Longarm and the Apache Plunder

He neither confirmed nor denied her accusation. He liked to ask trick questions too. So she lit out for the kitchen to fetch him his substantial if unusual breakfast.

He was enjoying it, his Winchester across his lap, when a couple of new customers came in, dressed cow and covered with dust. They gave Longarm a long look and took a corner table. When Trisha came out to ask what they wanted, Longarm politely waited until she’d taken their order before he called out, “Hold on, Miss Trisha. The next time you get a chance could I have me some cream for this coffee?”

She nodded easily and said, “Sure you can. But I thought you said before you cottoned to it black, Henry.”

The strange riders exchanged glances as Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, “You’ve made it stronger than usual this morning, no offense.”

The waitress didn’t seem to care one way or the other. A short spell later she’d fetched him a can of condensed milk and served the two others their white bread and beans with black coffee. Longarm was glad the coffee really was brewed strong, the way he liked it.

The other two would have doubtless finished their lighter breakfasts ahead of him in any case. But Longarm gave them plenty of time by ordering a slab of cheesecake and more coffee to go with his after-breakfast smoke. So they and some of the other customers had left, and Longarm was about to, when he heard the waitress hissing like she’d cut herself, and turned to see a burly young cuss in bib overalls had her by one wrist and didn’t seem to want to let go as he grinned up at her like a shit-eating hound.

Longarm knew better. He’d just ridden out of one dumb scrape with an aspiring desperado, and gals who didn’t want assholes falling in love with them had no business waiting tables. But when Trisha sobbed, “Damn it, Alvin, you’re hurting me!” Longarm just naturally found himself saying, “Stop hurting her, Alvin.”

The burly lout let go of the gal’s skinny wrist, but rose to his own considerable height as he scowled Longarm’s way and demanded, “Were you talking to me, cowboy?”

The question hardly deserved an answer, but Longarm had just found out how dumb it could be to call a scowling asshole an asshole. So he kept his own voice mild as he replied, “Somebody had to. Trisha, why don’t you go rustle up more coffee for me and Alvin whilst we have us a word in private?”

The pallid blonde pleaded, “Please don’t have a fight in here, boys. It could mean my job!”

Then Longarm got to his own feet and, seeing how tall he rose, Trisha sobbed, “Oh, Dear Lord!” and tore out of the room.

Alvin was looking itchy-footed too as he stared down at the saddle gun in Longarm’s big fist and the.44-40 on his hip, saying, “Hold on, Mister Henry. I ain’t armed and it ain’t as if I really hurt your gal, right?”

Longarm moved over to the heavier man’s table, scaring the shit out of old Alvin but smiling pleasantly enough as he explained, “I knew all the time you were only funning, Alvin. But you’re a man of the world. So you can surely see the fix the two of us poor innocent gents are in. You know how gals expect a man to stick up for them when they let out a holler. You know you’d have had to call me, no matter how you really felt, had I been teasing your own gal, right?”

Alvin suddenly grinned boyishly and said, “Say no more, Hank. I didn’t know the gal was spoken for and if it’s all the same with you, I’d rather just drop the matter than fight over a gal who’d only call me a big bully if I won!”

Longarm laughed and asked, “Lord have mercy, has that happened to you too?”

So they were shaking on it when Trisha and the cook risked a peek through the kitchen doors. But she never came out till her burly admirer had left, leaving a handsome dime on the table instead of the usual nickel. Then she asked, her blue eyes staring astounded, “How did you do that, Henry? The last time anyone told Alvin to leave me alone there was broken chinaware and busted-up furniture all over the place!”

Longarm said, “I told him a white lie about us. is it safe to say you don’t have any other gent here in town to stick up for you?”

She sighed. “The few who might have shown any interest all seem afraid of Alvin. He’s the town blacksmith and they say he can bend horseshoes with his bare hands. What you did was awfully sweet, Henry. But if I were you I’d ride. I can handle Alvin without resorting to gunplay. But you may wind up with a harder row to hoe!”

Longarm finished his coffee—she hadn’t brought any more—and left the right change on his own table without sitting down as he said, “I doubt we’ll have a duel over you, no offense. I mean to ride on. But I’ve had a long night in the saddle and daytime ain’t the best time to travel here and now. So I reckon I’ll hire a hotel bed upstairs and stay out of sight and study war no more till suppertime.”

She told him he was cutting it thin, then spotted the quarter tip he was leaving and allowed she hoped to serve him some more at suppertime.

He ambled through the archway into the hotel lobby next door. An old jasper who looked as hearty as one of their dusty paper fern plants or the dusty elk’s head over the key counter, stared hard at the Winchester Longarm had toted in by way of baggage and said he could have a corner room for six bits, payment in advance.

He brightened some when Longarm paid with a silver cartwheel and allowed he’d take the change in the form of not being disturbed one moment before he damned well decided to wake up and come back down for his supper.

The corner room offered cross ventilation and a view of the river, meaning it would be on the sunny side after high noon. But when Longarm shut the jalousies he saw there was far more breeze than light coming up through the slanted slats.

He bolted the hall door, stripped to the buff, and flopped naked atop the turned-down bedding to discover that, once he was able to take a load off his feet and clear his mind of listening for distant hoofbeats in the dark, he was more tuckered than he’d expected.

He was sound asleep in no time, unaware of the conversation those two advance scouts were having about him in the saloon across from his hotel.

The mean-looking Granddaddy Townsend was holding court at a corner table as the younger and faster-riding kinsmen of the late Jason Townsend remained standing, as if they were schoolboys reporting to their teacher to explain piss-poor grades. One insisted, “We’ve scouted high and we’ve scouted low, Granther. The only stranger to anyone we talked to here in Camino Viejo won’t work as the bastard who shot it out with our Jason.”

The grim, grizzled Granddaddy Townsend snapped, “Nobody shot it out with the dumb kid. Jason drew on a known gunfighter who was standing there with his damned carbine in his damned hand!”

The bitter old man looked away as he muttered, “Jason was a fool kid and I always knew he was going to die young and dumb, but blood calls to blood. You say there’s only one such stranger?”

One of the Townsend riders who’d been in the hotel dining room with Longarm said, “Tall, tanned cuss with a mustache, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties, just as they described that son of a bitch who gunned Jason. But after that he seemed to be known here.”

The old man snapped, “He had to be known some damned where, and we know he wasn’t from Loma Bianca, damn his eyes!”

The younger Townsend, who’d heard Trisha call Longarm Henry, said, “After that, he wore his hat crushed cavalry instead of Colorado. Had on a sissy pink shirt instead of the green one they told us about up in Loma Blanca. Everyone with any sense favors a six-gun and Winchester loading the same.44-40 brass in Apache Country. But he’s over to the Hotel de Paris if you want us to fetch him for you, Granther.”

The old man might have told them to. Then two more of his boys came in, blinking like owls as their eyes adjusted to the change from the dazzling sunlight out front. One called out, “We found some riding stock that don’t belong to nobody here in town, Granther. Stranger left ‘em at the town livery. Said he meant to bed down a spell and ride on in the cool of evening.”

The mean old man growled, “Never mind what he might be doing here. Which way was he coming from and what was he riding?”

The second of the two who’d found those bays at the nearby livery said, “Seems he rode in from the south on one bay gelding, leading a second. One’s a redder shade of chestnut than the other and they both have white blazes but different brands. Don’t know what you’d call either, seeing the Mex brands look more like kids’ scribbles than the letters and numbers real rancheros register.”

Granddaddy Townsend made a prune face and said, “Never mind all that. Any rider on the dodge can circle a town to come in from any direction. But that Julesburg Kid who murdered our Jason rode into Loma Blanca earlier astride a white barb and leading a palomino, in a green shirt, not no pink one. You say this jasper you other boys saw eating breakfast at the hotel knew somebody there?”

One of them nodded and said, “The waitress called him Henry. They acted sweet on one another, like he’d come courting.”

The old man rose from his seat, patting the worn grips of his Walker Conversion as he decided, “We’re wasting time. No killer on the owlhoot trail slows down to court waitress gals this close to the scene of his crime! Having no known business in these parts, that Julesburg Kid is doubtless on his way to that stagecoach line to Fort Wingate and points West, unless he’s streaking for Old Mexico in hopes of escaping us entire. So vamanos, muchachos. I want the head of that murderous drifter, and he sure as hell don’t seem to be here in Camino Viejo!”

As the bunch of them strode out of the saloon, boot heels thudding and spurs jingling, the barkeep who’d been listening silently turned to signal what looked like a regular customer sipping suds down the bar.

That wasn’t exactly what the man was there for. The barkeep asked if he’d been following all that war talk. The hired gun nodded casually and said, “I’m paid to notice trouble. Didn’t sound like trouble for anyone we know, though.”

The barkeep said, “Boss lady says she likes to hear everybody’s troubles hereabouts. You’d best go tell her what just blew into town.”

The hired gun protested, “Shit, that federal deputy they want us to watch out for wears a dark brown outfit, not no pink shirt.”

The barkeep said, “Tell her anyways. They say Longarm’s been known to act sort of sneaky.”

CHAPTER 11

Longarm arose around five that afternoon feeling way better. He flung open the jalousies so he could see what he was doing as he gave himself a whore-bath and shaved at the corner washstand. He had to put on the same rosy shirt, but it smelled all right. Then he went down to see what they might be serving for supper, having slept clean by his usual noon dinner.

He found there was nobody else having supper at that hour, if anyone living in town ate supper out to begin with. When he commented on this to the same waitress, the dishwater blonde said they had to stay open lest travelers stopping at the hotel go hungry. But there didn’t seem to be all that many since all that talk about Apache trouble had started up again.

Longarm was tempted to assure her the Jicarilla seemed resigned to their unfair fate. But he never did. What Billy Vail had sent him to look into was no beeswax of anyone else. So he allowed that roast beef with mashed potatoes and string beans sounded fine, if they’d leave out the string beans and serve him some of the tamales mentioned on the blackboard instead. When she said they could, but it would cost him extra, he said to deal him that hand anyway.

So they did, and he was right about hot tamales tasting far more interesting than string beans. A couple of townsmen in frock coats came in, but only had coffee, and left as Longarm was ordering dessert. He noticed that as Trisha was clearing away his dinner dishes, she was singing soft and low that old Scotch song about rye whiskey. He’d have never followed her words if he hadn’t already known them. But seeing he did, he had to grin as their possible double meaning sank in. She’d said that she didn’t have anybody here in Camino Viejo, but she still seemed to be singing:

“Among the train, there is a swain I dearly love myself. But what’s his name and where’s his hame, I dinna choose to tell!”

It was a shame he had all that riding ahead of him around the time she’d be getting off, but that was the way things went some nights. So he had apple pie with cheddar cheese, put away another strong cup of coffee, and told her he might or might not see her again at breakfast time.

She really seemed to care as she asked whether he’d be staying on at the hotel or not. So he said, “We live in an uncertain world, Miss Trisha. I got some calls to make this evening. Ain’t sure how many or how long.”

She asked, “Are you some sort of cattle buyer or traveling salesman, Henry? They were wondering about that this afternoon.”

He said, “You might say I’m interested in horse-trading. Who did you say wanted to know?”

She shrugged. “Queen Kirby, I imagine. It was some of her help, not Queen Kirby herself, of course. You saw two more of them just now. Having coffee at that table near the door?”

Longarm nodded and said, “Figured they were looking me over. I take it this Queen Kirby is the biggest frog in this little puddle, no offense?”

Trisha made a wry face and replied, “None taken. I don’t think much of Camino Viejo, either, but a girl needs a job. Queen Kirby’s all right, I reckon. She owns most everything and everybody in town, but she’s never done me dirty and I was brung up to live and let live.”

Longarm said, “I thought you sounded like a decent country gal. I take it this Queen Kirby don’t own this dining room, though?”

Trisha said, “Nor the hotel, the two churches, or mayhaps a few of the shops down the street. Once you own the saloon, the card house, the, ah, houses of ill repute, and the municipal corral, you’ve got a pretty firm hold on things, though.”

He nodded. “I follow your drift. There seems to be some such big frog in every puddle this size. Not too many of ‘em seem to be gals called queens, though. Is that her first name or an honorary title, Miss Trisha?”

The blonde said she didn’t know, explaining, “I’ve only seen her out front in passing. She never eats here. I understand she has a Chinese cook and dines on frog legs, fish eggs, and peasant-birds at her fancy mansion just outside of town.”

Longarm smiled gently and said, “I think pheasant was the bird you had in mind. But you were right about such vittles sounding a mite fancy. I’ve known rich folks who ate natural as the rest of us. So it’s likely this Queen Kirby ain’t been rich as long. I reckon I could use another coffee, ma’am. Seeing others seem so interested in me, it might be interesting to hang around a spell.”

She said that he could have all the coffee he wanted, but that she’d thought he had to go somewhere.

He didn’t want to tell anyone he planned to explore some canyons officially said to be deserted. So he just said he’d ride out soon enough, and lit a cheroot as she went to fetch the pot.

Nobody else came in as it started to get darker out front. By then he’d gotten about all Trisha knew out of her, and she’d started to ask more about him, or about the Henry she now thought she remembered from an earlier trail drive. So he quit while he was ahead and ambled off to see what that saloon might be like.

As Trisha had told him, they did their serious gambling in the card house between the saloon and a ramshackle row of whorehouses around a corner and up a cinder-paved lane. The saloon was the usual twenty-by-forty-foot establishment meant for drinking, conversation, and penny-ante poker. The bar ran back most of the length of the smoke-filled space. There was no piano, and a sign warned everyone to stay out of the back rooms unless they worked there.

Nobody was seated at any of the four tables. At that hour there were only a half dozen cowhands and a jasper in a rusty black suit at the bar. Longarm figured that one for the most nosy. So he bellied up handy to the cuss, but ignored him as he ordered a draft for himself.

The barkeep was usually the one who casually asked a stranger if he was new in town. But this one just poured and didn’t seem interested in the change Longarm left on the zinc-topped bar. So Longarm nursed his beer scuttle a third of the way down and lit his second cheroot before he casually said, “Heard some talk about Apache trouble as I was having supper just now.”

The rusty suit took him up on it to observe in an agreeable tone, “Noticed the cavalry way you wear your hat. You interested in scouting Apache, Mister…?”

“Crawford, Henry Crawford,” Longarm replied easily enough, seeing as Crawford Long had invented painless surgery just in time for the war, and there was that reporter Crawford of the Post who kept writing all that Wild West bullshit about Longarm.

The man in black said he answered to Wesley Jones, and repeated his question about scouting.

Longarm said, “Not hardly. To begin with, the army seems to be out after Victorio along the border way to the south. After that, I’d as soon kiss a sidewinder on the lips as scout Apache. I asked my doubtless foolish question with a view to avoiding Apache. I heard something about some having jumped the Jicarilla reserve, is all. Heard some were hiding out in them canyonlands to the east.”

The man in black exchanged glances with the barkeep before he quietly asked, “You know your way around La Mesa de los Viejos, you say?”

Longarm replied, “No, I don’t. I’ve never been over yonder, and I ain’t sure I’d want to go up one of them canyons with a picnic basket and a pretty gal. Somebody said something about them being haunted, and I try to avoid haunts as well as hostile Indians. When I asked about Apache hiding out over yonder, it was only because I got to ride north betwixt the uncertainties of that haunted mesa and the sure-enough Apache reserve to the west.”

Wesley Jones said, “So you do. You say you have business up in Loma Bianca or Vado Seguro, Henry?”

Longarm shook his head casually and replied, “I’m bound for Chama. The railroad stop called Chama, not that river out front. Got to meet a business associate there. Just want to make sure I won’t run into any other gunplay along the way.”

“You say you’re headed up to Chama with some gunplay in mind?” the barkeep suddenly blurted out despite himself.

Longarm smiled innocently and said, “Is that how what I said came out? Well, that’s one on me. I only meant I had to meet somebody in Chama. A man would have to be a fool to say he was on his way to a gunfight if he was really on his way to a gunfight, wouldn’t he?”

The man in black nodded at the barkeep and said, “Don’t take my invite wrong, Henry, but there’s somebody we’d like you to meet and this saloon ain’t where the real action transpires here in town. It’s only here on the coach road to serve folks just passing through.”

Longarm sipped more suds before he asked with the caution one had to expect from a knock-around rider, “Just what sort of action might you have in mind for this child, Wes?”

Jones, if that was his name, said, “You name it, from faro to fornication, and we’ll likely be able to satisfy your cautious nature. Old Mel here can testify to my being a respectable cuss who ain’t out to rob you or cornhole you, Henry.”

The barkeep nodded soberly and said, “We got our business rep to consider. Old Wes is a gambling man. I’m sorry, Wes, but I got to say it. After that, Mister Crawford, he ain’t a crooked gambling man. The place of which he speaks is owned by the same respectable lady who owns this saloon and the hardware across the street.”

Longarm said that in that case he’d try anything once. So Wesley Jones led him out the back way, past the sign warning them not to pass, and through a maze of back alleyways in the gathering dusk. Then they were in a dimly lit hallway, leading into what looked like the main salon of a steamboat, or the front parlor of a whorehouse.

Then Longarm noticed most of the hired help seemed to be men in suits instead of gals in kimonos, with a rougher-dressed crowd at the bar or around the gaming tables. Jones had been right about the faro. They had crap tables and one of those fancy French wheels of fortune as well. Jones led Longarm over to a red plush sofa and sat him down, saying, “I’ll see about our drinks. Don’t go away.”

Longarm leaned back and lit a cheroot. Jones didn’t seem to be coming back. But after a tedious time another cuss in a black frock coat came over with two gin-and-tonics to ask where Jones was. Seeing as “Henry Crawford” didn’t know, he handed him both stiff drinks.

They let him work on them awhile. Longarm set one aside and nursed the other so long that the same cuss came back to sit down beside him and sadly declare, “You’re getting to where you need glasses, or else I need to lose some weight and shave off this mustache. You really don’t recognize me, do you?”

Longarm had to admit he didn’t. He had a trained eye for faces, and he suspected he knew this routine, having spent some time with a Gypsy fortune-teller who’d really liked it dog-style.

As Longarm stared thoughtfully, the total stranger said, “Come on, who was your best pal in the old outfit?”

Longarm was sure where they were headed now. So he stared hard at his questioner and demanded, “You were in Sibley’s Sixth Minnesota? No offense, but my best pals were Swede Bergen and Chad Spooner, and you don’t look like either.” He took a sip from his glass and added, “Chad got killed later in the Sioux Wars, and you couldn’t even be related to old Swede!”

The too-clever-by-half confidence man laughed and said Longarm had been right the first time, going into a song and dance about the not only late, but also nonexistent Chad Spooner having introduced them during a payday crap game. They both laughed and agreed they’d been young and green to shoot craps on an army blanket. It was easy for Longarm to laugh. He’d never been near the Sixth Minnesota during his real war service. He’d learned the little he knew about the outfit the time Billy Vail had sent him to Santee country to look into other Indian trouble. The silly bastard pumping him by pretending to be an old army pal was taking awesome chances, counting on all soldiers having similar memories about crap games, army grub, and mean sergeant majors. But Longarm went along with the game, smart enough to let a wise-ass play him for a fool. The slicker smugly confided, “I’ve found it wise to change my own name, since I’ve taken up more sporting ways. I was the kid they called Slim in the third platoon, remember?”

It was easy enough to agree. There’d always been some kid called Slim in one platoon or another.

The slicker said, “You and Chad were in the first platoon under old Carlson, right?”

Longarm shook his head and said, “You must be getting old too. It was the second platoon and the shavetail was Jergensson.”

The so-called Slim nodded eagerly and said, “Gotten fatter, like I said, too. I’d forgot old Jergensson. Whatever happened to the looie after I got wounded and sent home?”

Longarm had no idea, since he’d never served under any Second Lieutenant Jergensson of the Sixth Minnesota, but he managed to look sober as he said, “Stopped a Sioux arrow with his floating fibs up around Yellow Medicine. He wasn’t such a bad cuss, for an officer. Say, do you remember that infernal Major Palmer who held a full inspection in that snowstorm?” It worked. The sneak calling himself Slim decided to quit while he was ahead and got back to his feet. But before he left he had to try. “Your real name was Femdale, right?”

That Gypsy gal had explained how any wild stab was as likely to get the same response from the mark. So, seeing he was supposed to be the mark, Longarm laughed and said, “Not even close. You must have me mixed up with old Hank Ferguson. I was Hank Bradford before I had to change my name for business reasons.”

The trick questioner smiled easily and said, “Right. I’d forgotten old Jergensson too. Smart move to keep your first name and stay so close to the original, Hank. We’ll talk about old times later. I got to get back to work before I get in trouble.”

Longarm didn’t try to stop him. He grinned wolfishly with his smoke gripped in his teeth as he watched the wise-ass circle a table and go through an unmarked door between two red plush curtains.

Longarm rose and drifted over to the nearest faro layout. He didn’t place a bet. Faro was as easy to rig as baccarat. But as he watched the dealer’s hands the cards seemed to be coming out of the so-called shoe, often a false-bottomed box, about the way a Christian might be expected to deal. So Queen Kirby seemed to be content with straight house odds. The house had to be coming out ahead, though, with a crowd this size.

The man in black who called himself Wesley Jones joined Longarm at the faro layout to demand, “How come you didn’t stay put like I told you?”

Longarm softly but firmly replied, “I don’t work for you. So who are you to tell me shit?”

Jones smiled uneasily and said, “Never mind. Queen Kirby wants a word with you. Play your cards right and you might wind up working for her.”

Longarm allowed that he already had a job, but tagged along through that same unmarked door. The big, rawboned redhead seated behind a fancy rosewood writing table was smoking a Havana claro as she waved him to a ridiculous perch on a small plush chair with her bejeweled and manicured left hand, saying, “You’ll be pleased to know we sent those others looking for you on their way while you were slug-a-bed and helpless at the hotel, Henry. Why did you tell my boys you were on your way north when you just came from there in a hurry?”

Longarm smiled easily and said, “That’s a fool question, if you don’t mind my saying so, Miss Queen. Where would you tell strangers you were headed if you were riding the owlhoot trail from the north?”

The handsome but hard-looking gal of at least thirty-five summers smiled wearily and said, “Henry, Henry, you haven’t changed a bit since last we met and you were trying to fib your way under my way-younger skirts.”

Longarm stared hard as he could with a poker face. Staring with a bit more thought, he realized she did look faintly familiar. But he was good at remembering faces, and it was just as likely he was recalling familiar features from different rogues’-gallery tintypes and trying to make a mite more sense out of a mishmash. He tried picturing her with natural hair. That pinned-up henna mop had likely started out brown, to judge from the remains of her more naturally colored plucked eyebrows. Her teeth were a tad pearly for her more time-worn painted face. But if they were false, she’d spent as much on them as she had on her low-cut maroon velvet dress. She likely showed that much bodice so nobody could miss the pearl choker she wore around her neck, as if she was that redheaded Princess Alex of Wales instead of… whatever all this was supposed to signify.

She removed the cigar from her painted lips with a smile and said, “After all that sweet talk you don’t remember me at all, do you, Henry? I fear Father Time’s cruel tricks have been easier on you than me, Henry. But I’ll give you a hint. Think back to where you first went after mustering out of the Sixth Minnesota, my young so ldier blue.”

The hardest part about going along with old fortune-telling shit was resisting the natural impulse to show you weren’t really a dumb shit. But Longarm thought fast and declared in a puzzled tone, “I don’t recall you from San Antone at all, no offense. It wasn’t all that long ago and I’m particular about whose skirts I might or might not mess with. I don’t mean you’re too ugly even now, but I never mess with gals I’d forget so total afterwards.”

She laughed and said, “I’m flattered, I think. You never got that far with me in San Antone, but it was a nice try and I forgive you for never having written.”

She waved her cigar at the man in black by the door and continued. “Wes tells me you said you had a job up in Chama. Was that just a lie or was that where you were going when the Townsend boy recognized you and behaved so foolishly?”

Longarm had no way of knowing whether anyone there had ever laid eyes on the real Julesburg Kid. So, hoping he’d thrown them off his back trail with that bluff about San Antone after the war, he patted the action of the Winchester across his lap and replied, “Jason Townsend never recognized me. He said I was the Julesburg Kid. I was still trying to persuade him he had me mixed up with someone more famous when he slapped leather on me. As to what I was really doing in Loma Blanca, or where I was headed from there, it’s nobody’s beeswax but my own. I ain’t asked anyone in this town for a thing I ain’t been willing to pay for. I ain’t asked anyone anywhere to tell me what they might be up to. But seeing we seem to be former sweethearts from San Antone, I’ll show you my pee-pee if you’d care to show me your own.”

The man in black sucked in his breath, but Queen Kirby laughed and said, “You were playing your cards close to your vest the last time I tried to get some straight answers out of you, Henry. So all right, I’ll spread one or two cards face-up for you. To begin with, you’re on a fool’s errand if you expect to be hired as a gunhand as far north as the D&RG Western stop at Chama. I know what you’ve heard about a land rush up that way. But I’ve gotten it from the horse’s mouth, or from a BIA official who likes redheads no matter what color hair they have, that the Interior Department’s not going to throw all that Apache land up for grabs. There’s a lot of Indian policy being debated back in Washington. The War Department was against moving Apache for no pressing reason to begin with. More than one BIA man doubts the Jicarilla can make do at the Tularosa Agency. But seeing there’s been so much other pressure to clear dangerous Indians out of these parts, the Apache are being moved on what Washington calls an experimental basis, with their present reservation held in trust as federal land for at least the next seven years. So what do you think of that, Henry?”

Longarm said, “The Jicarilla may think it’s some improvement over losing their land entire. If the BIA allows ‘em to return after even one year at Tularosa, they’re going to think us white eyes are mighty odd. Their Navaho cousins are still bewildered by the time we made ‘em all plant peach trees around Fort Sumner and then let ‘em all go home to the Four Corners again. I fail to see why I should worry about it, though. Like I said, I go where I please and work for whoever pays me the most.”

She said, “We may be able to pay more than any would-be land-grabber, with no Indian land up for grabs just yet. This is where all the real action’s about to start, near the south end of that Apache reservation, where the BIA and Indian Police have less to say about things.”

“You fixing to grab the south end of the Jicarilla reserve, Miss Queen?” he asked with a deliberately puzzled smile.

The big redhead said, “I’m not in the business of grabbing land. I’m in the business of owning land, cattle, and other good things. You should have taken me more seriously that time in San Antone. I may not have aged as gracefully, but I’ve wound up rich enough to buy and sell all sorts of good things, including men quick enough with a gun to protect me and my property.”

“Protect you from whom, Miss Queen?” Longarm asked in a desperately casual tone.

She smiled in a way that might have suggested coyness in a far more innocent face and said, “We’ll talk about it some more, after I’ve talked about you some more with some riders I sent up to Loma Blanca. I expect them back by breakfasttime. If you’re what you say you are, I can make it well worth your while to stay here as one of my own Regulators. So if you’re really you, you’ll do well to stick around.”

Longarm nodded and said he’d study on it. As he shifted his weight to rise, she added, “They tell me that skinny blonde waitress at your hotel has been droolin over you, you rascal. I hope you haven’t told her all those sweet lies you told me and Lord knows how many of the other girls in San Antone that time. But I take it you’ll either be with her in her quarters or up in that hotel room with her should anyone need to get in touch with you tonight?”

Longarm rose to his feet, stiffly saying, “I don’t cotton to folks getting in touch with me late at night, ma’am. I’ll be where I’ll be, and how would you like it if I was to blab all over town that it was with you instead of a sweet kid who never done you dirty?”

Queen Kirby laughed and said, “I can see why she’s drooling over you, Henry. You haven’t lost your touch or your looks since the war!”

He told her she was pretty too, and allowed that he had to get on back to his hotel. As he left he heard Jones saying, “Told you he’d stood up to your blacksmith for that dishwater blonde. Wouldn’t it be fun to be a fly on her bedroom wall tonight?”

Longarm strode through the crowd and out the back door without incident or dawdling. He’d closed one eye along the way so he was able to see outside in the dusk with that one. He ducked into the slot between the card-house and whatever they’d built right next to it. He’d already seen there was no window against the back wall of Queen Kirby’s office. It was always better to have a skylight when you kept a card-house safe in one corner. But if there weren’t any windows, there was no way anyone could see what he was doing as he dropped to the dirt and rolled under the frame card house. There was the usual eighteen-inch crawl space between the dry soil and overhead floor stringers. He dragged his Winchester after him as he inched on one elbow until, sure enough, he could hear them talking in the office right above him.

Jones was saying something about Apache painting white stripes across their faces from ear to ear. Queen Kirby said, “Never mind about Apache war parties right now, Wes. I asked you what you made of that tall drink of water we were conning earlier. You say he’s off the premises now?”

Wes said, “Spider says he just saw him go out the back. You’d better hope we were conning him, and not vice versa. Should he be that lawman we were warned about, he’s likely heard all the cons of old army pals and long-lost sweethearts.”

Queen Kirby laughed lightly and said, “I told you how I mean to make sure. I frankly think he’s what he seems, a well-armed and dangerous drifter, looking for action and hearing about that bunch of land-grabbers gathering up by the railroad. Who else would gun a pissant with no warrants out on him, then hang about as if he had more serious business in this territory?”

Wes suggested, “A man with serious business in this territory. As your head barkeep put it together from listening to those Townsend riders in your saloon, that Jason Townsend just started up with our Henry, Longarm, or whoever the blue blazes he really is. Any man, on either side of the law, would have swung his Winchester muzzle up the same way. Fool kid must have thought there was no round in the saddle gun’s chamber. But it was still a fool chance to take.”

Queen Kirby said, “Spare me the gory details. The point is that a federal deputy should have identified himself to the town law and our mysterious Henry Bradford didn’t.”

Longarm could picture the man in black shrugging as Wes replied. “I agree another lawman should have. That’s not saying he would have if he was in a hurry. Everyone agrees the man who gunned that punk was just passing through. He may have figured he had better places to go in a hurry.”

The man they were talking about heard Queen Kirby say, “I just don’t know. I’ll allow this Henry Bradford, Crawford, or whatever, is a tall tanned galoot with a heavy mustache, wearing his double-action.44-40 cross-draw. I’ll allow we were warned the famous Longarm rode out of the Dulce Agency looking much the same, if you’ll agree much the same ain’t quite the same.”

Wes said, “Your pals with the BIA said Longarm had on jeans and was using a stock saddle in place of his well-known McClellan. You wouldn’t need surgeon’s hands to punch the crown of a dark brown hat into a different shape, would you?”

Queen Kirby said, “We were wired that Longarm left the Dulce Agency with a pale blue work shirt, a black-and-white paint pony, and a buckskin. My old flame Henry rode in wearing a not-too-new Mex shirt of dusky rose. After that, he’s boarding two bay ponies, not a paint with a buckskin, in my very own livery. How do you like it so far?”

Wes said, “Riders have been known to change horses, and those old bays could have been swapped for those better Indian ponies easy!”

Queen Kirby said, “That’s why I sent Fats and Tiny up the river to Loma Blanca, Wes. We’ll know soon enough whether anyone swapped those Indian ponies for livery nags. I told them to ask if anyone had been wearing a tamer shirt during that saloon fight, too. But I’m going to be mighty disappointed if our Henry really turns out to be Longarm. For they say he’s called Longarm because they send him far, wide, and sudden, to be the long arm of federal law.”

Wes didn’t seem to follow her drift. So she stamped her foot, close to Longarm’s ear, and said, “I’m talking about the time even a slowpoke would have taken to get here from the Dulce Agency, you dunce. If that was the real Longarm we just talked to, where has he been all this time?”

Wes said, “Somewheres, I reckon. We know he rid out of the Dulce Agency to poke his nose into our own business and-“

“No we don’t,” Queen Kirby said with a chuckle. “You just heard me tell him about those land-rushers way up the valley. So how you know the real Longarm isn’t poking about up yonder, having heard some of them are hiring guns, and not having heard a thing about our bigger play down this way?”

Longarm grinned in the darkness right under her feet as he waited for what came next. But all that came next was a bitch from Wes about some stockman who couldn’t seem to savvy he was supposed to pay off his gambling markers.

Queen Kirby told Wes not to worry about it, adding she’d own the deadbeat’s land and cattle before long in any case. So Wes asked her about some other business dealings, and Longarm decided to quit while he was ahead.

He rolled out from under the card house and made his way out of there without being spotted in the tricky light of early evening. But even as he headed for the town livery he realized there was no way to take out even one of those bays without Queen Kirby learning he’d gone night-riding. So he headed back to his hotel on foot, his mind in a whirl as he considered whether to risk his ass one way or another. For he had to ride over to that mesa sooner or later, and it sure seemed sooner was best.

His mind made up, he trudged on toward the lamp-lit side entrance, muttering, “Perfidy, thy name is woman, and you’re likely to feel a fool when she tattles on you!”

Then he sighed and said, “Aw, shit, stealing a horse would be taking an even bigger chance, and you know you have to get a damned horse off somebody!” He knew Queen Kirby owned neither his hotel nor that dining room.

The dining room was still open and that dishwater blonde seemed pleased to see Longarm. But she told him the kitchen had shut down for the night if he wanted anything more than cooling coffee or a slice of something colder. Seeing there was nobody else out front, he took a deep breath and asked if she thought she could keep some right important secrets that wouldn’t mix her up in anything indecent.

She sat him down at a corner table and then sat down beside him, smiling a tad indecently as she confided, “My daddy was a Myers of clan Menzies, and I was raised on the tale of brave Jeannie MacLeod, who refused to say where Prince Charlie was hiding, no matter how the redcoats beat her and raped her!”

Longarm resisted the chance to allow the gal couldn’t have enjoyed the beatings and got out his wallet instead as he said, “I need a horse as bad as that old cuss in Shakespeare’s play, Miss Trisha. I got the two I rode in with over in Queen Kirby’s own livery. Don’t see how I’d get either out for some night-riding without them telling her.”

The waitress stared thunderstruck at his federal badge and identification as she marveled, “You mean you ain’t the Henry Crawford I’ve been… getting to know all this time? Well, I never, and there’s the mail coach coming through around midnight if you have to get out of town without anyone but me knowing about it, Henry. I mean, Custis.”

He put a hand on her wrist as he put the wallet away, explaining, “Ain’t ready to leave for good. Got to snoop around over by La Mesa de los Viejos, and it’s too far to walk both ways before sunrise.”

She gasped, “You don’t want to go over there alone! They say there’s spooks, crazy hermits, or just some sickness in the canyon soils. In any case, nobody lives over yonder or rides over yonder since the old-timey cliff dwellers all got sick and died a thousand years ago!”

He patted her wrist reassuringly and said, “We heard different. Your government and mine wants me to see just what in blue thunder is really going on over yonder, and like I said, I need a mount to lope me over there and back before dawn. How are we doing so far?”

Trisha said, “Heavens, I don’t keep a horse of my own. I’ve no occasion to go that far from this place I work or my hired cottage down by the river.”

She placed her other palm on the back of his already friendly hand. “I’d be afraid to ride out into the open range around town. It was Apache country until mighty recent, and some say Apache riders have been seen out there since!”

Longarm said, “If they were visible to the casual eye I doubt they could have been Jicarilla, Miss Trisha. You don’t know anyone you could borrow a mount from, saying you were brave enough to ride off somewhere you just had to get to tonight?”

She started to say no. Then she brightened and said, “Meg Campbell! Over by the schoolhouse! She does ride her own pony and, seeing she’s from a Highland family as well, we ought to be able to confide in her, Custis!”

Longarm said, “I’d rather we didn’t. Two can keep a secret if one of them be dead. A secret shared by three ain’t much of a secret to begin with. Couldn’t you just tell her some white lie, borrow her pony on the sly, and lend it to me eight or ten hours, Miss Trisha?”

The waitress thought, sighed, and said, “Lord, I don’t know what excuse I’d give for borrowing her pony over night. She knows I don’t have a sweetheart, and she’s homely enough to snoop if I told her I’d met somebody since the last time we talked.”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I wasn’t going to ask you to risk your good name. But since you just came up with such a swell excuse, couldn’t you say you had to ride out to a big spender’s cow spread to admire his stamp collection or whatever? I don’t see how your schoolmarm chum could hope to follow you once you borrowed her only mount.”

Trisha said, “She wouldn’t be able to snoop around any rancho I just made up. But she knows where my cottage is and it’s only a short walk from her own!”

He shrugged and said, “Nobody would expect to find their pony by any cottage in town if they’d lent it out for a midnight tryst somewheres else, would they?”

Trisha explained, “Meg Campbell’s nice, but she’s inclined to be nosy. What if she knocked, knowing it wouldn’t matter if nobody was there, but meaning to ask me where her pony was if anyone came to the door?”

Longarm started to say she couldn’t simply pretend to be out. Then he had a better notion and suggested, “You could hide out in my hotel room whilst I whipped over to the mesa and back.”

She slapped the back of his wrist. “Why Custis Long, whatever are you saying?”

He said, “Nothing all that indecent, ma’am. You’ll be even safer from my forward ways upstairs alone than here in this dining room holding hands with me. We’ll leave the lamp lit and you can read my Police Gazette and Scientific American whilst I’m out riding. That could even help explain where I spent the earlier parts of this evening, should anybody glance up at my shuttered windows. Might be a good idea if you were to move about and cast some shifty shadows from time to time.”

She didn’t answer. They sat there holding hands across the table a spell as Longarm gave her the time she needed to make up her mind. Then she did, and she was laughing like a kid starting out on Halloween with some laundry soap and rotten eggs as she said, “Let’s do it. It sounds like fun!”

CHAPTER 12

It wasn’t the schoolmarm’s cordovan mare pony that gave Longarm a literal pain in the ass. It was the sidesaddle he’d found cinched to the otherwise satisfactory mount when Trisha brought it around to the back of the hotel. The stock saddle he’d borrowed off his male pals at the Diamond K was out of reach in the tack room of the boss lady’s livery, and what the hell, it wasn’t as if he was hoping to meet up with anyone in the dark. So he handed his room key to Trisha, told her to make sure the door was bolted after her as well, and got on the mare awkwardly with his Winchester across his unusually placed thighs.

Actually riding sidesaddle made it tougher for a man to buy all the snickering things other men said about gals who rode that odd way, with the left foot natural in the near stirrup and the other one dangling in midair with one’s right knee wrapped around a sort of leather banana sprouting from the forward swells. He doubted a gal could really gallop astride, seated backward with that big banana up inside her. For aside from being too big, the knee brace was set at better than forty-five degrees off center. Longarm found this one braced his right knee well enough for him to lope the mare once they were off to the northeast a ways.

He didn’t lope all the way to that mysterious mesa, of course. It was too far for one thing, and too mysterious for another. He reined to a walk when he spied the moonlit rimrocks looming about a mile and a half ahead. He was glad he had when he heard distant hoofbeats.

He hadn’t been followed from town. The riders, a plot of riders, were coming his way from the canyon-carved mesa—fast!

Longarm reined off the trail into high, but not high enough chaparral, cussing the old-timers who’d cut all the real firewood this close to town. When the pony balked at moving off farther, Longarm dismounted, Winchester in hand, to lead the balky brute deeper into whatever chaparral was left.

True chaparral, back in Old Spain, was scrub oak. The Mexican and Anglo vaqueros, or buckaroos, had decided any sticker-brush too tall to call weeds and too short to call woods was chaparral. The shit all around seemed mostly cat’s-claw and palo verde, neither offering cover worth mention in bright moonlight unless you’d got a heap of it between you and someone else!

Then he almost stepped off into space, and told the mare he was sorry for cussing it as a balker once he saw why the trail ran the way it did. The arroyo running alongside was so deep he couldn’t see bottom. He sighed, got between the pony and the trail, and snicked the hammer of his Winchester to full cock. He knew a man could flatten out in thin chaparral with an outside chance of not being seen. But there was no way to ask a live pony to flatten out like a bear rug, and as long as they were likely to see the damned mare in any case, a man could dodge lead better on his feet. There wasn’t a bit of solid cover between his exposed position and the trail.

He could only stand quietly in the moonlight, hoping to pass for a clump of overlooked firewood, as he listened to those riders riding ever closer. Then he could see them in the moonlight, and he cradled his Winchester to cover the pony’s nostrils with a palm and held his own breath as well, hoping against hope, even as he knew he had to be hoping in vain.

Then the baker’s dozen of bare-headed and cotton-shined riders had passed by, without a glance in his direction, as the moon shone brightly on white stripes across dark faces framed by long hair bound with rolled cloth. As they jingled off into the darkness he murmured, “Jesus H. Christ, those Quill Indians seem to be headed for town! So how do we get there ahead of ‘em to raise the alarm?”

The pony didn’t answer. Longarm wasn’t sure he could have either. Cutting cross-country by moonlight, over busted-up range he didn’t know, would be risky riding slow. Those painted Jicarilla had been following the trail at a lope. But hold on. Could no more than thirteen of anything hope to raid a whole town on the prod with all that Apache talk in the air?

He led the pony back to the trail afoot. “They have to be headed somewheres else. In a hurry, seeing they missed us standing there like moonlit graveyard statuary. They could circle the town and be across the river and back on their reserve before sunrise. So that makes more sense.”

Then he remounted awkwardly, and rode on up the trail to the northeast as he muttered, “Might be interesting to see where they just came from.”

He naturally knew better than to ride into a canyon entrance in Apacheria. That could be a fatal move in calmer country. So a quarter mile out, as the range began to rise at a steeper angle, Longarm led the pony off to the other side of the trail, tethered it to lower but lessferocious greasewood, and gave it a hatful of canteen water before he put the wet Stetson back on his head and started legging it the rest of the way, saddle gun at port arms.

A mesa was called a mesa because that was the Spanish word for a table and the early Spanish explorers had noticed how many flat-topped hills they seemed to have in these parts. Most mesas grew that way because millions of rainstorms had carved away land that hadn’t been covered by a lava flow, an ancient lake bottom dried to dense mudrock, or whatever, leaving land that had once lain lower perched higher in the sky. The moonlit caprock of La Mesa de los Viejos was far higher than Longarm had time to climb. So he worked about a third of the way up the gentler slopes below the jagged rim of the flat top, and proceeded to mountain-goat around bends that swung into the canyon that the trail entered down below.

He found he was near the upper limits of easy sidewinding when one of his boot heels dislodged a fist-sized chunk of scree that, fortunately, fetched up in a clump of yucca instead of rattle-clanking all the way down the slope. So he eased down to where the footing felt surer and learned great minds often ran in the same channels when he rounded a bend to spot movement ahead and freeze in place.

He sank slowly down to one knee as he tried to decide what he was looking at, near the very limits of eyestrain in the moonlight. Then one of them stood up to stretch near that big moonlit boulder, and Longarm proceeded to crawfish backward, slow as hell for a white eyes who’d just spotted painted Apache!

He figured they’d been posted there because that boulder overlooked the trail below. He knew he was moving so slowly because you weren’t supposed to move at all near Jicarilla without getting spotted.

But his luck seemed to hold. It wasn’t always clear whether Indians had spotted you or not. Then he’d made it back down to the schoolmarm’s borrowed pony, and he’d run it over a mile before he reined in to pat its warm neck, saying soothingly, “I know. You had to have been up there with me to savvy why we left so fast. But let’s just set this rise and listen for a spell.”

They did, but all Longarm heard was the panting of his mount and the pounding of his own heart. So a million years later he decided they’d best get it on back to town.

He was tempted to lope the spunky mount some more. But he never did. He knew Trisha would have to answer for any needless wear and tear on a borrowed pet. So he trotted it down slopes and walked it up slopes as they made good enough time. They hadn’t gone near as far as he’d told Trisha they might. For while a lone lawman might or might not be able to sneak up on outlaws, he wasn’t about to try it on Quill Indians in canyon country without a cavalry column backing his play.

They soon saw the lights of Camino Viejo ahead of them, and by now the winded pony was breathing naturally and the dry night winds had blown most of that sweat away. He knew he could get by with just watering it before Trisha took it back if he walked it the rest of the way to cool it down easy. So he did, remembering that cautionary poem about mistreating borrowed horseflesh as they poked along. He recited it to the pony:

“I had a little pony, its name was Dapple Gray. I lent it to a lady, to ride upon one day. She whipped it and she lashed it, She rode it through the mire. I wouldn’t lend my pony, now, for anybody’s hire!”

When the pony he was riding didn’t seem to notice, he confided, “I’ve known gals who ride like that. I reckon it’s because they let us fool men worry about the rubdowns, whiplash wounds, and loose shoes. But we won’t be returning you too stove in, considering some of the other little ponies you met on the trail tonight!”

There was no other stock at that hour in the small corral out behind his hotel. But there was water in the trough along the north rails. So he tethered the saddled mare there for the moment, and snuck himself and his Winchester up the back stairs.

Trisha answered his second knock. As he stepped into the dark room she said she’d thought he was gone for the night. So she’d gone to bed. He could see she hadn’t wanted to wrinkle her underwear in the very short time it took him to strike a light, say he was sorry, and shake it out. She hadn’t seemed quite as blonde down yonder, but few men would have complained. Like a lot of gals who seemed a tad skinny with their duds on, Trisha Myers had a body that would have worked fine cast in plaster for one of those Greek goddess gals.

She stammered, “Shame on you! Or should I say shame on me? I’m all confounded and still half-asleep. What time is it and what did you find out, Custis?”

He rebolted the door and leaned his carbine against the wall, and tried to tell her it was time to get dressed so they could take that pony back. But she somehow sat him down beside her on the rumpled bedding. He said, “It ain’t midnight yet, but your schoolmarm chum may be asleep already. So with any luck we’ll be able to put her pony safe in its stall out back without disturbing her.”

Trisha moved his hand to her bare lap with both of hers as she demurely replied, “Never mind how disturbed Meg Campbell needs to feel right now! I’m so disturbed I’ve been feeling myself down here, and they say too much of that can make a girl go crazy or blind!”

Longarm put his other arm around her, and stretched them both across the mattress so he could finger her more friendly as they kissed. But when she took his hat off and commenced to fiddle with his gun rig he said, “What about that mare out back?”

To which Trisha replied, bumping and grinding, “Screw the silly pony. Let her get her own swain. Or better yet, screw me, for I’ve not had any since I first came up from Santa Fe last winter and I’m a naturally warm-natured woman, as you may not have noticed.”

As a matter of fact he hadn’t. But seeing a lady he’d mistaken for a mousy small-town waitress was slithering all over him while she flat out begged for it, he figured it wouldn’t hurt that pony to loiter in the moonlight out back for a few more minutes.

CHAPTER 13

The wise and doubtless French philosopher who’d said no human being is ever more sane than right after they’d enjoyed some good food and a satisfying screw had doubtless met up with someone like Trisha Myers in his travels. Because she’d no sooner come, begging for him to do it faster and swearing she’d kill him if he dared to stop before they were both old and gray, than she commenced to stew about what her friend, the schoolmarm, was going to say if they didn’t get her pony back to her before midnight.

Longarm reminded her she’d borrowed the mare for the night, and added it was hardly likely to turn back into one of Cinderella’s mice at one minute past midnight. But she pleaded with him to pull his pants back up as she got dressed with an economy of motion that might have inspired rude questions about other hotel rooms from a man less considerate of adventurous blondes.

They encountered nobody else on the dark back streets as they walked the mare to its owner’s modest cottage and carriage shed near the more barn-like public schoolhouse. Longarm unsaddled and rubbed down the pony in the darkness of the shed, while Trisha tapped on the kitchen door and had a few words through the slit with a mighty sleepy Meg Campbell, who didn’t invite her in.

Trisha rejoined Longarm in the shed, giggling, to report she’d just been called an infernal sex-crazed night owl. Longarm warned her not to hoot too much when her friend woke up all the way and really wanted to know about the other sex-crazed night owl.

Trisha assured him his secrets were safe with her, as long as he meant to escort a lady to her own back door and treat her right.

So he did, and Trisha agreed it was even nicer to just get all the way undressed by candlelight, as if they were old pals, and start all over without the awkward fumblings of that first desperate desire to come before the other one changed his or her mind.

She said she’d never watched herself taking it that way in the mirror before. She said it made her feel like a total whore. But when he said he didn’t consider her a whore, she wiggled her tailbone and demanded, “What am I doing wrong, then? You just tell me what any whore has done for you that you liked better and I’ll just bet I can do it at least as well!”

He chuckled and assured her, “If you were moving that sweet little ring-dang-doo any better it would hurt. I take it you aspire to become a full-time professional after you’ve waited tables a tad longer? It’s more often the other way around, ain’t it?”

She moaned, “Faster! Deeper! I don’t want to be a whore who does it with just anybody. But I love to feel like the man I do want to do it with considers me a totally depraved slut! My mama always told me girls who really let themselves come were totally depraved sluts!”

“I’ve heard Calvinist ministers explain why boys and girls were created different,” Longarm told her. He didn’t ask who’d taught her to finger a man’s crack like that as he was trying to move in her with her legs locked around his spine. To prove he understood her better now, and to get her damned finger out of his ass, he withdrew just long enough to roll her over on her bare belly and sweet little cupcakes, shove a pillow under her lap, and enter her some more from behind, with her slender thighs down and almost together as he braced his own knees outside instead of inside her legs to move it in her, as no man had ever moved it in her before, she said, while he planted a bare palm on either of her finn buttocks to shove them open and shut while singing to her:

“You naughty girl, her mama said. You’ve gone and lost your maidenhead! There’s only one thing left to do, We’ll advertise your ring-dang-doo!”

It made her laugh like hell, and then she laughed even louder as she panted, “I’m coming! I’m coming hard and, oh, Custis, it’s never, ever, felt so amusing before!”

He thought it was fun too. So a good time was had by all, and it made them both feel sad and sentimental when they just had to stop a spell lest they screw one another unconscious.

But neither felt really sleepy just yet. So as they reclined propped up on her pillows and sharing a smoke, Trisha finally recalled how they’d wound up such good friends and asked him, again, where he and her friend’s pony had been earlier.

He told her as much as he knew, adding, “Whoever reported a heap of white strangers hiding out amid those old Indian ruins must have been blind. Or else disgruntled Jicarilla have wiped them out and nobody this far from the mesa noticed the considerable gunplay that should have taken place.”

She said she hadn’t heard about anyone, red or white, camping up in those dry canyons in any numbers. When she asked how he felt about Indians and white renegades being up to something sneaky as hell—in cahoots the way those Mormons and Paiutes had acted out Utah way—Longarm said, “Na-dene ain’t Paiute, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was a sort of ill-considered brawl that nobody had spent all that much time in plotting. The Jicarilla leaders smart enough to plot worth a tinker’s dam are up at the Dulce Agency, trying to get as good a deal as they can out of the Great White Father. Disgruntled young bronco Apache don’t meditate dark deeds up a canyon with any white outlaws. They kill ‘em for their guns and horses.”

She took the cheroot from him as she allowed that was the way she’d always heard Apache behaved, too. Billy Vail had never sent her down this way to investigate conflicting rumors.

Longarm speculated, “Not much mystery about disgruntled Indians. I’ve often felt disgruntled by our willy-nilly Indian policy, and I must have a better grasp of our two-party system than your average Indian. What can you tell me about numerous new faces in or about these parts, honey?”

Trisha said there were lots of new faces around Camino Viejo, including her own, but that she’d never been up any canyons over by that mesa.

When he asked her what had inspired a gal so fond of… nightlife to come up this way from Santa Fe to begin with, she explained she’d heard things were booming up this way, just as the place she’d been working in, near the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe, had been shut down by the new, reform administration.

She said she didn’t know why. They’d never told the gals waiting tables out front what went on in the back rooms, but there’d been boomtown talk about a ghost town coming back to life up this way. Hence, here she was.

She agreed with Longarm that Camino Viejo was hardly more than a bigger stagecoach stop than most, with the stage company’s local relay station four miles farther on. But she said old-timers said it had been much less before Queen Kirby had come out of the blue to do wonders with her fairy wand, or ready cash.

Trisha explained how the mysterious redhead had swept in one day, three summers back, to find a few forlorn merchants and the slightly more prosperous hotel, serving the crossroads near a river ford and not much else. The Mexicans had been run off years back, and the more stubborn or stupid Anglo homesteaders had eventually found it discouraging to live more forted up, and lose more stock, than folks just a few miles up or down the valley in either direction.

Trisha said, “The way I heard it, Queen Kirby started by buying out a couple of failing rancheros, hanging on to their cowboys, and adding some hired guns of her own to make stock-stealing in these parts more threatening to one’s health. Then she plowed those profits back into her card house and less wholesome enterprises. Some of the cowboys say there were never all those whorehouses just off the coach road in olden times.”

Longarm blew a smoke ring and said, “I was over to her card house earlier. Money can be a lot like snow, once you get a ball of it rolling right. She might or might not have come by her first wad of seed money honestly. I’ve got no warrant to question that. I fail to see how any federal court would be interested in an old carnival grifter using the profits from one business to start up or buy out another. They call that free enterprise, and I can see how she got her first holding almost free. It was smart to revive a ghost town with a handful of private guns instead of building a town from scratch with a far bigger army of masons and carpenters.”

Trisha said Queen Kirby had a building contractor working for her now. “You can’t get hardly anything new built here in Camino Viejo without Queen Kirby turning a profit on you. Why did you say she was a carnival grifter? I thought you said you’d never courted her down San Antone way like she said.”

Longarm explained, “That was a carnival grifter’s trick. I heard about it from another carnival gal one time.”

Trish pouted. “A younger and prettier one than Queen Kirby, I’ll bet, you rascal!”

He put the cheroot back between her pouting lips as he said soothingly, “You’d win. I thought you admired rascals, you nicely depraved little slut. Be that as it may, everything I know for certain about Queen Kirby smells of popcorn and the tinny blare of a carnival. That might explain her appearing from nowhere with a fast line of patter and a Minnesota bankroll.”

That term was a new one on Trisha, despite her sophisticated Santa Fe background. So Longarm explained, “Cheap flash. A Minnesota bankroll is a big bill wrapped around a lot of singles, or even newsprint cut to size. I ain’t sure why tinhorns are said to do that more in Minnesota. Heaps of greenhorns there, I reckon. But anyway, once you convince enough folks that you’re rich, you can buy heaps of stuff on credit. What you do then depends on how smart a grifter you may be. A tinhorn moves on, owing everyone in town. We call the smarter grifters millionaires, once they mortgage stuff they’ve bought on credit to get the front money it takes to buy more, and then more, until they don’t have to leave town because they own it.”

Trisha laughed and said that sure sounded like Queen Kirby. When she asked how he meant to stop the old brawd, Longarm shrugged his bare shoulders and asked, “Stop her from doing what? Nobody’s sworn out all that many warrants on Commodore Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, or even Bet-A-Million Gates for grifting their way to fame and fortune.”

She said it hardly seemed fair that big fibbers could get so rich by skating the thin ice just within the law.

He said, “I only get to arrest ‘em when they break through the ice. The only thing I don’t understand about Queen Kirby is why she seems so worried about me. The real me instead of the drifter I told her I was, I mean. For unless she’s doing something more crooked than what you just said, she’d have nothing to fear from a federal lawman.”

Trisha asked, “What if she’s up to something really down and dirty?”

To which he could only reply, “That’s what I just said.”

CHAPTER 14

Trisha had to be on the job when the morning stage from Santa Fe made its breakfast stop in Camino Viejo. So she was up with the chickens, and served him black coffee and orange marmalade on fried bread, while she had him for breakfast in bed. She allowed that a gal waiting tables tended to nibble all day on the job and skipped sit-down meals if she wanted to keep her figure halfway trim.

They agreed it would hardly be discreet for them to stroll hand-in-hand from her cottage by the dawn’s early light. So she left a spell ahead of him. Then he got dressed, rolled over a rear windowsill, and emerged from some crackwillow farther along the riverbank, too far for anybody nosy enough to care.

He mosied back to the hotel, saw nobody had been searching his room, unless they knew his trick involving a matchstick stuck in the door crack under a bottom hinge, and cleaned all three guns on the bed both to kill some time and to make it tougher for folks to kill him.

It took him some time to decide what was making him oddly uneasy as he listened to the morning sounds outside. He hadn’t heard anything odd. Birds always chirped and boots always clunked on plank walks in the morning. Then he realized it was sounds he wasn’t hearing that was odd. Trisha had said a morning stage was due in from Santa Fe. But here it was going on seven in the morning and where was it?

He moved over to the shuttered window overlooking the street and flung the jalousies wide. Things looked quiet for that hour out front. He left his Winchester by the bedstead, locked up, and wedged another matchstick under the bottom hinge before he went downstairs.

He didn’t hand over his room key at the desk in the lobby. Nobody really wanted him to while he was still staying there. It was a bother for all concerned to fumble keys in and out of pigeonholes whether a guest was sneaking someone up the stairs or not.

But he stopped there anyway to ask the gummy-eyed desk clerk what time the chambermaid usually made the beds upstairs.

The clerk yawned and asked when he was planning to leave town. When Longarm allowed he didn’t know how many more days he might be there, the clerk said the maid would change the damned sheets at the end of the week or whenever he left for good, depending on which came first.

Longarm said, “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, old son. I’d as soon not have anyone popping in and out of my room like a cuckoo-clock bird. That’s how come I asked.”

The clerk said sullenly that they’d never robbed a guest yet, and asked how many stagecoach strongboxes he’d hidden under the bedstead up yonder.

Longarm smiled and said, “Only one. The coach from Santa Fe seems to be taking her time this morning.”

The clerk said, “It ain’t running this morning. Apache. Where were you when them riders tore through blazing away to raise the alarm last night?”

Longarm thought hard, nodded, and said, “I do recall what I took for distant thunder along about three in the morning. You say it was something more exciting?”

The clerk said, “You must have been sleeping like a log. They woke me up and I live two streets over. The way I got it, coming to work, was that the Apache raided the Chandler spread just north of town. Lucky for the Chandlers, the crew at the stage relay up the road heard the whooping and shooting and came to help. But the fool Apache shot out all the window glass, turnt over the shithouse, and naturally run off all Bob Chandler’s riding stock.”

Longarm whistled softly and said, “I wonder if the army knows as much as we do about all this.”

The clerk shrugged and said, “they’ve wired Santa Fe. Wires to the north have already been cut. But at least they won’t butcher the folks aboard that morning coach, and the one coming down from that railroad stop at Chama won’t even start, seeing the wire’s down in Apacheria.”

As Longarm turned to stride out front, the clerk added in an oddly cheerful tone, “The army’s got all its spares chasing old Victorio along the border right now. They ain’t about to detach even a squadron to chase Jicarilla horse thieves. We have to lose us some hair up this way before the soldiers in blue show up.”

Longarm was afraid he agreed. He headed for the Western Union on the corner anyway. Billy Vail had sent him on a wild-goose chase. There were no outlaws holed up in the canyons of that mesa. Not alive, at any rate. But meanwhile, some Jicarilla kids were fixing to get their whole nation in a whole heap of trouble if somebody didn’t do something about it before white blood was spilled!

Knowing there was no way to wire BIA headquarters in his official capacity without giving his true identity away, Longarm strode into the combined tobacco stand and telegraph office to send a wire east via the line to Santa Fe. But the older gent who sold cigars more often than he sent wires anywhere, morosely informed Longarm he was solely in the tobacco business that morning.

“Apache,” he laconically observed, figuring nobody but a tenderfoot needed more explanation than that when Western Union shut down for repairs in Apacheria. Nobody had ever had to explain electricity to any hostiles. All they’d had to hear was that the blue sleeves got word somehow along those singing wires stretched from pole to lonely pole, far from the gaze of any cavalry patrol.

With the wires down in all directions, Longarm felt no pressing need to identify himself as he stocked up on some cheroots instead.

As he stepped out on the walk, pausing to light one of the cheroots, the man in black called Wesley Jones caught up with him. “Where have you been? They just told me you weren’t in your room and I’ve been looking high and low for you.”

Longarm finished lighting his cheroot and shook out the match before he said, “You found me here instead because I was running low on tobacco. What did you want with me, Wes?”

Jones said, “It’s Queen Kirby who’d like another word with you. I was asking where you might have been earlier this morning when she first sent me to fetch you.”

Longarm blew smoke in the rude questioner’s face and calmly told him, “Where I might or might not have been is my own beeswax. When did Miss Queen adopt me as her wayward child? I can’t come up with any other reason I’d have to report to her for roll call. Can you?”

Jones said, “I can. You can’t ride on to that job up Chama way with Apache on the warpath. Meanwhile she’s got as good if not a better job for a man who’s not afraid to use a gun on short notice.”

Longarm didn’t want to seem too anxious. On the other hand, he sure wanted to know why Queen Kirby was recruiting a private army of hired guns. So he shrugged and said, “I’ll hear her out. I ain’t saying I want to work for any woman, though.”

The man in black smiled thinly. “You’ll find Queen Kirby as tough as most he-bosses if you cross her. Now that it’s over, I can tell you just how close you came last night to finding out how tough she can get. How come you swapped two fine Arab ponies for bay scrubs up Loma Blanca way, Crawford?”

Longarm was glad he’d picked an alias easy to remember as he answered casually, “I left in a hurry. Would you want to be riding a cream and leading a palomino right after a serious gunfight, Wes?”

The man in black led the way along the walk as he chuckled and replied, “They say you changed your shirt from green satin to rosy cotton, too. I admire a man who thinks fast on his feet. It’s a good thing you never put on a pale blue shirt or swapped those pale ponies for a buckskin or a paint.”

Longarm knew exactly what he meant, but naturally pretended not to as they walked on past that saloon and around to the card house, where this morning better than a dozen ponies were tethered out front.

When they went inside, the gaming room was full of tobacco smoke and some hard-looking gents, armed to the teeth and not playing cards or shooting craps. When Longarm commented that it looked as if someone was fixing to go to war, Jones told him he was right.

They went into Queen Kirby’s office. A hatchet-faced individual with an old army shirt, shotgun chaps, and an English Enfield.476 six-shooter was leaning against a back wall, arms folded Indian-style. Queen Kirby asked, “You ever meet up with Poison Welles before, Henry?”

Longarm stared, neither friendly nor unfriendly, at what assumed to be the stranger instead of a desert water hole, and allowed he’d never had the pleasure.

Queen Kirby said, “Fortunately for us all, Poison here knows the famous Custis Long, or Longarm, on sight.”

Poison Welles nodded soberly and declared, “He ain’t half as tough as they say he is in the Rocky Mountain News. I backed him down in Durango, just about this time of year, around ‘76 or ‘77. Thought he could dance with my gal just because he was a famous lawman. But when I told him to fill his fist, he just grinned like a fool and said he’d only been funning.”

“I’m sorry I missed that,” said Longarm, trying not to sound too sarcastic. He wasn’t supposed to be as clever as Queen Kirby, and it was no skin off his nose if she didn’t know the town of Durango hadn’t been there in ‘76 or ‘77, since they’d built it on land the Ute had lost more recently, after that ill-advised Meeker Massacre closer to White River. He didn’t know why fabulists like Poison Welles made up such whoppers, but he was glad this one had when Queen Kirby said, “We’d already backtracked you enough to feel we were safe in calling you Henry, Henry. But having Poison here assure us you can’t be who you couldn’t be means I may as well lay some more cards on the table, face-up. I want you and your gun hand working for me, Henry. I’m paying a hundred a week and found, with a bonus for each and every time you really have to fire a gun. How do you like it so far?”

Longarm quietly asked, “Who might I be fixing to gun for you?”

She said, “Right now I’ve got Apache pestering me. I knew from the beginning that that stupidity with the Jicarilla was going to cause more Indian trouble. Those fools down in Santa Fe never thought ahead as they were pulling strings to move the Jicarilla. I told you what the wise-money boys told me about the Bureau of Land Management freezing all that Indian land, and now we’re stuck with upset Indians, at a time the army can’t spare us any help with them!”

Longarm cocked a brow and cautiously asked, “You’ve been recruiting gunhands to fight Indians, ma’am?”

She shrugged her bare shoulders and replied, “Somebody has to. I just told you the army seems too busy. General Sherman says he just can’t spare the troops to chase horse thieves when Victorio and his four hundred total savages are running wild down south.”

She took a drag on her cigar before adding primly, “I prefer to call you boys my’ Regulators,’ not my hired guns. I can assure you all it’s perfectly lawful, Henry. I’ve cleared it with both Santa Fe and our county sheriff up Ensenada way. So how’s about it?”

Longarm exchanged glances with Poison Welles, as if he thought the blowhard knew his ass from his elbow, then turned back to Queen Kirby to demand, “What’s the bounty per Apache head, ma’am?”

She met his gaze unflinchingly and said, “I knew you were my kind of gun, Henry. A hundred dollars on each dead buck and fifty for a squaw or kid. We don’t take prisoners. Any Apache who messes with me will learn I’m not a fool government you can fight with one day and tap for a handout the next.”

Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I follow your drift, ma’am. I’ve often wondered why Uncle Sam fights ‘em in the summer and feeds ‘em through the winter, myself. But ain’t we likely to get in trouble with said government, slaughtering wards of said government without a hunting license?”

Queen Kirby shrugged and said, “Hell, I’m only asking you to shoot the red devils for me. Nobody’s asking you to sleep with them or buy them any drinks.”

Poison Welles chimed in. “White folks got the same right as anyone else to defend themselves, and it’s the Apache, not us, as started it!”

Longarm didn’t feel like debating that point. He’d warned Indians more than once not to give his own kind the excuse to fight them if they weren’t ready to start their own industrial revolution.

He said, “Well, like Wes here says, I’d never get up to Chama to see about that other job alone at a time like this. So I reckon you just hired another gun, Miss Queen.”

She said, “Good. Go home and get your Winchester. Then saddle up any mount in my livery and be ready to ride. I’ve heard those Apache are holed up around La Mesa de los Viejos and I want you to lead the patrol, Henry. For I know you’re a killer and I want those damned Apache killed, right down to the last papoose!”

CHAPTER 15

Longarm didn’t intend to kill anyone he didn’t have to. But a reservation-jumping Jicarilla could offer mighty persuasive arguments for killing him wherever you might meet him off his reservation. So Longarm was not too upset to find that one canyon deserted once he’d led, or at least rode out ahead of, Queen Kirby’s score and a half of “Regulators.”

The riders he’d spotted the night before had been camped among some barely noticeable ruins. The “Old Ones” of La Mesa de los Viejos had either dwelt there mighty far back, or built their cliff dwellings and canyon-bottom pueblos mighty carelessly.

They’d all dismounted to scout for sign amid the squares or circles of freestone. So Longarm was counting flies on some horse apples by what might have been a kiva, filled in and almost totally erased by the rare floodwaters of many a year, when the famous badman Poison Welles came over to join him, holding a fresh but empty tin can.

Poison said, as if he knew, “Canned salmon. No Apache ever brung this from his agency. Reservation trading posts don’t stock any sort of canned fish for Apache.”

Longarm took the can and sniffed it, saying, “Been open and empty a spell. Might have been whites up this way ahead of ‘em. I heard in town that some kid had seen a mess of white strangers over by this mesa a spell back. You hear anything about that, Poison?”

Welles shrugged and replied, “No white boys up this way right now. No Indians neither. But wouldn’t you say them turds at our feet were dropped by a white man’s horse?”

Longarm nodded and said, “I was just admiring the oat husks. The flies say the pony was here about two days back. The Pueblos never named them Apache because they steal from one another.”

Poison Welles said, “I follow your drift, but they raided that white outfit last night, not two days ago.”

Longarm made a mental note to be careful with Poison Welles in spite of that bad first impression. The West was full of pests who seemed half bullshit and half real. Old Bill Cody had started to grow his hair shoulder-length and wear fringed white buckskins like some of those sissy boys who stayed in camp with the women. But it was still a fact that he had shot all those buffalo, and had fought it out blade-to-blade with Yellow Hand of the Cheyenne Nation.

Wesley Jones, another bullshit artist, came over to ask what was going on. Longarm said, “Mixed signals. Red or white campers this far up the canyon. I’d go with white if I didn’t have good reason to, ah… suspect a good-sized war party rode out of this very canyon just last night.”

Jones said, “Damned gravel makes it hard to track any breed at all, not to say which way or when, Hank. What inspired you to say Apache in particular were up this way last night?”

Longarm reminded himself that Cockeyed Jack McCall had been taken for a harmless blowhard till he’d really gone and gunned Wild Bill in the Number Ten Saloon. Then he chose his words carefully and told them both, “I can’t say I saw them with my own two eyes. But don’t it stand to reason? Why would any white boys with a lick of sense be way out here in this dry canyon during an Apache scare when they could be safely drinking rotgut or, hell, sipping cider over by the river in Camino Viejo?”

Poison Welles stared around at the canyon walls as he objected. “I can’t see Indians camping even dumber, Hank. This is about the last stretch of canyon I’d expect to find an Apache camp.”

Jones scuffed at the outline of an old stone wall with his boot and said, “Oh, I dunno. You can see some Indians must have favored this spot in olden times.”

Poison Welles shook his head, wigwagging his comical tan Texas hat, and insisted, “Anasazi lived up these canyons on sites and for reasons no modern mind can fathom. But Apache are worse than schoolboys about graveyards and haunted houses, which these old ruins sort of combine. Could you see kids scared of ghosts camping out in a graveyard when there was plenty of sites just as good further up or down?”

Longarm managed not to ask how a man who knew that much about Indians could fail to know the town of Durango had mushroomed on a recent hunting ground. He said instead, “We know what’s down this canyon we just came up. Let’s go on up it some more and have a look-see.”

As they strode back to the others and their ponies, the hard-to-figure Poison Welles called ahead, “We’re moving on. But don’t nobody mount up. It’s safer to walk your horse around a canyon bend in Indian country.”

A prouder man might have reminded Welles that Queen Kirby had told himself to lead the patrol. But Longarm let it go, letting Poison have as much rope as he wanted.

The canyon boxed a furlong farther on. That explained the ancient ruins at ground level. Noah’s forty days and forty nights would have had a tough time flooding the canyon floor this close to its upper end. The box was paved with gravel, too, along with scattered horse turds. This time it was Jones, despite his soft hands and carnival grifter’s manners, who declared, “They must have kept their Indian ponies up here in this natural corral.”

Longarm said, “Somebody’s ponies at any rate. But they ain’t here now, and there must be more canyons than this one cut into the mesa.”

There were. It took the better part of the day, with some volunteers scaling the rocks to scout around with a buzzard’s-eye view, before Longarm and all his so-called Regulators decided there weren’t any fool Indians to be found around La Mesa de los Viejos now.

They reported back, hot and dusty, only to be told another spread had been raided, this time down the river to the south, with the wire still down and nobody moving along the coach road.

When Longarm said you traveled through Apacheria by night but hunted Apache by day, because that was the best time to find them holding still, Queen Kirby told them all to get a good night’s rest and go get the savage rascals at sunrise before they hurt somebody.

Longarm enjoyed a good meal, a hot bath, and even got some rest before Trisha got off work and rejoined him in his hotel room.

After he’d shown her how much he’d been missing her too, she asked how long he’d be staying there in Camino Viejo.

He finished lighting their cheroot, patted her bare shoulder, and truthfully replied, “Can’t say. If those mysterious white strangers were ever holed up around that mesa, they ain’t there now. I might have gone riding with some of them today. Queen Kirby seems to have all the gunslicks in these parts on her payroll. I’m still trying to figure out why.”

She took a drag, handed the smoke back and said, “I was working in Santa Fe when they hired all those Regulators down in Lincoln County. But we sure heard about all the feuding and fussing. You don’t suppose Queen Kirby is out to murder the county sheriff and just take over like a real queen, do you?”

Longarm said, “The lady don’t seem that stupid. The Lincoln County War was mutual stupidity, no matter what you read in the papers about it. The Murphy-Dolan faction thought they owned a whole county because Major Murphy said so three times, like that queen Miss Alice met up with in Wonderland. The Tunstall-McSween side said they owned Lincoln County because Truth, Justice, and Billy the Kid was on their side.”

He took a drag on the cheroot and said, “It was a bareknuckles fight betwixt stubborn cusses who, all huddled together, might have added up to one mature adult. Old John Chisum sided with Tunstall and McSween at first. But being a grown-up, he backed out in time and wound up way better off when… Hmm, I wonder if Queen Kirby noticed that.”

Trisha began to fondle him fondly as she repressed a yawn and asked, “Was that the Chisum they sing about in that trail song, hon?”

He said, “Nope. Jesse Chisholm blazed that cattle trail north from Texas. John Chisum is the biggest cattle king in New Mexico Territory now. Because he had the brains to pull in his horns and sit it out as the Gingham Dog and Calico Cat ate each other up. You can’t just shoot folks, rob them of their land and property, and sit there like a fool dog with a bone, no matter how wild Ned Buntline writes about these parts. The Murphy-Dolan boys gunned Tunstall and McSween in turn, only to have their tame Sheriff Brady back-shot and have martial law declared by the new governor appointed by President Hayes. Jimmy Dolan ran off, along with most everyone else who meant to go on living outside of jail, or simply go on living. Old Murphy died broke, his business ruined by the war and his health ruined by all the nerve tonic he’d been taking in increasing doses. Some say The Kid is washing dishes down at Shakespeare, near the border. I don’t know where he might be right now and don’t much care. He’s only wanted local for gunning Sheriff Brady. My point is that everyone got ruined but Uncle John Chisum. When it was all over he was in position to buy up all that property mortgaged or abandoned by the fools who’d ground one another down to nothing, see?”

She began to stroke it harder as she demurely replied, “I guess so. But there only seems to be one side around here. There’s Queen Kirby and those Indians she wants you boys to get rid of for us all. No white folks around here are at feud with Queen Kirby, and the Indians don’t have any property anyone can grab without the government’s say-so, right?”

He snubbed out the cheroot and rolled back on top of her as he decided, “That’s about the size of it. But I’ll be switched if I can see anyone hiring her own well-paid army to fight Indians pro bona—meaning a free public service in lawyer talk.”

Then he was too busy to talk, and she wouldn’t have been listening in any case, as they both went deliciously loco some more.

CHAPTER 16

The next few nights were as nice, or nicer, with Trisha proving a real sport about experimenting in bed or anywhere else he could think of. But the days went tedious as hell, with those infernal raiders neither moving on to fresh fields of action nor offering a stand-up fight. It was almost as if the painted rascals were out to taunt the white eyes in and about Camino Viejo; for they seldom hit more than half a day’s ride in any direction, and always seemed to double back and hit some more every time it seemed they’d ridden on.

Everybody Longarm talked with seemed as bewildered, whether they worked for Queen Kirby or her neighbors. Some were more jealous than others, but nobody was on really bitter terms with the hard-faced but jovial redhead.

Some Western Union riders repaired the wire to Santa Fe. It was cut somewhere else the same day, as if the Indians had been watching.

Longarm watched for smoke signals as he led patrols out on both sides of the river, trying in vain to cut the Indians’ trail, with just enough sign hither and yon to let you know they were still around without saying exactly where.

Then it got worse. Wes Jones, leading his own patrol south along the riverbanks, came upon what was left of old Pappy Townsend and the bunch he’d led all the way to Santa Fe and back in search of the man who’d gunned their young kinsman Jason up at Loma Blanca. When Jones brought them back, stacked like bloated cordwood on a buckboard, it was generally conceded they’d have been far better off staying up in Loma Blanca. One could only hope the bodies had been stripped and carved up that thoroughly after they’d been killed.

Queen Kirby ordered eight pine coffins in a hurry for the bunch of them, and sent them on their way north, more dignified if not a whiff sweeter-smelling under the sunny New Mexico sky.

When he told Trisha about it later, the pale blonde turned paler and said she was scared, which sounded reasonable. Then she pleaded with him to take her away from such savage surroundings, which he would not, he told her, because he wasn’t fixing on going anywhere before he learned what was going on.

They were getting undressed at the time, of course, so she tried to take unfair advantage of him, on her knees beside the bedstead, as she said, “Pooh! You told me you were a lawman, not the hired hand of a silly old thing whose only crime is that overdone henna rinse! You told me just the other night that neither gambling nor whoring are federal offenses, lucky for us, and everybody shoots to kill at Apache, save for the army.”

He sighed and said, “I’ve noticed that. Some officers seem to go along with the Indian policy of the moment, whilst others like to preserve the species, lest a son still in West Point graduate to find no hostiles of his own to hunt. I sometimes feel we’d have been kinder in the long run to follow the Mexican or Canadian Indian policies. I know it saves a heap of money to just leave Indians be when they ain’t bothering nobody, and arrest them as outlaws when they are.”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t talk with her mouth so full. He lost interest in what was going on everywhere else on earth that night.

It was downstairs in the dining room the next morning, her serving him more sedately with ham, eggs, and an innocent expression, when he told her, “Don’t pack your bags just yet. But I reckon I could get us out of here aboard my two livery nags by way of the far side of the river and up to the railroad inside the reservation line. I doubt like thunder we’d meet many reservation-jumpers on or about the reservation they’d jumped. So by now nobody else over yonder should know whether to be sore at me or not.”

She looked so puppy-dog eager he quickly added, “Hold on. I never said I’d be able to c you all the way back to Denver with me, and I ain’t even fixing to cross the river till I check just a few more angles out.”

She bent over to pour him more coffee as she asked what else there could be to find out about a sort of informal but sensible enough way to cope with any sort of wild and woolly killers.

He said, “We’ve been whittling away at where those raiders could be holing up by day to raid at night. But like you said yourself, fighting Indians for fun and profit ain’t my regular occupation.”

None of the few others having breakfast seemed to be listening, so he confided, “I just want to wire some questions hither and yon about old Queen, her boyfriend Wes, and a couple of her other old boys. She and the one who says he used to be called Slim tend to sound like a pair of carnival barkers when they get into a two-sided conversation. They lard their jargon with so many terms I can barely understand, and I’ve spent some time with carnival folk.”

She pouted. “I was wondering where you learned to contort a poor girl into such dirty positions. Is that what you’re planning to do to that old redhead as soon as you get the chance?”

He laughed incredulously and said, “Not hardly, albeit she does remind me of somebody prettier from a time gone by. I’ve been busting brain cells trying to remember. Neither of us would have forgotten a long-ago love affair, despite her bull about having met me before in San Antone.”

Trisha said, “Goody! Does that mean you’ll still let me French you if we meet like this a dozen years from now?”

He sighed and said, “Honey, you can do that when I come back to you this very evening, should that be your pleasure as well. Meanwhile, I think I may have seen a younger Queen Kirby’s face on a tintype or sepia-tone. It’s possible she resembles some male relation on file. In either case, that carnival or theatrical background may narrow the target area down. I know some theatrical agents I can call on and, of course, the Pinkertons keep files on grifters, bunko artists, and such, because they provide security at so many state fairs and such.”

Trisha had to go serve somebody else. He didn’t care. He’d only been musing aloud with the only person he could trust with his musings in these parts.

He finished breakfast and ambled over to the card house. Queen Kirby and her Wesley hadn’t shown up yet. Longarm had learned the others called the man in black her Wesley after hearing some shocking comments by old boys who’d overheard sloppy noises through door panels from time to time.

Longarm hadn’t asked for further details. It was enough to know who might be making sloppy noises with whom. Everybody acted sort of disgraceful at such times, and some said the real queen, Victoria, favored that Scotch butler, John Brown, because it saved time behind closed doors with the two of them wearing skirts.

It was more important to know Wes outranked Darts Malloy, the wise-ass who’d said they’d known one another as Hank and Slim in the old Sixth Minnesota. He sure talked like a gent who’d once run a dart game in some dingy traveling show, though he rode well enough.

Queen Kirby finally came in, looking flushed and out of breath, as if she’d been out jumping fences sidesaddle. Old Wes, coming in after her looked as if he’d been doing some riding that morning as well.

Queen Kirby declared, “We’ve been talking it over. We have to do something about those blamed Apache. It seems pretty clear it’s not such a big war party and that they’re shifting around like spit on a hot stove.”

When nobody argued she said, “I want you boys to split up into smaller patrols to cover more range. How small can we get away with, seeing you’re our Indian expert, Henry?”

Longarm soberly observed, “George Armstrong Custer was an Indian expert, Miss Queen. He wrote the training manuals the army still uses, and we know he didn’t have enough men with him at Little Bighorn. But I reckon corporal’s squads, every man with at least a fifteen-shot Henry, ought to be able to handle the baker’s dozen we seem to be chasing all over creation.”

She seemed confused by the numbers. Darts Malloy volunteered to her, “Corporal’s squad is eight riders, Miss Queen. Baker’s dozen is thirteen. Me and Henry were in the army together and that’s the way you talk in the army. Ain’t that right, Henry?”

Longarm dryly answered, “If you say so, Slim. If each head scout gets to pick and choose, I reckon I’d like to try those canyons off to the northeast today. Nobody’s been back since we spotted sign over yonder days ago.”

Nobody argued and Longarm didn’t care who wanted to tag along as long as they were packing fifteen rounds in their magazines and one in the chamber. Most Indians packed single-shooters, or at best, the seven-shot Spencer repeaters the BIA had gone on issuing in fair weather or foul—to hunt with, of course. You could really nail a rabbit with a .52-40 Spencer round.

He rode out with his own eight Regulators a few minutes later, mounted astride one of the boss lady’s better ponies, in this case a blazed roan with white socks. Darts Malloy, alias Slim, and Poison Welles seemed to want to hunt Apache with him. As they all rode out, Longarm noticed four of the others were on joshing terms with old Poison. The others seemed to have been with Queen Kirby longer. Longarm didn’t trust any of them as far as he could spit against a windstorm.

But they got up to the mesa without incident. Longarm allowed, and Poison Welles agreed, that any Jicarilla lookouts peeking down at them from the rimrocks should have sent up some smoke by this time. It made Longarm less sure of himself to have a dime-novel enthusiast agreeing with him on Indian-scouting tactics!

They dismounted near the mouth of that one promising canyon and Longarm went first afoot, leading the roan with his cocked Winchester pointing ahead. They’d almost made it as far as those nearly gone ruins when Darts Malloy pointed at the rocks across the way and said, “Say, don’t that look like some sort of cavern betwixt them big boulders?”

Longarm had to stare hard before he made out what surely seemed an opening in the sandstone. He muttered, “That’s what I get for a snap judgment. You’ve got good eyes, Darts. I’d best have a peek. Would you hold these reins for me, Jennings?”

He handed the reins to the nearest willing hand and moved in on the dark opening, saddle gun at port. He hadn’t told anyone to stay or follow. He was mildly annoyed when he heard Darts telling the others to stay put while he and his old army pal saw what was inside that hole in the wall. But it did make as much sense to have somebody covering their backs, and the cleft was barely wide enough for the two of them single file.

It seemed to be more a natural crack, widened by erosion, than a tunnel or adit carved with any purpose in mind. Then he spied the scattered chalky bones in the gloom ahead and declared, “No Jicarilla born of mortal mama would ever hide shit in here! See those skulls? Looks like a family tomb from years gone by. I make it a daddy Anasazi, a mama Anasazi, and look at all those baby Anasazi!” Then he heard someone yelling, “Longarm! Down!” and so he was already dropping to the gritty bone-strewn floor as all hell busted loose in the confined space. He could only hug the dirt and hold his own fire as bullets and rock fragments sponged off the rock walls above him and the air got stuffy with black powder smoke. Then somebody flopped limply half on top of him, and as Longarm rolled him off and over he could just make out the surprised dead face of his old army pal Darts Malloy. The shooting had stopped. Longarm eased his own weapon in position across the handy corpse and sat tight until a familiar voice called out, “You still with us, Longarm?”

The bewildered federal man replied, “Who wants to know?”

The rider he’d known up until then as Poison Welles called back, “Rod Duncan, New Mexico Territorials. Your old army pal was about to shoot you in the back just now. Lord knows how he meant to explain it. Maybe he figured he wouldn’t have to. My boys threw down on his boys as soon as I opened up on the sneaky bastard!” Longarm asked a trick question about the Governor’s Palace down in Santa Fe. When Poison, or Duncan, confessed he’d never heard tell of a stenographer called Rosalinda, Longarm got to his feet and waded out through the gunsmoke to regard a mighty grim tableau around the sunlit entrance.

One of the two thoroughly shot-up cadavers was still crapping blood and worse in slow but steady spurts. The other poor bastard just lay there.

The other lawman, who’d ordered the surprise ending to Malloy’s wicked plan, nodded at Longarm and asked, “How do you figure all of this, pard?”

Longarm smiled thinly and said, “They had orders to kill me. What I really find mysterious is how a paid-up Apache fighter ever came up with Durango being there back in ‘76!”

Duncan shrugged and said, “Wes Jones was asking if anyone there had ever met the one and original Longarm. I’d read that story about you being in Durango some damned time and figured it would help if I volunteered. To tell the truth, I don’t know Colorado as well as I know New Mexico.”

Longarm asked, “How come you joined up ahead of me, Rod?”

The New Mexico lawman indicated his four modestly smiling associates as he explained, “We all did. Governor Wallace ordered us to when he heard something odd was going on up this way. I’ve been hoping you might know. I’ll be damned if I can make any sense of it.”

Longarm said, “Neither could I, until just now. Let’s leave these old boys here for now and go make us some arrests. I’ll explain along the way.”

Duncan asked, “What about them Indians?”

Longarm said, “Ain’t no Indians. Soon as you figure that out the rest just follows as the night the day!”

CHAPTER 17

It was mid-afternoon when Longarm and his five fellow lawmen reined in near that saloon in Camino Viejo. They stopped there first because Longarm recognized the pretty Morgan mare Wesley Jones had ridden out on, tethered with a half dozen more to the saloon’s hitch rail.

The man in black, now dusty as well, seemed to be holding court at the table farthest back. The seven or eight others with him were all on their feet and, recognizing Longarm and the man they knew as Poison Welles, made way for them.

Jones rose to his feet, smiling uncertainly as he said, “Not a sign of Apache off to the south this time. I see you boys got back early too. How’d you make out?”

Longarm soberly replied, “Darts Malloy is dead. So are Jennings and Alderthorpe.”

Jones gasped, “My God, what happened? You brush with them Apache?”

Longarm said, “Nope. Let’s talk about them Apache. Jicarilla on the prod and off their usual range who don’t have any lookouts posted to smoke-signal our own movements as we tear-ass all over after ‘em.”

Jones said, “Well, we’ve been figuring them for kids, acting on their own with no serious chiefs in charge.”

Longarm smiled thinly and said, “That’s likely why they rode past a grown man and his mount standing in the open by the light of the silvery moon. That’s likely why they’d been camped, or paused to put on their costumes, in a haunted canyon. I have it on good Jicarilla authority that the mere sight of what they call a chindi will kill you on the spot after dark. Yet there they were, eating fish cold from the can without any camp fire, smack dab on top of an Anasazi ghost town. It makes one wonder, don’t it?”

Jones tried. “Hell, if the fool Apache were acting usual we’d have caught up with ‘em by this time, right?”

It was Rod Duncan who quietly observed, “One would certainly think so. Me and a couple of these other old boys have scouted Jicarilla in the past. They were out in force as late as ‘73. Yet try as we might, we could never cut the rascals’ trail. It’s been my own experience that when experienced trackers can’t find anybody to track, there’s nobody to track.”

“Or there’s somebody else,” Longarm amended, adding, “We naturally never tracked sign left by other Regulators far enough to mention. So who do you reckon scared all them local settlers, and even butchered a bunch of riders from other parts, to set a good example for those in these parts who might not have been scared enough yet?”

Jones licked his lips and stepped back to give himself more room as he stammered, “How do you expect me to answer for the loco ways of infernal Apache, Henry?”

Longarm said, “Aw, come on, you know who I am. You’ve known since the first day your boss hired me. But lucky for me, neither of you spotted Inspector Duncan here for anything but a harmless blowhard you could use as a tool.”

Then he said, “As for why we’d like you to answer some questions about them fake Jicarilla, it’s obvious as hell you were them!”

The man in black was good. He dropped to the floor and tipped the table on its side between them as he went for his side arm. Longarm drew and fired four rounds at the bare pine tabletop. It took more than an inch of pine to stop two hundred grains of lead backed by forty grains of powder. But the results were far from neat as Jones stopped the deformed slugs, and a heap of pine slivers, with softer flesh.

Meanwhile Duncan and his own boys were backing Longarm’s play with blazing guns of their own. For naturally the hirelings who’d been riding directly under Jones had as much to answer for, and hoped to beat the hangman’s noose with gunplay of their own.

They lost, of course, with one of Duncan’s boys pinked along one rib by a bullet, and all but the barkeep and another man on the other side dead. The one survivor had been as quick as the barkeep when it came to reaching for that pressed tin ceiling. So he was doubtless good for a signed statement.

CHAPTER 18

Duncan had instructed his own deputies to head off other Regulators as they rode in and either arrest or deputize them pro tem, depending on whether they’d been riding at certain times with the late Wesley Jones, alias Frenchy O’Donnel, or, like most of the outfit, just going through the motions as tools of the boss lady. So just Duncan and one of his deputies tagged along as Longarm strode on to the card house to confront Queen Kirby.

The big redhead must have heard the noise, judging from the way she greeted them, seated in her office behind that writing table as the one back-up man positioned himself just outside the door to make certain they weren’t disturbed.

Queen Kirby smiled weakly and asked, “What’s going on? Why are you staring at me that way, Henry?”

Longarm said, “You know who I am and I sure feel silly about that. You’ll be pleased to hear your lover boy never gave you away as he lay oozing his last just now. But Thomhill gave up without a fight, and as soon as he confessed he’d met up with you all on the carnival trail, it all came back to me where I’d seen your pretty face before. You always have liked to make total fools of mere mortal men, haven’t you, Dolly Moore? You’ve come a long way since you had that freak show back in Saint Lou. Don’t do that, Dolly!”

But a monstrous Le Mat revolver was already rising from behind the writing table in a jewel-encrusted hand. So Longarm fired point-blank with the derringer he’d had palmed just to be on the safe side. And that red wig flipped skyward as the now gray-headed Queen Kirby, or Dolly Moore, flew backwards with the chair and all, in a flurry of velvet and scattered pearls.

As the smoke still hung above the writing table, Longarm moved around it for a better look, grimaced, and said, “Takes a spine shot to snap their heads back that hard. Dead as a turd in a milk bucket. But we’ve got that fairly full confession and some of the others may fill in a few gaps as we round ‘em up drifting in.”

Rod Duncan gulped and said, “She must have hoped you’d hesitate just long enough. I know you had to do it. I was there. But Jesus, I’m sure glad it wasn’t me as had to gun a woman, pard!”

Longarm said, “I never did. Dolly must have been so used to the common courtesies accorded the unfair sex that he lost track of the fact I’d just told him I knew who he was.

“Who he was?” gasped the New Mexico lawman.

Longarm said, “Used to be a bearded lady, traveling with decent tent shows. Put on a less decent act whenever he, she, or it wasn’t stopped. When I caught the act in Saint Lou a few years ago, he had half a man’s suit and half a lady’s gown on. You paid extra to go in the back and watch the he-she takes its duds off. I was as big a fool back then. Cost me four bits to discover he-she was just a soft-built boy. I wasn’t interested in the girlish ways he could act for just a few dollars more. Reckon enough others were to finance more ambitious projects. Read a flyer later about this soft-built but hard-headed he-she marrying up with some rich mining man and robbing him blind on their honeymoon. Reckon old Dolly persuaded him she was saving it for her wedding night. Old Frenchy back there was the one true love of Dolly’s life.”

He finished reloading and put the derringer away as their back-up man stared goggle-eyed in the doorway and Duncan said, “Far be it from me to argue that the two of them weren’t acting sort of strange. But what in thunderation was the motive for all this confusing shit?”

Longarm said, “I’ll give you a copy of my report once I have everything tidied up complete. I got one more arrest to make first, and if you think I just felt silly gunning a lady in a red wig and pearls, you don’t know the half of it!”

CHAPTER 19

Longarm had learned in his boyhood that things didn’t always go as a body might plan them, and that sometimes it might be best to just play the cards a fickle fate dealt you.

He didn’t want to stage a possibly awkward scene in front of a summer-school class. So he waited until he was sure Meg Campbell had come home from her job at the schoolhouse before he went calling.

He caught Trisha Myers in another big fib when the gal who came to the door turned out to be a stunningly beautiful brunette with deep blue eyes a man just wanted to drown in. But he figured it made more sense to show her his badge and identification.

She invited him right in and sat him down at her kitchen table to coffee and cake him as she allowed that Trisha had mentioned him, but had never told her he was a lawman.

He suspected why she sort of avoided his eyes when he asked what else the ash blonde might have said about him. The schoolmarm was blushing but composed herself as she murmured, “Just that the two of you were becoming… good friends. What’s this all about, Deputy Long?”

He said, “My good friends call me Custis. They told me over at the hotel that Trisha didn’t work there anymore. She wasn’t at her own place, either. I finally found some old boys who’d been spitting and whittling in front of the tobacco shop when she’d ridden by, headed down the coach road to Santa Fe most likely. The wires ain’t up yet, and I ain’t sure I want her stopped in any case. Might that have been your mare she lit out on, Miss Meg?”

The schoolmarm sat down across from him, shaking her head firmly as she said, “My Pixie is right out back, if you’d care to see her.”

Longarm said, “I’ll take your word for it, ma’am. No lady capable of such fine marble cake would tell really dumb lies.”

She met his eyes this time as she blazed, “See here, I’ve not a thing to hide from you or any other lawman! I haven’t been the one in bed with an impossibly endowed man night after night, damn it!”

He didn’t ask how disappointed she felt about that. He just smiled sheepishly and said, “She told me you were a dried-up old prune. But I ain’t charging her with that big fib. I’m trying to determine how deep she was in more serious stuff. I turned to her to borrow your pony for me that night. I figured I might be able to confide in a waitress gal who didn’t work for the late Queen Kirby. I figured wrong, and the two of them were playing me for a total sap until mighty recently.”

Meg Campbell brightened and said, “So that’s what it was! Did you say the late Queen Kirby? What happened to her?”

Longarm said, “You go first and I’ll tell you the whole tangled tale from the beginning. What were you about to say something was?”

The brunette said, “Trisha boasted that whether you were willing to take her away from all this or not, she was going to leave town on her own high-stepper, with money to start over in a real town. I guess I’m as nosy as I ought to be, and so I naturally kept after her about it. But all I got was that certain parties were willing to pay good money to learn harmless little secrets. Do you think she was telling Queen Kirby you’d been, you know, up in your hotel room?”

Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “I doubt Queen Kirby cared about my love life. That’s all a matter of taste—literally, in Queen Kirby’s case. But it’s sort of soothing to know Trisha was only a dumb blonde after all. I doubt she’d ever be able to tell us more than we already know, and what’s a little betrayal betwixt friends?”

The brunette poured some coffee for herself as she gently but firmly reminded Longarm he owed her a story.

Longarm washed down some cake and began. “Once upon a time there was this sort of odd couple, well-fixed for cash but on the dodge for having obtained the cash under many, many false pretenses. They came in their travels upon this bitty trail town, well-located but dying on the vine because it was located betwixt a haunted mesa and an Apache reservation. Being keen students of human nature, the couple I’ll call Frenchy and Dolly saw folks were still unreasonably spooked by Indian troubles of the past. So it was possible to buy valuable property up this way cheap.”

He took another bite and continued. “They did. One going business finances another, and so in no time at all Frenchy and Dolly became Queen Kirby and her boys. They naturally sent for other grifters to help them run their private town.”

Meg Campbell protested, “They didn’t own all of us. I’ll have you know I was hired by the town council, not any card-house or parlor-house madam!”

He said soothingly, “I know. Almost half the town council is made up of more respectable old-timers. That’s what was eating the greedy gent who was posing as a gal.”

She gasped. “Good Lord! Queen Kirby was a man?”

Longarm said, “I reckon Trisha never told you because she never knew. He made a fairly convincing old gal, But that wasn’t the crime that caused so much bother. There was a colonial governor back in the time of the real Queen Anne who liked to dress up like a fine lady, but he never dressed others up as Indians to spook folks even worse.”

He saw he’d gotten ahead of himself again when she marveled, “Those Apache were dressed up silly too?”

He silenced her with a wave of his coffee cup and said, “Forget a heap of their unusual habits and you’ve still got greed. The natural laws of supply and demand raise real-estate values as a township gets more attractive to investors. They must have noticed how unwise it was to simply grab property the way they did down Lincoln County way. It was slicker when they grasped how Uncle John Chisum had wound up owning everything when the gunsmoke cleared, leaving the surviving property-holders demoralized and ready to sell out for a song. But as word got out about those Jicarilla being cleared to make room for progress, land values in these parts figured to go up, not down, and leave us not forget the rising price of beef back East. In sum, Queen Kirby’s trail-town empire had finished expanding for the foreseeable future, unless they could make the future look different.”

He sipped, put down the cup again, and said, “They sent out for more help. Some of them hardcase killers but mostly just adventurous saddle tramps. Only a small number of them had to be let in on their true plans. They didn’t want to make it easy to add up the numbers, so they had some camping over in the canyonlands at first. That was a mistake they corrected as soon as they heard word was getting out to the real world about private armies gathering. They knew Governor Wallace and even the president who’d appointed him would be on the prod for another New Mexico dust-up like that Lincoln County War. So they pulled them into town and enlisted them with the rest of their so-called Regulators before I ever got here.”

“Regulators regulating what?” she demanded.

He said, “Apache, of course. Turns out no Jicarilla have really gone all that wild over the latest BIA nonsense. They likely figure Washington will reshuffle everybody back the way they were as soon as they get Victorio calmed down or buried. But everyone else with the hair and horseflesh they value was already braced for another Apache war before this county’s effeminate answer to Uncle John Chisum decided to provide ‘em with one. It was simple for Wes Jones, as Frenchy now called himself, to stage some Apache raids while pretending to be protecting all the white settlers from the savages. They didn’t have to steal half as seriously as real raiders to scare the liver and lights out of folks. They didn’t want to kill anyone capable of signing a bill of sale for some quick cash on the way to safer parts. So for all the dramatics, it was mostly hollow noise.”

She poured him more coffee as she marveled, “Well, I never. But how much of this might Trisha have known, the two-faced thing?”

He grimaced and replied, “Not much. There was no need for hardly anyone they used to know what they were really up to. Trisha never came into the story before I came down from Colorado, by a devious route and a tad late. They’d known I was coming. We’re still working on old pals they might have had on the BIA payroll, working for the railroad or whatever. Drifting grifters meet a lot of other shady sorts in their travels and a buck is always worth a hundred cents.”

He sipped more coffee—she’d brewed it swell—and explained, “It was my getting here way later than expected that confounded them about me. I fear their first plan was to have me killed by Apache. I showed up not exactly as described after killing somebody else along the way. So, not wanting to waste a possibly valuable asset, Queen Kirby, or more likely the one you all knew as Wes Jones, came sneaking around, found Trisha in my room with me somewhere else, and made a quick deal with her.”

Meg nodded and said, “She knew Wesley well. She said he was a generous tipper who was always nice to her. She seemed confused that he never asked her out after work.”

Longarm said, “He had a steady sweetheart. But he persuaded the gal I’d been fool enough to confide in that they’d make it worth her while if she’d report every fool word I said to her to them!”

Meg fluttered her long lashes and murmured, “Heavens, I can see how foolish that might make you feel!”

He sighed and said, “I doubt they cared about my personal idiocy. I told Trisha who I really was. But then I told her I had no idea who I was really after or what might be going on. So they figured it was as easy and a heap safer to just hire me and have me where they could keep an eye on me as they got me to jump through hoops like a trained flea. They figured I’d tell Trisha when and if I commenced to suspect anything important, and they were right. I acted like a total sap, and even when I did start to get warm, I was still so far from the truth they’d have been better off letting me run down like a clock and head on home. Have you ever felt really stupid, Miss Meg?”

She reached across her table to pat the back of his big tanned hand and soothed, “It might have gone worse for us. If they were even partway onto you, and that two-faced Trisha hadn’t convinced them you weren’t onto them, they’d have killed you before you found out a thing and then where would we be?”

He put his own free hand atop hers—most men would have wanted to—and quietly replied, “You’re doubtless right—and I reckon all’s well as ends well. How come you asked where we would have wound up, Miss Meg? No offense, but I don’t recall old Marshal Billy Vail putting you on the case with me.”

The pretty schoolmarm looked away, cheeks flushed, as she murmured, “I guess I meant we’d have never been having this conversation, after Trisha had told me so much about you. I suppose you’re in a hurry to get back to Denver, now that you’ve learned all there ever was to know about our dinky town?”

To which he could only reply, with a friendly squeeze, “I ain’t so sure I’ve gotten to know everyone down this way as well as I’d like to. In any case I’ll have to stick around long enough to tidy up a few loose ends and make sure law and order’s been restored total.”

She asked, in that case how many days, or hours, they might have to get to know one another better. When he suggested at least a good two days, she shyly suggested they’d best get started and so, what with one thing and another, it was over a week before Longarm got back to Denver, walking sort of funny.

The End

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