Longarm didn't really care who got to drink with the Prince of Wales these days, and he failed to see what all that fuss about Miss Sarah Bernhardt was about. He'd met the Divine Sarah that time they'd asked him to bodyguard her on her Western tour, and she'd made no mystery of the simple fact she'd been born Jewish but partly raised by Catholic nuns and hence felt as comfortable, or uncomfortable, praying either way. The current dispute seemed to have something to do with Miss Sarah's unconventional ways with men and other pets she liked to lead about on leashes. Longarm had found her a good old gal who'd only kissed him like a sister that time he'd saved her life. But it seemed the French Jews and Catholics were having a serious row over her now, with the Catholics insisting she was Jewish and the outraged Jews insisting she'd been baptized by those nuns and so the Catholic Church was more than welcome to such a flashy thing.
Longarm didn't bother to finish the dumb news item. He found it mighty tedious that grown men could really care what an actress did or didn't do just to work up some curiosity about her show. Longarm had been too polite to ask, but the Divine Sarah had told him to his face she'd never slept in a coffin or kept a live crocodile in her bathtub like some said. But those Jew-baiters he'd had to save her from out Virginia City way must have believed even worse tales about her judging from the wild way they'd carried on.
This old world seemed filled with folks who carried on wild as all hell over nothing much. It was one of the reasons he was packing his badge and guns. He'd found some of the wildest bastards convinced of their own God-given right to raise hell in the name of some half-ass excuse, such as Frank and Jesse's conviction they were riding for a Confederate Army they'd never been enlisted in to protect kith and kin from the cruel advances of the Missouri Pacific, which ran way the hell over on the far side of their state but deserved to be robbed in any case, according to them.
Calvert Tyger's gang of Galvanized Yankees seemed to have worn their own fight for the Lost Cause a mite thin, to Longarm's way of thinking. The James boys, at least, could be said not to know any better, since their only military experience had been with half-assed guerrilla bands who'd never surrendered for the simple reason nobody had ever asked them to. But Tyger had enlisted in the real rebel army, been captured fair and square, and enlisted in the Union Army so he could get out of Sandusky Prison and fight the Santee.
That romantic bull about two flags waving at Little Crow side by side, as boys in blue and gray civilized him with butt stock and bayonet, was postwar twaddle. Calvert Tyger and his pals had foresworn the Confederacy a good spell before Lee's surrender, and would have been free to head home the same as any other Union vets had they not deserted both armies in time of war.
One of the young gals behind Longarm squeaked "I can't look! Tell me when it's over!"
Longarm glanced out his own window as he set the Police Gazette to one side and dug out the sheaf of typed-up onionskins Henry had given him. The tracks wound gently alongside the brawling San Juan through the South Ute Reserve near the New Mexico line, and what the hell, most everyone aboard figured to live if this old car jumped the tracks and rolled no more than three or four times down that forty-five-degree slope. He wondered what those gals were fixing to squeak when they got to the really high hairpins further up the line. His own asshole had puckered some the first time he'd been over that series of sheer-drop zigzags along the Pinos on the far side of the Divide, where the ranges rose more steep and craggy.
He'd read Henry's terse but thorough rundown on the Tyger bunch and their recent robberies a dozen times since leaving Denver on what seemed to have been a wild-goose chase. He read them again, with the breeze through the open window fluttering the corners of the thin pages as he searched once more for some pattern that made a lick of sense.
The double turncoat and his half-dozen followers had shot up that federal paymaster's office at Fort Collins as gleefully and senselessly as a wolverine raiding a box full of kittens. A stenographer gal they'd spared after some mock gallantry had given the same description as the one wounded clerk who'd not been hit as bad as he'd let on. The other four men on the premises had been gunned down like dogs after they'd opened the damned safe and given up the damned money. The paymaster in charge, who'd told the others not to put up a fight, had doubtless seen how tough a time they were going to have with those high-denomination treasury notes, intended to pay government expenses rather than salaries at that time of the year. The gal said Tyger had cussed her boss about those hundred-dollar notes before gunning him, as if it had been the poor paymaster's fault. Tyger had never been accused of deep thinking. Longarm was hardly the first lawman who'd wondered why a nondescript outlaw who was said to be fairly well educated insisted on being so famous.
Frank and Jesse, the Youngers, and that stubborn young rascal they called Billy the Kid down Lincoln County way tended to get named a lot because they perforce hung out in the same parts, where lots of admiring folks knew them and tended to gossip about them even as they were helping them hide out.
But nobody riding with Tyger, Flanders, and that more mysterious Chief had ever gone home after the war. They seemed to roam all over the Far West with no particular base the law had any line on. So why would even a mad-dog killer take such pains to let the law know just who they were after? Anyone you were robbing at gunpoint was just as likely to turn over the money whether you said your name was Smith or Jones, and the law would take far longer as they tried to figure out who'd done it.
"Oh, Dear Lord!" wailed the fatter of the two gals behind him as they rounded a turn at a speed even Longarm considered a tad sudden for a sheer drop of a good two hundred yards.
"Road company picking up extra actors!" Longarm suddenly said aloud as he rose from his seat and put the onionskins away so as to spare his ears what was coming next.
What was coming next involved a shaky trestle over a headwaters branch of an ominous river valley. Screaming gals had a way of distracting a man even when he was interested in them, and he was on to something he hadn't considered before as he strode on out to the forward platform where a man could smoke and think in peace.
As he cupped his big hands around a match to get a cheroot going in the cross winds of the platform, he thought back to that time on the road with the Divine Sarah's road company. He'd seen right off how they saved a heap of fancy salaries for French actors by just keeping the key players on the payroll as they traveled from town to town. Once they got to where they meant to put on another show, they could easily hire local talent, or even unemployed cowhands, to put on a costume and just stand around carrying a spear or waving a fan while the few professionals did all the real acting. Those Mormon gals in Ogden had made fairly convincing Egyptian slaves for Miss Cleopatra, or would have had not they insisted on wearing their special Mormon underwear along with their otherwise revealing stage costumes.