So that was the end of the other two customers and three bank employees, two of the victims women, as the three masked men and their petite advance scout made a hasty as well as substantial withdrawal from the Bitter Creek Savings & Loan.
The smoke was still clearing, and Longarm was still numbly wondering who he was and where he might be, as the first townsmen and local lawmen tore in, their own guns drawn, to view the scene of carnage with dismay.
“Jesus H. Christ!” exclaimed a more literate Wyoming rider. “It looks like the last act of Hamlet, save for the blood being real! They gunned Banker Nelson, and ain’t that Miss Rumford from the schoolhouse laying yonder with her skirts up scandalously and half her face blown off?”
Another local peered down through the clearing smoke and exclaimed, “This here looks like that Colorado boy who turned hisself in to us a few days ago. He was supposed to be headed back to Denver to stand trial for shooting some Indian agent. Now somebody has shot him dead as a turd in a milk bucket, and where’s that Colorado rider who took him off our hands this morning?”
Another Bitter Creek lawman responded to some funny noises coming from behind an apparently vacant desk, and called out, “Here he is, alive but not at all well, covered with blood and busted glass from this brown paper bag he must have been packing when they gunned him!”
So the supine Longarm was soon the center of attention as he tried to talk, and found it nigh impossible to breathe for the better part of the next five minutes.
By the time he was able to tell them what had happened and give his description of the killers, the three masked men and their sidesaddle leader had galloped out of town, doubled back along a wooded draw the leader had scouted in advance, and holed up for the moment in the sod house of an old loner they’d buried out back beneath his henhouse.
Out of sight for the moment, but knowing full well they’d hardly be out of mind in the nearby settlement, the quartet changed clothes to go with the fresh mounts they’d left there in the care of a skinny ash blonde called Pinkie. As the man who’d appeared the leader at the bank changed into what might have been a traveling salesman, he confided to the gal they’d left holding the fort, “You should have seen this other sweet little thing blazing away back there! Blowed this one tall drink of water clean off his feet with that bodacious Le Mat!”
The object of his admiration, now dressed more like a homesteading gal than a young lady of fashion, idly hefted the now-reloaded Le Mat and quietly observed, “I had to. I recognized him from the time he was pointed out to me at the Cheyenne Opera House. He was that famous and mighty dangerous Longarm from the Denver District Court.”
Pinkie gasped. “Oh, Dear Lord, you gunned a federal lawman! We’ve got to flee far as can be from these parts before his friends posse up to hunt us all down and hang us high!”
The brunette nodded soberly and replied, “They’ve already possed up by now, and this time there’s no way for us to catch a train out to safer parts. The sod all about is soft after that recent gully-washer. So it won’t take them long to cut our trail, boys and girls.”
One of the men, recalling a gal who’d been staring at him wide-eyed in the bank before he’d blown half her face off, gasped, “This is one hell of a time to tell us we won’t be flagging down that train after all! You should have called off the job when you found out about them blamed railroad tracks. I figured you had some other way out in mind. I never would have gone along with that robbery if I’d thought I was about to get caught, Dad blast it!”
The more talkative one, now dressed up to sell windmills or bob wire, said, “Calm down, Smokey. I’m sure the little lady has another way out of these parts figured. Ain’t that right, pretty lady?”
To which the brunette in rustic riding togs demurely replied, “I sure do. They’ll be looking for four riders. Three men and a girl. I don’t see how anyone in town could know about Pinkie here.”
Men who live by the gun get good at living by the gun, if they’re to live any time at all. So the same, hair- triggered hardcase who’d shot the schoolmarm in the bank put a thoughtful hand to the grips of his six-gun, but never got to ask his next question as the brunette opened up at point-blank range with that massive Le Mat, filling the already dusty interior of the little soddy with the reek of gun smoke and spattered gore while Pinkie wailed for mercy in a far corner.
“Don’t hurt me! Please don’t hurt me! I’ll be good!” the terrified ash blonde sobbed as the smoke lifted to reveal three bodies spread like carelessly tossed bearskin rugs across the dirt floor.
The brunette calmly replied, “You’re going to have to change that dress. You’ve shit yourself. You silly kid. I’m not about to hurt you. I need you. That posse will be searching high and low for three men and one girl. After you and me get rid of this dead meat down the outhouse pit, they won’t be able to find anyone but two innocent farm girls, riding east with some pack ponies because they couldn’t catch that train, see?”
Pinkie gasped, “I see it all now! You meant to do those boys dirt from the first moment we picked them up in Cheyenne, didn’t you?”
To which her somewhat older and far more deadly partner could only reply, “Of course. Why, in heavens name, would we want to split the swag five ways when we could simply divide it even-steven?”
Pinkie grinned like a mean little kid and marveled, “You sure have thrifty ways with money. I never liked any of these dirty old men to begin with. Bob and Smokey both kept trying to mess with me, and when I wouldn’t let ‘em they called me a lizzy gal.”
She grinned up at the deadly brunette and added in a dirtier tone, “A lot they knew. About us lizzy gals, that is.”
Reloading the Le Mat, her smaller and darker companion sighed and said, “You’re going to have to see if you can fit into my other outfit, now that you’ve made such a mess of your farm-girl disguise. Go out back, shuck, and wash off at the pump while I see if I can let my coat out at the seams for you.”
When the ash blonde hesitated, she was told, “Just do as I say. Girls your age get in trouble when they try to think for themselves. Anybody who recalls that citified riding outfit I had on at the bank ought to remember little old me in it, you big Swede. It’s your own fault for soiling the disguise we chose for you, and who’s going to be looking for two lady bank robbers to begin with?”
Pinkie went out back, gingerly shucked the summer-weight gingham Mother Hubbard, and used the cleaner bodice as a washrag as she used the yard pump, a lot, from her broad hips down. Then, her socks wet above her tightly laced high-buttons, she strode back inside, naked as a jay from the ankles up, and declared, “I need a nice warm towel to wipe away this wet gooseflesh!”
