Longarm tried to look outside again, but the spot he’d rubbed clear only a few moments earlier was already frosted over and completely opaque again. It could be that the conductor wasn’t bullshitting about the danger of a person getting lost and frozen if he didn’t know where he was going.
Where was he going? Longarm wondered where the hell he was.
For some reason the name Jennison Arms kind of struck a chord. He’d either stayed there before, taken a meal there, or at least been somehow familiar with it in the past. If he could just remember … hell, yes. Jennison Arms. Longarm hadn’t stayed there before, but he’d eaten at the hotel restaurant.
The train was stopped in Kittstown, Wyoming, not too awful far west of Medicine Bow and about a like distance east from Rawlins. He’d been here—what? A year and a half ago? Something like that. Came up to claim a prisoner on federal warrants and got acquainted with Town Marshal Clay Waring and his wife. What the hell was her name anyhow? Marjorie, that was it. Clay and Marjorie Waring. Helluva nice couple. That was why he hadn’t had to stay at the Jennison Arms. The Warings took him into their home and fed him and sat up talking half the night with him, and the next day he stood treat for them for a fancy meal at the hotel.
Oh, he remembered now, all right. It’d been their wedding anniversary and Clay had forgotten it, and Marjorie was going to cloud up and get her feelings hurt until Longarm pretended he’d talked Clay out of his own celebration plans and insisted on the best meal in town to honor the special occasion. Yeah Longarm recalled it now. Nice visit that had been. Nice folks. And if he was going to have to spend some more time in Kittstown, well, he would just have to look up Clay and Marjorie and make a pleasure out of the layover.
“Get your things together, everyone,” the conductor called from the front of the car. “Get ready to leave. I’ll be back in a few minutes with the people from the other car. Please be ready when I return. We wouldn’t want anyone lost, ha, ha.”
Longarm stood. He had everything he needed in his carpetbag, which was on the steel rack overhead. His saddle and rifle were back in the baggage car, but he couldn’t imagine needing either of them here in Kittstown. He hauled the bag down onto the seat beside him, lit a slim dark cheroot from the dwindling supply in his inside coat pocket, and waited patiently for the Union Pacific conductor to return.
Hell, with no work needing to be done until he could get home to Denver, and some friends in town that he could visit with, this layover was going to be the next best thing to a vacation.
Wasn’t it?
Chapter 2
“Marshal? You awake in there, Marshal? I have hot water here if you’re wanting to shave yourself.”
Longarm yawned and shoved the sheet and thick quilt aside, swinging his bony legs off the side of the bed and sitting up.
That, he quickly decided, was a mistake. Probably he should have stayed right where he was, chin deep in blankets, until the storm blew itself out. Which, judging from the screech and whistling beyond the hotel window, damn sure wasn’t yet.
Still, awake was awake and up was up. He might as well get on with things.
“Marshal?”
“Coming.” When he stood it felt like someone had glazed the floorboards with a thin layer of ice. He blinked, and with something of a start realized that the street-side wall of his room was iced over. A white, frosty rime of powder ice lay a quarter-inch thick on most of the wall and the window was completely opaque, buried under its own load of thick ice. No damn wonder the room felt so bone-chilling cold. The benefit of a couple of open registers to let heat rise from downstairs wasn’t anything like enough to combat the frigid wind that battered and rocked the three-story-tall building.
Longarm rubbed his eyes, and out of sheer force of habit picked up his gunbelt, before unbolting the door and peeping through a narrow crack to see a pair of huge blue eyes set in a freckled, gap-tooth face. The boy was carrying a crockery pitcher from which steam drifted like smoke. Longarm grunted—he wasn’t quite up to coherent speech just yet—and swung the door wide.
The grinning boy—damn anybody who could be so cheerful and bouncy on a lousy morning like this—half filled the basin on a corner stand and stepped cockily forward to accept the nickel Longarm handed him.
“Thanks, kid. How, uh, how are the meals downstairs?”
“Best you’ll find this side of Cheyenne, sir.”
“Cheap?”
“A dollar.”
Longarm winced. The boy grinned. “It’s okay, sir. The railroad is paying for it.”
“I didn’t take the railroad’s offer of a shared room.”
“That don’t make no difference, sir. You’re still on the books for Union Pacific layover benefit. They’ll pay your meals and sixty cents a day on your room. Mr. Wiggins has the rest of your room cost on the voucher you gave him.”
“You pay a lot of attention to what’s going on here, Longarm said.
The boy grinned. “My pa has a two-thirds share in this ol’ hotel, Marshal. One of these days it’s gonna be mine. All of it.”
“Y’know, son, I believe that it will for a fact. Now if you’ll excuse me, I better get to my shaving before that water gets cold.”
“Yes, sir. And Marshal, sir, if there’s anything you need, you just ask for me. Jim Jennison Junior. You hear?”
“I do, young Jim, and I thank you.”
The boy let himself out, and Longarm bolted the door closed behind him, then gave some attention to getting dressed and ready to face the day. A shave, a shit, and some groceries first, then off to visit with Clay while he waited for the track to be cleared. Could be worse.
He was not a block distant from the hotel and already Longarm’s ears were deceptively numb. Dangerously numb. If he spent much time like this, he would wind up with frostbite. Damn ears would go white, then blacken with rot and fall plumb off his face. How the hell was a man supposed to keep a hat out of his eyes if he didn’t have ears to prop it up on.
Not that he was wearing his hat at the moment. With a blue norther whistling down the main street of Kittstown, it would have been stupid to wear a hat. Angle your head a fraction of an inch the wrong way and a hat would soar off to Utah or some such lonesome place. Instead he’d wrapped a thin, knitted muffler around his head to try to keep the bite of the wind away. But it turned out that that covering, the best he happened to have with him, wasn’t nearly enough, so he headed into the doorway of the Kittstown Mercantile.
“Mister,” the proprietor greeted him, “you must be near to desperate for whatever brought you here. Personally, I only unlocked the door out of habit. And I wouldn’t have come to work at all if I didn’t live upstairs.” The fellow was a tiny wisp of a man, probably not more than five feet and a half tall, if that, and weighing no more than a good sack of the flour he sold.
“It didn’t seem so bad when I set out,” Longarm admitted.
“What is it I can do you for, friend?”
“Do you happen to have any fur hats or at least some earmuffs?”
“Would some Army-issue coyote fur hats do what you want?”
“Perfect.” The bulky things looked like hell, but the fur-covered earflaps would keep a mule’s floppy ears warm as toast.
The storekeeper rooted through a crate and came up with one likely-looking gray-brown hat, then found an identical item under his counter. He laid the two of them side by side for Longarm’s inspection. “Dollar,” he said, “for this one here. Fifty cents for that one.”
“Why the difference?”
The man grinned. When he did that, Longarm saw that the storekeeper wasn’t nearly as old as Longarm first thought. The man’s hairline had receded halfway back on his scalp so that he looked mostly bald when viewed from in front, and a set of gold-rimmed spectacles lent weight to the impression of age. At first Longarm had assumed he was in his late thirties or early forties. Now Longarm revised that estimate backward, judging the slightly built fellow to be still in his twenties. Twenty-six or -seven? About there. He seemed bright and pleasant enough, though.