to handle a drunken cowboy when and if he had to. So in sum, for as long as there’d been anybody at Sappa Crossing, good old Werner Sattler had been established as the law, not an outlaw.”
Old MacSorley asked, “But what about my foreman, Martin Link? I asked for references when he came out from town to replace the one who’d left without notice and … Och, mo mala! The town law vouched for him having an honest record, and what do you suppose ever happened to that first foreman I hired!”
Longarm suggested they stick to one mystery at a time and continued. “With one old partner established as the town law, and another doing the hiring and firing here at the Lazy B, Wolf Ritter saw his chance to vanish into thin air as he was being posted dead or alive all over this country. Anyone who’d ever served as a cavalry officer could wrangle cow ponies, and it was up to the foreman who had to be told to do what. So Mister MacSorley here had no call to doubt Martin Link when he was told he was paying those top-hand wages to a boss wrangler. So let’s leave the three old pals getting fat and happy in these parts with nobody suspecting a thing.”
“Until Horst Heger recognized an old comrade in arms, ja?” said that talkative Kurt Morgenstern.
Longarm shook his head and sternly warned, “I asked you not to horn in. Horst Heger had never served in any military unit with the renegade Prussian officer. If they had ever met, an outlaw on the prod should have been the first to recognize anyone. Ritter had been smooth-shaven and scar-faced as well as blond in their old country. Heger likely looked much the same as he ever had. He wasn’t the one growing mutton-chops and likely having his hair trimmed and tinted over at the county seat, or mayhaps McCook. We wrap up such details as we get out final reports. Suffice it to say, there’s no call to assume Horst Heger knew beans about the three wolves in sheep’s clothing. He had his own worries. Business had been slow and his wife had run off with another man. I found her to be alive and well, or at least alive and working in a house of ill repute, out Tombstone way.”
Morgenstern looked as if he was fixing to piss his pants as he wailed, “Then what did our poor gunsmith do to them? What could Heger have done if he didn’t know anything?”
Longarm let the deputy coroner glare for him as he took a drag of his cheroot. Then he said, “Nothing. Ritter, posing as an Irish hand called O’Donnel to hide his slight accent under a slight vaudeville brogue, had Heger order him new grips for his six-gun as a matter of fact. Heger’s misfortune was that, despite his personal problems, you’d all done business with him at one time or another and decided he was an honest man. So once those rainmaking gals came over the horizon to threaten your winter wheat harvest with unseasonable rain, you thought you collected a handsome payoff in hopes of a dry harvest. Some folks say kissing a frog might turn it into a handsome prince too.”
The undersheriff, seated to the right of the deputy coroner, said he’d counted the money, given receipts to the donators, and passed it on to Heger, accompanied by the town law and two armed deputies.
Longarm nodded and said, “Link told Miss Iona and me about that as he lay dying this evening. That was the rub as far as stealing all that money before Heger could pass it on was concerned. Ritter was for killing you as well, sir. But that left those two deputies who’d have to be killed as well, and the two cooler heads talked Ritter out of a total bloodbath that might have led to Sattler’s door in any case. Once the money was missing, the rest of you were bound to ask who’d had it last. But nobody but the actual donors and the few authorized to move the money from the bank so it could eventually get to those so-called Ruggles sisters were supposed to know there’d been that much in Heger’s vault.”
Somebody wanted to know why he didn’t think the Ruggles sisters were the Ruggles sisters.
Longarm said, “I know they ain’t. But forget ‘em. Their Only crime was making noise. They never even managed to take money under false pretenses. They never knew about the collection for a drought this way. The three sneaks never let them hear your offer. Sattler was the one that needed a good alibi. They agreed that had they just killed Heger and taken the money, Sattler would be the most logical suspect. So they needed some razzle-dazzle to make us look under a heap of other shells for the pea.”
He took another drag to compose his thoughts, knowing some of them were already finding his tale hard to follow, and continued. “Ritter was sort of proud of his recorded killings. So he’d kept a bunch of old reward posters on himself and rival killers. He’d long since rid himself of the incriminating LeMat revolver he’d used often enough to have it noted by the law. But it was easy enough to pick up another at a hockshop over to the county seat. I could prove that by a wire from your county sheriff if there was any need to. Seeing there ain’t, just picture the town law he trusted and an Irish cowhand he’d done business with showing up late that same night, along with the foreman of this Lazy B. Heger had quarters above his shop. His one and only assistant, Helga Pilger, was asleep out back over the carriage house. They forced Heger to open his vault and hand over all that money. Then the four of ‘em went out to the carriage shed and hitched up Heger’s shay. When the sleepy gal called down, it was Ritter, not her boss, who allowed he was going somewhere the sleepy-eyed gal had no call to remember all that accurately. When you ask a sleepy question in High Dutch and somebody mutters back at you in High Dutch, you just go back to bed.”
He took another drag, grimaced, and said, “The heroic outlaws took the poor gunsmith far enough out on the prairie for privacy, filled him full of lead, and here’s where they got tricky. Sattler tore back to his office in the town hall to look innocent, being the most likely of the three to look guilty. Link drove the shay over to the county seat under cover of darkness, trailing his cow pony behind it, so’s he could abandon it there and send a Western Union night letter, composed by Wolf Ritter, saying the undersigned, Heger, had spotted such a notorious crook and could use the reward. They sent it to my more distant office to give themselves some working time. Meanwhile, Ritter, who enjoyed that sort of work the most, pony-packed the body back to the shop, locked it in the vault to sort of marinate, and dragged more red herrings across their trail. He left those wanted papers where they’d be found. I did find them, and came to the wrong conclusion. He left the LeMat he’d just used on Heger in Heger’s front window, priced so high nobody would buy it before a sucker such as this child noticed it. When I did, I jumped to some of the conclusions they wanted me to. Taking the telegram from Heger and all those wanted flyers in his work shop at face value, I figured the man I couldn’t find to talk to had spotted a known killer and been killed by the same or run off with all that money after I found out about the money. When I did suspect Werner Sattler of anything, late in the game, I was still mixed up. I was so busy wondering why a lawman would cover up for an outlaw with a handsome bounty on him that I never had time to ask about that money before he more or less confessed he’d done something wrong by bolting from that earlier hearing. But he did, and so let’s forget him and his pals for a minute.”
The deputy coroner demanded, “How do those other outlaws, seven in all, tie into the murder of Horst Heger?”
Longarm said, “They don’t directly. As I told you at that earlier hearing after the shootout in the saloon, Breen, Dawson, Fawcett, and Walters came to town to rob your bank of other money entirely. They had no call to rob a missing gunsmith they’d never laid eyes on. The four of them hid out with that trash washwoman, the late Brunhilda Maler. Which one of them recalled her from her earlier days as a soiled dove ain’t important. They might or might not have cracked the bank vault in Sappa Crossing, like they did the ones in other Kansas towns of late. But then somebody neither sets of crooks had anything to do with sent me crashing through the window of Heger’s shop and inspired Werner Sattler and his boys, acting in good faith against total strangers, to arrest Fingers Fawcett and Juicy Joe as suspicious characters.”
“Then who pegged that shot at you?” someone naturally asked.
