The barkeep assured Longarm he had no intention of crossing anyone who shot so good. So Longarm went back outside to watch them load the other body in the wagon. He told them the one inside was personal property. They said they didn’t care, since it saved space in an already overcrowded city plot. As the wagon rolled away, Longarm saw Sergeant Nolan crossing Larimer to join him. He said, “I know, I know, I said I’d fill out all the damned papers for Denver, damn it.”
Nolan said, “That can wait. That ain’t what I come looking to tell you. Your Black Jack Slade has struck again and, since this time it’s outside the city limits, the captain says to tell you the crazy little owlhoot is all Uncle Sam’s. For he just shot up an army post, way to the northeast, and it was a well known fact he disliked the army even before he gunned them military police last night.”
Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, “Damn, I thought that penny dreadful left something out. By any chance did the more recent Black Jack Slade raise all this hell anywhere near Fort Halleck on the old Overland Trail?”
“He didn’t shoot up anything near Fort Halleck,” Nolan said. “He was right on the post when he tore into the canteen, to demand a drink, and then shot up a couple of troopers and all the lights, when they refused him service. How did you know it was Fort Halleck, though?”
Longarm said, “I just remembered. The original Black Jack had to run for Montana after he shot up Fort Halleck in Sixty-one. That wasn’t heroic enough to put in a story trying to make a trigger-happy killer look sensible, but it happened anyway.”
“Well, history sure seems to be repeating itself of late, don’t you think?” Nolan said.
Longarm said, “I don’t think. I know. That crazy young owlhoot is following in the footsteps of his idol, guns and all!”
CHAPTER 5
“I heard. Why are you Still here in Denver?” asked Marshal Vail as his calmer wife showed Longarm into the sitting room of their residence atop Capital Hill.
Longarm noted the yellow telegram on the lamp table next to Vail’s easy chair. “That’s what I came to clear with you. I just had to shoot Texas Teddy Morrison. That didn’t take half as long as all the fool paperwork at Police headquarters. They say they don’t blame me for swatting such a fly, but that I can’t leave town until after the coroner’s jury clears me.”
Vail said, “Sure you can. Texas Teddy had a Kansas warrant out on him, and never should have come to Colorado in the first place. I get my hair cut in the same barbershop as the coroner, and he ain’t all that stupid. Did you give them a deposition stating all you care to know about Texas Teddy’s demise?”
Longarm said, “I did. In triplicate. All three copies signed and witnessed.”
“There you go,” Vail said. “I’ll chip in my own statement under a federal letterhead, saying I sent you out in the field on more serious business, and that ought to do ‘em. I see you just missed the last northbound this side of sunrise. So why don’t you just trot on down the avenue and ask that widow woman you sleep with to set her alarm for you?”
Mrs. Vail, who knew the lady in question socially, and didn’t enjoy gossip as much as her husband did, gasped in dismay and left the room. Longarm sat down across from Vail and said, “That was spiteful, Billy. Do I tell you who to sleep with?”
Vail sighed. “There was a time, but lately it hardly seems worth all the suspense. I don’t know if I’m getting old or getting smart. But had I known that shapesome lass just down the way felt so lonely I might have beat you to her.”
Longarm got out a smoke. “Can we stop dreaming and get back to another idjet’s dream world? I’m going to need extra expenses on this job, if we’re in a race with the War Department. I can’t ask for the loan of an army mount at Fort Halleck if old Colonel Walthers is mad at us.”
Vail nodded. “Get a livery nag at Julesburg when your train stops there and we’ll wire the money if the price sounds right. You’ll do better owning the horse instead of hiring it if you mean to follow the Overland Trail. As I recall, it stretched from Council Bluffs to Sacramento in its day.”
“With side branches,” Longarm agreed, “but I doubt even a lunatic would be out to haunt all of it. The kid’s fixation on Black Jack Slade ought to confine his sleepwalking to the parts his hero raised hell on. But you’re right about my needing a bought and paid for mount and maybe a pack animal. We are discussing anywhere between Julesburg and Salt Lake, with a side trip up into the Montana mining country, where the Overland stage never went but Black Jack did.”
Vail nodded but said, “I know he got lynched in Virginia City because I read about it at the time. I don’t recall him getting in trouble as far west as Utah, though.”
“That’s where he’s buried, on paper,” Longarm said. “I mean to look into that some more if ever I can find an account that makes sense. Who do you reckon would have all the properly kept records on that old case on file, Billy?”
Vail said flatly, “Nobody. Conditions out this way was more casual before the War. I was riding with the Rangers at the time. We was sort of overworked, so we only wrote down serious stuff, like another Comanche rising. I doubt the vigilance committee that strung Black Jack Slade up paid half as much attention as us Rangers to pencil pushing. As to other papers out on him at the time he done the rope dance, they’d be filed hither and yon along the wake of his wanderings. Sedgwick County might have records of his more dastardly doings in Julesburg. He had to go through Wyoming to wind up dead in Montana and he always made trouble everywhere he stopped for a drink. I still can’t see why he had to go to Utah afterwards.”
Longarm said, “Neither can I. The version I just read says that after he was cut down his long-suffering wife, Virginia, had him salted and boxed so’s she could carry him home to Carlyle, Illinois, with his kin. Only it was summer, and they hadn’t used near enough salt. So by the time they got to Salt Lake he just had to be buried, sudden, and the Latter-Day Saints were kind enough to provide a plot.”
Vail frowned and said, “Something’s rotten in Denmark, and I don’t mean that licorice whip you just lit. Don’t it strike you odd that a man lynched in Virginia City would have a wife named Virginia dumb enough to bury him in Utah on the way to Illinois from Montana?”
“I’ve noticed a lot of penny dreadful writers do get their geography a mite mixed up. I reckon the gent who had to fluff out the bare-bones account enough to fill all them pages didn’t know Montana lies northeast, not west, of Salt Lake City, and he had to give Slade’s wife some damn name. I can check out a friendly Mormon elder I know. They couldn’t have buried a Gentile in any of their cemeteries without noticing, and they’re great ones for keeping records.”
Vail reached for a defensive cigar in his own humidor and bit off the end before he growled, “In that case, why are we mulling over such petty details? Even if the original Black Jack could still be alive, he’d be a grown man about my age, not a sassy little runt in his early twenties.”
Longarm explained, “Black Jack Junior, as I feel it handy to think of him, don’t seem to know that. He’s been acting as if he thinks he’s the real thing and, if he read how mysterious the final disposition of any body at all seem to be, it could stand to reason, in his unreasonable mind, that Black Jack, meaning him, somehow survived that lynching, and so now he’s back, see?”
Vail lit his cigar before he shook out the match. “No, I don’t. Vigilante hangings tended to be crude, but the result was usually fatal, anyhow.”