grave-site as it buzzed between them and spanged off a gravestone just behind them!
Then Longarm had spun to draw and throw down on the cloud of gun smoke peeking around the far corner of First Methodist at them. He ran that way as fast as his long legs and low-heeled cavalry boots would carry him. He swung wide around the corner, the muzzle of his .44-40 peering in every direction. But all there was to see was the fresh-mown strip of grass between the side wall of the church and a five-foot picket fence.
It looked as if the back-shooting rascal had run all the way down to the far end, or jumped the picket fence into the weedy yard of the house next door. Or had he? Longarm jogged down to the cellar door sloping out from the foundation bricks of the big frame church as Pat Brennan got to the corner he’d just rounded and yelled, “Be careful! Jim Tobin says he was a skinny cowboy in chinked chaps and a Texas hat!”
Longarm called back, “I think I got him boxed. Come down this way and cover these doors whilst I go inside to head him off at the head of those other stairs!”
Pat ran over to him, her own S&W double-action drawn as Longarm put a free finger to his lips to shush her. He’d noticed in bed how good a team they made. Old Pat just nodded and flattened out on one side of the outside cellar entrance, her back to the whitewashed siding, while Longarm took up a similar position across from her.
A million years went by. Then, as Longarm had hoped, the gunslick trapped in the church cellar chose what he thought might be the lesser of two grim choices and came up out of the cellar shooting at one woman alone, he sure was praying!
Longarm shot him in the back as he was still bolting forward in a haze of his own gun smoke. It seemed only just. Pat put a bullet in the cuss as he went down. Longarm yelled, “Hold your fire! I’d like to see if he has anything else to tell us!”
But this was not to be. Longarm knew as he rolled the back-shot back-shooter face-up in the grass that he and Pat, between them, had killed the skinny cuss deader than a turd in a milk bucket.
Longarm sighed and said, “Well, he ain’t Miss Medusa Le Mat either. So who in blue blazes do you reckon we just nailed, pard?”
The local undersheriff replied without hesitation, “That’s Corky Landon. Used to ride for the Rocking Seven before he went bad. Didn’t Hard Pan Parsons tell us he’d got out of prison just recent?”
To which Longarm grimly replied, “Yep, and Waco McCord says Buster Crabtree recruited him to ride for Miss Medusa Le Mat. So that’s another down, and Lord knows how many more of the gang to go.”
Then he dryly added, “If they don’t get me first. They sure seem to be as anxious to get me as I am to get them!
Chapter 20
Later that evening, after things had quieted down and Longarm had dined late with Pat and Maureen, he went back to his hotel to find a Miss Wojensky from the bank waiting for him in the lobby.
Longarm invited her upstairs. Most men would have. For it was sort of gloomy in the musty lobby, and Miss Wojensky was a pretty little thing with big blue eyes and honey-blond hair piled under a perky straw boater with fake birds nesting on its brim.
She said he could call her Lucy and she’d brought the listings of small holdings along with her. She was the one who allowed it might be best for her to stay while he went over the papers, lest he have any questions she’d be proud to answer.
He didn’t ask any personal questions, tempted as he was by such an interesting contrast to both of the gals he’d been kissing recently. There were times a man grabbed for the few gold rings to be grabbed on the only ride he was likely to get. There were times when such grabbings could lead to more trouble than any gal could be worth. For Romeo, oh, Romeo had been a poor young sap when you studied on the chances he’d taken for a fourteen- year-old sass. Most young gents had learned better by the time they were old enough to vote, if they hadn’t died over some gal by then.
Old Pat had said she wasn’t coming by after dark, lest somebody see her sneaking into his hotel and draw the right conclusions. But on the other hand, nobody would ever get caught in bed with anybody else if everybody did what they said they’d be doing all the time.
But it was a small town where everybody knew everybody else, and if Lucy Wojensky was as easy a lay as he suspected, old Pat would suspect that too. So Longarm sat the tempting blonde on the bedstead and read the papers standing up, near the wall lamp.
After he’d read more than one mortgage agreement, compressed into a few simple lines by a secretary who knew her business, whatever her rep for after-hours slap and tickle, Longarm smiled down at her and said, “Let me see if I have this straight. Most of these small holders have borrowed money on homesteads they’ve proven out, or bought off others who’ve won free title to the land?”
She nodded primly, seeing he was acting so prim, and explained that the bank couldn’t grab an unproven homestead for bad debt. Longarm cut her explanation short with: “I work for the federal government, Miss Lucy. I know you can’t post federal property as security for a personal loan. I arrest folks who’ve tried all the time. The homestead Act of 1862 says you don’t get full title to your quarter section until you’ve improved it some and lived on it for at least five years. So where’s that Nesbit place and … Oh, here it is. Filed on, fenced, and proven by the Nesbits, who gained free title only to lose the hardscrabble claim to your bank. I wonder what made them think they could drill spring wheat into flinty chalk?”
She said she’d never asked the poor nesters.
He read on to note Rose Cassidy had bought the place off the bank for a quarter down, pending the sale of her old spread down Texas way. Lucy Wojensky brightened and said, “Our Texas associates sent us an estimate on that spread. Mr. Guthrie approved the purchase on time for the Nesbit place, with her Texas property held in escrow until the Nesbit place was paid for in full. Why are we talking about the entailed property of a dead woman, Deputy Long?”
Longarm asked, “Doesn’t her daughter, Maureen, own one or the other spread now?”
The banking gal shook her head and replied, “I may have left out a few lines of details. We’re not in business to go broke in a world filled with fevers and wild Indians. The contract in full forbids the sale or transfer of either place before the owner’s loan with us has been repaid in full. There’s an insurance clause I didn’t think you’d need to concern yourself with. It provides that upon the unexpected death of anyone owing money to us, we get everything they ever owned.”
