by Tabor Evans
She explained, "That was an argument over cards. Pecos McBride was another trail drover cut from the same rough cloth as Amarillo Cordwain. I don't know what gets into Texas riders when they're a long way from home. At any rate Pecos McBride shot a young homesteader in the taproom of the Pronghorn Hotel, right across from my substation. He rode out of town at full gallop, after dark, before my helpers and I could posse up, as you bigger boys put it. But, as in the case of Cordwain, the brute had told others here in town where he hailed from. It was Waco, nowhere near the Pecos, by the way. I recruited a girl I met at the homesteader's funeral to run down there and kill him back, the mean thing. She and the boy McBride killed over a penny-ante pot were engaged to be married."
She saw the deep thoughts in Longarm's gun-muzzle eyes and asked him what he found so complicated about what she'd just told him.
He said, "I'm studying on things you told me earlier, Miss Rita. It all sounds so simple until I ask how come your Ida Weaver never came back after I saw her gun Rusty Mansfield in the Parthenon Saloon the other day. The tale she told us jibes with what you've been telling me. But if it's all so simple, how come she's vanished into thin air, and why have other owlhoot riders been trying to prevent this mighty unrewarding meeting we're having this very afternoon?"
She said she wasn't sure she hadn't just been insulted.
Longarm said, "There's nothing wrong with you, your shortcake, or this tea, Miss Rita. But you ain't told me a thing your Deputy Ida couldn't have told us down Denver way if my boss hadn't let her go without pressing her because he's so smart. He thought I might be able to catch you ladies at something more sneaky. He ordered me to mosey up this way, talk to all you Wyoming folk, and tell him what I thought you might be up to.
She looked confused as she replied, "But you just said you found this conversation pointless."
He shook his head and explained, "Not pointless, ma'am. Everything everyone I've talked to tells me points in the same direction. A tad rough-hewn and you'd all be in trouble if you'd been treating regular small-town pests so rough. But they told me in Cheyenne you'd all been warned not to word them arrest warrants so drastic and-"
"I've never written out any arrest warrants!" she cut in, adding, "I told Judge Edith it would look more seemly if she simply wrote she wanted us to bring the accused in for questioning. My temporary man-hunters didn't need written instructions not to take any chances with a dangerous male gunfighter, for heaven's sake!"
Longarm shrugged and said, "Whatever. What I meant to say was that I'd have gotten here yesterday, we'd have had this conversation, and I'd have been headed home as bemused as them other federal deputies from the Cheyenne District Court, if somebody other than yourself wasn't trying to convince me he, she, or it was eating cucumbers and performing other wonders."
She said she had no idea what he was talking about.
He said, "The notion of a criminal genius is an affront to common sense. You have to be stupid or warped to want to ride the old Owlhoot Trail to begin with when you're all that energetic and clever. But the crooks chewing the fat in a prison cell or house of ill repute are forever convincing themselves they're masterminds and pestering us until we pay attention to them."
He washed down the rest of the shortcake he'd been handed and went on to say, "Hardly anyone had ever heard tell of Frank and Jesse James while they were robbing close to home and hiding out amid the trash whites of Clay County, Missouri. They had to clever themselves into a raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and wind up shot to pieces with their names in all the newspapers coast to coast. Billy the Kid, down Lincoln County way, could have 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.
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p; 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 anyone would be dumb enough to use a cypher because that would be easy to spot, next to code."
She said she thought a code and a cypher were the same.
He pocketed up the spent brass and explained the difference while he helped her down the steep steps, saying, "You ain't the only one, Miss Rita. What most everybody calls the Morse Code ain't no code at all. It's cypher, which is a series of individual signs or symbols standing for letters of the alphabet. Don't matter whether you use dots and dashes, numbers or substitute letters. Anyone else can see at a glance the message is encyphered, and that's why crooks hardly ever use cyphers. Anyone as smart can figure your cypher out in time, once he knows he ought to." She didn't seem to be following his drift. He said, "A coded message is tougher to crack because it ain't half as easy to see it's in code. Codes are most often substitute words or sentences agreed upon in advance or written down in code books used by the sender and receivers. If somebody in Cheyenne wanted to tell a pal here in Keller's Crossing somebody like me was coming or not coming, they only have to word innocent-sounding messages a tad different. A message allowing Aunt Rhodie's goose had died in the millpond or from getting hit on the head with a walnut would only seem important to the ones who knew a millpond meant yes and a walnut meant no."
Rita brightened and said, "With Aunt Rhodie's goose meaning you, to them and them alone, right?"
He shrugged and said, "If that was the code they'd agreed on. What will you bet they're using other code words and phrases?"
As he helped down the last step inside the tower, she dimpled up at him to declare, "We can eliminate the majority of folk in these parts who haven't been sending or receiving telegrams at all, right?"
He shook his head and replied, "Wrong. It's a sure bet that most of the folk in these parts have to be innocent. But a real sneak could send a coded message by wiring somebody innocent to do something, with a confederate watching for them to do it. I told you codes could be tougher than cyphers to break."
As they stepped out into the church nave, one of her kid deputies came over to them holding a beat-up old trapdoor Springfield with as pleased an expression as a tabby cat delivering a dead sparrow to its mistress.
He said, "We just found this in the flower bed by the side steps down to the churchyard, Miss Rita. That door bolts from the inside, and guess how we found the barrel latch? Looks like the jasper as shot out your front window got in here by forcing the front latch, then left by that side exit to slither and sneak his way through the tree-shaded tombstones to parts unknown!"
The newspaperman, Big Jim Tanner, joined them to ask who they were looking for in connection with this latest outrage. Before Longarm was able to nudge her, the lady undersheriff said, "Deputy Long, here, is of the opinion we're after a hired gun called Ram Rogers and at least one companion. They were in cahoots with that Texas Tom who tried to ambush Deputy Long in Cheyenne and got shot by Wyoming's own Marshal Casey down yonder!"
Longarm wanted to kick her. But he knew he wasn't even supposed to kiss her before he knew for certain he wasn't going to have to arrest her. She seemed a good old gal, but somebody in those parts had to be as two-faced as that Roman statue, Mr. Janus.
For his own part Longarm told the newspaperman, "I ain't accused nobody of nothing for the record, Big Jim. I understand your desire for all the news that's fit to print. But I'd be much obliged if you just held your fire, for now and, if you will, I'll give you the very first officious statement. Do we have a deal?"
Big Jim frowned thoughtfully and replied, "It sounds like a one-way marriage agreement in which I agree to love, honor, and obey you without any right to kiss you. You are so right about my havin
g a newspaper to put out, and my readers have the right to know a hired gun is running loose in their township like a mad dog off its leash!"
Longarm snorted. "Aw, come on. I only told Miss Rita another shady character named Ram Rogers as a possible suspect. There's no solid evidence it was him and not some other mad dog up in the bell tower just now!"
Rita said she wanted to question this Ram Rogers whatever he was and allowed she was headed over to their J.P. to ask for a writ she could use to run the rascal in on suspicion, if nothing else, for a good seventy-two hours.
Longarm started to warn her not to swear out a felony warrant with no more to back it but the unsupported accusations of a known con man.
Then he wondered why he'd want to say a dumb thing like that. For Billy Vail and the attorney general had asked him to find out what these Wyoming wildwomen were up to and old Rita, for all her dimples and auburn hair, was talking sort of wild right in front of him. So he held his tongue and went along with the rest of them as they all made their way afoot down the main street and around a corner to a mansart-roofed frame house painted puke green with chocolate brown trim.
They all trooped inside to find the formidable Edith Penn Keller, J.P., presiding over her crowded parlor from a big keyhole desk set on a raised and carpet-covered dais at one end, with a gilt plaster goddess of Justice at one end and a stack of law books at the other.
The J.P., herself, was a fat lady of about forty with her dark hair drawn up in a tight bun as she sat there in black poplin judicial robes, reminding Longarm of a big black broody hen setting on a clutch of billiard balls somebody had slipped under her big ass as a joke. She was fining a young cowboy two dollars for disturbing the peace as Longarm followed Rita, two of her kid deputies, and Big Jim from the Riverside News in. It sounded fair to ask two dollars off a kid who'd roped and drug a watering trough the night before. But when J. P. Keller saw who'd come to admire her, or see her, least ways, she ordered everyone else to clear her court. So it wasn't clear how the case of the trough-roping cowboy would ever be resolved.