Longarm put the cheroot to her soft lips as he mused, half to himself, “The younger and smaller riders along the owlhoot trail don’t have to be all that willing. Bullies with no respect for the property rights of bankers and railroad stockholders tend to take what they want, when they want it, from anybody they have the edge on. We’ve been wondering why they had a puny young kid riding along on all those robberies. If they call him Huggy Bunny, that may account for them managing to avoid our usual informants in the whorehouses of many a trail town.”
Peony gave the cheroot back to him as she asked, “You mean Bunny McNee rides with a band of queer outlaws?”
Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring into the darkness and replied, “Most lifetime crooks tend to be what the alienists who study queer folks describe as degenerates. Whether they start out favoring gals or not, they spend so much time in prison that they learn how to make love to milk bottles, ham sandwiches, or one another. Old cons like to brag they ain’t the ones being queer when they beat up and rape the kid cons they call queers. There’s nothing on McNee’s yellow sheets, I mean criminal record, about him doing any hard time in state or federal prisons. But I reckon his fellow gang members had learned about such matters during their own misspent youths.”
He took another drag and asked her to describe the one she’d called older and bigger as well as strange.
Peony shrugged a plump shoulder against his bare ribs and said she’d only glimpsed the rascal at a distance, headed the other way down a hallway that was always sort of gloomy. She was sure he’d been dressed cow, in a blue denim jacket and jeans and with a foray hat with its crown pinched higher than most Colorado riders seemed to favor.
Longarm nodded and said, “Some of the gang members are suspected of hailing from Texas. It’s a long shot, but they have a dead gunslick in blue denim on ice in a root cellar down by the jail. Might you be up to viewing the late Ginger Bancott, come morning and less call for the neighbors to gossip about us leaving this hotel together?”
Peony shook her brown curls against his bare shoulder and replied mighty firmly, “I’m not about to be spotted leaving this hotel with you at any hour. I told you I never got a good look at that rascal in the hallway, and didn’t somebody say Amos Payne shot that Bancott boy after he’d just shot some Englishman at the depot?”
Longarm nodded. “We might have leaped to a hasty conclusion. We know Ginger Bancott was a professional criminal who’d once killed a man for money down Texas way, and he had on a blue denim outfit as he was gunned right after killing another.”
She nodded and said, “Right, that stranger from England.”
“Or West-by-God-Virginia!” Longarm cut in. “Stranger is the word to steer by as we move poor Gaylord Stanwyk off the same train I came in on, striding alone into the depot in a suit and tie as well as Stetson and riding boots. After that, we were just about a perfect match as to height and build. I’m not saying we were doubles, but he was the only one who described at all like me, and he was walking alone as I brought up the rear with a bunch of local folks and some baggage!”
Peony marveled, “Good heavens! Are you saying it was you that dead boy was out to kill, honey?”
To which he modestly replied, “It wouldn’t have been the first time the pals of a crook I was coming for tried to discourage the notion. I can already see a few holes in such a plot. But the jails of this wide country would be less crowded if crooks plotted as smart as me. And besides, who else could have been expecting me? I’d only just wired Constable Payne I was on my way here to transfer a federal prisoner. I didn’t know another soul in town, and vice versa.”
She demanded, “What good would it have done Bunny McNee if a pal had murdered the first deputy sent to fetch him? Wouldn’t your outfit have simply sent a second, or even a third?”
He sighed and muttered, “I wish you wouldn’t confuse my elaborate plots with simple facts. Are you certain you couldn’t help us out in that root cellar, pard? I mean, it’s dimly lit, and mayhaps if we sort of rolled him over so’s you could view him from behind in dim light …”
She sat up, moving the bedsprings considerably, as she swung her button shoes to the rug and said, “Thanks for reminding me how late I seem to be getting home from work. What time is it, lover?”
Longarm groped his pocket watch from the vest he’d somehow left on the rug on that side and struck another light to declare with a chuckle, “Lord have mercy if it ain’t just going on midnight! I could swear we’ve known one another at least a full hour, and speaking of knowing one another, in the Biblical sense, how come you’re putting on that seersucker uniform so soon? I was fixing to finish this cheroot and suggest a position you may not have ever tried before.”
The pleasantly obese chambermaid sighed wistfully and replied, “Hold the thought until at least Thursday night. Tomorrow is my day off, and I’d never be able to explain tomorrow night to my husband! For some reason the jealous thing keeps accusing me of fooling with other men when I’m not home picking up after him.”
A big gray cat woke up in Longarm’s stomach, swished its bushy tail, sharpened its claws on the roots of his bars, and lay back down, along with his suddenly limp pecker, as he quietly allowed he’d have been much obliged had she told him earlier she was married up.
As she went on pinning her hair with the back of her uniform wide open to her exposed tailbone, Peony giggled and asked if it would have saved her from a ravaging she sure would like to thank him for. Then she asked him to be a lamb and button her up the back. So he lit the bed lamp to do it right and told her to just hesh when she started to go into her female complaints. For he’d met females who complained they weren’t getting enough in the past and he found it tedious to make up self-serving excuses.
What they’d just committed was a sin, and he wasn’t going to say her sin was greater than his own because the sinners he kept having to deal with disgusted him with all their talk about only being half-ass sinners. A man who stole cows had no call to describe himself as a rustler instead of a cow thief. There was no offense under statute or common law described as rustling, swiping, or helping one’s self. What he’d just been doing to another man’s wife was described as the state offense of adultery, and it was sure a good thing that wasn’t a federal offense. For he was able to just button up her back like a sport without having to consider turning himself in. But as he did so, he reflected it was sure a good thing he’d be on his way back to Denver with that other sinner come morning. For now he might have at least two jealous Jaspers and who knew who else he had to worry about here in John Bull!
Chapter 7
The one and only morning train would be heading down to Golden after nine, lest anyone in town with urgent business miss it. But that still cut too fine for Longarm to find out whether Peony had bragged about him to that waitress pal of hers. Old Matilda would be fixing to start serving in the hotel dining room about the time he had to board that combination with Bunny McNee.
He hadn’t wanted to worry about a waitress gal’s poker face in any case, and they served tolerable flapjacks with fried eggs at a small joint across from the jail. It was tougher to eat breakfast with your gun hand free and both eyeballs peeled. So he stuffed his own face before he ambled across the way to pick up his prisoner and feed him decently before they headed out. Longarm was too polite to tell local lawmen how to run their own jails. But it was a simple fact that prisoners without pocket jingle to send out for luxuries, such as tobacco and food, got to chew lots of match stems and live on stale bread and unsalted beans in your average small-town lockup.