Longarm and the Wyoming Wildwoman

by Tabor Evans

  Her undersheriff introduced Longarm to the bossy older woman and Longarm found it tougher to smile at this one.

  Had she been born a man, Edith Penn Keller, J.P., would have been one of those puffed-up bullfrogs who don't want anybody to tell them anything, but want to tell everybody everything.

  Having been born a woman, she was one of those puffed-up cow-frogs who didn't want anybody to tell her anything but wanted to tell everybody everything. So Rita had barely explained they wanted to have Ram ne Melvin Rogers brought in for questioning before the blustersome older woman declared, "Consider it done, dear heart. I'll have my law clerk type it up for you before suppertime and run it over to you. Ram Rogers aka Melvin Rogers wanted on suspicion dead or alive!"

  Longarm couldn't help himself. He said, "No offense, your honor, but you can't put that on a properly made-out arrest warrant."

  Edith P. scowled at him to reply, "Nonsense. I do it all the time. Didn't you just tell us the man was a hired gun who might know something about the disappearance of Deputy Ida Weaver as well as those attempts on your own life?"

  Longarm said, "Yes, ma'am. I want to question him, not pay my respects at his funeral. Didn't them other federal and county lawmen tell you it ain't considered seemly to order anybody executed before they'd had a fair trial and been found guilty of a capital offense?"

  She allowed she'd gotten some nit-picky letter from the district attorney over to the county seat. Then added she'd been appointed to her township position fair and square and ought to know what she was doing.

  Longarm sighed and said, "You don't, if you think you can sentence a man to death on a suspicious writ. All you ladies have been lucky none of the outlaws you've sent girls after drew and fired first. For many a slick lawyer's gotten a client off on self-defense with way less documentary proof."

  It was the newspaperman who asked what Longarm meant by that. The J.P. only seemed to think he was joshing.

  Longarm said, "Wherever Ida Weaver is, right now, she came into a Denver saloon with the stated purpose of serving the late Rusty Mansfield with a document signed by your J. P., giving her permit to shoot him on the spot. Before that, the ladies had established that same intent by shooting other wanted men, earlier. Had Rusty Mansfield blown little Ida Weaver away, in front of me and everyone, he'd have had a pretty good excuse to present in court, and it only takes one juror to get you off if you can persuade him you had any excuse at all!"

  Big Jim Tanner sighed and said, "I fear he makes a valid point, Your Honor. As I've tried to tell you, myself, your girlish deputies would have every right to defend their own lives against known killers by shooting first and asking questions later, serving a more delicately worded legal document."

  Rita said, "You'd better just summon Mr. Melvin Rogers to appear before you, and I'll see it's served on him, Edith."

  The J.P. asked Longarm if he had the address of the scamp.

  Longarm shook his head and said, "If I did I'd wire somebody else to pick him up, Your Honor. I want him alive and talking and there's limitations to Miss Rita's girlish approach to serving writs and warrants, no offense."

  CHAPTER 16

  Longarm had to escort Rita back to her own place because he was a gent and because he wanted his pony and Winchester back.

  Once he had them he retraced his course on horseback to the center of town and dismounted at the Western Union to send a heap of wires in every direction.

  As he handed the profitable sheaf of yellow forms over to the dry and dusty-looking clerk he introduced himself and said, "I know all about the company policy laid out by your late Mr. Cornell and I hope you understand he's dead and I'm riding for the federal government, which allows you all to string considerable miles of wire over federal open range."

  The clerk said, "You still don't get to read any private messages sent or received at five cents a word by this private company. I had this same conversation a few days ago with some other federal deputies out of Cheyenne."

  A skinny kid with a goofy Adam's apple came in with his spurs ringing to ask where they wanted him riding next. any wires for him to deliver. The string-bean in tight but faded denim said he'd be out front where he could admire the ladies shopping if they needed him.

  As soon as they were alone again, Longarm told the clerk, "I could get me a court order if I had to, friend."

  To which the clerk replied, "You have to, and don't you come at me with any writ from that fat-assed Edith Keller. For we've established how much weight she really carries with the territorial or federal courts in Cheyenne."

  The old fuss didn't know he'd already answered a question Longarm had been meaning to ask somebody who knew. He smiled thinly and told the old-timer he'd noticed old Edith could lose a few pounds. But it didn't work. The Western Union man said, "Don't try to butter me up. I'm paid to be firm about company policy, and my company is not at all impressed by crossroads J.P.s of any description. Our customers pay good money for our services, and we mean to serve them right."

  Longarm said, "Don't get your bowels in an uproar, old son. All I need is some delivery times and dates. The messages I suspect a local sneak has been sending and receiving are doubtless in code to begin with. But you'd have records of who got a particular wire from a particular town on a particular day, wouldn't you?"

  The clerk shrugged and said, "You'd better find a judge with the weight to sway a nationwide corporation with friends in high places while I put your own messages on the wire. I know who you are, Longarm. Other clerks have reported how persuasive you can be when you want to read over their shoulders. Other clerks have gotten in a whole lot of trouble, and I told you I've already had this conversation with other lawmen. So, like the Indian chief said, I have spoken!"

  He sounded like he meant it. Longarm didn't want to set his skinny jaw any firmer by arguing with him. So he paid for the wires that he couldn't send collect, and they parted as friendly as the crusty old cuss seemed to get.

  Out front, that string-bean was sitting on the edge of the plank walk, ogling a gal across the way that Longarm didn't think as much of. Longarm stepped down off the walk to untether his pony as he told the kid, "I'd be U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long and I'm expecting a heap of answers to the wires I just sent. I'm fixing to check into the hotel across the way, and I'd be obliged if you got them to me as fast as they come in."

  The kid said, "They call me Pony Bodie and I hope you understand there's a delivery charge, Deputy Long?"

  Longarm nodded and said, "I never ask nobody to work for me free. I can't be traipsing back and forth betwixt the hotel and your office if I'm to get anything else done around here. So you just leave any messages at the hotel desk if I ain't in, and I'll settle up with you on your service charges when I can. I take it you're a sort of private contractor, not on the Western Union payroll?"

  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?"

  Longarm said, "I like that better. But there's one hole in the bucket. Honor among thieves is a myth, and there's been many an old pard back-shot as the robbers were fixing to divvy up the spoils. But a local boy fingering targets for outside road agents would have to gun them sooner and closer, wouldn't he?"

  Big Jim nodded and said, "Rusty Mansfield was spending the money from that stage holdup like he feared the ink would fade when... a certain source wired me where he'd turned up."

  "How did you know it was Rusty Mansfield as stopped the stage and shot Ida Weaver's uncle? The little I have on that one says the road agents were masked, and Rusty Mansfield was neither well known in these parts or alone."

  Big Jim said, "He was the one dumb enough to brag, once he thought he was far enough from these parts. Just like that mean drunk in the Texas Panhandle boasted of gunning that railroad worker. We're not talking about the likes of Frank and Jesse, Longarm. To begin with, they haven't all been what I'd call a professional criminal. Three or four out of the nine, so far, were no more than evil-tempered brutes who killed in anger without taking a dime for their troubles. What profit would I or any other mastermind make from ordering any gunslicks to behave like that?"

  Longarm said, "I was hoping you could tell me. I'd agree the whole thing was just a string of wild but unconnected incidents if Deputy Ida Weaver wasn't missing and nobody seemed to be shooting at me, personal. It all started late last winter with Amarillo Cordwain gunning that Irish railroad man, right?"

  Big Jim nodded, started to say something, then lau
ghed like hell and called out to his type sticker, "Will you listen to this slick talker, Inky? You just heard me telling him we won't play ball with him unless he's willing to play ball with us, and here I am playing ball with him!"

  Then he said, "Get out of here, Longarm. I have a paper to publish, and we work together my way or we don't work together at all!"

  CHAPTER 17

  The workday was winding down by then. But Longarm had time to do some eliminating that Billy Vail would have applauded. For in a town that small and close-knit it was easy to eliminate like hell with casual questions about who'd been doing what with whom when what was going on.

  He'd known right off that neither he, Rita Mae, nor her household help had been smoking up her front parlor with that old army rifle from the bell tower. It hardly made sense that Preacher Shearer would have had to bust his own locked door to get into his own church and the notion of the sniper busting in before dawn when nobody was on the streets of Keller's Crossing eliminated heaps of others.

  For everybody with a regular job near the center of town had been at work instead of up in that bell tower and had plenty of others to back their alibi. Alibi came from a Latin term meaning "somewheres else," and it was tough to fathom how anybody could be lying in ambush up among the pigeons and going about their usual chores in front of everybody.

  The very few who were too important to be laboring in public, such as that snotty newspaper man, the preacher himself, and most of the public officials of Keller's Crossing had all come running from the wherevers they'd been in response to the gunshots later in the day. So whilst it burned like fire, Longarm had to allow those rifle shots had been fired by somebody who was neither holding a steady job near that church nor a total stranger to those who did. It had to be at least a face they'd seen before. Folk remembered strange faces in small towns, whether they'd done anything or not. Many a horse thief had learned this to his cost when the local vigilance committee rode him down after he thought he'd gotten away clean from a town where nobody was supposed to know he was a horse thief.