Then she blinked up at him. “Oh! You did say you were a lawman up here after somebody, and that is a public corral, isn’t it?”
As he followed her up the stairs, admiring the view, even though her swaying hips seemed sort of skinny under that tan smock, Longarm soberly observed, “It surely is, ma’am. I understand they got this one street corner in London Town, near some place called Pick Your Dilly, where they say that if you wait there long enough, everyone in the world is sure to pass by sooner or later.”
She gasped. “Good heavens, are you suggesting wanted outlaws have been riding in and out of the municipal corral, right under my front window, without my ever suspecting a thing?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “You’ve been running a boardinghouse. You ain’t paid to keep an eye peeled for outlaws. I carry a gun and a badge. So they expect me to suspect things, ma’am.”
Chapter 3
Longarm offered to help. But the Widow MacUlric insisted housework was women’s work. So he allowed he’d be back for noon dinner, and strode over to the Western Union near the railroad stop.
Once there, he wired his home office the little he’d found out so far. He didn’t ask Marshal Billy Vail whether he was supposed to arrest anybody or not. Western Union charged a nickel a word for flat-rate wires and old Billy could be such a fuss about needless waste when he went over a deputy’s field expenses.
Longarm stopped by a tobacco shop for some three-for-a-nickel cheroots and the latest gossip on last night’s lynchings. He wound up with two bits worth of smokes and as much information as he might have gotten from the wooden Indian standing out front.
It was early in the day for any responsible citizens to be sipping suds in the one saloon that was open at that hour. So Longarm tried the barbershop he spied across the way. He didn’t need a haircut, but a man could always use a store-bought shave this late in the day if he needed an excuse to wait his turn and jaw a mite.
There were four morning customers ahead of him. Three townies and what seemed like a prosperous cowhand indeed. The rascal must have weighed three hundred pounds. He was only saved from looking just plain sissy-fat by standing well over six feet, and that was before he put on those high-heeled Justins he wore with his sailcloth pants legs tucked inside. His black sateen shirt and maroon brocaded vest had likely set him back more than his black Texas hat. But not as much as the brace of silver-mounted and ivory-handled Remington .45s riding his broad hips in tooled black leather holsters.
Longarm could see all this at a glance because the big beefy cuss rose when Longarm entered, as if he’d been expected.
But when Longarm nodded at the big rider, the big rider never said anything as he barely nodded back. Longarm could see the one barber wasn’t nearly finished with his current customer. So he figured the stockman had just grown tired of sitting in the bentwood chair he’d risen from. There were plenty of seats that morning. So Longarm felt no call to thank anyone for offering him one as he sat down near the doorway. There was a folded newspaper on the empty chair next to the one he’d chosen. He picked it up and scanned the front page a spell before he declared to nobody in particular, “I see they ain’t printed anything about that necktie party we had last night yet.”
Nobody said a word or even glanced his way. Small-town barbershops could be that way. He went on. “The reason I mentioned current events is that I am Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long of the Denver District Court and I was sent all this way to gather up the one they called Dancing Dave and deliver him to another hangman entirely. I find it more peculiar than annoying that somebody up this way hung Dancing Dave at less expense to the federal district I ride for. Dancing Dave Loman had done wonders and eaten cucumbers in other parts of this great land. But it was my understanding he was hiding out in Nebraska because this was about the only state he wasn’t wanted in.”
The balding barber shot him a stern look by way of the big wall mirror and demanded, “Did you come in here for a shave, a haircut, or to gossip like an old fishwife?”
Before Longarm could answer, the bulky stockman standing near the back wall with a gun on each hip laughed jovially and cut in to take the bit in his own teeth, declaring, “Lawman has a right to be nosy when the Minute Men string up a cuss he’d had his heart set on.”
Beaming down at Longarm, who was fighting the temptation to rise and adjust his own gun rig, the just as tall and far wider two-gun man explained, “That’s last week’s edition of the Monitor, pilgrim. They ain’t had time to report what happened in these parts last night. I ain’t saying I was there myself, you understand, but I reckon I can tell you why they robbed you of your own true love. That train robber had the misfortune of being locked up with the murderous son of a bitch the Minute Men were really after. They were after Bubblehead Burnside because he raped and murdered a pretty church lady, and because they knew the son-of-a-bitching circuit judge was likely to send the knave to that insane asylum over to Omaha!”
There came a rumble of agreement—now that the bully had told them what their opinions had better well be. A townsman in a snuff-colored outfit opined, “They should have locked that loony away years ago. Always knew Bubblehead Burnside was going to hurt somebody someday. Had half the kids in town scared skinny, coming at them all squinty-eyed and drooling as he asked ‘em to shoot marbles with him!”
Another customer volunteered, “And him a grown man of nearly four and twenty too! I mind what you just said about him and the little kids. Had poor Mildred Powell heeded the other ladies, she might be alive today! Nobody else but poor Miss Mildred wanted the idiot attending her Sunday school classes. They told her it wasn’t natural or healthy to have a full-grown man drooling at her over coloring books that way.”
The bigger man standing by the back wall stared thoughtfully down at Longarm as he declared, “Our Denver lawman ain’t interested in the droolings of Bubblehead Burnside. He’s more concerned with the rope dance of Dancing Dave Lowman. Ain’t that right, Longarm?”
There was common courtesy, and there was common sense when a man with two guns in quick-draw holsters was smiling down at you that way. So Longarm rose to his own considerable height, his frock coat open to expose the more modest grips of his own .44-40 as he calmly replied, “It surely is, and might you have a name of your own, old son, seeing you seem to know me so well?”
“I’d be Porky Shaw, boss wrangler out to the Diamond B,” the big man answered easily. He added, “Knew who you were as soon as you opened your mouth because you’re more famous. We’d heard you were headed up this way to carry that train robber back to Denver.”
“Is that why you hung him?” Longarm asked as easily.
It got very quiet for the next million years. Then Porky Shaw laughed incredulously and demanded, “Are you
