The red and purple sky was pretty, and lamps were lighting windows all over town in a way that made a traveling man feel left out and wistful. Longarm didn’t know why he ought to feel wistful about all those settled couples, happy or otherwise, who’d had their suppers and might soon be going to bed to do all sorts of things, naughty and nice. For while it was true he had to be missing out on one hell of a lot of naughty and nice, he’d still never get at half the loving down yonder no matter which particular bedroom lamp he got to trim.
Some few stars were coming out as bats fluttered past, some lower than his prone form. One star near the northern horizon seem to be getting bigger. Longarm figured before he heard the distant wail of its steam whistle that the southbound evening combination was coming in on time. Train whistles were another thing that made a body feel wistful when the day was done. Folks all over town would be heaving sighs as that evening train sang its siren song to them in passing. Men fixing to bed down with gals a passing stranger could only dream about in passing would be wishing they could follow that lonesome whistle through the night to someplace like Paris, Camelot, or maybe Kansas City. Human beings were like that. There’d be no need for any man to pack a badge or gun if human beings could make up their fool minds what they wanted and be satisfied with it. But on the other hand, how many clipper ships or railroad engines had ever been invented by trees, or even sheep?
The train chugged ever closer, and now some few dim figures were moving about down yonder in the gathering dusk. Then the headlight of the slowing locomotive lanced ahead of it down the tracks to shine on nobody more sinister than a fat man with a mail sack and a half-dozen casual-looking men and boys who seemed to admire trains.
The water tower stood north of the loading platform and cattle pens so the engines could water best as they were headed north, up the slight but persistent rise of the SandHill Country. Longarm was just as glad when the engine passed under him, blowing smoke in his face, to hiss to a halt further down, with the passenger cars of the freight-passenger combination right under him. Anybody interested in others getting off or getting on would have to be watching from damn close. But Longarm couldn’t spot a lick of suspicious movement as nobody got off or on. Then, farther along the platform, they’d finished swapping mail sacks and loading some freight from Pawnee Junction aboard. Nobody seemed to be expecting any deliveries from anywhere else on the sea of grass that lay all the way north to the Peace River. Then the bell was clanging and the combination was rolling on toward the bright lights of Ogallala again, calling back its haunting song of adventure and romance as it chugged away.
Longarm stayed put. He’d learned as a kid, at a place they called Shiloh, how dumb it could be to move first after things commenced to seem safe. But after he’d counted to a thousand Mississippis, it was really dark and the bats all around were starting to flutter past with the contempt bred of familiarity. So he put his hat back on and slowly made his way down to where you just had to crunch a tad on the railroad ballast if you wanted to get anywhere else.
Nobody else was crunching as he eased his way off railroad property to cross that weed-grown lot and the brooding silence of the churchyard behind First Calvinist. It was easy to picture someone popping out of that dark frame mass as he crossed the churchyard. Timmy Sears hadn’t been scared as he might have been because he’d known the one who’d popped. Those mounted cowhands on the far side would have seen the cuss if he’d run any direction but … yonder, towards the railroad yards Timmy had just come from.
Longarm got out to the sandy street and headed for the more wide-awake parts of town.
Most of the shops were closed by now. Some ponies were tethered out front of a hole-in-the-wall describing itself as the Aces and Eights Card House. As he eased along the plank walk, he could see over the tops of the painted lower panes of the front windows. If anyone inside cared, he saw nobody staring back at him. That snooty redhead he’d seen at the coroner’s inquest was seated at a table between the bar and swinging doors with some gents dressed cow and a man in a planter’s hat and a linen suit. Places regulated as tightly as the Parthenon in Denver or the Long Branch in Dodge never would have allowed a woman to sit in at cards in the main taproom. But Pawnee Junction was a far from tightly regulated town.
Longarm strode on to the larger and more familiar Red Rooster. He left his six-gun holstered, but had his derringer palmed as he stepped through the swinging doors. But nobody seemed to care. He saw some new faces along with many who’d been there when Porky Shaw had slapped leather on him. There was no sign of Porky on the swamped and sawdusted floor that evening.
Longarm saw the buck-skinned county prosecutor sitting at a corner table with another redhead, this one dressed more like a rich widow than a cowgal and owing her hair coloring more to the henna shrubs of the Old World than that other gal seemed to.
Longarm knew how he’d feel if some other gent came over uninvited as he was jawing with a plain or fancy gal. So he moved over to the bar, eased along it to where he had the door, front glass, and most everything else covered, and ordered a scuttle of tap, leaving that palmed derringer right where it felt best, down at his side.
He’d just been served when that same brassy saloon gal came over to ask him what made him think he was better than poor Kiowa Jack.
He gravely replied, “You have the advantage of me, ma’am. I’d have to know who Kiowa Jack was afore I could tell you whether or not I was better than him.”
She laughed, turned to the older imitation of Buffalo Bill, and called out, “Says he never heard of you, Kiowa Jack!”
When he saw they were talking about the county prosecutor, Longarm covered up by calling, “I thought you said your name was John.”
The man who also seemed to be Kiowa Jack waved the two of them to join him. So they did, with the gal seeming surprised when Longarm held her bentwood chair for her. She turned out to be the Baroness du Prix for some reason. The reasons anyone would call his fool self Kiowa Jack were more mysterious. Buffalo Bill had a rival showman describing himself as Pawnee Bill because he’d once scouted for the army with some Pawnee friendlies. It sounded reasonable to say you were a blood brother to the Pawnee because, like their distant kin, the Cherokee and Mohawk, Pawnee saw things more like white folks than most Indians. That was likely why Cherokee and Mohawk had had so much trouble with white neighbors back East. The less-famous Pawnee went in for more farming around settled villages than their Cheyenne and Arapaho enemies too. So it was easier to make friends with Pawnee as long as you remembered not to walk through their corn fields or mess with their women. But Kiowa were contrary next to Comanche or Lakota, and a white man who intimated he was all that close to Kiowa was a born liar or one hell of a diplomat.
Longarm didn’t want to hear bullshit about Texas Indians from a Nebraska lawyer with a possible drinking problem and a mighty wild taste in summer dress for certain. So he said he’d just been up by the scene of Mildred Powell’s murder. Kiowa Jack sighed and said, “A poor innocent girl who died too soon at the hands of an idiot she was only trying to help. I’ll drink to that.”
The Baroness du Prix raised her own beer, but sniffed, “Or so they say. I hear she was sort of flirty, for all her Sweet Jesus ways.”
“Don’t speak ill of the dead,” said Kiowa Jack, the county prosecutor, gravely. “I know for a fact you used to be Baptist, and that Sunday school teacher would hardly spend much time over here. So there’s no way you could have known that much about the lady.”
The Baroness du Prix was likely drunker than she let on. Because she snorted, “Oh, I know all about such ladies!” and commenced to sing, “Christ, the savior, I’m his lamb! Jesus Christ! How glad I am!”