help as I was about to slash my wrists, you sweet man.”
He said, “Aw, mush. This seems to be the last pan, and I have some reading to catch up on before I ‘tend that coroner’s hearing after supper. So why don’t I carry these fool books upstairs and get out of your way?”
She assured him he wasn’t in her way. But he figured she must have still been feeling tense because he heard her busting a china cup on the floor as he was headed up the stairs.
He found it too sunny and hot up in his hired room at that hour. He didn’t want to carry the books back through the kitchen to the cooler backyard with the widow in such an uncertain mood. So he swung the casement all the way out and sat on the sill with one boot up to light a cheroot and leaf through both books, taking notes in pencil from time to time. Ellen Brent had been right about the family brag of the hardware man, which told him little he hadn’t already guessed at. The township and surrounding range were divided sharply, but not in a serious feud, as far as one could tell while selling lumber and bobwire to both the original stockmen and more recent sodbusters. Longarm knew from his earlier trips up this way that there was just no way a homesteader with or without a lick of sense could plow enough of the higher sand-hill range to matter. Unless you farmed down in the lower and wider draws, where the water table rested on peat and clay, you were never going to raise a thing but windblown sand. The stockmen, on the other hand, had more use for the well-drained grassy rises than the often cold and swampy draws. So the stockmen and nester would likely get along a few more years in these parts before they had all that much to fight about.
The medical tome confirmed his guess that science was trying to keep up with unfortunates such as the late Bubblehead Burnside. They’d dug up more figures and studied more Mongoloids since Langdon Down’s first description of the syndrome. That was what they called what Bubblehead had suffered—a syndrome.
There was nothing in the medical tome about crazy folks that offered any explanation as to why the Widow MacUlric was singing like a canary bird downstairs, for Gawd’s sake.
Chapter 7
Pawnee Junction barely ran eight city blocks each way, but it was getting tedious to leg it in high summer. So after supper Longarm hired a chestnut gelding and a stock saddle from the livery next door to attend that coroner’s hearing in style.
Seeing he had the time as well as a pony under him, he scouted those few parts of the small business district he wasn’t too clear about on all sides of the courthouse square. It took less than ten minutes to circle more than once. He found Pawnee Junction about as tedious from any point of view. But he did take note of the chunky paint pony out front of Spaulding’s Funeral Parlor and Furniture Shop when he saw it was sidesaddled. That had to be the famous Grassy, named by a half-wit and ridden by his sole survivor.
Another sidesaddled Indian pony, this one a buckskin, was tethered out front of the county courthouse along with many other horses. Longarm dismounted and half-hitched his own reins to the hitching rail. When he went inside, he wasn’t surprised to spy Nurse Nancy Calder milling back through the main courtroom with the others in her tan riding habit. He drifted after her, admiring her rear view and the way the gloaming light from the windows along one side highlighted her thick taffy brown hair. It was a pure wonder how gals could look so much different from one another and still look swell. Nurse Calder was as tall as the Widow MacUlric, but built more like that brunette from the library and … It was best not to undress them any further in one’s mind when one had matters of life and death to ponder.
As promised, the hearing was being held in a back room behind the judge’s chambers and cloakroom. Doc Forbes and a half-dozen other gents were seated between the rear wall and a long table the county commission likely used for its own sessions at other times. Everyone else made do as best they could on folding chairs or standing in the larger space left in the crowded chamber. Longarm moved over to one corner to stand with his back wedged into it so he could just worry about the hearing. Nurse Calder took a seat she was offered down at one end of the panel. The rest of the crowd was dressed mostly cow or corn, with reporters from both the Advertiser and rival Monitor obvious amid the handful of townsmen. Longarm noticed they hadn’t bunched up in sullen clumps the way men did in a community at feud. That bragging local history by the hardware man had said all original white settlers had depended on one another when Dull Knife and his Cheyenne were scaring western Nebraska just a few autumns back.
Doc Forbes finally banged on the table for silence and declared, “This hearing has been called to decide the causes of two deaths. That of the late David Loman, alias Dancing Dave, and Howard Burnside, who was better known as Bubblehead. This shouldn’t take long because, with the help of Nurse Calder yonder, I autopsied both those boys this very afternoon.”
He picked up some papers as if to read them, decided the technical terms would only confuse his fellow panelists, and declared, “I can sum it up best by saying they both died with severed spinal columns.”
A cowhand seated near the back joyfully volunteered, “They say that’ll happen ever time when you tie a rope around a rascal’s neck and shove him off a railroad trestle.”
Doc Forbes silenced the laughter with a severe look and told them all, “We have to word our official report soberly. How does manslaughter at the hands of person or persons unknown strike the rest of you?”
There came a murmur of agreement from both the panel and their audience. So Longarm called out, “Manslaughter my Aunty Fanny! When you set out alone or in a bunch with the avowed intention of killing somebody, and then you kill not one but two, the legal definition of your crime is premeditated murder in the first degree!”
Doc Forbes said that sounded fair. But another man on the panel, who looked like he and Buffalo Bill bought their outfits at the same shops, protested, “Hold on. The Minute Men ain’t murderers. I’ll allow they might have been rougher than they needed to be on that one train robber the other night. But they had just cause to be het up about the fiendish ravaged murder of that poor little Sunday school gal!”
The agreement was louder this time. As it died down a fussy-dressed gent wearing his glasses with a string on them cleared his throat and fussed, “We held our hearing on the death of Mildred Powell the day before yesterday. I see no reason to rehash it. We agreed on those findings, and the grand jury surely would have indicted that half-wit if the Minute Men hadn’t taken the law into their own hands.”
“Three cheers for the Minute Men!” yelled another cowhand, to be seconded by a townsman, who called, “Saved the grand jury a meeting and Lord knows what it might have cost the taxpayers to go on guarding and feeding that ravenous half-wit!”
Nurse Calder rose to her five-foot-six or so and snapped, “You gentlemen are the ones who sound like half- wits! Thanks to the murder of Howard Burnside, we’ll never really know what happened the other day in the basement of First Calvinist!”
The older man dressed like Buffalo Bill or a mighty well-paid top hand looked up at her, surprised, and said, “We know what happened to Miss Mildred, Nurse Calder. She told Nick Olsen and Rafe Jennings who’d just ravaged
