you’d help me?”
The old man’s face lit up. “You just say the word. I’m there.”
Longarm said casually, “You wouldn’t happen to have a long-range rifle, would you by any chance? High- caliber?”
Clell Martin said, “Ha! You wouldn’t believe it, but I still have my Springfield from the War of the Confederacy. You know, of course, we didn’t have no proper arms like the Yankees did, so I took me one of them modern Springfield breech-loaders off one of them blue bellies. Still got it. Fires a .58-caliber cartridge.”
Longarm said, “That might come in handy.” He sipped at his coffee, watching the old man over the rim. They talked for another half hour, and Longarm managed to make his way through two of the bitterest cups of coffee that he had ever tasted. Finally, when he felt that his visit was as fruitful as it was going to get, he made his adieus with a promise to come back and discuss their mutual problem at greater length. After he had mounted, he said, “Mr. Martin, I think you and I are going to do some business. I consider you, sir, a citizen and a patriot.”
The old man seemed to straighten up. He said, “I like to think of myself that way.”
“Well, we need more like you. I’m going into town now and do some thinking and some planning. I’ll be on out here. It just might be that we can help each other.”
Clell Martin said, “Well, that would just suit me jam up to jelly.”
Longarm rode away in a very thoughtful frame of mind. That the old man had an old Civil War Springfield did not surprise him. They had been manufactured toward the end of the war by the Union forces in the hundreds of thousands. There were probably a many a one hanging over fireplaces or stored in attics all over the country. Of course, in the years since, they had been replaced by the all-metallic cartridge rather than the cap-and-ball mechanism that had operated the Springfield. The old rifles were slow but they were extremely effective. However, they were not the only long-range rifle that fired a large-caliber slug. Any number of buffalo guns, most notably the Sharps, did the same.
But he found it most interesting that Clell Martin had such a hate for the Castles. At one part of the conversation, Longarm had wondered out loud what effect it would have on the peace and tranquility of the Castle family if they both got up on top of one of the buttes near one of the Castle ranch headquarters and lobbed a few shells through the ranch house roof. The old man had cackled with glee at the very thought.
But there was still a question that Longarm wanted answered. The best man for that was one of the town’s undertakers. He assumed that it would have had to have been an undertaker who’d readied the bodies of the soldiers to be shipped back home for their burial. However, only part of his mind was dwelling on the subject of the murdered soldiers. Other parts of it were playing around with the delightful prospect of dinner with the delicious Miss Mabelle Russell that evening. It was the one bright spot in an otherwise dreary time. As he rode toward town, he couldn’t keep from wondering where Billy Bob and his brother Glenn had been the night before. The deputy had warned him that they would come looking for him, but they hadn’t. What business could have been so important to keep them from seeking revenge? His problem was that he had no way of finding out. He simply couldn’t go around asking questions and he couldn’t go to the sheriff. He didn’t know any way to get any information without putting on his badge, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Yet.
When he got into town he inquired about undertakers, and was surprised to find that there was only one. With the state of civility in a place like San Angelo, he’d figured that they would need at least a half a dozen. He got directions and rode to the other side of town and pulled up in front of the building. As he dismounted from his mare, he noticed that there was a barbershop right next door, and it reminded him that it might be a good idea to get a haircut and a store-bought shave before his dinner that evening with Miss Russell.
Longarm learned very little from the undertaker, though the man was willing enough. He was an affable, plump man named Charlie something—Longarm never did get his last name. The undertaker had handled all of the bodies, including the one that had been stabbed. He had a vivid memory of each one. In fact, he went out of his way to make it clear to Longarm that he took pride in his work and in his handling of the bodies that were in his care. Of all the soldiers who had been shot, only one body had seemed to indicate that the bullet had been fired from an elevated position. Charlie was quick, and as soon as he caught on to what Longarm was after, he was able to draw on a piece of paper the locations of the entrance and exit wounds of all the soldiers who had been shot. One shot had been shot from a level position, which meant that the assassin must have been standing or kneeling or in concealment on a slight rise. The other two entrance wounds had been lower than the exit wounds. In all cases, however, it was clear that a high-powered, long-range rifle of a high caliber had been used since the exit wound had been so much larger than the entry.
The result was that Longarm had left the undertaker no wiser than when he had entered. He was not at all surprised that each of the murders had been committed with a long-range, high-caliber rifle. That only made sense. If you were going to ambush a man, it made sense to do it from as far a distance as possible, and that meant a long-range rifle. If you wanted to make sure that you killed him, that meant a heavy-caliber slug. But the information was virtually useless since he had no idea of how many old Springfields like Clell Martin owned or how many Sharps buffalo rifles or other high-powered long-range heavy-caliber rifles there were in the county. They probably numbered in the fifties or the hundreds. He doubted that he would find his killer through the weapon. His visit to the undertaker had been in the hope that all of the ambushing had been done from an elevated height, which would indicate that someone was using a position on one of the buttes, and that could point in the direction of Clell Martin. But he really couldn’t suspect Clell Martin because he didn’t have a solid reason. The Castles continued to be foremost in his mind only for the flimsy reason that he had no one better. And also because Billy Bob and Glenn had not come looking for him last night when the last trooper had been killed, and because the Castles were behind the effort to move the fort.
It was in a thoughtful mood that he went into the barbershop to get a haircut and a shave. It was a three-chair barbershop and there were quite a number of loungers hanging around. After the barber finished trimming Longarm’s hair, he leaned the chair back so that Longarm was lying almost horizontally and began lathering his face for the shave. As he lay there with the barber putting hot towels on to soften his bristly whiskers, he chanced to hear a couple of the loafers laughing about Virgil Castle. He just caught the end of the remark, which sounded like, “and you know that they found that fool running nekkid down the road with a rifle in his hand …” Another voice chimed in to say, “Yeah, I heard about that. You know that the boy gets stranger and stranger every year.”
Longarm suddenly got very curious. He asked the barber, “Who are they talking about?”
The barber was stropping his razor. He turned to Longarm and said, “Oh, one of Vernon Castle’s sons. He ain’t quite right, a little strange.”
Longarm said, “They called him a boy? Is he young?”
The barber answered, “Naw, he’s about twenty-five. He just ain’t ever growed up.”
“Is he dangerous?”
