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“Ah, shit, dammit, whoa,” Jesse moaned loudly into the night.

The coach lurched again, slithered back and forth like a gigantic dog shaking its tail, and then finally came to a rocking stop on its creaking thoroughbraces.

“Jesus Christ,” Jesse said.

“I wisht he wouldn’t talk like that,” one of the passengers complained. “He’ll bring the wrath down on us.”

“I don’t think he was cussing,” one of the whores suggested. “I think he was praying.”

“What I think,” Longarm said, “is that we all better get out and see if we’re needed for anything.”

Lawyer Overton was the first one out the door. He stepped down to the ground. And promptly disappeared. “Damn!” he yelped.

“What’s the matter?”

“Be careful when you step down. Hang onto something.” There was a low grunt and Overton’s voice was strained. “It’s slick as snot on ice out here. Mud. My feet went right out from under me soon as I stepped on the ground.”

It helped that someone, either George or Jesse, scratched a match afire and lighted a lantern that he hung from one of the side curtain hooks above the window.

Tyler Overton’s suit was liberally smeared with bright red mud, Longarm could see by the light of the lantern. So were the lawyer’s hands. Obviously he hadn’t thought before he’d tried to brush himself off. It looked like the only thing he had accomplished was to rearrange the mud into broader smears that covered most of his back and butt and right side. Longarm managed to keep from chuckling, mostly because he knew he could end up looking just as grimy if he wasn’t careful when he got out of the coach himself.

“You gents go ahead,” the woman nearer the door said as she pulled back and resumed her seat. “I ain’t moving.

You, Ada?”

“I didn’t lose nothing out there, honey.”

Longarm stepped down—very carefully—and immediately reached for a cheroot.

George produced a second lantern and climbed down. Jesse was already on the ground fussing with his mules, soothing them with soft mumblings and going from one mule to the next while he scratched their polls and rubbed the sensitive hollows beneath their jawbones. He did seem fond of those animals.

“Shit,” George grumbled.

The lantern light showed the cause of the comment. The coach had skidded off the crown of the road—they were long since out of the mountains and traveling across the broad expanse of sage flats here—and managed to bang sideways into an old rut in the road. It wasn’t even a rock that had done them in; there wasn’t anything that solid in sight, just a narrow, mud-filled rut.

That rut had been quite good enough to cause a problem, though. The left rear wheel had two broken spokes.

“Shit,” Jesse echoed when he finished calming his mules and came back to see to the trouble on his coach.

“Do we have a spare?” the medicinals salesman asked.

“Did your mama change your diddies for you?” Jesse snapped back, his voice testy.

“Dammed if I can remember,” the salesman shot back with a grin, not at all put off by the driver’s annoyance. “Did yours?”

“No, and I think maybe that’s why I got the red-ass now,” Jesse said, conceding defeat pleasantly enough. “Anyway, yeah, of course we got spares. A couple of ‘em. We also have a bitch of a deal to make the change.”

That was true enough. It was night. In the middle of absolutely nowhere. And the ground here seemed to be solid mud. Cold as a witch’s tit but gooey, gummy, slick, and slippery mud nonetheless.

And some poor sonuvabitch was going to have to crawl underneath the coach in order to set the screw jack—and somehow find a way to keep the damn thing from sinking into the muck once weight was applied—so they could get the busted wheel off and a new one bolted on.

Longarm puffed on his cheroot and kind of faded off behind the coach where he wouldn’t be noticed if Jesse commenced to looking for volunteers. Like that whore had said when it came to getting out of the coach, he hadn’t lost anything underneath the son of a bitch and there was nothing down there that he was going to go look for.

This was, he was beginning to suspect, gonna be a very long night.

Chapter 20

“Screw it. I don’t care. They’re nothin but a couple whores. They can pull their own weight or get out. That’s what I say.”

The other men gave the salesman—his name was Leonard—an uneasy glance. But it was apparent that they had been thinking pretty much along those same lines.

It was past dawn now and they still hadn’t reached Howard Burdick’s relay station.

Every man, Wind River employee and passenger alike, was pretty well plastered over with thick, caked mud. And if he could judge by the way he felt himself, Longarm thought, everyone was pretty near to the end of the line when it came to strength and stamina too.

Ever since hitting the flats the mud had gotten worse and worse until it was just plain impossible.

Cold, wet, clinging, slippery mud.

The mules were covered with it. The coach wheels were constantly mired in it. And the only way to move on was for everyone—everyone except the women, that is—to get out and push the heavy Concord coach out of the latest mud hole and onto whatever passed for solid ground.

There were places where they had to push—throw their shoulders against the coach body, grab hold of a wheel spoke and lift, take a grip on whatever was within reach and pull—a hundred yards and more at a time.

At this point it felt like they weren’t so much riding in the stagecoach as they were having to pick it up and carry the damn thing to Burdick’s.

Burdick’s relay stop, Longarm thought. Funny how on the way north he had stopped there and had a better than merely decent bowl of stew and gone on again without ever once thinking to inquire about the name of the place or the owner or anything else about it.

Now, after a full night of shared labor, he knew the name and at least a partial personal history of every other bastard aboard, and was almost desperately interested in getting to Howard Burdick’s no-longer-taken-for-granted relay point.

By now Longarm ached in every joint and every limb. He was winded and weary. His eyes burned and his legs ached from dragging around half a hundredweight—well, it felt like that much anyway, and who the hell was gonna produce a set of scales and dispute him if he wanted to make the claim—of cold mud that caked his lower legs to the knees.

That came from wading through the slimy shit every time the coach bogged down. And from slipping and falling every couple of minutes. There wasn’t any way to avoid going down. Every man among them now looked worse than Tyler Overton had after that first experience long miles and hours back.

“Let the bitches help push. Their shit stinks just the same as ours does,” Leonard Groble complained.

“Jesse, what d’you say?”

“Hold it,” Longarm put in. “You’re just tired and feeling out of sorts, Leonard. We all are. But we aren’t gonna fall so low as to make a lady get out and push a mudbogged stagecoach. Now we just aren’t gonna do such a thing as that.”

“They ain’t no damn ladies, Long. That’s the point,” Delmer Jelk said, siding with Groble.

“All right then. Women. Same thing in my book. A man don’t do that to a woman. Right is right, boys, even out here.”

“I say we take a vote on it,” Leonard said.

There was little doubt which way a vote would go. Longarm suspected Jesse and George would vote with him to let the women keep their seats inside the coach—they would pretty much have to or face trouble from their employer when they finally did reach Bitter Creek—but all the other men would likely vote to make the women labor.

Except for Overton? Longarm wondered. And honestly was not sure how the fat lawyer would cast a ballot. Either way …