Longarm muttered, “Least I could do, seeing how drunk and foolish you’ve been acting. Ain’t there nothing I can say to change your mulish mind, Tex?”
Waco shook his head, but didn’t answer as he almost got himself killed. But Longarm didn’t go for his .4440 as Waco McCord just closed his eyes to fall asleep, standing up, and fell backwards as straight as a sawed-through pine, hitting the sawdust behind him with an awesome thump and just lying there, out like a snuffed candle.
As Longarm stared down, bemused, there were stirrings of life all around in the Sunflower Saloon.
An old-timer murmured, “Somebody go get the law. I sure thought we were about to see more bloodshed here this evening.”
The barkeep rose from where he’d been hiding all that time to peer over the bar at the unconscious Waco and marvel, “You could have had him, Marshal. You could have blown him away and added an easy notch to your pistol grips!”
To which Longarm replied in a disgusted tone, “I’m only a deputy marshal, and why would any grown man want to whittle on his tailored pistol grips, for Gawd’s sake?”
Chapter 19
Longarm had posted himself behind a lumber pile near the railroad stop with his Winchester. So that was where one of Hard Pan Parsons’s deputies caught up with him.
The deputy said, “Undersheriff Brennan just wired us from Minnipeta Junction. Silent Knight and Lash Flanders drove in around sundown with the dismembered remains of Rose Cassidy. Miss Pat says the killers really made a mess of her with a shotgun and a sharp shovel. Meat buried in damp sand in warm weather don’t keep too well neither.”
Longarm replied, “I’ve noticed. Miss Pat was sure of the identification?”
The deputy said, “I don’t know if she was. Rose Cassidy’s half-wit daughter identified the remains. Carried on some afterwards, according to Miss Pat’s wire. We got the wire over to the jail if you’d like to go over it.”
Longarm said, “It can wait. You were the one who just pointed out Maureen Cassidy carries on sort of silly. But neither she nor that dead woman are going anywhere tonight. I ain’t so sure about the ten-fourteen eastbound that’ll be stopping here to jerk water from your Cottonwood Creek before long.” The deputy volunteered to back Longarm’s play. Longarm let him. It could get tedious, staked out with nobody to talk to after dark.
They talked about this, that, and the other until the night train rolled in from the west to pause with its engine on the trestle across the creek and its rear cars lined up with the platform at one end of the main street.
Nobody got on or off as the engine crew dropped buckets on long ropes off the tender and into the swirling inky current downstream. It took longer than usual to top the tender’s tanks that way. Longarm warned the deputy someone might make a last-minute run for the rear platform as the train was pulling out.
But that never happened. The deputy suggested they’d wiped the gang out or driven them into hiding. That was too obvious to jaw about. So Longarm took his Winchester back to Red Robin’s, waited for Red Robin to get off, and spent a good part of the night saying farewell to a pal who screwed like a mink.
Red Robin didn’t cry, or wake up all the way, when Longarm rolled out of bed early the next morning. He knew that she knew they’d meet again someday, or else they wouldn’t. Red Robin was a vice that was best taken on occasion, if not in moderation.
After a hearty breakfast of fried eggs and hash, Longarm saddled and bridled that borrowed chestnut to head back to the Junction.
It was a crisp sunny morning and the chestnut was feeling its oats after all that rest in the livery corral. So they made good time, and got into the Junction just about the time the pony was getting harder to move and Longarm’s stomach was growling.
Longarm tethered the spent pony in front of the bank, but ducked across the street for a bowl of chili and a slab of mince pie, washed down with two mugs of black coffee.
Then, feeling better, he went into the bank to ask Banker Guthrie some questions he hadn’t known he wanted to last time.
Banker Guthrie said he’d be proud to have his secretary type up a digested list of all the small holdings the bank held mortgages on for a day’s ride all around. He naturally asked Longarm why.
Longarm explained, “Sometimes we get in trouble searching for too complicated a pattern. Sometimes we get in just as much trouble by assuming too simple a pattern.
Getting back to his feet, he continued. “Every time we’ve tried to reconstruct one of Miss Medusa Le Mat’s robberies, we’ve assumed heaps of things we don’t really know for certain. For example, when we’ve found members of her gang shot up, along with the hermits and such who owned some lonesome spread, we’ve assumed that that was all there was to it. They met at an agreed-upon rallying point, their murderous mastermind gunned them, and rode off with the loot, sometimes with and sometimes without a last sucker to fetch, carry, and blur the trail.”
Banker Guthrie nodded knowingly, and followed Longarm out front as he pontificated. “That’s the way the Pinkertons have it pictured too. We’ve all assumed the plan called for them to rob us around payday and dash out of town as far as that old Nesbit place, where the posse would sooner or later come upon the two Cassidy women and most of the gang dead.”
Longarm paused on the bank steps and demanded, “Then what? Ain’t no railroad tracks this side of Florence. I just spent all morning and change riding that far, without having to double on my trail or watch out for other riders chasing me. Country folks have come forward to report glimpses of one or two gals riding sidesaddle in the distance after a holdup. But where did they really go?”
Banker Guthrie was paid to be smart. He nodded soberly and said, “I see why you want a more complete list of local small holdings. A cold-blooded killer who could take over one isolated spread at gunpoint could take over more than one, to just lie low until things calmed down all around!”
Longarm allowed that was close enough, untethered his borrowed mount, and rode it back to the pal he’d borrowed it from.
Undersheriff Brennan seemed mighty glad to see them both. She had one of her deputies take the pony around
