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.”