Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Newspaper reporters and other folks who didn't have to tidy up after killers tended to consider hangmen cold unfeeling butchers because they handled their chores with such

swift and sometimes brutal effectiveness. But Longarm had bellied up to many a bar, afterwards, with such notorious hangmen as old George Maledon of Fort Smith, who'd likely hung more poor bastards than anyone. Old George and all the others, save for a few mean-hearted bastards, agreed that the meanest way to hang a man was to draw the process out with mock kindness, urging him to say just a few last words and giving him plenty of time to choke back sobs and piss his pants, instead of just frog-marching him up those thirteen steps to have the halter around his neck and the trap sprung under him before he felt dead certain he was really done for.

Longarm swore at himself for dwelling on matters that he couldn't do enough about to matter. Despite how long it felt just waiting, Longarm was a good enough judge of true time to wonder how that pretty blonde could have ordered and eaten so soon when she suddenly popped back through the front doorway of the car, her face flushed and more than one hair out of place.

He wondered even more when she suddenly swung belly to belly with him, as if she wanted to kiss him, save for the expression of total dismay on her pretty face.

Then Longarm saw the big male paw that had gripped her by one arm of her duster and swung her into such a mutually awkward fix. So as the burly Texican who went with the big fist followed it the rest of the way into view, Longarm quietly asked the lady if she was arm in arm with that other gent of her own free will.

Before the blonde could reply, the cuss in the ten-gallon hat growled, "I'd keep my own nose under the brim of my own High Plains hat if I was you, little darling."

To which Longarm could only reply in dulcet tones, "It may be just as well I ain't you then. I was speaking to this here lady and if I was you, I'd commence by letting go her arm."

The bully did no such thing as he protested, "See here, I just now set across from her polite and offered to pay for her

dining-car meal, friendly as anything. But she just throwed down her fool napkin, sprang skywards as if I'd spilt hot coffee in her lap, and flounced out as if I'd done something wrong. Since then I've followed her the whole length of this whole train demanding some answer to her insulting behavior, and as you see, she still won't talk to either of us'n!"

Longarm said, "Let go her arm and mayhaps I can explain some of the rules of polite train travel, Tex."

When nothing happened he added, an octave lower, "Let go her arm. I mean it."

The bully in the checked vest and Walker Conversion didn't seem to think Longarm meant it. He still hung on— with his gun hand, the asshole—while the bewildered-looking blonde told one or the other of them, "Ich verstehe nicht! Ich spreche kaum Englisch!"

So Longarm simply threw a left cross over her shoulder to sucker-punch the moron holding on to her, and sure enough, he let go of her arm as his head thudded back into a doorpost. He then proceeded to slide slowly down.

The foreign gal was halfway to her own compartment door by the time her molester made it all the way to the flooring. And so Longarm felt no need to kick a man who was down as the maiden who was no longer in distress called something that sounded like donkey chimes before ducking safely inside her own compartment.

The Texican who'd been pestering her had lost his big white hat sliding down the doorpost. As he sat there in one comer, glassy-eyed and bleeding a bit out of one comer of his big mouth, Longarm hunkered down to gather up the fallen hat and brush it with one tweedy elbow as he amiably explained, "Aside from being a lady dining alone, the gal was a foreigner who just couldn't say what she thought of you in any lingo you could follow. I suspicion that was High Dutch she was just spouting."

"You son of a bitch! You cold-cocked me!" the man he'd cold-cocked shouted as his befuddled brain started ticking again.

Longarm held the hat out to him, saying, "Yeah. Like I was just saying, your doubtless-well-meant attentions spooked that sort of high-toned little lady considerably, and I might have done both of you a favor by breaking it up before anyone could get all excited and cable Der Kaiser about international incidents. I recall this time, down Mexico way, when this high-toned lady who spoke neither Anglo nor Mex—"

"You cold-cocked me in front of a woman, and now I'm going to have to kill you total!" the brute he'd belted cut in, trying to get up and go for his own gun at the same time.

So this time Longarm didn't pull his punch, and after a while another passenger came back from the dining car and offered to fetch the conductor when Longarm flashed his badge and sort of explained.