He pointed at the dead Indian agent to add, "It worked even better as soon as I suspected we were dealing with Cherokee and a white mastermind who literally liked to screw the Cherokee."
One of the troopers said he'd heard young Rogers was like that.
Longarm said, "We might have been able to charge him with crimes against nature on federal property. I doubt he even knew Fred Ryan tried to gun me twice tonight. It looks as if Ryan killed his lover boy for the same reason he gunned that clerk across the way. To shut them both up. So's he could play innocent."
The provost marshal barged in with more troops, demanding answers. Longarm pointed to the O.D. and said, "The lieutenant knows as much as me so far. I got to get up to your Signal Corps installation and see if anyone I wired earlier can tell me anything more."
He pushed his way out as the O.D. started explaining the mess in the B.I.A. office. The provost marshal must not have been satisfied. He caught up with Longarm up the line, just as the tall deputy read the last of the few telegrams waiting there for him.
Waving a penciled transcription at the older army man, Longarm said, "It sure beats all how things fall in place once you figure the overall pattern of the puzzle. Mud Creek identifies a shotgun messenger who replaced young Quirt McQueen, for no good reason, as a Lester Tenkiller, Tenkiller being a common Cherokee name. Quirt was fired and left to fend for his fool self because Ryan didn't want a witness coming back this way to tell me, in particular, how Ryan had never gone on to Fort Smith with a lady we both knew."
Longarm picked up another message to make sure of his details as he continued. "Ryan was whipping back and forth betwixt here and the railroad stop at Atoka. That seems to have been his home plate. He met his Cherokee pals there, picked up mail-order duds for 'em, and-"
"Atoka's one hell of a ride," the provost marshal said.
Longarm nodded and said, "Handy to the railroad, though. After that, it's a fair-sized settlement where none of his recruits were apt to meet up with either Comanche Police from this reserve or the Cherokee Police from their own. I just wired the Choctaw Police to be on the lookout for the Lester Tenkiller who comes through there fairly often. I'm letting the three Indian police forces work out the probable suspects Ryan would have recruited around Tahlequah. It'll be good training for all concerned, and we've accounted for the really bad apple in the bunch. Old Ryan must have figured I'd been sent to catch him personal. He was the only one up to anything crooked, involving any Indian Police. As a liaison man he was naturally privy to all the messages sent back and forth. But he must have been afraid he'd missed something."
Longarm picked up another message and said, "It's too bad he never read this wire from Denver, ordering me home before I'd recalled the meaning of Chickamauga. That enlisted clerk and the Cherokee breed might have still been alive if old Fred had let sleeping dogs lie. I might have missed his petty extortions entirely if he hadn't scared the shit out of me with his wilder-acting Indians. Or burned my ass when he ran off with a wild newspaper gal he was only interested in getting rid of before she followed up on some gossip about his operation!"
CHAPTER 19
A few days later, along about supper-time at the Brewster Dairy outside Trinidad, the pretty young widow was crossing her barnyard toward the main house when she spied a familiar figure on a chestnut gelding.
Longarm had hired it, along with its stock saddle, at a livery near the depot. He could only hope his own saddle and original baggage was still waiting for him at the Union Depot in Denver. He was wearing his suit and tie again, seeing he was calling on a lady.
As he reined in near her front steps, Cora Brewster hurried to greet him there, saying, "I was just thinking of you, Deputy Crawford! I wired you in care of Fort Sill, and they wired back that they'd never heard of you!"
Longarm dismounted and started to tether his hired mount to her hitching rail as he awkwardly replied, "Good help is hard to find these days. I just got back from Fort Sill, after some tedious train transfers. But to tell the truth I spent most of my time with some Indian pals, and I reckon they lost track of me at the fort. You say you were trying to get in touch with me, Miss Cora?"
The young but fully developed brunette in blue calico that matched her eyes dimpled up at him and explained, "That horrid Longarm's back in Trinidad. They said he'd run off with Magda Homagy, the brute. But he's been sparking another Bohunk girl too young for him by half and the immigrant ladies are all atwitter!"
Longarm nodded gravely and said, "That accounts for another blond lady who talks funny up Fort Collins way. I've been in touch with my home office by wire, and they just now told me the couple in question produced papers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the law paid a call on their rooming house. He used to be some sort of cavalryman they call a Hula Hula Lancer, and his wife had permission to leave as well."
Cora Brewster said, "I told you Longarm deserted that other blonde somewhere. Why are you tethering your mount to that post? You surely mean to sup and visit with me a while, don't you?"
He allowed he hadn't made any better plans for that evening. So she led the way back across her barnyard, explaining along the way how she'd just given her two hired men and house-girl the payday evening off. Longarm knew enough about cows to assume her dairy stock had been led into their stalls and milked for the last time that day no later than four in the afternoon. She didn't invite him to stable a pony with her cows. The chestnut gelding wound up in the stable with its own kind to gossip with. He noted with approval she fed them all timothy hay and medium-grade oats.
On the way back to the house Cora explained she'd been planning a light, simple supper for herself alone. He said he'd been stuffing his face with peanuts and such aboard many a train for the past few days. She laughed when she thought back to those few hours they'd done the same in that D&RG club car.
She said, "It seems so long ago, and as if our time together lasted longer. Isn't it funny how well you seem to get to know a stranger on a train, Deputy Crawford?"
He said it sure was, and added, "This jasper everyone keeps calling Deputy Custis Long, Miss Cora, you've seen the skirt-chasing cuss in the flesh your ownself? I mean, you'd know him if he rode in to join us for supper this evening?"
She indicated the way to her back steps as she sniffed and told him, "That'll be the day! You're so right about him chasing skirts! I swear I think he'd have his wicked way with a snake if he could get some other rogue to hold its head for him! He'd get my broom across his wicked face if ever he darkened my door at supper-time or any other time!" Longarm naturally opened the back door for her. As she marched through, chin at an indignant angle, she continued. "That snip of a dishwater blonde he's involved with now can't be a day over fifteen, and even a rogue with Longarm's rep ought to know better than to mess with bitty virgin girls!"
As he followed her into her neatly kept kitchen, he smelled fresh-baked bread and something sweeter. He said, "Leaving the virtue of the maiden to her own conscience, fifteen does seem a tad young. She ain't reached the age of consent under Colorado law. He'd have to get her legal guardian's permission to even come courting."
Cora took his hat and sat him at a scrubbed pine table near the window as she asked, "What's poor Bela Nagy supposed to do, challenge a notorious gunfighter with a badge to a duel? That wicked child's poor father is a coal miner who barely speaks English and wouldn't want trouble in any American court in the unlikely event he won!"
Longarm murmured, "I've noticed ignorant folks can be easy to cow with even a mail-order badge. I just got done exposing some fake lawmen over in the Indian Territory. According to a wire I got just the other day, the real Indian Police have rounded up a bunch of 'em and have 'em singing their little hearts out about home addresses in the Cherokee Nation. It's easy to round up fake lawmen once you notice they're fake."
She placed a bowl of stew she'd had warming on her stove in front of him, along with a pound of butter and some of that fresh bread he'd been smelling, as she sighed and said, "I hope you'll forgive me this once for offering so little. I'll make it up to you with a proper dinner tomorrow, if you aim to be in town that long. Why did you just suggest Longarm is a fake lawman, Deputy Crawford? For all the dreadful things they say about his way with the ladies, nobody I know has ever suggested he's not a real federal lawman like you."
The real Longarm said, "I'm going to have to catch up with him to be dead certain. But I'm fixing to be surprised as well as chagrined if the bully pestering Bohunk miners' wives and daughters turns out to be the real thing, Miss Cora."
The young widow sat down with her own serving across from him and insisted, "I'm sure Longarm is a real lawman. It was only a few weeks ago we were reading in the Rocky Mountain News about the way he'd been in yet another gunfight and won!"
Longarm said, "I read that edition too. Those newspaper reporters go on a heap. I just read a copy of the New England Sentinel on the train this afternoon. So I know for a fact that a reporter gal who couldn't have interviewed the one and original Quanah Parker in Fort Smith, Arkansas, just published a long interview with some fool Indian. You got to take Miss Weaver's word about him being a big chief."
Cora asked, "Are you suggesting Longarm was never really interviewed by that reporter from the Rocky Mountain News? Why aren't you eating your stew? Is it too salty?"
He said, "That reporter interviewed the survivor of that gunfight, ma'am. I was raised with better manners than to slurp my stew without a proper invitation."
She started to ask a dumb question, fluttered her lashes, and dug into her own serving as she confessed, "I'd forgotten what the etiquette books say about the hostess taking the first taste. I guess you think I'm mighty countrified."
He dug into his own grub, saying, "Nobody was ever raised more country than me. I had to read that in a book myself. There ain't no shame in just not knowing. But once you learn there's a right way and a dumb way to act around ladies of quality, it would just be rude not to bone up on 'em."
She blushed becomingly and murmured, "Go on, I'm nowhere near a lady of quality. I'm just a farm girl who's made out all right in butter and eggs."
"By hard work," he insisted. "I got an eye for whitewash and clean sweeping, Miss Cora. Takes a tidy eye and honest sweat to keep a spread this size this neat, even with help, and a lady who'd give her help an evening off before sundown is a lady of quality in my book."
She insisted, "You're making me blush. I swear you're as big a flirt as that dreadful Longarm, albeit I don't feel as frightened as I would if it was him across this very table from me!"
The man of whom she was speaking said, "I'm sure going to have to meet up with this womanizing wonder. You say he can be found in the company of some fifteen-year-old kid from Bohunk Hill?"
Cora said, "Eva Nagy, and we're not certain she's that old. I doubt you'd find Longarm anywhere near her parents' humble home after dark, though. They say he drives off into the hills in a curtained buggy, with all the greenhorn girls he can get to go with him."
She got up to fetch the fresh-perked coffee from her stove as she added, "Accuse me of having a dirty mind, if you like, but I am a widow woman who's not entirely ignorant of human anatomy and that child he's been molesting can't be... fully developed yet."
Longarm could only glance out the window at the lengthening shadows as he murmured, "Well, they say some gents like their olives green because it makes 'em feel... more manly."
She poured mugs of coffee for both of them as she exclaimed without thinking, "They say Longarm's hung like a horse, and she's such a tiny thing!"
Then she realized what she'd said, blushed beet red, and sat down to cover her face with her apron, sobbing, "Oh, Lord, I must really be going mad from living alone, the way I read in that book about the lady who lived in a tower in olden times!"
Longarm said, "That yam about the Lady of Astolat was only a fairy tale, Miss Cora. Even if it was true, she never went loco en la cabeza from living alone up in her tower. She was hankering for Sir Launcelot in particular. Only he never knew it because she couldn't just call out an invitation to come up and stay a spell whenever he rode by in his tin suit. They did things the hard way in those days. Sir Launcelot never knew the Lady of Astolat hankered for him whilst he, in turn, was hankering for King Arthur's wife."
Cora laughed despite herself and said, "That sounds a lot like Colorado these days. That adultery at King Arthur's court led to a really nasty brawl in the end, didn't it?"
Longarm nodded soberly and said, "It often does. The unwritten law calls for blood and slaughter all out of proportion to the fun anyone could have had. Poor old Arthur threw away his kingdom and his life, Attila Homagy is wandering the world like that Frankenstein monster seeking revenge, and a certain colonel I know has just transferred junior officers to miserable postings because of a few minutes' slap and tickle."
He sipped some coffee and wearily added, "Lord knows what he'll ever do if he finds out about his own lady's views on hospitality. But my point is that there's likely nothing wrong with you, Miss Cora. It's little Eva Nagy, not yourself, up in the hills in that covered buggy as the sun goes down, right?"