One of the other federal deputies did ask Longarm whether he thought they ought to wire home for a federal warrant on Sheriff Wigan, just in case he ever came back.
Longarm said, “He’ll be back. He has kin in the cattle business up this way, and it ain’t as if he was telling Pronto Cross and his gang what to do. I’ve hashed that out with his dumb but honest deputies. I reckon Wigan was just going along with a tougher and more violent lawman gone wrong. It’ll be up to the local voters, come this November, whether they want a sheriff who’d rather live and let live with bullies than stare them down. I see no serious reasons to mount a mighty expensive and uncertain federal hearing for a poor old cuss whose only crime is an unhealthy desire for peace and quiet.”
The same calm contempt applied to those other township or county officials who knew more than they’d been letting on about the Minute Men. Many, like Remington Ramsay, hadn’t really known for certain just who might or might not have stuck with an officially disbanded bunch of friends and neighbors.
Leaving it to his fellow lawmen to tidy up, Longarm sent a night letter to Billy Vail in Denver, and headed back to his redecorated front room at the MacUlric boardinghouse to catch up on some well-earned rest. The new wallpaper had sunflowers against two shades of green. Longarm didn’t care. He was sound asleep within seconds of his head hitting the sachet-scented pillow, and he didn’t wake up until the church bells were chiming the noon hour.
He might not have opened his eyes that early had not he had to take a piss. For he had no great call to go anywhere before he’d be boarding that night train south, and that last dream had been sort of promising.
He lay there staring up at the disgustingly cheerful yellow ceiling as he muttered, “Why is it a piss hard-on always wakes you up just as you’re all set to stick it in your dream gal?”
Nobody answered. He threw the covers off, swung his bare feet to the bare planks, and considered the chamber pot under the bed. But he felt silly leaving a pot of piss where a pretty gal he’d never shown his dick to was sure to see it. So he swiftly got dressed and headed on out to do it right.
He met Mavis MacUlric in the hall, with her feather duster. She was about the dustingest landlady he’d had in recent memory. She asked him how he liked his new wallpaper. His back teeth were floating but he had to stand there, shifting from one foot to the other, as she brought him up to date on her dawning interest in that nice Remington Ramsay.
After he’d at last been allowed to empty his bladder and tidy up the rest of him, Longarm ate dinner out back and walked Ellen Brent back to the library to say adios properly. And after she said she was never going to forget him, coming twice downstairs in the dark, she got dressed and went upstairs to open the place officially.
Longarm ambled over to the county jail, where the state troopers were set up. Longarm offered to make himself useful, but the provost sergeant said young Howard Tendring in the back had made a full confession to the attempted rape and frustrated knifing of an older gal he’d admired from afar until he hadn’t been thinking straight.
Longarm said he knew the feeling. He didn’t tell the older noncom who he had in mind. It was nobody’s business that he’d almost managed a wet dream, and had pretended a petite brunette had been a willowy redhead just now. He asked if it was safe to assume the state troopers, since they rode for Nebraska, would see that the young killer got a fair state trial. He was assured he didn’t have to worry about that mean kid any more, and so he left.
The rest of the day went as slow as a constipated cat with no place to shit. He thought more than once about riding out to the Diamond B and begging Fox Bancroft for some infernal understanding. But a gal who got sore at a man unfairly wasn’t worth acting foolish over, and he knew no real gal could ever be built the way he’d pictured her in his head, whether asleep or on top of old Ellen. For being a man, he tended to picture the ones he couldn’t have a bit different from the ones he could. The human mind sure teamed up with the human pecker to confound a poor innocent cuss.
But since all things good and bad must end, it only felt like a million years before Longarm was able to settle up with everyone he owed in Pawnee Junction and board that southbound night train at last.
He rode alone in the smoking car for most of the short ride down to the main line. Ogallala, Nebraska, was a bigger cow town than the one he’d just left. But that wasn’t saying much in high summer when the cows were all grazing the surrounding range and hardly anybody could afford to crowd into the bigger town’s bigger whorehouses, card houses, and saloons, in that order.
Longarm got a room in one of the few hotels in Ogallala instead. The main-line day train that would carry him on to Denver wouldn’t get in before breakfast time, and a man who went looking for action in a strange town late at night was a man who made more money than they paid even a senior deputy.
He carried some magazines upstairs with his light baggage, and got undressed to read himself sleepy in bed. He hadn’t been reading long when there came a gentle rapping on his chamber door. So he got up to wrap a hotel towel around his waist and follow his .44-40 over to the door to see who it might be.
He hadn’t really been expecting a raven. But he was surprised to see Fox Bancroft standing there in all her glory, or at least with no hat, her red hair let down, and the top buttons of her shirt neglected.
She pushed in and shut the door behind her with a boot heel as she softly said, “I don’t want anyone to see me in a strange man’s hotel room like this!”
To which he could only reply, lowering the muzzle of his gun at least, “Aw, I ain’t so strange and to what might I owe this honor?”
She dimpled up at him in the lamplight and confided, “I was aboard the same train out of Pawnee Junction. I couldn’t come forward to your smoking car because Rose Burnside was getting aboard just as I was. I waited until she’d gone to another hotel before I hired a room in this one, just down the hall.”
Longarm asked, “How come? I thought you were sore at me about the way I had to call the shots about little Timmy and his momma.”
She seemed to be herding him backwards toward the bedstead as she said soothingly, “I saw you had no other choice as soon as I got to thinking about it later. Rose Burnside was gushing about you on the train, by the way. She’s sold out and never means to return to Pawnee Junction and its painful memories. But she’s ever so grateful about the way you cleared her brother’s name, and she said you spoke to her gently as well. I understand you never got fresh with Rose, or that pretty Mavis MacUlric you did so much for either.”
“Does Miss Mavis think I’m swell too?” he asked her uncertainly.
The redhead suddenly planted her shapely but work-hardened palms against his bare chest to push him hard and spill him back across the bed as she demurely replied, “The Widow MacUlrich has her own beau. Let me tell you about the hateful man I met when my daddy sent me back East to this fancy school just before he died.”
She braced one hand against his bare chest and reached down to whip the towel from between them as she wormed a knee into his armpit on either side, saying, “He was the leader of the debating team, and he could talk the horns off a billy goat or the pantaloons off a country girl who’d never heard such big words from a man she was in a closed carriage with! The brute seduced me when I was barely seventeen!”
Longarm gulped and said, “I’m sure sorry you got seduced so young by a slick-talking college boy, ma’am.”