As he walked back toward the hotel and a belated lunch, though, for some reason he kept thinking about Paul Markham and his capture. There was something in that that was nagging at him, and he couldn?t quite put his finger on what it was. Oddly enough, he had the impression that it had little or nothing to do with Markham and Jessie. But he just couldn?t quite drag it out to where he could look at it. He chewed on the thought while he walked.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Longarm jerked upright in his chair and slapped his fork down beside his plate.
?Of course, damnit,? he said aloud. ?But who??
He laughed, the sound abrupt and loud in the near silence of the restaurant.
Two men having a late lunch at the next table gave him a look that said they thought he was daft, but Longarm didn?t care at all.
That was what had been gnawing at him ever since Arnold Batson told him about running Markham to ground.
It all fit now.
The failure of the White Hoods to show on Friday afternoon.
The explosion in the bank.
The fact that no one but poor, half-witted Donald Potter tried to leave town Saturday morning.
Even, by damn, the flour-sack hood found in Potter?s pocket.
Longarm smiled to himself, thinking about the way Potter had had no idea that the flour sack even was a hood. When Longarm handed the article to him, Potter took it and used it to wrap around the coins for safekeeping.
That was the whole bugaboo with this search for the White Hood Gang. There were no White Hoods! Not, at least, in Thunderbird Canyon.
His thoughts were coming together now, and Longarm was becoming excited at the process of discovery.
The ambusher who had tried to kill him the other night
No wonder the man wanted Longarm out of the way. He desperately needed to get the train running again. So he could make his escape with the stolen payroll money. Hell yes, he did. With the train running?whether Longarm was alive or dead?the law would be looking for strangers trying to escape in hiding. But the man who planned the payroll robbery would be a familiar face, right there in plain sight among people who thought he was a decent member of a decent community. The son of a bitch would be able to board the train and wander off to Meade Park in full view of everyone. No one would be inspecting baggage for the stolen money. They would all be looking for the sinister and unfamiliar members of the White Hood Gang.
Longarm almost admired the simplicity of it.
And when Longarm thought the man was trapped on the mountainside following the attack out of the night, he had been right about thinking a stranger to the country would follow a game trail before a ledge.
The thing was, the gunman was no stranger to this country. He had known where the trail and the ledge alike would lead and was shrewd enough to figure Longarm for sensible reasoning on the subject. That was exactly why he was able to stay on the ledge and give the slip to his pursuit.
Someone local, right here in town the whole time, had set this whole deal up.
The White Hood warning was a complete hoax, start to finish, just to force the authorities?Longarm right along with them?into doing exactly what the thief planned. And that was to keep all the payroll and royalty monies in one juicy lump, ripe for the taking, under guard but all together and available to a thief smart enough and brash enough?and vicious enough?to go after it.
Longarm pushed his plate away. His steak was only half eaten, but all of a sudden he was much too wound up to care about food. He dropped a coin onto the table beside his neglected meal and hurried out into the sunlight.
He knew part of it. He was convinced of that now. But he still needed to fill in the rest of the picture.
He thought he had a pretty fair idea of how to go about that.
ChapterThirty-Nine
His first stop was the obvious one. He took the courthouse stairs two at a time. There was a chance, just the barest chance, that under the proper questioning Donald Potter might remember enough to give Longarm a clue to the identity of the thief and murderer of Thunderbird Canyon.
Because Longarm was convinced now that Potter was guilty of nothing more, really, than having been a tool used by the murderer. Potter was hired as window dressing? paid a hundred dollars and told to try and sneak out of the canyon by way of the railroad tracks.
When the poor man was caught, as he inevitably would be, the hood in his pocket would ?prove? that the White Hood Gang was behind the explosion and robbery.
And for a while Longarm had bought it, damnit.
No longer. Now Longarm cussed himself for not noticing before that the flour-sack hood taken from Potter?s pocket still had remnants of wheat flour in the seams, but there was no trace of the substance in the man?s hair. Potter had never worn the hood, and in fact had not even known that he was carrying something fashioned into a hood.
If he had noticed that to begin with it would have started the doubts and this train of thought that much earlier, damnit. Being dead beat and dragging was scant excuse for that failure, but there was no point in worrying about it now.
The important thing was that now he could talk to Potter not about the White Hoods and a crime that he had had nothing to do with, but about the things that really might have happened that night.
