Longarm grimaced and replied, “She fooled you gents, didn’t she? Let’s cut across to yonder saloon and wet our whistles as we gossip about the lady in some shade.”
Constable Payne thought that made more sense than anything else he’d heard since coming to work that morning.
As they bellied up to the bar inside, Payne signaled for two needled beers and confided, “Nate Rothstein thinks she might be a ringer. I used to play chess when the game was checkers too. The kid reads too many of them dime detective magazines.”
Longarm waited until the barkeep slid their schooners across the zinc-topped bar to them before he observed, “Who’s to say Nate might not have a point?”
Payne said, “Me. I was the arresting officer, in broad daylight, when the narrow-gauge backed up from that landslide to deliver an apparent deadbeat into the hands of the law. The charges had been pressed by Manager Cooper at the Elk Rack Hotel you just checked out of. We didn’t know, then, we had more than a simple vagrancy and theft-of-service charge on him—I mean her. So what would all sorts of razzle-dazzle be meant to accomplish, if Nate’s notion is supposed to make a lick of sense?”
Longarm sipped some beer needled with fair rye as he considered, and then asked, “That hotel manager pressed charges against the one you’ve been holding, of course?”
Payne snorted, “The sass never owed me nothing! Naturally Cooper bore witness before Silas Hall, our justice of the peace. We don’t lock drifters up just for the hell of it. We had her locked up as a he who’d skipped out on a hotel bill until it was Nate, I’ll have to allow, who noticed we had a possible federal want on our hands.”
Payne sipped at his own schooner, set it down again, and said with a weary smile, “I told you Nate reads a lot. I thought from the tone of Marshal Vail’s telegram that he’d be sending a deputy who knew the notorious Bunny McNee on sight.”
Longarm considered, shook his head, and replied, “I doubt either of the original team knew Bunny any better than me, and I never laid eyes on him, her or it until I got here yesterday.”
Payne said, “Nate tells me you tried to trick the sneaky gal with a remark about the late Ginger Bancott. He says that after you left she asked about that, and acted surprised but not at all upset when Nate told her the tale about the shootout at the depot. Nate says that if she’d ever known Ginger Bancott, she was one hell of an actress.”
Longarm snorted and replied, “We’ve established that she’s one hell of an actress. How many gals have you ever met who could stay at a hotel as a man and convince a snoopy chambermaid she was at worst a sissy? After that, we have dozens of witnesses who identified the kid holding the get-away mounts for the gang as a wayward youth of the male persuasion.”
Payne sipped some suds thoughtfully, then said, “Six of one and half a dozen of the other. Say she come up here to hide out with Ginger or somebody else when the gang split up after their last big haul. There’s only the one hotel, but a real wayward youth could hole up any number of places as a hired hand or paying boarder. So say Ginger or whoever cached his sweeter sidekick in the Elk Rack lest someone notice she sat down to pee, or simply to keep anyone from noticing two strangers in town all at once.”
Longarm grimaced and said, “I thought you just advised against a chess game we don’t really have to play. I told you I’d sent for chaperones. Once I have her before Judge Dickerson with no counter-charges to offer, he’s fixing to tell her she can tell all she knows or face a slow twenty years in striped cotton dress. Females have fewer good years to spend than us, and twenty years would scare a heap of men. But since she never actually aimed a gun at anyone as a member of that meaner bunch, Judge Dickerson could doubtless let her walk, if she was willing to witness against rascals who let her down and left her stranded with an unpaid hotel bill.”
Payne nodded soberly and said, “I follow your drift. But what if Ginger Bancott wasn’t that other robber she was hiding out with? My boys have been scouting about to no avail trying to find out where he was holed up before he tried for either you or that Englishman at the depot across the way.”
Longarm shrugged and replied, “I’ve been studying on that angle. At the risk of false modesty, the more I study the more I tend to go with Gaylord Stanwyk as the intended target. I ain’t the only gent who ever trod on somebody else’s toes, and way more folk knew he was on his way to John Bull. You and your deputies were the only ones in town I wired that I’d be coming in place of them other deputies.”
Amos Payne stared goggle-eyed and gasped, “Thunderation! Are you suggesting me or mine could have been out to gun the transferring lawman before he could take our pretty prisoner away from us?”
Longarm said, “The thought had occurred to me. But. .
“Then that’s the dumbest thought I ever heard tell of, and you’d be surprised what I hear from the drunks on payday night! Had we been aiming to aid and abet the escape of Bunny McNee, we’d have just let her go and say she escaped! That don’t sound half as risky for a bought-off town constable as assassinating federal agents! I suppose you’re fixing to tell me next that I hired that known killer to kill you and then killed him when he killed the wrong man?”
Longarm snorted and growled, “I hadn’t finished. I was saying I like to ponder all the possibles before I make up my mind. So I did and, had you let me finish, I was about to make them very points for you all.”
“We never had to wire you people we were holding a federal want to begin with!” Payne whined. “We’d only arrested a deadbeat drifter as far as anyone else in town knew. Had the shiftless slut been rich enough to bribe this child, she’d have paid way less to the Elk Rack Hotel and never been arrested in the first place!”
Longarm nodded, drained the last of his schooner, and replied in a friendlier way, “That does make that tall Englishman the far more likely target. Might you have a public library here in John Bull, old son?”
Payne looked surprised, then said, “Sort of. That limey mining syndicate built a school with a library wing whilst this was their company town. Now that we’ve incorporated as a Colorado township, the school, library, and such are still there, no matter who’s been paying for their upkeep. You sure bring up a heap of matters nobody’s ever asked me about before.”
Longarm said, “They pay me to be nosy. Which way did you say your schoolhouse was?”
Payne said to head away from the mining operation and railroad yards until he passed the First Methodist Church. The frame school complex would be back from the road a piece, surrounded by shade trees of green ash. So they shook on it and parted friendly. It wasn’t easy, but Amos Payne managed not to ask what Longarm wanted with a library.
But others were more suspicious of Longarm’s motives as they watched from the shade of a shop overhang at
