But then, that was a part of what passed for moral propriety at the time and place. It was acceptable for a man to poke his pecker into a woman’s snatch, but it would have been scandalous for him to look at her naked ankle in a public setting.
“We have coffee on the stove, folks, and breakfast will be on the table soon as you’ve all had a chance to wash up. Ham, hominy, and my good wife’s biscuits and no need to hold back. There will be plenty enough for all. Over there by the settee is a box with some carpet slippers in it. Not enough for everyone, but help yourselves as long as they hold out. Anyone who has to go outside to the backhouse, don’t try and put your shoes or boots back on; they’d just get muddy again. I have some gum rubber overshoes you can use. Just step into them on your way out. They’re big enough it’ll be like trying to wear a bucket on each foot, but at that it’s better than getting cold and wet all over again. Keep your feet dry, gents, and you’ll be all right. Get too wet and cold and you’ll catch your death. And we can’t have that, after all. The coach line needs all the paying passengers it can get, and so do we.” Burdick was a slender, bespectacled man of middle years and sunny disposition. He had a bald patch on the crown of his graying head and a pencil-thin mustache. Longarm found the contract station keeper to be a thoroughly likable fellow. And an efficient sort as well.
Jesse was the last man in, having taken time to put his beloved mules to “bed” before seeking comfort for himself.
“Any news from down south, Howard?” Jesse asked.
“Nope. Not a whisper. Of course I don’t have a telegraph point here. As for the northbound coach, I haven’t seen anything of them yet. They’re even worse overdue now than you were. Should have passed through here last night, but they never did.”
“No, I seen that. They would’ve passed us on the road if they’d gotten here. You think they ever left Bitter Creek?”
Burdick shrugged. “Your guess is every bit as good as mine, Jesse.”
The jehu frowned. “Damn road must be as bad to the south as it is here. If that’s so, we could be stuck here for days.”
Longarm gave Tyler Overton a worried look. When they’d left Talking Water they’d thought they were in plenty of time to block the execution of an innocent man. But if they were to be stuck in the mud—literally so—for days here at this isolated outpost …
“When the northbound gets here, if the northbound gets here, we’ll find out what the conditions are to the south,” Jesse went on. “But hell, we’re a long ways from getting our own coach the rest of the way in here to the station, much less heading south again. We’ll just have to wait an’ see how she goes.”
From the back of the big public room came the sound of a cowbell clattering. “Breakfast, everyone,” Jean Burdick called cheerfully. “Come and get something warm in your bellies before I throw it to the hogs.” Then she laughed. And no wonder. There probably was not a hog, not a living one anyway, within eighty miles.
Longarm shrugged and, putting aside the problems of immediate transportation, followed his nose to the source of the tantalizing odors coming from the long trestle tables at the back of the place.
Chapter 23
“Aw, hell,” George moaned. “What’s the matter? Apart from the obvious, that is.”
“We was hoping maybe things weren’t so bad south of here? Well, forget that. Here comes the folks from the northbound. They’re on foot and look more wore out than we was when we got here.”
Everyone crowded to the door and two tiny windows at the front of the stage station. The view was not encouraging. Seven men and a woman were slipping and sliding their weary way through the gooey gumbo south of Burdick’s. The men wore the bright, reddish-brown tint of mud to their knees or higher, and several of them looked like they had virtually bathed in the sticky stuff.
The whole thing would have been laughable under other circumstances, Longarm thought.
But not when an innocent man’s life might be forfeit because of this aberration of nature.
“We’d best put more water in the stew, Ma,” Burdick said to his wife with a wink. She immediately began peeling potatoes and slicing carrots while her husband pulled on a pair of rubber boots and went out to the old dugout that now served as a root cellar. And a cold locker for meats as well, as was attested by the slab of beef—or it might have been elk—that he soon brought back to chop into man-sized bites and add to the stew pot.
The situation here was not pleasant in many ways, but they were not going to starve while partaking of the hospitality of Howard and Jean Burdick, Longarm thought.
it took nearly an hour for the party from the northbound coach to reach the station. And when they did Jesse was hopping mad. “Damn you, Roy, where’s your stock? Where’s your mules?” Roy, much older than Jesse and presumably senior to him with the Wind River line, shrugged and looked away, avoiding the fury that flushed Jesse’s face a dark, mottled purple. “You left them back there, didn’t you?” Jesse accused.
“Dammit, Jess, they’re mired s’ deep we wouldn’t never of got them loose an’ all the way here. Shit, they’re all right. They’ll work theyselfs free an’ graze whatever they can find close by. It ain’t like they’ll go far. Not in this shit, they won’t. They’ll be right there when we need ‘em again.”
“The hell they will,” Jesse declared. “You and Charlie are going back there. Right damn now. You’re gonna go back and get those mules and bring them in here to where they can have some shelter and fodder and dry feet. And you’re gonna do it before you set down or have yourselves a bite to eat, either one of you.”
“Aw, Jess …”
“Goddammit, Roy, you heard me. Right now.”
“Who d’you think you are t’ be giving me orders, Jesse?”
“I’ll tell you who I am, Roy. I’m the son of a bitch that’s going to beat hell out of you if you don’t see to the welfare of your stock, that’s who I am. I’m going to do that if I have to pick up a singletree and beat on you with it. And I don’t figure to stop until those mules have been taken care of. You got that, Roy? Is it clear to you?”
“You got no right.”
“I got whatever rights I’m willing t’ take, Roy.”
“I’ll see you lose your job over this, Jesse.”
“You do that, Roy. If the boss wants to fire me for worrying about the stock and the passengers, that’s fine by me, I wouldn’t want to work for no line that won’t care for its stock anyhow. Until then, though, you are gonna do what I told you or I will personally bust your jaw and do my level best to break every tooth in your head.”
“Me and Charlie can’t get six mules through all this mud. Not by ourselfs we cain’t.” There was a hint of a whine in Roy’s voice now.
“Fine. Me and George will go along and help bring them in,” Jesse declared.
Longarm sighed. Four men. Six mules. What the hell. “I’ll go too,” he said softly.
“Me too, dammit,” Leonard Groble mumbled. The expression on his face said that the offer surprised him as much as it did Longarm. “Well, we aren’t any of us going to get out of here unless there’s mules to pull both coaches, right?” he added, almost as if he felt a need to apologize, or at the very least to explain, for volunteering.
The argument was not Particularly sound, of course. There were, after all, fresh mules out in the barn, Burdick’s being a relay station and not merely a rest point. Not that Longarm intended to point that out to Groble, who probably needed little encouragement to back out of his offer to help. “Do we have rubber boots enough to go around?” Longarm asked.
“Plenty enough,” Howard Burdick responded.
“Then bring out the rest of them, Howard,” Jesse instructed. “We don’t want to leave those poor animals stranded any longer than we have to.”