As she simmered down and got to work side by side with him, once he’d shown her how clean garden dirt looked as soon as you rinsed all the worms out with a couple of changes of water, the young widow got less gloomy for the time being. As he stacked the first well-scoured pans to dry, she marveled, “You do know what you’re doing! You say you were once a soldier, like my man Martin? He was a soldier in the war. He rode with Pope at the second Bull Run, and after he was well again, he rode against the Sioux out this way.”
Longarm rubbed harder on the pan he was scouring as he asked in a mildly interested tone, “Do tell? From those Confederate war bonds you used to paper that one wall upstairs, I had the impression you might be Texas folks, no offense.”
She hunkered down to haul out some baking potatoes as she sighed and said, “That was Martin for you, the poor dear. He grew up in Penn State, and I was the girl next door who waited for him while he won the war for us all. Martin MacUlric was never a lazy man. He had his points, and we were very happy until his poor generous heart gave out on him at an obscenely young age. But he was a man for dreaming, and so many of his dreams were … so dreamy. He bought those Confederate war bonds from another dreamer, or a confidence man, who was certain the South would rise again, or at least redeem those bonds at ten cents on the dollar.”
Longarm said, “I may have met up with a similar investment-consulting gent a spell back. We called him Soapy Smith. I was the one who ran him out of Denver over another swindle he’d been pulling. Ten cents on the dollar and he only asked two bits, right?”
She sighed and began to wash the spuds she’d chosen in another pan he was going to have to wash if she didn’t calm down. She said Martin MacUlric, owing steep payments on this house they’d just bought in a railroad town certain to boom, had been suckered worse with those high-face-value railroad bonds.
She said, “The story Martin was sold about those pretty pictures of choo-choo trains involved some tortured rehash of that awfully complicated Credit from Mobile eight or ten years back. Martin tried to explain it to me when they were talking about putting Vice President Colfax in jail, but to tell the truth, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the scandalous mess!”
Longarm grimaced and replied, “I doubt poor old Colfax or President Grant could have explained that mess sober. The investigation sniffed in vain in ‘72 and ‘73 for dirty deeds done early as ‘64, when Honest Abe was in the crow’s nest and likely didn’t know what they were doing either. You’re not alone in finding that Credit Mobilier of America a can of worms indeed. You’re saying your late husband invested in those Credit Mobilier of America bonds whilst he was in the service, ma’am?”
She sighed and said, “No. He bought them out here eighteen months ago—at too big a discount to pass up, he said—from a railroad man with a drinking problem and some fairy tale about not having the time left to wait for them to mature.”
Longarm nodded knowingly and said, “I hear that Credit Mobilier scandal left lots of investors with stocks and bonds worth more as wallpaper, ma’am. Took the railroads a long time to get over that crisis in confidence, and some say the country ain’t quite over the Great Depression of the seventies yet. But at least you still have this property, and things are commencing to pick up again. We had us a wetter than usual green-up out this way, and the price of beef and other produce keeps rising.”
She sighed and said, “Don’t I know it! I just had to pay for the groceries you’ll be eating tonight, thanks to your help as I was about to slash my wrists, you sweet man.”
He said, “Aw, mush. This seems to be the last pan, and I have some reading to catch up on before I ‘tend that coroner’s hearing after supper. So why don’t I carry these fool books upstairs and get out of your way?”
She assured him he wasn’t in her way. But he figured she must have still been feeling tense because he heard her busting a china cup on the floor as he was headed up the stairs.
He found it too sunny and hot up in his hired room at that hour. He didn’t want to carry the books back through the kitchen to the cooler backyard with the widow in such an uncertain mood. So he swung the casement all the way out and sat on the sill with one boot up to light a cheroot and leaf through both books, taking notes in pencil from time to time. Ellen Brent had been right about the family brag of the hardware man, which told him little he hadn’t already guessed at. The township and surrounding range were divided sharply, but not in a serious feud, as far as one could tell while selling lumber and bobwire to both the original stockmen and more recent sodbusters. Longarm knew from his earlier trips up this way that there was just no way a homesteader with or without a lick of sense could plow enough of the higher sand-hill range to matter. Unless you farmed down in the lower and wider draws, where the water table rested on peat and clay, you were never going to raise a thing but windblown sand. The stockmen, on the other hand, had more use for the well-drained grassy rises than the often cold and swampy draws. So the stockmen and nester would likely get along a few more years in these parts before they had all that much to fight about.
The medical tome confirmed his guess that science was trying to keep up with unfortunates such as the late Bubblehead Burnside. They’d dug up more figures and studied more Mongoloids since Langdon Down’s first description of the syndrome. That was what they called what Bubblehead had suffered—a syndrome.
There was nothing in the medical tome about crazy folks that offered any explanation as to why the Widow MacUlric was singing like a canary bird downstairs, for Gawd’s sake.
Chapter 7
Pawnee Junction barely ran eight city blocks each way, but it was getting tedious to leg it in high summer. So after supper Longarm hired a chestnut gelding and a stock saddle from the livery next door to attend that coroner’s hearing in style.
Seeing he had the time as well as a pony under him, he scouted those few parts of the small business district he wasn’t too clear about on all sides of the courthouse square. It took less than ten minutes to circle more than once. He found Pawnee Junction about as tedious from any point of view. But he did take note of the chunky paint pony out front of Spaulding’s Funeral Parlor and Furniture Shop when he saw it was sidesaddled. That had to be the famous Grassy, named by a half-wit and ridden by his sole survivor.
Another sidesaddled Indian pony, this one a buckskin, was tethered out front of the county courthouse along with many other horses. Longarm dismounted and half-hitched his own reins to the hitching rail. When he went inside, he wasn’t surprised to spy Nurse Nancy Calder milling back through the main courtroom with the others in her tan riding habit. He drifted after her, admiring her rear view and the way the gloaming light from the windows along one side highlighted her thick taffy brown hair. It was a pure wonder how gals could look so much different from one another and still look swell. Nurse Calder was as tall as the Widow MacUlric, but built more like that brunette from the library and … It was best not to undress them any further in one’s mind when one had matters of life and death to ponder.
As promised, the hearing was being held in a back room behind the judge’s chambers and cloakroom. Doc Forbes and a half-dozen other gents were seated between the rear wall and a long table the county commission likely used for its own sessions at other times. Everyone else made do as best they could on folding chairs or standing in the larger space left in the crowded chamber. Longarm moved over to one corner to stand with his back wedged into it so he could just worry about the hearing. Nurse Calder took a seat she was offered down at one end of the panel. The rest of the crowd was dressed mostly cow or corn, with reporters from both the Advertiser and rival Monitor obvious amid the handful of townsmen. Longarm noticed they hadn’t bunched up in sullen clumps the way men did in a community at feud. That bragging local history by the hardware man had said all original white settlers had depended on one another when Dull Knife and his Cheyenne were scaring western Nebraska just a few autumns back.