“I want to go home now,” Bubblehead Burnside whimpered. But then other masked men were pouring out of the stable as the sheriff said, “All right, I can’t stop you from taking the half-wit, but this other prisoner was picked up on a federal warrant and there’s this U.S. deputy marshal on his way up from Denver for him, hear?”
It might have worked. But another member of the bunch called out in a worried tone, “Let the federal want be, Porky. They never said they wanted us to take anybody but Bubblehead, and where’s the call for us to hang a total stranger?”
The burly leader called Porky snorted in disgust and replied, “You just now called it, you asshole.”
Swinging the twin muzzles of his Greener so the sheriff could stare straight into them, Porky quietly said, “You didn’t hear anybody here identify any of us by name, did you, Sheriff?”
To which the older and wiser man could only reply, “I wasn’t paying attention, mister. You say somebody called someone here by name?”
Porky nodded his sack-covered head and suggested, “Why don’t you and Deputy Clancy just go back inside, Sheriff? Me and the boys will be proud to take over from here!”
The sheriff started to say something. Then, as if he’d grown weary of staring down the barrels of that Greener, he shrugged and turned away, motioning Deputy Clancy to fall in step with him once he’d made it that far alive.
As the two lawmen walked away from the tense confrontation by the stable door, Dancing Dave tried to live up to his name with some sudden footwork. But he was pistol-whipped and fell to his hands and knees in the moonlit dust, and other rough hands had laid hold of the sobbing Bubblehead, who didn’t resist but got pistol-whipped in any case as he bawled he didn’t like the way they were playing with him.
Both prisoners were bound with their wrists behind them and marched through the stable and out to where others waited with saddle broncs and a buckboard drawn by two mules.
“You boys are making a big mistake!” yelled Dancing Dave as he and the weeping half-wit were thrown face-down across the wagonbed. But nobody seemed to be listening to either of them as the one called Porky called, “Move it on out, boys!”
As the buckboard carried them to a fate only the train robber with a federal warrant on him seemed to grasp, Bubblehead Burnside sobbed, “Why are they acting so mean to us, mister? I ain’t been bad. Have you been bad?”
Dancing Dave Loman had been bad indeed, for some time. But some inner spark of warmth welled up from deep inside him as he said soothingly, “Don’t cry, old son. Crying ain’t gonna help and it’ll only make the bastards feel better about doing us dirty.”
Bubblehead sniffed, “Why do they want to do us dirty, mister?”
To which the homicidal train robber beside him could only reply with a graveyard smile, “Reckon they’re just ornery. All I ever did was done for money. Hardly seems fair I’m about to die over an infernal Sunday school teacher I never laid eyes on! Was she pretty, this here Miss Mildred you admired so much?”
Bubblehead Burnside seemed to forget where they were, or the position he was in, as he smiled broadly and replied, “Oh, Miss Mildred was real pretty, and real nice too. She told the other boys and girls not to laugh at me and call me names when I went over the lines.”
“Went over the what?”
“Coloring book lines,” Bubblehead explained. “Miss Mildred gave us crayons to color with and books with pictures of Baby Jesus and his mom. She said we could color them any way we liked as long as we didn’t go over the lines. I tried not to go over the lines, but some of the time it was real hard not to, see?”
“You didn’t have any notion what you were doing to her, did you?” said Dancing Dave Loman. Then, before his fellow victim could reply, the buckboard under them suddenly stopped so that rough hands could drag them across the rough planking and drop them to the dust with rib-cracking thuds.
Then they were yanked back to their feet and marched out along the cross-ties of a railroad trestle spanning a deep dry draw. Only Dancing Dave grasped the full meaning of the hemp noose someone dropped over his head and drew tighter around his neck. Bubblehead had more trouble balancing on the less certain footing as the compact party proceeded almost joyfully out to the middle of the trestle. Everyone but Dancing Dave laughed when Bubblehead asked if they were almost there yet.
The one called Porky declared in a jovial tone, “This ought to do well enough, boys.” So they stopped. Two different members of the gang hunkered down to knot the other ends of the ropes around exposed railroad ties. Bubblehead asked if he could have a drink of water.
Porky pushed him off the trestle. Bubblehead’s short but chunky body snapped the rope taut with a jolt that twanged the trestle under everyone’s feet. Then, in the moment of silence that followed the loud snap, Dancing Dave Loman muttered, “You cold-hearted son of a bitch! You didn’t even give the kid a chance to say his last-“
And then Dancing Dave Loman was flailing his longer legs through thin air as he too went off the trestle to drop down, and down some more, until the trestle twanged under everyone else.
Then Porky chuckled knowingly and declared for the edification of anyone who cared, “Hell, I knew what both them bastards wanted to say at the last. They wanted to say they were innocent. That’s about all any of ‘em ever have to say.”
As he led the way back to solid ground and their waiting horseflesh, one of his followers thoughtfully opined, “That outlaw from other parts was innocent, as far as the crimes against Miss Mildred went. Ain’t we likely to have trouble with Uncle Sam when that U.S. deputy marshal arrives to discover we’ve strung up a stranger with a federal warrant on him?”
Porky shrugged his massive shoulders. “What can he do to us, seeing ain’t nobody in this county is about to tell him who done it? He’s welcome to fume and fuss a mite before he gets back aboard the train to let us handle things our own way in these parts.”
Someone else in the bunch asked, “What if he ain’t content to fume and fuss? I heard over to the Red Rooster earlier they were sending that tall drink of water they calls Longarm. He was up this way a spell back after some other old boys. I understand he just kept scouting for their sign until he caught ‘em too!”
An even more worried voice cut in with: “I heard the same. That’s how come they call him Longarm. What are we supposed to say if Longarm cuts our sign, Porky?”
Porky didn’t answer as he shifted his ten-gauge Greener to remount his pony. There were some questions that were just too dumb to answer.
Chapter 2
The bodies hung side by side, long and short, all through the night. So they were both stiff as planks when they were hauled in to town the next morning. Doc Forbes, the part-time county coroner, allowed their rigor mortis would wear off by the time he could hold his official inquest. So they were left in his root cellar atop good stout planks that spanned the sawhorses. Doc Forbes hadn’t kept potatoes and turnips down there since they’d elected him the coroner.
So that was where they lay, and how things stood, when the morning combination came up from Ogallala to deliver a tall rangy figure wearing a tobacco tweed suit between his dark pancaked Stetson and low-heeled cavalry stovepipes. He hadn’t thought there was any call to haul along his old army saddle or Winchester ‘73. So he’d left them in his furnished digs on the unfashionable side of Denver’s Cherry Creek. But he had leg irons in his one overnight bag to go with the handcuffs clipped to the back of his gun rig under his frock coat in case Dancing Dave Loman acted as frisky as some said he might. The same gun rig braced a double-action Colt .44-40 in its cross-draw holster on his left hip, with a double derringer clipped to one end of the watch chain across his tweed vest, should push come to shove.