damned-body fill in some of the damned details! For I'll be switched with snakes if I can make one lick of sense out of all this bullshit!'
But before he could elbow away through the gathering crowd, one of the newcomers loudly demanded, 'Jesus H. Christ, who tangled with the Chief and what's the Chief doing there on the ground?'
It was Gus Hansson, that young cowhand Longarm had met the other night on the open range west of the county road. Longarm turned to the surprised-looking kid to declare, 'He's dead because he tangled with me. It was his own notion. I'm still working on how come. You say you knew him more recent than these older gents, Gus?'
Hansson nodded, but stared at Longarm as if he'd just been caught jerking off in church as he replied, 'Well, sure I knew him. We was riding for the same outfit. Miss Helga Runeberg hired him as a top hand not two weeks ago, and she ain't going to like this at all!'
An older local in the crowd proclaimed with a more noticeable Swedish accent, 'Yumpin' Yesus! Helga Runeberg has always been as mean as she was pretty and she has more than a dozen riders! If I wass you I'd get out of town before she finds out, no matter who I wass or why I yust shot one of her boys!'
Longarm smiled thinly and announced for all who had any interest in the matter, 'I did what I had to and I'll leave these parts when I've finished what I came to do. If anyone wants to build what just happened here into a blood feud, be advised I can get just as mean as pretty too!'
CHAPTER 20
Longarm spent more time than he felt he had to spare at the Western Union office near the depot. First the fuss in charge had to argue with him about rates, seeing he wanted to send more than three full pages of close-set block lettering to his home office at day rates collect.
The clerk pointed out they charged way less than a nickel a word after midnight, when the moonlit wires might otherwise hum idle in the wind. But Longarm said he'd have told them to send it as a night letter if he hadn't wanted his boss to get the damned report directly.
They didn't argue, since he paid up front for the shorter wires he sent to the Indian agents at Crow Creek and Leech Lake, hoping to get a better line on that dead Indian, whether Ojibwa or Santee. Then he had a longer argument over their prior telegraph traffic, with the old fuss in charge insisting Mister Ezra Cornell would rise from his grave to haunt them if they betrayed their sacred trust to all their customers.
Ezra Cornell had been the rich old bird who'd gotten richer than old Sam Morse on the telegraph by founding and stringing the Western Union Telegraph Company just in time for the Civil War. He'd made so much money he'd had enough left over to build a university and get his son elected governor of New York, after Ezra had died, by setting down some company rules in stone. One that had given Longarm a pain in the past was that nobody who didn't work for the company was ever to read a private message sent by a paying customer.
Longarm explained, 'I've had this argument with you boys before and, so far, I've usually won. Old Ezra never intended his employees to obstruct justice. He just didn't want small-town gossip emanating from his scattered offices.'
He let that sink in and added, 'I ain't interested in whether an elderly colored lady who might have called herself Smith was sending or receiving dirty messages. I only need to know if anyone like that availed herself of your services at all, damn it!'
The clerk sniffed and grudgingly allowed, 'We have very few darkies in New Ulm to begin with. I suppose it's safe to tell you no elderly colored women by any name have availed themselves of our services in recent memory.'
Longarm nodded. 'Now we're getting somewheres. As you'll see whilst you're sending that tedious report to my boss, Marshal Vail, I just had to shoot me an Indian they called Chief Youngwolf. Santee, or what you'd call Chippewa. I described him in more detail in them wires I just asked you to send to the Sioux and Chippewa B.I.A. agents. You'd know if a pure-blood wearing a black Stetson Buckeye had been in and out of here all that much by any name, right?'
The Western Union man declared that as a matter of fact they had fewer Indians sending or receiving telegrams than colored folks, the Great Sioux Rising of '62 having left Indians unpopular as hell in this particular corner of Minnesota.
Longarm started to ask a dumb question about breeds. He decided an Indian gunslick laying low in a county so crowded with blue-eyed blond Scandinavians would as likely recruit a pure white to front for him if he was shy about dealing with Western Union in person.
Longarm confided to the clerk, as much to diagram it in his own puzzled mind, 'Somebody communicating by wire with Colorado pals on a fairly regular basis would doubtless be using some slick code if he was too slick to just wire back and forth naturally.'
The Western Union clerk asked how Longarm knew his mysterious red outlaw had been trying to communicate with anyone by wire to begin with.
Longarm said, 'That's easy. I never put an ad in your local paper to announce my arrival. Youngwolf has been laying low on a cattle spread closer to Sleepy Eye than here to begin with. I'd have never thought to look for him there if he hadn't come looking for me with a twelve-gauge just now, if that was his true intent. I'd sure like to ask the white pal he must have had fronting for him just what in blue blazes this is all about. For up until a few minutes ago I was inclined to agree with my boss that there wasn't all that much going on here in New Ulm!'
The somewhat mollified telegraph clerk agreed it seemed a real poser. Longarm didn't want to get him het up again by asking to go over all the wires they'd sent or received for, say, the past seventy-two hours. He knew that even if he won the fight, he'd have a hell of a chore just reading that many messages without a clue as to which ones might be in code.
Folks who hadn't had to try decoding tended to mix codes up with ciphers. A cipher was kid stuff next to a code. The cipher everyone since the ancient Greeks tried first involved simply switching the letters of the alphabet around, so an X might stand for an A or a Z for an E and so forth. But any signal corpsman worth his salt would know right off that a message reading something like 'UIF RVJDL CSPXO GPA KVNQFE PWFS UIF MBAZ EPH' had to be cipher, and once you knew that, it wasn't too tough to figure the letter used most likely stood for an E, the next most an A, and so on till you got a few words to make sense and could fill in the rest.
But a simple pre-arranged code could be almost impossible to break because it worked the way kith and kin might talk when they didn't want the kids to know just what they were saying. It was just as easy and less shocking, for instance, for the lady of the house to suggest they put the kiddies to bed and go for a stroll in the moonlight than it was to say, 'Let's lock the kids up and screw,' although her man had as good a notion of what
