Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

The grave-diggers stepped back. Longarm strode closer, paused, and stared soberly down at the Mona Lisa smile of a total stranger. He already knew the one called Pearly had been packing no identification at all, even fake. He looked to have been around twenty-five, or a tad older than the one he'd called Kid. When Longarm asked about that one, Lukas pointed with his chin at a slightly mounded bare patch, saying, "Already feeding the worms. They planted him late yesterday the way you arranged. He was already turning funny colors, I'm told, and the county can't afford embalming for drifters nobody cares about."

Longarm gazed about the disturbed and sort of disturbing plot as he couldn't help noting, "Bishop Reynolds here already told me that. I see you don't bother marking the graves neither?"

Lukas shrugged. "Why should we? We got a fair idea where we've planted someone recently, and nobody never comes to put no flowers on the graves. We got us regular Mormon and gentile churchyards here in Zion, Deputy Long. Nobody anyone ever gave a shit about winds up here in Potter's Field."

Longarm nodded. "Well, I can't say I was all too fond of this poor bastard, whoever he might have been. I sure would like photo prints of both of 'em before I leave, but as of right now, your guess is as good as mine."

Lukas nodded and one of his hired hands nudged the body with a boot heel to roll it, stiff as a plank, into its grave. It landed facedown. Longarm was just as glad when they commenced to kick and then scoop dirt in on top of the cadaver they were planting without even a muslin shroud. It helped some to reflect on how they'd have left him for the carrion crows had things turned out the way they'd planned the day before.

Walking back to town with the coroner and the others, Longarm casually asked just how many unmarked graves they could be talking about back yonder. Lukas thought before he answered. "Two dozen tops. Some before my time. You don't get many unclaimed dead folks in an out-of-the-way town like this, even though it is the county seat."

Bishop Reynolds nodded. "We take care of our own. Overland takes care of the few who die aboard its coaches on their way to or from the gold fields."

There was barely time enough for the locals to recall half the six or eight vagrants buried back yonder since Lukas had taken over as coroner a couple of summers back. Then one of the Mormon townsmen met them on the far side of the trash piles to tell old Bishop Reynolds a bunch of gentile riders were coming in from the south, lathered and still riding hard.

Longarm figured, and everyone agreed, it sounded like that government party. As they spied a stationary column of dust down the road ahead Lukas observed, "Looks as if they've reined in at the Overland stop."

Longarm said, "I noticed. They come all this way to treat with Indians and it seems the Indians have scared 'em shitless. I got to find out why."

That was easier said than done, once they joined the confusion all around the Overland stop. A dozen sweaty and dusty riders could run in heaps of circles, and their two dozen ponies and six or eight pack mules weren't making much more sense as they argued about who got watered first.

Once he'd established the boss men were already inside, Longarm tracked them down in the smoke-filled dining

room, with Reynolds and Lukas following him. Those ranch hands and grave-diggers who worked for Lukas both ways went around to the back to lend their know-how with stock to some poor souls who didn't seem to have the knack.

Longarm and his own companions found a portly red-faced cuss of, say, fifty gulping coffee and puffing cigar smoke across that same comer table at a slightly older and far skinnier cuss with a hatchet face and superior brand of cigar. Longarm couldn't have afforded to smoke with either of them on a regular basis, but even so they were both dressed less refined, in sort of dusty Davy Crockett outfits. Longarm was too polite to ask why, or to point out Davy Crockett had been dressed more like a white man when he'd headed out to Texas as a grown-up. Indians and white folks who had to live like Indians wore buckskin because they had nothing better. Had machine-woven textiles not felt better against human skin wet or dry, there'd have been no point in inventing half as many textile machines. But you'd never guess that from Currier and Ives prints or half the covers of the current Wild West magazines, and so even old Bill Cody seemed to think he had to gussy up like a Cheyenne squaw lest someone accuse him of being just off the boat.