Longarm said, “Later. After you pay me that ten dollars and help me figure out what’s been going on.”
Waco protested, “I ain’t got your infernal ten dollars. I’ll just have to owe it to you whilst we have it out man to man!”
Longarm firmly insisted, “I can’t let you take advantage of me that way, Waco. You pay up like a man or I flat out refuse to fight you. How would it look if everyone said I shot you over a lousy ten-dollar debt?”
Waco stepped clear of the bar as he replied in the formal tone only the dead drunk can muster, “You presume a lot when you presume you can beat this child in a man-to-man confiscation … constitution … whatever.”
Longarm said, “I’ll drink to that. I know what Miss Medusa Le Mat looks like from our personal confrontation. Neither of the gals we seem to be missing looks too much like her, from the way they both describe. Let’s start at the beginning, with her local recruiting officer out to rustle up more help than she usually feels the need of. She might have heard, the same as me, that the big payoff coming up at the end of the month will be heavily guarded.”
Waco said, “I said I wanted to fight you now, damn it.”
Longarm went on, half to himself, “Buster and her other gunslick were spooked as stock on loco weed this evening. It looks as if they got spooked about Rose Cassidy before it came time to take over her place and leave French Barbara there with spare mounts.”
“I’m fixing to count to ten,” said Waco McCord, swaying like a tree in the wind. “When I get to ten I mean to go for my gun, and you can go for your own or go to hell for all I care!”
Longarm said, “Putting myself in the high-button shoes of that murderously cautious gal with the ten-shooter, I might well be on my way for parts unknown by now. She has to know she didn’t really kill me that time. So she has to know I’ll recognize her on sight, right after nailing at least one of her top guns. If I ain’t clear on that other jasper, Miss Medusa Le Mat has no way of knowing how much either one of them could have told me this evening, as a dying statement or some indiscreet letter or laundry mark on either of ‘em.”
“I’m starting to count now,” declared Waco McCord.
Longarm said, “Go ahead. But what time does that last train come through here after sundown?”
Waco said, “Four, five, ten. The train comes through at ten, I mean, and where was I before you throwed me off my tally?”
Longarm sighed and suggested, “Why not start all over? I’ve plenty of time to meet that night train at the stop just down the way. You don’t mean to pay me back first, eh?”
Waco said, “I’d be proud to, if I had the money. But I don’t, and you see how it has to be, don’t you, Longarm?”
Longarm nodded soberly and stepped clear of the bar, shifting his derringer to his left hand so he could pocket it without tying up his gun hand.
The move was not wasted on Waco, who said, “That was mighty white of you, old son. You had the drop on me all the while, but you’re man enough to fight me fair and for that I do salute you.”
Longarm muttered, “Least I could do, seeing how drunk and foolish you’ve been acting. Ain’t there nothing I can say to change your mulish mind, Tex?”
Waco shook his head, but didn’t answer as he almost got himself killed. But Longarm didn’t go for his .4440 as Waco McCord just closed his eyes to fall asleep, standing up, and fell backwards as straight as a sawed-through pine, hitting the sawdust behind him with an awesome thump and just lying there, out like a snuffed candle.
As Longarm stared down, bemused, there were stirrings of life all around in the Sunflower Saloon.
An old-timer murmured, “Somebody go get the law. I sure thought we were about to see more bloodshed here this evening.”
The barkeep rose from where he’d been hiding all that time to peer over the bar at the unconscious Waco and marvel, “You could have had him, Marshal. You could have blown him away and added an easy notch to your pistol grips!”
To which Longarm replied in a disgusted tone, “I’m only a deputy marshal, and why would any grown man want to whittle on his tailored pistol grips, for Gawd’s sake?”
Chapter 19
Longarm had posted himself behind a lumber pile near the railroad stop with his Winchester. So that was where one of Hard Pan Parsons’s deputies caught up with him.
The deputy said, “Undersheriff Brennan just wired us from Minnipeta Junction. Silent Knight and Lash Flanders drove in around sundown with the dismembered remains of Rose Cassidy. Miss Pat says the killers really made a mess of her with a shotgun and a sharp shovel. Meat buried in damp sand in warm weather don’t keep too well neither.”
Longarm replied, “I’ve noticed. Miss Pat was sure of the identification?”
The deputy said, “I don’t know if she was. Rose Cassidy’s half-wit daughter identified the remains. Carried on some afterwards, according to Miss Pat’s wire. We got the wire over to the jail if you’d like to go over it.”
Longarm said, “It can wait. You were the one who just pointed out Maureen Cassidy carries on sort of silly. But neither she nor that dead woman are going anywhere tonight. I ain’t so sure about the ten-fourteen eastbound that’ll be stopping here to jerk water from your Cottonwood Creek before long.” The deputy volunteered to back Longarm’s play. Longarm let him. It could get tedious, staked out with nobody to talk to after dark.
They talked about this, that, and the other until the night train rolled in from the west to pause with its engine on the trestle across the creek and its rear cars lined up with the platform at one end of the main street.
Nobody got on or off as the engine crew dropped buckets on long ropes off the tender and into the swirling inky current downstream. It took longer than usual to top the tender’s tanks that way. Longarm warned the deputy someone might make a last-minute run for the rear platform as the train was pulling out.
But that never happened. The deputy suggested they’d wiped the gang out or driven them into hiding. That was too obvious to jaw about. So Longarm took his Winchester back to Red Robin’s, waited for Red Robin to get off, and spent a good part of the night saying farewell to a pal who screwed like a mink.
Red Robin didn’t cry, or wake up all the way, when Longarm rolled out of bed early the next morning. He knew that she knew they’d meet again someday, or else they wouldn’t. Red Robin was a vice that was best taken on occasion, if not in moderation.
After a hearty breakfast of fried eggs and hash, Longarm saddled and bridled that borrowed chestnut to head back to the Junction.
It was a crisp sunny morning and the chestnut was feeling its oats after all that rest in the livery corral. So they made good time, and got into the Junction just about the time the pony was getting harder to move and Longarm’s stomach was growling.
Longarm tethered the spent pony in front of the bank, but ducked across the street for a bowl of chili and a slab of mince pie, washed down with two mugs of black coffee.
Then, feeling better, he went into the bank to ask Banker Guthrie some questions he hadn’t known he wanted to last time.
Banker Guthrie said he’d be proud to have his secretary type up a digested list of all the small holdings the bank held mortgages on for a day’s ride all around. He naturally asked Longarm why.
Longarm explained, “Sometimes we get in trouble searching for too complicated a pattern. Sometimes we get in just as much trouble by assuming too simple a pattern.
Getting back to his feet, he continued. “Every time we’ve tried to reconstruct one of Miss Medusa Le Mat’s robberies, we’ve assumed heaps of things we don’t really know for certain. For example, when we’ve found members of her gang shot up, along with the hermits and such who owned some lonesome spread, we’ve assumed that that was all there was to it. They met at an agreed-upon rallying point, their murderous mastermind gunned them, and rode off with the loot, sometimes with and sometimes without a last sucker to fetch, carry, and blur the trail.”