drifted off an unremembered saddle tramp had he been willing to quit when Governor Lew Wallace put his foot down and declared the Lincoln County War was over or else. Crooks are forever getting distinguished tattoos, wearing odd outfits, or just bragging a heap about how big and bad they are until somebody like me gets the chore of tracking down such shy violets. You've explained how you and your deputy gals were able to track down some of the wildmen who tore through here. Deacon Knox explained how some self-styled mastermind has spread the word there's easy picking up this way, thanks to you being a gal and all, no offense. So how come they didn't just quit, if they were worried about somebody like me riding in to back your play?'
She poured more tea for the both of them as she decided, 'I think they think you might know more than you really do. You were there when our missing Ida shot Rusty Mansfield. You and those other Denver lawmen interviewed her right after the shooting. You had the outlaw's cadaver and personal belongings handy to go over as often as you liked. I know you don't know why they must have intercepted Ida before she could get back here to tell us something. But they must have had some reason, and they must fear you and me could figure it out if ever we compared notes like this, see?'
Longarm smiled wearily and replied, 'I wish I did. I've gone over that shooting in the Parthenon a hundred times in my head. I've jawed with other lawmen about all your Wyoming wildwomen, no offense, and to tell the truth I'd have given you the same bill of health as the boys from the Cheyenne District Court if those rascals you say you never heard of had only left me alone!'
He sipped enough of that extra cup to be polite and asked directions to where Edith Penn Keller, J.P., might be holding court that afternoon.
The lady undersherrif explained they didn't rate a courthouse in Keller's Crossing. The lady J.P. who rode herd on local legal proceedings from marriage licenses to arrest warrants took care of such matters in the front parlor of her own house off the main street but handier to the river crossing, stage terminal, jail, and such.
Longarm allowed he could likely find the place and started to rise, hat in hand. Then all hell busted loose.
'Down!' he shouted as a bullet shattered the panes of the bay window across from their sofa to thunk into the papered wall above a head of auburn curls!
He let go his hat to draw his.44-40 with one hand and grab Rita by one shoulder to haul her out from behind her coffee table and down to the Persian carpet with him as another round spanged another pane of glass and hit the wall close to where his head had just been!
He hissed, 'They're trying to draw us over to that window! We need another one, higher up, and already open if you can think of one!'
She could. Longarm followed her shapely sky-blue rump as she led the way on hands and knees while yet another bullet whizzed over them from outside, just ahead of the echoing gunshot. It sounded like a rifle, over a hundred yards away. He didn't tell Rita. He was sure she had enough on her mind.
Out in the hall, where it was safe to rise, Rita waved back her motherly housekeeper and a bewildered- looking colored man in kitchen whites, yelling, 'Get everybody down in the cellar! We seem to be under attack!'
As she headed for the stairs, Longarm called to the other grown man, 'I'm the senior law, here, and forget what she just said. Before you herd the rest of the help clean out of this wooden firetrap, I want you to make sure that front door behind me is bolted fast on the inside, hear?'
As the male cook moved forward to carry out his order, Longarm ran up the stairs after the lady of the house. She led him into a third-story sewing room up in one of those round towers he'd admired on the way in. She didn't have to point to the window opened wide to catch the prevailing summer breezes from the northwest. He told her to stay back as he eased closer with his six-gun, wishing like hell it was the rifle he'd left with that fool saddle!
But once he was peering around the edge of what he sure hoped to be a good solid frame, there didn't seem to be anything worth shooting at. He had a clear field of fire out across the churchyard as far as the looming whitewashed church itself. But if anyone had been up in the belfry with that rifle they'd be long gone by now. For half the town seemed to be coming from all directions with their own guns drawn as they shouted back and forth.
He told the pale-faced undersheriff it looked as if the mysterious rascal had just shot and run.
She murmured, 'I hope so. I see what you mean, now, about them refusing to just let you be! But didn't you just tell me, down in the parlor, you'd about lost interest up this way?'
To which he could only reply, 'That was then. This is now, and I am really starting to get sore!'
CHAPTER 15
Longarm tore down the stairs and out the front door with Rita Mae Reynolds paying no mind to his telling her to stay put in her house. That was the trouble with allowing Women's Suffering.
They found a reedy old cuss in clerical garb arguing with a heavyset gent in a summer weight Madras plaid suit on the front steps of the church across the way. The preacher was yelling at the huskier-looking cuss to do something, right now, about the front-door latch.
Rita introduced them to Longarm as Preacher Shearer from the manse on the far side of the church and Big Jim Tanner, owner and editor of their Riverside News. The minister was bitching and moaning about the way someone had jimmied the front door of his church, closed during working hours on a weekday. It wasn't clear what Preacher Shearer expected a newspaper man to do about this, and Big Jim said so, in the tone one usually reserves for small children and army mules.
Longarm had no call to explain his methods to the older cleric. He elbowed his way between them to just open the damned door and go on in, his .44-40 showing the way with its muzzle.
There was nobody lurking amid the dark varnished pews. He was sort of tense, and he yelled at the auburn- headed undersheriff more than once as she poked around after him with her own.40-caliber Patterson Conversion. He had as much luck getting her to stay downstairs when he worked his way up into the bell tower, ready to throw down on the first damned pigeon who cooed at them.
But all that remained on the top landing was a thick crust of dry pigeon shit, with the kitchen-match smell of gunsmoke lingering to explain why all the birds had flown away. Three spent brass.45-70 shells shone fresh-from- the-box on the shitty floorboards.
'Likely an army issue Springfield. About as easy to trace as a Stetson hat or a pair of Justin boots.'
Rita peered past him out the open latticework pigeons could whip in and out through. She said, 'I can see what's left of my poor bay window from here. But how could the villain have seen either one of us, inside, from up here?'
Longarm said, 'He, she, or it couldn't. The plan was to draw me to yonder bay window where I'd have been in their sights at less than three hundred yards. Anybody watching from up here would have seen me coming to call on you. Anybody with any notion of the way your house is laid out would know that bay window goes with your front parlor. It don't take a college degree to read the little sign the shooter left us, Miss Rita.'
She demanded, 'How could anybody follow you up the street in broad daylight with a rifle, then break into the front door facing in the street downstairs without being seen?'
Longarm said, 'I doubt it was done that way. When they failed to stop me in Cheyenne, they figured I'd get through and they knew I'd have to pay a courtesy call on yourself. So at least one of them got in downstairs before sunrise and waited up here, mayhaps with a good book, a jug of wine and somebody singing beside him, until I came along as expected and all went as planned until I failed to rise to the bait in your bay window.
She frowned thoughtfully and objected, 'The shooter had to leave by broad day, didn't he?'
Longarm nodded and replied offhand, 'We'd best scout around down below for his or her cheap rifle. Anyone willing to leave one behind only had to step out a side door into the churchyard and join the rest of the rush toward your shot-up bay window.'
She gasped. 'Then it had to be somebody who wouldn't stand out as a stranger in our township!'
Longarm managed not to sound sarcastic as he replied, 'I somehow doubted we were searching for three wise men on camels, ma'am. Deacon Knox told me some local mastermind has been sending for outside help with a view to robbing you all blind. He, she, or it has to be somebody who's been here long enough to know Keller's Crossing and vice versa.'
She forgot her ladylike manners enough to mutter, 'Shit! That means there's little point in asking Western Union to tell us who wired whom from Cheyenne about you, doubtless in some criminal cypher!'
Longarm said, 'It's worth a try. My boss likes me to use what he calls a process of eliminating. I doubt
