Longarm smiled in some confusion, and assured her he hadn’t been about to tell a lady she’d struck him as unwashed or lousy.
Iona pouted. “I don’t think you’ve been thinking about me at all. You’ve been treating me like a bitty nighneag since first we met. I may be small for a woman grown, but I’m womanly enough where such things matter, and why haven’t you sparked at me even once?”
Longarm chuckled gently and truthfully replied, “It never occurred to me, Miss Iona. I don’t mean you ain’t good enough for me to spark with. It’s just that, like I told you before, I have a heap on my mind and you wouldn’t want to get my hopes up, seeing I won’t be around all that long.”
She blazed, “You are talking to me as if I was a little girl! A woman can tell when a man’s not interested in her as a woman, and I can’t say I like your attitude, you snooty thing!”
He said he was sure she was used to being sparked at. It would have been dirty, to both ladies concerned, if he’d told her why he doubted he could get it up again with a block and tackle after that last dry effort in that friendly Indian. So he just repeated what he’d already told her about more serious stuff, and she suddenly reined in and sobbed, “Och, as an sin thu! Go on about your airy-fairy business, and I’m off to buy some ribbon bows and mayhaps spark with some real men!”
Longarm had no call to argue as she cut away at a sharper angle, knowing the back ways of the trail town ahead much better. Being a stranger to Sappa Crossing, Longarm perforce rode on up to the main street. Aside from not wanting to get turned around in some blind alley, he didn’t want anyone spooking the town law with tales of an armed stranger poking around out back.
As he swung on to that wagon trace where it widened out to become the main street of a dinky trail town, he was mildly surprised, as he’d been the last time, by how natural Mennonites looked.
Unlike some Pennsylvania Dutch sects or even the English-speaking Mormons out Utah way, the Anabaptist farm folks from far-away prairie country seemed to belong out on the American prairies, like the new kinds of wheat and that one big species of tumbleweed they’d introduced from those back steps of Russia.
Even Indians who should have known better seemed to feel those big fat Russian tumbleweeds had always been tumbling around out here, though in fact the biggest native American tumbleweed had now been reduced in rank to “witch grass.”
The soberly dressed folks Longarm passed as he rode in could only be distinguished from ordinary Western rustics by straw hats and chin whiskers on most of the men, and perky white half-bonnets on most of the ladies. The signs along the street were in both English and High Dutch. Longarm knew that a sort of big white barn was their meeting house, and he’d been assured nothing as odd as Holy Rolling went on inside. Hardly anyone would have noticed such a natural-acting religious sect if the Mennonites hadn’t been changing the country between the Mississippi and the Rockies far more, in their own quiet way, than the Mormons had on the far side of the Continental Divide. Longarm had recently read how, at the rate things were going, there’d be more white Americans of High Dutch or Irish descent than any other breed by the turn of this century.
Of course, most of the immigrants quietly flocking in from all parts of that Dutch-speaking hodgepodge Bismarck and his kaiser had only recently hammered together as the Germanic Empire were Lutheran or even Papists. But whether they were outnumbered or not, it was the Mennonite Dutch who’d taught everyone else how to make a good living farming what Pike and Fremont had agreed to call the Great American Desert. That Turkish brand of winter wheat the Mennonites had put on the American market wasn’t just a grain you could grow on buffalo range. It was a superior sort of hard wheat that came out of those big steam-powered mills back East as the finest grade of flour. So when anyone bragged on American apple pie, whether they knew it or not, they were bragging on a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe baked in a crust of Russian-Dutch flour.
A plain American-looking gent with a pewter star pinned to the front of his clean white shirt was regarding Longarm from a doorway with some interest as the dustier federal deputy dismounted in front of the town hall. Longarm had pinned his own badge to the lapel of his old denim jacket as he’d ridden in from the Lazy B with that imperious brunette. He’d found in the past he could save local lawmen harsher words than they could gracefully retract if they knew right off who they might be cussing at. A total stranger of the Anglo-Saxon type wasn’t going to ride into a community such as this without anyone of innocent or guilty intent taking note of his arrival. So in this case a frontal attack seemed as safe as any.
That didn’t mean a lawman on the trail of another stranger to the close-knit community couldn’t zigzag a mite in case Wolf Ritter had made more friends so far than he had. So when the Dutch-sounding town marshal said to call him Werner Sattler, they shook on it and Longarm told him the truth halfways as he tethered the two ponies out front. He said he’d heard an owlhoot rider wanted by the federal government had been reported in this corner of Kansas.
The town law nodded soberly and said, “Wolfgang von Riuerhoff. You’ve missed him by a week.”
“You knew who he was, and where he was, and you never saw fit to let the rest of us in on it?” Longarm demanded with a scowl.
The town law replied with what appeared an easy conscience, “He was gone before anyone told me. Come on inside. I don’t have any bread and salt in my office desk, but we keep schnaps filed under S.”
Longarm followed the town law through that side door of the town hall, and confirmed his memory of schnaps as a strong but smooth brandy to be consumed in moderation while on duty. So he nursed the tumbler Sattler had poured him as they sat on either side of the older lawman’s desk to jaw about wayward Prussians with dueling scars.
The town law explained, “That killer trained by the Prussian Army rode in on a market night. So nobody would have paid any attention to him if he hadn’t spoken Hoch Deutch.”
Longarm started to ask a dumb question. Then he nodded and said, “I follow your drift. A stranger talking English with a Boston accent would attract more attention in a Texas saloon than your average Mex. By the way, you do have saloons here in Sappa Crossing, don’t you?”
The Mennonite lawman nodded, raised his glass, and said, “We are good Christians and Our Lord poured wine at the Last Supper. I wish you other Christians would get over the idea we’re some sort of cult.”
Longarm said, “You won’t be as noticeable a generation or so down the road. Your kids are already talking like everyone else out this way. But we were talking about Wolf Ritter, as he’s more often named on many a wanted flyer.”
Sattler finished his schnaps, poured himself another, and explained, “Our saloon, like some of the other establishments serving the wagon-trace traffic, serves a mostly English-speaking crowd, and as you just pointed out, none of our crowd speaks Hoch Deutch in that guttural Junker accent. People from Stettin or Berlin always sound as if they have sore throats.”
Longarm was in no position to agree or disagree. So he just took another sip of schnaps and Sattler continued. “There’s no law against speaking like a Prussian bully. Fred Zimmermann, at the Ganseblumchen, was the one who brought the mysterious beer drinker to our attention. The bartender’s description did match up with a lot of those wanted posters you just mentioned. But by the time I gathered a few of my part-time deputies and got over there, he’d left.”