on once they had.
She dimpled and stopped trying to unbuckle his gun rig as she told him she agreed it was time they got out of this ridiculous vertical position.
They slipped out the back way and moved along a back street in the gloaming. Off in the distance, a train whistle seemed to be mourning the death of another day. But Longarm knew it was that eastbound he'd have had to wait for if he'd taken that clerk's suggestion about modern transportation. When Viggy asked what he'd just chuckled about, he told her, 'I'd be crossing the Sleepy Eye trestle aboard that train about now if I hadn't checked today's timetable and met up with a buckskin pony that was more convenient. Don't know whether they'll be stopping at Sleepy Eye or not. Either way, they'd have been letting me off here even later.'
As they approached the entrance to her own alley Viggy hesitated and murmured, 'I might have felt better leading you and that rifle to my back door after dark, dear. It's not that I'm ashamed of anything exactly, but it's still awfully light out, and...'
'I know about small-town gossip,' he said, not wanting to upset her by telling her a widow was talking about them clean across town. But he never argued when she shyly suggested he let her go on ahead and then come on down that alley alone after it got a mite darker.
He said he'd hold up a cottonwood with his back and smoke a couple of cheroots while she went on ahead to turn down the covers.
She glanced about, then stood on her toes to kiss him some more before she turned and scampered off in the gathering dusk like a kid out for mischief on Halloween.
Longarm chuckled as he turned his back to that cottonwood, cradled his Winchester over one arm, and reached for a smoke. But he'd barely lit it, and taken no more than a half dozen drags on it, when the soft gloaming light lit up with a hellish glare and the earth underfoot was shaken by a horrendous blast that just had to be dynamite, a heap of dynamite, going off too close to keep Longarm from wailing, 'Aw, shit, don't let it be that, Lord!'
But it was. Shattered wood had been set ablaze down the alley, and he could see the empty smoke-hazed gap where Viggy's carriage house had stood long before he got that far. So he didn't join the crowd of confounded neighborfolk gathering like flies around a cow pat as he spun and tore the other way, with the Winchester '73 at port arms. He levered a round of.44-40 in its chamber as he heard that eastbound train's huffing and puffing off to the west. He beat it into the New Ulm depot with time to spare, though, and was only half surprised to find the so- called Deputy O'Brian alone on the open platform.
O'Brian didn't act surprised to see him. He said, 'Howdy, pard. I figured the bastard who set off that bomb would head for here to catch that train too.'
Longarm said, 'Well, sure you did. How did you know someone just rigged a mess of dynamite to go off when a lady I was escorting home tried to open her damned door?'
O'Brian tried, 'I heard the explosion, of course. Just like you, I figured Laughing Larry Lucas had blown some damned something up and that he'd naturally have his getaway planned in advance.'
'You're under arrest for the murder of Miss Vigdis Magnusson, a gal who never done no harm, you son of a bitch!' Longarm swung the muzzle of his Winchester to cover the impostor, adding, 'Go for that side-draw, please, if you think I'm fooling. Otherwise you'd best give me some answers pronto. Who sent for you and how come?'
Laughing Larry lived up to his nickname by laughing like a fool hyena and demanding, 'What if I tell you to just guess?'
Longarm said, 'I reckon you'll get gut-shot trying to escape. You don't seem to grasp this situation, you comical cuss. I am mad as hell and I'd rather kill you personally, gruesomely, than let you die quick and painless on the gallows or even talk your way back into another nut house. But I'll still take you in alive if you'd like to say who else I want to arrest for what you just done!'
Laughing Larry looked really loco as the headlight beam of that train pulling into the station etched his grinning features in harsh yellow light and shadows black as sin. But Longarm was still trying to reason with the half-crazed killer when Laughing Larry suddenly spun on one boot heel like an awkward ballet dancer and bolted for the far side of the tracks just as the locomotive's big barn-red cowcatcher was about to plow between them.
Longarm fired, of course, and hit the fugitive felon low in the right hip, to send his holstered six-gun flying as he spun again to land spread-eagled on his back, both boot heels hooked over the far rail as the big locomotive hissed to a stop to block Longarm's view.
So he was tearing around the front end of the train as he heard a voice from the engineer's cabin wailing, 'Lord have mercy! I think I just ran over a passenger!'
He was right, Longarm saw, as he moved down the far side of the big steel drivers through clouds of hissing steam. For he found the killer he'd just shot stretched out on the ballast, spurting blood from both severed stumps while he laughed like hell.
Longarm lay his Winchester aside on the ballast and whipped off the dark bandanna he'd been wearing in place of a sissy tie as he told Laughing Larry to lie still. He was knotting the now-bloody calico as tight as he could around the killer's right shin when the amused or more likely hysterical cuss laughed some more and asked if Longarm wanted to race him down to the far end.
Longarm reached for the killer's own shoestring tie as he told him not unkindly, 'I feel your foot-racing days are done. But we may be able to stop the bleeding, and weren't you fixing to tell me who else I have to thank for all this tomfoolery?'
Laughing Larry just giggled, lay back, and closed his eyes. Longarm still knotted the tie around his left shin, even though it wasn't bleeding that hard now.
Sheriff Tegner and two deputies came around the front end of the locomotive with lanterns. As they joined Longarm and Laughing Larry, the older lawman said, 'Thanks for standing by as I recovered from them caraway seeds. Somebody just blew Vigdis Magnusson to bits all by herself, despite the old biddy across the alley, and how come I see Deputy O'Brian laying there so still? Is he dead?'
Longarm nodded soberly and said, 'I reckon. He wasn't the real Sean O'Brian from our Saint Paul office. He was the one and original hired killer he'd come all this way to warn us about!'
Sheriff Tegner swung the beam of his lantern over the blank face of the figure at their feet, marveling, 'That's Laughing Larry Lucas? How come? Why would he go to all that trouble warning you he was in town if, all the time, he meant to blow you up the way he did Miss Vigdis and all them other victims?'
