obvious enough, and the whole box is gone. They didn’t bother to try and break it open here, just picked it up and walked off with it. The post office money was in a cash drawer. You can see where they used the pry bar to snap that open. Again it wasn’t exactly hard for anyone to spot, whether they’d been here before and knew the layout or if they were strangers coming in for the first time. The rest of it, more post office money, was in a bank bag that I’d hidden behind that ledger book on the shelf there.” He pointed. “But I suppose a cursory look would turn that up, too. I mean, I just hadn’t thought in terms of securing things from robbers. Not until the Brumbauer kids get tall enough to see over the counters, anyhow.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. How about your local law? Where’s your town marshal?”
“Don’t have one. Why, we don’t even have a deputy assigned to this part of the county. There’s the county sheriff, of course, but the only reason he ever needs to come around is when he’s electioneering, giving speeches and asking for votes. Fourth of July there’s usually one of the county supervisors will show up and give a talk, but except for that we don’t have much dealing with government.”
“Have you sent for a deputy?”
“Sure. Likely one of the boys will come over tomorrow sometime. Or the next day.”
Longarm sighed. There wasn’t a hell of a lot to see here.
He went outside, starting at the front and working his way around the building. The alley at the back where the door was broken open was littered with trash on ground that was hard as macadam. A herd of circus elephants wouldn’t have left tracks on soil that thoroughly compacted, and if there were any footprints to be seen then they would have to be spotted by someone an awful lot better than Custis Long. And in truth he didn’t think there was anyone that much better than he.
“Do you know if anyone saw anything or anyone, well, out of the ordinary? Today? Any time in the past week? Anything at all?”
Jefson shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Then I expect we’ll have to ask around,” Longarm said. He thought about the train that was soon due in to carry the Capitals on to their next stop. He was supposed to be on that train.
On the other hand, his job here, appearances aside, was to act as a U.S. deputy marshal and never mind the silliness of baseball.
If he had to, he figured, he could ask the Schultzes to put up with him for one more night.
“Let’s go look for folks t’ talk to,” he told Jefson.
Chapter 24
No way in hell was Longarm going to get on that train, by himself, in broad daylight, wearing a baseball uniform. He said his latest round of good-byes to the Schultz clan and got Howard Jefson to open his store shortly past dawn the next morning so Longarm could shuck the uniform and dress himself in a fifty-cent cotton shirt, a dollar pair of used Levis, and a two-bit soft cap. The price seemed a mite stiff. But preferable to spending the day being stared at by total strangers.
The train ride, thanks to his badge, didn’t cost anything though, and that was something.
He settled onto the cinder-pocked cushions of a seat in the smoking car and enjoyed a cheroot while he pondered the little he’d learned from his unexpected overnight extension in Hoskin.
It hardly seemed worth the bother.
Jefson had had time to go over his records and as far as the man could determine he’d lost a little over eight hundred in store receipts plus something in excess of twelve hundred in postal funds. The total take in the breakin was close to twenty-one hundred.
As for who might have done it, they hadn’t learned much of anything.
No one Longarm and Jefson talked to the previous evening remembered seeing anything or anyone out of the ordinary of late.
The only strangers reported were a threesome of cowboys seen camping in a live oak grove along a stream the locals called Three Mile Creek. And Milt Warner, the farmer who saw them, said they seemed innocent and ordinary as could be.
“Did they try and hide from you when you spotted them?” Longarm had asked Warner.
“Naw, not a bit of it. In fact when I first seen them they was waving to me. They was cooking some squirrels they’d shot, making a right nice-smelling stew, and first thing they done was invite me to eat with them. They mistook the land for mine and asked permission to spend the night there. I told them to go ahead and bed down, that I knew Ralph … he’s the fellow owns that piece of ground … I told them I knew Ralph wouldn’t mind and for them to make themselves to home. They said they was on their way home in Texas someplace … I forget exactly where they said they was from … after delivering a herd of stock cows to a fellow up near Manhattan.”
“I thought the days of cattle drives being welcome in Kansas were over,” Longarm said.
“Beef shipping is pretty much done with because of the fevers those Texas cows bring with them. But if a man don’t mind the time and money to have his cattle dipped for ticks and inspected he can still make out selling breeding stock. The steers they mostly drive on the government trails on west of here, but there’s a good market yet for breeders,” Warner explained. “I bought some myself off a fella from Beeville, Texas, just, let me see, two years back it will be this August. Decent cows too. They accept my bulls just fine and have easy birthing with them fine-boned little calves. Little buggers grow fast once they’re on the ground, too. Convert their feed real nice, they do.”
The farmer was obviously more interested in talking about livestock and probably crops, too, than he was in the things that were of interest to Longarm.
As for the cowboys, he’d shrugged and said they seemed like nice young fellows to him and he hadn’t any reason to be suspicious of them, not then and not now.
“They was carefree young’uns, not a mean bone among the three of them is what I’d say,” Warner concluded. “I wouldn’t think of them in connection with anything like Jefson’s robbery.”
Longarm pretty much had to agree. After all, the cowboys had been in the vicinity of Hoskin two days ago. At
