“Boys, you can vote all you damn want. But I’m telling you this. I won’t stand by and see anybody abuse a lady.” He quickly held his hand up to stop the snorts of protest. “Woman, all right? If not ladies exactly, then women. We c’n all agree on that.”
“Lady, woman, what the hell does it matter. Their legs ain’t broke. They can help push.”
“I reckon they could,” Longarm agreed, “but they ain’t going to. They’re gonna stay right where they are. The man that tries to make ‘em do otherwise, or who tries to put them out into this mud, is gonna get the crap knocked out of him.” He grinned. “And let me tell you, fellas, having to do that would piss me off something awful, ‘cause I’m already so tired I can’t hardly fart without it putting me on my knees.”
“You’d punch a white man to keep some whore from having to help out?” Jelk asked.
“I said it, Delmer. I’d damn sure do it. But hell, you go ahead an’ do what you like. You know what your teeth are worth to you. Spend ‘em if you feel the need strong enough.”
“I don’t think I want to fight about it.” He too managed a grin. “Right now I’m not sure I could lift a fist to hit back at you if you stood still and gave me five minutes to wind up for it.”
“Look, I tell you what. I got”—he reached into his coat pocket and counted—“I got three cigars left here. Let’s divvy them up and have us a break before we go at ‘er again.”
“if it makes you fellas feel any better,” George put in, “you can all look yander. You see that smoke? That’s coming from Howard’s chimney. That smoke is cooking our breakfast, boys. And I for one want to get over there and wrap myself around it.”
There was a general lessening of misery among the men at the thought of hot coffee, piles of buckwheat flapjacks, and thick stabs of bacon.
Even more important, though, there would be an opportunity for everyone to scrape themselves free of mud, wash up, and just plain sit in comfort for a spell.
Lordy, but it had been one long, miserable son of a bitch of a night.
And close enough to see in these conditions probably meant they were still several hours away from reaching the relay station.
Longarm broke his cheroots in two and handed the pieces out among the men, saving a stub for himself. He sure as hell hoped Howard Burdick had some decent replacements on hand at that relay station, because the trip was only half over and Longarm would hate like hell to have to go the rest of this entire day without a smoke.
Chapter 21
“Son of a bitchin’ chinook,” Jesse complained.
“Who?” Delmer asked.
Longarm, laboring at the mud-slimy wheel beside the salesman, gladly accepted an excuse for a moment’s respite—any excuse would have been good enough—and paused to wipe cold, greasy sweat from his face while he explained. “Chinook,” Longarm said. “It ain’t a who, it’s a what. A wind, actually. Warm wind. Gener’ly comes outa the west. And gener’ly is welcome because it cuts the cold and warms things up when you don’t expect warmth. This time, though, comin’ in behind a wet an’ heavy snow, it caused a helluva lot more trouble than the warm weather is worth. It melted all that snow like tryin’ to wrap a ball o’ butter round a stick and roast it over a fire. Melted it clean away. And o’ course left all that water behind where the snow had been. That’s why we got the mud now. Normal spring melt, see, happens over weeks or even months as things warm up a bit at a time an’ most o’ the water evaporates clean away into the air. The rest is runoff that swells the creeks and the rivers down low. Well, this time there wasn’t no evaporation, not time enough for it, and there’s too much water to run off in the regular way. Up in the mountains the creeks are busting their banks. Count on it. Out here on the flats there’s no creeks to carry the runoff water. Out here what there is is mud.” Longarm grinned. “Or ain’t you noticed?”
Delmer Jelk sighed, wiped a cheek that was already so grimy and mud-smeared that it was impossible to tell if he’d gotten it any cleaner or not, and took a fresh grip on the spokes of the wheel they were wrestling. “Ready?”
“Ayuh, if you are.”
“On three then. One, two …”
“Jesus God,” George moaned. “I never been so tired in all my life.” Even his voice seemed limp as he slumped to a sitting position on the hard and no doubt uncomfortable edge of the metal step into the coach.
They had been trying for twenty minutes or more to man-handle the big Concord out of this latest bog. The miserable thing weighed more than three tons, and that was without adding the weight of all the mud that adhered to the undercarriage.
At this point even the mules were of little help. They too were exhausted, and unlike a horse that can be driven until it quite literally lies down and dies from excessive fatigue, a mule can be forced only so far. Then it will balk and refuse more work regardless of whips or prods. A mule will not allow itself to be worked beyond its capacity, although that capacity is enormous and rarely reached.
This time they had managed to reach the physical limits of all but two of Jesse’s team, and two mules and a handful of weary men were not close to being enough to drag the massive stagecoach out of this bog.
What was most painful about it was that they were so tantalizingly close to their destination. They could see Howard Burdick’s station less than a quarter mile off.
The way Longarm felt at the moment, though, that distance might as well have been a quarter of the continent as a quarter of a mile. “Look, folks,” Jesse said, leaving his mules and stumbling back to the side of the coach. “We aren’t doing any good here. What we need is a little time for the chinook to dry out this mud or else a good freeze to firm up the ground. It’s close enough we can all walk the rest of the way to Burdick’s. We’ll put the ladies on the backs of the two mules that are still pulling, and we’ll walk in. Me and George can come back out when the ground has dried some or else tonight if we get a freeze. Any of you needs your bags—or anything out of them, help yourself. Just remember you got to carry it yourself. George, you carry the ladies’ small bags for them. I’ll take care of the stock.”
“If you like,” Longarm said, “I’ll lead one of those mules that’ll be carrying a lady.”
“I’ll take the other,” Tyler Overton volunteered.
“Thanks, gents.” Jesse had the appearance of a man who had just suffered a crushing personal defeat. But then, for the proud jehu of a Concord and six-up—and there were few men prouder than the flamboyant stagecoach drivers of the wide-open West—this failure to bring his coach in was indeed a crushing and a very personal form of defeat.
The rest of them had no regrets, though. Moving slowly their limbs turned leaden from fatigue and their minds numbed by exhaustion, the menfolk left the bogged coach where it was and began a slogging trek through shin-deep mud to reach the comforts of Burdick’s.
Chapter 22
Heaven was a basin of warm water. And here Longarm had gone and found it right here on earth.
When the exhausted travelers arrived they discovered that Howard Burdick and his wife Jean had long since seen their predicament and were prepared to greet them.
Shoes and stockings were left at the front door, where the station host personally washed them in a huge laundry tub and set them aside to dry. While Howard was doing that, Jean was cheerfully issuing pots and small basins of warm water along with squares of soft, dry ticking to serve as towels so the guests could wash their feet and get comfortable again for the first time in many hours.
The ladies—well, so to speak—were given water and towels and sent off into the privacy of the Burdick’s own sleeping quarters so they would not have to bare their limbs in front of the gentlemen. This despite the unacknowledged likelihood that any or all of the males present could well have screwed one or both of the female passengers.