So it took Longarm the better Part of an hour to find out her name was Grace. But he was still sober because of the slow service. The place was just beginning to thin out and she was just starting to spend more time at his end of the bar, batting her eyelashes friendly, when a blue-uniformed copper badge came up beside Longarm. “They said you might be here, Longarm. Sergeant Nolan told me to fetch you if I could find you.”
Longarm sighed and said, “You found me. What’s UP?”
“Two federal agents down. The federal building is closed at this hour and the sarge thinks someone working for Uncle Sam may have something to say about the shooting.”
“Nolan thought right. You say a couple of deputy marshals lost a shootout? That’s odd. I don’t recall Billy Vail mentioning anything about us picking anyone up tonight.”
The copper badge shook his head. “It wasn’t any of you boys. Couple of gents from the provost marshal’s office. Went to pick up an army deserter at the address he’d given on his enlistment papers and got lucky about the address and unlucky about him. Right now they’re spread out on the rug over there. It ain’t all that far. Are You coming?”
Longarm shot a wistful glance at the blonde down the bar and said, “Let’s go get it over with. As the nearest federal officer still sober enough to function, it looks like it could be my case for now.”
As they elbowed their way toward the batwing doors, Longarm asked if they’d made any arrests yet, The cOpper badge told him, “No. The kid they was after threw down on them, right in his front parlor, and drilled ‘em both through their hearts like a real pro. Time the roundsman on the beat responded to the sound of gunfire on a normally quiet street, the moody cuss was long gone. He might not get far, though. Witnesses gave us a mighty good description to go on.”
As they got outside, the copper badge added, “He’s a little runt dressed cow, even if he was a townee boy raised right here in the city. Worse yet, he was last seen running in wooly chaps and a hat big enough for a family of Arapaho to move into.”
Longarm looked incredulous. “That can’t be right! Do we have a name to go with this pint-sized pistoleer?”
The copper badge nodded. “Sure. His name is Joseph, but he makes everyone call him Jack. Jack Slade. What’s so funny?”
Longarm said, “It ain’t funny. It’s just awful. I figured he had to be crazy, but not that crazy!”
Copper badges got to walk more than Longarm had to, so their notion of not far was over a quarter-mile, across Broadway and up the lower slopes of Capitol Hill as far as Lincoln Avenue. Longarm had the house figured before they got to it. There was a considerable crowd out front and Sergeant Nolan was standing on the front porch of the modest but neatly painted two-story frame structure.
As they joined him on the porch, Nolan told Longarm, “We got a statement from the only other person in the house, the killer’s older sister. Some neighbor women are comforting her in her sewing room. Poor thing’s hysterical.”
As he followed Nolan in, Longarm asked, “Did his kin see the killing?”
“No,” Nolan replied. “She didn’t even know he’d deserted, riding his commanding officer’s horse with the saddlebags full of stuff the army never issued him. When they showed up to ask if he might possibly be home she went to fetch him from his quarters over the carriage house out back. She didn’t find him there. As she was coming back she heard two shots, ran into her parlor where she’d left the army agents, and I’m about to show you what she found.”
They stepped into the well kept, if cheaply furnished parlor. It was occupied by a handful of other lawmen on their feet and two more stretched side by side on the floor. Both were dressed in civilian riding duds. Longarm saw no need to comment on this. In a peacetime army no soldier off-post was required to wear a uniform, and a man who got gigged for every stain or missing button seldom did. Getting close to deserters was tough enough.
Nolan said, “We’ve already patted them down for I.D. The older one would be Staff Sergeant Flint. The younger one with the big moustache was Sergeant Hughes.”
Longarm didn’t answer. He stared soberly down at the dead men, feeling embarrassed for them as he noted how dumb and helpless they looked, staring up through him. They were both wearing gun rigs under their coats. He bent to draw Flint’s and sniff it.
Nolan said, “Neither gun’s been fired, or drawed, for that matter. As we put it together, they were just standing there like big-ass birds when the kid stepped through that doorway, yonder, and simply blowed them away. He must have had his gun out already, don’t you reckon?”
