Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (9 page)

"Oh, Dear Lord!" wailed the fatter of the two gals behind him as they rounded a turn at a speed even Longarm considered a tad sudden for a sheer drop of a good two hundred yards.

"Road company picking up extra actors!" Longarm suddenly said aloud as he rose from his seat and put the onionskins away so as to spare his ears what was coming next.

What was coming next involved a shaky trestle over a headwaters branch of an ominous river valley. Screaming gals had a way of distracting a man even when he was interested in them, and he was on to something he hadn't considered before as he strode on out to the forward platform where a man could smoke and think in peace.

As he cupped his big hands around a match to get a cheroot going in the cross winds of the platform, he thought back to that time on the road with the Divine Sarah's road company. He'd seen right off how they saved a heap of fancy salaries for French actors by just keeping the key players on the payroll as they traveled from town to town. Once they got to where they meant to put on another show, they could easily hire local talent, or even unemployed cowhands, to put on a costume and just stand around carrying a spear or waving a fan while the few professionals did all the real acting. Those Mormon gals in Ogden had made fairly convincing Egyptian slaves for Miss Cleopatra, or would have had not they insisted on wearing their special Mormon underwear along with their otherwise revealing stage costumes.

But getting part-time help to act convincing hadn't been Longarm's chore, and everyone agreed the Tyger bunch had been acting far more vicious than smart. So say no more than those three original deserters wandered from place to place, picking up extra help as needed amongst the drifting riffraff you found most everywhere. A down-on-his-luck drifter without the balls to pull robberies on his own would need some encouragement to join up for even one job. But a gang leader with a rep would have less trouble picking up a part-time gang. That accounted for the bragging, and it wasn't too tough to buy a tinhorn sissy boy trying to cash in on some real or fancied resemblance to a tougher gunfighter in the hopes of staying out of gunfights. But in that case, why in blue blazes had the late Brick Flanders been using the name of Calvert Tyger in that other rooming house?

Another passenger came out between cars. He was dressed cow, and both shorter and younger-looking than Longarm. As they nodded and Longarm made room for the other man to pass, he wondered idly where the young cowhand thought he was going. He was fairly sure why another male passenger would want to head forward as those two young gals commented on the scenery shrilly, but the next car forward was the baggage car, with the mail and then freight cars beyond. Maybe the jasper was after something in his own saddlebags. He hadn't been anyone the law was after.

Or had he?

Longarm turned just in time. It was still a good thing he had a good grip on a boarding grab-iron as the total stranger hit him stiff-armed, with all his weight, to send Longarm over the side, or try to. Then the bigger deputy grabbed a fistful of shirt with his free hand and raised a long leg to knee the wild-eyed cuss clean off his feet.

His attacker swung wildly, even as he howled in agony. But Longarm caught most of the blow with a suddenly shrugged shoulder, as he hauled the lighter man in and butted him in the face with his forehead. Then Longarm's hat was gone, and so was the total stranger, who'd tried to shove him off the train as it rumbled across that high trestle those gals were doubtless screaming about in the car behind.

The stranger screamed too, all the way down to the narrow ribbon of white water, which blossomed pink for a moment before his shattered body and all that bloody foam were whipped downstream by the ferocious current.

The train hissed to a stop on the far side of the trestle, and Longarm had just recovered his hat from a far corner of the platform when the conductor came out to yell, "Some female passenger says she saw a man falling off back yonder, and another asshole pulled the emergency cord. I don't suppose you'd know who we're talking about, cowboy?"

Longarm shrugged and replied, "Can't say anyone I'd ever seen before fell off any train." He was in a hurry, and it was likely to take days or weeks before that body hung up on some damned something way downstream. And because what he'd just said was the simple truth as soon as you studied every word.

CHAPTER 8

The next nine hundred miles or more were tedious as hell. For while a flirty gal got on at Trinidad, and an even prettier flirt came aboard at K.C. to sit across the aisle as innocent as a mink in season, Longarm was as considerate a lover as other gals allowed he was, and it wouldn't have been considerate to risk either gal's innocent ass getting peppered with lead just because they both looked so tempting. That jasper who'd swan dove off the trestle had seemed mighty determined, and since Longarm was sure he'd never done a thing to a total stranger, it was even-money he'd been sent by somebody else with a personal hard-on for a lawman who simply didn't know who he, she, or it might be!

He had no way of knowing whether his unknown enemy or enemies knew how poorly their errand boy had done. So there was a good chance he had nothing to worry about but his virtue as he kept avoiding those arch glances shot his way by two very pretty gals. He could tell they were aware of one another by now, and there was nothing like a rival flirt to turn a gal prick-teasing for practice into an all-out and go-for-broke nymphomaniac. Gals that worked up over a gent had been known to go for a three-in-a-bed orgy, with each trying to out-screw the other, rather than let a pretty rival win the whole game. So a man of some experience in such matters was inclined to tingle in his crotch a mite as he tried in vain not to picture a saucy little redhead and a statuesque brunette fighting over him without all those high-buttoned bodices and flouncy skirts confining their movements or his view. Lord, that bigger one's ass swung like it was a saloon door on payday every time she went forward to the water cooler at the end of their car.

But Longarm concentrated on the far less interesting gloom outside as the small redhead almost cartwheeled up to that cooler as if to make certain he hadn't missed the way she filled out that bodice of summer-weight calico. So by bedtime both gals were sore as hell, and there was no sensible way he could assure two pretty strangers he was out to save their lives by not hauling them both into a sleeping compartment and making mad Gypsy love till somebody made another try for him.

Having ridden this line before, and having let the conductor win a few hands of penny-ante in the wee small hours after the club car was officially closed, Longarm was able to fort up in one of those fancy sleeping compartments without paying extra. His conductor pal allowed he hated noise too, and agreed a passenger who might have somebody gunning for him would be safer out of sight. Longarm hoped he'd be out of mind as well. For he'd spent more than one night in a coach car, sitting up and trying not to think about a piece of ass he'd just missed out on.

It was tough enough lying down in a comfortable bunk, trying to concentrate on payroll robberies instead of redheads, brunettes, and such who'd doubtless find the bunk mighty cozy.

He never found out where either got off. Having forted up so fine, Longarm sent out for coffee, sandwiches, and reading matter all the way to Minnesota. The name was supposed to stand for Sky Blue Water in Santee, if you wanted to be poetic. An Indian Longarm had asked the last time he was this far east had allowed it meant more like chalky or dishwater-gray water. The Indian hadn't known why either name might apply. They had all sorts of water, as well as some mighty arid range, in such a fair-sized state.

Lots of folks considered Minnesota an eastern state, since it had been a state before the war and had so many farms and farm folks. But in fact, lots of it lay west of the Mississippi. The Santee country Longarm had been sent to lay in the drier southwest corner, just a spit and a holler east of the Dakotas.

He had to stay aboard till they stopped at New Ulm, the seat of Brown County, where the tracks crossed the Minnesota River. So he got to see quite a few miles of the Santee hunting ground, and it sure was a caution how much pure hell the folks called Sioux by most everyone but themselves could raise in such natural cavalry country.

Whether the gently rolling swells out yonder were covered with a blue-stem prairie dotted with groves of hardwood, or a forest with a lot of open glades all through it, depended on who you asked or just what stretch you were both talking about. The sub-tropical term "savannah" was used to describe such park-like mixtures of grassland and groves, although nobody who'd ever seen how it snowed up here in the winter would describe the place as sub-tropical.

The bluestem was still blue-green, going to tawny on the windier rises, thanks to all the rain they'd had across the West that last greenup. The trees were mostly oak atop the rises, with crack willow, box elder, and such along the bottoms of the draws. Longarm spied a heap of cows and no buffalo at all as they rolled on through lands the white man had stolen, according to the Santee, or bought fair and square off Indian-givers, according to Washington.

Such matters were not for Longarm to adjudicate. He hadn't been riding for the law when Little Crow, or at least his young men, had brought a long simmer to a boil by killing three white men and two white women, the prize for this shootout being less than a full dozen eggs from the homestead they'd hit.

Some said, whites included, that old Tshe-ton Wa-ka-wa Ma-ni, as he said his name in Santee, had tried to head off what he knew was coming, warning his followers they just didn't know what they were getting into. But of course, being a Santee, he had to lead them when they insisted on an all-out war with the Wasichu, lest they get their fool selves killed even faster.

They'd gotten killed soon enough, once an outraged Great White Father showed he wasn't too distracted by the war in the East to do nothing about the blood and slaughter along the Minnesota Valley. Sibley's Minnesota militia were gleefully exterminating Santee, having gained the upper hand after some earlier and mighty frightening reverses, by the time old Pope had made it west with his Union regulars and columns of Galvanized Yankees in time to mop up.

The onionskins failed to say whether Calvert Tyger and his reb pals had lit out before or after Abe Lincoln told the army to take it easy and pardoned all but a tenth of the bunch the army had been fixing to hang. According to the little they had on Israel Bedford, the Union vet and local homesteader who'd cashed that one treasury note in these parts didn't seem connected in any way with Galvanized Yankees, whether they'd deserted in time of war or served with honor and just gone on home to brag on being a vet of both sides.

But Bedford had cashed that bill, not long after a mess of federal employees had been gunned for such ill-gotten gains. So Bedford would be the first one up ahead to scout for sign, discreetly as possible, just in case he turned out to be the one who'd sent that kid to shove a lawman off a train.

It had been Longarm's experience that jaspers with guilty secrets to hide tended to want lawmen headed off before they got close enough to uncover the secrets.

Longarm had no idea, after all this time to study on it, if there was some secret connection between a mad-dog outlaw gang and a sober settler everyone seemed to have down as honest and upright. But that was how come they called such connections secret.

Longarm knew the baggage-smashers he'd tipped in advance would run his McClellan and possibles over to the baggage room of the New Ulm depot for him once they got there. In case his unknown enemies had other secrets planned for him, he ambled back to the rear observation platform and swung over the rail to hit the cross-ties running when the train slowed down on the outskirts of town. He still came close to killing his own fool self for any sons of bitches laying for him around the depot. But he landed in a patch of sunflower and rolled lightly back to his feet, Winchester at port arms, after tripping over a switch point while the train was running fifteen miles an hour.

As long as he was still moving quickly, Longarm sprang across a trackside ditch, crossed the dusty service road on the far side at a dead run, and hunkered down in the shady angle provided by a box elder growing against the plank fence of somebody's backyard.

He wasn't planning on hunkering there any longer than it took to catch his breath and gather his wits a bit. The odds on the smartest crooks in the world knowing where he'd drop off so they could set up an ambush more than a mile from the depot seemed mighty slim. So he doubted the lady staring over the fence at him from under a polka-dot sun-bonnet could have murder in mind. But she did sound determined as she scolded, "Get out of my tulips and explain yourself this very instant, young man!"

Longarm glanced down to confirm he had in fact flattened out a patch of cropped vegetation that might have sprouted as tulips a spell back. He grinned up sheepishly. "I doubt I damaged the bulbs along this fence, ma'am. But I'd be proud to buy you some new ones if you'd name your price. I'm U.S. Deputy Marshal Custis Long, on a government mission and allowed to charge anything within reason to my expense account."

The woman on the far side of the sun-bleached planks sounded doubtful as she replied, "You're likely right about underground bulbs surviving your silly behavior. But would you like to show me some identification? You look like a hobo in need of a shave, I just saw you drop off that passing train, and I could say I was Queen Victoria if nobody asked me to prove it!"