Tim Sears Senior staggered as if he’d been punched in the head, and Fox Bancroft grabbed hold of him in a motherly way while she called Longarm an unfeeling brute.
Longarm nodded soberly and replied, “None of us here can feel Tim’s pain. Pronto Cross got off way too easy. But saying it never happened ain’t going to unhappen it, and we still have to find their remains.”
Tim Sears Senior sobbed, “My God, that son of a bitch could have buried them easy anywhere for miles around in those infernal sand hills!”
Longarm shook his head and pointed out, “No, he couldn’t. He’d have had to sneak them out of a busy town in broad day, and I for one would have noticed any buckboard he was driving.”
Turning to Remington Ramsay, he asked, “Is it possible you were the contractor who threw up the marshal’s office along with all the other public buildings, Oh, Pioneer?”
Ramsay nodded easily and said, “Sure, at cost. But before you ask, there are no secret rooms, nor space to sneak in one’s own, over at our modest town lockup.”
Longarm quietly asked, “Might it have a cellar, like your library?”
Ramsay said it did. Tim Sears Senior gasped, “Oh, Dear Lord!” and broke free of Fox Bancroft to dash out the front door. The redhead cried, “Now see what you’ve done, you unfeeling beast!” and tore out across the square after him.
The newspaperman, Preston, dithered, “I don’t know whether to run after them or stay here! I’m afraid I’ll miss out on the big story no matter what I do!”
Longarm smiled wearily and said, “Chase after them, but do me a favor and gather up Doc Forbes along the way. I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m right, an official coroner’s report will sure come in handy.”
As the newspaperman left, Longarm turned to Ramsay and said, “My boss calls that delegating authority. He likes it when I get other lawmen to co-sign my notes. Sometimes they read sort of complicated.”
Then he fished out two more cheroots as he added, “This one ain’t as complicated as some cases I’ve been sent out on. But old Billy Vail will be pleased to have my uncertain spelling backed up by Doc Forbes and less sneaky local lawmen.”
Curly came out from the back to say that the lawyer wanted to talk to him. Longarm said, “Tell him he can talk to me out here. I ain’t trying to be rude. I hope it’s over. But if it ain’t, I’ve already saved young Howard’s guilty neck for him this evening!”
When the cowhand left, Ramsay took a drag on his second free smoke and said, “You were saying you didn’t find all this confusing. I’ll be buttered with axle grease and dipped in shit if I can see what in the devil Pronto Cross was up to! Nobody ever gave him permit to set up and lead any second county militia, and even if he wanted to, why would he have wanted to? He was already the town law, for Chrissake!”
Longarm took a drag on his own cheroot as he morosely stared out at the townsfolk gathering up dead and wounded they knew better than he could hope to. He said, “Pronto Cross was an old hand at taming cow towns and keeping them sedate. Like Sheriff Wigan, he knew that even though they send lawmen like me after the really wild and woolly riders of the Owlhoot Trail, policing a mixed bag of town and country drunks can be dangerous as hell whether you do it too firm or too gentle. If you rule the roost with a firmer hand than called for, you make heaps of enemies and get fired a lot, like poor old proddy James Butler Hickok did before he got back-shot by Cockeyed Jack McCall.”
He blew a smoke ring and continued. “Tame a town just a tad too gentle, the way Marshal Tom Smith tamed Abilene a few years ago, and you can wind up shot by a trash-white like Andy McConnell and killed with an axe by the shiftless Moses Miles. So your Sheriff Wigan and Pronto worked out a gentleman’s agreement. The sheriff would leave the township drunks to Pronto, Pronto would leave the country drunks to the sheriff’s tender mercies, and the Minute Men would deal with anyone really dangerous. No kith or kin was likely to come after a lawman if that particular lawman hadn’t done anything to him. Meanwhile, the taxpayers couldn’t fault a lawman for tolerating a wild man who’d finally been run out of town or worse by unknown vigilantes, see?”
Ramsay sighed and said, “I do now. Are you saying even our lazy old sheriff was party to this devil’s bargain?”
Longarm shrugged and replied, “Well, it’s agreed he seemed sort of lazy when he should have been upholding the law. We’ll find out how deep a part he played in any lynching as soon as we’ve had time to question the surviving Minute Men. I expect they’ll be easier to question, now that they’ve lost their leaders and their masks.”
He blew another smoke ring and added tolerantly, considering what they’d just gone through with the sons of bitches, “I expect we’ll find old Pronto Cross had the final say, before and after I shot it out with that loudmouthed Porky Shaw. Pronto had the best motive for running a tame mob, so he could avoid having to stand up alone to real wild men. But you were right about it being a bargain with the devil. Any lawman who thinks it’s practical to break the law to uphold it is just about as practical as a fool who sets his house on fire to keep warm. But I reckon few such gents have ever read that tale about Dr. Faust and Mr. Mephistopheles. For every time we make a bargain with the devil, it turns out to be a dumb one.”
Chapter 22
That expected special combination rolled in just after midnight with four federal deputies, a detachment of state troopers, and a declaration of martial law.
By that time the pathetic remains of little Timmy Sears and his murdered mother had been recovered from their shallow grave in the clay floor of the cellar of the town marshal’s office. Doc Forbes said they’d both been killed with a small hammer they found in the marshal’s desk upstairs.
So the surviving members of the Pawnee Junction Minute Men were falling over one another to make sworn depositions about all their recent night riding. A lot of what they had to say for themselves was self-serving guff, but some of it was sincere, and all of it was easy enough to check because nobody now had any use for a two-face who’d murder a mother and child to cover his mistake about Bubblehead.
As others came forward to tell tales about the now-discredited and no-longer-feared Minute Men, it developed that Pronto Cross and a handful of close pals had been using and abusing both the Minute Men themselves and a lot of local merchants. It was Longarm who was able to detail the way their protection flimflam worked, because he’d run across it before in New Orleans, where those immigrant gangs they called Black Handers sold the same bill of goods to worried minds.
Some of the recent Minute Men seemed vexed as all get-out to learn they hadn’t been let in on the extorted cash, goods, and services in spite of their being used to scare folks.
Longarm pointed out that the common soldiers who’d won the southwest third of the country from Mexico hadn’t been paid the current going rate of thirteen and beans a month. He was used to getting the short end of the stick.
That was why he never complained as the pushy deputies out of the nearby Ogallala District Court took over the investigation as if they’d been there all the time. Longarm hadn’t planned on growing old and gray in the sand hills of Nebraska, and there was a lot to be said for letting others do the leg-and paperwork as long as you were content to let them hog the glory.
Longarm knew his own home office would have to allow he’d done as much as he’d been sent to do, even more, once his federal prisoner had been left in no shape to stand trial in Denver. And he hadn’t been shoved aside nearly as rudely as the local township and county powers.
Longarm hadn’t had to point out that Pronto Cross couldn’t have been the only local official in cahoots with the highly irregular vigilante riders. The major in charge of the state troopers had only had to hear the Minute Men had been secretly led by the town marshal before he stripped every official in the county of all powers, pro tem, and said everyone could consider their fool selves occupied by the state of Nebraska until further notice.