Longarm and the Outlaw's Shadow by Tabor Evans

Author:Tabor Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Chapter 11

“Wichita” as such meant nothing sensible in any of the Great Plains dialects. Longarm figured it was likely a well-meant stab at “Wichasha,” a Sioux-Hokan word meaning any grown man. He had it on the authority of many a “Wichita Indian” that the whole notion was tachesli wasichun or white folks’ bullshit. Wichasha or weya meant man or woman and no more.

Down Mexico way, they’d wound up with the Yucatan Indians of Yucatan by asking Indians they grabbed who they were and what their hunting ground was called. “Yucatan” translated loosely from the Maya as, “What the hell are you talking about?”

But a rose by any other name would have smelled as strongly of boiled cabbage, coal smoke, horse shit, and steam as, thanks to having to transfer more than once, then wait spells on sidings while the highball combinations tore through, Longarm got in around nine in the morning, feeling seedy as the bottom of a canary cage and no doubt looking worse.

The store-bought tweed suit he’d left Denver in was a total disaster after all he’d put it through, and the fool newspapers kept running descriptions of his corpse somewhere out yonder. So before he set up field headquarters right between the Dexter Hotel and Franco-Turkish Baths, Longarm made a few quick purchases after he wired Denver from the nearby telegraph office.

Then he booked a room with bath to sweat out Billy Vail’s pick of the several choices Longarm had come with on his way north.

A body could sure come up with alternate plans while staring out into the dark aboard a pokey night train.

First things coming first, Longarm treated himself to a hot-tub soak and shave. Then he flopped, still damp and bare-ass, across the bedding to dry out in the cross-ventilation and maybe catch forty winks after such a pain-in-the-neck night sitting up.

But thanks to all the coffee he’d been killing time with, and no doubt to the stolen moments of sleep old soldiers manage without noticing, he was too keyed up to doze off. So he swung his bare feet to the braided rag rug and proceeded to turn into somebody else for local consumption.

He’d replaced both his missing Stetson and the hat he’d salvaged at the Galvez spread with the cheaper summer straw of the Kansas rural scene.

He’d treated himself to secondhand, although steam-cleaned, cavalry pants still bearing faded gold stripes down the blue-gray legs, and picked up a fresh shirt of Army blue to wear under a bolero jacket of new crisp-blue denim.

The State of Kansas had voted itself dry as far west as Wichita, and they’d frowned on packing guns in town when it was still possible to get lawfully drunk in Kansas. So, not wanting to explain his .44-40 over and over, he’d sprung for one of those shoulder holsters such as John Wesley Hardin had made so infamous and, sure enough, once you buttoned up the bottom of the jacket, the six-gun was riding out of human ken.

Unable to

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.