Longarm and the Colorado gundown

_{The smelter men managed to divest themselves of their weapons in practically no time at all. Perfect. Longarm would be pleased if he could bring this whole thing off with not a shot being fired.}

_{By the time all the employees had been rounded up and all the firearms collected, the smelter files had been located and the cabinets jimmied open.}

_{“Well?” Longarm asked.}

_{“It’s probably here,” one of the possemen said. He had been selected for this chore because his everyday job was as comptroller of Ames Delacoutt’s mine in Snowshoe. He was a man who knew his way around ledger entries the way Longarm knew his way around good horses or bad men. “But it’s going to take some long, serious study to nail it all down. Marshal. I have to cross-reference all the inventory and production records and sort out all the}

_{receipted concentrates. I can do it, of course. They couldn’t possibly hide all those tons of concentrates they took from us. The work will be reflected somewhere in these records, I promise you.”}

_{Longarm looked at the silent, fuming men of Tipson who were standing now under guard in their own smelter.}

_{It was almighty interesting, he thought, how not a single one of them had bothered to ask what this raid was about. But then they all knew, didn’t they?}

_{And they all accepted as fact that Longarm and the Snowshoe men knew as well.}

_{The way Longarm read it, this failure to protest and question was as damning as any evidence the comptroller from Snowshoe might expose in those records. Although, of course, that form of confirmation would be necessary too once the mess came before a judge and jury.}

_{“Where are the bosses?” Longarm asked.}

_{“Which ones?”}

_{“Let’s start with Edgar Monroe.”}

_{“He’s ... not here.”}

_{“I guessed that much. So where is he?”}

_{“Search me.”}

_{“Boo, you heard the man. Have some of your boys take him outside and search him.”}

_{“Hey!” the fellow yelped.}

_{“Just remember where we can find Mr. Monroe, did you?”}

_{“I think, uh, I think maybe I did.”}

_{Longarm smiled and stepped forward.}

_{Once again Longarm had Boo Bevvy and a posse of men from Snowshoe at his back. The difference was that this time there were fewer of them. Most of the posse members had been left at the smelter keeping the workmen under guard while the comptroller examined dry, dusty business ledgers line by line. Now only the Snowshoe police chief and four of his best officers were backing the federal man.}

_“Ready?”

_“Go.”

_{Longarm’s boot smashed into the door. The lock shattered, and the door was flung back on its hinges.}

_{Longarm was inside, gun in one hand and badge in the other, before the door had time to rebound.}

_{“Nobody move. Federal marshals.”}

_{As a collection of conspirators these fellows were a disappointment. They looked like any other bunch of smalltime businessmen.}

_{Except maybe a little more nervous than most.}

_{There were five of them at the table. The only one Longarm recognized was Ellis Farmer. Farmer blanched even paler than usual when he saw who had burst in. The other men at the table seemed mostly interested in gaping at the gun muzzles. Farmer kept staring with a certain degree of horror at Chief Bevvy and the other individuals who had been his neighbors in Snowshoe. And whom he had betrayed on behalf of these other men.}

_{“This is an outrage. This is—”}

_{“Shut the fuck up, Andrew.” Longarm might not know all the men at the table, but Chief Bevvy knew this one at least.}

_{“You have no right to barge in here like this,” another squawked.}

_{“Bullshit,” Longarm said. “Lawman has every right to make an arrest.”}

_{“We haven’t done anything.”}

_{“No? Then you won’t care that we’ve impounded the records from that smelter you set up.”}

_{“Jesus!” someone blurted out.}

_{“Keep trying, mister. Maybe He’ll help you.”}

_{“We haven’t done anything. Really, Boo. We haven’t.” “Cut the crap, Jasper. Deputy Long figured it out. Me and my boys have been going crazy looking for your tracks from where you got away with our gold. Hell, the tracks were in plain sight all the time. Railroad tracks.”}

_{“The stupid thing,” Longarm put in, “was that those Indians didn’t give a damn what a bunch of white men wanted to do. If you’d just left them alone they would have gone on down to the low country and set about their spring hunt. It made no particular impression on them at all when they saw you stealing that gold. They figured you were just so many crazy white men, and hardly any Indian will bother himself trying to figure white men out. If you’d just left them alone another few weeks they would have headed on down for the spring hunt. They sure as hell didn’t care enough about what they’d seen the day of the train robbery to tell anyone about it. But no, you got nervous and tried to keep them quiet by hiding them away in legal custody. And you would have started riots or generated any kind of slaughter to accomplish that, spreading those lies about Ute war parties and everything. You dumb bastards. You could’ve actually started another Indian war with those lies.”}

_{“You’re responsible for that, Farmer,” Bevvy said. “Your neighbors will hold you accountable too. Don’t you think otherwise.”}

_{Farmer had begun to sweat.}

_{Longarm shook his head, disgusted with the whole crowd of them. What the Utes had seen, the reason these men had panicked and orchestrated the series of lies, was the robbers carrying their impossibly bulky loot away from the Bitterroot and Brightwater train. Not by wagon or mule train, but by simple gravity. The train was held up and taken to the point where it most closely approached the right of way of the Silver Creek, Tipson, and Glory hundreds of feet lower in the canyon bottoms. Then the robbers simply slid the boxed concentrates down to be loaded onto the SCT&G cars below. It was that bare slide that Longarm and Leah Skelde had seen when they were waiting for the train to pick them up the other day. From below the marks left behind by the boxes were obvious. But from up above, at the level of the Bitterroot and Brightwater roadbed, there was nothing remarkable that could be seen. The robbers opened the throttle of the stolen train once the boxes were unloaded, and the train was sent down the tracks on its own to stop wherever it ran out of steam. That was where Bevvy and his men found it, and where they assumed the gold concentrates had been unloaded. They hadn’t thought to backtrack in search of anything so ordinary as the SCT&G tracks that they saw every time they traveled the B&B right of way. Longarm had been able to put it together only because of that delay between when the coach from Silver Creek dropped passengers off at the end of the tracks and the train from Glory arrived to carry them the rest of the way. Otherwise he never would have seen those drag marks.}

_{Those tipped him to the truth, along with discovering that the man in Snowshoe who was primarily responsible for the Ute scare was the same newspaper editor who suddenly had a vested financial interest in the survival of the SCT&G. Ellis Farmer went out of his way to stir up hard feelings against the Ute tribe. And it had occurred to Longarm too that despite all the violence he’d been told to expect from the townspeople of Snowshoe, the only real trouble}

_{he’d experienced came at the hands of outsiders, not from locals at all.}

_{Longarm was sure he could find a whole passel of charges to lodge against each and every one of these conspirators. Molesting Ute Indians—who were, after all, wards of the government and therefore clearly under federal jurisdiction for their protection—would come at the top of that list.,}