been going around telling folks the same?”
Jake of the Advertiser said, “No. A lot of others are. They’re taking bets on the outcome at the Red Rooster— with you the favorite, I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear.”
Longarm snorted in disgust and replied, “The hell you say! I’m a grown man, for Gawd’s sake. I gave up meeting the class bully after school a long time ago.”
Jake shrugged and replied in a knowing tone, “You may have grown up. But speak for yourself, Longarm. You’re a stranger who’s brought a rep to town, and many a town bully has never been able to pass on a chance like that just for the glory. But the way we have it, there’s more than the usual glory involved. The way we have it, you crawfished Porky Shaw in public. You ran him out of the barbershop before he could get his shave and a haircut free. You called him a coward to his face and told him to fill his fist then and there if he didn’t like it. He didn’t like it. So he ran—caught off guard and not sure he ought to draw on a lawman, he’s saying now.”
“Now?” asked Longarm thoughtfully.
The younger printer he’d be supping with later, with any luck, said, “That was earlier, over in the Red Rooster. He’s not there now. Some say he rode out to the Diamond B to rustle up some backing. Some say he’s left for good. It ain’t easy to get backing when the play calls for man-to-man with nobody hiding his face.”
Old Jake sounded cheerful as hell, considering, when he chimed in. “Porky will never get any of his pals to shoot it out in broad day with a paid-up lawman. He’s going to have to fight you fair and square, or maybe hide out until those Minute Men come at you in a bunch in the dark.”
Longarm cocked a brow and demanded, “You mean you think Porky Shaw is tied in with those Minute Men too?”
The two newspapermen exchanged glances. Preston was the one who told him, “Thinking is one thing. Proving it would be a bitch. Even if we could, the sheriff is scared skinny of them and these plate-glass windows cost the earth!
Chapter 6
He only had to ask directions once, and found the public library handy to their one schoolhouse near the square. The schoolhouse was closed for the summer. Longarm might have thought the library was as well, if he hadn’t just had dinner with Miss Ellen Brent, who worked there. For the front door was locked and nobody came before he’d banged on it considerably.
When she did open up, the perky little brunette looked as if she might have just had to dress in a hurry. Her face was flushed and, had women been allowed to sweat when they were only supposed to glow, he’d have sworn she was sweating like hell inside that buttoned-up seersucker bodice.
But she seemed glad to see him, and as she let him inside her large one-room library, he saw no signs of the hay she’d been pitching or the gent she’d been screwing. She said she hadn’t known she’d locked the fool front door after her when she’d come back from her noon dinner, and added with a laugh that she’d been wondering why business had seemed so slow. Longarm didn’t ask how come she hadn’t heard him or anybody else knocking. It was a lady’s own business if she wanted to take a nap or play with herself in the back, as long as he wasn’t paying her salary.
He asked if he could use her card index, and it was her turn to be discreet and not ask where a gent who talked so country had learned to scout up reading material in a hurry.
But she couldn’t hold back totally once he’d selected a privately printed local history and a medical tome. She said he could carry them home to read without a regular library card, seeing he was the law, but asked him what he expected to find in those particular mighty tedious-sounding books.
Hefting the heavy textbook and lighter publication, Longarm explained, “I’ve found in my travels that there’s almost always some proud member of a local founding family willing to pay some printer to run off a handsomely bound history of that family. You can’t hardly brag on your own bunch being one of the dozen or less original land- grabbers without saying at least a few words, good or bad, about them. I see this here Remington Ramsay who sells lumber and bobwire seems to feel the noble outline of his own family tree is worth preserving for future generations. I ain’t as interested in hardware as I am hardcase cattle barons who might rate a line or more in here.”
She wrinkled her pert nose and said, “I don’t see why even a snob like Bob Wire Rem would trouble himself with a history of a township less than five years old. That medical casebook you’re holding is even newer. We just got it in a month or so ago.”
Longarm said, “I noticed the publication date. That’s how come I want to borrow it, ma’am. Them alienists who study the human brain are at it day and night. So it’s possible somebody’s noticed something new since Dr. Langdon Down’s famous study of ‘66.”
She looked surprised and asked, “Surely you’re not investigating the murder of that Sunday school teacher in addition to the lynching of a federal prisoner, are you?”
To which he could only reply, “Looks like I’d better. For the one seemed to follow the other as the night does the day. Those so-called Minute Men could have been bent on avenging Miss Mildred Powell, like they said, or they could have been out to cover something else up. I keep telling the rough-justice bunch that once you take the law into your own hands you confuse law and order a heap.”
As he ticked his hat brim at her to be on his way, Ellen Brent took hold of his free sleeve and said, “Wait! You can’t dash off and leave me hanging, as if the last page of a thrilling romance was missing, just as I was getting to the end of it! I agree those night riders were awfully mean and that it would have been better to hold a trial and at least hear the idiot’s side of the story before they hung him. But I don’t see what anyone could hope to cover up by hanging him a little sooner. Are you suggesting they were holding the wrong man? Do you think it likely that a dying woman would accuse a harmless idiot when she had that chance, and only that chance, to name her attacker?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “There’s this old church song I’m sure the late Sunday school teacher must have known. It’s called ‘Farther Along’ and advises us to just keep poking along down the straight and narrow until, sooner or later, we’ll know more about it farther along. I do have my troubles with the straight and narrow, but I’ve sure known more about things farther along. So I try not to guess wild until I have me some solid facts to guess with. I’ll be proud to tell you where I am farther along, Miss Ellen. Right now I have to do some reading, attend that coroner’s inquest this evening, and with any luck, scout up some new sign to follow. What time do you turn in over to that boardinghouse we’re both bedded down in?”
She blinked, dimpled, and said, “I usually trim my lamp by nine or ten, unless I have a good book to read. But we have to be more discreet than that, Custis! It would never do for you to come sniffing around an unmarried
