Outlaw Train by Cameron Judd

referring to what was in fact little more than a small barn with a tightly enclosed room he used as a coroner’s facility and short-term morgue. It stood on the edge of town, near his home and on his property, and he leased itto the county for a dollar a year. “I want to study it, anyway, to see if I can figure out some of how that thing got into that preserved state. I’ll bring in Mr. Edgar from the undertaking parlor and see what he has to say.”
    “Thank you, Wilton,” Crowe said. “I suspect that leg may prove to be evidence in a crime.”
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Luke said. “You’re thinking that whoever cut off that leg and put it out where it was found was trying to make it appear that it had been cut off by a passing train. Which means they were trying to disguise what really happened.”
    “Right. If the intention wasn’t deception, why include the trouser leg? Why leave the boot on the foot? The goal was to make what had happened seem obvious. But in this case, the ‘obvious’ isn’t actually obvious, if you take the time to look closely.”
    “Now, I guess, all we need to do is find a mummified dead man hopping around town because he’s missing his left leg,” Luke said, grinning.
    “Wilton, fetch up that leg,” Crowe said. “Charlie, we’ll take our leave of you now. And you can tell Franny she won’t have to hesitate to come out to her shed anymore.”
    The battered coffeepot steaming on the stove in Luke Cable’s office filled the entire jail with a strong but delicious coffee aroma. Luke, Dewitt, Harvey Crowe, and Wilton Brand sat lazily about the room, cups in hand, talking over what had just gone on.
    Dewitt, having not been part of the group that traveled to the ranch, was full of questions.
    “So how can they be so sure it wasn’t a train that cut the leg off?” he asked for the third time.
    Crowe rolled his eyes in exasperation, so Luke fielded the question this time. “It’s because of how it was cut,” he said. “Think about it, Dewitt…even though it’s not pleasant thinking. If a train cuts off a man’s leg, that’s going to mash the wound area right considerable, and crush through the bone. Not very neat work. But this leg was sliced as neat and clean as if some surgeon had worked on it. And the bone looked sawed. Not crushed, but sawed.”
    “Another thing, too,” Brand added. “And I didn’t think about this until we were riding back. That leg was severed about as high up as you could cut off a leg. Nigh up to the hip, and straight across. I can’t figure how a man could lie on a railroad track and get his leg cut off at that particular angle without losing more of himself than just that one leg. Not if he’d just chanced to pass out and fall down. You’d pretty much have to lie crossways on the track to lose your leg at that straight of an angle, and if you were doing that, the other leg would be cut off, too. But they only found the one leg. That alone to me is evidence that somebody placed that leg there after it had already been surgically removed from a corpse. A corpse, by the way, that had been embalmed in some manner unknown to the science of undertaking.”
    “Strangest thing I’ve ever run across,” Crowe said.
    “I wonder if that leg was throwed off the train by somebody riding on it,” Dewitt said.
    Crowe rolled his eyes again. It was his habit to perceive and treat anything said by Dewitt Stamps as derision-worthy. “Riding the train, or the leg?” he said, then laughed heartily.
    “Sheriff, come on now,” Luke said, reflexively slipping into a defensive attitude toward Dewitt.
    “Well, it was just how he phrased it,” the sheriff replied.
    “We all know what he meant, and I think Dewitt has a point,” Luke said. “This is a small community. Somebody loses a limb around here, people would know. And I doubt there’s a lot of mummified corpses lying around, either. I’d say odds are high that somebody passing through