Longarm asked if they were talking about the corner room numbered 206. When the shavetail allowed they surely were, Longarm said, 'It was me they were after. I'd booked that room for the night and hung on to the key. The killer or killers came in down here asking for me. The clerk must have thought I was upstairs when he didn't see my key in its pigeonhole. They made him lead them upstairs and open my door with his passkey. Then they just started shooting until they emptied their wheels or noticed I wasn't there. So what are we all standing here for? Whether it was the Quirt McQueen you all know or some other son of a bitch entire, he can't have more than a few minutes lead on you, and it's open prairie all around if he's not holed up in Shanty Town!'
The provost marshal roared, 'You heard the man! I want four squads assembled on the double, fully armed! I want one to sweep this post inside the perimeter, just in case. I want that squatters' settlement turned over like a wet rock, and meanwhile, I want one squad riding north and the other south!
The O.D. asked what about east and west. The major said, 'We are to his west. I don't think anyone but Indians would head for that Indian agency to the east.'
He shot a questioning glance at Longarm, who suggested, 'If Indians passed through your gates this evening, your sentries should have seen 'em, right?'
The major smiled thinly and said, 'They told us you were good. Do you think that was why someone was out to kill you just now?'
Longarm started to say Quirt McQueen hadn't struck him as that deep a thinker. Then he remembered those other more persistent attacks, and contented himself with answering, 'Don't know, Major. I sent me some questions by wire earlier. Reckon I'll head over to the Signal Corps and see if anything came in. Your wire is manned round the clock, ain't it?'
The provost marshal nodded and said it had to be. Longarm elbowed his way out and started across the parade in the tricky light, his mind in a whirl. For no matter how he kept collecting facts around here, he hadn't been able to fit any together worth beans!
He knew he was overloaded with more information than he needed. It had been simple to figure the less tangled motives Of, say, Spike Wilson, the colonel's lady, and even that cheating army wife who told tales out of school. He reviewed his simple transactions with all three of them. Old Spike was just selling sin at a price enlisted men could afford. That lady in the dark who'd wound up on her way out to Fort Douglas had just been getting back at her cheating husband, and old Elvira...? She was just getting fat as she pined for the impossible, a young love now dead and buried after falling in the vicious Battle of Chickamauga in the hills of Tennessee.
Longarm took another full step before he gasped, 'Jesus H. Christ! That's it!' and swerved a tad to bear down on the B.I.A. liaison office instead. There was no light inside at this hour. But Longarm knocked anyway. And it was a good thing he was standing to one side as a whole fusillade of bullets tore through frosted glass and paneling from inside!
Longarm called back, 'Give it up, old son! That's another time you missed me, and I got it all figured out. After that, you're smack on an army post and they've already called out the guard on you!'
As if to prove his point, that young O.D. and a quartet of his interior guard, with bayoneted rifles, were running his way until he waved his own drawn.44-40 and yelled, 'Don't line up with this doorway! We got us a sore loser inside!'
As if to prove the point another shot rang out inside, and then a familiar but unexpected voice called out, 'Don't shoot. I got him! What's going on around here, for Pete's sake?'
Longarm yelled, 'Open up, Ryan.'
So Fred Ryan did, wearing no more than his pants, a sleepy-eyed expression, and a smoking Walker Conversion as he said, 'I was asleep in the back when I heard young Rogers blazing away out here. When I asked him what was going on and who he'd been shooting at, he turned on me with his two guns and I had to shoot him!'
Longarm mildly asked, 'How come? I counted twelve shots just now.' Ryan said as calmly, 'That's doubtless why I'm still alive. He had the drop on me and I was half asleep when I fired my own gun. Come on in. You can see for yourselves how it was.'
As they all filed into the smoke-filled office after him, Ryan turned up a lamp someone had trimmed to a blue flicker earlier. As it flared to display the Cherokee clerk on the floor behind the counter, facedown and bare-ass with a pistol in each dead hand, Longarm followed Ryan through the gap in the counter, observing, 'You made good time to Fort Smith and back, Fred. We weren't expecting you this soon.'
Ryan said, 'I just got in this evening. That's why I went right to bed without making a speech about it. I never went all the way east to Fort Smith. That newspaper gal did, looking to interview Quanah Parker for her readers. I only had to pick up some mail-order stuff of a... personal nature at the freight depot in Akota.'
Longarm said, 'I could keep asking questions and you could keep slithering slimy as an eel all night. But it's over, Fred. I got to arrest you for all sorts of things now, starting with the murder of this Indian ward of the government on the floor.'
Longarm hardly expected any sane man to throw down on the law and three armed soldiers blue. But Fred Ryan didn't look too sane as he said dreadful things about Longarm's mother and started to swing the drawn gun in his hand into position.
He never managed it, of course. Longarm sent him spinning across the office with a round of.44-40, and then as Ryan bounced off the far wall, he was hit in the face with a.45-70 rifle ball that really messed him up.
The O.D. was fussing at the trooper who'd fired without orders by the time the Indian agent stopped twitching on the blood-slicked floor. So Longarm said, 'No harm done, and I'm writing you boys up for an assist in my official report. The son of a bitch we just shot used to work at the Cherokee Agency in Tahlequah, two thirds of the way to Fort Smith. He knew all about ordering police uniforms and such from Saint Lou. He'd done so earlier for the Cherokee Police, and whether he stole some or ordered more after he'd transferred out is a matter we can work out later. Them mystery riders he had pretending to be Comanche Police or Kiowa raiders were Cherokee crooks. The Five Civilized Tribes that were out here earlier have had plenty of time to pick up white habits. They never learned to set up a proper tipi ring or savvy the sign lingo and paint of Horse Indians because the Cherokee were never Horse Indians when they lived in the wooded hills of Tennessee.'
The O.D. asked, 'Who told you all this, Deputy Long? No offense, but you didn't seem to know that much earlier.'
Longarm said, 'I'd forgot some things I knew. I jumped to hasty conclusions, trying to fit Mex bandits into a pattern that wouldn't work. I didn't even get it when Agent Conway persuaded me I'd heard an Indian say someone was dead, not that he needed water. Wichita or Pawnee raiders made a tad more sense than Mexicans. But not
