croaked, 'Is that you, Alabam?'
Longarm softly replied, 'Yep. How did we know that lawman might be staying here?'
The dying stranger sighed and murmured, 'Don't you remember? It was your grand notion to ask around town about that black pony with a white blaze. When the kid heard it was kept by a widow who lived all alone, you were the one who said it surely sounded like old Longarm's wet dream!'
Longarm smiled thinly and muttered, 'They told us true about the horny rascal, didn't they? By the way, old son, who told us?'
There came no answer. Longarm felt the downed man's throat again and then, since the smoke was getting bad by now, he got back up to go pour a pitcher of what turned out to be fruit juice over the smoldering body spread out face-down by the stove. It sure smelled funny in the end. He threw open the back door as well as another window, and moved to cut Ilsa out of her pigging string bonds as he said, 'Sorry about that dessert topping, honey. Thought it was water.'
The widow gal, who'd been baking up a storm when they'd burst in on her, removed the wad of dishrag from her own mouth as she gasped, 'I was afraid you'd never get to me, you brute! Let me up! I have to pee so bad my back teeth are floating!'
So he let her run for it, and just managed to reload and pin his own badge to his own chest by the time that deputy sheriff and a quartet of town constables showed up out back, their own guns drawn.
Longarm stepped out on the back porch, holding up a hand for some decorum as he saw other men, boys, and at least a few gals stampeding onto the Pedersson property. He declared, 'I want you New Ulm lawmen to keep this growing crowd out of Miss Ilsa's flower beds.' Then he motioned to the county deputy. 'You'd best come on in and tell me whether two gents I just shot were the same ones as were asking so many questions about me earlier.'
The deputy sheriff followed Longarm inside, marveling, 'Whatever has Miss Ilsa been cooking in here? Smells like candied ham mixed up with burnt wool, for Pete's sake!'
Longarm said that was about the size of it as he rolled the short one over with a boot tip. The county lawman stared soberly down at the dead man's blankly staring face and firmly declared, 'That's the senior deputy from Saint Paul. How come you shot him, Deputy Long?'
Longarm answered tersely, 'Had to. Got an eyewitness. I got me another one over here by this other doorway. Miss Ilsa may have heard him confess they'd been sent after me by name. He died before I got him to say who they were working for. But I'm going to be mighty surprised if our Saint Paul federal office sent either. You naturally asked to see theirbadges and credentials when they called on you before?'
The deputy sheriff smiled down uncertainly and allowed, 'This taller one was introduced as a junior federal man, but to tell the pure truth, nobody asked to see no papers, once that older one flashed what surely looked like a badge pinned to his wallet.'
They went back in the kitchen. Longarm hunkered down to gingerly probe the charred pants of the dead man by the stove until he found a singed and juice-soaked wallet. As the local deputy watched bemused, Longarm opened it up to expose a badge of German silver and some rather official-looking identification. Then he muttered, 'Mail-order badge. Sold by a Saint Lou novelty house for the use of kids, so-called private outfits, and pests like these. I see he filled out these lodge membership cards under the name of John Singleton Mosby. Reckon he thought Smith and Jones had been used up.'
The Minnesota deputy frowned thoughtfully and asked, 'Wasn't old Johnny Reb Mosby the Confederate raider we used to call the Gray Ghost?'
Longarm nodded wearily and said, 'I arrested an owlhoot rider who said he was Paul Revere one time, and the hell of it was, the name on his birth certificate really was Paul Revere. But this old boy's not young enough to be named after the real Colonel Mosby of wartime fame.'
The Minnesota lawman decided, 'You'd still have to admire a rebel raider a heap to name yourself after him, wouldn't you?'
Longarm soberly replied, 'That's about the size of it, and they've sent me to backtrack a gang of unreconstructed rebel admirers who've raided considerably, after starting out in these parts to begin with!'
The deputy sheriff removed his hat to scratch his head as he sighed and said, 'I'm missing something here. I know they all say Calvert Tyger, Brick Flanders, and them other Galvanized Yankees started out in these parts years ago. But didn't you say yourself both them crazy rascals are supposed to have been burnt up in rooming house fires?'
Longarm nodded and said, 'More than once in Tyger's case. On the other hand, the last I heard, Colonel John Singleton Mosby was still alive and full of piss and vinegar, no matter how dead this namesake at our feet seems to be right now.' lisa Pedersson seemed awfully pensive when she finally came back out. Longarm didn't see why. He was the only one who knew for certain where she'd just been, and it wasn't as if he'd never noticed she had the usual entrances and exits down yonder.
Some of her neighbors pitched in to help tidy up as the local law hauled the bodies off to be photographed and stored in a cool place in the hopes somebody might come forward to claim or at least hazard a guess as to who they might belong to.
Longarm didn't think a widow gal living alone would want all her neighbors to know she liked it dog-style. So he made sure nobody else was listening when he offered to spring for a new hall runner and some ceiling tin. But she just got all flustered and ran up front again with her apron over her red face. So he figured, as soon as he had the chance to do so quietly, it might be best to slip his saddle and possibles off her property and over by the boat landing. For it was getting late to ride Blaze clean out to that Chambrun place to begin with, and there seemed to be at least one member of the gang left in New Ulm. The one that dying jasper had only named as 'the kid' was not only out there somewhere, but had the added edge of being the only one who knew all the faces involved!
CHAPTER 15
The Minnesota got a mite tricky to navigate above, say, Mankato. But the little stern-wheel steamboat, Moccasin Blossom, carried some local freight and passengers every other day, and this turned out to be one of those days. And since two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, Longarm didn't tell anyone in town what he planned to do next. He found that same old colored lady over by the boat landing, and gave her four bits to smuggle his baggage on board, disguised as garden truck, once he'd had a sneaky conversation with the little tub's purser in the shade of a riverside sycamore.
The purser was the officer in charge of who got to ride upstream with them or not. He allowed his skipper
