Homagy must not have wanted him to. He stared wild-eyed, decided not to go for his own hardware after all, and spun around to try for a dash to Lord only knows where on the swaying, crunchy coal.
Longarm bawled, 'Don't do that, damn it! There's no place you can run to and you're fixing to fall down betwixt the cars.'
But Homagy just kept going as Longarm fired a warning shot over him. Then the wily killer vanished from view as Longarm ran forward, stared soberly down at the empty void between cars, and muttered, 'I told you you'd fall betwixt the cars, you asshole!'
He holstered his six-gun and swung himself down a ladder to leap clear and land running. It felt as if he had to run a mile before he was able to stop, spin about, and run the other way.
He found most of Attila Homagy between the rails, bleeding all over the cross-ties. Homagy had lost a right forearm and left foot to the steel wheels. Being dragged across the ballast a good ways hadn't done him a whole lot of good either, but to Longarm's surprise the coal-blasting man was still conscious.
Longarm knelt to whip off his own shoestring tie as the older man croaked, 'I should have killed you that first day up in Denver.'
Longarm decided the severed ankle was bleeding the most. So he tied that off first, muttering, 'You never had the balls to kill anyone wearing pants. You heard your woman was fooling around. You beat the truth out of her right off. But Zoltan Kun was too big a boo for you. He was mean and cocky with good reason. He knew you were scared skinny of him. But the unwritten law called for a man to do something about the man his wife had betrayed him with. So you got rid of her before she could say anything different. Then you told everyone a well-known American, not a Bohunk bully, was the man on your shit list.'
Longarm heard shouting, and looked up to see a railroad yard bull running across the yards at them with a baseball bat. Longarm called out, 'I'm the law and we need us a doctor here! So stop waving that fool club and go get one!'
The yard bull must have thought Longarm meant it. He turned to run the other way. Longarm got out a pocket kerchief and went to work on the stump of the sobbing Homagy's gun arm as he continued in a conversational tone, 'You knew full well that had you demanded satisfaction from Zoltan Kun, he'd have laughed in your face, if you were lucky. Had you taken a swing at him he'd have kicked the shit out of you. Had you even hinted you meant to draw on him, he'd have killed you easy. I know it ain't fair, old son, but in real life bullies who've grown to manhood without getting it slapped out of them are tough sons of bitches.'
He knotted the bloody kerchief tight around the unresisting man's stump. It seemed to help, unless the poor bastard had just lost too much blood to spurt worth mentioning.
Longarm said, 'You knew everyone in town was waiting to see what you aimed to do about your wayward wife. So after you shut her up forever it was you, not her, who grabbed my name and rep as a fighting man off a newspaper laying around your house and declared it was me, not the Zoltan Kun everyone suspected, who'd been strumming on her old banjo.'
He shook the mangled man and demanded, 'How did you kill Magda? We know you done it because we found her body where you hid it, you sneaky cuss!'
Homagy croaked something in his own odd lingo.
Longarm swore and said, 'Talk English and let's see if we can get a clearer picture. I figure you killed her at the time or not too long after she confessed to screwing Zoltan Kun whilst you were out of town. He might or might not have had to threaten her. We both know he was a dedicated bastard. But you didn't have the balls to kill both of them. You could have left your dead wife for a day or more behind your locked doors. Few if any of the neighbor women had ever seen the buggy a well-known labor organizer kept in a Trinidad carriage house. There was no place for either you or Zoltan Kun to park atop Bohunk Hill.' Homagy could have been confessing or cursing for all he could tell.
Longarm shook him some more and insisted, 'Come on, own up to what you done. You drove up to your own house in an unfamiliar buggy that you kept in the carriage house, with new curtains snapped to the top. It was after midnight, on an early Sabbath morn with the mine site shut down. Nobody really saw Magda getting in to go for such a mysterious ride. Nobody had to. We all go through life with a literal blind spot in each eye. But we never notice, because our brain fills in the bitty gaps with imaginary blue sky or even wallpaper. When a buggy stops out front and the lady of the house ain't there no more, she naturally drove off in the wee small hours with some buggy driver. How were they to know you meant to carry her to a casually guarded coal mine and hide her in an abandoned drift?'
Longarm saw that yard bull was coming back with a whole crowd of other gents. He told Homagy, 'Hang on and we'll get you to a hospital in time to save your worthless life. You'd have likely been better off dropping all that shale atop the body instead of in front of it. I don't envy the coroner, but there are ways to tell whether a victim was strangled or stabbed. No matter how you killed her, you wanted to distract anyone from looking for her. You made your neighbors think she'd run off with her lover because you knew she wasn't with Zoltan Kun. That gave you the excuse not to challenge him about your missing wife. Nobody in Trinidad knew shit about me. So when you said she'd run off with me, they had no call to look anywhere else for her.'
A man in the oncoming crowd shouted, 'I'm a doctor. How bad does he seem to be hurt?'
Longarm called back, 'Bad. He's lost a bucket of blood and may have a concussion as well. Fell a good ways betwixt them coal gondolas a mile or so down yonder now.'
As the chunky M.D. in black serge hunkered down on the far side of Homagy, whistled, and popped open his oilcloth bag, Longarm told the mangled Hungarian, 'Your bullshit with me was just razzle-dazzle from the beginning. Like another four-flusher I met up with at Fort Sill, you knew the safest man to challenge to a gunfight would be a paid-up lawman with no call to fight a total asshole. We have to account for ourselves when we shoot kid shotgun messengers or old coal blasters with no warrants out on 'em. You both hoped your pals would be more impressed by your bravery than a grown man might be. You couldn't have expected my boss, Marshal Vail, to play right into your hands by taking your threat seriously. Billy Vail's been married up a spell, and he'd likely get upset as hell if his old wife told him she'd been giving French lessons to some blackmailer. How's he doing, Doc?'
The doctor the yard bull had fetched shook his head and murmured, 'You were right about that concussion. Is there any point to all this conversation with him?'
Longarm nodded and said, 'There is. If you can save him he'll likely hang for murder. The unwritten law only lets you kill your wife and plead passion if you kill her lover at the same time and don't hide any bodies.'
As the doctor put some smelling salts to Homagy's nostrils, the tall deputy said, 'You slickered us all pretty good by chasing me so persistently, demanding I pay for stealing your wife. But you overdid it by pestering me and
