Ramsay said, “Call me hardheaded when it comes to romance. But a man with horse sense can fall for a handsome woman who’s been proven a good wife as easy as he can fall for a spinster schoolmarm or some divorced gal who might well have been the one in the wrong!”
“I’m sure you and Miss Mavis will be very happy,” Longarm replied in a dismissive tone. “I never asked about your love life. I asked for some straight talk about those Minute Men. Before you say you don’t know shit, I read that book you had printed up about the carving of this whole county from a howling wilderness. Are you now trying to say you were never invited to join?”
The still-young old-timer of the Sand Hill Country smiled thinly and confessed, “I might have been doing some of the inviting, if you want to hear about the Cheyenne Scare of ‘78.”
He stared out at the ominously empty and dimly lit courthouse square as he added in a softer tone, “My God, it seems like yesterday. But the county was half as settled and barely incorporated. The state capital at Lincoln seemed so far away and those renegade Cheyenne were said to be so close!”
Longarm firmly stated, “Dull Knife and his breakaway band would have headed for a leper colony before they’d get within a day’s ride of that nearby Pawnee Agency. Aside from that, they weren’t wearing paint and the last thing they were looking for was another fight with our kind.”
He got out two cheroots and handed one to the hardware man as he added morosely, “They got one just the same, when the army caught up with ‘em over to the west. You hardy pioneers organized your own half-ass militia to fight Indians?”
Ramsay waited until Longarm had lit his cheroot for him before he explained, “Just for that one emergency. I’m afraid it was my own idea to call us Minute Men. As a history buff I was thinking of how the real Minute Men had been organized back in the 1700s to deal with an earlier red menace. We disbanded the next spring, of course.”
Longarm blew smoke out his nostrils and demanded, “What was Porky Shaw, a slow reader?”
Ramsay sighed and said, “That’s exactly how you could describe him and some few of the others in these parts. Militia meetings are fun when there’s no war on. I had a serious business to run. Most of the others who’d started the Minute Men with me dropped out for much the same reasons. Sitting around a campfire with jugs seems less attractive to men with serious chores to occupy their hands and minds.”
“Then how come you respectable folk here in Pawnee Junction refuse to tell the law who’s left in the ragged- ass bunch that’s left?”
Ramsay shrugged and replied, “It’s more that you’re an outsider than the fact that you’re a lawman. Everyone in town likely suspects a few friends and neighbors still meet in secret to ride at night. Nobody who’s no longer an active member could say for sure who might be doing what, and to be fair, most of the times the Minute Men have taken the law in their own hands, they’ve gone after someone who had it coming.”
“You don’t have a town marshal or a county sheriff, huh?” Longarm demanded dryly.
The local man said, “You can see what sort of sheriff we have. Old Wigan is a political hack who spends more time down at his local party headquarters in Ogallala than here, when he’s not gold-bricking with his in-laws out to the Rocking Seven.”
“What about Pronto Cross?” asked Longarm, adding, “I understand your board of aldermen paid good money to import a town-tamer with a rep.”
Ramsay said, “We did. I was there and I voted for the motion. Pronto Cross has calmed our Saturday nights in town considerable and nobody has insulted a woman in public for quite a spell. But I hardly have to tell a lawman how many times the statute laws just don’t seem to apply to a total son of a bitch.”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “You’re talking about habitual mean drunks, wife beaters, untidy neighbors in general. This may come as a shock, but neighborhood vigilante gangs always seem to start out as a means of dealing with pests the regular law can’t seem to cope with.”
He blew more smoke out his nostrils and snorted, “They go from whupping wife beaters to burning out suspected stock thieves or lynching unpopular suspects. You ain’t ready to tell me who’s in charge now, right?”
Ramsay said, “Wrong. I just don’t know. I’m only half sure about a few of the lesser lights. I think one of my yard hands is still a member. He said he wasn’t there when they lynched Bubblehead Burnside. I asked. That’s not saying anyone told me the truth.”
Longarm spotted the willowy form of Fox Bancroft striding afoot across the square with two taller figures, both male, one town and one country.
All three were packing repeating carbines at port arms. Longarm unbolted the front door to let them in anyway.
The cowhand backing his redheaded boss was the kid they called Curly. Longarm was just as glad Curly hadn’t chosen the other side. His saddle gun was a seven-shot Spencer .52, and he wore a six-gun on his right hip.
The other man who’d crossed the square with the gal was the skinny printer Preston of the Pawnee Junction Advertiser. He said he’d always wanted to be a newspaper reporter instead of a type sticker, and added that the mob had been gathering in the Red Rooster when Pronto Cross had come in and read them the riot act. Preston couldn’t say where they’d gone after the town marshal dispersed them from the saloon. The newspaperman was packing a Winchester ‘73. The gal had a somewhat older but just as deadly Winchester Yellowboy with brass receiver.
She said she’d sent his wires and ordered yet another loyal hand to ride out to the Diamond B for additional help.
Preston said, “Oh, please, Lord, let me live through this first big scoop as the snowballs start flying. Where do you want me posted, Uncle Sam?”
Longarm told the well-armed newspaperman to watch the next window over, and moved back through the darkness to reorganize their defenses now that he had seven gun muzzles to position. He figured Curly, Sears, and the two sheriff’s deputies could hold the more solid back. Anyone rushing the rear door would have one avenue of approach across the stable yard, thanks to brick walls running back to the stable and carriage house. But it was black as a bitch out yonder until one of the deputies suggested, and Longarm approved, lighting an outside lamp that hung facing them from the stable wall. Nobody on either side would be able to put it out without exposing himself in the open. A marksman could doubtless shoot it out from inside the jail, but it seemed safe from anyone
