Longarm figured he'd been in there taking a leak. He had no idea who the proddy cuss might have been. Ilsa had said she peddled bobwire and other hardware from her house, But why would, say, a retail merchant or homesteader tether catty-corner across the way instead of smack out front?
"Didn't want us to notice he'd come calling," Longarm muttered as he moved along the shady side of the house. "It gets even spookier when you consider that second pony. It don't add up as a rival for a pretty widow gal's favors, and a man on more innocent beeswax wouldn't worry about nosy neighbors while calling on a business woman during business hours with a chaperon in tow!"
Longarm eased around a rear corner, gingerly rose for a cautious peek, and saw nobody was in Ilsa's corner pantry. Better yet, she'd opened the pantry window from inside to cool a couple of fresh baked pies on her broad sill.
They were talking in the kitchen. They seemed to be talking about him. For one male voice was saying, "Of course there's been no sign of that Denver boy out back. You'd have heard this here scattergun going off if he was within range of yonder back door. Get back up front and cover the front door like we agreed, you nervous ninny!"
Another male voice sort of whined, "I guess I got a right to feel nervous, knowing they're expecting just the two of us to take out a gunslick with his rep, and I still say I heard something outside when I was in the crapper just now!"
The one who appeared to be the boss, the one covering the most likely entrance with a shotgun, raised his voice a tad as he insisted, "Get back to your damn post and stay there till I tell you different, whether by word of mouth or gunshot. I swear I was a fool to let them saddle me with such an itchy greenhorn!"
Longarm worked faster, taking advantage of the noise as boot heels clumped sullenly off through the frame house. He slid the pies silently aside and eased his long frame over the sill as smoothly, and as noisily as a weasel slipping into a hen house. Then he was over by the pantry door, six-gun in his big right fist as he gingerly inched the door open just a crack. The first thing he saw, with a stiffled sigh of relief, was Ilsa Pedersson in a far corner, bound and gagged but seated upright in one of her kitchen chairs. He could tell by her scared staring eyes that she saw him as well. There was no way to tell her not to look his way with such an interested expression. So he was more chagrined than surprised when some cuss he couldn't see gruffly demanded, "What are you staring at like that, pretty lady?"
Longarm had little choice but to kick the door all the way open and blaze away as the startled jasper near the stove with that ten-gauge tried in vain to swing its muzzle up in time. For nobody with a pistol and a lick of sense tried to take a man with a ten-gauge alive in a close-quarters fight. So Longarm nailed him twice in the chest to sit him uncomfortably on the hot stove while he blew a hole in Ilsa's pressed-tin ceiling without really knowing what he might be aiming all that buckshot at. Then he just fell forward off his hot seat, too dead to notice his pants were on fire.
Longarm didn't care either. For sure enough, just as he'd spun into another corner, facing the hall door, it popped open to let a somewhat taller and younger gunslick enter, a Colt '74 in each fist as he yelled, "Hot damn! Did we get him?"
Longarm put three rounds in him and got out his derringer backup as he wearily replied, "Not yet," then moved in to see what he'd done to that one. The younger one lay across the threshold with his spurred boots in Ilsa's kitchen and the rest of him making a mess on her hall runner. As Longarm hunkered to feel for a pulse his victim croaked, "Is that you, Alabam?"
Longarm softly replied, "Yep. How did we know that lawman might be staying here?"
The dying stranger sighed and murmured, "Don't you remember? It was your grand notion to ask around town about that black pony with a white blaze. When the kid heard it was kept by a widow who lived all alone, you were the one who said it surely sounded like old Longarm's wet dream!"
Longarm smiled thinly and muttered, "They told us true about the horny rascal, didn't they? By the way, old son, who told us?"
There came no answer. Longarm felt the downed man's throat again and then, since the smoke was getting bad by now, he got back up to go pour a pitcher of what turned out to be fruit juice over the smoldering body spread out face-down by the stove. It sure smelled funny in the end. He threw open the back door as well as another window, and moved to cut Ilsa out of her pigging string bonds as he said, "Sorry about that dessert topping, honey. Thought it was water."
The widow gal, who'd been baking up a storm when they'd burst in on her, removed the wad of dishrag from her own mouth as she gasped, "I was afraid you'd never get to me, you brute! Let me up! I have to pee so bad my back teeth are floating!"
So he let her run for it, and just managed to reload and pin his own badge to his own chest by the time that deputy sheriff and a quartet of town constables showed up out back, their own guns drawn.
Longarm stepped out on the back porch, holding up a hand for some decorum as he saw other men, boys, and at least a few gals stampeding onto the Pedersson property. He declared, "I want you New Ulm lawmen to keep this growing crowd out of Miss Ilsa's flower beds." Then he motioned to the county deputy. "You'd best come on in and tell me whether two gents I just shot were the same ones as were asking so many questions about me earlier."
The deputy sheriff followed Longarm inside, marveling, "Whatever has Miss Ilsa been cooking in here? Smells like candied ham mixed up with burnt wool, for Pete's sake!"
Longarm said that was about the size of it as he rolled the short one over with a boot tip. The county lawman stared soberly down at the dead man's blankly staring face and firmly declared, "That's the senior deputy from Saint Paul. How come you shot him, Deputy Long?"
Longarm answered tersely, "Had to. Got an eyewitness. I got me another one over here by this other doorway. Miss Ilsa may have heard him confess they'd been sent after me by name. He died before I got him to say who they were working for. But I'm going to be mighty surprised if our Saint Paul federal office sent either. You naturally asked to see theirbadges and credentials when they called on you before?"
The deputy sheriff smiled down uncertainly and allowed, "This taller one was introduced as a junior federal man, but to tell the pure truth, nobody asked to see no papers, once that older one flashed what surely looked like a badge pinned to his wallet."
They went back in the kitchen. Longarm hunkered down to gingerly probe the charred pants of the dead man by the stove until he found a singed and juice-soaked wallet. As the local deputy watched bemused, Longarm opened it up to expose a badge of German silver and some rather official-looking identification. Then he muttered, "Mail-order badge. Sold by a Saint Lou novelty house for the use of kids, so-called private outfits, and pests like these. I see he filled out these lodge membership cards under the name of John Singleton Mosby. Reckon he thought Smith and Jones had been used up."
The Minnesota deputy frowned thoughtfully and asked, "Wasn't old Johnny Reb Mosby the Confederate raider we used to call the Gray Ghost?"
Longarm nodded wearily and said, "I arrested an owlhoot rider who said he was Paul Revere one time, and the hell of it was, the name on his birth certificate really was Paul Revere. But this old boy's not young enough to be named after the real Colonel Mosby of wartime fame."
The Minnesota lawman decided, "You'd still have to admire a rebel raider a heap to name yourself after him, wouldn't you?"