The report from East Texas had the usual three desperados hit the bank near closing time, masked, armed, and frightening, to light out with over twenty thousand after gunning just one teller. That unfortunate had been waiting on a female customer nobody else could describe in detail. Nobody would have thought about her at all if she’d still been around when the local law came to question all the survivors. One other woman who’d been there allowed the missing witness had been wearing a straw boater atop pinned-up red hair and a long tan travel duster.
Longarm grimaced and said, “Would only take me two minutes to shuck a hat, wig, and duster in a nearby alley. Was that one teller gunned by a Le Mat?”
Vail shook his balding head and replied, “Caliber .36. One of the robbers was waving a Navy Colt Conversion. She never left her disguise in any alley. They looked. I figure she put the hat, wig, and duster in a bag and just strolled over to the railroad depot, looking like some other gal entirely.”
“If she was the one we call Medusa in the first place,” Longarm pointed out. “More than one bank has been held up by a trio of owlhoot riders in this land of opportunity. More than one witness has fled the scene of a crime just because they didn’t want to be a witness. Has anybody tried reading the sign that way?”
Vail said, “Yep. I have. You ought to let your elders finish the damned story before you horn in, old son. The robbery went smooth as silk, like I said, with the crooks Just vanishing into thin air and no clear trail to cut for a good three days.”
Longarm asked what had happened after three days.
Vail said, “The smell was getting awful. The four bodies on a houseboat in a bayou of the big thicket likely stunk a good while before a market-hunting swamprunner got downwind of ‘em and circled in to see what smelled so dead. He knew the old colored lady who’d lived alone on that houseboat. He had to get the Texas Rangers to figure out the other three bodies had been local wayward youths that everyone had always expected bad ends for.”
Longarm asked, “Twenty-gauge?”
Vail said, “Just one of the men. The old colored lady and two of the less dangerous boys had .40-caliber rounds in ‘em. You want more? Another swamprunner came forward later to say he’d spotted a young white gal on the deck of that same houseboat about the time of the robbery.”
Longarm whistled and declared, “The first cadaver wouldn’t have begun to decompose if they pulled the robbery the first day they took over her houseboat on her. Medusa slickered the bunch of them with her move to secure a safe hideout. What she really wanted, every time, was a handy place to gather all her black sheep together and slaughter ‘em in a bunch before riding off with all the loot! That other gal Medusa recruited with a tale of holding the spare ponies back at the hideout was really meant as a substitute corpse in case anybody described one of the bank robbers as female, right?”
Vail said, “That seems about the size of it. Lord knows why Medusa didn’t kill that spare girl right there with all the others, or how a second gal could be persuaded to ride far with such a murderous pal.”
Longarm frowned thoughtfully and said, “Too many ways to count before we catch up. She could have abducted that other gal at gunpoint, or talked her into going along willingly. You want me to head down to the Big Thicket country of East Texas for a look-see, right?”
Billy Vail said, “Wrong. I want you to head over to the Flint Hills country of West Kansas and find out what in thunder Miss Medusa Le Mat is planning way closer to home.”
Longarm brightened. “How do you know she’s doubled back that close to Denver?”
Vail growled, “I don’t for certain. That’s how come I’m sending you. We know the treacherous gal we have no real name for recruits three men and a gal fairly close to the scene of the next crime she’s planning. Now, a known bank robber just got out of Leavenworth, but never turned up for the homecoming party his kith and kin were planning—under the watchful eye of the local law. A plain but popular soiled dove from the same trail town has dropped out of sight at the height of the spring roundup business. Miss Medusa Le Mat may or may not have had time to recruit two more men and scout a handy hideout no more than a hard lope from the nearest bank worth robbing But I ain’t fixing to teach a fox to suck eggs or a senior deputy how to nip things in the bud. I had Henry type up your travel orders and a full report before I left the office last night. I’ll get it for you directly and you can be on your way. Any questions?”
Longarm said, “Just one. How am I supposed to take such a lethal little lady without gunning her? I can say from experience that she can be unreasonable with a loaded Le Mat Duplex in her hand!”
Chapter 4
Figuring that a lawman who was supposed to be dying in the hospital would look silly following the official dress code of the reform Administration in Washington that made him report to the office wearing a suit, Longarm went over to his furnished digs west of Cherry Creek to get dressed sensibly for work in cattle country.
He changed into clean but faded denim jeans and a denim jacket, swapping his shoestring tie for a calico bandanna, but stayed with the stovepipe boots and coffee-brown Stetson he usually wore. Suspicious eyes were as likely to pick up on a rider’s new boots and hat as they were to recall the description of a well-known lawman’s trimmings. A man could walk softer and run faster on well-broken-in boots in any case.
With those pesky newspaper articles about him in mind, Longarm took his bedroll, saddlebags, and Winchester ‘73 off his usual McClellan so he could lash them to the double-rigged roping saddle he’d borrowed on his way across town. Like his faded denims, the substitute saddle had seen better days and shouldn’t attract attention, even though it was still serviceable, with a well-broken-in grass rope in case anybody looked at it seriously.
Less than a day later the semi-disguised Longarm and his nondescript gear had arrived by train in Florence, Kansas—which sounded no sillier than Rome, New York, when you studied on it.
Getting off the train at Florence too late to ride on, Longarm got a room in a third-class hotel near the railside stockyards, drawing looks that were thoughtful to hostile as he deposited the loaded-up roping saddle on the floor near the desk to sign in.
The nearby Flint Hills were an eighty-mile-wide strip of cow country with serious land-hungry farm folks all around it and sort of resentful, even though no cow folks had been consulted by the Lord in the laying out of Kansas.
Like the Sand Hills of Nebraska, the Hint Hills ran like a wide ribbon of unplowed prairie from northeast Kansas all the way south to the Indian Nation, having resisted the nester and his plow, although for opposite reasons.
You could plow up the sod all too easily in the Nebraska Sand Hills. Then the strong prairie winds would blow the sand dunes of some long-dead seashore right out from under the roots of your plantings. The Kansas Flint Hills looked like a similar rolling sea of grass, but the sod lay right atop solid chalk, with layers of the chert they called flint to bust up any plowshare tough enough to dig into chalk. Hence the cow and the cowboy had hung on in the Flint Hills as the plow and the farmer had leapfrogged west.
Leaving his gear upstairs in his hired room, Longarm strode out to take in the evening action of Florence, Kansas, on a work night. There wasn’t as much along the one main street as the town’s name might seem to call for. Longarm treated himself to a sit-down supper in a Chinese restaurant near his hotel, then considered getting a haircut, but decided he’d best hold the surplus hair in reserve for a barbershop closer to the smaller cow town Billy Vail wanted him to scout.
Small-town saloons were almost as good for gossip as small-town barbershops. So Longarm peered through a few windows near the stock yards until he found a place with more cowhands than farmers on tap. Then he sauntered in to belly up to the bar and order himself a schooner of needled beer. You got more beer more cheaply when you ordered it by the scuttle. But a stranger in town just never knew when he might get the chance to order a round for new-found friends, and it took time to put a scuttle away without feeling it.