who’d murder a mother and child to cover his mistake about Bubblehead.
As others came forward to tell tales about the now-discredited and no-longer-feared Minute Men, it developed that Pronto Cross and a handful of close pals had been using and abusing both the Minute Men themselves and a lot of local merchants. It was Longarm who was able to detail the way their protection flimflam worked, because he’d run across it before in New Orleans, where those immigrant gangs they called Black Handers sold the same bill of goods to worried minds.
Some of the recent Minute Men seemed vexed as all get-out to learn they hadn’t been let in on the extorted cash, goods, and services in spite of their being used to scare folks.
Longarm pointed out that the common soldiers who’d won the southwest third of the country from Mexico hadn’t been paid the current going rate of thirteen and beans a month. He was used to getting the short end of the stick.
That was why he never complained as the pushy deputies out of the nearby Ogallala District Court took over the investigation as if they’d been there all the time. Longarm hadn’t planned on growing old and gray in the sand hills of Nebraska, and there was a lot to be said for letting others do the leg-and paperwork as long as you were content to let them hog the glory.
Longarm knew his own home office would have to allow he’d done as much as he’d been sent to do, even more, once his federal prisoner had been left in no shape to stand trial in Denver. And he hadn’t been shoved aside nearly as rudely as the local township and county powers.
Longarm hadn’t had to point out that Pronto Cross couldn’t have been the only local official in cahoots with the highly irregular vigilante riders. The major in charge of the state troopers had only had to hear the Minute Men had been secretly led by the town marshal before he stripped every official in the county of all powers, pro tem, and said everyone could consider their fool selves occupied by the state of Nebraska until further notice.
One of the other federal deputies did ask Longarm whether he thought they ought to wire home for a federal warrant on Sheriff Wigan, just in case he ever came back.
Longarm said, “He’ll be back. He has kin in the cattle business up this way, and it ain’t as if he was telling Pronto Cross and his gang what to do. I’ve hashed that out with his dumb but honest deputies. I reckon Wigan was just going along with a tougher and more violent lawman gone wrong. It’ll be up to the local voters, come this November, whether they want a sheriff who’d rather live and let live with bullies than stare them down. I see no serious reasons to mount a mighty expensive and uncertain federal hearing for a poor old cuss whose only crime is an unhealthy desire for peace and quiet.”
The same calm contempt applied to those other township or county officials who knew more than they’d been letting on about the Minute Men. Many, like Remington Ramsay, hadn’t really known for certain just who might or might not have stuck with an officially disbanded bunch of friends and neighbors.
Leaving it to his fellow lawmen to tidy up, Longarm sent a night letter to Billy Vail in Denver, and headed back to his redecorated front room at the MacUlric boardinghouse to catch up on some well-earned rest. The new wallpaper had sunflowers against two shades of green. Longarm didn’t care. He was sound asleep within seconds of his head hitting the sachet-scented pillow, and he didn’t wake up until the church bells were chiming the noon hour.
He might not have opened his eyes that early had not he had to take a piss. For he had no great call to go anywhere before he’d be boarding that night train south, and that last dream had been sort of promising.
He lay there staring up at the disgustingly cheerful yellow ceiling as he muttered, “Why is it a piss hard-on always wakes you up just as you’re all set to stick it in your dream gal?”
Nobody answered. He threw the covers off, swung his bare feet to the bare planks, and considered the chamber pot under the bed. But he felt silly leaving a pot of piss where a pretty gal he’d never shown his dick to was sure to see it. So he swiftly got dressed and headed on out to do it right.
He met Mavis MacUlric in the hall, with her feather duster. She was about the dustingest landlady he’d had in recent memory. She asked him how he liked his new wallpaper. His back teeth were floating but he had to stand there, shifting from one foot to the other, as she brought him up to date on her dawning interest in that nice Remington Ramsay.
After he’d at last been allowed to empty his bladder and tidy up the rest of him, Longarm ate dinner out back and walked Ellen Brent back to the library to say adios properly. And after she said she was never going to forget him, coming twice downstairs in the dark, she got dressed and went upstairs to open the place officially.
Longarm ambled over to the county jail, where the state troopers were set up. Longarm offered to make himself useful, but the provost sergeant said young Howard Tendring in the back had made a full confession to the attempted rape and frustrated knifing of an older gal he’d admired from afar until he hadn’t been thinking straight.
Longarm said he knew the feeling. He didn’t tell the older noncom who he had in mind. It was nobody’s business that he’d almost managed a wet dream, and had pretended a petite brunette had been a willowy redhead just now. He asked if it was safe to assume the state troopers, since they rode for Nebraska, would see that the young killer got a fair state trial. He was assured he didn’t have to worry about that mean kid any more, and so he left.
The rest of the day went as slow as a constipated cat with no place to shit. He thought more than once about riding out to the Diamond B and begging Fox Bancroft for some infernal understanding. But a gal who got sore at a man unfairly wasn’t worth acting foolish over, and he knew no real gal could ever be built the way he’d pictured her in his head, whether asleep or on top of old Ellen. For being a man, he tended to picture the ones he couldn’t have a bit different from the ones he could. The human mind sure teamed up with the human pecker to confound a poor innocent cuss.
But since all things good and bad must end, it only felt like a million years before Longarm was able to settle up with everyone he owed in Pawnee Junction and board that southbound night train at last.
He rode alone in the smoking car for most of the short ride down to the main line. Ogallala, Nebraska, was a bigger cow town than the one he’d just left. But that wasn’t saying much in high summer when the cows were all grazing the surrounding range and hardly anybody could afford to crowd into the bigger town’s bigger whorehouses, card houses, and saloons, in that order.
Longarm got a room in one of the few hotels in Ogallala instead. The main-line day train that would carry him on to Denver wouldn’t get in before breakfast time, and a man who went looking for action in a strange town late at night was a man who made more money than they paid even a senior deputy.
He carried some magazines upstairs with his light baggage, and got undressed to read himself sleepy in bed.
