Pony Bodie sighed and said, "I always wanted to be a telegrapher, or mayhaps a fireman, when I grew up. But delivering wires for folk who don't want to pick 'em up at the desk inside pays better than weeding yards or beating rugs. So what the hell."
"You get to ride out to the surrounding spreads a lot?" Longarm asked as if he didn't really care.
Pony Bodie shrugged and answered, "Some. Not as often as I have to leg it here in town, though. Stockmen and homesteaders only get wires on rare and important occasions. The merchants and businessmen here at the crossing wire back and forth at a nickel a word like they had money to burn."
Longarm allowed he'd heard it cost money to make money and led old Socks across the main street afoot, not wanting to press the delivery boy too hard, this soon, within earshot of the crusty clerk inside.
At the Pronghorn Hotel across the way they told him not to be silly when he asked if he could hire a room with a bath. But at least the shitter down the hall had a modern flush tank, and they had a water tap you could use to refill the basin that went with the corner washstands in the small but fairly tidy rooms on the second floor.
They charged seventy-five cents a night for travelers laying over without riding stock. Longarm allowed a dollar a day for horse and rider sounded fair. But he followed old Socks around to their stable to make sure they knew what they were doing out back.
They did. The half-dozen other ponies they were boarding were all alive and well with a sunny corral and fresh straw bedding in the stable stalls. He left his borrowed saddle in the tack room and took the Winchester up to his hired room.
He left it leaning in a corner, took a shit down the hall, and headed next for the Riverside News just up the street on foot.
When he went inside he found they had a long counter cutting off the front of the twenty by forty-foot forespace from a typewriter-topped editorial desk, some filing cabinets, and a hand-cranked flatbed press in the back. Ben Franklin might have found the setup newfangled. Longarm had seen fancier.
The only individual on the premises seemed to be a gal about the right age but too pretty for that string-bean down by the Western Union. But that wasn't saying much. She was just a plain young gal with nothing wrong with her, save for a smudge of ink on one cheek. Her mousy brown hair was pinned up in a bun with a pencil shoved through it. You couldn't say much about her figure, either way, because she wore an ink smudge printer's smock of mattress ticking over whatever else she might have on.
She came over to the counter from the composing galley where she'd been sticking type, her type stick or box-like metal holder still held in her ink-stained left hand, and got prettier as she smiled across the counter at him to ask what she could do for him.
Longarm resisted the temptation to tell her that all depended on whether she was married-up or not. She looked sort of country for that sort of teasing. He'd been wearing his badge since he'd ridden in. So he had no call to offer her more than his name before he told her, "I'd sure like to look through your morgue, ma'am."
She looked blank and answered, "Morgue? That would be over at the county seat, Deputy Long. We have a sheriff's substation, but dead bodies are examined by the county coroner and-"
"Newspaper morgue." He cut in, explaining, "That's what they call the files of dead stories worth saving at the Denver Post and other such high-falutin papers. You know what airs folk put on in them bigger cities."
She brightened and said, "Oh, I think I did hear that term when I was working on the school paper back in Iowa. You'd better talk to Big Jim Tanner, my boss, about that. I just work here. I'm Inez Potts. They call me Inky Potts. I'm not sure just what we've been saving in yonder files. I know we don't have room to save complete back issues, and so the boss, not me, cuts out all the advertising and boiler plates."
"Boiler plates?" Longarm asked before he recalled that meant national and world-wide news supplied to small-town papers for a modest fee by the bigger news and features syndicates. They shipped what looked like boiler plates of made-up type, cast in one piece back East.
He was working on how he wanted to talk her into going behind her employer's back when Big Jim came in, puffing a cigar and looking as pleased as punch to find Longarm jawing with his hired help.
Inky went back to work as soon as she'd turned Longarm over to Big Jim, telling her boss the lawman wanted to paw through the morgue.
Big Jim said, "That's easy enough. But about us putting our heads together on a news exclusive-"
"I told you why I can't go along with you on that," Longarm cut in, trying to keep it friendly as he continued, "I don't hold my cards to my vest to cheat nobody, Big Jim. I just don't want nobody cheating me, and I can tell you I'm dealing with a mastermind--unknown because you know he, she, or it has had me shot at from here to Cheyenne. I'll be proud to tell you all the news that's fit to print, as soon as I find out what's been going on and just who I can trust in these parts."
"Meaning you don't trust me?" the burly newspaperman demanded in a tone about as warm as January in the South Pass.
Longarm smiled friendly as ever as he asked, "Is there any reason I shouldn't trust you, Big Jim?"
Tanner grimaced and said, "All right. You're going to find out in any case. I've given Rita Mae Reynolds tips on more than one owlhoot rider she had warrants out on. Before you say only a master criminal would be able to track down swaggering bully boys by Western Union, what does that make you? Newspapermen scattered all over the country have been comparing notes and sometimes scooping official government handouts since before the American Revolution!"
Longarm went on smiling as he said, "I read about old Sam Adams printing Patrick Henry's speeches before the Redcoats in Boston had heard he was speaking. Who told you the late Rusty Mansfield was staying at the Tremont House in Denver before you told Miss Rita?"
Big Jim had his temper back under control as he calmly replied, "Let's just say I have my own confidential sources. You'll no doubt get our pretty undersheriff to tell you I have lots of confidential sources. It goes with my line, which is gathering news. If you want to be one of my confidential sources, I'll be one of your confidential sources. If you intend to treat me like an infernal suspect, see if you can get a court order violating the freedom of the press with us screaming, in headline type, on our extra editions in an election year!"
Longarm shook his head wearily and replied, "I doubt I could manage in the time I have. But what can I tell you? You are a suspect. It's nothing personal. We call it the process of eliminating, and you ain't been eliminated yet."
Big Jim snorted. "Jesus H. Christ, do I look like the ringleader of some vast outlaw conspiracy?"
Longarm shrugged and said, "Sheriff Henry Plummer never would have been elected if they'd known he had all them Montana Innocents riding for him. From the little I've been able to suspicion, word has been spread, by way of confidential sources, that there's easy pickings in these parts because of the local law being so... refined."
He saw he'd worded that smarter when Inky Potts shot him a wary glance across the press room. Mentioning skirts around anybody in a skirt could tense things up as tight as shouting "Greaser" in Nuevo Laredo on a Saturday night.
Big Jim Tanner sneered, "All right, I'll confess, I've always wanted to scoop the Wyoming Eagle, and nobody invited me to cover the Northfield Raid that time. So I've been trying to engineer as big a shoot-out in front of the Drover's Trust up the block! Or would you rather accuse me of luring road agents here from far and wide so's I could get them to rob somebody and then double-cross them for the loot?"