The dark hay shed was alive with sleepy, querulous conversation when Longarm got in there. Everyone seemed to be trying to speak at once, and most of the voices were all demanding to know the same thing: What happened and who did it?
“Does somebody have a match?” one voice called, overpowering the rest. “I got a candle some-damn-place here but I can’t find my matches.”
Longarm thumbed a lucifer aflame and held it up so he could find the man with the candle. It turned out to be one of the pair of northbound passengers who looked like mining engineers or surveyors, both of them pretty much peas from the same pod with rough but expensive clothing, knee-high lace-up boots, and narrow-brimmed fur felt hats of the very highest quality. Longarm took the few steps to his side and touched his match to the wick of the candle stub the man was holding.
Once they had some light to see each other by, the buzz of disjointed conversations slowed and withered away into a bleary-eyed and glowering silence.
“Does anybody know what happened?” Longarm asked.
“Not me.”
“Huh-uh.”
“I was sound asleep.”
There were five men in addition to Longarm, and each disclaimed any knowledge of what had caused the commotion, although everyone had certainly heard it plainly enough. All had been jolted awake by the abrupt little explosion.
Each man certainly appeared to be telling the truth, Longarm thought.
In addition to himself—and because of the darkness he actually hadn’t known beforehand just who his sleeping companions were—this side of the hay storage was accommodating Tyler Overton, the two engineers, the diminutive northbound gent with the cane, and the salesman Delmer Jelk.
“It sounded like a gunshot. That’s what I think,” Jelk offered.
“It was a gun. Had to be.”
“All right, so who fired the shot? And at what?” Longarm asked. No one answered. “Tyler?”
“Wasn’t me, Long.”
“You, mister?” he asked the man who was holding the candle.
“Not me.”
“You?”
The fellow shook his head.
“Delmer?”
“Nope.”
“You, Sir?”
“Certainly not.”
Longarm shrugged. “Look, could anybody have sort of, I dunno, rolled over an’ touched off a shot. You know, kinda accidental like?”
Again there was a round of denials, although Jelk went to the trouble of pulling a stubby bulldog revolver out of his coat pocket and sniffing the barrel to make sure the gun had not somehow discharged by accident while he slept.
“All right, if it wasn’t a gun goin’ off, what else could it have been?” Longarm inquired.
“It was a gun. Not a big one but a gun for sure,” the candle-holder’s companion asserted. “I’ve heard more than enough guns to know. This here was a gun going off.”
“Fine,” Longarm said. “You’re bedded down kinda in the middle of things. Which side o’ you was the gun fired on. Left? Right? Can you remember?”
The man frowned, lay down on the soft hay, and turned his face first in one direction, then in the other. After a few moments he shook his head. “I been trying to bring it back to mind. You know? But I was sleeping hard. I’m damned if I could say which way the sound came from. I mean, if it’d happened a second time, after I started to come awake, I’m sure I could tell you. But as it is …” He spread his hands wide, palms upward, and shrugged.
“Can anyone else recall?”
No one could.
“How about somebody not in this room? Could somebody else have come in from the other side, or someplace else for that matter, and fired one up Into the roof for a prank or like that?”
“If it was a prank, Marshal, it was a piss-poor one.”
“But could it have been that?”
“Marshal, it coulda been any damn thing except sensible. And it wasn’t me that done it. That’s all I’m sure of,” Delmer Jelk claimed.
“That about covers it as far as I can see,” Overton agreed. “We were all asleep, you know. None of us could testify to anything of a factual nature. At best we can only speculate.”
Longarm frowned. He hated coming up against anything that he did not understand. Still, no harm seemed to have been done.
“The hell with it,” he said, taking advantage of the candlelight to return to his nest of warm, soft hay and pull a
