Longarm said, “I’ll explain along the way. I have to go arrest a couple more. If you gents would care to be deputized for an hour or so, there’s bounty money on whoever robbed that other bank at the county seat a few days ago.”
The two Lazy B riders exchanged grinning glances, and the young town deputy said he wanted to go with the three of them. But Longarm warned him he might catch Ned if he left those two birds in the hand unguarded. So the kid allowed he’d stay and guard them, but he wouldn’t like it.
Walking back down to the Ganselblumchen, Longarm explained how any grain merchant’s checks would be cashed by mail right off by any bank with a lick of sense.
He said, “It’s sort of sad how many checks bounce when the futures market ain’t going the way the wise- money boys were betting. But when you pay a farmer for his crop in advance, the money is his from the day he takes your check to his own bank.”
Trooper O’Donnel soberly observed, “In other words, that innocent-looking little bank near the schoolhouse is overflowing with cash, even before that harvest these squareheads keep talking about!”
It had been a statement rather than a question. So Longarm replied, “You gents are more familiar faces if they’ve been here any length of time. So what say you two go in the front way whilst I circle around to drift in from that beer garden? That way we’ll have ‘em covered from three directions when I tell ‘em they’re under arrest, see?”
They did, and that was the way it might have gone, had both those rascals been seated at that same corner table when Longarm strode in from out back, Winchester down at his side.
But there was only one, drinking alone. Longarm glanced at Link and O’Donnel, who’d entered from the front and taken up positions at either end of the bar. Link met his eye and shrugged. Longarm shrugged back and turned to bear down on the one left in the corner. Then O’Donnel yelled, “Longarm! Duck!” and Longarm would have, had not the one in the corner been slapping leather on him as he rose, teeth bared and eyes brimming with desperation. So Longarm could only hope that gun going off behind him was aimed somewhere else as he crabbed to one side and whipped his Winchester up, yelling, “Freeze!” and then, when that didn’t work, bounced the cornered desperado off one wall to crash down through his own less effective gunsmoke. He’d missed the toe of Longarm’s left boot by a good three inches.
Longarm turned in the ringing sudden silence to see another form, that of the missing corner conversationalist, oozing blood into the sawdust as he sprawled facedown between Longarm and the bar. Martin Link said, “He must have been in the crapper. It was Trooper here who got him as he was throwing down on your spine!”
Chapter 12
The English-speaking county board was disposed to let a Mennonite community handle as much as it could on its own, and as was often the case in remote parts, big froggies in the little puddle tended to wear extra hats. The only local member of the Kansas Bar Association served as the Sappa Crossing justice of the peace, the vet doubled in brass as deputy coroner, and the town’s only banker could produce an undersheriff’s badge the county had given him if he had to.
It still took almost until supper time to tidy up the shootout at the Gansblumchen.
Close to a dozen witnesses, from Zimmermann the manager to the town drunk, agreed on all but the petty details. They’d seen Longarm come in one back door, followed shortly thereafter from another back door by the older of the two cadavers over at Zuber’s hardware and casket shop. Everyone agreed the one covering Longarm’s back had been the first to slap leather and that Trooper O’Donnel had only shot him in the back as he was fixing to do the same to a federal lawman. They seemed more confused about the details after that. Folks usually were after they’d witnessed a gunfight. For the real thing was usually over a lot sooner than it took to describe it.
Gents who thought slow enough to describe a gunfight usually lost.
But nobody had call to doubt Longarm’s version, since he’d been on that side of all that gunsmoke. They took the word of a well-known lawman and the wanted flyers in Werner Sattler’s office that the dead men had been well known as well. Tiny Tim Breen and Slick Dawson, the one who’d drawn first behind Longarm’s back, had been wanted on bank robbery, murder, and horse-stealing charges in lots of places. So the only mystery was just how they fit in with Fingers Fawcett and old Juicy Joe, who were still alive and well and full of beans.
Brought to the hearing from their patent cell out back, both known safe-and-loft men denied they’d ever laid eyes on either of the dead crooks. Moreover, they could both produce prison release papers, and defied anyone to prove they’d stolen an apple off a cart since they’d served their debts to society and been turned loose.
One of Sattler’s other deputies had meanwhile found the washerwoman down by the creek who’d been providing room, board, and perhaps other services to the two dead men as they waited, they said, for some pals to ride up from Dodge. She stridently denied, in High Dutch, knowing either Fingers or Juicy Joe. She said she hadn’t been paying attention to the ponies her paying guests had quartered out back with her mule. So far, the town law had only found two saddles to go with the four poorly cared-for mounts. Fingers and Juicy Joe were sure they’d last seen their own saddled ponies at the municipal corral, and threatened to sue for their full value if the infernal Dutchmen had lost them.
The mostly Mennonite town council cum coroner’s subpanel were more worried about that than Longarm. The experienced lawman and the one paid-up lawyer in the bunch agreed they could hold the rascals for a full seventy- two hours on suspicion alone without bending the Bill of Rights too badly. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to get someone from the county seat to verify the two survivors had been at least somewhere near that bank over yonder around the time it had been robbed.
Stepping outside with his Winchester cradled in the late afternoon glare from the west, Longarm found himself in the company of Miss Iona MacSorley, who said she’d been waiting and waiting at that stuffy old tea-room.
Longarm assured her, “I wasn’t aiming to be rude. Your hands and me got sidetracked.”
She said, “I know. Athair will be so proud of them. I heard some of it inside once I’d been told what all the fuss up this way was about. What are we to do if nobody can prove those meanies robbed that bank at the county seat a spell back?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Let ‘em go. Nothing else we can do if we can’t prove more than suspicion after seventy-two hours. It happens that way a heap. By definition, a sneaky crook leaves as few signs as he can. The two that were killed this afternoon were known to be gunslicks. They’d likely been recruited as backup. The two we have on ice are experts at opening safes, and nobody was watching when they cracked that bank safe in the dead of night. What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss Iona?”
She said, “I heard somebody took a shot at you earlier. I was going to suggest you come back to the Lazy B with me tonight, where you’d be safer. But I guess you got the ones who were after you, right?”
