Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds

by Tabor Evans

  Egger said he just wanted to be safely far away with his sweet little Margaret in his arms after all those lonesome nights in a cell.

  Longarm didn't comment on how a gal that big-boned and buxom could be described as small, or where she really was just then. He rose to leave some coins on the table and muttered, "Let's move out."

  They did, and sure enough, the open platform out back was sunny and unoccupied, with no train expected for a good forty-five minutes and the late afternoon sun glaring uncomfortably hot through the dust and coal smoke of the rail yards to the west. Longarm led Egger to an open stretch near the north end of the platform, and told him he doubted too many passengers would come crowding up this way to get on the Burlington Flyer's cowcatcher once it arrived.

  Egger glanced nervously about and protested, "We're easy targets out here, and that dazzle off the boards and bricks will make it even tougher to spot Cal in time!"

  Longarm stared soberly at the switchman's booth forming a cul-de-sac to the north as it almost met the sun-washed bricks of the depot's rear wall. "The light will be just as tricky for him. How come you're expecting Calvert Tyger in the singular flesh, Egger? He sent a whole swarm of lesser lights after me and we're still working on some of their true names and addresses."

  Egger sighed and said, "You just answered your own fool question. You don't send a boy to do a man's job, and he wants us both bad if he suspects I rode with Brick Flanders against his orders and just now made a deal with the law!"

  He glanced down the other way and added, "Aside from that, he must be finding good help tougher to find these days. We were all running low on pocket jingle when Brick took it in his red head to stop that train on his own."

  Longarm started to ask how the gang could be throwing around all those hundred-dollar notes if they were so broke. But the punk had told him more than once that Calvert Tyger and his faction hadn't taken part in the Fort Collins job. That had doubtless made Chief sound mighty sincere when he'd told Helga Runeberg he'd been framed for a job he'd never done.

  Egger sucked in his breath, and Longarm turned the same way to see a familiar figure, missing his chaps but wearing a six-gun, slowly coming up the platform from the cover of those baggage carts to the south. Egger said, "It's Gus Hansson. He's supposed to be riding for my sister-in-law back in Brown County! What could he be doing way out here in Colorado?"

  Longarm said, "Move back and off to one side and I'll ask him."

  So the unarmed Egger crawfished back and off to one side indeed as Longarm just stood there, smiling sort of wistfully.

  As the Minnesota kid came within pistol range Longarm called out, "That's far enough and don't try it, Gus. Can't you see you're being used as a cat's paw by a sly old mouser who doesn't give a fig for your future?"

  Gus Hansson stopped, only to drop into a gunfighter's crouch as he bitched, "We just got word from New Ulm, you son of a bitch! The sheriff just arrested Miss Helga and half of my pals on the Rocking R!"

  Longarm nodded amiably and replied, "I know. I wired them earlier and allowed it was about time we commenced wrapping up. Somebody has to pay for hiring Laughing Larry Lucas to blow pretty ladies up, and I'm sure the big boss has told you it wasn't his dumb notion."

  Gus Hansson snarled, "Fill your fist by the time I count to three. For that's when I mean to draw, you smirking know-it-all!"

  Longarm thoughtfully threw his frock coat open to expose the grips of his cross-draw.44-40, but called out in a calm reasonable tone, "You don't want to try it, Gus. This ain't one of them Wild West yarns in Ned Buntline's magazines. Life is real, life is earnest, and I've got an edge on your skills and experience."

  Gus Hansson grimly answered, "One!"

  Longarm snorted, "Aw, shit, this is getting silly, Gus!"

  To which the determined-looking kid answered, "Two!"

  So Longarm, being a grown man instead of a kid who'd read too many dime novels in the bunkhouse, fired the derringer he'd been palming all this time before the fool kid could slap leather as he counted to three.

  Then all hell busted loose, and Longarm let the double derringer dangle from his watch chain as he dropped to the platform and rolled over the edge to bob back up with his more serious six-gun in hand as he called out, "Smiley? Dutch?"

  "Over here," came a jovial reply from the narrow dark slit between the switchman's booth and depot wall.

  A second voice Longarm recognized as that of the more somber cuss called Smiley called out, "It didn't work quite as well as you planned though. We tried to get him to drop his damned gun and grab for the sky as he was fixing to throw down on your back. But he paid us no mind and, well, you know Dutch here."

  Everyone who worked with the jolly but murderous Dutch knew how he was when suspects didn't do exactly as he said. But first things coming first, Longarm rose to his full height, brushing his tweed pants with his Stetson as he holstered his unfired six-gun and put the warm double derringer away for now. He moved over to the nearer of the two figures sprawled on the platform. Rolling Gus Hansson over with a boot tip, he could see at a glance the bravely stupid kid had no need for a sawbones. You aimed for the dead center of a man's trunk, when you only had two derringer rounds to work with.

  But as he turned on Egger, the pallid punk raised his head from a puddle of puke and sobbed, "Am I still alive? Is it over?"

  Longarm muttered, "All but some loose ends," as he saw his boss, Marshal Vail, coming out from the depot waiting room on his stubby legs, his own gun out.

  Vail announced, "O'Foyle and Cohen will only be able to keep that crowd inside a few minutes longer. They keep saying they got a train to catch. Who's that lying yonder so dead?"

  Longarm said, "His name was Gus Hansson. We met earlier back in Santee country. He was one of 'em. You already know Egger here. So let's see who Smiley and Dutch have yonder."

  They moved to the far end of the platform. Despite his height, Longarm found it easier to move through that narrow slit than his shorter and stockier boss did. But they both managed, and sure enough, the tall grim Smiley and short jolly Dutch were standing over another corpse. This one was older, wearing his gun rig under a snuff-colored store-bought suit, and wasn't familiar to either Longarm or his fellow lawmen.

  Longarm called Egger through the slot and demanded, "All right, is that the real Calvert Tyger, or has he faked his damned death some more?"

  Egger gulped and marveled, "It's Cal. You got him! I didn't think it could be done! He was such a sly old dog!"

  Longarm shrugged and said, "I figured he'd be more cautious than a villain in one of Ned Buntline's gentlemanly duels. That's how come we staked out all the handy cover he'd have to work with, after I'd made sure he'd know of a good time and place to nail the two of us."

  Billy Vail chuckled fondly and said, "There was never a rider that couldn't be throwed or a slicker who couldn't be snowed. It's sort of sad about his young sidekick. But we got him. So that's about it, right?"

  Longarm said, "Wrong. We have an even slicker bastard left, Boss."

  CHAPTER 30

  Fort Collins, sixty-odd miles north of Denver, had commenced as a military outpost on the Cache La Poudre or Powdercache River. But by this time it had grown into the seat of Larimer County, with a new land-grant college and all. The federal government offices had all closed for the day when Longarm paid his call on Miss Lorena Fenward, the surviving female witness to the horrendous events at the payroll office closer to the center of town.

  The stenographer gal roomed with an even more maidenly older lady, who sniffed at Longarm's badge and identification, and allowed he and her roomer gal might be more comfortable out on her front porch as the warm shades of a summer evening crept down from the Front Range to the west.

  When she fetched Lorena Fenward, the mousy little thing looked sort of pleased with him. As she offered Longarm her tiny hand, she told him she and Clifford, the other survivor of the robbery, had just read the newspaper reports about the capture of t
hose notorious outlaws.

  As they sat down together on the nearby porch swing, with somebody inside doing a piss-poor job of peeking through lace curtains without moving them, Longarm told her, "The three leaders and a heap of their followers are dead, not captured, ma'am, and notorious was just the word I wanted to talk to you about." She seemed to be paying attention. So he explained. "Most outlaws tend to be notorious after the fact, ma'am. I know it don't seem like it now, but hardly anyone had ever heard of Frank and Jesse James before they tried to rob a bank in Northfield, Minnesota, along with the unknown Younger and Miller boys. I was just back yonder in Minnesota, thinking about notorious outlaws in general, and it struck me, lighting a smoke one day, how Frank and Jesse got so famous all at once by riding out of that wild shootout alone, leaving the shot-up survivors of a robbery gone sour to be interviewed by all those reporters and get famous themselves."

  She demurely asked if he'd like her permission to smoke. He chuckled and said, "I wasn't hinting, ma'am. I was explaining. That Tyger gang might have gone on robbing hither and yon if they hadn't started to get so notorious within just the past year or so."

  She said she hadn't really been following Calvert Tyger's criminal career before he'd burst into that payroll office like a maniac to murder all the men but poor Clifford and scare her half to death.

  Longarm had gone over his notes before he'd come calling, so he nodded and said, "That would be Clifford Stern, the bookkeeper who played dead after he'd only been grazed?"

  She nodded and said, "You should have seen how bloody his shirt was after that evil Indian they called Chief creased his poor chest with a pistol ball. I was the one who described that Indian member of the gang in some detail. I only caught a glimpse of that other one's red beard amid all the gun-smoke and confusion. Clifford remembered that scary glass eye and gold tooth more vividly because that one--Flanders, wasn't it--was the one who bent over him to say he was done for and not to waste any more time."

  Longarm nodded and said, "Riding with a full-blood and a red-haired cuss with such distinctive features did cause folks to remember who might have robbed them, once they made a more serious habit of it. From gang members we've interviewed since, the less distinctive-looking Calvert Tyger was getting broody about reading his name in the papers, albeit we all know it was his wilder-looking sidekicks folks described while laying the blame on his doorstep. So he'd given the others orders not to rob anybody for a spell. It must have really put his nose out of joint when he read in the papers about his gang, or a close facsimile, robbing your office and killing federal employees in the process!"

  The mousy Stenographer gal gasped, "My heavens, are you suggesting that wasn't the Tyger gang robbing us in broad day and murdering poor Mister Godwynn and those younger clerks?"

  Longarm nodded grimly and replied, "That's about the size of it, ma'am. If it's any comfort, the gang had a furious falling out over it, with Tyger and Chief deciding to get rid of fellow riders they had down as big fibbers. Brick Flanders and his bunch kept saying they had nothing to do with any payroll robbery, and tried to excuse a train robbery that went wrong by complaining they were broke and needed the money. Tyger and Chief, trying to lay low, must have had conniptions when hundred-dollar treasury notes taken from your payroll office kept turning up all over the country as if Santa Claus was on a spending spree. An outlaw who went on spending such hot paper after learning from the papers it was hot would have to be awesomely stupid. We tried to keep the papers from reporting how your boss, the late Paymaster Godwynn, had made that list of serial numbers. But once they'd turned up all over, getting all sorts of folks hauled in to say where in blue blazes they'd come by the money..."

  She nodded primly and said, "That was why Mister Godwynn made that list of serial numbers. It must be very difficult to cash a hundred-dollar treasury note recorded as stolen from the government!"

  Longarm said, "It sure is. Brick Flanders had his faults, but he'd been riding the owlhoot trail better than a dozen years, and he'd have never tried to spend big bills he knew we had records on. He'd have fenced them for, say, two-bits on the dollar to a money-washer willing to sit on 'em for a couple of years and cash them in once they'd had a chance to cool down. I'm sure Calvert Tyger knew as much as we do about disposing of outlaw loot. He must have felt mighty vexed at his old pard when Flanders naturally kept saying some other red-haired cuss with a glass eye and gold front tooth had held up a government office and gunned a federal paymaster in cold blood for no good reason. Or did they offer some explanation why they shot all the male witnesses and let you live, Miss Lorena?"

  She stared owlishly at him in the purple twilight. "How should I know? Clifford and me agreed at the time they'd been awfully mean. As they were leaving the leader did say something about leaving nobody to tell the tale. But mayhaps the last young boy out the door just didn't have it in him to shoot a girl."

  Longarm nodded thoughtfully. "That works. So does somebody pretending to be a more famous outlaw, using theatrical makeup or a mighty fine wax mask. Another lady who's gotten to chatting with me about a former beau says Chief, Baptiste Youngwolf, was with his boss in Denver at the time of your robbery up this way. Tyger must have been willing as me to figure one Indian would be recalled much like yet another by a robbery victim. Unfortunately for Flanders, Tyger was way more certain it had to be him pulling jobs on the sly and making an outlaw laying low more famous than he'd ever mean to be."

  Longarm shifted his weight in the swing and removed his hat so she could see his grave features more clearly as he placed his hat in his lap. "There's no call to go on with that comedy of errors and coincidence. Suffice to say that gang's no more, and now I want to talk about the money, Miss Lorena. I can promise you won't hang by your pretty little neck, and you'll still be fairly young when you get out if you'd care to turn state's evidence now."

  She stared at him thunderstruck. "State's evidence of what? Are you accusing me of being in on the robbery with that gang?"

  Longarm said, "Nope. Accusing you of making false accusations. A grievously grazed bookkeeper and miraculously unscathed stenography gal sold everyone but me a titanic taradiddle about an inside job, and now you'd best tell me where the two of you hid the money."

  She wailed, "What money? Those outlaws rode off with all the money we had after they'd murdered everyone but Clifford and me! Haven't you been paying attention to the newspapers? Treasury notes with serial numbers recorded by poor Mister Godwynn have been turning up all over creation!"

  Longarm nodded pleasantly. "It had that gang confused as well. For which I reckon we ought to thank you. But since I see you still think you can fib your way out of it, here's what I'm fixing to testify at your trial."

  He leaned back more comfortably and continued. "Everyone knows how handling large sums of money can tempt our weaker brothers and sisters. So outfits that deal in such temptations set up all sorts of checks and balances to make it nigh impossible to embezzle funds without being detected."

  She protested, "You can't mean that! Neither Clifford nor I were ever left alone with the contents of that office safe!"

  Longarm replied, "I just said that. Funds coming in or going out have to be noted in the daily ledgers as well. I was recently going over some bank records in New Ulm, and it hit me then how tough a time a thief would have cooking books kept in more than one hand by more than one money-wrangler. So I don't doubt the ledgers of your payroll office would tend to go along with your fairy tale about red-bearded ogres with glass eyes and gold teeth, Miss Lorena. But that other list, kept separate in block lettering but purported to have been the notion of Paymaster Godwynn, is a whole other kettle of fish."

  He gave her a chance to comment. When she just went on staring at him bug-eyed, he said, "Your boss had no call to keep such a list. There was no question the money coming in had just been printed for him by the federal mint. There'd have been no point in recording the serial numbers on notes to be paid out within days t
o honest folks the government owed money to."

  She said, "We were asked about that at the time. Neither of us could say why Mister Godwynn had been extra cautious. Perhaps he'd been tipped off about a planned robbery, or..."

  "Or perhaps it was one or both of you two survivors who'd made up the list, over a period of days or weeks, by writing down numbers of high-denomination notes being paid out in good faith to honest folks."

  She laughed incredulously and demanded, "Why would anyone want to do that, whether they were honest or not?"

  He sighed and said, "You sure stick to your guns, considering how far down in the water you are right now. We both know the two of you knew that even if you gunned your boss and fellow workers to leave no witnesses, someone was sure to consider all that money leaving the office safe another way. So you made up that list in advance, to let notes with those serial numbers spread far and wide, before the two of you just smoked up your own office one Friday around closing time. Then you told your whopping fish story to the first lawmen on the scene, and produced that list you said your late boss had made, just to throw suspicion off your ownselves as all that stolen money turned up here, there, and everywhere but around you. So I figure the two of you have been waiting for that impressive but unrecorded money to-"

  Then the front door of her rooming house burst open, and it was a good thing Longarm had already drawn his.44-40 and covered it with his Stetson. Because it was still too close for comfort as the dark figure in the doorway threw down on them, but had to watch where he was aiming as his doxie screamed, "Get him! He knows!"

  Longarm didn't have to worry about his own fusillade, so he got three rounds of rapid fire off in time to stagger his foeman back against the doorjamb, and put a fourth round in him when he took a full extra second to drop his own six-gun and slide silently down to the doorstep while Lorena Fenward wailed like a banshee and might have scratched Longarm's face off if he hadn't stiff-armed her back on that porch swing.