Longarm and the Bandit Queen Page 2

  "You killed him deliberately, with a gun, instead of just stopping him from-from what he wanted to do."

  Longarm was losing his patience. He looked into the woman's angry eyes for a moment before he replied, "If you'll recall, ma'am, there were four of them. And they weren't the kind I'd want to walk up to and try to reason with, seeing as how all of them were wearing guns."

  "He should have been tried in court, not summarily executed! Even the most disgusting criminal deserves a trial before a judge and jury. You deprived him of his life without giving him a chance to defend himself!"

  Her eyes were fixed scornfully on Longarm's apparently emotionless face.

  "Oh, he defended himself. Him and his three friends all had a few shots at me before I winged two of them and they lit out."

  "But they didn't."

  Longarm's temper finally let go. "Now, you just be good enough to keep quiet a minute, ma'am."

  She looked at him questioningly, and started to say something, but Longarm was already standing up, his back to her. He went to the fire and selected a branch, choosing one that had a good flame at one end and was long enough to serve as a torch.

  "you follow along with me, if you feel able to," he told the woman.

  "Follow?" she shook her head. "I don't understand."

  "You will," he assured her.

  Longarm waited for her to stand up. She got to her feet by kneeling first. The loose, unfastened skirt dropped away. She stood up quickly and grabbed for the skirt, which lay on the ground. Draping it around her waist, she fumbled for a button or snap, but whatever had secured the garment had been torn off by the dead man. She settled for holding the skirt with one hand as she took a step toward Longarm. He led her toward the edge of the glade.

  "Where are we going?" she asked suspiciously.

  "Not far, just a few steps over here. There's something I want you to see."

  Wordlessly, still puzzled, she followed him as he led the way to the shallow grave. By the light of the burning branch, they could see a short-handled spade sticking in the ground beside the pile of dirt that had been taken from the long, narrow excavation.

  "Good God!" she gasped, as the significance of the hole's shape dawned on her. "You've already dug a grave for the man you killed! I suppose you're getting ready to bury him out here in this wild place, without even a prayer?"

  "You're a little bit wrong in what you're thinking, ma'am." Longarm kept his voice to a low-keyed, conversational pitch. Very matter-of-factly, he went on, "You see, it wasn't me that dug this grave. Those men did, sometime after you got here, after they'd made their plans for you while you were on the trail from Fort Smith. They weren't planning on letting you go free to testify against them, if they got caught after they'd finished with you."

  "You... you mean, that grave was intended for me?" she asked. Her voice was suddenly subdued, its scolding tone gone, and she spoke almost in a whisper.

  "Well, now, you stop and think back a minute," Longarm suggested. "After you and those four rascals stopped here--they said it was time to stop, didn't they? Getting too dark to see the trail, or something like that?"

  "Yes. Something like that. They said it was getting dark and the horses were tiring. We'd left Fort Smith quite early, so I believed them."

  "And after you'd stopped, one of them chopped up some wood, and another one acted like he was taking care of the horses, and one or two of them went off, maybe to look for water? I suspicion he told you there was a spring off this way close by?"

  "Yes," she agreed. "Jasper--that's the one who's dead--said it Was too Wet closer to the spring for us to stop," she shook her head. "He wasn't gone long enough to dig a hole this big, though."

  "Oh, I don't know." Longarm pulled the shovel out of the soil and pushed it back in, experimentally. "Real soft dirt. Mostly just a thick layer of old, dried leaves and suchlike. And you can see the hole's not real deep." He held the torch so the woman could get a better look at the shallow pit.

  "I-maybe I'm mistaken about the time. Perhaps he was gone long enough, now that I think back."

  "And while he was gone, I bet the other three kept you busy with stories and jokes and so forth?" Longarm suggested.

  Slowly, she nodded. "Yes. Yes, they did. How did you know that?"

  "You ain't the first woman that's trusted the wrong kind of men, and maybe dropped out of sight along some lonesome trail. Maybe wound up in a hole like this one, where nobody's likely to find the body for a dozen years or more. Mostly, the kind of men I'm talking about run in bunches of three or four, and it don't much matter how they do what they got in mind, or where it happens. They pretty generally follow the same style."

  "From the way you talk, you know a great deal about the way these rapists--and I suppose they're robbers, too--about the way they operate. How do I know you're not one yourself?" she challenged.

  "I guess you don't, at that." Longarm pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to show her his deputy U.S. marshal's badge. "Maybe this'll set your mind at ease a mite."

  "You're an officer of the law? A U.S. marshal?"

  "Deputy marshal," he corrected her.

  "And you actually shot that man," she went on, as though he hadn't spoken. "Shot him without making any sort of effort to warn him to stop?

  Without making an effort to arrest him? You just pulled your pistol out and killed him?"

  Longarm's patience ran out. He snapped. "Now, that's all I want to hear from you along those lines! I wasn't close enough to use my six-gun, or they'd all four be dead now, instead of just one! They were four-to-one against me, and all of them packed iron. The way that fellow was going after you, once he shut you up with his fist, he'd have been on you and inside you before I opened my mouth. Warning him wouldn't have stopped him. All it would have done was to give one of the others time to kill me."

  For a moment, the woman stared at Longarm as though seeing him for the first time. She saw a man taller and wider than most, with gunmetal-blue eyes in a tanned face, which was clean-shaven except for a bold, sweeping mustache. In the flickering torchlight, those gunmetal eyes reflected controlled anger.

  He said curtly, "Now, if you've seen enough of what those four planned for you, let's go back to the fire. I'll drag that body out here later on and cover it up, after I go over it to see if that--Jasper, I recall you said his name was--to see if he had another name or two besides the one he told you."

  "And after that?" she asked.

  "After that, we'll talk about what comes next. Now, come along."

  CHAPTER 2

  Subdued and silent, the woman walked with Longarm back to the clearing. He tossed the torch on the fire and added two or three more pieces of wood from the fast-dwindling pile of chopped tree limbs. Night had arrived now, its blackness crowding the rim of the glade, held at bay only by the dancing firelight.

  Longarm was still angry. He made no effort at conversation, but circled the glade at the perimeter of firelight until he found the deadfall log from which the firewood had been cut. Am axe was still buried in the log. He used it as a lever to roll the deadfall up close to the fire, and quickly cleared the log of its remaining branches. He motioned to the cleared log.

  "Might as well sit down," he told the woman. "We've got to talk a mite. I'll cook up some supper and make coffee after a while. I guess you've got some grub and your bedding on that pack mule tethered over yonder?"

  "Yes." She sat down on the log. "I gave those men twenty dollars to buy supplies. They told me they'd buy me a slicker, whatever that is, and a set of blankets. I suppose you'll find them with the supplies."

  "Time enough for that," Longarm said.

  He hoped there might be a bottle of Maryland rye among the supplies, but he knew the best he could hope for, if there was any whiskey at all, was a bottle of questionable origin, probably the watered-down product of one of the illegal stills in the Indian Nation that supplied half the liquor drunk in the towns along its borders.

&n
bsp; "You've got a name, I guess," he told his companion. "Mine's Long. You've already seen my badge, so you know what my business is."

  "I'm Maidia Harkness," she replied. Then, somewhat tartly, she went on, "If you'd explained to me what sort of pressures you were under in stopping those men, I wouldn't have been so critical, Marshal. But where I come from, the police don't act as judge and jury. They arrest criminals and take them to jail, and let the courts decide whether they're innocent or guilty."

  Longarm decided to let that pass without comment. Instead he asked, "Just where do you come from, Miss Harkness? Or is it Mrs. Harkness?"

  "It's miss. And my home's in Boston."

  "I knew it was one of them big towns in the East," Longarm said, nodding. "And this is your first trip to the West?"

  "Yes. And I must say, my first impressions of it aren't very favorable."

  "They'd have been a lot worse if I hadn't come along when I did," he reminded her. "That is, if you'd stayed alive to get any kind of impression."

  Maidia shuddered. "Yes. I'm still having trouble believing all this is happening to me, though. I keep waiting to wake up and find myself at home in bed. It's been something of a nightmare."

  "And pretty much your own fault," Longarm couldn't keep himself from replying. "But I can understand why you acted like you did. Back where you come from, there's people underfoot everyplace you turn, all of them living in the pocket of the fellow standing next to them. And a policeman on every corner to look after them and keep them safe."

  "It's not quite that simplistic," Maidia said. For the first time since Longarm had seen her, she smiled. Her face changed completely.

  She went on, "Perhaps we have come to depend too much on others for protection, though. We've gotten to look on it as automatic, something we buy and take for granted, instead of looking out for ourselves."

  "Why'd you come out here, Miss Harkness?"

  Longarm was frankly curious. He'd seen all kinds of people during the years he'd been trying to bring civilized behavior to the raw, untamed West, but the Harkness woman didn't fit any of the compartments others had filled.

  She seemed surprised. "Why, to help, of course."

  "Help who?"

  "Those who need help the most. The Indians."

  "I see." Longarm made a business of blowing the ash off his cheroot. "Did they ask you to come help them?"

  "No, of course not. But other social workers have told me about their needs, and I decided that I'd be of more service to them than to the people I've been trying to help back home."

  Longarm was puzzled. "I reckon you lost me around that last bend, Miss Harkness. Is that what you do for a living? Just go around helping people?"

  "I suppose you could call it that. I'm a social worker, you see."

  "That's just it," he frowned. "I don't see. Now, I guess my business is helping folks by keeping robbers and killers and such behind bars, but from the way you were talking a while ago, you're just as concerned about helping them as you are about trying to do something for the folks they take advantage of."

  "Everybody has rights in life. Marshal Long, even the ones you call robbers and killers. After all, they're human beings too."

  Longarm grinned wryly. "After some of the things I've run into, I might put up a pretty argument that a lot of them ain't what you'd call good examples of human beings."

  "Nonsense. Why, you must remember the beautiful words Thomas Jefferson wrote in our Declaration of Independence: '... that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights.'"

  "Oh, I know about the Declaration, sure. Only I disremember its saying anything about a body having a right to rob and maim and kill."

  "You're evading the issue, Marshal," she said severely. "Take the Indians. We've deprived a great many of them of their lives, and now we're depriving all of them of their liberty, by shutting them up on reservations like the ones here in the Indian Nation."

  "Well, now I've been pretty much all over the reservations here in the Nation. I don't recall seeing any Indians shut up, except a few that's turned to thieving from their own people, and killing, and things like that."

  "That's an old, feeble argument, Marshal. I've heard it before, many times. And I expect I'll hear it again and again, now that I'm out here in the West. Why, this country belonged to the Indians, and we took it away from them by force."

  "I reckon there's something in what you say. We crowded the Indians so close together that we made whole armies where there were only small raiding parties before. George Custer wouldn't have found himself in such a pickle if it hadn't been for that. And there's plenty who have lied to them and stolen from them and sold them guns and whiskey and gotten filthy rich in the process, and ruined such lives as they had in what they're pleased to call the Shining Times. I've traded shots with Indians, white men, Mexicans, and even Chinese, and I've had some of them help me out when I was in a few tight spots, too. There's some Indians just as greedy and ornery as white folks can be, which is how they lost some of what they had. They took a lot of scalps and tortured a lot of their own people, way back when, over sharing what they'd staked out as their territory."

  "Oh, I've heard that, too. Why should they share? The land was theirs."

  "Land's not worth much to people unless it's used, ma'am."

  Maidia was getting angry. "We spoil the land! We dig up the soil and cut down the trees and dam up the rivers and kill the animals. The Indians never did things like that!"

  Longarm grinned. "You ever see a Comanche buffalo drive? Or a Ponca village after a Pawnee raid?" He hesitated, then added, "I never did see that last myself, but I talked to men who did."

  "I'm not saying the Indians are perfect," Maidia retorted angrily. "But they certainly didn't despoil the land and destroy the forests the way we've done in the East, and the way people are beginning to do here in the West."

  Longarm sat thoughtfully for a moment, then got up and walked over to the fire. He picked up one of the few remaining long branches that hadn't been reduced to firewood length, and began to pull the burning sticks out of the fire and stamp them under his boots, driving them into the dirt and extinguishing them.

  Maidia watched him for a moment, her face showing her perplexity. Then she began to feel the bite of the night wind that the fire had kept her from noticing before.

  "What on earth are you doing?" she asked. "You're putting out our fire, and I'm getting cold!" Longarm said with great seriousness, "Why, seeing as you're so dead set against the trees being cut up for firewood, Miss Harkness, I didn't want you to be embarrassed by sharing any of the heat we been getting from that tree."

  "But we need the fire to be comfortable!" she protested. "If we didn't"--she stopped short and smiled. The smile became a laugh. She said, "All right, Marshal, you've made your point. But I think you exaggerated a little bit, just as I was doing."

  Squatting down, Longarm began rebuilding the blaze. Over his shoulder, he said to her as he worked, "The world might be a prettier place if folks were all considerate to each other, but they ain't, and that's why I've got this here job of mine. I can't afford to ponder too much on the way things ought to be--I've got to enforce the law, which is about the way things are. And I do my best to enforce the hell out of it. Now, I don't know anything about you, except you're a nice-looking young lady, but I'd guess you went to school a lot, and didn't do much rubbing up against real people. And you sure don't know much about Indians. Or men, either."

  "I'll admit I deserved the lesson," she replied soberly. "I made a very serious mistake in not going to somebody in Fort Smith and asking about those four men I hired. But the man at the livery stable where I went to find out about getting here to the Cherokee Nation seemed to know them, so I just assumed they were all right."

  "Which wasn't a real smart thing to do," Longarm pointed out. He added hastily, "Meaning no offense, ma'am. But I'll see you safe back to Fort Smith, and you can catch a train there to take you back to Boston." />
  "I have no intention of going back to Boston," Maidia said firmly. "I came out here to work with the Indians, and that's what I intend to do. I appreciate your offer, Marshal Long, but I'll manage quite well on my own, I'm sure."

  "You know I can't just ride off and leave you to look out for yourself," Longarm told her sternly. "Now, I'll tell you what. You backtrack with me a little ways tomorrow morning. There's a little place on the river called Webbers Falls, only eight or maybe ten miles from here. I'll find somebody dependable there to ride with you to wherever you're going."

  "I have a letter of introduction to a Reverend Miller in some place called Choteau. I found it on the map; it's quite a distance north. There's an Indian school there, and I'm hoping to find a place teaching, to begin with."

  "A while back, you said something about being a social worker," Longarm said. "Guess I don't rightly know just what that is."

  "Generally, it's just being helpful to poor people and those who don't have an education. I'm qualified as a teacher, though, among other things."

  "As long as you got a place waiting, that'll make me feel better. But how about my proposition, Miss Harkness? Will you go along to Webbers Falls with me, and let me pick out somebody to ride with you and see that you get to Choteau safe and sound?"

  "Of course I will. I think it's very thoughtful of you to offer to help me." Maidia hesitated for a moment. "I'm afraid I owe you an apology, Marshal. I misjudged your actions earlier--not that I approve of them, you understand--but I'm beginning to see that the standards I've been judging things by can't always be applied to this part of the country."

  "You don't need to apologize," Longarm assured her. "And meaning no offense again, you sound a lot smarter now than you did when you were ripping me up one side and down the other for what I done. But that's put behind us, I guess?"

  "Yes, I guess it is," she agreed.

  "Good. Now, if we're going to be comfortable tonight, I've got to look after some camp chores. The first one's to get rid of him." Longarm nodded at the corpse. "And then I'll see what I can rustle up in the way of some supper." Keeping her eyes off the body, Maidia said, "You do what's necessary. I don't know much about cooking over a campfire, but I'll help you as much as I can in getting dinner ready."