Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds by Tabor Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

worried about the law, and long gone if he was.
    Meanwhile Durango, Colorado, was far closer than New Ulm, Minnesota, even though it got sort of hard to tell along the last leg of the tricky route across the very spine of the Rockies.
    In the end, it only felt like a million miles of hairpin turns above sheer drops to ribbons of white water in the canyons way down below. It was still short of midnight when Longarm stiffly climbed off the train in Durango with his heavily laden saddle. He checked the McClellan with its bedroll riding across stuffed saddlebags in the depot baggage room, hanging on to his Winchester '73 saddle gun lest it prove too tempting, and went straight to the Durango office of the railroad dicks. Pending more official incorporation as a township in the southwest corner of the fairly new state, the settlement was being policed by the railroad that had opened it to settlement once the Ute had been run off to less desirable water, timber, and range. The railroad didn't brag about it, but Longarm knew the silver smelters near the rail yards refined ore from up the valley a fair haul by freight wagon. So there wasn't much mystery about a gang that went in for payroll robberies drifting through Durango. They hadn't been out to buy any land-grant property off the D&RGW. Unless and until they laid the last of those narrow-gauge tracks up to Silverton, Durango would remain the transfer point where the three dollars a day of many a hardrock miner would be sent on by stage, in the handy form of treasury notes, over many a bumpy mile of lonesome mountain scenery.
    But there hadn't been any recent stage robberies out this way. The purported leader of the gang, Calvert Tyger, was supposed to have died in an accidental fire, which would be easier to buy if yet another gang member, under the same name, hadn't been done to a turn much the same way in Denver, and if a bill from that earlier payroll robbery hadn't surfaced later more than thrice that far from whatever in blue blazes they'd been up to in Durango.
    The railroad dicks, like telegraphers and such, stayed open around the clock because that was the way you ran a railroad. Longarm had met the older gent on duty that night as watch commander. He knew the old-timer had been a full-fledged U.S. marshal down Texas way at a time when good men and true had been forced to make their minds up on the double. Unlike a Ranger captain named Billy Vail, old Ross Gilchrist of West Texas had surrendered his U.S. marshal's badge to accept a commission with Hood's Texas Brigade, C.S.A. A railroad had been more forgiving later than the winning side.
    Gilchrist seemed sincerely glad to see Longarm again. Things did get tedious late at night on a weeknight in Durango. But while he broke out a pint of what he swore to be real Scotch liquor, and offered Longarm a Havana Claro from the humidor on his roll-top desk, the old-timer allowed he'd been there when that roominghouse had burned down less than two furlongs to the west, but couldn't seem to tell Longarm anything that Henry hadn't already typed up on onionskin for him.
    Gilchrist said there'd been no autopsy ordered for a drunk who'd died screaming like a banshee behind a wall of flames the volunteer firemen hadn't managed to break through in time. When Longarm mentioned there was no record of the late Calvert Tyger having a drinking problem, assuming he was really all that late, Gilchrist shrugged and said, "I've read his yellow sheets, old son. There's no record of him signing the pledge neither. But leaving aside whether he burnt to death drunk or sober, he sure as shit burnt to death. You could hear him bitching about it for quite a ways and longer than I'd care to die that particular way."
    Longarm asked Gilchrist if he'd seen the body afterwards.
    Gilchrist grimaced. "What was left of it. Had he baked a mite longer we could have saved the expense of planting him over in Potter's Field."
    Then, as if he'd foreseen the next