Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Aside from so much pleasure, the stay was good for his business as well. Thanks to the government telegraph and the leisure he had to use it free, Longarm was able to telegraph all over creation, and with some of the answers he had time to wait for, waiting for old Senator Rumford to raise the ante or fold, he was able to tidy up some of his own concerns without missing a meal or as many sessions of sweet slap and tickle as a lady might want.

Dame Flora seemed to want a lot of them. She said she was

sure old Angus was getting some of little Jeannie and didn't want her hired help to get ahead of her.

Murgatroid Westmore's memory improved wondrously as soon as Lx)ngarm was able to uncover his true name and all the other silly things he was remembered for back home in Tennessee. Longarm had little trouble convincing the surviving member of Tim McBride's gang that most any federal prison had to be an improvement on Tennessee State Prison, or that seeing he was sure to do more hard time on those old local wants than Uncle Sam was likely to give him, it was mighty dumb to hold out the pure shit on pals who were too dead to care whether one peached on them or not.

So once Westmore and some confirming wires had identified all the bodies in the springhouse for certain, the agency buried them a polite distance from their more respectable and hence respected dead Indians. Westmore was even willing to help with information on those other poor souls who'd crossed Longarm earlier, with such sad results. According to Westmore, W. R. Callisher, the crude cattle baron Longarm had shot it out with in the Burlington train shed, had been acting on his own as the stupid bastard everyone had said he was. All the other attempts on Longarm along the way had been inspired by Pappy, or Tim McBride, to keep a savvy lawman from doing just what Longarm had done in the end.

Westmore denied any knowledge of missing Scotch spinsters, moonshiners running com to Indians, or Indians running smoke puffs up into the sky. Longarm decided his prisoner was likely telling the truth. He'd been holding out on Westmore just a mite. He'd meant what he said about forgetting to tell Tennessee he had their want on ice for them, provided Westmore wanted to cooperate. But he'd forgotten to tell Westmore about that murder warrant the state of Missouri had outstanding on a mean little bastard. He figured he might as well let that sheriff's deputy from Liberty, Missouri, tell Westmore once he got to Fort Hall. They likely owed the poor shit a few more days in Fool's Paradise for being so talkative.

Getting in touch with Zion County regarding the true names and records of those rascals in their potter's field was sort of complicated. Longarm decided to hold off until he passed through there on the way back. None of them would be going anywhere, and it hardly seemed likely anyone would ever want them dug up.

Since Dame Flora kept pestering him about those missing gals, when she wasn't pestering him to go riding with her, Longarm even got in touch with an old pal from Scotland Yard. It had been possible to cable London since just before the war, and while Scotland Yard was nowhere near Scotland, they did keep tabs on most all such shit anywhere in the British Isles.

His old pal. Inspector Fennel, who'd been looking for that mean Englishman in Colorado that time, wasn't able to tell Longarm and Dame Flora anything they hadn't already figured out, though.

As the pretty gal had already told Longarm, nobody could recall what the person or persons placing the classified proposals in the Scotch newspapers might have looked like. Fennel suggested by wire, and Longarm agreed, it hardly seemed likely nobody would recall a red Indian or even an obvious Yank. Dame Flora said she'd already had her Angus check that out. It seemed Angus had been a private detective she'd hired back home, first to see what he could find out for her there, and then to bodyguard her and Jeannie once she decided to track the missing spinsters all the way to the wilds of Deseret. She said his affair with her maid had started somewhere this side of the Mississippi and that she'd been feeling mighty left out, although her kind never dallied with the hired help, even when they were far better-looking than crusty old Angus.

Checking with the B.I.A. itself, Longarm had no trouble establishing Pete Robbins as a notorious pest who'd been run off more than a dozen times for running bad booze to wards of the government. A warrant signed by Judge Isaac Parker over to Fort Smith had likely inspired Robbins and his trash

to run and keep running on learning Longarm was a deputy U.S. marshal. More than one such gent had been after them over in the Cherokee Strip a spell back.