take place.'
She asked, 'Don't you think that poor Mister Maxwell had call to kill his wife's lover tonight?'
Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders, making her purr and wriggle back, as he said, 'Nope. They're going to let him off. For all any of us know, the dead man had it coming. But Maxwell never would have gunned him if he hadn't been brought up to feel a real man didn't have any other choice, or all that much to fear, once he'd caught a fool like the late Sunny Jim in such a ridiculous position!'
She murmured, 'This position feels just grand to me. What other positions do you suggest for the couple next door, dear?'
Longarm started moving faster in her as he replied in a conversational tone, 'It wasn't the physical pose Sunny Jim was in that left him no way to come out ahead. It was more like who he was posing with nude when her husband barged in on them this evening.'
She gripped him tighter with her thighs and coyly asked what he might do if some other man kicked in their door.
He told her, 'I'd stand a better chance than poor old Sunny Jim. For I've hung my own gun handy and it would be a fair fight, unless you fibbed about being new in town and unspoken for leastways.'
She began to grind her pelvis teasingly in time with his thrusts as she assured him she was single and casually asked why the lover caught in this same act earlier couldn't have fought back.
Longarm said, 'He could have. Had he won, he'd have been looking forward to his hanging along about now. The unwritten law allows the injured husband to gun his woman's lover. There's nothing writ or unwrit that allows a jasper to bust up a man's home and then put a bullet in him. I wasn't just being nosey when I asked you all them personal questions over supper at Romano's earlier. I've seen too many old boys buried young to mess with any other gent's woman!'
At the time he really thought that was all a man had to worry about as far as the Unwritten Law was concerned.
CHAPTER 2
The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News enjoyed a field day with what they described as the Sordid Love Triangle at the Viceroy Hotel. But after a couple of days on the front pages of both papers, things commenced to go about the way Longarm had expected.
Maxwell's slick Denver lawyers knew better than to enter a plea of justifiable homicide. Cockeyed Jack McCall had tried that in a Colorado court after backshooting James Butler Hickok up Dakota way, and everyone remembered the possibly unconstitutional but certainly fatal verdict. Colorado folks considered a homicide a homicide, and figured even a horse thief deserved to die by rope-dancing. So the old stockman's lawyers got the case postponed while their client had his head examined at a fancy private sanitarium down by Pike's Peak. That was the last of the case as far as any front pages went. Longarm had no idea where Maxwell's fat wife wound up. But a copper badge at the Parthenon Saloon did tell him Sunny Jim Stanhope had been buried out by the clay pits, neatly wrapped in mattress ticking, at no cost to the taxpayers and damned little to Maxwell's law firm.
By this time Longarm could see he should have asked more questions at that spaghetti joint the night he'd first wound up in bed with old Lina Marie. For while it was true she'd had no male friends out Denver way, she'd left out the part about wanting to find one in particular and settle down. It was a notion he'd run across before, womankind being less adventurous than himself. So he knew that once they got to saying they felt unfulfilled selling dry goods where they worked, or cramped for space in the furnished room that you'd found for them, it was only a matter of monthlies before you got that old ultimatum. But in this case the ploy was another gent, at work, who seemed anxious to make an honest woman of her, if only she'd forget that taller cuss with more hair who was only using and abusing her.
Longarm didn't invoke the Unwritten Law to go gunning for the son of a bitch. He just wistfully allowed there was no way he could top such a fine offer, and was sorry that he wasn't there to escort her to supper after each hard day's work, since that other gent, if he existed, seemed so set on making her feel so blamed fulfilled.
He didn't know why the pretty young widow woman he'd been planning to invite to supper instead slammed the door in his face when he showed up at her place on Capitol Hill with store-bought violets. He felt sure that whether Methuselah had really lived nine hundred years or not, he'd gone to his grave without understanding the unfair sex.
Fortunately, the head matron at the Arvada Orphan Asylum hadn't heard about him having spaghetti at Romano's with any blond hussy, and so Longarm got to work a tad later than usual the next morning with a crick in his back. He'd forgotten how athletic little Morgana could be after she hadn't been getting any for a time.
As he entered the marshal's office in the Denver Federal Building, young Henry, the clerk who played the typewriter out front, told him their boss, Marshal Billy Vail, had Attila the Hun in the back.
Longarm doubted that, but said nothing as he sat down on a bench and picked up a back-dated copy of Godey's Lady's Book, the marshal's wife saving her subscription periodicals for the office. Longarm had no call to sew a hem or bake a cake. But some of the pictures were interesting.
He looked up to exchange glances with Henry when they both heard loud cussing coming from Billy Vail's office. When mention was made of blowing someone's balls off, Longarm rose to his considerable height and ambled back to see who the visitor had in mind, his own.44-40 drawn but pointed down along the seam of his pants.
As he entered Billy Vail's oak-paneled inner office without knocking, he saw his stocky, bulldog-faced superior's visitor was a wiry gnome wearing a summer-weight seersucker suit with a brace of six-guns under his unbuttoned jacket. As they both turned to regard him, old Billy Vail called out from behind his cluttered desk, 'Morning, Deputy Smiley! Has that slug-a-bed Deputy Long shown up yet? Mr. Homagy here has some serious charges he means to make to the rascal's face!'
Longarm knew how little he resembled the hatchet-faced quarter-Pawnee Deputy Smiley. So he figured his boss had to be as drunk as a lord or trying to slicker the scowling Homagy. So he just went on aiming at the rug in the uncertain light as he calmly replied, 'Long was having breakfast in that chili parlor near the corner just a few minutes ago.'
This was true. As soon as you studied on it. The wild-eyed cuss in the seersucker suit and six-guns didn't take much time to study on it. He said he knew the place and was already on his way, with a set jaw and a glare of grim determination as Longarm stepped aside to let him stride through the door as well as he was able.
Turning back to Vail with a bemused smile, Longarm asked what on earth might be going on. Vail was already up from behind his desk, and stumped over on his own short legs to snap, 'Tell you along the way!' as he grabbed
