Widow Farnsworth offered to be a sport about the body of the man she’d hired. The friendless drifter who’d gunned the railroad expert would be kept in a cool cellar for a few days and then planted over in potter’s field in a newspaper shroud if nobody came forward to claim his dead meat.
By the time they’d figured all of that out it was going on supper time. But Longarm went over to the town lockup with Deputy Rothstein for a look at his own prisoner first.
The yellow sheets Longarm had read in the waiting room of Denver’s Union Station had described Bunny McNee as a runty nineteen-year-old. The dirty-faced kid Rothstein called over to the bars looked far more harmless than expected. That slightly bucktoothed smirk seemed a good enough reason for the unferocious nickname. Young McNee started to protest. “I haven’t done anything deserving to be treated this mean, damn it.”
Longarm quietly replied, “Nail a wreath betwixt your eyes. Your brain is dead. I’m taking you back to Denver on more serious charges than skipping out on your hotel bill, junior. But there’s no train we can catch before tomorrow morning. So another night in that box won’t hurt you, and meanwhile, I want you to study some on the fatherly advice I’m about to give you.”
Bunny McNee asked if he could have some tobacco, or at least some soap to wash up with.
Longarm said, “I might leave you with a couple of cheroots, and I reckon I could manage a cake of soap early enough in the morning for you to clean up for that train ride if I wanted to. They tell me you’ve been carrying on like a spoiled brat instead of a grown man who knows he’s done wrong. So the question for you to help me decide is whether I want to. I don’t have to give you any breaks at all. I can slap you in cuffs and leg irons and let you ride in the baggage car, or we can head back to Denver like a sensible sinner and a man just doing his job.”
McNee said, “I follow your drift and I don’t mean to give you any trouble, Longarm.”
The tall lawman reached under his coat for some smokes as he said, “That’s not the main advice I’d like you to sleep on, kid. I’m taking you to talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax with Judge Dickerson of the Denver District Court. You’ll find him firm but fair. He won’t take shit off anyone who’s ever bent the law. But on the other hand, the only charges that’ll stick to you for certain are aiding and abetting. You’ve for sure been aiding and abetting the sort of friends your mama warned you against. So the judge is sure to be more interested in them than the kid seen holding the horses and such.”
He passed out cheroots for the three of them and handed the kid a fourth one through the bars, even as McNee protested, “They are my friends, dad blast it! Do I look like the sort who’d peach on a pal just to butter up some old judge?”
You caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. So Longarm managed not to say the prisoner looked a lot like exactly that as he thumbed a match head aflame to light all their smokes. “I have heard of that code of silence. Seen it in one of Buntline’s Wild West magazines too. So it must be true. What I’d like you to ponder, in the wee small hours you have left thanks to the narrow-gauge timetable, is the year or more of hard labor Judge Dickerson could throw at you against your walking out of the Denver Federal Building with me for a friendly drink at the nearby Parthenon Saloon before we each went our separate ways on a soft summer night.”
McNee gasped, “I couldn’t! They’d track me down no matter where I ran to!”
To which Longarm replied with an annoyed snort of smoke, “Not if you helped us round the whole bunch up. Even if we missed a few, there’d be nothing about your peaching on them in the court records. We only need some names and addresses, kid. You don’t have to sign a single warrant with your own name.”
The young owlhoot rider didn’t answer. So Longarm nodded soberly and said, “You take your time and think it over. It’s no skin off my ass if you’d rather make little rocks out of bigger ones for the sake of your swell pals.”
He enjoyed another drag on his own cheroot and added, “We have a whole night ahead of us. I’m fixing to bed down in that same hotel you were charged with sneaking out of. I aim to pay them for their services to me. I’m surprised you were caught creeping out like an abandoned woman, seeing your outlaw pals are so loyal to one another.
Bunny McNee flushed mighty red, but still refused to answer. Longarm chuckled fondly and told the town lawman, “We’d best let him jerk off in private over his true blue asshole amigos. Anyone can see they’ve left him to face the music alone, right?”
Rothstein was an experienced lawman as well. So as the two of them strode away the town lawman replied, as if for Longarm’s ears alone, “That’s for damned sure. Any real pal with the price of a few beers could have bailed him out on that theft-of-service charge before we had any notion he was wanted by you boys.”
As they got out front, Rothstein asked if Longarm thought it was going to work.
Longarm shrugged and said, “Depends on whether the kid got into that fix on his own or with some help. From the little we know about the gang he’s been riding with, they divvy the take and split up after each robbery. McNee might have blown his own share a dozen different ways as he was laying low up here. I mean to ask around, if I have the time.
Rothstein said, “We already did. The kid never blew that much on cards or the few whores left in town now that the silver lode has about bottomed out.”
Longarm whistled softly. “Heard things had started to slow down up this way. Hadn’t heard they were that slow. Usual story with Front Range silver carbonate? The high-grade setting on top of base metal like icing on a cake?”
Rothstein shrugged. “I don’t know enough about mining to argue. The way I heard it, they keep smelting more and more lead and zinc out of the crushed rock by the time they run it all the way to the smelters on the main line. So the British syndicate’s had to sell things off, a holding at a time, to keep things going at all.”
Longarm nodded absently and muttered, “That accounts for the railroad being run by a widow gal of our own persuasion. Our Bunny McNee likely figured a town withering on the vine was a better place to lay low than either a boom town or an outright ghost town where a stranger would stand out even more.”
Rothstein said, “I follow your drift. We had him down as no more than a drifter who’d failed to get hired up at the mine and run out of eating money before yours truly got to killing time with some old wanted fliers. Amos says he figures that gang splits up between robberies and then gets together for another after things cool down from the last one.”
By this time they were out on the walk. The sky above had turned dusky rose, the peaks to the east to flame, the peaks to the west deep purple, and everything between sort of murky lavender. So Longarm said, “I was wondering why I was getting so hungry. Constable Amos Payne and my boss, Marshal Billy Vail, think a heap alike. McNee has to know where his pals are fixing to get together again, and you just now heard me tell him why he ought to confide in us. By the time I have him in Judge Dickerson’s chambers tomorrow afternoon, he ought to be
