The rider he’d addressed as his boss dryly said, “I suppose it was too big a bother to look around his infernal hotel?”
The man replied in an injured tone, “First place I looked. I acted innocent and asked the night clerk if he’d come in yet. When the night clerk said he had, I went next door for some coffee, waited a spell, and snuck up the service stairs like I worked there. Longarm must have thought he was too smart for this child. When I knocked, got no answer, and let myself in with my skeleton key, a match stem fell on the hall runner from where he’d jammed it in by the bottom hinge. I put it back, once I made sure the room was empty, and just locked it up natural.”
The boss swore softly. “He’s on to us. I can’t for the life of me see how! But they warned us he was good and they warned us right! There’ll be no evidence even Longarm could arrest us on before we make our final move. But it’s getting to be that time, and there’s no way to put things off at this late date!”
The other rider sighed and said, “If your asking for volunteers, I ain’t half the gunfighter poor old Quicksilver was, Boss.”
His boss quietly replied, “I know. Nobody I could get on such short notice would be any better than Quicksilver, and Quicksilver wasn’t fast enough to take Longarm out!”
The man asked, “Then what are you aiming to do, Boss?”
To which the other replied, “Take him out myself, of course. Somebody has to, and like you said …”
“But Boss!” the man protested. “Quicksilver was a professional faster than you, and Longarm still swatted him like a fly in a face-to-face fair fight!”
His boss asked quietly, “Who said anything about a fair fight?”
Chapter 13
The traditions of the posse comitatus were rooted in old English common law on the simple notion that all the able-bodied men of the county ought to pitch in and protect common property, unless they had so much property they felt too fancy to bother.
But when Longarm, walking a tad stiff, reported to the new Constable Rothstein in the cold gray dawn and explained he had no mount of his own and that he’d left his McClellan, Winchester, and such in his furnished digs in Denver, Nate Rothstein didn’t care. He armed Longarm with a .44-40 Winchester ‘73 from their gun rack, along with a box of spare rounds that would fit either his over-powered six-gun or modest borrowed carbine. Out back, they outfitted him with the high-stepping Cayuse-Morgan cross, a buckskin mare, the late Amos Payne had ridden. So there was no graceful way of getting out of it. By the time Longarm and Nate Rothstein were mounted up out front, a good thirty others had come to ride along with their own guns and horseflesh.
As they lit out at an easy trot along the wagon trace that at first ran in line with the railroad tracks and Mudpuppy Creek, Rothstein explained the morning train would be leaving around noon that day, because of some serious track work Widow Farnsworth had ordered. That left but one old Indian trail out of the steep-walled park. It never occurred to Longarm to say his old pal Miss Red Robin had already told him about it. He asked Nate Rothstein how you told a horse apple or hoof mark of a killer on the run from the more average cross-country rider.
Rothstein explained he’d asked around town, and determined nobody who sounded innocent had said anything about riding up over those ridges to the west since a mule train had set out a good spell before the killings at the jailhouse.
Jerking a thumb over his shoulder at a dark morose rider to their rear, Rothstein confided, “You’re right about horseshit along any trail. Old Beavertail Bill is half Ute and all tracker. He can read sign the way you and me read French novels illustrated. There’s no sense trying to cut any this close to town on a well-traveled trace. But once the trail winds up through the aspen on the far side of the Double Seven, Beavertail Bill ought to be able to tell us whether anyone lit out for those newer gold fields to the Southwest within the past twelve hours or so, see?”
Longarm did. The simple plan made simple sense. He was glad they might not have to ride all the way to Holy Cross. He’d be willing to if they spotted any recent sign or, even better, blood!
A couple of miles out of town they came to where those track workers of Widow Farnsworth seemed to be following the suggestions of that Encyclopedia Britannica. The posse had to ride around the cluster of carriages drawn up along the wagon trace. The pretty Widow Farnsworth was watching her laborers from a one-horse shay she’d driven down from her mansion herself. Old T.S. Nabors of C.C.H. was holding court at a sullen distance in his own coach and four, as if afraid he’d miss something the competition was up to.
As the posse rode past, Longarm dropped out long enough to tick his hat brim to the well-proportioned brunette and ask how things seemed to be going.
She dimpled up at him from under her sunbonnet and declared, “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you, Custis. It was all so simple as soon as you pointed it out! Half my track workers have never learned to read or write, yet they all seemed to grasp your diagram at a glance!”
Longarm allowed that was why he’d tried to draw it simple. Then he explained they were hunting for killers, ticked his hat brim again, and rode on to catch up with Nate Rothstein as he led his posse down the gentle slope toward the tracks. He naturally did so well clear of the eight-man work crew, all colored, as they sang in time while they all pried a heavy length of Wilkinson rail loose with their long crowbars.
Longarm had to rein in again. He lit a cheroot and watched with admiration as other workers grabbed hold of the loose rail with what looked like ice tongs, lifted it as one, and flipped it over like one hell of a long flapjack to clank smoothly into that long line of small steel cradles as the workers all laughed like kids. Longarm felt mighty pleased with himself as he rode on. The feeling passed by the time he caught up with the posse again. For he didn’t feel half as smart about outlaws in these parts. He didn’t have an educated guess as to what in blue blazes they were up to!
He knew there had to be some around, for they kept shooting at more honest folks. But there was just no saying why. Nobody but cranky old Granny Boggs had reported any missing stock, and even her losses seemed too modest to justify any killing.
As they forded the shallow Mudpuppy Creek, there was no mystery as to where it had come by its name. At this altitude you got trout where the streams ran cold between granite boulders. You got more frogs and mudpuppies, or big fat salamanders that seldom left the water, where the streams flowed sluggishly over muddy bottoms with no shade to keep the sun from warming the water to just too cold for much swimming. The trail picked up on the far side as a narrower pair of wagon ruts. Nobody paid any mind to the fresh horse apples or cow pats they passed. Nate Rothstein had said the trail ran past the Double Seven spread.
That turned out a bigger and handsomer home spread than one expected to find up here where the grass grew greener in far smaller amounts. Someone had left a salt block just outside the cattle guard gate through the six-
