views on hospitality. But my point is that there's likely nothing wrong with you, Miss Cora. It's little Eva Nagy, not yourself, up in the hills in that covered buggy as the sun goes down, right?'
She looked away and murmured, 'Praise the Lord for small favors. I'd die before I let a brute like Longarm touch me, but I don't know how I'd feel about a buggy ride with somebody nicer.'
He said it was too bad he hadn't driven out from town in a hired buggy. She called him a big silly, and got up to serve the peach cobbler dessert from her oven.
He waited until they were on her front veranda, admiring the sunset from her porch swing, before he got out his note book to ask directions to the cabin of that coal miner with the wayward daughter.
Cora said, 'Heavens, I don't know my way around Bohunk Hill! I only know it as a cluster of shacks atop a low hill, man-made or natural, near the mine adits to the west. I've ridden past it, along the Purgatoire Trail. I've never been up in that cinder-paved maze of crooked lanes. I'm only repeating gossip I heard in town.'
He put the notebook away, saying, 'Reckon I'll just ride on over and ask directions then. If ladies in Trinidad are gossiping about the Nagy gal, folks who live closer ought to know where her folks can be found.'
Cora protested, 'You'd never make it before total darkness now. There are no street lamps on Bohunk Hill, and they say Longarm can be dangerous in broad daylight. If he should hear that even another lawman is looking for him on a morals charge...'
'I got to find the jasper and ask him where Magda Homagy can be found. What's going on betwixt him and that younger sass is betwixt them and her father. Attila Homagy is only after him because of his own flirty little thing. For all we know for sure, the cuss he's so sure she ran off with could be innocent as me. I know I never messed with Magda Homagy and I'm finding this whole affair mighty tedious.'
Cora smiled at him uncertainly in the tricky light and asked what he was talking about. She said, 'Surely nobody has ever accused you of adultery with that coal miner's wife, Deputy Crawford?'
He smiled sheepishly and said, 'Yes they have. Before I go on, are you sure you've seen that cuss they call Longarm down here in these parts?'
She nodded soberly and said, 'Plain as day. More than once. He even smiled at me outside the milliner's one day.'
Longarm said, 'It's agreed he has an eye for pretty ladies. But you Trinidad ladies have his handle wrong. I had a good reason for telling you I was Gus Crawford when we first met. I knew Attila Homagy was gunning for Deputy Custis Long because I'd just ducked out of a fight with him in the Union Depot. I've yet to lay eyes on this Longarm he's after, but I'd be the only deputy out of our Colorado office that's ever been called Longarm!'
The pretty young widow stared goggled-eyed at him in the fading light. 'You claim to be Longarm, Deputy Crawford?'
He said, 'Deputy Custis Long at your service, ma'am. There ain't no Deputy Crawford riding out of our Denver District Court. I told you I just made that up. I didn't want Homagy to find out which way I'd lit out. We were hoping to find his woman and calm him down whilst I took care of easier problems around Fort Sill. But as of now she's still missing, her man is still looking to track me down and gun me for running off with her, and so I'd best tidy up around here before I head back to Denver. What are you crying about, Miss Cora?'
She sobbed into the apron she was holding to her face again as he placed a gentle hand on a heaving calico- clad shoulder to repeat the question.
She blurted out, 'I feel like such a fool! It was mean of you to trick me into those observations about your anatomy if you were the real Longarm all this time!'
He chuckled and observed, 'I just got done teaching some Indian Police how unsupported hearsay and possibly inaccurate mental pictures can lead one astray. The crooks we were dealing with had barely sense to steal with. But we gave them an edge by leaping to conclusions. I hope you've learned your lesson about me at least. No matter how I might be hung, I've never messed with either that miner's daughter or Attila Homagy's wife.'
She laughed like hell and called him a dirty dog. But as she felt him shift his weight to rise, she asked where he thought he was going at this hour.
He settled his weight back in the swing, to be polite, as he told her, 'Looking for the man I owe all this trouble to. I got a pony to ride me anywheres he could take a gal in a buggy. Someone over yonder ought to be able to tell me which way that would be. There's this rise called Cherry Hill, just outside Denver, where heaps of swains park their buggies a spell by moonlight. You can tell, come morning, because of all the... sign along the wagon trace.'
She said, 'Don't ride up into the hills after him. Whoever he really is, he has all the other men afraid of him, and coal miners are hardly sissies.'
Longarm said, 'Got to find him before Attila Homagy does then. Homagy ain't afraid of him. That gives a man a natural bully might under-rate an edge. It gets even stickier for law and order in these parts if the womanizing bully wins. He'll doubtless know he'll be charged with murder, and once he runs, we may never know what really happened.'
Cora said, 'Well, I, for one, can't really work up much sympathy for anyone now that I know even the injured husband has been acting like a drooling idiot!'
Longarm observed the law protected drooling idiots as well as the more refined, but once again she said, 'Don't go. if you have to have it out with that imposter pretending to be you, he's staying at the Dexter Hotel near the Trinidad Depot when he's not out chasing young girls!'
Longarm frowned and muttered, 'You mean this home wrecker has a home address and Attila Homagy was looking for him up in Denver?'
She shrugged and said, 'I don't know how long he's been there, or the name he's registered under. I only heard he took yet another and somewhat older Trinidad woman there in broad daylight, the devil!'
Longarm nodded soberly and said, 'I know the Dexter Hotel near the depot, and I wasn't looking forward to pestering clannish immigrant coal miners after dark. A man with a hotel room who takes an under-aged gal for a buggy ride must have more respect for the town law than her immigrant kith and kin. There's a heap of hills for a buggy ride out yonder too. So when do you reckon my alter ego would have had enough... buggy riding?'
Cora demurely suggested, 'It would depend on how good a ride he was having, wouldn't it?'
