Silent Knight nodded and said, “She was a good-looking woman carrying money aboard a fine horse. So there’s three motives, and now all we have to do is find that there delicate corpse!”
Longarm didn’t feel up to instructing a self-styled regulator on the legal distinctions betwixt a dead corpse and the corpus delicti, or tangible evidence that any sort of crime had been committed. More than one slick crook had hanged because he’d thought the law had to find a body to nail you with murder in the first. Burning your wife to ashes in the kitchen range didn’t help you a lick if witnesses convinced the jury they’d seen you butcher and overcook her.
So as he dismounted back in the draw and tethered his borrowed mount to a box-elder sapling, Longarm knew they only had to produce tangible evidence that something awful might have happened to Rose Cassidy. He mentally emphasized they because he wasn’t sure Billy Vail would want him horning into a local killing.
He said so as he and the two regulators watched the colored help poking with long crowbars, searching for soft spots in the sun-baked watercourse between the tree roots before they wasted time with their shovels.
He said, “Seeing you gents know who I really am, I’m really after bank robbers who’ve followed a similar plan more than once. Leaving out less important moves for the moment, they like to locate and take over a lonesome hideout not too far away before they hit a bank at a hard, fast gallop to and fro. They leave one or more members of their gang at the hideout with a change of mounts and, likely, duds. They rob the bank and use the hideout just long enough to confound pursuit with a change of pony and costume for at least the leaders. They like to leave a real mess for the posse to ponder as they slip innocently off into the mists. Rose Cassidy’s little horse spread fits the usual bill of fare better than any place else I’ve come up with.”
Silent Knight said, “We was told about that Medusa gal when we was told about you. You figure she sent that Uncle Chester to talk sweet and scout old Rose and Maureen?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Uncle Chester could have just been a saddle tramp with a hard-on. He could have been scouting for another lady with bank robbery in mind. I’ve reason to suspect Miss Medusa ain’t interested in the hard-ons of her recruits.”
He fumbled for a cheroot as he wryly added, “We’re sure piling up a shithouse made of guesswork when they do say bricks work better!”
One of the colored hands from Florence gave a yell and said his crowbar had sunk into something soft. Everyone else headed over to join him in the shade of a blackjack oak. The more itchy Lash Flanders grabbed a shovel from the nearest hand and commenced to dig as Silent Knight wrinkled his nose and said, “Oh, Lord, I hate the way folks smell after they’ve been dead a while.”
But even though Longarm could almost smell that fetid odor amid the dusty greenery all around, it was only a woman’s riding boot that Lash came up with before he muttered, “That’s all there is this side of the damned chalk. But why in thunder would anybody bury just the one boot of a missing woman?”
Longarm flatly stated, “Because he aimed to bury other things in other places. This is shaping up to be a long row to hoe, gents. But I have to say your educated guess makes more sense now. Whether that was one boot or two, I can’t picture the lady riding on from here with even one bare foot in the stirrup.”
The others agreed. The hired hands fanned out with more enthusiasm, now that they could see they were really probing for something. But all they found before sundown was a gal’s black cotton chemise. No man but the missing Uncle Chester was in any position to say whether the undergarment belonged to the missing Rose Cassidy. Although they agreed Maureen might know back at the Junction.
It was Silent Knight who first declared it would make more sense to knock off for the day and start over at sunrise to really root up the draw, which was now getting dark.
Lash and Longarm had to agree. The shovel hands moved over to their buckboard to gather gear for a night camp in the draw. But Longarm went to untether his chestnut. When Silent Knight asked how come, Longarm explained, “They never sent me here from Denver to search for Rose Cassidy. The lady I’m after is better known as Miss Medusa Le Mat. She don’t seem to be around the Junction. She might not be over in Florence. But it’s a bigger town, and I’d best make certain.”
The regulator said, “We don’t get many murderous folks of either gender in these parts. How do you cotton to the notion of that bank-robbing gal getting rid of poor old Rose somewheres around here so’s she and her gang could take over the old Nesbit place for a hideout?”
Longarm said, “The thought crossed my mind earlier. But there’s a couple of holes in the notion. You’d expect them to get rid of the pretty half-wit even more young studs find interesting. But they never did, and now the daughter’s safe in town and that homestead’s being watched by the county law.”
Silent pointed out, “All that comes after the mother disappeared sometime back. You might have saved Maureen unexpected.”
But Longarm insisted, “I said there was more than one hole. Thanks to you and Lash tracing the mother at least this far by asking so many questions, it’s safe to assume Rose Cassidy was the only woman riding by that day. Since nobody saw her closer to Florence than this draw, I figure she should have been stopped by one or more nondescript male riders, not another lady with a ten-shooter.”
Lash Flanders had come over in time to catch the last of that. So he was the one who suggested, “What if this Medusa gal rides around wearing men’s duds, seated in the saddle astride? Wouldn’t that sort of explain why nobody in these parts recalls a strange woman with no visible means of support?”
Longarm said, “It could, if you’d like to sell me a handsome young woman passing as a strange saddle tramp nobody would look at twice. I should think regulators paid to watch for such uncertainties in cattle country would have noticed a short baby-faced stranger who doesn’t have to shave as he drifts about.”
The two local bullies exchanged thoughtful glances in the tricky light of the gloaming. Lash asked, “What about that grub-line rider we patted down for running irons a few weeks back? He was in his teens and either not full- growed or doomed to go through life mighty short.”
Silent Knight shook his head and said, “He won’t work as a mystery woman in jeans. We took a leak together as you were sneaking that peek through his saddlebags. He could have used a fresh shave as well, and after that, I’d seen him somewhere in the Flint Hills before, remember?”
Lash shrugged and decided, “I do now. He was just the only rider I could come up with who could have possibly looked so sissy.”
Longarm put his reining hand to his saddlehorn as he mused, half to himself, “Maureen Cassidy recalls that saddle tramp who trifled with both her and her mother as young and pretty. What did the traveling man you beat up
