Longarm was free to ask the same trick questions. But when he started by saying he’d just come from seeing little Timmy Sears, the sudden flash of candle glow on steel was all that saved him!
Longarm sucked in his gut as he crawfished from a sweeping stab that would have done old Jim Bowie proud. As he felt the end rail of the porch with the cheeks of his ass, he saw the concealed weapon was almost as long and surely as sharp as your average Bowie knife. So he grabbed the big kid’s wrist at the end of the second swing and slapped openhanded, hard, with his free palm.
Howard Tendring III let go of the knife and started running, barefoot, into the night. He crashed through his mother’s picket fence and just kept running, with Longarm close behind.
Longarm had long legs and less worry about where he planted his pounding heels in the dark. But the barefoot boy out ahead was wild with sheer terror and as anxious to get away as Longarm was to catch him. So damned if the distance between them didn’t seem to grow wider as Longarm struggled to get the cuffs off the back of his gun rig on the fly and willed his fool legs to run faster.
Then a female voice cried out through the night, “I’ll hold him and you brand him, Custis!”
So that was about what they did. Fox Bancroft roped damned fine for a woman throwing sideways at a lope in such tricky light. Her loop snapped tight as she slid her pony to a calf-busting squat on its haunches, and Howard Tendring III was flat on his ass in the roadside weeds before he could free himself from her oiled and braided hemp.
Then Longarm was on top of the writhing and cussing young monster, and it was still a near thing, taking such a spiteful kicking spitter without busting his damned skull.
Fox Bancroft helped by keeping her line tight as the throw-rope pinned the youth’s powerful arms to his sides. Longarm came close to singing soprano for a spell when the unruly schoolboy kicked hard, with skill, but only bruised a thigh.
Then Longarm had the mean young shit face-down with his hands cuffed behind him. He grabbed a fistful of dark hair and banged the kid’s face against the ground a couple of times as he told him firmly but not unkindly to cut it out before somebody got hurt.
The nearby mounted redhead asked for her rope back. So Longarm loosened the noose and slipped it off over the kid’s head as he knelt on sweet Howard’s spine. Fox Bancroft was whipping in and recoiling when Mrs. Tendring came shrilling down the path, weeping and wailing about her precious child.
She was still in her thin robe, and she sure smelled nice as she hugged Longarm from behind, her tits rubbing all over the back of his vest while she said there was some mistake and that she’d do anything, anything, if only he’d let her darling boy go.
Then Fox Bancroft had dismounted to join them, saying, “Go home and put some clothes on, Felicia Tendring. This federal lawman never would have come for your foulmouthed brat if he hadn’t done something. What did her foulmouthed brat do, Custis? We’ve been looking all over for you since you never came back to tell us what happened to that other kid and his own mother.”
Longarm rose to his feet with Howard Tendring III, despite the combined efforts of mother and son, as he soberly said, “You have to eat the apple a bite at a time. I don’t reckon this boy knows what happened to that other boy. You don’t know where we might find your young friend Timmy, do you, Howard?”
To which his young prisoner replied with a sob, “Screw Timmy Sears. Screw all of you! You’re all against me! All of you! Everybody hates me and I hate everybody, so there!”
Felicia Tendring gasped, let go of Longarm from behind, and came around his front to slap the kid’s face.
Her son spat, “Don’t you go hitting on me, Mom! I’ll cut you if you hit me like that again!”
His mother covered her face with her hands and began to bawl like a frightened baby. Fox Bancroft softly said, “Go home and put those clothes on. You can talk to your boy later, after things have calmed down. You’re taking him to the town marshal’s now, aren’t you, Deputy Long?”
Longarm had been thinking about that. He said, “The sheriff’s county jail is built more solid and fireproof. I reckon I’ll turn him in to the county and see where they want to go from there. There don’t seem any just cause to charge him with anything federal. We’d have a time proving he had anything to do with the death of Dancing Dave Loman, and the murder of Mildred Powell is a matter for your own grand jury to decide.”
Fox Bancroft gasped, “You’re charging this kid with that crime? I thought Mildred Powell was attacked by Bubblehead Burnside! Didn’t little Timmy Sears say he saw that feeble-minded cuss coming out of the cellar door whilst the dying gal was still screaming inside?”
Longarm said, “No. Not if you read over the transcript of his kid talk carefully. Timmy said he saw Howard at the scene of the crime. So they added two and two to get seven when they asked if he didn’t mean Bubblehead. Timmy was likely telling the simple truth, as he saw it, when he simply told them a generous-hearted young lady had told them never to use the cruel nickname Bubblehead for another Howard entirely!”
Felicia Tendring told her baby she’d get dressed and go see a friend or lawyer called George about his plight. As she turned away she sweetly added, “Don’t sign anything. Don’t tell them anything, honey. Uncle George and I will have you out in no time!”
As she scurried away in her slippers, Longarm turned to Fox and quietly asked, “Uncle George?”
The redhead shrugged and said, “Ask this one. George is a more common name than Howard. How did you figure out that this was the Howard little Timmy really meant, by the way?”
Longarm said, “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you along the way as we march this one over to the county jail.”
So she led her paint pony afoot as the two of them escorted the handcuffed Howard Tendring III the quarter mile or less to the jail. When Longarm got to how he’d had trouble buying a sweet-natured and baby-sexed Mongoloid as a slashing sex maniac who’d exposed himself to a younger gal earlier, Howard Tendring III complained, “I never just supposed nothing. I meant to give ‘em what I knew they both wanted. But they were teasing me, like alley cats in heat, smiling dirty and then trying to twist away at the last minute!”
Fox Bancroft softly gasped, “Oh, my God!”
Longarm told the monster, “Your mother told you to save your tales of woe for your family lawyer, Howard. Old Kiowa Jack or somebody from his office will take down all you have to say for yourself while your mother and your lawyer listen in, see?”
