Longarm shook his head. “Did Claude Blanton have any family that I should notify?”
“He lived with a woman and some kids just south of town. Their place is real hard to find and you’ve never seen a sorrier family.”
“Well,” Longarm decided, “sorry or not, I ought to inform them that Claude is dead.”
“You might get your ass shot off for your trouble,” Hackett warned. “The woman is a witch and her boys are going to grow up to be troublemakers … or worse.”
“Why don’t you put on your hat and take me out there?” Longarm suggested.
Hackett shook his head. “Well, I really ought to stay here in town in case there’s trouble.”
“That doesn’t seem too likely,” Longarm replied with growing annoyance. “It’s a real small town and I doubt this little errand would take more than an hour—if we get started right away.”
Hackett didn’t want to be bothered. “I …”
“There might be a reward,” Longarm said, dangling his lure. “Sometimes there is when a lawman is murdered.”
“For what? You already killed Claude.”
Longarm could see that the man wasn’t going to take the bait. He was a discredit to the profession, but not entirely stupid. “All right, I’ll pay you five dollars to take me out to this woman’s house.”
“House?” Hackett scoffed. “Even calling it a shack is an exaggeration. It’s just a collection of rusty tin and broken wood that they stole from the railroad sheds. It’s all held together with chicken wire.”
“Five dollars,” Longarm repeated, pulling a bill out of his pocket and holding it up before the marshal.
“All right,” Hackett said, reaching for the money.
Longarm pulled it away saying, “You’ll get paid when we leave the woman.”
“You ain’t a bit trusting, are you?” Hackett snapped.
“No,” Longarm replied, “I’m not. Let’s get moving.”
“Why don’t you pay me three dollars and I’ll tell that witch the next time she comes into town?” Hackett suggested. “That way, you save yourself two dollars and we don’t go to the bother of riding out there and having to put up with that bunch of trash.”
“No,” Longarm insisted. “The woman lived with Blanton. She at least has the right to hear that he’s never coming back.”
“She’d hear it even if we didn’t tell her.”
“Get your hat and move!” Longarm said, putting steel into his voice.
“All right, all right!”
It took Hackett nearly an hour to get someone to give him the use of a horse. He was so fat that the horse had to be especially stout, and he had a devil of a time getting into the saddle. But at last they rode out of Newcastle and followed the road south for about three miles. Once, the train passed them and a lot of passengers waved from the windows. Longarm was in a sour mood and ignored them, but Hackett had to stop his horse and wave until the train and its passengers were all out of sight.
“I try to be friendly to folks,” Hackett explained as they continued on down the road. “It helps, you know.”
“It also helps to keep yourself fit and clean,” Longarm said.
Hackett bristled. “Just because I work for a little town and they don’t hardly pay me enough to live on is no reason to be insulting.”
“How much further?”
“About two miles. We leave this road and take a trail off to the south. You can start to smell these people about then.”
Longarm didn’t say anything. Hackett didn’t say anything more either, and so they rode in irritable silence all the way to the shack where Claude Blanton’s woman and her kids lived.
“There it is,” Hackett said, pointing through the trees. They got some big, mean hounds, so don’t dismount or they’re likely to chew your leg off.”
Longarm pushed on ahead. Suddenly, a pack of hounds began to howl as they came flying out from under a broken-down wagon. There were six or seven of them, all big and mangy. About the same number of children, ranging from toddlers to kids in their teens, came chasing after the hounds.
“Ain’t it a chillin’ sight,” Hackett said with disgust. “They’re all ornery little beggars. Just stay on your horse and don’t worry about quirting them in the face if they get too close.”
Since Hackett held back, Longarm rode forward, and the dogs swirled in around his horse causing it to have fits. Then the kids arrived and it was a melee, but Longarm kept riding until he drew to within fifty feet of the run-down shack.
Hackett hadn’t been exaggerating when he said it was a sorry sight. There was garbage all over the yard and the shack itself wasn’t fit for human habitation.
“Hello the house!” Longarm shouted.
A woman as wide as the door itself appeared with a shotgun clenched in her fists. She was so obese and filthy that she made Marshal Hackett appear fastidious.
“What the hell you want!” she screamed through a mouth mostly without teeth.
“Ma’am,” Longarm said, “I have something important to tell you, but I won’t say it while you’re holding that shotgun on me and Marshal Hackett.”
“You a lawman too?”
“I’m Marshal Long.”
“I hate lawmen.”
Longarm’s hand eased closer to his pistol and, out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Hackett was sweating profusely.
“What I have to tell you is important, ma’am. Put the shotgun down.”
The woman spat at her bare and dirty feet. She lowered the shotgun and yelled, “Speak your piece and then get outa my sight, you murderin’ maggots!”
Longarm was having second thoughts about this mission, and realized why Hackett had been so reluctant to come out here despite the enticement of money. But second-guessing wasn’t going to help, so he just drew his six-gun and shouted, “Claude is dead. He ambushed Marshal Walker in Auburn and I had no choice but to kill him or he would have killed me too.”
The woman’s jaw dropped. Her chins quivered, and Longarm was sure she was going to try and kill him, but instead, she threw back her head and howled with joy, then began to cackle.
“I told you that she was a damned witch,” Hackett said, mopping his greasy face with a dirty handkerchief. “Crazier than a loon.”
Longarm was willing to agree, but mostly he was just glad that he wasn’t going to have to use his pistol.
“Ma’am? Ma’am,” he said when the laughter finally started to die. “I’d like to know what’s so funny.”
The woman had started to cough, and when she could catch her breath, she looked up and said, “What’s funny is that I’d made up my mind to kill Claude. The sonofabitch was cheatin’ on me!”
“Let’s get out of here,” Hackett muttered. “Maybe whatever ails her is contagious.”
But Longarm shook his head. “Ma’am, did he ever tell you that he was going to try and kill Marshal Walker?”
The woman was red in the face, but she managed to nod her head and say, “Not exactly. Not the marshal anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was supposed to kill Noah Huffington with a stiletto. Did he do it?”
Longarm took a deep breath. “Are you saying that he was talking about murdering Noah Huffington?”
“Yeah. With Art Mead and Nick Huffington. I got some of Claude’s money after they all got drunk! Stole it right out of Claude’s pockets! He promised to give me more, but he spent it on some whore. That’s why I was going to kill the cheatin’ sonofabitch!”
Longarm knew that he finally had the evidence he needed to arrest Mead and Nick Huffington—if this harridan would testify in court and if she could be believed by a judge or jury, which was doubtful.
“Ma’am,” Longarm said, digging into his pockets but not trusting the hounds enough to dismount. “Here is twenty dollars. Buy yourself a dress and some shoes.”