Longarm saw Kim Stover staring at the raging woman, openmouthed, and suggested, “You’d best go off and stop your ears, ma’am. I suspicion she’s a mite overwrought.”
“For God’s sake, she should be! You just said you killed her husband!”
“Yes, ma’am. He was trying to kill me, too. I was a mite better at it.”
Longarm had studied women, but the longer he’d been at it the harder it was to figure them out. After having called Mabel all sorts of things, Kim Stover went over to comfort her, as the more recent widow shouted, “He was twice the man you were, you son of a bitch!”
Timberline sidled up alongside Longarm, asking softly, “What was that about her killing them fellers?”
“Let’s put it this way: what he said to me was sort of fuzzy, but what I’ll remember to the judge might put her away for a spell.”
“Hot damn! You aim to railroad him, right?”
“Now, that’s putting it unfriendly, Timberline. Let’s say I’m worn out tying up all the loose ends of this case and, what the hell, I know for sure she shot at me. I’ll allow it ain’t neat, but at least it’s enough to satisfy a grand jury and let me get on to something more worthy of my time. I don’t really care if they convict her or not. I just want to be rid of this whole infernal mess!”
“You reckon any of us will get called as witnesses?”
“Why? Did any of you see her gun Kincaid or anyone else?”
“Hell, nobody but that old tattooed man ever got to Crooked Lance!”
“there you go. We’ll just deliver the gal to the Justice Department and let them worry about her.”
“You still need me as a deputy? I mean, what the hell, one old gal don’t seem to rate all this guarding, if you ask me.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “We’ll be in Salt Lake City by tomorrow afternoon, deputized or singing Dixie. It would be a favor if you were with me when I took her to the federal courthouse. I’ll likely need a witness, transporting a female prisoner as I just did.”
“A witness? Federal courthouse? You just said you wouldn’t need us in court. I wish you’d make up your mind.”
Longarm laughed and explained, “Not as a witness against her. As a witness for me, just while I sign her in. You’ve heard the mouth on her, and half the women a lawman brings in sing that same old tune of rape.”
Timberline’s eyes widened. Then he grinned lewdly, and exclaimed, “Hot damn! I never thought of that! A man would get some golden opportunities in your line of work, wouldn’t he?”
“People suspicion as much. A lawman with a lick of sense won’t trifle with female prisoners, though. Usually, I like to bring ‘em in with at least one deputy, making it two words against one. You won’t have to sign statements or anything. They’ll record you as my deputy and, of course, you’ll get a check from the Justice Department that you can cash in Bitter Creek when you and the others get off there.”
“Well, we’re all headed to Salt Lake City, anyways. what’s this thing about recording me?”
“You’ll be in our files as a sometime law man. It won’t interfere with your job at the Rocking H. We just like to keep a record on who’s for or against us.”
“Hell, that sounds good. Can I go on calling myself Deputy Malone?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be official once I drop you off the payrolL but I doubt if you’d get arrested for it. Malone’s your last name, huh?”
“Yeah, but you can call me Timberline like everybody else. They been joshing me so long with that fool name I’ve gotten used to it.”
One of the hands came over with a worried look and said, “I can’t find my saddle rifle. Anybody see a Henry.44-40?”
Longarm said, “Didn’t see it, but I know where it is. Get a tarp or a waterproof groundcloth and some latigos or twine. Got another package up the slope I’d be obliged if you’d wrap for me, seein’ you’re wearing leather chaps. My wool britches are soiled enough as it iS.”
Timberline followed Longarm and the cowhand up the slope to where their torchlight revealed the missing rifle ten yards from the toadlike body of the midget. Cedric Hanks had been ugly in life. Glaring up at them in death he looked like something that should have been carved on the parapets of Notre Dame. Timberline grimaced and said, “Funny, he looks so ugly for such a tiny thing. Didn’t it bother you, Longarm? Picking on somebody so much littler than you?”
“Why should it? Never bothers you, does it?”
“Hey, I thought we’d made up!”
“Couldn’t resist getting in a lick for fun. As to who was picking on who, the midget had the advantage, as well as the choice to make it a serious fight.”
“Advantage? Poor horse turd didn’t come up to your bellybutton!”
“made me the bigger target. As you can see, we were both throwing.44-40 balls at one another, so if anything, I had to aim better, since there was so much less to hit. He likely became a gunslick in the first place when he noticed that while God created Man, Sam Colt and other gunsmiths made them equal.”
Timberline watched the cowboy roll the little corpse up in the groundcloth as he shuddered and said, “My head tells me you’re likely right. But I’m glad it wasn’t me that killed him. Looks like Windy’s wrapping up a baby!”
“Let’s get back with him. It’s too late to think of bedding down, ‘cause the sun’s creeping up on us. We’ll get an early start. We can eat right away and break camp by first light.”
He turned and walked toward the campfire winking up at him through the trees, feeling more morose about the killing than he’d really let on to the men behind him. It didn’t bother him that the man he’d killed had been so small. It bothered him that he’d had to kill at all. He’d trained himself not to show the sick feeling these affairs left in his stomach. He’d steeled himself to eat his next few meals mechanically, tasteless as they might be. He knew why so many men in his line of work wound up with bleeding ulcers, or like poor Jim Hickock, got to be ugly drunks toward the end.
He wasn’t given to probing the dark shadows of his own mind, but he knew one night he’d dream about that ugly little gargoyle, as he had again and again, about the others he’d had to kill. It wasn’t as if he felt guilty. He couldn’t remember shooting anyone who hadn’t deserved it. At least, not since the war. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure why he should feel so drained after a gun fight—and disappointed.
Maybe it was just the waste. People lived such a short while at best. Man was born with a death’s-head less than an inch below the soft skin of his face. By the time he was old enough to talk, he knew the graveyard waited just up the road ahead. What was it that made some men rush the process so?
He remembered that first one in the dawn mists of Shiloh, shouting fit to bust as he charged through the spring greenery into another boy’s gunsights. He remembered the kick of the old Springfield against his shoulder as the world dissolved in gray-blue smoke for a long, breathless moment and how, as the smoke cleared, that other boy had been lying under a budding cherry tree with a surprised look on his face, and how the cherry blossom petals had fluttered down like gentle, pink snowflakes as the body stopped twitching. The first man he’d killed had been fourteen or so. A farm boy, from the looks of his dead hands as they lay, half open, near the stock of his musket in the cherry blossoms. It was later, when the kitchen crew brought the evening grub up to the line, that he’d noticed the ball of fuzzy, gray nothingness in his gut. He hadn’t been able to eat a thing. By the second evening of the battle, he’d been hungry as a bitch wolf and pinned behind a stone wall without so much as a plug of tobacco to chew on. He’d learned, by the time they marched him beyond Shiloh Church through the sniper-haunted forests, not to let his feelings show. But he still wondered sometimes, late at night, who that other boy had been, and why he’d been in such an all-fired hurry to end the life he’d hardly started.