Longarm started field stripping and cleaning the Winchester in his lap as he considered what he’d be doing if he was riding with the vigilantes instead of running from them. He decided to appoint the Mountie, Foster, as the most dangerous head of a combined posse, which was the worse thing he could picture tracking him. An experienced lawman wouldn’t just follow hoofprint by hoofprint. Sergeant Foster would know he and the prisoner were well-mounted with a good lead. The Mountie would try to figure out where they were headed and ride hard to cut them off.
All right, if he was Sergeant Foster, where would he guess that a U.S. Deputy Marshal and his prisoner would be headed?
Bitter Creek, of course. There was a jail in Bitter Creek to hold Cotton Younger till a train came by. If the Mountie had gone in with the vigilantes and told them that, Timberline’s boys, or maybe a third of them, would be riding directly for Bitter Creek, planning to keep him from boarding the eastbound U.P. with a prisoner he hadn’t paid for.
The next best bet? A run for the railroad right-of-way, well clear of Bitter Creek, with hopes of flagging down a locomotive. He’d be set up nicely for an ambush anywhere along the line if he did that. So the Union Pacific was out. Too many unfriendly folks were expecting him to take Cotton Younger in that way.
As if he’d heard Longarm call out his name aloud, the prisoner rolled over and sat up, muttering, “I got to take a leak. You’ll have to take these irons off me, Longarm.”
Longarm placed the dismantled Winchester and its parts carefully on a clean, flat rock before he got to his feet. He walked over and hauled the prisoner to his feet. Then he unbuttoned the man’s pants, pulled them halfway down his thighs, and said, “Leak away. I gotta put my rifle back together.”
“Gawd! I can’t just go like this! I’ll wet my britches!”
“You do as best you can. I don’t aim to hold it for you.”
The cow thief turned away, redfaced, as Longarm squatted down to reassemble his rifle, whistling softly as he used his pocketknife screw driver.
The prisoner asked, “What if I have to take a crap?”
“I’d say your best bet would be to squat.”
“Gawd! With my hands behind me like this?”
“Yep. It ain’t the neatest way to travel, but I’ve learned not to take foolish chances when I’m transporting. You’ll get the hang of living with your hands like that, in a day or so.”
“You’re one mean son of a bitch, you know that?”
“Some folks have said as much. I got my rifle in one piece. You want me to button you back up?”
“I dribbled some on my britches, damn it!”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
Longarm crooked the rifle through his bent elbow and went back over to pull the prisoner’s pants up, buttoning just the top button. “Since there’s no ladies present, this’ll save us time, when next you get the call of nature. It’ll also probably drop your pants around your knees if you get to running without my permission.”
“You’re mean, pure mean. As soon as I can talk to a lawyer I’m gonna file me a complaint. You got no right to torture me like this.”
“You’ll never know what torture is, until you try to make a break for it. I got some jerky and biscuit dough in my saddle bags. As long as we’re resting the mounts, we may as well eat.”
He took the prisoner to another flat rock near the hobbled army mounts, sat him down on it, and rummaged for previsions. He cut a chunk of jerked venison from the slab, wrapped it in soft sourdough, and said, “Open wide. I’ll be the mama bird and you’ll be the baby bird.”
“Jehosaphat! Don’t you aim to cook it?”
“Nope. Somebody might be sitting on a far ridge, looking for smoke against the sky. Besides, it’ll cook inside you. One thing I admire about sourdough. You just have to get a bite or two down and it sort of swells inside you. Saves a lot of chewing.”
He shoved a mouthful into Cotton Younger and took the edge from his own hunger with a portion for himself. After some effort, the prisoner gulped and asked, “Don’t I get no coffee? They gave me coffee three times a day in that log jail.”
“I’ll give you a swallow from the canteens before we mount up again. Tastes better and lasts you longer if you’re a bit thirsty when you drink.”
He took his Ingersoll out and consulted it for the time. “I’ll give the brutes a few more minutes, ‘fore I saddle and bridle ‘em. I’ve been meaning to ask: do you reckon they was really fixing to hang you, last night?”
“They never said they was. Pop Wade was sort of a friendly old cuss.”
“Somebody told me Timberline was tired of having you on his hands. How’d you get along with him?”
“Not too well. He’d have hanged me that first day, if the redheaded lady and Pop hadn’t talked him out of it.”
“Hmm, that midgets game gets funnier and funnier. Did he really offer you a deal to spring you from the jail in exchange for Jesse James?”
“I told him I’d put him onto Jesse James, but I was only trying to get out of that place. I got no more idea than anyone else where that rascal’s hid out.”
“Let’s see, now. He sends me to get killed. Then, amid the general congratulations, him or Mabel slips you out, they put a barlow knife against your eyelid to gain your undivided attention. It figures. It ain’t like they had to transport you out of the valley. They just wanted a few minutes of Apache conversation with you. Once they knew where to pick up Jesse James, you’d be useless baggage to dispose of. Hell, they might even have let you live till the vigilantes found you.”
“Damn it, I don’t know where Jesse James is hiding!”
“Lucky for you I come along, then. I suspicion you’d have told ‘em, whether you knew or not. That Cedric Hanks is a mean little bastard, ain’t he?”
“You still think I’m Cotton Younger, don’t you?”
“Don’t matter what I think. You could be Queen Victoria and I’d still transport you to Denver to stand trial as Cotton Younger.”
The owlhoot’s expression was sly as he asked, cautiously, “Is cattle rustling a federal charge, Longarm?”
“No. It’s a fool thing to say. You rustle up some grub or you rustle apples as a kid. You don’t rustle cows, boy. You steal ‘em! If you ride with a running iron in your saddle bags, it’s best to be honest with yourself and call it what it is. Cow theft is a serious matter. Don’t shilly-shally with kid names for a dangerous, dead-serious profession!”
“If I was to admit I was a rustler—all right, a cow thief—named Jones, would you believe me?”
“Nope. I ain’t in a believing business. You don’t know what fibbing is until you’ve packed a badge six or eight years. You owlhoots only lie to decent folks, so you seldom get the hang of it. In my line, I get lied to every day by experts. I’ve been lied to by old boys who gunned down their own mothers. I’ve taken in men who rape their own daughters. I’ve arrested men for the sodomy-rape of runaway boys, for torturing old misers for their gold, for burning a colored man to death just for the hell of it, and you want to know something? Not one of them sons of bitches ever told me he was guilty!”
“Longarm, I know I’ve done wrong, now and again, but you’ve got to believe me, I’m only…”
“A professional thief who’s done more than one stretch at hard labor. You think I don’t recognize the breed on sight? No man has ever come out of a prison without that whining, self-serving look of injured innocence. So save me the details of your misspent youth. I’ve heard how you were just a poor little war orphan, trying as best he could to make his way in this cruel, old world he never made. I know how the Missouri Pacific stole your widowed mother’s farm. You’ve told me about the way they framed you for borrowing that first pony to fetch the doctor to your dying little sister’s side. You’ve told me every time I’ve run you in.”