Longarm felt no call to argue with anyone as stubborn as Billy Vail. So knowing old Henry could play that typewriter faster than most could write by hand, he went out front and asked, "Would you do me a favor, Henry? The boss don't seem to cotton to my carrying office files all the way to Minnesota. So I was wondering if you'd like to type up a thumbnail sketch of that payroll robbery and a list of names we might be interested in whilst I run home to pack, send my regrets about that Sunday-Go to a couple of pals, and pick me up a fresh railroad timetable at the Union Depot?"
Henry handed him a bulky envelope and smugly replied, "I wish you wouldn't tell me how to do my job. You'll find everything you need in here, along with your travel orders, and I naturally looked up the times and places you'll have to transfer between here and New Ulm if you're leaving on the eastbound night flyer, as I'd say you ought to."
Longarm didn't argue with Henry either. He allowed he'd be back when he finished the field job, strode out of the office and over to his hired digs, then hauled his possibles to the Union Depot and bought a round-trip ticket to Durango on his own.
CHAPTER 5
Longarm wasn't being disrespectful of Billy Vail's ability to read sign. He knew nobody tracked better on paper than his pudgy paper-pushing boss. But sometimes sign read different in the cold gray light of reality, and old Billy had just said there wasn't a great hurry to head for New Ulm. For a suspect working to prove a homestead claim would be there if he wasn't worried about the law, and long gone if he was.
Meanwhile Durango, Colorado, was far closer than New Ulm, Minnesota, even though it got sort of hard to tell along the last leg of the tricky route across the very spine of the Rockies.
In the end, it only felt like a million miles of hairpin turns above sheer drops to ribbons of white water in the canyons way down below. It was still short of midnight when Longarm stiffly climbed off the train in Durango with his heavily laden saddle. He checked the McClellan with its bedroll riding across stuffed saddlebags in the depot baggage room, hanging on to his Winchester '73 saddle gun lest it prove too tempting, and went straight to the Durango office of the railroad dicks. Pending more official incorporation as a township in the southwest corner of the fairly new state, the settlement was being policed by the railroad that had opened it to settlement once the Ute had been run off to less desirable water, timber, and range. The railroad didn't brag about it, but Longarm knew the silver smelters near the rail yards refined ore from up the valley a fair haul by freight wagon. So there wasn't much mystery about a gang that went in for payroll robberies drifting through Durango. They hadn't been out to buy any land-grant property off the D&RGW. Unless and until they laid the last of those narrow-gauge tracks up to Silverton, Durango would remain the transfer point where the three dollars a day of many a hardrock miner would be sent on by stage, in the handy form of treasury notes, over many a bumpy mile of lonesome mountain scenery.
But there hadn't been any recent stage robberies out this way. The purported leader of the gang, Calvert Tyger, was supposed to have died in an accidental fire, which would be easier to buy if yet another gang member, under the same name, hadn't been done to a turn much the same way in Denver, and if a bill from that earlier payroll robbery hadn't surfaced later more than thrice that far from whatever in blue blazes they'd been up to in Durango.
The railroad dicks, like telegraphers and such, stayed open around the clock because that was the way you ran a railroad. Longarm had met the older gent on duty that night as watch commander. He knew the old-timer had been a full-fledged U.S. marshal down Texas way at a time when good men and true had been forced to make their minds up on the double. Unlike a Ranger captain named Billy Vail, old Ross Gilchrist of West Texas had surrendered his U.S. marshal's badge to accept a commission with Hood's Texas Brigade, C.S.A. A railroad had been more forgiving later than the winning side.
Gilchrist seemed sincerely glad to see Longarm again. Things did get tedious late at night on a weeknight in Durango. But while he broke out a pint of what he swore to be real Scotch liquor, and offered Longarm a Havana Claro from the humidor on his roll-top desk, the old-timer allowed he'd been there when that roominghouse had burned down less than two furlongs to the west, but couldn't seem to tell Longarm anything that Henry hadn't already typed up on onionskin for him.
Gilchrist said there'd been no autopsy ordered for a drunk who'd died screaming like a banshee behind a wall of flames the volunteer firemen hadn't managed to break through in time. When Longarm mentioned there was no record of the late Calvert Tyger having a drinking problem, assuming he was really all that late, Gilchrist shrugged and said, "I've read his yellow sheets, old son. There's no record of him signing the pledge neither. But leaving aside whether he burnt to death drunk or sober, he sure as shit burnt to death. You could hear him bitching about it for quite a ways and longer than I'd care to die that particular way."
Longarm asked Gilchrist if he'd seen the body afterwards.
Gilchrist grimaced. "What was left of it. Had he baked a mite longer we could have saved the expense of planting him over in Potter's Field."
Then, as if he'd foreseen the next obvious question, the war vet and experienced lawman volunteered, "He wound up on his side with his arms and legs drawn up the way most of us do when we're dying miserable. Used to see old boys like that in the hills of Tennessee. You could tell when a soldier boy had been killed instant or sobbing for his momma by the way he lay. Like I said, they should have let Tyger burn a mite longer and let the wind have his clean ashes. This way, his remains wound up the worst of a couple of ways. Halfway cremated and then left to molder in the wormy clay of Potter's Field. Ain't that a bitch?"
Longarm grimaced and sipped some more Scotch liquor. It was almost as good as Maryland Rye, save for a smoky aftertaste that he didn't really need right now, picturing what likely lay in the pauper's grave of a stranger charred beyond recognition. "I was wondering how I meant to get an exhumation order without a heap of tedious explanations. I'll take your word a cuss checked into that roominghouse as Calvert Tyger and died in that fire as a result of that fire. But as long as we're on the subject of my need to report this side trip to Durango, I'd as soon not bother. I get to file enough in triplicate as it is."
Gilchrist leaned forward to light the cigar for Longarm as he chuckled and allowed he knew the feeling. "I ain't about to write up this social visit for the Denver & Rio Grande Western, if that's what you were hinting at, old son."
Longarm put down the empty shot glass and helped himself to a mouthful of less smoky-tasting smoke before he confessed he'd had such a shortcut in mind. Then he blew a thoughtful smoke ring and added, "I mean to ask around town, seeing I'm here, but might your company files hold anything on the other riders said to have been with Calvert Tyger when he somehow got the call to check into a mighty seedy roominghouse alone?"
Gilchrist shook his head. "I'd have said so if we'd noticed. Nobody working for the railroad knew any of 'em were here in Durango till that fire broke out a couple of weeks back. Since we do such police work as need be, we naturally took some interest as soon as we saw what we took for a handful of part-time laborers and full-time drunks had gone up in smoke. We'd planted 'em all in Potter's Field, like I said, before anyone put the name of one victim together with that of a wanted outlaw."