awesome discharge blew old Oregon John clean out on the walk through the stained glass next to the usual exit!
Then Longarm was back on his feet to dash over and kick Buck’s fallen six-gun the length of the brass rail along the bottom of the bar before he dashed the other way, through the swaying strung beads, to throw down on a familiar figure sprawled by his shotgun in a spanking new pair of Justin boots.
It was young Will Posner, who’d said he rode for the Lazy Three and hadn’t wanted Longarm messing with his true love, Flora Munro.
Longarm hunkered down and gingerly opened the front of the love-struck cowboy’s shot-up gray shirt. The kid was still breathing. It was tough to fathom how. Longarm said, not unkindly, “You keep playing with guns and sooner or later someone’s bound to get hurt, sonny. I know that was you in them aspens earlier. Where’s the rifle you had the last time we met down by the town hall?”
Posner croaked, “You bounce around too unsteady for a rifle, you sweet-talking cuss! I heard you talking sweet to my Flora some more this evening. So I figured this old Greener and some number-nine shot was just what it would take to make you quit!”
“Asshole!” Longarm muttered as he made sure the jealous idiot had no other gun and relieved him of his extra ten-gauge shells.
He went back into the tap room to see it filling up with others. One of them being Nate Rothstein, he yelled, “Constable, you’d best send some men out to the Double Seven in force. Tell ‘em to arrest all the help and bring Miss Amanda Nolan into town with them so’s she can wait safely for her husband at the hotel.”
But then the dying man at their feet croaked, “Hold on, boys. I don’t want you arresting Ute Mary or good old a z. They don’t know nothing. Oregon John said he’d never trust a Mex. So we never invited the bunch at the smithee to join, and as for good old Mary, I was only sleeping with her. I was too smart to trust any woman with a serious secret.”
Longarm holstered his .44-40 and hunkered down beside Buck Lewis to remark conversationally, “I heard about them highwaymen getting betrayed by false-hearted women. Irish track workers like to sing songs about ‘em. Oregon John was your Segundo, right?”
Lewis croaked, “He knew all the trails across these mountains as good as most Indians, and we didn’t want to ask Beavertail Bill if he wanted to join the venture.”
The new town constable had drifted over by those beads to look through them and gasp, “My God, you shot Will Posner off the Lazy Three too, Longarm?”
Longarm replied, simply, “I never got the chance. Both sides got one another as they worked at cross-purposes to get me. Now hesh and let me get the details out of this one while there’s time. It won’t matter whether Posner lives or dies. He was just an asshole with nothing important to say.”
Turning back to Buck Lewis, Longarm got out his notebook and pencil stub. “Tell me who was in and who was out, if you don’t want everyone on the Double Seven spread hauled in.”
Nate Rothstein rejoined them, saying “Posner’s gone. That makes it two out of three, and how come this one’s still with us?”
Longarm growled, “They filled Will Posner with slugs whilst he was peppering them with buckshot. It ain’t any bitty ball in particular that does you in. The effects of all them perforations accumulate. Now hesh and pay attention whilst old Buck here gives us some names.”
The internally bleeding ramrod of the Double Seven began to reel off names Rothstein said he knew. Buck Lewis stopped at eight and said that was it. Rothstein said he’d posse up again and get out to the Double Seven after them before they lit out.
But Longarm said, “Let ‘em. The innocent men and women on the spread will be safer once they’re gone. You can beat ‘em to either Golden or Holy Cross by Western Union. They’ll have to make for one or the other without Oregon John to lead them through rougher country.”
Karl Thalman, the druggist, came in and announced, “I heard. Nothing can be done for Oregon John out on the walk. Is that Buck Lewis you shot this time, Longarm?”
The federal man snorted in disgust and said, “Never mind who shot whom. I want him to keep talking while he can. Go over to your drugstore and fetch us some laudanum and strychnine tonic.”
The druggist whistled and asked whether Longarm meant to make old Buck dopey or pep hell out of him.
Longarm replied, “Whatever it takes. Get going.”
Then he turned back to the shot-up Lewis, gently observing, “They say confession is good for the soul. So before your soul has a mighty serious discussion with Saint Peter, be a sport and tell us how Ginger Bancott and Quicksilver Quinn fit in.”
Lewis croaked, “Quicksilver was up our way on the dodge from the law. He was looking for a job to tide him over. So he naturally came to me at the Double Seven for one. I could see right off he was the sort of jasper me and Oregon John were looking for. So I let him in on our plans and the rest you know. I don’t know anything about that Ginger Bancott who shot that Englishman. He wasn’t working for us. Mebbe the other bunch as shot up the jailhouse?”
Rothstein called him a pure rascal and insisted, “Come on. Are you trying to tell us that wasn’t you or someone you sent who killed Constable Payne, poor Tim Keen, and that he-she back in that patent cell?”
Lewis insisted that was about the size of it. His voice was getting weaker. The barkeep came over with a shot glass of brandy. Longarm took it from him, drank the contents in one gulp, and said, “Thanks. I needed that.”
Rothstein insisted, “Make him tell us why they gunned that gal in pants and my pals. Damn his eyes!”
Longarm said, “Hesh. He just now said he didn’t know anything about that.” Then he poked Buck’s bloody blue shirtfront, saying, “We know you killed French Sarah. Which one of you raped her first?”
The dying man blinked owlishly and gasped, “Nobody raped anybody! I had to strangle her when she showed up out by the spread, fussing at me to kill you for killing Quicksilver. I never treated her with no disrespect, though. She’d been Quicksilver’s girl! What sort of a shit-heel would screw a pal’s woman?”
As if he’d been paged, Karl Thalman came back in with a basket of paten medicines and a roll of gauze. As he
