She swung her small shapely derriere around to perch it on a low leather hassock as she calmly replied, “Horst Heger is the only gunsmith in Sappa Crossing and the only good gunsmith this side of the county seat. Do you take canned cow and sugar, Custis?”
He said he preferred his coffee black, and as she served them she elaborated. “I should say he was the best gunsmith in these parts. I don’t know when I’ll ever get back a fowling piece I left with him a good two weeks ago. I’m not the only one who’s noticed how distracted he’s been acting since his child bride ran off on him with some saddle tramp a month or more ago.”
Longarm silently sipped some black coffee. She’d been truthful as to the brand. It was almost impossible to brew a bad cup of Arbuckle, which was why it was so popular in cow camps. But it tasted even better poured by a dainty hand from a coffeepot. He had some of their fine marble cake as well before he decided the risk of asking these outsiders outweighed asking Horst Heger’s High Dutch neighbors, or the distraught gunsmith himself. So he asked Iona MacSorley what else they’d heard about the small-town scandal out here a half-hour from town.
She said she’d never had much truck with Heger’s missing wife, save to notice she seemed shy and sort of pretty in a dishwater-blond way. The Scotch-American gal explained, “She didn’t speak much English. Or at least she never had anything to say to me in any lingo. Since my only truck with those Mennonites is purely business, I can’t give you any exact dates. I never asked my gunsmith where his fool wife might be when I didn’t see her peeking through the door in the back at us. I was over to the ladies’ notions shop, picking up sewing supplies, when I overheard an English-speaking nester woman complaining about her man being low on birdshot shells because that fool of a Dutchman had forgotten to send for them.”
Iona cut another slice of cake for Longarm, without waiting for him to finish the first, as she went on. “I spoke up about the fowling piece he never seemed to get around to fixing, and that was when the Mennonite shopkeeping lady told us we had to be patient with the poor man because his woman had strayed. That’s what religious folks call a wife running off with another man, straying.”
It was her gnomish father who quietly asked why a law man from out Denver way gave toad squat, or something that sounded as bad in the Gaelic, about the domestic tranquility of a local gunsmith.
Longarm decided half truth might be the best policy, and tried to sound as bemused as he washed down some cake to gather his thoughts, then told them both, “I’m following up a report on a wanted man who may have passed this way with an unusual side arm. So my boss suggested I have a word with any gunsmiths such a gunslick might have done business with.”
It didn’t work. Iona had already shown herself more interested in guns than most gals. When she asked what was so unusual about the gun of that wanted man, Longarm thought some more, decided a lie might be riskier than partly revealed truth, and said, “A lethal cap-and-ball antique called a LeMat, Miss Iona. It was invented in France, but heaps of Confederate gunsmiths copied it during the war because it was right popular with their cavalry raiders.”
She nodded and said, “Nine .40-caliber rounds in the wheel and a .66-caliber shotgun barrel thrown in for added conviction.”
Longarm smiled across the table at her. “You’ve seen such a horse pistol, Miss Iona?”
She replied, “In Heger’s window. On sale. I asked about it and you were right, picking up such ammunition would be a chore. The one Heger has for sale is converted to take brass .40-25 rounds now. I never asked about that shotgun backup. I lost interest as soon as they said I had to send so far for the special pistol rounds.”
Longarm was grateful for the chaw of marble cake in his mouth. For by the time he’d rinsed it down he saw there was no call to go into how a small-town gunsmith in remote parts had come by such an unusual gun. Horst Heger would know better than anyone, and it might be just as well if nobody else got to gossiping about it.
He made more small talk about the rising beef prices that year, quietly satisfied himself the Lazy B riders weren’t likely to bother either their wheat-growing or corn-growing neighbors in the immediate future, and allowed he’d love to stay but he had to get it on down the road.
Iona MacSorley announced she was riding into town with him. One got the impression she never asked anyone’s permission to do anything. Her gnomish father seemed to think it was a grand notion. Longarm had no right to forbid a grown woman the use of a public right-of-way to most anywhere she might want to follow it. So in no time at all she’d turned the coffee tray and crumbs over to the household help, and the two of them were cutting across the short grass at an angle because the gal said it would be shorter and she didn’t want to watch anyone skinning out Old Reb in any case. He’d already noticed, mounting up in the dooryard, how that dead dog had sort of evaporated into thin air. You had to sort of keep your eye on things if you expected them to be there the next time you looked.
Chapter 9
The settlement of Sappa Crossing was still about where he’d been expecting it, off to their southeast as they rode over the last of the Lazy B rises. As they angled down the long slope to the nearly dry creek bed, Longarm saw nobody had planted wheat on that sunnier slope facing into the hotter summer winds from the south. But the ever westward trend of the sodbuster was only getting started. So he asked the cow gal riding to his right what her daddy, or athair, meant to do when newcomers filed on his side of Sappa Creek, as was inevitable as death and taxes.
The stockman’s spoiled child seemed sincerely puzzled by such a question. She said, “They can’t. We graze all the open range between the Sappa and the south divide of the Cedar.”
Longarm nodded but said, “On public land, save for the few acres you hold lawful title to. Right now the land office would rather see longhorns than buffalo and buffalo-eating Indians out this way. But the Homestead Act of ‘62 was meant to make the West even more taxpaying. So we’re only talking a question of time.”
She shook her head stubbornly and insisted, “We can’t afford to let anyone crowd us closer. Athair was very understanding about those corn and barley growers to the north, and as you see, those Anabaptists down yonder know better than to plant winter wheat where you might get a warm sunny day in January. Nobody but a grasshopper-loving fool would claim any more of our natural duthas. Anyone can see it’s marginal short-grass range above the high-water mark!”
To which Longarm could only morosely reply, “If fools were not allowed to file homestead claims, you wouldn’t see half as many new wire and windmills out this way. There’s already been ugliness in other parts where folks following different traditions move on to recently vacated Indian lands. My job would be easier if everyone headed out this way from all over creation agreed the laws of These United States were the only ones that counted.”
She repeated, in a more American way, what her father had taught her about water, fire, swords, and such. It seemed tough to argue a lick of sense into anyone who considered Arapaho-Cheyenne home range a Hebredian duthas, to be held against all comers by some sort of half-ass highland clan. Longarm had read enough history books from that library to know how such old boys had made out against Redcoats and cannon under that prissy Prince Charlie just before the way more important French and Indian War on this side of the main ocean. But while he could have told her about all that, he knew she didn’t want to be told, so he didn’t tell her.
As they were fording the shallow braided creek to the west of the town—you could really cross the Sappa most anywhere—Longarm’s mind was naturally on more important matters. So he had to jerk his attention back to the perky little brunette when she suddenly announced she took a bath every Saturday night and rinsed her hair with larkspur lotion once a month whether she’d felt any nits in her hair or not.