So Longarm, never having fought with a claymore all that much, got into a sort of baseball batting stance with the two-handed weapon as the smaller man with the lighter sword dropped into a more regular saber fighting stance with the tip of his own chosen weapon swaying like a steel cobra between them.
As Longarm stood his ground like a lethal baseball player, the renegade officer nodded thoughtfully and decided, “He’s not quite so dumb as he looks. I am naturally used to dealing with right-handed swordsman. I now have to consider how one takes on a left-handed lumberjack! That clumsy claymore only has to get in one solid blow and you might not stand so solidly afterwards!”
From his post near the front door Link said, “Left, right, im Scheissenhaus already! Shoot him and let’s be done with him! We don’t have time to play games here!”
The sadistic Prussian purred, “But we do! Nobody else can enter without permission of the foreman, and you haven’t quit just yet. How are we doing with that Chinaman in the kitchen, Werner?”
Sattler replied, “He’s cooking supper and keeping his mouth shut if he knows what’s good for him. But I think Martin’s right about our riding!”
Wolf Ritter didn’t answer. He lunged at Longarm instead. Longarm had figured he might. So when the experienced but formal swordsman bored in with a formally flashing feint and slash, Longarm whirled completely around to his left, to come out of his spin with that monstrous Highland sword gripped right-handed for a normal attempt at a home run, just as Ritter’s broadsword whistled through the space Longarm had occupied at the beginning of his diagonal slash.
The startled Prussian saw what had to happen next and tried to recover and parry, just a tad too late to really help, when a bigger man had already launched his own horizontal swing with a heavy three-foot meat chopper!
It felt to Longarm as if he was busting glass and chopping through a head of cabbage as the claymore in his hands snapped Ritter’s blade to send flashing steel in one direction and Ritter’s dyed head in the other!
Iona screamed like a banshee as the headless Prussian stood there spouting gore for almost a full second before the knees buckled. Then everyone was staring slack-jawed at the big bloody claymore Longarm had swirled up to thud into and hang from the ceiling rafters. That gave Longarm another instant to whip out his double derringer and fire it twice. Once was enough to part Werner Sattler from his shotgun. Then Martin Link was screaming loud at Iona, gutshot, flopping about on the floor while Longarm dove headfirst at the sofa, grabbing his six-gun as he rolled over the back and landed back on his feet in better shape to take charge again.
As Longarm covered the gutshot Link, the ramrod wailed, “I give! I give! For God’s sake don’t shoot me again!”
Longarm strode closer to kick Link’s fallen six-gun clear across the room while, over in the kitchen doorway, the Chinese cook seemed to be softening Werner Sattler’s remains with a rolling pin.
Longarm told him to cut that out, and asked old MacSorley if he had any hands who spoke more Gaelic than High Dutch. When the old Scotchman allowed he did, Longarm said he wanted guards posted all about and a rider sent to town to fetch the undersheriff, seeing the town law of Sappa Crossing had turned out so crooked.
MacSorley tore off to carry out Longarm’s orders. Iona demanded, “Why make such a mess in here when you had that gun on you all the time?”
Longarm said, “No way to take out three armed men with two bullets. Can’t you tally bang and bang?”
Then he hunkered down by the gutshot Link and declared, neither cruel nor mushy, “You’re done for, Link. I don’t like your color at all.”
“You don’t like it?” croaked the dying ramrod with such a wan smile that Longarm knew he’d worked his way past agony to numb acceptance.
Shaking the dying man’s shoulder, Longarm said, “I can see they notify your kin and send you home in a lead-lined coffin, or we can feed you to the worms in potter’s field. A lot depends on how much you’d care to clear up for my official report.”
Link sighed and said, “I told them they were being too cute. But Wolfgang had to pile red herring on red herring until it’s a wonder they didn’t send in the U.S. Cavalry!”
Iona came over to complain, “Custis, that head you stood over in that corner—it’s making faces at me, as if it’s still alive!”
Longarm said, “It ain’t. Marty here was fixing to tell us what in blue blazes that sneaky Wolf Ritter thought he was up to. Ain’t that so, Marty?”
The dying man croaked, “Mama, bist du es?” as the girl insisted, “Custis, that head in the corner just winked at me!”
Longarm said, “Maybe it admires you. Get over here and take your dying boy’s hand, Mama. I have to write down every word we can get out of him in English.”
So the dying Martin Link surprised them both a mite as he told his mama how he’d gotten his fool self in this fix. Iona was smart enough, or imperious enough, to reply in English each time he lapsed into the lingo of his childhood. Some of it surprised Longarm a lot. At the end he wound up nodding soberly at that head in the corner and telling it, “You’d have pulled it off if you hadn’t been so greedy and mean. But nobody would have been after you if you hadn’t been greedy and mean to begin with. So I reckon it all came out inevitably in the end.”
Chapter 19
It was a good thing the night was warm and Mennonites drank in moderation. The crowd that rode out from Sappa Crossing had to be assembled in the dooryard, and old MacSorley barely had enough of that malt whiskey to go around.
The deputy coroner presided from the front veranda at a table the Lazy B hands had toted outside. Most everyone else got to stand or hunker wherever they could find the space.
Old MacSorley, his daughter, and the Chinese cook, in that order, had much the same tales to tell and didn’t take long. But when they got to Longarm the deputy coroner declared, “I sure hope you’ll do more for us than the previous witnesses, Deputy Long. For now one can picture the blood and slaughter inside this house this evening, but what led up to such a gory ending?”
Longarm stood before the panel with one foot on a veranda step and a fresh cheroot in hand so he could speak clearly as he began. “Once upon a time there was this hot-tempered Prussian officer I’d as soon call Wolf Ritter because that’s what’s on most of the wanted flyers. He was such a mean cuss he even shocked the Prussian Army, and they were fixing to court-martial him because he couldn’t get it through his head they wanted him to kill Frenchmen, not fellow officers. They don’t lock up officers and gentlemen as they await a court-martial, so Ritter just ran for it. Made it to America and proceeded to pick fights for pleasure and rob folks for eating money.”
Kurt Morgenstern volunteered, “Then Horst Heger recognized him when he came to Sappa Crossing, ja?”
Longarm said, “Nein. Forget about Horst Heger till I get to him, and don’t horn in unless you want this to be even more confusing.”
He took a drag on his cheroot to make sure they were listening to him tight. Then he continued. “Before there was any such trail town as Sappa Crossing, while most of you all were learning the ropes up in Dakota Territory, Wolf Ritter was raising Ned in other parts with two lesser-known partners, a Dutch American kid called Martin Link and a wayward Mennonite you’d later know as Werner Sattler. But Ritter, being so mean and such a show-off, was the only one of the three who wound up wanted by the law by name.”
Almost as if they were singing a duet in harmony, the undersheriff and old MacSorley bayed about the foreman and town marshal being crooks.
Longarm took another drag as, this time, the deputy coroner told them to shut up and let the witness proceed.
Longarm said, “As they doubtless recalled to their chagrin this very evening, pulling off jobs with a partner in crime such as Wolf Ritter tended to be needlessly exciting. And I’ve noticed heaps of owlhoot trail riders weary of the chase after missing many a warm supper or a good night’s sleep in a feather bed without half so many things on one’s mind. So the older Werner Sattler was the first to drop out. Being a Mennonite by birth, if not conviction, he found it easy to drop out of sight up Dakota way as he started to act more law-abiding.”