Constable Payne and Deputy Rothstein were only asked a few questions as to what they’d found when they tore down the street towards those distant but distinct gunshots. Neither charged Longarm with raping Miss Dorman or gunning anybody but Quinn, of course. So their terse statements were taken down too, and then it was Longarm’s turn.
For some reason there came a round of applause from the onlookers as he rose to take his place before the sub-panel. As he sat himself on the bentwood witness chair he spied many a familiar face in the crowd and nobody looked sore at him. He saw all those folks he’d come up on the narrow-gauge with, save for the small kids who’d been with Flora Munro, present and accounted for.
Widow Farnsworth was there, and to Longarm’s chagrin, so was fat Peony from his hotel, with a skinny galoot that had to be her jealous husband. But at least Longarm didn’t see that asshole kid who’d warned him to stay away from young Flora Munro.
The dentist in charge of the hearings swore him in, heard him out as he gave his own laconic account of the reading room shootout, and then demanded to know why Quinn had been gunning for him.
Longarm answered simply, “I don’t know. Didn’t know who he was before Nate Rothstein nudged my memory by describing the remains on the schoolhouse floor more formally. I was just minding my own beeswax with the Encyclopedia Britannica when, like Miss Dorman says, Quinn busted in with her to shoot my hat. So I naturally shot him.”
There was a murmur of approval along the table as well as from the crowd behind him. Then a crusty older gent in a snuff-colored frock coat demanded to know what Longarm had been looking for in those “sissy furrin books.”
Longarm started to tell them. Then he reflected that the pretty Constance Farnsworth would have to call to serve him more tea and pastry if he solved her problem here and now, like a jackass with better things to do and fancier places to go that evening. They’d have never asked what he’d been up to if he’d said he was killing a morning in a card house or saloon, damn ‘em. So he shrugged and said, “I like to read schoolbooks when I have time on my hands. My formal education was cut short by the war. But there’s all sorts of book learning there, just for the reading.”
Another oldtimer, dressed more country, snorted, “That’ll be the day when this child wastes the little time the Good Lord gives us on book learning! I say ride out across the hills and see it all for your ownselves! See sky-scraping mountains white with summer snow and wide valley carpeted with blue-eyed grass for as far as you can see.”
The dentist said, “Simmer down, Oregon John. This is an inquest, not a poetry reading, and you heard the man say he likes to read for the pleasure of it.”
Then he asked Longarm if it seemed possible the killer had been out to prevent a federal lawman from carrying out his more important chores.
Longarm truthfully replied, “As Constable Payne just told you, I was sent up here to pick up a federal want he’d arrested on a petty local charge.”
An onlooker near the front of the crowd called out, “The hell you say! That McNee boy owed us better than a month’s wages for an honest cowhand in unpaid room and board!”
Longarm assumed the florid-faced older man had to be the manager of the Elk Rack. Half turning in his chair, he nodded and called out, “I meant petty next to the federal charges hanging over him and his pals, Mister Cooper. After that, he wasn’t any boy. He, or I ought to say she, appears to have ridden with them other outlaws as a doxie, as such wicked ladies are described along the owlhoot trail.”
Turning back to the sub-panel as the crowd buzzed like a beehive, Longarm continued. “We had just determined the gender of the prisoner an hour or so before Quinn came gunning for me. I have no call, in a chamber half filled with ladies, to go into why I thought it unwise to head back to Denver unchaperoned with a wicked lady. Suffice it to say I wired my home office for some safety in numbers, and then I was stuck for at least another day up your way, no offense. So with so much time on my hands I ambled on down to the school, where Miss Dorman, yonder, was kind enough to let me kill some of said time, and the next thing I knew I was killing Quicksilver Quinn. I understand he liked to be called Quicksilver because he was so fast as well as unpredictable. If any of you have ever spilt real quicksilver from a thermometer, you’ve seen how it darts all about like spit on a hot stove as soon as you try to sweep it UP.”
The dentist in charge sighed and asked what basic chemistry had to do with a killer’s possible motivation.
Longarm said, “Nothing, save for the fact he prided himself on being hard to figure. You’d have to ask the jokers who sent him after me what their motive might have been. Quicksilver is in no position to say, and he never said a word to me on his way to the floor.”
That little old lady who’d come up on the narrow-gauge with him rose to shake a bony fist and shout, “Cow thieves! That’s what they have to be! I’ve lost four head in the last month and both them dead boys in that root cellar died with cowboy boots on their shiftless feet!”
The dentist said, “Sit down, Granny Boggs. Lots of riders wear cowboy boots. It don’t signify nothing.”
The peppery old lady snapped, “It signifies they knew how to herd cows, and I can tell you for a fact neither one was working anywhere in these parts as a cowhand. I asked!”
The dentist rolled his eyes skyward and marveled, “All I want to record is the facts that are known and I get blue-eyed grass, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and strayed or stolen beef! It’s a fact both those dead strangers had no known address, visible means of support, or honest reasons to be up our way to begin with. After that, they both had criminal records.”
“As hired guns!” Granny Boggs chimed in. “So who hired ‘em if it wasn’t some untidy neighbors stealing stock off the rest of us?”
There came a low rumble of suspicion, if not agreement. The man in the snuff-colored outfit called out, “Let’s rein in and eat this apple at a bite at a time! A lot of folks have lost stock to the vicious wet thaw this spring, and I’m not saying no trash nesters couldn’t have helped themselves to some prime veal since. But we’ve long since been agreed nobody could move enough beef out to matter without loading it aboard the narrow-gauge, which they ain’t.”
The dentist called out, “Would you care to chime in, Widow Farnsworth?”
But the Junoesque Constance Farnsworth only called back a demure agreement to the agreement just cited. She said her railroad had only carried a modest amount of beef and a lot more produce and stamped ore to market. When she added everything loaded aboard her combination was recorded as to shipper and receiver down in Golden, the dentist cum deputy coroner banged for attention and ruled that, as in the case of the late Ginger Bancott, the late Quicksilver Quinn had been properly gunned in the line of duty by a paid-up lawman and that, after that, what either desperado had been up to, six-gun blazing, would be left an open question until some damned body came forward with some more sensible answers than any suggested so far.
That stuck Longarm as a sensible finding, and he said so as he got up from his chair, dismissed as a witness. He was now more convinced that both gun waddies had been after him in particular, meaning poor Gaylord Stanwyk had been mistaken for him at the depot the day before. But seeing he’d already looked into what Stanwyk had come up there to look into, he elbowed his way through the milling crowd to catch up with the brunette railroading gal on the town hall steps.
When he told her he’d been studying on railroad track, she told him he’d be having supper with her that evening, if he could manage to get there by seven. Fashionable folks ate later than working folks. He’d read that the beautiful but scatter-headed Princess Alexandra of Wales ate her supper at eight! That likely accounted for the slimmer figures of older society matrons. The poor things tore through life sidesaddle, half starved.