Longarm and the Denver Executioners by Tabor Evans

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

Chapter 11

It lay just past noon by the time Longarm dismounted out front of the doc’s combined clinic and residence, a three-story, Mansart-roofed pile of whitewashed frame with living quarters above and the clinic taking up what would have been the parlor floor of a larger family. Inside, they told Longarm they’d just carried Bobby Arrowmaker to the undertaker’s. So he rode there next.

Like most everybody else in a town that size, their undertaker doubled in brass as the town’s druggist and postmaster, with the post office to the rear of the drugstore and the undertaking down below. He found Sally Arrowmaker seated in the viewing chapel near the stairs with that strapping nurse from the clinic. The big blond was sort of holding the smaller breed gal in the French maid’s outfit like a lost kid. She quietly told him they were working on the boy in the back.

Longarm sat beside them on the same sofa, with Sally betwixt them as he gently took one of her hands to murmur, “I don’t know what to say, Miss Sally. Is there anything I can do?”

The petite brunette sounded surprisingly conversational as she told him, “He was lying in the boiler room near the delivery stairs. He was trying to make it outside for some air when he collapsed. His lungs were full of blood and he’d coughed it up all over the cement floor. But he knew who I was and he said he was sorry. I told him he had nothing to be sorry about and asked him what had happened. He said that same one who’d shot Luke Warner had come down to the basement after him. That’s all I heard. I ran upstairs for help. By the time we got back down to him he’d passed out. We never got to speak to one another again. And now I have no mitakuye oyasin! Now I am all alone from where the sun now stands, forever!”

“You’ve still got us! We’ll be your friends, honey!” the strapping Dutch gal tried to assure her.

Longarm murmured, “She means she’s got no kith and kin left. She and her kid brother were orphans.”

“Our father was a redskin and our mother was an outcast ruined woman!” Sally sobbed.

Longarm patted her hand and said, “Aw, mush, he fell for the Union and she died owning land, Miss Sally. I know you don’t believe me, but you’re going to be all right. You still got property and your honest job at the hotel. Your brother would want you to carry on.”

Sally shuddered and said, “I’ll never go back to that hotel, never, not even to change my clothes and they can send me any wages they owe me! It was awful, Custis. He’d coughed up blood all over the dusty cement floor and as soon as I see to what they left of the poor boy I want you to take me home. My own home, where our mother died and I have flowers to

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