Red Robin scowled at them and declared, “That’ll be the day, Custis Long! You know very well I was playing ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands,’ or at least that was the request I was aiming for.”
Longarm laughed and said, “I stand corrected. Maybe those alienists who study dreams and such over in Vienna Town are on to something when they say our memories play funny tricks on us. Nobody in these parts seems to be missing no heart in no highlands. It’s a wonder I didn’t come up with ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas.’”
One of the townsmen who’d seemed to be holding a lot in since witnessing the whole thing came forward to address the local lawmen. “I’ve seen that one at your feet around town before,” he said. “Him and the taller one who went through the window just now hung around the railroad stop and Western Union a lot.”
One of the deputies had gone outside for a closer look at the big one sprawled amid busted glass on the sun-bleached plank walk. He came back in to report, “I think I recognize the one out front. Rode for one of the Flint Hills spreads over by Minnipeta Junction. Went into business for himself and wound up in Leavenworth for running the brands on some army stock. But it looks like he’s dyed his natural red hair brown!”
Longarm exchanged thoughtful glances with Hard Pan Parsons and asked if the name Buster Crabtree meant anything.
The local deputy said he wasn’t sure. Another concerned citizen of Florence swallowed, sighed, and rose from his seat at a corner table to declare, “His name was Melvin, and they called him Buster if they knew what was good for them. Old Jed is right about him hanging around the telegraph office the last few days. Him and that younger jasper. They seemed to be pals, and anxious about something. I can’t say I ever heard Buster Crabtree mention his young pal by name. But I remember that one riding into town, about a week ago, dressed more like a cowhand and coming from the southeast aboard a spent pony.”
“What sort of a pony?” asked Longarm, soberly.
The man replied, “Cordovan stud. Nice-looking mount with Morgan lines. But from the way he’d been pushing it, I don’t think he cared.”
Longarm and the town constable exchanged glances again. Hard Pan Parsons dryly remarked, “We’d about agreed the one who waylaid Rose Cassidy out on the open range rode her pony into town and abandoned it. But where’s the pony he was riding when he headed poor Rose off at that draw?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Let’s eat this apple one bite at a time. Musical saddles is less of a puzzle than who did what to whom for what reason. I know this is your town. But if I was in full charge I’d want both bodies over to your deputy coroner for some serious examining. You do have a deputy coroner here in Florence, don’t you?”
Hard Pan said, “Sure. The boss coroner’s up to the county seat at Marion, but Doc Hobart, our undertaker and cabinetmaker, does a fair job with death certificates. Are you worried about what killed these poor boys, Deputy Long?”
Longarm said, “I’d like to know them both better. It’s surprising how laundry marks, old scars, tattoos, and such can tell you more than anything an outlaw might be packing in a wallet for public consumption.”
Red Robin’s boss, the night manager, horned in to suggest they all take their dead pals somewhere else so the Sunflower could get back to its more usual business.
Hard Pan Parsons deputized some locals, whether they wanted to help or not, and it wasn’t long before Red Robin was playing a Stephen Foster tune Stephen Foster might not have recognized while the losers, one winner, and one survivor were on their way to Doc Hobart’s cabinet shop cum undertaking parlor.
Longarm made Johnny Behind the Deuce tag along so he could keep an eye on him, despite his protests that he’d never laid eyes on the dead men until shortly before they’d died.
Johnny Behind the Deuce confided to Hard Pan Parsons, “You should have been there. One minute the short one says something about my old pal Longarm knowing something. The next minute the two of them lay dead as doornails. Don’t never mess with my pal Longarm!”
Doc Hobart had been sanding pine shelving just before they showed up with other business for him. So he looked like a sawdust-covered Santa Claus in a hickory shirt and bib overalls. He said he felt no call to change outfits just to work on meat instead of wood. So they carried the bodies down to his cool cellar and laid them side by side on planking across sawhorses under a coal-oil lamp with a big white reflecting shade.
Doc Hobart handed the dead men’s duds over for inspection as he cut the bodies out of them with a murderous-looking pair of pinking shears.
Longarm didn’t ask why the deputy coroner wanted all the cuts he’d made himself to have distinctive zigzag edges. There were no stab or slash cuts in the blood-and crud-stained duds. The soft lead slugs had stayed in the bodies after making small round bullet holes about where Longarm had been aiming. Both billfolds recovered held modest amounts of cash and the usual library cards, voter registrations, and such that an owlhoot rider tended to accumulate along the way. Since everyone there knew the bigger corpse was that of Buster Crabtree instead of Buster Jones, it hardly seemed likely the shrimp stretched out naked next to him could have been John Brown.
The small dapper stranger with the pimp mustache looked even smaller with his duds off. He could have passed for a boy in his teens if he hadn’t had so much body hair to go with his sort of manly privates.
Doc Hobart declared it was his professed opinion that both men had died of gunshot wounds to the upper body, and added that the embalming would be easier if they just took his word on that.
Before anyone could answer, Red Robin barged down the cellar stairs, asking for Longarm in a worried tone. Longarm said, “Don’t come any closer, Miss Red Robin! These dead boys ain’t got any pants on!” Red Robin said she didn’t care, and added, “Waco McCord is over in the Sunflower armed, drunk, and dangerous, looking for the man who gunned his old pal Buster Crabtree. When some fool told him it was you, Waco said mean things about your mother and allowed he knew your face and meant to shoot you on sight!”
Chapter 18
Hard Pan Parsons said the best way to capture Waco McCord alive involved one deputy distracting him and another circling behind him with a throw rope, after Waco had been given time to get good and drunk.
Longarm had a better idea. Smiling fondly at his old pal Johnny Behind the Deuce, Longarm said, “It’s been my experience that men who like to talk about a fight ahead of time are sort of hoping to be talked out of it. In any case, I didn’t know Waco was in that tight with old Buster Crabtree yonder, and I’d rather talk to him whilst he ain’t totally out of his head.”
The others there tried to talk him out of it. But Longarm soothed the town law by allowing it would be all right to arrest old Waco if he insisted on a fight and won.
Johnny Behind the Deuce said he had a five spot saying an unusual event such as that wasn’t about to take place. So in the end Longarm was alone when he stepped through the bat-wings of the Sunflower and calmly told the one man standing with his back to the whole vacated bar, “You owe me ten dollars, Waco.”
Waco McCord stared owlishly at Longarm, gun hand hovering near the grips of his own six-gun, and replied in a voice of confusion, “Don’t you go changing the subject, Longarm! They say you just gunned my old pal Buster Crabtree, and I mean to clean your plow! So fill your fist and let’s get to it!”
“That’s a mighty low way to avoid a debt of honor,” Longarm insisted, raising his voice lest anyone still there miss a word as he went on. “A man who’d let a pal pay his fine, then gun him so he wouldn’t ever have to pay him back, would likely sell you his wife’s ass for drinking money!”