Longarm cocked a brow and dryly replied, “I’ve had such messages relayed to me in the past. They do that more often down Mexico way. Who sent you, the Minute Men or this Fox Bancroft I’ve heard so much about?”
The cuss from the barbershop said, “I don’t recall. I’m only trying to be helpful. I was told to tell you there’s a southbound combination passing through this evening. That gives you time to have supper, settle up with anyone you owe here in Pawnee Junction, and be safely on your way by sundown.”
Longarm asked, “What happens if I’m still here after sundown?”
The townsman looked sincerely worried and asked, “Who’s to say? I ain’t armed and I ain’t threatening anybody with shit. I’ve only told you what I was told to tell you, see?”
Longarm nodded thoughtfully. If he shoved this worried-looking older cuss against the wall and shoved a .44-40 muzzle up one nostril, he might or might not get a true name or more out of him. But after that, as they’d long since noticed down Mexico way, it could be a waste of time trying to follow a tangled thread from one mere lickspittle to another, and worse yet, that was sometimes exactly what they expected you to do. He’d walked into a swell ambush in Sonora one night trying to find out who’d sent Pancho to tell Juanito to tell Hernando. So he contented himself with: “Tell your pals I’ll take their railroad timetable under advisement.”
Then he lit a smoke out front, and circled the courthouse to duck between two buildings and sneak over to the library and catch little Ellen Brent just as she was fixing to close for the afternoon.
She let him back inside when he allowed he’d like her to. As she shut the front door after them she said, “We missed you at dinner. That hardware tycoon, Remington Ramsay, took your place under the grape arbor and ate enough for the both of you. What are we going to do about him, Custis?”
Longarm smiled uncertainly and replied, “Didn’t know we had any call to do anything about him, Miss Ellen. I asked him to come over and give me an estimate on the damage from that gunplay in the wee small hours.”
Ellen shot the bolt of the door as she said, “I fear you may have created a monster. He was still there when I had to get back to work and leave poor Mavis to his mercy!”
Longarm said, “I noticed he seemed sort of smitten with a still young and handsome widow woman.”
“Her property, you mean!” sniffed the snippy brunette. “I know he was flirting with her a lot, but all the time he was going on about losing his own spouse to the plague a good spell back, he was eyeing everything inside her picket fence as if he already owned it. I told you about that other skunk who came courting a poor woman with little experience with smooth talk, didn’t I?”
Longarm said, “You did. She’s lucky to have a more well-read librarian as a chaperone. I can see a man would have to get up early to put anything over on you. Do you have any books about that old Credit Mobilier of America scandal as broke during the ‘72 Presidential race?”
She said she thought there might be something on it in the recent history cross-index, and led him over to her files as she confessed she’d heard about them doing something dreadful with railroad stock back in Washington while she was in high school in Omaha. She confessed she’d been more interested in a certain boy down the street at the time.
As she pored through her index cards Longarm said, “I was just getting over my admiration for cows at the time. They were still at it about Credit Mobilier when I signed on with the Justice Department as a junior deputy. But they never asked my opinion, and I’m not certain I recall the skullduggery right.”
She sighed and said, “I don’t have anything filed under Credit or Mobilier. If we have anything about the mess it would be in a book we have under another listing. Maybe if you could just get me started with the gist of it all …”
Longarm sighed and said, “I fear everyone wound up mighty confused with all the facts and figures laid out in front of them. The way I remember it, some big railroading men got authorized by Congress to build that transcontinental railroad betwixt ‘64 and ‘69, under mighty generous terms. The government was so anxious to see a railroad all the way out to California that they loaned both the Union Pacific and Central Pacific millions of dollars and granted them alternate sections of land all along their rights of way, along with the water, timber, and mineral rights.”
She said, “I heard about that. I wish somebody would give me just one square mile of free land, with or without a forest or gold mine on it!”
Longarm nodded. “The hard-nosed directors of that Central Pacific were content with just getting as rich as King Midas. But a couple of Union Pacific directors called Ames and Durant took pork-swilling to new heights. They set up a dummy corporation, called the Credit Mobilier of America, to contract with the Union Pacific the two of them already ran to lay the tracks out to the Great Salt Lake and pound gold spikes with the eastbound Central Pacific.”
“Was that against the law?” She asked.
Longarm said, “They’re still arguing about that. The exact numbers are in those books you don’t have handy. But the left hand billed the right hand a third more than it really cost for every mile of track. Ames and Durant, as Union Pacific directors, were proud to pay Ames and Durant of Credit Mobilier such a handsome profit with other suckers’ money. Oakes Ames sat in Congress as well as on all those boards of directors. So he figured he’d best cut some politicos their own slices of the pie. He dealt out shares in Credit Mobilier cut-rate or even on credit, which could be considered outright bribery, and was by some. For as those golden spikes got driven and the construction company was liquidated, Credit Mobilier shares with a face value of around two hundred dollars were redeemed with cash and Union Pacific paper worth over eight hundred dollars per share, which does add up when you slip a congressman a few hundred free shares at a time. That may have been why so few came forward.”
She said, “I’m not sure I understand what those congressmen were supposed to do for all that railroad paper, Custis.”
Longarm said, “Neither was that congressional panel after they’d looked under many a shell. They never found out how many shares, worth what, were distributed amid how many congressmen to do what. They managed to implicate Vice President Colfax, two senators, and four or five representatives, along with old Ames himself. But nobody was ever indicted or even expelled. The committee likely missed a few old boys holding handsome blocks of Credit Mobilier. In the end the dummy outfit that built the Union Pacific faded away like that Cheshire cat in the story about Miss Alice in Wonderland, leaving more of a bad taste in the air than any big grin.”
Ellen asked, “Aren’t those Credit Mobilier certificates under all that wallpaper back at the house worth anything at all?”
Longarm said, “That’s how come I want to look ‘em up. I’m only a lawman, not a stockbroker. I don’t think they could be worth anything at this late date. Martin MacUlric couldn’t have thought much of them when he used them to paper his upstairs before he passed on. But he did buy a heap of them before he decided they were only pretty paper.”
Ellen said, “I never met him. But if you ask me he must have been a fool. Why would he have paid anything for all that Confederate money?”
Longarm shook his head and replied, “Not money. Bonds. A promise on the part of the Confederate States of America to pay the bearer face value on maturity. He wasn’t a total fool. Some of the former states of the Confederacy have started to pay pensions to Confederate widows, now that the Reconstruction has blown over and Southerners are running Southern states again.”