Longarm muttered, “Aw, shit, you’re supposed to be a gunfighter as well as a total asshole?”
It was the wrong thing to say to a punk on the prod. Townsend had been working himself up all the time he’d been trailing his intended victim. So he moved fast, faster than most, as his gun hand swooped down on those side-draw ivory grips.
Then he was reeling along the bar with his cheap fancy gun still in its holster and two hundred grains of hot lead cooling off inside his ruptured but still-convulsing heart. As Longarm followed his last movements with a smoking but now-silent Winchester, the boy bawled out, “Don’t whup me no more and I’ll be good, Mama!”
Then he landed facedown in the sawdust with one spur still ringing like a coin spinning down as Longarm muttered, “I told you not to try, you poor dumb kid!”
As the smoke cleared, the barkeep came back in with a somewhat older gent wearing a silvery mustache and matching pewter badge. So Longarm started to identify himself as he finished reloading.
Before he could do so, the town marshal firmly stated, “I don’t want to hear your sad story. Kevin here just told me the punk-ass was the one who started it, and no jury would ever hang a man who’d been called a son of a bitch to his face in public.”
Longarm put his gun away and just paid attention to his elders as the town law continued. “I’d hold you for the coroner’s hearing anyways, if I liked noise. But rightly or wrongly, you just now gunned the black-sheep son of a mighty big and mighty close cattle clan I’d as soon not mess with in an election year. So why don’t you do us both a favor and ride on, Julesburg?”
Longarm managed not to grin as he quietly replied, “I see great minds do run in the same channels. I’d only stopped here to wet my whistle on my way t-“
“Don’t tell us where you’re headed and we won’t have to tell the Townsends,” the town law said. “Nobody with a lick of sense is about to lie to the Townsends about anything involving the spilled blood of even a worthless Townsend. And I don’t want to have to tidy up after any local voters neither. So how come you’re just standing there like a big-ass bird, stranger?”
Longarm allowed he was just leaving and left, crabbing to one side as he stepped out the swinging doors into the darkness. But nobody gathered outside seemed more than curious as he bulled his way through and crossed over to the livery.
One of the Mexican hostlers said he’d figured El Brazo Largo would want one of his caballos saddled in a hurry, and so he’d taken the liberty of cinching that stock saddle to the fresher-looking mare.
Longarm nodded soberly, but said, “Seeing you’ve guessed who I might be, I shouldn’t have to tell you why I’d rather ride on aboard less distinctive horseflesh. What sort of a swap might you be willing to make for danged near pure Spanish barbs?”
The hostler grinned like a kid smelling fresh-baked pie while coming home from school, and said, “Take your pick from our remuda out in the corral. In God’s truth we don’t have stock to match either of those two you rode in with. Pero we may be able to send you on your way with reliable if less distinguished riding stock, eh?”
They could. Longarm rode out of town before midnight aboard one bay and leading another. In the meantime he’d changed shirts. Everyone who’d been there would recall a stranger in a green satin shirt as the intended victim of the late Jason Townsend. The one thing anyone could say for dusky-rose poplin was that it didn’t look at all like green satin.
CHAPTER 10
Longarm wouldn’t have entered either fresh mount in a serious horse race, but he found them both steady and willing. So along about two in the morning he tried crossing back over the river to the less traveled side.
He suspected he’d picked the wrong ford when the river came up to his knees and filled his boots. But as long as he was at it, he took off his telescoped Stetson and bent down with it to fill the crown with more water.
Once the felt had taken the time to soften some, he punched the crown all the way plain, and then creased it along the top and dimpled both sides cavalry-style.
He didn’t meet up with any Apache war parties on their side of the river as he worked his way south through timber and chaparral. The reservation line doglegged far off to the west this far south, and he suspected the Jicarilla were more worried about pindah lickoyee than vice versa about now.
Well before dawn he recrossed the Chama to get back on that coach road and follow it north. He didn’t want to go back to see Consuela, despite fond memories of her rollicking tawny rump. He knew the trail town of Camino Viejo stood by the river just to the southwest of La Mesa de los Viejos.
You just about had to pass close by to get to the old Indian pathway up to those canyonlands, and all in all, he figured it might be best if folks recalled him coming from the south instead of the scene of that dumb gunplay to the north.
As the sunrise caught him still in the saddle, Longarm peeled off his denim jacket and put that away with the green shirt to ride into town outstandingly rosy from the gunbelt up.
He wasn’t too surprised to see that despite its Spanish name the town, handy to more than one trail, was far more Anglo than Mexican. There was always Mexican or Indian hired help in any New Mexican town for the same reasons the shoe-shine boys and street sweepers tended to be colored east of Austin. But neither Mexicans nor Indians with money to pick and choose seemed to cotton to Camino Viejo, situated as it was between an Apache reserve and a heap of haunted ghost towns.
He left the two bays in an Anglo-run livery near the Western Union. He didn’t have anything new to wire anyone, and he hadn’t told anyone to wire him here in Camino Viejo. So he idly traced the single line of telegraph wire east against the morning sky for as far as he could tell, then took himself and his Winchester to breakfast at the hotel dining room recommended by the livery hands.
There were always a few late risers having breakfast at seven in the morning. So Longarm knew the blandly pretty waitress answered to Trisha before she came over to take his order. He’d already read the blackboard on the wall, the place not being prissy enough to hand out printed literature, and said, “Them waffles with scrambled eggs and sausages sound tempting, Miss Trisha. But could I have mine with chili con carne instead of syrup over ‘em?”
The slender dishwater blonde told him it was his funeral. Then, just as she was fixing to take his order to the kitchen, she turned back to him with a puzzled smile and asked, “Do I know you, Mister…?”
“My friends call me Henry,” Longarm lied, figuring drunk or sober he’d be able to recall the clerk who played the typewriter for Billy Vail. He didn’t push his luck by insisting he’d met Trisha before. But she suddenly smiled—it was a great improvement in her looks—and said, “Oh, sure, I remember that dark cavalry hat and mustache now. You told us you’d fought those rebs at Apache Canyon during the war, last time you passed through with that big market drive.”
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.”