He lit a cheroot without offering in such a crowd and told them all, "Ram Rogers won't be sitting there waiting to be taken alive. The mastermind who's been advising him will have told him to go there and lay low pending further instructions. So he's going to be mighty chagrined when Smiley and Dutch tell him they were tipped off to his whereabouts by the one pal who'd be in any position to know." Rita grinned like a kid who'd just spotted an unguarded apple tree and declared, "Then you've got him! He can't get away, and he's as good as in my jail the moment you hear from your friends in Pueblo!"
Longarm said, "That's about the size of it. Stay put, Miss Rita. I want to keep this private, and I see your words have inspired a certain nervousness over this way."
Then he snapped, "Don't do it, kid!" as Pony Bodie went for his Schofield.45, his weak-chinned face contorted with desperation!
The delivery boy was good, for a delivery boy or anybody else. Longarm would have been hard-pressed to beat the tensed-up killer to the draw if he hadn't been thinking ahead, himself.
But he had been. So he simply had to raise the right hand he'd been palming his derringer in and fire, pointblank, just as Pony Bodie's bigger gun was clearing leather.
The weak-chinned young terror staggered back against another tombstone, back-flipped over it, and landed facedown in the dust, sobbing as he struggled to rise with all that blood running out of his chest while Longarm held his double derringer's second round on him.
Then the treacherous young rascal collapsed limp as a bear rug left outside to air, and someone said, "I think you killed him."
Longarm said, "That was my intent. Like you all heard me tell him, getting a conviction can be a chore, and this way we won't have to air the dirty laundry of a lot of lesser sinners in these parts."
Rita marveled, "You mean you were lying to him, just to trick him?"
Longarm shrugged and answered truthfully, "I won't know until I hear from Smiley and Dutch. All I left out was that Smiley and Dutch can be wild as any Wyoming woman when you send 'em after a want. So I'll be pleasantly surprised if they take Ram Rogers alive. Not that it really matters, now."
CHAPTER 21
Longarm was more than pleasantly surprised by the long wire he got late that afternoon. For once the team of Smiley and Dutch had worked the way Billy Vail had planned when he put them to work together.
Deputy Smiley hardly ever smiled. Smiley was his last name and he was the smart but slower one. Nobody could pronounce the outlandish last name of the one they just called Dutch, but he was the fastest gun on the payroll, albeit about as levelheaded as a scorpion in one's empty boot of a morning. Billy's hope in teaming such an odd pair was that Dutch might keep Smiley alive while Smiley kept Dutch from being indicted for murder.
That hadn't always been easy for either of them. But the wire said they'd busted in on Ram Rogers and his ladylove at that Pueblo hotel to catch them in the act of posing for French postcards without any concealed weapons on them at all.
Smiley had thought to separate the two of them as soon as they were out of bed in their duds and handcuffs. They said Ram Rogers had been as chagrined as promised when they told him he'd been turned in by his Wyoming mastermind. The terrified gal, of course, had sung even louder when they got her to see she could tell all she knew or hope her true love would be waiting when she got out, old and gray.
The separately dictated statements of Ram Rogers and a gal called Rowdy Ruth agreed fairly well and cleared up loose ends Longarm hadn't managed to figure by himself. Billy Vail had ordered him to meet with county officials he hadn't gotten around to. But he didn't think his boss wanted him wasting the time, seeing there was nobody left to arrest and it was up to the voters, come November, whether they wanted the same bunch running things.
He could have caught the last night train out to save himself some time getting back to Cheyenne. But he reflected the railroading he'd want to detail in his officious report, and after that he owed Bronco Bob in Dwyer a borrowed mount and saddle. He figured old Socks would be just as happy out on a moonlit prairie with him as moping in that livery across the street for days. So he left his room key on the bed upstairs and rode out of Keller's Crossing around suppertime, when he didn't have to bother about shaking hands with all creation.
Socks was happy to be loping into the sunset for home, and he let her have her head till they were past that drift fence and sailing over a rolling sea of tawny buffalo grass. But he didn't want to lather his mount with the literally cool shades of a Wyoming evening commencing to spread deep purple in the draws. So when they got to that cottonwood-lined creek, he reined her in and dismounted to water and rest her some, saying "We ain't in that big a hurry, Socks. You get me there by midnight, I'll still have to wait shivering on the platform for that night train to head back from Wendover, see?"
Socks just drank more creekwater. Longarm tethered her to a sapling, pissed on another one, and moved up the grassy slope away from any wood ticks to rest his ass by Standing tall as he lit a cheroot.
Rita Mae Reynolds called out to ask if that was him when she spied his match flare from afar, aboard her own cordovan Morgan. Longarm had to identify himself to an undersheriff packing a pistol. So she loped on over, reined in, and slid gracefully from her sidesaddle to demand, "Why did you leave without saying goodbye? How could you leave me just hanging like that, you brute?"
Longarm said he hadn't known he was leaving her hanging. But when he took her in his arms to kiss her, she laughed wildly and gasped up at him, "I didn't mean you'd left me hanging that way! You were going to tell me all about poor Preacher Shearer and his outlaw gang and why he had Ida Weaver killed and-"
Longarm said, "You got that all wrong, Miss Rita, You were there when I had it out with the mastermind, one of them really dangerous crooks smart enough to let himself be taken for dumb and ornery enough to act harmless. I told you this morning that justice had been done and there was no call to hang a lot of dirty laundry out to dry over the graves of dead folk."
She kissed him, this time, and said, "Come and sit by my side in the grass and tell me all about it from the beginning."
So he did. As they reclined on the grassy slope in the gloaming he told her, "In the beginning God created man, then Woman, then something more mixed up. Poor prim and scrawny Preacher Shearer was one of them mixed-up sorts. The army gives you a prison sentence and dishonorable discharge if they catch you behaving that way. The Indians allow some just can't help wanting to pretend they're gals, and so they let 'em. Indians almost never whip kids, neither. Sometime I get to wondering who's more Christian."
Rita said, "Big Jim told me all about the poor man being a queer. I can't for the life of me see what any man would get out of letting other men use him that way. Can you?"
Longarm said, "I never spent that much time in jail. No man I've ever met has anything I'd be that interested in."
She gasped. "What do you think you're doing with that fresh hand? You told me you were going to tell me all about those queer outlaws!"
He lay her back in the grass and kissed her again but eased off when he felt her stiffen some. He said, "I told you the villain was Pony Bodie. He assured me before I ever asked that he didn't go in for that sort of thing. That wasn't all he was fibbing about. He drifted into town a year or so back, as you may recall, fresh from an Alabama chain gang, which he forgot to tell any of you. He'd picked up bad habits in prison, and in no time at all he'd made friends with the only man in town who'd take the gal's part. He likely learned the preacher was prissy from some other saddle tramp. Poor old Shearer was too shy to ask gents such as Big Jim Tanner or the blacksmith."