Longarm and the Colorado gundown

_{Longarm shook his head, disgusted with the whole crowd of them. What the Utes had seen, the reason these men had panicked and orchestrated the series of lies, was the robbers carrying their impossibly bulky loot away from the Bitterroot and Brightwater train. Not by wagon or mule train, but by simple gravity. The train was held up and taken to the point where it most closely approached the right of way of the Silver Creek, Tipson, and Glory hundreds of feet lower in the canyon bottoms. Then the robbers simply slid the boxed concentrates down to be loaded onto the SCT&G cars below. It was that bare slide that Longarm and Leah Skelde had seen when they were waiting for the train to pick them up the other day. From below the marks left behind by the boxes were obvious. But from up above, at the level of the Bitterroot and Brightwater roadbed, there was nothing remarkable that could be seen. The robbers opened the throttle of the stolen train once the boxes were unloaded, and the train was sent down the tracks on its own to stop wherever it ran out of steam. That was where Bevvy and his men found it, and where they assumed the gold concentrates had been unloaded. They hadn’t thought to backtrack in search of anything so ordinary as the SCT&G tracks that they saw every time they traveled the B&B right of way. Longarm had been able to put it together only because of that delay between when the coach from Silver Creek dropped passengers off at the end of the tracks and the train from Glory arrived to carry them the rest of the way. Otherwise he never would have seen those drag marks.}

_{Those tipped him to the truth, along with discovering that the man in Snowshoe who was primarily responsible for the Ute scare was the same newspaper editor who suddenly had a vested financial interest in the survival of the SCT&G. Ellis Farmer went out of his way to stir up hard feelings against the Ute tribe. And it had occurred to Longarm too that despite all the violence he’d been told to expect from the townspeople of Snowshoe, the only real trouble}

_{he’d experienced came at the hands of outsiders, not from locals at all.}

_{Longarm was sure he could find a whole passel of charges to lodge against each and every one of these conspirators. Molesting Ute Indians—who were, after all, wards of the government and therefore clearly under federal jurisdiction for their protection—would come at the top of that list.,}