Longarm nodded agreeably and replied, “Nobody but Quantrill ever implied they might have been. Neither Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, Frank James, nor Cole Younger were ever enlisted in any real military unit, North or South. They were a piss-ant bunch of pure-ass bandits raiding along the Missouri-Kansas border on their own without as much as a note to the teacher from any elected official of the Confederacy.”
“Are you calling my very own kith and kin a bunch of liars?” the hulking boss wrangler choked out.
Longarm moved clear of his vacated seat as he quietly pointed out, “You were the one who said they rode with Quantrill and his pure outlaw regiment. But should you feel insulted I’m at your service, Pork Pie.”
Porky Shaw looked as if he was either going to slap leather or piss his pants. But then he spoiled all the fun by licking his pale lips and blustering, “We’d best cut out this kid stuff before somebody calls the law on us. I ain’t afraid of you personal, Longarm. But we both know what a time I’d have explaining once I beat you to the draw.”
“Don’t you mean if you beat me to the draw?” asked Longarm mildly.
“Don’t the rest of you see what he’s trying to do here?” the big boss wrangler asked the barber in an almost pleading voice.
The barber sighed and said, “Sure. It was your own grand notion to start up with him, Porky. I never talk to strangers if I don’t have to. That’s how come I’m so much older than you’re ever likely to wind up at the rate you’re going.”
Porky choked back some words that might have been meant for anyone in the shop. Then he circled around the far side of the barber’s chair, blustered out the corner door, and stomped off down the walk.
The barber made a wry face at Longarm and declared, “If I was you I’d be on my own way as well. He’s liable to be coming back with some friends, and I don’t reckon you know who you were just talking to!”
Longarm moved over to stand with his own back to the wall as he quietly replied, “Golly, I sure hope you’re right. I know who I must have been talking to. I just don’t know how I’d be able to prove it unless I can encourage him to stop acting so friendly.”
Chapter 4
The World Atlas allowed that the Sand Hill Country of western Nebraska enjoyed, or suffered, a “continental climate.” That meant cold as a banker’s heart in the winter and hot as a whore’s pillow on payday in the summer, So Longarm was sweating under his shoestring tie and tweed frock coat by the time he made it back to the Widow MacUlric’s for that noon dinner she’d promised.
She met him in the hall to say she was serving out back under her grape arbor, and he almost kissed her when she added the gents would be served in their shirtsleeves without ties, seeing it was getting hot enough to hard-boil eggs under the hen.
Longarm went upstairs to the front room he’d hired in order to hang up his hat and coat. He gained more respect for their thoughtful young landlady when he felt how hot the room she usually bunked in could get facing south at noon. The fresh linens on the modest iron-pipe bedstead were clean but threadbare, and there were other signs of barely getting by in evidence. There were no rugs on the oiled plank flooring, and while three walls had been papered cheaply to display cheerful orange blossoms unknown to botany against a spinach-green and mustard-yellow background, they’d run out of regular wallpaper and made do along one side wall with what seemed to be Confederate war bonds and defunct stock certificates. The smaller rectangles of engraved bond paper were neatly applied so that all the dignified old gents and newfangled steam engines that had likely never been built were right side up.
Longarm left his vest buttoned, but got rid of that fool tie he’d been expected to wear on duty since President Hayes and Miss Lemonade Lucy had moved into the White House. He considered hanging up his gun rig. He’d still have his vest-pocket derringer if anybody fought him for second helpings. But he remembered that barber’s warning, and more than one old boy had been shot over a picket fence as he was dining al fresco out back. So he went back downstairs with his .44-40 riding cross-draw and suddenly feeling more awkward against his hip.
But nobody else seemed to notice when he joined the party of four other boarders and Miss Mavis under the grape arbor out back. Everyone but the landlady was seated at a trestle table, with mismatched china spread on worn but spotless linen. As he was introduced to the three gents and one young gal, it developed that all four were single working folk without any kin in these parts. So Longarm felt free to pay more attention to the small brunette library gal than the two clerks and a skinny gent who said he stuck type for the Pawnee Junction Advertiser. Miss Ellen Brent, the librarian, was cute as a button, and once he knew the Advertiser was the Republican paper in these parts, he figured nobody working for it would know more than he did about the so-called Minute Men.
There were almost always at least two local papers, partial to the two factions you almost always had in your average county. The business folks and small-holders tended to vote Republican in Nebraska. Cattle barons, and the hands who worked for them, tended to vote Grange or Democrat out this way. Porky Shaw had bragged on being the boss wrangler of the Diamond B, and a cow spread had to grow a bit before you got to brag on its brand.
Longarm knew, from earlier scouting in the Sand Hill Country, how many a Union vet had headed west to homestead out Nebraska way while many an unreconstructed Texican Reb had been driving his longhorns up to the greener north ranges to replace the buffalo and horse Indian. Adventure writers such as old Ned Buntline tended to make a big whoop-de-doo over cowboys and Indians down in the cactus country along the Rio Grande or Gila, but if anybody wanted to worry about gunsmoke on the wild frontier, the tense frontier ran just west of longitude 100 degrees, from the chaparral of Chihuahua to the Peace River Range of Canada, where the long grass met the short grass and a man could argue either way about plowing or grazing it.
Neither murder-rapes nor midnight lynchings made for proper mealtime talk, even if he’d thought anyone there knew anything about what seemed like a bunch of surly range riders. So Longarm just ate and allowed the others to do most of the talking. None of it was all that interesting. It was easy but hardly unusual to compliment the Widow MacUlric on her plain but hearty fare. Once you’d allowed she salted stew just right and mashed spuds smooth, there was no need to lie about her sort of weak coffee. The poor gal was doing her best to get by. Four boarders at three bucks apiece gave her twelve a week to run this place on. So she had some other financial woes that didn’t show. Likely a mortgage. It wouldn’t have been polite to ask, and Billy Vail hadn’t sent him up this way to study Pawnee Junction real estate in any case.
She’d made a too-sweet apple pie with lots of corn starch for dessert. There was no cheese to go with the apple pie. He idly wondered if she might be a solitary drinker. Such folks tended to have a sweet tooth as well as financial problems. But she didn’t look like she was up to anything unhealthy when she wasn’t wading through housework up to her hips. Having debts to pay off made more sense. It was easy as hell for a widow woman to wind up in debt.
Miss Ellen from the library helped the widow clear the table as the gents leaned back to light up. Longarm decided the little library gal wasn’t as stuck on herself as she had every right to be since the taller and thinner widow woman said right out she could manage by herself and didn’t expect her boarders to pitch in. But when Miss Ellen stamped with her high-button shoe and went right on rolling up the sleeves of her seersucker bodice, Miss Mavis smiled at her fondly as hell and the two of them made short work of that table.