Longarm said, “Cover me,” and stepped out, .44-40 in hand, to move out as far as the ones they’d dropped closer to the front door. Fox Bancroft tagged along uninvited. He hadn’t ordered her to cover him from the jail, she explained demurely.
He smiled thinly and rolled the one who’d had the ten-gauge off the face-down leader of the mob. He hunkered to remove the mask and expose the face of a total stranger—to him, at least.
Then the redhead who hailed from those parts gasped and said she knew him. He was Swen Bergen, who ran the municipal corral across from Longarm’s boardinghouse.
Longarm allowed that answered more than one question, and reached out to yank the pillowcase off the head and shoulders of the late Pronto Cross. The erstwhile town marshal and mob leader was staring up surprised as hell about being dead.
Longarm wasn’t nearly as surprised as Fox Bancroft. She gasped, “Oh, what a two-faced liar! He only dispersed that crowd from the Red Rooster so he could take command and lead them against us on the sly! He reminds me of a boy I went to school with, only worse! But how did you know, Custis? I heard you call his very name, just as he opened up on you, the dumb thing!”
Longarm said, “When a man keeps telling you things that just don’t seem to make sense, you commence to suspect he must be lying to you. When a man keeps lying to you, you begin to suspect he must be hiding something from you. He didn’t want me paying enough mind to him to get suspicious, so he told me mysterious strangers had got off the train from Ogallala. Had he thought tighter about his made-up menace, he’d have had this other rogue say they’d hired some livery stock. But he must have taken me for simple. He never accounted for them riding off or having any place to stay in such a small town.”
As they strode over toward another downed Minute Man, Longarm added, “Pronto said he’d seen his mysterious strangers getting off the morning train. But you told me you posted your own rider, Curly, to make sure those crooked gamblers got aboard that same northbound train to leave town. So that left me with conflicting stories, unless poor Pronto here or Curly inside needed eyeglasses.”
As he hunkered down to unmask the swamper from the Red Rooster, the redheaded gal gasped, “Remind me never to fib to you! For you surely do pay attention, and as soon as one does, it doesn’t make sense that the town law would notice possible outlaws getting off a train whilst my poor country boy Curly would pay no mind to a couple of sinister total strangers after I’d told him to keep his eyes peeled!”
The swamper was dead too. As Longarm straightened up, he spied Doc Forbes kneeling by a moaning cowhand his redheaded local guide knew as a rider off the Lazy Four to the southeast.
Longarm called out, “I need at least one in shape to talk when my fellow lawmen get off the train, Doc.”
Doc Forbes called back, “I can promise you three. Too early to say about Ned Danfield. One of you spine-shot him serious! Lord knows what an accountant was doing over this way with a fool sack over his head!”
Felicia Tendring, young Howard’s weeping mother, was coming their way, fully dressed, with a pasty-faced cuss in an undertaker’s suit who allowed he was the family lawyer.
The nice-looking mother of the really ugly-natured Howard Tendring III stared wildly about at the results of the short savage gunfight and blazed, “What have you done to my baby, you monster?”
Longarm ticked the brim of his hat to her and said, “Just saved his neck for the time being, ma’am.”
He turned to call out to his pals inside the jail, “Let the monster’s mother and Uncle George talk to him through the bars. I’ll be joining you directly, lest these other monsters demand a rematch!”
As he hunkered to identify another downed Minute Man, this one still breathing but unconscious, Fox Bancroft said, “You told me you’d caught Pronto in more than one big fib, Custis.”
Longarm called out, “Hey, Doc? When you got time I got another live one for you here.”
Then he straightened up and waved his gun muzzle toward the front door of the jail to herd the redhead that way as he explained, “His second unlikely tale was the one he told about little Timmy Sears and his mother. He told me the night of the coroner’s inquest that he’d have the boy over to his office the following morning for me to talk to. He did go to the boy’s house, and like Tim Senior inside says, they did agree to have little Timmy meet up with me at the town marshal’s office.”
As they strode together toward the county jail, Longarm swore under his breath and said, “I had no reason to suspect a known town-tamer with a good rep at the time. But I still wish I’d gone direct to the poor little kid’s home and to blazes with his bedtime. But I had no call to suspect skullduggery before Pronto told me, barefaced, how they’d been waiting for me at his office but stepped out to run some other errands in the middle of town.”
Fox Bancroft nodded soberly and said, “I was there when you all rode out to my spread, searching for the boy and his mother. But try as we might, we never cut sign as we searched for the missing pair and those strangers who’d likely … But Custis, if Curly never saw any sinister strangers getting off any train …”
“That’s about the size of it,” Longarm said grimly. The heavy door ahead gaped open for them as he added, “Unless Pronto’s local and likely innocent deputies were lying about a whole mess of local merchants and shopping folks, who’d have had to be lying instead? Not a living soul but Pronto Cross himself said they’d seen little Timmy and his poor mother leave the town lockup to do spit. Women and children don’t vanish into thin air on the streets of their own hometown in the middle of a workday. So like I said, as I tried in vain to find anyone else who’d back old Pronto’s unlikely stories, I commenced to get suspicious. He cinched it for me earlier this evening when he gave us some feeble excuse to run off some more as I was arresting yet another murderer of a town gal who’d been murdered within his jurisdiction! He didn’t seem to be around here the night the Minute Men came for that poor Burnside boy and, well, I may be slow but I do plod on till I plow up something.”
They stepped inside. Remington Ramsay asked if he thought it was over. Longarm said he thought it might be. But he wanted to hold the place tight until those state and federal lawmen arrived.
He said, “They’ll likely ask the railroad to run them up here from the main line aboard a special. It ain’t as if they have to worry about the tracks ahead, once that southbound I just missed gets down yonder in an hour or so.”
Tim Sears Senior came out from the back, almost sobbing, “That mean Tendring kid just told his mother and her lawyer that my boy had nothing to do with the murder of Mildred Powell. But why was our Timmy hanging about with that full-grown half-wit to begin with?”
Longarm told him gently, “Howard Tendring couldn’t get boys his own age to hang about with him. He and Timmy weren’t as far apart in mental prowess as they might have looked, walking railroad tracks and such. Your boy was naturally more innocent and less interested in why little boys and little gals were built different. I doubt anything you’d have to feel ashamed of took place. The big girl-crazy lout was paying less attention to a tagalong kid than the tagalong kid was paying to him.”
The worried father said, “We should have kept a tighter eye on our Timmy. Have you any idea where that two-faced Pronto Cross had been holding my wife and child, Deputy Long?”
Longarm nodded soberly and softly replied, “I wish there was some nicer way to say it, Tim. But Pronto Cross didn’t want your son to talk to me. So I fear we’re never going to find either your boy or his mother alive.”