The mayor instantly began shaking his head. “I don’t know nothing about that, Marshal. No, sir, I don’t know a thing.”
The deputy said, “Me neither, sir. Nothing.”
“That’s mighty handy for the both of you,” Longarm said. He paused for a moment. “Mayor, are you married?”
The mayor nodded rapidly. He said, “Yes, sir. I am.”
“Then I’m going to have to send a boy to your house to tell your wife that you’re not going to be home for twenty-four hours.”
Longarm looked at the deputy. “What about you?”
The deputy shook his head. “No, sir, I’m not. What’s all this about?”
Longarm said, “It’s about neither one of you leaving this place for the next twenty-four hours. I don’t want to get out to the Nelsons and find out that advance word has reached them. So for the time being, you’re going to be in the company of Marshal Gray over here. If I’s you, I’d be on my Ps and Qs because he’s a mean sonofabitch. In a little while, you’re going to get to see what happened to the sheriff when he tripped over his own feet and fell down. And what came to the sheriff will come triple to both of you from Marshal Lee Gray over here, I can promise you that, and it will all be within the law. If he’s got to kill you, he killed you while you were escaping. You understand?”
They vied with each other in trying to see which could nod their head the fastest. Longarm looked at them for a moment, and then turned on his heels and walked to the front door. Lee Gray opened it and they went on through. They stood at the edge of the boardwalk and talked for a moment.
Lee Gray said, “Longarm, I don’t like the idea of you going out to that place by yourself. That bunch sounds kind of deadly to me and I think you need me to back you up.”
“Yeah, Lee, I do, and I wish you could, but it’s more important to me to have that sheriff and deputy and mayor put in a jug and the cork put in on top of them to give me that twenty-four-hour head start I need. I don’t want word getting there ahead of me. I’m afraid that’s what happened in the case of young Ross Henderson.”
Lee Gray shrugged. “Well, it makes sense to me. I just hate to see you riding blind into a situation like that. You got any last orders for me?”
Longarm scratched the back of his head while he thought the question over. He said, “Well, don’t forget that you are a special deputy United States marshal. If there’s any question about it, Billy Vail can confirm it by wire. I haven’t got a badge to hand you, but you are the law, so don’t forget that.” He thought a minute more. “Don’t be no hero. If I ain’t back here in what seems a reasonable amount of time, forty-eight hours or so, don’t come looking for me.”
Lee Gray said, “Well, what am I supposed to do? Give a donation to the church in your memory?”
Longarm smiled slowly. “You ain’t never been close enough to a church to even throw money at it, what are you talking about? No, if much more than forty-eight hours pass, you’d better wire Billy Vail and tell him that he’s lost another deputy. Tell him to start sending them in groups because we can’t seem to handle the situation one at a time.”
Lee Gray nodded his head toward the jail. “What about them in there?”
“To tell you the truth, I’d stick either the mayor or the deputy in a cell. Maybe even both of them. I damned sure wouldn’t give them no chance to talk to anybody or get loose. As a matter of fact, that’s what you better do, just plunk them in a cell.”
“What about the sheriff?”
“Well, he’s going to tell you he needs a doctor,” Longarm said. He looked off down the road for a second, and then came back to Lee Gray. “And he probably does, but he can’t have one, not at least for twenty-four hours. Get him a bottle of whiskey and maybe some laudanum.”
Lee Gray said, “You whip up on him pretty good?”
Longarm shrugged and then looked at his left fist, which was half swollen and bleeding. He said, “Well, I maybe broke a few ribs. Nothing worse than you or I have had a half-dozen times in our lives. Of course, I did keep hitting him in those broken ribs on account of he didn’t want to talk.”
Lee Gray shook his head. “Longarm, I’ve warned you about that temper. You know, if you keep going on, folks are going to start believing you really are mean.”
Longarm laughed. “I’d better get kicking, friend. You hold the fort down here and I’ll go on down south and see what I can make happen.”
He went, first to the hotel to get his extra revolver, some extra cartridges, and a bottle of bourbon. Then he went down to the kitchen and talked the cook into putting him up some dried beef and cheese and some biscuits in a flour sack. After that, he walked back to the livery stable and had the boy saddle the horse that Lee Gray was lending him. There was a set of saddlebags tied to the saddle, and Longarm stowed his vittles in one side and his extra revolver in the other, and put his extra cartridges in his right-hand shirt pocket. He asked the boy if they had a canteen, and the young man quickly filled him a five-gallon canvas sack. That was the best for use in the desert.
Longarm was under no illusions about the south New Mexico terrain. For flat country, it was about as rough as it got. Nothing grew there unless it was a rock or had a thorn or would bite you. It was easily as desolate a country as anything he knew of in the whole United States. It made him shake his head and wonder that men rich enough to live anywhere they wanted would have chosen such a place just because it reminded them of the country they had made their wealth in. He had heard of South Africa, but he couldn’t imagine another place as dry and desolate as the country he was about to pass through. That was why he was so grateful for the five-gallon canteen of water. It was enough to give his horse a little and still fill his needs. He didn’t expect to run into any springs or wells or water holes along the way.
Longarm led the horse out of the livery stable, mounted, touched the horse with his spurs, and rode south out of town. Lee Gray was off the street—back in the jail office, Longarm guessed. A few people stared at him as he went trotting down the street, but they didn’t seem too curious. As he left the confines of the town, he lifted the horse up into a gentle lope. He figured to lope the horse for fifteen or twenty minutes, then walk the horse for a like amount, and then bring him back up into a lope. It was a tried and true method of covering country while not wearing your horse down.
