the back.
Another body sprawled facedown near the far entrance. The less well-dressed badge-toting gents standing over it still had their guns out. As Longarm stepped over the big puddle of blood to call out his own connections with the law, he saw an army Schofield on the floor between the two bodies. He nodded and said, “Let me guess. That one closer to you all gunned this other jasper in direct violation of the municipal pistol ordinances, right?”
The town constable of heavier build and more substantial mustache nodded gravely and declared, “We were just outside when we heard him blasting away in here. As we tore in, there was only one man in here on his feet with a gun. I yelled at him to drop it. When that didn’t seem to impress him, I fired. Now I’d like to know what in pure hell this was all about. I’d be Constable Amos Payne and this would be my deputy Nate Rothstein, by the way.”
Longarm introduced himself and added, “I hope you got my earlier wire today.”
Payne nodded in a distracted manner. “You can have the McNee kid any time you want. But he’d be locked up in a patent cell even as we speak, and I got me two dead bodies to account for here and now!”
Longarm reholstered his gun as he suggested, “First thing we ought to do is clear this waiting room so’s we can see what we’re doing. I rode up on the train with the one over yonder. He spoke with a sort of high-toned English accent. That’s as much as I know about him so far.”
Payne told his deputy to clear out the spectators that gunfire always seemed to attract. As he was doing so, Longarm rolled the denim-clad body on its back with a boot tip. Then he gave a soft whistle and said, “I hope the powers that be allow you to put in for bounty money, Amos.”
Payne said in a puzzled tone, “It’s never come up. We seldom have this much excitement here at the end of the tracks. You know who he might be, Deputy Long?”
Longarm replied, “There’s no might about it. You just backshot the one and original Ginger Bancott, wanted from Texas to Nebraska for everything but spreading the whooping cough. He mostly rented his six-gun by the hour to the highest bidder. So I’d say somebody hired him to gun that more fashionable gent across the floor. You want to wire the Texas Rangers in Austin about the bounty you have coming, by the way. Big cattle baron posted a thousand on the rascal after his black sheep son got backshot by Bancott in Amarillo.”
“`As the two of them moved over to the other body Payne protested, “I wish you wouldn’t wrinkle your nose like that when you mention a gent getting shot in the back. I know they call you Longarm and say you’re the bee’s knees with your own six-gun. But I called out to the killer as he stood there with a smoking Schofield in his hand. What was I supposed to do when he didn’t drop it, wait until he turned it on me?”
Longarm shook his head. “I’d have done the same in any scene such as you’ve described, Amos. When I said you’d just shot a famous gunslick in the back, I never meant to imply you shouldn’t have. I was only stating things as they was. An awesome amount of tedious twaddle gets printed in the papers by newspaper men who report every shooting out our way as if we were knights in armor holding a sporting event at King Arthur’s court.”
He dropped to one knee on the less bloody side of the dead man and reached inside the open frock coat for any possible clues as to his identity. Bancott’s victim had been unarmed as well as a neater dresser. Longarm had just found an expensive pigskin billfold when a feminine voice from the far doorway called out, “Oh, Dear Lord, that can’t be Mister Gaylord Stanwyk I see there on the floor!”
Longarm suggested Deputy Rothstein let the lady in as he opened the dead man’s billfold and gravely announced, “I’m afraid it has to be, ma’am. You say you know him?”
As the Junoesque brunette of some thirty summers joined them by Stanwyk’s sprawled cadaver, Constable Payne introduced her as Mrs. Constance Farnsworth and added that she ran their one and only railroad. Longarm had already noticed she was wearing a fashionable black chiffon dress. So he didn’t ask what her late husband might have had to do with the railroad. He rose to his more considerable height and held out the dead man’s billfold to her with one hand as he ticked the brim of his Stetson to her with the other.
The vision in ebony and ivory didn’t take the dead man’s identification as she murmured, “We’d already met in Denver this spring. He was an established railway engineer, as the English call such gents. They lay out their railways different from our railroads and this has been a problem to us here along the John Bull Line.”
Longarm gravely nodded. “I noticed the way your narrow-gauge tracks were laid, and they told me a British syndicate started the whole shebang up this way. Are we supposed to assume this poor English gent came all this way to help you run your railroad, only to be assassinated as he was getting off the train?”
The railroading widow woman agreed it certainly looked that way, but that she had no idea who’d want to do such a thing. Amos Payne allowed, and Nate Rothstein agreed, that both dead men were strangers to the small mountain community.
Longarm spied scared eyes peering at them from behind the brass bars of the one ticket window. Not wanting to step in blood, Longarm called out to ask what the old gray coot might have to add to this confusion.
The ticket clerk called back, “I saw the whole thing, but I don’t know what I saw. That gent in the fancy duds had just come in off the platform, calling out something about his baggage. Next thing I knew that cuss dressed more cow over yonder had just drawn that gun on the floor and blazed away. I hit the floor on this side of my counter about the same time. Then I heard Constable Payne yell something and fire some more. I didn’t feel like getting back to these tired old feet until I was sure it was all over out yonder!”
Widow Farnsworth murmured, “Uncle Ted never lies when he’s sober, and I’ve yet to catch him drinking on the job.”
Longarm didn’t care. He felt sort of sorry for the apparently harmless Englishman. But there seemed to be no mystery as to who might have shot him. He felt curious about the motive for the killing. But whether Bancott had been hired to kill Stanwyck or simply killed a total stranger for practice, Longarm had been sent to pick up a federal want, not to solve a local tiff.
The barley-growing Colman stuck his head in the trackside entrance to yell, “What’s going on in here? Them women and children want to get off that train and … Hold on, ain’t that gent at your feet the same one as rode up from Golden with us?”
Longarm replied, “Yep. That other one near the far doorway did it. You can send the women and children on their way now, pard. It’s all over, far as I can see.”
Longarm didn’t see, of course, that his own involvement in the blood feud of John Bull had barely begun.
Chapter 4
