The legal definition of a township extended roughly three miles north, south, east, and west of the city hall on Court house Square.
In practice, few cow towns sprawled half that wide when you took in the modest produce, butter, and egg spreads catering to the local market. One of the townsmen riding with him told Longarm they grew mostly garden truck off to the western upwind farms close to town. Longarm didn’t ask why they penned more pigs, chickens, and dairy cows over this way downwind. There sure were a lot of small hardscrabble spreads within sight of First Calvinist’s white spire. When Longarm commented on that, Remington Ramsay volunteered that filing homestead claims within the limits of a township was not allowed. He said you had to beg, borrow, or steal a plot of ground that big before you and your pals incorporated a township on top of it.
Longarm dryly asked if that was how Ramsay had wound up with so much property in town. The big frog of the little puddle sighed and said, “I wish I’d got here first. But I thought you read my history of Pawnee Junction. It was carved out of a railroad grant, sold off in one-hundred-by-two-hundred-foot lots at fair prices when they laid out a water stop hereabouts and decided they might as well drum up some freight and passenger business. I confess with a clear conscience that the lots my late wife and me bought cheap are worth way more now.”
Longarm muttered, “You said in your book how that great-uncle back in the old country cornered the market in imported lumber. I don’t see how anybody could ride through countryside this settled in broad day with an unwilling woman and child, do you?”
Neither the local big frog nor any of the lesser lights within earshot saw fit to argue. Longarm spied two small snot-nosed kids watching them over some snow fencing alongside the wagon trace they were riding. He swung across the roadside weeds to talk to them rather than yell, the little gal already staring big-eyed and ready to bolt.
He reined in his livery bay at conversational range and asked the kids if they’d seen another little boy and his momma passing by since breakfast. The boy of about six or seven said they just come out to play after their noon dinner.
Longarm had no better luck a furlong up the trace, where an old man with a hoe was regarding them all with interest as he stood shin-deep in cabbage sprouts. When Longarm agreed the big prairie grasshoppers could sure be a bother with garden truck, then asked about a grown woman and small boy being bothered by anybody, the old man in the cabbage patch said he hadn’t seen anything more suspicious than these son-of-a-bitching bugs they grew out here in the sand hills. He almost sounded as if he was bragging when he added nobody anywhere had ever suffered plagues of bigger, meaner, hungrier insects. Hence Longarm didn’t tell him what they said about Mormon crickets on the far side of the Rockies.
They rode on encountering the same results as they passed by many a spread and questioned many a nester up and about at this busy time of day. Nobody had seen any other strangers in recent memory.
There was nobody in sight as they rode by the hog farm of Rose Burnside. The pens were empty and there was a “For Sale” sign nailed to the door of the flat-roofed sod house. One of Sheriff Wigan’s deputies volunteered they’d had no trouble spotting her Mongoloid idiot kid brother at a distance. “He was on his hands and knees this side of yonder soddy, playing marbles in the dirt as if he didn’t have a care in the world. When we asked him why he’d been so rough with Mildred Powell, the funny-looking cuss just grinned and said he loved her. Ain’t that a bitch?”
“Let’s have a look inside,” Longarm replied, heeling his mount in that direction. Remington Ramsay started to ask why, then followed, saying, “Right. Miss Rose has been boarding in town whilst she ties up her few loose ends in these parts. So we’re talking about an empty house a lot of folks know of as empty!”
But that was all they found when they dismounted to scout all sides through the grimy glass windows. The discouraged Rose Burnside had apparently already sold off the furniture and stove, leaving just an empty shell that somehow looked sort of spooky.
Empty houses all seemed haunted, even when they didn’t have any ghost stories attached to them. The human eye was used to reading the sign that others left as they occupied their property. It was likely the lack of signs of recent living that made vacant property seem so unlived in and hence creepy. Even critters felt uneasy around their own kind lying ominously still and starting to get dusty and musty.
They rode on, asking everyone they met about the missing mother and child. They passed the colored shantytown, built closer to the tracks by the section hands who kept the north-south spur line in repair. One of the old-timers Longarm had seen earlier in that barbershop opined there was just no way any darkies could kidnap a white woman and her boy in the middle of town in broad daylight without anyone noticing. He added, “We only have a few darkies up this way and they seem to know their place. You never see them along Main Street unless they’ve been sent there on some errand. They have their own general store up the other side of the stockyards. Mrs. Sears would have no call to shop there, of course.”
Longarm was glad Tim Sears Senior was riding with Pronto Cross. He had to allow his informant seemed as fair-minded about colored folks as a man who called them darkies ever got.
They rode on past a good-sized chicken run, and then they saw Pronto and the others who’d circled to the west were already waiting up ahead by the low clay dam of that broad pond to the east of the tracks. So they rode on up to join them.
As Longarm reined in near his fellow lawman, Pronto smiled wearily and declared, “Nobody we passed saw a thing. Before you ask, I just asked those colored boys yonder about whether we ought to drag this pond or not.”
As Longarm spotted the two kids he’d seen the night before under the shady crowns of some poolside boxelder, Remington Ramsay told them, “Don’t have to drag it. I can have my yard hands drain it for you any time you like. It’s only a yard deep in the middle and you can see that dam is just clay.”
Pronto Cross said, “Well, them colored kids say they’ve been here fishing since before we first missed Timmy and his mother. But seeing it would be so easy … What do you think, Longarm?”
The more experienced lawman fished out a smoke and lit it before he said, “I reckon it depends on whose property we’re talking about and whether we charge those two young fishermen with criminal conspiracy. What else can you tell us about this overgrown puddle, Ramsay?”
The hardware and construction king of Pawnee Junction made a wry face at the broad expanse of stagnant water. “You’ve described it about right. The railroad ran that dam across the draw from yonder track bed. They thought they’d wind up with something much grander. I told them what would happen. In the end they had to sink a tube well like the rest of us ignorant peasants. You don’t dam surface streams for fun and profit in the Nebraska Sand Hills.”
Longarm mildly observed, “No offense, but it seems to me they did so, here at least.”
Remington Ramsay snorted in disgust and swept the back of his free hand across the watery view, insisting, “A quarter mile long, a furlong across, and most of it inches deep. All the grassy swells you see around us are stabilized sand dunes, held in place by thick sod, on top of the mud flats of some dried-up inland sea. I dig a lot of cellars and sink a lot of tube wells for others on contract. So I can tell you it’s much the same no matter where you dig down in these parts. You dig or drill through a yard or so of sand, it gets moister as you go, till you hit a layer of soggy black muck over clay hardpan. You drill down through the clay into clean reliable groundwater in a swamping bed of coarse wet sand I’ve yet to drill all the way down through. There’s no need to. You can pump it all day and all night without worry, once you’re down through that clay. This pond you’re looking at lies on top of that clay. It’s fed by the rainwater soaking down through the sand hills all around, and vice versa. That’s why it’s never deeper, and can’t get any deeper, than the seasonal weather warrants. By late summer you’ll see more mud than water north of this dumb dam. I’ve offered to drain their mistake for them in exchange for the recovered bottomland, but you know how some railroad surveyors are about admitting mistakes.”