One of the stable hands sank his shovel in the bare dirt mounded over the coffin far below and said, "You're right. It feels more like digging bird gravel. Almost as loose packed, least ways."
As the recruits began to get down to business they were naturally joined by others. It seemed you could hardly have a gunfight or dig up a grave in a small town without others coming over to ask what you thought you were doing.
Longarm saw Big Jim Tanner and young Pony Bodie, among others, as things got sort of crowded around the hog farmer's last resting place. So he said, "I wish you'd give us more room and be careful of them other graves, gents. How come so many of you are still packing guns?"
Pony Bodie replied, "I told you. We're on the prod for the persons unknown who cut up poor Preacher Shearer and his squaw."
Big Jim volunteered, "I keep telling the boys you shot the killer right next door. But who listens? Why are we exhuming poor old Nate, Deputy Long?"
Longarm said, "We ain't. I don't expect we'll have to dig down as far as the coffin lid. The killer wouldn't have had time to dig down more than a yard or so at the most."
The newspaperman demanded, "What killer? Gus Bergman? He wasn't in town when we buried the old timer in that grave."
Before Longarm had to answer, one of his stable hands called out, "I've hit something soft and mushy here."
Longarm moved over to stare down at a scrap of floral-print calico visible amid the dusty 'dobe clods and said, "Brush the dirt off her gentle, boys. She'd have wanted it that way."
So they did and soon had one arm, then a shoulder, then half the swollen face of the once-pretty Deputy Ida Weaver exposed to the cruel morning sun. Somebody gasped. "Good Gawd! It's Ida Weaver!" Somebody usually did.
Longarm said, "I wish folk didn't have to turn such funny colors after they were dead. It would be so much tidier if we could just dry up and blow away like faded flowers. But we don't. So pending an autopsy, I'd say they killed her as soon as she got home from Denver near to half a week ago."
"Do you have any idea who killed her?" asked Big Jim Tanner.
Longarm saw Rita Mae Reynolds coming over from her nearby house with her own gun strapped on, now, as he told the newspaperman it was too soon to say.
Rita rolled over the fence in her riding skirts and came over to take one look and gasp. "Oh, no! Not poor Ida! We were such good friends!"
Longarm said, "I'm sorry, ma'am. But that's what comes of sending inexperienced gals to carry out chores many a man would find too big a boo."
"But how could this have happened here in Keller's Crossing?" the auburn-haired bossy gal demanded, adding, "Ida won when she met up with that dangerous killer down in Denver, Custis!"
Longarm said, "Aw, he wasn't all that dangerous, next to some I've tangled with. Like Amarillo Cordwain, Texas Tom, and all them others, he was mostly too lazy to work and too dumb to cheat at cards. The one fairly experienced tinhorn they recruited lit out on them as soon as he saw how dumb they were acting."
Big Jim stared soberly down at the partly exposed cadaver of Ida Weaver to say, "Call them anything you like, as long as you bring them to justice! Why did you just say it was too soon to say? Do you have any idea at all who's behind all this?"
Longarm said, "Sure. But you can't get milk out of a turtle just by trying to milk it, or a conviction out of a judge and jury just by pointing your finger with no proof."
"What more proof do you need?" asked Pony Bodie with a puzzled smile, pointing over at the nearby church as he said, "That preacher played with fire until he got burnt. He was running some sort of home for wayward boys. But he felt he had to turn them in when they left home or robbed other folk or, shucks, he just got tired of them. He'd have been defrocked or worse had word gotten out that he went in for queer parties under his very own church. So, knowing Miss Rita, here, had a firmer way than most for dealing with outlaws, he saw she got tipped off they were outlaws, whether they were or not, and told her where they might be found, so's her deputy gals could finish them off for the old sneak!"
Longarm nodded thoughtfully as more than one in the crowd agreed that all made sense.
Longarm said, "Well, like the old song says, farther along we'll know more about it. Your notion only adds up part way, Pony Bodie. I see how a dirty old man might use the law to aid and abet his fickle nature, or his worries about being blackmailed or exposed. But tell me how you think he got ten discarded lovers in a row to go where he wanted them to go and wait until he could sic the law on them."
Pony Bodie looked confused.
Big Jim said, "I might be able to answer that. You may have it backward. What if those double-gaited owlhoot riders just left him, friendly or unfriendly. He told me he'd gotten wires from others he knew. Not as swishy lads of course. He told me he got to comfort and advise heaps of prairie drifters, good, bad, and indifferent. Couldn't he have simply put the word out on some former pal and waited until another wired him from wherever?"
Rita said, "That works for me. I'd heard Amarillo Cordwain had spent a lot of time in prison, getting known in the Biblical sense by a lot of other shady young men with no visible means of support."
Longarm said, "I've been thinking about that since first I found out about the preacher's other interests, Miss Rita. Not all the nine fugitives you and your wild deputies have accounted for had spent that much time in prison. Not all of them were thieves or robbers. So try her this way. What if somebody who knew about poor old Preacher Shearer and his rough-and-ready pansies was only using that angle to razzle-dazzle us with others?"
She said she didn't know what he was talking about.
He said, "It don't matter. I've been lying to you, too."
In the following silence he could have cut with a knife, Longarm explained, "I knew that once I got past Texas Tom and Ram Rogers, the survivors would be ordered to head somewhere else and await further instructions. I felt sure that once they arrived to be set up like clay pigeons, somebody was going to tell you where they were, so's you could send another wildwoman after them, no offense."
Rita gasped. "You did? Then why did you let me send that Covina Rivers from Cheyenne if you didn't want me to?"
Longarm said, "I wanted you to. That's how come I let you. Miss Covina was working with me. I asked her to. She lied to you herself. She never met Ram Rogers, and that shop gal she told you about was just a petty thief."
Rita looked hurt. "But why, Custis, why? I trusted you and I liked Covina! Why did you both lie to me?"
Longarm said, "I just told you she had orders to lie to you. I had to lie to everybody here, save for those pals from the hotel stable, least ways. I didn't know which one of you was behind all this dumb but deadly razzle-dazzle."
"But you do now?" asked Big Jim warily.
Longarm hesitated, stepped back from the open grave a ways, and declared, "Not for certain, but likely by this afternoon. I'm waiting on a wire that ought to get here well before that last train out for the day. So the one I want ain't going nowheres before I'm ready to do some serious arresting around here!"
Rita asked, "Who's supposed to wire you about what? That Covina Rivers who ran off with one of our badges?"
Longarm smiled thinly and soothed, "I'll see you get your badge back, Miss Rita. I'll bet it's worth at least a dollar. I told Miss Covina just to go back to her notions store in Cheyenne and wait for her own compensations from my outfit. I know you told her to go down to Pueblo and flirt her way close enough to Ram Rogers to get the drop on him. I know you told her not to kill him if it could be avoided. So, to your credit, you and Judge Edith have commenced to behave more sensible."
He reached in his jacket for some matches and a cheroot as he continued, "Miss Covina wouldn't know Ram Rogers if she woke up in bed with him, and, after that, she's a lady who sells notions, not no manhunter. So I gave her a message to wire my own boss when she got to Cheyenne. It's been long sent by this time. My boss will be sending a team we call Smiley and Dutch down to Pueblo by now. Smiley and Dutch will take Ram Rogers alive if he knows what's good for him."