Free Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds by Tabor Evans Page B

shirt, getting too familiar. The gal sounded like a mite more fun to Longarm than the prince's usual play-pretties. But on the other hand Longarm wasn't as old, stuffy, and married up. Fair was fair, and Longarm had to allow a prince might have a chore explaining all that ice cream in his underwear to his handsome but humorless princess once he got home.
    Longarm didn't really care who got to drink with the Prince of Wales these days, and he failed to see what all that fuss about Miss Sarah Bernhardt was about. He'd met the Divine Sarah that time they'd asked him to bodyguard her on her Western tour, and she'd made no mystery of the simple fact she'd been born Jewish but partly raised by Catholic nuns and hence felt as comfortable, or uncomfortable, praying either way. The current dispute seemed to have something to do with Miss Sarah's unconventional ways with men and other pets she liked to lead about on leashes. Longarm had found her a good old gal who'd only kissed him like a sister that time he'd saved her life. But it seemed the French Jews and Catholics were having a serious row over her now, with the Catholics insisting she was Jewish and the outraged Jews insisting she'd been baptized by those nuns and so the Catholic Church was more than welcome to such a flashy thing.
    Longarm didn't bother to finish the dumb news item. He found it mighty tedious that grown men could really care what an actress did or didn't do just to work up some curiosity about her show. Longarm had been too polite to ask, but the Divine Sarah had told him to his face she'd never slept in a coffin or kept a live crocodile in her bathtub like some said. But those Jew-baiters he'd had to save her from out Virginia City way must have believed even worse tales about her judging from the wild way they'd carried on.
    This old world seemed filled with folks who carried on wild as all hell over nothing much. It was one of the reasons he was packing his badge and guns. He'd found some of the wildest bastards convinced of their own God-given right to raise hell in the name of some half-ass excuse, such as Frank and Jesse's conviction they were riding for a Confederate Army they'd never been enlisted in to protect kith and kin from the cruel advances of the Missouri Pacific, which ran way the hell over on the far side of their state but deserved to be robbed in any case, according to them.
    Calvert Tyger's gang of Galvanized Yankees seemed to have worn their own fight for the Lost Cause a mite thin, to Longarm's way of thinking. The James boys, at least, could be said not to know any better, since their only military experience had been with half-assed guerrilla bands who'd never surrendered for the simple reason nobody had ever asked them to. But Tyger had enlisted in the real rebel army, been captured fair and square, and enlisted in the Union Army so he could get out of Sandusky Prison and fight the Santee.
    That romantic bull about two flags waving at Little Crow side by side, as boys in blue and gray civilized him with butt stock and bayonet, was postwar twaddle. Calvert Tyger and his pals had foresworn the Confederacy a good spell before Lee's surrender, and would have been free to head home the same as any other Union vets had they not deserted both armies in time of war.
    One of the young gals behind Longarm squeaked "I can't look! Tell me when it's over!"
    Longarm glanced out his own window as he set the Police Gazette to one side and dug out the sheaf of typed-up onionskins Henry had given him. The tracks wound gently alongside the brawling San Juan through the South Ute Reserve near the New Mexico line, and what the hell, most everyone aboard figured to live if this old car jumped the tracks and rolled no more than three or four times down that forty-five-degree slope. He wondered what those gals were fixing to squeak when they got to the really high hairpins further up the line. His own asshole had puckered some the first time he'd been over