He found Deputy Rothstein in charge out front. Rothstein allowed his boss, Constable Payne, would be by directly to hand the prisoner over to the federal government on paper. Longarm nodded, but told the amiable younger deputy he wanted to make certain his prisoner got on the train looking well fed and halfway neat.
Rothstein allowed it would be all right to let McNee have some soap and warm water out back while they waited for the constable to get there. Rothstein didn’t have any toothbrush for the kid, and razors in the hands of dangerous criminals had never struck him as a sensible suggestion. So Longarm ambled back to the cell block for a word with his prisoner as Rothstein went to tell someone they wanted soap and water from the barbershop next door.
Longarm found Bunny McNee pacing like a caged critter, dressed to go in what looked like a bigger kid’s hand-me-downs. The loose jeans and baggy shirt likely were. Longarm told the kid they’d be leaving directly and that it was up to him whether the short day trip down to Denver would be relaxed or tense.
As McNee came to the bars to accept another smoke from the easy-going Longarm, he nervously asked just what that meant.
Longarm flared a match to light them both up as he tersely said, “You can ride down to Denver like a passenger who just happens to be headed for a hearing before a federal judge, or you can ride all the way in handcuffs and leg irons. I can be as fair or as firm as the situation calls for and … Hold on now, Bunny. Don’t we have you on yellow foolscap as a wayward youth of nineteen, going on twenty?”
The youthful prisoner shrugged and replied, “What if you do?”
To which Longarm soberly replied, as Rothstein came to join them with a remark about that soap and water, “You don’t need a shave.”
Rothstein had naturally heard that. So he said, “I told you why we don’t allow no razors back here unsupervised. Our swamper will be here with that soap and water as soon as it heats up next door. You say the punk don’t need any shave to begin with?”
Longarm gravely nodded and told the prisoner, “I’d like you to unbutton that floppy shirt and show us your hairy chest now. I’d as soon you kept your pants on, though.”
Bunny McNee primly replied, “I don’t want to unbutton my shirt for you. I was raised to be more modest than most, and since when is it a crime for a boy to have a bare chest?”
Longarm smiled thinly and said, “I’ve yet to see a boy with any sort of chest go all this jail time without even sprouting some lip fuzz, if he’s really a boy of nineteen. So about them buttons …”
McNee stamped a boot heel on the cement and sort of sobbed, “All right, if you must know, I’m not a boy. I’ m a girl. I’ve been a sort of tomboy girl for all of those nineteen years you mentioned. Are you satisfied?”
Longarm sighed and said, “A lawman transferring a prisoner just ain’t allowed to get satisfied with her. I owe my poor old boss an apology. I thought he’d assigned two deputies to transport you down to Denver because he didn’t want one of ‘em to go to a dance. Now I suspect he knew, or suspected, more than I did about you when I changed Marshal Vail’s orders behind his back!”
Turning to Rothstein, Longarm continued. “Let her have the soap and water, but don’t plan on her going anywhere today. I have to send me another telegram. There’s no way in hell I can get me another deputy and a matron from the federal house of detention up this way before I’m stuck for at least one more night up here. For I ain’t about to spend the better part of a day alone with a prisoner of the female persuasion and an established lying nature!”
The poor excuse for a youth on the far side of the bars blew a teasing puff of smoke and coyly asked, “Why, Deputy Long, are you saying you can’t be trusted not to abuse my fair white body?”
Longarm snorted, “I’m saying you can’t be trusted not to accuse me the moment we get you before a federal grand jury. But since you had to ask, I wouldn’t abuse you with Ginger Bancott’s dick, you skinny lying two-bit slut!”
She asked who Bancott was as Longarm stormed out, composing one mighty humble telegram in his worried mind. There was no damned way he could wire his home office without eating a generous helping of crow. But it likely served him right for being such a smart-ass in the first place. Some antique Greek had written, years before, how those frisky Greek gods in fig leaves and firemen’s helmets liked to totally screw mere mortals up by making them feel smarter than they could ever really be!
A man strode fast in low-heeled boots when he was as chagrined as a Turkish pasha with a big harem and a little dick. So he’d sent his sheepish wire and was coming back out of the Western Union near the depot when Constable Payne caught up with him.
Payne said, “Nate Rothstein told me. It wasn’t easy, but we got the prisoner’s pants down and she sure is a hairy little thing down in the cornfield where the sun but seldom shines! Are you saying none of you federal lawmen knew why that outlaw gang had her tagging along to hold their horses and doubtless other things for ‘em?”
Longarm grimaced and replied, “She fooled you gents, didn’t she? Let’s cut across to yonder saloon and wet our whistles as we gossip about the lady in some shade.”
Constable Payne thought that made more sense than anything else he’d heard since coming to work that morning.
As they bellied up to the bar inside, Payne signaled for two needled beers and confided, “Nate Rothstein thinks she might be a ringer. I used to play chess when the game was checkers too. The kid reads too many of them dime detective magazines.”
Longarm waited until the barkeep slid their schooners across the zinc-topped bar to them before he observed, “Who’s to say Nate might not have a point?”
Payne said, “Me. I was the arresting officer, in broad daylight, when the narrow-gauge backed up from that landslide to deliver an apparent deadbeat into the hands of the law. The charges had been pressed by Manager Cooper at the Elk Rack Hotel you just checked out of. We didn’t know, then, we had more than a simple vagrancy and theft-of-service charge on him—I mean her. So what would all sorts of razzle-dazzle be meant to accomplish, if Nate’s notion is supposed to make a lick of sense?”
Longarm sipped some beer needled with fair rye as he considered, and then asked, “That hotel manager pressed charges against the one you’ve been holding, of course?”
Payne snorted, “The sass never owed me nothing! Naturally Cooper bore witness before Silas Hall, our justice of the peace. We don’t lock drifters up just for the hell of it. We had her locked up as a he who’d skipped out on a hotel bill until it was Nate, I’ll have to allow, who noticed we had a possible federal want on our hands.”
Payne sipped at his own schooner, set it down again, and said with a weary smile, “I told you Nate reads a lot. I thought from the tone of Marshal Vail’s telegram that he’d be sending a deputy who knew the notorious Bunny McNee on sight.”
Longarm considered, shook his head, and replied, “I doubt either of the original team knew Bunny any better than me, and I never laid eyes on him, her or it until I got here yesterday.”
Payne said, “Nate tells me you tried to trick the sneaky gal with a remark about the late Ginger Bancott. He says that after you left she asked about that, and acted surprised but not at all upset when Nate told her the tale about the shootout at the depot. Nate says that if she’d ever known Ginger Bancott, she was one hell of an actress.”
Longarm snorted and replied, “We’ve established that she’s one hell of an actress. How many gals have you ever met who could stay at a hotel as a man and convince a snoopy chambermaid she was at worst a sissy? After that, we have dozens of witnesses who identified the kid holding the get-away mounts for the gang as a wayward youth of the male persuasion.”