Longarm and the Ungrateful Gun by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 11

There went a day on the trail because Longarm naturally had to ride back to The Falls and report the murder to Sheriff Maguire. They both agreed it looked like murder before Doc Ballard, their coroner-cum-druggist, found the bullet hole in his back. A small caliber round didn’t leave a dramatic entrance in black wool. Doc agreed Lovecraft had been shot around twelve hours before Longarm had caught up with him, or say ten or eleven the night before.

Their conversation was taking place back in town, a few hours later, with Lovecraft still stiff on his side but naked on the zinc-topped dissecting table under Doc’s drugstore as the balding forensic expert poked the cadaver to say, “Starting to relax some. Over the next forty-eight hours he’ll go mushy as a wet dishrag.”

The sheriff opined, “He was murdered and hauled off into that barley field by a person or persons unknown betwixt going on midnight and that duster as blew in before dawn. But where did they shoot him? He ain’t been at his office nor at his townhouse for some time. Others working for him, both places, would have noticed.”

Longarm said, “I mean to send a wire to Fort Smith about the delivery dray I found him in. By now they may have more on a dray just like it, last seen fleeing the scene of a crime in a damper storm.”

Maguire was quick-witted. He said, “You’re suggesting them three outlaws you want finally made her here in such a dray. But why would they gun the very lawyer who helped Hungerford escape?”

Longarm said, “I mean to ask when I catch up with ’em. But as an educated guess, a slippery lawyer who met them here and led them to some hideout might have turned from an asset to a risk they wanted to eliminate.”

Maguire nodded and said, “He might have told them you’d come by and he was ducking you. So they got rid of him and that incriminating transportation purloined in Fort Smith at the same time. Meaning the murdersome trio must be holed up right here in The Falls!”

Longarm warned, “Don’t take the bit in your teeth and just run with the wind, Sheriff. It works as well or better another way. We know they haven’t been holed up around Lovecraft’s home or office. He could have been hiding from me alone and met them anywhere in town as planned back in Fort Smith. They could have loaded him in with them and driven out a ways to get rid of him and that dray before they just rode on most anywhere, say with his money and fresh mounts he had waiting for them. They’d have had no call to scout him up if he hadn’t offered them a good reason.”

Maguire asked, “Are you saying Lovecraft was acting as a sort of relay station for riders bound for other parts?”

Longarm said, “Three strangers, one of them colored, would be dumb to loiter about this one horse town, no offense, and Lovecraft was only in the pay of somebody richer.

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