The barber shrugged and went to work. He knew the deputy wasn’t a man for small talk in the morning, so he lathered Longarm silently, wondering what he’d missed in the exchange just now.
The barber was still stropping his razor when the open doorway suddenly darkened. The youth who’d apparently left for good was back, with the Walker-Colt gripped in both hands and his red face twisted with hate.
Longarm fired three times as he rose, pumping lead through the barber’s cloth from the short muzzle of the.44 he’d been holding in his lap, as the barber dove for cover. When George Masters raised his head, Longarm was standing in the doorway, the cloth still hanging from his neck and the smoking .44 in his big right fist as he stared morosely down at the figure sprawled on the wet sandstone paving in the soft summer rain. Masters joined the lawman to stare down in wonder at the death-glazed eyes of the stranger who’d left his Walker Colt inside on the tiles as he fell. Masters gasped, “How did YOu know, Mister Long?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “Didn’t, for certain. He’s changed a mite since I arrested him down in the Indian Nation four or five summers back. He shouldn’t have said he was from Texas. It came to me who he was as he was walking away. He was wearing high plains spurs. That’s how he come back so quiet. Most Texans favor spurs that jingle when they walk. His hat was wrong for Texas, too.”
“My God, then you was waiting for him all the time?”
“Nope. just careful. Like I said, it was a good five years back and I could have been wrong. A man in my line arrests a lot of folks in five years.”
Their discussion was broken off by the arrival of a uniformed roundsman of the Denver police department. He elbowed through the crowd Of People by now gathering around the body on the walk and sighed, “I hope somebody here has an explanation for all this.”
Longarm identified himself and explained what had happened, adding, “here’s what’s left of one Robert Jackson. He’d changed his name bass-akwards to Jack Robinson but he hadn’t learned much since I beat him to the draw a few years back. He’d gunned a Seminole down in the Indian Nation and was supposed to be doing twenty years at hard labor in Leavenworth. I don’t know what he was doing in Denver, but, as you see, he don’t figure to cause nobody much bother.”
“You’re going to have to come down to the station house and help us make out a report, Deputy Long. I hope you don’t take it personal. I’m just doing my job.”
“I know. I got a job to do myself, so let’s get cracking. The boss is going to cloud up and rain all over me if I come in late again this morning.”
The sky had cleared by the time Longarm left the police station and resumed his walk up Colfax Avenue. Up on Capitol Hill the gilded dome of the Colorado State House glinted in the rain-washed sunlight, but the civic center, like the rest of Denver’s business district, nestled in the hollow between Capitol Hill to the east and the Front Range of the Rockies, fifteen miles to the west.
Longarm came to the U.S. Mint at Cherokee and Colfax and swung around the corner to walk to the federal courthouse. He saw he was late as he elbowed his way through the halls filled with officious-looking dudes waving legal briefs and smelling of macassar hair oil. He climbed a marble staircase and made his way to a big oak door whose gold leaf lettering read, UNITED STATES MARSHAL, FIRST DISTRICT COURT OF COLORADO.
Longarm went inside, where he found a new face seated at a roll-top desk, pounding at the keys of a newfangled engine they called a typewriter. Longarm nodded down at the pink-faced young man and said, “You play that thing pretty good. Is the chief in the back?”
“Marshal Vail is in his office, sir. Whom shall I say is calling?”
“Hell, he knows who I am. I only asked was he in.”
Longarm moved over to an inner doorway, ignoring the clerk as he bleated, “You can’t go in unannounced, sir!”
Longarm opened the door without knocking and went in. He found his superior, Marshal Vail, seated behind a pile of papers on a flat-topped mahogany desk.
Vail looked up with a harassed expression and growled, “You’re late. Be with you in a minute. They’ve got me buried under a blizzard that just blowed in from Washington!”
Longarm sat on the arm of a morocco leather chair across the desk from his superior and chewed his unlit cheroot to wait him out. It seemed that all he ever did these days was wait. A banjo clock on the oak-paneled wall ticked away at his life while Longarm counted the stars in the flag pinned flat on the wall over Vail’s balding head. Longarm knew there were thirty-eight states in the Union these days, but his eyes like to keep busy and the marshal wasn’t much to look at.
In his day, Marshal Billy Vail had shot it out with Comanche, Owlhoots, and, to hear him tell it, half of Mexico. Right now he was running to lard and getting that baby-pink political look Longarm associated with the Courthouse Gang. There was something to be said for working in the field, after all. Vail wasn’t more than ten or fifteen years older than Longarm. It was sobering for Longarm to think that he might start looking like that by the turn of the century if he wasn’t careful about his personal habits.
Vail found the papers he was looking for and frowned up at Longarm, saying, “You’ve missed the morning train to Cheyenne, God damn your eyes! What’s your tall tale this time, or did you think this office opened at noon?”
“You know a feller called Bob Jackson supposed to be doing time in Leavenworth?”
“Oh, you heard about his escape, eh? He’s been reported as far west as here and I’ve got Cottin and Bryan looking for him on the street.”
“You can tell ‘em to quit looking. He’s bedded down peaceable in the Denver morgue. I shot him on the way to work.”
“You what? What happened? Where did you spot him?”
“I reckon it’s fair to say he spotted me. He must have taken it personal when I arrested him that time, but I can’t say his brains or gun hand had improved worth mentioning. The Denver P.D.’s doing the paper work for us. What’s this about a train to Cheyenne?”
“Slow down. You’re going to have to make a full report before you leave town on the escaped prisoner you just Caught up with.”
“All right, I’ll jaw with that jasper you have playing the typewriter out front before I leave. Who are we after in Wyoming Territory?”
Vail sighed and said, “I’m sending you to a place called Crooked Lance. Ever hear of it?”
“Cow town, a day’s ride north of the U.P. stop at Bitter Creek? I’ve seen it on the map. I worked out of Bitter Creek during the Shoshone uprising a few years back, remember?”
“That’s the place. Crooked Lance is an unincorporated township on federally owned range in West Wyoming Territory. They’re holding a man with a Federal want on him. His name’s Cotton Younger. Here’s his arrest record.”
Longarm took the sheet of yellow foolscap and scanned it, musing aloud, “Ornery pissant, ain’t he? Says here Queen Victoria has a claim on him for raping and gunning a Red River breed. What are we after him for, the postal clerk he gunned in Nebraska or this thing about deserting the Seventh Cav during Terry’s Rosebud Campaign against the Dakotas?”
“Both. More important, Cotton Younger is reputed to be related to Cole Younger, of the James-Younger Gang. Cole Younger’s salted away for life after the gang made a mess of that bank holdup in Minnesota a couple of years back. Frank and Jesse James are still at large, and wanted for everything but leprosy.”
Longarm hesitated before he nodded and said, “I can see why you’d like to have a talk with this Cotton Younger, Chief, but does picking up and transporting a prisoner rate a deputy with my seniority?”