Longarm and the Colorado gundown

_{“Stand easy. We’ll work out in a minute who’s under arrest here and who isn’t.” Longarm sidled out of the doorway and motioned with his left hand. Boo Bevvy and half a dozen Snowshoe possemen poured in with shotguns held at the ready. It probably helped that each of them was already wearing a badge issued by the town of Snowshoe. It wouldn’t matter that that wasn’t who Longarm had said they all were. The startled smelter workers wouldn’t be thinking of such details. Not yet. All they would be seeing would be gun muzzles and steely eyes, never mind the rest of it.}

_{“That’s fine, boys. All of you with guns, pile them on that table there. That’s right, thank you. Yes, you too, dammit. Thank you.”}

_{The smelter men managed to divest themselves of their weapons in practically no time at all. Perfect. Longarm would be pleased if he could bring this whole thing off with not a shot being fired.}

_{By the time all the employees had been rounded up and all the firearms collected, the smelter files had been located and the cabinets jimmied open.}

_{“Well?” Longarm asked.}

_{“It’s probably here,” one of the possemen said. He had been selected for this chore because his everyday job was as comptroller of Ames Delacoutt’s mine in Snowshoe. He was a man who knew his way around ledger entries the way Longarm knew his way around good horses or bad men. “But it’s going to take some long, serious study to nail it all down. Marshal. I have to cross-reference all the inventory and production records and sort out all the}

_{receipted concentrates. I can do it, of course. They couldn’t possibly hide all those tons of concentrates they took from us. The work will be reflected somewhere in these records, I promise you.”}

_{Longarm looked at the silent, fuming men of Tipson who were standing now under guard in their own smelter.}

_{It was almighty interesting, he thought, how not a single one of them had bothered to ask what this raid was about. But then they all knew, didn’t they?}

_{And they all accepted as fact that Longarm and the Snowshoe men knew as well.}

_{The way Longarm read it, this failure to protest and question was as damning as any evidence the comptroller from Snowshoe might expose in those records. Although, of course, that form of confirmation would be necessary too once the mess came before a judge and jury.}

_{“Where are the bosses?” Longarm asked.}

_{“Which ones?”}

_{“Let’s start with Edgar Monroe.”}

_{“He’s ... not here.”}

_{“I guessed that much. So where is he?”}

_{“Search me.”}