“`As the two of them moved over to the other body Payne protested, “I wish you wouldn’t wrinkle your nose like that when you mention a gent getting shot in the back. I know they call you Longarm and say you’re the bee’s knees with your own six-gun. But I called out to the killer as he stood there with a smoking Schofield in his hand. What was I supposed to do when he didn’t drop it, wait until he turned it on me?”
Longarm shook his head. “I’d have done the same in any scene such as you’ve described, Amos. When I said you’d just shot a famous gunslick in the back, I never meant to imply you shouldn’t have. I was only stating things as they was. An awesome amount of tedious twaddle gets printed in the papers by newspaper men who report every shooting out our way as if we were knights in armor holding a sporting event at King Arthur’s court.”
He dropped to one knee on the less bloody side of the dead man and reached inside the open frock coat for any possible clues as to his identity. Bancott’s victim had been unarmed as well as a neater dresser. Longarm had just found an expensive pigskin billfold when a feminine voice from the far doorway called out, “Oh, Dear Lord, that can’t be Mister Gaylord Stanwyk I see there on the floor!”
Longarm suggested Deputy Rothstein let the lady in as he opened the dead man’s billfold and gravely announced, “I’m afraid it has to be, ma’am. You say you know him?”
As the Junoesque brunette of some thirty summers joined them by Stanwyk’s sprawled cadaver, Constable Payne introduced her as Mrs. Constance Farnsworth and added that she ran their one and only railroad. Longarm had already noticed she was wearing a fashionable black chiffon dress. So he didn’t ask what her late husband might have had to do with the railroad. He rose to his more considerable height and held out the dead man’s billfold to her with one hand as he ticked the brim of his Stetson to her with the other.
The vision in ebony and ivory didn’t take the dead man’s identification as she murmured, “We’d already met in Denver this spring. He was an established railway engineer, as the English call such gents. They lay out their railways different from our railroads and this has been a problem to us here along the John Bull Line.”
Longarm gravely nodded. “I noticed the way your narrow-gauge tracks were laid, and they told me a British syndicate started the whole shebang up this way. Are we supposed to assume this poor English gent came all this way to help you run your railroad, only to be assassinated as he was getting off the train?”
The railroading widow woman agreed it certainly looked that way, but that she had no idea who’d want to do such a thing. Amos Payne allowed, and Nate Rothstein agreed, that both dead men were strangers to the small mountain community.
Longarm spied scared eyes peering at them from behind the brass bars of the one ticket window. Not wanting to step in blood, Longarm called out to ask what the old gray coot might have to add to this confusion.
The ticket clerk called back, “I saw the whole thing, but I don’t know what I saw. That gent in the fancy duds had just come in off the platform, calling out something about his baggage. Next thing I knew that cuss dressed more cow over yonder had just drawn that gun on the floor and blazed away. I hit the floor on this side of my counter about the same time. Then I heard Constable Payne yell something and fire some more. I didn’t feel like getting back to these tired old feet until I was sure it was all over out yonder!”
Widow Farnsworth murmured, “Uncle Ted never lies when he’s sober, and I’ve yet to catch him drinking on the job.”
Longarm didn’t care. He felt sort of sorry for the apparently harmless Englishman. But there seemed to be no mystery as to who might have shot him. He felt curious about the motive for the killing. But whether Bancott had been hired to kill Stanwyck or simply killed a total stranger for practice, Longarm had been sent to pick up a federal want, not to solve a local tiff.
The barley-growing Colman stuck his head in the trackside entrance to yell, “What’s going on in here? Them women and children want to get off that train and … Hold on, ain’t that gent at your feet the same one as rode up from Golden with us?”
Longarm replied, “Yep. That other one near the far doorway did it. You can send the women and children on their way now, pard. It’s all over, far as I can see.”
Longarm didn’t see, of course, that his own involvement in the blood feud of John Bull had barely begun.
Chapter 4
Widow Farnsworth offered to be a sport about the body of the man she’d hired. The friendless drifter who’d gunned the railroad expert would be kept in a cool cellar for a few days and then planted over in potter’s field in a newspaper shroud if nobody came forward to claim his dead meat.
By the time they’d figured all of that out it was going on supper time. But Longarm went over to the town lockup with Deputy Rothstein for a look at his own prisoner first.
The yellow sheets Longarm had read in the waiting room of Denver’s Union Station had described Bunny McNee as a runty nineteen-year-old. The dirty-faced kid Rothstein called over to the bars looked far more harmless than expected. That slightly bucktoothed smirk seemed a good enough reason for the unferocious nickname. Young McNee started to protest. “I haven’t done anything deserving to be treated this mean, damn it.”
Longarm quietly replied, “Nail a wreath betwixt your eyes. Your brain is dead. I’m taking you back to Denver on more serious charges than skipping out on your hotel bill, junior. But there’s no train we can catch before tomorrow morning. So another night in that box won’t hurt you, and meanwhile, I want you to study some on the fatherly advice I’m about to give you.”
Bunny McNee asked if he could have some tobacco, or at least some soap to wash up with.
Longarm said, “I might leave you with a couple of cheroots, and I reckon I could manage a cake of soap early enough in the morning for you to clean up for that train ride if I wanted to. They tell me you’ve been carrying on like a spoiled brat instead of a grown man who knows he’s done wrong. So the question for you to help me decide is whether I want to. I don’t have to give you any breaks at all. I can slap you in cuffs and leg irons and let you ride in the baggage car, or we can head back to Denver like a sensible sinner and a man just doing his job.”
McNee said, “I follow your drift and I don’t mean to give you any trouble, Longarm.”
The tall lawman reached under his coat for some smokes as he said, “That’s not the main advice I’d like you to sleep on, kid. I’m taking you to talk about shoes and ships and sealing wax with Judge Dickerson of the Denver District Court. You’ll find him firm but fair. He won’t take shit off anyone who’s ever bent the law. But on the other hand, the only charges that’ll stick to you for certain are aiding and abetting. You’ve for sure been aiding and abetting the sort of friends your mama warned you against. So the judge is sure to be more interested in them than the kid seen holding the horses and such.”
He passed out cheroots for the three of them and handed the kid a fourth one through the bars, even as McNee protested, “They are my friends, dad blast it! Do I look like the sort who’d peach on a pal just to butter up some old judge?”
You caught more flies with honey than with vinegar. So Longarm managed not to say the prisoner looked a lot like exactly that as he thumbed a match head aflame to light all their smokes. “I have heard of that code of silence. Seen it in one of Buntline’s Wild West magazines too. So it must be true. What I’d like you to ponder, in the wee small hours you have left thanks to the narrow-gauge timetable, is the year or more of hard labor Judge Dickerson could throw at you against your walking out of the Denver Federal Building with me for a friendly drink at the nearby Parthenon Saloon before we each went our separate ways on a soft summer night.”