“That might account for our informant spotting him,” Longarm told his paint mount as he saw that the informant was a Mennonite by the name of Horst Heger, according to Henry’s typing. Longarm wished the infernal report had more to say about the informant than the son of a bitch he’d informed on. There was no mystery about the disgusting ways of Wolf Ritter, ne von Ritterhoff, since he’d fought one duel too many in his old country and started picking fights as soon as he got off the boat in New York City. Aside from that one federal killing, he was wanted for manslaughter or assault all along a route you could trace through upstate New York and the Midwest and beyond, as if that hot-tempered scar-faced rascal was riding with Mister Death into the sunset, the way some held they’d seen that dark rider on a pale horse after Shiloh, Cold Harbor, and such.
So how had a Mennonite farmer who’d never been in any Prussian army recognized Ritter as Ritter?
The report didn’t say. Longarm’s orders were to get on down to Sappa Crossing, scout up Horst Heger, and ask him to point Ritter out from the other bearded gents.
Without flushing a short-fused owlhoot rider who knew the law had to be out to hang him high!
That was the rub—nothing in these fool onionskins offered a lick of advice on. Oh, sure, Henry had typed plain as day, “SUSPECT IS ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS!” as if a body had to be told a killer packing a LeMat with nine in the wheel and a shotgun shell in the center of it was likely to roll over and beg you to scratch his belly.
Snorting smoke out both nostrils, Longarm cursed and told his mount, “That there Horst Heger must have some plan.” Had Wolf Ritter suspected anyone was on to him, Billy never would have got that wire. A killer desperate enough to grow a beard and take up new religious ways would swat anyone he suspected like a fly. Heger had been smart enough to send his fifty-word night letter from the county seat a half-day’s drive away from Sappa Crossing. But fifty words were hardly enough. Henry had typed up a full transcription of the tersely worded message to Marshal Vail. Longarm had read it over before and as he read it again, walking his ponies, he failed to see anything he might have missed riding east on that train.
The informant who’d recognized a Prussian killer hadn’t seen fit to explain why he’d wired Denver instead of the much closer federal court at Fort Dodge. He said the man he knew as von Ritterhoff had come into his shop in Sappa Crossing. He never said what sort of a shop he ran or exactly where it was. So for openers, a stranger who could well be the law had to ask around town for Horst Heger and hope like hell he wasn’t asking Wolf Ritter in disguise!
Longarm had already considered trying to blend in with a bunch of Dutch-Russian Anabaptists, and given up the notion as silly. Mennonites didn’t attach any religious significance to clothes or personal grooming, the way those Pennsylvania Dutch did. But most of them looked sort of outlandish because they were outlandish, more used to dressing like Russian peasants than American homesteaders. Some of the younger ones he’d met had taken to dressing and shaving more naturally. Their elders seemed an easygoing bunch next to, say, the Latter-Day Saints or even the Hard Shell Baptists. So a gent riding in discreetly in faded denim and with his guns out of sight …
“Forget it,” Longarm warned himself with a wry smile. “You talk a lot more Spanish than High Dutch, and you’d never in this world pass for a Mex if you put on a silly hat! As to your side arm, you’ll be up against an experienced duelist who could be packing a nine-shooter when and if you meet, and folks in a small trail town are surely going to spot and speculate on anyone riding in day, night, or sideways!”
So he’d have to make up some excuse for a U.S. deputy marshal being there when he made the expected courtesy call on the town law. An armed and dangerous-looking stranger who went poking about in town as a total mystery was as likely to be backshot by a proddy town deputy as the son of a bitch he was prodding for.
Longarm hummed a few bars of “Farther Along” as he decided he could make up some other outlaw he was after by the time he got to Sappa Crossing. And he could likely find a barber, even in a town where so many favored beards, and just casually ask where old Heger’s shop was. It seemed highly unlikely a trail-town barber would be the one and original Wolf Ritter.
Once he found Heger’s shop, he’d just ask the shopkeeper when and where he’d met up with that mean Prussian. It hardly seemed likely any gent who’d turned Ritter in to the law would hold anything back about him.
Chapter 5
South central Nebraska and northwest Kansas shared the same rolling sea of short grass. So there was just no saying where that wagon trace crossed the state line. Up close, the country was less tedious to look at than it seemed from a train window. As the U.S. Cav had learned the hard way, back when this had been Arapaho and Cheyenne hunting ground, what seemed a view across open prairie to the far and flat horizon was dissected by draws deep enough to hide whole Indian villages, guarded by the best light cavalry on Earth. The winds that swept mostly from the west but constantly from any direction made it a mite tough for anything taller than buffalo and grama grass or widely scattered clumps of soap weed to occupy the rises. But the deeper draws could surprise you with long skinny forests of box elder, cottonwood, willow, and even small red cedars. The buffalo had been shot off this far east, along with the buffalo-hunting Indians, but prairie dogs still cussed at you on high ground, and jackrabbits flushed to spook your ponies most anywhere.
Longarm had left McCook a tad later than an easy day’s ride down to Sappa Crossing called for. So even though he knew it was possible to push on and arrive by moonrise, that would hardly be the way to drift into a tight-knit little trail town without everyone in town hearing about it within the hour.
His government survey map showed a regular American trail town named Cedar Bend, where the wagon trace crossed Beaver Creek a few hours north of his Mennonite destination.
Longarm decided he might kill more than one bird with the same slowpoke stone if he overnighted there and rode on into tenser parts in the morning, when traffic would be busier on the roads.
Horst Heger hadn’t sent that wire from Cedar Bend, so the wanted killer would have no call to be watching for one particular rider in a regular American settlement.
At the same time, the two towns were close enough to one another for any important news to travel back and forth. They’d have surely heard up ahead if there’d been any gunplay in Sappa Crossing since that Burlington eastbound had pulled out of Denver. In a land where your nearest neighbor could be over the horizon, miles could be little more than city blocks to the local gossips.
Putting his map away, Longarm saw he had no call to consult his watch. The sun shone well above the western horizon in a clear cobalt-blue sky, and he knew Cedar Bend lay just over the next serious rise to his south. So he clucked the bay he was riding now into an easy lope, leading the paint at the same pace downslope and across a grassy draw, to rein in and walk both ponies up the long grassy grade ahead.
As he did so, gazing ahead at the crest of the rise they were climbing, Longarm muttered, “What the hell …?” as what seemed like a big old pumpkin peeked over the rise at them and continued skyward at a rate that would
