Having ridden this line before, and having let the conductor win a few hands of penny-ante in the wee small hours after the club car was officially closed, Longarm was able to fort up in one of those fancy sleeping compartments without paying extra. His conductor pal allowed he hated noise too, and agreed a passenger who might have somebody gunning for him would be safer out of sight. Longarm hoped he'd be out of mind as well. For he'd spent more than one night in a coach car, sitting up and trying not to think about a piece of ass he'd just missed out on.
It was tough enough lying down in a comfortable bunk, trying to concentrate on payroll robberies instead of redheads, brunettes, and such who'd doubtless find the bunk mighty cozy.
He never found out where either got off. Having forted up so fine, Longarm sent out for coffee, sandwiches, and reading matter all the way to Minnesota. The name was supposed to stand for Sky Blue Water in Santee, if you wanted to be poetic. An Indian Longarm had asked the last time he was this far east had allowed it meant more like chalky or dishwater-gray water. The Indian hadn't known why either name might apply. They had all sorts of water, as well as some mighty arid range, in such a fair-sized state.
Lots of folks considered Minnesota an eastern state, since it had been a state before the war and had so many farms and farm folks. But in fact, lots of it lay west of the Mississippi. The Santee country Longarm had been sent to lay in the drier southwest corner, just a spit and a holler east of the Dakotas.
He had to stay aboard till they stopped at New Ulm, the seat of Brown County, where the tracks crossed the Minnesota River. So he got to see quite a few miles of the Santee hunting ground, and it sure was a caution how much pure hell the folks called Sioux by most everyone but themselves could raise in such natural cavalry country.
Whether the gently rolling swells out yonder were covered with a blue-stem prairie dotted with groves of hardwood, or a forest with a lot of open glades all through it, depended on who you asked or just what stretch you were both talking about. The sub-tropical term 'savannah' was used to describe such park-like mixtures of grassland and groves, although nobody who'd ever seen how it snowed up here in the winter would describe the place as sub-tropical.
The bluestem was still blue-green, going to tawny on the windier rises, thanks to all the rain they'd had across the West that last greenup. The trees were mostly oak atop the rises, with crack willow, box elder, and such along the bottoms of the draws. Longarm spied a heap of cows and no buffalo at all as they rolled on through lands the white man had stolen, according to the Santee, or bought fair and square off Indian-givers, according to Washington.
Such matters were not for Longarm to adjudicate. He hadn't been riding for the law when Little Crow, or at least his young men, had brought a long simmer to a boil by killing three white men and two white women, the prize for this shootout being less than a full dozen eggs from the homestead they'd hit.
Some said, whites included, that old Tshe-ton Wa-ka-wa Ma-ni, as he said his name in Santee, had tried to head off what he knew was coming, warning his followers they just didn't know what they were getting into. But of course, being a Santee, he had to lead them when they insisted on an all-out war with the Wasichu, lest they get their fool selves killed even faster.
They'd gotten killed soon enough, once an outraged Great White Father showed he wasn't too distracted by the war in the East to do nothing about the blood and slaughter along the Minnesota Valley. Sibley's Minnesota militia were gleefully exterminating Santee, having gained the upper hand after some earlier and mighty frightening reverses, by the time old Pope had made it west with his Union regulars and columns of Galvanized Yankees in time to mop up.
The onionskins failed to say whether Calvert Tyger and his reb pals had lit out before or after Abe Lincoln told the army to take it easy and pardoned all but a tenth of the bunch the army had been fixing to hang. According to the little they had on Israel Bedford, the Union vet and local homesteader who'd cashed that one treasury note in these parts didn't seem connected in any way with Galvanized Yankees, whether they'd deserted in time of war or served with honor and just gone on home to brag on being a vet of both sides.
But Bedford had cashed that bill, not long after a mess of federal employees had been gunned for such ill- gotten gains. So Bedford would be the first one up ahead to scout for sign, discreetly as possible, just in case he turned out to be the one who'd sent that kid to shove a lawman off a train.
It had been Longarm's experience that jaspers with guilty secrets to hide tended to want lawmen headed off before they got close enough to uncover the secrets.
Longarm had no idea, after all this time to study on it, if there was some secret connection between a mad-dog outlaw gang and a sober settler everyone seemed to have down as honest and upright. But that was how come they called such connections secret.
Longarm knew the baggage-smashers he'd tipped in advance would run his McClellan and possibles over to the baggage room of the New Ulm depot for him once they got there. In case his unknown enemies had other secrets planned for him, he ambled back to the rear observation platform and swung over the rail to hit the cross-ties running when the train slowed down on the outskirts of town. He still came close to killing his own fool self for any sons of bitches laying for him around the depot. But he landed in a patch of sunflower and rolled lightly back to his feet, Winchester at port arms, after tripping over a switch point while the train was running fifteen miles an hour.
As long as he was still moving quickly, Longarm sprang across a trackside ditch, crossed the dusty service road on the far side at a dead run, and hunkered down in the shady angle provided by a box elder growing against the plank fence of somebody's backyard.
He wasn't planning on hunkering there any longer than it took to catch his breath and gather his wits a bit. The odds on the smartest crooks in the world knowing where he'd drop off so they could set up an ambush more than a mile from the depot seemed mighty slim. So he doubted the lady staring over the fence at him from under a polka- dot sun-bonnet could have murder in mind. But she did sound determined as she scolded, 'Get out of my tulips and explain yourself this very instant, young man!'
Longarm glanced down to confirm he had in fact flattened out a patch of cropped vegetation that might have sprouted as tulips a spell back. He grinned up sheepishly. 'I doubt I damaged the bulbs along this fence, ma'am. But I'd be proud to buy you some new ones if you'd name your price. I'm U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, on a government mission and allowed to charge anything within reason to my expense account.'
The woman on the far side of the sun-bleached planks sounded doubtful as she replied, 'You're likely right about underground bulbs surviving your silly behavior. But would you like to show me some identification? You look like a hobo in need of a shave, I just saw you drop off that passing train, and I could say I was Queen Victoria if nobody asked me to prove it!'
Longarm got to his feet, holding the Winchester muzzle down in his free hand as he got out his billfold and
