Such matters were not for Longarm to adjudicate. He hadn't been riding for the law when Little Crow, or at least his young men, had brought a long simmer to a boil by killing three white men and two white women, the prize for this shootout being less than a full dozen eggs from the homestead they'd hit.
Some said, whites included, that old Tshe-ton Wa-ka-wa Ma-ni, as he said his name in Santee, had tried to head off what he knew was coming, warning his followers they just didn't know what they were getting into. But of course, being a Santee, he had to lead them when they insisted on an all-out war with the Wasichu, lest they get their fool selves killed even faster.
They'd gotten killed soon enough, once an outraged Great White Father showed he wasn't too distracted by the war in the East to do nothing about the blood and slaughter along the Minnesota Valley. Sibley's Minnesota militia were gleefully exterminating Santee, having gained the upper hand after some earlier and mighty frightening reverses, by the time old Pope had made it west with his Union regulars and columns of Galvanized Yankees in time to mop up.
The onionskins failed to say whether Calvert Tyger and his reb pals had lit out before or after Abe Lincoln told the army to take it easy and pardoned all but a tenth of the bunch the army had been fixing to hang. According to the little they had on Israel Bedford, the Union vet and local homesteader who'd cashed that one treasury note in these parts didn't seem connected in any way with Galvanized Yankees, whether they'd deserted in time of war or served with honor and just gone on home to brag on being a vet of both sides.
But Bedford had cashed that bill, not long after a mess of federal employees had been gunned for such ill-gotten gains. So Bedford would be the first one up ahead to scout for sign, discreetly as possible, just in case he turned out to be the one who'd sent that kid to shove a lawman off a train.
It had been Longarm's experience that jaspers with guilty secrets to hide tended to want lawmen headed off before they got close enough to uncover the secrets.
Longarm had no idea, after all this time to study on it, if there was some secret connection between a mad-dog outlaw gang and a sober settler everyone seemed to have down as honest and upright. But that was how come they called such connections secret.
Longarm knew the baggage-smashers he'd tipped in advance would run his McClellan and possibles over to the baggage room of the New Ulm depot for him once they got there. In case his unknown enemies had other secrets planned for him, he ambled back to the rear observation platform and swung over the rail to hit the cross-ties running when the train slowed down on the outskirts of town. He still came close to killing his own fool self for any sons of bitches laying for him around the depot. But he landed in a patch of sunflower and rolled lightly back to his feet, Winchester at port arms, after tripping over a switch point while the train was running fifteen miles an hour.
As long as he was still moving quickly, Longarm sprang across a trackside ditch, crossed the dusty service road on the far side at a dead run, and hunkered down in the shady angle provided by a box elder growing against the plank fence of somebody's backyard.
He wasn't planning on hunkering there any longer than it took to catch his breath and gather his wits a bit. The odds on the smartest crooks in the world knowing where he'd drop off so they could set up an ambush more than a mile from the depot seemed mighty slim. So he doubted the lady staring over the fence at him from under a polka-dot sun-bonnet could have murder in mind. But she did sound determined as she scolded, "Get out of my tulips and explain yourself this very instant, young man!"
Longarm glanced down to confirm he had in fact flattened out a patch of cropped vegetation that might have sprouted as tulips a spell back. He grinned up sheepishly. "I doubt I damaged the bulbs along this fence, ma'am. But I'd be proud to buy you some new ones if you'd name your price. I'm U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, on a government mission and allowed to charge anything within reason to my expense account."
The woman on the far side of the sun-bleached planks sounded doubtful as she replied, "You're likely right about underground bulbs surviving your silly behavior. But would you like to show me some identification? You look like a hobo in need of a shave, I just saw you drop off that passing train, and I could say I was Queen Victoria if nobody asked me to prove it!"
Longarm got to his feet, holding the Winchester muzzle down in his free hand as he got out his billfold and flipped it open with a practiced motion to display his federal badge and personal identification. He gallantly suggested, "Nobody would ever buy a lady as young as yourself for the Widow of Windsor, ma'am."
He hadn't lied. He doubted she could be past fifty, and he could see she'd been a real beauty in her day. She still had most of her teeth, and if the hair peeking out from under that sun-bonnet was a mite streaked with gray, it was still thick and healthy-looking. Gals who shaded their features with sun-bonnets didn't prune up as fast in prairie country. So she looked downright comely when she smiled across the fence at him and said, "Well, I never. You come around to the front and let me coffee and cake you whilst you tell me all about it! Were you chasing somebody when I saw you leap from that speeding train, Custis? I didn't see anyone but you bearing down on me at breakneck speed, but then, I was cultivating my cabbages with this high fence between US."
"I wasn't chasing nobody, ma'am," he said, only hesitating a moment before he added, "I'll surely take you up on your kind offer. For anybody out to chase me round the depot figures to get discouraged when I don't get off that train and they don't see me anywhere downtown for a spell."
That would have roused most anyone's curiosity, and it turned out she was a woman who'd had few men to talk to since she'd wound up a widow three summers back. So he told her more or less why he was on the outskirts of her town, leaving out a few details. It was best to leave a certain amount of guilty knowledge to guilty folk, and far as Longarm knew, nobody in New Ulm was supposed to know about serial numbers one could backtrack to a payroll robbery but the bankers and the local lawmen who'd contacted Billy Vail about that treasury note. With any luck, the crooks who'd run off with them still didn't know the dead paymaster had listed the numbers on those larger notes. For nobody but a total asshole, or an innocent man, would try to spend any paper as hot as that.
His widowed hostess had shucked her sun-bonnet in the shade of her kitchen as she'd sat Longarm at a pine table and rustled some coffee and cake for the both of them. Her comfortably lived-in face looked softer once out of the harsher sunlight, and light brown hair streaked with gray looked sort of nice pinned up atop her fine-boned skull that way. She said the raisin cake she'd baked herself was an old Swedish recipe, and he wasn't surprised, since her name was Ilsa Pedersson nee Syse. She and her late husband had come to America from the Norwegian province of Sweden as kids, before Lincoln's Homestead Act cluttered up these parts with land-hungry Scandinavian folk. So that likely accounted for her natural English, although she confessed she could still talk her own sort of Swedish if push came to shove. She said most of the new American landowners were proud to be American now, and only talked their native languages during old-country festivals and such. She seemed surprised he already knew about Swedish children expecting a lady in a long white nightgown, with candles lit atop her head at Christmas instead of Santa Claus. Ilsa said it had to be fascinating to ride all over the country, meeting all sorts of folks and being allowed to question them without being called a nosy snoop.