Longarm turned in the ringing sudden silence to see another form, that of the missing corner conversationalist, oozing blood into the sawdust as he sprawled facedown between Longarm and the bar. Martin Link said, “He must have been in the crapper. It was Trooper here who got him as he was throwing down on your spine!”
Chapter 12
The English-speaking county board was disposed to let a Mennonite community handle as much as it could on its own, and as was often the case in remote parts, big froggies in the little puddle tended to wear extra hats. The only local member of the Kansas Bar Association served as the Sappa Crossing justice of the peace, the vet doubled in brass as deputy coroner, and the town’s only banker could produce an undersheriff’s badge the county had given him if he had to.
It still took almost until supper time to tidy up the shootout at the Gansblumchen.
Close to a dozen witnesses, from Zimmermann the manager to the town drunk, agreed on all but the petty details. They’d seen Longarm come in one back door, followed shortly thereafter from another back door by the older of the two cadavers over at Zuber’s hardware and casket shop. Everyone agreed the one covering Longarm’s back had been the first to slap leather and that Trooper O’Donnel had only shot him in the back as he was fixing to do the same to a federal lawman. They seemed more confused about the details after that. Folks usually were after they’d witnessed a gunfight. For the real thing was usually over a lot sooner than it took to describe it.
Gents who thought slow enough to describe a gunfight usually lost.
But nobody had call to doubt Longarm’s version, since he’d been on that side of all that gunsmoke. They took the word of a well-known lawman and the wanted flyers in Werner Sattler’s office that the dead men had been well known as well. Tiny Tim Breen and Slick Dawson, the one who’d drawn first behind Longarm’s back, had been wanted on bank robbery, murder, and horse-stealing charges in lots of places. So the only mystery was just how they fit in with Fingers Fawcett and old Juicy Joe, who were still alive and well and full of beans.
Brought to the hearing from their patent cell out back, both known safe-and-loft men denied they’d ever laid eyes on either of the dead crooks. Moreover, they could both produce prison release papers, and defied anyone to prove they’d stolen an apple off a cart since they’d served their debts to society and been turned loose.
One of Sattler’s other deputies had meanwhile found the washerwoman down by the creek who’d been providing room, board, and perhaps other services to the two dead men as they waited, they said, for some pals to ride up from Dodge. She stridently denied, in High Dutch, knowing either Fingers or Juicy Joe. She said she hadn’t been paying attention to the ponies her paying guests had quartered out back with her mule. So far, the town law had only found two saddles to go with the four poorly cared-for mounts. Fingers and Juicy Joe were sure they’d last seen their own saddled ponies at the municipal corral, and threatened to sue for their full value if the infernal Dutchmen had lost them.
The mostly Mennonite town council cum coroner’s subpanel were more worried about that than Longarm. The experienced lawman and the one paid-up lawyer in the bunch agreed they could hold the rascals for a full seventy-two hours on suspicion alone without bending the Bill of Rights too badly. Meanwhile, it might be a good idea to get someone from the county seat to verify the two survivors had been at least somewhere near that bank over yonder around the time it had been robbed.
Stepping outside with his Winchester cradled in the late afternoon glare from the west, Longarm found himself in the company of Miss Iona MacSorley, who said she’d been waiting and waiting at that stuffy old tea-room.
Longarm assured her, “I wasn’t aiming to be rude. Your hands and me got sidetracked.”
She said, “I know. Athair will be so proud of them. I heard some of it inside once I’d been told what all the fuss up this way was about. What are we to do if nobody can prove those meanies robbed that bank at the county seat a spell back?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Let ‘em go. Nothing else we can do if we can’t prove more than suspicion after seventy-two hours. It happens that way a heap. By definition, a sneaky crook leaves as few signs as he can. The two that were killed this afternoon were known to be gunslicks. They’d likely been recruited as backup. The two we have on ice are experts at opening safes, and nobody was watching when they cracked that bank safe in the dead of night. What was it you wanted to see me about, Miss Iona?”
She said, “I heard somebody took a shot at you earlier. I was going to suggest you come back to the Lazy B with me tonight, where you’d be safer. But I guess you got the ones who were after you, right?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Mebbe.” He had no call to voice all his suspicions to anyone before he had more answers. So he didn’t. He said he meant to sleep out on the prairie after dark, seeing he could eat in town and needed neither a night fire nor more than a ground tarp in such dry summer weather.
Iona glanced at the sky to their west and said, “It’s up to you. But we’re fixing to have a glorious sunset, and I think I heard thunder in the distance earlier.”
He said, “I noticed it’s gotten cloudier. But those few clouds to the west were starting from scratch against sunny blue, and I suspect those Ruggles sisters have been setting off more dynamite to the north. Those corn fields they’ve been paid to rain on ain’t more than a dozen miles by crow, and sound flies as straight across the sky.”
She insisted he had a standing offer covering room and board at her cow spread as she untethered her white pony and let him boost her up to her sidesaddle. She held her head sort of flouncy as she rode off down the street without looking back. He’d noticed she was used to having her own way. He wondered if that was all she found exciting about him.
He cut across the wagon ruts to a corner grocery and bought a bag of staples that would keep until old Helga got around to preparing them. He’d noticed that kitchen was getting sort of sour-smelling since the missing gunsmith’s icebox had gone dry. He knew Dutch folks, high and low, favored sauerkraut and pickled everything else because it tended to keep without ice or smoke. So he hoped she wouldn’t be too disgusted by canned pork and beans, bully beef, sardines, and plain old potatoes and onions in season.
She wasn’t. When he marched in the back door to plant the big bag of vittles on the table she looked like she was fixing to cry. She said she’d be sore as hell if he didn’t have supper with her, and then she did get teary-eyed when she read some of the labels and figured out what they meant in her own lingo.
Then she said something even more cheerful. She told him her own quarters were over Heger’s carriage house out back. He’d let her move in when she’d gone to work for him. Longarm wasn’t as sure it made up for not paying her any wages worth mentioning. Helga’s reason for making supper on the far side of the backyard became clearer once they’d gone that far with the vittles and he’d noticed how much better things smelled.
Helga said her boss had ridden off somewhere with his one pony and two-wheel shay. So it came as no surprise that a certain amount of musty fodder and horseshit lingered in the air downstairs. Up in the converted hayloft it smelled much more like a lady’s well-kept quarters. She’d spread lavender water and fresh-picked wildflowers about, but you could still smell an undercurrent of lye soap and elbow grease. She’d told him she hadn’t much liked her earlier job cleaning house for another gal. But it probably felt different cleaning just as thoroughly for yourself. As she sat him on a cot to bustle with the grub across the spacious single room, he set his hat and Winchester aside and asked if she’d heard the one about Abe Lincoln’s boots.