Blue Tooth would have liked it, but Longarm didn't order them any more beer after that colored gent came for the schooners around Longarm's usual quitting time. He told
them they weren't fixing to serve supper at the usual time because the train would be rolling into Denver, at the end of the line, about the time when most of the folks would be starting their main entree. Longarm tipped him another nickel and told him there was no call to worry further about their comforts.
As if even feeble minds could run in the same channels. Tanner suddenly blurted out, "I can't believe we're getting there this soon! I mean they told me it would take till sundown, and I was sort of anxious to savor as much more of the Lord's Good Earth as I could before they shut my eyes on me forever, but there's so much of it left out yonder for a man to see, and this fool train is going so blamed/<35/!"
Longarm lit two cheroots and handed one across to Tanner as he soberly said, "I know. I'm sorry this last trip you'd get to take had to be so sun-bleached and drab, old son, but they weren't holding you for us near Niagara Falls or the Painted Desert."
Tanner almost sobbed, "I'd like to see a lot more of all that swell shortgrass and that clear blue sky out yonder! I swear I'd take it in the ass and swallow the contents of a whole spittoon for just one day, one lousy day, walking free across all that dry and dusty downright beautiful open range!"
Longarm didn't doubt him. It would have been needlessly cruel to point out it had been the fool's own grand design to forsake a life on the open range as a poor but honest rider for the shorter excitement of the owlhoot trail. He knew Tanner had doubtless come to that very same conclusion by now.
So they smoked and jawed some more, with Longarm steering the conversation to such cheerful topics as the poor cuss knew about, until sure enough, as the range outside was starting to roll ever more and turn ever more golden in the gloaming light, they began to pass low-slung home spreads, herds of beef gathered about the tanks of sunflower windmills for their bedtime waterings and so forth. Tanner
said it had always made him feel sort of sad when the sun was setting, even when he had no reason. He said it got fcir worse when a man commenced to count how many sunsets he might ever see. When he asked Longarm how many days it usually took them to hang a man where they were going, Longarm said he didn't know and then, when pressed, made a guess at six weeks or so. They'd told him, growing up in West-by-God-Virginia, that a white lie was seldom entered in Saint Peter's book against a sinner.
So it was almost dark, that tricky twilight Longarm didn't like for gunfighting, when they rolled at last into Denver. He wasn't expecting anyone to be laying for him with a gun at the Union Depot, though. So he just told Blue Tooth to wait a spell as he got down his McClellan, explaining it was less awkward to get a prisoner and heavy-laden saddle off a train after most of the others had gotten off.
Blue Tooth Tanner said he was in no hurry. So they finished a brace of cheroots they'd been smoking before Longarm decided they might as well get cracking.
It worked. There was nobody in the corridor and nobody got in their way as Longarm led Tanner off, handcuffed to his own left wrist with the McClellan braced on his right hip. Longarm wasn't too pleased to see that nobody from his department seemed to be there to meet them. He muttered, "That'll learn me to roll into town at supper time. Let's drift down to the end of this platform and cut the smart way out of here, old son. Every fool in Creation will be out front by the carriage stands, cluttering the walk, and we don't need a ride, as far as we have to go."
Blue Tooth tagged along, gazing about at surroundings he found as unfamiliar as a kid at a county fair, while Longarm peered ahead through the tricky light for the baggage-way through dark brick walls that would shortcut them out to Wynkoop Street. So it was Blue Tooth, not Longarm, who suddenly gasped, "Jesus! Down!" and dragged Longarm after him to the cement as a gun muzzle flamed from the blackness to their left to fill the gloomy train shed with
roaring echoes and spanging lead!
Longarm heaved the heavy saddle between their prone forms and the source of all that gunfire, for all the good even thick saddle leather might do, as he somehow got his own gun out from between his left hip and Tanner's right one. Then he was firing back at a vicious fool who insisted on blazing round after round from the same stand, inky black or not, until, sure enough, they heard the murderous asshole wail, "Oh, Mamma, your boy's been hurt real bad!"
Even fools who fired more than once from the same stand could fib to a foeman. So Longarm lobbed another couple of rounds into that voice, closer to his own level, and heard it wail, "Oh, no! Don't punish me no more and I'll be good!"
A more familiar voice called out behind Longarm, claiming to be Sergeant Nolan of the Denver P.D. and demanding to know what all that noise was about.
Longarm called back, "I wish I knew, Nolan. I'd be Long, out of Justice, pinned down over here with a prisoner I just got off that Burlington train with. I might have hit our surly welcoming committee, but you never know, so keep your head down till we can get us some light on the subject!"
Nolan didn't work for Longarm, so once he'd issued orders of his own he joined the two of them on the cement behind the saddle, saying, "I sent my boys to fetch some bull's-eye lanterns. Do you reckon they were out to free this other bastard here?"
Longarm shook his head and replied, 'Tanner ain't exactly what I'd call a bastard, Sarge. He's a convicted killer, I'll allow, but he just now saved my bacon by spotting an ambush I was too dumb to see."
Nolan said in that case he'd shake with a man who'd just saved the man he owed his own stripes to. Longarm said he'd rather Nolan keep an eye on Tanner as he moved in on that other shootist. So Nolan said he'd be proud to, and
after some belly-down awkwardness Longarm had himself uncuffed. He reloaded and holstered his side arm, and slipped his sixteen-shot Winchester from its saddle boot to do some serious hunting.
He rolled well clear of their meager cover in dead silence, and rose as quietly to cross the tracks and platform beyond in a low running crouch. He saw why nobody was shooting at him when he got to the blurred form sprawled on the cinders of the track bed beyond. There was just enough light to make out the checked vest. The big white hat was upside down a couple of cross-ties away. Longarm dropped down there with him and kicked that Walker Conversion clean out of sight before, his Winchester across his own thighs, he said not unkindly, "I was wondering how come you seemed to be more scared than hurt by those last pistol rounds. Where did I hull you before you dropped, and whatever possessed a grown man to behave so foolish?"
"He shamed me, Mamma," the bully sort of croaked, adding in an even softer gurgle, "The gal was too stuck up to play with me, like that Sally Anne who sneered at us and wouldn't invite me to her birthday doings that time. I was fixing to show her, like I showed that Sally Anne out back in our alley, only this bigger boy homed in and hit me, right in front of Sally Anne!"
Longarm sensed light and movement and got up to see a Denver copper badge coming their way with a bull's-eye lantern. Longarm directed the other lawman to shine the wan beam on the wealthy cattle baron who'd been sent back to what sounded like a sort of deprived childhood. They both saw the poor bastard would never be worried about old age. The copper badge whistled softly and declared, "Smack through his rib cage, twice. Lord only knows how come he's still breathing. Who was he, Longarm?"
The dying man at their feet declared, "My mamma may take in washing since my daddy fell off in that stampede, but someday I'll be big as any of you and then I'll show you!"