Longarm 244: Longarm and the Devil's Sister by Tabor Evans

trouble as never praying at all.
    Longarm glanced heavenward and muttered, “I’m fixing to have a nice cool pitcher of suds now, Lord. Feel free to send me a sign if you don’t want me to.”
    He strode through the crowd out front to beat them all inside. He dropped his saddlebags and Winchester on a corner table and moved to the bar to pay for a pitcher of draft beer and two tumblers. Then he set up in that corner with his possibles on the floor and the rifle across his lap to see if anybody aimed to join him. For getting a town drunk talking in a small town was as easy a way to horn in as going to their barber when you didn’t really need a haircut.
    His eyes were just getting used to the dimmer light of the saloon when he spied someone drifting over, outlined by the sunlight through the swinging doors beyond.
    Then an all too familiar figure sat down, wearing the circled five-pointed star of the Texas Rangers on his trail-dusted white shirt as he said, “Afternoon, Longarm. What brings you to Sheffield-Crossing, that bust-out up Denver way?”
    Longarm rolled his eyes up at the pressed-tin ceiling as he sighed and muttered, “Oh, Lord, you might have sent me this sign before I paid for all this beer!”

Chapter 6
    Hoping against hope it wasn’t too late, Longarm murmured, “The name is Crawford, Duncan Crawford, off the Diamond K in New Mexico Territory if you follow my meaning, Ranger Travis.”
    The ranger replied no louder, “I follow your drift, even though I thought the Diamond K was in Colorado and that reporter for the Denver Post signed his newspaper stories Crawford. I remember them from when I was up that way to deliver a federal warrant. They were about this good old boy who took me over to that Parthenon Saloon. Speaking of which, is this my glass?”
    Longarm poured the tumbler closest to the ranger as he tried as hard as he could not to look up and see if anyone else was close enough to worry about. Glancing around, like a kid fixing to shoplift a stick of candy, was a certain way to look worried.
    But none of the booted feet he could take in without looking up seemed to be standing within easy earshot. So Longarm risked quietly observing, “I’ve heard there was another Diamond K outside of Denver. I doubt anybody in these parts would have much to say to that reporter or the lawman he writes all those tall stories about.”
    Ranger Travis sipped some suds and allowed he knew the feeling as Longarm filled his own tumbler. As Longarm drank, the ranger quietly told him, “I was just fixing to pack it in after riding high, low, and sideways in these parts after an escaped federal prisoner. For some reason nobody he grew up with remembers him at all. He ain’t down the valley at his home spread on the Deveruex-Lopez Grant. He ain’t at any of many a line shack they have spread out across all that property, and he ain’t at the townhouse the Widow Deveruex has here in Sheffield-Crossing. Ain’t that a bitch?”
    Longarm cautiously replied, “I’d be sort of suprised to find a known killer at his officious home address when the law came calling. As for his local kith and kin, nobody ever gets along with everybody in his family, and they don’t call him Devil Dave because he’s unusually easy to get along with. You mark my words and see if somebody they trust won’t betray Frank and Jesse, now that there’s bounty money posted on ’em.”
    Ranger Travis asked, “Why are we talking about the James Boys? I thought we were after Devil Dave Deveruex, ah, Mr. Crawford.”
    Longarm explained, “Same deal. A wayward youth with more bullets than brains hiding out betwixt temper tantrums in a fair-sized neck of the chaparral, inhabited by a whole heap of locals the law can neither arrest nor get the right time of day from. You don’t have to be a college professor to hold up a bank and run home