“There was no law about to object to such rude behavior?”
She turned at the bottom of the stairs to grin up at him like the wicked child he suspected she must have been in her day. “Oh, the boys were going to string Belle up. My husband was the one as got the rope. But then Ben Ficklin in the flesh came. He’d read Black Jack’s first reports and had meant to fire Frenchy Belle in any case. The company owned the town. Mr. Ficklin bossed the company. So when he said he didn’t want a lynching on company property, the boys had to listen. Mr. Ficklin told Frenchy Belle to ride fast and hope he’d ridden far enough by the time Black Jack died. So Belle rode, and that was that. I don’t mean to boast, but I was one of the ladies as nursed poor Black Jack back to health, and it wasn’t easy. Nobody but a giant of a man could have soaked up so much lead and lived.”
“Then I take it the original Black Jack was not what one could call a runt?”
She replied, sort of wistfully, “He was tall, dark, and handsome. Almost as big as you, but a lot more dark. That’s why they called him Black Jack. He could have passed for a Sioux, and some said he had Injun blood. Didn’t you know that?”
He said he hadn’t thought about it, since the lunatic who was trying to be Black Jack nowadays was short, pale, and puny. Then he ticked his hatbrim to her and headed for the doorway. As the sun outside slapped him in the face with a hot towel, the middle-aged Myrtle called after him, “Come back here if you can’t hire even a mule. I might be able to fix you up.”
When he got to the livery he discovered that she’d been right about the townees playing posse. The fat old stablehand there told him the only transportation they had left for hire was a pony cart. When Longarm asked if it would be at all possible to hire just the pony, the older man laughed and told him, “Anything’s possible, but a man your size would sure look stupid aboard a Shetland mare. On the other hand, since you’d have both feet on the ground, you could likely get her to move a mite faster. Lord knows she’d need a little help in packing anyone your size. We mostly hire her out to women and children, cart and all.”
Longarm almost let that go by him. Then he asked, “By the grasp of a straw, could you have hired that pony cart to a gent short enough to pass for a kid, say yesterday afternoon?”
The stablehand shook his head. “Nope. The sheriff was ahead of you on that. The cart was out exactly twice yesterday. A grandmother I’ve dealt with before took her grandkids from back East for a morning ride on the prairie. Later in the day, a young gal hired the rig to ride off alone in. I suspect she aimed to meet her fellow outside of town. She got back after sundown, looking sort of rolled in the grass, if you know what I mean. There was mud on the spokes. They likely did their spooning over in the willows along the South Platte.”
Longarm frowned and said, “This is likely another wild guess, but Fort Halleck is along the South Platte. So can we be sure such a mysterious traveler was a woman, and not a short gent dressed silly as hell?”
The older man laughed knowingly. “She was pure she, and built sort of tempting. I helped her out of the cart, and you know how a helping hand might grasp the situation sort of accidental. When I told the sheriff that he said I was a dirty old man. He should talk. Everyone in town except his wife knows about the sheriff and that young schoolmarm.”
Longarm hadn’t come all this way to listen to small-town gossip. “If your sheriff was so interested in that same young gal in that same pony cart, he must have had a reason. Did he say what it was?” he asked.
“Sure he did. He wanted to know if I’d hired any stock to anybody new in town, and when I told him I had, we got down to possibles. He said he figured some married man was carrying on over in the willows, too. The rascal who shot up Fort Halleck must have got out there on his own mount. There ain’t a horse owned by anyone around here that can’t be accounted for at the time of the shoot-up.”
Longarm thanked him and headed back to his hotel, mulling over what he had been told. Assuming young Slade had been keeping that purloined army mount somewhere in Denver and had started riding just after he sung so awful in the Parthenon, it still wouldn’t work. Following the South Platte and its forage and water all this way would have taken even a horse-killer more than the time they had to work with. Aside from having to ride faster than the Pony Express ever had, and then some, the country between here and Denver, while still mighty open, wasn’t so open that a stranger of any description going lickety-split on a lathered horse would not get noticed at all.
By the time he got back all the way he had decided his want had gotten to Julesburg the way he had, by train. There was just no way to ride a horse, invisible, for a good hundred and fifty miles in less than three days, even if one hated his horse. Just as important, the rascal had ridden off, on something, after shooting up that army canteen. So unless he’d boarded a late-night train paying half-fare for a four-legged kid under twelve, which hardly seemed likely, he’d found a mount at this end of the trip.
Longarm went over that gal in the pony cart again. They had not reported a gal shooting up Fort Halleck. On the other hand, a gal could change into a cow outfit and likely pass for at least a short cowhand. But that raised more questions than it answered. The army could hardly have mistaken even a skinny little recruit for a gal, casual as some medical exams might be. While the sly old dog at the livery could hardly have mistaken a he for a she as he stole a feel. Black Jack Junior had to be a he. If he didn’t want folk to know where he was or what he was up to, he’d only have to calm down. Nobody noticed a mousy little runt who behaved halfway sensibly.
Myrtle greeted Longarm in the lobby and asked how he’d made out. He said, “They didn’t have a single horse for sale or hire.”
“Well, I won’t sell you my Blue Boy, but you can ride him all you like for two bits a day,” she said.
He brightened and said he hadn’t known she kept her own stock.
“I was hoping you’d be able to pick one up at the livery,” she said. “I don’t like to hire out my personal mount. Blue Boy has a tender mouth and he’s used to carrying considerably less weight. But if you promise to ride him gentle, and look out for prairie-dog holes, I’ll hire him out just this once.”
He agreed to treat her Blue Boy like a brother and ran up to get his own gear as she called after him that she’d meet him out back. In his room he shucked his coat and string tie. It was going to get hotter before it got cooler. He lugged his gear downstairs and, sure enough, found Myrtle talking to an old steel-gray gelding in the stable out back. She was feeding the brute dining-room sugar cubes and telling it not to be afraid as Longarm joined them to observe mildly, “It’s your horse, ma’am. But they like apples or even carrots just as well, and such treats don’t rot their teeth as bad.”
She said she knew Blue Boy was spoiled, but that she’d never been able to resist a pleading male. He was too polite to point out that a gelding wasn’t exactly a male, once it had been cut. He told the sleek critter how much he Red it, too, and had no trouble saddling up. Getting Blue Boy’s sweet teeth to accept the bit he’d brought along as well was more trouble. Myrtle said he was used to her own bridle and he agreed, grudgingly, since while it was in fact a bridle, it was silver-mounted sissy, and the bit was intended more for spoiling pets than serious riding. As he led the spoiled pet out into the alley, Myrtle followed, and as he mounted up she warned him not to lope too fast in the cruel, hot sun.