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betwixt me and this cuss we're talking about?"
    Cora Brewster turned on her club car stool to peer across their small round table more intently as Longarm fought to keep a poker face. The intelligent and apparently sharp-eyed brunette took her time and sounded convinced as she flatly stated, "No resemblance at all. You're both tall and sort of rangy. At the risk of turning your head, you're both good-looking and you both wear guns and mustaches of heavy caliber. After that you look nothing like one another. I don't see how that conductor could have taken you for that nasty Longarm.
    The real Longarm replied, "He must need new specs. Did this tall drink of water down Trinidad way say right out he was Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, or might it have been someone else's decision, Miss Cora?"
    She started to say something without thinking, caught herself, and gained even more respect from Longarm when she decided, "As a matter of fact, the first townswoman who pointed him out to me gave an outlandish Hungarian-sounding name I don't recall. She was a shop girl from somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. But you'd have to ask her if you wanted to know exactly where. She said he was a notorious womanizer and a big bully who took advantage of his fellow greenhorns, knowing his way around the American West better."
    Longarm smiled thinly and said, "That sure sounds like the West-by-God-Virginia rascal I keep reading about in the Denver Post. But how did his fellow Bohunks uncover his true identity if he started out as one of their own badmen?"
    She sipped more soda through her love-grass straw as if to allow herself time to choose her words before she confided, "It all came out in the Homagy scandal. Trinidad's not half as big as Denver, so a scandal as juicy as that one gets told and retold until everyone has every detail whether they wanted them or not."
    Longarm sighed and said, "I know this young widow woman back in Denver who'd agree with you on back-fence sass in any size town. I swear that if you drop a jar of olives on Lincoln Street, it'll grow to a wagon load of watermelons by the time the gossip gets all the way to Sherman, a block up the slope. So ain't it possible to mistake one tall cuss with a mustache with another?"
    Cora Brewster sipped more soda and demurely decided, "I've never confessed adultery to a husband after midnight. So I can only try to imagine the scene inside the Homagy cabin when she told him she'd been seduced by a blackmailer who'd threatened to have the two of them deported. I remember how surprised we were at the notions shop to hear it had been an American government official instead of the immigrant bully we'd thought we'd noticed pestering the immigrant girls of Bohunk Hill while their men were down in the mines or out of town to those anarchist meetings immigrants go in for."
    Longarm frowned thoughtfully out the grimy glass at the passing grassy swells. "Hold on," he said. "I'm missing something. Just who come down off the slopes of Bohunk Hill to tell the rest of the world Attila Homagy had caught his woman with the one and original Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, ma'am?"
    She shook her pretty head and replied, "Nobody. Had the poor man actually found an intruder under his roof, dressed as suspiciously as in his shirtsleeves with his vest unbuttoned, the code of any gentleman, foreign or domestic, would have called for the spilling of blood on the spot!"
    Longarm soberly said, "I know how that fool code's supposed to work, ma'am. I told you I was a lawman. Is it safe to say Homagy beat his wife and announced his even grimmer intentions about a famous American lover after she told him that was who he was after?"
    Cora Brewster demurely replied, "I told you I wasn't there. But I suppose she must have, since her husband never actually caught her with anyone!"
    Longarm took a deeper pull on his beer than he'd meant to as he mulled one gal's suspicions about another over and over in his