hitting it with a bullet around a corner.
Longarm rejoined the three others up front. There were no side windows through the thick brick walls for anyone to shoot in or out through. Longarm posted Ramsay and the newspaperman on the far side of the front door. He told Fox Bancroft to stay closer to him, and chided her gently for ever coming back.
She said, “I told you I sent for my riders out to the Diamond B, and I have to be with my men when they get here, don’t I?”
Longarm sighed and said, “Those riders who ain’t riding with your local Minute Men, you mean. Ramsay just owned up that he suspects one of his hired hands. The trouble with these secret societies is that they’re so blamed secret. You say you got them wires off for me?”
She said she had, adding, “My boys will be here long before those state troopers or the federal deputies from Ogallala could hope to make it!”
The newspaperman on the far side of the front door, who seemed to be taking notes, opined, “They’d better get here even sooner, for yonder comes our sort of determined-looking neighborhood uplifting society and … Sweet Jesus, I didn’t know we had that many interested in one rotten kid!”
Longarm snubbed out his smoke on the sill as he counted roughly two platoons coming across the square in a line of skirmish, with waving torches as well as hooded masks. Remington Ramsay softly called out, “I knew it. Feed sack or no feed sack, I recognize the patched overalls of that rascal who works for me. I mean, that rascal who used to work for me.”
Longarm called back, “Douse that smoke and let them guess where to aim. Don’t challenge the one you recognize by name unless I ask you to. Mobs are like bananas. They’re yellow and like to hang in a bunch. Once you single a cuss out, he’s inclined to back down or come at you sudden. I want you all to let me do the talking, hear?”
Nobody argued. Longarm’s mouth felt a mite dry too as he watched the ragged line of fifty-odd masked men advancing at a slow but steady pace.
He growled, “Ain’t near a tenth of the grown men in and about your dinky town, Ramsay. Where’s all the rest of ‘em? You reckon they’re scared of our brave little band of big bad bully boys?”
Ramsay answered simply, “Yes. As a history buff I can tell you a heap of history would read different if all the little kids stood up to the bully boys who smoke corn silk and bust windows. The bully breed gets the hex on the rest of us early, because our mommas teach us to be nice before they ever send us to school to meet up with meaner brats.”
“Reminds me of the one we got locked up in the back,” said Longarm. “It’s sort of odd how gents with no respect for law and order seem so anxious to string up outlaws.”
He told everyone to get ready to move out of line with his or her dark window before he cocked his .44-40 and called out, “That’s about close enough, boys. Who’s in charge and what’s this all about?”
A Minute Man standing close to another with a sawed-off, double-barrel ten-gauge aimed politely, called out, “You know what we’re here for, Longarm. We want the murderous half-wit who murdered Mildred Powell. We don’t want no judge saying you can’t hang mean kids!”
To which Longarm replied in a disgusted tone, “Do tell? I thought you boys had already done that. How many times were you planning on hanging a prisoner on the same charge, with no warrant and no trial?”
His words seemed to fall on ears made deaf by hard liquor as well as earlier orations, judging from the angry rumbles up and down the line.
Another voice called, “Hand him over. Now. Unless you was planning on doing the rope dance beside him!”
Longarm called back, “I’ve sent for both state and federal lawmen, speaking of rope dances. If I were you boys I’d quit whilst I was ahead. You’ve already got the blood of a harmless half-wit on your hands. If you can’t see Bubblehead Burnside was innocent, what in blue blazes do you want with young Howard Tendring?”
He could tell from some puzzled murmurs that he’d scored a point. So he drew a bead on that one with the Greener shotgun as he called out cheerfully, “Go home and let the judge and jury decide which one of them it was.”
Then he took a deep breath and called, “All but you, Pronto Cross. I want you to drop that gun and step this way with your hands filled with sky!”
It was just as well he’d yelled that well back and to one side. For the one holding the ten-gauge wasn’t the one who swung a Winchester muzzle up to bore a whole lot of holes through the blackness Longarm was just to one side of. Then Longarm fired back at a clear target illuminated by street lamp and torchlight before the one with the ten-gauge could come unstuck and blast away with both barrels.
By then, of course, Longarm had moved down to the next window to shove Fox Bancroft to the safety of the floor as both Remington Ramsay and Preston fired at the shotgun man, to flop him screaming and kicking across the face-down form of the treacherous bastard Longarm had just killed.
Then things got noisy as all get-out for a spell.
Chapter 21
It got tougher to hit targets that were crawfishing away from you and filling the air between with the gunsmoke of their return fire. So as the redcoats had noticed at Lexington Green (according to old Remington Ramsay later) you could fire right into a raggedy mob and only lay a handful on the ground before they’d retreated clean out of sight.
As the smoke cleared, nine figures and a whole lot of smoldering torches lay strewn across the otherwise empty square. From the way at least four of them were flopping and moaning, they’d likely live.
Longarm was glad. Dead men tell no tales, and he still had a lot of loose ends to wrap up around these parts.
The same natural feelings that kept most from standing up to the scowling and swaggering seemed to encourage the sweeter-natured pups to snap at the heels of a big bad wolf in retreat with its old tail between its legs. So in no time at all the square began to fill up some more with a more jovial crowd.
