Longarm and the Colorado gundown

_{Longarm chuckled. Breaks Wind. That must be Aggie’s Bray Swind, misunderstood when one of the Utes had been trying to speak English. Longarm kinda liked the real name better than Aggie’s term anyhow. “Go ahead,” he said. “Sorry I interrupted you.”}

_{“Okay,” Crannock said, picking up where he’d left off. “By the time we got comfortable enough around the Utes to figure that out, all this court stuff was already going on. And then we learned that you federal boys didn’t want it stopped and—”}

_{“Whoa!” Longarm barked. “Now you stop right there.” He glanced around. The other guards had come over to join them now, and they were surrounded by placid, well-fed}

_{Ute Indians as well. “What was it you just said, mister?” “About what?”}

_{“About the federal government wanting this shit t’ continue, that’s what.”}

_{“Well, of course I said that. I mean, it’s true. Right?” “Wrong.”}

_{Crannock frowned. “But we were told real plain, Deputy, that the U.S. government wanted this to play all the way. So there’d be a, uh, precedent, they call it. That’s when all the courts have to rule some particular way because some other court has already—”}

_{“I know what a precedent is,” Longarm injected.}

_{“Okay. Well, that’s what we’re working out here is, a precedent. Hell, it was your idea, not ours. Once we saw how things really were, well, we didn’t want to keep Wind and his folks no more. But we was told you didn’t want ’em turned loose for a while yet. Not till there was time for that Nebraska writ to be tested on appeal. And that you were only gonna go through the motions of serving the thing until then, so we should pretend to not cooperate with you. We all agreed to go along with it. Wind an’ his people been camping out here, more or less, and we been setting around looking like guards in case somebody official came by and—” ‘The Indians’ own lawyer let you get away with something like that?” Longarm blurted out. He found it a little hard to accept that Aggie could have been playacting her part of the deception all this time.}

_{“Oh, we couldn’t let Miz Able find out. She’s a prissy kinda bitch and not always very understanding about things. She wouldn’t have gone along with it at all. Anyway, I got to say that it couldn’t of come at a better time far as we’re concerned. We got all we can pray over trying to solve the train robbery, you know, and—”}

_{“Forget the train robbery,” Longarm said. “Who the hell told you a stupid think like that about the court precedents and appeals and shit?”}