The big kid lowered his face, as if ashamed to be seen by anyone he knew, as Longarm said, “Ain’t holding him on kidnapping. It will be up to your local courts to decide, after I turn him in to them, but I’d say he’s an easy win for murder in the first, whether little Timmy can testify against him or not. If push comes to shove, I can come up with three other kids who stand ready to identify him as the one Timmy meant when he mentioned his overgrown playmate Howard.”
Pronto Cross said, “Oh, Lord, I’d best rustle up more help whilst you get him over to the jail, and bar all the outside doors and windows. For whether you are right or wrong, there’s liable to be hell to pay as soon as the Minute Men learn they might have hung the wrong half-wit the other night!
Chapter 20
Sheriff Wigan’s two deputies were surprised, but willing to hold young Howard Tendring till their boss got back to town to tell them differently. The kid still refused to talk politely to anybody but his momma or his Uncle George. When one of the deputies backhanded him, Longarm said, “Leave him be. His mother and her lawyer, lover, or whatever ought to be along any time now.”
So they locked him up in one of the patent cells and commenced to douse the inside lamps and get set for anyone else who might come to call that evening.
Fox Bancroft asked Longarm which window he wanted her to man. He said, “No offense, but you ain’t a man, and seeing you have that pony out front, I’ve got a better chore for you.”
He ripped two pages out of his notebook and spread them on a windowsill to jot hasty messages by the light of the street lamp outside.
Handing them to the redhead, he explained, “I’d be obliged if you could send these wires for me at the Western Union and not show ‘em to anyone else you meet along the way.”
She started to argue, nodded soberly, and left Longarm, the two sheriff’s deputies, and Remington Ramsay feeling sort of lonesome in the county jail.
Ramsay joined Longarm at the open window near the bolted front door to muse, “Pronto could be wrong. It’s not as if they had anyone all that ambitious egging them on. I’m pretty sure Porky Shaw was the main ringleader last time, and everyone on both sides knows what you did to Porky Shaw.”
Longarm said, “Porky had a pal with a ten-gauge Greener who shot up my room. Nobody on the side of the law has seen fit to tell me who he is. Let’s talk about him, Ramsay.”
The big hardware man said, “The reason I told Mavis MacUlric I’d buy her worthless railroad bonds at par is that I tried to help her when I first heard she was having financial trouble. She acted like I was trying to buy her fair white body, for Chrissake!”
“Weren’t you?” asked Longarm dryly.
Ramsay snapped, “Damn it, my intentions are pure toward Mavis MacUlric. I’ve never had the time or inclination to chase skirts for the hell of it. I was true to my late wife while she lasted, and I was there when Martin MacUlric died of that heart stroke after his own long and happy marriage.”
“That made you hot for his widow?” demanded Longarm, who’d noticed on his own that Mavis MacUlric wasn’t suffering from warts on her nose or a flat chest.
Ramsay said, “Call me hardheaded when it comes to romance. But a man with horse sense can fall for a handsome woman who’s been proven a good wife as easy as he can fall for a spinster schoolmarm or some divorced gal who might well have been the one in the wrong!”
“I’m sure you and Miss Mavis will be very happy,” Longarm replied in a dismissive tone. “I never asked about your love life. I asked for some straight talk about those Minute Men. Before you say you don’t know shit, I read that book you had printed up about the carving of this whole county from a howling wilderness. Are you now trying to say you were never invited to join?”
The still-young old-timer of the Sand Hill Country smiled thinly and confessed, “I might have been doing some of the inviting, if you want to hear about the Cheyenne Scare of ‘78.”
He stared out at the ominously empty and dimly lit courthouse square as he added in a softer tone, “My God, it seems like yesterday. But the county was half as settled and barely incorporated. The state capital at Lincoln seemed so far away and those renegade Cheyenne were said to be so close!”
Longarm firmly stated, “Dull Knife and his breakaway band would have headed for a leper colony before they’d get within a day’s ride of that nearby Pawnee Agency. Aside from that, they weren’t wearing paint and the last thing they were looking for was another fight with our kind.”
He got out two cheroots and handed one to the hardware man as he added morosely, “They got one just the same, when the army caught up with ‘em over to the west. You hardy pioneers organized your own half-ass militia to fight Indians?”
Ramsay waited until Longarm had lit his cheroot for him before he explained, “Just for that one emergency. I’m afraid it was my own idea to call us Minute Men. As a history buff I was thinking of how the real Minute Men had been organized back in the 1700s to deal with an earlier red menace. We disbanded the next spring, of course.”
Longarm blew smoke out his nostrils and demanded, “What was Porky Shaw, a slow reader?”
Ramsay sighed and said, “That’s exactly how you could describe him and some few of the others in these parts. Militia meetings are fun when there’s no war on. I had a serious business to run. Most of the others who’d started the Minute Men with me dropped out for much the same reasons. Sitting around a campfire with jugs seems less attractive to men with serious chores to occupy their hands and minds.”
“Then how come you respectable folk here in Pawnee Junction refuse to tell the law who’s left in the ragged-ass bunch that’s left?”
Ramsay shrugged and replied, “It’s more that you’re an outsider than the fact that you’re a lawman. Everyone in town likely suspects a few friends and neighbors still meet in secret to ride at night. Nobody who’s no longer an active member could say for sure who might be doing what, and to be fair, most of the times the Minute Men have taken the law in their own hands, they’ve gone after someone who had it coming.”
“You don’t have a town marshal or a county sheriff, huh?” Longarm demanded dryly.
The local man said, “You can see what sort of sheriff we have. Old Wigan is a political hack who spends more time down at his local party headquarters in Ogallala than here, when he’s not gold-bricking with his in-laws out to the Rocking Seven.”
“What about Pronto Cross?” asked Longarm, adding, “I understand your board of aldermen paid good money to import a town-tamer with a rep.”
Ramsay said, “We did. I was there and I voted for the motion. Pronto Cross has calmed our Saturday nights in town considerable and nobody has insulted a woman in public for quite a spell. But I hardly have to tell a lawman how many times the statute laws just don’t seem to apply to a total son of a bitch.”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “You’re talking about habitual mean drunks, wife beaters, untidy neighbors in general. This may come as a shock, but neighborhood vigilante gangs always seem to start out as a means of dealing with pests the regular law can’t seem to cope with.”
He blew more smoke out his nostrils and snorted, “They go from whupping wife beaters to burning out suspected stock thieves or lynching unpopular suspects. You ain’t ready to tell me who’s in charge now, right?”
Ramsay said, “Wrong. I just don’t know. I’m only half sure about a few of the lesser lights. I think one of my yard hands is still a member. He said he wasn’t there when they lynched Bubblehead Burnside. I asked. That’s not saying anyone told me the truth.”