Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

O'Hanlon made the mistake of peering closer, even as he said a real ranger would have some other identification to go with a tin star anyone might find in a pawnshop.

He knew just how right he'd been in the few instants of awareness left to him between the moment a .45-55 erupted like a volcano in his chest and when his world, and life,

whirled down and down in a pinwheeling kaleidoscope of ever-darker chaos.

The killer with the Texas hat and Irish brogue was already out of sight before the first windows along the street had popped open and O'Hanlon's body on the grassy side of the pickets had stopped twitching. The man who'd just killed one lawman had been about to give up on Longarm in any case. For they'd told him that unless the target of their annoyance wasn't home by moonrise, it would likely mean he'd gotten lucky at love or some other game of chance in some other part of town.

Longarm didn't seem to worry at all about healthy habits.

It made him awfully hard to kill.

Chapter 4

Longarm's pals on the local force were on the O'Hanlon case before Longarm heard a thing about the killing just across the street from his furnished digs.

Having no call to connect the one with the other, the hard-eyed Denver Detective Squad was reading the sign well but wrong about the time Sandy Henderson was fixing scrambled eggs as Longarm reclined on one elbow, admiring her bare, bruised derriere.

Noting the way O'Hanlon lay sprawled behind that fence in that tree-shaded yard, with his own gun out and the front of his uniform so powder-burned, the detectives assumed the copper badge had been moving in on some prowler he'd spotted in the yard, and either been ambushed by the prowler or walked into a confederate he hadn't expected. The folks who lived in the house O'Hanlon had died so close to had no better suggestions as to just what might have been going on out front as they'd been having supper in the back. They said the first they'd heard of any trouble in the neighborhood was the roar of a man-sized gun. One of the old boys from the meat-wagon crew said it looked as if O'Hanlon had tried to stop at least a .45-55 with his heart. Others from the neighborhood agreed the single shot they'd all heard had sounded about right for a .45 long. Nobody had seen the shootist, of course, so nobody could

say whether it had been a carbine or horse pistol they'd heard. A man could fire a .45-55 from a pistol, if he had mighty good wrists.

The copper badges did the usual canvassing of the neighborhood. Most who lived near Longarm's rooming house, including Longarm, did so because the neighborhood was inexpensive as well as handy to downtown Denver. The few more prosperous neighbors felt a tad reluctant to discuss their sources of income with the Denver P.D., and nobody within blocks seemed to have been robbed or even heard a suspicious sound before the roar of that one fatal shot.

Longarm didn't hear anything about the killing until the next morning, late the next morning, because once he and Sandy had established why Indians liked it dog-style, they'd naturally wound up the good old way in Sandy's bed and sort of overslept.

Both the Post and Rocky Mountain News had the killing headlined on every morning newsstand Longarm passed. He heard a lot more, some of it true, when he dropped by his furnished digs just across from the killing to pack.

Longarm didn't get excited about the location of poor O'Hanlon's demise. He'd heard it was a rough part of town before he'd hired furnished digs on that side of the creek. But he did raise an eyebrow when he heard they'd dug such a serious slug out of a copper badge who must have surprised a burglar and vice versa.

Aside from the neighborhood and the early hour of the killing, a .45-55 seemed a lot of gun for your average residential prowler. The .45-55 carbine round threw a 405-grain slug a good ways with fifty-five grains of powder. Meaning they were talking about a stranger or someone who knew the neighborhood prowling it with a mighty noticeable cavalry carbine. Or, and this was even tougher to buy, they were talking about a petty hit-and-run burglar armed with a bodacious horse pistol indeed.

Longarm himself favored the more practical and most popular AA A O anmiunition a fairly serious shootist could

shove into both his Winchester saddle gun and Colt double-action six-shooter. The .44-40 lobbed two hundred grains of lead with its forty grains of powder, hard enough to stop anything lighter on its feet than, say, a pissed-off grizzly. Many wayfaring riders favored the even lighter and hence cheaper .45-30 rounds for their good-enough Colt single-action Peacemakers. So a rascal gunning copper badges with a .45-55 read more like a hired gun than a burglar to a lawman who'd chased both in his time.