Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

The conductor joined Longarm and his stretched-out victim a few minutes later. He agreed Longarm had done what had only been right, but when Longarm suggested they just roll the surly cuss off at the next water stop, the conductor explained how awkward that could be for a mere senior employee.

The asshole Longarm had just knocked out, twice, was a major holder of Chicago, Burlington & Quincy stock and a mighty mogul of the beef industry. When Longarm pointed out he'd been acting more like a drunken drag rider in a Dodge City whorehouse the conductor agreed he was notorious for that as well.

In the end they decided it might be best to just stuff the big pest in his own compartment, minus his gunbelt, and allow him to come to such senses as he had in his own good time. So that was what the conductor and one of his porters did in the end, with the conductor hanging on to the Walker Conversion for now. When he pointed out he'd have to return the asshole's property as soon as they got to the end of the line, Longarm agreed that would only be right, and suggested a good nap followed by a pounding headache would likely calm the cuss by sundown.

A few more passengers came by. Then that colored ding-donger got back to Longarm's car with plenty of grub and joe on a good-sized tray with skinny fold-down legs one could use to convert it to a piss-poor table. So Longarm tipped him an extra dime just to set it up inside between the facing seats.

After he'd left, Longarm left Blue Tooth Tanner's leg-irons on so he could eat with total ease without handcuffs. For a man who'd said he wasn't hungry, old Blue Tooth sure tore into his ham and hash browns. When Longarm said so, the doomed outlaw sighed and said, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I've been trying like anything to go easy on the grub since they said you was coming to fetch me for the hangman, but to tell the truth I just can't seem to refuse anything worth eating or drinking."

Longarm washed some chewed ham down with Arbuckle and asked how come, adding, "Ain't it a mite late to worry about your figure or even your health, no offense?"

Tanner confided, "I was there when they hung my poor old daddy. Some others who was there laughed when he shit himself so much at the end. Daddy had ordered himself a swell last meal, and you could smell the oysters and fancy fish sauce he'd et the night before as he dangled there in the cold gray light of dawn."

Longarm swallowed ham that had suddenly gone awfully greasy as he refrained from commenting on the results of feeding a whole regiment a swell supper of pork sausages and sauerkraut the evening before a serious battle in a summer rain. It hardly seemed a fine topic to discuss across a dinner table. So when Blue Tooth Tanner wistfully asked whether a hanged man shit himself worth mentioning on an empty stomach, Longarm assured him he'd seen lots of old boys dangle dry and dignified.

It wasn't true, but he didn't see how his prisoner was going to know for sure before it would hardly matter, to him, so what the hell, it seemed the least he could do.

Blue Tooth cast all caution aside as he enjoyed the apple pie and mousetrap cheese with extra sugar in his genuine Arbuckle Brand. He said he felt sure he'd have time to go back on a diet between the time Longarm handed him over in Denver and the time they actually hung him.

Longarm didn't answer. Tanner would learn soon enough that they meant to drop him through the trap on arrival to save the expenses of making up and cleaning out an extra cell at the Federal House of Detention close by the railroad yards. When old Judge Dickerson sentenced a cuss he paid attention to the fine print, and there was seldom if ever any bullshit with appeals and stays of execution, but Longarm had no call to crush a prisoner's hopes. So he never did, unless the cuss had done someone Longarm knew real dirty.

Longarm wouldn't have known that schoolmarm in Castle Rock had he woke up in bed with her, dead or alive, and Blue Tooth had said he hadn't meant it personally. So Longarm just let the poor doomed rascal dream of hanging in the sweet by and by as they rolled ever closer to the waiting gallows with every clickety-clack of the steel wheels under them. So, dull as this run across the sunbaked prairie usually was, it seemed no time at all before that helpful colored gent had cleared away their repast around three or four in the afternoon and returned with the beer schooners Longarm had asked him to fetch for them from the club car.

Blue Tooth Tanner, back in handcuffs but out of his leg-irons again by that time, allowed Longarm was a real sport to serve beer to a prisoner like that. But Longarm just shrugged and told him he was lucky he wasn't an Indian. He didn't trust Blue Tooth enough to confide he often drank with Indians, no matter what Miss Lemonade Lucy had to say about that.