only stopping long enough to matter up in Cedar Bend. He said there was a guest hostel out back of the Mennonite meeting house across the way, and suggested they might put a stranger up for the night.
Longarm said he didn’t know how to say grace in High Dutch, and didn’t mind sleeping out under the stars in dry weather if he had to. Meanwhile, he had to find out how long he was likely to be in these parts. Following Sattler’s easy directions, Longarm rode the bay and led the paint the short distance upslope to where, sure enough, he saw a big wooden rifle, painted gold, across from the open front of the smithy, where a bunch of men and boys were watching the blacksmith shoe a monstrous dapple gray drafthorse that just didn’t think it needed new shoes.
Longarm passed by the amusing antics and High Dutch cussing to rein in and dismount across the way, tethering his ponies to the hitching rail near a handy water trough. He took his tempting Winchester from his McClellan, and stepped up on the plank walk to see that there really was a LeMat nine-shooter for sale in the front window.
Someone had written in High Dutch and English on a card propped against the trigger guard of the dramatic weapon. Longarm bent lower to read what the English writing said. That was why the bullet aimed at the nape of his neck just took his hat off for him as it flew on to shatter that plate glass all to flying bits!
Longarm had been taught by a war in his teens that the best way to duck for cover was the way someone aiming a second shot might not be expecting. So he dove headfirst through the now glassless front window of the gunsmith’s shop to roll through the crepe-paper curtain behind the display and land flat on his ass in a pile of busted glass and scattered shooting irons with some woman screaming fit to bust from the gloom beyond.
He yelled at her to shut up and take cover as he rolled over to rise up on one knee, levering a round into the chamber of his saddle gun as he glared out through all that confusion for something to aim it at.
But the street out front was a milling swirl of men, boys, rising dust, and at least three horses screaming bloody murder as they tried to bust loose. So Longarm rose to his full height and turned to the screaming gal behind him to say, “It’s over for now. I never busted your front window with my fool head, ma’am. Someone was shooting at it, or at me, from across the way. As an educated guess, I’d make it from that dark slot betwixt yonder smithy and the feed store next to it.”
“Was kann ich fur Sie tun, mein Herr?” didn’t sound as if she was following his drift.
He asked for Horst Heger. She brightened and gushed, “Ich weiss es noch nicht. I can a little English when you slow speak it. I am Helga Pilger and I haff only here started. Herr Heger has just me hired to watch for him when he somewhere goes.”
Longarm could see why. The big buxom blonde was busting out of the peasant blouse and laced-up bodice above her pleated red calico skirts. It hardly mattered if anything that pretty spoke English in a High Dutch-speaking town, or had the brains of a gnat behind those big blue eyes.
He was still admiring the view when his attention was drawn to the fuss outside, and he turned from the Mennonite maiden to see old Wemer Sattler, the town law, climbing through that busted-in shop window to join them, saying, “Zum Teufel! I thought they might have had you in mind! The men across the street say the shot was fired from the feed store, but the boy in the feed store thinks it came from the Schmiede next door.”
The lawman’s English was so much better than Helga’s that it came as a surprise to hear him grope for less familiar words. Longarm nodded and replied, “I reckon you mean smithy, and I made it that narrow slot betwixt the two. I’m still working on who might have been so sore at me. Will you look at this mess!”
Sattler said, “Whoever it was won’t get far. I’ve sent deputies out in every direction to cover the outskirts of town, and it’s not as if we’re surrounded by Das Schwarzwaid—I mean the Black Forest.”
Longarm said, “I know what you mean. Anyone crawling through ripe grainfields on hands and knees would leave a trail a schoolmarm could follow, and it’s just after high noon outside, so pony dust can be seen. But let me ask you something, no offense. How many folks do you reckon you’d have in town just now, whether resident or just in for some shopping or other fun?”
The town law thought. “About a hundred and ten families of fellow Mennonites, perhaps a dozen of other faiths, and there might be two dozen individuals off the surrounding spreads at any given time. But not many of them would be strangers to my deputies. We’re looking for a stranger. That Wolfgang von Ritterhoff, nein?”
Longarm said, “Nine and a question mark. Sounded like a common old .44-40 round, the most popular caliber for the thinking shootist, and who says it has to be a stranger? That bullet missed me by a whisper, and I got the distinct impression it was aimed my way by someone who knew me on sight from a distance!”
Chapter 10
Longarm got them to stable his stock behind the smithy. He knew he didn’t know who belonged in the township. So he stayed behind to help the bewildered Mennonite maiden tidy up. He gingerly picked up and wiped off the scattered guns as Helga swept up the busted glass. As they worked together she drew him a clearer picture of the situation. Her English seemed to get better, or else he got better at figuring out what she was trying to say. Her old country grammar was something like Olde English had started out. When you thought about how English was strung together in King Arthur or the Good Book, you weren’t half as confounded by someone saying something like, “I have but two weeks been out with this shop helping.”
Her story, in plain English, was that she’d been born on those back steps of Russia, been orphaned up in the Dakotas by that plague going about a few winters back, and sent down here to Kansas by Dakota kin to see if she’d like to marry up with one of the Brethren who’d filed on a hundred and sixty acres and was anxious to file on more in the name of most any wife who’d have him.
Helga had decided she didn’t want him. She said one look had been enough to inspire some doubts before he’d asked her to dig postholes while he cooked supper. She said the clincher had been his forgetting to offer her bread and salt when he met her stage in Cedar Bend.
Longarm had to think back. Then he nodded and said, “I’d forgot that Russian habit your kind picked up living under the czars. But anyone can see it’s an easy way to make a newcomer feel welcome. He could have just felt it was too old-timey for a brand-new American to bother with, though.”
Helga hunkered down to sweep some glass into a uppright dust pan as she protested, “In that case he could have flowers, books, or candy met me with. I have courting cowboys watched. A schnorrer is still a schnorrer no matter how the customs followed are!”
“He snored too?” Longarm asked with a wry grimace.
Helga blanched and protested, “Schnorrer in my zunge is the same as a bum in your own. I never stayed out at his dusty sod Hutte to about him that much learn! I here in town found a job as a putzenfrau—I mean cleaning
