Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Longarm stayed where he was, reloading, as Tupombi joined him by her doorway while others called up the stairs at them. Longarm called back, "Somebody best fetch Bishop Reynolds some more. I suspect I just got the one who got away this afternoon."

Moving in through the clearing smoke with his own gun loaded six-in-the-wheel, Longarm spotted one of the other man's bigger thumb-busters on the floor between baseboard and bloody buckskin. The stoutly framed army-issue revolver had been rechambered for those more lethal rounds and fitted with tailored grips, likely Mex, carved from mussel shell or maybe real mother-of-pearl. So Longarm muttered, "Howdy, Pearly. Now all we got to figure out is the true identity of Pappy, after which we might be able to figure out why killing me was so important to you determined rascals."

Tupombi pointed through the clearing smoke at some goose down floating out the door of Longarm's room. He nodded and said, "Yep, it was my own poor feather bed he just shot the liver and lights out of, the poor bastard."

He couldn't resist adding, with a lopsided grin, "Ain't you glad you waited till we was in your room before you tried to get us both into such a ridiculous position?"

Chapter 9

The gunplay had naturally been heard all over a town as modest as that one, and one advantage of small-town crowds for a lawman was the simple fact that most everyone in such a crowd knew most everyone else in town. So it didn't take long to establish Pearly as a total stranger to those parts as well.

This time Bishop Reynolds showed up with his temporal boss, a High Sheriff Alcott who didn't rank as high in church affairs but still seemed a Saint it wasn't safe to offer a cheroot to. So Longarm didn't, and when he said he had to ride on after those Scotch folk as soon as possible, the stem old High Sheriff told him it wasn't possible, but that he'd send a posse comitatus out to bring Dame Flora and her party back, dead or alive.

Meanwhile, having shot two men within twenty-four hours in or about Zion County, Deseret, they thought the least a gentile stranger who claimed to be a lawman could do would be to explain some of this infernal gunplay at a formal sit-down with the county coroner, who was off somewhere hunting strays at the moment. It didn't really cheer Longarm all that much to learn they'd elected a gentile stockman with some knowledge of veterinary medicine as their county coroner.

But after some consideration Longarm decided it might be best if he went along with the local lawmen, who knew the

local lay of the land way better than he did.

It stood to reason a posse of riders familiar with the rugged range this side of Fort Hall would be able to search it at least as thoroughly, in far safer numbers. And besides, he'd still been sent all this way to ride herd on those other dudes, bogged down or forted up, whichever, in the other direction entirely.

The manager allowed they'd be proud to overnight him some more, and rustled him up another room, a couple of doors closer to the one Tupombi and his possibles were in. He didn't say so as Lulu led him up there after things had simmered down and then left him unmolested to go back down and molest the manager some more.

Longarm lit a sneaky cheroot from the candlestick Lulu had left him and smoked it down, reclined across the unwounded feather bed with the window sash flung wide. Then, figuring the others had bedded down for a spell, he got back up and slipped out into the mighty dark hallway without that lit candlestick. For he knew where he was headed and it was nobody else's beeswax.

Tupombi opened up, although just a candlelit slit, without yelling through the door he'd tapped on discreetly. He could still see she didn't go to bed in deerskins. But she was standing sideways lest he spy anything important as she braced her bare hip against that damned door, murmuring, "Heavens, I was almost asleep and what are you doing at my door at this hour, Custis?"

He said, "Rapping on it, of course. Ain't you fixing to invite a man in for just a minute?"

It was tough to read her eyes with all the light coming from behind her bare ass like that. So when she fluttered her lashes and demanded to know what sort of a girl he thought she was, he decided to take her at her word. He didn't know any Indian words for "prick-teaser," although that game was hardly confined to the gals of his own persuasion.

He said, "I ain't out to trifle with any wards of the government. Miss Tupombi. I only need some stuff from my saddlebags, and as you'd likely notice if you'd be kind enough to

glance down, my old McClellan should be somewhere on your floorboards betwixt the doorjamb and the baseboard."