Another customer volunteered, “And him a grown man of nearly four and twenty too! I mind what you just said about him and the little kids. Had poor Mildred Powell heeded the other ladies, she might be alive today! Nobody else but poor Miss Mildred wanted the idiot attending her Sunday school classes. They told her it wasn’t natural or healthy to have a full-grown man drooling at her over coloring books that way.”
The bigger man standing by the back wall stared thoughtfully down at Longarm as he declared, “Our Denver lawman ain’t interested in the droolings of Bubblehead Burnside. He’s more concerned with the rope dance of Dancing Dave Lowman. Ain’t that right, Longarm?”
There was common courtesy, and there was common sense when a man with two guns in quick-draw holsters was smiling down at you that way. So Longarm rose to his own considerable height, his frock coat open to expose the more modest grips of his own .44-40 as he calmly replied, “It surely is, and might you have a name of your own, old son, seeing you seem to know me so well?”
“I’d be Porky Shaw, boss wrangler out to the Diamond B,” the big man answered easily. He added, “Knew who you were as soon as you opened your mouth because you’re more famous. We’d heard you were headed up this way to carry that train robber back to Denver.”
“Is that why you hung him?” Longarm asked as easily.
It got very quiet for the next million years. Then Porky Shaw laughed incredulously and demanded, “Are you accusing me or anyone else here of stringing them boys up last night?”
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “I ain’t as worried about who as why. You were right about us having our hearts set on a serious conversation with Dancing Dave. Aside from his own misdeeds, he was in a swell position to clear up some other matters for us. Any man given his choice of talking about his gang or dancing at the end of a rope is likely to choose talking.”
Porky Shaw looked sincerely puzzled as he asked, “Didn’t you just now say the cuss hadn’t done anything to anyone up our way?”
Longarm nodded soberly and replied, “That’s why I find his death so mysterious. We wanted him alive, to talk to us. More than one of his former business associates would have paid good money to see him dead so’s he couldn’t. I’ll be switched with snakes if I can fathom why a purely local mob of cowardly assholes would want to lynch old Dancing Dave. Unless, of course, they like to jack off in unison to the thrill of watching somebody die.”
The barber froze in mid-snip. Nobody else in the confined space seemed to be breathing as Porky Shaw’s fat face changed colors back and forth between ash and beet while he chose his words with some care. Then, as Longarm calmly studied him as if he’d been a bug on a pin, Porky blustered, “Them’s mighty hard words for men you don’t know, Denver boy.”
Longarm quietly but firmly answered, “I know them. If not by name, I know them by their cur-dog snarly laughter as they egg one another on to cowardly heroics. Dancing Dave had his faults, and from what you say that marble-shooting sex maniac couldn’t have been a man I’d care to drink with. But ain’t it curious how not a single one of your so called Minute Men had the grit to face either of ‘em man to man?”
As Porky Shaw’s fat face went from frog belly back to smoked ham, the barber interjected soothingly, “Come on. Be fair, Longarm! It ain’t as if our Minute Men had no just cause! Suppose you found a pretty young church lady all cut up and dying. Then suppose she flat out told you she’d been ravaged and stabbed by a drooling idiot she’d tried to be nice to! What would you do if you’d known the poor gal personal and you knew the law was likely to let her killer live?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “I’d kill him. I wouldn’t go home to get my mask and wait around until me and all my pals could screw up the nerve to come slithering like snakes after sundown.”
Porky Shaw blustered, “The Minute Men ain’t sneaks! They ain’t any mob! They’re a sort of secret militia organized to keep law and order in these parts, see?”
Longarm laughed coldly and glanced thoughtfully at the Regulator Brand clock above the mirror as he said, “I didn’t know the saloons had been open that long this morning. I hope you won’t take this as mean-spirited, Porky, but a mob is still a mob no matter what anybody wants to call it. Secret posse is a contradiction in terms. Under the rules of common law, going back before Robin Hood and that mean Sheriff of Nottingham, a posse comitatus is a temporary but lawfully assembled gathering of the able-bodied men of a county, sworn in under the sheriff of the county, to follow said sheriff’s orders.”
He let that sink in before he continued. “Whether he was in the wrong or in the right, old Robin Hood had no powers under common law to swear his merry men of the forest in as a posse comitatus. Like the book says, Robin and his merry men were outlaws, no matter how fair or unfair they thought the laws were at the time.”
Porky Shaw grumbled, “Hell, don’t fuss at me about the way them Minute Men are organized. I never organized them!”
Longarm said, “Somebody must have, and I’d sure like to tell him what an asshole he was if he even hinted they were militia. For I’ve heard tell you have men in these parts who rode for both sides in the war, and calling another bunch a militia could be taken as an insult to the memories of many a real militiaman in blue or gray!”
A younger townie who’d been trying not to say anything burst out with, “Hold on, I knew the Ohio Volunteers were militia, but what was that about them Johnny Rebs?”
“Militia. Lawfully enlisted by the elected state assemblies of both sides,” Longarm replied with a nod. “That’s how come we call state troops the National Guard now. From way before the American Revolution up to the elections of 1860, the governor of each colony and then state was empowered to recruit and organize a militia, or body of part-time troops, to call out in times of trouble against, say, raiding French and Indians or pesky redcoats. The point to bear in mind is that such militia units were open and aboveboard organizations approved by their local government, with nobody wearing masks or enlisted under phony names.”
The barber snorted, “Hell, if our Minute Men gave out their right names, they’d never be able to uphold law and order around here without winding up in state prison!”
To which Longarm replied with a sardonic smile, “I just said that. Real militiamen carry out the orders of their lawfully constituted governments period, with no ifs, ands, or buts. I wasn’t there, but I’ve read the reports handed in by Captain Parker of the real Minute Men and Major Pitcairn of the Royal Marines, after the gunfight at Lexington Green. Nobody on either side was saying he was somebody else. Captain Parker allowed he was acting in his lawful capacity as a commissioned officer of the Massachusetts Assembly when he demanded to know where all those redcoats were headed without any search warrant. And we know what happened after that. The first shots of the more recent war were fired by honest soldiers with their bare faces hanging out too! As the Southern states left the Union, or tried to, they called up their lawful state militias, just as the Northern states called their own already organized outfits to active duty. The end result was a Union Army whupping a Confederate Army, with the victors stripping all state governments of the powers to carry things that far in the future by federalizing all state militias. But we were talking about what is and what’s not a posse comitatus or a militia, and anyone can see the rascals who lynched a federal prisoner last night were neither one nor the other!”
“The hell you say!” snapped Porky Shaw, bracing his boot heels wider as he continued in an ominous tone. “It just so happens some kith and kin of mine rode with William Clarke Quantrill’s Fifth Confederate Cav, and I don’t recall anything about them starting out as any state militia outfit.”