woman—with a lutherisch family. My poor mother was so wise to leave me to choose what I would be after I had up grown! I am sure I don’t schwesterlich wish mein Taufe. That is in English baptism, nicht?”
Longarm regarded the gaping storefront thoughtfully as he replied without a whole lot of interest, “It’s a free country, Miss Helga. You can pray to the Great Jehovah or Wakan Tonka for all my department will pester you. Might your boss, Horst Heger, have any lumber handy? You were fixing to tell me more about where he’d gone and when you expected him back before we got sidetracked into bread and salt, her?”
She said, “There is in the keller a workbench and some boards, I think. Herr Heger never told me where he was going or when he was to back return. I have not since last week seen him. I no longer to our old services go. But naturalich I did not on Sonntag miss him. I opened Montag Morgen and have since then been the shop trying to run for him. I know little about guns. But most of our trade is ammunition and supplies.”
He told her to stay topside and watch the store while he went down to the cellar to see about that boarding. He struck a match on the steep wooden steps and found an oil lantern hanging handy on a nail. It still took two genuine wax matches from Old Mexico to get the lamp burning right. The ‘dobe-walled and dirt-floored cellar was spider-webby and stinky for that late in summer. The place needed airing out. When he spied a flight of brick steps leading up to what had to be a sloping exit to the backyard, he made a mental note to mention airing to young Helga.
Meanwhile he gathered up some pine planks apparently salvaged from some other building, found a hammer and a mason jar of mixed nails, and hauled it all upstairs.
As he put his hat and jacket aside to get to work up front, he told Helga about that outside cellar door. She said she knew about it, and had noticed how rank the dirt cellar smelled, but that her boss had the only key to the padlock sealing the stink in.
He told her to open the front and back doors upstairs at least, and left the cellar door open as he hammered together a lattice of odd lengths of lumber in hopes of letting in some air while keeping small boys out. He had to make more than one trip. Seeing Helga seemed more comfortable with him now, he took a mite more time in the cellar and found a whole sheaf of wanted flyers and reward posters in an old chest of drawers across from the workbench. Longarm left them where they were for now. They weren’t his, and it stood to reason a gunsmith who’d spotted an owlhoot rider packing an unusual gun had been making a sort of hobby out of collecting wanted papers. A gunsmith too dumb to know outlaws were interested in guns might have never recognized a renegade with a LeMat for sale.
Back upstairs, nailing a diagonal plank with shorter nails than he might have bought from scratch, Longarm told Helga, “That ought to keep casual prowlers out. But all these guns are too valuable to leave out after your regular closing time. Is there some safer place I could help you store them, if you’d like me to come back?”
She said her boss had always put such tempting stock away in a vault in the back. Then she asked where he was going before closing time.
He said he’d know better once he got there, and asked her to show him their vault.
That turned out to be a combination vault, big enough to walk into, if only it had been open. Helga said only her boss had the combination, and she’d been mighty worried about that. She’d found all the stock in the cases out front, just as they’d been when she’d tidied up Saturday noon, when she reported for work the following Monday with her key to the front door. She said she’d felt she’d had no choice but to keep things humming as best she could until her fuzzy-headed but kindly boss got back from wherever on God’s green earth he’d gone. Helga insisted on showing Longarm the modest receipts in the till, as if he had any notion how much money was supposed to be there.
He made the mistake of saying that. So the next thing he knew the strapping blonde had dragged him into the back quarters, where Helga had a small kitchen set up, and made him sit at a table with a pile of business ledgers as she puttered about making them a snack.
Longarm leafed through the dry dusty ledgers with about the same interest he’d have shown to the scrapbook of some touring piano player, Everything was printed in High Dutch. But figures were figures, and ink came red or black in any lingo. So almost despite himself, Longarm found himself paying attention to another man’s business.
Business had been lousy lately. The profit on ammunition and new supplies was less than fifty percent. Longarm had pals in the trade out Denver way, so he knew there was purer profit in repairing and altering guns. But Mennonite farmers and even the local cowhands had placed damned few orders for tailored gun grips, hair triggers, and such. Longarm noticed other entries showing Heger had taken used guns on consignment, meaning the original owner only got paid if and when his gun was sold. Longarm looked back a few pages, in vain, as Helga dished out generous portions of what looked like kitten’s brains mixed with bloody cedar shavings. “There’s something I don’t savvy here,” he said.
She told him they were having Blaukraut mitt Blumerkohl and that everyone drank tea from glasses in her old country.
He said that wasn’t what he was worried about. He explained, “That LeMat on sale in the window for twenty whole dollars ain’t on the books here at any price.”
He had to explain which gun was a LeMat before Helga was able to tell him she wasn’t sure how long it had been in the window or who’d consigned it to them for sale.
The oddly named grub turned out to be pretty good pickled cauliflower and red cabbage. The Russian-Dutch tea helped a heap with its sort of sour aftertaste. She seemed more puzzled as to why he found a gun in the window of a gunsmith shop such a puzzle.
He said, “Whether your boss took it on consignment or paid cash, it should have been listed in the ledgers. And they were asking way too much. Twenty dollars would buy you a spanking-new Colt ‘73, and a factory-fresh Remington would run you less.”
She suggested perhaps the owner had set the price on the gun over Herr Heger’s mild objections. She said with a smile that her boss never seemed to really fuss with anyone.
Longarm washed down some red cabbage and said, “I noticed. Going over his books just now, it’s easy to see why he might have been anxious to make some money on the side. When you say he acted sort of fuzzy, did you mean absentminded fuzzy or drinking fuzzy, Miss Helga?”
She allowed the missing gunsmith could have had either a troubled mind, a drinking problem, or both. She hadn’t even known Heger when his wife ran off on him that spring. She said he’d put a sign in the front window saying he could use some help, and hadn’t put up too much of a fuss when she’d barged in to say she’d rather keep shop than clean house. As Longarm got her to go over it all again, he saw she really didn’t know as much about Horst Heger as he did. The missing gunsmith had never confided in his new hired help about wanted outlaws he
